#10 – Thiago Philipe Souza Bragança and Walderson Junior da Silva
In January of 2020, a Brazilian model named Ana Braga suddenly vanished from her California
home.
The 24-year-old had moved to Los Angeles in 2019 to further her modelling career, but
January the 29th marked the last time anybody had heard from her.
Braga knew two other Brazilian nationals, Thiago Philipe Souza Bragança and Walderson
Junior da Silva, also staying in California at the time.
The woman’s friends reported that she’d become distant after getting romantically
involved with one of the men.
One night, video surveillance captured Braga entering her home with the pair, who later
claimed they were high on an illicit substance.
They maintained that Braga had brandished a knife at them and, while acting in self-defense,
they’d fatally strangled her with a power cord.
However, in a video they’d taken just moments after killing her, Bragança and Silva were
heard mocking the woman.
Her body could be seen lying face down, with a cord wrapped around her neck, before the
duo hid her in a comforter.
Surveillance video captured the men leaving Braga’s home while carrying the comforter.
They placed the model’s body into her car and subsequently drove 1,300 miles to Oklahoma
City.
Weeks later, on February the 12th, police found her empty vehicle in the parking lot
of a casino.
Surveillance video from February the 1st showed Bragança and Silva abandoning Braga’s car
before getting into a green minivan.
They then fled to Mexico before catching a flight back to Brazil.
On February the 22nd of 2020, both men were arrested in the South American country and
admitted to murdering Braga. #9 – Maury Travis
In May of 2002, Maury Travis, also known as the St. Louis Killer, was arrested in connection
to a string of deaths in the area.
Between March of 2001 and May of 2002, Travis was proven to have been responsible for the
murder of at least 12 escorts whose bodies were found along roadsides throughout the
city.
Police sorted through several pieces of evidence that pointed to Travis, including a map that
the man himself had anonymously sent to the authorities with the location of one of his
victims’ bodies.
Investigators were able to trace the map back to Travis’s computer.
When they searched his home, the police found a chamber in his basement, where they determined
he’d tormented his victims before killing them.
Recordings were found that showed abuse, torture, and at least one instance of Travis strangling
a woman to death.
He admitted to committing 17 murders but only 12 bodies were found.
Travis was arrested on June the 7th of 2002 but, just three days later, was found dead
in his cell after he’d hung himself.
#8 – Richard Davis and Dena Riley In 2006, Missouri police discovered the body
of Michelle Huff-Ricci, burnt and buried in a shallow grave.
Investigators found evidence that linked Richard Davis and his girlfriend, Dena Riley, to the
crime.
However, by the time the connection was made, the couple had fled and gone into hiding.
While searching their home, the police came upon graphic videos that showed the couple
torturing and abusing both Huff-Ricci and another woman, Marsha Spicer, whose body was
also found in a shallow grave.
After an eight-day manhunt, the police eventually captured the couple.
Davis received the death penalty while Riley was given nine consecutive life sentences
for the murders.
In December of 2020, it was announced that Davis had died behind bars at the age of 56.
#7 – Gregory Graf 33-year-old Jessica Padgett’s mother reported
her missing after she’d disappeared from her Pennsylvania home, on November the 21st
of 2014.
During an extensive five-day search, the police questioned Padgett’s stepfather, Gregory
Graf, whose story about what had happened was inconsistent.
Graf eventually confessed to the authorities that he had shot Padgett in the back of the
head and recorded himself abusing her corpse before hiding it on his property.
At his trial, in 2015, the jury only needed six minutes to convict Graf of first degree
murder, resulting in a sentence of life in prison.
#6 – Deidre Hunt and Konstantinos Fotopoulos In 1990, Mark Kevin Ramsey went out to the
woods west of Daytona Beach, Florida, with Konstantinos Fotopoulos and his girlfriend,
Deidre Hunt, in what he thought was an official initiation into a criminal club.
The 19-year-old knew that Fotopoulos was a counterfeiter and was interested in being
part of his operation.
However, Fotopoulos had no real intention of allowing Ramsey on the inside.
The problem was the latter already knew too much and had threatened to blackmail the former.
Hunt later alleged that Fotopoulos had forced her to take part in a scheme of luring Ramsey
into the woods to kill him, threatening to do the same to her if she didn’t go along
with it.
Once they got there, Fotopoulos started videotaping with a camcorder as Hunt shot Ramsey four
times, thrice in the chest and once in the head.
The recording was used as compelling evidence during their trial that resulted in both Hunt
and Fotopoulos being sentenced to death.
However, eight years later, Hunt’s sentence was reduced to two terms of life in prison.
