Joachim Georg Kroll was a German serial killer,child molester and cannibal. He was known as the Ruhr Cannibal, and was very particular about where he killed, only killing in the same place on a few occasions years apart. This, and the fact that there were a number of other killers operating in the area at the time, helped him to evade capture. Kroll would surprise his victims and strangle them quickly. Afterward he would strip the body and have intercourse with it, often masturbating over it again. He would then mutilate and cut off pieces to be eaten later. Upon returning home, he would have intercourse again with a rubber sex doll he had for the purpose. Kroll said that he often sliced portions of flesh from his victims to cook and eat them, claiming that he did this to save on his grocery bills.
A small class of serial killers are the mentally retarded who usually are caught quickly by authorities because they are unable to conceal their crimes sufficiently. But Joachim Kroll of was an extreme example of a man suffering from mental retardation who was able to evade police discovery for nearly twenty one years. The classification of the mentally retarded offender is described as one who has limited vocabulary, difficulty answering questions, prefers young children as friends, acts impulsively, is incapable of understanding consequences, and has limited ability of recalling events that might have taken place. Notoriously incompetent, mentally retarded serial killers cannot commit their crimes without an accomplice who can help them rape victims, hide bodies and construct a viable alibi. Most killers with low IQ’s, such as Otis Toole, are able to commit their crimes primarily with another smarter and more capable person, such as Henry Lee Lucas. Joachim Kroll, one of the few exceptions, was able to do all of these things by himself, perhaps out of sheer luck. Police investigations were looking for a multitude of killers who were intelligent enough to kill for twenty years without being caught. This is a classic example of police searching for someone they believed was very smart, but in fact, they were seeking a seriously below average individual who was of a third grade intelligence. Once in custody, he believed that he was going to get a simple operation to cure him of his homicidal urges and would then be released from prison. Instead he was charged with eight murders and one attempted murder. In April 1982, after a 151-day trial, he was convicted on all counts and was given nine life sentences.
Arthur Shawcross was an American serial killer, also known as the Genesee River Killer in Rochester, New York. His parents dispute his claims that he was molested as a child, but it's clear that he was troubled. In 1972, he confessed to killing two children and went to prison. His records were sealed so he could settle in a new town without causing a panic. But from 1988 to 1990, Shawcross killed 11 women in upstate New York, earning the nickname "The Genessee River Killer." He died in prison.
He was born on June 6, 1945, and died on November 10, 2008 while serving a life sentence for the murder of 11 women. From his birthplace of Kittery, Maine, his family moved to Watertown, a small town near Lake Ontario in New York State, when he was still a child. Shawcross claims that his adolescence was turbulent, and cites a difficult relationship with both parents, particularly his domineering mother, for his later troubles. He says he also exhibited behavioral problems at an early age, including bed-wetting and bullying. He also made extreme reports about his early sexuality. He claimed his aunt sexually molested him when he was 9, and that he had sexual relations with his younger sister. He also admitted to his first homosexual encounter at the age of 11, which he says was followed by experimentation with bestiality.
In contrast to these claims, however, his parents and siblings maintain that he had a normal childhood, and the described events were largely the product of his imagination. There is no way of knowing whose version represents the reality of his upbringing, but what became clear, later on, was that Shawcross would change his stories at will, as he was interviewed by various professionals in the course of their investigations. From school records it can be independently verified that he was an inveterate truant, with a particularly low IQ, a tendency to bullying and violence and that he came under suspicion for a series of juvenile arson attacks as well as burglaries. He dropped out of school after failing to pass the ninth grade, and the next few years were punctuated with violence and jail sentences. He received his first probationary sentence in December 1963 for smashing a shop window.
Shawcross married first wife, Sarah, in September 1964. The couple produced a son in October 1965. But another probationary charge for unlawful entry in November 1965, proved the last straw for his marriage and he was divorced soon after. His second marriage, following drafting into the Army in April 1967, was also tainted by violence and was equally short-lived. He served a tour of duty in the Vietnam War in October 1967, and he later claimed that he murdered and cannibalized two young Vietnamese girls and several children while there. There is no corroborating evidence to support this, however. He also claimed a "combat kill" total of 39 which, when investigated later, was also discounted as fabrication; authorities claim he killed no one on his tour of duty.
On his return from military duty in 1968, he landed in trouble yet again when he was caught and convicted for an arson attack. Shawcross served two years of a five-year jail term. He was released in October 1971 and returned to Watertown again. A year later, on April 7, 1972, he claimed his first victim: 10-year-old neighbor Jack Blake. Shawcross took him fishing just a few days before he disappeared, but denied any knowledge of the disappearance. Several weeks later on April 22, 1972, he married his third wife, Penny Sherbino, who was pregnant with his child. Five months later, his victim's body was finally located. He had been sexually assaulted and suffocated, but police had no leads to the identity of the killer. Jack Blake would be the first of many more victims.
In September 1972, the body of 8-year-old Karen Ann Hill was found under a bridge. She had been raped and murdered. Police found mud, leaves and other debris had been forced down her throat and inside her clothing. Neighbors remembered that Shawcross had been seen with Karen in the vicinity of the bridge before her disappearance, and he had a history of minor run-ins with local children. Shawcross came under immediate suspicion. He was arrested on October 3, 1972, and finally confessed to both killings, although he was only charged with Karen Hill's killing, given the lack of evidence tying him to Jack Blake's death. He received a 25-year jail sentence, and third wife Penny divorced him shortly thereafter.
