WORST SERIAL KILLERS OF ALL TIMES

Also nicknamed by the media, the Bestia (The Beast), the Colombian is probably one of the worst serial killers in the world.

Garavito, born in 1957 in Colombia, is a rapist and serial killer who confessed to the torture, rape and murder of 147 young boys. Only 139 have been proven and it is even believed that the number of his victims could exceed 300. He himself was allegedly physically and psychologically abused by his father and began to reproduce this abuse on young boys at a very young age.

He disguised himself as a monk or a traveling salesman to approach his victims, whom he raped before slitting their throats and dismembering them. He was arrested in April 1999. Even though the maximum sentence for murder in Colombia multiplied by 139 (the number of proven cases) equals 1,853 years and 9 days, Colombian laws limit the prison term to 30 years.

And because he helped police find some bodies and confessed to his crimes, Garavito had his sentence reduced to 22 years. Which means the Beast could soon be released… for good behavior.

Gay men were murdered in clusters from 1975 to 1977, dumped unceremoniously along highways between Los Angeles and the United States Mexican border. The investigation centered on Patrick Wayne Kearney, an electronics engineer from Los Angeles who bears no resemblance to a murderer with his glasses, short stature and innocuous appearance.

Patrick Kearney, born in 1939, killed 43 victims. His first murder is said to have taken place in 1965, when he was 26, but it was from 1974 that he committed all the others, almost one a month.

Kearney picked up his victims, all gay, on the side of the highway or in gay bars. He killed them with a bullet to the temple in his car or his pick-up then went to an isolated place to rape them.

Wanted by police with an acquaintance David Hill, who was never charged with any crimes related to the murders, Kearney's reign of death ended when he simply walked into the Redondo Beach police station. He pleaded guilty to killing three men.

The authorities, knowing that he had killed more, made him an offer. He was promised that he would not receive a death sentence if he gave a full list of his victims. Kearney then confessed to killing 18 other people and indicated where to find the bodies. He later admitted to killing 11 more, but was never charged with those murders. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. He is incarcerated in California State Prison.

Ricardo Ramirez was born in Texas in 1960. His father beat him and his cousin, a Vietnam veteran, killed his wife in front of him when Ricardo was only 13 years old. From 1984 to 1985, this Satan worshiper terrorized the cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco.

He would break into the houses of his victims at night, kill the men with a bullet to the head, then beat, rape and mutilate his victims, who ranged in age from 9 to 60. He signed his murders by drawing pentagrams on the walls of crime scenes.

He was arrested in 1985 and sentenced to death for committing 11 rapes and 14 murders. In October 1996, Ramirez married Doreen Lioy, a freelance journalist, in prison. On August 7, 2006, his appeal was dismissed by the California Supreme Court. He died in hospital on June 7, 2013, aged 53, of natural causes, apparently.

Dahmer was born in 1960 in Wisconsin. He raped, killed and dismembered 18 men and boys in the Milwaukee area between 1978 and 1991. He invited the young men, often found in gay clubs, to his apartment where he tortured them in an attempt to turn them into zombies.

He drilled holes in their skulls, while they were still alive, then injected hydrochloric acid or boiling water into their frontal lobes. During his arrest, four human heads, photographs of his crimes, hands and penises, bodies in cans of acid, human bones and a heart kept in the freezer were found in his apartment.

In 1992, Dahmer was charged with 15 murders and sentenced to 15 life terms, or 957 years. Two years after his incarceration, he was beaten to death in prison by another prisoner. He was 34 years old. Pictured is Jeffrey Dahmer as he enters court for his trial, August 6, 1991.

In 2022, Netflix released the series Dahmer, about the serial killer. The series received a mixed reception.

Theodore Robert Bundy is infamous for raping and killing several young women during the 1970s. He was suspected of having committed similar crimes before as well. However, what horrified the American population is that he practiced acts of necrophilia on the corpses of his victims. Arrested in 1975 in Utah, he managed to escape from prison twice during spectacular escapes. Then, captured again in Florida in 1978, he received 3 death sentences in 2 different trials for murders committed in that state. He was executed by electric chair on January 24, 1989 at Florida State Prison.

