Which serial killer had almost 100 victims? Who got caught trying to flee the country?
And who was arrested nearly 40 years after their killing spree? Keep watching for all the details.
Lonnie Franklin earned his name, "The Grim Sleeper," because authorities believed he went
into a deep hibernation between his grisly killing streaks. After a string of murders in the 1980s,
the killer re-emerged to stalk the streets of Los Angeles once again at the turn of the century.
To the authorities' knowledge, "The Grim Sleeper" had a relatively small number of
victims that were spaced years apart, with a long break between 1988 and 2002. But by the
time Franklin was finally caught in 2010, his victim count was higher than anyone imagined.
In all, "The Grim Sleeper" was charged with the murders of ten women,
and the real number of victims may even be higher than that.
When he was apprehended, more than 1000 photos and
hundreds of hours of video were found in the killer's possession,
showing unknown women who may well also have been his victims. It's possible that Franklin
killed more than 25 women, potentially leaving 15 unaccounted for in southern California.
In cases like these, the authorities tend to continue trying to identify victims long
after the killer has been convicted, so the families of those victims can
have some closure. With Franklin already sentenced to the death penalty in 2016,
there really wasn't much more that the justice system could legally do to him.
Before his sentence could be carried out, Franklin died in his cell in March of 2020.
"It's a relief to know that he's gone and that the victims' families that
are still alive were able to see an end to that."
Elias Abuelazam had an unusually literal nickname:
"The Serial Stabber." His crimes spanned from Michigan through Ohio and all the way to Virginia,
with the majority having been committed in Flint, Michigan.
"He hurt a lot of families. He hurt a lot of lives, a lot of homes.
He ruined a lot of people's lives, period."
It's thought that Abuelazam may have stabbed up to 20 victims, with at least five having died as
a result. Most of the killer's victims were Black men, either by design or coincidence,
suggesting that his senseless violence could have been racially motivated.
The killer's run spanned four months over the summer of 2010 before he was arrested
and convicted. The police caught up to Abuelazam at an airport in
Atlanta where he was attempting to flee the country for Israel.
It took two years to convict Abuelazam of the murders; he was sentenced to life in prison.
Anthony Sowell, "The Cleveland Strangler," had a pretty straightforward MO:
he strangled his victims in Cleveland, Ohio. But it wasn't the killings that put him on the
police's radar, but rather a different violent crime that followed him throughout his life,
and blew the Cleveland Strangler case wide open.
It all started in 1989, when Sowell was found guilty of assaulting a woman and
sentenced to serve 15 years. He was paroled early,
but came under suspicion of sexual assault several times after his release.
Being a sex offender meant the authorities could pay Sowell a
surprise visit anytime they pleased, and that's what happened in 2009.
For years, there had been complaints about foul odors emanating from somewhere near Sowell's home,
but the dots hadn't been connected until the day of that surprise visit.
Girls had also been found strangled in the area going as far back as 1988. But, on that
fateful day, Sowell assaulted another woman and earned himself another arrest. When the police
searched his home, they found the decomposing bodies of several victims on his property.
"The Cleveland Strangler" killed at least 11 women during his run,
and though he wasn't initially arrested in the past ten years,
he was convicted for those killings in 2011 -- and he was also sentenced to death. The
penalty couldn't be upheld though, since Sowell died in prison in February 2021.
Salvatore Perrone, "The Son of Sal" as he's been ironically named, is a serial killer who
targeted Middle Eastern shopkeepers in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bay Ridge.
In 2012, Perrone gunned down three shopkeepers in the area in seemingly random attacks.
Perrone's killings were cold-blooded. He walked into each of the shops and
opened fire with a sawed-off .22 caliber rifle.
Perrone was arrested the same year as the killings after the authorities found a duffel
bag containing his rifle and three knives, covered with traces of what looked like blood,
at his girlfriend's apartment. The killer was sentenced to life in prison.
No serial killer is known to have accumulated a body count in the United States as high as that
of Samuel Little. That's not just speculation either. The Federal Bureau of Investigation
has confirmed that Little is the most prolific serial killer in U.S. history. Little gained his
title by murdering those he thought would never be accounted for, and he nearly got away with it too.
This killer's murder spree began in 1970 and ended in 2005,
though Little wasn't convicted of his crimes until 2014,
and it took another four years for him to confess. And it was a confession of mind-blowing scope.
"What city did you kill the most in?" "Miami and Los Angeles."
"How many did you kill in Los Angeles?" "Los Angeles, uh, approximately 20."
Little has stated that he strangled 93 victims during his serial killing career, and so far,
at least 50 of his confessed crimes have been confirmed. Those 50-plus victims make Ted
Bundy's 33 and John Wayne Gacy's 36 look measly in comparison. Along with his detailed confession,
Little was kind enough to provide investigators with detailed sketches of the people that he
killed, which the authorities are still trying to match to the identities of known victims.
Little truly lived a life of crime, surviving on what he could steal and
drifting the country until he was put behind bars. He died in prison in December 2020.
