Infractori celebri

Ø  Ted Bundy

Theodore Robert Bundy (born Theodore Robert Cowell; November 24, 1946 – January 24, 1989) was an American serial killer, kidnapper, rapist, and necrophile who assaulted and murdered numerous young women and girls during the 1970s and possibly earlier. Shortly before his execution, after more than a decade of denials, he confessed to 30 homicides committed in seven states between 1974 and 1978. The true victim count remains unknown, and could be much higher.

No one knows when or where Theodore “Ted” Bundy killed for the first time. It could have been during his teenage years or when he was in his early 20s in the late 1960s. It might have been in Washington state, where he resided for many years, or on the East Coast, where he was born and lived as a young boy and had family ties.

Theodore "Ted" Bundy started life as his mother's secret shame. Eleanor Cowell was twenty-two years old and unmarried when she had her son Theodore, which scandalized her deeply religious parents. Instead of raising the child alone as a single mother, Cowell moved to her parent’s house in Philadelphia, where Ted was brought up believing that his mother was his sister. With Cowell as his supposed sibling, Ted was led tp believe that his grandparents were his birth parents. Bundy grew up in a content, working-class family. He showed an unusual interest in the macabre at an early age. Around the age of 3, he became fascinated by knives. Bundy was a shy, but bright child who did well in school, but not with his peers. As a teenager, a darker side of his character started to emerge. Bundy liked to peer in other people's windows and thought nothing of stealing things he wanted from other people. Ted Bundy said that he “identified with”, "respected", and "clung to" his grandfather; but he and other family members told attorneys in 1987 that Samuel Cowell was a tyrannical bully and a bigot who hated blacks, Italians, Catholics, and Jews, beat his wife and the family dog, and swung neighborhood cats by their tails. He sometimes spoke aloud to unseen presences, and at least once he flew into a violent rage when the question of Ted's paternity was raised. Bundy described his grandmother as a timid and obedient woman who periodically underwent electroconvulsive therapy for depression  and feared leaving their house toward the end of her life. Ted occasionally exhibited disturbing behavior, even at that early age. Julia recalled awakening one day from a nap to find herself surrounded by knives from the Cowell kitchen; her three-year-old nephew was standing by the bed, smiling. Bundy discovered the truth about his mother when a cousin mocked him and showed him a copy of his birth certificate, but some sources state that he found the certificate himself.

His classmates from public school remember Bundy as an intelligent, happy, and popular child with many friends and a good academic record. Once in high school, people’s recollections of Bundy suddenly become more clouded. Bundy is said to have been withdrawn and his academic progress was mediocre. He no longer was as popular as in junior high school. His friend recalled that he lost his confidence and appeared tongue-tied in social situations, not only with girls but with meeting new people in general. As a child, Ted suffered from cleptomany. Later he developed voyeurism, because he was impressed by a lady in the neighbourhood. He watched her through the window while she undressed herself.

In the spring of 1966 Ted Bundy met the love of his life. Her name was Stephanie and she was older than him – a beautiful young woman who wore her long, dark hair parted in the middle. Her resemblance to Bundy’s later victims is striking. But, by the time she graduated she was starting to get bored with Bundy, feeling he was too childish and immature, so she broke up with him, and moved to San Francisco. Bundy’s lack of confidence and tendency toward manipulation had ruined the relationship. He soon dropped out of Stanford, reportedly devastated. Ted’s brother recalls that before the breakup with Stephanie, Ted was always in charge of his emotions. Bundy then waited until the fall and re-entered the University of Washington with a sense of purpose, turning form an average student into an honor student. He excelled at his studies and became increasingly involved in local politics, continuing to work on and off for political campaigns.

Ted gained popularity among youngsters, and Stephanie developed feelings for him again. He confessed his love to her, saying that it those feelings are everlasting. Finally, they got married in 1973. It seemed like everything in their lives was all sugar. But his twisted mind couldn’t stop thinking about anything else but revenge. During the honeymoon, Ted beated and humiliated his wife. Few days later, he committed his first known murder. Amazingly, his victims resembled a lot Stephanie: brown hair, parted in the middle and they all were wearing pants and had the same age as she did. Starting from January 1974 until February 1978, he murdered 23 people (he admitted killing 23 people; the number could be higher) in five states from the U.S. 

Bundy was an unusually organized and calculating criminal who used his extensive knowledge of law enforcement methodologies to elude identification and capture for years. His crime scenes were distributed over large geographic areas; his victim count had risen to at least 20 before it became clear that numerous investigators in widely disparate jurisdictions were hunting the same man. His assault methods of choice were blunt trauma and strangulation, two relatively silent techniques that could be accomplished with common household items. He deliberately avoided firearms due to the noise they made and the ballistic evidence they left behind. He was a "meticulous researcher" who explored his surroundings in minute detail, looking for safe sites to seize and dispose of victims. He was unusually skilled at minimizing physical evidence. His fingerprints were never found at a crime scene, nor was any other incontrovertible evidence of his guilt, a fact he repeated often during the years in which he attempted to maintain his innocence.

Other significant obstacles for law enforcement were Bundy's generic, essentially anonymous physical features, and a curious chameleon-like ability to change his appearance almost at will. Early on, police complained of the futility of showing his photograph to witnesses; he looked different in virtually every photo ever taken of him. In person, "... his expression would so change his whole appearance that there were moments that you weren't even sure you were looking at the same person," said Stewart Hanson, Jr., the judge in the DaRonch trial. "He [was] really a changeling." Bundy was well aware of this unusual quality and he exploited it, using subtle modifications of facial hair or hairstyle to significantly alter his appearance as necessary. He concealed his one distinctive identifying mark, a dark mole on his neck, with turtleneck shirts and sweaters. Even his Volkswagen Beetle proved difficult to pin down; its color was variously described by witnesses as metallic or non-metallic, tan or bronze, light brown or dark brown. His modus operandi (M.O.) was in a continuous development: it evolved in organization and sophistication over time, as is typical of serial murderers, according to FBI experts. Most of the time he strangled his victims.Yet there are some that managed to get away from him, such as the famous actress and singer Debbie Harry.

