20 Messed Up and Evil Serial Killers of All Time

Serial Killers are viewed as a threat because of how evil, disturbed, and crazy their actions are towards other individuals or animals. Although seen as wicked, we are always drawn and fascinated by how these individuals operate. We want to know their stories and how do these horrid individuals operate. What makes a serial killer slay and what motivates them to catch and kill a prey? To satisfy your interest in these villains, here are 20 of the most notorious serial killers of all time.

1. Donald Henry Gaskins

In the year 1969, Gaskins began picking up hitchhikers around the southern coastal highways of America. The reason why he is picking up these unaware travelers is that he is into torturing, mutilating, and eventually killing them. When Gaskins was captured because a criminal associate saw him killing two men, Gaskins confessed that he had killed 80 to 90 people. The court convicted him with murder and was then sentenced to death, but then due to some reasons, it was changed into life imprisonment without parole. In a morbid remarkable way, although Gaskins was already inside a high-security prison, he was still able to kill his fellow inmate. Gaskins was the only known inmate in death row who was able to kill an inmate.

2. Dennis Rader (the BTK Killer)

Dennis Raider murdered 10 people in Sedgwick County, Wichita, Kansas between 1974 and 1991. Obsessed with notoriety, Raider sent taunting letters to police under the name BTK which stood for ‘Bind, Torture, Kill’. Rader stalked his victims before breaking into their homes, then bound their limbs before strangling them. Having disappeared in 1988, BTK reemerged in 2005 when he sent a floppy disc to the press which was to be his downfall. Tracing him via the floppy disc, Raider was arrested and charged upon which he immediately confessed. He is serving 10 consecutive life sentences with an earliest possible release date of February 26, 2180.

3. John George Haigh

Known as the “Acid Bath Murderer” John George Haigh was an English serial killer during the 1940s. He was convicted of the murders of 6 people, although he claimed to have killed 9. A professional conmen, he targeted wealthy individuals and charmed them into believing he was a successful businessman. He lured his victims to a derelict warehouse before shooting them. He then dissolved their bodies in sulphuric acid before forging papers in order to sell their possessions and collect their life savings. Traces of human remains were found and there was sufficient evidence to convict him. In 1949, he was sentenced to death and hanged at Wandsworth Prison.

4. Peter Manuel

He was an American-born Scottish serial killer who was known to have killed 9 people across southern Scotland between 1956 and 1958. Manuel is suspected of having killed as many as 18 people. Police were unable to prove his guilt until his final murder. This was when some banknotes Manuel had been using to pay for drinks in Glasgow pubs were proven to be stolen from one of his victims. He confessed to these murders after his mother confronted him at the police station where he was being held. Manuel was hanged at Glasgow’s Barlinnie Prison for his crimes in July 1958. He was one of the last prisoners to be hanged in Scotland before they ended capital punishment.

5. Fred & Rose West

Between 1967 and 1987 Fred West and his wife Rose tortured, raped and murdered at least 11 young women and girls, many at the couple’s homes at 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester which was later nicknamed the house of horrors. The pair was finally apprehended and charged in 1994 after police obtained a search warrant and located several human bones buried within the garden and under the floor boards. Having been arrested and during his trial, Fred West hanged himself in his prison cell prior to being convicted. In 1995, Rose West was jailed for life for being found guilty on 10 counts of murder. To discourage any souvenir hunters, their house at Cromwell Street was then demolished in 1996

6. Peter Sutcliffe

Peter William Sutcliffe is a British serial killer known as “The Yorkshire Ripper”. In 1981 Sutcliffe was convicted of murdering 13 women and attempting to murder seven others. He targeted prostitutes in Leeds and Bradford area causing a climate of fear across northern England. When arrested in January 1981 for driving with false number plates, police questioned him about the killings and he confessed. At his trial, he pleaded not guilty to murder on grounds of diminished responsibility, but his defence was rejected by the jury. He was sentenced to serve life imprisonment without patrol and remains in Broadmoor Maximum Security Mental Hospital to this day.