After serving less than 15 years of this sentence, he was released on parole in April 1987. The well-publicized resettlement of a child killer in the Binghamton area of New York State was greeted by a public outcry, and he was forced to leave the area after a few months along with his new girlfriend, Rose Whalley. His past meant that he would be unwelcome almost anywhere, and the authorities made the decision to seal his criminal record in order to prevent a recurrence of the public alarm in Binghamton. They moved Shawcross and Whalley to Rochester, New York, where she became his fourth wife. In Rochester, Shawcross took on a succession of menial jobs. His lackluster marriage to Whalley meant that he was soon seeking solace elsewhere, both from prostitutes as well as his new girlfriend, Clara Neal.
It did not take long for Shawcross to return to his murderous ways. Hunters discovered his next victim, 27-year-old prostitute Dorothy Blackburn, on March 24, 1988. Her body was found in the Genessee River, dumped there following a vicious attack, which included bite marks in the groin area and strangulation. With little evidence, and no public impetus to solve the murder of a prostitute, her case languished for over a year. There were other murders of prostitutes in that time but, given the danger of the profession, nothing untoward was noticed that linked any of the cases. The discovery of the body of another prostitute, Anna Steffen, on September 9, 1989, linked several of the victims. She died of asphyxia, and her body had been dumped in a similar manner to Blackburn's corpse. Her body, however, was found far from the original murder scene, so again the possibility that a serial killer was at work was not recognized.
On October 21, 1989, the body of homeless woman Dorothy Keeler, aged 59, was discovered followed six days later by another prostitute, Patricia Ives, in the same area. Both had been asphyxiated and the press started to show an interest as the cases were linked. They nicknamed the offender "The Genessee River Killer." In all the previous cases at least some attempt at concealment had been made, which police felt indicated previous criminal or military experience. They began to advise prostitutes working in the area to exercise caution, and sought as much information as possible about strangers operating in the area. They also began checking criminal records for offenders who might be living in the immediate area. Shawcross' sealed criminal record meant that he shielded him from police scrutiny.
As prostitutes continued to disappear, it became apparent that the killer must be someone familiar to the women who worked in the area. Police were able to piece together a description of a regular client called "Mitch" or "Mike." Women said this particular john was prone to violence. Then the body of 26-year-old June Stott, who was neither a prostitute nor drug user, was found on Thanksgiving Day. She had been strangled, anally mutilated after death, had her labia removed, and was gutted from throat to crotch like a wild animal.
With the body count mounting, the police sought assistance from FBI profilers. They divided the 11 unsolved prostitute murders into sub-groups according to method and position. They developed a profile that described the killer as a white male in his 20s or 30s, who was strong, probably with a previous criminal record, familiar with the area, and comfortable enough with the victims that they would enter his vehicle without question. The lack of sexual interference indicated it might be someone with sexual dysfunction. The post-mortem injury inflicted on June Stott, and not on any other victim, indicated that the killer was becoming more comfortable around corpses, probably returning to the crime scene again later to relive the attack.
The discovery of the body of Elizabeth Gibson, on November 27, brought a breakthrough: suspect "Mitch" had been seen with her shortly before her disappearance, but they seemed no closer to establishing his identity. Police tried various tactics, including canvassing all the local bars, to no avail. When a pair of discarded jeans was discovered near the river on December 31, 1989, containing an ID card for a girl named Felicia Stephens, police began an aerial search of the surrounding area. On January 2, 1990, a helicopter spotted what appeared to be a naked female body lying on the ice surface of the river by a bridge in the forest. The body was not Felicia Stephens but that of missing prostitute June Cicero. She had also been mutilated post-mortem, as well as sawn practically in half.
Even more importantly, the helicopter spotted a man standing on the bridge next to a small van. He appeared to be either masturbating or urinating. Fortunately for the authorities, Shawcross had, as speculated, returned to the scene of one of his crimes to relive the pleasure of the attack. Patrol teams on the ground were alerted to the vehicle, which had sped away. They finally tracked down Shawcross via the car's registration, which was in the name of his girlfriend Clara Neal. When approached, Shawcross agreed to assist the police with their enquiries. When they asked for his driver's license, he admitted he did not have one and then revealed that he had been in jail for manslaughter.
Police were confident they had their killer, and further questioning revealed the earlier child deaths and a grandiose account of his Vietnam War service, which was later discounted. A photo taken of him during the initial questioning soon confirmed his identity as "Mitch," and official enquiries unearthed the reason for Shawcross' sealed record, which prevented the police from tracking him down sooner. Still, police were unable to get Shawcross to admit to the murders—until they confirmed that a piece of jewelery he had given to Clara Neal previously belonged to victim June Cicero. When police threatened to implicate her in the killings, Shawcross capitulated and admitted to most of the murders, giving detailed excuses about why he had been "forced" to kill each one. He even admitted to the killing of two undiscovered bodies, those of prostitutes Maria Welsh and Darlene Trippi, leading investigators to their bodies. His formal confession was nearly 80 pages long.
