Are there serial killers in Antarctica? Who was the worst in Europe? Africa had more than you think might think
and killers in South America smash records. As for North America, we struggled to pick
out one person, but we got there in the end. Let’s start with Oceania, the far-flung
continent of the world that contains Australasia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia. In terms of population, Oceania is small,
with only about 44.4 million people living in it. That doesn’t mean the continent doesn’t
have its fair share of barbaric and twisted killers. Something we need to get straight at the beginning
of this show is what defines a serial killer. The meaning has changed over time, but according
to the FBI’s website it’s: “The unlawful killing of two or more victims by the same
offender(s) in separate events.” This is not the same as a spree killer, even
if the spree killers murder many people. To meet the definition of a serial killer,
there has to be a “cooling off” period between the crimes. One more thing we’ll tell you before we
go down this blood-spattered rabbit hole today is where the term serial killer came from. As you might know, centuries ago, such crimes
were thought to be so abhorrent that they were sometimes blamed on werewolves or vampires
or some kind of evil spirit. Later, we heard the term “lust killer”
because many of these crimes involved a sexual element. A German criminologist wrote in the 1930s
about Serienmörder (serial murderer), and the term also appeared in the 1966 book by
a British author, The Meaning of Murder. In the 1970s, Robert Ressler, famous for his
starring role at the FBI’s then-new Behavioral Science Unit – think, “Silence of the
Lambs” – used the term when he was giving a lecture at a British police academy. This was when profiling was becoming all the
rage. The New York Times used the term an estimated
233 times in the 1980s and in the 1990s, an estimated 2,514 times. The rest is history. The term serial killer became planted in our
minds, but what’s fascinating is the media and the movie industry only ever seem to pick
up on a few of them while not reporting or representing some of the very worst. Today, we hope to shed light on some of those
people. Over the years, we’ve researched many killers,
so we think we’re in a good position to tell you which ones were the most terrifying. Bear in mind that this show is indeed about
the most terrifying, not the most prolific or most famous. We are talking about the scariest, the ones
who give you nightmares, whose vicious acts leave you both paralyzed with fear and perplexed
as to what can go wrong with the human psyche. Oceania
For Oceania, we could have written about the sorcery murders in Papua New Guinea, also
known as witchcraft killings, in which entire families were hacked apart just recently after
being accused of witchcraft. Then, in the same country, there was Steven
Garasai Tari, aka Black Jesus, a pastor and cult leader accused in the 2000s of murder
and cannibalism. But we have chosen Australia for our winning
nation in regard to terrifying serial killers, the country that has spawned countless outback
movies in which Australian hicks terrorize backpackers. Such stories are based on the serial killer
Ivan Milat, who, in the late 80s and early 90s, abducted backpackers and hitchhikers,
killing at least seven. His crimes were indeed terrifying. He tied up his victims and, in some cases,
paralyzed them by stabbing them in the spine, further prolonging the torture. In technical terms, he was a “hedonistic
killer,” doing it for pleasure, not as part of some kind of mission (e.g., The fictional
Dexter) or because he wanted to be with the dead bodies (lust killers: Jeffrey Dahmer,
Dennis Nilsen). Since he kept his victims alive and dominated
them, he also likely fell into the category of a “power/control” killer. He obviously enjoyed seeing people in pain,
so we can say he was a sadistic thrill killer. It’s the sadistic thrill killers and also
the lust killers that usually scare us the most. This now brings to us Oceania’s most terrifying
killer, a sadist if ever there was one, but not a lust killer. His name was John Bunting. His crimes took place between August 1992
and May 1999, in and close to the city of Adelaide, South Australia. We guess a few of you might already know his
name due to a very realistic movie of the murders titled “The Snowtown Murders,”
a film that is so brilliantly wretched and disturbing that’ll make you feel like having
the longest shower of your life after watching it. The crimes were so nasty that three of the
original 15 jurors involved in the trial asked to be removed from the case. They just couldn’t handle it. To this day, journalists and jurors receive
counseling. John Bunting traumatized an entire nation. Bunting was born on September 4, 1966, in
a small town in the state of Queensland. To understand what shaped the man to come,
we need to look no further than his childhood, when at the age of eight he was beaten by
the older brother of one of his friends. This older kid then sexually abused him. According to an academic paper on Bunting,
when he was young, he didn’t wet the bed or start fires everywhere, but he did torture
animals. These are three of the most common behaviours
noticed in the childhood of future serial killers. He tortured ants with acid, and later, that
escalated to killing and skinning cats and dogs. It’s said he had an unhealthy interest in
anatomy. At age 20, he found the perfect job at a crematorium,
and when dead bodies weren’t enough, he found work slaughtering animals at the company
SA Meat Corporation. Unlike most people, he told friends he took
great pleasure in this line of work. Bunting needed to kill, but it seemed he needed
a reason to kill. His reason would be allegations of sexual
misconduct, allegations he created all by himself. On August 31, 1992, he took a shovel and beat
to death 20-year-old Clinton Douglas Trezise. Bunting later told his friends and accomplices
that Tretize had harmed children. That was likely not true, but Bunting was
never interested in facts. He just wanted to kill. When Bunting got rid of the body, he employed
the help of a man named Robert Wagner and a 40-year-old pre-op transgender woman, Vanessa
Lane, who’d also lived under the name of Barry Lane. Lane and Wagner were in an intimate relationship
at this point…but not for long. After Bunting married a woman named Elizabeth
Harvey, the mother of a young, not-so-smart boy named Jamie Vlassakis, he became the boy’s
father figure. Notably, one day, Vlassakis told Bunting that
when he was 13, his much larger stepbrother, Troy Youde, had violated him. You can probably imagine what Bunting thought
about this. Bunting told him that very soon, Youde would
get what was coming to him. Vlassakis soon discovered that Bunting had
killed and intended to kill again. In fact, Vlassakis's mom had already helped
Bunting with one murder, that of 26-year-old Ray Allan Peter Davies. Davis, who had a very low IQ, was accused
of hurting young men. On Christmas 1995, Elizabeth Harvey stabbed
him in the leg, and then he was choked unconscious by Wagner. They took Davis to another house, where they
proceeded to electrocute him with jumper cables and beat him so hard in the genital area that
he passed out and died. Bunting now had a taste for torture. He loved it. Wagner loved it. To hurt someone like that and see the life
drain from them. It was exhilarating for the group of sadistic
killers. On the wall of a room in the house, Bunting
had a “rock spider wall” in which the names of various people were connected with
string. Bunting told Vlassakis that these men were
all guilty of hurting boys or at least of sleeping with other men. Each one of them, said Bunting, had to go. After two more murders, they killed Wagner’s
partner, Lane, well, ex-partner. The two had already split up. Bunting had never liked Lane. He put up with her only because Lane was familiar
with sexual predators in the area, and she occasionally gave names to Bunting. They tortured her in a bathtub, crushing her
toes with pliers, beating her head, and strangling her with a cord, after which she finally died,
