Crime shows will make you think that serial killers usually get caught. But in real life,
plenty of them don't. Some of them walk free for years, even decades, or never get captured
at all. Keep your head on swivel, because these dangerous serial killers are still out there.
The widely accepted definition of a serial killer is a person who murders three or more
people over a long period of time. Now, let's consider the case of Pedro Lopez,
a Colombian serial killer who hunted his way across South America.
He's gone way beyond three people — and as of right now, nobody knows where he is.
According to Rolling Stone, Lopez's predilection for assault and murder started when he was young.
Born in 1948, he was eventually arrested in Ecuador in 1980. It was there that he confessed
to 110 murders in Ecuador alone, and later added 240 more victims across several other countries.
He preferred children between seven and 12-years-old, and was a suspect in a further
300 killings. At one point, he claimed he was able to kill three people a week.
Lopez was arrested after an attempted kidnapping was thwarted. He served 14
years of a 16-year sentence in Ecuador when he was released early for good behavior. Then, he
was immediately sent back to his native Colombia and put on trial for the murders committed there.
The end of the trial saw him committed to a psychiatric institution, and he remained
there for four years — until 1998. That's when he was released on good behavior and $50 bail.
Now in his seventies, he hasn't been seen since, but he has been connected to still more killings.
It took some time for the full scale of the case to unfold, and when it did,
it became what 48 Hours calls "the biggest unsolved murder case in NY history."
It started with a 23-minute 911 call, made by Shannan Gilbert.
Gilbert — an escort — had just been dropped off at a client's home when,
three hours later, she fled that home, ran to a neighbor, asked for help, then disappeared.
That was in May 2010, and it wasn't until December 11 of the same year
that the manhunt for Gilbert started turning up bodies along Long Island's Gilgo Beach.
Those bodies included Maureen Brainard-Barnes, who had been
missing for three years, and Megan Waterman, who left behind a three-year-old daughter.
More remains were discovered in the following months, bringing the total to 10.
Fast forward more than a decade, and not only is the killer still out there, but five of the
women found along that lonely stretch of beach remain unidentified. According to ABC News,
the case is still very active and recently, new evidence — including a photo of a belt
bearing the initials WH or HM — were released to the public. The killer remains at large.
In January 2021, the Chicago Sun-Times ran a profile piece on Gwendolyn Williams.
She loved to dance, they said, and was a fierce protector of her younger siblings.
She taught them how to stay on the straight and narrow, encouraged them to follow their dreams,
and to stay in church. She loved to cook, and her family called her their "guardian angel."
Her body was discovered on June 12, 2002, bearing defensive wounds and signs — like
skin under her nails — that showed she'd tried to fight off whoever had killed her.
And it wasn't just Williams: police believe she is one of 51 Chicago
women who have been the victim of a serial killer operating in the city since 2001.
According to The Chicago Tribune, the victim count may be 55 to 75 or even higher.
By the time law enforcement put together a task force to treat the murders as connected,
at least four more potentially connected victims had been discovered. In late 2020,
investigators had turned up a slew of non-matching DNA samples in the cases,
but stressed that the fact there was no DNA in the overwhelming majority of murders pointed
toward the likelihood that this was one very careful, very intelligent killer.
Why wasn't the trend of missing DNA evidence discovered sooner? Because, the Illinois
State Forensic Labs are, in some cases, 30 years behind in analyzing evidence from certain cases.
The Killing Fields — the name given to a strip of abandoned oil fields near Interstate
45 — have long been known as a favorite dump site for at least one murderer. In 1984,
news went national with the discovery of four naked, carefully posed, female murder victims.
At the time, law enforcement had a suspect: Robert Abel, a NASA engineer who worked on the original
Apollo missions. Abel was around 60-years-old when the murders — and more disappearances — happened,
and the same law enforcement officials who considered him a suspect were also forced
to admit that they had absolutely no evidence that he had anything to do with the killings.
Abel insisted that he was innocent, but it's undeniable that some killer was at
work along this lonely stretch of highway. The 30+ young women who have been killed or gone
missing over the course of decades are sometimes collectively referred to as the I-45 killings,
and according to The Washington Post, a few perpetrators have been caught,
but most cases — including the killing of those four women — are still open.
Two of those four victims discovered in the mid-80s were only identified in 2019,
thanks to advances in genetic analysis. Tim Miller, the father of victim Laura Miller,
has since turned the Killing Fields into a memorial for all missing loved ones,
and hopes that someday, the killer will be caught.
The Jeff Davis 8 is the name given to eight women who were killed in
regular intervals from 2005 to 2009 in Jefferson Davis Parish, Louisiana.
According to The Washington Post, they were all between 17 and 30-years-old,
they were all associated in some way with area's drug and sex work trade,
and they were all from Jennings, Louisiana. By fall of 2009, law enforcement went on
the record to state that the murders were undoubtedly the work of one serial killer,
and that they were offering a reward leading to his capture.