Happily, Ted made a mistake on 8^th February 1978. At that time, he was in Jacksonville. Bundy  drove a stolen Dodge van, where he wanted to murder a girl, but she escaped. A witness wrote down the car’s licence number. That night was terrible for another person and her family, unfortunately. Ted got mad and killed a little girl, Kimberey Leach. Two days after, a policeman arrested him for running away with his Volkswagen “Beetle” car. He represented himself in court and even married again with Carole Ann Boone, whom he had a daughter with.   Although he escaped prison three times, Bundy was finally executed by electric chair, on 25^th January 1989, at 7:16 A.M. in a jail in Florida.

Ø  Albert Fish

Hamilton Howard "Albert" Fish (May 19, 1870 – January 16, 1936) was an American serial killer. He was also known as the Gray Man, the Werewolf of Wysteria, the Brooklyn Vampire, the Moon Maniac, and The Boogey Man. A child rapist and cannibal, he boasted that he "had children in every state", and at one time stated the number was about 100. However, it is not known whether he was referring to rapes or cannibalization, nor is it known if the statement was truthful. He was a suspect in at least five murders during his lifetime. Fish confessed to three murders that police were able to trace to a known homicide, and he confessed to stabbing at least two other people. He was put on trial for the kidnapping and murder of Grace Budd, and was convicted and executed by electric chair.

After his capture, Fish would blame the conditions of his childhood for his crimes. Although he was related to ancestors who fought in the American Revolution, Fish was abandoned at an early age and placed in an orphanage, where he saw and experienced his first brutal acts of sadism. He had been born in 1870 in the Washington D.C. area and later married and raised six children. He had minor public education and mostly worked as a handyman and a painter. It's likely that his psychosis actually manifested much earlier but according to the testimony of one of his children, his weird and unpredictable behavior did not begin to surface until January 1917. It was at this time that his wife ran away with John Straube, a slow-witted handyman who boarded with the Fish family. Fish returned from work one day to find the house deserted and stripped of its furniture. 

Mrs. Fish was apparently a bit odd herself. She once returned to her husband with Straube at her side and asked if they could move in with the family. Fish said that she could but that her loved could not and so she agreed and sent Straube away. Days later, Fish discovered that his wife had actually secreted Straube in the attic and he lurked there while she smuggled food up to him. Again, Fish told her that she could stay but that Straube had to leave. They both departed this time and the family never saw Mrs. Fish again.

Soon after, Fish began to behave very strangely. He took his family up to their summer home, Wisteria Cottage, in Westchester County, New York for outings and they would watch, terrified, as he climbed a nearby hill, shook his fist at the sky and repeatedly screamed, "I am Christ!". Pain seemed to delight him. Whether inflicting it on himself or others, he took strange pleasure in being whipped and paddled. He encouraged his own and neighbor children to paddle his buttocks until they bled, often using a paddle that was studded with inch-and-a-half nails. He also inserted a large number of needles into his body, mostly in the genital region, and burned himself constantly with hot irons and pokers. He even answered classified ads placed with widows seeking husbands. His letters --- 46 of them were recovered and entered as evidence at his trial -- were so obscene and vile that the prosecution refused to make them public. Basically, Fish told the lovelorn ladies that he was not as interested in marriage as he was in their willingness to paddle him. None of the women accepted his offers.

On night of the full moon, his children later testified, Fish would consume huge quantities of raw meat. Over the years, he collected a great amount of published material on cannibalism and he carried the most gruesome articles with him on his person at all times. Before he ever turned to murder, Fish was examined several times by psychiatrists at Bellevue but he was always released and judged "disturbed but sane."

In 1898 he married and later fathered six children. The children led average lives up until 1917, after Fish's wife ran off with another man. It was at that time the children recall Fish occasionally asking them to participate in his sado-masochistic games. One game included the nail filled paddle Fish used on his victims. He would ask the children to paddle him with the weapon until blood ran down his legs. He also found enjoyment from pushing needles deep into his skin. After his marriage ended, Fish spent time writing to women listed in the personal columns of newspapers.

In his letters he would go into graphic detail of sexual acts he would like to share with the women. The descriptions of these acts were so vile and disgusting that they were never made public even though they were submitted as evidence in court. According to Fish, no women ever responded to his letters asking them, not for their hand in marriage, but for their hand in administering pain.

Fish developed his skill for house painting and often worked in different states across the country. Some believe he selected states largely populated with African Americans. It was his belief that the police would spend less time searching for the killer of a African American child than a prominent Caucasian child. Thus, several of his victims were black children selected to endure his torture using his own labeled "instruments of hell" which included the paddle, meat cleaver and knives.

On May 25, 1928, Fish saw a classified advertisement in the Sunday edition of the New York World that read, "Young man, 18, wishes position in country. Edward Budd, 406 West 15th Street." On May 28, 1928, Fish, then 58 years old, visited the Budd family in Manhattan under the pretense of hiring Edward; he later confessed that he planned to tie Edward up, mutilate him, and leave him to bleed to death. He introduced himself as Frank Howard, a farmer from Farmingdale, New York. Fish promised to hire Budd and his friend Willie, and said he would send for them in a few days. He failed to show up, but he sent a telegraph to the Budd family apologizing and set a later date. When Fish returned, he met Grace Budd. He apparently changed his intended victim from Edward Budd to Grace Budd and quickly made up a story about having to attend his niece's birthday party. He convinced the parents, Delia Flanagan and Albert Budd I, to let Grace accompany him to the party that evening. The elder Albert Budd was a porter for the United States Equitable Life Assurance Society. Grace had a younger sister, Beatrice, two older brothers, Edward and George Budd, and a younger brother, Albert Budd II. Grace left with Fish that day but never returned.