In November 1990, Shawcross went on trial for the 10 murders that had occurred in Monroe County. The last victim, Elizabeth Gibson, had been killed in neighboring Wayne County. The trial was a national media event, extensively televised and widely viewed. Shawcross' defense team tried to build a case based on an insanity plea, citing various mitigating factors, such as his upbringing, post-traumatic stress as a result of military service, a cyst on the brain and a rare genetic defect. The prosecution was quick to dispute the claims about his childhood and military service, casting doubts on Shawcross' testimony. The physiological evidence about brain science and genetic factors was, at best, spurious and beyond the understanding of the jury. It was also hindered by poor presentation on the part of the expert witnesses called to testify. Shawcross was declared sane—and guilty of 10 instances of second-degree murder. The judge sentenced him to 25 years for each count, a total of 250 years imprisonment. A few months later, Shawcross was taken to Wayne County to be tried for Elizabeth Gibson's murder. Rather than claim insanity this time, he pleaded guilty and received a further life sentence. Shawcross was held at the Sullivan Correctional Facility in New York State until November 10, 2008, when he complained of pain in his leg. He was transferred to a hospital where he died later that day of cardiac arrest.
The Doodler is an unidentified serial killerbelieved responsible for 14 slayings and three assaults of men in the gaycommunity of San Francisco, California between January 1974 and September 1975. To the extent the case has been written about, the Doodler has been credited with fourteen victims. One encounters this figure in the era’s press accounts and books of recent vintage. But it is far more likely there were, in fact, five or six. (The larger figure may be due to the frequency with which gay men were murdered in those years; it’s possible that several distinct cases were conflated and the Doodler given too much credit.) Five men were contemporaneously identified in the newspapers as Doodler victims, but the count shouldn’t be considered definitive. It’s a fool’s errand to say any single victim is definitely the work of the Doodler, or to rule out the possibility of others. As a veteran detective once said, “Anyone in my position who tells you otherwise, especially when there hasn’t even been an indictment, is either untrustworthy or lying.” Forty years after the fact, the story of the Doodler killings has not been even cursorily told. Unlike cases with similar body counts this one was quickly forgotten. It was, perhaps, somewhat a matter of timing. When the killings began, it had been just a year since the American Psychiatric Association Board of Trustees ceased classifying homosexuality as a disorder. Most media outlets, just maybe, did not consider gay men sufficiently sympathetic to rate coverage. And then, four and half years after the killings ended, San Francisco’s own Ken Horne, a ballet school dropout, was reported to the Centers for Disease Control with Kaposi’s Sarcoma. Five murdered men would become, relative to what followed, a statistical blip.
It is believed the Doodler would sketch his victims nude before murdering them. Though 3 victims survived, and a suspect was identified, none were willing to "out" themselves in open court in order to convict the suspect. This is one of the reasons gay men have been the focus of several serial killers, not only are they gay and needed to be secret about it, but often would the serial killer also be gay and quite uneasy about it and being secret about it. Easy prey when they have nowhere to go. Sad and scary, almost the same scinario with many prostitute serial killings.
Maoupa Cedric Maake was a particularly brutal individual whose crimes seemed almost random. He operated mostly in the city of Johannesburg, South Africa. His victims included men and women, both young and old. There was no set pattern to whom he decided to kill, just the chaotic murders of a deranged mind. To add further unpredictability to his crimes, there were several methods that he used to attack his victims. Some he would sneak up behind while they were alone and bludgeon to death with rocks. Others consisted of couples in cars, the men which he would shoot before raping the women. For some reason he also attacked tailors within the inner city, beating them to death with a hammer while they were in their shops. The seemingly unconnected nature of the crimes confused police for some time. They at first thought Maake’s killings to be the work of two separate serial killers due to the different victims chosen and murder weapons used. Eventually, however, they would catch up with Maake in December of 1997. When he was finally caught, he was charged with a wide variety of crimes. The total convictions ended in 27 murders, 26 attempted murders, 14 rapes, 41 robberies and a number of other, less serious crimes. In all, he was found guilty of 114 charges and sentenced to 1159 years in prison, where he resides today.
Juan Corona murdered at least twenty-five migrant workers during a bloodstained six week period in 1971. He had arrived in Yuba City, California in the 1950s as a Mexican migrant worker. By the early 1970s, he'd moved up the pecking order and was a labour contractor; he hired itinerants to pick fruit on behalf of local farmers (for minimal pay) around the Yuba area. Long before Corona’s series of homicides, as far back as 1956, he’d been diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia. However, no-one suspected the disturbing depths of his true mental condition. Though outwardly a macho man with a wife and children, Corona was a predatory homosexual and a brutal sadist. His murder victims were all male and all were sexually assaulted before being killed. At least one other member of the Corona Family had a history of sexually motivated violence; in 1970, Juan’s half-brother Natividad, who owned the “Guadalajara” cafe in nearby Marysville, had molested and beaten a young man in the washroom at his place of business. The victim was discovered bleeding by other customers; when he sued Natividad for $250,000.00. The pervert fled back to Mexico.
