The World's Most Notorious Serial Killers: The Definitive Guide (2026)

Ed Gein occupies a unique position in the catalogue of American crime — not because of his victim count, which was relatively small, but because of what police found when they searched his farmhouse in Plainfield, Wisconsin in November 1957. The discoveries there were so extreme that they permanently altered American culture’s understanding of what a human being was capable of, inspiring three of the most influential horror films ever made.

Gein was the product of an extraordinarily warped upbringing. His mother Augusta was a domineering religious zealot who taught her sons that women were instruments of sin and that the world beyond their isolated farm was moral filth. Gein idolised her and was psychologically devastated by her death in 1945. He was 39, alone on the farm, and entirely without moorings. He began reading anatomy books and literature about Nazi experiments. He started visiting graveyards and exhuming the bodies of recently buried women, particularly those who resembled his mother. He made household objects and clothing from human skin and bones: lampshades, chair upholstery, wastebaskets, a vest with breasts still attached that he would wear while dancing outside at night.

He killed at least two women: tavern owner Mary Hogan in 1954 and hardware store owner Bernice Worden in 1957, whose headless body was found strung up in his shed when police arrived. Gein was found not guilty by reason of insanity and confined to a psychiatric institution. He died of respiratory failure on July 26, 1984, aged 77. His Plainfield farmhouse was burned to the ground by locals shortly after his arrest.

Ted Bundy remains the most culturally prominent serial killer in American history — not because of his victim count, but because of the chilling contrast between his outward appearance and his crimes. He was handsome, articulate, and studied law. He volunteered on a suicide hotline. He was described by those who knew him as charming and thoughtful. Between 1974 and 1978, he abducted, raped, and murdered at least 30 young women and girls across seven states, though he hinted before his execution that the true total was higher.

His method was predatory and deliberate. He would approach women in daylight with a fake cast on his arm, asking for help carrying something to his car. He sometimes impersonated police officers. Once he had a victim isolated, he beat them with a crowbar, then raped and murdered them. He revisited body dump sites to have sex with the corpses until decomposition made this impossible. He escaped from custody twice — once by leaping from a courthouse window during a court appearance in Aspen, and once by squeezing through a ceiling crawlspace at a Glenwood Springs jail.

After his final arrest in Florida, Bundy represented himself at his murder trial for the Chi Omega sorority house killings — a macabre spectacle that attracted national media attention. He was convicted and sentenced to death three times. On the eve of his execution, he gave a series of interviews claiming his violence had been driven by an addiction to violent pornography — a claim that was met with widespread scepticism from psychologists. He was executed by electric chair at Florida State Prison on January 24, 1989. His last meal was steak and eggs. He chose not to eat it.

John Wayne Gacy was a Democratic Party precinct captain in Chicago, a successful contractor, an organiser of neighbourhood block parties, and a man who regularly performed as “Pogo the Clown” at children’s hospitals. Between 1972 and 1978, he also tortured and murdered 33 young men and boys, burying 26 of them in the crawl space beneath his house, throwing the rest into the Des Plaines River when he ran out of room.

Gacy lured his victims — mostly young men seeking construction work — by offering them jobs or simply inviting them inside. He would then trick them into wearing handcuffs by demonstrating a “magic trick,” and once restrained, would torture, rape, and kill them using a rope or a board pressed against their throats. Police discovered the crawl space in December 1978 only because neighbours had reported a persistent foul smell coming from his property.

Gacy confessed to 33 murders and told investigators he had lost count. His defence team argued diminished responsibility; he claimed that a separate personality — “Jack Hanley” — was responsible for the murders. The jury deliberated for under two hours. He was convicted of all 33 murders and sentenced to death. Executed by lethal injection on May 10, 1994, Gacy’s reported last words were “Kiss my ass.” His crawl space had to be excavated by a forensic team over several weeks; four victims were never identified and remain listed as John Does.

Jeffrey Dahmer’s crimes were so extreme in their nature — involving drugging, murder, dismemberment, necrophilia, and cannibalism — that they shocked even experienced law enforcement officers. Between 1978 and 1991, he killed 17 men and boys, primarily gay men of colour whom he met at bars and bathhouses in Milwaukee, luring them back to his apartment with the promise of money for photographs.

