• From the biography of an underage serial killer to ¬¬¬¬¬¬writing about your murders
and claiming they’re fiction, we count ten weird books written by serial killers!
10 – Zekka, • Sakakibara Seito is the alias of an underage
Japanese serial killer who killed two kids and mutilated three others in 1997.
He was fourteen when he was arrested for the murder of eleven-year-old Jun Hase, whose
severed head he placed before the entrance of a school in Kobe.
He also confessed to the murder of ten-year-old Ayaka Yamashita after his arrest.
• In 2015, Seito’s controversial autobiography Zekka was published.
Seito reportedly sent copies of the book to his victims’ families with personalised
apologies.
The families, however, believed the book would only prolong suffering and tried in vain to
have the bestseller removed from stores.
• In the book, Seito admits to being a sexual deviant and claimed he only progressed to
murdering people because killing cats no longer thrilled him.
He describes his crimes – including his love of dissecting humans – in considerable
detail and leaves it unclear whether he feels any true remorse.
• Seito received royalties for sales of the book, which he claimed he would use to
pay off the civil damages awarded to his victims’ families.
He was released back into society in 2005, but his true identity remains unknown.
9 – The Strange Case of Dr. H.H. Holmes, • Herman Mudgett, AKA Dr H.H. Holmes, was
a trained doctor and one of the first serial killers in the US.
He admitted to killing twenty-seven people, but many believe the body count could be as
high as two hundred.
• Holmes bought and renovated an entire city block, turning it into a hotel built
for murder.
Opening just before 1893 World’s Fair, the hotel contained numerous booby traps, like
windowless rooms that could be locked from the outside, built-in gas jets, fake walls
and padded rooms to muffle sound, and a person-sized insulation chamber in the basement.
Holmes constantly changed workers during the hotel’s construction so that he would be
the only one who fully understood the building’s design.
• Of course, Holmes was eventually caught and was sentenced to be hanged in 1896.
His three-volume book, The Strange Case of Dr. H.H. Holmes, was published shortly before
his execution.
The first volume, Holmes’ Own Story, is an autobiography and describes Holmes’ childhood
and hardships – although I’m not sure you can really claim to have experienced hardships
if you had enough money to buy a whole street and build an elaborate hotel.
8 – Final Truth, • Written in collaboration with journalist
Wilton Earle, Donald Gaskins’s Final Truth: the Autobiography of a Serial Killer presents
the serial killer’s life history and describes his heinous crimes.
• Best known Pee Wee Gaskins, Donald Gaskins was a prolific American serial killer with
a serious case of short man syndrome.
He confessed to killing thirteen people by drowning, stabbing or shooting them and then
concealing their corpses in backwoods graves near South Carolina.
• Gaskins was found guilty of eight murders, but in his autobiography he claims to have
killed as many as 110.
Among his many victims was also a toddler whom he raped before murdering.
Disturbingly, he also wrote that he had ‘a special mind’ that gave him ‘permission
to kill’. 7 – Killer,
• Killer: A Journal of Murder was written by Thomas E. Gaddis and James Long and contains
mass murderer Carl Panzram’s personal journal and letters.
The texts were written as far back as 1928, but it took another forty years for them to
be published.
• While incarcerated for burglary at Washington Asylum, Carl Panzram met a prison guard named
Henry Lesser who pitied him and advised him to write, resulting in a wealth of letters
and manuscripts.
• In these letters, Carl Panzram gleefully recounted the details of his murders, his
thousands of robberies and arsons, and the way he sodomised over a thousand men in thirty
countries and out at sea.
• In another harrowing letter, Panzram writes about buying a yacht with stolen money and
hiring sailors, whom he got drunk and sodomised once at sea.
He then shot them in the head, tied rocks to their corpses and coldly dropped them overboard.
6 – The Gates of Janus, • Ian Brady is half of the child-murdering
duo that went down in history for the Moors Murders in Manchester in 1966.
Together with Myra Hindley, he murdered and raped five children ranging in age from ten
to seventeen years old.
• In The Gates of Janus is Ian Brady’s manifesto and has been described as a ‘disturbingly
self-aware and provocative addition to the true crime canon’.
In it, Brady takes the reader into the mind of a serial killer and explains its clockwork.
He tries to convince readers that serial killers have great insight into themselves and presents
a theory about the origin of the modern-day serial killer, including profiles of famous
killers like Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy. 5 – The Trinity of Superkidds,
• J.D.
Bauer is the pseudonym of Charles Kembo, a serial killer who, it turns out, authored
a young adult novel called Quest for Water.
