SERIAL KILLERS
They disgust us. They terrify us. They fascinate us. Veritable monsters in human form, serial killers represent some of the scariest and yet most interesting people on Earth, ones whose grisly deeds leave us wondering “why?”

Some were victimized themselves, some suffered from serious mental disorders, and some actually may have just been plain evil. Whatever the psychological makeup of these murderers, serial killer stories are filled with the kind of macabre and shocking elements that always leave us coming back for more, even if we’re chilled to the bone.

Take the story of Ted Bundy, the handsome charmer who killed at least 30 victims and even referred to himself as “the most cold-hearted son of a bitch you’ll ever meet.” Then there’s the story of David Parker Ray, “The Toy-Box Killer” who brutalized his victims with a ghastly array of implements inside a homemade torture chamber in his truck trailer.

If that’s not enough, discover the story of Ed Gein, the man who inspired both Norman Bates from Psycho and Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Or learn the story of female serial killer Aileen Wuornos, whose own film adaptation, Monster, tells you much of what you need to know about her in the title.

From those immortalized onscreen to those too brutal for the movies, these are the worst serial killer stories
Here are 30 seriously demented Serial killers

Here we go.

Present!

JEFFREY Dahmer




Serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer’s house is still standing today. A beautifully quaint family home ensconced by flourishing trees, the Akron, Ohio house was idyllic — but also the site of Dahmer’s first murder.


Over the decade that Jeffrey Dahmer lived in this quaint house in Akron, Ohio, he developed the sadistic obsessions that fueled his 13-year reign of terror.

When Jeffrey Dahmer was eight years old, his family moved to the Beth Township suburbs of Akron, which at the time in 1968 had a population of little more than 4,500. The same year Dahmer graduated high school there, however, he murdered and dismembered his first victim right under the family’s roof — before scattering the victim’s pulverized bones across the backyard.

Later convicted of 15 murders in 1994, Dahmer became one of the most chilling serial killers in American history. His psychosexual obsessions inspired countless films, books, and challenged criminologists to understand his mind.

Ultimately, one might be wise to start at the beginning — in Jeffrey Dahmer’s childhood house.

Dahmer’s father recalled taking him to the local soda shop as a boy and exploring the nearby fields with the family dog, Fisk.

There was some turbulence in the home, however. Dahmer’s father would later lament how he spent little time with his son due to his studies. Joyce Dahmer, meanwhile, was allegedly a hypochondriac and suffered from depression.

Dahmer, nonetheless, appeared to be a happy boy until he required surgery for a double hernia at four years old. He was notably changed after the incident and reportedly grew quieter, particularly after his father found work as an analytical chemist and moved the family to Akron in 1966. Dahmer’s brother David was born in December of that year.

In 1968, the Dahmers moved into a new home at 4480 West Bath Road. Surrounded by woods with three bedrooms and two-and-a-half bathrooms, Jeffrey Dahmer’s house in the Bath Township suburb was perfect for a family. But it was also where his obsession with death truly took hold.

When Dahmer asked his father if bleach could preserve animal bones, his father was impressed. He believed his son was showing an inherited curiosity in science, even though the young man was actually collecting animal carcasses. In high school, Dahmer also began regularly drinking alcohol.

Jeffrey Dahmer’s First Murder At His Childhood Home
On June 18, an 18-year-old hitchhiker named Steven Hicks was lured to Jeffrey Dahmer’s house under the pretense of drinking beers. Then, Dahmer bludgeoned him with a 10-pound dumbbell and strangled him to death before masturbating over the corpse.

Dahmer, just a recent high school graduate at the time, then dismembered Hicks the next day and buried his body parts in the backyard.

Unaware of the extent to Dahmer’s psychosis, his father encouraged him to enlist in the military. Dahmer did so as a combat medic in December and was stationed in Germany until being honorably discharged in 1981.

Upon returning to the States, Dahmer initially lived with his recently remarried father but soon moved out to stay with his grandmother in West Allis, Wisconsin. Over the years, he was arrested for indecent exposure, masturbating in front of two 12-year-old boys, and underwent legally obligated counseling and probation.

Then in September 1987, he killed his second victim and dismembered him in his grandmother’s basement. Yet again, he masturbated on the body before disposing of it. He killed two others while living with his grandmother before moving to Milwaukee in 1989.

In March, he strangled and dismembered a male model.

Dahmer killed 13 other locals over the next three years. His methods grew crueler and involved drilling into victims’ skulls while they were alive, injecting them with acid, and eating them. He was arrested on July 22, 1991, when would-be victim Tracy Edwards escaped and was found wandering the streets in handcuffs.

