It's no secret that we have a morbid fascination with serial killers, and chances are you can name
a handful of history’s most infamous ones. But have you heard of the woman who turned
her victims into beauty products? Yeah … Ted Bundy? He's got nothing on these criminals.
The crimes of Jeffrey Dahmer are made worse because it took a serial killer to blow open
the racial, homophobic, and victim-shaming views of the time. Dahmer was a handsome,
white, gay man with a job; his victims were hustlers and down-on-their-luck men of color.
Dahmer preyed on and ultimately killed 17 men before he was finally brought to justice.
The killing took place between 1978 and 1991,
and here's the thing: It's not like Dahmer went wholly unnoticed.
There were actually multiple times that he could have — and perhaps, should have — been caught.
Biography lists a ghastly timeline of missed opportunities: arrests in 1982 and 1988,
a jail sentence in 1989. In 1991, Dahmer escaped capture by convincing police that his next victim,
a drugged 14-year-old boy, was simply a friend. Nothing was farther from the truth: He was not
only another victim, but he was the brother of a teenager Dahmer had targeted several years prior.
Police helped Dahmer get the teen back to his home, and if they had looked around,
the whole thing would have come to an end: They would have found the remains of another victim.
As it happened, he would kill four more people before his arrest.
"You took my 17-year-old son away from me. You took my daughter's only brother away from her.
For that, I can never forgive you."
As a modus operandi, Dahmer drilled holes into the cranium of victims,
applied acid, and attempted to create what has been described as a "sex zombie."
At Dahmer's final arrest, police found preserved sex organs, a total of 12 heads and skulls,
two skeletons, and three torsos submerged in acid, with another in the refrigerator.
"I feel so bad for what I did to those poor families, and I understand their rightful hate."
He was sentenced to 16 consecutive life terms in a bid to guarantee he never went free.
He wouldn't serve them: Dahmer was killed by a fellow inmate in 1994.
For Enriqueta Martí, murder was a business. She killed children,
rendered them, and turned them into high-end creams.
This infamous Spanish case faded with time, but an El Pais retrospective gives a background:
Martí was a Barcelonan sex worker who, in 1909, became a high-end madam catering to
illegal vices — she abducted little girls to peddle in her brothel. Even then,
she was already siding as a witch doctor, first claiming the blood of toddlers cured tuberculosis.
As STSTWorld reports, Martí slaughtered her victims, then used the fat, bones, and hair to
manufacture expensive ointments to treat disease. When her lair was discovered, officers found:
"[Jars] with strange remains, blood, bones, and hair."
It is unclear how many victims Martí killed during her 20-year campaign.
PsychologyToday confirms 10, IBTimes estimates 12,
but Vice says the final number is a mystery. And as she was murdered in prison in 1913 without
ever confessing, the death toll of "The Vampire of Barcelona" will never be known.
No list of serial killers is complete without the infamous, and anonymous, Jack the Ripper. Hunting
amid the slums of East End London in 1888, he is heralded by Texas State University as the
"first modern serial killer." Despite being well over 100 years gone, the case still fascinates.
There are five murders credited definitively to the Ripper. His victims of choice were
low-end sex workers, and he killed with unimaginable rage. He slit the throat and
abdomen of the first victim, disemboweled the second, nearly decapitated the third,
gutted the fourth — and mailed half a kidney to police — and the fifth?
"In her room in Miller's Court,
the Ripper had the time and space to realize his very darkest fantasies."
The crime scene photos are beyond imagination:
In a frenzy of gore, he defleshed and hollowed out the torso of the fifth.
All the while, cat-and-mouse notes were sent to officials, in which one, the famous "From
Hell" letter, finds the killer bragging about eating the other half of the kidney.
Jack the Ripper was never caught,
leading to scores of theories, movies, and even tours. But was the case solved?
Rolling Stone highlighted a 2019 study that used DNA evidence to identify Aaron Kosminski,
a 23-year-old barber, as the most likely suspect. A "Kosminski" is
indeed mentioned in 1888 transcripts; while he was not pursued as a suspect,
records show he was in and out of asylums and had a particular hatred for sex workers.
He is, of course, far from the only suspect. Others are as gruesomely fascinating as the
Ripper himself: Among them are the barber who was executed for the murders of three wives,
a Russian-born con man who dropped off the world in 1904,
and Thomas Neill Cream, a notorious poisoner who was executed for other crimes in 1892.
Javed Iqbal was absolutely unrepentant for killing 100 boys. As far as he was concerned, it was
payback. According to the BBC, Iqbal was charged — but not convicted — with sodomy in the 1990s. This
made the Pakistani man swear murderous revenge on random boys he blamed, vowing 100 kills.
And he did just that; the BBC reports Iqbal raped and strangled his way through
the street children of Lahore, murdering boys from ages 6 to 16.
Making the case worse was the astonishing fact that Lahore police did not even notice
100 children had gone missing until after Iqbal mailed in an anonymous confession.
Even more damning, officers could not catch Iqbal;
rather, as the BBC reports, he turned himself in once he reached 100 deaths.
Archives at CrimeLibrary describe that when they finally raided his house, officers found butchery:
decomposing bodies, the chain Iqbal used to kill, and vats of acid for dissolving the remains.
