Did you know some of the vilest, most sadistic,
most warped killers in history got away? Most of them you won’t have even heard of.
Some of them right now could be living in a town near you, watching you, stalking you, and,
if two hard-working former detectives are right, they’re conspiring to plan your murder on the
Dark Web. This is real. You’ll hear about this underground group of modern American killers in
due course, but before we talk about the present, let’s look at the past.
The New York Ripper Murders Many serial killers enjoy being front page
news; they thirst for attention, which, as you’ll see throughout this video today, is very
problematic for society as a whole. Perhaps no one has had more attention than Jack the Ripper,
the unknown maniac that worked at a time when London was the center of the media world.
His story has been told a quadrillion times, and it seems he may have inspired copycat killers.
Between March and May of 1915, the Ripper came back to life, although he was now called “The New
York Ripper.” He brutally killed two young folks in some East Side tenements of Manhattan. Only
27 years after Jack did his business in London, stories of the New York Ripper filled
the American press, leading to angry mobs taking the law into their own hands.
The Brooklyn Daily Times said there was a “Ghetto Ripper.” People read that a “lunatic” was
on the loose. This caused panic in every household in this mostly poor area. This new Ripper taunted
police with letters signed Jack the Ripper, saying he would kill again at random. One
hundred cops were soon assigned to the case. What’s shocking is the Ripper wrote the
letters to the mothers of the victims. In one letter, he wrote:
“DEAR MRS. MURRAY: I really feel sorry for you…But when the excitement
cools off again some evening after dinner, I am going out to kill again... You must
understand that I must see blood and cut flesh.” So, Jack the Ripper or someone like Jack the
Ripper chose New York City as his hunting ground. The press sold newspapers while the public lost
its collective mind. Soon a news report stated, “Man Mobbed as Ripper.” It explained
that a cop had to draw his gun to stop the mob from killing the man. Another
story talked about a man who was seen hanging around outside the Lafayette Street
School. One hundred students chased him down. It was a delirious time, full-on mass hysteria.
For Italians, then mostly quite new to the city, it became a perilous time after a
cashier who’d sold one of the victims some milk before she was killed said she’d seen
a “foreign-looking man” who she said looked Italian. Some newspapers then discussed these
new immigrants and their alleged strange customs. The New York Tribune wrote, “It is well known
that among certain ignorant immigrants from the south of Europe, there is a superstitious belief
that by sacrificing a little girl, they can be cured of certain complaints.” This immediately put
Italians' lives at risk from the mob, even though the story was based on nothing but an idle rumor.
Alas, the New York Ripper was never found., and things eventually calmed down.
This next killer deserves a place in the serial killer hall of Infamy. If there
were such a thing as the Ripper’s Ripper, it would be this guy, the worst of the worst.
The Cleveland Torso Murderer The story of this very real Ripper takes place
around the southeast side of Cleveland, Ohio, in an area that was known as Kingsbury Run. That’s
why the killer was also referred to as the “Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run.” The killer gained his
nickname after his custom of dismembering all of his victims, seven men and five women, who were
all found in pieces here, there, and everywhere. The hand that killed them obviously knew a lot
about anatomy, just as Jack the Ripper had. As happened in London, the Cleveland Ripper
chose poor, disenfranchised people as his victims. Modern researchers have called such
people “less dead” because when they’re dead, they don’t matter as much as other folks with
a higher social status. The Kingsbury Run area was then known as the “Hobo Jungle,” famous for
its gambling dens, raucous brothels, vagrants, booze, and nightly punch-ups. It was one of
the so-called Hoovervilles, depressed and often violent shanty towns that popped up all over
the US during the era of the Great Depression. Still, the authorities did try and get this
man. They even put Eliot Ness on the case, the leader of the so-called Untouchables that went after the illegal booze maverick
Al Capone during Prohibition. It was the sheer gruesomeness
of the case that compelled the US government to send their best man.
In September 1934, a woman who was in her mid-30s was found. Well, her torso and
thighs were, which were reported back then as a “rotting slab of human flesh,” found
on the shores of Lake Erie. Two fishermen on Lake Erie later said they found her head
bobbing up and down in the water. She became known as the “The Lady of the Lake” after a
young girl swimming in the lake said she saw a hand waving at her from the water. What’s
notable is that the coroner, Mr. A.J. Pearse, said there were signs of a preservative
chemical on the skin of the victim. Where would one find such chemicals? You’ll see soon.
