Between April 1971 and May 1972, sections of northern West Germany were besieged by a series of sick crimes. Corpses were being removed from their resting places and defiled in various ways - decapitated, mutilated, or partially eaten. There were also instances of attempted sexual intercourse. Finally, on May 6, 1972, in the village of Lindelburg, when a teenage couple was shot dead in their car, a witness saw a man with a leather hat and glasses dash away on a red motorbike. There was evidence that the murderer had drunk some of the dead woman’s blood and had been examining her genitals before he fled. He became the prime suspect. On May 10, a transport company worker told authorities that the man they wanted was quitting his job at the company, and that they had better apprehend him quickly. The police drove quickly to the company and arrested Kuno Hofmann, forty-one. Hofmann and his brother had been brutally beaten by a sadistic father as they grew up, beatings that had left Hofmann a dwarfish deaf-mute with an IQ of seventy. Hofmann, who had served nine years for theft, confessed to all the crimes against the corpses and several others as well. In addition to killing the teenagers, he had shot and wounded mortuary attendant George Warmuth, who discovered him kissing a corpse. Doctors explained that he could not separate reality from the fantasy crimes he committed in his head. Searching Hofmann’s house, which he shared with his brother and sister, police found books on satanism and witchcraft. Hofmann had garnered from these books the idea that he could be strong and handsome if he performed rituals on dead bodies. When that had not worked, he had switched to live victims, killing the teenagers. He was never brought to trial but was committed for life to an institution for the criminally insane.

Hedonistic lust killers are probably the scariest and most monstrous of all types of serial killers. Not all of them want to necessarily hurt you or kill you - they simply want to wear your skin or eat your liver or have sex with you severed head. It’s just that your life gets in the way… Edmund Kemper, who murdered ten victims and had sex with their corpses and various mutilated body parts, explained that the actual killing of his victims had little to do with his fantasies. “I’m sorry to sound so cold about this, but what I needed to have was a particular experience with a person, and to possess them in the way I have wanted to: I had to evict them from their human bodies.” Lust killers often have an ideal victim type in mind with fetishistic elements - type of footwear or clothing worn, colour or style of hair, body shape, a ‘cheerleader type’ or a ‘slutty type,’ and so on. Lust killers often need intimate skin-to-skin in their killing, and use a knife or strangulation to murder. Necrophilia is a very frequent aspect of lust killer homicides. They are mostly highly organised, having gone through years of the process of transforming and rehearsing their often bizarre fantasies into reality. Lust killers are often aware that their victim choice is visible to police and may choose to travel to various jurisdictions in both their hunt for and disposal of victims. Because sometimes these killers consume certain body parts or focus on them, dismembered victims may be spread over different locations. The lust killer usually chooses different dumping grounds for each victim.

This is the X-ray of a young woman who was murdered by her husband of a few years, they both worked on the same golfing range. The husband murdered her due to her sexual relationships with other women, he then began postmortum mutilation.  He stabbed golf tees into her face and stabbed her under her chin with a pen. He then shoved a kitchen knife inside her genitalia and pushed a golf ball inside her. X-rays show the knife and golf ball inside her genitalia.

Miguel Rivera randomly attacked young boys in tenement buildings in East Harlem and on the Upper West Side of New York between March 1972 and August 1973. His first victim, an eight-year-old boy, was stabbed thirty-eight times and sodomized, and an attempt was made to cut off his penis. Three others were found in hallways, in basements, and on the rooftops of various tenements, stabbed to death and their genitals cut off. Local children dubbed the serial killer “Charlie Chop-Off.” Witness testimony produced a description of a Puerto Rican suspect who was attempting to persuade young boys to run errants for him. Following a failed attempt to kidnap a nine-year-old boy in May 1974, Miguel Rivera, who exhibited severe signs of mental illness, was arrested. Rivera claimed that God had told him to transform little boys into girls.

Between 1911 and 1912 Henry Lee Moore was a traveling serial killer who murdered more than twenty-three people - entire families. But little is known about him - he is a mere footnote. In September 1911, using an axe, Moore killed six victims in Colorado Springs - a man, two women, and four children. In October he killed three people in Monmouth, Illinois, and then he slaughtered a family of five in Ellsworth, Kansas, the same month. In June 1912, he killed a couple in Paola, Kansas, and several days later he killed seven people, including four children, in Viscilla, Iowa. Moore then returned home to Columbia, Missouri, where he murdered his mother and grandmother. At this point he was arrested and prosecuted in December 1912. But Moore was not immediately linked to the previous crimes until a federal agent investigating the Viscilla homicides was informed by his father, a warden of the Leavenworth Penitentiary with contacts throughout the prison system, of the nature of Henry Lee Moore’s crimes in Missouri.

Between January 1911 and April 1912, forty-nine victims were killed in unsolved axe murders in Texas and Louisiana. Entire families were wiped out: a mother and her three children hacked to death in their beds in Rayne, Louisiana, in January 1911; ten miles away in Crowley, Louisiana, three members of the Bryers family in February 1911; two weeks later, a family of four in Lafayette. In April the killer struck in San Antonio, Texas, killing a family of five. All the victims were killed in their beds at night and nothing was stolen from their homes. In November 1911 the killer returned to Lafayette and killed a family of six; in January 1912 a woman and her three children were killed in Crowley. Two days later, at Lake Charles, a family of five were killed in their beds, and a note was left behind: “When He maketh the Inquision for Blood, He forgetteth not the cry of the humble - human five.” In February 1912 the killer murdered a woman and her three children while they slept in their beds in Beaumont, Texas. In March, a man and a woman and her four children were hacked to death in Glidden, Texas, while they slept. In April a family of five were killed in San Antonio again, and two nights later, three were killed in Hempstead, Texas. The murders were never solved.

Dale Nelson went on a killing spree in September 1970, after a serious drinking binge created in him an uncontrollable rage. He first visited his distant relative, Shirley Wasyk’s house in British Colombia, Canada, killing her and one her her children and raping another. Nelson then drove to the Phipps’ family home, killing Ray and Isabelle and three of their four children, then abducted their eight-year-old daughter Cathy; the following day her body was found horribly mutilated. Nelson was caught sleeping off the effects of the alcohol. He was found guilty of all eight murders and was sentenced to life imprisonment in April 1971. The sheer violence, particularly in the Wasyk’s house, shocked the Canadian community near the US boarder. It was said that after killing Tracy Wasyk, Nelson cut her stomach open and ate her organs.

William McDonald became know as the ‘Sydney Mutilator’, claiming the lives of four vagrants between June 1961 and November 1962. McDonald had been indecently assaulted whilst in the army and sought revenge through the sexual mutilation of other men. After he was found guilty of the murders in September 1963, he nearly killed again in prison and was transferred to a mental institution. It is almost certain that McDonald was a schizophrenic.