The Yorkshire Ripper is one of the most notorious serial killers in British history. He is known to have murdered a minimum of 13 women and severely injured a further 7 (some experts believe that he may have been responsible for more, unsolved murders committed throughout Europe).
The Yorkshire Ripper's first known victims were in July and August of 1975. Somehow, both women survived the brutal hammer and knife attacks. But in October of the same year, the Ripper struck again. And this time the victim - 28-year-old Wilma McCann - did not live to tell the tale.
On January 20, 1976, The Yorkshire Ripper killed for a second time, bludgeoning a woman with a hammer, before stabbing her 50 times. He would not strike again until the following year, killing 28-year-old Irene Richardson in February 1977 and 32-year-old Patricia Atkinson in April of the same year. Atkinson's body was mutilated after death.
So far, all of the victim's had been prostitutes - society's forgotten women. But the next one was different. On June 16, 1977, The Yorkshire Ripper attacked and killed Jayne MacDonald, a regular and well-liked 'girl next door'. Suddenly, no woman in the North of England could really relax: any one of them was a potential target.
Police officers were, of course, under immense pressure to catch the killer before he could strike again. But they had no real evidence to go on. Until, that is, they were sent a recording and several taunting letters that purported to come from the Ripper himself. They threw themselves into the analysis of the new evidence, wasting countless hours on what turned out to be nothing more than an elaborate hoax (the identity of the hoaxer was never revealed).
In a desperate bid to catch the killer, law enforcement officials across the North of England had taken to staking out places that they thought he might strike next. It seemed like looking for a needle in the proverbial haystack, but one of the stakeouts noticed a man walking with a known prostitute. They decided to stop and search him just on the off-chance that he was the man they were looking for. And, by a stroke of good fortune, it turned out that he actually was. The police officers found that he was carrying weapons. Under interrogation, he confessed to the killings. His name was Peter Sutcliffe.
Peter Sutcliffe was sentenced to life imprisonment at HMP Parkhurst, but was later diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and sectioned under Section 47 of the Mental Health Act 1983. He is currently incarcerated in the infamous Broadmoor High-Security Hospital. He claims to have been cured, but his appeals to the courts have all been rejected. He will most likely die within the bleak walls of Broadmoor.
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Albert DeSalvo - The Boston Strangler?, Richard Trenton Chase - The Vampire of Sacramento, Ted Bundy - The Charismatic Killer
Friday 13 December 2013
Thursday 12 December 2013
Albert DeSalvo - The Boston Strangler?
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| Image Attribution: Federal Bureau Of Investigation [Public Domain] via Wikimedia commons |
Between the years of 1962 and 1964, the US city of Boston was gripped by fear. Fear of a man the media referred to as The Boston Strangler.
It all started on June 14, 1962, when the body of a 55-year-old woman was found lying on the floor of her apartment. There was a rope around her neck. At first it looked as though she had hung herself, then fallen to the ground. But closer examination revealed otherwise: Her body had been posed after death, with her legs spread unnaturally wide. She had also been raped with a foreign object. It was clearly a murder.
A little over 2 weeks later, on June 30, another body was found. It was that of 68-year-old Nina Nichols. She had been sexually assaulted with a foreign object, strangled, and posed in the same way as the victim of the June 14 attack.
The third body was discovered on July 2. Again she had been raped with a foreign object, strangled, and posed with her legs spread wide. A fourth victim followed in late August. This time it was a 75-year-old, Ida Irga.
People became terrified. Boston women, in particular, started to take unusual precautions. Sales of deadbolts and other home security devices skyrocketed. Strangers were treated with suspicion, and some women went so far as to refuse to go out without an escort.
Another victim was found, having been killed within 24 hours of Ida Irga. The FBI were called in to help with the investigation. Scores of known sex offenders were questioned. A psychological profile was created of the killer. But still The Boston Strangler managed to elude capture.
Then, on December 5, 1962, The Boston Strangler did something that made the city even more terrified - he struck again, but this time he didn't take the life of an elderly, white woman. Instead, he attacked and killed a young, black woman. Suddenly no one was safe. Levels of paranoia and fear went through the roof.
