The Internet can often seem harmless, with its never-ending supply of cat videos, memes, and other distractions. But there is a dark side to all this connectivity. In some cases, social media inspired online fights that resulted in offline death. Whether those killings were committed by people who couldn't bear being humiliated publicly, or they simply snapped, these murders caused by social media are chilling.

Some social media feuds that led to murder were sparked by fights about lovers, online threats, or even a simple $20 debt. Tragically, the victims in these cases were often very young; many were teenagers. The jealousy and hurt egos of the individuals engaging in online behaviors that turned murderous make these stories all the more harrowing.

In 2009, childhood friends Kwame Dancy and Jameg Blake began arguing over a girl in Harlem. They started trading insults on Twitter, and by December 1, 2010, things escalated. Their fight ended with Dancy being fatally shot in the neck by Blake.

A fight about a boy on Facebook led a 16-year-old to kill her rival in Scranton, PA, in 2016. Cathleen Boyer sparred with Kayla VanWert, the mother of her lover's son, on the social media site. The two agreed to meet, but during the fight, Boyer stabbed VanWert. She later died at a hospital.

After the fight, Boyer took to Facebook again to say that she had "no remorse" for the stabbing. She was eventually arrested and charged with homicide.

A Facebook fight between two 14-year-old Chicago girls, who were arguing over a boy, ended with one of them being killed on April 13, 2014. Endia Martin was shot and killed by the other teenager (who is unnamed due to her age) while she walked home from the school. Another girl was wounded in the arm by the shooter.

The killer didn't act alone. Donnell Flora, the uncle of the shooter, gave her the gun so that she could commit the crime. He was sentenced to 100 years in jail for his role in the killing. Another teen, Vandetta Redwood, was originally connected to the crime as well, but was ultimately acquitted.

Kayla Henriques stabbed her friend Kamisha Richards in New York City after they fought on Facebook over a $20 debt. In February of 2011, Richards gave Henriques the money to buy diapers, milk, and other essentials for her baby. When Richards asked for her money back, the two began arguing over Facebook. When the two met in person, the fight quickly escalated: Richards threatened Henriques with a pair of scissors, while Henriques armed herself with a knife. Ultimately, Henriques killed Richards with a single blow.

Henriques was arrested and charged with second-degree murder. She pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

In February 2016, Javhonn Frazier tweeted that his friend Jerrold Parker couldn't rap. Another young man, Devin Leggett, retweeted Frazier, and Parker arranged for the two to meet to end the feud with a fight.

The two teenagers began fist-fighting in the middle of an Indianapolis street, and at some point Leggett pulled out a gun and shot Parker. Frazier then put Parker in the front seat of his car and sought help. Police arrived and rushed Parker to the hospital, but he died soon after arrival. Leggett was later arrested and charged with murder and carrying a handgun without a license.

After moving to Mountain City, TN, and struggling to make friends, Jenelle Potter finally seemed to settle into a group that she fit in with. But her Facebook friend Billie Jean Hayworth was jealous that Potter had a crush on her boyfriend (and father of her child) Billy Payne. An online battle broke out, with Potter and Payne's cousin Jamie Curd - who also happened to be sleeping with Potter - pitted against his cousin and Hayworth. 

Eventually, the Facebook threats and arguments ended when Potter, Hayworth, and Payne unfriended each other. The fight was far from resolved, though. On January 31, 2012, police found Hayworth and Payne shot in the head, with Payne's throat cut. The couple's child was in Hayworth's arms, alive.

A police investigation led to the arrest of Potter's father Marvin. In an interrogation, he told police a CIA agent told him to commit the crimes. Police later discovered that the agent was really his daughter, who had used a fake online identity to provoke her father into committing the murders. The authorities arrested Potter and her mother Barbara for making Marvin murder Hayworth and Payne. Potter's lover Curd was also charged for his role in the killings, and was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Potter and her mother were given life in prison, and Marvin received a double life sentence.

On June 10, 2015, a Facebook fight led to a gun battle that left a man dead in Cincinnati. Police say that Nake’land Williams and Daysmen Latham traded keyboards for pistols after one of the men responded to a comment about a girl, saying, "Why don’t you come up and fight?" Latham found Williams, and opened fire on him and a group of people.

Latham was arrested in connection with the shooting.

Two Pontiac, MI women were fighting over a paramour on Facebook, but the argument became deadly. Torrie Lynn Emery was sent to prison after an 80 mph car chase left Alesha Abernathy dead. But Abernanthy wasn't the woman Emery had been arguing with.

The incident occurred on July 20, 2010, when Emery saw her romantic rival Danielle Booth riding in the passenger seat of Abernanthy's car and began pursuing them. As the chase sped up, Abernanthy ran a red light and was hit by a truck.

Booth was critically injured in the crash, and Emery was arrested and charged with second-degree murder and child abuse - her 3 year-old had been in the car.

Anthony Gelia was arrested on November 8, 2016 for murder, after his brother threatened him on Facebook. The crime occurred when Gelia got intoxicated and kicked in the door a home his tormenter was in. Unfortunately, others were home, too.

The accused murderer reportedly ran through the Jackson, MI home while firing a gun. One of the bullets hit Brittany Southwell while she was holding her infant son. Southwell, who lived in the home with her fiance Tyler McCravey along with Gelia's brother, died of her wounds.

When police arrested Gelia, he said he had taken pills and was intoxicated. He held a gun to his head, but officers convinced him to surrender. When police interviewed Gelia, he said that he had seen a mysterious man in the house and had shot at him. No such man was found.

For one teen, online fighting had deadly repercussions. Sarah Ludemann fell for a boy named Josh Camacho in her hometown of Pinellas Park, FL. While dating Ludemann, Camacho was also with a young woman named Rachel Wade, and had a son with another woman. 

Wade began taunting Ludemann on Facebook and MySpace, and even threatened her life in a voicemail. After a few weeks of this, Ludemann apparently decided that enough was enough. On April 14, 2009, she and some friends went to confront Wade, but she was lying in wait with a knife. Ultimately, Ludemann died of a stab wound to the heart. Wade was convicted for the killing, and her story came full circle when a Facebook group was formed to petition for her release.

Social media over-sharers are a common complaint. Facebook is a medium where people spill their guts, sometimes without enough discretion. While detailed status updates about breakups can be annoying, killers who confessed on social media give new meaning to the term "TMI." It's hard to believe, but some people use Facebook as a platform to announce heinous crimes.

These stories are all incredibly unsettling. There are the killers who bragged on Facebook, taking pride in their act. Then there are the killers who confessed on Facebook with a tone of deep remorse. Regardless of the motivations behind their status updates, there is something undeniably chilling about taking a life and proceeding to use your Facebook page to announce this to the world. 

When Rosemarie Farid's roommate got too noisy for her liking, she began posting violent status updates about her desire to harm him. Later that same day, Farid (who describes herself as mentally disturbed) uploaded a bizarre video to Facebook in which she confessed to having brutally beaten her roommate to death by repeatedly bashing his head onto the bathroom floor. The 2014 video was taken while she was walking outdoors, and at one point she paused to greet a passerby with the words, "How ya doing, man? God bless your family." 

Police officers found Farid's roommate in a pool of blood in the bathtub. There were bloody washcloths in the kitchen sink and a trail of blood led to the bathroom. Farid confessed she took her roommate's phone before killing him so he could not contact authorities. She was arrested the next day and charged with murder. 

In September of 2016, Earl Valentine posted an unsettling video on Facebook Live. In the video, Valentine said, "Hello, everyone. I just killed my f****** wife." Unbeknownst to Valentine, his wife had survived her gunshot wound, but his 15-year-old son was not so lucky. Valentine's son had been shot in the crossfire, and used his dying words to phone the police for help. 

There would end up being no trial for Valentine. After the shooting, he fled the scene and phoned police to say he was going to Virginia to kill more relatives. However, after visiting his father's grave, Valentine checked into a hotel room in Columbia, South Carolina. Less than 48 hours after the shooting, Valentine died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. 

When his estranged wife cut off Facebook contact with him, Mark Alvin Manliclic was desperate to get her attention. His wife had left the Philippines for Canada for a job, an action she allegedly took out of fear of her own life. As revenge, Manliclic brutally stabbed their daughter to death and posted the images of her body online. Some witnesses claim he also posted a video of the murder, which was later taken down. 

Manliclic's aunt found the seven-year-old girl's body and police found stab wounds in her neck, abdomen, and back. While the murder is an unbelievable tragedy, at least justice was served. Manliclic was swiftly taken into custody. 

When Samantha Stansifer broke up with her boyfriend Anthony Hall, he let her stay with him for two weeks while she worked out her living situation. This turned out to be a deadly mistake. When Stansifer was going through Hall's phone, she found he had been texting another girl. Her reaction was to brutally stab him to death in his sleep and then post on Facebook, "I did it. He deserved it." 

Stansifer, who was covered in Hall's blood when she was arrested, apparently showed no remorse and was unfazed as she recounted her story. The only solace is that a judge and jury showed Stansifer little empathy in return. She was sentenced to life in prison without parole in June of 2015.

After killing his child's grandfather, Anthony Curtis Macneill posted on his Facebook page that he had a killed a man. In a series of status updates, he claimed he was going to take his own life. The last status read, "Goodbye to my friends and people who gave a damn."

Police later found Macneill's decomposing body less than half a mile from the murder scene. He had apparently shot himself in the head. 

After fatally shooting his wife several times, Florida man Derek Medina uploaded images of her corpse to Facebook. He claimed the murder was in self-defense, but he still expected to go to prison. The jury did not buy his self-defense claim, however, and the judge overseeing the case was quick to point out Medina foretold his own fate in the post. 

While Medina claimed his wife was abusive, the prosecution countered this with testimony from his wife's friends. Medina also gave conflicting reports on what occurred and his wife's wounds did not match his story. When he was sentenced to life in prison, he gave a rambling statement to the court claiming he did not get a fair trial. 

In a bizarre tragedy, Randy Janzen took to social media in May of 2015 to post an unnerving status update about his actions ten days prior. He claimed his daughter suffered debilitating migraines. As a result, he felt he had no choice but to murder his daughter as well as his wife and sister (to spare them pain and shame over his actions).

In a lengthy post, he described the psychological suffering his daughter's migraines caused. Janzen seemed almost relieved at his actions. "I took a gun and shot her in the head and now she is migraine free and floating in the clouds on a sunny afternoon," he wrote, "her long beautiful brown hair flowing in the breeze, a true angel."

When police arrived on scene, a four-hour standoff ensued. They saw a man matching Janzen's description in the window and shortly thereafter the house was engulfed in flames. The inferno was so intense, it took three days before for it to be safe to reenter the home. Upon searching the ruins, Janzen's charred body was found. Forensic reports indicated he had shot himself after starting the fire. 

When Gypsy Blanchard posted a bizarre Facebook message reading, "That b**** is dead," police decided to search her home. They were shocked to discover the body of Gypsy's mother, Dee Dee Blanchard, who had been stabbed to death in her bed. Neighbors did not believe Gypsy had committed the crime, as Gypsy was allegedly wheelchair bound. However, police soon found Gypsy and her mother had been faking her disability to gain financial assistance from the government. 

The story gets stranger from there. It soon came out that Gypsy did not act alone. She conspired with boyfriend Nicholas Paul Godejohn, whom she met on a Christian dating site. Godejohn confessed to having stabbed Dee Dee to death on orders from Gypsy and the pair were promptly charged with first degree murder. 

When Nancy Lopez logged onto Facebook in December of 2011, she saw a disturbing status from her Facebook friend Bart Heller. In the status, Heller claimed he had killed his ex-girlfriend and a friend of his, and would soon take his own life. Lopez phoned the police in Fort Lauderdale, Indiana, nearly 1,000 miles away from her home, to report the crime. 

Police arrived at the scene to find the bodies of Heller, Erin Jehl, and Ryann Tipton. Allegedly, some kind of love triangle spurred Heller's actions. Jehl had recently begun a relationship with a police officer and Heller was also suspicious of her friendship with Tipton. His jealousy led him to commit this unspeakable act. 

Despite her online confession, 18-year-old Nakasia James pled not guilty to the stabbing death of her boyfriend, Dorian Powell. After a heated argument, James claimed to have killed Powell in self defense, according to a distraught Facebook status update.

In the post, James seems genuinely remorseful. She wrote, "I gt the knife and stabbed him ddnt I would hurt him BT I did he died." She then wrote she was going on the run, hoping the lord would forgive her. She ended the status with the chilling message, "And sorry Dorian Powell rip." 

There have been some incredibly sloppy serial killers over the years, murderers that hacked people up in the streets, then left the scene of the crime soaked from head to toe in viscera - but not the guys on this list. These serial killers who were extremely thorough either made sure to dispose of their victims' bodies in a way that made it seem like they had simply disappeared, or they killed so many potential witnesses that there wasn’t anyone left around to ID them.

You’ve definitely heard of a few of these serial killers who were the hardest to catch, but others were so detail-oriented with their crimes that they were either never caught, or they evaded arrest for so long that it was embarrassing to the police for their stories to get out.

The most common mental picture of serial killers who were meticulous is probably someone in a hazmat suit dissolving bodies in lye, but as you’ll come to discover, these serial killers who were careful weren’t necessarily master criminals, they just knew how to keep from drawing attention to themselves. Although in a few cases, some of these detail-oriented killers did the exact opposite and specifically contacted the police with piles of information for investigators to sift through. And if they weren’t devising plans for the perfect way to dispose a body, they were simply eviscerating everyone in a 50-foot radius. Keep reading and don’t get any big ideas.

This little-known serial killer happens to be one of the most oddly detailed people on this list. With a kill count of 42 women and girls, he proves that he was dedicated to his insanity in the worst way. Known as the "Black Magic Killer," Suradiji began his wave of terror in 1986, after his father allegedly appeared to him in a dream and told him to kill 70 women. Being a total daddy's boy, Suradji set out to make this figment of his imagination proud. Suradji was able to kill so many victims because he was known locally as a witch who regularly helped people solve their problems.

When women came to Suradiji, he would take them to a field, convince them to let him bury them up to their wastes, and then strangle them to death. Then he would drink their saliva in order to increase his strength, then bury them fully with their heads facing towards his home. Keep in mind that he did this 42 times, with designs on killing at least 28 more women and children. Unfortunately for Suradji, police discovered some of the bodies in 1998 and promptly arrested him. He was executed by firing squad a decade later.

Dean Corll, otherwise known as "The Candyman," is one of America's least-known serial killers, but not for lack of trying. From 1970 to 1973 (and possibly earlier), Corll raped and murdered over 27 teenage boys across the Houston area before carefully disposing of their bodies in his personal storage unit and, once that filled up, at Lake Sam Rayburn.

Corll was meticulous in choosing the boys whom he would murder; he preyed on runaways and children from low-income homes in order to keep from raising suspicion. And just to make sure no one came looking for the boys, he would often have them write letters to their family saying that they had left town seeking employment before he strangled them to death. Corll likely would have continued his low-key rampage if it weren't for one of his accomplices shooting and killing him in the middle of his final act. 

In the early '70s, law enforcement was still largely unfamiliar with the idea of a serial killer (the phrase "serial killer" hadn't even been coined yet), and the Houston Sheriff's Department hardly investigated the disappearance of more than two dozen boys. Once Corll's body count had officially surpassed that of California's Juan Corona, the police didn't even continue searching for bodies, making it likely the Candyman's real death toll was considerably higher.

The murders that Ed Kemper committed may have been messy, but you can't say that he didn't go all the way with his batsh*t-crazy plans. At the age of 15, he killed his grandmother, and followed that by killing his grandfather because he didn't want his pop-pop to be sad. That's follow-through.

About half a decade after he got out of a teenage mental institution, he got back into his murder hobby when he started murdering co-eds at their various Berkley-area universities before having sex with their corpses. But he didn't just murder and desecrate their bodies, Kemper would take things to another level by burying one of the girl's heads in his mother's backyard.

Kemper was caught in 1973 when he just kind of gave up on killing women and turned himself over to the police after leaving the state for a little while. At his trial Kemper was found guilty and requested that he be given "death by torture," but was interred for life at the California Medical Facility 

Pack it up, all you wannabe serial killers, John Edward Robinson did it all. He embezzeled thousands of dollars, committed forgery and mail fraud. He even gave himself a Man of the Year award at a banquet that he hosted. This guys loves crime.

After all of that white-collar crime, Robinson began to get into the heavy stuff. In 1984, Robinson started to take in young, usually homeless, women and promise them jobs before quickly killing them and in some cases, selling their babies along with falsified adoption letters. After going to prison for a spell between 1987 and 1993, Robinson discovered the Internet, and that's when his murderous tendencies sunk to even more sadistic depths.

In 1993, Robinson began posting on BDSM chat rooms under the name "Slavemaster," where he lured multiple women to his home under the guise of wanting to start a relationship before killing them and disposing of their bodies in 85-gallon chemical drums that he kept on his property. In 1999, Robinson was already on police radar when he was arrested for allegedly stealing a woman's sex toys, and after an investigation of his property, authorities found the decomposing bodies of two of his victims. 

Out of all the terrible murderers and creeps on this list, Moses Sithole may be the worst of the group - if such a thing is possible. Sithole committed at least 38 rapes and murders (he claimed to have committed more than 75) between 1994 and 1995 in Atteridgeville, Boksburg, and Cleveland, South Africa, before he identified himself as the ABC Killer to a reporter and led the police on a chase through the streets of Johannesburg.

Prior to his murder spree, Sithole had been imprisoned for the rape of a young woman, whom he later said falsified her claims against him, inspiring him to commit his gruesome crimes. In order to kill so many women, Sithole set up a shell charity organization called Youth Against Human Abuse that he claimed was meant to wipe out child abuse. But instead of dedicating himself to that noble cause, he would take every female interviewee that he met into a remote field before beating and raping them, and then strangling them with their underwear before writing "bitch" on their dead bodies. 

