The “Washington Snipers” (aka, “Beltway Snipers” or “D.C. Snipers”) killed ten people within a three-week period in the Washington, D.C., area in 2002. Originally thought to be a lone gunman, the killers turned out to be Gulf War veteran John Allen Muhammad and 18-year-old Lee Boyd Malvo, who were both convicted of capital murder. The media quickly labeled them “spree killers.” Forensically speaking, however, they are probably more accurately described as a serial killers.

Gwendolyn Graham and Catherine May Wood are a rare case in which two women teamed up in a series of sexual murders. Wood was a recently divorced 450-pound supervisor in a nursing home when she entered into a lesbian relationship with Graham, a nurses aide. The dominant Graham told Wood that it would be a sexual thrill to murder six elderly patients in the home so that their last names would spell out the word murder. Their spelling game failed when some of the patients did not die as easily as the couple hoped. Nevertheless, using a wet washcloth to suffocate the patients, Graham killed five victims while Wood stood guard. After each murder, the couple immediately retired to a vacant room in the nursing home and had sex. In exchange for her testimony, Wood received a twenty-to-forty sentence, while Graham was given six life sentences.

The mask of notorious Serial Killer B.T.K.  Dennis Rader.

This was his own personal mask he used to enjoy wearing when he would bind himself up. Eventually, he left it at one of his crime scenes. He would later say that he regretted doing so, and missed his mask. His known body count is 10. He is doing his time at the El Dorado Correctional Facility in Kansas.

The Zodiac Killer

The identity of this serial killer has never been discovered, although authorities attribute at least 5 killings to the self-proclaimed Zodiac Killer. In taunting letters to the police, the Zodiac Killer claims to have killed 37 people over the course of nine years. This killer is best known for the letters and cryptograms he sent to California newspapers than for the 5 deaths that have been attributed to him directly. To date, police only know that the perpetrator is a male who claims to have killed at least 37 people during the span of his crimes in the late 60’s and early 70’s. Because the Zodiac Killer was never apprehended, the California Department of Justice has maintained an open case file on the murders since 1969.  The first confirmed murder occurred on December 20, 1968 when a 17 year old male and 16 year old female were gunned down as they were parked on a well-known lover’s lane in Northern California.

Six and a half months later, Zodiac struck again, approaching a couple who were in a parked car at a Golf Course. Using a 9mm Luger, he fired 3 shots into each victim and turned away, returning when he heard one of the victims moan. He pumped two more shots into each victim and drove away. The Male victim survived the attack. Minutes later, a phone call was received by the Vallejo Police Department from a man claiming responsibility for the golf course shooting and the lover’s lane shooting the prior December.

On August 1, 1969, three letters were received by the 3 main newspapers in the San Francisco region. The letters, virtually identical in nature, claimed responsibility for the golf course and lovers lane murders. Each letter also contained one third of a 408 symbol cryptogram and demanded that it be printed on the front page of the next day’s edition. The killer came up with his Zodiac moniker with the next letter which was received by the San Francisco Examiner 6 days later. It began with the statement, ‘Dear Editor, This is the Zodiac speaking’. To prove his responsibility for the crime, in the letter he described several aspects of both shootings that had previously not been released to the public.

A little more than a month later, he claimed another victim, this time knifing a picnicking couple more than 500 times. The woman died in route to the hospital later that day, while the man survived the attack to provide police with a description of the hooded attacker. Once again, Zodiac phoned police to report the crime and claim responsibility. Two weeks later, Zodiac shot and killed a cab driver near The Presidio. Witnesses worked with the authorities to provide composite sketches of the killer, but no suspects were ever charged. The letters and cryptograms continued through the end of 1969. Throughout 1970, the San Francisco Chronicle received greeting cards and letters from the Zodiac Killer.

The correspondence denied responsibility for various crimes that had been committed, but alluded to other crimes that police had not connected to Zodiac. Each letter ended with a scorecard which counted the number of victims that he was claiming responsibility for. This continued from 1971 through 1973 claiming responsibility for crimes and offering clues to the whereabouts of some victims bodies. One of the final letters received by the Chronicle praised the movie, ‘The Exorcist’ and ended with the scorecard, Me = 37, SFPD = 0.

