List of Famous Serial Killers

Shoko Asahara , born Chizuo Matsumoto , was the founder and leader of the Japanese doomsday cult known as Aum Shinrikyo. He was convicted of masterminding the deadly 1995 sarin-gas attack on the Tokyo subway, and was also involved in several other crimes. Asahara was sentenced to death in 2004. In May 2012, his execution was postponed due to further arrests of Aum members. He was executed by hanging on July 6, 2018.

Joseph Roy Metheny was an American murderer from the Baltimore, Maryland area who said that he was a serial killer and had killed up to 13 people. However, sufficient evidence was only found to convict him for two murders. His victims were heavily involved with alcohol and addictive hard drugs, as was Metheny himself, and the killings also involved brutal sexual assaults.

The Long Island serial killer is an unidentified suspected serial killer who is believed to have murdered 10 to 16 people over a period of nearly 20 years, mostly prostitutes, and left their bodies in areas on the South Shore of Long Island, New York.

Countess Elizabeth Báthory de Ecsed was a Hungarian noblewoman from the noble family of Báthory, who owned land in the Kingdom of Hungary.

Bible John is an unidentified serial killer who is believed to have murdered three young women between 1968 and 1969 in Glasgow, Scotland.

Joseph-Thomas "Tommy" Recco (born 1934), nicknamed "Geronimo", is a French serial killer. He was sentenced to criminal imprisonment in 1962 for murdering his godfather two years earlier. Released in 1977, he killed three cashiers in Béziers in December 1979 and three other people, including an 11-year-old, in Carqueiranne in January 1980. He was sentenced in 1983 to life imprisonment without parole for these two triple murders. An inmate since 1980, Tommy Recco is one of the oldest detainees in France.

Harold Frederick Shipman , known to acquaintances as Fred Shipman, was an English general practitioner who is believed to be one of the most prolific serial killers in modern history. On 31 January 2000, he was found guilty of the murder of 15 patients under his care; his total number of victims was approximately 250. Shipman was sentenced to life imprisonment with the recommendation that he never be released. He died by suicide by hanging on 13 January 2004, a day before his 58th birthday, in his cell at HM Prison Wakefield, West Yorkshire.

Ottis Elwood Toole was an American drifter and serial killer who was convicted of six counts of murder. Like his companion Henry Lee Lucas, Toole made confessions he then later recanted, which resulted in murder convictions. The discrediting of the case against Lucas for crimes for which Toole had offered corroborating statements created doubts as to whether either was a genuine serial killer or, as Hugh Aynesworth suggested, both were merely compliant interviewees whom police used to clear unsolved murders from the books.

Amelia Elizabeth Dyer was an English serial killer who murdered infants in her care over a thirty-year period during the Victorian period of the United Kingdom. Trained as a nurse and widowed in 1869, Dyer turned to baby farming—the practice of adopting unwanted infants in exchange for money—to support herself. She initially cared for the children legitimately, in addition to having two of her own, but whether intentionally or not a number of them died in her care, leading to a conviction for neglect and six months' hard labour. She then began directly murdering children she "adopted", strangling at least some of them, and disposing of the bodies to avoid attention. Mentally unstable, she was committed to several mental asylums throughout her life, despite suspicions of feigning, and survived at least one serious suicide attempt.

Robert Black was a Scottish serial killer and paedophile who was convicted of the kidnap, rape, sexual assault and murder of four girls aged between 5 and 11 in a series of killings committed between 1981 and 1986 in the United Kingdom.