In the latest
in our series on crime, we look at some of the most dangerous serial killers
ever to walk the earth - and see how the Mirror covered their gruesome crimes
at the time.Whether it has been Jack the Ripper or the Suffolk Strangler,
serial killers have horrified and fascinated.
As Crime
& Investigation Network screens Secret Life of a Serial Killer tomorrow
night, we look at 10 serial murderers' chilling crimes...
1 - Robert Black
Robert
Black’s job as a van driver allowed him to roam the UK and become a serial killer of little
girls. It has been proved he killed four between 1981 and 1986, but
detectives believe he killed several more. Between 1981 and 1986 Robert
Black killed four little girls, but detectives believe he killed several more
His victims
included:
·
Nine
year old Jennifer Cardy, who was snatched in County Antrim in August 1981. Her body was found
in neighbouring County Down a few days later.
·
Susan
Maxwell, 11, was kidnapped at Coldstream , Scotland in July 1982. Her body was dumped
250 miles away in Staffordshire.
·
Caroline
Hogg was five when Black grabbed her near her home in Portobello, Edinburgh in
July 1983. Her body was found in Leicestershire.
·
Susan
Harper was abducted in Leeds in 1986. Her body was found in the River Trent at Nottingham .
Black was
cornered in Scotland in 1990 after he was seen bundling a
six-year-old girl into his van.
He is now
serving eleven life sentences and will not be freed until he is aged 89.
2 - Dennis
Nilsen
Loner Dennis
Nilsen strangled at least 15 young men and boys who he lured to flats he rented
in London between 1978 and 1983.After his arrest Nilsen told detectives after
killing several of his victims he kept their corpses and slept with him in his
bed for several days before disposing of them “because he was lonely”.He
disposed of his victims either by burning them on bonfires or cutting up their
remains and flushing them down the lavatory.
He was caught
because his ghoulish activity blocked the drains at his home. A plumber found
pieces of flesh in the pipe and decided to have them scientifically analysed. They
were human. Nilsen was declared sane when he went on trial at the Old Bailey
and jailed for life.
Dennis Nilsen
being driven from the Old Bailey after being sentenced to life imprisonment on November
4, 1983
3 - Kenneth Erskine
During the
investigation the victims were examined by Home Office pathologist Dr Iain
West. All had been strangled manually with the killer using just one hand.
When police finally captured 24-year-old Kenneth Erskine they found he was
already on file as a cat burglar. He was convicted at the Old Bailey in 1988
and sentenced to forty years.
In 2009,
after new psychiatric evidence was heard at the Appeal Court , it was ruled that Erskine should
have been convicted of manslaughter on grounds of diminished responsibility. He
was subsequently moved to be detained indefinitely inside Broadmoor top-security
hospital.
4 - Colin Ireland
In 1993 Colin
Ireland , a former soldier, decided to become a serial killer.
He became known as the ‘Gay Slayer’.PA
He decided
the ‘casual affair’ lifestyle of some members of London ’s gay community made them ideal targets.
His first victim was theatre director Peter Walker.After killing him at his London flat he called a newspaper and
tipped them off. Police found Mr Walker naked and tied to his bed with leather
belts. Chris Dunn was the second victim. Police found him naked and tied to his
bed. He had been strangled.
When police
found the body of third victim Perry Bradley – similarly tied up and throttled,
they found the killer had turned family photographs on a mantelpiece towards
the wall – so they would not see the murder.
When the
police found victim four, Andrew Collier, tied and strangled at his London home they found the killer had also
strangled his pet cat.
5 - Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper
Peter
Sutcliffe, became known as the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ during a five-year rampage in
which he murdered 13 women between October 1975 and November 1980. Most of
Sutcliffe’s victims were prostitutes. He felled them from behind with a blow
from a heavy ball peen-hammer, stabbed them, and then sexually assaulted them
as they lay dying. Not all of Sutcliffe’s victims were ‘working girls’. His
last two victims were students. Sutcliffe also violently attacked seven women
who survived, though seriously injured.
Nine of
Sutcliffe’s attacks were in Leeds , four in Bradford , and two each in Halifax , Huddersfield and Manchester . Sutcliffe was caught by chance in Sheffield in January 1981. Cruising the
red-light district, his car was spotted by a police patrol as there was
something suspicious about its registration plates. They pulled him over, and
the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ was finally unmasked.