It was about a year later that two young men were found, each missing their head. One body had
been drained of blood. Coroner Pearce said the cause of death was decapitation. The victim was
later identified as 28-year-old Edward Andrassy, described by newspapers and cops as
a “snotty punk” who occasionally got involved with prostitution and weed. The
other body, which had signs of a chemical preservative on the skin, was not identified.
Both men were missing their manhood. Notably, unlike Jack the Ripper, the mutilations
happened while the men were still alive, but the decapitation part was given as the actual
cause of death. This was utterly brutal, but cops believed the killer must have drugged the victims
first. The Cleveland News at the time asked, “What fantastic chemistry of the civilized
mind converted him into a human butcher?” In January, June, and July of 1936, more bodies
were found, and the signature of the murders was the same. They were headless, and if they
were men, were found missing their genitals. In September of that year, a man tripped over
something while trying to hop on a train. He soon realized it was the upper half of a person’s
torso. When police were recovering the other half from a muddy pool nearby, 600 people turned
up to watch. The case shook America. Still, the Cleveland Ripper, while arguably 100 times
worse than Jack in terms of severity, was not major global news. His story was never be printed
on thousands and thousands of newspapers or given the major Hollywood blockbuster treatment.
Despite Ness’s efforts, including 5000 interviews, he couldn’t get his man. He decided the best
thing to do was burn the entire shanty town down, making very poor people even more desperate in
the process. Even back then, such a hardline act elicited widespread criticism.
Ness was made more furious in 1938 when the killer left two of his victims,
or parts of them, right near City Hall, in clear view of Ness’ office. This was an
obvious taunt. Body parts were now being found on local streets; as one writer explained,
they were literally “tripping over bodies.” In 1939, County Sheriff Martin O’Donnell arrested
a fifty-two-year-old bricklayer named Frank Dolezal who was thought to be a potential suspect.
He made a confession, which some now say was staged. Cops broke six of his ribs, after which
Dolezal was found dead in his jail cell. That hardly sounded like top detective work.
The press then wrote about a mysterious man they called Dr. X, an alcoholic
physician that had lost his mind and, eventually, his practicing license. His name
was Francis Edward Sweeney, a well-known member of an influential Cleveland family and was the
cousin to the US congressman Martin L. Sweeney. Francis was a veteran of WW1, and no doubt
suffered from what we now call PTSD. He drank all day, often flying into blind rages. He was
crushed by anxiety and depression. He also had nerve damage from a gas attack in the trenches.
What’s more, he’d worked as part of a medic unit which performed amputations in the war. After the
war, he worked in a hospital. Between 1933-1938, when the murders happened, Sweeney’s erratic
behavior at the hospital resulted in five competency hearings. He barely passed each one.
A man also accused Sweeney of once drugging him. This man claimed to have been given the
drugs in an office, which was Sweeney’s, and just so happened to be next to the
coroner’s room where sharp scalpels and preservative chemicals could be found.
Sweeny also failed a polygraph test once he became a prime suspect. Still, Ness didn’t think he
had much chance of convicting a man of such high standing in Cleveland. Before he could be tried,
Sweeney committed himself to a mental hospital, from where he wrote Ness threatening letters for
years to come. There was only ever circumstantial evidence against him, though, so Sweeney was never
even charged. It’s worth noting that as soon as Sweeney committed himself, the murders stopped.
Now for the exceptionally grisly murders that inspired many of the horror movies
you’ve enjoyed. Still, we bet you’ve never even heard these stories before.
American Maniacs and Mad Axe Murderers On May 23, 1918, husband and wife Joseph
and Catherine Maggio were sleeping soundly in their bed in New Orleans when a mysterious
man walked up to them and slit their throats with a very sharp razor. For good measure,
he took an axe to them. Joseph actually lived long enough for his brothers to discover him
crawling around, although he died soon after. The killer became known as the Axeman of New
Orleans, who may have hacked and killed six and injured six more. He, or someone pretending to
be him, once wrote a letter that was published in the local newspapers, in which he threatened to
besmear New Orleans with “blood and brains” if he didn’t see jazz being played on a particular night
all over the city. That night, every bar, every hotel, and even people in their homes listened
to jazz. He didn’t kill anyone that night. This was shocking to Americans all over the
country, but in those days, they were hearing more and more about crazed killers than they had
in the past, particularly axe murderers. According to serial killer researcher Peter Vronsky in
his book “Sons of Cain,” between 1900 and 1950, the US saw an increase in serial killers,
and many of them chose the axe as their preferred tool for their nasty deeds.
