How These Sneaky Serial Killers Finally Got Caught

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A once bullied nerd leaves a toothless head on  a golf course, this isn’t his only victim and   gets away with multiple murders for years;  a child whose brother was eaten by starving   neighbors becomes an almost invisible killer;  while another man, a respectable grandfather,   would never have been caught had he not  once explained what the backside of a human   tasted like after 30 minutes in the oven. These men are seven deadly sinners of the   highest degree, men who could have killed many  more people had fate or ego not intervened.  7. One of the worst serial killers ever, and   certainly one of the strangest, is busy at work in  his upper management job at a government office in   London. This always polite man is well-liked by  the staff, and even though he can be quiet at   times, he’s a conscientious worker and boss. His name is Dennis Nilsen. As evening approaches on February 8, 1983, he  has no idea that he will soon be explaining how   he killed people, many people, and that he often  sat with the bodies propped up in a chair as he   laughed and joked with the corpse about what  he, or they, were watching on the television.  He neatly places his pens into his office  drawer and announces he’s going home.   That is, to 23 Cranley Gardens, situated  in a leafy suburb of middle-class London.   At that moment, as he puts on his coat, ready  to face the wintry evening, something strange   and perplexing is happening outside his house. He’s a clever bloke, Nilsen, there’s no doubt   about it, but oh my, did he get caught  in one the weirdest ways imaginable.  Some say Nilsen’s fascination with death and  holding on to dead bodies crystallized during his   time serving in the army. Some say it went farther  back to his childhood. And maybe he learned how   to get away with murder when he was a cop. But it wasn’t until he became a trusted civil   servant in the 1970s that he really started  to thirst for company, not so much blood,   more for the friendship of the dead. Truth  be known, he didn’t enjoy the killing part.   He really didn’t enjoy the dissecting and  dismembering bit, especially when the bodies were   already in a terrible state of decomposition. After his one true living love left his life,   he started killing for company. In 1978,  lonely and depressed but successful at work,   he invited a guy back. He waited for him  to fall asleep, and strangled him. This was   at his previous house on Melrose Avenue.  Number 195. A veritable house of horrors.  One trick Nilsen had up his sleeve  is that he was an alcoholic,   and boy could he drink. He invited more young men  back for booze, sometimes just tourists visiting   the UK armed with cameras and full of curiosity.  Nilsen got them wasted and strangled them.  Then they became his friends. He washed their  bodies. He stroked them as they lay in bed next   to him. He propped them up in chairs and slapped  them on the knee when something on the TV made   him laugh, treating them like the living. But the problem with bodies is they bloat,   and they decompose, and Nilsen didn’t much  like watching Coronation Street with lovers   who were stinking and falling apart. So,  he buried them under the floorboards. He   later burned their bodies in the garden  under a stack of tires. Local kids used   to come around and enjoy what they thought was  a nice man having another one of his bonfires.  At night he drank with the dead, and throughout  the day he gave orders in the office. He once   explained his routine, saying, “End of the day,  end of the drink, end of a person ... floorboards   back, carpet replaced, and back to work.” But then he had to move house, and his new place,   23 Cranley Gardens, a lovely looking 1930s  Semi-detached with Tudor-style exposed wood   on the façade, was a large place but  with separate apartments. That meant   no place to bury or burn bodies. But as  you know, serial killers aren’t quitters.   They can’t quit. And Nilsen kept on killing. This brings us back to the beginning.  When Nilsen returned home that evening, he found  a drain cleaning company outside his apartment.   The other residents complained of often  smelling something terrible in the air   and they didn’t know where it was coming  from. But get this, even Nilsen had complained   to the landlord about that. Yeah, go figure. So, a hired drain cleaner named Michael Cattran   started looking for blockages in the drains,  where he too could smell something akin to a dead   animal. Perhaps, he thought, a dead rat. But  then he pulled out what looked like bits of meat.   That’s exactly when Nilsen walked  up to him and said the famous words,   “It looks to me like someone has been  flushing down their Kentucky Fried Chicken.”  But Cattran was pretty sure it wasn’t chicken.  In fact, he thought he’d found part of an eye,   a human eye. He sent what he’d found off to a  pathologist, while Nilsen went up to his flat   and went about his life as normal. During  the night, he was in his vest as snow fell   outside. He was doing a bit of drain cleaning,  but there was no way he was getting out of this.  The next day the cops were at the house. It was  a human eye! They asked to look inside Nilsen’s   flat, to which the polite man didn’t refuse. The  place stank. The cops looked startled. Nilsen then   pointed to a wardrobe and said, I think that’s  what you’re looking for. He added calmly, “It's   a long story; it goes back a long time. I'll tell  you everything. I want to get it off my chest.”  