but not before she’d given up her bank details. While Bunting was a compulsive killer, he
also made money from his morbid ventures by taking people’s IDs, bank details and cards. Later, Bunting and his accomplices hanged
an 18-year-old paranoid schizophrenic man from a tree. In such a depressed and impoverished area,
police didn’t even bother to investigate the murder thoroughly. Soon after, Bunting was pricked by a needle
left lying on a couch by a substance abuser. He strangled him for that. Then they got Troy Youde, who was then 21. He might have been Vlassakis’s half-brother,
but after what Vlassakis had accused him of, Bunting was intent on causing him the utmost
harm. They tortured him, crushing his toes, and
forced him to say that he was going away for a while on a recording. As things tend to happen in the killing world,
the violence escalated. Bunting would choose names from his spider
wall, people who no doubt were innocent of whatever he’d accused them of, and abducted
them after gaining their trust. They took 18-year-old Frederick “Fred”
Robert Brooks and put him in handcuffs and thumb cuffs. They tortured him for hours, shoving things
inside of him, injecting bleach into his life-giving organs, and shocking the same place with electricity. Again, before they got what they wanted, they
crushed his toes with pliers, now a trademark of their torture. Their last victim, 24-year-old David Johnson,
was not even accused of a crime. Bunting was homophobic. He hated men he’d accused of touching people
they shouldn’t touch. He even hated overweight people, who he called
a waste of space. But with Johnson, he had no reason to feel
such hate. He soon made one up, though. Bunting said Johnson was too tidy. He called him a yuppie, too posh, accusing
him of looking down on the rest of them. While Bunting and his view had already dumped
bodies in the small town of Snowtown, Johnson was the only victim actually killed in Snowtown. Another first with Johnson was that Bunting
and Wagner cut off his flesh, fried it, and ate it. They were now cannibals. It was there in Snowtown where police later
found eight victims inside six barrels, or what was left of them. It was discovered that a man named Mark Ray
Haydon had helped Bunting dispose of the bodies. One of the victims was actually Haydon’s
wife, Elizabeth, whom Bunting had tortured and killed, as usual, with songs blasting
over the screams. Bunting particularly liked the US band Live’s
song “Throwing Copper,” which he played while torturing his victims, making them call
him “God,” “master” and “Lord Sir.” Due to this discovery, the case became known
as the Bodies in the Barrels murders. The Guardian reported on Wednesday, December
13, 2000, “Bodies in barrels case grips Australia.” The article stated, “The court heard how
handcuffs, knives, rubber gloves, and a machine capable of giving electric shocks were unearthed
in the vault alongside the bodies.” A pathologist said about the bodies, “There
was cutting, quite a bit of cutting. The number of pieces the legs were reduced
to showed quite a deal of work in getting flesh off the bones.” In court, Vlassakis wept and one time even
vomited. He was given four consecutive life sentences
for his part in the crimes, compared to Wagner's ten life sentences and Bunting's eleven life
sentences. Wagner, who was illiterate, said in court
he did what he’d done because people “were doing terrible things to children.” He added, “The authorities didn't do anything
about it. I decided to take action. I took that action. Thank you.” He failed to mention if these people were
guilty or not, and he didn’t mention that he’d obviously enjoyed torturing them. The judge, in response, told him:
“I am satisfied both of you derived pleasure from the physical act of killing and the violence
and torture that preceded some of the killings. I am also satisfied you derived pleasure from
the defleshing and dismembering of some of the bodies.” The court heard how Wagner and Bunting enjoyed
the dismembering part, the skinning part, sometimes taking the head of a victim and
inviting each other to “kiss the puppet.” Now let’s go to Africa and to a country
whose number one serial killer was so bad the police enlisted the help of the serial
killer expert we mentioned earlier, Robert Ressler. Africa
Like with other continents, there was no easy choice when picking an African serial killer. We thought about Namibia’s so-called B1
Butcher, who, with precision, dismembered at least five people between 2005 and 2007
and dumped their bodies along the country’s B1 national highway. There have been arrests in the past, but it
seems the B1 butcher may still be on the loose. Then there was the Hadj Mohammed Mesfewi,
Morocco’s most infamous shoemaker who, in the early 1900s, would invite women to his
shop, drug them, and then mutilate and behead them. But we’ve chosen a man named Moses Sithole,
aka “The South African Strangler,” sometimes referred to as the Ted Bundy of Africa. He was born on November 17, 1964, in a town
in Gauteng, the smallest but wealthiest province in South Africa. Wealthiest because about a quarter of South
Africa’s population lives there, many of whom are residents of the country's largest
city, Johannesburg. Sithole’s life was certainly not one of
riches. His father, Simon, died young, and his mother,
Sophie, had very little money during his early years in the rough and ready township of Vosloorus. Since Moses’ mother was unable to take care
of him and his four other siblings, they were one day dumped at a police station. Her parting message to them all was: Please
don’t give them my name. After that came the orphanage, where the adults
systematically mistreated Moses. He tried to run away on several occasions,
once going to live with his brother Patrick. From there, he earned a tough living in the
province’s gold mines, sometimes doing other odd jobs, often walking the streets helping
homeless kids. He may have had a soft spot for such children,
but he certainly harbored a lot of anger toward women. It seems he could never forgive his mother,
the way she told him as a scared little boy: Please don’t give them my name. He despised women, but like Mr. Bundy, Sithole
had the gift of the gab. He was strong, handsome and very charming. Witnesses to his case would later come forward
and express how well he spoke, how clever he was, and how he was able to gain the trust
of just about anyone. It helped, of course, that women often saw
him helping kids on the streets. In 1994, his murder spree began. His method of luring victims was perhaps quite
novel. He’d approach women in the street and tell
them he was managing an NGO that takes care of children called “Youth Against Human
Abuse.” It looked legit. He had documents. While working at a car wash, Sithole had asked
a typist named Melody to type up all those documents. His charm certainly helped, so when he told
women he had job openings, they believed him. A witness later explained how he approached
one of his victims: “He promised her a job. A better job and money and benefits. He gave her forms for a job. She trusted him because she was excited. She said: 'I'm not coming to work tomorrow
because this man is taking me on a date to Johannesburg to have some lunch.'” He wasn’t. The only place Youth Against Human Abuse existed
was in Sithole’s head. That woman who’d been excited about the
new job never returned home. Her family became frantic, only to become
shocked when, a few weeks later, her mutilated body was found in a field. Later, more bodies were found. They soon stacked up. Cops couldn’t keep up with it, especially
as the bodies were discovered with no IDs on them. As time went on, the police noticed that the
killer was becoming more confident. He spent more time with the bodies. He hurt the women in more creative ways. A newspaper explained, “The killer was evolving
his murder technique to extract the greatest pain from his victims, assumedly increasing
his own pleasure.” In fact, the bodies piled up so fast that
police felt the need to contact Robert Ressler, the FBI profiler and serial killer expert
over in the USA. As many as 30 bodies were found in a matter