In that half-decade, Vronsky counts 171 serial killers, or 3.4 new ones every
year. Other researchers have written that there were particular bad runs from
1911 to 1915 and also from 1935 to 1941. It seems war years were bad years, but that’s
hardly surprising, given the madness of war. But there was one axe murderer that came
before the two wars. He was later referred to as the “Servant Girl Annihilator,” a cool
title for a video game but a scary one for a person to have. This killer struck between
1884 and 1885 in Austin, Texas, and guess what? People started saying it was England’s Jack
the Ripper, who may or may not have decided that the weather was much better over the pond.
In 1885, the New York Times wrote that two servant women in Austin were dragged from
their beds and murdered. The article said, “The crimes of last night surpass all others in
brutality.” The Times said the “servant women of Austin” had been under attack for over a year.
The article said seven black women and four white women had been killed the same way, mutilated
by an axe. The article explained that most of the women had been “outraged,” which back then
meant something very different from what it means today. We think you can guess what that entailed.
We’ll just say it had to do with “indecency”, there’s no need to go into details.
Word spread about the attacker. Everyone had their own theory about who it was. Some of
the African-American community who practiced voodoo thought the killer was a white man who had
magic powers to make himself invisible; otherwise, they said, how did you explain how he got in
and out without even making a dog bark? Indeed, this guy was like a ghost. Hundreds of cops
were then assigned to look for this man. Some thought there might be a group of men doing it,
that there was some kind of dark conspiracy. No one was ever convicted.
As we said, axes were often the weapon of choice, likely because axes were everywhere in those
days, and perhaps there were copycats. A man named Henry Lee Moore would walk into people’s
houses and massacre everyone with an axe, usually one he’d found lying around near the
house. He’d just knock on the door and proceed to murder everyone. This is the theory.
There could have been multiple mad axemen. The theory states he killed 23 people in
total, all with an axe. In September 1911, he chose a house in Colorado Springs,
using a handy axe to kill the father, mother, and four kids. A month later, he traveled
to Illinois, where he did the same to a family of three, and that same month, he massacred a family
of five in Ellsworth, Kanas. He went to Villisca, Iowa, in 1912, when his axe rampage killed six
members of a family and two of their guests. Moore was a prime suspect for that one but
was never convicted. There were so many axe murderers back then that it’s very likely some
of these deaths were caused by copycat killers. Moore was only arrested after he murdered his
mother and grandmother, and even then, the cops didn’t immediately link the crimes with other
axe murders. This is sometimes called “linkage blindness.” In the early 19th century, cops from
different states didn’t collude. They barely ever linked anything if it happened in another state.
On July 4, 1911, the Baltimore Sun ran a story about another axe killer. It was said
the victims so far had been mixed race, although some later stories refute that.
The axe killer was very much real, though. The so-called Atlanta Ripper sent shockwaves
throughout the city. People were afraid to leave their houses. This maniac was doing terrible
things to those people’s bodies with his axe. A daughter of one victim survived an attack,
describing the man as a “large, black man who was powerfully built and neatly dressed,” but no
one was ever convicted for these horrific murders that took 21 people. Police didn’t even know if
they’d all been committed by the same person. The question should also be asked, did the cops
try very hard, given the victims were poor and, in this case, black? Were they less dead?
In 1911 and 1912, there were equally brutal murders (49) in Louisiana and Texas.
Again, the killer walked into family houses, probably after just knocking on the door, and
then wiped everyone out in the most extreme fashion. In San Antonio, this axe killer or
someone copying him, murdered a family of five. It’s likely that the same killer returned
to the city the next year and axed to death another family of five, and three days later, in
Hempstead, he did the same to a family of three. In Louisiana, he slaughtered the three
members of the Byers family. In February 1911, he killed a family of four in Lafayette, and
later in November, he returned to the same city and chopped and slaughtered a family of six.