Found guilty on 15 counts of first-degree murder, Dahmer was given 15 life sentences and additional 70 years. He was bludgeoned to death in prison on Nov. 28, 1994, by inmate Christopher Scarver.

The house of Jeffrey Dhamer’s childhood was ultimately sold before his mother moved to Fresno, California

The Ohio home is still standing today. Built in 1952, the 2,170-square-foot home sits on 1.55 acres of land and has since been fully renovated. The former half-bathroom is now a complete one, while a greenhouse has been added, and the outdoor balcony and spiral staircase continue to provide picturesque views.

In 2005, it was sold to musician Chris Butler for $244,500. He rented it out for $8,000 while the Republican National Convention was in town in 2016, but he later tried to sell it for more than he initially spent on it.

“You’ve gotta kind of get past the horror factor,” said Butler of his experience living in Jeffrey Dahmer’s house.

Denis Nelsen

On February 8, 1983, a plumber named Michael Cattran was called to 23 Cranley Gardens, an apartment building in North London. Residents had been complaining of blocked drains for some time, and Cattran was there to fix the issue. He never expected to find human remains

Known as "The Muswell Hill Murderer," Scottish serial killer and necrophile Dennis Nilsen murdered more than a dozen victims while living in London starting in 1978

After Cattran opened a drain cover at the side of the building, he began to pull out the blockage. But instead of seeing the typical mess of hair or napkins, he discovered a flesh-like substance and small broken bones.

Dennis Nilsen, one of the building’s residents, remarked, “It looks to me like someone has been flushing down their Kentucky Fried Chicken.” But Cattran thought it looked disturbingly human. As it turned out, he was correct. And the culprit behind this horrific mess was none other than Nilsen.

From 1978 to 1983, Dennis Nilsen killed at least 12 young men and boys — and did unspeakable things to their corpses. To make an already horrific case even worse, the Scottish serial killer left behind a series of chilling audiotapes that described his murders in sickening detail.

Born on November 23, 1945, in Fraserburgh, Scotland, Dennis Nilsen had a somewhat difficult childhood. His parents had a troubled marriage, and he was devastated by his beloved grandfather’s death. Nilsen also realized early on that he was gay — and he was very uncomfortable with his sexuality.

At age 16, he decided to join the army, where he worked as a cook and — chillingly — a butcher. After he left in 1972, he pursued a job as a police officer. While he wasn’t a cop for long, he was at his posting long enough to develop a macabre fascination with dead bodies and autopsies.

Nilsen then went on to become a recruitment interviewer, and he also moved in with another man — an arrangement that went on for two years. While the man later denied that the two shared a sexual relationship, it was clear that his departure in 1977 was devastating to Nilsen.

He began to actively seek out sexual encounters, but he felt lonely each time a new partner left. So Nilsen decided that he would force the men to stay — by killing them. But despite his murderous urges, he claimed that he felt conflicted about his actions once the deed was actually done.

Nilsen said, “The greater the beauty (in my estimation) of the man, the greater was the sense of loss and grief. Their dead naked bodies fascinated me but I would have done anything to have them back alive.”

Nilsen’s first victim was a 14-year-old boy whom he had met at a pub on the day before New Year’s Eve of 1978. The boy accompanied Nilsen back to his apartment after he promised to supply him with alcohol for the night. Eventually, the youth fell asleep after drinking with him.

Fearing that the young boy would leave him if he awoke, Nilsen strangled him with a necktie and then drowned him in a bucket filled with water. He then washed the boy’s body and took it to bed with him, where he attempted a sex act and then simply fell asleep next to the corpse.

Eventually, Nilsen hid the boy’s body underneath the floorboards of his apartment. He would stay there for several months until Nilsen finally buried him in the backyard. Meanwhile, Nilsen continued to seek out new victims.

Some of the boys and young men were homeless or sex workers, while others were tourists who were visiting the wrong bar at the wrong time. But no matter who they were, Nilsen wanted to keep them all to himself forever — and blamed this sickening urge on his loneliness.

Before moving to 23 Cranley Gardens, Nilsen lived in an apartment building with a garden. Initially, he had been hiding corpses under his floorboards. However, the smell eventually became too much to bear. So, he started burying, burning, and disposing of his victims in the garden.


Believing that it was just the internal organs that were causing the smell, Nilsen took the bodies out of their hiding places, dissected them on the floor, and often saved their skin and bones for later use.