7. Arthur Shawcross

Known as the Genesee River Killer, Shawcross first killed in 1972, sexually assaulting and murdering a 10-year-old boy after luring him into a wooded area in Watertown, New York. He then raped and killed an eight-year-old girl for which he was captured and convicted of manslaughter. Serving 14 years imprisonment he was released in 1988 and went into brutally killing 12 female prostitutes aged between 22 and 59 years old. Eventually captured at the scene of his last murder, Shawcross confessed to all 12 murders and was sentenced to 250 years imprisonment, though died in prison of cardiac arrest in 2008.

8. Jeffrey Dahmer

Known as the Milwaukee Cannibal, Jeffrey Dahmer was an American serial killer and sex offender who raped, murdered and dismembered 17 men and boys between 1978 and 1991. He also committed necrophilia and ate parts of his later victims, dismembering and cooking parts of their bodies within his home. Dahmer was eventually caught after a would-be victim managed to overpower him and alert police. In 1992, Dahmer was convicted of 15 of the murders and sentenced to 15 terms of life imprisonment. However just two years into his sentence he was beaten to death by a fellow inmate at the Columbia Correctional Institution.

9. Richard Ramirez

Ricardo Leyva Muñoz Ramírez was an American serial killer and Satan worshipper who terrorised Los Angeles between 1984 and 1985. Nicknamed the Night Stalker, Ramirez broke into the homes of many of his victims, shooting, stabbing, raped and mutilating his victims who ranged between a 9 year old girl and a married couple aged in their late sixties. Notably he smeared pentagrams on the walls of the crime scenes. Captured in 1985, Ramirez was sentenced to death and remained on California’s death row for 23 years until he died in his cell in June 2013.

10. Dennis Nilsen

The British equivalent of Jeffrey Dahmer, Dennis Nilsen was a homosexual killer who murdered 15 gay men within his home in London, England between 1978 and 1983. He retained his victims’ bodies before dissecting their remains and disposing of their bodies by burning or flushing the remains down the toilet, which led to his capture when human flesh was discovered in his sewage system. Nilsen was convicted in 1983 of six counts of murder and two of attempted murder and was sentenced to life imprisonment. He remains imprisoned at Full Sutton maximum security prison in Yorkshire, England without the chance of release.

11. Charles Ng and Leonard Lake

A Chinese-American serial killer, Charles Ng is believed to have raped, tortured and murdered between 11 and 25 victims with his accomplice Leonard Lake at Lake’s ranch in Calaveras County, California. They filmed themselves raping and torturing their victims. Their crimes became known in 1985 when Lake committed suicide after being arrested and Ng was caught shoplifting at a hardware store. Police searched Lake’s ranch and found human remains. Ng was identified as Lake’s partner in crime and attempted to evade police by fleeing to Canada. After a lengthy extradition to the United States, he stood trial in 1998 on twelve counts of murder and was convicted in 1999. Ng is currently on death row at San Quentin State Prison.

12. Ted Bundy

One of the most widely known murderers of the 20th century, Ted Bundy was an American serial killer and rapist who kidnapped or overpowered numerous young women and girls during the 1970s. Bundy typically approached his female victims in a public place and led them to secluded areas where he would sexually assault and kill them. He decapitated at least 12 victims and kept the severed heads in his apartment as trophies. Repeatedly captured, he twice managed to escape from police and court houses before further committing three killings. He was then sentenced to death as he was convicted of multiple murders. He was executed by the electric chair in 1989.

13. Andrei Chikatilo

Chikatilo was a Soviet serial killer, nicknamed The Butcher of Rostov. He committed the sexual assault, murder and mutilation of at least 52 women and children in Russia between 1978 and 1990. Believing he was the killer, police carried out surveillance on Chikatilo which eventually provided adequate grounds to arrest him. He confessed to a total of 56 murders and was tried for 53 of these killings in April 1992. Victim’s relatives demanded that authorities release him so that they could kill him themselves. He was convicted and sentenced to death for 52 of these murders in October 1992 and subsequently executed by firing squad in February 1994.