Richard Chase, the literally blood-thirsty serial killer from Sacramento, was thorough in his murders in the way that a wood chipper is thorough in pulping a tree. During his murder spree, he shot, bludgeoned, stabbed, and ripped his victims to shreds. His victim whose body was most desecrated was Teresa Wallin, who was not only raped post mortem, but was stabbed multiple times with a butcher knife before having her organs removed (except for her kidneys), her blood drained, and her nipple removed. After everything, Chase shoved dog feces in Teresa's mouth. 

Cottingham's name may not be memorable, but his crimes will sit with you for the rest of your life. Beginning in 1969, this New Jersey computer operator for Blue Shield began strangling women, usually prostitutes but sometimes just ladies around the community, and carving away their limbs in order to simply leave their torsos at the scene of the crime. Sometimes he would light the torsos on fire, and other times he would leave the arms connected to the body and handcuff them behind their backs. The Torso Killer was nothing if not a work in progress.

Cottingham was arrested in the middle of attempting to rape and murder his final victim, a prostitute named Leslie Ann O’Dell, at the same motel where he committed his two previous murders. 

Yang Xinhai didn't have the most prolonged period of terror, but he did commit 67 murders and 23 rapes in a three-year spree that took place between 1999 and 2003. During those years, he moved around the provinces of Henan, Anhui, Shandong, and Hebei while using a hammer to kill his victims. Often he would murder entire families after entering their homes in the middle of the night.

After Xinhai was caught in a nightclub bust, he told state officials that he didn't have a motive, and that he just liked to kill people. "When I killed people I had a desire (to kill more). This inspired me to kill more. I don't care whether they deserve to live or not. It is none of my concern," Yang continued, "I have no desire to be part of society. Society is not my concern."

While Xinhai may have not been as interested in covering up his crimes as some of the other killers on this list (he actually seemed proud about the fact that he didn't hide his crimes), he was definitely driven to act on his nightmarish impulses more than some killers, who take years to build up to their over-the-top spree-killing phase. And his murdering of entire families proves that he's a guy that likes to get the job done. 

Randy Kraft, better known as the "Scorecard Killer" or the "Freeway Killer," is a very 70s serial killer who fell by the wayside when guys like John Wayne Gacy and Richard Ramirez took center stage as America's bogeymen. Throughout the '70s and early '80s, Kraft picked up male hitchhikers, roofied them, and proceeded to torture, sexually abuse, and kill them before ditching their bodies on freeway ramps. He definitely killed 16 victims, but is believed to have murdered up to 65 men throughout his time spent driving up and down the west coast.

Kraft's meticulous attention to detail came in the form of a scorecard that was discovered in his truck after he was apprehended in 1983. The card contained a coded list of victims made up of innocuous words and phrases like "EDM" and "Golden Sails," that refer to either the victims themselves, or where their bodies were unceremoniously dumped. Despite being sentenced to death in 1989, Kraft still sits on death row to this day.

Is there anything more detail-oriented than building an entire sex/torture chamber adjacent to your home, and then recording an audio welcome for each woman whom you drug and kidnap from the same New Mexico drifter bar? David Parker Ray, better known as the "Toy Box Killer," was a true monster who not only planned out his kidnappings to a T, but was obsessed with wiping the memories of the victims that he kept alive, experimented on the women that he raped and tortured until he actually had some success. Even though it's obvious that Parker had been raping, torturing, and killing women for years, he was so meticulous with his crimes that investigators were still searching for the remains of his victims 16 years after he was arrested. 

In less than a year, Javed Iqbal, a middle-aged Pakistani man, allegedly raped and killed 100 young boys and teenagers, taking advantage of apathetic attitudes towards poor children to commit his disturbing crimes. Many of Iqbal's victims weren't reported missing to police until months after they had disappeared, making it possible for him to take 100 lives before law enforcement even learned the young boys had vanished. 

When this Pakistani serial killer's crimes came to light, parents of missing children desperately tried to learn if their sons had died at the hands of Iqbal, forcing mothers and fathers to sort through evidence taken from the murderer's home.

After he turned himself in and was convicted of the killings, Iqbal was given a severe sentence designed to subject him to the same merciless acts he'd visited on 100 children. Even after he died in prison, Iqbal is remembered as one of the worst serial killers who murdered boys, making him a dark figure in Pakistan's history.

After officials found photographs of his victims and barrels containing the bodies three young boys in his home, Pakistani police launched a massive manhunt that lasted for one month until Iqbal turned himself in on December 30, 1999. However, instead of going to a local police station, Iqbal went to the Daily Jang, an Urdu newspaper, to surrender. According to the staff at the newspaper, Iqbal didn’t express any remorse for his crimes, instead stating, “I hate this world, I am not ashamed of my action and I am ready to die. I have no regrets. I killed 100 children."

He also gave Daily Jang staff a 32-page journal that contained details about the sexual assaults and murders, as well as pictures he had taken of the boys he’d sodomized and killed. The staff at the newspaper contacted the police, and Iqbal was promptly arrested.

When police searched Iqbal’s home, they discovered two large drums containing acid and the dissolving remains of three children. They also found note cards that provided information about his victims, including their names, ages, physical descriptions, and the dates they were killed, covering the walls of his home.

The authorities also recovered photographs Iqbal had taken of his victims and bags of children’s clothing and shoes, which provided proof that Iqbal had been telling the truth when he claimed responsibility for the murders of 100 boys. Armed with evidence to support his confession, the police launched a manhunt to track down the admitted serial killer before he could viciously kill another child.

In November 1999, Javed Iqbal decided to confess to the murders by sending a letter to the police. In the letter, which was received by law enforcement in early December 1999, Iqbal admitted to killing 100 “beggar children” by strangling them to death; he also included details about dismembering his victims and dissolving their remains in barrels of acid.

Iqbal sent a similar letter to the Daily Jang, his local newspaper, and although the correspondence was unsigned, it included directions to his home. Consequently, reporters arrived at Iqbal’s home before the police, although newspaper staff contacted law enforcement after they made a number of shocking discoveries in the confessed killer’s rented house.

In September 1998, Iqbal was hospitalized for 22 days after he and one of his employees, Arbab, were beaten and robbed by another man who worked for him. However, after Iqbal was released from the hospital, he was immediately arrested and charged with sodomy: while he had been lying in the hospital unconscious, the result of a severe head injury suffered during the attack, Arbab’s family had filed a complaint with the police, alleging Iqbal had sodomized Arbab.

Iqbal was granted bail, but when he tried to return to his lavish home, he discovered his house, as well as his business and vehicles, had been sold to pay for his medical care. Consequently, Iqbal was broke and homeless, so he rented a house in a Lahore slum, the place where he would eventually take the lives of 100 children.

In addition to finding victims through the various businesses he created, Javed Iqbal also met boys through pen pal programs. Reportedly, Iqbal would find pen pals through magazines for children and begin correspondences with young boys.

Eventually, he would convince his pen pals to send him pictures of themselves, and he would focus his attention on the children he found most attractive. Iqbal groomed these chosen boys by sending them gifts, until he was able to arrange in-person meetings where he sexually assaulted and sodomized his pen pals.

Using the considerable inheritance he received after his father’s death, Iqbal opened a number of different businesses designed to help him meet and sexually assault young boys and teenagers. One of these businesses was a video store, where Iqbal reportedly left money on the floor of the shop, waiting to see which of his young customers would pick up the cash. Then, Iqbal would accuse the boy of trying to steal from him, and he would take the "thief" into another room, presumably for some sort of punishment, and sodomize the child.

After the video game shop closed, Iqbal opened more businesses, including an aquarium, a gym, a general store, and even a school, but none of these entrepreneurial endeavors lasted for very long because parents were afraid to let their children go to places run by Iqbal.

One of the main reasons Javed Iqbal was able to get away with raping and sexually assaulting children over the course of several years was because his father was an incredibly wealthy stock market trader who had amassed a large fortune. Iqbal’s father Mohammed bought his son a villa to live in, and he also helped his son start a steel recasting business in 1978 that allowed Iqbal to enjoy a lavish lifestyle.

After Mohammed passed away in 1993, Iqbal, who was in his late 30s at the time, inherited more than 3 million rupees from his father’s estate, making him even richer. Iqbal used this windfall to build a massive home, complete with a swimming pool, as well as to purchase four different vehicles.

Prior to the start of his killing spree, multiple criminal complaints were filed against Iqbal, accusing him of sexually assaulting and sodomizing children. However, Iqbal’s father was a respected and powerful businessman in Lahore, and he used his influence to keep his son out of jail.

Consequently, prior to his murder spree in 1999, Iqbal was never convicted of sodomy, leaving him free to eventually take the lives of 100 children. However, Iqbal later said that when he was arrested and questioned by police, he was beaten and brutalized, and he claimed the abuse he suffered at the hands of law enforcement motivated him to kill young boys and teenagers.

Over the course of just eight months, businessman Javed Iqbal reportedly murdered 100 boys, ranging in age from 6 to 16, while he was living in the city of Lahore, Pakistan. From May to December 1999, Iqbal (who was 43 years old at the time) drugged, sodomized, and sexually assaulted the boys, many of whom were poor children who lived on the streets of Pakistan, before strangling them to death with a chain.

After killing the boys, Iqbal disremembered their bodies and placed their remains in large vats of hydrochloric acid to dissolved his victims' flesh and bones. Then, once the boys' bodies were reduced to little more than liquid, Iqbal poured the contents of the barrels into the sewer or a river near his home.

In order to find out if their missing sons had been sexually assaulted and strangled to death by Javed Iqbal, a number of parents whose children had disappeared sorted through items taken from the confessed killer’s home. Officials found five bags of children’s clothing in Iqbal’s house, as well as three bags containing a total of 85 pairs of shoes, and distraught parents sifted through these piles of clothes and footwear to see their children’s belongings were among them.

Parents of missing children also looked through the photographs Iqbal had taken of his victims to see if the confessed murdered had snapped their son’s picture prior to killing them.

Over the course of more than 20 years, Joachim Kroll murdered 14 people, including very young girls, making him one of the most disturbing German serial killers in the country's history. Not content just to end the lives of his victims, Kroll repeatedly ate the flesh of the people he killed, leading him to be called the Duisburg Man-Eater and the Ruhr Cannibal.

After getting away with murder for more than two decades, Kroll's revolting crimes were finally discovered when law enforcement found him cooking the remains of a young girl in his apartment. Kroll, who was called "Uncle Joachim" by the neighborhood children who adored him, is one of the first known German cannibals and serial killers, eventually joined by infamous German murderers Armin Miewes and Volker Eckert.

After killing his victims, Joachim Kroll often mutilated their corpses, leaving behind particularly bloody and gruesome crime scenes. In the case of his first victim, Irmgard Strehl, after strangling the 19-year-old to death, he used a long-bladed knife to disembowel the teenager, while after he murdered and raped 16-year-old Manuela Knodt in July 1956, he cut pieces of flesh from the teenager’s body.

After mutilating Knodt’s corpse, Kroll masturbated over the 16-year-old’s lifeless and blood-soaked body, leaving large quantities of semen on the girl’s genitals and face. Consequently, officers first assumed Knodt had been killed by several different men, not a single serial killer like Kroll. However, the reason he cut the flesh from the teenager’s body was even more disturbing than the grisly mutilation he perpetrated.

In the case of five-year-old Ilona Harke, as well as the majority of Joachim Kroll’s victims, raped the child’s lifeless body after killing her. In fact, most of the women and girls he attacked were either dead or unconscious when he raped them, indicating Kroll was a necrophile who enjoyed having sex with people who could not resist or reject him.

However, while he raped the corpses of his victims, some of whom were very young children, necrophilia wasn’t even the most disturbing act he subjected the girls and women to after their deaths.

With the murder of Irmgard Strehl, Joachim Kroll began a killing spree that lasted more than 20 years and resulted in the untimely deaths of 13 women and girls. His victims ranged in age from four to 61, although the majority of the people Kroll murdered were young girls who were around 12 years old. As with Strehl, Kroll attacked most of his victims when they were traveling to school or home or walking through parks, wooded areas, and fields.

He killed the majority of the young women and girls by strangling them to death his hands. However, in the case of Petra Giese, he used the 13-year-old’s own scarf to strangle her to death on Easter Sunday in 1962. More than four years later, in December 1966, he killed five-year-old Ilona Harke by holding her head underwater in a stream simply because he wanted to know what it felt like to drown someone. Initially, people thought the child had accidentally fallen into the water and drowned, but an autopsy revealed evidence to indicate five-year-old Harke had been murdered.

Born on April 17, 1933, in Nazi Germany, Joachim Kroll was the youngest of eight children, and his father was a miner who was held as a prisoner of war during World War II. As a child, Kroll was smaller than his peers and frequently wet the bed.

Shortly after his mother passed away in 1955, Kroll, who was 22 at the time, committed his first known murder when he attacked Irmgard Strehl, 19, while the young woman was walking on a street in the village of Walstedde. After strangling the teenager to death with his hands, Kroll subjected her corpse to horrifying acts that became signature aspects of his future killings.

Joachim Kroll’s 21-year-reign of murder, necrophilia, mutilation, and cannibalism finally came to an end after a plumbing problem brought his gruesome deeds to light. In July 1993, the toilet in the bathroom Kroll shared with one of his neighbors wouldn’t flush, so the man asked Kroll if he knew what was wrong. Incredibly, Kroll told his neighbor the toilet was “clogged with guts.” Initially, the man didn’t make much of Kroll’s strange comment until police officers visited his home to find out if he knew anything about the recent disappearance of a local girl, four-year-old Monika Kettner.

When the neighbor told investigators about Kroll’s odd remark, the officers called a plumber to take apart the toilet in bathroom. To the shock and horror of everyone at the scene, the plumber discovered the toilet had been clogged with multiple internal organs, including a heart, a pair of lungs, a liver, and two kidneys.

One of the reasons Joachim Kroll was able to kill 14 victims over the course of more than 20 years was because a number of other men were arrested and convicted of murders he’d actually committed. Six months after Kroll murdered, raped, mutilated, and cannibalized 15-year-old Manuel Knodt in July 1959, another man went to the police and confessed to killing the teenager. Even though he later told officers he hadn’t actually killed Knodt, the man was convicted of the 16-year-old's murder and sentenced to eight years in prison.

After Kroll killed Petra Giese on Easter in 1962, another man, Vinzenz Kuenh, was arrested and sent to jail for murdering the 13-year-old. Another man, Walter Quicker, was accused of murdering one of Kroll’s victims, 13-year-old Monika Tafel, but the authorities weren’t able to convict Quicker of the teenager’s murder. However, Quicker’s neighbors were certain he was responsible for killing the girl, and the falsely accused man committed suicide after he was ostracized by his community.

Yet another local man, Adolf Schickel, killed himself after he was blamed for a murder perpetrated by Kroll. In September 1966, Kroll killed Schickel’s 20-year-old girlfriend Ursula Rohling. Despite Schickel having absolutely no involvement in the young woman’s murder, people were convinced he’d killed Rohling, so his grief and the accusations caused him to jump off of a bridge to his death.

In addition to his expansive collection of children’s dolls, Joachim Kroll had a life-sized rubber figure that he regularly used for his sexual satisfaction. According to Kroll, after he murdered a victim and raped her dead body, he would return to his apartment and have sex with the rubber doll while he relived the violent acts he’d just committed.

The German serial killer also confessed that he would often choke the doll with his hands while he had sex with it. However, the life-sized rubber sex doll was far from the most disturbing item investigators found when they visited Kroll’s home.

Joachim Kroll was well-known by the children is his neighborhood, and he often went for walks with little girls. Incredibly, while he murdered several children, including girls as young as four and five, many of these neighborhood children returned from their jaunts with Kroll completely unharmed.

In addition to giving candy to the kids in the neighborhood to win their affections, Kroll also collected dolls which he would use to help him become acquainted with young girls. He also used these dolls, which were the size of small children, to fulfill his violent fantasies and practice murdering his victims: Kroll choked the figures while he masturbated, providing himself with a perverse and frightening thrill.

While most of the people Joachim Kroll murdered were women and young girls, he did kill one male victim, 25-year-old Hermann Schmitz, on August 22, 1965. Schmittz had parked by a lake close to the city of Duisburg, and he was sitting in his car with his girlfriend, Marion Veen. Kroll approached the vehicle and used his knife to deflate one of the tires; then he stabbed Schmittz multiple times in the heart when the 25-year-old exited his car to investigate the damage.

Miraculously, Veen was able to flee the scene in the her boyfriend’s vehicle before Kroll attacked her, but Schmittz died from his injuries, making the young man the only known male victim of the Duisburg Man-Eater.

After cutting flesh from Manual Knodt’s dead body, Joachim Kroll took the pieces of the 16-year-old’s buttocks back to his home, cooked the cuts of meat, and ate them. After experimenting with cannibalism for the first time, Kroll must have developed a taste for human flesh, because he went on to eat more pieces of meat he’d taken from his victims’ bodies.

After killing 13-year-old Petra Giese in April 1962 by strangling her to death with her own scarf, he used his knife to cut off sections of the girl’s hand, forearm, and buttocks. Just months after murdering Giese, he strangled 12-year-old Monika Tafel in June 1962. After killing the child, he raped her body and cut pieces of flesh from her thighs and buttocks, and some experts concluded he may have even eaten consumed some of Tafel’s raw tissue at the murder scene.

When Sheila Davalloo met Nelson Sessler while working for a pharmaceutical company in Stamford, CT, it was the beginning of a dangerous obsession that left one woman dead and another person clinging to life. Not content to surrender Sessler to another lover, Davalloo committed one of the most brutal and disturbing love triangle murders in Connecticut history, driven by jealousy to bludgeon and stab her romantic rival to death.

After killing Anna Lisa Raymundo - Sessler's new girlfriend - Davalloo had him all to herself. But she decided to commit murder for a second time to guarantee nothing stood in the way of their romance. After stabbing a man multiple times, nearly ending his life, Davalloo's many lies were discovered, and her deadly deeds were brought to light for the entire world to see.

On November 8, 2002, 33-year-old Sheila Davalloo, visited the Stamford, CT, condo of her former co-worker Anna Lisa Raymundo and stabbed the 32-year-old to death. Davalloo and Raymundo had worked together at Purdue Pharma alongside Nelson Sessler, a 33-year-old research scientist who had been romantically involved with both women.

