Gilles De Rais
(September 1405 - October 26, 1440)
Noble, French serial killer of the 15th century. He became a marshal after his participation in the War of 100 years and amassed a vast fortune. His fame in the French towns changed when his atrocities were discovered. He may have suffered from severe schizophrenia. The ruthless nature of his crimes seemed contrary to his exacerbated Christian faith. In 1422, Gilles kidnapped his mother-in-law and locked her, feeding her only on bread and water until she acceded to the punishments he required. The Dauphin Charles gave an army to Gilles and Joan of Arc to release the English siege of Orleans. Gilles went on to say that Joan was God and that if he should kill under her mandate, he would do it. He became her bodyguard and protector, saving her on several occasions during the clamor of battle. He could not prevent Joan of Arc’s death at the stake, although he hired a small army of mercenaries. Gilles took refuge in the castle at Tiffauges and released his most perverse instincts. In order to fulfill his eagerness to obtain victims, their servants would look for children and teenagers, promising them they would make them Mr. de Rais’ pages. Between 1432 and 1440, there were over a thousand missing children, between eight and ten years, in Britain. Gilles and his henchmen tortured, harassed, humiliated and murdered previously abducted children. The Bishop of Nantes, Jean Malestroit investigated the disappearances and discovered the person responsible for the crimes. Gilles de Rais surrendered and was brought to trial. Initially, he pledged innocence, but during one of his personality crises, he ratified his murders. On October 26, 1440, Gilles de Rais, having rejected the royal pardon granted to him for being a peer of France, was hanged at Nantes.
Erzsébet Bathory, the Blood Countess
(August 7, 1560 - August 21, 1614)
Belonging to one of the most powerful families in Hungary, she was an aristocrat who committed a series of crimes which were motivated by her obsession with beauty. Erzsébet has the Guinness record for being the woman who committed the most murders in history, with 630 fatalities. According to some sources, the crimes attributed to the Countess could be inventions of her enemies in a complex political context. Many tortured girls and lots of corpses scattered around the gardens, were found in her castle. In 1612, a trial began against her in Bitcse.
Erzsébet did not appear, making use of her nobility rights. Those who did appear, by force, were her assistants. Her butler testified that he had witnessed at least 37 murders of women between 11 and 26 years old, and that six of them had been personally recruited by him to work at the castle. The prosecution focused on the murders of young nobles, as the servants were unimportant. In the judgment, all of them were convicted. Erzsébet’s assistants were beheaded and their bodies burned. But, by law, her noble status prevented her from being executed. She was consequently sentenced to life imprisonment in solitary confinement. She was locked in the dungeon of her castle. Doors and windows were sealed, leaving a hole to pass the food. After four years, Erzsébet died on August 21, 1614. They tried to bury her in the Church of Čachtice, but local residents objected. She was buried in the village of Ecsed in northeastern Hungary. It was forbidden to talk about her around the country.
Jesse Harding Pomeroy
(November 29, 1859 - September 29, 1932)
He was one of the youngest murderers in the history of crime. It is said that his father was an alcoholic and that, for whatever reason, he would undress his children and beat them to calm himself. Pomeroy’s physical appearance inspired fear. He was too robust for his age. His facial features were unappealing. His right eye had no iris or pupil, which gave him a frightening appearance. Pomeroy’s attacks were directed to children younger than him. He committed atrocities and mutilations, burying needles into his victims’ bodies. Clues to find him were found quickly, because his completely white eye made him easily recognizable. After he was identified by one of his victims, he was arrested. When he was asked to explain, he just said, “I could not help it.” The judgment stated he should be placed in a reformatory until age 18.
But at 14, Pomeroy was conditionally released. Then his brutal murders began. He was arrested again, and his mother had to sell her clothes store because everyone who knew the story avoided her. When renovations began, they found the corpse of a girl buried in a pile of ashes in the basement of the store. Pomeroy was convicted on December 10, 1874 and sentenced to death by hanging, but no governor dared to sign the death sentence of a fourteen-year-old boy. There were no precedents in criminal history. He was given a life sentence in a state of complete isolation. The only person who visited him was his mother. In 1917, after 43 years of isolation, he was allowed to integrate with the rest of the prisoners. He spent the last two years of his life plagued by disease and in absolute agony. He died on September 29, 1932 showing no remorse for the crimes he committed.
