They often say that a perfect crime doesn’t exist because the person committing the crime would do at least something wrong that can help the police to join the dots and reach up to him. Well, today we are talking about the nastiest-of the-lot. The ones who were not just murderers, but more.
World’s most hideous serial killers. Some of these are cringe-worthy, some are simply gross.
1. Dr. Henry Howard Holmes
Henry is one of America’s first serial killers..and oh boy! This has been one of the most dreadful beginning to a list that would follow.
Holmes was born to a mother who was a cold and distant teacher and a disciplinarian father, who would end physically abusing Holmes, as a child. The harsh disciplinary tactics included prolonged isolation and even food deprivation. Furthermore, his father reportedly held kerosene soaked rags over Holmes and the other children’s mouths to “quiet them” when they cried. During these instances of abuse by his father, Holmes found refuge in the forest near his home. It was in the forest that he began dissecting animals and developing his deviant fascination of things, both dead and alive.
Thus Holmes was a weird individual as a grown up. Henry planned his acts like the mission of his life. He built Chicago murder castle in 1893, where he would rent rooms to people to stay. He raped and killed multiple women in this house. Some of these women were his girlfriends.
The hotel thing was just a trap with a maze which lead into torture chambers & traps. He used to disembowel and burn the flesh off his victims in the basement. He used an oil furnace to burn the remains of his victims, here. Some people suspect that this very killer could be a prime suspect of the killings in London by Jack the ripper as he was in London during the same time.
His confessions solved 27 murders but his kill list seems to have gone up to as high as 200.
2. Green River Killer
Gary Leon Ridgway aka. Green River Killer is the most prolific serial killer of the United States. He sat for a prosecution for 49 separate murders. His first few victims were found on Green River, thus he earned the name. However, Ridgway confessed for at least 71 murders. But, the real figure is expected to be around 100. He got this name after the first five cases were brought to the light by the media and because of his pattern of killing in 1980s and 1990s.
Most of the victims have been identified to be sex workers or girls who had left their parents or legal guardian without permission. The age of many victims has been reported to be less than 16 as well. He strangled his victims with his hands and dumped their bodies in the thicket of King County. But that is not where it ends. He often returned to the bodies to have sex with the corpses.
Ridgway revealed the fact about having sex with the bodies only after being sentenced for life imprisonment. He targeted sex workers as according to him they were easy to pick. He buried the bodies after having sex to control the urge of necrophilia. You know the word by now!
3. Monster of the Andes
Pedro Lopez aka. Monster of the Andes has a very different story not only because of the way the killings were done by him but also by the staggering tally he reached up to.
Pedro’s mother was a prostitute and thus he saw a lot of men coming into his home as a child. He was introduced to the concept of sex at a very tender age. He was thrown out of his house by his mother as a child as he was caught molesting his sister. That was a time of brutality in Columbia. For a child being out on his own at the worst years lead to Pedro being abused and molested by strangers.
Long story short, he had a brutal and traumatic childhood which made a deep impact on his psyche leading into unusual consequences. Between 1969 and 1980 he killed around 350 girls. By 1978 he had starting killing an average of three girls per week. He would lurk his victims away from market places with a small piece of jewellery. Then raped them and strangle them to death. In one of his interviews after being imprisoned, he said he liked the terror in his victims’ eyes. He wanted to look at the spark of innocence go out of them, when he performed his crime.
The ironic part of the story is that he was convicted for murder of only 110 murders in Ecuador, and he additionally confessed to 240 more in Peru, Columbia. However, he was still charged for only 110 because of absence of concrete proof for the other 240 deaths.
For all these crimes he had to serve a sentence of only 16 years which was maximum prison sentence in Ecuador at that time. Due to his good behaviour he was released two years before from psychiatric unit from his sentence was supposed to end.
