10 Most Brutal Serial Killers Ever

Here is a list of 10 most brutal serial killers ever.

10. Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi

Also known as the ‘Hillside Stranglers’, these two cousins brought fear to California in the late 70s. They kidnapped, raped, tortured, and killed 10 victims between 1977 and 1978. All their victims were between the ages of 12 to 28. They earned the notorious nickname of ‘Hillside Stranglers’ because they always executed their plans in the hills above the city of Los Angeles. Their first victim, a prostitute named Yolanda Washington, was murdered while walking along Ventura Blvd. in San Fernando Valley, California.

Bianchi attempted an insanity defense, claiming he had a personality disorder, and a separate personality from himself committed the murders. Court psychologists observed him and found that he was faking the illness, so Bianchi agreed to plead guilty and testify against Buono in exchange for leniency. The jury sentenced both of them to life imprisonment.

9. Edmund Kemper

He was also known as the “The Co-Ed Killer”. Between May 1972 and February 1973, Kemper began picking up female students hitchhiking, taking them to isolated rural areas and killing them. He would stab, shoot or smother the victims and afterwards take the bodies back to his home where he would have sex with them and then dissect them. He killed six college girls. He would often go hunting for victims after arguing with his mother.

In one bizarre incident, after abducting and pulling a gun on a woman, he locked himself out of his car leaving the woman inside with the gun. She chose to let him back in the car. Shortly after, Kemper killed her.

Kemper’s final killings were those of his mother and her best friend. Then he began a cross-country flight, in a rented car loaded with guns and ammunition, that ended in a decision to surrender, “so I wouldn’t kill again.” Although he pleaded that he should be sentenced to death, he was eventually sentenced to life imprisonment.

8. David Berkowitz

He is also known as the “Son of Sam” or “The .44 Caliber Killer”. In 1977 in New York someone was shooting couples in cars with a .44 caliber Bulldog revolver. The killer was named for the gun until mentioning in letters to the press that he was killing to satiate father Sam’s need for blood and thereafter became the Son of Sam.

Eventually, police found a ticket for a car matching the description of the killer’s vehicle parked at a hydrant nearby a crime scene at the time of a shooting, which led them to the killer. When police came for Berkowitz he admitted everything but claimed his neighbor’s demon-possessed dog Harvey urged him to kill. It didn’t work as an insanity defense but it did spawn countless conspiracy theories of satanic cults and the like. Berkowitz is still incarcerated and refuses to attend parole hearings. He claims to be a born-again Christian and feels like his place is in prison until his death.

7. Ian Brady and Myra Hindley

Also known as ‘The Moors Murderers’ these two got popular during the mid-60s in the city of Manchester. The raped and murdered five small children. The murders are so named because two of the victims were discovered in graves dug on Saddleworth Moor; a third grave was discovered on the moor in 1987, over 20 years after Brady and Hindley’s trial in 1966. The body of a fourth victim, Keith Bennett, is also suspected to be buried there. Despite repeated searches of the area, it remains undiscovered. These two were sentenced to life imprisonment. Hindley died in the year 2002 of a heart attack while still in prison.

6. Richard Chase

Also known as ‘The Vampire of Sacramento’, he was known as one of the most deadly killers of all time. He earned his notorious nickname because he drank the blood of his victims and ate their internal organs. He did this as part of a delusion that he needed to prevent Nazis from turning his blood into powder via poison they had planted beneath his soap dish.

After his arrest and trial, the jury found Chase guilty of six counts of first-degree murder and he was sentenced to die in the gas chamber. A few months later, he committed suicide in prison by overdosing on antidepressants that he had been saving up in the prison.

5. Javed Iqbal

Javed Iqbal was a Pakistani serial killer who was found guilty of the sexual abuse and murder of more than 100 children aged between 6 and 16. In 1999, he sent a letter to police and a local Lahore newspaper confessing to the murders. He claimed that over the course of two decades he strangled and dismembered his victims who were mostly runaways and orphans living on the streets of Lahore. He disposed of their bodies in the vats of hydrochloric acid. He then dumped the remains in the Ravi river.

The judge sentenced him to die by strangulation in the same public square he had frequented when searching for victims, and that his body should be cut up into 100 pieces and dissolved in acid. Nearly two years later, he apparently committed suicide in his prison cell by hanging himself with bedsheets, though there has been speculation that he was murdered.

4. Jeffrey Dahmer

He is known to have murdered 17 men between the years 1978 and 1991, the year he was apprehended. Jeffrey revealed that he drugged his victims before strangling them to death although he also performed bizarre experiments on some of his victims, such as drilling holes into the skull in order to inject acid into the brain. He was also known to cannibalize parts of a victim and perform sexual acts with the corpses. He explained that he had attempted to build a shrine from the skeletons of his victims so he could have a place to “reflect” and collect his thoughts.

He ran out of luck when one of his victims ran out of the house screaming for help. He was sentenced to over 800 years in prison. Dahmer was killed in prison in 1994 at the age of 34, by inmate Christopher Scarver.

3. Dennis Nilsen

Also known as the ‘The Kindly Killer’, this Scottish serial killer was responsible for the killing of over 15 men and boys. Between 1978 and 1983, he lured his victims to his house and murdered them. He was known to retain corpses for sexual acts. He was eventually caught after his disposal of dismembered human entrails blocked his household drains: the drain cleaning company found that the drains were congested with human flesh and contacted the police. He was convicted of six murders, two attempted murders and was sentenced to life imprisonment.

According to one victim account, he once changed his mind midway through a murder. The victim of the attempt, Carl Stotter, said later: “I was told afterwards that he’d actually given me heart massage and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and brought me back to life. Nilsen claimed that it was because he thought what passed between us was ‘a thin strand of love and humanity’.” The police said it was simply because there wasn’t enough room in the flat for another body.

2. Joachim Kroll

Also known as ‘The Duisburg Man-Eater’, he was a German serial killer and cannibal. When corpses of five young women turned up in small villages in West Germany, police found that each body had been raped, stabbed and or strangled, as well as mutilated. The cuts were of a strange nature. They were about steak size and body parts of the victims such as buttocks, thighs and belly had been removed. This type of cut was suggestive of a cannibal.

When they searched his apartment, police found plastic bags of flesh and other body parts. He confessed to the murders, even to the ones the police did not know about. He confessed to killing nine other people, taking the toll to 14 victims. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.

1. Ted Bundy

Bundy murdered numerous young women across the United States between 1974 and 1978. He twice escaped from prison before his final apprehension in February 1978. After more than a decade of vigorous denials, he eventually confessed to 30 murders, although the actual total of victims remains unknown. Estimates range from 29 to over 100, the general estimate being 35. Typically, Bundy would bludgeon his victims, then strangle them to death. He also engaged in rape and necrophilia.

He would pretend to be a policeman or even fake injury just to get the attention of his victims. Once they approached his car, he would use hit them with a crowbar. He was sentenced to death through execution by an electric chair in 1989.