Over in Denver and Colorado Springs that year, seven women were bludgeoned to death by
an axeman…or axe-woman. In just about all of these cases, no money or valuables were taken
from the houses. This was a time of axe madness, recently discussed in the book “The Axes of Evil.”
Back then, the stories barely even made it out of the state, never mind being exported worldwide.
They were likely the work of males since males generally kill more than women. These days,
only about 17 percent of all serial murders in the U.S. are committed by women. About
ten percent of all murders in the U.S., serial or not, are committed by women. We don’t
know the stats for the early 1900s, but we can be sure women did kill back then. Still, we imagine
there were more mad axemen than mad axewomen. All ethnicities have had their serial killers
throughout American history. White males have made up the brunt of American serial
killers. African-Americans, according to Scientific American, “comprise the largest
racial minority group among serial killers, representing approximately 20 percent of
the total.” Still, it’s mostly the white males whose murderousness gets turned into
movies and TV shows. It’s also interesting that the data shows that serial killers tend to
kill people of their own ethnicity. Oftentimes, they start in places they’re familiar with but
often expand to new areas as they progress. What’s important is that the American serial
killer was becoming something of a household celebrity in the early 20th century, more so than
in other countries, which might be one reason why the US has way more reported serial killers than
anywhere else. We have to make this distinction because while it seems like the US is the serial
capital of the world, it’s not the whole truth. According to data from the Radford University
Serial Killer Information Center, the US is top with 3,204 recorded serial killers since
serial killers started being recorded. Keep in mind that the US was one of the first countries
to recognise the phenomenon of serial killers, so data from the US started to be collected a lot
earlier than in other countries. England, which is super close to the US in cultural terms, was
next with just 166 serial killers, but if we take population into account, this figure is not as
impressive considering the US has around 5 times as many people. No country, large or small, can
touch the US where serial killers are concerned, although for countries with larger populations
like India and China we have to keep in mind the previously mentioned population difference. Maybe
the US is a country where serial killing for fame has become attractive to many people, because it
wouldn’t make sense that the US just breeds more natural-born killers than other nations. Or maybe
countries with similar or larger populations are underreporting or just not publishing their
serial killer data and countries with strict media censorship are not letting the stories get
out there. The second seems a lot more likely. This next killer is straight out of a Batman
movie, and what’s worse, he could still be around today.
The Doodler The Doodler was like no one else. He was the
artistic type, which you don’t often find with serial killers. In 1974 and 1975, he murdered
between six and sixteen men in San Francisco, with each victim showing similar types of
stab wounds. He met the men in areas known for the city’s gay scene. The reason he got
the name the Doodler is that one of the men he assaulted but failed to kill said he met
the man while he was sketching caricatures. Police said they had a good description of
the Doodler. They said he was 19 to 25 years old. He was described as “black,
lanky, and around six feet tall.” Police have also released a sketch of what the
man might look like now, in his early to mid-60s. One of the problems with the case is some of the
witnesses were not willing to testify since they wanted to keep the fact they were homosexual
under wraps. In fact, investigators said they were pretty sure their suspect was guilty, but
they had their hands tied as some witnesses just wouldn’t have their day in court.
In 1977, the Associated Press wrote, “Murder suspect free because gays silent.” Such
a headline didn’t seem fair to some people. The activist Harvey Milk, who became San Francisco’s
city supervisor only to be assassinated in 1978, said there was pressure on the men. They had
families to think about, wives, and children. So, this is a strange one. Police think
they know who killed those men but are powerless to do anything about it. The case
is still open, with detectives now trying to secure a conviction through DNA technology.
As things stand, serial killings only make up about 1 percent of all murders in the U.S. The
National Vital Statistics System said in 2021, there were 26,031 homicides in the US, so
that would mean if FBI estimates are correct, about 260 of them would be the work of active
serial killers. The FBI has said before that at any given time, there are between twenty-five and
fifty serial killers operating in the U.S. By the end of the show, you’ll believe that’s a fact.
