Ed Gein
He's not the killer on this list, but he's certainly one of the most chilling. As far as the police knew, they found the body of a hardware store clerk and Gein admitted to murdering another waitress in the mid-1950s. Raised by an alcoholic father and an extremely strict mother, when he was left alone after the deaths of his entire family, Gein specialized in desecrating and emptying graves to take the bodies to their homes, decorated with the bones of those dead.
He made ashtrays, lamps, and even glasses with the skulls. He was declared mentally ill and his career inspired the vast majority of serial killers in movie history, from the "Leatherface" of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" to Norman Bates or Buffalo Bill, from the novel "The Silence of the Lambs".
John Wayne Gacy
One of the most chilling was also John Wayne Gacy or, as he was colloquially known, the “clown killer”. Although Gacy's first conviction was in the late 1960s for assaulting a teenage minor, which resulted in a 10-year prison sentence for sodomy, that was just the beginning.
Upon his release from prison, he began to redeem himself with community work and volunteering at the Moose Club, where it was customary for some members to dress up as clowns to liven up parties. Thus began the myth of Pogo the Clown, the disguise that Gacy used and with which he raped, tortured, and murdered up to 33 minors, 26 of whom he buried in his own house. All of them within 6 years. He was sentenced to death, and executed after 14 years on death row.
Gary ridgeway
The greatest murderer in the history of the United States. He was convicted of a total of 49 murders, the highest number in the history of the North American country, most of those victims being women. He was known by the nickname of the Green River Killer because he used to strangle girls before dumping them in the Green River, at least the first five victims. In addition, his murders included a clear S- component, since, after throwing them into the river or wooded areas, he returned to the same area to rape the body and abandon it again. He used to strangle women either with his bare hands or using rope, cord, or wire. He was arrested at the turn of the 21st century and although he was sentenced to life in prison without the option of parole, he avoided the death penalty.
Ted Bundy
We cannot close the list without the justification that we opened it in the first place. Theodore Robert Cowell Bundy, like Gacy, committed most of his murders in a short period (between 1974 and 1978), at least the 30 crimes that he admitted when he entered prison. The truth is that the number of women he murdered throughout his life is unknown.
Bundy had been raised by his grandparents, who led him to believe that they were his parents and that his mother was actually his sister. Discovering the truth at the age of adolescence deeply marked Bundy, who developed a contempt for women, of whom he assured that he "only saw as objects, things to be eliminated." The last of his crimes were committed by escaping from prison and kidnapping a 12-year-old girl whose throat he slit while he was raping her. Bundy's attractiveness allowed him to act as a seducer and thus attract his victims.
Richard Speck
1966 was a dark year when it came to crime in the United States. Before ex-Marine Charles Whitman climbed the clock on the University of Texas campus to kill 15 people, Richard Speck set a new bar for the bogeyman. Drunk and drugged, Speck broke into South Chicago Community Hospital to commit, he later testified, a simple robbery. Instead, he found 8 resident nurses whom he locked in a room and brought out one by one to stab or strangle. Furthermore, he strangled and raped the last of them.
A ninth nurse was hiding under the bed and was able to testify about the entire incident. Speck was arrested two days later and sentenced to death, later changed to 400 to 1,200 years in prison. Once in prison, he became famous for his attachment to animals, specifically birds, and there he was interviewed by FBI agent John E. Douglas, an interview that is reflected in both the book and the television series " Mindhunter”, and in which he assured that he was “a complete womanizer” in face-to-face meetings in prison.