A further 5 victims were to be found before The Boston Strangler would finally be caught. The last of these was 19-year-old Mary Sullivan, who was found dead in her apartment on January 4, 1964.
At this point, the police still had no real idea as to the identity of The Boston Strangler. But then George Nasssar, a patient at the Bridgewater Hospital for the Criminally Insane, told investigators that one of his fellow inmates had all but confessed to being The Boston Strangler.
This fellow inmate was Albert DeSalvo, a 29-year-old man who was incarcerated for sexually assaulting a woman after tying her up. Under questioning, he was able to give the police details of the Strangler's crimes that had not been released to the general public.
However, a number of the doctors at the hospital were not very convinced. For one thing, it was a hospital for the criminally insane: could they really take the word of two mentally ill patients? Secondly, Nassar was trying to use the information to set up a plea bargain for himself. He would testify in court if the police gave him something in return. And finally, Nassar's psychological profile was a better match to that of The Boston Strangler than Albert DeSalvo's.
But DeSalvo confessed to the crimes, and did so in a detailed and believable manner (though, of course, he could have easily learnt the facts from Nassar). He also confessed to two murders that the police had not previously attributed to The Boston Strangler - the first because she had been bludgeoned to death, not strangled, the second because she had died of a heart attack. DeSalvo claimed that when he went to strangle her, she had a heart attack and just collapsed in his arms. No one had ever even suspected foul play.
It should probably be mentioned at this point that Albert DeSalvo did possess a large number of traits that crop up time and time again in cases of serial sexual murder. For one thing, he had suffered an abusive childhood at the hands of his father, who had beaten DeSalvo, along with DeSalvo's mother and siblings. DeSalvo also had an almost unbelievable sex drive. He would have sex with his wife around 30 times a week, and would also flirt with other women as well. This sex drive is reminiscent of other sexually-motivated serial killers, such as Bobby Joe Long and The Green River Killer, Gary Ridgway.
It was never proven beyond doubt that Albert DeSalvo was the Boston Strangler. Instead, he was charged with a series of rapes, to which he pleaded guilty. He was found stabbed to death in his prison cell on November 26, 1973. In July of 2013, DNA evidence was found that linked DeSalvo to the rape and murder of the Strangler's last victim, Mary Sullivan. The DNA evidence excluded 99.9% of the population, meaning that although it was highly likely to have come from DeSalvo, it is not 100% certain.
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Bobby Joe Long - The Want-Ad Rapist/Killer, Gary Ridgway - The Green River Killer, Edmund Kemper - The Co-ed Killer
Monday 9 December 2013
Edmund Kemper - The Co-ed Killer
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Image attribution: By Santa Cruz County Sheriff's Office ([1]) [Public domain],
via Wikimedia Commons
|
At an imposing 6'9'' and 280 pounds, Edmund Kemper was probably not the kind of man you would expect young women to happily get in a car with, especially when they knew there was a serial killer on the loose. But Kemper was an extremely intelligent individual (once tested as having an IQ of 136) who knew how to put the women at ease. He would talk to them and play the 'gentle giant' routine. Sometimes he would take them to where they wanted to go without incident; on other occasions he would kill, dismember, and cannibalize them, as well as using their corpses for sexual release.
As is so often the case with serial killers, Edmund Kemper had an abusive childhood.The primary abuser in his case was his mother, who would constantly degrade and belittle him. She would also often lock him in the basement of the house. On one occasion, she forced him to kill his pet chicken, and his father then made him eat it.
From a young age, Kemper displayed some unnerving behaviours. He would often spend hours alone with his sister's dolls, decapitating them and cutting up their limbs. After a while, he moved on to doing the same to cats and dogs.
