List of Famous Serial Killers

Andrew Phillip Cunanan was an American serial killer known to have murdered five people during a three-month period in mid-1997. His victims included Italian fashion designer Gianni Versace and Chicago real estate developer Lee Miglin. Cunanan died of suicide by gunshot on July 23, 1997.

Edmund Emil Kemper III is an American serial killer, serial rapist, cannibal, and necrophile who murdered ten people, including his paternal grandparents and mother. He is noted for his large size, at 6 feet 9 inches (2.06 m), and for his high intellect, possessing an IQ of 145. Kemper was nicknamed the Co-ed Killer, as most of his victims were female college students.

Keith Hunter Jesperson is a Canadian-American serial killer who murdered at least eight women in the United States during the early 1990s. He was known as the "Happy Face Killer" because he drew smiley faces on his many letters to the media and prosecutors. Many of his victims were sex workers and transients who had no connection to him. Strangulation was his preferred method of murdering, the same method he often used to kill animals as a child.

Joseph James DeAngelo Jr. is an American serial killer, serial rapist, burglar, and former police officer who committed at least 13 murders, 50 rapes, and 120 burglaries across California between 1973 and 1986. DeAngelo was responsible for at least three crime sprees throughout California, each of which spawned a different nickname in the press, before it became evident that they were committed by the same offender. In the San Joaquin Valley, he was known as the Visalia Ransacker before moving to the Sacramento area, where he became known as the East Area Rapist and was linked by modus operandi to additional attacks in Contra Costa County, Stockton, and Modesto. DeAngelo committed serial murders in Santa Barbara, Ventura, and Orange counties, where he was known as the Night Stalker and later the Original Night Stalker. DeAngelo is believed to have taunted and threatened both victims and police in obscene phone calls and possibly written communications.

James Joseph "Whitey" Bulger Jr. was an Irish-American organized crime boss and FBI informant who led the Winter Hill Gang in the Winter Hill neighborhood of Somerville, Massachusetts, a city directly northwest of Boston. On December 23, 1994, Bulger fled the Boston area and went into hiding after his former FBI handler, John Connolly, tipped him off about a pending RICO indictment against him. Bulger remained at large for sixteen years. After his 2011 arrest, federal prosecutors tried Bulger for nineteen murders based on the grand jury testimony from Kevin Weeks and other former criminal associates.

Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo was a Soviet serial killer, nicknamed the Butcher of Rostov, the Red Ripper, and the Rostov Ripper, who sexually assaulted, murdered, and mutilated at least fifty-two women and children between 1978 and 1990 in the Russian SFSR, the Ukrainian SSR, and the Uzbek SSR. Chikatilo confessed to fifty-six murders, fifty-three for which he was tried in April 1992. He was convicted and sentenced to death for fifty-two murders in October 1992, although the Supreme Court of Russia ruled in 1993 that insufficient evidence existed to prove his guilt in nine of those killings. Chikatilo was subsequently executed in February 1994.

Kurt-Werner Wichmann was a German serial killer, who was probably responsible for the Göhrde Murders.

Dennis Lynn Rader is an American serial killer known as BTK or the BTK Strangler or the BTK Killer. Between 1974 and 1991, Rader killed ten people in Wichita and Park City, Kansas, and sent taunting letters to police and newspapers describing the details of his crimes. After a decade-long hiatus, Rader resumed sending letters in 2004, leading to his 2005 arrest and subsequent guilty plea. He is serving ten consecutive life sentences at El Dorado Correctional Facility in Prospect Township, Butler County, Kansas.

Hatchand Bhaonani Gurumukh Charles Sobhraj is a French thief, fraudster and serial killer. Sobhraj preyed on Western tourists, throughout the Hippie Trail of Southeast Asia during the 1970s.

Jack the Ripper was an unidentified serial killer active in the largely impoverished areas in and around the Whitechapel district of London in 1888. In both the criminal case files and contemporary journalistic accounts, the killer was called the Whitechapel Murderer and Leather Apron.