Most intriguing serial killers

[maveric]

So many but so few poll choice boxes.
I have a morbid facination with these types as to what makes them do the evil that they do.

My choice is The Boston Strangler mainly because I remember the terror he spread throughout the greater Boston area and I also believe that he was never caught.

[JohnKleeb]

1. damnit maveric theres so many choices

The Boston Strangler is interesting indeed. I think the case of Dahmer is intriguing, as is the case of Albert Fish.

[maveric]

13. I know and it it just dawned on me that I left Dahmer out.

How about this guy?

Andrei Chikatilo

http://www.fortunecity.com/roswell/streiber/273/chikatilo_mo.htm

[JohnKleeb]

19. Yep hes interesting

www.crimelibrary.com
Do you know about Fritz Haarman?
The cannibals interest me, for some strange reason.
Wuernos is definely an interesting case. The Hillside Stranglers of LA are interesting too.

[devilgrrl]

2. NONE OF THEM!!!!!

:mad:

Serial killers are boringest people ever - they kill because they enjoy killing - plain and simple! What's so intriguing about sadistic assholes??? What a stupid question. :eyes:

[JohnKleeb]

4. not exactly dev

Motives really can vary. Not all murderers are by definition sadists either.

[GOPisEvil]

12. I disagree. The FBI's behavioral sciences unit does too.

Criminal profiling exists because someone thought serial killers were interesting enough to study. Those studies and interviews allow police to be more efficient in the capture of criminals.

[pnb]

15. Not true at all

Your assessment is very simplistic and quite honestly, not true in terms of boring and more often than not, not true that they enjoy killing. There is a certain cycle they go through which is fascinating.

My fascination came from wondering what is going on inside other peoples' heads that they can do the things they do while we don't.

They are also generally very intelligent and not the "boringest."

[GOPisEvil]

3. Being from Texas, Henry Lee Lucas - what a FREAK!

Although, for law enforcement, he had to have been frustrating as hell. You could never tell when he was lieing about a murder or telling the truth. He could not have committed the murder he was executed for as he was proven to have been out of state, but he was certainly guilty of many murders.

[JohnKleeb]

7. Hes from Virginia originally man

Blacksburg I think. He is an interesting case indeed and what I find interesting is that Shrub as governor let him live with a life in prison case yet he excuted innocents :shrug: death penalty is always wrong IMO though.

[maveric]

17. I believe that bu$h commuted his death sentence as gov.

And this was hid 2nd death sentence too. he killed his mother in 1960 (???), got the death sentence and in 1972 capital punshment was found to be unconstitutional, he got a commutation to life and was released a few years later only to kill again.
Why did bu$h commute his entence? Oh, he's white, ok. Never mind.

[GOPisEvil]

20. Oh yeah, that's right. He was sent to death row for a murder he

could not have committed.

[absyntheNsugar]

5. Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka

aka the Ken and Barbie killers. Even more intriguing is Karla is due to be let out soon.

http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/notorious/bernardo/index_1.html?sect=5

[mitchum]

42. They are certainly the most banal...

They actually viewed "American Psycho" as an ideal, rather than a vicious parody of consumerism. A real pair of murderous twits.

[absyntheNsugar]

47. OMG...they did???

I never heard that little bit about them, but it wouldn't surprise me.

The two were the embodiment of narcicism...

[fudge stripe cookays]

53. Yep, they were my choice.

What kind of woman helps her boyfriend/husband rape and kill girls? Especially her OWN SISTER!

That's just bleeping twisted.

[nothingshocksmeanymore]

6. Dahmer because of his admission of his sickness, his contrition

and the fact that he wanted to have psychologists make use of him and the circumstances of his death i.e. being in a state that does not have a death penalty but does mix high risk prisoners in with the general population which is in essence a death penalty.

[chiburb]

23. Gross but sickly funny...

I was driving through Terre Haute Indiana and saw a bumper sticker that said "Jeffrey Dahmer thinks Mike's tattoos are the best"!
(Mike's was a local parlor)

[Snow]

8. he Zodiac killer in San Francisco was never caught, either

there some interesting speculations about whether that means he's dead.

And the Green River killer finally has been caught.

[JohnKleeb]

9. Ted Kazincyki (Unabomber yes I cant spell names) was a suspect

after his capture but he was cleared.