At the age of 15, Kemper killed his grandparents. He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and sent to a psychiatric hospital. He behaved himself and even managed to befriend the psychiatrist. He was given a job administering certain psychological tests to other patients. Kemper memorized some of these tests, along with the answers the psychiatrists were looking for. When it was his turn to be evaluated, it should come as no surprise that he passed with flying colours. He was released back into the community at the age of 21, right back into the custody of the one person all his doctors seemed to agree he should never live with again - his mother (quite why this happened is something of a mystery). 3 years later he started killing again, taking the lives of 6 co-ed students at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Next, Kemper killed his mother. Apparently, he realized that it was his mother who was the source of his anger: the college students had merely been symbolic representations of her. He waited until she was sleeping, then crept into her room and smashed her skull with a ball-peen hammer. Kemper then cut off her head and hands with a pocket knife, removing her larynx and grinding it up in the garbage disposal.
After that, Kemper invited his mother's best friend round to the house, on the pretense of throwing a surprise party for his mother. When the friend arrived, Kemper strangled her to death, then decapitated her corpse. Shortly afterwards, Kemper phoned the police and confessed to his crimes. He was arrested and given a sentence of life imprisonment.
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Dennis Rader -The BTK Killer, Richard Ramirez - The Night Stalker, Ted Bundy - The Charismatic Killer
Harvey Glatman - The Lonely Hearts Killer
On the surface, Harvey Glatman seemed fairly harmless and innocuous. He looked like a bit of a geek and had an IQ of 130. But not everyone is who they appear to be.
At the age of 12, Glatman hung himself from a rope - not as a suicide attempt, but simply because he enjoyed hanging there, finding it difficult to breathe. He literally seemed to take pleasure in his own physical suffering.
Glatman also had a penchant for making other people suffer - particularly females. When he was 17, he started to mug women for their purses, only to give them back straight afterwards. His intention, it seems, was not to steal from the women, but to scare them. Later that year, he threatened a young girl with a toy gun, ordering her to take off her clothes. The girl screamed and he ran. For this crime, Glatman was later arrested. But he escaped to the East Coast of America before he could be sentenced.
Eventually, however, Glatman was arrested again, this time for a robbery. The police soon learned that he was a fugitive from justice. He was sentenced to serve 5 years in the Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York.
Glatman was released from prison in 1951. He moved to Los Angeles, where he found himself a job as a television repairman. He settled into the community, and appeared to have turned his back on crime.
But in 1957, Glatman was called out to repair the television of an attractive 19-year-old woman by the name of Judy Dull. She said that she was a model, at which point Glatman claimed to work as a part-time photographer (a lie, although photography was something of a hobby for him). He said that he happened to be looking for a model to pose for a bondage themed photo shoot - would she be interested? He offered to pay her $50 and she accepted.
Harvey Glatman picked Judy Dull up on August 1, 1957, on the pretense of taking her to a photography studio. But once she was in the car, Glatman pulled a gun. He took her to his apartment, forced her to strip, and proceeded to take photos of her. Next, he raped her, made her put her clothes back on, tied her up, and took more photos. Finally, he drove her 125 miles out into the desert, where he took yet more photographs, before strangling her to death and burying her in a shallow grave.
After killing his first victim, Glatman started looking for a second. He joined a singles club, where he met a woman by the name of Shirley Bridgford. They arranged a date, and she agreed to him picking her up in his car. He took her out into the Borego Desert State Park in San Diego, where he raped her. Glatman then tied the woman up and took photographs. Then he raped her again and strangled her to death. He did not bury the body this time, deciding instead to leave it out in the open to be eaten by wild animals.
Glatman's next victim was another model - Ruth Rita Mercardo. Glatman went over to her apartment on the pretense of offering her work. He raped her, then drove her out into the desert. Once there, he tied her up and took photographs. He proceeded to kill her, though this time he did deliberate somewhat. He had actually grown to be quite fond of her - in his own disturbed and unbalanced way. He didn't want to end her life. But she had seen his face and he decided that he had no real choice.
There is no knowing how long Harvey Glatman would have gotten away with his shocking crimes if it had not been for one woman by the name of Virgil. Glatman had lured her into his car and pulled out a gun. He went to tie her hands, at which point the plucky woman made a desperate bid to fight him off. The gun went off in the struggle, hitting Virgil in the leg. But she did manage to get it away from him.
