Serial Killers

Killers who took lives in separate attacks, often over months or years.

58 cases

The Toolbox Killers

Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris met behind prison walls, then bought a windowless 1977 GMC van they nicknamed 'Murder Mac' — and began cruising the Pacific Coast Highway toward a fire road in the San Gabriel Mountains.

Rat Alley

In Newcastle's crumbling Scotswood slums in 1968, four-year-old Martin Brown was found dead in a derelict house — and the trail led police to Mary Bell, a ten-year-old girl the neighborhood children already feared.

The Green Chain Killer

When Pauline Lasham told police her son Robert Napper had confessed to a rape near Plumstead Common, they checked their records, found nothing, and let it go — while the attacks along London's Green Chain Walk were only beginning.

The Glamour Girl Slayer

Long before he posed as a professional photographer hiring Los Angeles models, Harvey Glatman was a bullied Denver kid with a disturbing childhood fascination with rope — an obsession that never let him go.

Captain Cash

London heroin dealer Ken Avery — 'Captain Cash' to the underworld — lost everything when he turned informant, so he changed his name to Ken Regan and fixed his ambitions on a wealthy Heathrow freight importer named Amarjit 'Neil' Chohan.

God Chose Us

Two days before her high school graduation, Shari Faye Smith's little blue Chevette sat idling at the end of her family's long South Carolina driveway, the driver's door open and the mail scattered — and seventeen-year-old Shari was gone.

The Canal Killer

In February 2001, two boys fishing in London's Regent's Canal snagged a duffel bag weighted with bricks — the first of six bags divers would recover, holding a woman whose missing head, hands, and feet made her nearly impossible to identify.

The Lady Killer

Neville Heath charmed postwar England posing as a decorated airman with aristocratic names — but when Margery Gardner was found dead in a London hotel room, the trail led to the crowded seaside resort of Bournemouth, where Heath was already courting someone new.

The Broomstick Killer

Doted on by his pistol-packing mama in tiny Rosebud, Texas, Kenneth McDuff grew from small-town bully into one of the most sinister figures in Texan history — a killer handed unprecedented leniency by the very system meant to stop him.

The Kičevo Monster

In sleepy Kičevo, Macedonia, three older women were beaten and strangled between 2005 and 2008 — and mild-mannered local journalist Vlado Taneski covered the murders with an uncanny eye for details no reporter should have known.

Divine Justice

In a Pacific Northwest decade haunted by vanishing girls — several later confirmed as Ted Bundy victims — fourteen-year-old Kathy Devine's 1973 disappearance near Olympia sat unsolved for decades, filed under the wrong killer.

The Werewolf Butcher

In September 1994, nine-year-old Penny Davis wandered off along Patterson Creek near tiny Tonasket, Washington and vanished without a trace — the beginning of a case that led to a man who believed himself a werewolf.

Dead in the Water

Jo Rogers and her daughters Michelle and Christe left their Ohio dairy farm for their first real vacation, snapping photos from a hotel room overlooking Tampa Bay — days before the Coast Guard began pulling bodies, roped to concrete blocks, from the water.

The Carnival Cult

Johnson County police wrote off the pentagrams and '666' graffiti around Whiteland, Indiana as harmless heavy-metal kids — but Mark Goodwin's homegrown cult, Satan's Disciples, had begun recruiting among the traveling carnival crews.

The Mousse Can Killer

Robert Mark Edwards was raised on beatings and addiction and turned early to burglary — and when a woman was found beaten and strangled, the bloody can of hair styling mousse left on her bed became the case's strangest piece of evidence.

A Heartless Mother

After her young son David died, St. Louis mother Ellen Boehm bought a new car rather than pay his $2,348 funeral bill — and seemed more upbeat than ever. She still held a $5,000 life insurance policy on each of her surviving children.

The Family Murders

In 1972, Bevan Spencer von Einem was hailed a hero for rescuing two men thrown into Adelaide's River Torrens. Seven years later, sixteen-year-old Alan Barnes stuck out his thumb on Grand Junction Road to hitch a ride home — and never arrived.

Mommy's Little Helpers

Hilma Witte's Indiana household was ruled by her husband Paul's beatings — until it wasn't. Before the story ended, a grandmother lay dead in her bed, shot with a medieval crossbow as she slept, and Hilma's teenage sons carried the secrets.

The Killer Cop

When a sheriff's cruiser stopped teenage hitchhikers Nancy Trotter and Paula 'Sue' Wells on Florida's Treasure Coast in July 1972, Deputy Gerard Schaefer lectured them about the creeps and kidnappers out there — then kindly offered the girls a ride to Jensen Beach.