You might also believe the estimate is too low. Obviously, these numbers can change year
by year; it’s not an exact science. 1970 to 2000 saw a bumper crop of serial killers. This is
referred to as the “Golden Age” of serial killers. Hmm, and we wonder why there are
so many serial killers in the USA… These days, it’s much harder to go around chopping
people up with axes as there are so many CCTV and other cameras around. The axe murderer of Texas
and Louisana wouldn’t have gotten far in 2023, not with smart doorbells and such. It’s sometimes
said there are 70 million surveillance cameras in the United States, although the number changes a
lot depending on the source. Still, you’re never far away from a camera. Serial killers are now at
least more forensically aware, and they pick their moments and places better, as you’ll see soon.
Now let’s turn our focus outside of the US. Bible John
Imagine if you were a woman and you were on the dance floor in a
nightclub dancing across from a good-looking fella. He then went over to you and shouted in
your ear, “If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbor, both the adulterer and the
adulteress shall surely be put to death.” Hmm, what a turn-on that would be.
This guy’s a hottie for sure, so despite his strange sweet talk and the fact
he won’t even have a drink, you decide to go home with him. On the taxi ride there, he’s suddenly
very quiet, then all of a sudden, he leans into you and whispers, “To preserve you from the evil
woman, from the smooth tongue of the adulteress. Do not desire her beauty in your heart, and do
not let her capture you with her eyelashes.” You’d be somewhat turned off, which is how we
imagine the three women felt who’d met Scotland’s notorious Bible John at a ballroom in Glasgow in
the late 1960s, a place Bible John told a victim’s sister was an “adulterous den of iniquity.”
This guy got his strange nickname because women who met him before he killed his third victim
said he’d introduced himself as John only to start quoting the Old Testament on the topic of
adultery. In the taxi with that last victim, he told one of her friends, “I don’t drink…I pray.”
John beat and strangled his dates just minutes from their homes. This should have been a
fairly easy case. Many people had seen him. He was obviously very religious. He was young and
handsome. A sketch of him was seen by just about every person in Glasgow while hundreds of men
stood in lineups. Yet Bible John disappeared, and he remains on the loose today, or more
likely, he’s dead, not in ballroom heaven, but in disco hell.
The Butcher of Mons The same goes for Butcher of Mons in Belgium; he
just disappeared. From January 1996 to July 1997, he dismembered five women with what police said
was precision skill. The killer put various parts of their bodies into bags, whereafter people
found them, some containing feet, or a head, or some hands and organs. He didn’t even hide
the bags. He just left them close to the road. The case remains a mystery today. Cops have no
idea who committed those crimes. There’s ample evidence that serial killers don’t just get bored
or start having scruples. Killing is addictive. Once they start, they can’t stop. What do
you think happened to this Belgian Ripper? The Vending Machine Killer
It was a similar story for cops in Japan, who investigated a case in the 1980s in which
12 people were murdered, and 35 more were made seriously ill when a killer put poisoned drinks
in the troughs of vending machines. The victims would buy a drink and then discover there were two
drinks in the trough, possibly believing they’d got two-for-one. Unbeknownst to the victim, the
free one had been laced with dangerous herbicides. This man became known as The Vending
Machine Killer. Why he stopped, no one knows. What’s worrying is there were
copycats in Japan. A new kind of serial killer was born. The New York Times in 1985 quoted a
Japanese psychologist who said there was a “new breed of thrill-seeking criminal” in Japan
known as “yukaihan.” The psychologist said, “They cynically enjoy superiority by imagining
the victims groaning and do not feel any remorse.” This reminded Americans of the so-called
Tylenol poisonings, in which a killer laced the drug Tylenol with potassium cyanide
in various parts of Chicago. Seven people, most of them in their 20s and 30s, all bought some
spiked Tylenol capsules and died from September to October 1982. In those days, you could just
open the bottle and put it back on the shelf. Mary ‘Lynn’ Reiner bought some regular Tylenol
capsules at Frank’s Finer Foods, took two, and fell into a coma. Theresa Janus just took one pill
around dinner time. She told her husband Frank her chest hurt. She was dead just after midnight.
