Monsters

Edward Theodore Gein was born on August 27, 1906, in La Crosse, Wisconsin, the second of two sons. His father George was an alcoholic who died when Ed was thirty-four. His mother Augusta was a devout Lutheran who preached to her sons about the immorality of the outside world, the evil of women, and the certainty of damnation. She was the dominant force of his life. When she died in December 1945, Ed was thirty-nine years old and entirely alone on the family farm in Plainfield. Gein did not immediately begin killing. For several years after his mother's death, he read pulp magazines and books about human anatomy, Nazi medical experiments, and headhunting practices. He began visiting local cemeteries at night, exhuming recently buried women — women who resembled his mother — and taking body parts back to the farmhouse. He made bowls from skulls, lampshades and wastebaskets from human skin, a vest with breasts from a female torso. He was attempting, investigators later concluded, to construct a woman suit — to literally become his mother. He killed at least two women: tavern owner Mary Hogan in 1954 and hardware store owner Bernice Worden in 1957. It was Worden's disappearance that led police to the farmhouse, where they found her decapitated body hanging in the shed and the full inventory of what Gein had been doing for years. Gein was found mentally incompetent to stand trial and committed to a psychiatric institution. He was eventually tried in 1968, found guilty of first-degree murder, and returned to the institution, where he died in 1984. He directly inspired three of horror fiction's most iconic characters: Norman Bates in Psycho, Leatherface in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs.

"When I see a pretty girl walking down the street, I think two things. One part of me wants to take her out and talk to her and be real nice and sweet. And the other part of me wonders what her head would look like on a stick."

Charles Milles Manson was born on November 12, 1934, in Cincinnati, Ohio, to an unmarried sixteen-year-old mother. He spent much of his childhood in reform schools and juvenile detention facilities. By the time he was released from Terminal Island federal penitentiary in 1967 at age thirty-two, he had spent more than half his life incarcerated. He asked to stay. They released him anyway. Manson arrived in San Francisco during the Summer of Love and discovered he had a gift. He could read people — their insecurities, their hunger for belonging, their need to be told they were special. He assembled a group of mostly young women and some men around him, calling them the Family, and established a commune first in the Haight-Ashbury district and later at Spahn Ranch in the Santa Susana Mountains outside Los Angeles. He preached a theology assembled from Scientology, the Bible, and the Beatles' White Album, which he believed contained coded messages about an impending race war he called Helter Skelter. In August 1969, Family members acting on Manson's instructions murdered seven people over two nights. On the night of August 8–9, they killed five people at 10050 Cielo Drive, including actress Sharon Tate, who was eight and a half months pregnant. The following night they killed Leno and Rosemary LaBianca. Manson was not present at either murder. He was convicted of first-degree murder under conspiracy law. Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi's book Helter Skelter (1974) became the best-selling true crime book in history. Manson died at Corcoran State Prison on November 19, 2017, at age eighty-three. He had spent forty-six years in prison. His face — the swastika carved into his forehead, the eyes that seemed to look through rather than at — became one of the most reproduced images in American criminal history.

"I'm nobody. I'm a tramp, a bum, a hobo. I'm a boxcar and a jug of wine."

The Zodiac Killer is the name given to an unidentified serial killer who operated in Northern California in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He is confirmed to have killed at least five people and wounded two others, though he claimed in letters to have killed thirty-seven. He was never identified. He was never caught. His confirmed attacks began on December 20, 1968, when he shot two teenagers in a parked car near Vallejo, California. He attacked again on July 4, 1969, at Blue Rock Springs Park, killing one and wounding another. On August 1, 1969, three San Francisco Bay Area newspapers received identical letters from someone claiming responsibility for the murders, each accompanied by one-third of a 408-symbol cryptogram the writer claimed contained his identity. The cipher was solved within a week by a high school teacher and his wife. It did not contain his name. He continued writing letters to newspapers and police throughout 1969 and into the early 1970s, taunting investigators, threatening to attack school buses, and sending additional ciphers. One of the four ciphers he sent was not solved until December 2020, fifty-one years after it was written. It did not contain his name either. His identity remains unknown. The case has generated more amateur investigation than almost any other in American criminal history. Robert Graysmith, a cartoonist at the San Francisco Chronicle who received the letters, spent years investigating and wrote Zodiac (1986), which became the basis for David Fincher's 2007 film — a procedural masterpiece about the obsession the case creates rather than the killer himself. The case remains officially open.

"I like killing people because it is so much fun."

