Earle Leonard Nelson aka “the Gorilla Murderer” was raised by his aunt after both his parents had died of syphilis. Raised by his aunt, she thought she could impart her Christian beliefs to Earle Nelson. He absorbed those teachings but his behaviour became more and more erratic as he matured. He would often lock himself up and recite passages from the bible for hours. Nelson was expelled from grade school by the age of seven and was a habitual petty thief. By the age of ten he suffered a severe, life-threatening head injury and remained in coma for over a week. After this event he became increasingly violent towards girls. In 1911, being 14 years old, Nelson dropped out of school, took a succession of menial jobs and became a petty thief. He became obsessed with the Book of Revelation and spent two years in St. Quentin for housebreaking in 1915. In 1919 he took a job as a hospital janitor where he meet 58-year-old Mary Martin. They got married but Nelson grew increasingly violent towards his wife and after raping her in a hospital bed where she was recuperating from an illness Mary decided to leave him. Authorities tried to keep him incarcerated but he would not stay in prison for long. In November 1923 Nelson once again fled from prison but after the attack on a twelve-year-old girl he landed in a mental hospital. Discharged in June 1925, Nelson went on a killing spree that would leave ten women dead. Drifting from California, to Oregon, and several other states he was always a step ahead of the authorities who only got a vague description from witnesses who agreed on his simian appearance. The press dubbed him as “the Gorilla Murderer” and Nelson turned north into Canada, where he murdered two more women before being finally caught. He was tried and convicted in November 1927 and was hanged in January 1928 in Winnipeg.

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.

“Sex is one of my downfalls. I get sex any way I can get it. If I have to force somebody to do it, I do… I rape them; I’ve done that. I’ve killed animals to have sex with them, and I’ve had sex… While they’re alive. “

Henry Lee Lucas was born August 23, 1936 to an alcoholic couple. His mother would occasionally work as the neighborhood prostitute to run the house while his father (who had no legs due to a freight train accident) would drown himself in alcohol all day. The Lucas family had 9 children, out of which some were given away to relatives, foster homes, and certain institutions. But Henry was “lucky” enough to stay with his parents. Henry and his father were regular witnesses to his mother’s beatings, violent outbursts and parade of strange men who shared her bed. After his father’s death (fatal case of pneumonia), Henry would always be subject to his mother’s cruelty and beatings. Henry was introduced to bestiality by his mother’s live-in lover, “Uncle Bernie”. Desperate to know what sex with a human would be like, at age 15, Henry picked a girl near Lynchburg, strangled and buried her body in the woods when she tried to resist.  Henry had confessed to almost 300 murders, one of which was his mother as well. After striking his mother with a knife, 5 days later he was arrested and boasted about raping his mother’s corpse. Later on, he went to state that he was making it up. Over 90 of the murder cases, which were closed after Henry’s confession, were re-opened as officials thought that he was toying with them to see how far he could go with them. Henry also had an accomplice, Ottis Toole, who he said participated in over 100 murders with him. In 1998, Henry was sentenced to death penalty. Although, Henry died in 2001 while he was in prison due to heart failure. His death left series of questions and doubts about him actually killing all those people or making them up as he went along.

A nomadic German sex killer, Joachim Kroll lived in the vicinity of Duisburg, filling his bachelor apartment with electronic gadgets and inflatable sex dolls, frequently strangling the latter with one hand while he masturbated with the other. Too nervous and shy for sex with conscious partners, he turned to rape and murder at age 22, killing so often over the next two decades that he lost count of his victims . In the 1960s, Kroll tried cannibalism on a whim, enjoying it so much that he kept up the practice, stalking “tender” victims in an effort to reduce his grocery bills. Kroll’s first remembered victim was 19-year-old Inngard Strehl, raped and murdered in a barn near the village of Walstedde, during February 1955. Twelve-year-old Erika Schuletter was the next to die, raped and strangled at Kirchhellen in 1956. Three years later and miles away, he killed Klara Jesmer in the woods near Rbeinhausen, on June 17, 1959. Sixteen-year-old Manuela Knodt was raped and murdered near Bredeney, south of Essen, with slices cut from her buttocks and thighs in the first slaying attributed to the man police would dub the “Ruhr Hunter.” On April 23, 1962, 13-year-old Petra Giese was raped and killed at Rees, near Walsum, both buttocks sliced off, along with her left forearm and hand. The Hunter was still stalking Walsum on June 4, when 13-year-old Monica Tafel vanished on her way to school. Searchers found her body in a nearby rye field, steaks carved from her buttocks and the back of her thighs. Kroll sometimes changed his pattern, in an effort to confuse police. No meat was taken when he murdered 12-year-old Barbara Bruder, in Burscheid, during 1962. In August 1965, at Grossenbaum, he crept up on a pair of young lovers, stabbing a tire on their car, then fatally knifing the driver, Hermann Schmitz, when he stepped out to investigate the noise. In Marl, he raped and murdered Ursula Roling on September 13, 1966, rebounding three months later to kill five-year-old Ilona Harke at Wuppertal, slicing steaks from her buttocks and shoulders.