Dahmer’s methods evolved over time. In his early killings he used blunt force; later he experimented with drilling holes into victims’ skulls and injecting hydrochloric acid into their brains, attempting to create zombie-like sexual objects. He kept skulls, hands, and genitalia as trophies. He consumed the hearts and flesh of several victims, later telling investigators he did this because he believed his victims would “become a part of him.”

The most disturbing episode surrounding Dahmer’s crimes came in May 1991. A 14-year-old boy named Konerak Sinthasomphone escaped Dahmer’s apartment naked and disoriented. Two women who called police to help him were told by responding officers that he was Dahmer’s adult boyfriend and they watched as Dahmer escorted the boy back inside. The boy was dead within hours. The officers involved were later dismissed. Dahmer was finally arrested in July 1991 when Tracy Edwards escaped, still wearing handcuffs, and flagged down police. Dahmer was convicted of 15 murders in 1992 and sentenced to 15 consecutive life terms. He was beaten to death by fellow inmate Christopher Scarver with a metal bar on November 28, 1994.

Gary Ridgway is the most prolific convicted serial killer in American history. Over nearly two decades, he targeted women working in street-level sex work and young runaways along Pacific Highway South near Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. He chose these victims deliberately and calculatingly — “because I thought I could kill as many of them as I wanted without getting caught,” he told investigators after his arrest.

He strangled his victims by hand, then returned to the body sites to engage in necrophilia. He was investigated as a suspect as early as 1982, passed a polygraph test in 1984, and was not arrested until 2001, when improved DNA technology matched a saliva sample from 1987 to semen found on victims. He confessed to 48 murders, then pleaded guilty to a 49th in 2011 when additional remains were identified. He told investigators he had killed approximately 71 women and could not remember all their names or faces. In September 2024, aged 75, Ridgway was briefly transferred from Washington State Penitentiary to the King County Jail after he told investigators he could lead them to the remains of additional unidentified victims. The investigation remains open.

Ridgway avoided the death penalty through a plea deal in which he agreed to help locate missing victims — a decision by prosecutors that was controversial but driven by the needs of victim families who needed closure. As of December 2025, reports indicate he may be receiving end-of-life care, though the Washington State Department of Corrections disputes this.

David Berkowitz terrorised New York City for over a year, shooting at young couples and lone women sitting in parked cars or walking on streets in the Bronx and Queens. Six people were killed and seven wounded before he was caught in August 1977. The city’s fear during the 13-month killing spree was intensified by taunting letters Berkowitz sent to the NYPD and to newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin, in which he signed himself “Son of Sam” and mocked investigators.

Berkowitz was identified not through forensic evidence but through a parking ticket — a cream-coloured Ford Galaxy parked near the final crime scene had received a ticket, and the car was traced to Berkowitz. Police found an arsenal in his apartment and a letter that began “I am a monster. I am the Son of Sam.” Berkowitz initially attributed his killings to orders from a demon transmitted through a neighbour’s dog. He later admitted this story was invented to support an insanity defence — the real motivations, he said, were rage toward women stemming from his abandonment by his biological mother and repeated rejection. He received six consecutive 25-years-to-life sentences and has been denied parole 13 times, most recently in 2024. He became a born-again Christian in prison and now advocates against his own release.

Dean Corll was a Houston candy factory worker who, with two teenage accomplices — Elmer Wayne Henley and David Brooks — abducted, tortured, raped, and murdered at least 28 boys between 1970 and 1973. Corll would pay Henley and Brooks $200 per victim recruited. The boys were strapped to a plywood “torture board” in his home and subjected to prolonged abuse before being killed by shooting or strangulation. Bodies were buried across three sites including a boat shed Corll rented for the purpose.

