 | This article needs additional citations for verification .(February 2018) |
Atlanta Ripper | |
|---|---|
| Details | |
| Victims | 15–21 |
| Date | 1909 and 1914 |
| Country | United States |
The Atlanta Ripper was an unidentified serial killer [1] who is suspected of killing at least fifteen Atlanta women between 1909 and 1914. [2]
On May 28, 1911, the body of Belle Walker, a cook, was found 25 yards from her home on Garibaldi Street in Atlanta by her sister after she failed to return home from work the previous night. Her throat had been cut by an unknown person, and the crime was reported in the Atlanta Constitution under the headline "Negro Woman Killed; No Clue to Slayer." [3]
As news of the murders continued to spread, the black population of Atlanta were filled with terror. On July 3, after the eighth consecutive killing, The Baltimore Sun reported that news of the murders caused few black women to be on the streets at night and black service workers were refusing to go to work after dark. [4]
News reports also noted the similarities of the victims in the case. By the end of 1911, fifteen women, all black or dark-skinned, all in their early 20s, had been murdered in the same manner. [5] The victims were all described as "good looking" and "neatly dressed", with many of them having received an education. [4] The murders were all described as having been committed with a knife or other sharp object, with their gruesomeness being of particular note. The murderer would rip, tear and mutilate the bodies of the victims after death. [4] One victim, Lena Sharpe, was described as having had her head almost severed. [4]
The search for the serial killer, named "the Atlanta Ripper" by the press, found six different suspects but no convictions were ever made, nor was the crime ever solved. [5] The "Ripper" may have had as many as 21 victims, but there is no conclusive proof that the murders were carried out by one person. [6]
It was reported that the daughter of one of the victims, who was also attacked by an assailant and recovered, caught sight of the attacker. [4] She described him as a large, black man who was powerfully built and neatly dressed. [4]
Peter William Sutcliffe, also known as Peter Coonan, was an English serial killer who was convicted of murdering thirteen women and attempting to murder seven others between 1975 and 1980. He was dubbed in press reports as the Yorkshire Ripper, an allusion to the Victorian serial killer Jack the Ripper. He was sentenced to twenty concurrent sentences of life imprisonment, which were converted to a whole life order in 2010. Two of Sutcliffe's murders took place in Manchester; all the others were in West Yorkshire. Criminal psychologist Dr. David Holmes characterised Sutcliffe as being an "extremely callous, sexually sadistic serial killer."
Danny Harold Rolling, known as the Gainesville Ripper, was an American serial killer who murdered five students in Gainesville, Florida over four days in August 1990. He later confessed to raping several of his victims, committing a triple homicide in his home city of Shreveport, Louisiana, and attempting to murder his father in May 1990. In total, Rolling confessed to killing eight people. He was sentenced to death for the five Gainesville murders in 1994. He was executed by lethal injection in 2006.
Dennis Lynn Rader, also known as BTK, is an American serial killer who murdered at least ten people in Wichita and Park City, Kansas, between 1974 and 1991. Although Rader occasionally killed or attempted to kill men and children, he typically targeted women. His victims were often bound, sometimes with objects from their homes, and either suffocated with a plastic bag or manually strangled with a ligature.
The Servant Girl Annihilator, also known as the Austin Axe Murderer and the Midnight Assassin, was an unidentified American serial killer who preyed upon the city of Austin, Texas, in 1884 and 1885. The sobriquet originated with the writer O. Henry. The series of eight axe murders were referred to by contemporary sources as the Servant Girl Murders.
Jack the Ripper was an unidentified serial killer active in and around the impoverished Whitechapel district of London, England, in 1888. In both criminal case files and the contemporaneous journalistic accounts, the killer was also called the Whitechapel Murderer and Leather Apron.
Gordon Frederick Cummins was a British serial killer known as the Blackout Killer, the Blackout Ripper and the Wartime Ripper, who murdered four women and attempted to murder two others over a six-day period in London in February 1942. He is also suspected of committing two earlier murders in October 1941. Convicted of the murder of 34-year-old Evelyn Oatley, Cummins was sentenced to death and hanged at HMP Wandsworth on 25 June 1942.
The Lisbon Ripper was an unidentified serial killer who, between 1992 and 1993 murdered three prostitutes in Lisbon, Portugal.