The fight spilled out onto the road, and Virgil eventually got control of the gun. She levelled it at her assailant, at which point a police officer came running over. Glatman's reign of terror was finally over. He was sentenced to die in the gas chamber, a punishment that was carried out on August 18, 1959.
You might also be interested in:
Ted Bundy - The Charismatic Killer, Bobby Joe Long - The Want-Ad Rapist/Killer, Richard Trenton Chase -The Vampire of Sacramento
At the age of 12, Glatman hung himself from a rope - not as a suicide attempt, but simply because he enjoyed hanging there, finding it difficult to breathe. He literally seemed to take pleasure in his own physical suffering.
Glatman also had a penchant for making other people suffer - particularly females. When he was 17, he started to mug women for their purses, only to give them back straight afterwards. His intention, it seems, was not to steal from the women, but to scare them. Later that year, he threatened a young girl with a toy gun, ordering her to take off her clothes. The girl screamed and he ran. For this crime, Glatman was later arrested. But he escaped to the East Coast of America before he could be sentenced.
Eventually, however, Glatman was arrested again, this time for a robbery. The police soon learned that he was a fugitive from justice. He was sentenced to serve 5 years in the Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York.
Glatman was released from prison in 1951. He moved to Los Angeles, where he found himself a job as a television repairman. He settled into the community, and appeared to have turned his back on crime.
But in 1957, Glatman was called out to repair the television of an attractive 19-year-old woman by the name of Judy Dull. She said that she was a model, at which point Glatman claimed to work as a part-time photographer (a lie, although photography was something of a hobby for him). He said that he happened to be looking for a model to pose for a bondage themed photo shoot - would she be interested? He offered to pay her $50 and she accepted.
Harvey Glatman picked Judy Dull up on August 1, 1957, on the pretense of taking her to a photography studio. But once she was in the car, Glatman pulled a gun. He took her to his apartment, forced her to strip, and proceeded to take photos of her. Next, he raped her, made her put her clothes back on, tied her up, and took more photos. Finally, he drove her 125 miles out into the desert, where he took yet more photographs, before strangling her to death and burying her in a shallow grave.
After killing his first victim, Glatman started looking for a second. He joined a singles club, where he met a woman by the name of Shirley Bridgford. They arranged a date, and she agreed to him picking her up in his car. He took her out into the Borego Desert State Park in San Diego, where he raped her. Glatman then tied the woman up and took photographs. Then he raped her again and strangled her to death. He did not bury the body this time, deciding instead to leave it out in the open to be eaten by wild animals.
Glatman's next victim was another model - Ruth Rita Mercardo. Glatman went over to her apartment on the pretense of offering her work. He raped her, then drove her out into the desert. Once there, he tied her up and took photographs. He proceeded to kill her, though this time he did deliberate somewhat. He had actually grown to be quite fond of her - in his own disturbed and unbalanced way. He didn't want to end her life. But she had seen his face and he decided that he had no real choice.
There is no knowing how long Harvey Glatman would have gotten away with his shocking crimes if it had not been for one woman by the name of Virgil. Glatman had lured her into his car and pulled out a gun. He went to tie her hands, at which point the plucky woman made a desperate bid to fight him off. The gun went off in the struggle, hitting Virgil in the leg. But she did manage to get it away from him.
The fight spilled out onto the road, and Virgil eventually got control of the gun. She levelled it at her assailant, at which point a police officer came running over. Glatman's reign of terror was finally over. He was sentenced to die in the gas chamber, a punishment that was carried out on August 18, 1959.
You might also be interested in:
Ted Bundy - The Charismatic Killer, Bobby Joe Long - The Want-Ad Rapist/Killer, Richard Trenton Chase -The Vampire of Sacramento
Sunday 8 December 2013
Bobby Joe Long - The Want Ad Rapist/Killer
In 1974, Bobby Joe Long was riding his motorcycle in Tampa, Florida, when a car materialized in front of him. Long slammed down on the brakes, but it was too little too late: he was thrown forwards into the car, hitting his head hard enough for his helmet to crack. He did survive, but not without incurring long-term brain damage.
