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.