of a few months. President Nelson Mandela had to cancel trips
abroad. South Africa was in a state of panic. Matters were made more chaotic when bodies
were found with words written on their skin. On one body, Sithole wrote in broken English,
“She a beach [sic],” “I am no fighting with you please [sic],” and “We must stay
here for as long as you don't understand.” Were these messages for the cops? In 1995, police discovered that Sithole had
been seen with one of the victims, and with his name already on file for a violent sexual
crime, they went after him, only for Sithole to go on the run. That’s when he called a journalist at The
Star newspaper named Tamsen de Beer. He said he was the killer, calling himself
Joseph Magwena. In a phone interview, he admitted to scores
of murders but denied he had anything to do with the murder of a woman and her two-year-old
son. In fact, he had killed the boy, hitting him
over the head, after which the kid died in the field from exposure. In a third call, cops tracked the number. It was a pay phone, but by the time they got
there, Sithole was gone. Police soon discovered that this Mr. Magwena
was actually Moses Sithole, having tracked a number he’d given to some of his victims
in the interview process. There was nowhere to run now. Sithole later got in touch with his brother-in-law
and asked for a gun. When he met with the brother, who’d already
told the cops, they swooped on him. The cops shot him twice, once in the abdomen
and once in the leg when he charged at them with an axe. Sithole spent two days in critical condition,
after which he was interviewed. What’s disturbing is that some reports say
that while he was admitting to murdering those women, under the sheets, he was playing with
himself. This was one sick man. He explained to the investigators why he’d
committed those heinous crimes, saying, “l force a woman to go where I want, and when
I go there, I tell them, 'Do you know what? I was hurt, so I'm doing it now.' Then I kill them.” So, he blamed his childhood maltreatment for
his depravity. He admitted to killing 29 women in the space
of just over one year, making him arguably the most prolific African serial killer in
terms of body count and the short time frame the murders were committed in. Police said they had him on 38 murders, which
would mean around three murders a month. He was actually suspected of murdering 79
women, which, if true, would make him about the busiest serial killer in African history. 79 in one year is a lot, but as you’ll see
later, others have killed in a similar quick fashion. In subsequent interviews, Sithole said he
took great pleasure from watching the women’s eyes bulge when he strangled them, often with
their own underwear. The full extent of how he tortured his victims
was never detailed, but it was written that he put them through absolute horror and agony. A South African newspaper wrote, “The case
of Moses Sithole serves as a painful reminder of the existence of evil in our society.” This man was hated all over South Africa,
and it came as no surprise when, on December 4, 1997, he was sentenced to 2,410 years in
prison with no possibility of parole for 930 years. He’s still in prison today at the Mangaung
Correctional Centre in Bloemfontein, South Africa’s so-called judicial capital. Let’s now move to Asia, the largest continent
in the world, home to around 4.7 billion people. Asia
With a population that large, it’s not easy to choose one serial killer. We might have gone for Ahmad Suradji, the
Indonesian killer of 42 women and girls who believed that their deaths would give him
supernatural abilities. In terms of evil geniuses, the Vietnamese-French
psycho scammer Charles Sobhraj has a story like no other, which included drugging and
murdering backpackers in Bangkok and devising some of the most exceptional prison escapes
in world history. In Japan, there was Tsutomu Miyazaki, the
killer of young girls, who mutilated their bodies and committed unspeakable acts with
the corpses. Then there was the Butcher of Rostov in Russia,
Andrei Chikatilo, who brutally murdered over 50 women from 1978 to 1990. And when we say brutal, we mean it with a
capital B. During his confession in 1982, he admitted that the “cries, the blood,
and the agony gave [him] relaxation and a certain pleasure.” So-called lust killers, killers who mutilate,
stab, and dismember solely for sexual gratification, are scary, especially when some of them like
to do all of this while the men or women are alive. Then again, doing things with dead bodies
or body parts is equally disgusting and exceedingly baffling. You’ll learn more about this later in the
show, but first, we need to tell you about our number one pick from Asia, a case that
Japanese cops said was unprecedented in the history of the nation. The Japanese media at the time said that they
wouldn’t print the details of the case since they were too disturbing for human consumption. There were actually two killers. Futoshi Matsunaga, was born in the city of
Kitakyūshū on April 28, 1961, and his accomplice, Junko Ogata, was born in the city of Kurume
on February 25, 1962. The two, who studied together in school in
the Fukuoka Prefecture, were both from well-off families, especially Ogata, whose family had
money from land. They were both smart. They were both good-looking, and they showed
none of the signs normally seen in the childhood of serial killer. Matsunaga was something of a playboy in school. He became a father at 19, at which point he
already had a slew of mistresses. That’s when he met his school pal, Ogata,
who soon got into a relationship with Matsunaga despite his marriage. This is why Ogata’s mother, Shizumi, told
her daughter to stay away from him. The Japanese press doesn’t give many details,
but it was said that Matsunaga, at one point, engaged in sexual misconduct with Shizumi
and later persuaded Junko to move in with him. By this point, he’d already divorced his
first wife. This was not a nice man. He enjoyed wrecking families. He was chaos walking, feeding from other people’s
misery. Ogata, who was mentally unstable at times
and suffered from depression, was a victim, too, in these early days, completely under
the spell of her deranged lover. There’s a good reason he became known as
the Mind Control Killer, but that doesn’t mean we can forgive Ogata for what happened
next. Still, reports say he beat her. He branded her with cigarettes and, using
a safety pin and Indian ink, forced her to tattoo his name on her thigh. Matsunaga ticked all the boxes for a psychopath. He was controlling. He showed no empathy. He oozed superficial charm, lied a lot, became
bored easily, and had a grandiose sense of self-worth. He was impulsive, parasitic, shallow, a cheat,
and showed no remorse or guilt for his actions. But there are psychopaths everywhere. It’s often said about one percent of the
human population meets the criteria for a psychopath, and the vast majority of them
don’t kill people for money and pleasure. On the outside, this charming fella looked
successful. He owned a futon firm he named “World”
and seemed to be doing alright. Little did people know that one way he had
fun at work was by getting his five or six employees into the soundproof room above the
shop and giving them electric shocks. This was 1980s Japan, where folks were generally
expected to respect their boss. The Japanese media later reported (translated
to English): “Employees were called there if they were
unable to meet their monthly sales quota or if Matsunaga was in a bad mood. A senior employee held him down and wrapped
electrical cords with exposed metal around his hands and ankles.” One of those employees, who, with the other
employees, lived behind the futon business in a small wooden house, said years later,
“It was a hellish life” working for Matsunaga. He explained to the press what the shocks
felt like, saying, “It was as if my brain had been hit with an iron rod. I lost consciousness for a moment, but I always
woke up with burning pain in my limbs.” At the time, Matsunaga told his employees,
men he locked in that wooden house, that he knew they had parents and sisters and that