But not everyone was convinced, including an investigative journalist named Ethan Brown.
He would later write "Murder in the Bayou" based on his findings, and the gist of the accusations
is this: Brown found that all eight victims had some sort of relationship — some sexual,
some as informants — with local law enforcement. That — and insight from their shared pimp,
Frankie Richard — led him to believe that the women died in some sort of massive cover-up.
Whether the killer — or killers — were from law enforcement or a serial offender working alone,
the murderer remains at large and the cases are unsolved.
There's a stretch of Canada's Yellowhead Highway 16 between Prince Rupert and
Prince George where the scenery includes billboards warning women not to hitchhike.
They're there because there have been so many bodies recovered along this stretch
of road that it's now popularly called the Highway of Tears.
The Canadian Encyclopedia says it's unknown just how many people have been killed along
this stretch of highway. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police officially say the number is 18,
but Human Rights Watch — along with Indigenous groups in the area — say
the actual number is closer to 40, as many of those who have
disappeared — or been killed — belong to often-overlooked Indigenous populations.
Unsolved murders along Highway 18 go all the way back to 1969, and in 2016,
RCMP Staff Sgt. Wayne Clary had some somber words for CBC. He told the news agency,
"I've been honest with our [victims'] families and I say perhaps they'll never be solved."
A task force called E-PANA was assembled in 2005 to investigate disappearances,
but since, the number of people assigned to the task force has dropped from 70 to just eight.
Clary says that in many of the still-open cases, the years have not been kind. Evidence is lost,
witnesses have died, and sometimes, victims' bodies go undiscovered in the wilderness. But
the police say that they're still following up on tips that come in,
trying to find some closure for the many people lost along this lonely stretch of road.
It started with a list of names, compiled by an Albuquerque detective starting in 2005.
The names added up quickly, but it wasn't until 2009 that law enforcement uncovered their remains.
According to the Albuquerque Journal, the first human bone was found on February 2.
It was weeks before all the bodies were uncovered and another year before the women were identified.
10 of the 11 women were on a list that Detective Ida Lopez had made of missing women with ties to
the city's high-crime, Central Avenue area. Seven more women on the list are
still unaccounted for, leading experts to believe there are other burial sites.
At the time, it was reported in the national media as the "crime of the century,"
but as the years have gone on, a lead suspect in the killings has yet to publicly emerge.
"Do you guys have a lead suspect on this? Do you in your gut think you know who did this?"
"No."
The first victim of the serial killer dubbed the Rainbow Maniac was Jose Cicero Henrique. He
was killed on July 4, 2007, then dumped in Sao Paulo's Paturis Park — and he wasn't the last.
According to The Guardian, 13 men in total were killed and dumped in the park
against the backdrop of Brazil's gay pride march, leading police chief Paulo Fernando
Fortunato to say of the killer, quote, "He doesn't like homosexuals, he hates them."
It wasn't until six months after Henrique's body was discovered that
police even announced they knew they were dealing with a serial killer they'd linked
not only to the Paturis park killings, but to three more murders in a nearby city. 0:08:19.360,1193:02:47.295 The announcement came alongside the arrest of a retired police officer,
but in spite of a witness that identified the man as having been the shooter in at least
one of the murders, he was ultimately acquitted. No other arrests were made.
For a long time, it seemed that LA's homeless community could rest at least a little bit easier:
the Skid Row Stabber had been caught. The months of October and November, 1978,
had been a terrifying time, when 10 homeless men were brutally murdered in the streets.
According to the LA Times, police honed in on Bobby Joe Maxwell after discovering two
pieces of evidence: his handprint on a bench near one of the crime scenes,
and the fact that he owned a knife that could have made the wounds in some of the stabbings.
Add in the testimony of a man named Sidney Storch, and it was an open and shut case.
Only, it definitely shouldn't have been. Years later, new information came to light: Storch
would use details from public news reports to put together false confessions he then claimed to have
heard from fellow inmates, like Maxwell. That was in 1998, and shockingly, it wasn't until 2010 that
Maxwell's conviction as the Skid Row Stabber would be overturned, and it still wasn't over.
According to AP, Maxwell was still fighting the charges in 2018, and they were finally dismissed
in August. By then, Maxwell was hospitalized and comatose following a severe heart attack.
He died in May of the following year, and the real Skid Row Stabber was never caught.
Three years, eight bodies, and a 23-mile-long section of Virginia Highway:
that forms the backbone of the so-called Colonial Parkway Murders.
"Four couples, eight murders, two not found."
At a glance, there's a lot of evidence that seems to suggest the eight murders were the work of the
same person. Victims were killed between October 1986 and September 1989, they were all young
couples killed at the same time, in the same area, and each set of victims seemed to have
been reaching for identification or registration information when they were taken from their cars.
