From a South American man who's allegedly responsible for more than 300 murders to a
maniac who terrorized Chicago for almost two decades, here are the most dangerous serial
killers who are still on the loose.
Between April 8 and May 7, 1992, six people were shot and killed along a stretch of I-70.
The deaths occurred between Terre Haute, Indiana and Wichita, Kansas, and there were striking
similarities between the victims.
Five were women — though police believe that the sixth was mistaken for a woman when
the killer saw his long ponytail; all were brunettes; all were employees at stores just
off the highway; and all were killed with a .22 caliber bullet.
There was no sexual assault, no major thefts, and witnesses were able to give police a basic
description of a man seen entering the stores before the murders.
He was described as white, with reddish or light brown hair, between 140 and 160 pounds,
and around 5-foot-7.
The spring of 2022 marked the 30-year anniversary of the still-unsolved murders, and police
wanted to make it clear that the case is still very much open.
In late 2021, law enforcement released a new sketch of the killer.
Based on those witness accounts and this new sketch, there's still hope that someone will
come forward with more information.
"I definitely do think that it is solvable, especially with what we have to our advantage
nowadays."
They've also released what they believe might be the key to catching him: A description
of the gun.
Wichita police Detective Tim Relph told the press that they believe that it's a replica
of an "old German Navy pistol" — one with a barrel so long that it "has a wooden forearm".
On November 20, 2006, two women who were out for a walk made a grisly discovery: The bodies
of four women had been neatly discarded behind the Golden Key Motel in a suburb outside of
Atlantic City.
The women were fully clothed — except for their shoes and socks — and had been positioned,
face-down, facing east, in a line behind the motel.
The victims had all been strangled, earning their unidentified killer the nickname of
the Eastbound Strangler.
Law enforcement said that at the time, there was definitely no shortage of suspects.
One by one, however, they were cleared of the murders until ultimately, there were no
more.
An appeal for information on the four murders was reissued in the last days of 2021, with
Chief of County Investigations Bruce Shields saying:
"Fifteen years later we have not made an arrest for these homicides, but we're always looking,
we're always working and reexamining information about this case.
We haven't stopped.
We won't stop."
A $25,000 reward has been issued for information leading to the killer's arrest, which can
be shared with any local law enforcement bodies.
The Albuquerque Journal calls Central Avenue a "high-crime area," and it first earned that
reputation back in 2001 when women started going missing more often than usual.
Almost a decade later, on February 2, 2009, a human bone found by a woman who was out
for a walk ended up being part of a crime scene on a scale that no one could have imagined.
Ultimately, 11 women and one unborn child were found and identified — all of them
attributed to the so-called "West Mesa Bone Collector".
Their life stories were varied: While many had connections to the drug and sex trade,
others did not.
Syllannia Edwards was just 15 years old when she disappeared, and 22-year-old Michelle
Valdez was pregnant.
Hundreds of people were interviewed and many suspects were investigated; for a while, the
APD believed they were closing in on the killer.
"Our suspect pool is…it's pretty solid."
However, their optimism was misguided, and the identity of the West Mesa Bone Collector
remains a mystery.
According to the City of Albuquerque, there is a $100,000 reward being offered for information
about the killer.
Any tips should be directed to Investigator Ida Lopez, or given via Crime Stoppers.
Back in 2019, the Chicago Tribune reported that police were assigning a designated task
force to investigate the theory that there was a serial killer stalking the city.
For many, it was an investigation that was long overdue.
It came more than a year after the news outlet had run another story, connecting the deaths
of at least 75 women who had been killed — all via suffocation or strangulation — between
2001 and 2017.
The Tribune's initial story ran in 2018, and even as law enforcement balked at calling
it what it was, four more women turned up dead in the same manner.
"The problem with law enforcement, local law enforcement, is the idea of 'Don't say serial
killer'."
However, they did ultimately admit that a serial killer being on the loose was a distinct
possibility.
While they claimed that there was little concrete evidence to link the victims, the Tribune
reported that others had seen a very large link: Most of the victims were Black women.
Fast forward to late 2021, and that's when a three-part docu-series called "The Hunt
for the Chicago Strangler" started streaming on Discovery+.
At the time of the show's debut, Chicago police were still saying nothing to confirm or deny
the existence of a serial killer, and at the same time, PBS says activists were demanding
answers.
Director Jennifer Anderson told them:
"I think these women are not just a name on a spreadsheet or police file, they had real
lives and we're missing something, because [they’re] not here.
They deserve justice..."
The bottom line is that no one really knows who is killing the women of Juarez, Mexico.
The Seattle Times reported that law enforcement has said there's a likelihood that there's
a serial killer prowling the streets of this city just a stone's throw from El Paso, Texas,
and they've also suggested the almost countless women that have died in recent years were
targeted because of gang activity.
But no one knows for sure.
Starting in the mid-1990s, hundreds of women began turning up dead.
Many were dumped in the desert, many bore signs of trauma and abuse, and it didn't stop:
In 2019, there were 1,006 victims added to a list — and those are just the ones law
enforcement knows about.
The crimes are falling under the umbrella of femicide: Whether the victims were targeted
by a serial killer who preys on women or by an abusive partner, they were killed because
they were women.
In 2020, the high-profile murder of an artist named Isabel Cabanillas de la Torre catapulted
Juarez's problems back into headlines.
Scores of women took to the streets to protest and demand justice for Cabanillas and the
hundreds of other women who have been murdered by killers who have never been identified,
much less brought to justice.
Every so often, there's a story that pops up that's so unbelievable, so terrible, that
it's impossible to think that it's true.
That's definitely the case with Pedro Lopez, a man who has been dubbed "The Monster of
the Andes".