Richard Ramirez was born Ricardo Leyva Muñoz Ramírez on February 29, 1960, in El Paso, Texas, the youngest of five children. His early life included a traumatic head injury at age two and a formative relationship with his cousin Miguel, a Vietnam veteran who showed the teenage Ramirez photographs documenting war crimes. Miguel later shot his wife in front of Ramirez. Between June 1984 and August 1985, Ramirez committed at least thirteen murders, eleven sexual assaults, and fourteen burglaries across the Los Angeles and San Francisco areas. He entered homes through unlocked windows and doors in the early morning hours, attacking victims of all ages and genders. He left pentagrams at crime scenes and shouted "Hail Satan" in court. The Night Stalker investigation was one of the largest in California history, involving multiple law enforcement agencies and a public terror that kept residents awake with their windows locked in the summer heat. Ramirez was identified through a fingerprint lifted from a stolen car. His face was published in newspapers, and he was recognized and physically detained by a group of East Los Angeles residents on August 31, 1985, while attempting to steal a car. He was held until police arrived. He was convicted in 1989 of thirteen counts of murder, five attempted murders, eleven sexual assaults, and fourteen burglaries. He showed no remorse at sentencing, flashing a pentagram drawn on his palm. He died on death row at San Quentin State Prison on June 7, 2013, of B-cell lymphoma, before his scheduled execution. He is the subject of the Netflix documentary series Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer (2021).

"Big deal. Death always went with the territory."

Dennis Lynn Rader was born on March 9, 1945, in Pittsburg, Kansas. He grew up in Wichita, served in the Air Force, attended Wichita State University, and worked for ADT Security Services before becoming a compliance officer for Park City, Kansas — a job that gave him authority to enter people's homes and cite them for code violations. He was president of his Lutheran church congregation. He was a Boy Scout leader. He was a husband and father of two. Between 1974 and 1991, Rader murdered ten people in the Wichita area, binding, torturing, and killing them in a manner he described in letters to police and newspapers as "BTK" — Bind, Torture, Kill. His first murders were the Otero family in January 1974: Joseph Otero, his wife Julie, and two of their children. He killed six more people over the following years, then went silent for over a decade. Rader sent taunting letters to police and newspapers throughout his active years, describing his crimes in clinical detail and demanding attention. In 2004, he resumed contact, sending packages containing evidence of his crimes. He asked police in a letter whether a floppy disk could be traced. They told him no, through a newspaper ad. It could. The metadata on the disk led to his church. He was arrested on February 25, 2005, thirty-one years after his first murders. At his sentencing, he described each murder in methodical, affectless detail. He was sentenced to ten consecutive life terms and is currently incarcerated at El Dorado Correctional Facility in Kansas. His case is the subject of the CBS series BTK (2024) and multiple documentaries.

"How many people do I have to kill before I get a name in the paper?"

Theodore Robert Bundy was born on November 24, 1946, in Burlington, Vermont, to an unmarried mother. He grew up in Tacoma, Washington, and was, by all accounts, charming, handsome, and intelligent — a law student, a Republican Party volunteer, and a crisis hotline counselor. Bundy began killing in the early 1970s, targeting young women, primarily college students. His method was to approach victims in public places, sometimes feigning injury or impersonating authority, and lure them to his vehicle. He confessed to thirty murders across seven states — Washington, Oregon, Utah, Idaho, Colorado, and Florida — though investigators believe the actual number was higher. He escaped from custody twice. The first time, in 1977, he jumped from a courthouse window in Aspen, Colorado, and was recaptured eight days later. The second time, in December 1977, he escaped from Garfield County Jail by losing weight and crawling through the jail's infrastructure. He was free for forty-six days, during which he traveled to Florida and attacked five women at Florida State University, killing two. He was recaptured in Pensacola after a traffic stop. He represented himself at his Florida trial, cross-examining witnesses and making legal arguments with enough competence that Judge Edward Cowart told him at sentencing: "It is a tragedy for this court to see such a total waste of humanity. You're a bright young man. You would have made a good lawyer." He was executed in the electric chair at Florida State Prison on January 24, 1989. Approximately two hundred people gathered outside to celebrate. His case inspired the Netflix docuseries Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes (2019).

"I'm the most cold-blooded son of a bitch you'll ever meet."

