1Benjamin Siegel
Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel was one of the most notorious mobsters during the era of Prohibition. He built his fortune not just on bootlegging and gambling but also on the proceeds of paid hits. Working for a number of Mafia bosses he carried out a number of Mafia hits, including one against the Sicilian mobster Joe “The Boss” Masseria in 1931. He was so entrenched in his hitman persona that he founded the “business” that was to become known as Murder, Inc. His organization was implicated in 70 murders and suspected to be responsible for hundreds more. When he traveled to Italy in 1938, he offered to kill Hermann Goering, Joseph Goebbels, and Benito Mussolini, but was stopped by his anxious mistress. He was killed in the traditional hail of bullets, and it is all but certain that he was murdered by the order of his partner.
2. Columbine shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were bullied in high school, including an incident in which they had a cup of crap thrown at them and another in which a group of students gathered around them and covered them in ketchup. On that unsettling day, Eric Harris encountered Brooks Brown, an acquaintance. Brown commented about Harris missing a test, Harris said “It doesn't matter anymore… Brooks, I like you now. Get out of here. Go home.” Brown, feeling uneasy, walked away. They had also planted two 9.8 kilogram propane bombs in the school cafeteria right before lunch. Had the bombs not failed to detonate, it is estimated that 488 students in the cafeteria at the time would have been killed or severely injured as a result.
3. In 1945 and 1946, three women were brutally murdered in the city of Chicago, and the killer used the lipstick of one victim to scrawl on the walls of her home: “For heaven’s sake catch me before I kill more. I cannot control myself.” The press named him the “Lipstick Killer,” and police attempted to track him down before he struck again. Six months after three murders, 17-year-old William Heirens was arrested when someone noticed him breaking into an apartment. Prosecutors said they had fingerprints and handwriting analysis to prove that he was the Lipstick Killer. He was incarcerated at 17 and has been in a US prison for over 65 years based on a murder confession that was extracted after days of beatings and torture.
4. In 1987, Harrison Graham’s (a.k.a. Cookie Monster) apartment in Philadelphia was raided by police and they found the remains of seven women. Graham told the police the bodies had been there when he first moved in but later confessed to “accidentally” strangling them all during sex whilst he was under the influence of drugs. Graham had a Cookie Monster toy that he would sleep with and his defense claimed he had three personalities; ‘Frank’ a drug addict and murderer; ‘Junior’ a 2-year-old who could not be without the Cookie Monster, and ”Marty’ a likable handyman who was compliant with the police. His defense that he suffered from multiple personality disorder was rejected by a judge and he was convicted of all seven murders. Due to his low IQ and mental illness, he managed to skip the death penalty and he became an ordained minister in prison.
5. Riley Fox was a 3-year-old girl from Illinois, who was murdered in 2004. Her father confessed to murdering her under coercive police interrogation. A pair of mud-covered shoes were found nearby, which were collected by police. But the police never followed up on this piece of evidence. The shoes had the name Eby written on the inside. After her father spent 8 months in prison, his neighbor Scott Eby was convicted from DNA evidence.
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6Karl Denke
Karl Denke, a well-liked Prussian man born in 1870, killed more than 30 people. In his old German town of Münsterberg, Denke was a local hero in the community who sold delicious meats at his market stall. Nobody questioned where he sourced his meat from as many items were still hard to come by following the devastation left behind following the First World War. When the police came knocking after a tip from one of his escaped victims, they were shocked to find pots filled with human flesh, human bones laid across the table, belts made from human skin and jars filled with body fat labeled as cooking oil. He confessed to selling his victim’s skin and flesh as suspenders and pork pickles from his stall.
7. Rapper G. Dep killed a man in 1993. Plagued by guilt, he tried to confess to the crime in 2010. The police did nothing. So two weeks later he went back to the station to confess again. The second time they matched his account to a cold case and charged him with murder. However, after turning himself in, Coleman pleaded ‘not guilty’ to second-degree murder at his appearance in Court. He was convicted of the second-degree murder charge and was sentenced to 15-years to life in prison.
8. David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz terrified the public when he killed eight people with a .44 caliber Bulldog revolver in eight separate shooting attacks between 1976 and 1977 in New York City. He was finally only caught when police, following a lead from a witness, discovered that his car had received a parking ticket for parking near a fire hydrant near one of the murder scenes on the night of the murder. When he was arrested he claimed that his neighbor’s dog “Harvey” ordered him to kill people. In 2002, he sent a letter to the then New York State Governor George Pataki asking that his parole hearing be canceled stating “In all honesty, I believe that I deserve to be in prison for the rest of my life.”
