Ted Bundy
(November 24, 1946 - January 24, 1989)
An irresistible, smart, and handsome seducer, he received hundreds of letters of love with indecent proposals and lipstick kisses, while in prison in Starke, Florida, where he was confined until his execution. Bundy had a degree in psychology, and was a young promise of the Republican Party. He was handsome and cheerful. Behind his gift of words with which he fascinated people, a ruthless monster was hiding.
When he was imprisoned, in 1976, he fired his attorneys and decided to defend himself. This allowed him access to the library, where he managed to escape by jumping from the second floor. He was captured six days later. On Christmas Eve, he escaped again through the air ducts. He had lost weight in order to get through the hole. His second escape would include two more crimes. However, the most shocking crime for society was the murder and rape of a 12-year-old little girl, Kimberly Leach.
While defending himself, he questioned witnesses with arrogance, asking them to remember what had happened. The judicial absurdity reached its fever point when Bundy, taking advantage of an old law, married during a court session with a fan named Carole Ann Boone. Bundy exhausted all legal remedies to postpone his own death. He even gained time giving detectives information about unsolved murders. On January 24, 1989, he was finally executed in the electric chair for sadistically killing more than 30 women.
Ottis Elwood Toole
(March 5, 1947 - September 15, 1996)
First, he admitted to charges of murder, rape and cannibalism, and then retracted on several confessions. Toole was convicted of two murders and confessed to four more while in prison. On April 1984, Toole briefly shared a cell with Ted Bundy in Raiford Prison in Florida. Toole died of liver cirrhosis in September 1996 at the penitentiary. At the time of his death, he was writing a script for television about a children’s show, which he hoped to sell to a television network. It was called “Christmas with Ottis Toole.”
Pedro Alonso Lopez, The Monster of the Andes
(October 8, 1948)
A Colombian serial killer, who, after he was captured in 1980, confessed to killing more than 300 girls and young women in Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. Some experts say that no one has committed more serial murders. In his confession, he admitted that he had murdered at least 110 girls in Ecuador, 100 in Colombia, and “many more than 100” in Peru. He described a field in Ambato, Ecuador, where 53 bodies were found, and four more bodies were found around this location. He also noted other places where no bodies were found. In April 1980, a woman was going to a supermarket with her 12-year-old daughter, when Alonso López tried to kidnap the girl. The woman asked for help to stop the man, who was trying to escape with the girl. Several traders intercepted him before he could escape and held him until authorities arrived. He pleaded guilty to multiple murders and was sentenced to life imprisonment. He was imprisoned in Ecuador until 1998 and was delivered to the Colombian authorities due to a request for extradition. He was detained in a psychiatric hospital but, some years later, he was discharged and released. Interpol issued an order to search for, find and capture Lopez. His current whereabouts are unknown, but it is believed that he was executed illegally.
Ed Kemper, The Co-ed Killer
(December 18, 1948)
He had an IQ of 136 and developed a socio-pathological behavior at an early age: he tortured and murdered animals, simulated sexual rituals with his sisters’ dolls and even said that in order to kiss a teacher he felt attracted to, he would have to kill her first. His mother used to force him to sleep in the basement, fearing that he would abuse his sisters. In 1964, at age 15, Ed shot his grandmother as she was finishing reading a book. When his grandfather arrived, he killed him too. He called his mother and asked her to call the police because he had killed his grandparents. The woman told officers that Ed “just wanted to see what it was like to kill his grandmother” and that he had killed his grandfather because “he knew he would be angry.” Once he was admitted to the hospital, he fooled his doctor into discharging him. Between May 1972 and February 1973, Kemper killed several students, which he picked up on the highway and led to isolated rural areas to stab, shoot or strangle them. Then, he practiced necrophilia and dismembered their bodies. He discarded their remains by throwing them off cliffs or burying them in the fields. But on one occasion, he buried the head of a victim in his mother’s garden, as a macabre joke. Eventually, in 1973, Kemper also killed his mother. He beheaded her, raped her and threw her vocal chords in the garbage disposal. In his statement, Kemper said “she screamed too much.” He finally ate part of her organs and slept for four nights with the body in a state of putrefaction. Then, he managed to get one of his mother’s best friends to visit him and strangled her. As he didn’t hear any news on his murders on the radio, he was disappointed and called the police to confess. Although he claimed insanity at his trial, he was charged with eight murders. He intended to receive the death penalty, but as it was suspended, he was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Robert Berdella
(January 31, 1949 - October 8, 1992)
He was arrested in 1988 after one of his victims escaped from the window of the second floor, wearing only a dog collar. Berdella had put it on his victims for his sexual delight. He later confessed that he drugged and tied young men to rape and torture them. Driven by his eagerness for different experiences, he tore a boy’s eye out, to see what would happen. He discarded the bodies by dismembering them in his bathtub and throwing them away in plastic bags. When the case surfaced, no one could believe it, as he was an exemplary man. He received a life sentence and died in prison in 1992 of a heart attack. He complained that the prison staff did not give him the appropriate medicine. His death was never investigated.
Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer
(February 18, 1949)
He confessed to killing 71 women. Gary would go from house to house talking about the Pentecostal church he attended. During his teenage years, he was about to stab a six-year-old child to death. Ridgway later confessed that he “wanted to know what it felt like to kill someone.” Of humble appearance, his hideous behavior was expressed through merciless hatred towards women. It is presumed that the cause of this hatred was his mother’s abuse of him and his father. After being arrested, he confessed to each of his crimes, describing them in detail. Ridgway used a photo of his child to attract victims. On November 5, 2003, a trial was conducted. He was sentenced to 49 consecutive life imprisonment sentences without parole. He avoided the death penalty by confessing his crimes, including some that hadn’t been attributed to him.
Richard Chase, the Vampire of Sacramento
(May 23, 1950 - December 26, 1980)
He was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic after shooting, stabbing, dismembering and drinking the blood of six people in 1987. Chase, at 21, was constantly drugged and became obsessed with the idea that a criminal organization was trying to kill him. Shortly after that, he shaved his head claiming that his skull was slowly deforming and that the bones were piercing his skin. Then, he said he was dying because someone had stolen his pulmonary artery and he noticed that his blood could not run properly. He was admitted to a psychiatric facility for a short time and then released, despite the opinion of some doctors who considered him to be dangerous. Then, the tragedy began. Chase committed six crimes. The most terrible was when he entered a house, shot a couple and a boy and a baby in the head. As he was discovered, he escaped with the baby’s corpse. Then, in his own house, he beheaded the body after drinking its blood and ate its brain. That same afternoon, the police discovered bloodstains, human bones, organs stored in the refrigerator and a dish with remains of brain in Richard’s apartment. The murderer was eventually arrested. “If I ate those people, it was because I was hungry and I was dying,” he said, dismayed. “My blood is poisoned and an acid is corroding my liver. It was absolutely necessary for me to drink fresh blood.” At the trial, he tried in vain to justify his macabre crimes. Sentenced to death, his execution was never carried out. Richard committed suicide in his cell with an overdose of antidepressants in December, 1980.
Kenneth Alessio Bianchi and Angelo Buono
(May 22, 1951)
Bianchi was an American serial killer, kidnapper and rapist. Along with his cousin Angelo Buono, they used fake badges to convince their victims that they were undercover cops. All of them were women aged 12-28 years. Bianchi and Buono arrested a young woman named Catherine Lorre, intending to kidnap and kill her. But when they learned that she was the daughter of actor Peter Lorre (specialist in interpreting murderers), they released her. At his trial, Bianchi convinced the expert psychiatrists that he suffered from a multiple-personality disorder, but investigators consulted other specialists. Bianchi finally admitted he had faked the disease. In order to request clemency, Bianchi agreed to testify against Buono.
Regardless, both of them were sentenced to life imprisonment. In 1992, Bianchi sued Catherine Yronwode for more than eight million dollars for placing his face on cards in her store. He said his face was a registered trademark. The judge dismissed the case claiming that if he had been using his face as a trademark when he committed the murders, he could not have hidden a single day from the police.
Donato Bilancia, the Monster of Liguria
(July 10, 1951)
An Italian serial killer who murdered at least 17 people in the region of Liguria from October 1997 to May 1998. On April 12, 2000, he was sentenced to 14 life sentences and 14 additional years for another attempt to murder.
David Berkowitz, the 44 Caliber Killer
(June 1, 1953)
He would suddenly shoot his victims. Six of those shots were fatal. Shortly after he was arrested, in August 1977, Berkowitz confessed to the crimes and said he had wounded seven other people. He stated that a demon, who had possessed his neighbor’s dog, had commanded him to commit the murders, but he later changed his statement. He said he had only fired twice. The other victims were killed, according to Berkowitz, by collaborators of a violent satanic cult of which he was a member. Although he remains as the only suspect, police found some degree of credibility in his last statement. It was possible that the killings had been committed by more than one person. The case was reopened in 1996. On June 12, 1978 Berkowitz was sentenced to six life sentences.