No one was ever caught, but what’s really disturbing is there were copycats. People
saw the news about the murders on TV or read about it in a newspaper, and instead
of naturally feeling shocked or upset, they went out and did the same. A year later,
in 1986, a young woman in Yonkers, New York, took two tablets of Extra-Strength Tylenol that
had been laced with cyanide. She died soon after. The New York Times said the FBI had found
a “second bottle of Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules laced with cyanide that had been seized
from a store in Westchester County.” Like the Chicago crimes, no one was ever convicted. Police
later said there were hundreds of similar cases throughout the US, which led to changes in how
Americans took their meds. It might have also inspired the Vending Machine Killer. Again, it’s
worth noting that there was a significant increase in serial killings when global media exploded
right at the time of Jack the Ripper. Sure, there were serial killers in the 17th,
18th centuries, sometimes called vampires or werewolves, but when newspapers took
over the world, serial killers got going. The Danilovsky Maniac
Russia’s Danilovsky Maniac killed at least seven people from 2004 to 2007
in the city of Cherepovets in the Vologda Oblast. Despite a massive investigation, no one has ever
been caught. It seems the killer had a change of mind (unlikely), died, or went to prison.
The Stone Man Did the stone man in India just stop, or did
he die or go to prison? In 1989, this guy went up to people sleeping in the street in Calcutta
and dropped a massive stone on their heads. The cops said he was probably quite strong since the
average stone weight was about 30 kg (66 pounds). There were similar murders in other Indian cities,
quite a lot in Mumbai, but no one was ever caught. The Monster of the Mangones
There was a killer in Colombia who was active between 1963 and 1974 and had the
whole country in a state of shock. Some people thought the stories about him were so far-out that
he was a myth. He wasn’t. This so-called “Monster of the Mangones” shouldn’t have come as much of a
surprise. After all, Colombia is infamous for its prolific serial killers. Two of the most prolific
in history are Luis Garavito, aka, The Beast, who viciously tortured and killed as many as
300 young men (142 convictions) in the 1990s. He really was a beast, a sadist of
the highest degree who often amputated parts of his victims before allowing them to die.
Pedro Alonso López, aka, The Monster of the Andes, chose girls and young women as his victims,
as many as 350, from 1969 to 1980 in various South American countries. But get this, he only
spent 14 years in prison in Ecuador and another four years in a mental hospital in Colombia.
He was released on a $70 dollar bail order in 1998. Lo and behold, he disappeared and didn’t
see his parole officer again. Interpol and the Colombian National Police now want him
in connection with some new murders... As for the Monster of the Mangones, he would shove
needles into his male victim’s throats and draw out blood. He may have drank the blood, making his
murders partly an act of vampirism. He killed up to 38 guys like this and dumped many of the bodies
down an alley locally known as the mangones. Jack the Ripper of Rwanda
We just don’t have time to cover every country, but we think you need to know about
the so-called Jack the Ripper of Rwanda. Rwanda is now an infinitely safer place than it was back
in the 90s when in 94 there was genocide, but in the capital of Kigali, where prostitution is said
to the rife, there’s a new version of the Ripper. On August 28, 2012, this guy killed two sex
workers in a poorer part of town in broad daylight. Another woman saw the act, so he killed
her, too. It’s reported he’s killed 18 women so far, but what shocked Rwandans the most is on
one of his victim’s flesh, he’d carved the words, “I will stop once I have killed 400 prostitutes.”
The New Times of Rwanda said eyewitnesses have seen this guy many times, who’s described as
a “slender light-skinned man who appears to be in his early 30s.” Some people accused
the cops of not looking hard enough, given the social standing of the victims.
Police responded to these slights by saying, “The government of Rwanda values every person
living in Rwanda regardless of what they do.” Police said the reason for the murders is
likely, “Conflicts over money and revenge following HIV/Aids contamination (45.8% of sex
workers are HIV positive) are apparently at the root of the problem,” but his criminal profile
might also meet the criteria for the “missionary killer,” a special kind of serial killer who tells
himself he’s on a mission to exterminate something he feels is evil, dangerous or just bad.
This next story is so horrible it would shock Ted Bundy.
The Forest of Horror In 2014, Nigerian media reported about the Ibadan
House of Horror, in the city of Ibadan, Oyo State, in Nigeria, the country’s third-largest city.
The house had been used for human sacrifices. All around it were buried bodies and body
parts in various states of decomposition, including skeletons. Inside the house were 21
(maybe 23) victims, many shackled and driven half-mad by despair. The entire area stank of
rotting corpses. One Nigerian writer summed it up, saying, “No adjective or description
is too much to express the horror.” A Nigerian newspaper said, “The police rescued
no fewer than 20 corpses and 21 living persons described as lunatics in various horrible health
conditions from the scene. The discovery of so many human skulls and the continued exhuming
of many more point to the idea that the spot might have existed for a long time.”
