In 1979, a series of child murders in the predominantly black suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia, ignited the already strained racial tensions of that state. All victims were black and many thought that the murders were the work of the Klan, a paedophile network or even some type of payback crimes for the spate of muggings and shootins of white businessmen in the city of Atlanta. The following year, the bodies of black children continued to be found until the person or person(s) changed their attention to young black men and began dumping their bodies in the Chattahoochee River. Twenty-nine victims were attributed to the ‘Atlanta Child Murderer’ before 22-year-old Wayne Williams was arrested in June 1981 after a major manhunt. Most extraordinarily, Williams broke the mould with what authorities thought they knew about serial killers. Like his victims, Wayne Williams was black.

In France, Paris police announced in 1998 the arrest of Guy Georges “The Beast of Bastille” - who raped and murdered seven women. Described as “unstable,” Georges is said to be a persistant sexual offender who had been living in cheap hotels and squats for some time. In court, Georges was described by the public prosecutor as “the incarnation of evil,” and psychiatrists warned that he could not be cured of the desire to kill. All the victims were young women, some found tied to their beds with knife or razor cuts to their throats. In 2001 he was sentenced to life with no chance of parole for twenty-five years.

George Putt  was physically and emotionally abused as a child, this Memphis, Tennessee, predator was socially and psychologically handicapped from the get go. Psychology test revealed a “morbid preoccupation with blood and gore” as he continued with his career as a violent criminal. By 1967 he married a Mississippi woman from whom he demanded sexual gratification six to eight time a day. A charming and tactful fellow, in 1969 he tried to rape his mother-in-law in three different occasions. Shortly after the third attempted rape, authorities believed George committed his first killing. By March of 1969 George’s deadly habits were in full swing. He first brutally murdered a couple. A week and a half later he clobbered to death an 80-year-old widow. Four days later third woman was bound and brutally stabbed fourteen times. He attacked his fifth victim in her home on September 11. He was found guilty of all his crimes and given the death penalty. When the Supreme Court struck down the death penalty, George was handed a 497-year sentence. Always the good sport, George chuckled when the judge read him the sentence.

Ted Bundy once explained how he diminished his vulnerability to detection when disposing of bodies. He would park on a curve so that he could see cars approaching from either direction. He learned this technique from a movie about a killer who had done the same thing. Asked how old he was when he saw this movie, Bundy replied he must have been 12 or 13. That movie did not turn Ted Bundy into a serial murderer, a whole variety of life experiences made him what he was. However, Bundy did learn this particular method.

Edward Gingerich murdered his wife Katie in Crawford County, Pennsylvania in 1993. He has the distinction of being the only Amish man to have been convicted of murder. He killed and disembowelled his wife in a schizophrenic frenzy that was witnessed by his two children. He was found guilty of involuntary manslaugter. At the time, he had stopped taking medication for paranoid schizophrenia for nine months. Gingerich was released from prison in March 1998.

When 12-year-old Lorna Lax left her parents’ home near San Francisco on November 14th, 1959, she left a note saying she was mad at the world” and would return the next morning. Her parents were not alarmed explaining later that Lorna was ” an unfortunate child, physically retarded and emotionally troubled.” When she had not returned by Mornday morning, they grew concerned. That afternoon Norman Fortner, thirteen, found Lorna’s body in a wooded area about two hundred yards from her home. Fortner told how Lax had often used the thicket as a “sex club,” charging “initiation fees” of thity-five cents to a dollar for local boys. Visitors to the sex club were questioned. Clifford Fortner, fifteen, told police he had gone to the thicket with Lorna early that night. Eventually, Fortner admitted that he had had sex with Lorna and then “something came over him.” He first battered her head with a torch, then strangled her with a rope from a swing nearby, and finally stabbed her in the stomach several times. Fortner was sentenced to be detained for an indefinite time.

David J Carpenter (born in 1928) committed his first crime when he brutally attacked a woman with a hammer in 1961. He got sentenced to 14 years of which he only spent 9 years in prison before getting released. In 1970, he drew another seven years on two counts of kidnapping and robbery. Carpenter escaped from prison but was recaptured by the FBI and was paroled in 1977. Carpenter then started working for a photo print shop in San Francisco. 2 years later, on August 29, 1979 Edda Kane’s naked and violated body was discovered on a hiking trail in Mount Tamalpais State Park, near San Francisco. Half a year later the body of 23-year-old Barbara Swartz was discovered nearby. The killers MO was to shot and then stab his victims usually as the knelt and plead for their lives. When police investigated the whereabouts of his ninth victim, Heather Scaggs, in May 1981, they found out that she was a fellow print shop worker who disappeared after he gave her a ride. Evicence linked him to the murder weapons and Carpenter was finally arrested. On May 10, 1988, he was convicted of first degree murder in the slayings of Richard Stowers, Cynthia Moreland, Shauna May, Diana O’Connell, and Anne Alderson.

Looking into Ed Gein’s World, a man and a woman peer through, dirty, tattered curtains and past the cluttered sill into the kitchen. All Plainfield’s people came to see the house they had long ignored.