H. H. Holmes
(May 16, 1861 - May 7, 1896)
His real name was Herman Webster Mudgett. A Don Juan of crime, he was especially attracted to women with fortunes. In his first stage, he seduced, robbed and led to the disappearance of many wealthy widows. Then he built the “Holmes Castle,” an alleged hotel that was actually a house of crime, with gas taps to choke its visitors, a secret chute for dropping the bodies down to a basement with buckets of sulfuric acid and a room with torture instruments. One of the machines installed caught the attention of reporters: it was an automated machine that tickled the soles of the victims. Holmes chose them carefully. They had to be rich, young, beautiful, and alone and, in order to avoid unexpected visits, their homes had to be located in a state far enough away.
When hotel rents fell, Holmes set the top floor on fire to claim insurance, unaware of the fact that the company would do some research before paying it. Exposed, he took refuge in Texas. There he developed another criminal operation. The idea was simple: an accomplice called Pitezel, would buy insurance from a company in Philadelphia. Then they would present an anonymous body disfigured by an accident, pretending it was Pitezel. They would share the insurance money and Pitezel would take refuge for a reasonable time in Latin America. Shortly after their operation began, Holmes changed plans and killed Pitezel for real, avoiding the disfigured corpse and keeping all the money for himself. He later got rid of Mrs. Pitezel and her children. Once arrested, police searched his home, finding the expected results. Holmes was sentenced to death by a court in Philadelphia and hanged on May 7, 1896. He was thirty-six years old.
Jack the Ripper
Five crimes perpetrated in Whitechapel in 1888 revolutionized London and the world. For years, investigators, detectives, police officers and fans have unsuccessfully tried to determine the name of the murderer. Jack the Ripper is the most famous serial killer in history – a true unsolved mystery.
His brief reign of terror began on August 31, 1888, although it is suspected that two previous murders had also been committed by him. His nickname originated in a letter written by someone claiming to be the murderer, who used this alias. As a result of its diffusion through the media, the nickname came to be known by the public. Several sources believe that the letter was written by a journalist to increase the interest in the story. Often, the legend of Jack the Ripper presents a smart, effective, mocking, cunning, cold and obsessive murderer. Attacks attributed to him involved female prostitutes from poor neighborhoods and a distinctive modus operandi consisting of strangulation, beheading and abdominal mutilation. The removal of the internal organs of the victims led to the belief that the murderer had surgical knowledge.
Meanwhile, rumors that the murders were connected intensified between September and October 1888, when a large number of letters, written by one or more anonymous subjects, were sent to Scotland Yard and various newspapers. One of the letters included half of a human kidney from one of the victims. Due to the brutal nature of the crimes and the media’s orientation when they decided to spread them, everyone understood that it was a single murderer. The wide press coverage led these crimes to achieve international notoriety. Although it couldn’t be efficiently established that the crimes were connected to each other, the legend of Jack the Ripper spread as if it were true. The murders were never solved. This favored the proliferation of certain details based in part on the research and also in folklore and fiction.
Carl Grossmann
(December 13, 1863 - July 5, 1922)
A German serial killer, protected by his service record in World War II, he killed his victims and sold the meat on the black market, near the railway terminal of Silesia. The war and subsequent economic depression caused increased hunger in Germany. This, added to his past as a butcher, facilitated the sales. In August 1921, he was arrested at his Berlin apartment after neighbors heard screams and sounds of fighting. When they appeared, the police found a woman recently murdered in his bed. Grossmann was arrested and charged with murder. Neighbors reported that he was usually accompanied by young women, who were never seen leaving the house. No one knows for certain how many victims fell prey to Grossmann. According to his own statements, he had annihilated at least 50 women. Grossmann hanged himself in his cell while awaiting the execution of his death sentence.
Henri Landru, the “Bluebeard” from Gambais
(April 12, 1869 - February 25, 1922)
One afternoon in 1909, Landru attended a date with a grieving widow named Madame Izoret, who in a press release, had offered her assets in exchange for the company of a man. Telling her empty promises, he managed to take 20,000 francs from her. The woman reported him and Landru was arrested.