Immediately following the accident, Bobby Joe Long claims that his sex drive started to increase dramatically. Beforehand, he had been a fairly regular guy: he thought about sex from time to time and would engage in intercourse with his wife about 2 or 3 times a week. But after the accident he thought about sex almost all the time. It became his obsession; it took over his life. He started demanding sex from his wife 2 or 3 times a day and would also masturbate a further 5 or 6 times daily.
But after a while even this wasn't enough. In 1980, Bobby Joe Long began to search for want ads in his local papers, looking for items that required him to go to a woman's home to collect. He would respond to the ad, and arrange to collect the item during the day, as he reasoned that this would make it less likely that a husband or boyfriend would be at home. Once he had made sure that there was nobody else in the house, Long would tie the woman up and rape her.
The media had a frenzy, referring to him as 'Want Ad Rapist'. FBI agents and local police forces combed all the evidence they could find in order to track him down. But he would succeed in evading capture for 3 years.
As time went on, Bobby Joe Long started to lose control more and more. He would get angry at the slightest provocation. On on occasion, he even grabbed his mother and spanked her like a child.
It is a well-known fact that some rapists will, sooner or later, escalate to murder. After a while, the rapes just don't seem to stimulate them the way they used to. They need to take it to the next level in order to feel the same amount of thrill and power.
In 1983, Bobby Joe Long killed a Vietnamese woman. He lured her into his car, overpowered her, tied her up, raped her, and strangled her to death. Her body was unceremoniously dumped on the side of the road. A further 8 murders would follow.
Just before killing for the 9th time, Bobby Joe Long abducted a 17-year-old girl, raped her, and let her go. He didn't seem to be able to bring himself to kill her, even though she had seen his face as well as the inside of his apartment.
Shortly after letting the 17-year-old go, Bobby Joe Long was arrested. He spoke of the growing sense of revulsion he felt at his acts. He tried to claim diminished responsibility on account of the brain damage he had incurred as a result of the motorcycle accident. However, his defense team were unable to prove a causal link between this and his later crimes. He was convicted and sentenced to death in 1985. He remains on Florida's death row to this day.
You might also be interested in:
Gary Ridgway - The Green River Killer, Early Warning Signs of a Future Serial Killer, Jeffrey Dahmer - The Milwaukee Cannibal
Immediately following the accident, Bobby Joe Long claims that his sex drive started to increase dramatically. Beforehand, he had been a fairly regular guy: he thought about sex from time to time and would engage in intercourse with his wife about 2 or 3 times a week. But after the accident he thought about sex almost all the time. It became his obsession; it took over his life. He started demanding sex from his wife 2 or 3 times a day and would also masturbate a further 5 or 6 times daily.
But after a while even this wasn't enough. In 1980, Bobby Joe Long began to search for want ads in his local papers, looking for items that required him to go to a woman's home to collect. He would respond to the ad, and arrange to collect the item during the day, as he reasoned that this would make it less likely that a husband or boyfriend would be at home. Once he had made sure that there was nobody else in the house, Long would tie the woman up and rape her.
The media had a frenzy, referring to him as 'Want Ad Rapist'. FBI agents and local police forces combed all the evidence they could find in order to track him down. But he would succeed in evading capture for 3 years.
As time went on, Bobby Joe Long started to lose control more and more. He would get angry at the slightest provocation. On on occasion, he even grabbed his mother and spanked her like a child.
It is a well-known fact that some rapists will, sooner or later, escalate to murder. After a while, the rapes just don't seem to stimulate them the way they used to. They need to take it to the next level in order to feel the same amount of thrill and power.
In 1983, Bobby Joe Long killed a Vietnamese woman. He lured her into his car, overpowered her, tied her up, raped her, and strangled her to death. Her body was unceremoniously dumped on the side of the road. A further 8 murders would follow.
Just before killing for the 9th time, Bobby Joe Long abducted a 17-year-old girl, raped her, and let her go. He didn't seem to be able to bring himself to kill her, even though she had seen his face as well as the inside of his apartment.