Ted Bundy was born in 1946, in Vermont. He is one of the most famous American serial killers. He raped and killed at least 36 women between 1974 and 1977, in seven different states. Some believe he would have killed a hundred or more. His charm and intelligence made him a celebrity during his trial and his case inspired many novels and films about serial killers. He operated in various states in the United States and confessed to killing 30 women. He revisited the crime scenes and engaged in sexual acts with the corpses.

This neat-looking law student with no criminal record was first arrested in 1977, but twice managed to make a spectacular escape. On January 10, 1978, he was placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List.

On February 15, he was arrested, definitively. He defended himself and was found guilty of several murders and rapes. His technique for attracting his victims was always the same: he pretended to be injured, by wearing an arm in a sling for example, and asked the young woman to help him bring a package to his car. He decapitated at least 12 of his victims and kept the heads in his apartment, like so many trophies. He was executed in the electric chair in 1989. He was 43 years old. The story of this man who had everything to succeed troubled all of America. His own defense attorney said, “Ted, that was the very definition of heartless evil. »

John Wayne Gacy is the perfect example of how you never really know your neighbor. A respectable man involved in several causes, Gacy nevertheless remains the author of 33 murders of young men, making him one of the greatest serial killers in American history. To know all the details of his story, check out this article.

John Wayne Gacy, born in Chicago in 1942, was a respectable businessman, twice married, who did a lot of volunteer work. Among other things, he played the role of Pogo the clown when he went to visit sick children in the hospital.

He was also a man who liked to have homosexual relations with men younger than him whom he recruited from his entourage to offer them odd jobs, often at his home.

This is how the police came to visit him in 1978 during an investigation into the disappearances of young people who had worked for him. A total of 26 bodies were found buried in the crawl space under his Des Plaines home, three on his property and four others in the nearby river.

Gacy was accused of killing 33 young men between 1972 and 1978. He handcuffed and raped them, then disposed of the bodies.

He attempted to plead insanity at his trial, unsuccessfully, and was sentenced to death. He was executed in May 1994 by lethal injection.

In 1998, four more corpses were found in a building where Gacy's mother had previously lived and where he had previously done construction work. His clown self-portraits are now collector's items…

German Joachim Kroll, born in 1933, was arrested in 1976 for the kidnapping of a 4-year-old girl. When the police arrived at his home, they found the severed body of the child there. Chunks were in the fridge, a hand was cooking in a pot, and the intestines were stuck in the garbage chute.

Kroll admitted killing the girl and provided full details of 14 other murders spanning from February 1955 to July 3, 1976. Thirteen of the victims were women. They were raped, then strangled, stabbed or drowned. Slices of flesh were cut from the buttocks and thighs of some of them.

After a trial that lasted 151 days, Kroll was found guilty of eight murders and one attempted murder. He was sentenced to nine life sentences. He died in prison in 1991 of a heart attack at the age of 58.

Pedro Lopez was born in 1948, in Colombia. He raped and killed over 300 girls across South America. He never killed at night because, he said, all the fun was in looking his victim in the eye while he was killing her. He was arrested in 1974 in Ecuador after a failed kidnapping attempt and sentenced to 20 years in solitary confinement. He was released on August 31, 1994, only to be re-arrested an hour later as an illegal immigrant by Colombian authorities who later charged him with the murder of an 8-year-old girl.

Declared irresponsible for his actions during his trial, he was sent to a psychiatric institute in Bogota. In 1998 he was declared cured and released after posting $50 bail. In 2002, Interpol issued an arrest warrant for him for a new murder. Since his release, no one knows where the monster of the Andes is, who once confessed to a journalist that he “would be happy to still be able to kill. This is my mission”. That was before being released...

This American, born in 1950, made an impression, not so much by the number of his victims, six in all, but because he drank their blood and engaged in acts of cannibalism. At the age of 25, Chase was placed, against his will, in a mental institution after injecting rabbit blood into his veins. He was released a year later, after treatment with psychotropic drugs, and entrusted to his mother. She decided he no longer needed the medication.

A year later, on December 29, 1977, Chase killed his first victim. He was not arrested until a month later, after killing five others. He said he had to drink their blood to prevent the Nazis from turning his into powder, thanks to a poison they allegedly placed under his soap dish. He committed suicide in his cell a few months after his arrest. He was 28 years old.