During his detention, he perfected his system for seducing lonely widows, but added murder to avoid the reports. World War I increased the number of widows. Landru published advertisements of this style: “Widower, two children, forty-three years old, solvent, caring, serious and in social ascent wishes to meet widow with matrimonial desires.” Hundreds of women answered his proposal. So, Landru would select the most profitable ones, promise them marriage and when he had assured a certain amount of money, he would murder them. Meanwhile, he lived a normal life and showed himself as an attentive father and a generous husband.
Once the War ended, families began to look for their missing relatives. The net began to narrow. The key was supplied by the sister of a victim who went to the police when she saw her missing sister’s apparent fiancée buying artworks in a store. The police officers questioned the seller and got the address where they arrested the murderer. The evidence began to sprout from the earth. The trial lasted two years and was one of the most memorable in Paris. Landru acknowledged having cheated, but he denied the murders. On November 30, 1921 he was condemned for eleven proven murders, although police estimated that the number of victims exceeded a hundred. The following year, he was guillotined. In 1963, a letter written by Landru, in which he acknowledged to be the perpetrator of the crimes, was discovered by accident. His story was adapted into a film by Claude Chabrol that year. In 1947, Charles Chaplin made a film inspired by the psychopath, called Monsieur Verdoux.
Albert Fish, the Vampire of Brooklyn
(May 19, 1870 - January 16, 1936)
He had a compulsion to dismember and eat children. In 1890, Fish began raping young boys from lower classes in New York. In 1898 he married a woman nine years younger than him and they had six children. He was sentenced to prison on charges of embezzlement. After he was released, while working as a house painter, he raped more than 100 children, most under 6 years. Between 1910 and 1924 he attempted to murder several people, mostly children or mentally deficient people. He did not consummate any of these crimes. Fish said he received instructions from the Apostle John. In 1917, his wife left him. In 1928, Fish, 58, killed a girl -- Grace Budd. Police arrested another man by mistake. Seven years later, Grace’s parents received an anonymous letter in which the murderer described the crime in detail. This led the police to Albert Fish. His trial began in March 1935. Fish claimed that God had ordered him to kill and rape children. Psychiatric reports indicated pedophilia and masochism, but he wasn’t certified to be mentally insane and the judge ordered his execution. At the trial, he admitted that he felt “an overwhelming desire to eat raw meat and dance naked during full moon nights.” He was executed in 1936.
Bela Kiss
(1877 - Unknown)
A Hungarian serial killer, he is believed to have killed 23 people, including his wife and her lover, whose bodies he preserved in metal containers. His crimes were discovered in 1916, while he was on the front lines. Gasoline shortages caused by World War II, led the authorities to confiscate the gasoline Kiss claimed to have stored on his property. But in the containers, they found 24 bodies preserved in alcohol, corresponding to 23 women who had been strangled and a man, who was later proven to be his wife’s lover. They also discovered letters indicating that Kiss seduced women, choosing as victims those who didn’t have a family. When authorities tried to arrest him, Kiss disappeared from the Serbian hospital for war-wounded, where he was convalescing, stealing the identity of a deceased young soldier. It was thought that Kiss had died. After that, he was believed to have been seen in Budapest, or in the subway in New York. It was rumored that he had died of yellow fever in Turkey, that he was in the Foreign Legion, and even that he had been seen working as a janitor in a building. His ultimate fate is still unknown.
Fritz Haarmann, the Vampire of Hannover
(October 25, 1879 - April 15, 1925)
Born in Hannover, he came from a disastrous family of alcoholics parents, who physically assaulted each other all the time. Haarmann’s mother treated her son like a girl and dressed him in female clothes. At 17, Haarmann was picked up by the police for harassing teenagers. In 1919, when he was 40, he committed his first crime, which was followed by many others. He used to go to the Hannover bus station, where there were dozens of youths looking for work. He promised them work and food. He took them to a dormer near the Leine River, raped them and bit their throats, cutting off their carotid and trachea. He carried out this macabre ritual in the company of his lover, Hans Grans. Once dead, he removed the bones of his victims and sold their meat as pig or horse meat. On May 17, 1924, some children found a skull in the Leine River. Authorities ordered the dredging of the river and found human remains. Once arrested, Haarmann confessed to his crimes. He admitted having killed and practiced cannibalism on forty children. On April 15, 1925, he was beheaded by order of the judge. The Butcher of Hannover did not apply for clemency, although he claimed to be possessed. His horror mate, Hans Grans, was sentenced to life imprisonment, but his sentence was commuted to 12 years in prison.