As a labour contractor, Corona personally recruited migrant workers and housed the men in a barracks-like building on the Sullivan ranch. These men were, for the most part, elderly alcoholics, social dropouts, and misfits - the kind of people who would not ordinarily be missed if they vanished. In early May 1971, Corona apparently started to single out individual workers for sex and death. But it’s likely that his career as a homosexual rapist began much earlier. His job and his twisted inclinations gave him ample opportunities to prey on vulnerable men; his position and their lack of social standing would have ensured that the police were not informed. On May 19, a Japanese fruit farmer noticed a large hole seven feet long and three and a half feet deep that had been scooped out of his land in a peach orchard. The next night he went to the same spot and saw that the earth had been packed back into the hole. He called the police who dug into what was a fresh grave. Inside of it was Kenneth Whitacre, a vagrant who had homosexual pornography in his back pocket. He had been sexually assaulted and then stabbed to death - somebody had chopped his head open with a machete. Another farmer noticed what appeared to be a freshly dug grave on his land and police began digging again; this time finding an elderly man - Charles Fleming, known to be a drifter. More graves in this area yielded more men, all of them sodomized, stabbed (one was shot) and mutilated viciously about the head with a machete. The killer had followed a similar pattern in every case; each of the victims bore a deep puncture to the chest followed by two slashes across the back of the head in the shape of a cross. All had been buried face up, arms stretched above their heads, shirts pulled up over their faces. Some had their lower garments lewdly pulled down.
In one grave police found the body of Melford Sample and a meat market receipt made out to "Juan V. Corona." The bodies kept turning up - including that of John Henry Jackson, an elderly worker who had been seen some weeks earlier riding in the back of Corona's pickup truck. The police kept digging until June 4, 1971, unearthing twenty-five bodies, along with more receipts that had the name of Juan Corona on them. Corona was arrested and charged with murder. He pleaded not guilty, but his defence lawyers, who maintained that his half-brother had done the murders, had an uphill battle against the overpowering evidence of bodies, receipts and eyewitnesses who had seen the murdered workers with Corona shortly before they disappeared. There was speculation that Corona and another man committed the murders, but no other suspect was ever found, let alone arrested. Psychiatrists ventured many theories about Corona, one claiming that as the spring deepened and the fruit ripened, Corona's madness increased until the climate drove him into a frenzy of murder and mutilation so that he was compelled to kill someone each day to satisfy his blood lust. The availability of victims increased as warmer weather set in and scores of migrant workers drifted into the Marysville -Yuba City area. In several instances, the prosecution at Corona's trial proved that Corona had planned his murders in advance - digging graves days before he had any victims to put into them. Added to this was the presence of two bloodstained knives, a machete, a pistol and blood-caked clothes in his home...along with an equally damning ledger in which Corona had officiously listed the names of seven his victims and the dates of their murders.
Corona simply had to stop his truck at any roadside and take his pick from a steady stream of nomadic workers - men who would generally grab the chance to make some money. He would work his chosen targets a few days then, when it was time to pay them, the burly, 200-pound Corona would strike; they were sexually molested, murdered and buried. His victims included Kenneth Whitacre, Charles Fleming, Melford Sample, Donald Smith, John J. Haluka, Warren Kelley, Sigurd Beierman, William Emery Kamp, Clarence Hocking, James W. Howard, Jonah R. Smallwood, Elbert T. Riley, Paul B. Allen, Edward Martin Cupp, Albert Hayes, Raymond Muchache, John H. Jackson, Lloyd Wallace Wenzel, Mark Beverly Shields, Sam Bonafide (also known as Joe Carriveau) and Joseph Maczak, plus four men who remained unidentified. The jury in the Corona case deliberated for forty-five hours and then brought in a verdict of 'Guilty' in the case of each of the twenty-five murdered men. In January 1973, Judge Richard E. Patton sentenced Corona to twenty-five life terms to run consecutively with no hope of parole. In 1978 an appeals court upheld a petition by Corona - he claimed that his original legal team had been incompetent. They had not put forward Schizonphrenia as a mitigating factor or pleaded inasnity. Corona was granted a new trial. Whilst awaiting this process, he was attacked in prison by three other inmates and slashed with a razor thirty-two times, losing his sight in one eye. In 1982, his second trial confirmed all twenty-five guilty verdicts. Some observers have theorised that he might have killed prior to 1971. Corona's early years in Mexico are obscure and not well documented, so we'll never know what he did before he hit the road as a migrant worker. Whilst it’s entirely possible that the Californian countryside still contains bodies and dark secrets, several factors tend to suggest that his 1971 killing spree was an explosion of long-supressed urges, rather than the tail-end of a lengthy career in homocide.
He was extremely careless in the manner used to dispose of his victims. Holes were dug and left empty for some time - perhaps he thought that this was a clever way of cutting down on the danger of discovery when he was in possession of a corpse? In reality, the ruse only aroused the curiosity of farmers who were naturally interested in unauthorised activities on their land. The victims' bodies were buried along with a lot of evidence that could only point towards Juan Corona. He made no attempt to dispose of incriminating weapons, clothing or even a list with victims' names and dates of death. It seems more credible that he graduated to rape/murder after enjoying a very long period of rape and battery without even coming close to being caught. There came a point when beating and violating a helpless person no longer thrilled enough. His need to dominate and express unbridled power over others sought out a higher, more bloody level. The ultimate expression of power over another person is to deprive him of life. Corona had never needed to be particularly careful or resourceful in the past; this attitude stayed with him when he extended his activities and began to kill the men he raped.
