30 Shocking Murders That Will Scare You Senseless

Throughout the 1980s, a number of young women disappeared in Eastern Ukraine. They were abducted by Serhiy Tkach who killed them and performed necrophiliac acts on them. He was a former forensic expert used his law enforcement knowledge to throw police off his trail. He was eventually caught and he confessed to killing 100 people. However, before he was apprehended, 15 men were arrested and imprisoned for his crimes, one of whom even committed suicide.

In 1852, Mary Ann Cotton married a laborer. Seven out of eight of her children died of gastric fever. Later her husband died too of stomach sickness. She remarried and her second husband died and soon did her mother pass away. Later her last remaining child and her second husband’s children died. Her third husband kicked her out. Later her fourth husband died as well as his sister, his son and a child he had fathered with Mary. After 20 years of mysterious deaths, the police investigation found she was poisoning her victims with arsenic in order to collect insurance money.

In 1980, a 32-year-old woman named Dorothy Jane Scott disappeared one night when helping a coworker at a hospital. For months before her disappearance, she was receiving anonymous phone calls from a stalker who was threatening her. She was last seen in her vehicle speeding speed out of the parking lot of a hospital. Her parents then started receiving weekly, harassing phone calls from the abductor for several years. She was never found and her abductor has never been captured.

In 1993, 10-year-old Holly Piirainen went missing while visiting her grandparents in Sturbridge, Massachusetts. Two months later, her body was discovered on a rural road. People reached out to the family including 10-year-old Molly Bush, who wrote them a condolence letter. About 7 years later, in 2000, Molly went missing at the age of 16 and her body was found three years later buried in a similar manner to Holly. Police believe their murders are linked and to this day the murders remain unsolved.

18-year-old Alexis Valdez who lived with his aunt and her boyfriend Silvestre Diaz got into an argument in late December of 2013 because Alexis was living there rent-free and not contributing to the household. On Christmas Eve, when his aunt was out, he smashed Diaz’s head with a hammer. Then he chopped off Diaz’s arms and pulled out his eyes. He then decapitated him, leaving his head on his aunt’s pillow as an “early Christmas present.” He then called 911 and confessed to the murder and said he would have killed his aunt too had she been home.

In 1980, a 12-year-old girl named Georgia Jane Crews went missing in the small town of Montverde in Florida. Two days later, the local police department, the girl’s grandmother and the police marshal’s wife all received an unidentified caller saying, “You know that 12-year-old girl you’re looking for? She’s dead.” Eight days later her decomposing body was found near a K-Mart parking lot, with a stab wound in the back. The killer was never found.

In 2013, guests staying at the Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles complained about problems with water pressure, it being black and having an unusual taste. Next morning, the body of 21-year-old Elisa Lam was found in the water tank atop the hotel. She was last seen on the hotel’s elevator security camera. In it, she was seen exiting and re-entering the elevator, talking and gesturing in the hallway outside, and sometimes seeming to hide within the elevator, which itself was malfunctioning. Her case still remains unsolved.

Manson Family was a cult led by Charles Manson. The group consisted of about 100 followers who were mostly young girls who were drawn to the commune by hippy culture and drug use. They were radicalized by Manson’s teaching and believed he was a manifestation of Jesus. In 1969, he sent five members of his “family” to two homes in Los Angeles to kill anyone who lived there. They killed actress Sharon Tate (who was 8-1/2 months pregnant) and four other people who were renting with her. They were also responsible for a number of other murders, assaults, petty crimes and thefts.

Amelia Dyer was a "baby farmer", i.e., she housed pregnant women with unwanted or illegitimate babies for an upfront fee. When the babies were delivered, the mothers would leave the baby with her. She would care for them until they were adopted. In reality, Dyer was only interested in collecting the upfront fee for housing the mother. She neglected the babies until they died of malnutrition. She was arrested when investigators found 50 bodies of babies in Thames, wrapped in paper with her address printed on it. She is suspected of killing as many as 400 infants. She was hanged in 1896 in London.

In 1995, 29-year-old Mary Ann Holmes was murdered in her home in Thatcher, Arizona. One of her daughters escaped and ran, naked and bound to tell her neighbor that her mother was murdered. Mary Holmes was found in her bathroom with her hands cuffed and her head bashed in. Investigators found that she was sexually assaulted after her death, while both her daughters were bound and forced to watch. In 2016, 53-year-old Phillip Turley was named a prime suspect though he wasn’t formally charged.