25 Gruesome Facts About Terrible Crimes

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.