On July 21, 1979, a 14-year-old boy disappeared. Four days later, another teen went missing. Both, it was soon learned, had been killed. It was the beginning of a shocking series of murders—some 29 in all—that would take place over the next 22 months in Atlanta. The victims were all young African-Americans, and as the death toll mounted, so did fear and tension across the city. The FBI’s involvement in the case began on June 22, 1980 following the abduction of a 7-year-old girl. The Atlanta Police Department, which—along with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation—was investigating the string of killings, asked the FBI if the federal kidnapping statute had been violated. None of the crimes appeared to fall under federal law, but Special Agent in Charge John Glover—the first African-American to lead an FBI field office—offered all the support the Bureau could give under the circumstances. Our Atlanta office helped follow up on out-of-state leads. The FBI Lab provided assistance. And our Behavioral Sciences Unit sent an expert to develop a profile of a possible perpetrator.
Meanwhile, the murders continued. Local politicians, the news media, and even Georgia Senator Sam Nunn asked the Department of Justice to permit FBI involvement, and the attorney general did so on November 6, 1980, authorizing a preliminary investigation. On November 17, the Bureau launched a major case investigation, devoting more than two dozen agents and other personnel to the case full time. FBI agents joined local and state law enforcement officers on a task force investigating the murders. Collectively, they focused on a dozen disappearances with several shared traits. The victims were all young African-American males who vanished in broad daylight in fairly public locations. Their bodies were found in desolate areas. Their murders had no obvious motivation (in contrast, two other homicides from that period appeared to have been gang-related). These commonalities suggested a single killer. The case continued through the winter and into the spring of 1981. By late April, however, the killer began to change his behavior, dumping the victims’ bodies in the Chattahoochee River. Members of the task force staked out the 14 bridges in the Atlanta metropolitan area that crossed the river and patiently waited.
On May 22, a big break came in the case. One of the groups conducting surveillance—consisting of an FBI agent, an Atlanta police officer, and two police cadets—heard a loud splash around 2:52 a.m. A car sped across the bridge, turned around in a parking lot on the other side, and sped back across the bridge. The vehicle was pursued and stopped. The driver was a 23-year-old African-American freelance photographer named Wayne Williams.
Lacking probable cause, authorities let Williams go. But when the body of a young African-American man named Nathaniel Cater was found downstream two days later, more attention was paid to Williams. Investigators soon learned that his alibi was poor and that he had been arrested earlier that year for impersonating a police officer. Later, he failed multiple polygraph examinations. Williams was arrested on June 21, 1981. He was convicted of two murders on February 27, 1982, after he was linked to the victims through meticulous hair and fiber analysis and witness testimony.Following the trial, the law enforcement task force concluded that there was enough evidence to link Williams to another 20 of the 29 deaths. He went to jail for life, and the Atlanta child killings stopped.
One of the most infamous vampire related mass murderers was Fritz Haarmann (1879-1925), who with his two accomplices was responsible for the deaths of at least twenty and as many as fifty young men. He was known as a vampire because of his cannibalism and habit of biting his victims in the throat. Born to a working-class couple in Hanover, Germany, Fritz was a sullen and slow-witted child whose favorite pastime was dressing up like a girl. At 17, he was committed to an asylum after being arrested for child molesting. Six months later, he escaped to Switzerland and made his way back to Hanover. Throughout his twenties, he was in and out of jail for offenses ranging from being a pickpocket to burglary. For awhile, he attempted to lead a respectable life, taking a job in a cigar factory and getting engaged to a young woman. But this period of normalcy didn't last. Deserting his fiancee, he ran off and joined the army. A child molester and homosexual, Haarmann spent time in a sanatorium after being discharged from the army. After being released he rejoined the army, this time serving with an elite group, distinguishing himself throughout World War I.
A civilian again during Germany's post war era, Haarmann returned to his native city and joined a postwar smuggling ring that trafficked, among other things, in black-market beef. He also served as a police stool pigeon, a sideline that afforded him protection for his illicit activities. By this time he was already a murderer and then in 1919 he met Hans Grans, a fellow homosexual, who came to dominate Haarmann and lead him into the gaudy underworld of Hanover's homosexual community. Later in 1919 after being caught in bed with a young boy, Haarmann was shipped back to prison. It was after his release nine months later that Haarmann launched into his career of unparalleled depravity. Living in Hanover's seamy Old Quarter, Haarmann found an abundant supply of prey in the young male refugees who were flooding the city. He often brought young men home with him and murdered them in a grisly fashion, all under the watchful eye of Grans. Another mysterious accomplice entered the scene and aided in body disposal. The victims' clothing was sold on by Haarmann, and the most horrid of all acts was that Haarmann and Grans actually sold flesh to unsuspecting people for human consumption, peddling it as black market beef. Though Haarmann was ultimately charged with 27 murders, it seems likely he was responsible for as many as 50. The method he employed to kill his victims was always the same.