Iqbal himself was dismissive of law enforcement: As he felt they would kill him before trial, he
surrendered to staff at a newspaper. He committed suicide in 2001 before his sentence could be
carried out: Execution, where he was to be chopped into 100 pieces — one for each of his victims.
Born in 1859, Belle Gunness was a grifter who found murder more profitable than her
previous careers as a fraudster and arsonist. She first killed her husband and two children
for the insurance money, and from there it was off to the races: Legends Of America
says that she killed her second husband, their daughter, her stepdaughter, and then a string
of lonely men looking for love via Lonely Hearts Clubs… plus any included children.
Over 40 people met their end at the hands of Gunness, but the exact number isn't known.
In today's money, Gunness murdered her way to a fortune of $6.7 million.
Also unknown is her fate. The brother of one of her victims tracked Gunness down.
Sensing the jig was up, Gunness set fire to her farm, supposedly going up with the property.
HistoricMysteries tells that, along with the remains of suitors and their children,
a headless corpse was found. Officials assumed, but did not confirm, it was Gunness;
sightings of the serial killer continued until 1931, and it was more than a little
suspicious that all of Gunness' accounts had been emptied just before the fire.
Some serial killers are driven by sexual desires, others money,
and still others for the thrill. The "Angel of Mercy" is much more sinister;
hiding behind the benign face of a health practitioner, they play god.
Profiled on Biography, British doctor Harold Shipman killed a staggering 215 people. Preying
on the elderly, Shipman overdosed his patients and hid behind his profession to cover up the deaths.
RadioTimes constructed a timeline: Shipman began medicine in 1970, then his own practice in 1993.
Just five years later, an undertaker noticed Shipman's patients died not only in high numbers
but in a similar, upright pose. Around the same time, a victim's daughter, a lawyer,
alerted authorities when her deceased mother curiously left her entire estate to the doctor.
The police were called, Shipman was arrested,
and the insularity of the British medical field found itself in the crosshairs.
While Shipman was charged with only 15 deaths at the trial, many more red flags were uncovered.
Those including his addiction to prescription drugs and the fact he pressured families to
cremate the deceased. Shipman was found guilty of all counts in 1999 and sentenced to life;
a later audit found he was responsible for 236 other deaths over a 24-year period.
Shipman committed suicide in his cell in 2004.
When bodies of men, shot and robbed, began appearing in central Florida between 1989 and
1990, law enforcement suspected they had a serial killer. What they didn't suspect was a woman.
Biography says that when Aileen Wuornos was arrested in 1991 for seven murders,
she was a known sex worker with a record. The press went mad for the story. Her gender,
in particular, generated headlines; per the U.S. Department of Justice,
the vast majority of serial killers are men. Discover Magazine notes female serial
killers account for approximately 11% of cases in the last century.
The 2002 execution of Wuornos was the final stop in a long downward spiral.
According to Biography, she was abused by men from childhood to her teens.
She was abandoned by her mother at 4; committed incest with her brother;
was raped at 13, made pregnant, and forced to give the child up for adoption.
"Lee, it sounds like you've been betrayed by everyone."
"That's right, I was. That's why I don't care if I'm executed."
As The Guardian reports, she was homeless soon after giving up her child,
and she turned to sex work to survive.
Psychologically scarred, CNN reported Wuornos admitted she would kill again if able.
If there is the idea that serial killers tend to be white, male,
and between 25 to 34 years old. Jummai Hassan blows it all out of the water:
She is female, she is Black, and she was, at the time of her arrest, 13.
The murders gripped Hassan's native Nigeria. As reported by The Guardian and the BBC in 2001, it's
hard to know where to start. Is it that Hassan is a child? Or is it that is she a child that killed
48 people? Or is it that she is a child who killed 48 people as part of a cult? Or is it that she is
a child who killed 48 people as part of a cult and sold the pieces of her victims as talismans?
The Guardian says that Hassan's spree occurred over the seven years prior to
her arrest and imprisonment, so that means she began killing at age 6. The BBC argues she was
a victim of religion, but The Guardian counters that cultic killers are in fact
common in Nigeria, and that Hassan is simply a young extremist. The sheer number of Hassan's
killings — toddlers and her own father among them — leave more questions than answers.
When authorities arrested Albert Fish for the murder of Gracie Budd in 1934,
they had no idea how far and wide the case was going to blow open.
According to archives at the TruTV crime library, this unassuming, elderly man had,
for 30 years, committed a slew of crimes that included — but definitely wasn't
limited to — murder, kidnapping, child abuse, dismemberment of a corpse, and cannibalism.
There's more that's just too grisly to go into, and it's also worth noting: That is just what
experts could identify. According to Fish's own accounts quoted in several later profiles,
he "had a child in every state," a victim count in the hundreds, and it all started at age 5.
Records reveal that mental illness was already in the family when Fish was born,
a predisposition not helped when he was regularly and severely beaten while in an orphanage;
Fish, who liked it, would say it was then that he "got started wrong."
By 20, he was a sex worker preying on young boys — and on Black boys in particular because,
in a sign of the times, he felt the authorities would not care if they went missing.
Records are limited given the period and passage of time,
but Radford University officially attributes just seven deaths to Fish. However,
it adds that he is suspected of many more, plus attempted murders. By his execution,
Fish struck such a nightmare nerve that ever after, his moniker was "The Boogey Man."
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