The police arrested 66-year-old superintendent Charles Edward Pope on September 5, 1930 as a suspect, accused by Pope's estranged wife. He spent 108 days in jail between his arrest and trial on December 22, 1930. He was found not guilty.

In November 1934, an anonymous letter was sent to the girl's parents which ultimately led the police to Fish. Mrs. Budd was illiterate and could not read the letter herself, so she had her son read it to her. The unaltered letter (complete with Fish's misspellings and grammatical errors) reads:

“My dear Mrs Budd

In 1894 a friend of mine shipped as a deck hand on the steamer Tacoma, Capt John Davis. They sailed from San Francisco to Hong Kong China. On arriving there he and two others went ashore and got drunk. When they returned the boat was gone. At that time there was a famine in China. Meat of any kind was from $1–$3 Dollars a pound. So great was the suffering among the very poor that all children under 12 were sold to the Butchers to be cut up and sold for food in order to keep others from starving. A boy or girl under 14 was not safe in the street. You could go in any shop and ask for steak – chops – or stew meat. Part of the naked body of a boy or girl would be brought out and just what you wanted cut from it. A boy or girls behind which is the sweetest part of the body and sold as veal cutlet brought the highest price. John staid there so long he acquired a taste for human flesh. On his return to N.Y. he stole two boys one 7 one 11. Took them to his home stripped them naked tied them in a closet then burned everything they had on. Several times every day and night he spanked them – tortured them – to make their meat good and tender. First he killed the 11 yr old boy, because he had the fattest ass and of course the most meat on it. Every part of his body was cooked and eaten except Head – bones and guts. He was Roasted in the oven, (all of his ass) boiled, broiled, fried, stewed. The little boy was next, went the same way. At that time I was living at 409 E 100 St, rear – right side. He told me so often how good Human flesh was I made up my mind to taste it. On Sunday June the 3 – 1928 I called on you at 406 W 15 St. Brought you pot cheese – strawberries. We had lunch. Grace sat in my lap and kissed me. I made up my mind to eat her, on the pretense of taking her to a party. You said Yes she could go. I took her to an empty house in Westchester I had already picked out. When we got there, I told her to remain outside. She picked wild flowers. I went upstairs and stripped all my clothes off. I knew if I did not I would get her blood on them. When all was ready I went to the window and called her. Then I hid in a closet until she was in the room. When she saw me all naked she began to cry and tried to run down stairs. I grabbed her and she said she would tell her mama. First I stripped her naked. How she did kick – bite and scratch. I choked her to death then cut her in small pieces so I could take my meat to my rooms, cook and eat it. How sweet and tender her little ass was roasted in the oven. It took me 9 days to eat her entire body. I did not fuck her tho I could of had I wished. She died a virgin.”

Police investigated the letter. The story concerning "Capt. Davis" and the "famine" in Hong Kong were unable to be verified. The part of the letter concerning the murder of Grace Budd, however, was found to be accurate in its description of the kidnapping and subsequent events, although it was impossible to confirm whether or not Fish had actually eaten parts of Grace's body.

The letter was delivered in an envelope that had a small hexagonal emblem with the letters "N.Y.P.C.B.A." representing "New York Private Chauffeur's Benevolent Association". A janitor at the company told the police he had taken some of the stationery home but left it at his rooming house at 200 East 52nd Street when he moved out. The landlady of the rooming house said that Fish checked out of that room a few days earlier. She said that Fish's son sent him money and he asked her to hold his next check for him. William F. King was the chief investigator for the case. He waited outside the room until Fish returned. Fish agreed to go to headquarters for questioning, then brandished a razor blade. King disarmed Fish and took him to police headquarters. Fish made no attempt to deny the murder of Grace Budd, saying that he meant to go to the house to kill Edward Budd, Grace's brother. Fish said it "never even entered [his] head" to rape the girl, but he later claimed to his attorney that, while kneeling on Grace's chest and strangling her, he did have two involuntary ejaculations. This information was used at trial to make the claim the kidnapping was sexually motivated, thus avoiding any mention of cannibalism.

There were other crimes Albert Fish was quilty of. During the night of July 14, 1924, eight-year-old Francis McDonnell was reported missing by his parents. He failed to return home after playing catch with friends in the Port Richmond neighborhood of Staten Island. A search was organized and his body was found—hanged by a tree—in a wooded area near his home. He had been sexually assaulted, then strangled with his suspenders. According to an autopsy, McDonnell had also suffered extensive lacerations to his legs and abdomen, and his left hamstring had almost entirely been stripped of its flesh. Fish refused to claim responsibility for this, although he later stated that he intended to castrate the boy but fled when he heard someone approaching the area.

On February 11, 1927, 3-year-old Billy Beaton and his 12-year-old brother were playing in the apartment hallway in Brooklyn with 4-year-old Billy Gaffney. When the 12-year-old left for his apartment, both younger boys disappeared; Beaton was found later on the roof of the apartments. When asked what happened to Gaffney, Beaton said "the bogeyman took him." Gaffney's body was never recovered. Initially, serial killer Peter Kudzinowski was a suspect in the boy's murder. Then, Joseph Meehan, a motorman on a Brooklyn trolley, saw a picture of Fish in a newspaper and identified him as the old man whom he saw February 11, 1927; the old man had been trying to quiet a little boy sitting with him on the trolley. The boy was not wearing a jacket, was crying for his mother, and was dragged by the man on and off the trolley. Beaton's description of the "bogeyman" matched Fish's. Police matched the description of the child to Billy Gaffney. Detectives of the Manhattan Missing Persons Bureau were able to establish that Fish was employed as a house painter by a Brooklyn real estate company during February 1927 and that on the day of Billy Gaffney's disappearance he was working at a location a few miles away from where the boy was abducted.

