Serial Killers

While the statistics on serial killings, also referred to as serial murders, are not gravely high, the methods of execution used are, in most cases, brutal. Serial killers employ various means and tools to accomplish their mission. They target certain types of people depending on their age, sex, personal qualities and/or physical appearance.

Childhood experiences, social, environmental and biological factors may influence a person to commit serial murders. Nonetheless, it is important to note none of the above factors in their own individuality leads a person to become a serial killer. As stated by Federal Bureau Investigation (FBI), “… there is no single identifiable cause or factor that leads to the development of a serial killer rather, there are a multitudes of factors that contribute to their development. The most significant factor is the serial killer’s personal decision in choosing to pursue their crimes.”

Also, it is important to note not all serial killers are motivated by sex gratification to carry out serial murders. Other reasons that lead an individual to commit serial killings are: a motive to revenge, gain wealth, or are thrilled by the acts itself.

The following list has not been arranged in severity of the serial killings.

1. Andrea Chikatilo, Ukraine

Nicknamed, ‘The Butcher of Rustov’ or ‘Rustov Ripper,’ Chikatilo was a Soviet serial killer.

A former teacher, husband, and father of two children, Chikatilo commenced his serial murders in 1979. His first victim was a nineteen-year old girl.

Through stabbing and slashing children and women, he felt sexually satisfied.

He was arrested in 1990, and confessed to having murdered 56 women and children. However, he was tried for 53 murders in 1992.
He was found guilty of 52 murders, and sentenced to death.

Execution method: Shooting

He was charged of having murdered 14 girls (aged 9-17), 21 boys (aged 8-16), and 17 older women.

Chikatilo committed the rapes and murders between 1978 and 1990. The victims’ bodies were mutilated – eyes gouged out, abdomens slashed, and organs missing. One of his victims found in the woods had her nipples missing. A 10-year old boy, Dmitri Ptashnikov, was found dead, his penis and tip of the tongue missing. A 17-year-old girl, Lyudmila Alekseyeva, was found dead, slashed 39 times with a kitchen knife. Another girl’s body discovered in the woods indicated she had been murdered with a hammer.

He would eat most of his victims' body parts after butchering them.

2. John Wayne Gacy, Chicago, USA

Nicknamed the ‘Killer Crown,’ Gacy was a Chicago serial killer. He was a husband, father, and well-respected businessman. He owned a contracting company.

Initially, he had been sentenced to 10 years behind bars after being convicted of sexually assaulting two young men in 1968. He was released on parole 18 months later due to his good behaviour.

Instead of rectifying his behaviour, he carried it a notch higher, spelling a nightmare in his community.

Gacy lured his victims, teenage boys and young men, to his home with the promise of money or work. Once they were inside his house, he tortured, raped, and then used tourniquet to strangle them to death.

The dead bodies were buried in the crawl space in his house. When the space was filled with the dead bodies, he buried additional ones in his yard, and others in a nearby river, Des Plaines River.

Gacy confessed to his killings after police found bones in the basement of his house. He was convicted of 33 murders and sentenced to death. He spent 14 years in death row before he was executed on May 10, 1994.

Execution method: Lethal injection.

3. Gary Ridgway, Washington, USA

Nicknamed ‘Green River Killer,’ Ridgway was convicted of 48 murders and sentenced to life imprisonment without the likelihood of parole.

He committed rapes and murders for over 20 years; targeting runaways and prostitutes. His means of killing involved strangling his victims with his bare hands or using ligatures

After killing them, he arranged the bodies in different postures, and engage in sexual activity with the dead bodies.

His first victims were found dumped in the Green River. After he was arrested, he confessed to killing 71 women. He showed the police the grave sites where he used to dump the dead bodies of his victims.

He was caught on November 2001 after close to a decade of escaping arrest. In 2003, he pleaded guilty of having murdered 48 young women (ages 14-26).

4. Pedro Alonso Lopez, Columbia

Nicknamed ‘Monster of the Andes,’ Lopez was the seventh of the thirteen children born to a prostitute mother. At the age of age of eight, his mother chased him from the house after finding him touching the breasts of his sister. Living in the streets was tough for him. At one time, he was sodomized by an old man who deceived him that he would provide for him a place to stay and food to eat.

At the age of eighteen, he was arrested for car theft. When he's released from prison, he moved to Peru where his serial killings began. His victims were mostly Peruvian girls, aged 8-12. He raped and brutally killed the young girls after luring them to unoccupied buildings or secluded areas.

His arrest came into force when market traders trapped him as he attempted to abduct a young girl. He confessed to killing over 300 girls from Ecuador, Columbia and Peru. The police were not convinced until he took them to the grave sites where he had buried the young girls. The police uncovered 53 bodies.

He was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for raping, killing, and mutilating, over 100 young girls. After 20 years of solitary confinement, he was deported to the Columbia border. The maximum life imprisonment in Ecuador was 20 years.

If he is alive or not, is continuing with his murderous acts or not, and if alive, where he is living is unknown. He is wanted by Columbian and Ecuadorian police together with Interpol.

5. Ahmad Suradji, Indonesia

Suradji, a serial killer from Indonesia, was convicted of 42 murders and sentenced to death.

Method of execution: Shooting (July 10, 1998).

Suradji, a self-proclaimed sorcerer, was a cattle breeder who killed women ranging from 11-30 years at a span of 11 years. He attributed his killing of young women to the ghost of his father which appeared to him in a dream. He claimed that his deceased father's ghost advised him to kill 70 women and drink their saliva to become a mystic healer.

He chanced upon the women who visited him so that he could cast magical charm on their boyfriends or husbands to remain faithful in their relationship or marriage. Also, his clients desired to look beautiful and to be rich.

