By: Barbara Maranzani & HISTORY.com Editors
Aileen Wuornos, Ed Gein and Dennis Rader are just some of the mass murderers who have gone down in infamy.
Few people have left as frightening imprints on the public consciousness as serial killers. Murderers like Jack the Ripper loom large as their identities remain unknown. Others like Ed Gein and Aileen Wuornos have inspired iconic horror villains and dramatized portrayals of their wicked deeds on-screen. The result? The truth about serial killers and their horrifying crimes can be hard to come by.
Here are the cold, hard facts about 10 of history’s most infamous serial killers.
In 1888, London’s Whitechapel district was gripped by reports of a vicious serial killer stalking the city streets. The unidentified madman—dubbed Jack the Ripper—lured prostitutes into darkened squares and side streets before slitting their throats and sadistically mutilating their bodies with a carving knife. That summer and fall, five victims were found butchered in the downtrodden East End district, sparking a media frenzy and citywide manhunt.
The killer allegedly sent a number of letters to the London Metropolitan Police Service (also known as Scotland Yard), in which he taunted officers about his gruesome activities and speculated on murders to come. Without modern forensic techniques, Victorian police were at a loss in investigating the heinous crimes and who perpetrated them.
After taking his final victim in November, the killer seemed to disappear like a ghost. The case was officially closed in 1892, but Jack the Ripper has remained an enduring source of macabre fascination. The most popular theories suggest that the killer’s understanding of anatomy and vivisection meant he was possibly a butcher or a surgeon. Over 100 possible suspects have been proposed.
In the era before modern forensics, Jack the Ripper left Victorian police stumped when it came to the killer’s true identity.
Revisit the deadly sprees of some of history's scariest serial killers—including one who was never captured.
H.H. Holmes spent his early career as an insurance scammer before moving to Illinois in advance of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair to work as a pharmacist. It was there that Holmes built what he referred to as his murder “castle”: a three-story inn that he secretly turned into a macabre torture chamber. Some rooms were equipped with hidden peepholes, gas lines, trap doors and soundproofed padding, while others featured secret passages, ladders and hallways that led to dead ends. There was also a greased chute that led to the basement, where Holmes had installed a surgical table, a furnace and even a medieval rack.
Both before and during the World’s Fair, Holmes led many victims, mostly young women, to his lair only to asphyxiate them with poisonous gas and take them to his basement for horrific experiments. He then either disposed of the bodies in his furnace or skinned them and sold the skeletons to medical schools.
Meanwhile, Holmes continued to work insurance scams, collecting money from life insurance companies. Holmes was finally caught when one of his co-conspirators tipped off the police after Holmes failed to deliver his payout. Holmes was eventually convicted of the murders of four people, but he confessed to at least 27 more killings before being hanged in 1896.
American pharmacist and convicted serial killer Herman Webster Mudgett, better known by his alias H.H. Holmes
The woman who became known as the “Lady Bluebeard” immigrated to the United States from Norway in 1881 and settled in Chicago where she married a fellow Norwegian immigrant. Belle Gunness and her husband had four children (two of whom died young) and ran a candy store. By 1900, the store had mysteriously burned down, and Gunness’ husband was dead. Although both happened under suspicious circumstances, Gunness was able to collect multiple insurance policy payouts allowing her to purchase a farm in La Porte, Indiana.
She quickly remarried, but just eight months later, her second husband died. Gunness claimed that he’d received a fatal burn from scalding water and had been hit on the head by a heavy meat grinder. While an inquest was held, there was no proof of foul play, leading to another hefty insurance payout. Gunness then began placing newspaper advertisements in search of a third husband, with the requirement that potential suitors had to visit her Indiana farm. Several prospective suitors made the trek, only to disappear forever. Only one man made it out alive, after reportedly waking up to see a sinister-looking Gunness standing over him.
Nobody knows for certain just how many people Gunness murdered, but it seems she herself met a grisly end. In February 1908, a fire devastated the farm. Amongst the wreckage were the bodies of Gunness’ remaining children and the decapitated corpse of a woman. Although officials said the remains belonged to Gunness, doubt quickly spread given that the body was much smaller than the tall, heavyset Belle. The search for her missing head (which never turned up) led to the gruesome discovery of almost a dozen bodies, including the missing suitors and several children.
Ray Lamphere, a former farmhand that Gunness had fired a few years earlier and later claimed was threatening her life, was arrested and tried for the crimes but was only convicted of arson. Gunness’ true fate remains unknown, though unverified “sightings” continued for decades after her death.
Belle Gunness killed up to 15 men for their insurance.