On March 11, 1935, Fish's trial began and he plead innocent by the reason of insanity. He said it was voices in his head telling him to kill children that made him do such horrendous crimes. Despite the numerous psychiatrists who described Fish as insane, the jury found him sane and guilty after a short 10-day trial. He was sentenced to die by electrocution.

On January 16, 1936, Albert Fish was electrocuted at Sing Sing prison, reportedly a process Fish looked upon as "the ultimate sexual thrill" but later dismissed as just rumor.

Ø  Aileen Wuornos

Aileen Carol Wuornos (February 29, 1956 – October 9, 2002) was an American serial killer who killed seven men in Florida between 1989 and 1990. Wuornos claimed that her victims had either raped or attempted to rape her while she was working as a prostitute, and that all of the homicides were committed in self-defense.

She the product of a troubled marriage between Leo Dale Pittman and Diane Wuornos, a feckless teen mother who married at 15, quite incapable of the responsibilities of motherhood. Diane abandoned Wuornos and her elder brother, Keith, to the care of her parents, Lauri and Britta Wuornos, before she was 4 years old, and they adopted the pair and raised them as their own. One of the few good things in her young life, ironically, was that her biological father never got to know her. Pittman was a psychopathic child molester who hanged himself in prison in 1969. The Wuornoses raised Aileen and Keith with their own children in Troy, Michigan. They did not reveal that they were, in fact, the children’s grandparents. Aileen discovered the truth at around age twelve, information which did not help an already troublesome situation. Lauri Wuornos was an abusive parent, both physically and sexually, while his wife Britta was an abusive alcoholic. Wuornos claims that sexual contact with both Lauri Wuornos, and her brother, Keith, occurred from a very early age, although there is no firm corroborative evidence for this. But her sexual precocity, from whatever source, is certain: Wuornos fell pregnant, aged 14, claiming that Keith was the father, and she was sent to a home for unwanted mothers. On 23rd March 1971 she gave birth to a baby boy, who was given up for immediate adoption. Within months of Wuornos returning to the family home, her grandmother died of liver failure, a result of heavy drinking (although years later Wuornos’ biological mother claimed that Wuornos had killed her.) Her husband Lauri insisted that Wuornos and Keith be removed from his house, and they were made wards of the court for a short time, before Wuornos ran away and began a life of hitchhiking, prostitution and crime. In the next few years, Keith died of throat cancer at the age of 21, Lauri committed suicide, and Aileen headed for Florida. When she was 20, she was hitch-hiking when a wealthy 69-nine-year-old yacht club president named Lewis Fell picked her up. He fell in love with her instantly. When they married in 1976 the news was actually printed in the society pages. This was a real stroke of luck for her, but she was too wild and destructive to understand when she had it good. She treated Fell badly, got into bar fights and was sent to jail for assault. Fell was horrified; a brawling bride had no place in his high-society lifestyle, and he had the marriage annulled after a few months. Her destructive streak continued and, over the next ten years, she drifted aimlessly, still working as a prostitute, and committing various crimes that ranged from forgery and theft, to armed robbery and assault. In 1986, Aileen met 24-year-old Tyria Moore at a Daytona gay bar. The couple began a volatile and intense relationship that lasted for four years, and Moore was drawn into Wuornos’ cycle of vandalism, violence and harassment.

From late 1989 through late 1990, the bodies of 7 middle-aged white men were discovered in central Florida. The assailant had robbed all of the victims before shooting them to death and stealing their cars.

The first victim was shop-owner Richard Mallory in 1989, a 51 year-old white man who picked up a prostitute along Interstate 75 in Florida to engage in sex for pay. A Volusia County deputy discovered his body several miles away from his abandoned car. Mallory had been shot multiple times in the chest.

The nude body of David Spears, a 43-year-old construction worker, was found June 1, 1990, in Citrus County. He had been shot six times in the torso.

A few days after Spears’ body was discovered, the body of Charles Carskaddon, 40, was discovered in Pasco County. The part-time rodeo worker had been shot nine times in the chest and stomach.

Marion County law enforcement found the body of Troy Burress, a 50-year-old salesman, on August 4, 1990, less than a week after he was reported missing. Though the body was fairly decomposed, the medical examiner was able to determine that the cause of death was two gunshots to the torso. 

A retired Air Force major, police chief and Florida child-abuse investigator, Dick Humphreys was found dead in Marion County on September 12, 1990. The body was fully clothed and had suffered multiple gunshots to the head and torso. Humphreys' car was later found in Suwannee County.

Sixty-five year old Peter Siems left central Florida and headed for New Jersey in June of 1990. His car was found in Orange Springs on July 4, 1990. Though Siems’ body has never been found, witnesses described two women near the car in Orange Springs.

The partially disrobed body of Walter Antonio, 62, was found November 19, 1990, in a remote part of Dixie County. He had been shot four times in the back and head. Antonio’s car was found five days later in Brevard County.

On July 4, 1990, Wuornos and Moore abandoned Peter Siems' car after they were involved in an accident. Witnesses who had seen the women driving the victims' cars provided police with their names and descriptions, resulting in a media campaign to locate them. Police also found some of the victims' belongings in pawn shops and retrieved fingerprints matching those found in the victims' cars. Wuornos had a criminal record in Florida, and her fingerprints were on file.