9. Between the years of 1989–1993, Joel Rifkin killed 17 young women in New York City and Long Island, although the actual victim count is still unknown. He was only caught when he was spotted driving without a rear license plate, and police found the corpse of his last victim in the back of his truck. While in prison, he proposed the idea of a shelter for prostitutes where they would be shown pictures of murdered hookers to scare them straight. “These girls think, they can’t be touched. Well, 17 girls thought that, and now they’re dead.”
10. In 2008, Tim McLean was beheaded and cannibalized while riding a bus in Canada. One of the first officers on the scene later committed suicide. The perpetrator, Vince Li, spent less than 10 years in a mental hospital and was granted an absolute discharge in 2017.
11Sture Bergwall
A man named Sture Bergwall confessed to more than 30 murders and crimes such as rape and cannibalism while being incarcerated in a mental institution for personality disorders. Between 1994 and 2001, he was convicted of eight of these murders. He was labeled Sweden’s most notorious serial killer. Later it was found that he was a manipulative liar. He didn’t actually commit any of these murders. Though he had never killed anyone, he had indeed committed crimes before he was in the mental institution. He had sexually assaulted 4 young boys in 1970 and he stabbed a man 10 times in 1974. In 1990 he robbed a bank by taking the bank manager hostage before he confessed to all the murders.
12. For 18 years a Frenchman named Jean-Claude Romand convinced his family and friends that he was a successful medical doctor at the World Health Organization. Instead of working, he hid in hotels to study medicine and maps of countries he claimed to visit. He lived off the money his wife and he had made by selling an apartment, from his wife's salary, and from sums of money which were given to him by various relatives, who relied on his assurances that he was investing the money in various imaginary hedge funds and foreign ventures. When he feared that he was going to be exposed, he killed his wife, his two children, his parents, their family dog and also tried to kill his ex-mistress. Then he burned down his house.
13. In 1995, a book was unveiled in Mexico by an unknown author using the pseudonym “Richie”. The book painstakingly compiled the events and details of several dozen murders. It is thought to have been written by a serial killer named Alejandro Máynez. In 1998, Alejandro attempted to kill a waitress named Ana Benavides, only to find out that she herself was a serial killer as well. He found out that Ana was a devil-worshipping fanatic who had already claimed the lives of three people. She then quickly began to take an active part in Máynez’s murders.
14. James Holmes, the guy who committed the Aurora shooting during the premiere of The Dark Knight Rises in 2012, was sentenced to 13 life sentences in prison, with an additional 3,318 years for rigging his apartment with bombs and 140 counts of attempted murder. During psychiatric interviews, he revealed that during his childhood he was terrified of “nail ghosts” that would hammer on the walls at night. He would also see shadows and flickers at the corners of his eyes, which would fight each other with firearms and other weapons. He was previously rejected from the University of Iowa’s graduate neuroscience program after an interview. The program director warned colleagues about him “do not offer admission under any circumstances” and declined to elaborate on what Holmes said or did specifically during the interview.
15. Charles Whitman a.k.a. the Texas Tower shooter, who killed 16 and wounded 32 in the infamous 1966 Austin clock tower shootings, asked for an autopsy to be done after his death to determine what made him kill. The autopsy found a tumor pressing on his amygdala which possibly influenced his actions. He once even told his doctor that he had been having violent thoughts including “going up to the tower with a deer rifle and killing people.” The doctor just gave him Valium and sent him home. Charles knew he would occasionally lose himself in his rage so he would incessantly leave himself notes reminding him of his love for his wife and his mother. He had to constantly remind himself not to lose his temper. He did end up killing his wife and his mother, but he didn't know why he did this, according to his note. He had a burial with full military honors and his casket was draped in the American flag because he was a veteran.
16Diane Downs
On May 19, 1983, Diane Downs shot her three children and drove them at 5-7 mph to the hospital. Her 7-year-old daughter was already dead when she arrived and her other 2 children were in critical condition. She’d also shot herself in the forearm. She claimed she’d been carjacked. She was sentenced to life plus 50 years in prison and her two of her children who survived were adopted by the lead prosecutor of her case.