6 - Dennis Rader
Dennis Rader,
known as the BTK murderer, killed 10 times in Sedgewick County , close to Wichita , Texas , between 1974 and 1991. His first
victims were all members of one family, Joseph and Julie Ortero and their
daughter Josephine, 11, and son Joseph junior aged 9. They were all smothered
and strangled using a combination of ropes and plastic bags.
Detectives
discovered evidence of systematic torture, leading them to dub the unknown
suspect as the ‘Bind, Tie, Kill (BTK) murderer’.
His next victim,
21-year-old Kathryn Bright was stabbed. His next five, all young women, were
strangled.
During his
murder spree the killer wrote anonymous letters to police and local papers
describing his crimes.
Then in 1991
the killings suddenly stopped. For 13 years the trail went cold until in 2004,
for no apparent reason, the killer started to write again to the police, and
using the newspapers, a dialogue was opened with detectives.
In one letter
he asked if information could be gleaned from a computer floppy disc. The cops
said ‘no’ but it was a deliberate deception.
His next
communication was on a disc and from it police traced Dennis Rader to his home.
Rader, now
aged 69 is now serving 10 consecutive life terms in jail.
7 - Albert DeSalvo
Albert
DeSalvo was the Boston Strangler who terrorised the female population of the
American city between 1962 and 1964. He killed 13 times, usually after spying
on his victims and breaking into their homes. DeSalvo’s oldest victim was Mary
Mullen, aged 85. The youngest, Mary Sullivan, was only 19. Although most of his
victims were strangled, one was battered with a metal pipe and another was
stabbed. In 1964 the murders stopped, but a serial rapist spread fear across Boston . The attacker usually wore green
clothes. Eventually the ‘green man’ rapist was caught and revealed as Albert
DeSalvo. Police were able to link him to the murders.
Declared
insane, DeSalvo was sent to a high-security mental hospital but escaped.
Recaptured, he was placed in the tough Walpole prison where in 1973 he was stabbed
to death by another inmate.
8 - Ted Bundy
Bundy was
probably America ’s worst ever serial killer. He was
executed in the Electric Chair in 1989 having confessed to the killing of 30
young women, but the FBI think the true tally of his crimes may be twice that
number. Bundy was handsome and charming. Sometimes he got attention from women
by pretending to be injured or disabled and by asking for help.
Bundy appears
to have started his killings in the Seattle area, where he battered and
strangled several victims. He hid their bodies in remote country areas, often
returning to visit them and committing depraved sexual acts on their corpses.
Detectives
discovered he had decapitated many of his victims and kept their heads at his
home for a period as ‘trophies’. After leaving Washington State he continued his killing spree in Colorado and Utah .
It was there
in Aspen he was first arrested, but he
escaped from custody twice, the second time on New Year’s Eve 1977. Bundy moved
on to Florida where for he killed three more women in three weeks before
being caught, tried and executed. The bodies of many of his victims have never
been found.
9 - Jeffrey Dahmer
Jeffrey
Dahmer was unmasked as a serial killer when a semi-naked man wearing a handcuff
on one wrist flagged down a patrol car in Milwaukee , USA , one evening in July 1991. The man
led the police to an apartment rented by 31-year-old Jeffrey Dahmer. Searching
a room an officer noticed a stack of photos in a drawer of what appeared to be
naked men. Closer inspection showed they were of the dismembered bodies of
Dahmer’s victims.
When
detectives interviewed him he confessed to the murders of 17 men he had lured
to his apartment. Dahmer admitted he had eaten parts of some of his victims and
kept the skulls of some as ‘souvenirs’.
Dahmer was
sentenced to over 900 years in jail, but in 1994 he was murdered by another
inmate.
10 - Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo
Ukraniain
Andrei Romanovich Chikaltilo was convicted of murdering 53 women and children
from 1978 to 1990. Known variously as The Butcher of Rostov, The Red Ripper and
The Rostov Ripper, most of his victims were homeless people who he picked up
near train and bus stations.
His crimes
were notable in their violence, stabbing the victims uncontrollably until his
perverted urges were satisfied.
When arrested
and interrogated, he confessed to some 56 murders, but as three of the victims’
bodies could not be found, Chikatilo was not held accountable for them.
Declared sane
after a six-day psychiatric evaluation, he stood trial in one of the first
major media events of the post-Soviet era. He was sentenced to death and
executed with a single shot to the back of the head on Valentine’s Day 1994
Tell me if i missed the names of killers in the list
Adopted from Mirror news
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