After being led out of the house,  an investigator asked him how many?   Nilsen, again in a calm voice, said, “Fifteen  or sixteen, since 1978.” There were bits and   pieces of bodies all over the house. The police  had never seen anything like it. One of them,   perplexed, later at the station said why? Nilsen  responded, “I'm hoping you will tell me that.”  He killed 12 to 15 people and the cops  were never on to him at any point.  Let's remember that many of his victims were  young, gay, homeless men. To the police"s shame,   they were less than caring when those young  guys went missing. Had the victims been wealthy,   you can be sure this story would be different. And if it weren’t for Nilsen"s poor choice of   flesh disposal, he might have had a lot more  dead lovers. He died in prison in 2018, aged 72.  With this next maniac, his  massive ego led cops to him.  6. “Bind,   torture, kill”, that’s what this man was  known for. The BTK Killer confounded cops   and made panic pervasive for almost two decades in  America's midwest. He later became Dennis Rader,   but only after he’d left many bodies on the  streets and had his fun taunting detectives. Again, we the classic quiet guy next door,  who may have tortured animals as a kid and   played with himself dressed in stolen panties  while peeping through neighbors’ windows,   but as an adult, he was just  another normal-looking family guy.  Rader had a degree; he had decent jobs, he  married, and had two kids. He became president   of the church council and was a trusted boy scout  leader, but my God was this guy sick in the head.  As a child he kept detective magazines out  near his family’s chicken house. Magazines   that showed women tied up with ropes with knives  at their necks. Young Dennis tied himself up and   fantasized about killing at the same time. He was  just 14. He later admitted even getting turned on   by the Rocky and Bullwinkle show when the damsel  in distress got tied up on a railway track. And so, bondage and torture became the thing  for this father of two. He got away with it time   and again, and the cops were for a long time not  even close to solving the crimes. That was until   2004 when Rader was pulled over and asked, “Mr.  Rader, do you know why you're going downtown?”  That’s when things went wrong for the BTK,  a man who thought he couldn’t get caught.  On January 15, 1974, he murdered a family  of four. They were the Otero family. He first cut all the lines to the house and  with his murder toolkit: ropes, knife, gun,   he broke into the house. There he found the  husband and wife and two kids. At gunpoint,   he told them they were safe, that he’d soon  be gone, once he’d gotten what he wanted.  He tied them up one by one and killed them all. Rader wasn’t just a perverted sadist;   he was also a narcissist. That’s why he hid a  letter in a library detailing what he’d done.   It read in part, “I did it myself with no one’s  help…the code words for me will be...Bind them,   torture them, kill them, BTK.” In another part of the letter,   he tried to explain his madness, saying, “It’s  hard to control myself. You probably call me   'psychotic with sexual perversion hang-up.' Where  this monster enters my brain, I will never know.   But, it here to stay.” He even talked about  his heroes, H. H. Holmes, Jack the Ripper,   The Boston Strangler, and other fiends. He killed again, in much the same style,   and again, this arrogant beast wrote letters. He  committed one murder while he was on a boy scout   trip being a good role model to boys learning  how to tie knots and make fires. Rader had some   outdoor skills. Like Nilsen, he’d served time in  the military. He even won a good conduct medal.  He killed another woman named Nancy and  another named Shirley. He wrote letters   to the cops with the titles, “Oh, Death to  Nancy” and “Shirley Locks.” He said in the   former letter that he was driven by “factor X”,  a force only a serial killer would understand.  The killer who’d frustrated the police  just as the Zodiac Killer had done,   then just vanished. He’d stay vanished for  a long time, but Mr. Rader was not immune to   making silly mistakes. As you’ll see again today,  ego is sometimes the downfall of murderous men.  What’s dark and unfortunate, is that in order  to catch a killer it often requires them to   make a mistake, so to get justice, the police,  in some ways, need the killer to strike again.   But Rader, well, he completely went off  the radar for many years so there didn’t   seem like there was any hope of catching him  anymore. In 2004, the BTK became a cold case.  But Rader just couldn’t stop himself. He  sent a newspaper a photocopy of a driving   license of a dead girl. He signed  the letter, Bill Thomas Killman.  Later, he sent more letters and even a  puzzle, with one letter titled the “BTK Story”   and another along with a package titled,  “The Sexual Thrill Is My Bill.” In 2005,   he left a cereal box in a pickup truck at a Home  Depot, and although the box was thrown away,   Rader told the cops what he’d written another  letter. It was then the detectives looked at the   CCTV of the parking lot. They saw a Jeep Cherokee. He then had the temerity in another letter to ask   the cops if they thought it could be traced if  he sent them his letters on a floppy disc. They   replied in a newspaper article in the Witchita  Eagle and said no, they couldn’t trace that.   Rader was no computer specialist, and he didn’t  know that there was metadata in the Microsoft Word   document he then sent them. It revealed the name  Dennis and the words “Christ Lutheran Church.”  