The man whose macabre and horrific acts helped inspire Psycho, Silence of the Lambs and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre grew up in a rural Wisconsin farming town. Ed Gein had an isolated, troubled childhood. His father was an alcoholic, and his puritanical, domineering mother instilled in her son a pathological fear of both women and sex. When his father, brother and mother died within a 5-year period, he was left alone at the family farm, where he eventually cordoned off parts of the house turning it into a shrine, of sorts, to his mother.
More than a decade later, in 1957, local police arrived at the farm to follow up on a tip regarding missing hardware store owner Bernice Worden. They discovered Worden’s headless corpse hanging upside down from the rafters. Their search of the property revealed a hall of horrors that included human body parts turned into household items such as chairs and bowls, faces used as wall hangings and a vest made of a human torso. Gein had fashioned many of these gruesome items after stealing several bodies from their graves. He said he was using the body parts to assemble a new version of his beloved mother.
Gein, who also killed a woman named Mary Hogan, was diagnosed with schizophrenia and initially declared unfit for trial. A decade later, he was convicted of Worden’s murder but was declared insane at the time of the crime. He spent the rest of his life in a mental hospital and died of complications from cancer in 1984.
In 1957, Ed Gein (left) admitted to murdering two women and committing a series of grave robberies.
Handsome, well-educated and brimming with charm, Ted Bundy seemed the unlikeliest of serial killers. That made his decade-long, multistate killing spree all the more surprising—and to some, appealing. Born to an unwed, teenage mother, Bundy never learned his father’s identity and was raised believing that his grandmother was actually his mother (and his mother actually his sister).
Following a difficult adolescence, Bundy graduated from the University of Washington and soon embarked on his murderous spree, killing his first victim in Seattle in 1966. Focusing primarily on attractive college coeds, Bundy committed a series of murders across the Pacific Northwest. He continued on to Utah and Colorado, killing several more women before being arrested. Despite being convicted of kidnapping, he managed to escape police custody not once, but twice, while awaiting trial in Colorado. He moved to Florida, where he killed several members of a sorority and his final victim, a 12-year-old girl who he raped and murdered.
When Bundy was finally apprehended while driving a stolen car a week after his last murder, his trial quickly became a media sensation. It was the first murder trial to be fully televised and featured Bundy front-and-center acting as one of his own defense attorneys. He became a media star, welcoming journalists to his cell, receiving letters of admiration from lovelorn fans (and even marrying one of them) and providing an endless list of clues about additional murders he might have committed in the hopes of delaying his execution. It didn’t work; he was executed in the electric chair in 1989 with the true number of his victims unknown.
Ted Bundy is indicted on two murder charges in Florida’s Leon County jail.
To most of his suburban Chicago neighbors, John Wayne Gacy was a friendly man who threw popular block parties, volunteered in local Democratic politics, had a successful construction business and often performed as a clown at local children’s parties. But Gacy, who had at one point served a stint in prison for sexually assaulting a teenage boy, was hiding a horrific secret right beneath his neighbors’ unseeing eyes.
In 1978, police obtained a search warrant for Gacy’s house after a 15-year-old boy, in search of construction work and last seen with Gacy, went missing. At the home, authorities found a class ring and clothing belonging to several young men who were previously reported missing. In a 4-foot crawl space beneath the house, where a penetrating odor was present, they were shocked to find the decomposing bodies of 29 boys and teenagers that Gacy had raped and murdered. Gacy’s ex-wife had complained about the odor for years while they were still married, but Gacy had chalked it up to moisture-caused mildew.
Some people weren’t surprised when Gacy’s true identity was revealed. Family members of several of the victims had previously pointed to him as a possible suspect, leading to criticism of law enforcement for not acting sooner.
In addition to the bodies found at his house, Gacy admitted to killing several additional men and disposing of their bodies in a nearby lake. His attempts at presenting an insanity defense failed, and he was convicted on 33 counts of murder and executed by lethal injection in 1994.
John Wayne Gacy was charged with committing 33 murders. He was later executed by lethal injection.
One of history’s deadliest serial killers was a married family man who used his position as a popular British physician to commit 218 credited murders (and as many as 250). Harold Shipman began his murderous spree in 1972. It’s believed he killed at least 71 patients while working at his first practice and doubled that number at a second practice he joined after butting heads with colleagues who found him arrogant, brusque and overconfident.
Finally, in 1998, both a local undertaker and another doctor noticed the unusually high number of cremation certificates Shipman had signed off on. They also noticed striking similarities in the recently deceased patients themselves; the majority were elderly women who were found sitting up and fully clothed, not in bed as would usually be the case with the gravely ill. Despite these clues, the shoddily handled initial investigation allowed Shipman to kill three more times.
Shipman’s luck ran out later that year, when the daughter of his final victim, lawyer Kathleen Grundy, claimed he’d not only killed her mother but had also tried to create a new, fake will, naming him as her sole beneficiary. Unlike his earlier victims, Grundy had not been cremated, and an autopsy revealed lethally high levels of diamorphine (the drug Shipman used for most of his killings). He was formally charged with 15 murders and was convicted and sentenced to life without parole in 2000. Four years later, Shipman died by suicide in his cell. He never admitted to any of the killings.
