23 Horrific Facts About Heinous Crimes Too Chilling to Forget

In the 1800s, a wealthy socialite named Delphine LaLaurie kept and tortured slaves in her mansion. In her torture chamber, women were chained to beds with their stomachs cut open, and their intestines wrapped about their waists. There were men with their eyeballs poked out and their private parts mutilated among other horrors.

2. Serial Killer with the most confirmed murders, Luis Garavito a.k.a ‘The Beast’ was charged with killing 172 children (it is speculated that the actual number exceeded 300). He received a sentence of 1853 years, but could not serve more than 30 years due to Colombian law. He is now only serving 22 years because he was a cooperating witness and still hasn’t being released as of August 2022.

3. In 1993, a 2-year-old boy named James Bulger was abducted, tortured and murdered by two 10-year-old boys, Robert Thompson, and Jon Venables. There was a worldwide injunction against publication of either killers' location or new identity and in 2011 Venables was sent back to prison for child porn.

4. Fritz Haarmann was a German serial killer who killed at least 24 men and boys. He was known as the “Wolfman” because of his preference for biting through his victims' throats, which he referred to as “love bites.” He also dismembered their bodies which he is believed to have sold as mincemeat.

5. In the 1700s, there was a rich widowed noblewoman named Darya Nikolayevna Saltykova, who out of jealousy, tortured and murdered servants. Because of her status, it took a petition to the royals to have her investigated. She spent several years in a windowless room. She survived in prison for 33 years.

Joshua Phillips at the age of 14 murdered his 8-year-old neighbor and hid her under his water bed for a week. During that time he was also a volunteer in her search party. He was later given a life sentence and now works as a paralegal to help other inmates with their appeals.

7. Griselda "Godmother" Blanco was suspected of over 200 murders, made $80 million a month in drug money, allegedly kidnapped and killed a child when she was only 11 years old, and only ever served 15 years in prison before being killed by a drive-by at the age of 69.

8. A South Korean man named Woo Bum-kon went a massive killing spree in 1982. He went village to village shooting and bombing people. In total he killed 56 and injured 35 people. He did this after he was filled with rage because he was awoken by his live-in girlfriend swatting a fly on his chest.

9. A serial killer named Jack Unterweger after being convicted of murder in 1974 was released in 1990 as an example of rehabilitation. He became a journalist and a minor celebrity, but within months started killing again, eventually murdering possibly over 12 people.

10. Susan Smith was given a life sentence for drowning her two young children in their car and subsequently reporting them kidnapped by a black man. She was later directly been involved in two incidents at the prison that resulted in two prison guards being punished for having sex with her.

A woman named Katherine Knight, murdered her lover, skinned him, decapitated him, cooked chunks of his flesh in a stew and attempted to feed it to his two children.

12. Ilse Koch, a female commandant at Buchenwald concentration camp was, apparently, obsessed with collecting human skin and shrunken heads. She was accused of taking pieces of skin as souvenirs off murdered inmates who had distinctive tattoos. She also killed prisoners if they just looked at her. The Nazis named her “The B*tch of Buchenwald.”

13. A nurse named Charles Cullen is the most prolific serial killer in the state of New Jersey, charged with up to 400 undocumented murders. His weapon of choice was Digoxin, a heart medication.

14. Mohammed Bijeh a.k.a The Desert Vampire was an Iranian serial killer who killed 16 boys. He was executed in 2005. He tricked boys into coming with him to a desert by telling them that they were going hunting. Once he killed them, he buried their bodies in shallow, sandy graves. At his execution, he was first flogged 100 times. The brother of one victim tried to stab him, but the boy was quickly pushed away by the soldiers.

15. In the mid-1800s, a woman named Mary Ann Cotton murdered 21 people by arsenic poisoning. Her victims including 4 of her husbands and her 11 children. She did it to collect their insurance money. She was arrested and later hung for her crimes.

An Indonesian serial killer named Ahmad Suradji killed 42 women and buried them with the heads facing his house believing that it would give him mystic powers as a sorcerer.

17. In 1994, Baruch Goldstein, a physician in the Israeli Defense Forces, entered a mosque and massacred 29 Palestinian Muslim worshipers and wounded another 125 before being beaten to death by survivors. His gravesite became a pilgrimage site for radical Jews around the world and was visited by over 10,000 people.

18. In 2001, a 12-year-old boy named Christopher Pittman shot his grandparents, burned their house down, and stole their car to flee the scene in Huntsville, Alabama. His attorneys maintain that the side effects of Zoloft (which was not approved for minors) caused him to do it. Pittman was sentenced to 30 years in prison in 2005, which was later reduced to 25 years.

19. Aribert Heim is known as Dr. Death because of the horrific experiments he performed on Jews during the Holocaust. He removed organs of Jewish prisoners without anesthetic during his time at Mauthausen concentration camp. After World War 2, he evaded capture by escaping Germany and converting to Islam, living in Egypt under the name Tarek Hussein Farid until his death in 1992.

20. Serial killer Albert Fish would embed needles into his groin and abdomen. After his arrest, x-rays revealed that he had at least 29 needles lodged in his pelvic region. He also hit himself with a nail-studded paddle and inserted wool doused with lighter fluid into his anus and lit it. She was a sadistic, pedophile, and admitted to cannibalizing several children. His last words before execution were, “I don't even know why I’m here.”

In 1966, Kenneth McDuff murdered three people and was sentenced to death. His sentence was later commuted to life, and he was paroled in 1989. He went on to murder at least four more people, was caught in 1992, once again sentenced to death, and executed in 1998.

22. Frederick Mors, who wore a white lab coat, referred to himself as "Herr Doktor", and killed at least 8 elderly patients in 1914-15. He escaped from an insane asylum at the age of 26 and was never heard from again.

23. A Soviet serial killer named Anatoly Slivko tricked over 47 boys into being hanged with the promise of being in a movie.