It didn’t take long to find a Dennis Rader  who was president of the church council,   and lo and behold, he drove a Jeep Cherokee.  DNA did the rest and Rader went down.   In court, his confession was likened to a speech  at the Academy Awards. What a narcissist he was.   But in the end, his self-adoration put him  behind bars. Like Nilsen, he could likely   have killed many more and gotten away with it. Ok, now for a maniac like no other, arguably the   sickest man that’s ever lived. 5.  The story of Albert Fish once  heard can never be forgotten. A story of a seemingly kindly grandpa who  committed crimes that would have made Jack the   Ripper blush, that might have compelled Ted Bundy  to proffer words of concern. He was also another   man that thought he was too clever to get caught. Mr. Fish got off on not just inflicting pain on   others, but on himself, too. When he was arrested,  x-rays showed he had a total of 28 needles deeply   embedded in his thighs and groin area. Not only  that, he often beat himself with a studded paddle   and set his nether-regions on fire. He claimed to have murdered 100 victims all   over the USA, but we doubt that’s true. Still,  he definitely deserved all the monikers he got,   which included the “Brooklyn Vampire”,  the “Moon Maniac”, and without doubt,   he was the living version of “The Boogey Man.” At some point, he developed a liking for human   meat, at times feeding himself and his kids on raw  meat because that seemed like the closest thing.   During this period in his life, he was  seen by numerous psychiatric doctors,   but all of them said he was sane, despite  Fish telling them he regularly hallucinated.   If only they’d listened to him more. By 1924, still acting like the good dad   of six kids, his psychosis got to a point that he  thought that God was telling him to hurt people,   often of a young age. But because he looked like  a stable fella working hard to feed a family,   people trusted him. This was at a time  when he kept various killing tools,   which he called his “implements of Hell.” He murdered people in the proceeding years,   but we only really need to know  about one particular murder.  In 1928, he responded to an ad in the newspaper,  an ad made by one of the sons of the Budd family.  Part of it went, “Young man, 18,  wishes position in the county.”  The son wanted work, and Fish, using a  fake name, visited the Budd family and   regaled them with tales of being a single  parent. They liked him. They trusted him.  Fish told the son that he had a job  for him on his farm on Long Island.   There was no farm. Fish wanted to lure  him there and kill him. He did later   confess that he intended to bleed the son out. Budd, excited, ran out of the house to buy a   new suitcase, while Fish told the parents that  his niece was having a birthday party and would   like their daughter, Grace, to attend. Delighted  that this man had given their son a job, they   said yes, sure. The last time they saw Grace, she  and Fish were holding hands and waving goodbye as   they entered the dark mouth of a subway station. It was six long years before Mrs. Budd discovered   what had happened to her daughter.  One day, she woke up to find a letter   addressed to her. She was illiterate,  so she asked one of her sons to read it.  Here are some of the parts of possibly  one of the worst letters sent in history:  “My dear Mrs. Budd. In 1894 a friend of mine  shipped as a deckhand on the steamer Tacoma,   Capt John Davis. They sailed from San Francisco  to Hong Kong, China. On arriving there he and   two others went ashore and got drunk. When  they returned the boat was gone. At that   time there was a famine in China. Meat of  any kind was from $1 to 3 Dollars a pound.   So great was the suffering among the very poor…” Fish went on to talk about how these people   became cannibals and acquired a  taste for human flesh, young flesh,   according to Fish. This was all fiction, of  course. Fish was just being a creative demon.  He wrote in another part of the letter, “He  was roasted in the oven, boiled, broiled,   fried, stewed.” That kind of thing. He then  talked about his own taste for flesh and the   time he invited Grace to his house and fed her  strawberries and pot cheese. He said he took her   to an empty house and prepared himself while she  picked wildflowers without a care in the world.  “When all was ready, I went to the window  and called her. Then I hid in a closet until   she was in the room.” You can guess what  happened next, especially when we tell you   he used the words “sweet and tender.” He  was talking about meat, not personality.  The cops were not surprisingly shocked, and  even though the part about Hong Kong could not   be verified, the part about Grace looked like the  truth. But Fish, too confident for his own good,   had used an envelope with the letters  “N.Y.P.C.B.A.” on it. That stood for “New   York Private Chauffeur's Benevolent Association.” The police discovered that the envelope had   belonged to a janitor and he had left it at  200 East 52nd Street after he moved out. The   landlady there said another guy had lived there  but had just moved out, too. His name was Fish.  Detective William F. King got on the case  and found this Fish guy, who pulled out a   razor blade after being escorted to the police  station. He was easily wrestled to the floor, and   not that long after, in an interview, he admitted  to killing Grace Budd and other young folks.  