Corll’s crimes only came to light when Henley, 17, shot Corll dead on August 8, 1973, after Corll threatened to kill both him and two friends he had brought to the house. Henley then called police himself. The subsequent excavation of the boat shed — at the time the largest mass grave in US history — shocked the nation. Corll was never prosecuted because he was dead. Henley was convicted of six murders and sentenced to six consecutive 99-year terms. Brooks received a life sentence. At the time of the discovery, the case temporarily displaced the Manson murders as the most notorious crime in American history.

Aileen Wuornos was a sex worker operating along Florida’s highways who shot and killed seven of her male clients between 1989 and 1990. She is among the most culturally discussed female killers in American history — though the media label “America’s first female serial killer” is historically inaccurate. Women have killed serially throughout history; Wuornos was unusual because she killed strangers with a firearm rather than intimates with poison, which is statistically atypical for female killers.

Wuornos claimed throughout her trial that all seven men had either raped or attempted to rape her — that she acted in self-defence each time. Her first victim, Richard Mallory, was later confirmed to have a prior conviction for violent rape in Maryland, a fact investigators had withheld and that was not presented to the jury. Whether this changes the moral calculus of the case remains disputed. She later recanted her self-defence claims entirely, saying she wanted to die and no longer wished to fight her execution.

Her background was one of almost unrelenting abuse and abandonment: abandoned by her mother as a toddler, raised by alcoholic grandparents, allegedly sexually abused from childhood, pregnant and homeless at 14. Charlize Theron won the Academy Award for Best Actress playing her in the 2003 film Monster. Wuornos was executed by lethal injection on October 9, 2002. She declined a last meal, accepting only a cup of coffee. Her final words: “I’ll be back — like the movie, big mothership and all.”

The Zodiac Killer remains the most famous unsolved serial murder case in American history. Between December 1968 and October 1969, a killer attacked at least five people — killing five and wounding two — in and around the San Francisco Bay Area. The killer then sent a series of taunting letters to Bay Area newspapers, including four cryptograms, claiming a total of 37 murders. Only one cryptogram has been definitively solved — by a high school teacher and his wife in 1969. In it, the killer wrote that he killed for the thrill, and that victims would become his slaves in the afterlife.

The case generated one of the most extensive amateur and professional investigations in criminal history. Hundreds of suspects have been proposed over the decades. The most prominent is Arthur Leigh Allen, a former school teacher and convicted sex offender who was investigated by police on multiple occasions but was never charged — DNA testing of a stamp on a Zodiac letter did not match Allen, though investigators note the killer may have had someone else lick it. In December 2020, a team of amateur codebreakers called The Beast cracked the “340 cipher,” a cryptogram the Zodiac had sent in 1969 that had defeated experts for 51 years. The solved message contained no identifying information.

The San Francisco Police Department officially lists the case as open. No arrest has ever been made.

Between June 1962 and January 1964, 13 women were murdered in the Boston area — most sexually assaulted and strangled, their bodies left in a deliberately posed manner. The killings created widespread terror across the city. Albert DeSalvo, already imprisoned for unrelated sexual assaults, confessed in 1964 to being the Boston Strangler and provided detailed information about each murder. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and was stabbed to death by an unknown attacker in his cell at Walpole State Prison on November 25, 1973.

What makes the case genuinely unresolved is that DeSalvo’s guilt is seriously disputed by investigators and criminologists. He was never tried for the stranglings — his confession was inadmissible because it was made during a psychiatric evaluation. Multiple experienced investigators believed the murders were too varied in method, victim type, and signature to be the work of a single killer. In 2013, DNA testing on evidence from the final victim, Mary Sullivan, did not match DeSalvo — but did match an unidentified male. DeSalvo’s body was subsequently exhumed; his DNA matched the crime scene sample. However, investigators note this could mean DeSalvo was present but was not the killer, or that the sample was contaminated. The case officially remains open.

Harold Shipman was a respected family physician in Hyde, Greater Manchester, who murdered his patients for over two decades. He was not targeting the vulnerable or the invisible — he killed ordinary elderly people, mostly women, during routine home visits, administering lethal doses of diamorphine (pharmaceutical heroin) and then falsifying death certificates. He did this in plain sight, inside his patients’ homes, while their families sat in the next room.