if they ever squealed, they would be killed. Those employees had no idea that their boss
had stolen 180 million yen ($2.2 million) as part of fraud and blackmail schemes. His scheme fell apart when the cops started
investigating him, only for him and Otaga to go on the run. Both of them were then added to Japan's Most
Wanted list in 1992. This is where things turned much darker. While on the run, Matsunaga met a woman he’d
known in the past who was married with three kids. She immediately fell for the charming Matsunaga
and agreed to leave her husband. He told her, “Divorce him and come to me,
and I'll take care of [your] children.” At this point, he already had a kid with Ogata,
but he told the woman that Ogata was his sister and the kid his niece. In September 1993, one of the woman’s children
mysteriously dropped dead. She mysteriously died a year later, but not
before Matsunaga had defrauded her family of 11.8 million yen (about US$145,510). The police have never been able to convict
him of these deaths, but it’s thought he was the perpetrator. In 1994, he met an estate agent named Kumio
Toratani, who was living with his 10-year-old daughter. The two talked about crimes they’d committed
in the past. At the time, Ogata told Kumio she had experience
in childcare and would take care of his daughter. What happened next is plain weird, but maybe
that’s because of cultural differences between Japan and the West. We should also understand that Matsunaga told
Kumio that he wanted to start a business with him, but only if he could completely trust
him. The Japanese press reported that on one of
Matsunaga and Kumio’s drinking nights, Matsunaga pulled out a form and told Kumio he’d have
to sign it to prove he wasn’t lying about his criminal past. The form was titled “Certificate of Facts.” Below was written, “I certify that I committed
the crime of…” and below that, a space to write a signature. Kumio signed it, apparently under great pressure,
after which Matsunaga blackmailed him. This is when Matsunaga and Ogata took Kumio
and his daughter hostage in their own home. They demanded money, saying the two couldn’t
leave until the ransom was paid. Kumio was then tied up, or, as the Japanese
press put it, “lynched.” After being forced into a stress position,
Matsunaga would electrecutre him if he moved. He was fed little to no food, sometimes being
fed his own feces and vomit. They even forced his daughter to bite him
all over his body. You can only imagine how distressing this
was for the girl. Kumio died soon after, and Matsunaga managed
to convince the daughter it was her fault. He told her, “I couldn't take your father
to the hospital because of the impression you made on him with your teeth. If I took him to the hospital, they'd immediately
know that you killed him, and the police would arrest him.” She believed him. She was just a kid. The Japanese press explained, “Matsunaga
left the disposal of the corpse to Junko and the girl. The two dismembered the bodies using knives,
saws, and blenders, boiled them in pots, threw the chunks into the ocean, and disposed of
the meat juices in public toilets.” He then got the daughter to sign one of his
certificates that said, “I certify that I killed my biological father with murderous
intent.” He then met a woman who’d worked for Kumio. As usual, he convinced her he was in love
with her, telling her he was a professor at Kyoto University. She and her daughter moved in with Matsunaga,
after which they were held prisoner, electrocuted, starved, and beaten, as she was forced to
borrow money from all her relatives. One day, she managed to get free after jumping
through a second-floor window, sustaining a broken hip and a crushed lung. It’s uncertain how much she suffered as
a result, but when found, she was committed to a mental institution. After this failed extortion and murder attempt,
Junko Ogata would get extra money from her parents and relatives (the other Ogatas),
but it was never enough. In 1997, she went to work in a hostess bar,
and one day, she just never returned home. At this point, she lived in a busy house with
her own kids and the daughter they’d kidnapped. Matsunaga knew she would have gone home to
her parents, so he called them. They arranged to meet him in his apartment. Junko's mother, Shizumi, her father, Homare,
Junko's sister, Rieko and her husband Kazuya, all went, as did Reiko and Kazuya’s two
children, Aya and Yuki. Big mistake. The Japanese press said that he once again
used his mind control to keep them there. Junko turned up later, knowing he had her
family. As soon as she stepped through the door, she
was lynched and electrocuted her, but get this, he’d convinced her family that it
was Junko who was in the wrong, and so she deserved it. A Japanese news report stated, “At this
point, Junko was more shocked that her family not only took Matsunaga's side but also that
they were placed under his wing, rather than being deceived.” As time went by, Matsunaga convinced Reiko
and Kazuya that Shizumi had gone mad, telling them they needed to strangle her. The story gets confusing here. A lot of money was talked about, and it seems
Matsunaga managed to convince family members they had enemies within their own family. He made them hate and distrust each other,
all living in this little apartment. It was about to become the home of a bloodbath. If this sounds unbelievable to you, it does
to us, too, but we guess there’s a reason he was named the Mind Control Killer. He was apparently excellent at his job. In December 1997, he convinced Junko to electrocute
her own father, Homare, to death. He forced the remaining members of the Ogata
family to cut up the corpse and dispose of it. In January, he convinced Kazuya to strangle
his wife, Reiko, and their 10-year-old daughter, Aya. He killed his wife but not his daughter. Aya would succumb to depravity soon enough,
though. Matsunaga then locked Kazuya in a bathroom,
where he eventually died from starvation on April 13, 1998. Soon after, Matsunaga convinced Junko to kill
Rieko's 5-year-old son, Yuki. Talk about a house of horrors! Both he and Junko then tortured Aya. It was Kumio’s daughter, who’d been with
them all this time, that finally murdered Aya, but under duress. The date was June 7, 1998. Now, the only survivors were Junko’s own
children. Matsunaga told Junko, “Because you ran away
that time, I had no choice but to kill your entire family. It’s your fault.” On January 30, 2002, Kumio’s daughter managed
to escape, but Matsunaga found her, took her back to the apartment, tied her up, and electrocuted
her. She escaped again in March and, this time,
managed to get to the police. The daughters were taken into care. Everyone testified as to the extreme things
they’d seen in that house, although the bodies were never found. Kumio explained how Matsunaga had made everyone
hate each other. When he killed her father, he made a stew
with the body parts and forced her to eat some. She said he was absolutely “inhuman.” A neighbor later testified in court, perhaps
having smelled the ingredients for the stew, stating, “There was this vile smell that
permeated the entire apartment block.” People couldn’t believe what they were hearing,
and in actuality, they only heard the lighter version of the story. In 2005, both Matsunaga and Junko were sentenced
to death, but in 2007, Junko’s sentence was commuted to life in prison. Just about everyone in Japan said death is
too good for these people. Amen to that. Could there be anyone as demented as Mr. Matsunaga? Maybe. Let’s now visit Europe. Europe
Europe, the home of Jack the Ripper, the Yorkshire Ripper (Peter Sutcliffe), the extremely creepy
and cruel couple, Fred and Rose West, and the German man Karl Denke, aka The Forgotten
Cannibal, who butchered his 40-odd victims in the early 1900s and sold their meat as
pork. Then there was Harold Shipman, the British
doctor who may have put at least 215 of his patients to sleep…forever, but his crimes
don’t elicit as much fear as other serial killers’ crimes do. Again, we have scores of people we could choose,
going back centuries up until the present day, but the killer we think needs to join