Kroll’s luck nearly ran out in 1967, when he settled briefly in Grafenhausen, befriending local children who began to call him “Uncle.” Luring a 10-year-old girl into a nearby field one afternoon, he promised to “show her a rabbit” but produced obscene photos instead, hoping the child might become sexually aroused. Instead, she was horrified, bolting for safety as Kroll made a grab for her throat, and he fled Grafenhausen the same day, before police could begin asking troublesome questions. On July 12, 1969, he invaded the home of 61-year-old Maria Hettgen, in Hueckeswagen, strangling her to death and raping her corpse in the front hall. Reverting to children on May 21, 1970, Kroll murdered 13-year-old Jutta Ranh in Breitscheid, discarding her strangled body after he had satisfied his lust. In 1976, 10-year-old Karin Toepfer was raped and strangled on her way to school, in Dinslaken Voerde. Kroll’s arrogance defeated him in July 1976, when he claimed the next victim in his own neighborhood of Laar, a Duisburg suburb. Four-year-old Marion Ketter was reported missing from a nearby playground, and police were asking questions door-to-door when they heard a curious story from one of Kroll’s neighbors. According to their witness, Kroll had warned him that the upstairs toilet in their block of flats was clogged “with guts.” A plumber quickly verified the statement, flushing a child’s lungs and other organs out of the pipe, and detectives went calling on Kroll. In his apartment, they discovered plastic bags of human flesh stored in the freezer; on the stove, a tiny hand was boiling in a pot with carrots and potatoes. Convinced that they had bagged the Hunter, officers were stunned by Kroll’s long-running litany of rape and murder. He remembered fourteen victims, but he really couldn’t say if there were more, a circumstance that left detectives free to speculate upon his final body-count. With capital punishment abolished in Germany after World War II, Kroll received the maximum possible sentence of life imprisonment .

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.

In 1992 Hadden Clark was arrested for the murder of 23-year-old Laurie Houghteling in Bethesda, Maryland. Clark was a transvestite and a cannibal, believing that by killing and eating women, he would become one himself. Clark would later admit to the murder of at least 12 women, including six-year-old, Michele Dorr. His first trial in Maryland gained him 30 years imprisonment; a second, in 1999, a full life sentence. Clark used to make confessions to a fellow inmate, who he believed was Jesus, and had often taken the police to try and find the shallow graves of his victims. Each time, he dressed as a woman and is in his alter-ego of Kristen.

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.

“The necessity to be myself passes all moral barriers.”

-Richard Ramirez.

Interview with Ottis Toole

Interviewer: “Tell me how you cook a young boy or girl.” 

Toole: “After the fucking then you strip them naked and hang them upside down by ankles; then slit their throat with a knife, slit the belly and take out the guts, the liver, the heart. Cut off the head. Let the blood drain.” 

Interviewer: “Do you have a big fire?” 

Toole: “A pit. A bar-q-que pit. Charcoal so there ain’t much smoke. Take down the body, put the metal spit through them. Put it into the asshole, through the body and out the neck, wire the meat to the spit, put it on the spit-holder over the coals. Damn tasty.” 

Interviewer: “Just how does a little boy bar-q-que taste, Ottis?” 

Toole: “Same as a roasted piglet. Boys and girls taste about the same when you roast them 8 to 10 years old. The flavor is a shade different when they’re teenagers. The boys are gamier than the girls. Give me the roasted meat of a boy age 14 and a girl age 14 and I can tell the difference when you use a spicy sauce.”