However, Sessler had ended his relationship with Davalloo in order to pursue a more serious relationship Raymundo. Davalloo, who was obsessed with Sessler, couldn’t bear being rejected by the object of her affections in favor of another woman, so she murdered Raymundo in hopes of rekindling her romance with him.

After stabbing her husband, Davalloo was arrested and charged with attempted murder. Investigators questioned Sessler to find out why he’d spoken to Davalloo on the day she tried to kill her husband. When Sessler was questioned, he was shocked to learn the woman he had an on-and-off relationship with for years was actually married.

According to Sessler, despite regularly visiting her home, he had no idea Davalloo was married, mainly because she went to extraordinary lengths to hide Christos’s existence from him.

While Davalloo stabbed her husband a third time in the hospital parking lot, a passerby witnessed the attack, and Christos was rushed inside the medical center where he underwent emergency surgery. Incredibly, Christo survived the vicious attack perpetrated by his wife, and while Davalloo tried to flee the scene, she was apprehended by police. At the police station, Davalloo was questioned about the stabbing and officers checked her cell phone logs to find evidence to support or dispute her version of events. They quickly learned that when Davalloo told her husband she'd tried to call 911, she'd actually spoken to Sessler.

According to Sessler, Davalloo asked him if he wanted to come over to her home that evening for dinner. However, Davalloo said she had called her lover not to invite him over that evening for a date, but to cancel plans because Christos had been injured.

After she stabbed her husband twice in the chest, Davalloo tried to convince him she had injured him by accident. While Christos wasn’t sure exactly what had occurred, he knew he needed medical attention, so he asked his wife to call 911. Initially, Davalloo refused to get him help. Then, she pretended to call 911 but told Christos the line was busy, and said she was unable to get through to anyone.

Christos, who knew he desperately needed medical help, was finally able to convince her to drive him to a nearby hospital. However, when they arrived at the Westchester County Hospital, instead of taking Christos straight to the emergency room for treatment, Davalloo stopped her car in an isolated part of the parking lot and stabbed her husband once more in the chest.

Sessler wasn't the only man in Davalloo's life. In fact, she was married to a man named Paul Christos for two years before the killing. Davalloo wasn’t immediately a suspect in Raymundo's killing, allowing her to remain free. After Raymundo's death, Sessler and Davalloo began their secret affair. But Davalloo decided one more obstacle stood in the way of their happiness: Christos. She decided she had to kill Christo in order to be with Sessler.

On March 23, 2003, Raymundo convinced her husband to play a game with her that required him to be both blindfolded and handcuffed. According to Christos, the game was supposed to be an innocent exercise Davalloo had learned at work, not something sexual in nature. However, shortly after Christos was restrained and unable to see, his wife stabbed him twice in the chest, leaving him confused and in agonizing pain.

In 2004, Davalloo was convicted of the attempted murder of Christos, and she was sentenced to 25 years in a New York prison for the crime. Eight years later in 2012, she stood trial for the 2002 murder of Anna Lisa Raymundo, waiving her right to an attorney and instead choosing to represent herself.

At one point during the two-and-half-week trial in Stamford, CT, Davalloo questioned her now-ex husband, who divorced her after her arrest. She became emotional and near tears when she asked him about the time he visited her in prison after she was given 25 years for his attempted murder.

After entering Raymundo’s apartment, Davalloo repeatedly hit the woman in the before stabbing her nine times in her chest, neck, and face. After killing her, Davalloo cleaned herself up, washing the blood from her hands in Raymundo’s bathroom sink, and fled the scene of the brutal murder. Then, the she went to a nearby restaurant and used a payphone to call 911.

Instead of confessing to the murder, however, Davalloo told the operator Raymundo - who she claimed was her neighbor - was being assaulted by a man. Davalloo refused to provide the 911 operator with her name, although she did provide Raymundo’s address. When officers went to Raymundo’s condo, they discovered the 32-year-old’s brutally beaten and stabbed body.

When police questioned Sessler about his relationship with Davalloo, Sessler started to wonder if she had been involved in the killing of Raymundo. Sessler told the authorities about the love triangle and Raymundo’s murder, and Davalloo quickly became a suspect in the 32-year-old woman’s unsolved killing.

While they found a lot of circumstantial evidence to connect Davalloo with the brutal crime, law enforcement officials were convinced she was Raymundo’s killer they found her DNA at the crime scene. After Raymundo was killed, crime scene investigators found blood on the bathroom sink - presumably left by the murderer when they washed their hands after beating and stabbing the young woman to death - but they were unable to link the sample to anyone until Davalloo became a suspect in the killing. Her DNA matched with the blood and she was arrested for Raymundo's murder.

Davalloo could have just left Christos in order to pursue a relationship with Sessler, but prosecutors argued she didn’t want to get divorced for a second time. When Davalloo met Christos while attending New York Medical College, she was actually already married to another man. Consequently, she had an extramarital affair with Christos until her first husband learned she was being unfaithful and filed for divorce.

According to Davalloo, her family was extremely opposed to divorce, and she knew they would be upset with her if she had yet another failed marriage. Therefore, Davalloo concluded the only way she could end her relationship with Christos without displeasing her parents was by murdering her husband.

One of the reasons Sessler didn't know Davalloo was married was because she regularly convinced her husband to move out of the house for entire weekends so Sessler could visit and stay the night in their home. Amazingly, Davalloo made Christos believe she had a brother with mental health issues who would have been upset to learn his sister was married, so Davalloo had to keep Christos a secret when her brother spent the weekend at their house.

Davalloo not only persuaded Christos to stay at hotel for a couple days on a regular basis, she also convinced him to take all of his personal effects with him when he left, making the apartment free from any trace of her husband. By going to such extraordinary lengths to erase any sign of Christos, Davalloo was able to successfully convince him she was a single woman who lived in the apartment by herself.

When he was just a teenager, Edmund Kemper committed a double homicide that shocked both his family and police, leading medical professionals to diagnose the 15-year-old with a serious mental illness. After spending several years in a psychiatric hospital, however, Ed Kemper was released at the age of 21, only to commit the series of killings that earned him the nicknames the "Co-ed Killer" and the "Co-ed Butcher" within months of leaving the secure facility.

However, his penultimate killing, in which Kemper murdered the woman he blamed for many of his problems, was truly shocking, not only because of his relationship to the victim, but also because of the depraved acts he subjected her body to after beating her to death with a hammer. Now in prison for his crimes, the necrophiliac serial killer, one of the most intelligent serial killers the FBI has ever interviewed, appears to have no interest in returning to the outside world, and he has repeatedly taken steps to guarantee he will the spend the rest of his life behind bars.

After killing both of his grandparents with a rifle, the authorities determined 15-year-old Edmund Kemper was criminally insane, so he was committed to California's Atascadero State Hospital for evaluation and treatment. While at Atascadero, Kemper helped out in the hospital's psychology lab and even gave psychological exams to other patients, furnishing him with a unique insight into the instruments used to determine sanity.

As a result, Kemper was able to convince hospital officials he was no longer criminally insane, nor was he threat to others. Consequently, Kemper was released when he turned 21, just six years after he murdered his grandmother and grandfather, and he moved into his mother's apartment near Santa Cruz and got a job with the California Highway Department.

From the time he was a boy, Edmund Kemper was fascinated by death to a disturbing degree, and he routinely played a macabre game with his sister he called "gas chamber." In the game, Kemper played the role of the condemned criminal and his sister pretended to be the executioner, culminating in Kemper miming painful death throes.

In addition to this bizarre form of recreation, Kemper tortured and killed animals, including the family cat. In an act of dismemberment that seemed to foretell his future crimes, after burying the poor animal alive, he disinterred his family pet, decapitated it, and placed its severed head on the end of a stick.

From the time he was a child, Edmund Kemper was considerably larger than his peers, and even his own mother was fearful of the harm a boy his size could cause. By the time he was fully grown, Kemper was 6'9", making him a head taller than the average man, and he weighed approximately 250 pounds when he was arrested in the early 1970s.

Given his remarkable height and weight, Kemper should have had difficulty convincing women to accept rides from him, but he used a number of psychological tactics to make the hitchhikers think he was safe, even after they had learned that a serial killer was operating in the area.

Plus, Kemper's mother worked at the University of California, Santa Cruz, so he had a sticker on his vehicle that not only gave him access to the college campus, it also made young coeds view him as a fellow student or school employee they could trust.

During his time at the Atascadero State Hospital, doctors administered a number of psychological tests to Kemper, including an exam to determine his IQ. At age 15, hospital staff found he had an IQ of 136, which is considered to be well above average.

After he was apprehended for the crimes he committed as an adult in the early 1970s, Kemper was given yet another IQ test, and the doctors found he had an IQ of 145, making him near genius. While his intelligence undoubtedly helped him commit murders and avoid detection, it also gave Kemper insight into his crimes, which he shared with FBI profilers who were eager to learn more about the minds of serial killers like the Co-ed Killer.

After killing his victims, Edmund Kemper brought their dead bodies back to his home to dismember their corpses, sometimes performing this grisly task in his bathtub. In the case of 15-year-old Aiko Koo, he decapitated the teenager and put her head in the trunk of his car, intending to dispose of it in the mountains. On his way to discard Koo's remains, Kemper kept a scheduled appointment with a psychiatrist: the doctor deemed the serial killer no longer a threat to others, recommending his juvenile record should be sealed, all while Kemper had a severed head in the trunk of his vehicle.

In an interview with the authorities after he was apprehended, Kemper admitted that when he saw an attractive woman, part of him thought about what it what it would be like to take her on a date, while another part of him wondered "how her head would look on a stick."

When he was a child, Kemper's sister teases him about having a crush on one of his teachers, to which he reportedly replied, "If I kissed her, I'd have to kill her first." This disturbing statement proved prescient, as Kemper later demonstrated a bizarre desire to mix death with sexuality.

After killing his victims, Edmund Kemper dismembered their bodies and then engaged in necrophilia with their corpses. In the cases of Anita Luchessa, Mary Ann Pesce, and Cindy Schall, he decapitated the young women and used their severed heads to perform oral sex on himself. He also vaginally raped the corpses of some of his victims after killing them, and he took nude photographs of many of their lifeless bodies.

At the same time Edmund Kemper was murdering young female hitchhikers in Santa Cruz, California, two other serial killers, Herbert Mullin and John Linley Frazier, were also operating in the area. Because so many people were being abducted and murdered in the early 1970s in Santa Cruz, the city had the unfortunate honor of being dubbed the "Murder Capital of the World" by the press.

On October 19, 1970, Frazier killed a family of four and the patriarch's secretary, and he was convicted of the murders and sentenced to life in prison. From October 1972 to February 1973, Mullin killed 13 people, many of them hitchhikers, because he was convinced he needed to commit murders to prevent earthquakes from happening in California. Mullin was arrested and convicted of the killings, and he received a life sentence for his crimes.

Having murdered his grandparents and six young women, Edmund Kemper killed his final two victims on April 30, 1973. While visiting his mother at her home, Kemper said 52-year-old Clarnell became angry with him when he interrupted her while she was reading a book. Frustrated by a lifetime of verbal abuse and a childhood of physical assaults, Kemper responded by bludgeoning his mother to death with a hammer and cutting off her head. As with his other victims, Kemper had sex with Clarnell's severed head, and he also cut out his mother's vocal cords and destroyed them by forcing them down the garbage disposal.

After killing his mother, Kemper invited Clarnell's closest friend, 59-year-old Sally Hallett, over for dinner, only to strangle her to death shortly after she entered the home. After murdering both women, Kemper fled his mother's house and drove until he hit Colorado.

On May 7, 1972, less than six months after he was released from Atascadero State Hospital for killing his grandparents, Kemper murdered Anita Mary Luchessa and Mary Ann Pesce, two 18-year-old college students he picked up as hitchhikers. He drove the teenagers to an isolated area, stabbed and strangled the girls to death, and took their corpses back to his home, where he engaged in a disturbing post-mortem ritual.

Months later, on September 14, 1972, Kemper offered to drive 15-year-old Aiko Koo to a dance class. However, instead of taking the teenager to her destination, he threatened Koo with a gun and drove her to a remote location. Incredibly, he accidentally locked himself out of the car, leaving the 15-year-old inside the vehicle with his keys, but Kemper was somehow able to convince the girl to open the door for him. Sadly, he choked Koo to death and took her lifeless body back to his house.

On January 7, 1973, Kemper killed a fourth female hitchhiker, 18-year-old Cynthia Ann Schall, after driving the college student to a secluded spot and shooting her to death. The following month, Kemper murdered Rosalind Heather Thorpe, 23, and Alice Helen Lie, 20, by shooting both of them with a .22 caliber pistol. After killing the young women, Kemper wrapped their dead bodies in blankets and drove through a security gate, telling the guard his passengers had passed out from drinking too much.

On August 27, 1964, 15-year-old Edmund Emil Kemper III killed his first victims when he murdered both of his paternal grandparents while staying with them at the elderly couple's ranch in North Fork, California. Kemper killed his grandmother Maude by shooting her in her back and head with a rifle and stabbing her repeatedly, and then he murdered his grandfather by shooting his namesake when he arrived home.

After ending the lives of both of his grandparents, Kemper phoned his mother to tell her what he'd done. When police arrived at the remote California farm, Kemper explained the murders by telling officers, "I just wondered how it would feel to shoot grandma."

Serving as the inspiration behind Fritz Lang's classic film M, Peter Kürten remains one of the most infamous serial killers in European history. Nicknamed the "Vampire of Düsseldorf," Kürten terrorized Germany between 1913 and 1929, claiming the lives of at least nine in a series of bloody knifings and hammer attacks.   

Kürten holds a prominent position among German serial killers, as he was a sadist without bounds whose sensational exploits instilled fear in an entire nation. Sometimes referred to as the "Düsseldorf Monster," Kürten was a child killer who also practiced necrophilia, cannibalism, and bestiality - a real-life bogeyman capable of unfathomable evil.

Peter Kürten was born in Köln-Mullheim, a suburb of Cologne, Germany, on May 26, 1883. He was the eldest of a staggering 13 children, and his parents struggled to provide for their massive brood, which was confined to a small, one-room apartment. 

Growing up in extreme poverty, Peter - and the rest of his family - also had to endure an abusive and alcoholic father. Coming home after an evening of drinking, the Kürtens' patriarch would often rape his wife in plain view of his children. His father also served three years in prison for committing crimes of incest on Peter's 13-year-old sister.

Traumatic childhoods are often a unifying trait among serial killers, and Peter Kürten's experience as a youth - particularly as a witness to extreme sexual violence - certainly puts him that group. 

It's typical for a serial killer to ramp up to the act of murder by committing a series of escalating crimes, and Peter Kürten certainly accumulated an impressive criminal resume on his road to killing. With convictions for arson, burglary, sexual assault, and even desertion during WWI, Kürten did almost 30 prison bids before his final arrest. He would later blame the conditions in the German penal system for fostering his sadistic tendencies, particularly his time spent in solitary confinement. It was in those isolated cells that Kürten began experiencing strong, murderous fantasies - visions that he enjoyed so much he committed further crimes while in prison just to be sent to solitary. 

Suffering from a chaotic and unstable life at home, at the age of nine, Kürten formed a strange and unhealthy bond with a neighbor. The man - who happened to be a dog-catcher - would introduce Kürten to the practice of bestiality, another dark turn on his path to mass murder.

As he grew into his late teens and early twenties, Kürten expanded his bestiality to farm animals, including cattle, goats, and sheep. It was during this experimentation that he discovered how much pleasure he derived from stabbing a creature to death during intercourse, a practice he would carry on as he graduated to violating humans. 

One does not acquire a nickname like "The Vampire of Düsseldorf" for committing run-of-the-mill homicides. Peter Kürten earned that charming title from the German press after a startling discovery was made at his various crime scenes. It seemed that Kürten suffered from a particularly unusual paraphilia - he received sexual pleasure from drinking the blood of victims. His usual modus operandi was to stab his victims, then put his mouth on their open wounds and drink directly from their bloodstream. 

Peter Kürten's reign of terror came to a merciful halt in 1930, when he was finally arrested. In an uncharacteristic act of kindness to his wife, he had colluded with her to turn himself in to authorities in hopes that she would recover the reward, leaving her with some financial security. Though he confessed to dozens of crimes, he was only convicted of nine murders. Through his vivid courtroom accounts, and later descriptions to psychiatrist Karl Berg, the his actual body count is thought to be around 68.

Before escalating to murdering his victims directly, Kürten set a series of fires. He told police he set the fires because he found them sexually stimulating, and also because he hoped they might burn sleeping homeless men alive, an idea he found sexually thrilling. He said, "When my desire for injuring people awoke, the love of setting fire to things awoke as well."

Later profilers would say that Kürten's desire to start fires - and later, to murder - were manifestations of his desire for control after his unstable and chaotic childhood.

As he began getting more press for heinous crimes, Peter Kürten reveled in his newfound celebrity. Feeding the rampant hysteria, Kürten reached out to a local newspaper on November 9, 1929, and provided a map to the body of his most recent victim. The map proved to be accurate, and led authorities to the body of five-year-old Gertrude Albermann, who had been stabbed to death placed under a pile of rubble. It's believed that she was killed two days before Kürten had sent his letter.

It's not uncommon for serial killers - especially necrophiles - to return to the scenes of their crimes. Famous murderers like Ted Bundy and Gary Ridgeway were both known to re-visit the corpses of their victims. Peter Kürten also engaged in this practice, most notably after he had murdered 10-year-old Christine Klein.

Kürten had killed the young girl in her home while her parents were working downstairs in the pub. When he returned to the scene the next day, he looked on in delight as horror had swept the community. Klein's uncle would later become a suspect in the murder and face trial, a proceeding which Kürten followed quite closely.

When Peter Kürten advanced to regularly committing murder, he did so with an unflinching brutality. His victims, more often than not, were young girls who were subjected to unthinkable horrors in their final moments. He often raped his victims while simultaneously stabbing them - sometimes upwards of 25 times - climaxing at the perceived moment of their death. 