this list is Anatoly Onoprienko, the man often referred to as The Terminator or the Beast
of Ukraine. By God, did he earn those very grim-sounding
sobriquets… In March 1996, the Ukrainian authorities were
under pressure to solve a slew of cases in which people had been massacred in their homes
and in the streets. The killer indeed went through them like a
Terminator. Out of desperation, the country’s security
services interrogated and tortured 26-year-old Yury Mozola, thinking it was him. It wasn’t, and the resulting torture ended
up being fatal, adding the death of another innocent man to the case. Soon after, the now-embarrassed and disgraced
authorities received a tip-off. They were told the man they were looking for
was Anatoly Onoprienko, a sadist of the highest order, a cruel maniac if ever there was one. There have been few serial killers in world
history who were as violent as he was. In 1989, he walked into a house. He’d already scoped the place. He knew how many people lived there and was
sure the house was far enough away from other houses that screams wouldn’t be noticed. He could have chosen a family of 3 or 4 or
five, but in this case, he chose a home with a father, a mother, and eight children. He entered the home and, as planned, used
a 12-gauge shotgun to blast away the father. He then shot the mother, and one by one, he
followed the screaming kids around, blasting each one. Hence his nickname, The Terminator. It’s hard to even imagine what that scene
would have looked like, but he’d only just started. Months later, he saw a Lada car parked off
the highway. Five people were sleeping inside. He blasted them all through the window before
they could even realize what was going on. He later said, “I just shot them. It's not that it gave me pleasure, but I felt
this urge. From then on, it was almost like some game
from outer space.” He also said he was angry ever since growing
up in an orphanage, leading to his thirst for wanting to cause harm to families. He also said he heard voices, too, but this
fact is still debated. That night, he got in the car with the dead
family and took their valuables. Unlike some of the killers on this list, and
especially one we’ll talk about soon, he was not fond of dead bodies. He later admitted, “The stink would send
out bad vibes. The smell was unbearable.” A few months later, he massacred a family
of four, again with a shotgun. He then killed another family of four in their
home and gunned down a man in the street who might have seen him leaving the house. In January 1996, he waited on the highway,
gun in his jacket, and pulled people over, waving as if he was in distress. When they stopped, he gunned them down. One of the victims was a chef, one a soldier,
and another a taxi driver. Two weeks later, he broke into another home
and massacred a family of five. When he left the house, he lit it on fire,
only to be seen by a 27-year-old railroad worker and a 56-year-old pedestrian. He gunned both people down. He did something similar 13 days later to
another family, and around two weeks, he shot a father and son. He then bashed the mother to death in front
of the daughter with a hammer. When the daughter said she had no money, he
took the hammer to her, too. This man was a thrill killer, a sadist, what
we generally call a violent maniac. There was no sexual motive. He was killing for killing’s sake, albeit
he took money and valuables from his victims. They’d have given him everything, anyway. He just loved killing. Just over a week later, he engaged in what
criminologists sometimes call “overkill.” He shot the parents, but with the kids, he
took his time, striking them over and over again with an axe. An hour later, he saw a man near the house,
so he shot him to death and hacked up the body. He’d later tell cops he was just getting
rid of the evidence, but there was certainly no need to kill every single person in those
houses. He enjoyed it, no doubt about that. In an interview, he said one time, after he’d
killed the parents, he went to a bedroom where a girl was praying. She hadn’t properly seen his face. She was just praying to God that she wouldn’t
be killed like her mom and pop. He told the investigators, “Seconds before
I smashed her head, I ordered her to show me where they kept their money. She looked at me with an angry, defiant stare
and said, 'No, I won't.' That strength was incredible. But I felt nothing.” He later called it hunting, explaining, “I
would be sitting, bored, with nothing to do. And then, suddenly, this idea would get into
my head. I would do everything to get it out of my
mind, but I couldn't. It was stronger than me.” This case is special because serial killers
these days don’t generally wipe out entire families. Sure, there were prolific axe murderers in
the US at the start of the 20th century, but in the 21st century, such massacres are rarely
heard about. Had this crime been in the UK or US, there’d
already be 7 TV shows made about it. And yet, we imagine most of you have never
heard a thing about The Terminator. During the trial, his lawyers argued that
he was mentally unfit to stand trial. Half the time, he’d ramble to them about
him being part of an experiment headed by the CIA and Interpol. It was a bit late for MKUltra… “I'm not a maniac,” he once said to an
interviewer. “If I were, I would have thrown myself onto
you and killed you right here… I have been taken over by a higher force…I
am like a rabbit in a laboratory. A part of an experiment to prove that man
is capable of murdering and learning to live with his crimes.” Other times, he said such things as, “I
love all people, and I loved those I killed. I looked those children I murdered in the
eyes and knew that it had to be done. For you, it's 52 murders, but for me, that's
the norm.” 52, that’s the number of kills, and except
for the first two massacres, all of them happened in a space of around six months. Ukrainians were upset. It seemed to them the cops hadn’t done enough,
especially when they heard the killer say, “People screamed so loudly that they could
be heard in neighboring villages. But nobody came to help them. Everybody went into hiding, like mice.” He was given a death sentence, but after Ukraine
abolished capital punishment, his sentence was commuted to life. Would he kill again if he were ever released? He once said:
“If I am ever let out, I will start killing again. But this time, it will be worse, ten times
worse. The urge is there. Seize this chance because I am being groomed
to serve Satan. After what I have learned out there, I have
no competitors in my field.” Err, well, let’s just say South America
might say to that, “Hold my beer.” Still, killing that many people in six months
is certainly worthy of the record books. Now, let’s head over to South America, the
continent that contains the most prolific serial killers in modern history. South America
Who to choose? Who to choose? We could go for “The Monster of the Andes,”
Pedro López, a Colombian who killed at least 110 girls and women from 1969 to 1980 throughout
South America. He claimed it was more like 300. Unbelievably, he was released from custody
and is currently in hiding, believed to be out there killing again. In terms of raw numbers, the South Americans
come out on top, especially when you consider another top ten killer, Pedro Alonso López
(Luis Alfredo Garavito!), aka The Beast, also from Colombia, who brutally tortured and murdered
young men and boys, beating, cutting, slashing, biting, burning and doing all manner of other
unmentionable things to them as he had them bound. It’s believed his body count was 221 from
1992 to 1999. So, a higher number than The Terminator’s,
but within a much larger timeframe. But we’ve chosen Daniel Camargo Barbosa
for this list, the so-called “Sadist of El Charquito.” He was also from Colombia. We’ll just add here, in case any Colombians
are upset with us, that we had our eye on serial killers in Argentina, Brazil, and Peru. In the 1970s and 1980s, this sadistic creature
murdered at least 72 girls and young women in Colombia and Ecuador. That’s the lowest figure. He might well have murdered up to 180 girls. Like many or even most serial killers, Mr.
