Which killer mentioned Disney when he was sentenced to death?
Who told his executioner to hurry up?
And just who found killing funny?
Keep watching to hear what these serial killers had to say about their crimes.
Peter Kürten was a German serial killer who was active during the early 1900s.
He started killing as a child when he pushed a friend off of a raft and then drowned the
boy's would-be rescuer.
He would be later cleared of both deaths because no one thought a 9-year-old could possibly
be that evil.
As an adult, he murdered at least nine people, many of them children.
The German press nicknamed him "The Vampire of Dusseldorf," based on police conjecture
that he might be drinking the blood of his victims.
It took a jury 90 minutes to convict Kürten of his crimes, and he got nine death sentences
for his trouble.
Speaking to the prison psychologist just before his execution by guillotine, he said,
"Tell me, after my head is chopped off, will I still be able to hear, at least for a moment,
the sound of my own blood gushing from the stump of my neck?"
Jeffrey Dahmer was one of the 20th century's most infamous serial killers.
Dahmer killed 17 men and boys between 1978 and 1991.
He usually drugged them, then strangled them, then cut them up into pieces for easy disposal.
He often photographed his murders-in-progress and sometimes ate parts of his victims.
"I desensitized myself to it."
Dahmer is famous for telling a Dateline reporter that although he disliked killing people,
he liked the idea of turning them into zombies.
He said,
"The killing was a means to an end.
That was the least satisfactory part.
I didn't enjoy doing that.
That's why I tried to create living zombies, [...] but it never worked.
No, the killing was not the objective.
I just wanted to have the person under my complete control, not having to consider their
wishes, being able to keep them there as long as I wanted."
"There is a big element of wanting complete control over someone, total control."
Incidentally, Dahmer was killed by a fellow prisoner in 1994 because of his habit of making
severed-limb art out of prison food.
Carl Panzram killed at least 21 people, probably committed thousands of robberies, and was
fond of burning down buildings.
According to All That's Interesting, he was evidently also quite good at escaping from
prison, escaping from the Oregon State Penitentiary not once, but twice.
After his second escape, he decided to spend his newfound freedom killing people on the
yacht he owned.
After his yacht sank, he moved to Africa, killed there, then moved back to America where
he killed yet again.
He was finally sent to prison in 1928, but not for murder— for robbery.
In prison, he killed someone else, and it was then that he was tried for murder.
Even though he was clearly a depraved psychopath, Panzram evidently did not think he needed
to be reformed.
He apparently only killed so his victims would become better citizens, saying at one point,
"I believe the only way to reform people is to kill them."
Panzram was executed by hanging in 1930.
He reportedly told the executioner,
"Hurry it up, you Hoosier bastard!
I could kill a dozen men while you're screwing around!"
Nicknamed "The Night Stalker," Richard Ramirez killed at least 14 people between 1984 and
1985.
While many serial killers leave weeks or months or even years between killings, Ramirez killed
frequently — his most prolific spree was five attacks in 10 days, though one victim
was lucky enough to survive.
According to CBS, Ramirez didn't target a particular type of person.
He attacked men, women, and children, and he used knives and guns — whatever he had
on hand.
He didn't always kill everyone he attacked, either.
When he was finally apprehended, it became clear that he wasn't just a psychopath—
he was also a well-spoken psychopath.
He said at one point,
"We've all got the power in our hands to kill, but most people are afraid to use it.
The ones who aren't afraid control life itself."
"You don't understand me.
You are not expected to.
You are not capable of it.
I am beyond your experience.
I am beyond good and evil."
Also, just after his death sentence was handed down, he said,
"Big deal.
Death always comes with the territory.
I'll see you in Disneyland."
Ramirez ultimately avoided the executioner, dying from lymphoma in prison in 2013.
"Why did you kill those people?"
"No comment."
John Wayne Gacy is unique amongst serial killers because he was a murderer and also a clown
with the stage name "Pogo."
"The clowning was relaxation for me.
I enjoyed entertaining kids."
According to the Chicago Tribune, Gacy tortured and killed 33 men and boys between 1972 and
1978 and buried many of them in his own crawl space.
Police suspected Gacy for a while before they finally got enough evidence to arrest him.
Evidently, he snagged their attention because he was known for having parties and inviting
lots of teenage boys to his house.
Like many serial killers, Gacy didn't think he was going to get caught and was brazen
enough to even invite two cops who were tailing him out to breakfast one morning.
He told them about his exploits as a single guy and his job as a clown at children's parties
and then leaned in and said,
"You know, clowns can get away with murder."
Gacy was so brazen that he's also quoted as saying,
"All the police are going to get me for is running a funeral parlor without a license."