John Wayne Gacy Jr. was born on March 17, 1942, in Chicago, Illinois. He was a contractor, a Democratic Party precinct captain, and a fixture of his Norwood Park Township neighborhood, known for throwing elaborate parties for neighbors and colleagues. He performed as "Pogo the Clown" at children's hospitals and charitable events. He was photographed with First Lady Rosalynn Carter in 1978, an image that would later be reproduced in every account of his crimes. Between 1972 and 1978, Gacy murdered thirty-three young men and boys, most of them lured to his home under the pretense of construction work or other arrangements. He strangled or asphyxiated them and buried twenty-six of them in the crawl space beneath his house. Three more were buried on his property. Four were thrown into the Des Plaines River. The investigation began in December 1978 when fifteen-year-old Robert Piest disappeared after telling his mother he was going to speak with a contractor about a job. The contractor was Gacy. When police searched his home, they found a class ring belonging to a missing boy and evidence connecting him to Piest. The crawl space contained the remains of twenty-six victims. Gacy had run out of room and begun disposing of bodies in the river. He was convicted of thirty-three counts of murder in 1980 — the most murder convictions in American history at that time — and sentenced to death on twelve counts. During his fourteen years on death row, he painted prolifically, producing hundreds of clown paintings sold at auction after his execution. He was executed by lethal injection on May 10, 1994.

"Clowns can get away with murder."

Aileen Carol Wuornos was born on February 29, 1956, in Rochester, Michigan. Her father was incarcerated before her birth and later died in prison. Her mother abandoned her and her brother at age four. She was raised by her grandparents and was pregnant at thirteen, giving the baby up for adoption. She was on her own by age fifteen. Between November 1989 and November 1990, Wuornos shot and killed seven men along Florida's highways while working as a prostitute. She claimed that all seven men had raped or attempted to rape her and that she killed them in self-defense. Prosecutors argued that the killings were premeditated. She was arrested in January 1991 after her girlfriend, Tyria Moore, cooperated with police in exchange for immunity. Wuornos confessed to all seven murders and was convicted and sentenced to death six times. She was executed by lethal injection on October 9, 2002. Her last words were: "I'd just like to say I'm sailing with the rock, and I'll be back like Independence Day, with Jesus, June 6th. Like the movie, big mother ship and all, I'll be back." Patty Jenkins' Monster (2003) starred Charlize Theron in a performance that won the Academy Award for Best Actress. Theron underwent a significant physical transformation for the role. The film presented Wuornos's story with attention to the abuse and poverty that preceded the murders. Nick Broomfield made two documentaries about her: Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer (1992) and Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (2003).

"I'd just like to say I'm sailing with the rock."

Herman Webster Mudgett was born on May 16, 1861, in Gilmanton, New Hampshire. He was a gifted student who graduated from the University of Michigan Medical School in 1884, where he stole cadavers from the anatomy lab and used them to fraudulently collect insurance money — a scheme that would define the rest of his life. He changed his name to Henry Howard Holmes and moved to Chicago, where he talked his way into managing a pharmacy on the corner of 63rd and Wallace in the Englewood neighborhood. Holmes built a three-story building across the street from the pharmacy that he designed himself, dismissing contractors mid-construction so no single person understood the full layout. The building contained a hotel on the upper floors, retail space on the ground floor, and a labyrinth of secret rooms, false walls, gas pipes that could be controlled from his bedroom, a chute leading to the basement, and a kiln large enough to incinerate a human body. He opened the hotel during the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, which brought millions of visitors to Chicago. Many of them checked in. Not all of them checked out. Holmes was eventually arrested in 1894 on unrelated fraud charges. Investigation of his building — which newspapers called the "Murder Castle" — revealed the basement kiln, vats of acid, and the remains of multiple victims. He confessed to twenty-seven murders, though the true number is unknown. He was convicted of the murder of his business partner Benjamin Pitezel and hanged on May 7, 1896. Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City (2003) interweaves Holmes's story with the construction of the 1893 World's Fair, bringing the case to a new generation of readers. A television adaptation produced by Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio has been in development for years.

"I was born with the devil in me. I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing."