He was exposed almost by accident. A neighbouring GP, Dr Linda Reynolds, raised concerns in 1998 about the unusually high death rate among Shipman’s patients. A coroner investigated but found nothing. Shipman was ultimately caught because he made a single catastrophic error: he forged the will of his final victim, Kathleen Grundy, leaving her entire estate to himself and altering the date of her death certificate. Grundy’s daughter, a solicitor, was suspicious and demanded an exhumation. Toxicology confirmed a lethal dose of diamorphine.

Shipman was convicted in January 2000 of 15 murders. The subsequent Shipman Inquiry, led by Dame Janet Smith, reviewed 887 patient deaths and concluded he had killed at least 218 people, and possibly as many as 250, over 23 years. He never confessed, never gave a motive, and never expressed any remorse. He hanged himself in his cell at HMP Wakefield on January 13, 2004 — the day before his 58th birthday — reportedly to ensure his wife would receive his full pension. His case led to sweeping reforms in UK GP oversight, death certification, and prescription monitoring.

The house at 25 Cromwell Street in Gloucester, now demolished, was home to Fred West and his wife Rose between 1972 and 1994. It was also a torture chamber in which the couple kidnapped, systematically abused, and murdered at least 12 girls and young women — including Fred’s own daughter from his first marriage, Charmaine, and his and Rose’s daughter Heather, who had been missing since 1987. Fred had also killed his first wife Anne McFall in 1967 and buried her in a field near Much Marcle.

The investigation began in earnest in February 1994 after police received information that Heather might be “buried under the patio.” Officers arrived with a warrant and began digging. Within 24 hours they had found human remains. The excavation of the house and garden revealed a total of nine sets of remains. Three more were found at other locations associated with West. Most victims had been dismembered, and bones were found missing — investigators believe Fred West retained them as trophies.

Fred West was charged with 12 murders and Rose with 10. Fred West hanged himself in his remand cell using torn bedsheets on New Year’s Day, January 1, 1995. He left no confession and the location of at least one victim’s remains was never found. Rose West was convicted of 10 murders in November 1995 and sentenced to a whole life tariff. She remains at HMP Low Newton in County Durham and has repeatedly been denied any possibility of release. She is now in her 70s.

Dennis Nilsen was a civil servant in London — previously a Metropolitan Police officer — who killed at least 12 young men and boys over five years at his two North London addresses. His victims were almost all lonely, marginalised men: homeless youths, runaways, and gay men he met in pubs who had nowhere else to go. Nilsen killed because he was terrified of being alone. He would strangle sleeping victims to prevent them from leaving and then keep their bodies — washing, dressing, and propping up the corpses and holding one-sided conversations with them — for days or weeks before disposing of them.

His disposal methods became more complex at his second address in Muswell Hill, where he had no garden for burial. He boiled victims’ heads and flushed body parts down the toilet. He was caught in February 1983 when a plumber investigating blocked drains found flesh and bone fragments in the external drain at 23 Cranley Gardens. When detective Peter Jay confronted Nilsen that evening and asked where “the rest of the body” was, Nilsen pointed to the wardrobe and said: “In there, in two plastic bags.”

Nilsen was convicted of six murders and two attempted murders in November 1983 and sentenced to a minimum of 25 years — later changed to a whole life tariff. He spent his time in prison writing an extensive autobiography and composing music. He died on May 12, 2018, at York Hospital following complications from abdominal aortic aneurysm surgery. He was 72. No family members attended his cremation.

In a six-week period between October 30 and December 10, 2006, Steve Wright murdered five women — all sex workers — in and around Ipswich, Suffolk. Their naked bodies were found at five different rural locations. The speed of the killings, the geographic concentration, and the vulnerability of the victims triggered one of the largest police operations in British history, codenamed Operation Sumac.

Wright was arrested on December 19, 2006, just eight days after the final victim was found. DNA evidence and CCTV footage placed him with multiple victims. His trial began on February 14, 2008, and he was found guilty of all five murders a week later. The judge sentenced him to a whole life tariff, stating that the planning and premeditation involved meant he should never be released. Wright died at HMP Frankland in April 2023 at the age of 64, from natural causes.