His homicidal fantasies were strong and sadistic and gave him unique sexual pleasure. After his conviction, he recalled an instance to his psychologist where he had witnessed a man fall under a train. Feigning an effort to help the injured and dying man, he simply wanted to get close to the sight of blood, which caused him to reflexively climax on the spot.

Peter Kürten, by his own accounts, got an early start on his murderous career. After he was apprehended in 1930, he described to a court-appointed psychologist that at the age of just nine years old, he killed two of his classmates. In his version of the events, he pushed one boy into a nearby river, and when another jumped into help him, Kürten held the second boy under the water, resulting in the drowning death of both children. He never faced any consequences for this particular crime, which at the time was deemed to be a tragic accident.

From 1975 to 1980, Peter William Sutcliffe terrorized the people of Yorkshire, England, with his bizarre serial killing style – viciously attacking young woman and teenage girls with a hammer and a screwdriver. Sutcliffe murdered at least 13 women and girls and seriously injured several others, and the brutality of his killings and assaults reminded many Britons of one of the most famous English serial killers in history, Jack the Ripper. Because of the similarities between the crimes committed by Jack the Ripper and Peter Sutcliffe, the media dubbed the then-unidentified perpetrator of the crimes the "Yorkshire Ripper."

Witnesses provided descriptions that matched Sutcliffe; someone named him as a suspect to police; and he surfaced multiple times in the course of the investigation. However, a heartless hoax played by a member of the public, as well as errors made by law enforcement, meant the man known as the Yorkshire Ripper was able to get away with murder for five straight years. However, after he was apprehended, a jury was forced to decide whether Sutcliffe was a blood-thirsty killer who had murdered victims to satisfy his own depraved needs or a mentally ill man who was driven to kill by dangerous delusions.

In 1967, 21-year-old Peter Sutcliffe met 16-year-old Sonia Szurma at a Yorkshire pub, and they quickly became a couple. While Sutcliffe worked various jobs, including as a truck driver and a grave digger, Szurma, the daughter of Czech immigrants, studied to become a teacher. However, while attending school in London in the early 1970s, Szurma experienced delusions and behaved erratically, leading doctors to diagnose her with schizophrenia.

Szurma had difficulty coping with her mental health issues, and she repeatedly withdrew from school, overwhelmed by the pressures of her classes and the sometimes debilitating symptoms of her schizophrenia. However, Sutcliffe remained committed to his relationship with Szurma, and the couple married in 1974. While they both desperately wanted to have children, all of Szurma's pregnancies ended with miscarriages, preventing them from ever having a child together.

On January 2, 1981, 35-year-old Peter Sutcliffe was stopped by police while driving through the city of Sheffield with Olivia Reivers, a sex worker, because the officers thought he was behind the wheel of a stolen car. However, the officers quickly realized that Sutcliffe looked very similar to composite sketches provided by surviving victims of the Yorkshire Ripper, so they questioned him about his possible involvement in the killings. The officers became even more suspicious when they realized Sutcliffe had tried to dispose of a rope, a hammer, and a knife under the pretense of using the bathroom, so they brought him into the station for further questioning. 

Once at the station, law enforcement asked Sutcliffe to undress, and they discovered that, underneath his pants, he was wearing a v-neck sweater on his legs. Officials later determined this bizarre outfit enabled Sutcliffe to keep his penis exposed via the neck opening while keeping his legs covered, allowing him to rape women on the ground without risking injury to his knees which were protected by the sweater's elbow pads.

One of the contributing factors to Peter Sutcliffe's hatred towards women may have been his shock at discovering his beloved mother, Katherine, had been unfaithful to his father, John. When Sutcliffe's father learned his wife had been cheating on him, instead of confronting Katherine privately about her infidelity, he decided to humiliate and embarrass her in front of their children.

When John discovered his wife planned to meet her lover at a local hotel, Sutcliffe's father invited his children, including Peter and his girlfriend, to wait with him in the room Katherine and her loved had booked. When Katherine opened the door to the room, she was shocked to find her husband and family, not her lover, waiting for her. John called her a prostitute and forced Katherine to open up her purse, revealing the lingerie she had packed for the romantic evening.

The ordeal had a devastating effect on the family, including Peter Sutcliffe, who was horrified his mother, whom he had always held in high esteem, had been having an extra-marital affair.

Peter Sutcliffe was able to get away with killing women and girls for five years for a number of different reasons, including the actions of a deranged man who contacted police, claiming to be the person responsible for the murders. In March 1978, when Yorkshire officials and residents were desperate to find the man who had taken the lives of several local girls and women, a man sent the first of three letters purporting to be the sought-after serial killer.

From March 1978 to March 1979, the man, who was eventually dubbed "Wearside Jack," sent two written communications to the authorities and another to a newspaper, as well as an audio tape, convincing the police he was the person who had committed the killings. Using information gleaned from the letters and the tape, officers focused on tracking down a man with a Wearside accent, causing them to eliminate any suspects who didn't speak in the manner of people from Sunderland, a city in Northeast England.

During the course of his five-year crime spree, Peter Sutcliffe was questioned multiple times by police about his possible connection to the killings attributed to the Yorkshire Ripper. Sutcliffe regularly drove through the red-light district in Bradford, and police who were searching for the Yorkshire Ripper wrote down the license plate numbers of vehicles frequently seen in the area. Consequently, law enforcement officials interviewed Sutcliffe about his possible connection to the killings, but the questioning didn't yield enough information for them to classify him as a suspect, despite a number of details that should have raised their suspicions.

Police also interviewed Sutcliffe when a new £5 bill was found in the purse belonging to Jean Jordan, a murdered sex worker, and law enforcement officials eventually traced the note to money distributed by three local firms to their employees. Using this information, the authorities made a list of all the men who could have received this specific bill, questioning everyone, including Jordan's killer, Peter Sutcliffe. However, Sutcliffe's wife provided him with an alibi, claiming she and her husband were hosting a housewarming party on the night the young woman was murdered.

In November 1980, Trevor Birdsall sent an anonymous letter to the West Yorkshire Police, telling law enforcement that he suspected his close friend Peter Sutcliffe was the man responsible for the attacks and murders attributed to the Yorkshire Ripper. In the note, he told investigators about Sutcliffe's negative feelings towards sex workers, and he provided details about an attack that had occurred five years earlier. Birdsall also included Sutcliffe's name, occupation, and address, giving officers plenty of information to help them follow up on the anonymous tip.

Not content just to send the letter, Birdsall, at the urging of his girlfriend, went to Bradford Police headquarters and told an officer about the note he'd mailed and also provided additional details about Sutcliffe. While the constable wrote down the information Birdsall gave about his friend, no one ever followed up on the tips, allowing Sutcliffe to remain free.

Years after Peter Sutcliffe was apprehended and confessed to his crimes, he told his brother the reason he had attacked and murdered women and girls was because he was "cleaning up the streets." Many of the people Sutcliffe assaulted and killed had been involved in prostitution, and he felt as though he was doing some sort of public service by viciously beating and stabbing sex workers.

However, not all of the girls and women who were subjected to Sutcliffe's extreme violence were involved in prostitution, with some of the Yorkshire Ripper's victims being students, a shop worker, and a bank clerk. Because he didn't exclusively kill sex workers, it appears as though Sutcliffe attacked victims of opportunity, many of whom just happened to be involved in prostitution.

From 1975-1980, Peter William Sutcliffe, who was born in Yorkshire, England, on June 2, 1946, murdered 13 women and girls who ranged in age from 16 to 47. During this five-year period, Sutcliffe viciously attacked seven other victims who survived their violent assaults, leaving them with long-lasting psychological, mental, and physical scars.

Sutcliffe killed many of his victims by bludgeoning them with a hammer and then repeatedly stabbing them with a screwdriver, causing the press to dub him the "Yorkshire Ripper." In Leeds in 1976, Sutcliffe attacked Marcella Claxton, one of the few women who survived a violent encounter with the Yorkshire Ripper, giving her blows to the head that required the young woman to have emergency brain surgery.

Peter Sutcliffe's crimes had a devastating effect on everyone involved, especially the families and friends of the women and girls he had attacked and murdered. Sutcliffe's first known murder victim, 28-year-old Wilma McCann, was killed on October 29, 1975, leaving her four children without a mother.

One of McCann's children, Sonia Newslands, was particularly shattered by her mother's murder, leading to a debilitating alcohol addiction. Despite time spent in a rehabilitation center, Newslands was unable to cope with the destruction Sutcliffe had visited upon her and her family, causing McCann's oldest daughter to commit suicide in December 2007.

Shortly after he was arrested in 1981, Peter Sutcliffe confessed to being the Yorkshire Ripper, the killer responsible for ending the lives of 13 innocent women and girls. At his trial, Sutcliffe claimed he was guilty of manslaughter, not murder, because of diminished responsibility caused by mental health issues. He also pleaded guilty to seven counts of attempted murder, and, at the conclusion of his two-week trial, he was found guilty of all charges and given 20 life sentences for his crimes.

Despite Sutcliffe's confession and conviction, his wife Sonia remained loyal to him for several years, regularly visiting her husband in prison. In fact, she didn't divorce Sutcliffe until 1994, 13 years after he was incarcerated for his gruesome crimes and two decades after they married on August 10, 1974.

Dennis Nilsen is one of the more well-known serial killers to emerge from the UK in the late 1970s and early '80s. Dubbed the Muswell Hill Murderer by the British press, Nilsen amassed over a dozen kills, his victims often homeless young men and prostitutes - easy prey for a seemingly benevolent stranger. 

Nilsen's predilection for necrophilia - coupled with his habit of keeping corpses around for weeks on end - has drawn comparisons to Jeffrey Dahmer, one of America's more deranged murderers. While Nilsen did not quite share the Milwaukee cannibal's culinary palette, he certainly engaged in enough strange corpse play to put him in that same unique echelon of killers. He was also the inspiration for the movie Cold Light of Day.

The following list explores some of the most bizarre and gruesome facts about a man sometimes called "The Kindly Killer"; the deadly dossier of a charming English stranger who just happened to keep a heap of dead bodies back at his flat.

After successfully luring a man back to his flat, Nilsen would often feel overcome with a sense of abandonment when they attempted to leave - and this was usually a death sentence for his guests. Using household items like electrical cables or neckties, Nilsen would strangle his victims to death with whatever he had handy, ensuring they could never exit his company.

If his evening guests were incapacitated enough by drugs or alcohol, Nilsen would sometimes drown them. He did this by either drawing a bath and submerging his victims underwater, or by more simply placing their heads in a bucket full of water.

Curiously, Nilsen claims to have revived at least three men he asphyxiated, all of whom he then let go, ironically stating that he took great satisfaction in saving a life. In at least one instance, a young man went directly to authorities, who simply brushed off his claims and allowed Nilsen to continue his grim streak.

Say what you want about him being a brutal murderer, Dennis Nilsen was not the "love 'em and leave 'em" type. Though he indeed had a serious passion for necrophilia, it was not just the sexual gratification aspect he enjoyed about keeping a corpse in his bed - he also simply enjoyed the company. 

Not only did Dennis Nilsen sleep next to the dead bodies of his victims, he watched TV with them, ate dinner in their company, and even let loose and got drunk with them.

Bizarrely (for a serial killer anyway), the dead bodies of the men he killed also evoked a sense of remorse from Nilsen, who after his arrest remarked that when he looked at them he wished nothing more than for them to be alive again.

After the murder was over and the body was cleaned, Nilsen would carry his departed guest to his room, where he would take several photos of the body before engaging in depraved sexual activity. 

Treating his corpses as dolls - dressing them, talking to them, posing them - Nilsen had the ultimate submissive partner. As such, he had a hard time letting go of his dead friends, sometimes keeping them around for weeks. 

Dennis Nilsen's innate separation anxiety meant that he had a difficult time parting with the dead bodies he'd grown so fond of. Not wanting potential new victims to be put off by a rotting corpse sitting on his sofa, Nilsen would often hide dead bodies under his floor boards or beneath his kitchen sink. 

Being sent to storage, however, did not mean that Nilsen had tired of his fleshy prizes. In the case of one of his victims, a Canadian man named Kenneth Ockenden (whom Dennis would later describe as his "favorite"), his dead body was brought out from under the floorboards four times before finally being disposed of. You can imagine the romantic evenings they likely shared.

After completing the act of murder, Dennis Nilsen went to great lengths to tend to the appearance of his victims. He would immediately bathe and clean his newly possessed corpses, all the while speaking to them as though they were still alive. Once his dead victims were sufficiently spick and span, Nilsen would dress them in pajamas and haul them off to bed, where things would proceed to get really weird. 

As Dennis Nilsen was brazenly attempting to flush human flesh down the drain of his kitchen sink, the sewer system that accommodated his apartment building proved ill-equipped for such removal. In February 1983, one of his neighbors called a plumber to check on their backed-up system, and when the technician descended into a manhole below the building he made a startling discovery - a lot of stuff that looked human. 

Police were called in shortly thereafter, and when they went to Nilsen's flat to question him - where he had spent a long night attempting to clean his drains - they were overcome by a pervasive odor. After a bit of prodding, Nilsen confessed rather easily and he was apprehended. In his home, police also recovered several garbage bags of human remains that Nilsen had not yet gotten around to removing. 

By the time Dennis Nilsen had acquired six corpses, his modest apartment was becoming cramped for space - bodies were literally bursting out of the floorboards and cabinets. Beyond that, flies were hatching from the decomposing human flesh and becoming a real nuisance, and that's to say nothing about what must have been an unthinkable odor. Nilsen claims that at this point he was dousing his apartment with air freshener twice a day, but while that may have been good enough for him, his neighbors began to complain.

Pacifying nearby residents with explanations that the odor must be a structural defect, Nilsen began to devise ways to evict his pungent roommates.

Dennis Nilsen did a brief stint in the British army as a cook. It was during his time in the kitchen that he gleaned valuable skills as a butcher - skills he was able to employ when it became time to dispose of his decomposing collection of corpses. 

Using a simple butcher's knife, Nilsen severed hands, feet, heads, and limbs from his victims' bodies before placing them in black garbage bags. With his deceased guests in a more toteable state, he threw the bags on a large bonfire in his backyard, where he also included a large tire to mask the smell of the bodies.

This system worked well for Nilsen until he had to relocate to a smaller flat in 1982 - then he had to get a bit more creative.

Unable to burn the corpses of his victims, Nilsen had to further dismember their bodies, which now included boiling their heads to separate the flesh and brains from their skulls. Nilsen also began getting a little lazy with his disposal methods, and resorted to attempting to send large chunks of flesh down the drain - a practice that would ultimately lead to his downfall.

Dennis Nilsen was born in Fraserburgh, Scotland, in 1942. A child of an unhappy marriage, Nilsen spent a lot of time with his maternal grandfather and was traumatized by his sudden death; he would later claim that viewing his grandfather's corpse at his funeral was the root of his later obsession with the dead. After his mother married again and had several more children, Nilsen became isolated and distant, eventually leaving Scotland for a stint in the army.  

Settling into north London in 1975, it was a few short years later that he began his murderous spree. Between December of 1978 and February of 1983, Nilsen murdered and dismembered at least 15 young men. He committed these crimes over a six-year period at two different addresses, always just barely avoiding the suspicion of his neighbors.

Dennis Nilsen's M.O. was to prey on the vulnerable. He often went out and picked up young, destitute men, or even those who were more plainly homeless. He would ply his victims with offers of food, booze, or shelter - phantom promises that lured them into his house of horrors. 

In the case of 20-year-old Steven Sinclair - his final victim - Nilsen actually claims to have tried to help the young man with his drug addiction, in hopes that the two could have a prolonged sexual relationship. It was not meant to be, however, as Nilsen could not control his urges and killed him hours after bringing him home.

People often think of serial killers as modern savants, men and women who gleefully lead homicide detectives in a game of cat and mouse that ends with a dramatic climax and maybe even a skin suit. The reality is, there are serial killers who evaded the police for years while the detectives working on their case were either ignoring clues, disregarding hot tips, or just screwing around while the killers continued to go about their business.

These stories of serial killers who left obvious clues and the cops who ignored them in favor of going on a wild goose chase are extremely frustrating. The levels of police incompetence at display here will hopefully give you an appreciation for the detectives who actually do catch killers, but you’ll probably develop a deep-seated hatred for the police, too.

It won’t come as a surprise that the killers who weren't caught because of police incompetence tend to have higher body counts, although many of them were only convicted of murdering a handful of people because the evidence of their mass slayings had either decomposed, or it had become inadmissible due to the ineptitude of the police working the case. These stories offer up some of the most glaring tropes of shoddy police work; the wrong suspects being apprehended, police agencies refusing to work together, and quite possibly the most frustrating thing of all, police blatantly ignoring a victim’s pleas for help. Keep reading to lose all faith in humanity.

The story of Arthur Shawcross is one that sheds light on how a strained correctional justice system that doesn't take care to curb recidivism can lead to mentally unstable criminals acting out until they completely snap and become next-level bogeymen. Shawcross was a classic serial killer: he was a bed wetter, he set fires, and he was allegedly the victim of sexual assault by his mother. All of those things are the perfect combination of what you need to make a deranged serial murderer. In 1972, Shawcross raped and murdered two children; as part of a plea deal, the charges were dropped to manslaughter, and in 1987, he was released from prison despite psychiatrists assessing Shawcross as being a "schizoid psychopath." 

After prison, Shawcross didn't live anywhere for long. Whenever he moved into a community and they were informed of his past they would flip out, he would lose his job, and he and his wife would be forced to leave town. Because of this, the authorities made the worst decision they could have and sealed his records. Shawcross moved to Rochester, New York, in June 1987, and his parole officer failed to notify Rochester authorities of Shawcross's arrival. Less than a year later, Shawcross would begin a year and a half-long killing spree that would claim the lives of 12 women.