After being kicked out of his home as a child after assaulting his sister, Lopez grew up
on the streets of Colombia.
He traveled across South America, raping and killing as he drifted from one country to
another.
Nearly executed for his crimes in 1978, he was given a second chance by a missionary
who put in a good word for him ... and unknowingly kept him alive to keep preying on more victims.
It's unknown just how many people he killed, but the numbers are staggering.
He confessed to killing as many as two or three people a week.
In 1980, his estimated death toll in Ecuador alone was around 110.
That's when he was arrested and given a 16-year-jail sentence.
After serving some time there, he was released early – thanks to "good behavior" — and
sent back to Colombia.
There, he was reportedly held in a psychiatric facility for a further four years.
In 1998, he was deemed sane, released on a $50 bond.
"It could either be that the psychiatrist really felt that he was recovered, or that
he faked it."
Unsurprisingly, he promptly vanished, and he hasn't been seen since.
His victim count is ultimately unknown.
According to Biography, the total is well over 300.
Since the early 1970s, authorities have been finding discarded bodies in an area of Texas
that runs along I-45 — known ominously as The Killing Fields.
"It's an easy place to dump a body, and you can get away with it."
However, it wasn't until the discovery of four specific bodies in the span of a little
less than a decade that authorities began to believe that they might be dealing with
a serial killer.
Heide Villareal Fye went missing in 1983, and her remains turned up a few months later
after a dog dug up her bones.
A little less than two years later, the remains of 16-year-old Laura Miller were found not
far from where Fye had been left, and during that investigation, a third body was found.
She was known as Jane Doe until she was finally identified in 2019: Her name was Audrey Lee
Cook.
A fourth body was discovered in 1991 and known as Janet Doe until she was properly identified
in 2019: Her name was Donna Gonsoulin Prudhomme.
According to the FBI, there are no known connections between the victims, and no witnesses have
come forward to shed light on what happened to the women in their last moments.
The Washington Post says that there've been plenty of suspects and even some false confessions,
but the investigation had stalled completely between the discovery of the fourth victim
and the discovery of their identities, while four families have spent years wanting to
know what happened in those Texas fields.
With the identification of the final two victims, law enforcement has once again issued an appeal
to the public, with Special Agent Richard Rennison saying:
"Anything anyone in the public knows, no matter how small they think it is, we really want
them to come forward, because it may be very significant to us."
Law enforcement agencies have a ton of resources at their disposal, including the Murder Accountability
Project — or MAP.
Created by investigative journalist Thomas K. Hargrove, it's essentially a database that
collects information from various law enforcement agencies and compiles it into a massive file
on murders.
According to VOA News, algorithms designed to find patterns in the data suggest there
are multiple serial killers stalking the Indigenous women of the Americas.
Western University criminologist and MAP board of director member Michael Arntfield shared
a pretty dire interpretation of the data he found recorded in the criminal database.
He suggested patterns that lit up both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts along with a series
of truck stops indicating that serial killers are hunting along the highways.
He told APTN:
"The Highway Serial Killer Initiative has about 400 to 450 offender profiles of unidentified
subjects on its database alone that are involved in the trucking industry for the entire Interstate
system."
Unfortunately, complete data only exists for the U.S., and a picture of Canada's serial
killer landscape remains incomplete.
However, there is some good news: With the discovery that serial killers often doubled
as long-haul truckers, the industry created Truckers Against Trafficking training programs
that teach drivers to recognize signs of human trafficking – and it has saved hundreds
of lives.
"As soon as this campaign launched, we saw a significant increase in calls about trafficking
cases — trafficking cases that were not being reported."
If there's anything more terrifying than a serial killer with a type, it's a serial killer
who chooses victims randomly — and according to what former Little Rock, Arkansas Police
Chief Keith Humphrey had to say in a statement issued on April 29, 2021, that's what the
city was facing.
At the time of the statement, there had been four attacks, and three had been fatal.
They had all taken place in the wee hours of the morning, and KATV Little Rock reported
that the first victim, 64-year-old Larry McChristian, was killed in August of 2020.
The second victim, 62-year-old Jeff Welch, was attacked and killed about a month later.
The killer fell silent for a bit until stabbing a 43-year-old woman 15 times on April 11,
2021.
She survived, but the following day, 40-year-old Marlon Franklin was attacked and killed.
Law enforcement issued an appeal for any witnesses or surveillance camera footage that might
have caught the suspect or attacks, and by the end of April, they posted the footage
to their YouTube channel.
The footage was dark, grainy, and gave no identifying markers away, and in spite of
a $20,000 reward promised for anyone who would give information leading to the suspect's
apprehension, he remained at large.
"We will do everything possible to arrest this suspect, and protect our city."
From 2005 to 2009, the bodies of eight women were discovered in Jefferson Davis Parish,
Louisiana.
At first, there didn't seem to be any connection between them – as there often is when it
comes to serial killers.
They range in age from 17 to 30, they vary in race, they were found in different circumstances,
and they were killed in different ways.
Eventually though, the similarities came to light: All eight women were local to the area,
they knew each other, had criminal records, and according to what private investigator
Ethan Brown discovered, they were all involved in sex work and relaying information about
the area's drug trade to law enforcement.
"You may be a drug user yourself, but you provide information to the police in exchange
for something."
When local law enforcement kept coming up empty and bodies kept dropping, Brown went
to investigate.
He says that he got a taste of what was wrong when he showed up at the murder scene of local
dealer David Deshotel only to find people coming, going, and helping themselves to some
souvenirs along the way.
Brown set up shop to investigate, and claimed he turned up not incompetence, but misconduct.
When more bodies turned up during his investigation and he connected them with evidence given
in the earlier murder cases, he claimed that something was, indeed, rotten in Louisiana.
The cases remain unsolved.