Subsequent investigations found that Mr. Fish  wasn’t just a killer, but he was an avowed madman   with sadistic impulses. He later admitted to not  just killing, but mutilating and drinking blood,   after which he ate the flesh. That’s  when a newspaper rightly called him   the most vicious killer in criminal history. At the trial, psychiatrists invoked numerous   words, isms and illias, which most people had  probably never heard before. They called him a   “psychiatric phenomenon” of which he definitely  was, but he wasn’t insane by the standards of   the law. To think, he would have gotten away  with it had he not have written that letter.  On January 16, 1936, Fish uttered the words “I  don't even know why I'm here” right before the   switch was pulled for the electric chair.  Prior to that, he had written a detailed   document as to the full extent of his crimes  and passed it to his lawyer, James Dempsey.   When journalists asked Dempsey about the contents,  he replied, “I will never show it to anyone.”  As you will now see, other maniacs could have  gotten away with murder, many more murders,   in fact, and they would’ve continued had the cops  have not been given the facts on a silver platter.  4. If ever there was a serial   killer who a casting agent would want to play the  devil in human form in a movie, it would be the   British killer, Peter Sutcliffe. Let’s now talk  about how he got away with killing for so long. The date was July 1979, and a police  constable named Andy Laptew had just   knocked on the door of a fairly nice-looking  semi-detached house in Yorkshire, in the north   of England. A woman invited him in for a cup  of tea and her husband, Peter, joined them.  Laptew was one of many cops who’d been looking  for a man who’d been plaguing this part of   industrial England for years. The police had  so much paperwork for the case that the room   where it was kept had to have a reinforced  floor so it wouldn’t give in to the weight.   Somewhere in that paperwork, Sutcliffe’s name  popped up many times, but the organization was   so bad that it was hard to connect the dots. But when Laptew spoke to this man,   he got a feeling this could be the  guy they were looking for. After all,   he was a dead-ringer for the police sketches  compiled by some survivors of attacks. When this young officer told his boss about  this suspicious man he received the loud reply,   “Anybody mentions photofits to me again will be  doing traffic for the rest of their service!”   After that, Sutcliffe went on killing. His MO was just about always the same.   He sneaked up behind women at night and bashed  them over the head with a hammer. After that,   he often went to work with a knife, hence  he got the name the Yorkshire Ripper.  The women were often poor, with some of  them selling their bodies on streets in   some of England’s most rundown areas of  Leeds and Bradford, places that looked   as though they belonged not in wealthy England  but some of the poorest places on the planet. This is one reason why the cops were later  criticized. Had the victims been well off,   perhaps they’d have felt more  pressure to solve the case.  In truth, they tried hard, but their minds  and investigation techniques were old.   The case ruined not just the victims’ lives  and their families' lives, but it made the   hardworking investigators so ill some of them died  from stress-related illness way before their time.  Still, when at first it seemed as though  the Ripper was only killing prostitutes,   the cops seemed less than compassionate. When it  seemed Sutcliffe had killed the first woman who   wasn’t a prostitute, unbelievably the cops  issued a statement saying, that the Ripper   “is now killing innocent girls.” They were all innocent of course,   but that statement shows how the cops felt  and how out of date their thinking was. As the years passed more and more women  were being found with similar injuries,   but police didn’t always connect the  killings. They had an innumerable   amount of survivors coming forward, some  stating this man had a definite Yorkshire accent   and that he had dark hair with a dark beard. They actually interviewed Sutcliffe nine times   during the long investigation, but he was let  go each time. After all, he was a working man   with a wife, and they shared a nice house. He  didn’t look like a killer. As you guys now know,   it can literally be a fatal mistake to  discount people who don’t look like killers.   Serial killers look like you, like  me, like your neighbor and your boss.  Then in 1977, Sutcliffe made his fatal  mistake. He was already many victims in,   so this time he decided to choose the  city of Manchester for his next killing,   about a 45 minutes drive from Bradford. He killed  her, mutilated her, and left the scene, but later   he realized he’d given this woman a five-pound  note for services that were never rendered.  Furious with himself, he drove back to  the bit of wasteland to retrieve the note.   When he couldn’t find it, in anger he almost took  off her head with a spanner. Knowing how mean   the streets were, the clever woman had hidden  the note in a secret compartment in her purse.  But the cops found it. Tracking a  note isn’t easy, as you would guess,   and it took some pretty amazing police work  to eventually find out that note had been   paid to someone who worked at T. & W.H. Clark  Holdings…where Sutcliffe had a job as a driver.  