If the incredibly strange and horrifying case of Dean Corll, a Houston-area serial killer who was murdered by one of his teenage accomplices in 1973, sheds light on anything, it's the way in which law enforcement agents will go out of their way to avoid facts that are staring them in the face. Because Corll died before he could be apprehended, the only facts that are available come from Jack Olsen's spectacular biography of Corll's life, The Man with the Candy, and what Corll's teenage accomplices, Wayne Henley and David Brooks, have said about their time spent with the murderer.

Despite the inconsistencies that come with jailhouse tall tales and a tight-lipped good ol' boy sheriff's department, it's agreed upon by everyone involved that between 1970 and 1973, Corll molested and murdered at least 28 teenage boys, and that there were probably more victims, but no one knows for sure. 

So how did the Houston Sheriff's Department botch this job? In the early 70s, Houston was in a period of steep economic decline that effected every aspect of the city and its surrounding suburbs. There was a severe lack of homicide detectives in the area, and when teenage boys went missing they tended to chalk the young men up as runaways and call it a day. That method of detective work would come back to bite everyone in the ass when Wayne Henley and David Brooks led the police to a storage shed where Corll had buried the bodies of most of his known victims. If the police had followed up on just one of the reports from the families of one of the boys that Corll killed, they could have saved the lives of dozens of young men. 

The police have never been closer to arresting a serial killer without actually arresting him than they were when Gary Ridgway took a polygraph test in 1984 to prove that he hadn't murdered a series of prostitutes and runaways near Seattle and Tacoma, Washington, before posing their naked bodies by the Green River. Because polygraph technology was still in its infancy (it never really became very trustworthy) the whole thing was a waste of time for the police, and it made Ridgway aware that he was on their radar.

Ridgway began to work smarter and between 1982 and his arrest in 2001, Ridgway supposedly murdered so many woman that he forgot his kill count (he was convicted of 49 murders but is presumed to have more than 90), and when he was finally arrested, he admitted to planting fake evidence and generally just screwing around with the cops who were chasing him. Fun!

The detectives working on the Green River case suspected Ridgway for decades. The polygraph test was the first roadblock in their investigation; then in 1987, they took a DNA swab from the killer, but that didn't pay off for over a decade when the technology finally came along that would allow the police to match the saliva sample to semen that was found on multiple victims. This finally allowed the police to arrest Ridgway and bring some kind of closure to the families of the victims.

Out of all the serial killers who could have had their orgies of murder cut short, Jeffrey Dahmer proved to be the luckiest of them all. Not only had tenants in his apartment building been complaining to their landlord about the smell of "rotting meat" coming from Dahmer's apartment for over a year, but prior to his arrest, he had a run in with a cop who was more than happy to let Dahmer off the hook. 

After Dahmer's neighbors called the police about a naked boy covered in blood running from the killer cannibal's apartment, one of Milwaukee's finest came down and spoke with Dahmer and the 14 year-old boy, Konerak Sinthasomphone. Dahmer convinced the officer, Joseph T. Gabrish, that he and the boy were lovers and that they had simply had an argument. After the incident, Dahmer killed four more men - including Sinthasomphone - before he was finally apprehended on July 22, 1991. 

There are few serial killers who haunt the psyche of America as thoroughly as John Wayne Gacy. Not only did he have one of the creepiest alter egos known to history, Pogo the Clown, but for all intents and purposes, he seemed like a regular guy. It turns out that the white bread, upstanding member of the Democratic party that was known to Cook County, Illinois, was nothing more than a poorly crafted persona that hid the soul of an aberrant nightmare beast.

Gacy is most known for raping and murdering 33 boys before hiding them in the crawl space of his Illinois home between 1972 and 1978, but prior to that, he ran into some trouble in Iowa that should have been the key to keeping him off the street forever.  

In 1967, Gacy was living in Iowa, where he was molesting the sons of his fellow Jacees, including 15-year-old Donald Voorhees. When Voorhees reported the sexual assault to the police, Gacy paid another teen to assault Voorhees in a park to keep him from testifying in Gacy's case. Gacy was sentenced to a decade in prison, but got out on parole two years later before immediately running away to Illinois. In 1971, Gacy was charged for impersonating a police officer and sexually assaulting a teenage boy, the kid didn't show up to court so the charges were dismissed, and no one thought to contact the Iowa Board of Parole. Eight months later, Gacy's parole ended, giving him a clean record that allow himself to ensconce within the community and begin committing his most heinous crimes. 

Between 1984 and 1985, Richard "The Screen-Door Intruder" Ramirez broke into homes across Los Angeles, where he murdered 14 people, sexually assaulted 11 women, and terrified anyone who thought they were safe from the kind of gruesome violence that Ramirez inflicted on his victims. According to biographer Philip Carlo in the book The Night Stalker: The Life and Crimes of Richard Ramirez, the killer was almost caught by a police officer who pulled him over on suspicion of driving a stolen vehicle. 

Carlo's books recalls a run-in between Ramirez and one Officer Stavros where the officer asked Ramirez point blank, "Hey, you're not that guy killing people in their homes, are you?" Ramirez played it off, and when Officer Stavros went to back to his motorcycle for some reason, the killer "said a prayer to Satan, drew a pentagram on the hood of the car," and ran away. 

Anthony Sowell (or the Cleveland Strangler) was a sex offender who strangled women to death before lazily burying them in shallow graves in his backyard and basement - and there were even a few bodies that he allowed to decompose on the floor of his home. By the time he assaulted his final victim, his death count had reached 11 women who were murdered after he promised to smoke crack with them. On top of that staggering body count, Sowell also had three living rape victims who never reported the crime over fears of past drug arrests. 

Some of the atrocities Sowell committed could have been avoided had the police seriously considered a 2008 call where a woman claimed that Sowell had repeatedly raped her before she escaped to the bathroom, where she found a decapitated body wrapped in plastic sitting in the bath tub. Rather than respond immediately to this call, the police informed the woman that she would have to come to the station to make a statement. At Sowell's 2011 trial, the woman was allowed to testify and she said that after making the call she "felt less than human. I didn’t know who to turn to.”

On the other side of the pond, a little known murderer named Stephen Port (or the Grindr Killer) moved silently through the London gay scene, drugging his victims with GHB and a loose collection of party drugs before watching them die. His first murder occurred in June 2014 when he contacted a student who was moonlighting as an escort, drugged him at the Barking Station bus terminal, and then left the student for dead at Port's own apartment.

Port called an emergency services line to report the death, and was arrested for giving a variety of conflicting stories to the police before being released. Yet when he started killing again with the same exact M.O., leaving bodies in cemeteries, and walking around in public with a jug of GHB, the police were dumbfounded with how to proceed. 

After Port was finally arrested for murdering four young men, Scotland Yard realized that there were at least 58 other suspicious GHB-related deaths in London that shared multiple similarities with Port's style and launched an investigation into 17 of its officers who they say may have mishandled the case from the jump. 

The police investigation that surrounded the Claremont serial murders that occurred in Western Australia throughout the mid '90s has the air of a comedy of errors that would honestly be very funny if it didn't involve the murders of at least four young women and the possible sexual assault of a teenage girl in the same area prior to the murder.

The three confirmed victims of the Claremont Killer disappeared from the same wealthy shopping center in suburban Perth under the same circumstances. Newspaper editor Bret Christian, who has followed the case for a decade, believes that by ignoring the connection between the teenager's rape and the murders that they may have set their investigation back by years and endangered the lives of multiple Perth area women. 

In the 20 years that it took to bring in a suspect, Bradley Robert Edwards, how did the police investigate the appalling crimes? At one point detectives handed out questionnaires to persons of interest that read, "Are you the killer?" They took DNA tests of local cab drivers, and they asked other serial killers who had already been arrested if they had committed the crimes. Top-notch detective work all around. 

In 2016, Todd Kohlhepp, a real estate agent in South Carolina, was arrested after authorities traced the cell phone signal of a missing woman and her boyfriend to Kohlhepp's property. Police discovered the woman, Kala Brown, alive and chained inside a shark cage inside of a metal storage shed where she could be heard banging on the walls. A search of Brown's property revealed the graves of Brown's boyfriend and two more victims who had the unfortunate luck of coming into Kohlhepp's orbit.

Thirteen years prior to the murders of the people on his property, Kohlhepp shot and killed four people inside Superbike Motorsports, a motorcycle shop in Chesnee, South Carolina. Could he have been stopped earlier than he was? Yes. 

While living with his father at the age of 15, Todd Kohlhepp kidnapped a 14 year old girl using a .22-caliber revolver, tied her up in his home, taped her mouth shut, and raped her. Then he took her home and threatened to kill her family if she told anyone. The girl didn't even blink and had Kohlhepp arrested for kidnapping and sexual assault. At the end of his trial, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison and registered as a sex offender.

How was this man allowed to become a real estate agent? One woman who met with Kohlhepp alone at a listing in her area researched him after he began behaving erratically during their walk -through, discovered that he was a sex offender, and not only contacted the Greenville Board of Realtors, but she also reached out to the Spartanburg County Sheriff's Department, who said that Kohlhepp had "special approval" to work as a real estate agent.

But that's not the full story. When Kohlhepp applied for his real estate license in 2006, there were no background checks in place, and when asked if he had any past felonies he said yes and explained, "I entered into a verbal argument with my girlfriend who was also 15 at the time. I was charged with felony kidnapping due to the fact that I did have a firearm on me." Obviously that's a lie - and legitimately crazy that he believes that's a less damning version of the story - but it's distressing that the people in his real estate company were fine with making themselves complicit in a series of murders because they didn't want to follow up on his felony kidnapping charge.

There are crimes, and then there are crimes. In the case of Tim McLean, a young man stabbed, dismembered, and cannibalized while riding home on a Greyhound bus bound for Winnipeg, the details are beyond words. They would leave an indelible mark on witnesses and put the normally tame Canadian justice system to the test. This bus ride gone horribly wrong would not only cost the 22-year-old victim his life, but it exposed the frightening reality of mental illness run rampant.

When Vincent Li, a diagnosed schizophrenic, randomly boarded the bus that day, no one could have ever anticipated the depth of his depravity or the severity of the voices in his head. Later dubbed the Canadian Cannibal, Li committed one of the most shocking and unbelievable crimes of the decade that night, reminding anyone who heard the tale that humans are, indeed, the real monsters. What makes the case truly stunning, however, are not the grisly details but the fact that Vince Li is now a free man. 

It was around 6 pm on July 30, 2008 when Vince Li, a tall, well-built Asian man, boarded a Greyhound bus traveling from British Columbia to Winnipeg. Standing over six feet tall, he cut an imposing (if quiet) figure. Some passengers say he seemed agitated and possibly confused as he climbed aboard, but he did not seem to be a threat. He chose a seat near the front of the bus, spoke to no one, and eventually disembarked briefly to smoke a cigarette at a rest stop. When Li returned to the bus, he seemed dissatisfied with his original seat, choosing instead to sit next to Tim McLean towards the rear of the bus. 

When police boarded the bus, they were faced with an intensely gruesome scene. Not only had McLean's remains been hacked apart and decapitated, but there seemed to be some missing body parts as well. When they searched Li, they found the victim's nose and tongue in his pocket. Findings later revealed McLean's eyes and part of his heart were never recovered, supposedly eaten by his killer that night. 

The horror of the situation took its toll on everyone involved. Many of the passengers from that night suffered from reoccurring nightmares and feelings of severe anxiety. The Mountie who first boarded the bus the night of McLean's death never recovered from his shock. Although he had been exposed to many gruesome and frightening scenes over the years, he could not seem to shake those bloody images from his mind. Burdened and overwhelmed by his PTSD, he finally took his life six years after the murder. The trauma had simply become too much, and he could not longer do his job or handle the daily torment of his own private hell. 

As the passengers ran screaming from the bus, the driver and two other brave men carefully boarded the bus again to see if they could help the victim. Li chased them away with the knife, forcing them to exit the bus and lock the door from the outside. Li grabbed McLean's severed head and brandished it for the stunned passengers, dropping it near the door and then retreating to eat some flesh from the mutilated body. 

Born on October 3, 1985, McLean was an active athlete and a beloved son, father, brother, and uncle. He had a large extended family. He was known as an adventurous person who loved traveling and meeting new people. He took up employment as a carnival employee in 2008 and was returning home on Greyhound bus 1170 through Saskatchewan. He had boarded the bus earlier in the day, around noon, and sat in the rear, one row ahead of the restroom.  

When Li moved to the seat next to him, he thought nothing of it. He barely acknowledged him and proceeded to fall asleep, his head against the window and headphones in. He was awoken just five minutes later as Li began to stab him in the neck. 

Vince Li was 44 years old at the time of the crime, having immigrated to Winnipeg, Canada from China in 2001. Although he studied computer science in China, he was unable to find steady work in Canada, moving from jobs at McDonalds to Meatland Food to Walmart, where he was eventually fired over a disagreement with a coworker. All the while, he harbored deeply disturbing thoughts about aliens and how he had been chosen by God to vanquish them.

It was only later he understood this voice to be a symptom of schizophrenia, and not the work of a divine power. Li traveled around trying to find the aliens he was supposed to destroy, and he felt he finally came to the end of his search when he saw McLean that day. McLean was the alien he was destined to kill. According the voices in his head, he was doing everyone a service by killing the sleeping man, even though he knows now it was completely wrong. 

There were dozens of witnesses that day when Li changed his seat and positioned himself next the sleeping McLean. Just moments after the bus began moving, Li calmly pulled out a massive hunting knife and began stabbing it repeatedly into McLean's neck. The young man instantly snapped to attention and began screaming in pain and horror — a scream that haunts many of the other passengers to this day. Although he fought desperately for a few moments, he was no match for the crazed killer.

As Li stabbed McLean over and over, he was calm and methodical, never changing his expression or showing emotion. Onlookers were shocked by his lack of rage and the way he committed the killing almost robotically, stabbing him close to 60 times according to one witness. As the screams of horror filled the bus and the driver pulled urgently to the side of the road, Li began to cut off McLean's head and dismember his body.

For those who witnessed the horrific killing of Tim McLean, there can be no peace. Some tried to drink the memories away, while others have sought therapy and even moved to new locations. For many, their lives have been destroyed by the PTSD they experienced after the killing, and some are paralyzed by large crowds or loud sounds.

The thing most of the passengers seem to recall with perfect clarity is the sound of McLean's scream as he woke to the terror of what was happening. They just can't seem to rid themselves of the sound. For others, they can only feel numbness. 

Vince Li was not a well man. Before he boarded the bus that fateful evening, he was already showing signs of someone on the brink of a mental episode. He was observed sitting at the bus stop, long before his ride was scheduled to arrive. Emotionless and quiet, he posted a sign reading "Laptop For Sale $600 O.B.O." in front of his luggage and sat. And sat. In fact, he sat there through the entire night, bolt upright with his eyes open.

The next morning, just hours before he would board the bus with Tim McLean, he sold his laptop to a 15-year-old boy for $60. Once Li's gruesome crime was uncovered, however, the computer was quickly confiscated. 

Although Li was obviously responsible for his actions that evening, Canadian law has surprisingly lax requirements for those with mental illness. Li refused to hire a lawyer. However, those who represented him stated he could not be accountable for what he did due to his untreated schizophrenia — and the judge agreed. As a result, Li was committed to a high-security psychiatric ward for one year so he could be evaluated and treated according to his condition. 

McLean's parents, on the other hand, were looking for answers, none of which they found that day. Their lives were shattered by their son's untimely death, and it seemed no one could be held responsible for their pain. 

The report soon came into the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that there had been a stabbing on a Greyhound bus west of the city, but authorities were not remotely prepared for what they would find. They arrived to find Li still on the bus, and a group of men guarding the the door with a crowbar and hammers. Cleverly, the driver engaged the emergency immobilizer system so the killer could not attempt to drive the bus away.

By 9 pm, the police were in a standoff with Li and as he paced the length of the bus, trapped inside, until special negotiators and heavily armed tactical units arrived on the scene. When he tried to escape through a back window of the bus, he was Tasered twice and handcuffed. 

More often that not, children do as they are instructed to by adults - and usually its for the greater good. But when an adult uses a child for insidious deeds like murder - it's even more evil and horrible than the act itself.

In the eyes of a child, what their parent or other influential adult figure in their life says, goes. This is, in some ways, a great power adults wield over children. Viewing kids as an easily manipulated target, it is certainly not unheard for adults to will children to do their bidding, but what if that's taken to the most evil extreme? Some of these stories sound like kids who belong in horror movies. This list explores the adults who've used children to do the unthinkable, driving them to commit murder at their behest. Let's take a look at some kids turned killers who were influenced by truly psychopathic adults.

Charles Starkweather was 19 when he began his murderous rampage that spanned from Nebraska to Wyoming. While the killer was only active for 60 days, he managed to kill 10 people. Along side him was 14-year-old Caril Fugate, who he met through one of his sisters. 

Their murderous spree began in January 1958, when Starkweather killed Fugate's mother, step-father, and two-year-old half sister. They hid the bodies before police arrived. They then went onto kill other people they knew - including a family friend and his dog - as well as complete strangers who offered to give them rides. 

They were finally caught after they tried carjacking a man near Douglas, WY, and a sheriff's deputy happened upon them. Starkweather was executed and Fugate received a life sentence, though she was released in 1976. She was killed in a car crash in 2013. 

Dean Corll abducted, raped, tortured, and murdered 28 boys in Houston, TX, between 1970 and 1973. When his crimes came to light, it was one of the most shocking and sensational cases of mass murder in American history, making Corll a prolific serial killer. Corll amassed a staggering body count by luring teenage boys back to his home with the promise of booze, drugs, and a good time, before taking a murderous turn on his young guests. And he didn't act alone.

Corll was aided by David Brooks and Elmer Wayne Henley, Jr. - both just 15-years-old when the murders began - who he kept on a sort of payroll to bring him fresh kills. The boys were paid per victim they could bring to Corll's home, at which point the three of them would carry out unspeakable acts on their unsuspecting prey.

The young victims were frequently fastened to what Corll called his "torture" board, where they were repeatedly raped, burned, and tortured by means of having glass tubes shoved in their urethras and the snapped, causing excruciating pain.

