A serial killer is a person who murders at least two or three people, with the killings taking place over a significant period of time in separate events. Their psychological gratification is the motivation for the killings, and many serial murders involve sexual contact with the victims at different points during the murder process. The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) states that the motives of serial killers can include anger, thrill-seeking, financial gain, and attention seeking, and killings may be executed as such. The victims tend to have things in common such as demographic profile, appearance, gender or race. Although a serial killer is a distinct classification that differs from that of a mass murderer, spree killer, or contract killer, there are overlaps between them.
Edmund Emil Kemper III is an American serial killer convicted of murdering seven women and one girl, between May 1972 and April 1973. Years earlier, at the age of 15, Kemper had murdered his paternal grandparents. Kemper was nicknamed the Co-ed Killer, as most of his non-familial victims were female college students hitchhiking in the vicinity of Santa Cruz County, California. Most of his murders included necrophilia, decapitation, and dismemberment.
The Manhattan Psychiatric Center is a New York-state run psychiatric hospital on Wards Island in New York City. As of 2009, it was licensed for 509 beds, but holds only around 200 patients. The current building is 17 stories tall. The building strongly resembles the main building of the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens. It is adjacent to Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center, a specialized facility for patients with criminal convictions.
Joel David Rifkin is an American serial killer, who was sentenced to 203 years in prison for the murders of nine women between 1989 and 1993, though it is believed he killed as many as 17 people.
Jerome Henry "Jerry" Brudos was an American serial killer and necrophile known as the Lust Killer and the Shoe Fetish Slayer who committed the kidnap, rape, and murder of four young women between 1968 and 1969 in Salem, Oregon. He is also known to have attempted to abduct two other young women.
David Michael Krueger, best known by his birth name, Peter Woodcock, was a Canadian serial killer, child rapist and diagnosed psychopath. He gained notoriety for the murders of three young children in Toronto in the late 1950s, as well as for a murder in 1991 on his first day of unsupervised release from the psychiatric institution in which he had been incarcerated for his earlier crimes.
Richard Francis Cottingham is an American serial killer who was convicted in New York of six murders committed between 1972 and 1980 and convicted in New Jersey of twelve murders committed between 1967 and 1978. He was nicknamed by media as the Torso Killer and the Times Square Ripper, since some of the murders he was convicted of included mutilation.
William MacDonald was an English serial killer responsible for the deaths of five people in the Australian states of Queensland and New South Wales between 1961 and 1962.
Peter Vronsky is a Canadian author, filmmaker, and investigative historian. He holds a PhD in criminal justice history and espionage in international relations from the University of Toronto. He is the author of the bestseller true crime histories Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (2004), Female Serial Killers: How and Why Women Become Monsters and Sons of Cain: A History of Serial Killers From the Stone Age to the Present (2018), a New York Times Editors' Choice, and most recently American Serial Killers: The Epidemic Years 1950–2000 (2021), a history exploring the epidemic surge of serial killers in the second half of the 20th century. He is the director of several feature films, including Bad Company (1980) and Mondo Moscow (1992). Vronsky is the creator of a body of formal video and electronic artworks and new media. He has also worked professionally in the motion picture and television industry as a producer and cinematographer in the field of documentary production and news broadcasting with CNN, CTV, CBC, RAI and other global television networks in North America and overseas. Vronsky's 2011 book, Ridgeway: The American Fenian Invasion and the 1866 Battle That Made Canada, is the definitive history of Canada's first modern battle – the Battle of Ridgeway fought against Irish American Fenian insurgents who invaded across the border from the United States on the eve of Canadian Confederation shortly after the American Civil War. He currently lectures at Toronto Metropolitan University's History Department in the history of international relations, terrorism, espionage, American Civil War, and the Third Reich. He consults as an investigative criminal historian to a number of law enforcement cold case homicide units including the NYPD, New York State Police, and Bergen County Prosecutor's Office New Jersey.
Charles Ray Hatcher was an American serial killer. He was convicted in Missouri of one murder, has been linked to four others in Illinois and California, and confessed to having murdered a total of 16 people between 1969 and 1982.
The Alphabet murders are an unsolved series of child murders which occurred between 1971 and 1973 in Rochester, New York.
James Clifford Carson and Susan Barnes Carson are American serial killers convicted for three murders between 1981 and 1983 in Northern California and the San Francisco Bay Area.
David Joseph Carpenter, also known as The Trailside Killer, is an American serial killer and serial rapist known for stalking and murdering a variety of individuals on hiking trails in state parks near San Francisco, California. He attacked at least ten individuals and was convicted in seven murders and was confirmed to be the killer in an eighth murder; Carpenter is also suspected in two additional killings. Two victims, Steven Haertle and Lois Rinna, mother of television personality Lisa Rinna, survived. Carpenter used a .38 caliber handgun in all but one of the killings. A .44 caliber handgun was used in the killing of Edda Kane on Mount Tamalpais.
The Doodler is an unidentified serial killer believed responsible for between six and sixteen murders and three assaults of men in San Francisco, California, between January 1974 and September 1975. The nickname was given due to the perpetrator's habit of sketching his victims prior to stabbing them to death. The perpetrator met his victims at gay nightclubs, bars and restaurants.
The murder of Cheri Jo Bates occurred in Riverside, California, on October 30, 1966. Bates, an 18-year-old college freshman, was stabbed and slashed to death on the grounds of Riverside City College. Police determined the assailant had disabled the ignition coil wire and distributor of Bates' Volkswagen Beetle as a method to lure her from her car as she studied in the college library. The murder itself remains one of Riverside's most infamous cold cases, and has been described by some locals as a murder which "stripped Riverside of its innocence".
Ludwig Tessnow was a German serial killer known as the Monster of Rügen and the Mad Carpenter of Rügen, who murdered four prepubescent children in two separate attacks in 1898 and 1901.
Richard Westall Rogers Jr., known as The Last Call Killer, is an American serial killer. After being acquitted for the murder of a college student in Maine, he moved to New Jersey, where he murdered and dismembered two gay and bisexual men in 1992 and 1993. His modus operandi consisted of luring the men from piano bars in Manhattan, murdering and dismembering them at an unknown location, and dumping their bodies in garbage bags along highways in New Jersey.