He was interviewed like all the staff, and  when police interviewed him again at his   house his wife lied and gave him an alibi for  the night of the murder. She didn’t actually   know about his extramarital murderous activities. Then the cops received a tape recording in the   post. It read, “I'm Jack. I see you're having no  luck catching me. I have the greatest respect for   you, George, but Lord, you're no nearer catching  me now than four years ago when I started.”  George was the lead investigator, a man who’d  soon die from stress. But George was stubborn   and he was convinced that the guy on  the tape was the killer, even though   his accent was not from Bradford or even close by. The man was a hoaxer, and he later sent a letter   to a newspaper that read, “I am the Ripper. I've  been dubbed a maniac by the Press but not by you,   you call me clever and I am. You  and your mates haven't a clue   that photo in the paper gave me fits.” Even the FBI’s Behavioral Unit, who’d   literally invented criminal profiling, went over  to England and said that man is not the killer.  But those Yorkshire cops kept looking for  the man who’d been dubbed “Wearside Jack”   due to his accent, while Sutcliffe murdered  more women. Then the unbelievable happened,   even in a case already implausibly bad. One of Sutcliffe’s buddies, who’d long   suspected his friend was the Yorkshire  Ripper, sent a letter to the police. It   was marked “Priority No1” and read, “I have  good reason to know the man you are looking   for in the Ripper case. This man has dealings with  prostitutes and always had a thing about them...   His name and address is Peter Sutcliffe,  5 Garden Lane, Heaton, Bradford, Shipley.”  Remember, the police had already interviewed  Sutcliffe nine times and had been to that   house. He looked almost identical to the man  in the sketches and he had a Yorkshire accent   just as some survivors had said. For Pete’s  sake, he even worked where the note came from.  That friend even went to the police station soon  after to say what he knew verbally, but it seems   he was ignored again and to the cop’s utter  discredit, that talk he had at the police station,   which must have been noted in the station  files, seemed not to have happened.   The police later said all the evidence  of that chat had somehow disappeared.  And so, Sutcliffe was preparing himself  to kill again. He couldn’t believe his   luck. Even though he’d just killed a woman  with a hammer and severely mutilated her,   that murder had not even been connected to the  other murders in Bradford. It was a carbon copy,   in a city that didn’t have many murders.  Sutcliffe thought he could keep doing this   forever. He later said God must have been helping  him, but no, it was just shoddy police work  He killed again, even after being charged with  a DUI. He then attacked a woman studying at   Leeds University who’d been so scared  she slept with a knife under her bed.  Sutcliffe’s buddy died from a heart attack,  so he wasn’t alive to hear that on January 2,   1981, a man had been pulled over in the  city of Sheffield, not far from Bradford.  It was just a routine stop at a police  check, and the guy that stopped him was   still in police training. He soon discovered  that Sutcliffe’s car had a fake license plate.   It was then he recalled that this guy looked a bit  like those sketches he’d seen in the newspapers.  Sutcliffe then said he needed a pee, and so before  the cop took him in for further questioning,   he was allowed to go for one. There, out of  the view of the officer, he threw over a wall   a knife, hammer, and some rope. In the police station, they had   no idea they had the Ripper, and Sutcliffe was  sent to a holding cell without being searched.   He not only had another knife on him, but  he was wearing a V-neck sweater on his   legs. A kind of undergarment that gave easy  access to his private parts for when he killed.  The next day the cops went back to the scene after  the constable had told the peeing story. They   found the evidence and were soon interrogating  Sutcliffe. He held out for a bit, but cracked   in the end, saying, “The women I killed were  filth. I was just cleaning up the place a bit.”  In court, it was incredible that the judge  said this, “While some of the victims were   prostitutes perhaps the saddest part of  this case is that some were not. The last   six attacks were on totally respectable women.” Sutcliffe went to prison and then to Broadmoor   high-security psychiatric hospital, a  place where he was viciously attacked   and lost sight in one eye after someone put  a pen through it. He was attacked more times   after that. He lasted until 2020 when he  died of a heart condition as well as COVID.  This next killer is straight from hell, and likely  one of the most terrifying people you have never   heard of. 3.  On the morning of March 13, 2012, two Texas  police officers go over to a man in a parking   lot at a café in Lufkin, Texas. It’s still  early in the day and it’s a fairly routine stop   after the guy had been seen driving a bit  erratically. But little do those cops know that   the man they’re talking to is one of the vilest,  unforgiving creatures that has ever been put   in this sometimes wicked world. It will take  a long time for them to figure this out,   and not without the killer’s help. His name is Israel Keyes. This is a man that tortured and terrorized, a  man that was so unrepentant that he despised   other serial killers that had apologized for their  crimes. When your idol as a teenager is Ted Bundy,   there sure is a problem. The term  evil-personified springs to mind,   and it is only by chance that this  evil was contained when it was.  