Corll's reign of terror finally came to an end in 1973, when Henley put a bullet in the back of his head. Henley was angry Corll tried to assault his friend while they were passed out. Both Henley and Brooks were apprehended and sentenced to life in prison for their crimes.

Fred West was a convicted serial murderer who terrorized England in the '60s and '70s. West claimed the lives of a suspected 13 victims, two of whom were members of his own family - his unborn child carried by his teenaged mistress Anne McFall, his estranged wife Rena, as well as his own daughter Heather. But West practiced his murderous pastime within his family in more ways than one, grooming his second wife, Rose West, to kill right beside him. 

Rose West was just 15-years-old when she met Fred. He immediately began manipulating her to aid him in the rape, torture, and strangulation of young girls in the Gloucester area. A victim of a traumatic childhood herself, Rose was easy prey for Fred's homicidal desires, and soon she developed a taste for killing herself.

In a blind rage, Rose murdered Fred's daughter 8-year-old Charmaine West while he was doing prison time for theft. The act, heinous and unthinkable as it was, only served to bring the two closer together. Upon Fred's release, he disposed of his young daughter's body and he and he and his wife went on to kill together for several more years.

In October of 2002, residents of the Washington D.C., area were under attack. Ten people were killed and three were critically injured at the hands of what the media dubbed "The Beltway Sniper." The random shootings occurred while people did incredibly mundane things - mowed their lawns, pumped gas, or made trips to the grocery store - and there was no clear motive in place.

A car had been spotted near the scene of some of the crimes - a dark blue 1990 Chevy Caprice with New Jersey plates - and soon a massive manhunt was underway. On October 23rd, John Allen Muhammed and Lee Boyd Malvo were apprehended by Maryland authorities, who found in their vehicle a rifle, walkie talkies, maps, and other items used during their crime spree.

Lee Boyd Malvo was just 17-years-old at the time of his arrest. He was raised by a single mother in Kingston, Jamaica, and had a rather unstable childhood. Malvo met the much older John Allen Muhammed in Antigua around 1998, and he immediately became something of a father figure to him.

In 2001, the two men immigrated to the U.S. and formed a strange bond. Muhammed - an ex-member of the US military - began training Malvo to shoot, as well as indoctrinating him with murderous fantasies. Malvo, desperate for a father figure, was likely taken in by his new male role model, and willingly assisted John Allen Muhammed as the two took off on their tour of terror in 2002.

Lee Boyd Malvo was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment without parole in December of 2003.

Stories of people killing their husband or wife in order to collect a large life insurance settlement seem to grace the newspaper pages with a regular frequency. While this act is certainly evil enough, it reaches another level of depravity when a parent manipulates their own child to carry out the murder, which is exactly what one California man did in 1985.

Cinnamon Brown, age 14, was arrested in Garden Grove, CA, in March of 1985. Authorities discovered her in her home after an unsuccessful suicide attempt. In a neighboring room was Cinnamon's step-mother, 23-year-old Linda Marie Bailey Brown, dead with two bullets in her chest. Cinnamon was clutching a note that read “Dear God, please forgive me. I didn’t mean to hurt her.”

In what appeared to be a straight-forward case - tensions between daughter and stepmother gone horribly wrong - Cinnamon was tried and convicted of murder, receiving a 27 years to life sentence. While Cinnamon went about her life in prison as a model inmate - a person her fellow prisoners could not imagine committing a cold-blooded murder - her father, David Brown lived a happily lavish life, with ritzy homes and luxury cars, all of which were funded by an $835,000 life insurance settlement from his young wife's death. Even more troubling, Brown began a relationship with his dead wife's 17-year-old sister, who was also privy to the murder plot.

As it would later turn out, Brown had psychologically blackmail his young daughter to carry out the murder of his wife. He had assured Cinnamon she would receive a light sentence - therapy and no jail time - and they'd live happily ever after. Once Cinnamon caught wind of her father's posh lifestyle, she agreed to wear a wire, which led to David Brown's arrest. Cinnamon was freed in 1992, went on to marry, and live a relatively normal life.

When 23-year-old Jeremy Steinke started dating 12-year-old Jasmine Richardson, the girls parents were obviously not thrilled. They tried to punish Richardson, telling her to stay away from Steinke who was more than 10 years her senior. But that didn't stop the two lovers. 

Steinke allegedly asked Richardson to marry her, and when she agreed, he told her he was a 300-year-old werewolf who loved the tasted of blood. It's speculated the two met on an Internet forum for vampire lovers. They killed her dad Marc, her mom Debra, and her eight-year-old brother Jacob in their house in Alberta, Canada. It was all part of a plot imagined by Steinke, who wanted to the two to run away together, though some say it was Richardson her wanted to kill her family. 

She was released from prison in 2016, while Steinke is serving out a life sentence. 

In July 2007, the Petit family's idyllic life in Cheshire, Connecticut, became a living nightmare when two convicted criminals, Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky, broke into their house with the intention of robbing the upscale home of a respected doctor, William; his wife, Jennifer (a former nurse who had recently been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis); and their two daughters, Michaela and Hayley. However, the burglary quickly transformed into a terrifying home invasion that included multiple acts of sexual assault and ended with a frightening crescendo of arson and murder.

After the perpetrators were captured by law enforcement, many people in the wealthy town were left asking how such a brutal crime could have occurred in their quiet community, as well as what, if anything, could have been done to prevent one woman and two girls from losing their lives on that fateful summer day. The Cheshire, Connecticut, home invasion murders, as they came to be called, are a terrifying example of a "simple" robbery spinning out of control.

After they tied up Dr. Petit in the basement, Hayes and Komisarjevksy went upstairs where they discovered 11-year-old Michaela and her mother asleep next to one another in bed, while 17-year-old Hayley was asleep in her own bedroom. The pair tied up the woman and her two daughters and placed pillowcases over their heads. Then the two men searched the home at 300 Sorghum Mill Drive for valuable items they could steal.

Disappointed by the family's belongings, Hayes took Mrs. Petit to the bank to withdraw some money, leaving his 26-year-old accomplice in the house with the two girls. While Hayes was at Bank of America with Jennifer, 26-year-old Komisarjevksy performed oral sex on 11-year-old Michaela and made the girl pose in a variety of sexually explicit positions while he masturbated in front of her.

At approximately 3 AM on July 23, 2007, Joshua Komisarjevsky, 26, and Steven Hayes, 44, broke into the Cheshire, Connecticut, home of the Petit family, which included parents Jennifer, 48, and William, 50, and their two daughters, Hayley, 17, and Michaela, 11. The pair discovered William, a successful endocrinologist, asleep on a sofa on the porch, causing Komisarjevsky to hit the father of the family in the head with a baseball bat.

After striking Petit in the head, Hayes and Komisarjevsky tied the doctor up and took him down to the basement, where they secured him to a pipe. With Dr. Petit restrained and out of their way, the two men went upstairs to continue their horrifying reign of terror that lasted approximately seven hours and left three people dead and much of the house destroyed by fire.

After committing murder and multiple acts of rape and robbery, Komisarjevsky and Hayes decided to get rid of any evidence of their crimes by setting the house on fire. Before Hayes took Mrs. Petit to the bank to withdraw money, he'd actually left the house hours earlier to go to a nearby gas station, where he purchased two containers and filled them with several gallons of gasoline.

Together, Komisarjevsky and Hayes poured gas all over the house, making sure to douse Mrs. Petit's dead body with accelerant. The pair also poured gas all over Michaela and Hayley, who were both still alive and tied to their beds with pillowcases covering their heads. With the house and their victims soaked with accelerant, one of the men lit a match and set the home ablaze. However, both Komisarjevsky and Hayes have denied being the person responsible for setting the fire, with each man saying the other one struck the match that started the blaze.

Prior to breaking into the Petit home, Hayes and Komisarjevsky had burglarized at least two other houses in Cheshire, stealing money and credit cards. They decided to target the Petit family after Komisarjevsky spotted 11-year-old Michaela and her mother buying groceries at Stop & Shop and followed them back to their house.

According to Komisarjevsky, he thought the family had "a very nice house and very nice car and thought it would be nice to be there someday."

That evening, Komisarjevsky met up with Hayes and the two men made the fateful decision to rob the Petit family's home.

After Dr. Petit managed to escape his burning home, he tried to get help for his wife and two daughters, unaware that the police had already been notified of an incident at his home approximately one hour earlier. Apparently, when Hayes forced his wife to withdraw $15,000 from their bank, Jennifer told one of the tellers about the situation, even letting the employee know her children were tied up at her house. After Mrs. Petit left Bank of America with Hayes - who had been waiting in the car - a bank employee called 911 to inform the authorities about the disturbing situation.

Shortly after the call was made, officers were dispatched to the Petit home, but they were instructed by their superiors not to enter the house. They were also told not to attempt to speak with Hayes when he arrived back at the house and drove into the garage, nor were they allowed to try to contact someone inside the residence via phone.

Instead, law enforcement officials were told to set up a perimeter and monitor the situation, leaving officers just outside the home while Hayes raped and murdered Mrs. Petit and the men set the house on fire.

After the two men were arrested as they tried to flee, they were charged with multiple counts, including sexual assault, murder, kidnapping, and arson. In October 2010, Hayes was convicted of 16 counts, and the following month he was given the death penalty. In October 2011, Komisarjevsky was convicted of 17 counts, and in December 2017 he - like his accomplice - was sentenced to death for his crimes.

During both of their trials, members of the jury were exposed to horrifying evidence, including autopsy photos of the victims' bodies and images Komisarjevsky had taken of 11-year-old Michaela as he sexually assaulted her. As a result of these pictures - as well as disturbing witness testimony - many members of the jury experienced severe psychological and emotional trauma, so the state of Connecticut offered to provided free counseling the jurors.

After Komisarjevsky and Hayes started the blaze, they hopped into the Petit family's SUV and tried to leave the scene of their shocking crimes. However, the pair only managed to drive one block before they crashed the vehicle and were apprehended by law enforcement.

Investigators soon discovered both men had extensive criminal histories, and they'd actually met one another the previous year while they were both living at a halfway house in Hartford, CT. Shortly after meeting, Hayes and Komisarjevsky decided to become partners in crime, committing burglaries together in order to steal cash and credit cards from wealthy families.

Shortly after Komisarjevksy and Hayes set the house on fire and fled the scene, Dr. Petit - who had been tied up in the basement - managed to free himself from his restraints and escape from the burning home. Petit ran to a neighbor's house - with his ankles still bound together - to get help for himself and his family, not realizing his wife had already been strangled to death by one of the men.

When his neighbor discovered William at his door around 10 AM, he didn't recognize the doctor because he'd been beaten so severely with a baseball bat. Tragically, Dr. Petit was unable to save the lives of his wife and daughters, making him the only survivor of the sickening home invasion.

Before Komisarjevsky and Hayes set the house on fire, they shut the doors to Michaela and Hayley's bedrooms, leaving the two girls tied to their beds with pillowcases on their heads. According to Komisarjevsky, before one of them put a match to the gasoline they'd poured all over the house, he said to his accomplice, "You can't seriously be contemplating burning these two girls alive."

After they started the fire, the two men fled the house, and 17-year-old Hayley actually managed to escape from her room, but she was overcome by the heavy smoke that filled the Sorghum Mill Road home. Hayley's body was found at the top of the stairs, while Michaela's corpse was discovered still bound to her bed. A medical examiner later determined both girls had died of smoke inhalation.

When Hayes returned from Bank of America with Jennifer - having forced Mrs. Petit to withdraw $15,000 from her account - he learned that his accomplice had sexually assaulted 11-year-old Michaela. According to Hayes, Komisarjevsky encouraged him to assault Mrs. Petit in order to "square things up" between the two of them, so he raped Jennifer on the floor of the family's living room.

However, as the 44-year-old was assaulting Mrs. Petit, his 26-year-old accomplice came into the room to tell him Dr. Petit had escaped from the basement, causing Hayes to strangle Jennifer to death. After Hayes murdered Mrs. Petit, the two men decided there was only one way for them to destroy evidence of their horrible crimes.

Some killers went so far as to kill themselves, too. Several notable killer suicides have shocked the world. Many of these murderers who killed themselves did so after being captured for their crimes, while others committed suicide to evade arrest.

Who are some famous killers who committed suicide? On Dec. 14, 2012, Adam Lanza shot and killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook School in Newtown, CT. He then killed himself, before police could apprehend him on the scene. Columbine shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold also committed suicide following their murder spree in 1999.

Over a few months in 1997, Andrew Cunanan killed at least five people, including fashion designer Gianni Versace. A little over a week after he killed Versace, Cunanan used the same gun to shoot himself in the head. His body was found in a houseboat in Miami.

Are you surprised that so many killers have committed suicide? Take a look at this list and share your thoughts in the comments section.

Over a few months in 1997, Andrew Cunanan killed at least five people, including fashion designer Gianni Versace. He used several different methods in his murder spree, beating his victims with hammers, stabbing them with screwdrivers, and shooting them.

A little over a week after he killed Versace, Cunanan used the same gun to shoot himself in the head. He was found in a houseboat in Miami.

In 1927, Andrew Kehoe went on a killing spree in Bath, MI, that resulted in the deaths of 44 people. Victims included his wife and 37 children. His weapons of choice were largely bombs, which he detonated at locations like the Bath Consolidated School. The final blast - which killed Kehoe - was intended to target the school's superintendent.

On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 13 people and injured 24 others during a shooting spree at Columbine High School in Colorado. They opened fire on police, who were positioned outside the building, before turning their guns on themselves.

Their motive was to seek revenge on people who they believed had picked on them, while also destroying the school.

Oscar-winning actor Gig Young is believed to have shot his wife before killing himself in 1978. A motive for his actions was never revealed, but he had struggled with alcoholism.

Author and criminal Jack Henry Abbott first landed in prison for bank robbery. Abbott was released on parole in 1981, but wound up back behind bars a few weeks later after he fatally stabbed a man. In 2002, he hung himself with a shoelace and a bed sheet. He left a suicide note that was never made public.

On March 21, 2005, Jeff Weise went on a shooting spree that resulted in the deaths of nine people. He killed two people in his home before heading to Red Lake High School in Minnesota, where he wounded and killed several more bystanders. Weise engaged in a shootout with police before taking his own life with a shotgun.

Prior to the massacre, Weise had attempted suicide on two occasions.

On Feb. 22, 1974, Samuel Byck killed two people as he tried to hijack a plane to assassinate President Richard Nixon. The aircraft never left the ground, and Byck took his own life before police could capture him.

His plans were revealed by a reporter, who had received a tape recording of Byck explaining his intention to crash a plane into the White House to kill Nixon.

On Dec. 14, 2012, Adam Lanza shot and killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook School in Newtown, CT. He killed himself before police could apprehend him on the scene.

Earlier that same day, Lanza shot and killed his mother, Nancy Lanza, in their home.

In 2013, Ariel Castro was sentenced to life in prison for rape, kidnapping, and aggravated murder. He had kidnapped several women and held them for several years. Castro was found hanging in his cell after serving only one month of his sentence.

Elliot Rodger went on a shooting spree near the University of California, Santa Barbara, on May 23, 2014. He killed six people and injured 14 more. He also stabbed three men to death prior to the attack.

Rodger said on YouTube that his killings were motivated by his wish to punish women who had rejected him, and men who were successful at dating women. Rodger shot himself in his car before police could apprehend him.

When most people think of college and university campuses, a variety of images come to mind: peaceful, ivy covered walls, gorgeous architecture and landscaping, students walking and chatting between classes, hours of deep thought spent in silent libraries, and raucous parties. For some reason, there is a feeling of innocence and security. After all, college is a bubble and not like the real world.

And yet, the trusted exteriors obscure a darker character. Crimes committed by sorority girls have been exposed, along with dorm room murders at universities across the globe. Brutal hazing practices by fraternities are disquieting and the number of sexual assaults is alarming. Yet many of these crimes are not reported on the news. 

When murders on college campuses do make headlines, the public gasps in horror and colleges everywhere again turn to focus on how to make their students and campuses safer for everyone. Despite preconceived and old-fashioned notions of campus life, there are indeed college killers. Read on to discover terrifying tales that will shake you out of naïveté for the next time you visit a university. 

Gallaudet University is considered of the best colleges for hearing impaired students and has high academic standards. So, when two students were murdered in a span of six months, the entire community was stunned. Back in September 2000, student Eric Plunkett (19) was beginning his second year of college before he was stabbed to death in his dorm room. Just a few months later, in February 2001, Benjamin Varner (19) was found dead in his dorm room, under similar circumstances. 

The Gallaudet community was completely heartbroken and shocked to discover that the murderer was one of their own. Police investigations revealed that Gallaudet student, Joseph Mesa, Jr., had committed the heinous crimes. In fact, once discovered, he freely confessed to robbing and murdering his fellow students.

Mesa was born and raised in Guam, a US territory in the South Pacific. He'd had some mental issues earlier in this life, so his lawyers tried to argue that Mesa was insane and should not be convicted of murder. Mesa's jurors were unimpressed with the excuses offered and found him guilty as charged. He received a sentence of six life sentences with no possibility of parole. 

Haruka Weiser (18) was a student at the University of Texas at Austin. She was a dedicated theatre major, as well as a trained ballerina, and had stayed late at the campus drama building one evening in April 2016. She never made it back to her dorm and was reported missing. Three long days later, her body was found floating in a creek right on the university campus.

Police later reported that Weiser had been sexually assaulted, strangled to death, and then thrown into the creek. The entire community was shocked and desperate to find who had done such a thing to the young student. In a matter of days, a homeless teenager named Meechail Criner was arrested and charged with Weiser's murder.

But how did investigators know who to look for? The campus security cameras caught Crimer riding a bicycle on campus, including the moment he decided to follow Weiser. Additionally, a local citizen came forward and told police they had seen Crimer setting a fire on campus. He appeared to be burning a bag, which investigators concluded contained Weiser's backpack. 

Eve Carson might best be described as a "Super Student." Friendly, beautiful, and brilliant, she was a pre-med student on a full merit scholarship who served as the student body president at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, until the wee hours of March 5, 2008. 