The first rule in the serial killer's handbook is to not get caught. It takes
a lot of foresight and preparation, of which Israel Keyes had plenty.
Keyes was one of the most methodical serial killers in American history,
killing between eight and 12 people before he broke his own rules and got caught,
bringing his murder spree to an end in 2012.
Careful to avoid capture, Keyes refused to kill in his own backyard. Instead,
he would fly around the country to remote locations, and then rent a car to drive
up to hundreds of more miles before finally targeting a victim. He would also leave kill
kits around the country months or years in advance, to help limit his exposure
around the time of an actual murder. His kills would then happen in remote
areas or houses with attached garages so there would be no witnesses to catch him in the act.
Keyes was only caught because he killed a victim close to home and used her debit card
to make a purchase. To this day, the FBI is still trying to track down all of his potential kills.
Before Cleveland's Michael Madison turned to serial killing, his violent sexual impulses
had already landed him a four-year prison sentence in 2002 for attempted sexual assault.
But his admiration for a fellow Cleveland criminal, the Cleveland Strangler, may have
influenced him to become a killer himself.
Over the course of less than a year between 2012 and 2013,
Madison killed three people, luring them back to his home before he strangled them to death.
He kept the bodies close by, stashing one victim in his garage, another in a bush,
and the final victim in the basement of an empty house. In these locations, Madison could view
all of the bodies from the second-story balcony of his home anytime he wished.
A jury found Madison guilty of his crimes in 2019. He was given the death penalty.
As his name suggests, Darren Deon Vann operated in Gary, Indiana, killing at least seven people over
roughly a one-year period before being arrested in October 2014.
When Vann was questioned after being taken into custody, he admitted that he killed one woman
for a few hundred bucks and some cocaine. Another he said he killed simply because
he was angry. Vann also sent the police on something of a grim scavenger hunt,
revealing that he had hidden the bodies of victims within abandoned houses throughout the city.
"The individual who committed these crimes, his MO was to put
people in abandoned -- these dead women in abandoned houses."
In 2018, Vann's case would finally come to end due to a plea deal he struck with
prosecutors for life in prison in order to avoid the death penalty.
A 911 call in the middle of the night from a kidnapping victim brought police to the door
of Shawn Grate, whom they would soon discover was a serial killer. But, when Grate was arrested in
2016 for the murder of two women, nobody could've guessed how deep this rabbit hole would go. It
turned out that Grate had been murdering for a lot longer than anyone originally suspected,
and it didn't take long for the killer's two murder charges to turn into five.
His first kill took place in 2006. He managed to trick his girlfriend
at the time into unwittingly cleaning up the woman's blood,
later proposing marriage to her with a ring off the victim's finger.
Grate would receive the death penalty for his crimes, upheld in a 2020 appeal, which the county
prosecutor of the case thought was fitting. As County Prosecutor Christopher Tunnell told
the judge in the case, quote, "He is the reason the death penalty exists in the state of Ohio."
William Devin Howell was already serving a 15-year term for manslaughter when he
was charged with the murders of six other people, whom he killed in 2003. In 2017,
Howell pleaded guilty to the charges and received
six consecutive life sentences on top of the time he was already serving.
The killer spoke with author Anne Howard and spilled all of his dark, disturbing secrets
before his conviction. According to Howell, he didn't murder for the sake of murder. To him,
it was all about the assault -- killing was just a way to get rid of the evidence.
"I just don't fit the mold at all that everybody tries to put serial killers
in. You know what I mean? So why I grew up to commit these crimes, I have no idea."
After each killing, Howell would dump the bodies in a swamp behind the local strip
mall, which he referred to as his "garden." The term became the title of Anne Howard's book,
"His Garden: Conversations With a Serial Killer.
A former police officer by the name of Joseph James DeAngelo was arrested in
2018 for being the infamous "Golden State Killer," proving that serial killers can
truly be hiding behind any corner or within any face. DeAngelo's arrest,
however, took one of the most infamous serial killers of the past century off the streets
and put to bed a case that had gone unsolved for 40 years.
With a professional history as a police officer, DeAngelo committed a string of at least 12 murders
and more than 50 assaults in a period that spanned through the 70s and 80s. The spree
poisoned the hearts of California residents with heavy feelings of paranoid fear for years, first
as the "East Area Rapist," then as "The Original Night Stalker," before settling into his final
title as "The Golden State Killer." Whatever name DeAngelo's serial killer persona went by didn't
matter. He was sentenced to more than 20 life sentences for his terrible deeds regardless, and
it only took a covert investigation, DNA evidence, and the better part of half a century to do it.
The Los Angeles Times details the investigation that led to DeAngelo's arrest,
noting that the investigators used two for-profit genetic genealogy companies
to match bodily fluid from a rape kit in the case to some of DeAngelo's family members.
Once identified, the killer confessed to 26 total kidnappings and murders,
as well as more than 60 other violent crimes, closing a case that seemed virtually unsolvable.
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