On January 9, 1991, Wuornos was arrested on an outstanding warrant at The Last Resort, a biker bar in Volusia County. The police located Wuornos' former lover Tyria Moore the next day in Scranton, Pennsylvania. She agreed to elicit a confession from Wuornos in exchange for immunity from prosecution. Moore returned with the police to Florida, where she was put up in a motel. Under police guidance, she made numerous telephone calls to Wuornos, pleading for help in clearing her name. Three days later, on January 16, 1991, Wuornos confessed to the murders. She claimed the men had tried to rape her and she killed them in self-defense.

On January 14, 1992, Wuornos went to trial for the murder of Richard Mallory; although previous convictions are normally inadmissible in criminal trials, under Florida's Williams Rule the prosecution was allowed to introduce evidence related to her other crimes to show a pattern of illegal activity. On January 27, 1992, Wuornos was convicted of Mallory's murder with help from Moore's testimony. At her sentencing, psychiatrists for the defense testified that Wuornos was mentally unstable and had been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder. Four days later, she was sentenced to death.

On March 31, 1992, Wuornos pleaded no contest to the murders of Dick Humphreys, Troy Burress, and David Spears, saying she wanted to "get right with God". In her statement to the court, she said, in part: "I wanted to confess to you that Richard Mallory did violently rape me as I've told you; but these others did not. [They] only began to start to." On May 15, 1992, Wuornos was given three more death sentences.

In June 1992, Wuornos pleaded guilty to the murder of Charles Carskaddon; in November 1992, she received her fifth death sentence. The defense made efforts during the trial to introduce evidence that Mallory had been tried for intent to commit rape in Maryland and that he had been committed to a maximum security correctional facility in Maryland that provided remediation to sexual offenders. Records obtained from that institution reflected that, from 1958 to 1962, Mallory was committed for treatment and observation resulting from a criminal charge of assault with intent to rape and received an over-all eight years of treatment from the facility. In 1961, "it was observed of Mr. Mallory that he possessed strong sociopathic trends". The judge refused to allow this to be admitted in court as evidence and denied Wuornos' request for a retrial.

In February 1993, Wuornos pleaded guilty to the murder of Walter Jeno Antonio and was sentenced to death again. No charges were brought against her for the murder of Peter Siems, as his body was never found. In all, she received six death sentences.

Wuornos told several inconsistent stories about the killings. She claimed initially that all seven men had raped her while she was working as a prostitute but later recanted the claim of self-defense, citing robbery and a desire to leave no witnesses as the reason for murder. During an interview with filmmaker Nick Broomfield, when she thought the cameras were off, she told him that it was, in fact, self-defense, but she could not stand being on death row—where she had been for 10 years at that point—and wanted to die.

Assessed using the Psychopathy Checklist, Wuornos scored 32/40. The checklist evaluates individuals on a 20-item list of antisocial and interpersonal behaviors, with each item being scored at zero, 1 or 2 and thus a maximum score of 40. Depending on location and research perspective, scores above 25 or 30 are consistent with a diagnosis of psychopathy.

Wuornos was incarcerated in the Florida Department of Corrections Broward Correctional Institution (BCI) death row for women, then transferred to the Florida State Prison for execution. Her appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court was denied in 1996. In a 2001 petition to the Florida Supreme Court she stated her intention to dismiss her legal counsel and terminate all pending appeals. "I killed those men," she wrote, "robbed them as cold as ice. And I'd do it again, too. There's no chance in keeping me alive or anything, because I'd kill again. I have hate crawling through my system...I am so sick of hearing this 'she's crazy' stuff. I've been evaluated so many times. I'm competent, sane, and I'm trying to tell the truth. I'm one who seriously hates human life and would kill again." While her attorneys argued that she was not mentally competent to make such a request, Wuornos insisted that she knew what she was doing, and a court-appointed panel of psychiatrists agreed.

In 2002, Wuornos began accusing prison matrons of tainting her food with saliva, dirt, and urine. She said she had overheard conversations among prison personnel "trying to get me so pushed over the brink by them I'd wind up committing suicide before the execution" and "wishing to rape me before execution". She also complained of strip searches, tight handcuffing, door kicking, frequent window checks, low water pressure, mildew on her mattress, and "cat calling ... in distaste and a pure hatred towards me". Wuornos threatened to boycott showers and food trays when certain officers were on duty. "In the meantime, my stomach's growling away and I'm taking showers through the sink of my cell." Her attorney stated that "Ms. Wuornos really just wants to have proper treatment, humane treatment until the day she's executed." He added, "She believes what she's written."

In the weeks prior to her execution Wuornos gave a series of interviews to Broomfield. She described her impending death as "being taken away to meet God and Jesus and the angels and whatever is beyond the beyond". In her final interview she once again charged that her mind was "tortured" at BCI, and her head crushed by "sonic pressure". Food poisonings and other abuses worsened, she said, each time she complained, with the goal of making her appear insane, or to drive her insane. She also turned on her interviewer: "You sabotaged my ass! Society, and the cops, and the system! A raped woman got executed, and was used for books and movies and shit!" Her final on-camera words were "Thanks a lot, society, for railroading my ass." Dawn Botkins, a childhood friend of Wuornos, later told Broomfield that her verbal abuse was directed at society and the media in general, not at him specifically.

Wuornos's execution took place on October 9, 2002. She died at 9:47 AM that morning. She requested "Kentucky Fried Chicken and french fries" as her last meal. Her last words were, "Yes, I would just like to say I'm sailing with the rock, and I'll be back, like Independence Day, with Jesus. June 6, like the movie. Big mother ship and all, I'll be back, I'll be back." She was the tenth woman in the United States and the second in Florida to be executed since the 1976 Supreme Court decision restoring capital punishment.