Shortly after letting the 17-year-old go, Bobby Joe Long was arrested. He spoke of the growing sense of revulsion he felt at his acts. He tried to claim diminished responsibility on account of the brain damage he had incurred as a result of the motorcycle accident. However, his defense team were unable to prove a causal link between this and his later crimes. He was convicted and sentenced to death in 1985. He remains on Florida's death row to this day.
You might also be interested in:
Gary Ridgway - The Green River Killer, Early Warning Signs of a Future Serial Killer, Jeffrey Dahmer - The Milwaukee Cannibal
Israel Keyes - Alaskan Serial Killer
"There is no one who knows me - or who has ever known me - who knows anything about me really... They're going to tell you something that does not line up with anything I tell you because I'm two different people basically." - Israel Keyes
Israel Keyes (January 7, 1978 - December 2, 2012) was arrested on March 12, 2012 for the murder of 18-year-old barista, Samantha Koenig. He abducted her from her coffee stand, before raping her. He killed her the next day, leaving her body in his garden shed whilst he went on a 2-week cruise. Before he killed her, he forced her to reveal her PIN number.
Returning home from the cruise, Keyes sent a $30 000 ransom demand to Koenig's boyfriend. This was paid, with the money being deposited into Koenig's bank account. Keyes immediately started withdrawing money from ATMs across the United States, continuing until he was eventually apprehended.
Up until this point, Israel Keyes had been extremely careful and meticulous in all of his illegal activities. He had killed before; he had robbed several banks; he had burgled somewhere in the region of 20 to 30 homes. The only things he had ever been arrested for were driving under the influence and driving without a valid licence. This was largely due to the extreme lengths he was prepared to go to in order to avoid detection.
As an example of Keyes' generally meticulous nature, consider the following: In June of 2011, Keyes flew to Chicago,where he rented a car to drive a further 1000 miles to Essex, Vermont. He made sure to remove the battery from his mobile phone so that it could not be traced. He paid for everything in cash.
Once he arrived in Essex, Vermont, Israel Keyes broke into the home of Bill and Lorraine Currier. He tied them up and took them to an abandoned building, where he shot Bill Currier, before raping and strangling Lorraine Currier. Their bodies were never found.
Keyes would go on to confess to more murders, though the precise number may never be known. It is, however, estimated by many to be in the region of 10 or 11.
As a child, Keyes had, by his own admission, tortured animals. He had also begun to realize that there was something different about him. There were things he wanted to do, things he thought were OK, that no one else seemed to find acceptable. Realizing this, he started to become more and more of a loner. He also tended to carry a gun with him wherever he went.
Between the years of 1998 and 2000, Israel Keyes served as a specialist in the US Army. In 2007, he started working as an independent contractor, operating under the name 'Keyes Construction'.
The first major crime that Keyes admitted to was the rape of a teenage girl sometime between the years of 1996 and 1998. The crime was never reported, but the FBI believes the confession to be genuine.
On December 2, 2012, Israel Keyes committed suicide in his jail cell whilst awaiting trial for the murder of Samantha Koenig. He never showed any remorse for his crimes.
You might also be interested in:
Ted Bundy - The Charismatic Killer, Dennis Rader - The BTK Killer, The Six Motivations of a Serial Killer
 |
Image Attribution: By Federal Bureau of Investigation (MassLive.com) [Public
domain], via Wikimedia Commons
|
Israel Keyes (January 7, 1978 - December 2, 2012) was arrested on March 12, 2012 for the murder of 18-year-old barista, Samantha Koenig. He abducted her from her coffee stand, before raping her. He killed her the next day, leaving her body in his garden shed whilst he went on a 2-week cruise. Before he killed her, he forced her to reveal her PIN number.
Returning home from the cruise, Keyes sent a $30 000 ransom demand to Koenig's boyfriend. This was paid, with the money being deposited into Koenig's bank account. Keyes immediately started withdrawing money from ATMs across the United States, continuing until he was eventually apprehended.
Up until this point, Israel Keyes had been extremely careful and meticulous in all of his illegal activities. He had killed before; he had robbed several banks; he had burgled somewhere in the region of 20 to 30 homes. The only things he had ever been arrested for were driving under the influence and driving without a valid licence. This was largely due to the extreme lengths he was prepared to go to in order to avoid detection.