The Whitechapel murders were committed in or near the impoverished Whitechapel district in the East End of London between 3 April 1888 and 13 February 1891. At various points some or all of these eleven unsolved murders of women have been ascribed to the notorious unidentified serial killer known as Jack the Ripper.
Derrick Todd Lee, also known as The Baton Rouge Serial Killer, was an American serial killer. From 1992 to 2003, Lee murdered seven women in the Baton Rouge area.
Lonnie David Franklin Jr., better known by the nickname Grim Sleeper, was an American serial killer who was responsible for at least ten murders and one attempted murder in Los Angeles, California from 1984 to 2007. He was also convicted for rape and sexual violence. Franklin earned his nickname when he appeared to have taken a 14-year break from his crimes, from 1988 to 2002.
The Flat-Tire murders were a series of unsolved murders in Broward and Miami-Dade Counties, Florida, occurring between February 1975 and January 1976. The name originated from the investigators' belief that, when the offender committed two of the murders, he had deflated the tires of the victims' cars. The list of suspected victims ultimately included twelve girls and women whose bodies were discovered in or near South Florida canals. The murders were the subject of a 2021 book entitled The Flat Tire Murders: Unsolved Crimes of a South Florida Serial Killer.
Derek Ernest Percy was an Australian suspected serial killer and convicted child killer who was also a person of interest linked to the mysterious deaths and disappearances of multiple children in the 1960s, including the Beaumont disappearances and the Wanda Beach murders.
The Thames Torso Murders, often called the Thames Mysteries or the Embankment Murders, were a sequence of unsolved murders of women occurring in London, England from 1887 to 1889. The series included four incidents which were filed as belonging to the same series. None of the cases were solved, and only one of the four victims was identified. In addition, other murders of a similar kind, taking place between 1873 and 1902, have also been associated with the same murder series.
William Devin Howell is an American serial killer who was convicted of murdering seven women in 2003. He is one of the most prolific serial killers in Connecticut history. In November 2017, while already serving a 15-year prison sentence for manslaughter, he was sentenced to six consecutive life sentences, which he is currently serving at Cheshire Correctional Institution.
Charles Lee Duffy is an American serial killer and rapist who murdered three women in the Atlanta metropolitan area over six weeks in the summer of 1997. Having been turned in by his mother, Duffy later pleaded guilty and received two life sentences for his crimes.
Jacqueline Susan Ansell-Lamb and Barbara Janet Mayo were two young women who were murdered in separate incidents in 1970. Both women were last seen hitch-hiking along motorways in England, and both were sexually assaulted before being strangled to death.
Alun Kyte, known as the Midlands Ripper, is an English double murderer, serial rapist, child rapist, paedophile and suspected serial killer. He was convicted in 2000 of the murders of two sex workers, 20-year-old Samo Paull and 30-year-old Tracey Turner, whom he killed in December 1993 and March 1994 respectively. After his conviction, investigators announced their suspicions that Kyte could have been behind a number of other unsolved murders of sex workers across Britain in the 1980s and 1990s. He was apprehended due to the ground-breaking investigations of a wider police enquiry named Operation Enigma, which was launched in 1996 in response to the murders of Paull, Turner and of a large number of other sex workers. Kyte was sentenced to a minimum of 25 years imprisonment for the murders of Paull and Turner.
Chris Clark is a British amateur crime writer who writes chiefly about serial killers and their supposed links to unsolved crimes. He is a retired police intelligence officer who worked in the King's Lynn area for Norfolk Police, although his career was somewhat unsuccessful and he had three applications to join the new National Criminal Intelligence Service rejected in 1993, with the commanding officers unimpressed by his record and applications. In 2022, his book Yorkshire Ripper: The Secret Murders, which was jointly written with journalist Tim Tate and alleged links between Peter Sutcliffe and unsolved murders, was made into an ITV prime-time documentary series of the same name.
David Smith is an English repeat murderer, rapist and suspected serial killer who came to national prominence in 1999 when he was convicted of murdering a sex worker six years after having been acquitted of an "almost identical" murder. Cleared of the murder of 33-year-old west London sex worker Sarah Crump in 1993, Smith was found guilty in 1999 of the killing of 21-year-old Paddington sex worker Amanda Walker. Smith has since been linked to a number of other murders of sex workers across Britain.