After luring the hungry boy to his room, Haarmann would feed him a meal, then overpower him (often with Grans's assistance) and fall upon the boy's throat, chewing through the flesh until he had nearly separated the head from the body. Generally, he would experience a sexual climax while battering on the boy. As the number of missing boys mounted, police suspicion began to fall on Haarmann. A woman who had purchased one of his black-market "steaks" became convinced it was human flesh and turned it over to the police. In the summer of 1924, several skulls and a sackful of bones were found on the banks of the canal. Searching Haarmann's rooms, detectives found bundles of boys' clothing. The landlady's son was wearing a coat--given to him by Haarmann--that belonged to one of the missing boys.
In the end, Haarmann confessed his crimes in minute detail, proclaiming insanity but declaring he was forced to commit the crimes whilst in a trance. He was tried in 1924, found guilty, and sentenced to death. While awaiting execution, the "Vampire of Hanover" (as he'd been dubbed by the press) produced a written confession in which he described, with undisguised relish, the pleasure he had derived from his atrocities. At his own request, he was beheaded with a sword in the city marketplace, ironically one of the most common and effective ways to dispose of a vampire. Afterward, his brain was removed from his skull and shipped to Goettingen University for study. Unfortunately, nothing came of this effort. To this day, science is still no closer to comprehending the reasoning behind the crimes committed by people like Fritz Haarmann.
On the night of February 22, 1996, William George Bonin requested two pepperoni and sausage pizzas, three pints of coffee ice cream and three six-packs of Coke for dinner. He watched “Jeopardy” while he ate. Hours later, he put on a new pair of denim pants and a blue work shirt and was led to the execution chamber at San Quentin Prison. At 12:13 a.m. on February 23, 1996, Bonin was pronounced dead, the first inmate executed by lethal injection in the state of California.
Bonin, known as the “Freeway Killer”, was convicted of 14 murders committed across two counties between 1979 and 1980, and he was suspected in many other deaths. His victims were all boys, 12 to 19 years old—some hitchhikers, some prostitutes, some just young men in the wrong place at the worst possible time—who were robbed and raped before being killed and dumped along California freeways. According to court records, most had marks on their wrists and ankles indicating they had been tied up, and some showed signs of beatings and torture. On August 6, 1979, the body of the first victim Bonin would be convicted of killing was discovered naked on the side of a road in Malibu Canyon. Marcus Grabs, a 17-year-old German student on a backpacking trip, was abducted the night before, sodomized, beaten and stabbed 77 times. Weeks later, on August 27, the body of 15-year-old Donald Hyden was found near an off-ramp of the Ventura Freeway. He had been sodomized, stabbed and strangled, and he had a burn mark above his groin. At least a dozen more victims followed, most killed by ligature strangulation. According to court records:
When he was arrested on June 11, 1980, Bonin was caught in the act of raping a 15-year-old boy in his van. Police found white nylon cord and three knives in the vehicle. Bonin later gave investigators a statement leading them to the body of 14-year-old Sean King, who had disappeared from a bus stop in Downey on May 20, 1980, but that statement was not admissible in court. He was acquitted of King’s murder. Court records show Bonin had at least four alleged accomplices during the course of his killing spree. One, Vernon Butts, committed suicide in jail while awaiting trial. Gregory Miley and James Munro, two teens who had sexual relationships with Bonin, pleaded guilty to murder charges and cooperated with the prosecution. According to prosecutors, Gregory Miley was 18 years old when he and Bonin picked up one of the victims, Charles Miranda, near the Starwood Ballroom in West Hollywood in the early hours of February 3, 1980.
Bonin sodomized Miranda and Miley attempted to but was unable to do it. Miley testified that Bonin whispered to him, “This kid’s going to die,” and began to tie him up. He asked why Bonin did not just let Miranda go and Bonin replied, “No, man, he’ll know the van and he’ll know us.” Bonin and Miley then used Miranda’s shirt to suffocate him and crushed his neck with a jack handle, court records state. After they dumped his body in an alley, Bonin said, “I’m horny again. I need another one,” according to Miley. Later that morning in Huntington Beach, they picked up James Macabe, a 12-year-old who said he was on his way to Disneyland, according to prosecutors. Miley drove the van while Bonin sexually assaulted him. The two then strangled Macabe with a shirt and left his body in a dumpster. At Bonin’s Orange County trial, James Munro, who was 18 at the time of Steven Wells’ murder, testified that he and Bonin picked up Wells as he was hitchhiking on the afternoon of June 2, 1980 and brought him to Bonin’s house. According to Munro, Bonin offered to pay Wells if he would let him tie him up during sex. Munro then helped hold Wells down while Bonin strangled him with a t-shirt.
When they were on their way to dispose of the body, they bought cheeseburgers with $10 they took from Wells’ wallet, Munro claimed. As they ate, Bonin allegedly looked up and laughed, saying, “Thanks, Steve, wherever you are.” However, Munro changed his story about exactly what happened many times. Several exhibits introduced at the trial showed inconsistencies, including letters Munro wrote to judges and to Bonin’s defense attorney claiming that he either never saw Bonin kill anyone or that he killed Wells himself. Bonin’s attorney highlighted these contradictions during Munro’s cross-examination. A fourth accomplice, William Pugh, was the one who first put police onto Bonin’s trail, according to court records. After an arrest for unrelated auto theft charges on May 29, 1980, Pugh, then 17, told authorities that he had gotten a ride home from a party with Bonin once and that Bonin talked about having killed young boys. Investigators eventually learned that Pugh participated in Bonin’s March 1980 abduction and killing of Harry Turner. Still, his tip gave police a suspect, and Bonin was placed under surveillance on the night of June 2, leading to his arrest just over a week later, according to a probation officer’s report. Pugh was convicted of voluntary manslaughter in Turner’s death and sentenced to six years in prison.