[LynneSin]

10. Gary Heidnik (Philly's own Hannibal Lecter)

Only because he was in the news when I first moved to the Philly area!!

http://www.skcentral.com/heidnick.html

[YellowRubberDuckie]

11. I'm going to have to go with none...

I'm fascinated with their psychology, but I think what they did was reprehensable. I'm in a class studying them right now. And you're right to think that the Boston Strangler was never caught. Because the guy they got for it was forced into a confession. Some cops are so concerned with getting a person for a crime, they don't care if it's the right person or not, as long as they don't have to put forth much effort. I'm not saying all cops. I'm saying SOME. I've done a lot of research and reading on the subject, and yes, it's fascinating, but they suck.
Duckie

[maveric]

24. F. Lee Bailey got DeSalvo to confess to get a book deal

and publicity for Bailey. IMO Baile is and always was a publicity whore.
I'm from Lawrence MA and the Strangler killed 2 women there. One of which 2 blocks from my house. Some say that the real Strangler is a guy named George Nassar, a Lawrence homegrown thug who incidental was DeSalvo's cellmate after he was picked up on suspicion.
Nassar, still in prison for murder, was my mom's ex boyfriend from jr. high. She even visited him in jail on one occasion when my dad was writing a news story on the stranglings.

[Snow]

34. Exactly - we epidemiologists find outbreaks of scary diseases

fascinating - but horrible things to happen, of course.

[BigMcLargehuge]

14. Zodiac

never caught. Taunted the cops. creepy story.

[sasquatch]

44. He/She should be up there in that poll

[mitchum]

48. I don't want to be in the poll...

I'm retired. Leave me alone

[sweetheart]

16. Abraham Lincoln, *, and Tim McVeigh

He killed 2% of his country's population, and yet remains a national hero for some.

Bush is a minor serial killer, and rather uninteresting, however
sinister his life story... maybe if he gets a few million americans nuked, he'll be a more major serial killer, but still dead boring.

Tim McVeigh is an interesting serial killer. He never got an open hearing from the media, and i suspect that were that to happen, many
folks might sympathize with his less whacky views. He had real,
personal motives, that really had some power in them.

[Westegg]

39. Lincoln? Sweetheart, we gotta talk...

Seriously. Email me. I need to know more about what you've just said. Lincoln is a hero to ME, based on my education and upbringing---and family connections--- but I guarantee I'm more open-minded than many. So I'd like to hear what you have to say about this. Also, McVeigh isn't a "serial killer." He's a mass murderer. There IS a difference.

[sweetheart]

50. Lincoln beyond brainwashing and media

Now 145 years removed from a civil war, that is still, to this day being fought (with the confederates holding the white house!)...
did lincoln win anything REALLY... that could not have been won with peaceful means (without killing 2% of americans). The british empire successfully ended slavery without killing 2% of its citizens.... and methinks americans would similarly have ended slavery as the rest of the british empire did... peacefully (relatively speaking).

Likely without the military conflict, the civil rights of americans would be even stronger today, as warmongers with guns would not be seen as doers of "righteous deeds". I've argued this revisionism long and short on DU and elsewhere. It is too big a topic to burden
this thread. But i'm up for it, if you are... PM me with the thread if you reallllly want to investigate that.

Likely, you learned in your civil war history schooling that lincoln was a god, the great unifier and all that crap. Methinks the truth less noble. He killed 2% of americans. That would be percieved as rather a heinous crime in any other context, much how americans see the chinese civil war hero??? mao tse tung... who also murdered a significant percentage, but less than lincoln in relative statistics.

Then yankee thinking calls mao a heinous war criminal and lincoln the patron saint of free liberty for black people who to this very day do not have equal rights in america. Lincoln was a war criminal and those deaths were unnecessary.

Karl Marx was on lincon's side, thinking this the beginning of a world wide workers rebellion... When marx is on your side, you have to ask whether you're travelling down a moral path... slavery is evil, and that it is practiced today in greater absolute numbers than ever before in human history (sponsored by US business) makes
lincoln not the free'er of the slaves... rather he created a federal union that believes in its heart that rigtheousness and mass murder makes "justice.".. and this perversion warps american history. The truth is that every conflict america has been involved in since the civil war was self created, and that the wars are just a fantasy to perform mass population control.... marx said that religion was the opiate of the masses... and the religion of the stars and stripes has overtaken christianity in its white supremecy militarist zeal, that we are now all uncounted casualties from a civil war that was
never won.

Winning that war meant subverting the nation to the confederacy, that 140+ years later, we live under jefferson davis' moral thinking... to reduce anyone not a plantation owner to dirt, and using government to enforce this thinking.

Sorry if this sounds spotty, the lincoln worship needs to be reconsidered by the very nature that ameircan schools feel it necessary to brainwash all american kids towards lincoln's divinity.... i smell a fish.