Wuornos' body was cremated, and her ashes were spread beneath a tree in her native Michigan by Dawn Botkins. Wuornos requested that Natalie Merchant's song "Carnival" be played at her funeral. Merchant commented on this when asked why she permitted "Carnival" to be played during the credits of the documentary Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer:

When director Nick Broomfield sent a working edit of the film, I was so disturbed by the subject matter that I couldn't even watch it. Aileen Wuornos led a tortured, torturing life that is beyond my worst nightmares. It wasn't until I was told that Aileen spent many hours listening to my album Tigerlily while on death row and requested "Carnival" be played at her funeral that I gave permission for the use of the song. It's very odd to think of the places my music can go once it leaves my hands. If it gave her some solace, I have to be grateful.

Broomfield later speculated on Wuornos' motive and state of mind:

I think this anger developed inside her. And she was working as a prostitute. I think she had a lot of awful encounters on the roads. And I think this anger just spilled out from inside her. And finally exploded. Into incredible violence. That was her way of surviving. I think Aileen really believed that she had killed in self-defense. I think someone who's deeply psychotic can't really tell the difference between something that is life threatening and something that is a minor disagreement, that you could say something that she didn't agree with. She would get into a screaming black temper about it. And I think that's what had caused these things to happen. And at the same time, when she wasn't in those extreme moods, there was an incredible humanity to her.

Ø John Wayne Gacy

John Wayne Gacy, Jr. (March 17, 1942 – May 10, 1994), also known as the Killer Clown, was an American serial killer and rapist who sexually assaulted and murdered at least 33 teenage boys and young men between 1972 and 1978 in Cook County, Illinois.

All of Gacy's known murders were committed inside his Norwood Park Township home. His victims would typically be lured to this address by force or deception, and all but one victim were murdered by either asphyxiation or strangulation with a tourniquet (his first victim was stabbed to death). Gacy buried 26 of his victims in the crawl space of his home. Three further victims were buried elsewhere on his property, while the bodies of his last four known victims were discarded in the Des Plaines River.

Convicted of 33 murders, Gacy was sentenced to death for 12 of these killings on March 13, 1980. He spent 14 years on death row before he was executed by lethal injection at Stateville Correctional Center on May 10, 1994.

Gacy became known as the "Killer Clown" due to his charitable services at fundraising events, parades and children's parties where he would dress as "Pogo the Clown", a character he devised himself.

The son of Danish and Polish parents, Gacy and his siblings grew up with a drunken father who would beat the children with a razor strap if they were perceived to have misbehaved; the man physically assaulted Gacy's mother as well. Gacy's sister Karen would later say that the siblings learned to toughen up against the beatings, and that Gacy would not cry.

Throughout his childhood, Gacy strove to make his stern father proud of him, but seldom received his approval. One of Gacy's earliest childhood memories was of being beaten with a leather belt by his father at the age of four for accidentally disarranging car engine components his father had assembled. On another occasion, his father struck him across the head with a broomstick, rendering him unconscious. He was regularly belittled by his father and often compared unfavorably with his sisters, enduring disdainful accusations of being "dumb and stupid". The friction between father and son was constant throughout his childhood and adolescence. Although Gacy regularly commented that he was "never good enough" in his father's eyes, in interviews after his arrest, he always vehemently denied he ever hated his father.

When he was six years old, Gacy stole a toy truck from a neighborhood store. His mother made him walk back to the store, return the toy and apologize to the owners. His mother told his father, who beat Gacy with a belt as punishment. After this incident, Gacy's mother attempted to shield her son from his father's verbal and physical abuse, yet this only succeeded in Gacy earning accusations from his father that he was a "sissy" and a "Mama's boy" who would "probably grow up queer".

In 1949, Gacy's father was informed that his son and another boy had been caught sexually fondling a young girl. As a punishment, Gacy was whipped by his father with a razor strop. The same year, Gacy was himself molested by a family friend, a contractor who would take Gacy for rides in his truck, then fondle him. Gacy never told his father about these incidents as he was afraid his father would blame him.[

At school, where he was ordered to avoid all sports due to a heart condition, Gacy was an average student with few friends who was an occasional target for mockery and bullying by neighborhood children and classmates. He was known to assist the school truant officer and volunteer to run errands for teachers and neighbors. During the fourth grade, Gacy began to suffer blackouts. He was occasionally hospitalized due to these seizures, and also in 1957 for a burst appendix. Gacy later estimated that he spent almost a year in the hospital for these episodes between the ages of 14 and 18, and attributed the decline in his grades to his time out of school. His father suspected the episodes were an effort to gain sympathy and attention; on one occasion, he accused his son of faking even as the boy lay in a hospital bed.

Gacy's medical condition was never conclusively diagnosed, although his mother, sisters and few close friends themselves never doubted his illness. A school friend of Gacy's, named Richard Dalke, recalled several instances in which Gacy Sr. ridiculed or beat his son without provocation. On one occasion in 1957, Dalke witnessed an incident in which Gacy's father began shouting at his son for no reason, then began hitting him. Gacy's mother attempted to intervene between her son and her husband. Dalke recalled Gacy simply "put up his hands to defend himself", adding that he never struck his father back during these altercations.

At the age of 18, Gacy became involved in politics, working as an assistant precinct captain for a Democratic Party candidate in his neighborhood. This decision earned more criticism from his father, who accused his son of being a "patsy". Gacy himself later speculated the decision may have been an attempt to seek the acceptance from others that he never received from his father. Gacy later realized he was attracted to men, and experienced great turmoil over his sexuality.

Having dropped out of high school, he found work difficult to come by, and he enrolled in business school where his flair for sales was soon recognised, and he excelled in his first post-graduate job as a management trainee at a footwear company in Springfield, Illinois. He also became a tireless supporter of several organisations that served the community, often dressing as a clown to entertain sick children in hospitals.

