Gwen Amber Rose Araujo was an American teenager who was murdered in Newark, California, at the age of 17. She was murdered by four men, two of whom she had been sexually intimate with, who beat and strangled her after discovering that she was transgender. Two of the defendants were convicted of second-degree murder, but not the requested hate-crime enhancements to the charges. The other two defendants pleaded guilty or no-contest to voluntary manslaughter. In at least one of the trials, a "trans panic defense"—an extension of the gay panic defense—was employed.
Hans Thomas Reiser is an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, and convicted murderer. In April 2008, Reiser was convicted of the first-degree murder of his wife, Nina Reiser, who disappeared in September 2006. He subsequently pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of second-degree murder, as part of a settlement agreement that included disclosing the location of Nina Reiser's body, which he revealed to be in a shallow grave near the couple's home.
A thrill killing is premeditated or random murder that is motivated by the sheer excitement of the act. While there have been attempts to categorize multiple murders, such as identifying "thrill killing" as a type of "hedonistic mass killing", actual details of events frequently overlap category definitions making attempts at such distinctions problematic.
River's Edge is a 1986 American crime drama film directed by Tim Hunter, written by Neal Jimenez, and starring Crispin Glover, Keanu Reeves, Ione Skye Leitch in her film debut, Daniel Roebuck and Dennis Hopper. It follows a group of teenagers in a Northern California town who are forced to deal with their friend's murder of his girlfriend and the subsequent disposal of her body. Jimenez partially based the script on the 1981 murder of Marcy Renee Conrad in Milpitas, California.
Paul Charles Denyer is an Australian serial killer currently serving three consecutive sentences of life imprisonment with a non-parole period of 30 years for the murders of three young women in Melbourne, in 1993. Denyer became known in the media as the Frankston Serial Killer as his crimes occurred in the neighbouring suburbs of Frankston.
Levi Bellfield is an English serial killer, sex offender, rapist, kidnapper, and burglar. He was found guilty on 25 February 2008 of the murders of Marsha McDonnell and Amélie Delagrange and the attempted murder of Kate Sheedy, and sentenced to life imprisonment. On 23 June 2011, Bellfield was further found guilty of the murder of Milly Dowler. On both occasions, the judge imposed a whole life order, meaning that Bellfield will serve the sentence without the possibility of parole. Bellfield was the first prisoner in history to have received two whole life orders.
David John Birnie and Catherine Margaret Birnie were an Australian couple from Perth who murdered four women at their home in 1986, also attempting to murder a fifth. These crimes were referred to in the press as the Moorhouse murders, after the Birnies' address at 3 Moorhouse Street in Willagee, a suburb of Perth.
Stuck is a 2007 black comedy thriller film directed by Stuart Gordon and starring Mena Suvari and Stephen Rea, with a plot inspired by the true story of the murder of Gregory Glenn Biggs. The film premiered on May 21, 2007 at the Cannes Film Market. It was later adapted in Bollywood as Accident on Hill Road starring Celina Jaitley in Mena Suvari's role. It was the final film Gordon directed before his death.
Jennifer Moore was an 18-year-old American student from Harrington Park, New Jersey, who was abducted around July 25, 2006, from Manhattan, New York, and then raped and murdered.
The rapes and murders of Jennifer Lee Ertman and Elizabeth Christine Peña, two teenage girls from Houston, Texas, aged 14 and 16, respectively, occurred on June 24, 1993. The murder of the two girls made headlines in Texas newspapers due to the nature of the crime and the new law resulting from the murder that allows families of the victims to view the execution of the murderers. The case was also notable in that the state of Texas rejected attempts by the International Court of Justice to halt several perpetrators' executions.
Ivan Robert Marko Milat, commonly referred to in media as the Backpacker Murderer, was an Australian serial killer who abducted, assaulted, robbed and murdered two men and five women in New South Wales between 1989 and 1992. His modus operandi was to approach backpackers along the Hume Highway under the guise of providing them transport to areas of southern New South Wales, then take his victims into the Belanglo State Forest where he would incapacitate and murder them. Milat is also suspected of having committed many other similar offences around Australia.
The history of violence against LGBTQ people in the United States is made up of assaults on gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender individuals, legal responses to such violence, and hate crime statistics in the United States of America. The people who are the targets of such violence are believed to violate heteronormative rules and they are also believed to contravene perceived protocols of gender and sexual roles. People who are perceived to be LGBTQ may also be targeted for violence. Violence can also occur between couples who are of the same sex, with statistics showing that violence among female same-sex couples is more common than it is among couples of the opposite sex, but male same-sex violence is less common.
Michael Wayne McGray is a Canadian serial killer convicted of killing seven individuals between 1985 and 1998. He claims to have killed eleven others during the same time period.
Seya Sadewmi, was a four-year-old Sri Lankan child who was abducted, raped and murdered. The girl went missing from her house on 12 September 2015 while sleeping with her mother. After an extensive search of the premises by the police K9 unit, the naked body was discovered on the morning of 13 September 2015 near a canal. The body was found 200 meters away from the house. An autopsy revealed that Sadewmi had been sexually assaulted and was strangled to death. Four arrests were made by the Kotadeniyawa police, and two of them were later exonerated after a DNA testing. Third suspect, Dinesh Priyashantha subsequently confessed to the crime. Later he revealed that his brother, Saman Jayalath, manipulated him into confessing. Once arrested, Jayalath concurred with Priysantha's allegations and was detained for further investigations.
On March 3, 1993, Saint Joseph Academy high school senior Albert Joseph "Joey" Fischer Jr. was shot dead outside his home in Rancho Viejo, an upscale community north of Brownsville, Texas. Dora Cisneros, the mother of his ex-girlfriend, was responsible for orchestrating Fischer's murder after he broke up with her daughter Cristina. Fischer and Cristina had broken up the previous summer, but Cisneros became obsessed with their relationship and insisted that Fischer date her daughter again. After he refused a US$500 offer from Cisneros, she consulted María Mercedes Martínez, a fortune teller, to cast a spell on him.
On April 29, 2017, Jordan Edwards, a 15-year-old African-American boy, was murdered by police officer Roy Oliver in Balch Springs, Texas, within the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. Edwards was shot in the back of the head while riding in the front passenger's seat of a vehicle driving away from officers that attempted to stop it. He was unarmed during the encounter.
Donald Murphy is an American suspected serial killer, sex offender and bank robber, convicted of murdering two prostitutes in Detroit in 1980. During this time, several similar murders occurred in the city, presumably committed by two or more killers operating in the area, with Murphy himself confessing to committing at least six of them. However, he was convicted of only two with the available evidence, and sentenced to 15–30 years imprisonment for each murder.
Lyle Richard Brummett is an American serial killer who raped and killed three women in Texas from 1975 to 1976, two with the help of accomplice Allen Ladd Woody. Charged with two of the killings in exchange for testifying against Woody, Brummett had one of the murder charges dropped and was sentenced to life imprisonment.
On 13 January 1998, a Bulgarian student named Iordanka Apostolova, alias Tamia Pachinko, was discovered dead in a canal at Tanah Merah Ferry Road, Singapore. Investigations led the police to arrest one male suspect, who was Iordanka’s friend, while another man surrendered himself to the police. The two men were charged with her murder and later hanged in 1999. A third accomplice, the wife of one of the executed men who helped conceal the evidence of the murder, was subsequently imprisoned for six years by the courts for failing to report the crime to the authorities.
