“Born to rape” THE CRIME: Electrical engineer, Josef Fritzl ,was no ordinary father. He had been born an only child in Amstetten, Austria on 9 April 1935. In 1956 he married 17-year-old Rosemarie. In September 1967 he was sentenced to 18 months in prison for rape. When his daughter Elisabeth was just 11 years old… Read More »
“No more grannies” THE CRIME: Sydney Australia’s Granny Killer committed his first murder on 1 March 1989 when he attacked 82-year-old Gwendoline Mitchelhill in the foyer of her block of flats in Military Road. He beat her around the head with a hammer and also broke several ribs. She died later that day of her… Read More »
Rolling murdered Christa Hoyt, cut her head off and put it on a nearby bookshelf. THE CRIME: Danny Harold Rolling was born in Shreveport, Louisiana, on 26 May 1954, the elder of two sons of James Rolling, a policeman, who often viciously punished the boy. James Rolling was also a sadist who would catch stray… Read More »
Beast of Bastille THE CRIME: Guy Georges, the serial killer known as the Beast of Bastille, was born as Guy Rampillon at Vitry-le-Francois, France on 15 October 1962, the illegitimate son of an American GI. The Morin family, who had already taken on a dozen children, adopted Georges when he was six. At the age… Read More »
“There was something missing in Jeff… We call it a conscience” THE CRIME: One of America’s most notorious homicidal cannibals, Jeffrey Dahmer was born on 21 May 1960 in West Allis, Wisconsin and grew up in a middle-class family. From an early age, he had an interest in cutting up animals and also knew that… Read More »
Zikode murdered her and then had sex with her corpse THE CRIME: Having suffered the privations of apartheid for 42 years, South Africa had been through a tumultuous time. Just as the country seemed to be settling down, a serial killer began operating in Donnybrook, a town in rural Kwazulu-Natal, the seventh largest region in… Read More »
“Please Daddy, I want to come home this morning” THE CRIME: William Edward Hickman, the first ransom kidnapper in the United States to be executed, needed $1,500 to pay tuition fees at a school of divinity. He decided that kidnapping could raise the funds. He went to Mount Vernon Junior High School and told the… Read More »
“I hope I hear my own blood gurgle” THE CRIME: Born on 26 May 1883, the third of 13 children, in Cologne-Mulheim in Germany, Peter Kurten had an incestuous relationship with one of his sisters. Kurten’s taste for sadism was awakened by the local dog catcher who taught the boy to masturbate the dogs and… Read More »
“This was a targeted campaign of murder” THE CRIME: Nearly three decades after the Yorkshire Ripper (see page 397) terrorized women in the north of England, another serial killer began picking off prostitutes, this time in East Anglia. On 2 December 2006 the naked body of 25-year-old heroin addict Gemma Adams was found in Belstead… Read More »
“You’ll know why I did it when you read my statement to police” THE CRIME: Juana Barraza was born in 1957 in Mexico and worked as a female wrestler known as The Silent Lady but she had a sideline as a serial killer. The press nicknamed her Mataviejitas — The Old Lady Killer — and… Read More »