Strangers entered her home just off campus, where they threatened and kidnapped her. They stopped at a bank ATM and took $1000 from Carson's account. Just before dawn, the kidnappers released Carson near campus before shooting her repeatedly in the street. Police discovered her body around 5 am that morning, noting that she had suffered gunshot wounds, including a devastating one to her head. According to police, Carson's kidnapping and murder were totally random.

Thanks to the ATM security video, the two suspects, Demario James Atwater and Laurence Alvin Lovette Jr., were charged with her murder. They were also charged with felonious larceny, kidnapping, weapons charges, and armed robbery. Both men pleaded guilty to most of the charges, but both worked out a plea agreement that would save them from the death penalty. Both men were found guilty and are serving life sentences in high security prisons.

Hull University student, Rebecca Love, claimed to be happier than she'd ever been in her life. And then, her former boyfriend smothered her to death with his "love," but not before torturing her first. Jason Webster, also a student at Hull University, was upset and jealous over the breakup, so he stabbed Love dozens of times in the neck with a ball-point pen.

Detectives later described one of his stab wounds as particularly ferocious, jamming the pen down her throat. In total, the stabbing resulted in 93 injuries to Love's body. Even after such prolonged and painful torture, Webster finished her off by strangling her to death. Once he was sure she was dead, he stripped her body, washed the clothes with fabric conditioner, and forged a note that suggested her new boyfriend had killed Love.

Webster was sentenced to 21 years in prison, but not before Judge Michael Mettyear made the following statement to Webster before the court: "[Love] said before her death she was enjoying herself and it was one of the happiest times of her life. At the time she was feeling lonely and she turned to you. In the end that turned out to be a tragic mistake that caused her death." 

It's understandable that a parent would rush to defend their child from a bully, but this is the story of a woman whose motherly devotion transformed to murder. Unbeknownst to officials at Indiana University-Purdue University, Fort Wayne, the mother of a resident student was living in her daughter's campus apartment, which was not permitted. The mom, Tina Morris, had been living there for around two weeks when she stabbed her daughter's roommate, Liette Martinez (22), to death. Morris said she killed Martinez because she was rude to her daughter. 

The murder occurred on April 18, but by August 20, Morris was ready to plead guilty of murder. Other charges, including felony murder, robbery, and auto theft were dropped as part of Harris' plea bargain. Both the Harris and Martinez families embraced and cried together when the guilty verdict was announced. 

Perhaps the most infamous of campus murders, this story is a tale of horror, rape, blood, murder, and Ted Bundy, the famous and prolific serial murderer. The horror began on the evening of January 15, 1978, at the Omega Chi Sorority house on the Florida State University campus. The Omega Chi sisters were mostly settled in for the evening, though earlier some had gone out and were now returning home. One of the young women had just said good night to her date, and as she entered the back door she could see a man preparing to leave out the front door of the house. This was strange, as men were not allowed past curfew and it was nearly 3 am, so she found the sorority president to discuss the strange event. 

As they stood in the corridor, Karen Chandler came stumbling out into the hall with a broken jaw and arm. Through Karen’s open room door, they could see Karen’s roommate, Kathy Kleiner, sitting on her bed cross-legged with blood running down her chin. The young women in the corridor were suddenly frightened and ran to each of the rooms, flinging open the doors and discovering more horrors. Margaret Bowman lay dead in her room, choked to death with nylon pantyhose, her skull crushed by Bundy’s club. Lisa Levy was mortally wounded, also bludgeoned in the same manner with one of her nipples nearly bitten off.

Thirty days passed before Bundy was arrested. During that time, the Chi Omega sisters lived in fear of further attacks and male friends of the sorority slept outside the bedrooms at Chi Omega house. During the month Bundy was still on the run, he managed to murder another victim, a 12-year-old girl. By the time he was caught, he was suspected of more than 36 murders. Over ten years after Bundy was tried and convicted, he was put to death for his horrendous crimes. 

New Jersey Institute of Technology student, Joe Micalizzi, was inside his Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity house during the wee hours of an early May morning in 2016. Micalizzi, who was 23 and described by all who knew him as "a really nice guy," may have still been awake when burglars entered the house through the rear entrance around 3 am. There was a struggle, and the burglars fired several shots, hitting Micalizzi twice. One bullet struck his hand, and the other, his head.

Police later confirmed that Micalizzi's body bore defensive wounds. Several of his friends and a professor stated they were not surprised the young man fought back. Police immediately began to look for suspects, and a few days later, arrested local men Nafee Cotman and Taquan Harris. Cotman (19)  and Harris (22) were indicted in October of 2016 and charged with murder, felony murder, robbery, burglary, and weapons offenses. 

Yeardley Love and George Huguely were campus sweethearts on the bucolic University of Virginia campus in Charlottesville. Both were star lacrosse players with equally stellar futures awaiting them. They dated for two years, but Love was worried about her boyfriend's propensity for violence. She had reached the point where she decided to break up with Huguely, but she knew he would take it hard and the fact that the two still lived literally next door to each other in off-campus housing must have been a concern.

A little after 2:00 am on May 3, 2010, police received a call to check on a disturbance at an apartment in the University Corner area of town. Upon arrival, they found Love, who was unresponsive and pronounced dead at the scene. Detectives went next door to question Huguely, who waived his Miranda Rights and immediately began a stunningly grisly account of how he was let into Love's apartment, where he kicked in her locked bedroom door. He then claimed that he grabbed Love and shook her, over and over again, her head repeatedly banging on the wall behind her.

Upon this unexpected and detailed confession, Huguely was charged with Love's murder and held in the local jail. Huguely's trial by jury began on February 6, 2012, and he was ultimately convicted of second degree murder and grand larceny. Judge Edward  Hogshire ordered Huguely to 23 years in prison. Huguely has attempted to appeal his conviction, but in November 2014, the Virginia State Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal.

Nick Armstrong was a freshman at Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos. His bid to join the Kappa Epsilon fraternity was accepted and Armstrong eagerly attended the bid-night party. It was a party like any other - lots of alcohol, music, laughter, and pranks. At some point, Nick landed on a sofa, and fell asleep.

Around 3 am, frat member Clint Hart entered the nearly empty house and was somewhat startled to see two young men searching Armstrong for his wallet. Eventually they left, along with Hart, but Hart remained suspicious and turned back to see the taller of the two men run into the KE house again. Hart reentered the frat house to find Armstrong with his head was now split in two, blood was flowing and pooling around his head and body. Hart was able to get Armstrong to a hospital, but he never regained consciousness and died the following day.

Within a day of Armstrong's death and with the help of Hart, police had arrested Jeremiah Wilkerson (21), a former UT student. Apparently his anger that night stemmed from being asked to leave the party at the KE house. When he ran back into the frat house, his anger drove him to smash a baseball bat into the sleeping Armstrong's head. Naturally, Wilkerson was the police departments chief suspect, but before they could question him in the murder of Armstrong, Wilkerson had committed suicide. 

Katie Hall was a freshman student at Millersville University, an enthusiastic rugby player who volunteered at an animal shelter. She was nearly halfway through her second semester at college when stress came in the form of her on-again, off-again relationship with her boyfriend, Gregorio Orrostieta. He was twenty years old and not a Millersville student, but he spent a good deal of time on campus and in Hall's dorm room. He was the jealous type, and no matter what Hall did or did not do, he was ready to accuse her of cheating and would regularly confront her or antagonize her in other ways.

It was clear to friends and family that Orrostieta physically assaulted her at least twice and that the relationship was abusive. Despite their pleas to get help, Hall stayed with Orrostieta. In the early hours of February 8, 2015, the local 911 center received a call from Orrostietia. Authorities arrived to find Hall beaten to death in her dorm room, and later concluded that Orrostieta had done nothing to save Hall's life. 

Orrostietia was indicted and charged with Hall's murder, and later received a sentence of forty years in prison. Since Hall's death, Millersville University has developed programs that encourage and educate students and the entire community on the warning signs and dangers of toxic relationships.

Serial killers aren't solely an American phenomenon. There are plenty of serial killers in other countries, such as Ahmad Suradji, an Indonesian murderer. Suradji, also known as the Black Magic Killer, had a bizarre modus operandi and an insane motivation. He killed his victims in order to gain more spiritual power, as he believed he was a shaman. He was a ritual murderer and he had a very specific pattern to his kills. He believed that this ritual killing would enhance his abilities. This led to the creation of his aforementioned serial killer nickname. 

Suradji was born in 1949, and started his killing spree nearly 40 years later, in 1986. Over the next 11 years, he killed upward of 40 women. He was executed by the Indonesian government in 2008.  

Many serial killers do unsettling, ritualistic things with their victims. Ahmad Suradji's preferred methods were downright bizarre. He believed that his victims' saliva improved his shamanic powers, so he drank it after strangling them to death.

He wasn't very specific about how he drank it. Did he somehow manage to get it into a cup? Did he drink it straight from their mouths? Either way, he performed this strange ritual on every woman he killed. 

After Ahmad Suradji killed his victims and drank their saliva, he buried them in a sugarcane field near his house. While they were still alive, he placed them in the ground feet first, up to their waists. After he strangled them to death, he stripped them naked, and then buried the rest of their bodies with their heads pointed towards his house, thinking the placement would further enhance his magical powers. 

Ahmad Suradji had three wives, all sisters. Although all three were questioned after the murders were discovered, only one, Tumini, was charged as his accomplice. She went on trial at the same time he did, and received life in prison for her involvement in his crimes. His other two wives apparently didn't know about his evil activities. 

Ahmad Suradji claimed to be a type of spiritual healer called a "dutak." Technically, the Indonesian government only recognizes six different religions (including Islam and Christianity), but some people who live there also believe in magic and various healing practices. Suradji was a shaman who, people believed, could make women more beautiful and help them get rich or find a faithful boyfriend, thanks to his "magical powers." 

Ahmad Suradji's killing spree lasted from 1986 until 1997, when he was finally captured. It's possible he could have continued his sinister work, had the body of one his victims not been discovered in a local sugarcane field.

After the police identified her and local residents realized she was last seen alive on her way to Suradji for a shamanic ritual, officials searched his house. Inside, authorities found the woman's belongings, as well as those of several other missing women. 

After entering prison, Ahmad Suradji stopped trying to be a shaman. He converted to Islam, and became very devout. In fact, he started giving religious advice to his fellow prisoners. Apparently, he was also very popular. His infamy as a serial killer led to a kind of celebrity status while he was incarcerated.  

Because of his shamanic powers, Ahmad Suradji rarely had to go out and find victims. Most of them came to him for help improving their lives. Word spread around his village – and nearby villages – of his healing powers, so women came from all over the place to receive his help. 

As a part of his magical healing ritual (which, they quickly found out, was solely for his own benefit), his victims helped him by digging their own graves. He then covered the women waist-deep in dirt as part of his "cure," and then strangled them to death once they were immobilized. When Suradji went through a dry spell and didn't have any "clients" come to him, he reportedly went out and picked up prostitutes to kill in order to fulfill his quota. 

10 years after his capture and trial in 2008, Ahmad Suradji was executed in his home country of Indonesia by firing squad. Before he died, he gave one last interview, in which he stated, "The black magic came from God. I don't have it anymore, I have repented. I hope I have a chance to live."

Suradji was one of 10 people executed that year. Indonesia enforces the death penalty for everything from terrorism to possession of narcotics. Mass murder, of course, is punished with extreme prejudice. 

Ahmad Suradji started his killing spree in 1986, after his father came to him in a dream with an important message. If Suradji killed 70 women, he would become even more powerful and be able to perform stronger acts of magic. He would also become a mystical healer.

However, Suradji failed at his goal, and "only" killed 42 victims. However, there might be others women still unaccounted for. After his capture, local police put word out, asking people to come forward with the names of women missing in the area. This added an additional 80 people to his list of possible victims. 

Most serial killers have a day job. For example, John Wayne Gacy owned a construction and maintenance business. Things were a bit different in Indonesia, where Ahmad Suradji worked as a cattle breeder. His profession required quite a bit of open land, which provided him with a place to bury his victims. 

People travel every day, stopping, at times, in rest areas to take quick breaks. As anyone who has been on a road trip knows, some rest stops are creepier than others, and some travelers become the victims of unsolved rest stop murders. Their stories are so frightening that they read like horror movie plots... but no one knows the ending.

These rest stop killings that haven't been solved have stumped investigators and broken the hearts of victims' families, but it's the creepy details of these murders that will have you hesitant to stop off at a rest area ever again. Whether the rest stops in question were dumping grounds for serial killers, hunting grounds for victims, or places vagrants looked to take advantage of tourists, rest areas have been the unfortunate sites of untimely deaths, as these tragic stories show.

29-year-old Xavier Baligant was a divorced man from Belgium who took his children on a camping trip in France. The three were on their way home when Xavier needed to make a quick detour to use the bathroom at the Malvaux Rest Area in the French Alps at 2:00 am.

Xavier ran into the rest room while he left his sleeping children in the backseat of his vehicle. Some time went by before an employee from the Autoroutes Paris-Rhin-Rhône motorway company was on patrol of the highway and heard gunshots in the rest area. While trying to find the source of the noise, he discovered Xavier's body slumped on the floor in front of the toilets. He had been shot four times, and his hands were injured, indicating he fought with his murderer before he lost his life.

Police interviewed the drivers of the 24 trucks that were parked just across the street, but none of them claimed to have heard any shots. Their hands were tested for gunshot residue, and all of them came up clean. His killer has never been caught, and his case remains unsolved.

Coincidentally, one year later, a British tourist name Saad Al-Hilli was in his car on a deserted road in the French Alps with his wife, mother-in-law, and two children, just 100 miles away from where Xavier was murdered. Everyone in Saad's family was shot and killed, except for the children who were left to survive. Police don't know if the two crimes are related, but, like Xavier, the case hasn't had any leads, and no one has been arrested. Is it the work of a tourist hating serial killer? 

When it comes to tales about truckers and rest stops, the drivers aren't always shown in a positive light. Dwayne Allen McCorkendale, 28, however, was just trying to do his job. On November 12, 1988, McCorkendale was making his way from Detroit, Michigan, to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, when he pulled into a rest stop near Chandler, Oklahoma, wanting to use a pay phone so that he could check in with his wife.

Police speculate that Dwayne called in his stop on the CB radio, and someone was listening, waiting to find their perfect victim. They believe that when Dwayne pulled in, his assailants were already waiting for him, and, as he approached the phone booth, he was ambushed and shot in the back as he pulled the coins out of his pocket. The thieves left with nothing more than Dwayne's keys and $25 out of his wallet. 

Following Dwayne's death, calls from truckers began to pour in from the area about a brown Ford Pinto, equipped with a CB radio, that was spotted driving erratically on the highway. The Pinto reportedly targeted truckers and would weave in and out of lanes, making driving difficult. The suspects in the car were described as a white male, a white female, and a black male. No one has ever been identified, and Dwayne's family laid him to rest hoping for decades that his murderers would be brought into custody.

After Dexter Stefonek's wife passed away, he wanted to leave his home in Wisconsin and visit his son in Oregon. As the first anniversary of losing his wife was just around the corner, Dexter became homesick and decided to make the long road trip home. He planned to sleep at rest stops and save money by not stopping at motels, and he headed out early in the morning on November 18, 1985.

The next morning, a call came into the sheriff's station regarding a car that was on fire at the Bad Route rest area in Montana. It didn't take long for investigators to find out that it was Dexter's vehicle, and, soon, a search ensued for the missing man. Employees at the rest stop said that they saw a tall man in his late 30s getting out of Fred's car, carrying large plastic containers, but that wasn't suspicious. It wasn't until four months later that a couple rummaging through a landfill 17 miles away from the rest area came across Fred's body under a mattress. Dexter's wallet with his I.D. was near the body. He'd been beaten violently and shot in the head, twice.

There was still money in Dexter's suitcase, so robbery was discarded as a motive. Graffiti inside of one of the rest stop bathrooms suggested that the murderer wanted to slyly brag about his crime because they included the expression: "HOT JOCK SHOT WAD FROM WISCONSIN 11/85 SATURDAY THE 3rd." Police believe that "Hot Jock" could be a trucker's CB handle, but Dexter's death remains a mystery. 

In 1979, just a week and a half after celebrating the coming of the new year, DeLand, Florida, couple Franklin Shumaker and Patricia Doyle were inside their motor home, parked at a rest stop near the town of Grant. Eventually, deputies became suspicious of the home because it hadn't moved, and it looked to be abandoned. What they found inside proved to be a far more unsettling reality.

Doyle was shot in the face and strangled to death. Her body was found underneath Shumaker who had been shot six times with two guns. Four of those bullets went into his head – one in the leg and one in the neck. According to witnesses and acquaintances, Shumaker kept with some shady characters and was known to be involved with drugs, but, for over 35 years, no one has been arrested for the slaying of the couple.

Jane Snow left her home in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on May 15, 1979, to take a trip with her sons, aged 8 and 9, to visit her parents in Escanaba, Michigan. The family of three needed a bathroom break that evening and stopped off at the Loon Lake Rest Area near Gaylord, Michigan. While Jane hurried off to the ladies' room, the boys went in the opposite direction. They were the only car in the rest stop.

Minutes dragged on, so the the boys played in a grassy area near the women's restroom as they waited for their mother. One of the boys grew impatient so he went to check on his mom, and what he found was horrifying. There was Jane, sprawled out on the floor in a bathroom covered in blood. She had been stabbed 23 times. 

Her sons ran to the highway and flagged down the first vehicle they saw on the road, and the kind citizen drove the boys to a police station where they recalled their tragic discovery. The boys said they never saw another person in the area, and the murder weapon has never been found.

On Interstate 75 where the rest area is located, a state trooper picked up John McGawley for hitchhiking less than half a mile from the murder scene. The trooper noticed there were markings and scratches on McGawley's hands, but because the officer wasn't aware that a murder had occurred, he dropped McGawley off at his destination – but he did take down his information. After the murder, McGawley was questioned about Jane's death, and he claimed that on the evening of the crime, he was at a bar having a fight with his wife. He said he stormed off angry and left her there, and that's why he was hitchhiking down the road. A bloodstained shirt McGawley was wearing was tested, but the blood didn't match Jane's, and he was never arrested.