Barbosa had a childhood befitting of a nightmare. His cruel mother dressed him up as a girl
and sent him to school, where he was beaten up and humiliated. He wanted payback. He started off by drugging girls he’d persuaded
to go to his apartment. You can imagine what he did next. In the early days, he let them go once they
came around, but after one girl told the cops about her experience, he was imprisoned in
1964. From here on in, he wouldn’t leave any more
survivors. This guy was like the pied piper, the boogeyman,
luring young people to follow him, after which, as the press reported, he would do his worst
and then treated them to what they called an “extremely brutal death” often in the
middle of forests. He once said he chose the purist victims,
the most innocent he could find because, he said, “they cried more,” and he got off
on the crying and screaming. When his victims were young, he’d lure them
with the promise of candy or another type of treat or snack, and when the victims were
grown up, he’d use his intellect and cunning to get them to follow him. He was very successful at this. After he was caught, a Colombian journalist
called him “brilliant,” saying Barbosa talked about good and evil like a philosopher,
often quoting the likes of Herman Hesse, Sigmund Freud, Garcia Marquez, and Friedrich Nietzsche. "He had an answer for everything and was able
to speak of God and the Devil equally,” said the journalist. When Barbosa was finally caught in 1986, inside
his briefcase was the book Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Like another killer we’ll talk about soon,
he obviously intellectualized murder. Barbosa admitted to killing 71 girls and women,
but as we said, the number is likely much, much higher. We are not going to go through what happened
to each victim because it would be repetitive and just too grim, but we will say police
often found victims had been stamped to death, slashed, stabbed, strangled, and even crushed. His weapon of choice was often a machete. One time, an adult woman hit him on the head
with a rock, so, to make a point, he decapitated her and threw the head away like it was a
piece of trash. With another victim, he cut out the lungs,
heart, and kidneys and then gutted her like a fish. Some serial killers, such as the Brit Dennis
Nilsen or the American Jeffrey Dahmer, form an infinitely unhealthy relationship with
the bodies, but for Barbosa, he wanted to show the utmost amount of disrespect, or at
least he did that when they’d annoyed him. He even sometimes made nasty, taunting phone
calls to the victims’ families. His karma came knocking, but not until after
he served his second prison sentence. After ten years in prison in Colombia, he
escaped, only for the authorities to announce he would have been eaten in the shark-infested
waters he’d entered. That wasn’t true. At this so-called Colombian Alcatraz, Barbosa
had studied the ocean currents before he leaped into the water. He managed to get to Ecuador, where he carried
on killing more than 50 times, only for two cops to get him minutes after he’d killed
a girl in the capital city of Quito. Not only was he carrying that Dostoyevsky
book, but he was also carrying her bloodied clothes and a part of her sliced-off sexual
organs. On November 13, 1994, at Quito's infamous
García Moreno Prison Camargo, his new celly, 29-year-old Giovanny Arcesio Noguera Jaramillo,
forced him at knifepoint to kneel and said, “It is the hour of vengeance.” He stabbed him eight times and took an ear
as a trophy. Noguera later told guards that he was avenging
the death of his aunt, one of the many victims of this Sadist of El Charquito. Antarctica
Out there on the research stations, life can get pretty lonely, and people have been known
to lose their minds somewhat. While there have been violent attacks in the
past, we are yet to see an incident that could be turned into a movie like The Shining. Still, in 2018, media reported that one man
had lost his mind due to a bit too much “Antarctic desolation and cold.” AP reported that a Russian researcher named
Sergey Savitsky suffered an “apparent emotional breakdown” and stabbed a welder multiple
times. The welder survived, and Savitsky was sent
back to Russia to undergo some mental checks. There have been a few cases of violence out
there in the world’s most remote wilderness, but as yet, no serial killers…not like this
next continent, which has had quite a lot of them. North America
If we look at data regarding the number of serial killers that have been documented in
each country, the top ten list looks a bit like this – bear in mind the FBI says there
are around 25 to 50 serial killers working in the USA at any one time. United States — 3,204
England — 166 South Africa — 117
Canada — 106 Italy — 97
Japan — 96 Germany — 85
Australia — 81 India — 80
Russia — 73 The US might seem way ahead, but you also
need to bear in mind that the US has been publishing information about serial killers
for far longer than most other country. Some countries that are somewhat closed off
from the rest of the world, such as China and Russia, have no doubt suppressed information
about their maniacs. You should also bear in mind the population
of the countries listed and the fact that some of the these countries’ police forces
are much better at detecting killers, such as the US. The US isn’t as bad then as the numbers
suggest, but the country does seem to have quite a few serial killers. That might be because serial killers are so
well-reported there that they become kind of celebrities, and there’s evidence that
this can create copycats. In no other nation do killers get so much
exposure. In the US, most often than not, they become
famous. Ok, so who’d be the worst in North America? We could, of course, have played it safe and
chosen the psycho’s psycho, Ted Bundy, but he doesn’t frighten us like some others. Sure, Bundy’s creepy and charming personality
was petrifying, but we still think we need to look elsewhere. We could have chosen Ed Kemper, the high-IQ,
seemingly sweet man who slept with the decapitated heads of his victims, or ED Gein, who doesn’t
have a high kill count but gets points for making skin suits from his victims that he
actually wore and fashioning a belt made from nipples. Jeffrey Dahmer slept with bodies and tried
to create zombie slaves by injecting chemicals into his drugged victims’ heads. Then you have the utterly depraved sadists,
the Tool-box killers, the quite similar Freeway Killer, and one of the scariest men in history
who hardly ever even gets a mention in the American press, Dean Corll, aka, The Candy
Man, who horrifically tortured at least 28 boys on his torture wall in the early 70s
after sometimes luring his victims with free candy. He fastened those teenagers to his infamous
wall and used everything in his vile torture tool kit. After reading several books on North American