Suradji charged each woman between $200 and $400. As part of a magical ritual, he took them to a sugarcane plantation not far from his house. He buried them on the ground up to their waists, assuring them it was part of ritual. This afforded him an easy opportune of strangling them with an electric cable to their death.

After killing them, he drank their saliva then reburied them with their faces pointing to his house. He believed this act would enable him to gain super magical powers.

Suradji was arrested on May 2, 1977, when three bodies of old women were found buried in the sugarcane plantation. The police in the region discovered watches and clothes of 45 women who went missing.

The trial against Sudji, and his older wife as an accomplice, began on December 11, 1997, and on April 27, 1998, Sudji was found guilty.

His wife's death sentence was reduced to life imprisonment.

6. Moses Sithole, South Africa

A South African serial killer, Sithole was convicted of 38 murders, 40 rapes and 6 robberies on December 5, 1997. He was sentenced to 50 years of imprisonment for each murder, 12 years imprisonment for each rape, and five years each for the six robberies he committed - totalling 2,410 years. His eligibility for parole will only be heard after he has served 930 years.

Sithole, born on November 17, 1964, was one of five children in Sithole’s family. When his father died, his mother abandoned all of them at a police station as she was unable to take care of them. They were taken to an orphanage but Sithole couldn’t endure the abuse and mistreatment he received there. He ran away from the orphanage three years later.

At a later date, Sithole went to live with his older brother, Patrick. However, when Patrick relocated to Venda, Sithole sold the house without his brother's knowledge.

He was arrested in his teens for rape and sentenced to 7 years imprisonment. He asserted he never committed the rape.

In his adult life, he founded an imaginary organization called 'Youth Against Human Abuse.' The mission of the made up organization was to advocate for an end to all forms of child abuse.

His victims were women who he lured by promising them a job in his organization if they excelled in interview. When he met with the women, he took them into a secluded or remote area instead at the said organization.

He beat, raped, and strangled them to death using their underpants.

When details of his fake business were uncovered by the police, he went on the run. Not too long, his hideout was uncovered.

Sithole blamed his murderous acts on women who accused him of rape, and a girlfriend who mistreated him. It is thought the lack of a father figure, betrayal of his mother, and what he went through at the orphanage, might have contributed to his serial killings.

7. Javed Iqbal, Pakistan

Iqbal, a Pakistani serial killer,was suspected of having killed more than fifty runaway children in a period of eighteen months. Before withdrawing his earlier confession and pleading innocent to the charges, he claimed to have killed one hundred beggar children, and was not ashamed of what he did.

Despite his insistence he was innocent stating he invented the story to show the plight of runaway children, he was sentenced to death by handing.

After Iqbar gained the confidence of the children, he drugged, raped, and strangled them. He cut the dead bodies into pieces, put them in a container filled with hydrochloric acid to liquefy them.

He dumped the liquefied bodies in sewers before dumping them in the Ravi River.

The police found two partially liquefied remains of two boys, and some in a container outside his house.

According to the ruling, Iqbal was to be strangled 100 times to correspond with the 100 children he killed, his body cut into 100 pieces in the manner he cut the 100 children, and the pieces of his body to be put in an acid in the liken manner he did to the 100 children. According to CBS News, the judge also sentenced Iqbar to "700 years in prison for destroying evidence - seven years for each of 100 bodies that Iqbar is said to have destroyed by dissolving them in acid."

Two accomplices, including a 13 year-old boy were arrested. The boy and another one were sentenced to prison terms, and the third, a 17-year old boy, was sentenced to death. Iqbar and one of his accomplices, Sadji, 20, committed suicide in their cells. It's reported the two committed suicide by hanging. According to Arynews, the two took a poison a year after they were arrested. A report stated an accomplice jumped from the window of a police's window during interrogation leading to his death.

Initially, Iqbar confessed in a letter, sent to police and a local newspaper, on December 1999, stating he had raped and killed 100 runaway boys (aged 6-16).

A manhunt, the largest in Pakistan, was set up to arrest him. After a month of evading police arrest, Iqbar surrendered himself at a local newspaper office. He feared going to a police station lest he be killed.

8. Richard Trenton Chase, California, USA

Nicknamed, ‘The Vampire Killer of Sacramento’ or ‘Vampire of Sacramento,’ Chase was an American serial killer who killed six people in a period of one month. His nickname is derived from drinking the blood of his murdered victims.

Additionally, Chase felt sexually aroused when he engaged in barbaric acts such as killing animals or through necrophilia.

Chase, from a young age was fond of torturing animals. In his early twenties, he captured animals, tortured them to their death then ate them either raw or blended up. At one point he was hospitalised after injecting himself with blood from a rabbit which he had killed. He would go as far as to bite off the heads of birds and drink their blood.

He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenic but didn't seek assistance for his mental illness. It was thought that he had recovered from the mental disorder only to be learned that his mental health was deteriorating. He thought his mother was poisoning him leading him to leave his parents' home. He had the notion, on several occasions, his heart had stopped or that he was a walking corpse.

His final and gruesome murder involved shooting Evelyn Miroth, 38; her son, Jason, 6; her 22-month old nephew, David, and Don Mederith who had gone there to pay her a visit.

When the police finally caught up with him in his apartment, they found the gun he'd used to commit the murders, a butcher knife measuring twelve inches, boots, dishes containing body parts in a refrigerator, and three blenders which contained blood. David, Evelyn's nephew, was found in a box outside of the apartment in a vacant lot, decapitated and mummified.

He was found guilty of the murders and was sentenced to death in the gas chamber.

The sentence was never executed as a guard found him dead in his cell. He committed suicide at the persuasion of some inmates who feared him by overdosing himself with antidepressant drugs which he had stockpiled.