Not only did he keep many of the corpses, but he often dressed them up, took them to bed, watched TV with them, and performed depraved sex acts with them. Even worse, he later defended this disturbing behavior: “A corpse is a thing. It can’t feel, it can’t suffer. If you’re more upset by what I did to a corpse than what I did to a living person, then your morals are upside down.”

To dispose of the body parts that he didn’t want to keep, Nilsen would routinely have small bonfires in his backyard, secretly adding human organs and innards to the flames along with tire parts to hide the inevitable smell. The body parts that weren’t burned were buried near the fire pit. But these methods of disposal wouldn’t work at his next apartment.

Unfortunately for Nilsen, in 1981, his landlord decided to renovate his apartment, and he had to move to a new location. As 23 Cranley Gardens didn’t have enough outdoor space for Nilsen to discreetly burn body parts, he had to get a little more creative with his disposal methods.


Assuming that the flesh would either deteriorate or sink far enough into the sewers that it wouldn’t be found, Nilsen began flushing human remains down his toilet. But the building’s plumbing was old and not quite up to the task of disposing of human beings. Eventually, it became so backed up that the other residents noticed it as well and called in the plumber.

Upon a thorough investigation of the apartment building’s pipes, the human remains were easily traced back to Nilsen’s apartment. Upon setting foot in the room, the police immediately noted the aroma of rotting flesh and decay. When they asked him where the rest of the body was, Nilsen calmly showed them to the garbage bag of body parts he kept in his wardrobe.

A further search revealed that there were body parts stashed all over Nilsen’s apartment, implicating him beyond a shadow of a doubt in several murder cases. Though he admitted to committing between 12 and 15 murders (he claimed he couldn’t remember the exact number), he was formally charged with six counts of murder and two attempted murders.

He was found guilty on all counts in 1983 and sentenced to life in prison, where he spent much of his time translating books into Braille. Nilsen expressed no remorse for his crimes and no desire to be free.

In the early 1990s, Nilsen gained further notoriety when he commented on the arrest of the American serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer — since he also preyed on young men and boys. But Dahmer soon became so infamous that Nilsen eventually gained the title of the “British Jeffrey Dahmer,” even though he had been arrested long before the actual Dahmer.

Aside from targeting males, Nilsen had many other things in common with Dahmer, including his methods of strangling victims, performing necrophilia on the corpses, and dissecting the bodies. And when Dahmer was arrested, Nilsen weighed in on his motives — and also accused him of lying about his cannibalism. (When asked whether he ever ate any of his victims, Nilsen insisted that he was “strictly a bacon and eggs man.”)

At some point, while Nilsen was in prison, he recorded a set of chilling audiotapes describing his murders in graphic detail. These audiotapes will be explored in a new Netflix documentary titled Memories of a Murderer: The Nilsen Tapes. It’s set to be released on August 18, 2021.

In 2018, Nilsen died in prison at age 72 after suffering a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm. He spent his final moments laying in his own filth in his prison cell. And he was reportedly in “excruciating pain.”

Harold Shipman

Doctors are supposed to give people support when they are at their most vulnerable, but Dr. Harold Shipman used his position to take advantage of his patients – and in a cruelly ironic twist, became one of the most prolific serial killers in English history.

From 1975 to 1998, serial killer Harold Shipman used his position as a trusted family physician to murder as many as 250 of his patients by lethal injection.

Exploiting their trust, Shipman would first diagnose his patients with illnesses they didn’t have and then injected them with a lethal dose of diamorphine. Unbeknownst to perhaps 250 people, their visit to the office of Harold Shipman would be their last.




Following his mother’s death, Shipman went on to marry Primrose May Oxtoby while studying medicine at Leeds University Medical School. The pair had four children together, and from the outside, Shipman’s life was the picture of normality.

He graduated in 1970 and commenced life as a junior doctor, but he quickly moved up the ranks and became a general practitioner at a medical center in West Yorkshire.

It was here in 1976 where Shipman first found himself in trouble with the law. The young doctor was caught forging prescriptions for Demerol, an opioid typically used to treat severe pain, for his own use. Shipman had become addicted.

He was fined, fired from his job, and required to attend a rehabilitation clinic in York.

Harold Shipman seemed to get back on his feet quickly and returned to work at Donneybrook Medical Centre in Hyde in 1977. He would spend the next 15 years of his career here before setting up a one-man practice in 1993. He developed a reputation among his patients and in his community as a good and helpful physician. He was renowned for his bedside manner.
Yet no one knew that at the same time, the “good doctor” was secretly killing his patients.

It was March 1975 when Shipman took his first patient, 70-year-old Eva Lyons. It was the day before her birthday.