[absyntheNsugar]

51. Oh brother

Read some Howard Zinn....

Note that *confederate* towns actually cheered Union soldiers as they came down. The confederacy was an opressive government based not on Democracy, but on land holding. The more land you owned, the more vote power you had.

[sweetheart]

52. and did 2% of americans need to die to end it?

This is unexplored. I've read zinn's history and as well lies my teacher told me. I accept it is a very gray area as revisionism fails to account for ALL the factors in balance at the time... inevitably.

Your emotive argument fails to accomodate the root points:

1. The civil war is still being fought... and the confederates are in the white house today, destroying as fast as they can any aspect of an egaletarian government.

2. Slavery is at higher numbers today than ever before in human history. (on the back of american economic globalization)

3. America has a religion of making right through arms and has done nothing but damage and mass murder for a century under the false premise of doing "good". Even world war 2 was an outcome of world war 1 and napoleonic and russian revolution affairs that were all military involvements of the US on the post civil war model of using WAR and death to make civil rights... the impossible conundrum... and hence a nation 145+ years after its civil war, that has not yet achieved equality for blacks, women, gays or minorities of any kind... what a bunch of propaganda gas to call this anything but incompetent governance.

4. The massive union of states that was created in the civil war, that represses and perverts the rights of MOST americans and world citizens... this union was created in blood and does nothing but shed blood everywhere it goes... as if by bleeding over everything, justice is won.

There were ways, at the time, just like in our time with iraq or afganistan, were wise leaders could have attained their ends without murdering half a million people.

I agree that the war was about slavery and that the confederacy was wrong, very very very wrong in its approach, but i DISAGREE that war solved anything. War was unnnecssary... and other approaches, untried and poorly covered in history (propaganda) textbooks, could have lead to the end of slavery, and as well celibrating the right to life of 500,000 americans and a perpetually divided nation.

Do you think that "The more land you owned, the more vote power you had".. that this is not true today? America is a plutocracy today... that's pretty close to the evil you mention... and the reason why, i assert, is due to the civil war, that the south has totally perverted the union, like a cancer from within, as the war settled nothing but permanently grafting the governmental sickness of which you speak on to the union.

You and I agree, as you've really come forth with no position on the revisionist point asserted: The civil war is not over, and lincoln has set the nation on a wrong path, himself a mass murder by choice.

A last point is that 2%... consider if a war today killed 6 MILLION americans, the modern day equivalent of the civil war. would that make bush a hero?, or would people be so shaken by the gross loss of life, that they would rather call bush a hero than admit that the entire nation has become criminally evil?

[Blue-Jay]

18. Ed Gein

He's my favorite cannibal.

[NashVegas]

36. The Original Creep-Out

http://www.houseofhorrors.com/gein.htm

[frylock]

40. yep.. i'm going with ed gein too..

such an inspiration to so many.

[PVnRT]

45. My vote goes to Gein as well

Grade-A psycho that guy was.

[Wickerman]

46. In researching some early crime detection history

once, I had the pleasure of meeting the technician who took Ed's Fingerprints - he had some great stories.

[geniph]

21. Edmund Kemper

strange, strange fellow. Incredibly bright, incredibly manipulative, and incredibly fucked-up. He actually provided the early profilers with a lot of insight and information into the mindset of the serial killer.

http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/predators/kemper/edmund_1.html

[maveric]

35. I saw an interview with Kemper and it was CREEPY!

All 6'9" of him. This guy had a calmness and a nonchalance when describing his killings. At times cracking little smiles here and there. He's a very intellegent guy and has helped law enforcement since hic incarceration.
Every now and then TLC or Discovery channel airs a profile of Kemper. Watch it and you'll see what I mean.

[JohnKleeb]

22. Bathory is interesting too

http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/predators/bathory/countess_1.html
Check out crime library.

[absyntheNsugar]

49. Yes, up there with Vlad the Impaler

She used to take baths in the blood of dying women suspended above her....

[Spirochete]

25. Jerry Brudos

Ed Gein, Peter Kurtin.
I think they were the weirdest ones not already mentioned.

[afraid_of_the_dark]

26. Gacy is interesting... but what about Manson?

Charles, that is.

My favorite serial killer from the movies was Kevin Spacey's character in "Seven." Although Hannibal is a close second...

[GOPisEvil]

28. Manson never killed anybody though...

...not with his own hands, anyway. ;-)

[afraid_of_the_dark]

32. Nope...

He got others to do the dirty work for him - just like any other supervisor. :P

[TXlib]

27. Me.

I'm a cereal killer, and a pretty prolific one at that...