Gary Leon Ridgway was born on February 18, 1949, in Salt Lake City, Utah, and grew up in the Seattle suburb of Auburn, Washington. He was a poor student who struggled to read and was described by teachers as unremarkable. He served in the Navy, worked for decades as a truck painter at Kenworth, attended church regularly, and was married three times. His neighbors described him as quiet and ordinary. Between 1982 and 2000, Ridgway murdered at least forty-nine women — the highest confirmed victim count of any American serial killer. He targeted women he believed would not be reported missing: sex workers, runaways, and women in vulnerable circumstances along the Pacific Highway South corridor in King County, Washington. He strangled them, often returning to the bodies afterward, and dumped them in clusters in wooded areas near the Green River and elsewhere in the region. The Green River Task Force was formed in 1984 and became one of the largest serial killer investigations in American history. Ridgway was interviewed by detectives multiple times and passed a polygraph in 1984. He was not arrested until 2001, when DNA evidence collected in 1987 was matched to samples from three victims using new technology. In 2003, Ridgway pleaded guilty to forty-eight counts of aggravated first-degree murder in exchange for a life sentence rather than execution. He agreed to help investigators locate the remains of additional victims. He eventually led them to the remains of four more women, bringing the confirmed total to forty-nine. He is currently incarcerated at the Washington State Penitentiary. His case is the subject of the documentary Green River Killer: A Survivor's Story and multiple books.

"I killed so many women I have a hard time keeping them straight."

David Richard Berkowitz was born on June 1, 1953, in Brooklyn, New York, and adopted as an infant by Pearl and Nathan Berkowitz. He was a troubled child who set fires and tormented animals. He served in the Army, worked as a postal worker, and lived alone in a Yonkers apartment. He was twenty-three years old when he began killing. Between July 1976 and July 1977, Berkowitz shot thirteen people in New York City, killing six and wounding seven. He targeted young women with long dark hair, approaching couples parked in cars at night and firing through the window with a .44 caliber Bulldog revolver. He left taunting letters at crime scenes addressed to NYPD detective Joseph Borelli and later to newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin, signing them "Son of Sam." The letters were written in a rambling, grandiose style that suggested a man who wanted to be understood as much as feared. New York City in the summer of 1977 was already in crisis — the city had nearly gone bankrupt in 1975, crime was at historic highs, and a blackout in July 1977 triggered widespread looting. The Son of Sam murders added a layer of terror that kept women off the streets and drove the city's tabloids to their most sensational coverage in decades. Berkowitz was identified through a parking ticket issued near the scene of his final attack. He was arrested on August 10, 1977, outside his Yonkers apartment. He told police he had been commanded to kill by a demon that spoke through his neighbor's dog. He was sentenced to six consecutive twenty-five-years-to-life terms. He later recanted the demon story and claimed the murders were part of a Satanic cult. He remains incarcerated at Sullivan Correctional Facility. Spike Lee's Summer of Sam (1999) captured the city's atmosphere during the murders.

"Hello from the gutters of N.Y.C., which are filled with dog manure, vomit, stale wine, urine and blood."

Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo was born on October 16, 1936, in Yabluchne, Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union. His childhood was defined by the Holodomor — the Soviet-engineered famine of 1932–33 — and by his mother's stories of his older brother Stepan being kidnapped and cannibalized by starving neighbors, a claim historians dispute but which Chikatilo internalized. He was a poor student, a failed law student, and eventually a schoolteacher and factory supply clerk. He was married with two children. Between 1978 and 1990, Chikatilo murdered at least fifty-two women and children across the Soviet Union, primarily in the Rostov Oblast region. He lured victims — runaways, homeless individuals, and children — to wooded areas near train stations and committed acts of extreme violence. The Soviet state's ideological refusal to acknowledge that serial killers could exist in a communist society severely hampered the investigation. Authorities arrested and executed an innocent man for some of the murders in 1984. Chikatilo was arrested in 1990 after a plainclothes officer noticed him emerging from the woods near a train station with blood on his face. He confessed to fifty-six murders, though he was convicted of fifty-two. At his trial, he was kept in an iron cage in the courtroom. He was executed by a single gunshot to the back of the head on February 14, 1994. His case exposed the catastrophic failures of Soviet law enforcement and the ideological blindness that allowed him to kill for twelve years. Thomas Harris cited Chikatilo as an influence on Hannibal Lecter. The 1995 HBO film Citizen X, starring Stephen Rea and Donald Sutherland, is considered one of the finest true crime films ever made.

"I am a freak of nature."

Jack the Ripper is the name given to an unidentified serial killer who operated in the Whitechapel district of London's East End in the autumn of 1888. Five murders are attributed to him with near-certainty — the "canonical five": Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly. All were women working as prostitutes. All were killed between August 31 and November 9, 1888. He was never identified. He was never caught. The murders occurred in one of the most densely populated and impoverished areas of Victorian London. Whitechapel in 1888 was a place of desperate poverty, overcrowded lodging houses, and a population that included recent immigrants, the destitute, and the chronically unemployed. The victims were women who had been pushed to the margins of a society that offered them no protection and very little acknowledgment. The killer sent letters to the Central News Agency and the chairman of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, taunting police and claiming responsibility for the murders. One letter, sent with half a preserved human kidney, is considered by some researchers to be genuine. The name "Jack the Ripper" came from these letters. Scotland Yard investigated over three hundred suspects. None were charged. The case has generated more books, documentaries, films, and amateur investigation than any other unsolved murder in history. The term "Ripperology" describes the subculture of researchers devoted to identifying the killer. Suspects have ranged from a Polish immigrant to a member of the Royal Family. The true identity remains unknown. The case remains officially open. Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's graphic novel From Hell (1999) and the 2001 film adaptation offered one of the most serious artistic engagements with the case.

