38 Disturbing Crimes That’ll Keep You Up At Night – Part 2

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.

27. 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.

28. 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.

29. 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.

30. 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.”

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.”

32. 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.

33. 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.

34. 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.

35. 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.

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.

37. 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.

38. 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.