The discovery caused small riots. Families soon asked if their loved one who’d
gone missing had ended up at this horrible house of torture and death. Worse, the Nigerian
media and some of the public pointed to wealthy people and even officials and politicians,
who were accused of hiring kidnappers to find young folks for their sacrifices, which
were believed to bring them good fortune. Police still haven’t found the culprits, but
it’s widely believed people of high standing are behind this obscene set of crimes that had
gone on for years and possibly claimed 100s of victims. Some of the victims said indeed, when
they were kidnapped, the people taking them had said they were officials. The case remains a
mystery, but according to the press and public, something stinks to high heaven here.
Someone knows more than they’re letting on. Now for some killers you might bump into
one night on your way home from work. The West Mesa Bone Collector
In 2009, out in the desert of West Mesa of Albuquerque, New Mexico, a woman’s dog dug up a
bone. It was a human bone. Police got on the case, and soon the remains of 11 women, aged between 15
and 32, were found after a crime scene said to be as large as 75 football fields was cordoned
off for the dig. It was believed most of the victims were sex workers. One of the victims was
four months pregnant at the time of her death. A news reporter wrote, “All young women
heinously murdered and then deep-sixed into the grit of a forlorn desert. Their families
claim the local police made no effort to find them after they were reported missing.”
Was this the work of human traffickers, a deranged serial killer, or perhaps
druglords? It was said these women knew each other. They worked the streets and
scored drugs in what’s sometimes referred to as “Albuquerque’s War Zone.” How had they all
ended up in the ground not far from each other? There have been plenty of suspects, and yet
again, the case remains open. This next one will chill you to the bone.
The Colonial Parkway Killer You’ve heard of the Zodiac Killer,
but we doubt many of you have heard of the Colonial Parkway Killer.
You’ll likely recall the movie Zodiac, which shows the Zodiac killer shooting a couple
in a car parked down a lover’s lane. This happened in real life. That’s what the Colonial Parkway
killer did, too, down a dark, mostly deserted road called the Colonial Parkway in Virginia.
But he did it to three couples, killing them all, while another couple went missing. The
murders happened between 1986 and 1989. They might have all been the work of one man,
but since the deaths involved strangulation, gunshot, as well as stabbings, they might also
have been the work of multiple killers taking advantage of this very dark stretch of road. Then
again, in each case, the victims weren’t robbed, and each time the killer drove their car away.
In the first case in October of 1986, the victims were both United States Naval Academy
Class of 1981 graduates. Cathy and Becky were a gay couple who, at some point during the night,
must have been approached by a man, perhaps armed with a gun. Both victims were found with rope
burns on their wrists and necks, and they’d both been slashed so violently they were almost
decapitated. The killer then doused their bodies in gasoline, although he didn’t light it.
There might be other victims of the same killer not part of his official eight count,
such as 25-year-old Brian Craig Pettinger, who’d been hog-tied and thrown
into a river while still alive, or 18-year-old Laurie Ann Powell Compton, who’d
slammed a car door shut on her boyfriend after an argument and walked off into the night, only
to be found later with stab wounds in her back. Maybe the killer struck again in 1996. That
year the bodies of 24-year-old Julianne Marie Williams and 26-year-old Laura Salisbury
Winans were discovered. The two had been camping in Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park.
Like some of the other victims, they were bound and stabbed. Like those other people, the
killer wasn’t directly sexually motivated. Now for perhaps the strangest case of them
all and arguably the one you should be most concerned about. All you good-looking,
sporty types out there, listen carefully. The Smiley Face Killer
The story of the Smiley Face Killer is like a campfire horror tale you tell to your friends.