At this time, Shipman had got his hands on enough diamorphine to kill hundreds of people, though no one was even aware of his addiction until the next year.

Though Shipman was fired that year for forging prescriptions, he was not removed from the General Medical Council, the doctors’ regulatory body. Instead, he received a warning letter.
According to investigators, Shipman would stop and restart his killing spree many times throughout his decades of terror. But his method of killing always remained the same. He would target the vulnerable, with his oldest victim being 93-year-old Anne Cooper and his youngest 41-year-old Peter Lewis.

Then, he’d administer a lethal dose of diamorphine and either watch them die right there or send them home to perish.

In all, it’s believed that he killed 71 patients while working at the Donneybrook practice and the remainder while operating his one-man practice. Of his victims, 171 were female and 44 were men.

The police investigation failed to carry out the most basic of checks, including whether Shipman had a criminal record. If they’d asked the medical board what was on his file, they’d have uncovered that he had forged prescriptions in the past.

Cunning Shipman had also covered his tracks by adding false illnesses to his victims’ records. As a result, the investigation didn’t find any cause for concern, and the deadly doctor was free to keep killing.

...

Shipman’s crimes were finally uncovered after he made the mistake of trying to forge the will of one of his victims, 81-year-old Kathleen Grundy, a former mayor of his town of Hyde.

After Shipman administered a lethal dose of diamorphine to Grundy, he selected the “cremation” box on her will to hide the evidence. Then, he used his typewriter to write her family out of the will entirely, leaving everything to him.

However, Grundy was buried, and her daughter, Angela Woodruff, was notified about the will by local solicitors. Immediately, she suspected foul play and went to the police.


Woodruff said of the situation,”The whole thing was unbelievable. The thought of mum signing the document leaving everything to her doctor was inconceivable. The concept of her signing a document which was so badly typed didn’t make any sense.”

Grundy’s body was subsequently exhumed in August 1998 and diamorphine was found in her muscle tissues. Shipman was then arrested on September 7 of that year.

Over the next two months, the bodies of another 11 victims were exhumed. A police expert also checked Shipman’s surgery computer and discovered that he had made false entries to support the fake causes of death he gave on his victims’ death certificates.

Simultaneously, Shipman insisted that Grundy was addicted to a drug like morphine or heroin and pointed to his notes as evidence of this. However, police found that Shipman had written the notes on his computer after her death.

Then, police managed to verify 14 other cases where Shipman had given lethal doses of diamorphine, falsely registered the patients’ deaths, and tampered with their medical history to show that they were dying anyway.

Following

Harold Shipman always denied the murders and refused to cooperate with the police or criminal psychiatrists. When the police tried to question him or show him photos of his victims, he sat with his eyes shut, yawned, and refused to look at any evidence.

Police could only charge Shipman with 15 murders, but it’s been estimated that his kill count is anywhere between 250 and 450.


In 2000, Shipman was handed life imprisonment with a recommendation that he never be released.

He was incarcerated in a Manchester prison but ended up in Wakefield Prison in West Yorkshire, where he took his own life. On the day before his 58th birthday, Jan. 13, 2004, Shipman was found hanging in his cell.

He told his probation officer prior to this that he was thinking about committing suicide so that his wife would receive his pension and lump sum.

With his death looms the question of why he killed. A number of theories have been put forward to explain why Shipman had the urge to murder, some say that he may have been avenging the death of his mother.

Others offer the more charitable opinion that he injected the elderly with diamorphine as a misguided way of offering compassion.

Still, others suggest that the doctor had a God Complex — and simply needed to prove that he could take life as well as save it.

Following..

In the midst of one of California’s darkest seasons, plagued by the crimes of several of history’s most notorious serial killers, 16-year-old Chevelle “Chevy” Wheeler went missing. Soon, several more people in the San Joaquin County region were gone without a trace.


Speed killers’ Loren Herzog and Gary Shermantine were hard-partying methamphetamine users who are suspected of slaughtering as many as 72 people in San Joaquin County in the 1980s and '90s.


Wheeler’s disappearance would not be solved for another decade when San Joaquin County investigators linked two men, Loren Herzog and Wesley Shermantine to the kidnapping and murder of at least five people that earned them the moniker the “Speed Freak Killers.”

Loren Herzog and Wesley Shermantine grew up in the small, quiet California town of Linden, roughly 100 miles from the hustle and bustle of San Francisco. Linden had then had a population of about 2,000 people and Herzog and Shermantine were well-known methamphetamine users and regulars at the local bar, the Linden Inn. The pair of childhood friends were often seen together around town.