That last detail led to the belief that the killer either was, or was posing as, law enforcement.
But given the different ways in which the victims were killed, some investigators
were hesitant to call it the work of a serial killer. Revisiting the case in 2021,
Bill Thomas — producer of a four-part Oxygen series on the murders, as well as a brother of one
of the victims — says that with renewed interest in the case and advances in forensic technology,
he hopes that there's still a chance to bring his sister's killer to justice.
The first victim was killed on April 8, 1992, and the last known victim died on
May 7 of the same year. In just a few short weeks, six people — all brunette,
and all retail workers along a stretch of Missouri highway — were killed in the same way.
Each one was shot with a .22 caliber rifle, there was no sign of sexual assault,
and so little was taken from each store that robbery was written off as a motive. The killings
seemed to stop as abruptly as they started, and the serial killer was never identified.
Witnesses described the killer as a man who appeared disheveled, talking to himself,
who hung out around the stores where the victims would later be found.
Some witnesses later said they'd seen him hitchhiking away from the scene.
But that's not the end of the story. A man named Donald Waterhouse was originally on
the suspect list — he'd reportedly killed his mother and stepfather with the same caliber
rifle not long before the I-70 killer struck — but in 1993 and 1994, Texas experienced
a similar set of murders... while Waterhouse was behind bars. Three more store clerks were
shot in their workplaces and this time, one survived. The two sets of killings were never
officially linked by law enforcement, but to some, it seemed like more than a coincidence.
"Do you guys think he's still around?"
"There's nothing out there saying that he is not alive. I believe he's still alive and out there."
The Route 29 Stalker had a pattern: he'd pull up alongside or behind women who were driving,
and if they stopped, he'd try to convince them there was something wrong with their vehicle.
More than a dozen women were reportedly approached in this manner,
including known victim Alicia Showalter Reynolds.
Reynolds was killed on March 2, 1996 — and that's also when appearances of the Route
29 stalker stopped. She was missing for more than 2 months before her body was discovered,
and she's not the only person to meet a grisly fate along Virginia's Route 29.
Investigators have found a string of cases where women disappear from the same stretch of road,
including Morgan Harrington in 2009, Samantha Clarke in 2010, and Dashad Smith in 2012.
When Harrington's remains were discovered and identified, law enforcement also recovered
DNA that was a match to a rape case from northern Virginia. Jesse Matthew Jr. was
convicted in 2016 of Harrington's murder and is serving four consecutive life sentences.
It remains unclear whether or not the string of other disappearances are the work of a single
killer, or if several predators are stalking this particular stretch of road through Virginia.
The entire country of Belize has a population of about 230,000 people,
and for reference, that's about the same population as the city of Boise, Idaho.
In 1999, Belize was faced with the realization that they were
dealing with their very first serial killer, and he was hunting young girls.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the bodies of seven girls were recovered in the span of
just one year — and there was a pattern. Victims were mostly from low-income, single-parent homes,
and often forced into the shadier side of city life in order to make ends meet.
Suspects came and went, but other victims kept showing up. When suspect Michael Williams was
in custody, for example, 9-year-old Erica Williams went missing. Other arrests were
made as people demanded justice, but no one was ever tried and convicted of the killings.
Belize's News 5 called for an investigation into links between the murders and American serial
killer Lonnie Franklin — otherwise known as the Grim Sleeper — for what they called
a highly suspicious connection. Not only had Franklin married a woman from Belize,
but witnesses reportedly saw him in Belize City around the time of the murders,
and the "sleep period" that gave him his nickname coincided with the killings.
Was he not sleeping at all? Or did Belize's child-killer go free?
Having a serial killer active in your own backyard is a terrifying prospect,
and between 1985 and 1990, that's exactly what was going on in Philadelphia. The so-called Frankford
Slasher killed at least eight women in five years, and according to NBC Philadelphia, there was a
pattern. The women were all white, they were all locals who were known customers of the bars within
a three-block stretch of Franklin Avenue, they were all assaulted, and they were all stabbed.
In 1990, a Black man named Leonard Christopher was arrested on suspicion of being the killer,
and he was ultimately convicted of the murder of victim Carol Dowd.
But he didn't match any descriptions of the killer, who was described by witnesses as a white,
middle-aged man. Also, another woman was killed after his arrest. Christopher died from cancer
while still in jail for the murder, having maintained his innocence the entire time.
Another potential suspect disappeared before he could be arrested and investigated.
Clearly, there were numerous problems with the case and investigation,
beginning with law enforcement's complete denial of the connections between the victims. While no
further victims were discovered — in Philadelphia, at least — the presence of DNA evidence means that
it's entirely possible that technology will get to the point where a match can be made,
and this long-open case will finally be solved.
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