Andrei Chikatilo was a schoolteacher in Rostov-on-Don who murdered 52 women and children over 12 years — hunting at bus and train stations across the Soviet Union while an entire state machinery failed to catch him, in part because Soviet ideology refused to acknowledge that serial killing was a social product of the communist system.

Chikatilo suffered from severe sexual dysfunction that made conventional intercourse impossible. He discovered in his first murder that he could only achieve arousal through the act of killing. His victims were women and children he lured to isolated locations. Once there, he attacked with a knife — stabbing dozens of times — and mutilated the bodies, removing and in some cases consuming genitals, breasts, and other body parts. He told investigators he bit out and swallowed his victims’ eyeballs because he believed they photographically retained the image of their killer.

An innocent man was arrested, confessed under interrogation, and executed for one of Chikatilo’s early murders before the real killer was caught — one of the Soviet system’s most damning failures in the case. Chikatilo was finally arrested in 1990, confessed to 56 murders, was convicted of 52, and was executed by a single pistol shot to the back of the head on February 14, 1994.

Luis Alfredo Garavito is the most prolific serial killer in confirmed modern history. Between 1992 and 1999 he travelled across at least 11 Colombian departments, targeting boys from the poorest families — street children, orphans, and sons of market vendors — luring them with the promise of money, food, or drugs while disguised as a priest, monk, or homeless man. His victims were almost always boys between 8 and 16 years old. He murdered them — after torture and rape — by cutting their throats or decapitating them, almost always while drunk.

He was arrested in 1999 after an attempted rape, initially held under a false name, and identified by a prison-wide eye examination that matched his distinctive prescription glasses to a pair found at a crime scene. He then confessed compulsively, leading investigators to dozens of burial sites across the country. His confirmed victim total stands at a minimum of 193, making him the most prolific serial killer and child molester in the modern era. His actual total may be significantly higher.

Colombia’s penal code forbade life imprisonment and capped sentences at 40 years. Because Garavito cooperated with investigators, his effective sentence was reduced to approximately 22 years — sparking national outrage and prompting major sentencing reform. He never walked free. President Iván Duque blocked his release in 2021. Garavito died in prison in Valledupar, northern Colombia, on October 12, 2023, aged 66.

Yang Xinhai carried out what is almost certainly the most systematically violent home-invasion killing spree in modern history. Between 1999 and 2003, he broke into the homes of sleeping families in four Chinese provinces and murdered every person inside — men, women, and children — using agricultural tools: hammers, axes, shovels, and meat cleavers. He killed 67 people and raped more than 20 women. He later told investigators he had no particular motive beyond a generalised hatred of society rooted in years of failure, rejection, and imprisonment for prior offences.

Yang had a prior criminal record and had served prison time for rape. After his final release, he spent four years moving through rural provinces, working day-labour jobs and attacking households at night. He was arrested in 2003 during routine police checks at clubs in Cangzhou, Hebei, where officers found his behaviour suspicious. Cross-referencing confirmed he was wanted for murder across four provinces. He confessed to all 67 murders and 23 rapes. Yang Xinhai was executed by firing squad on February 14, 2004 — the same date, by coincidence, as Chikatilo’s execution exactly a decade earlier.

Javed Iqbal is the only killer in this guide whose crimes were announced by the killer himself, in writing, before the police even knew most of the victims were missing. In December 1999 he posted a letter to the Lahore police and to Khawar Naeem Hashmi, a chief news editor at a Lahore newspaper. In it he confessed to murdering 100 boys, all of them between 6 and 16 years old, most of them runaways and orphans who slept on the streets of the city. He wrote that he had sexually assaulted them, strangled them, cut up the bodies, and dissolved the remains in vats of hydrochloric acid that he later emptied into the Ravi River.

When officers reached his house, they found he had been telling the truth. There were bloodstains on the walls and floor, the chain he said he used to strangle the boys, and photographs of victims sealed in plastic bags. Each photograph was labelled by hand with a name and an age. Two vats still held partly dissolved human remains. Iqbal had left a note saying he had deliberately not destroyed everything, so that the authorities would find it.