Minnesota-born Carl Panzram was thirty-nine when he was executed after killing twenty-one people. Panzram was a personality of almost mythical proportions - he committed his first burglary at age eleven, and remained a professional criminal the rest of his life. In 1920, he brazenly burglarized forty thousand dollars’ worth of property from former U.S. president William Howard Taft’s house. In jail, he terrorized the guards and administration by inciting riots, and burning down the kitchen and factory in one of the jails. At one point, he broke out of jail, stole a yacht, and sailed it to Africa and Europe. He lured soldiers on board his vessel, then sodomized them, killed them, and threw their bodies into the water. In prison Panzram wrote a book openly describing his sex crimes, confessing to some one thousand homosexual rapes. Panzram stated, “My motto is: Rob them all, rape them all, and kill them all.” In 1929, Panzram was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for burglary and threatened in the courtroom to “kill the first person who bothers me.” Ten months later, he beat in the head of a fellow prisoner with an iron bar. For this crime he received the death sentence. When an anti-capital group attempted to have Panzram’s sentence commuted, he raged: “The only thanks you or your kind will ever get from me for your efforts on my behalf is that I wish you all had one neck and that I have my hands on it… I believe the only way to reform people is to kill them.” On September 11, 1930, Panzram was led to the gallows and there asked if he had any last words. He replied, “Yes, hurry it up, you hoosier bastard. I could hang a dozen men while you’re fooling around.

The disappearance of a 13-year-old girl in South Carolina in 1975 took police on a sickening journey into the world of serial killer Donald ‘Pee Wee’ Gaskins. While investigating the disappearance, police found two graveyards, one containing six corpses, the other two. With the assistance of one-time associate, Walter Neely, the police identified Gaskins as the contract killer in all cases. Gaskins had strong connections to the underworld. Using truth serum, Gaskins admitted to 13 killings and was sentenced to eight life terms. Unrepentant, Gaskins accepted another contract while in prison, this time to kill Rudolph Tyner. He rigged up an intercom packed with dynamite and blew off the side of Tyner’s head. For this Gaskins was finally sent to the electric chair on September 6, 1991, but not before admitting to 100+ murders.

Dr. Michael Stone’s Scale of Evil

Dr. Michael Stone has created a scale he calls Scale of evil. The scale stretches from 1 to 22 and Dr. Michael Stone places each and every serial killer on this scale all depending on how evil they are.

Level 1  “Those who kill in self defense and do not show psychopathic tendencies.” Level 2.  “Jealous lovers who, though egocentric or immature, are not psychopathic; crime passional” Level 3 “Willing companions of killers: aberrant personality—probably impulse-ridden, with some antisocial traits” Level 4 “Those who kill in self-defense, after extremely provocative behavior toward the victim” Level 4 “Highly narcissistic, but not distinctly psychopathic persons, with a psychotic core, who kill loved ones or family members out of jealousy” Level 5 “Traumatize, desperate people who kill abusive relatives and others.(like to support a drug habit)” but lack significant traits. Genuinely remorseful.“ Level 6 "Impetuous hotheaded murderers without psychopatic features.” Level 7 “Highly narrsasistic , but not distinctly psychopathic people.” with a psychotic core, who kill those close to them. Jealously is an underlying motive. Level 8 “Non psychopathic people with smoldering rage who kill when that rage is ignited.” Level 9 “Jealous lovers with marked psychopathic features” Level 10 “Killers of people who where in the way or killed for example witnesses.(egocentric but not distinctly psychopathic)” Level 11 “Psychopathic killers of people in the way.” Level 12 “Power-hungry psychopaths who kill when cornered.” Level 13 “Murderers with inadequate, rageful personalities and psychopathic features Level 14 "Ruthlessly self-centered psychopathic schemers” Level 15 “Psychopathic or cold blooded spree killers mulitple murders.” Level 16 “Psychopaths committing multiple vicious acts.” Level 17 “Sexually perverse serial murderers Torture-murderers. Murder is the primary motive, following prolonged torture(amoung the males rape is the primary motive with murder to hide the evidence. Systematic torture is not a primary factor”. Level 18 “Torture murderers with murder the primary motive.” Level 19 “Psychopaths driven to terrorism, subjugation, intimidation, and rape, but short of murder.” Level 20 “Torture murderers with torture as the primary motive but in psychopathic personalities.” Level 21 “Psyhcopaths preoccupied with torture in the extreme, but not known to have commited murder.” Level 22 “Psychopathic, serial torture-murderers, with torture the primary motive.”

The Murder of Elizabeth Short, AKA The Black Dahlia

On the morning of January 15, 1947, a housewife named Betty Bersinger was walking down a residential street in central Los Angeles with her 3-year-old daughter when something caught her eye. It was a cold, overcast morning, and she was on her way to pick up a pair of shoes from the cobbler.