serial killers, we’d say it was Corll’s depravity that shocked us the most. The man was just insanely cruel. Even so, we’re not choosing him. We’ve decided on a sicko named Melvin Rees,
one, because he deserves to be here and two, because his story hasn’t been as publicised
as the rest of the killers we’ve mentioned. His nickname was the “Sex Beast,” which
gives you a pretty good idea of what you’re about to hear. His other nickname is perhaps more confusing. That was “The Bebop Nietzsche Necrophile.” Peter Vronsky, an author we’ve mentioned
before who’s done a lot of good work on serial killers, introduced us to Rees in one
of his books, a man Vronsky called a “deeply twisted” person with “monstrous impulses.” He was indeed monstrous, and yet he looked
like a talented, intelligent, stable human being who you’d gladly invite over for dinner
or be proud he was the date of your daughter. He wasn’t creepy or slimey like Bundy, or
quiet like Kemper, or plain weird like Dahmer. This is one serial killer who, to everyone
around him, was just a cool, friendly, and clever guy. For us, that makes him all the more terrifying. He could be your best buddy, your uncle, your
teacher. We don’t know much about his childhood,
but we do know that in 1946, he joined the US Army and went to Europe, where he earned
his bread as a military musician. On his return, he studied at the University
of Maryland, where he proved he was an excellent musician, notably with the saxophone, piano,
and clarinet. Jazz music was his biggest love, well, we
guess after killing. After dropping out of uni, playing jazz in
bars was how he made a living. Everything looked quite normal in his life. In 1954, he got married, and later, he and
his wife, Elaine, had a son, Philip. Things were not as normal as they seemed,
though. In 1955, he attempted to abduct a 36-year-old
woman. However, she escaped before he could drive
away with her. It seems the police got involved, but the
woman decided in the end not to press charges, a decision that might have cost quite a few
people their lives. Now we move to June 1, 1956, when 18-year-old
Mary Fellers and 16-year-old Shelby Venable were looking for a good time. These two youngsters are rebels without a
cause. They love hitchhiking, looking for music and
fun, much to their parents’ concern. This is an era of beat writing and jazz music. The girls don’t want to be tied down. They want to discover America, like the author
Jack Kerouac. That night, they were waiting at a bus stop
with the intention of heading to North Laurel in Maryland when a blue sedan pulled up. The girls got in the car as if they knew the
man. They then got out again to switch positions. They seemed very comfortable with this guy,
a cool cat with a cute face who impressed young women with his deep talk about philosophy. It wasn’t until June 14 that Shelby’s
body was found face down on a patch of water at a place called Catoctin Creek in Virginia. Mary’s body was found nearby. Both girls had died at the same time or thereabouts. Shelby had been strangled, and Mary’s cause
of death was never ascertained. It was later discovered that the girls had
been a little bit too obsessed with a handsome jazz player at a club. His name was Melvin Rees. He was indeed a cool cat. That year, 16-year-old Nancy Shomette and
her buddy, 14-year-old Michael Ryan, went missing. The two had taken a shortcut through the University
of Maryland as they wanted to pick up Nancy’s report card from school. They never got there. Their bodies were found later by a dog walker. They’d been shot by a .22 rifle. In both these cases, pathologists said it
didn’t look like the killer had been sexually motivated. The victims were young and without known enemies,
so, wondered the cops, why had they been murdered in cold blood? It didn’t make much sense, and in those
days in Maryland, this kind of thing was not common. The Golden Age of serial killing in the US
was only just starting. This was one of the cases that kicked it off. Now we must go forward in time to June 26,
1957, when 36-year-old Margaret Harold and 31-year-old Roy Hudson had turned down a small
country lane off Maryland’s Defense Highway after having some food and beers earlier. They notice a car, after which a man walks
toward their car. He tells them, “What do you think this is,
a national park?” The man said it was his job to watch over
the area. He then asked the couple for a smoke and asked
them if they could give him a ride. When the man got in the car, Roy shuffled
into the back, after which the mysterious, well-spoken handsome man pulled out a snub-nosed
steel revolver. The man was about to tie their hands when
Roy told him he would not be able to get to his cash if his hands were tied. The man replied, “Don’t worry, I’ll
get your money.” Boom. He then shot Margaret in the back of the head,
and she slumped over. Roy, seeing an opportunity, burst through
the car door and started running for his life. He got to a farmhouse and called the police. When cops got back to the car, Margaret’s
brain matter was splattered everywhere. The man who’d killed her, described as about
35, white, six feet, 170 pounds, had violated her dead body, a pure sicko. Roy then told them he’d seen a green car
parked nearby, which might have belonged to the killer. The car was near a shack, said Roy, and when
cops crept up to the shack, they found some cord lying around. Worse, when they entered the rundown and dirty
abode, they were greeted by something out of a nightmare. The walls were covered with photos, horrid
photos of autopsies and women tied up. Scenes of death and torture taken from what
seemed like true detective magazines confronted these cops. This was the 1950s. They really didn’t know what to think. We’ll just say here that there were many
serial killers in the US in the 50s, 60s, and 70s who admitted after being caught they
were avid readers of detective magazines, magazines that often depicted murder and cannibalism. They were a huge craze back then, in an era
that had just gone through a world war and was involved in a paranoid and violent Cold
War. Back to the scene, police then noticed another
photo. This time, it was a regular photo of a girl
who looked of high school age. This was just shocking to them. Vronsky describes the scene as police walking
into a “pervert’s lair.” Now, dear viewers, we think you can understand
what kinds of things in the past inspired numerous Hollywood movies. Any number of films have depicted what the
cops saw that day. Actually, the rest of this story you’ve
seen presented in Hollywood thrillers time and again. Not long after this grisly and frankly weird
find, a couple, Irwin Adams and Denise Eggleston, walked into the police station looking like
they were in shock. They said they’d just been parked in a quiet
area when a guy came up to their car and threatened them with a .39 blue steel snub-nosed gun. The man managed to tie them up partly, but
both escaped on foot, barefoot. The man gave chase, but they managed to outrun