He started killing in 1998, did his stint in  the army, and then started killing again. He   had one thing on his mind while driving all over  the US robbing stores and burglarizing houses.   That was murder, or what he called hunting. He often chose isolated areas to pick his victims,   with campgrounds being one of his favorite places.  And when you drive from one side of the US to the   other and pick people from campgrounds, well, that  makes the job of law enforcement pretty darn hard.  When he brutally murdered Bill and Lorraine  Currier in Vermont in 2011, he made sure   their bodies were never found. According to  Keyes, he shot the man and strangled the woman. He bought weapons all over the country, and when  he bought chemicals to get rid of the bodies,   he also bought them in locations  far and wide. He paid only in cash,   and he often kept his phone turned off. How do you catch a man like this? Even   one who is robbing banks and breaking into  people’s houses, numerous times? No sooner   than he committed a crime he became a ghost.  But at some point, he had to make a mistake.  On February 1, 2012, a young woman named  Samantha Koenig was just finishing up her shift   at Common Grounds coffee stand in Anchorage,  Alaska, when a man walked in waving a gun. She did as told, and handed him the cash,  but Keyes had more on his mind than money.  He took her out to his Ford Focus  at gunpoint, her hands now tied   with zip ties. She fought and struggled, but  with a sharp warning about that gun being used,   she had no choice but to comply. And anyway,  Keyes assured her that she wouldn’t get hurt,   that he was only after a little ransom money. At some point, he drove back to the coffee   place to pick up her phone. Keyes then told  her to send a message to her boyfriend,   It read, “Hey, I’m spending a couple  of days with friends, let me dad know.”  Later, Keyes went to her house to get her  credit card. That credit Keyes knew was in   the boyfriend’s car, and so when  he went to get it, the boyfriend   saw him. Instead of confronting Keyes, the  boyfriend went inside and called the cops.  Keyes returned to his home, where he eventually  strangled Koenig. Calmy, he drank some wine,   and then made some notes about his upcoming  cruise ship trip close to New Orleans. He woke   his daughter up and they went to the airport. The cops knew someone was using that bank card,   but the guy was on the move. And  strangely, even though they had   video from when Keyes took the girl from  the coffee place, they wouldn’t release it. Seven days after the abduction, a  news website in Alaska wrote this:  “Anchorage police say showing the video  now would be purely for entertainment,   because besides containing evidence that could  be used in a courtroom, they say the video shows   nothing that would help them solve the crime.” But as he’d committed numerous murders, bank   robberies and burglaries, surely they must have  had a face on file that looked similar? Surely,   someone in the public would have recognized Keyes. Possibly, but in a book about Keyes called   “American Predator”, the writer says  it is possible that Keyes once went to   Mexico for plastic surgery. He might also have  removed the skin on the tips of his fingers.  After his cruise was over, Keyes went back to  Alaska with only a bit of cash in his pocket.   He made a decision, and applied makeup to the  now dead body of Koenig. To ensure her eyes   stayed open, he tied the lids with fishing  line. After that, he took a picture of her,   and sent out a ransom note. To make it look  real, he placed a new copy of the Anchorage   Daily News beside the body. Soon after, he  chopped her up and threw the parts in a lake.  He later drew money from Koenig’s account in New  Mexico, Arizona, and Texas. But when in Arizona,   he was caught on camera, so when those two  cops pulled him over in Texas, they had a   guy fitting the description of a kidnapper. Sometime later, CBS News wrote, “Investigators   believe Samantha died within hours of her  abduction. The article also said, “Investigators   further believe the person responsible for  Samantha's death acted alone, and we are   confident that we have that person in custody.” But at this point, those investigators really had   no idea who they had on their hands. They thought  Keyes was an idiot who’d messed up a kidnapping.   They had no idea he was a serial killer. He ended  up telling the cops about his other murders,   explaining that doing the deeds so far  and wide made him virtually undetectable.  In 2012, he was found dead in his cell. Close  to his body lay a piece of writing titled   “Ode to murder.” Some of it went like this: “The reality is you were just bones and meat,   and with your brain died also your soul… Your wet  lips were a promise of a secret unspoken, nervous   laugh as it burst like a pulse of blood from your  throat. There will be no more laughter here.”  Yeah, this guy wasn’t exactly a bag of  laughs. But how many people did he really   kill? It’s hard to say, but investigators found  a pentagram drawn next to 11 skulls in his cell.   Under the drawing were the words, “WE ARE ONE.”  Those 11 skulls, maybe they meant 11 victims.  And let’s be honest here, before that  kidnapping, police had no idea who he really was   even after all the confirmed robberies. His  name had popped up only in Washington state   for the offenses of driving without  a valid license and a separate DUI.  Now for a disturbing case of a man who  really knew how to get rid of a body,   even though he was bullied all his school  life because of his learning difficulties.  