At first glance, Bersinger thought the white figure laying a few inches from the sidewalk was a broken store mannequin. But a closer look revealed the hideous truth: It was the body of a woman who’d been cut in half and was laying face-up in the dirt. The woman’s arms were raised over her head at 45-degree angles. Her lower of half was positioned a foot over from her torso, the straight legs spread wide open. The body appeared to have been washed clean of blood, and the intestines were tucked neatly under the buttocks. Bersinger shielded her daughter’s eyes, then ran with her to a nearby home to call the police.

Two detectives were assigned to the case, Harry Hansen and Finis Brown. By the time the duo arrived at the crime scene — on Norton Avenue between 39th and Coliseum streets in Los Angeles — it was swarming with reporters and gawkers who were carelessly trampling the evidence. The detectives ordered the crowd to back off, then got down to business.

From the lack of blood on the body or in the grass, they determined the victim had been murdered elsewhere and dragged onto the lot, one piece at time. There was dew under the body, so they knew it had been placed there after 2 a.m., when the outside temperature dipped to 38 degrees.

The victim’s face was horribly defiled: the murderer had used a knife to slash 3-inch gashes into each corner of her mouth, giving her the death grin of a deranged clown. Rope marks on her wrists and ankles indicated she’d been restrained, and possibly tortured.

By measuring the two halves of the corpse, the detectives estimated the victim’s height to be 5'6 and her weight to be 115 pounds. Her mousy brown hair had been recently hennaed, and her fingernails were bitten to the quick.

The Evolution of the Term “Psychopath”

The term “psychopath” was introduced by J.L.A. Kock in his 1891 monograph “Die Psychopathischen Minderwertigkeiten” in his description of “psychopathic inferiorities”.

In 1939, Henderson described psychopaths in his book “Psychopathic States” as individuals afflicted with an illness:

In 1953, Thompson described psychopaths, in “The Psychopathic Delinquent and Criminal” as “such persons as those who seek momentary gratification, lack discretion, and fail to profit from experience, which leads to repeated failures.”

In Cleckley’s 1976 book, “The Mask of Sanity”, he outlined 16 characteristics of psychopaths:

Currently, we use what is considered the best methodology in measuring criminal psychopathy, which is Hare’s Psychopathy Checklist.

In 1920, at the age of 29, Carl Panzram took the final step in his life of crime by graduating to murder. He lured sailors in New York away from bars, got them drunk, shot them and dumped their remains into the river. After tiring of that, Panzram went to Africa where he raped and killed an 11-year-old boy. In his confession to this murder, he wrote: “His brains were coming out of his ears when I left him and he will never be any deader.” A few days later he hired six men to go hunting crocodiles with him. Once in the swamps, however, Panzram shot all six men to death, hacked them up and fed them to the crocodiles.

Back in America, Panzram shot a man dead for trying to rob him. He also raped and killed two small boys, beating one to death with a rock and strangling the other with a belt.

In 1928, Panzram was arrested for burglary and held in Washington, D.C.. During his interrogation and jailtime he voluntarily confessed to killing two boys. At this time, he was befriended by a young, liberal-minded prison guard named Henry Lesser who had just been hired that year. Lesser gave Panzram some writing materials which the prisoner used to write his autobiography, detailing his crimes and his nihilistic philosophy:

“In my lifetime I have murdered 21 human beings, I have committed thousands of burglaries, robberies, larcenies, arsons and last but not least I have committed sodomy on more than 1,000 male human beings. For all these things I am not in the least bit sorry.” —Carl Panzram

In light of his extensive criminal record, he was handed a 25-year sentence which was to be served at Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary. “I’ll kill the first man that bothers me,” Panzram told the warden, and sure enough, a few months later he killed Robert Warnke, foreman of the prison laundry in Leavenworth, battering him to death with an iron bar. To his evident delight, Panzram was sentenced to death. He refused to appeal, even threatening to kill human rights groups that attempted to appeal on his behalf.

Carl Panzram was hanged on September 5, 1930. When asked by the executioner if he had any last words, Panzram barked, “Hurry it up, you Hoosier bastard! I could kill 10 men while you’re fooling around!”

Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole teamed up to make the deadliest serial murder team in history. Or perhaps not. Due to their seemingly endless confessions and subsequent recanting, combined with alleged “case-clearing” by opportunistic law enforcers, the true totals of the killer duo will never be known for certain. There is no doubt that both were cold-hearted degenerates that took far more than their share of innocent lives.  Both had childhoods that no one would wish on their worst enemy. Lucas was one of nine children born on August 23, 1936, to a prostitute and her legless husband, both of whom were hopeless alcoholics. His mother physically and mentally abused her mate and their children, most of whom were removed from the home or sent away. As for Lucas, he was sent to his first day of school dressed as a girl and reportedly was not allowed to wear shoes. An older brother began engaging in sex with him and introduced him to bestiality in Lucas’ early teens. Adding to this horrid Virginia upbringing was his appearance, which was unattractive even before he lost an eye in an accident at the age of seventeen.  Toole was born in Florida and like Lucas was one of nine children, he being the youngest. He suffered several head injuries during his childhood, resulting in a lifelong struggle with seizures, and was sexually molested. Also like Lucas, Toole reported being dressed in girl’s clothing on occasion, no doubt a factor in his future transvestitism, and engaged in sex with a sibling (in his case an older sister). Toole was also far below average in the attractiveness department and had a speech impediment that made him nearly impossible to understand at times.  Both were already dangerous individuals, and possibly already serial killers, by the time they hooked up in Jacksonville in 1975. Lucas had already killed his mother and raped her corpse while Toole was an accomlished serial arsonist. Lucas began staying with Toole in his mother’s home along with Toole’s young niece Becky Powell. When his mother died, Toole took his niece and Lucas on the road, where all three reportedly engaged in sex with one another. Lucas and Powell even passed themselves off as man and wife though she was barely a teenager and he was in his early forties. During their drifting the trio was surely responsible for several killings. The total number could be anywhere from a few to a few hundred.  Toole and Lucas eventually parted ways, with Powell accompanying her older boyfriend to Texas where they settled down in 1982. Lucas soon murdered Powell and Kate Rich, the woman they had originally stayed with when they first arrived in Texas, in seperate incidents. Lucas had sex with both women’s corpses. He was soon arrested on unrelated charges and confessed to both slayings. For his part, Toole was arrested at about the same time for the arson murder of an old acquaintance in Florida.  The rest of the story is a confusing mess of false confessions and retractions by both killers, especially Lucas, resulting in an almost complete inability to pinpoint what killings the two committed either together and on their own. Lucas was eventually found guilty of ten homocides and sentenced to death in Texas for the murder of the Jane Doe hitchhiker known as “orange socks”, but was eventually pardoned for this killing and re-sentenced to life in prison. Toole also had his death sentence for murder commuted to life and gained additional fame for confessing to the abduction and slaying of six-year-old Adam Walsh, son of “America’s Most Wanted” host John Walsh. Toole later recanted. Toole has since died of cirrhosis in 1996 and Lucas also died of natural causes in March of 2001. 

I don’t know what God will do with me, and since I believe that God directs what happens in this world, I also think He allowed it, permitted it. He could maybe have prevented it. Perhaps He even tried. - Armin Meiwes, The Rotenburg Cannibal

Dennis Rader’s aliases

BTK Ethan Truman Happ Kakemann Bill Thomas Killman The BTK Strangler The BTK Killer The Wichita Strangler (self-named) The Poetic Strangler (self-named) The Asphyxiater (self-named) The Garrote Phantom (self-named) The Bondage Strangler (self-named) The Wichita Hangman (self-named)

The Murder of Elizabeth Short, AKA The Black Dahlia

On the morning of January 15, 1947, a housewife named Betty Bersinger was walking down a residential street in central Los Angeles with her 3-year-old daughter when something caught her eye. It was a cold, overcast morning, and she was on her way to pick up a pair of shoes from the cobbler.

At first glance, Bersinger thought the white figure laying a few inches from the sidewalk was a broken store mannequin. But a closer look revealed the hideous truth: It was the body of a woman who’d been cut in half and was laying face-up in the dirt. The woman’s arms were raised over her head at 45-degree angles. Her lower of half was positioned a foot over from her torso, the straight legs spread wide open. The body appeared to have been washed clean of blood, and the intestines were tucked neatly under the buttocks. Bersinger shielded her daughter’s eyes, then ran with her to a nearby home to call the police.

Two detectives were assigned to the case, Harry Hansen and Finis Brown. By the time the duo arrived at the crime scene — on Norton Avenue between 39th and Coliseum streets in Los Angeles — it was swarming with reporters and gawkers who were carelessly trampling the evidence. The detectives ordered the crowd to back off, then got down to business.

From the lack of blood on the body or in the grass, they determined the victim had been murdered elsewhere and dragged onto the lot, one piece at time. There was dew under the body, so they knew it had been placed there after 2 a.m., when the outside temperature dipped to 38 degrees.

The victim’s face was horribly defiled: the murderer had used a knife to slash 3-inch gashes into each corner of her mouth, giving her the death grin of a deranged clown. Rope marks on her wrists and ankles indicated she’d been restrained, and possibly tortured.

By measuring the two halves of the corpse, the detectives estimated the victim’s height to be 5'6 and her weight to be 115 pounds. Her mousy brown hair had been recently hennaed, and her fingernails were bitten to the quick.