17. Nannie Doss a.k.a. “The Giggling Granny” was an American serial killer who between the 1920s and early 1950s murdered almost every member of her family. She killed her four husbands, two children, her two sisters, her mother, a grandson, and a mother-in-law. Nanny insisted that money played no significant role in her crimes. Despite various insurance payments, her murders were actually motivated by marital boredom, a dream of discovering the ideal husband. She was sentenced to life imprisonment. The state of Oklahoma did not pursue the death penalty due to her sex.
18. Jack Unterweger was an Austrian serial killer who committed murders in several countries. After murdering an 18-year-old girl, he got a life sentence but became an author. His work gained the attention of the Austrian literary elite, who took it as evidence that he had been rehabilitated. So he then campaigned to get himself released after just 15 years. He then became a reporter and started reporting on his own crimes as he proceeded to kill at least 9 more people. After being convicted of an additional nine murders in 1994, he committed suicide in prison by hanging himself.
19. Carl Grossmann was a German butcher and serial killer who cannibalized his victims. He is suspected to have killed anywhere from 50-100 victims and covered his crimes by grinding up the ‘meat’ produced by his victims, making hot dogs and selling them at his stand outside a Berlin train station. He committed suicide while awaiting execution without giving a full confession, leaving the extent of his crimes and motives largely unknown.
20. In 1979, Albert Flick was sentenced to 25 years in prison for stabbing his wife to death while her daughter watched. He was released more than two decades later, but he was put behind bars again in 2007 for stabbing a woman with a fork and again in 2010 for assaulting a woman. Despite his record, the judge in the 2010 case cited his old age when sentencing Flick to about four years in prison, nearly half what prosecutors had recommended. After he was out of prison, in 2018, at the age of 77 Albert Flick was again convicted of the murder of another woman. He had fatally stabbed her outside a laundromat while her 11-year-old twin sons watched from a few feet away.
21The Night Stalker
In 1985, serial killer Richard Ramirez (AKA ‘The Night Stalker’) attacked 22-year-old Maria Hernandez outside her home, shooting her in the face with a .22 caliber handgun after she pulled into her garage. She survived when the bullet ricocheted off the keys she held in her hands as she lifted them to protect herself. He was captured the same year trying to steal a car. The car’s owner and his neighbors chased him down and recognized him from mugshots on TV. When the police arrived, the men were beating him in the street. During his trial, one of the jurors actually fell in love with him and even sent him a cupcake with “I love you” written in icing. She still, however, gave him a guilty verdict.
22. Within a month of opening her pediatric clinic, Dr. Kathleen Holland experienced six cases of children stopping breathing during their visit, one of whom died. One of her nurses Genene Jones had been administering dangerous injections to them, and was, in fact, a serial killer, unbeknownst to Dr. Holland. She is thought to be responsible for the deaths of up to 60 infants and children in her care as a licensed vocational nurse during the 1970s and 1980s. The exact number of victims remains unknown; as hospital officials allegedly misplaced and then destroyed records of Jones' activities, to prevent further litigation after Jones' first conviction
23. In 1965, a radio personality in Vancouver named Rene Castellani committed to living on the top of the massive Bowmac car dealership sign until all the cars were sold. Later that same year, his wife Esther died and investigation revealed she had died a slow and painful death due to arsenic poisoning which had been administered to her over months. Forensic investigation revealed a stripe of hair growth that was arsenic-free, and it corresponded to the 9 days Rene was away, thus convicting him of her murder. He had been poisoning his wife with arsenic for months.
24. The “Skin Hunters” was the media nickname given to four paramedic workers in Poland, who were convicted of murdering at least five elderly patients and selling information regarding their deaths to competing funeral homes. The price of the bribes paid to the killers was billed to the family of the deceased as an additional funeral charge. The perpetrators were apprehended in 2002. The court found out that more than 40 paramedics, doctors, nurses, and undertakers had conspired to ship seriously ill elderly patients straight to funeral parlors rather than hospitals, as a way to make quick cash in a grisly scheme that investigators have said could have been going on for almost 20 years.
25. Vlado Taneski was a Macedonian journalist/crime reporter who was also a serial killer himself. He reported on his own crimes and eventually got caught because he wrote articles on the murders with information that had not yet been released and only the killer would have known. All in all, he killed three 55+ aged women after strangling, torturing, and raping them. He was arrested in 2008 after his DNA was matched to semen found on the victims. After less than a month in prison, he was found dead in his shared prison cell. He was found drowned in a plastic bucket of water and in the absence of other evidence, his death was ruled a suicide.
