The 1960s weren't all about peace and free love. Indeed, the hippie movement was not
without its dark side, as demonstrated by the serial killers at large in that decade. From
the Boston Strangler to the Manson Family, these are the most dangerous serial killers of the 60s.
Between June 1962 and January 1964, the Boston Strangler killed 13 women in and around Boston,
Massachusetts. The victims, who ranged in age from 19 to 85,
were assaulted and strangled in their own homes.
The killer left no fingerprints, and although he meticulously went through his victims' personal
belongings, he took nothing. He also placed some of his victims in macabre poses after they died.
There were no signs of forced entry at the crime scenes. In each case,
it appeared that the victim had willingly allowed the killer into their homes.
"Police became more and more frustrated. No woman felt safe."
Nearly a year after the last killing, 33-year-old construction worker Albert DeSalvo confessed
to the crimes. He was already in jail for a series of assaults in which he'd posed as a
modeling agent to gain entry into the homes of young women. His recount of the final murder,
that of 19-year-old Mary Sullivan, was especially accurate and convinced authorities that they had
their man. A petty criminal and burglar from an abusive family, DeSalvo would often dress in a
workman's uniform to win the trust of his victims. Although inconsistencies in his testimony as well
as his obsession with fame has caused some to doubt his culpability, DNA evidence conclusively
linked him to the death of Mary Sullivan in 2013. He was killed in prison in 1973.
The horror of the Michigan Murders began on August 7, 1967, when the decomposing body of
a 19-year-old Eastern Michigan University student was found by two young boys in a cornfield. She'd
disappeared from campus on July 7, having told her roommate that she was going for a walk.
A year later, the body of a 20-year-old EMU student was found four miles from
the first one. She'd been stabbed five times, and her throat had been slashed.
Over the next year, the bodies of five more women ranging in age from 13 to 23 were
discovered dumped in and around the Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti area. Each victim appeared to have been
killed elsewhere and placed in a location where the body would be easily discovered.
The killer was a charismatic and athletic EMU student named John Norman Collins.
He was eventually caught when evidence linking him to his final victim, Karen Sue Beineman,
was found in the basement of a home belonging to his state trooper uncle.
That uncle had entrusted Collins to watch over his house while he was on vacation.
Collins is also suspected of having killed a woman in Salinas, California,
but he was only convicted for the death of Beineman, for which he received a life sentence.
“No one that lived through the two years of terror in Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor has ever truly healed.
And how could they?"
Obsessed with Nazism, Ian Brady began his criminal career at age 13,
when he was placed on probation for theft and attempted housebreaking.
After a stint in prison, he managed to get a job as a stock clerk in Manchester, England,
where he met typist Myra Hindley. Hindley became infatuated with the dark and brooding Brady.
Fascinated by his unconventional interests and tendency toward sadism, she devoted herself to
Brady, even bleaching her dark hair to more closely adhere to the Nazi ideal of beauty.
In July 1963, Brady and Hindley committed the first of the infamous Moors Murders when they
killed 16-year-old Pauline Reade. The killings of 12-year-olds John Kilbride and Keith Bennett
and 10-year-old Lesley Ann Downey would follow soon after. Their killing spree would end when
Hindley's brother-in-law, David Smith, reported witnessing Brady's murder of 17-year-old Evan
Edwards to the police. Authorities later discovered recordings and photographs
that Hindley and Brady made of one of their killings. Both of them were given life sentences.
Teenage killer Karol Kot developed a taste for blood as a child. While bored on a family trip
in southern Poland, he wandered into a local slaughterhouse, where the workers allowed him to
watch and assist in killing livestock. The death throes of the dying animals excited him to no end.
When offered a cup of warm animal blood, he gulped it down eagerly.
In the summer of 1964, a 17-year-old Kot acted on his sadistic obsessions when he attacked a woman
in a Krakow church, viciously stabbing her in the back as she knelt to pray, although she managed
to survive. Kot finally made his first kill when he stabbed an 86-year-old woman to death.
A little over a year later, Kot turned his attention to children,
as he stabbed an 11-year-old boy to death. His final victim was an 8-year-old girl,
who was able to miraculously survive. Kot proudly confessed his crimes to a friend,
who reported him to the police. Charged with two murders and 10 attempted murders,
he was sentenced to death by hanging in 1968. Remorseless to the end, he remarked to the press,
"The pleasure I felt when the knife was cleaving the meat [...] It's
impossible to describe the feeling. The experience is worth the gallows."
"I think that he purely enjoyed hurting people
and that was not a sign of a mental illness, but rather of a deep sadism."
Born with a cleft lip and palate in 1931, young Eric Edgar Cooke was often the target of his
alcoholic father's rage. He went on to gain a reputation as a troublemaker. Expelled after eight
months at his first school, he dropped out when he was 14. Drawn into a life of crime, he graduated
from petty theft to arson and burglary and wound up in prison by the time he was 18. In 1953,
a reformed Cooke married a waitress named Sarah. But he would ultimately return to a life of crime.
On September 12, 1958, Cooke stole a car for the express purpose of running someone down.
His first victim was 26 year-old bicyclist Nel Schneider, who survived but developed lifelong
health problems from her injuries. In January 1959, Cooke made his first kill when he broke
into a woman's home and stabbed her to death. In December of the same year, he killed 22-year-old
Jillian Brewer with a hatchet and scissors. This was just the beginning of a four year-long spree.