"I am down on whores and I shant quit ripping them till I do get buckled."

Hamilton Howard "Albert" Fish was born on May 19, 1870, in Washington, D.C. His father died when he was five, and he was placed in an orphanage where he was regularly beaten — experiences he later said introduced him to pain as pleasure. He became a house painter, married, had six children, and appeared to his neighbors as a gentle, white-haired grandfather. He was, by his own account, something far worse. Fish confessed to murdering at least three children, though he claimed to have "had" children in every state in the union — a statement investigators could not fully evaluate. His most notorious crime was the murder of Grace Budd, a ten-year-old girl he abducted in 1928 under the pretense of taking her to a birthday party. Six years later, in 1934, he sent her mother an anonymous letter describing in clinical detail what he had done to her daughter. The letter was traced through the envelope to a rooming house in New York, where Fish was arrested. At trial, his attorney argued insanity. Psychiatrists testified that Fish had practiced an extraordinary range of self-harm and held a complex theology of sin, suffering, and divine punishment. The jury found him sane and guilty. He was electrocuted at Sing Sing Prison on January 16, 1936. He reportedly told his attorney that the electric chair would be "the supreme thrill" — the only one he had not yet tried. Fish remains one of the most disturbing figures in American criminal history — not because of his victim count, which is uncertain, but because of the deliberate, patient cruelty he brought to his crimes and the letter he chose to write.

"I have no particular desire to live. I have no particular desire to be killed. It is a matter of indifference to me."

Dean Arnold Corll was born on December 24, 1939, in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He grew up in Houston, Texas, where his family operated a candy company. He worked at the plant, was known for giving free candy to neighborhood children, and served in the Army. He was quiet, helpful, and well-liked. Between 1970 and 1973, he murdered at least twenty-eight boys and young men in what became known as the Houston Mass Murders — at the time, the deadliest serial killing case in American history. Corll recruited two teenage accomplices, David Brooks and Elmer Wayne Henley, to lure victims to his home with promises of parties and drugs. Once there, the victims were restrained on a plywood torture board Corll had built himself. The murders took place over three years, in three different Houston residences, and the bodies were buried in a boat shed, on a beach, and in a remote forest. The case ended on August 8, 1973, when Henley shot Corll during a confrontation at Corll's home. Henley called police and led them to the burial sites. The scale of what investigators found — twenty-seven bodies in the boat shed alone — shocked the country. Henley and Brooks were both convicted of multiple murders and sentenced to life in prison. The case received far less national attention than comparable crimes of the era, a disparity that investigators and journalists attributed to the victims being working-class boys from a low-income Houston neighborhood. Jack Olsen's The Man with the Candy (1974) was the first major account of the case.

No recorded quote.

Pedro Alonso López was born on October 8, 1948, in Santa Isabel, Colombia, the seventh of thirteen children. His mother, a sex worker, expelled him from the home at age eight after catching him in a sexual act with a younger sister. He lived on the streets of Bogotá, was taken in by a man who abused him, and spent years drifting through Colombia and Peru. He was imprisoned in Peru in 1969 after being caught attempting to abduct a girl, and was reportedly gang-raped by other inmates. He later said he killed three of his attackers in retaliation. After his release, López began a campaign of murder across Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador that he later claimed totaled more than three hundred victims — primarily young girls between the ages of eight and twelve, whom he lured from markets and villages. He was captured in Ecuador in 1980 when a flash flood exposed a mass grave containing the bodies of fifty-three of his victims. He confessed to over three hundred murders and led police to fifty-three burial sites in Ecuador alone. López was convicted in Ecuador of fifty-seven murders and sentenced to the maximum term of sixteen years. He was released in 1998 for good behavior, handed to Colombian authorities on an outstanding warrant, declared insane, and committed to a psychiatric facility. He was released again in 1998. His current whereabouts are unknown. Interpol issued a warrant for his arrest in 2002. He has not been found. If his confessions are accurate, Pedro López is the most prolific serial killer in recorded history. The uncertainty surrounding his claims — and his freedom — makes his case one of the most disturbing in the annals of true crime.