Jane's murder has be a cold case for over 35 years and remains one of the most controversial unsolved homicides in Michigan.

Gordon and Jackie McAllister from Lindsey, Ontario, were a typical elderly couple who wanted to enjoy their retirement by going on a road trip. On June 28, 1991, they parked their motor home at the deserted Blind River, Ontario, rest stop to catch their breath and re-energize before the next leg of their journey. Just minutes before one o' clock in the morning, the pair were in a deep sleep when they were awakened by a man claiming to be a police officer. He was pounding on their window violently while screaming that the couple needed to move their vehicle.

When Jackie opened the door to see what the commotion was all about, the stranger made his way into the motor home with a rifle and a shotgun, telling the pair that he wanted all their money and jewelry. Poor Jackie immediately began digging around her purse to find anything of value, but the impatient stranger shot her before she could give him anything. The assailant shot Gordon, as well, but he was able to escape and hide under the RV undetected. It was then that 29-year-old Bryan Major pulled up to the rest stop in his car completely unaware of what was happening just a few feet away. The stranger shot and killed him, too, before taking off.

Gordon was able to flag down a passing trucker, but, by that time, the murderer was gone, and two lives were lost. The grieving husband gave police a description of his attacker, but no one was ever apprehended. There were no new leads into the crime until 1999 when DNA testing linked a former police officer named Ronald Glenn West to two unrelated unsolved murders, and he became a suspect, though, never directly linked to the crime.

A crew was working in Wright City, Missouri, in June of 2004 – trimming bushes at a rest area off of Interstate 70 – when they made a gruesome discovery. When they made their way around to the back entrance, they came across the torso of a body in an area used by travelers as a place to picnic. There is a small circular driveway where cars and vans can access, and it looked as if someone pulled around, threw the torso out of their vehicle, and kept driving. Police don't believe the victim, who was later determined to be a woman, was killed at the rest area.

What makes this story so much more creepy is that the coroner determined that the woman was killed just hours before her torso was placed in the rest area, and her remains were only there for 12 hours. These facts led authorities to conclude that she was killed within a 50- to 100-mile radius of where she was found, but the rest of her body parts have never been located. 

The woman remained a mystery for 12 years until authorities identified her as Deanna Denise Howland, a prostitute and drug user known in the area; however, her killer remains at large.

St. Francis Cathedral in Santa Fe, New Mexico, received a call in August of 1982 from a man saying that he needed a priest to come and administer his last rites. Father Patrick Gerard took the call but told the man that he wasn't available to leave – or talk – at that very moment. The Father asked the man to call again in 15 minutes, and, the next time, it was Father Renaldo Rivera who answered the phone. The man on the phone called himself Michael Carmello and repeated his request; this time, however, he wouldn't take no for an answer. 

Carmello told Father Rivera that he was at a rest stop in Waldo, New Mexico, and needed a priest immediately. Father Rivera left to meet the man. Three days later, Rivera's body was found on isolated road just a few miles from the rest area. He had been shot; however, where his body was found wasn't where he was murdered. 

Investigators pieced together that the "Carmello" character was sitting in a blue pickup truck at the rest stop waiting for Father Rivera to arrive, possibly with other assailants. Police say that after killing Father Rivera, the murderer returned to the rest stop and drove his car to another rest area about two hours away, where it was wiped clean of any physical evidence and abandoned. Father Rivera's last rites kit was stolen, but nothing else was, and authorities believe the killers just wanted to murder a priest, no matter who it was.

Kimyala Henson was planning a trip with her daughters, two-year-old Shaina and four-month-old Shausha, to British Columbia, but, first, she needed to stop off in Sacramento, California, to pick up her birth certificate. Not wanting her friend to make the long trip alone with two baby girls, Henson's friend Christina Mayer said that she and her husband, Curtis, would keep the family company.

The group left on April 4, 2001, and successfully picked up Kimyala's birth certificate. Later, the mother checked her family into a motel in nearby Redding, California. That was the last time the Hensons were seen alive. 

16 days later on April 20 at a rest stop in Collier County, Florida, Curtis and Christina Mayer were found shot to death. Investigators determined that Curtis killed Christina before he shot himself. Police searched the trash cans in the rest stop for clues and came across Kimyala's birth certificate. Her wallet and credit cards were found inside the Mayer's car, along with a blood-stained hatchet. The blood matched that of Kimyala.

Thousands of miles away in a desert near Reno, Nevada, a week after the Mayers were discovered, police found the half-buried body of Kimyala Henson. Little Shaina and baby Shausha were nowhere to be found. Their car seats and birth certificates were also missing, leaving authorities to believe that they were murdered, left to die, given over to someone as orphans, or sold.

Investigators pieced together as much information as they could. The man everyone knew as Curtis Mayer was really Frank Oehring, a fugitive who was wanted in Missouri for the attempted murder of his first wife. It's believed that the Mayers saw an opportunity to steal Kimyala's birth certificate, so that Christina could later take over her identity. What the criminal couple did from California to Florida can only be speculated about, and the two baby girls are still missing.

In August of 2005, police believe that a woman was dragged and left beside a remote rest area in Rockwood, Ontario. By the time her remains were found, she had been out there for a month, unnoticed. She had been covered with a sleeping bag and didn't have any visible recent injuries that gave investigators any clues as to how she died. 

Her face, however, showed that she had recovered from a broken cheek and a left eye socket that had since healed but may have left her with a physical deformity. Because of this, she wore a dental plate, and it looked as if the clothing she was wearing was purchased in Montreal. Other than that, the police remain clueless as to who this mystery woman is, but they are sure that someone, somewhere, used that rest area to dump her like she was garbage. They're so sure that she was the victim of foul play that the government is offering up a $50,000 reward, but, even with all of the calls that have come in, the woman has yet to be identified.

For many, the thought of California elicits notions of surf and sunshine. The massive, majestic state forming a boarder between much of the US and the Pacific Ocean represents a dream: a laid-back, low-stress lifestyle and maybe even the chance to chase stardom.  

But just as the palm trees that line its sunny streets can harbor nests of rats, California has been home to some of America's most famous killers. From the Zodiac to the Night Stalker to the Grim Sleeper, a who's-who of serial killers have either passed through the Golden State or committed the heft of their crimes there.

This list explores some of the scariest serial killers who have operated in California. From the historic to the very recent, California's bloody history of mass murderers is almost unparalleled elsewhere in America, casting a grim cloud over a state known for its sunshine.

Angelo Buono, Jr. was a serial killer who, along with his cousin Kenneth Bianchi, tortured and killed 15 women in the late 1970s. Operating in the Los Angeles area, the two men became known as a singular entity called "The Hillside Strangler," a moniker given to them based on where they dumped their bodies in the Highland Park area. 

Posing as police officers, Buono and Bianchi subjected their victims to a range of horrors, including rape, electric shock, and the injection of poisonous chemicals. Bianchi's desire to be an actual cop - he applied to the LAPD while the two were killing - actually led to the duo's downfall, as he had been going on ride-alongs with police officers and uncontrollably talking about the Hillside Strangler case. 

The two men were eventually arrested in 1979 and sentenced to life in prison after one of the longest trials in American legal history.

When Charles Ng was arrested for a seemingly innocuous shoplifting incident in June of 1985, authorities could not have possibly predicted what they would uncover. The northern California man would eventually lead police to a property he shared with another man named Leonard Lake, a compound of sorts in a remote area of Calaveras County near the Sierra Nevada Foothills. 

What police uncovered was truly horrifying - Lake and Ng had built a torture cabin, complete with a false wall, that was designed to hold women who had been forced into slavery. A search of the property would reveal extensive video recordings of the men with their captives, as well as over 40 pounds of charred human remains. Lake and Ng would later be linked to the disappearances of two families - both with infant children they had killed, along with their fathers, to isolate the women before ultimately killing them, too.  

It's believed the two men killed at least 12 people, but the actual number remains unknown. Lake, shortly after his arrest, swallowed a cyanide pill and died in custody. Ng was convicted of murder in 1999 and sentenced to death.

Richard Ramirez, otherwise known as the Night Stalker, was the consummate bogeyman. A deranged satanist, Ramirez raped and tortured an estimated 25 victims, killing at least 13 during his bloody streak in mid-1980s Los Angeles and San Francisco. 

A native of Texas, Ramirez moved to northern California in the early 1980s, where he began committing a series of escalating crimes. By the time he was apprehended in November of 1985, Ramirez had struck fear into millions of Los Angeles residents, as he had murdered swaths of men and woman of all ages in a variety of brutal ways, including strangulation, bludgeoning, and execution-style shootings.

In 1988, Ramirez was convicted of 13 counts of murder and sentenced to death. He died of lymphoma in San Quentin State Prison in 2013.

The Zodiac Killer is perhaps one of the most notorious American murderers to evade capture. Striking in northern California in the late '60s, the Zodiac killed at least five victims, typically targeting young couples and either shooting or stabbing them to death. 

The man who witnesses said donned a black hood, the Zodiac gained notoriety for taunting the police via a series of ciphers he mailed to the San Francisco Examiner. Thought to have contained clues to his identity, some have speculated that they were simply nonsense designed to be a red herring, but amateur sleuths still toil over them to this day. For whatever reason, the Zodiac's correspondence abruptly stopped in 1974, but the case remains open. No suspect has ever been arrested.

In 1979, Lawrence Bittaker and his accomplice Roy Norris terrorized the Los Angeles area kidnapping, raping, and murdering five young women within the span of about six months. After first meeting while in prison, the two men quickly cultivated a bond over torture and sexual assault, and in June 1979 they picked up their first victim, 16-year-old Lucinda Lynn Schaefer.

Bittaker's M.O. was to lure young women into his van where he and Norris would violently assault their victim with a series of torture implements from his notorious tool box. They even recorded their actions on audio, which when played in the courtroom during their trial induced some to actually vomit.

Lawrence Bittaker still sits on California's death row, where he sadistically goes by the nickname "Pliers."

Depicted in the 2008 Clint Eastwood film Changeling, The Wineville Chicken Coop Murders are a grim stain on the history of Los Angeles County. In the 1920s, in what's now called Mira Loma (the town changed its name from Wineville in 1930 to escape the attention) young boys were being held captive on a ranch after being abducted from neighboring towns. Their captor, a young Canadian man named Gordon Northcott, would molest the kidnapped boys before killing them with an ax and dissolving their bodies in quicklime.

Northcott's young cousin, Sanford Clark, had been living on the Wineville property and witnessed several murders, and was subjected to abuse himself. Upon his return to his native Canada, Clark alerted authorities to his cousin's crimes, and the property was raided in September of 1928. 

Northcott was convicted of three murders, but was suspected in up to 20. He was sent to the gallows where he was reported to have been sobbing and visibly frightened - a noticeable shift from his courtroom demeanor, which found him defiant and snickering.  

Lonnie Franklin, Jr. - whom the Los Angeles press dubbed "The Grim Sleeper" due to his apparent period of dormancy in the 1990s - may have murdered as many as 25 women, making him one of the most prolific serial killers in US history. 

Preying on marginalized individuals - sex workers, drug addicts, and the homeless - Franklin carried out his offenses in 1980s south-central LA where police were either woefully inept or willfully turning a blind eye. It wasn't until 2010 that DNA evidence finally connected Franklin to at least 10 murders, though a cache of photos found in his home suggests that he could be responsible for many more.  

Lonnie Franklin, Jr. was convicted of 10 counts of murder in 2016 and sentenced to death. He currently sits on death row in San Quentin State Prison.

In 1978, Rodney Alcala - an aspiring photographer - appeared on the popular television show The Dating Game. Though his competitors would later describe him as "bizarre," Alcala managed to win a date with the bachelorette, Cheryl Bradshaw. It wasn't meant to be, however, as the young woman whose affection he had been seeking turned him down, citing the fact that he was "creepy."

Bradshaw was, in no uncertain terms, correct. Alcala had managed to appear on the game show despite his 1972 conviction for the rape of an eight-year-old girl. Beyond that, prior to the program's 1978 broadcast, he had already killed 4 victims, including the brutal murder of 12-year-old Robin Samsoe in Huntington Beach, CA.  

Alcala was convicted in 1980 and sentenced to death. In 2010, Huntington Beach Police released 120 photographs they had found in Alcala's possession, believing at least some of them to be additional victims. His official body count remains unknown, but it's speculated to be in the dozens. 

The Golden State Killer - also known as the East Area Rapist and the Original Night Stalker - is a prolific serial killer who remains a fugitive to this day. Before suddenly stopping his rampage in 1986, this violent predator was responsible for 12 murders and at least 45 rapes up and down the California coast.

Described by survivors as a small, agile man, the Golden State Killer would break into his victims homes - often those of married couples - and subdue the male while sexually assaulting the female, sometimes escalating to murdering both parties. This killer also had an eerie habit of prank calling his victims if they survived the nightmare he imposed on them.

Though it's been over 40 years since his first offense, some in the FBI believe that the Golden State Killer is still very much alive.

Randy Steven Kraft committed a string of grisly murders between 1972 and 1983. With the majority of his crimes taking place in southern California, Kraft's M.O. was to pick up young men, ply them with alcohol, then systematically rape, torture, and kill them. 

When Kraft was finally arrested in 1983, authorities made an interesting discovery in the trunk of his car: a list containing the names of 61 men, all of whom were thought to be murder victims of Kraft dating back to 1972. His attorneys fought the list's inclusion as evidence, and Kraft was ultimately convicted of 16 counts of murder. His actual kill count remains a mystery.

In 1996,  Joe "The Cannibal" Metheny joined the ranks of serial killers who decided to serve their victims' bodies to people in food. He claimed to have killed several women, dismembered their bodies, and then fed the human meat to his customers at his small BBQ pit stand, turning everyone into unintentional cannibals. Metheny also worked as a truck driver and confessed that his first murder was motivated by the actions of his girlfriend, who abandoned their child because she was a drug addict. He kept killing from that point onward, and ended up with around nine victims - or so he claims.

Joe Roy Metheny - an urban legend come to life - was born in 1955 and grew up to became one of several killers who sold human meat as food in the early 1990s. Now, however, he is serving a life sentence in a Maryland prison. 

It's hard to tell the fact from fiction in Metheny's confession. Some news reports state that his first killings took place in 1994, while he has claimed that his serial murder spree actually began in 1976. The number of victims that he admits to have killed frequently changes as well. His known body count stands at nine, but there could be more, as he's bragged about killing others. He also claimed to have fed human meat to the customers of his small BBQ stand, but that could just be the talk of a madman. 

By all accounts, Metheny was not a little man. Many news stories describe him as being over six feet tall and weighing around 450 pounds. His intimidating size explains how he managed to overpower his victims, as well as explains how his last would-be victim - Rita Kemper - got away with her life. He couldn't run fast enough to catch her. 

In 1994, Metheny was living with his girlfriend and their six-year-old son in South Baltimore; however, he worked as a truck driver so he was gone for long stints of time on the road. One day, he came home and realized that his girlfriend abandoned him and taken their child. She was a drug addict and began living on the streets. Metheny said in his confession,

"I found out about six months later she had moved on the other side of town with some asshole that had her out selling her ass for drugs. They got busted for drugs and they took my son away from them for child neglect and child abuse." 

Metheny was so enraged by this that he went out to find his former girlfriend. He couldn't locate her, though, and instead ran into two homeless men. In a fit of anger, he killed them both with an axe and proceeded to chop them up into pieces, leaving their bodies where he had found them.

Metheny admitted to killing two women - Kimberly Spicer and Catherine Ann Magaziner - before dismembering them and putting their flesh into Tupperware containers that he kept in his trailer. Then, he decided to open up a small BBQ stand by the side of a busy Maryland road and served his unsuspecting customers human flesh - the flesh from Spicer and Magaziner's bodies. Metheny claimed that there was little difference between pork and human meat.

In 1994, Metheny was arrested and spent a year and a half in the Baltimore County Jail. He had been charged with the murder of the two homeless men that he chopped up and left under a bridge. He was denied bail, and had to sit in prison until his trial. However, due to a lack of evidence, he wound up getting away with the crime and was released from jail.

At the time of Kimberly Spicer's murder in the fall of 1995, she had been working as a prostitute in South Baltimore. Metheny was driving a forklift for a company that made wooden pallets and was living in a small trailer located near by his employer. One night, Metheny brought Spicer to his trailer where he brutally killed her, dismembering her body and discarding parts of it under some wooden pallets at his work - nobody noticed.

His last victim, Rita Kemper, was lucky. She was working as a prostitute in 1996 when Metheny kidnapped her and forced her into his trailer. He was gearing up to kill her, but she managed to get away, scaling an eight-foot-tall chain link fence as she fled. Kemper went straight to the authorities who, thankfully, believed her. Metheny was arrested for multiple murders shortly thereafter and confessed to all of his evil deeds.

During his confession to the authorities, Metheny admitted to committing some very horrific acts, one of which involved Catherine Magaziner's skull. She had been working as a prostitute when he invited her into his trailer. After she stepped inside, he stabbed and strangled her to death before dismembering her body. Apparently, six months later, he went back to the place where he had discarded some of her remains, found her skull, cleaned it off, and then had sex with it. 

Over the course of his killing spree, Metheny worked several different jobs, drifted in and out of homelessness, and spent most of his paychecks on drinks at local bars. He worked as a truck driver for a time before eventually getting a job at a wooden pallet factory driving a forklift. Later, he went on to open up what he described as a "BBQ pit stand," which he used as a way to dispose of the flesh of his victims by selling them as food.

The same night that he killed two homeless men, Metheny also went on to kill two prostitutes - luring them under a bridge and murdering them with the same axe he had used on the two men. A nearby fisherman, who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, was then spotted by Metheny and was promptly killed as well. He then tossed all three bodies into a nearby river and placed rocks on top of them so that they wouldn't float to the surface. No evidence of them has ever been found.