him. It was around this time that police found
the high school girl in the photo of the pervert’s lair. Her name was Wanda Tipton. They half-expected her to be dead, but she
was alive and well. They asked her if she’d met any strange
men, to which she said no. She was lying. She’d been dating this super cool cat, a
philosopher, jazz player intellectual. But he was married, so she told police she’d
met no one, so as to not get Rees in any trouble. Soon after, another couple in a car met a
man with a gun. The man stuffed the male into the trunk and
tied the woman up. When he was done with her, he told her, “You’re
a good woman. I’m glad this wasn’t worse than it was.” She was in shock. She didn’t know what to say out of fear
for her life. The man allowed them to run off into the nearby
woods. On Saturday, January 11, 1959, 29-year-old
Carrol Jackson, his wife Mildred, and their daughters, Susan (5) and Janet (18 months),
all went missing after visiting Mildred’s parents in Louisa, Virginia. Their car was found about ten miles away at
the side of the road, the keys still in the ignition. Soon, newspapers were all over the story,
talking about a whole family disappearing into thin air. Some talked about UFOs, and others mentioned
witchcraft. Entire families didn’t just vanish. The next March, two farmers were driving when
their truck got stuck in the mud. When one of them went to put branches under
the tires, he noticed a shoe, and then an ankle, and then a leg. It was Carroll. Police found that he’d been beaten badly
around the face and shot through the head. The youngest daughter was found next to him. It was likely she’d been in his arms when
he was shot, and so he’d suffocated her when he fell into the mud. But where were the others? Later in March, two teenage boys, John and
Paddy, were playing with their BB guns close to that pervert’s lair in Maryland when
they thought they saw the hair of an animal, maybe a squirrel. They shot at it, only to realize this was
no animal. They walked up to it and poked it. One of the boys later told police, “I thought
it was a baby doll, then I saw it was a human.” Cops then gave this man the name the Beast. He’d done terrible things to the mother,
beaten her so badly her lungs packed in. He’d also beaten the girl to death. Not only that, he’d committed disgusting
necrophilic acts with the corpses. What kind of maniac would do such a thing? One of the reasons we’re telling you this
story is that the Sex Beast is a historical true crime tale because it was the first time
the FBI was called in to investigate a serial killer. Up until then, they’d had no interest in
such cases, according to Vronsky, who cited Robert Ressler. Still, it seems the FBI was no better than
the police forces in Maryland and Virginia at solving the case. It was plain good luck then that they got
a lead on Rees. They spoke to his roommate, who’d contacted
them and told them his buddy had some very weird ways of looking at life. He told them that Rees, now divorced, a brilliant
musician, was fascinated with existential philosophy. The roommate said Rees often told him that
his existential theory was that there are “individual standards of right and wrong,”
so in some ways, you can make up your own ethics. “You can't say it's wrong to kill,” he’d
told the roommate. Rees seemed to be expressing the Nietzschean
things about master morality and slave morality. The masters, according to Nietzsche, make
their own morals, and the slaves follow. The slaves, Nietzsche said, resent the masters,
and that creates problems in society. What Nietzsche didn't say is it’s okay to
kill, but that’s how Rees and also Adolf Hitler interpreted the precept. The roommate also said about Rees, “Anything
he reads, he likes to experience. He’s a thrill-seeker, I guess.” Ree’s mother later said her son would often
talk about violence just being a form of self-expression, and no one had the right to take that away
from a person. She made him sound like the killer from the
movie Se7en, saying that he’d often tell her some “people in today’s sick society”
shouldn’t have the right to life. “There are some things I find pleasure in
doing,” he told his disturbed mother. She later told police he cheated at games,
the trait of a psychopath. She said he was fascinated by not just murders
in detective magazines, but he loved reading about Nazi atrocities. He liked Nietzsche but held to the views of
the anti-natalist Arthur Schopenhauer, whose philosophy kind of said life was so painful
that it’s not even worth being born. She said her son would stay up all night on
illegal substances reading books written by these people, and worse, he was obsessed with
the writings of the original sadist, the Marquis de Sade. On June 20, 1960, police arrested him, a man
they said was smart and mild-mannered. According to Vronsky, there are varying stories
about Rees’ childhood, but it seems he was a good kid who liked animals; he was clever
and well-liked. His father said his son was always “kind
and sympathetic and could not hurt any living thing.” Apparently, Melvin’s own son absolutely
adored him. After his arrest, his fellow students came
out of the woodwork, calling Rees talented, versatile, mild-mannered, intelligent, and
friendly. Even his ex-wife said he was all those things,
plus he never lifted a finger to her and wasn’t into any strange sexual stuff. He was a good husband, she said, but he left
her. The B-movie actress and topless dancer Pat
Barrington, who’d starred in such movies as Orgy of the Dead, The Satanist, and Hedonistic
Pleasures, had also dated and lived with Rees and it seems they got along just fine. But when the police raided his house, part
of the evidence they found was his “death diary.” In it, he wrote such things as “Drove to
the select area and killed the father and baby. Now the mother were all mine!” He’d emphasized the “all mine” part. Police refused to make public what he’d
done to them as it was too gory, too disgusting, but they did publish the part where he wrote,
“led her to place of execution and hung her. I was her master.” This is why we’ve chosen his story. It’s mind-boggling how such a clean-cut,
well-liked, obviously intelligent man with no history of trauma or violence could become
such a maniac. This was a Jekyll and Hyde case like no other. Such killers throughout history are very,
very rare. At trial, he looked like a Hollywood movie
star and sounded like an intellectual, but in prison, he began to lose his mind. In 1985, he gave an interview to a journalist
working for the Richmond Times Dispatch and admitted to killing Mary Fellers and Shelby
Venables, although he denied killing Ryan and Shomette. He died from heart issues in 1995 while serving
time in a federal facility in Missouri. Now you need to watch “Worst Serial Killers
That Cops Never Caught.” Or, have a look at “How These Sneaky Serial
Killers Finally Got Caught.”