It’s a movie, a myth, and yet, it might just be real. It’s the story of at least three dozen
young white men who, in the 1990s and 2000s, up until the present day, were all found drowned in
a body of water. The cases were mysterious, given the men could swim and no one saw them fall in the
water. Some people blamed booze and the high-jinx young guys are apt to get up to, but others
found the cases very, very strange. Three dozen mysterious drownings of similar kinds of young
men is a lot, and there might be dozens more. One of the reasons this has been blamed on a
serial killer or a group of connected serial killers is the fact that next to or near where
the men drowned, there was always a smiley face piece of graffiti drawn on a wall. Something
like 45 males have been found dead in the water in 11 states, often last seen at a party
or a bar. The smiley face was always nearby. Detectives who worked the case noted that these
men fitted a certain kind of profile. They were successful, popular, sporty types, the kind
of guy some people might resent. Nineteen of these dead men were found in just two states,
Minnesota and Wisconsin, but the detectives believe the killers have struck all over the US.
One of those detectives said he is sure there is a “well-structured, organized gang with cells in
major cities across the United States who drug, abduct, hold the victims for a period of time
before they murder them and then place them in the water.” This isn’t a joke; they’re deadly serious.
Some critics of the detectives’ theory believe that the smiley face is so common it’s
just a coincidence the men died close to where they were painted. Others have argued that it
wasn’t always possible to know exactly where the men died. The FBI has said it has no evidence
there’s a serial killer, stating, “These instances appear to be alcohol-related drownings.”
Tell that to the family and friends of a young man named Dakota James, who, on
December 15, 2016, called his friend Shelley on the phone sometime in the evening.
Dakota was in total panic. Crying, he told her, “I don’t know where I am. I’m so cold. Please help
me. I’m lost.” He sounded unbelievably desperate. She found him by using a cell phone location app.
He was somewhere on Pittsburgh’s South Side, still in shock. He hardly spoke at first but told her
the police had refused to help him. He’d actually asked them for help, and they’d just shrugged
him off. Dakota explained to Shelley he’d been at a work Christmas party hosted by the transport
company where he worked at, and the last time he remembered anything was about 7:15 p.m. Four
hours later, he was walking around Pittsburgh, not knowing where he’d been or what he was doing.
Shelley thought it might have just been a matter of too much booze, or maybe, at worst, he’d
been drugged, but Dakota seemed ok the next day…Five weeks later, he went missing, and
this time Shelley would not get a call. On March 6, 2017, some 40 days later, a woman
walking her dog found Dakota bloated and dead in the Ohio River. During the autopsy, the
powerful general anesthetic GHB, known as a date assault drug (YouTube won’t let us say the
R-word), was found in his system. Did Dakota run into the same people as he did five weeks earlier?
Had he been stalked? Had he actually been lucky to survive the first attack at his work party? He
was young, good-looking, and athletic, the profile that fit the victims of the Smiley Face killer.
His PayPal account had been used just two days after he’d vanished. His body certainly
had not been in the water for 40 days, according to pathologists. So, where had
he been for 40 days? Why hadn’t he called home? He wouldn’t do that kind of thing.
His death was ruled an accident, but a pathologist named Cyril Wecht, who later reviewed
this case, said Dakota had ligature marks on his neck. And guess what? On the closet bridge to
where he was found, the Roberto Clemente Bridge, there were 11 smiley-face symbols spray-painted
onto the concrete. This bridge was a few miles away, but it was still the closest bridge to where
Dakota was found and where police say he fell in. By now, you guys watching this video understand
very well how serial killers copy each other. They watch something on the news, and they replicate
it, for power, for infamy, to satiate a sick urge. That’s what some detectives think has happened
here, that in the USA, there were and maybe still are ruthless and brutal people killing for
fun and drawing a smiley face near to where they dump the bodies. Now retired, these detectives
say the Smiley Face killers have murdered around 100 people, but they’ve linked 250 cases to
them in total. One of the detectives is so sure of this that he’s remortgaged his house and
maxed his credit cards, trying to solve the case. Both detectives say this depraved gang is highly
organized, using various medications on people, stalking them, and choosing a specific target,
with each murder being meticulously planned on the Dark Web. One of the detectives said
in an interview in 2019, “The level of sophistication of the group is a lot greater than
we’d imagined. Now we know they communicate with each other on the dark web. We know there’s
surveillance and counter-surveillance.” Maybe the FBI is right, and there are
about 250 murders a year that are the work of American serial killers, or maybe
something much darker lurks behind the headlines we see in our day-to-day media.
Now you really have to watch “How These Sneaky Serial Killers Finally Got Caught.” Or,
get to know what the profilers and detectives do in “How Serial Killer Profilers
ACTUALLY Catch Serial Killers.”
