20/20 serial killers

Spree killers generally do not remain active as long as serial killers because there is no return to normalcy which can make it easier for people around the killer to alert authorities to strange behavior. The second thing I want to discuss is how I came up with the names on this list.

I have not included any unknown serial killers such as the Alphabet Killer or the Zodiac Killer. All of the killers on this list have been convicted. All of the names on this list either confessed to their crimes or had substantial evidence tying them to the crimes they were accused of.

The crimes of these men also all met the standard requirements to be considered the work of a serial killers. Female serial killers are often much different than male serial killers and I therefore felt they should be discussed in a separate article. Finally, this list is ordered by the number of lives the killer has taken for sure.

Still, there's obviously something very, very strange afoot on Gilgo Beach. The serial killer seems to have exclusively assaulted and killed Caucasian women who visited the bars of a specific area on Frankford Avenue, claiming eight or nine victims before the killings stopped. That approximate "eight or nine" figure, incidentally, is due to the fact that a man called Leonard Christopher was convicted of one of the first eight murders and given a life sentence.

Though one more murder happened while he was already incarcerated, he still became the public face of the Slasher at the time, and spent the rest of his days in prison for a crime experts believe he did not commit. The other eight murders remain unsolved. Though this means that an unknown serial killer might still be on the loose somewhere out there, there might be some light at the end of the tunnel.

During the investigation, the Philadelphia police did actually find a potential suspect: A middle-aged man claiming to be a minister. Though this person disappeared after initial questioning, the police did secure a DNA sample, which was being investigated with new techniques as of Someone in the small city of Chillicothe in Southern Ohio has a dark secret. As David Lohr of Huffington Post and Jona Ison of the area's own Chillicothe Gazette tell us, over the course of and , no less than six women disappeared around there.

Some of them haven't been seen since, while others have turned up dead at various spots. To be fair, the authorities haven't used the term "serial killer" quite yet, except in carefully structured sentences that begin with something like, "No one has said there's a Miller of the Washington Post reported in , the locals certainly seem to think that's what they're dealing with.

While the Chillicothe case remains unsolved at the time of writing, and therefore it's possible that the perpetrator remains on the loose, it's worth noting that a news story from a couple of hours' drive away may or may not shed some light to the situation. As CBS News reports, in , a West Virginia woman fought off an attacker and ended up shooting him with his own gun.

The man turned out to be Neal Falls, a suspected serial killer with possible connections to up to 10 deaths. The Colonial Parkway is 23 miles of beautiful Virginia road running between Yorktown and Jamestown, and as such, far from a terrifying, serial killer-y location.

Still, as crime writer David Lohr of the Huffington Post tells us, the stretch has seen its share of bloodshed in the shape of a suspected serial killer. The Colonial Parkway murders consisted of eight killings between and , and the similarities between the murders have led some to believe that they might be the work of the same person.

Some theories have suggested that the killer might either be a law enforcement officer or impersonating one, because the cars of some of the victims were discovered with the driver's window rolled down. Incidentally, the case might have faded into obscurity over time, if it wasn't for a former deputy called Fred Atwell, who emerged with a stack of 84 undiscovered crime scene photographs in , and started butting into the revitalized investigation at every opportunity.

Despite the red flags Atwell's increasingly odd behavior raised, the case remains unsolved, and the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook page reported his death on December However, as Alexa Doiron of Williamsburg Yorktown Daily reported on October , the situation might be about to change. There's a TV show about the crimes in the works, and it centers around an ace team of former FBI special agents who feel that they may be able to crack the case.

In , Interstate 70 was a dangerous place, and it wasn't because of the traffic. As Vox tells us, that year's spring was marked by the bloody trail of a serial killer who murderer six clerks in stores near the I in an identical fashion, starting in Terre Haute, Indiana and ending in Wichita, Kansas.

There's little question that it was the same killer every time, seeing as he used the same rifle in all cases, and seemed to exclusively target brunette women — though one of the victims actually turned out to be a guy with a long hair. He didn't just randomly enter gas stations and attack people, either — some of the victims worked in shoe stores, others sold herbs and health products.

There were several eyewitnesses who described the man as 5'7 with "light brown or red hair," who wore a gray sports coat and slacks. Despite this, the investigators have found the case impossible to crack.

There have been no known murders by the same perpetrator since the events of No one's even been able to establish a motive, and the killer only took a small amount of money from the stores' cash registers. For around two decades, Chicago has seen a series of eerily similar strangulation murders. The first victim was found in , and bodies have turned up in empty lots, vacant buildings, dark alleys and even garbage containers ever since then, with only a short period of peace between and early The victims have largely been women with a history of sex work or addiction, and there have been a lot of them — in fact, the Chicago Police Department and the FBI are investigating no less than 51 unsolved murders, in an attempt to find out whether they might be the work of at least one serial killer.

If you ask Thomas Hargrove, the chairman of the Murder Accountability Project nonprofit, at least some of them most likely are. Hargrove says that his group has a "serial killer detector" algorithm, which has been pointing at a serial killer situation in Chicago for years. By August , the killer was suspected of murdering at least 13 and possibly as many as 16 people. The murders were pretty much the definition of hate crime.

The killer scoured for victims in a popular hangout location known as Paturis Park, and shot all but one to death, often with their pants quite literally down to their knees. Though the killings were originally investigated as individual homicides, their ruthlessness and the great number was enough to stand out from the usual violence in the city. The police soon figured out that they were dealing with a homophobe serial killer.

Unfortunately, the Rainbow Maniac may very well still be out there. In , people in Japan started dying after drinking a popular beverage called Oronamin C, which someone had laced with a herbicide called paraquat, per CBC.

The police soon started suspecting that the killer was leaving the tampered drinks in the slots of the country's omnipresent vending machines. There, they were found and eventually consumed by the unwary victims who, according to the New York Times , may simply have assumed that the extra drink was a part of a promotional campaign.

It's estimated that as many as 12 people died because of the poison drinks, and many others became ill. It's hard to say whether all of these deaths were the product of one deranged mind, due to the fact that the high-profile case attracted several copycat poisoners. Regardless of the killer's true body count, they walked free — in fact, the case remains so unsolved that it appears no suspects have ever even been arrested.

Detectives take the Dating Game Killer into custody, but they face an uphill battle proving his guilt. A new serial killer strikes, abducting women off the Sunset Strip. The serial killers of this chilling era go to trial and receive their sentences, giving their victims justice.

Memorable TV.