#5 – Jamel Dunn On July the 9th of 2017, Jamel Dunn, a 31-year-old
Florida man, struggled to stay afloat after entering a pond.
A group of five teenagers between the ages of 14 and 18 happened to be on the shore when
Dunn called out for help.
Instead of intervening, they got out their phones and started recording while they mocked
him and laughed at his pleas for assistance.
They filmed him for over two minutes as he drowned and, after Dunn’s death, didn’t
alert anybody.
His family desperately searched for him in the aftermath and it wasn’t until 5 days
later that police found his body in the pond.
Despite video evidence of the teens’ complacency, a judge argued that while there may have been
a moral obligation to help, there wasn’t a legal one as there was no law in Florida
that required a person to provide emergency assistance.
However, the Cocoa Police Department intended to charge the teens with a misdemeanor for
not complying with Florida Statute 406, which stated that it was a person’s responsibility
to report a death if they saw one.
The conviction would’ve only meant a punishment of a $1,000 fine per person and the state
attorney ultimately decided not to press charges.
#4 – Cemeren Yilmaz On September the 16th of 2018, a UK teen was
fatally beaten and stabbed by four other teens in what was believed to have been a gang-related
incident.
The victim, Cemeren Yilmaz, had ties to the Mile Road gang while his killers, Aaron Miller,
Caleb Brown, Jacob Morgan, and Ramon Djuana were part of a rival gang called the Black
Tom gang.
Investigators uncovered video footage that showed prior tension building up between Yilmaz
and his rivals before the attack against him took place.
The four teens recorded the entire incident on Snapchat, which included the stabbing,
beating, and bludgeoning of Yilmaz with a hammer.
His friend called for help, and the teen was rushed to the hospital, where he died the
next day.
All four youths were found guilty at their trial and sentenced to life in prison.
Miller was given a minimum of 21 years, Brown and Djuana were sentenced to a minimum of
17 years, and Morgan was sentenced to serve a minimum of 16 years.
#3 – Bethany Martin In July of 2021, Bethany Martin, then in her
late teens, was walking through a Texas neighborhood with her friend when they came across the
body of a 25-year-old man in a drainage ditch.
Martin’s friend took a video, which they later posted to Snapchat, of her removing
a necklace from the dead man’s corpse.
The friend also took the pendant from the necklace with the intention of keeping it,
stating that “it matched her style.”
The girls then called the police to report the body.
During the investigation that followed, law enforcement was informed of Martin’s video,
which had since gone viral.
Upon seeing the recording, the police arrested and charged Martin as an adult with felony
theft from a human corpse or grave, but she was released on $2,000 bail.
The friend who was with her also faced charges but, due to her younger age, she was charged
as a minor.
The man was identified as Marcus Adams The pendant that the girls had stolen was returned
to Adams’s family.
#2 – Mark Masters and Sean Thompson In September of 2008, three English teenagers,
19-year-old Mark Masters, Sean Thompson, aged 17, and a younger female friend were involved
in brutally attacking an innocent man, which ultimately led to his death.
Masters and Thompson were playing “Happy Slap,” a gruesome game that essentially
involved beating up random people on the street.
On one particular day, the trio targeted 29-year-old Gavin Waterhouse.
Masters and Thompson asked their friend to record the attack with her phone while they
assaulted him.
In spite of his injuries and losing consciousness, Waterhouse initially survived his ordeal.
However, he didn’t go to a hospital for treatment and died three days later from a
ruptured spleen.
The teens posted the video online which was used as evidence to convict them for the attack.
Masters was sentenced to 7 years and Thompson to 6 years in juvenile detention facilities
for manslaughter, while the friend who recorded the attack received two years for aiding and
abetting. #1 – Luka Magnotta
In 2010, Canadian man Luka Magnotta started uploading gruesome videos that showed him
killing kittens but, at the time, nobody knew who he was.
Groups of animal rights activists made it their mission to bring the individual behind
the horrific footage to justice.
After following up on clues from the clips, Internet sleuths were able to uncover his
identity.
When they alerted the police, however, nothing came of it, which allowed Magnotta to continue
posting similar content.
Then, in 2012, he uploaded a video on a whole other level.
In it, he was on top of a nude, bound Chinese man, later named as Justin Lin.
Magnotta stabbed him 100 times with an ice pick and dismembered his body.
The police was contacted and the killer was promptly put on Interpol’s most wanted list.
He was found within a month and arrested at a cybercafe in Berlin.
His 2014 trial resulted in him being sentenced to a minimum of 25 years in prison.
The case was featured in Netflix’s massively successful true crime documentary series “Don't
F with Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer”.
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