Dr. Harold Shipman earned the nickname “Dr. Death” after his horrific killing spree of more than 200 patients came to light.
From an early age, Aileen Wuornos seemed prime for a life of crime. A victim of horrific abuse since childhood, she was forced to survive alone in the Michigan woods as a kid and turned to sex work and theft to get by. Over the years, her rap sheet grew longer and increasingly violent.
Then, in 1989, Wuornos committed her first murder during a sexual encounter in a remote part of central Florida. She shot 51-year-old Richard Mallory and later claimed she acted in self-defense after he beat, raped and sodomized her. Yet, it sparked a killing spree of at least six other middle-aged men. Wuornos typically took her victims to an isolated place, shot them several times then robbed them. Their bodies were usually found weeks later after being dumped in the woods on the side of the highway, and their vehicles were often stolen, then abandoned.
Noticing the trend, law enforcement quickly matched crime scene fingerprints with Wuornos’ prints, which were easily available from her long and colorful criminal record. She was arrested in 1991 and confessed to the murders during phone calls with an accomplice. Wuornos’ self-defense claims could hardly stack up to the overwhelming evidence against her. By 1993, she had received six death sentences. The Damsel of Death was executed by lethal injection in 2002.
Aileen Wuornos confessed to killing seven men and was executed in 2002.
Echoing John Wayne Gacy, Dennis Rader was the ideal all-American dad and military veteran. He was married with two kids, president of his neighborhood church council and a leader of the local Cub Scout troop. But beneath his benign exterior, Rader hid a dark secret. For years, he terrorized the Wichita, Kansas, area as the “BTK Killer” whose self-chosen moniker stood for “bind, torture, kill.”
The serial murderer claimed the lives of at least 10 people, including some children, from 1974 to 1991. Wanting publicity for his crimes, he began leaving hints and sending notes to local media outlets several months after committing his first murders. Even so, authorities couldn’t crack the case, and Rader eventually went dormant.
The monster hiding in plain sight nearly got away with murder, but a 2004 newspaper article about the 30th anniversary of his first killings spurred Rader to write another series of anonymous notes. Police finally pinpointed him as a suspect after BTK sent authorities a floppy disk that contained identifying information. Once in police custody, Rader confessed to his crimes and later pleaded guilty to 10 murders in 2005. He remains imprisoned for life today, and authorities continue to question whether he was responsible for additional killings in Kansas, Oklahoma and Missouri.
Dennis Rader was identified as the BTK Killer 14 years after committing his last known murder. He was sentenced to 10 consecutive life sentences in 2005.
Jeffrey Dahmer committed his first murder in 1978 when he was just 18. He would go on killing until his arrest in 1991, after a man escaped his clutches and hailed down police near Milwaukee. When the victim led police back to his captor’s apartment, they discovered photographs of dismembered bodies, the severed heads and genitalia of several other men and a tub full of acid that Dahmer had used to dispose of some of his 17 victims.
Dahmer had lived a shiftless life, dropping out of college and the Army and living with various family members before being kicked out by his grandmother and settling in his Milwaukee apartment. Three years before his 1991 arrest—and with several murders already under his belt—Dahmer was convicted of drugging and sexually molesting a young teenager. After serving only a year, he was released and continued his killing binge, which focused almost entirely on young men of color.
Dahmer’s sensational trial, featuring lurid descriptions of his eating the body parts of some of his victims and admissions of necrophilia, renewed the world’s interest in serial killers. In 1992, Dahmer was sentenced to 957 years in jail but was killed by a fellow inmate just two years later.
Jeffrey Dahmer at his initial appearance at the Milwaukee County Circuit Court, where he was charged with four counts of first-degree intentional homicide on July 26, 1991. Dahmer was arrested after police found the body parts of 11 men in his apartment.
If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts or self-harming behaviors, call or text 988 to get help from the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
Holmes allegedly killed as many as 200 by luring visitors to his lair during the Chicago World's Fair.
The elusive killer has never been found. Here are the crimes attributed to him.
Some have been broken, while others remain stubbornly resistant to code-crackers.
Barbara Maranzani is a New York–based writer and producer covering history, politics, pop culture, and more. She is a frequent contributor to The History Channel, Biography, A&E and other publications.
HISTORY.com works with a wide range of writers and editors to create accurate and informative content. All articles are regularly reviewed and updated by the HISTORY.com team. Articles with the “HISTORY.com Editors” byline have been written or edited by the HISTORY.com editors, including Amanda Onion, Missy Sullivan, Matt Mullen, Christian Zapata, Cristiana Lombardo and Adrienne Donica.
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