14. John Wayne Gacy

John Wayne Gacy sexually assaulted and murdered 33 teenage boys and young men in a series of killings between 1972 and 1978 in Chicago, Illinois. He lured victims to his home with the promise of work or money before murdering them by strangulation with a tourniquet . Gacy buried 26 of his victims in the crawl space under his home, before disposing of later victims in the Des Plaines River. Convicted of 33 murders, Gacy was sentenced to death. He spent 14 years on death row before he was executed by lethal injection on May 10, 1994.

15. Tommy Lynn Sells

Claiming to have killed at least 70 people, Tommy Lynn Sells is considered one of the most dangerous offenders in Texas, United States and has been convicted of several brutal murders between 1985 and 1999 including stabbing a 13 year old girl 16 times. Sells was eventually captured after breaking into the bedroom of a 10-year-old girl and stabbing her, but despite her injuries, the girl managed to survive and alert her neighbours. She provided a detailed description of Sells to police which eventually led to his capture. He is to be sentenced to death but remains on death row at a high-security prison in Livingston, Texas.

16. Pedro Rodrigues Filho

Pedro Rodrigues Filho is a Brazilian serial killer. Arrested in 1973, he was later convicted in 2003 of murdering at least 71 people and sentenced to 128 years imprisonment. Committing his first killing at the age of 14, he began a series of burglaries and carried out a murdering spree against local drug dealers in revenge for his girlfriend’s death committed by the criminals whilst he was in prison. By the age of 18 years old, he had killed 10 people. Whilst imprisoned, he executed his own father who was also serving time for murder. Remarkably he went into killing at least 47 inmates while imprisoned. Initially sentenced to just 30 years imprisonment, his continued killings have led to further convictions and his sentence has been increased to 400 years imprisonment.

17. Gary Ridgway

One of the United States most prolific serial killers, Gary Ridgway was arrested in 2001 for 4 murders though he confessed in killing at least 70 women in Washington state throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s. He avoided the death penalty by providing detailed confessions and led police to the dumping sites of his victims, five of whom he dumped in the Green River leading to the press nicknaming him The Green River Killer. He was convicted of 49 murders and sentenced to life imprisonment without parole.

18. Dr. Harold Shipman

Dr. Harold Fredrick Shipman was an English doctor and is one of the world’s most prolific serial killers in recorded history due to being responsible for 250 murders. A trusted doctor, he was well respected in his community. However, colleagues and local undertakers began raising concerns over the high death rate in the area, and the huge number of cremation forms for elderly women that he had countersigned. Several bodies were later exhumed and postmortems revealed diamorphine within their system. It was later established that Shipman had purposely injected fatal doses of the drug in a huge number of patients, causing their death. He then forged their wills so he could inherit large sums of money and completed cremation requests to destroy the victim’s bodies. The trial judge sentenced him to 15 consecutive life sentences and recommended that he never be released. Shipman later hanged himself in January 2004 in his cell at Wakefield Prison.

19. Daniel Camargo Barbosa

Camargo was a Colombian serial killer who was believed to have raped and killed over 150 young girls in Colombia and Ecuador during the 1970s and 1980s. He calmly confessed to killing 71 girls in Ecuador after escaping from the Colombian prison. He led authorities to the dumping grounds of those victims whose bodies had not yet been recovered. After raping his victims, he had hacked the girls with a machete. He was convicted in 1989 and sentenced to just 16 years in prison, the maximum sentence available in Ecuador. In November 1994, he was murdered in prison by the cousin of one of his victims.

20. Pedro Alonso Lopez

Pedro Alonso López is a Colombian serial killer who was accused of raping and killing more than 300 girls across South America. He was believed to have preyed on young and vulnerable girls in Peru. He lured them to secluded areas or inside unoccupied buildings where he raped each of them before killing them by a range of brutal methods, primarily strangulation. López was arrested when an attempted abduction failed and he was trapped by market traders. He confessed to over 300 murders. The police only believed him when a flash flood uncovered a mass grave containing many of his victims. Eventually, 53 bodies were discovered. Imprisoned in 1980, he served just 18 years before being released from an Ecuadorian prison and was deported to Columbia where he was rearrested and in 2002 and was sentenced to life in prison.