4. Handyman
Edward Gein aka. Handyman in the town of plains field Wisconsin was a prolific serial killer in the 1940s, in America. Fact! ‘Texas Chainsaw’, ‘The Silence of the Lambs, are movies based on real life account of Ed. He would dismember women’s bodies so he could create a woman suit resembling with his late mother so he could literally get into the skin of the suit. He would decapitate women and keep their head and other body parts to make trophies and keep-sakes out of those.
In 1957 police discovered bowls made of human skulls, a belt made of human nipples and several masks of human skin that he would wear and a lampshade made out of skin. After being caught he spent his life in an asylum where he died from cancer in 1984. A chapter of disgust ended with him.
5. Killer Clown
John Wayne Gacy was dubbed as the killer clown because his day job was to be a clown, the kind that entertains children in birthday parties.
Gacy had a disturbed childhood because of a bad relationship with an abusive father. This and having confused feelings regarding his own homosexuality were thought to be the reasons for his inability to ever graduate high school. Even though Gacy had a high IQ, his childhood experiences stopped him from having well developed personality.
He is possibly the first person ever to add this weird feeling of terror to the clowns. Gacy killed more than 33 young boys and men. His victims were lured to his home to see their worst nightmares come to life.
He would rape, smother and murder those people. When police conducted an investigation of his home in 1980, they found more than 25 bodies in the home also a skeleton of a victim whose age is identified to be only 10 years. He was sentenced to death after spending a life sentence of fourteen years and was finally put to death by a lethal injection in 1984.
6. Javed Iqbal
Javed was a Pakistani killer who killed a 100 boys between the ages of 6 to 16. In his 20s Iqbal was arrested for an alleged charge of rape. He said that he was innocent of the charges, but he was still jailed. He was very close to his mother who did everything in her power to get him released from jail. But by the time he got out, she had already died. It is then that Iqbal took an oath of making 100 women cry and feel helpless like his mother did.
Thus, he set out to carry out his oath. He strangled and dismembered his victims before dissolving the bodies in hydrochloric acid and dumping them in sewer. He was caught in 1999 because of an unusual habit of hanging clothes of his victims around his house as a trophy.
The bloodstains and body parts of victims wrapped in plastic bags could be seen around his home. He was sentenced to death in a rather unusual way where the judge told him that his would be strangled to death in from of the parents whose children he had killed and his body would be cut into several pieces before being dissolved in acid, same way as he did to his victims.
7. Kobe Cannibal
He is a necrophiliac murderer from Japan, Issei Sagawa. Before you google it, necrophilia is a sexual attraction or sexual act involving corpses. He got his name from the place he was born in, Kobe, Japan and obviously his obnoxious inclinations of cannibalism. Sagawa was born as a premature baby and developed his cannibalistic desires since he was a first grader after seeing a male thigh. He murdered a Dutch woman in 1981, after which he had sex with the corpse. But he did not stop here but went ahead and ate the body. After being declared insane for his act he served only a 15 months long sentence because of the influence of his rich father.
Thankfully he stopped at just one victim. God saved humanity! Currently, he is free and enjoys a status of a minor celebrity in Tokyo. Just that this unusual celebrity has written two books and has also shared his views on what human taste like. Reportedly the taste is similar to Tuna fish. I just spoiled your thoughts about seafood, didn’t I?
8. The Dracula Killer or The Vampire of Sacramento
Richard Trenton Chase would end your idea of vampires being hot and sexy in less than a minute. Richard like many of the other killers had a difficult childhood. His actions since early childhood were a window to his disturbing adult life .
He started with killing and eating animals for which he spent sometime in mental hospital. Chase soon grew into killing people and drinking their blood and eating their body parts. The man tried finishing up his victims by mixing up their left over parts with soda and drinking it. His total victim count was 6 before he went to trial. In his trial he was sentenced to death by being put in gas chamber. However, that did not happen as he killed himself before he could be put to death by the authorities.
Over the years, studies by psychologists on various murderers, attribute an individual’s disturbing behaviour to his/her disturbed or abusive childhood. Most common symptoms in such cases are arson, bed wetting and cruelty towards animals. These three form the notorious Macdonald’s triad.