"I like the girls in Ecuador — they are more gentle and trusting, more innocent."

Carl Panzram was born on June 28, 1891, on a farm in Warren, Minnesota. His father abandoned the family when he was seven. He was sent to reform school at eleven, where he was beaten and sexually abused by staff. He later wrote that reform school was where he learned that the world was governed by violence and that the only honest response was to return it in kind. He spent the rest of his life doing exactly that. Panzram committed his first murder in 1915 and continued killing for the next fourteen years across the United States, Europe, and Africa. He confessed to twenty-one murders, thousands of burglaries, and the rape of over a thousand men — confessions he made not in remorse but in contempt, daring the world to judge him. He was articulate, self-aware, and utterly without hope for humanity or himself. His autobiography, written while incarcerated and smuggled out by a sympathetic guard named Henry Lesser, is one of the most chilling documents in criminal literature. Panzram was convicted of the murder of a prison laundry foreman at Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary in 1929. He was sentenced to death. When anti-capital-punishment activists petitioned to save his life, he wrote to them asking them to mind their own business. He was hanged on September 5, 1930. His last words to the executioner were: "Hurry it up, you Hoosier bastard. I could hang a dozen men while you're fooling around." Thomas Gaddis and James Long's Killer: A Journal of Murder (1970) published his autobiography. A 1996 film adaptation starred James Woods.

"In my lifetime I have murdered 21 human beings, I have committed thousands of burglaries, robberies, larcenies, arsons and last but not least I have committed sodomy on more than 1000 male human beings. For all these things I am not in the least bit sorry."

John Reginald Halliday Christie was born on April 8, 1899, in Halifax, Yorkshire. He served in World War I, was temporarily blinded and lost his voice for three years after a mustard gas attack, and worked as a postal clerk and special constable. He was meticulous, soft-spoken, and wore wire-rimmed glasses. He murdered at least eight women in his ground-floor flat at 10 Rillington Place in Notting Hill, London, between 1943 and 1953. Christie lured women to his flat, incapacitated them with domestic gas piped through a tube while they believed they were receiving medical treatment, and strangled them. He concealed bodies in the walls, under the floorboards, and in the garden. His crimes might have remained undiscovered longer had he not sublet his flat in 1953 after murdering his wife. The new tenant, investigating a strange smell, discovered the bodies of three women hidden behind wallpaper in the kitchen alcove. The case is inseparable from one of Britain's most notorious miscarriages of justice. In 1950, Christie's upstairs neighbor Timothy Evans had been convicted and hanged for the murder of his wife and infant daughter — crimes Christie had in fact committed. Evans was granted a posthumous pardon in 1966. The case became a central argument in the abolition of capital punishment in the United Kingdom. Christie was convicted of his wife's murder and hanged on July 15, 1953. Richard Attenborough played him in the 1971 film 10 Rillington Place, considered one of the most effective true crime films ever made.

"I was the victim of circumstances."

Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer was born on May 21, 1960, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His parents' marriage deteriorated throughout his childhood, and by the time he graduated high school, he was living alone in the family home. He committed his first murder in June 1978, weeks after graduation, killing a hitchhiker he had brought home. He did not kill again for nine years. Between 1987 and 1991, Dahmer murdered sixteen more men and boys in Milwaukee, primarily young men he met at gay bars and bathhouses. He drugged them, strangled them, and in several cases engaged in acts documented in his confession and at trial. He preserved skulls and other remains in his apartment. He drilled holes in the skulls of some victims while they were still alive, injecting acid in an attempt to create a compliant companion — an act he described in detail during his confession. The investigation ended in July 1991 when Tracy Edwards escaped from Dahmer's apartment with handcuffs dangling from one wrist and flagged down a police car. Officers entered the apartment and found photographs of dismembered bodies and human remains in the refrigerator and freezer. Dahmer confessed to all seventeen murders and cooperated fully with investigators. He was convicted of fifteen counts of murder in 1992 and sentenced to fifteen consecutive life terms. He was beaten to death by fellow inmate Christopher Scarver at Columbia Correctional Institution on November 28, 1994. Ryan Murphy's Netflix series Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story (2022) focused on the victims and the systemic failures — particularly police dismissing a victim who had escaped — that allowed the murders to continue.

"I should have gone to college and gone into real estate and got myself an aquarium."