WORST SERIAL KILLERS OF ALL TIMES

Iqbal killed 100 children in just 18 months. In December 1999, the man, born in 1956, sent a letter to the police and to the editor of a newspaper in Lahore, Pakistan in which he admitted to killing 100 boys between the ages of 6 and 16, all runaways or orphans living on the streets of Lahore. He wrote of strangling and dismembering them before placing them in vats of acid and dumping their remains in a local river.

At his home, police found bloodstains on the walls and floor, the chain with which Iqbal claimed to have killed his victims, and photos of several of them in plastic bags. Two vats of acid containing half-dissolved human remains were on site with a note saying the bodies had not been dumped for police to find. In his letter, Iqbal explained that he was going to drown in the river. As his body was not found there, a manhunt was launched, without success.

Four accomplices, teenagers who lived with Iqbal, were arrested, and a month later Iqbal turned himself in to the police. Although his diaries contained detailed descriptions of the murders, he declared in court that he was innocent and that the whole affair was a hoax to draw attention to the plight of runaways from poor families.

Over a hundred people testified against him and he was sentenced to hang. The judge said: “You will be strangled to death in front of the parents of the children you killed. Your body will then be cut into 100 pieces and placed in acid, just like you did with those children.” Rather than face this judgment, Iqbal and one of his accomplices committed suicide in prison in October 2001.

John Bunting, an Australian born in 1966, was part of a clique of murderers with Robert Wagner who claimed 12 lives between 1992 and 1999, when eight bodies were discovered in barrels stashed in a disused bank in Snowdon, a small poor town near Adelaide, Australia.

The investigation showed that Bunting and his accomplices had tortured their victims by using various knives, a saw, and a metalworker's tool which was used to inflict electric shocks on their genitals. Bunting, a former neo-Nazi activist, began his murder spree by killing a man suspected of child molestation and that's what the group continued to do.

At trial in 2003, the court decided that Bunting was the leader of the group and sentenced him to 11 consecutive terms of life in prison without the possibility of parole. Robert Wagner was sentenced to 10 consecutive sentences under the same conditions. Upon receiving his sentence, he said:

“Pedophiles did horrible things to children. The authorities did nothing. I decided to act. I acted. Thank you. »

Yang was born in 1968, in Henan Province, China, to a very poor family. At the age of 17, he began to travel through various Chinese provinces working as a day laborer. Twice, he was accused of theft, then of attempted rape, which earned him five years in prison. It was only after his release in 1999 that he started killing. He entered the houses of his victims at night and killed all the occupants—farmers, in general—with axes, hammers and shovels. He came under suspicion because of his bizarre behavior during a routine police investigation in 2003.

After investigation, the police realized that he was wanted for murder in four other provinces. After his arrest, Yang admitted to killing 65 people, raping 23 and seriously injuring five others. In February 2004, he was found guilty of 67 murders and 23 rapes and sentenced to death. He was executed two weeks later. The man never expressed any regrets.

“When I was killing people, he said, I had desire. It inspired me to kill more. I don't care if they have the right to live or not. It's none of my business. I have no desire to be part of society. Society does not interest me. »

The Zodiac Killer is the pseudonym of an unidentified serial killer who operated in Northern California in the late 1960s. The case has been described as the most famous unsolved murder case in American history. It became a fixture of popular culture and inspired amateur detectives to attempt to solve it.

The Zodiac murdered five known victims in the San Francisco Bay Area between December 1968 and October 1969, operating in rural, urban and suburban settings. He targeted young couples and a lone male cab driver. His known attacks took place in Benicia, Vallejo, unincorporated Napa County, and the city of San Francisco proper. Two of his wounded victims survived. The Zodiac claimed to have murdered 37 victims. He has been linked to several other cold cases, some in Southern California or outside the state.

The Zodiac coined this name in a series of taunting letters and cards that he mailed to regional newspapers, in which he threatened killing sprees and bombings if they were not printed. Some of the letters included cryptograms, or ciphers, in which the killer claimed that he was collecting his victims as slaves for the afterlife. Of the four ciphers he produced, two remain unsolved, and one was cracked only in 2020. While many theories regarding the identity of the killer have been suggested, the only suspect authorities ever publicly named was Arthur Leigh Allen, a former elementary school teacher and convicted sex offender who died in 1992.

Tsutomu Miyazaki, Miyazaki Tsutomu, 21 August 1962 – 17 June 2008) was a Japanese serial killer who murdered four young girls in Tokyo and Saitama Prefecture between August 1988 and June 1989.

He got this nickname because of his hideous deeds. Indeed, this Japanese murderer kidnapped little girls, killed them and engaged in sexual activities with their corpses.

On one occasion, he not only drank the victim's blood, but also ate his hand. He also kept parts of his body as trophies and sent postcards to families describing the murder. Miyazaki was arrested in Hachiōji in July 1989 after being confronted while taking nude photographs of a young girl. He was diagnosed as having one or more personality disorders, but was determined by authorities to be sane and aware of his crimes and their consequences. His father committed suicide and Miyazaki was hanged in 2008, aged 45. 

Alexander Yuryevich Pichushkin, born 9 April 1974, also known as the Chessboard Killer and the Bitsa Park Maniac is a Russian serial killer who is believed to have killed at least forty-nine people, and possibly as many as sixty, between 1992 and 2006. Pichushkin was active in Moscow's Bitsa Park, where a number of the victims' bodies were found. In 2007 he was sentenced to life imprisonment.

His targets were homeless people whom he lured into his home with vodka. He is said to have killed 49 people, most of them with repeated hammer blows to the head and by inserting a vodka bottle into a gaping skull wound.

He first said he wanted to complete the number of squares on a chessboard and killed 64 people. Furthermore, it is believed that he was in competition with another Russian serial killer, Andrei Chikatilo, who was convicted in 1992 of 53 murders. It was the same year that Alexander started killing

John George Haigh was also known as the "Acid Bath Murderer" and operated in the 1940s. He was convicted of killing 6 people, although he claimed to have killed 9.

Haigh battered to death or shot his victims and disposed of their bodies using sulphuric acid before forging their signatures so he could sell their possessions and collect large sums of money. His actions were the subject of the television film A Is for Acid. His trial was held at Lewes Assizes.  Haigh pleaded insanity, claiming that he had drank the blood of his victims. He said he had dreams dominated by blood as a young boy. Haigh apparently had believed (mistakenly) that if the bodies of his victims could not be found, a murder conviction would not be possible. It took only minutes for the jury to find him guilty. Mr Justice Travers Humphreys sentenced him to death. He was hanged in 1949.

William George Bonin (January 8, 1947 – February 23, 1996), also known as the Freeway Killer, was an American serial killer and twice-paroled sex offender who committed the rape, torture, and murder of a minimum of twenty-one young men and boys in a series of killings in southern California from May 1979 to June 1980. On at least twelve occasions, Bonin was assisted by one of his four known accomplices; he is also suspected of committing a further fifteen murders. Bonin would dump their bodies along Southern California highways.

After his conviction for 14 of his murders, he was executed by lethal injection in 1996. His sadistic side was still visible during his prison term where he corresponded with many families of his victims about their children's reaction to their respective tortures.