As an example of Keyes' generally meticulous nature, consider the following: In June of 2011, Keyes flew to Chicago,where he rented a car to drive a further 1000 miles to Essex, Vermont. He made sure to remove the battery from his mobile phone so that it could not be traced. He paid for everything in cash.
Once he arrived in Essex, Vermont, Israel Keyes broke into the home of Bill and Lorraine Currier. He tied them up and took them to an abandoned building, where he shot Bill Currier, before raping and strangling Lorraine Currier. Their bodies were never found.
Keyes would go on to confess to more murders, though the precise number may never be known. It is, however, estimated by many to be in the region of 10 or 11.
As a child, Keyes had, by his own admission, tortured animals. He had also begun to realize that there was something different about him. There were things he wanted to do, things he thought were OK, that no one else seemed to find acceptable. Realizing this, he started to become more and more of a loner. He also tended to carry a gun with him wherever he went.
Between the years of 1998 and 2000, Israel Keyes served as a specialist in the US Army. In 2007, he started working as an independent contractor, operating under the name 'Keyes Construction'.
The first major crime that Keyes admitted to was the rape of a teenage girl sometime between the years of 1996 and 1998. The crime was never reported, but the FBI believes the confession to be genuine.
On December 2, 2012, Israel Keyes committed suicide in his jail cell whilst awaiting trial for the murder of Samantha Koenig. He never showed any remorse for his crimes.
You might also be interested in:
Ted Bundy - The Charismatic Killer, Dennis Rader - The BTK Killer, The Six Motivations of a Serial Killer
John George Haigh - The Acid Bath Murderer
 |
| Image attribution: By Gps909 (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons |
For a serial killer, one of the most difficult problems to solve is how to dispose of a body. You could, of course, just leave it lying in a ditch somewhere. But that would basically amount to handing law enforcement a whole lot of free evidence.
British serial killer John George Haigh believed that he had come up with the perfect solution to this problem. He would gain the trust of his victims over the course of several months, before luring them to an out-of-the-way location, where he would kill them quickly, often with the aid of a gun. Finally, he would dissolve the corpse in sulphuric acid, before forging papers that would allow him to take over his victim's material possessions.
English law has a concept known as corpus delicti, which basically means that a crime has to be proven to have occurred before a person can be convicted of it. John George Haigh assumed that if no body could be found, then it would be impossible to prove that a murder had been committed. Consequently, he could never be charged with the crime, however much the police suspected him.
This plan seems to work on the surface. But it is actually possible to prove beyond reasonable doubt that a murder has taken place even if the body is never recovered. For example, if a person goes missing and a large amount of her blood is found at the primary crime scene (more than a person could be expected to lose and survive), then that may be enough to prove murder in the eyes of the English legal system. As it happens, though, John George Haigh's disposal method didn't work quite as well as he had hoped. When the police searched his residence, they found human gallstones and bones. When combined with other evidence, this was enough to convict 'the acid bath murderer' (as he was dubbed by the media) of 6 murders. He would later confess to a further 3, but these were never proven.
Haigh tried to plead insanity, but this was rejected by the jury, who took only 15 minutes to find him guilty on all counts. He was sentenced to die by hanging, a punishment that was carried out on August 10, 1949.
John George Haigh appears to have been primarily motivated by greed and the challenge of committing the perfect crime. He was also possibly motivated by his strict upbringing. His parents were members of a strict Protestant sect known as the Plymouth Brethren. They were famous for their austere practices, as the young John George Haigh was only too aware. He spent an inordinate amount of time within the confines of a 10 foot fence that his father had erected around the family home to keep the world out. He was not permitted to play sports, and the only form of entertainment available to him was Bible studies. He would later claim that he was plagued from a young age with religious nightmares. But this might have just been a last ditch attempt to avoid the death penalty.
You might also be interested in:
Are All Serial Killers Insane?, Richard Ramirez - The Night Stalker, The Zodiac Killer
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