• Charles Kembo was convicted of four murders between 2002 and 2005.
In 2003, his wife disappeared and her body was never recovered.
Later that year, Kembo’s business partner was found strangled and castrated in a Vancouver
park.
A year later, the remains of his new girlfriend were found in a hockey bag, and then his twenty-year-old
stepdaughter’s body was found in 2005 wrapped in garbage bags and callously dumped.
• Charles Kembo was arrested a few days after his final murder and is still in prison
today.
• The Trinity of Superkidds: Quest for Water is Charles Kembo’s 372-page YA adventure
story about three fun-loving teens in a waterless post-apocalyptic world.
The wholesome story was published on Amazon in 2010, during the murder trial.
Who said serial killers can’t have other interests?
4 – Son of Hope, • David Berkowitz is an American serial
killer who killed six people July 1976 and August 1977.
He worked only at night and preferred to target dark-haired women.
Because of this, many women that summer dyed their hair blonde or cut it short to stay
off his radar.
• During his eventual imprisonment, David found religion and became the ‘Son of Hope’.
Hoping for redemption, he wrote a book with the same title, which contained his prison
journals and described his rebirth into Christianity.
• David had briefly been involved with a Satanist cult and says he was driven to murder
by the devil.
He claimed to suffer hallucinations and received instructional messages from the real mastermind
of his crimes: his neighbour’s dog.
• David is unable to profit from the sales of his book and a portion of the proceeds
from each sale goes to the victims of his crimes.
No word on whether the dog was compensated. 3 – The Making of a Serial Killer,
• Danny Rolling is a notorious Florida serial killer who raped and killed five college students
in 1990.
The son of a police officer, he came to Gainesville before the start of the University of Florida’s
fall semester and pitched a tent in the nearby woods.
He then carried out several gruesome murders over four days.
In the aftermath, students were instructed to carry baseball bats around campus and to
sleep twenty to a dorm room.
• One of the most horrifying aspects of Danny’s killing spree was the way he posed
one of his victims in a sitting position and placed her severed head on a nearby bookshelf.
• Danny was eventually apprehended and wrote the book The Making of a Serial Killer from
prison with his former fiancée, Sondra London.
The book was published in 1996 and is filled with disturbing stories, like a graphic recount
of his Sarasota rape.
2 – Killer Fiction, • In 1973, Deputy Sheriff Gerard John Schaefer
was convicted for the torture and the murder of teenagers Susan Place and Georgia Jessup.
It’s likely he committed other murders, too, as a police search of his mother’s
home revealed objects belonging to missing women and more than a hundred pages of writing
and sketches depicting mutilations and murders.
• In 1990, Gerard’s former high school girlfriend Sondra London – yes, the fiancé
of last Danny Rolling; does this woman have a type or what? – published some of Gerard’s
“fiction” in a volume called Killer Fiction.
• However, police and prosecutors believe there was more fact than fiction in these
stories, and Gerard himself even alluded to this in one a prison letter.
All of Gerard’s fiction featured the savage torture and murder of women, clearly mirroring
his own dark fantasies.
They were often written from the killer’s perspective and the killer was usually a rogue
cop like Gerard.
• If you’re wondering, Sondra London went on to become a true crime writer, while Gerard
was killed by a fellow inmate in 1995.
The inmate ran into his cell, cut his throat, and stabbed him in the eyes.
Mustn’t have liked him very much.
1 – A Question of Doubt, • The notorious John Wayne Gacy killed thirty-three
young people – mostly children.
After serving a small portion of a sodomy sentence, Gacy moved to Chicago where he became
a successful building contractor.
He was well-liked and often appeared as ‘Pogo the Clown’ at children’s parties and charity
events.
This is when he got the taste for murder.
• Gacy lured his victims – usually runaways and drifters – to his home by posing as
a police officer or inviting them in for drinks.
Once inside, he would handcuff them under the guise of performing a magic trick, and
then rape and torture them.
• He buried his victims’ bodies in the crawl space beneath his house, but was such
a prolific killer that the space eventually filled and he had to start dumping bodies
in a nearby river.
• Gacy was eventually caught when an investigating officer noticed the smell coming from the
crawl space.
He was convicted in 1980, and given a lethal injection in 1994.
• During his incarceration, Gacy co-authored a book called A Question of Doubt in which
he blamed other parties for the corpses under his house.
Probably that demonic dog was involved, too.
He claimed the police and media had set him up, but evidence against him was overwhelming.
• 500 copies of the book were published in 1993, but it has now fallen out of print.
However, there was a play based on the book called 33: A Question of Doubt, which you
can see if you like supporting mass murderers.