[RFKHumphreyObama]

29. Timothy Spencer-The South Side Stranger

I first read about this case in the Reader’s Digest when I was 11 and I have remained very interested and intrigued with the case ever since that period of time. I have been waiting for Crime Library to provide a story on this serial killer for the longest period of time now –he was after all one of the first serial killers to be convicted using DNA-but so far to no avail.

Another interesting one is the Louisiana serial killer case

Both of them are very sad and I feel immensely for the victims and their families

[Whitacre D_WI]

30. The "Mad Butcher" of Kingsbury Run.

That's right, Cleveland's own "Torso Murderer" of the Depression.

BTW, I do NOT consider Flo Polillo, nor the "Lady of the Lake" to be victims of the Butcher; and (even though he was never charged) I think Dr. Sweeney did it.

[bobthedrummer]

31. Jeffery Dahmer would have been my choice

as he hunted here in Wisconsin and was killed in a Wisconsin prison.
:puke:

[ronnykmarshall]

33. The Zodiac

They never caught him. Remains a mystery to this day.

[Westegg]

37. I'll 'ave to go wiff Saucy Jack, guvv'nr...

...As they never did catch 'im, did they? Scotland Yard were a bunch a wankers in them days, though, eh? The only man wot might have got at the true villain was Sherlock 'olmes. An' I believe he done just that in the movie "Murder By Decree." But that's fiction, innit? Fact is, I rather relish all the conspiracies and such like that've sprung up 'round the Ripper these last 'undred years or more. Why, I only recent-like finished th' perusin' of a tome by th' name ov "The Women of Whitechapel" by this bloke Paul West. Fiction it was, or so 'e says...

Still, the mystery goes on, don't it? As for the rest of these yobs, you're best off askin' Peter Sotos. 'Ere's a geezer wot knows his serial killers, innit? Takes a fancy to 'em, 'e does.

Each to 'is own poison. 'At's wot I say...

[maveric]

38. Some say it was a member of the Royal family that committed the murders.

Or the Queen's personal physician. Jack may be the most intriguing international serial killer. The Boston Strangler is my american choice.

[fudge stripe cookays]

54. I actually got an A on a research paper in college by proving this...n/t

[mitchum]

41. Elmer Wayne Henley, Jr...

"Hey Dean, I've brought some more of my buddies over so that you can strap them to the torture board and then kill them!"
What in the hell was going through Henley's head the whole time? Apparently he didn't even share Corlls' psychosexual pathology.

I also find the petty stupidity of Charles Ng and overreaction of Leonard Lake to be pretty damn confounding. Ng shoplifts a vice, runs off, Lake is brought into the manager's office for questioning about his friend, and then takes a freakin' cyanide tablet! That's an action guaranteed to make the authorities wonder just what one has been up to.

[MrSlayer]

43. Richard "The Night Stalker" Ramirez

Just wanted add another name in really. I'm interested in all serial killers/mass murderers.

[Awsi Dooger]

55. Zodiac, because of the Mt. Diablo radian theory

Zodiac sent complicated ciphers. One has yet to be decoded.

Plus he mentioned radian angles at least twice in his taunting letters, a very strange mathematical reference for a serial killer. Zodiac included a map of the Bay Area along with the radian reference, with a circle on Mt. Diablo.

More than a decade after Zodiac's final confirmed murder, a mathematician named Gareth Penn looked into the Zodiac case and specifically the radian aspect, which investigators had ignored. Penn aligned a radian angle over Mt. Diablo, as Zodiac implied, and the lines extended over the sites of Zodiac murders! It appeared Zodiac had selected the crime scenes intentionally, as part of a bizarre game. He even instructed his final victim, San Francisco cab driver Paul Stine, to take him to a specific Presidio area that virtually aligns with the radian angle.

Comprehensive analysis of the Zodiac case is found at Zodiackiller.com. A few of the regular posters vehemently dispute the radian theory, but since Zodiac himself mentioned radians I'm convinced there was indeed a significance.

[Mobius]

56. Im from milwaukee I have to go with Jeff Dahmer

:shrug:

[Spider Jerusalem]

57. Herman Webster Mudgett, alias Harry Howard Holmes.

Subject of the recent book "The Devil in the White City", by Erik Larson; estimated number of victims ranges from around 200 to as high as 300+. Cold, calculating, ruthless, intelligent, cunning, and totally inhuman. Holmes was America's first known serial killer, and remains probably the most prolific.