In September 1964, Gacy met and married co-worker Marlynn Myers, and his new father-in-law persuaded the newlyweds to move to Iowa, where Gacy was offered a position within a chain of fast food that he owned. Here again he developed his profile in the community, by doing volunteer work within the community organisation, the Jaycees.

In due course Marlynn gave birth to two children, a boy and a girl, and Gacy appeared to be living the American dream, with ambitions to become Jaycee president. Cracks began to appear in the idyll, however, when rumours began to spread that Gacy was making sexual advances to young employees within his father-in-law’s franchise restaurants. In May 1968 he was indicted for allegedly sodomising a teenage employee, Mark Miller. Gacy maintained his innocence, claiming that the sex had been consensual, and that there were factions within his Jaycee group that were fabricating evidence to spoil his chances of becoming president.

However, four months later Gacy was charged with hiring a young man, Dwight Andersson, to beat up Mark Miller, but Miller was able to escape his attacker and had Andersson arrested, who confessed to having been hired by Gacy. Gacy was charged, and forced to undergo psychiatric evaluation. He was deemed fit for trial, but unlikely to benefit from any medical intervention. Gacy decided to plead guilty to the sodomy charge, and he was sentenced to ten years in prison. His wife divorced him, and he never saw her or their children again. His adored father also died whilst he was incarcerated.

While in prison Gacy was a model inmate and, amazingly, after only 18 months in the Iowa State Correctional Facility, he was released on parole on 18 June 1970, when he returned to Chicago, where he spent four months at home with his mother.

His mother was impressed with how well her son had adjusted to life after prison, and bought Gacy a ranch-style house just outside Chicago, in which she maintained a 50% interest.

He developed good relationships with his neighbours, sharing festive occasions, and they were oblivious to his criminal conviction. Gacy had another close brush with the law, when he was charged with forcing a young boy to commit sexual acts, but the charges were dropped when the boy failed to appear at the court proceedings.

In June 1972, Gacy married Carole Hoff, a newly divorced mother of two daughters. Gacy romanced her when most vulnerable and she fell for his charm and generosity. She knew about his time in prison but believed that he had changed his life for the better. Carole and her daughters soon settled into Gacy’s home and forged a close relationship with the Grexa’s. The older couple was often invited over to the Gacy’s house for elaborate parties and cook-outs. However, they were often bothered by the horrible stench that often wafted throughout the house. Lillie Grexa was convinced that an animal had died beneath the floorboards of the place and she urged Gacy to do something about it. He blamed the odor on a moisture buildup in the crawlspace under the house though -- refusing to reveal the true, and much more sinister, cause for the smell. He would keep this secret for years to come.

In 1974, Gacy started a contracting business called Painting, Decorating and Maintenance or PDM Contractors, Inc. He hired a number of teenaged boys to work for him, explaining to friends that hiring young men would keep his payroll costs low. In truth, Gacy’s desires were starting to get out of control and he was having trouble hiding his true nature from those closest to him, especially his wife.

On December 11, 1978, 15-year-old Robert Piest went missing. It was reported to police that the boy was last seen by his mother at the store he worked at as he headed out to meet Gacy in relation to a potential job. On December 21, a police search of Gacy's house in Norwood Park Township, Illinois, uncovered evidence of his involvement in numerous horrific acts, including murder. It would later be determined that Gacy had killed 33 boys and young men, the majority of whom had been buried under the house and garage, while others would be recovered from the nearby Des Plaines River.

Gacy lured his victims with the promise of construction work, and then captured, sexually assaulted and eventually strangled most of them with rope. When he killed, he sometimes dressed as his alter ego "Pogo the Clown."

Gacy's trial began on February 6, 1980, with a prosecution team headed by William Kunkle. With Gacy having confessed to the crimes, the arguments were focused on whether he could be declared insane and thus remitted to a state mental facility. Gacy had told police that the murders had been committed by an alternate personality, while mental health professionals testified for both sides about Gacy's mental state.

Ultimately found guilty of committing 33 murders after a short jury deliberation, Gacy became known as one of the most vicious serial killers in U.S. history. He was sentenced to serve 12 death sentences and 21 natural life sentences. He was imprisoned at the Menard Correctional Center for almost a decade and a half, appealing the sentence and offering contradictory statements on the murders in interviews. Though he had confessed, Gacy later denied being guilty of the charges and had a 900 number set up with a 12-minute recorded statement of his innocence. He took up visual art as well, and his paintings were shown to the public via an exhibition at a Chicago gallery.

With both anti–death penalty forces and those in favor of the execution making their opinions known, John Wayne Gacy died by lethal injection on May 10, 1994, at the Stateville Correctional Center in Crest Hill, Illinois.

There have been lingering concerns that Gacy may have responsible for the deaths of others whose bodies have yet to be found, with the Cook County sheriff's office pushing to search a Chicago apartment building where Gacy once worked as a maintenance employee.

Ø  Edmund Kemper

Edmund Emil Kemper III (born December 18, 1948), also known as The Co-ed Butcher or The Co-ed Killer, is an American serial killer and necrophile who was active in California in the early 1970s. He started his criminal life by murdering his grandparents when he was 15 years old, and later killed and dismembered six female hitchhikers in the Santa Cruz area. He then murdered his mother and one of her friends before turning himself in to the authorities days later. Kemper is noted for his imposing size and high intelligence, standing 6 ft 9 in (2.06 m) tall and weighing over 300 lbs (140 kg) and having an IQ in the 140 range, attributes that left his victims with little chance to overcome him.

Kemper committed his crimes in the same area and around the same time as two other serial killers, John Linley Frazier and Herbert Mullins. At the time, Santa Cruz area became known as the “Murder Capital of the World” in the press and Kemper was dubbed the “Coed Killer” and the “Coed Butcher.”