2. Don’t ever   bully people viewers, it’s always wrong, it’s the  jurisdiction of the stupid… and you never know if   the person whose life you’ve made a misery might  one day put the head of a woman inside a paint   can and leave it lying on a golf course. You could  really put someone off their game by doing that.  A head in a can would usually  be pretty useful to the cops,   but not when all the teeth have  meticulously been pulled out,   and not when the legs for that head are lying  miles away and the torso and arms are swimming   down a river somewhere. When that happens, as  did happen in this case, the pieces might not   be put together for 24 years and even then,  the perpetrator had to lend a helping hand.  On February 20, 1989, this guy committed his  first murder, and his victim was Heidi Balch. When she was killed at the age of 25,  she’d been working as a prostitute in   the Manhattan area of New York City.  Sometime later, as you know, her head   was found on a golf course stuffed inside of a  paint can. One of the cops that worked on this   case not surprisingly said, “It was shocking.” That cop also said that as the years passed,   they never thought they’d ever arrest someone  for the crime. This guy had gone to great   lengths not to get caught, so despite his  learning disabilities, he was certainly what   detectives sometimes call “forensically aware.” His name was Joel Rifkin. Had he not told police that he killed this girl  and killed many others, he’d still likely be known   to his few friends as merely an oddball who wasn’t  very charismatic when it came to the opposite sex.  This troubled and sexually frustrated  man may have killed up to 17 women,   many of them prostitutes. Unfortunately,  sometimes when the poor and most vulnerable   people on this planet get murdered there is not  always the most energetic police response. That’s   why there is a theory of what’s called “less  dead” people, meaning such folks don’t mean as   much in life and so in death, they are less dead. Rifkin would almost certainly not have gotten away   with murdering 17 middle-class students in New  York, but to be fair to the police, he was very   good at not leaving clues. When he murdered Balch  by hitting her over the head and strangling her,   he then used an X-acto knife to remove her  fingertips on top of throwing her dismembered   arms in the East River. Taking out her teeth  was also a testament to his forensic awareness. Soon after when he killed another prostitute,  Julie Blackbird from Long Island, he not only   did the dismembering, but he weighted the body  parts down with concrete and threw them in a   canal. He kept killing this way, mostly  prostitutes or drug-addicted people whose   existences were tenuous, to say the least. One addict, 28-year old Lorraine Orvieto,   was killed by Rifkin and then stuffed into  an oil drum and dumped in Coney Island Creek.   She was found by a fisherman, but notably, her  family took two months to even tell the cops   their daughter was missing. It seems  she was less dead to her family, too.  In June 1993, Rifkin strangled a prostitute  named Tiffany Bresciani. He proceeded to drive   her body back to where his mother lived,  to presumably take her apart. On the way,   he stopped at a hardware store and picked up  some serial killer necessities: tarp and rope.  He then made the rookie mistake of leaving  her body in a wheelbarrow in the garage for   three days in the summer heat, which as you  know, will speed up the decomposition process   and create quite the stink. With that  malodor starting to perfuse the nearby area,   Mr. Rifkin decided it was time to make a move. He got in the car and started driving to an area   which he knew was an excellent spot to dump a dead  prostitute, but again, he’d made a rookie mistake,   especially for a man who had become an  accomplished killer. He drove in a car   with a missing license plate, which for a serial  killer, is tantamount to the folly of a politician   opening his mouth and speaking his mind. When Rifkin was spotted by State troopers   Deborah Spaargaren and Sean Ruane, and those blue  and whites starting flashing, he knew that he   couldn’t stop because he’d allowed that body to  progress to putrefactive stinkiness. At first,   he didn’t speed up, but he didn’t stop, either.  A high-speed chase ensued which ended with Rifkin   and his eternally quiet passenger being wrapped  around a utility pole right outside a courthouse.  When the cops ran over to the wreck, guns in hand,  before they could even assess the damage, they   smelled the familiar odor of a dead person. Rifkin  was subsequently questioned at the station, and   in time, he just told the cops everything, stuff  they had no idea about. He even drew them maps so   they’d know how to find the bodies, or body parts. Some Jane Does finally got a name,   although the head in the can on  the golf course was named Susie,   her working name and the name she’d given Rifkin.  It wasn’t until 2013 she became Heidi Balch.  In 1994, Rifkin met another killer  in prison named Colin Ferguson,   a man who opened fire at a train in 1993  with the intent of killing white folks. He shot 25 and killed 6. Close to the prison telephones,   they both started arguing over who was the  better killer, and with 17 bodies to his name   and an exemplary background in body disposal, no  doubt Rifkin got the upper hand in that debate.  