Serial Killers
New:
The Austrian Ogre: The Case That Shocked the World
by Marilyn Z. Tomlins
(05/20/08).
Josef Fritzl locked his 18-year-old daughter Elisabeth in his cellar and raped
her repeatedly for the next 24 years. She would bear him seven children, three
of whom he moved upstairs to live with him and his wife, and four to languish
below, one of whom would die days after childbirth.
Updated:
Murderous Mothers by
Marilyn Z. Tomlins
(9/19/07; updated 03/30/08).
Seven recent
cases of infanticide in France are causing the French to ask what is it in their
psyche that makes the nation's mothers kill their newborns.
Daisy de Melker: South Africa's First Serial Killer
by Marilyn Z. Tomlins. (12/02/2007)
Daisy killed the old fashion way, with arsenic and
strychnine.
Dr. Petiot Will See You Now by
Marilyn Z. Tomlins,
(10/07/07).
Sixty-one years after Dr. Marcel Petiot, dubbed "Dr. Satan" by French
newspapers, was guillotined for the murder of 26 people, he remains France's
most prolific murderer.
Adoption Forensics: The Connection Between Adoption and Murder
by Dr. David Kirschner
(09/19/07).
Of the 500 estimated serial killers in U.S.
history, 16 percent were adopted as children, while adoptees represent only 2 or
3 percent of the general population. Adoptees are 15 times more likely to kill
one or both of their adoptive parents than biological children.
Night Stalker by
David Lohr. (11/05/03)
Richard Ramirez was a
spineless, gutless punk who terrorized Los Angeles for five months in 1985.
His frenzied nighttime murder spree of random targets was as senseless and
pointless as his life.
Richard Speck by
David Lohr. (08/20/03)
Speck's murders of
eight young women -- all in nurse's training and rooming together in a quiet
apartment house on Chicago's Southside -- stands as one of the most horrific
and shocking crimes in U.S. history. During the mayhem of the killings, a
ninth student nurse wedged herself under a bed and went undetected. Her
description of the intruder with the "Born to Raise Hell" tattoo on his arm,
led to Speck's capture. Her testimony at trial got him the death sentence.
Murdering women was nothing new to Richard Speck. He had done it often before.
Ted
Bundy: The Poster Boy of Serial Killers by David
Lohr. (10/06/02)
Ted Bundy didn't have it all but he had most of it: good looks, charm, smarts,
and ambition. He could have been anything he wanted to be. Instead he became the
poster boy for serial killers, killing as many as 40 young women and girls as
young as 12 years old during a four-year rampage in the mid 1970s. He was so
mainstream that the Washington State Republican Party hired him, so cunning that
twice he escaped from jail, and so dashing a figure that women sent marriage
proposals to him on death row.
Jack the Ripper’s Victims
by Denise M. Clark. Jack the Ripper lives in lore, an icon of butchery,
the most infamous murderer in history. But what of his hapless victims? Who were
they?
The
Serial Killer the Cops Ignored by Jason Lapeyre.
Serial killers are among the most reckless of murderers. Their need to keep
killing far outweighs their need to be cunning or discreet. What allows many
serial killers to keep killing is that their carelessness is dwarfed by police
and investigative incompetence. The great majority of serial killers, like John
Wayne Gacy, are well known to the police as violent sexual offenders long before
their murders finally catch up with them. Such is the case of Henry Louis
Wallace, a black serial killer who killed young black women the police just
didn't seem to care about.
Boy
Killer: John Wayne Gacy by David Lohr. Serial killer John Wayne Gacy
was a born salesman with a natural charm. Kids loved him, parents trusted him,
First Lady Rosalyn Carter posed in a picture with him. All the while, over a
seven-year period, he sexually assaulted and murdered 33 teenage boys and young
men, burying 28 of them under his house and garage in a Chicago suburb.
The
Molalla Forest Killer by David Lohr. For serial killers, prostitutes
make easy targets. Dayton Leroy Rogers bound and stabbed to death at least eight
of them before his rampage ran its course.
America’s
First Known Serial Killers: The Harps, Big and Little by Doris
Lane. The first known serial killers in American history were the Harp boys.
During the years of the Revolutionary War, the two cousins went on an
indiscriminate killing rampage, killing anyone who got in their way. They killed
infants, including their own, children, women and numerous men. They killed for
the sake of killing.
Randy
Kraft: The Southern California Strangler by J. J. Maloney. The reporter who
coined the phrase "Freeway Killer," sets the record straight about why
serial-killer Randy Kraft should not be confused with William Bonin.
Henry Lee
Lucas is frequently touted as the ultimate serial killer, because he
ultimately claimed to have killed more than 600 people. This in-depth
story, by Bonnie Bobit, editor of the Death Row series
of books, not only brings Lucas into sharp focus, but explains why the Texas
board of pardons and paroles recommended that his death sentence be reduced to
life imprisonment -- the only such instance of mercy by that board in modern
times..
One of the
most horrific serial killers of modern times was
William Bonin, a/k/a the Freeway Killer.
This story tells the story of not only Bonin, but of the media's pursuit of the
story.