Kemper was the middle child of E. E. and Clarnell Kemper. After his parents’ divorce in 1957, he moved with his mother and two sisters to Montana. Kemper had a difficult relationship with his alcoholic mother as she was very critical of him, and he blamed her for all of his problems. When he was ten years old, she forced him to live in the basement, away from his sisters whom she feared he might harm in some way.

Signs of trouble emerged early. He had a dark fantasy life, sometimes dreaming about killing his mother. He cut off the heads of his sister’s dolls and even coerced the girls into playing a game he called "gas chamber" in which he had them blindfold him and lead him to a chair, where he pretended to writhe in agony until he "died." At the age of 13, Kemper killed his cat with a knife. He went to live with his father for a time, but he ended up back with his mother. She decided to send the troubled teenager to live with his paternal grandparents in North Fork, California.

Kemper hated living on his grandparents’ farm. Before going to North Fork, Kemper had already begun learning about firearms. His grandparents took away his rifle after he killed several birds and other small animals. On August 27th, 1964, Kemper turned on his grandparents. The 15-year-old shot his grandmother in the kitchen after an argument. (Some reports also indicate that he stabbed her as well.) When his grandfather returned home, Kemper went outside and shot him by his car and then hid the body. He called his mother who told him to call the police and tell them what happened.

Later, Kemper said that he shot his grandmother to see what it felt like. He added that he killed his grandfather so that the man wouldn't have to find out that his wife had been murdered. For his crimes, Kemper was handed over to the California Youth Authority. He underwent a variety of tests, which determined that he had a very high IQ and suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. Kemper was eventually sent to Atascadero State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

In 1969, Kemper was released. He was 21 years old. He was advised not to live with his mother because of her past abuse and his psychological issues involving her. Ignoring this recommendation, Kemper eventually joined his mother in California. Clarnell Kemper had moved there after ending her third marriage and took a job with the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Kemper attended community college for a time and worked a variety of jobs. He eventually went to work for the California Highway Department in 1971. Kemper applied to become a state trooper, but he was rejected because of his size—he weighed around 300 pounds and was 6 feet 9 inches tall, which led to his nickname “Big Ed.” He did, however, hang around some of the Santa Cruz police officers. One gave him a training-school badge and handcuffs, while another let him borrow a gun, according to Whoever Fights Monsters by Robert K. Ressler and Tom Shachtman. Kemper even had a car that resembled a police cruiser. The same year he began working for the highway department, Kemper was hit by a car while out on his motorcycle. His arm was badly injured, and he received a $15,000 settlement in the civil suit he filed against the car’s driver. Unable to work, Kemper turned his mind toward other pursuits. He noticed a large number of young women hitchhiking in the area. In the new car he bought with some of his settlement money, Kemper began storing the tools he thought he might need to fulfill his murderous desires, including a gun, a knife, and handcuffs.

At first, Kemper picked up female hitchhikers and let them go. He offered two Fresno State College students—Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa—a ride on May 7th, 1972, but they never made it to their destination. Their families reported them missing, but nothing was known of their fates until August 15th, when a female head was discovered in the woods that was later identified as Pesce’s. Luchessa’s remains, however, were never found. Kemper would later explain that he stabbed and strangled one of the women and stabbed the other. After the murders, he brought the bodies back to his apartment and removed their heads and hands. Kemper also reportedly engaged in sexual activity with their corpses. Later that year, on September 14, 1972, 15 year-old Aiko Koo decided to hitchhike rather than wait for the bus to take her to a dance class. She stepped into Kemper’s car and ultimately met the same fate as Mary Pesce and Anita Lucchessa.

In January of 1973, Kemper continued to act on his murderous impulses. He picked up hitchhiker Cindy Schall and shot her. While his mother was out, Kemper went to her home and hid Schall’s body in his room there. He dismembered her corpse the following day, and threw the parts into the ocean. Several parts were later discovered when they washed up on shore.

Kemper’s mother got him a campus parking sticker so that he could pick her up at the university. On February 5th, 1973, he used that sticker to facilitate a double-murder. Kemper drove to the campus after a fight with his mother and gave a ride to two students, Rosalind Thorpe and Alice Liu. Shortly after picking them up, he shot the two young women. Kemper drove past campus security at the gates with two mortally wounded women in his car.

After the murders, Kemper decapitated his two victims and further dismembered the bodies, removed the bullets from their heads, and disposed of their parts in different locations. In March, some of Thorpe’s and Liu’s remains were discovered by hikers near Highway 1 in San Mateo County.

Kemper’s last two killings took place in April of 1973. On Good Friday, he went to his mother’s home, where the two had an unpleasant exchange. Kemper attacked his mother after she went to sleep, first striking her in the head with a hammer and then cutting her throat with a knife. After removing her larynx, he put it into the garbage disposal in the kitchen. Kemper then hid her body and went out to a bar frequented by his police officer friends.

In another odd twist, he invited over a friend of his mother’s, Sara “Sally” Hallett. (One source says he invited her to dinner and a movie while another says that he wanted her help with a surprise party for his mother.) Kemper killed Hallett shortly after she arrived at the house, and hid her body in a closet. He fled the area the next day.

After driving for several days, Kemper reached Pueblo, Colorado, where he made a call to the Santa Cruz police to confess his crimes. At first, the police could not believe that the guy they knew as “Big Ed” was a killer. But he soon led them to all the evidence they would need to prove that he was the infamous "Coed Killer."

Charged with eight counts of first-degree murder, Kemper went on trial for his crimes in October of 1973. He was found guilty of all of the charges in early November. When asked by the judge what he thought his punishment should be, Kemper said that he should be tortured to death. He instead received eight concurrent life sentences.

At present, Kemper is serving his time at California Medical Facility in Vacaville. He was up for parole in 2007, but the state parole board denied his request. The other time that Kemper was eligible for parole was in 2012.