On Oct. 7, 1985, Chevelle Wheeler, known as Chevy, was dropped off at the front of Franklin High School in Stockton, California, just 20 minutes away from Linden. After her mother left, she ditched school to meet up with Herzog and Shermantine in the woods nearby to get high as she was also an active meth user. Wheeler was reported missing but her case went cold.

Thirteen years later, on Nov. 13, 1998, the Linden Inn made headlines when Cyndi Vanderheiden, daughter of the bar’s owner, went missing. Vanderheiden was seen at Linden Inn and The Old Corner Saloon with a date who dropped her off at home. She too went with Herzog and Shermantine to a nearby cemetery to smoke meth and then vanished. It would be over a decade before her case was solved.

As the San Joaquin Sheriff’s Department worked to find Vanderheiden, Shermantine’s car was repossessed in 1999 and was investigated after blood was found inside — blood that was later determined to be Vanderheiden’s. Investigators then focused their attention on an extensive questioning of Loren Herzog.

Herzog told investigators that Shermantine had killed a hunter in Utah named Henry Howell in 1994, as well as a 24-year-old woman named Robin Armtrout. He also said he was in the vehicle when Shermantine killed Vanderheiden, but did not actively participate in the killings.


Loren Herzog and Wesley Shermantine were charged with several counts of murder in March 1999. In 2001, Shermantine was convicted of the murders of Cyndi Vanderheiden, Chevelle Wheeler, and the 1984 murders of Howard King and Paul Cavanaugh. Herzog was convicted for the murders of Vanderheiden, Cavanaugh, and King.

The ‘Speed Freak Killers’ And Their ‘Bone Yard’.


Shermantine was given the death penalty and sent to death row at San Quentin State Penitentiary. Herzog was given 78 years, but his convictions were overturned in 2004 after an appeal was granted showing his confessions were coerced. Herzog took a plea bargain that reduced his sentence to 14 years, with six years already served.

In 2012 however, two years after his release, a bounty hunter informed Herzog that Shermantine intended to tell police about a well and two other locations of victims. That same bounty hunter, Leonard Padilla, promised Shermantine $30,000 for information and Shermantine drew a map to a well site Linden. Investigators dug through the site, which Shermantine and Herzog called their “bone yard,” finding over 1,000 human remains — including a rotted fetus.

The FBI took over the case after local authorities’ poor handling of the dig and sent the remains for DNA testing. On March 30, 2012 they announced the identities of two people found in a well: Kimberly Ann Billy and Joann Hobson, who disappeared in 1984 and 1985, respectively. Shermantine identified two other burial sites on property once owned by his family, where Chevelle Wheeler and Cyndi Vanderheiden were found.


Shermantine frequently wrote letters to investigators about burial sites of his and other death row inmates’ victims. The FBI investigated several, and when they turned up nothing they ceased taking Shermantine’s letters as leads.

Elected officials and families of victims and those believed to be victims of the Speed Freak Killers alleged that the Sheriff’s Office deliberately used a backhoe to hide evidence at the first burial site, knowing the damage it could do to the evidence. State Senator Cathleen Galgiani suggested that missing persons records of people possibly connected to Herzog and Shermantine were deleted. Later, it was determined emails had been sent to have them removed from the national missing persons list.

RICHARD RAMIREZ NIGHT STALKER


In the mid-1980s, Richard Ramirez murdered at least 14 people — and became forever infamous as the "Night Stalker."

On August 31, 1985, serial killer Richard Ramirez walked into a convenience store in Los Angeles. At first, he seemed like any ordinary shopper. But then, he noticed his own face on the cover of a newspaper — and ran for his life.



By that point, Ramirez was already considered the main suspect in the brutal “Night Stalker” murders that had terrorized California for over a year. But authorities had only just released his name and picture to the public — while he was traveling back to Los Angeles.


This gave residents plenty of time to memorize his physical features — and point him out to authorities as he dashed out of the store. It also gave Ramirez very little chance to get away. But of course, he still tried to escape.

The ensuing chase involved seven police cars and a helicopter that tracked Ramirez throughout the city. But an angry mob of bystanders caught up to him first. Enraged by his heinous crimes, they began to beat him relentlessly — and at least one man used a metal pipe. By the time the police arrived, Ramirez was practically thanking them for arresting him.


Richard Ramirez, who had been dubbed the Night Stalker by the local media, had started his brutal killing spree a little over a year before his arrest. In that time, he murdered at least 14 people — and committed countless other violent acts. But his life of crime started long before that