Once detectives convinced Bonin’s friend and neighbor, Scott Fraser, of his guilt, Fraser told them that Bonin claimed to have killed a teen in self-defense in August 1979 and that Vernon Butts was present at the time, Fraser said Bonin claimed he hid the body because he thought police would never believe him, given his criminal record for assaulting teenage boys. Police then arrested Butts, who confessed to participating in six or seven murders with Bonin before his suicide, investigator John St. John told the Register. Fraser ultimately received a $20,000 reward that had been offered for information in the case. In addition to Fraser, Miley and Munro, another key witness at Bonin’s trials was reporter David Lopez of KNXT in Los Angeles. Lopez, who interviewed Bonin in jail after his arrest, testified that he showed Bonin a list of 21 presumed victims of the Freeway Killer and Bonin admitted to murdering 20 of them.
When Lopez asked what he would be doing if he was not in jail, Bonin said, “I'd still be killing. I couldn't stop killing. It got easier with each victim I did." Prosecutors also presented forensic evidence linking Bonin to several of the murders. Investigators found triskelion-shaped fibers on the bodies of three of the victims that were consistent with the carpeting of his van. Hair that matched Bonin’s was found on three other victims. Also, human blood stains were found in several places in Bonin’s home and vehicle. At both of his trials, Bonin’s defense largely focused on attempting to discredit the prosecution witnesses, many of whom were criminals who stood to benefit from testifying against him. During the penalty phases, they tried to show that Bonin had been abandoned and abused as a child and that he had the potential to behave well and contribute to society in the structured setting of a prison if spared the death penalty.
Bonin’s former pre-parole counselor testified that he seemed interested in helping people and raised money to support the family of a prisoner in New England. A records custodian from Atascadero State Hospital said Bonin volunteered for experimental treatment programs while in custody for a previous sexual assault conviction. Defense experts testified that Bonin suffered from repeated abandonment as a child and that he showed signs of organic brain damage. Dr. Jonathan Pincus said Bonin exhibited a “snout reflex” and a “right Babinski reflex” that suggested frontal lobe damage, which could have made him uncommonly impulse-driven. However, Dr. Park Dietz, testifying for the prosecution, said that Bonin did not present any other behaviors associated with such damage and he testified that the reflexes Pincus observed would not explain a desire to sexually assault young men. Dietz determined that Bonin was a sexual sadist with a possible antisocial personality disorder, but he did not identify signs of any other neurological or psychiatric disorders.
Bonin was sentenced to death in both Los Angeles County and Orange County. An opinion on the case written by Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Alex Kozinski in 1995 highlighted a disturbing truth about Bonin’s crimes: “The facts of this case shock even those of us inured to shocking facts by years of capital cases. Most distressing, however, is that these tragedies could have been averted: Bonin gave us more than fair warning of his proclivities before he embarked on his killing spree.” Testimony by Bonin’s relatives and others at his trial alleged that his father was an abusive alcoholic and that Bonin was sexually abused in a detention home as a child. He served in Vietnam, received a medal for saving a fellow soldier and was honorably discharged, but he also engaged in what a judge described as “violent nonconsensual homosexual activity” during his service. Family members testified that he returned from the war a changed man. According to court testimony, he had planned to marry a woman when he came back, but she married someone else while he was away.
Between 1968 and 1969, Bonin abducted and sexually assaulted four teenage boys. One said he was gagged with his underwear and another was choked nearly to unconsciousness. When he was arrested in 1969, Bonin was driving with a 16-year-old boy. He told police he might have killed the teen if they had not caught him, according to court records. He was committed to Atascadero State Hospital as a “mentally disordered sex offender amenable to treatment.” However, in 1971, he was found unamenable to treatment and sent to prison instead. Bonin was released in 1974 and was convicted of sexually assaulting a teenage boy at gunpoint the following year. At the time of his arrest, he told police he would never leave a witness alive to testify against him again, court records showed. In 1978, he was paroled. A year later, the freeway killings began. Bonin presented numerous arguments in his appeals, many relating to alleged failures by his trial attorney to present mitigating evidence and decisions by judges that he argued infringed on his rights. Appellate courts agreed that some errors were made, but they never concluded that those mistakes—such as allowing David Lopez to testify that Bonin admitted to 20 or 21 murders rather than just 14, or only letting one of his two defense attorneys present closing arguments—would have impacted the verdict.
While awaiting his execution, William Bonin wrote a collection of stories and essays that received a small print run. The book, titled “Doing Time, Stories from the Mind of a Death Row Prisoner,” included several fictional tales of young boys in danger that ended with moments of redemption. “I like the way my writing is going…the message that I’m trying to get across,” Bonin said in a 1991 telephone interview with the paper. On the morning before his execution, while his attorneys filed motions for last-minute intervention by the Supreme Court, Bonin gave an interview to a local radio station. He told a reporter he had accepted the fact that he was going to die. However, he said of the victims’ families, “They feel that my death will bring closure. But that’s not the case. They’re going to find out.” About 50 witnesses attended the execution, including family members of several of Bonin’s victims and the survivor of the 1975 attack.