That did not turn out to be true.
He was executed for his crimes on May 10, 1994.
According to CNN, he was convicted in 1981 after he told a courtroom that he only went
on his five-year killing spree because God told him to.
During his confession, he tried to justify his actions to the police, saying,
"The women I killed were filth.
Bastard prostitutes who were littering the streets.
I was just cleaning the place up a bit."
People don't get executed in the United Kingdom, but Sutcliffe got a life sentence.
He died in 2020 at the age of 74, likely from COVID-19.
Charles Manson wasn't necessarily a serial killer, as he didn't actively participate
in most of the Manson Family murders — unless you count the murder of "Shorty" Shea or the
time he cut someone's face open with a samurai sword.
Still, he wasn't even present for most of the killings attributed to his followers.
According to the Washington Post, though, he was still convicted on seven counts of
first-degree murder, on account of the fact that he was the one who ordered the crimes.
However you categorize him, Charles Manson is a terrifying sociopath who at times said
very scary things.
One of his most famous quotes happened during an interview with MSNBC.
He told the camera,
"Believe me, if I started murdering people, there'd be none of you left."
Ed Kemper was also known as "The Co-Ed Killer," because his M.O.
was abducting and killing college-aged women.
If you grew up in the 1970s, your parents probably told you not to hitchhike, and Ed
Kemper was the reason why.
His victims were mostly hitchhikers, though he did also kill his grandparents at age 15
and his mother and her friend at the very end of his killing spree in 1973.
Over the years, many people have interviewed him — in fact, as of 2021, Kemper still
lives at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville, California, and he evidently enjoys
speaking publicly.
Kemper has said a lot of strange things over the years, but one of the creepiest was during
a 1974 interview with a magazine called Front Page Detective.
He said then,
"One side of me says, 'Wow, what an attractive chick.
I'd like to talk to her, date her.
The other side of me says, 'I wonder how her head would look on a stick.'"
Some serial killers just kill indiscriminately, so certain of their invincibility that they
think they'll never get caught.
Samuel Little killed people for an astonishing 40 years, mostly without attracting any attention
from law enforcement.
Little's victims, by his own count, numbered 93.
According to the Washington Post, he managed to remain anonymous because he preyed only
on those he was sure no one would miss: runaways, drug addicts, and sex workers.
No one put his victims' photos on the front page, expressed outrage at the shoddy police
work, or appeared on the news to tearfully beg for the return of their loved one.
Little's last victim died in 2005; he was only apprehended because someone opened up
a couple of cold case files.
During one of Little's many arrests on other charges, he'd given a DNA sample, and police
were able to match him to genetic material that had been collected from those old crime
scenes.
Little clearly viewed his victims as inhuman, as evidenced by something he said during a
police interview.
He told police,
"I'd go back to the same city sometimes and pluck me another grape.
How many grapes do you all got on the vine here?"
You might not have heard the name "Albert DeSalvo" but you've almost certainly heard
of the Boston Strangler.
BBC remembers the Boston Strangler as America's first modern serial killer, on account of
the fact that he was active in the 1960s, right around the time that the "media circus"
was becoming a thing.
"The city is, for some, glamorous, stimulating, prosperous.
Only recently has it become dangerous."
The Strangler is said to have killed 13 women between 1962 and 1964.
Despite the fact that all his victims were strangled there were actually enough differences
between each killing that, at the time, the police didn't even think they'd all been committed
by the same person.
The Boston Strangler's victims were mostly middle aged and elderly women, and he killed
them in their own homes.
DeSalvo was ultimately pegged as the Strangler because he'd been implicated in a series of
sexual assaults, and he later confessed to all of the Boston Strangler's murders, too.
Despite his confession, he was never actually convicted of any of the murders, and to this
day there are still people who think he wasn't actually the infamous serial killer.
He said of the murders,
"It wasn't as dark and scary as it sounds.
I had a lot of fun.
[...] Killing somebody's a funny experience."
Ted Bundy tried to convince his jury that he hadn't murdered at least 30 women, and
he hung onto the illusion for a long time, until it finally became obvious that he wasn't
going to get a last minute exoneration.
According to Oxygen, his confession came just a few days before his execution, and he only
did it because he thought handing over this information about his crimes would buy him
a couple of extra years.
Bundy's last interview was the night before his execution.
In the end, it didn't help him.
He said,
"We are your sons and we are your husbands.
[...] We grew up in regular families, and pornography can reach in and snatch a kid
out of any house today."
He did not seem remorseful about his crimes, adding,
"What's one less person on the face of the Earth, anyways?"
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