Police finally captured Cooke in 1963. After confessing to eight
murders, 14 attempted murders, and 250 burglaries, he was sentenced to death.
The last man to face the gallows in Western Australia, he was hanged on October 26, 1964.
Richard Benjamin Speck was born in Kirkwood, Illinois, on December 6, 1941.
He would go on to drop out of high school and embark on a life marked by misogyny and
violence. In 1965, he was sent to Texas State Penitentiary for assaulting a woman in Dallas.
When he got out, he moved to Monmouth, Illinois, where he attacked a 65-year-old woman and beat
a barmaid to death. Feeling the heat from the police, he left for Chicago,
where he found work on a ship before being fired for pulling a knife on a superior.
On the night of July 13, 1966, Speck entered a South Chicago townhouse
occupied by student nurses. Slipping through an open window, Speck bound, beat, strangled,
and stabbed eight women. Only one of them would survive to identify the killer.
Just days afterward, Speck attempted to kill himself. He was rushed to a hospital, where a
doctor recognized his "Born to Raise Hell" tattoo from police reports. He was sentenced to death in
1967, but a 1972 Supreme Court moratorium on the death penalty saved him from the electric chair.
He suffered a heart attack and died in the hospital on December 5, 1991.
A devout fundamentalist Christian, Janie Lou Gibbs taught Sunday school and was well known
in her community for her evangelical zeal. But her matronly facade came crashing down in 1967,
after a nearly two-year spree that left her husband, three sons, and infant grandson dead.
Gibbs' husband was the first to die. Collapsing after dinner, Charles Gibbs was rushed to the
hospital, where doctors determined his cause of death to be undiagnosed liver disease.
Nearly a year later, 13-year-old Marvin died of a similar ailment.
Soon after, middle son Lester died as well.
In 1967, the unthinkable struck again with the deaths of Janie Lou's eldest son,
Roger, and his newborn child, Raymond. In both cases, no cause of death could be determined.
Janie Lou's daughter-in-law demanded autopsies be performed on her husband and son.
The results led authorities to exhume the bodies of the other deceased family members.
In each case, the cause of death was arsenic poisoning. Janie Lou
Gibbs was sentenced to five consecutive life sentences. She died in 2010 at the age of 77.
Provincetown, Massachusetts was a bit of a counterculture haven in the late 60s.
Hundreds of hippies flocked to the New England resort town,
but danger lurked in their midst. By 1968, Tony Costa was growing marijuana on a remote
plot of land hidden behind a cemetery in nearby Truro. His easy access to weed
made him popular with Provincetown's youth, and he relished the attention.
"He was very proud of what he had done."
In January 1969, Costa was suspected in the disappearance of Pat Walsh and Mary Anne Wysocki.
An initial sweep of the Truro woods failed to locate them, though the search did turn up the
dismembered remains of a different woman. With the help of one of Costa's acquaintances, the police
were able to locate his drug garden. Nearby, they found the mutilated remains of Wysocki, Walsh,
and another victim. Costa was sentenced to life in prison for the killings of Wysocki and Walsh.
Author Kurt Vonnegut became fascinated by Costa when he learned that his daughter had
met the killer. He wrote about the killings in a feature for Life Magazine, in which he compared
Costa to Jack the Ripper. Costa ultimately killed himself while in prison in 1974.
The charismatic Charles Manson attracted a legion of young,
disaffected, and mostly female followers.
The so-called Manson Family came to regard their leader as both Jesus Christ and Satan.
Hoping to jumpstart an apocalyptic race war, Manson ordered followers Charles "Tex" Watson,
Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Linda Kasabian to a luxurious
house on Cielo Drive in Los Angeles' Benedict Canyon. Shortly after midnight on August 9,
1969, these handpicked killers had already killed Steven Parent,
a friend of property caretaker William Garrettson. Then they entered the home through
a slit in a screen window and killed pregnant actress Sharon Tate and three of her friends.
Angered that the crimes had been too chaotic, Manson accompanied Watson,
Krenwinkel, and Leslie Van Houten to the home of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca
the following night to personally supervise another round of deaths.
Manson and his followers were initially sentenced to death for the killings.
However, a 1972 Supreme Court ruling abolishing California's death penalty resulted in their
sentences being commuted to life imprisonment. Manson died in prison on November 19, 2017.
The serial killer who would come to call himself Zodiac publicly claimed his first
crime as December 20, 1968. - when he shot David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen
on a secluded road near Vallejo, California. Six months later, another couple met a similar fate.
In August 1969, the killer wrote letters to the San Francisco Examiner and the Vallejo
Times-Herald detailing the murders. Each message contained a complex cipher with
possible clues about the killer. More taunting letters would arrive containing new codes,
including one declaring that the victims would become his slaves in the afterlife.
On September 27, 1969, the killer struck again, this time targeting Cecelia Shepard and Bryan
Hartnell as they relaxed on the shores of Lake Berryessa in Napa County. After binding the
couple, he repeatedly stabbed them. He then left a message and his mark on the door of Hartnell's car.
Shepherd died from her wounds, but Hartnell survived. Two weeks after that, the Zodiac killed
a San Francisco taxi driver. Despite surviving witnesses, fingerprint evidence, decoded ciphers,
and numerous suspects, the identity of the Zodiac Killer still remains a mystery.
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