But his troubles with other prisoners, in the  end, meant solitary confinement. Presently,   he’s at Clinton Correctional Facility. He’s  due to see a parole board in the year 2197.  1. Ok, the last one. This is a very original   story of how killers get away with murder. The killer’s name was Andrei Chikatilo. He was arguably Russia’s worst serial killer,  although the killer cop Mikhail Popkov   and the infamous chessboard killer  might have something to say about that. Chikatilo possessed a rage from hell. He  did indescribable things to his victims.   He was MONSTER INCORPORATED, and  he got away with it for years.  He really shouldn’t have, given that when he was  a young man it was obvious he was a fiend. He was   impotent from a young age, and some girls mocked  his non-working member. This shame manifested   into rage, and the angry young man groped his way  through university while being roundly reviled.  When he later taught Russian literature,  he was a creep who groped his own students.   He spied on young women, watching them from  a distance as something stirred in his loins.   He acted on that as well, many times, and  so was removed from schools. If he started   at another school, he did the same again. You might wonder, how did he even get another   job? Well, the reason is connected to why he  got away with so many murders. At the time,   the Soviet Union and the Soviet education  system didn’t want to admit such a criminal   could come through the system. So, it  denied the wrongs that this man committed.  And even when he started killing, detectives  didn’t look at a literature teacher.   Former academics didn’t mutilate people  and rip parts off them with their teeth   even when the victim was still breathing. Only  wild animals did that. Sometimes the bodies were   literally torn to pieces, which is why the  killer became known as the Rostov Ripper.  Chikatilo had by this point  become a traveling businessman,   which is an ideal job for a serial killer since  bodies far from each other in a massive country   like Russia can’t easily be connected. Even  when they did start turning up in numbers,   with utterly disturbing crime scenes, Moscow  didn’t want to admit Russia had a serial killer.   It said, that kind of thing only  happens in the decadent West.  But bodies kept piling up and Moscow had to face  the truth. Soon there were 100s of cops after   this killer, many hanging around train stations  where the majority of victims had gone missing.  Operations happened where undercover cops were  stationed on trains and around railway depots,   but Chikatilo kept killing pretty much under  their noses. One time he was spotted by an   undercover cop at Donleskhoz station, right  after he’d murdered a woman. The cop asked him   what those stains were on his clothes, to which  Chikatilo replied that he was a mushroom forager.   Hmm, thought the cop, a mushroom forager  with a nice duffel bag. It didn’t make sense.  It was only by sheer luck that when another  cop was looking at the names of men who’d   been questioned, he actually noticed the name  Chikatilo. He recalled seeing that name before,   back in the day, related to a missing person.  But this time, unlike the other times,   this cop dug deeper. And guess what he found?  He discovered that this traveling businessman  had been kicked out of numerous schools in the   past for sexually motivated crimes. He then saw  Chikalito’s name had popped up again when there   had been a sexual and violent crime. No one had  joined these dots in years, and now they seemed to   form the picture of a violent murderous maniac. Chikatilo was at last put under some serious   surveillance, and even though they arrested  him right before he was about to commit another   murder, under questioning he never cracked, and  the cops really didn’t have much hard evidence.  He might have not done one year in prison  had something strange not happened next.  Police did something that had not  ever happened in the Soviet Union.   Instead of grilling him again, they called in  a psychiatrist named Alexander Bukhanovsky.   It was this guy that once rightly told them,  you are looking for an educated man, a sadist,   who is likely impotent and hates women. Now the cops knew he was right and so   gave a bit more credit to the art of  understanding the motivation of madmen.  Bukhanovsky sat in front of Chikalito and told  him what he had suspected. That he was a sad,   lonely man, a man with a terrible childhood. A boy  who’d been traumatized. Bukhanovsky didn’t know   right then that Chikalito’s family literally  starved in a famine, and his own brother was   killed and cannibalized by neighbors, after which,  the mother blamed the bed-wetting murderer-to-be.  Childhood could not have been any worse, by  any human standards, and when the psychiatrist   said this to Chikalito, by the time the  doctor was done, Chikalito, now in tears,   said, “It was me, I did it. I killed them all.” He told the police about the murders they’d been   investigating, but about many other murders they  didn’t even know had happened. Then on October 15,   1992, Chikatilo was sentenced to death  for 52 murders. On February 14, 1994,   a bullet to the back of his head ended his life.  He was buried in an unmarked grave in the prison.  Now you need to watch “America's Most  Evil Serial Killer - John Wayne Gacy.”
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Channel: The Infographics Show
Views: 2,462,540
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Length: 36min 17sec (2177 seconds)
Published: Fri Apr 15 2022
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