The Eyeball Killer

When Mary Pratt's body was found dumped on a dead-end Dallas street in 1990, it seemed another tragedy of Oak Cliff's rough streets — until the pathologist lifted the dead woman's eyelid and discovered her right eyeball was missing.

The Piggy Palace

Women had been vanishing from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside since 1983 — so many, and so invisible, that authorities took nearly a decade to notice. The trail eventually led out of the city to a pig farm and a man named Robert 'Willy' Pickton.

The Alligator Man

Joe Ball — bootlegger, brawler, crack shot — ran the Sociable Inn off Highway 181 in tiny Elmendorf, Texas, a rowdy roadhouse with poker tables, cold beer, and a pit of live alligators. Then people around Joe started to disappear.

Worlds Worst Mom

Driving near Lake Tahoe at dawn in June 1984, Maybel Harrison spotted flames beside the highway: a young woman burning on a makeshift pyre, bound, gagged, and unidentifiable. Nearly a decade later, Terry Knorr told police a story about her own family that no one believed.

The Eagle Scout

Thirteen-year-old paperboy Danny Joe Eberle vanished from his Bellevue, Nebraska route one Sunday morning in 1983, leaving behind his beloved BMX bike and a bag of undelivered newspapers. Just thirteen days earlier, another paperboy had disappeared two hours away in Des Moines.

Pied Piper of Tucson

Charles 'Smitty' Schmid stuffed his cowboy boots with crushed cans, wore pancake makeup, and painted on a fake mole — and Tucson's teenagers followed him anyway. Then he told Mary French he wanted to know what killing felt like, and asked her to pick the girl.

The Bears

Susan Barnes traded a posh Scottsdale life for LSD and free love, then met marijuana dealer James Carson. Reborn as 'Michael and Suzan Bear,' they believed God had tasked them with ridding the world of witches — and aspiring actress Keryn Barnes became an early follower.

The Revolving Doors

Born to a bootlegger's family in small-town Missouri, Charles Ray Hatcher grew from a bullied, brutalized boy into a cold and remorseless predator. His life became a revolving door through America's prisons — and the danger returned each time the door swung open.

The Ice Cream Killer

Since age seven, Esti Carranza had soothed herself with vivid fantasies of killing her abusive father. Years later, she and her husband Holger opened the Schleckeria, a Vienna ice cream shop with a cellar below — and a marriage curdling behind the counter.

The Bayou Butcher

For five years, women vanished from the night streets of Baton Rouge while Sean Gillis lived quietly with a girlfriend who had no idea where he went after dark. The break in the case came from something as ordinary as a set of rare car tires.

The Zombie Hunter

The day before her twenty-second birthday, Angela Brosso set off on a five-mile bike ride along a Phoenix canal near her home and never came back. For more than two decades, the canal killings haunted the Sunnyslope neighborhood.

The Hitchhiker Slayer

In 1970s Isla Vista, hitchhiking was simply how UC Santa Barbara students got around — until young women with outstretched thumbs began to vanish. When Jacqueline Rook missed Thanksgiving with her family, the community's free-spirited trust began to crumble.

The South Side Strangler

A car left running all night on a quiet Richmond street led police to Debbie Davis's apartment in September 1987 — the first in a series of brutal stranglings across Virginia that would push detectives toward a brand-new forensic tool called DNA.

The Cape Coral Monster

Jan Cornell rushed home before her early-morning shift in May 1990 to find her Cape Coral townhouse silent — her eleven-year-old daughter Robin and roommate Lisa Story inside. The DNA left behind would wait twenty-six years for a match.

The City Planner

Twelve-year-old Tina Marie Harmon stopped for a fudgesicle in Creston, Ohio, and never caught up with her friends. Two men were charged in her death — while matching orange carpet fibers kept turning up wherever more young girls were found.

The Highway of Tears

On a snowy November night in 2010, an RCMP officer watched a black pickup fishtail out of a deserted logging road near British Columbia's infamous Highway of Tears. The young driver, Cody Legebokoff, had blood on his face — and a story that didn't add up.

The Christadelphian

Springfield, Vermont, seemed like a postcard New England town until thirteen-year-old Sherry Nastasia vanished in August 1979. Over the next four years more young girls were taken — and the clue that finally broke the case was a church sweatshirt.

The Frankston Serial Killer

In the winter of 1993, the seaside Melbourne suburb of Frankston lived in terror as three young women — a student, a new mother out buying milk, a girl taking a shortcut home — were murdered in a matter of weeks. A yellow Toyota spotted near a bike path changed everything.