According to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, Bonin delivered his last words to the prison warden 45 minutes before his death. “That I feel the death penalty is not an answer to the problems at hand,” Bonin said. “That I feel it sends the wrong message to the youth of the country. Young people act as they see other people acting instead of as people tell them to act. And I would suggest that when a person has a thought of doing anything serious against the law, that before they did, that they should go to a quiet place and think about it seriously.” Two of Bonin’s accomplices remain in prison today. Gregory Miley, who was sentenced to 25 years to life for first-degree murder, had planned to seek parole in 2011, but he agreed to a continuance until 2014. In apress release announcing the delay, the Orange County District Attorney’s Office noted that Miley had incurred 26 prison rule violations including threats against inmates and nonconsensual sexual behavior that indicated he could pose a “significant” threat to the public if released. James Munro is serving 15 years to life for second-degree murder. At his sentencing hearing, the superior court judge stated, “He should every few seconds say a prayer that he is not going to the gas chamber with Bonin. For what he has done, I would have no problem sending him there, so I think he’s very, very fortunate.” Munro has tried and failed several times to get paroled. Over the last 22 years, he told several different versions of the events surrounding the murder of Bonin’s final victim, Steven Wells, according to court records and parole hearing transcripts.
Munro sometimes claimed that he watched Bonin kill Wells but did not participate at all, and he convinced his wife—who he married while in prison—and other supporters that he was completely innocent. He also sent letters to the district attorney’s office in 1994 and 1998 claiming that he was the one who killed Wells, but he later stated at a 2005 parole hearing that he only did that to “piss off” the prosecutors. When he has admitted to helping Bonin with the crime, Munro insisted that he only did so out of fear that Bonin would kill him if he did not. “I was scared to death,” he said at a 2005 parole hearing. “I was a victim as well as Steven Wells. Steven Wells died. I swear to God, I wish he never had.” Wells’ family has expressed doubt about Munro’s remorse. “I feel that he fully participated in this murder,” his sister, Susan Ruzzamenti, said at a 2009 hearing. “I feel he enjoyed it, and I feel that he received some type of deviant sexual satisfaction from it.” The parole board has repeatedly rejected Munro’s release, citing his history of minimizing his involvement in the crime and psychological evaluations that indicate he may pose a risk to the public. In 2009, the board ruled that Munro could seek parole again in five years. William Bonin continued to spark outrage and controversy even after his death, when it was revealed that the Social Security Administration had continued to pay benefits stemming from a 1972 diagnosis with mental illness into his bank account while he was on death row. Nearly $80,000 in disability checks was deposited in the account during the years between his arrest and execution. Bonin’s family agreed to repay the funds once the error was discovered, the paper reported. An investigation by the Social Security Administration concluded that no other death row inmates were receiving similar benefits.
Yoo Young-chul was born in 1970, in South Korea. His parents separated quickly soon after his birth and Yoo was raised along with his siblings by his grandmother for a few years until they moved in with their father in the Mapo district of Seoul. Yoo's parents were blue collar workers who often had money problems. This poverty was one of the reasons he was made fun of in class, which planted in him a resentment towards the wealthy. It was in school where he also found an interest in the arts. He played guitar, sang, painted, and read poetry through elementary school, finding himself enamored with arts so much that he applied to a high school that specialized in them. He was denied admission though and enrolled in a technical school. During his high school years, he began his life of crime and spent time in juvenile detention for thievery. He continued stealing into his adulthood, from cash and cameras to cars. He spent time in and out of jail throughout the 90s as a way to provide for his young family.
In 2000, Yoo was arrested for the rape of a 15-year old girl, which caused his wife to divorce him while he served his time in prison. When he was released from prison in 2002, he earned money by extorting it from pimps and hookers, using a fake police ID. He then decided to step up his criminal activities, and broke into a house that seemed to belong to affluent people. Inside, he found a very elderly couple that he murdered and stole from. He committed at least two more robberies and killed four more people in the process. Yoo then moved onto killing prostitutes, taking advantage of the anonymity provided by South Korea's illicit sex market. He managed to find a system that allowed him to lure prostitutes into his apartment, where he would bash their heads in with a homemade hammer that became his signature murder weapon. Hiding the bodies would involve him cutting up the corpse and burying the pieces in a particularly humid area of Seoul where they would decompose quickly.
Yoo's murders became infamous quickly, to the point where pimps voluntarily collaborated with police in an attempt to catch the killer. Local pimps had noticed that one number had come up in relation to the various prostitutes' deaths and notified the police of it. The next time the number came up during the summer of 2004, the pimps and police laid a trap for the caller. Yoo was ambushed, found chewing phone cards and carrying the fake police badge that he had been using throughout the year. When he was brought in by the police, Yoo confessed to everything, claiming to have killed 26 people since the time he was released from prison in 2003. He led police to various corpses and was eventually charged for 21 murders. While Yoo was sentenced to death, the debate over the death sentence in South Korea has made it so that he waits in prison with 62 other convicts with the same sentence.