He was born Javed Iqbal Mughal in Lahore in 1961, the sixth of eight children of a well-off businessman. He attended Government Islamia College and started a steel recasting business in 1978 while he was still a student. He lived in a house his father had bought for him, often with groups of boys staying there. Iqbal told investigators his killings were an act of revenge. Years earlier he had been arrested over the sexual assault of a runaway boy, who had beaten him badly about the head and left him unconscious. No charges were brought, but Iqbal said the episode broke his mother, who he claimed suffered a fatal heart attack after watching his reputation and finances collapse. He decided, he wrote, to make 100 mothers cry for their sons the way his mother had cried for him.

He did not try to disappear. His letter said he planned to drown himself in the Ravi, and when police dragged the river and found nothing they launched what was reported as the largest manhunt in Pakistan’s history. On 30 December 1999 Iqbal walked into the offices of the Daily Jang newspaper and surrendered. He said he had gone to journalists rather than the police because he was afraid the police would kill him.

Four teenage boys who had shared his flat were arrested as accomplices in Sohawa. One of them died in custody within days. Police said he jumped from a window, but the post-mortem indicated he had been beaten. At trial the judge sentenced Iqbal to death and said he should be strangled in front of the parents of the children he killed, his body then cut into 100 pieces and placed in acid, mirroring the way the boys had died. Pakistan’s interior minister at the time, Moinuddin Haider, publicly rejected that, noting the country’s human rights commitments did not permit such a punishment.

Iqbal never reached execution. In October 2001 he and an accomplice, Sajid Ahmed, were found dead in their cells at Kot Lakhpat Jail in Lahore. The official ruling was suicide by hanging with bedsheets. Autopsies found that both men had been beaten before they died. No one claimed Iqbal’s body. His case was later dramatised in the Pakistani film “Javed Iqbal: The Untold Story of a Serial Killer,” which censors blocked in early 2022 and which reached cinemas in June 2023 after a public backlash.

Moses Sithole killed 38 women across South Africa in 1994 and 1995, operating in three areas whose initials gave him his nickname: Atteridgeville, Boksburg, and Cleveland (a Johannesburg suburb). He was convicted of all 38 murders — and 40 rapes — in December 1997 and sentenced to a total of 2,410 years imprisonment, with a minimum of 930 years to be served before parole eligibility. South Africa’s Constitutional Court later ruled that concurrent sentencing applied, reducing the effective minimum; he became eligible for consideration in 2019. He has been denied parole and remains in Zonderwater Prison.

Sithole’s method was consistent and predatory. He presented himself as a businessman offering employment, lured women to a quiet location on the pretext of a job interview, and then raped and strangled them using their own clothing. In several cases he afterwards called the victim’s family to taunt them. He was identified when police traced a phone call he made to a journalist; they lured him into the open by using a journalist as bait. When officers moved in to arrest him, Sithole attacked one with an axe and was shot twice in the legs. His arrest was broadcast live on South African television.

Colin Ireland is one of the few killers in history who explicitly stated a goal to “become a serial killer” before beginning his crimes. According to his own account, he set himself the target — as a New Year’s resolution for 1993 — of committing five murders, which under the FBI’s then-current definition would qualify as serial killing. Between January and June 1993, he strangled five gay men he met at The Coleherne pub in West London, a well-known sadomasochistic gay venue whose clientele wore colour-coded handkerchiefs to signal preferences. Ireland targeted passive partners and used restraints from the sadomasochistic scene to bind victims before killing them.

After each murder, Ireland stayed at the scene until morning to avoid being seen leaving at night, then meticulously cleaned the flat to remove forensic evidence. He was identified when CCTV footage showed him at Charing Cross Station on the night of the first murder — he had left a fingerprint at the scene. Ireland confessed to all five murders while awaiting trial on the first two charges. He was convicted of all five murders on December 20, 1993, and given five life sentences, later converted to a whole life tariff. He died at HMP Wakefield on February 21, 2012. The original DirJournal article correctly reported this death.