NAMES: KHADIJA MAZHAR, RAKIA RANA, SANA

SOHAIL, AQSA TAHIR, MUDASSIR AHMAD, RAMSHA

Serial killers are the individuals who have committed murders of more than three
individuals in a relatively short time span. These murderers attain a feeling of
pleasure and fulfillment when they kill, as it is a source of psychological satisfaction
to them. Let us talk about a few of the most notorious killers that have ever existed
in history.

1. Ted Bundy:

Theodore Robert Bundy (known as Ted Bundy) was born on 24 November 1946 to
Eleanor Louise Cowell in Vermont, U.S. His biological father is unknown; however, his
grandparents raised him until his mother married Johnny Bundy, giving him his
surname. Ted did not have the best relationship with his parents, as he resented his
mother for never talking about his real father, and his stepfather for not making
much money.

At the age of three, Ted developed an obsession with knives and later, gory topics
involving murder and deaths. As he approached his teenage years, the boy started
developing perverted habits like peeping through people’s windows to watch them
change clothes, and even commit robberies. Moreover, he would also search
trashcans to search for magazines containing articles on murder or pictures of naked
women. Later in his youth, Ted Bundy enrolled in the University of Washington from
where he attained a bachelor’s degree in Psychology. He was a very intelligent and
smart student, however, when it came to social life, he was not doing well since he
had a hard time interacting with people or making friends.

Around this time, in the late 60’s, Ted began a relationship with a single alcoholic
mother who referred to him as a “warm and loving” person. One of the key factors
that led him to win people’s trust and consequently his victims was his charming and
charismatic personality. The serial killer was a devil in disguise, as his looks and
persona made it very impossible to believe that he could be a murderer. According to
the estimates of experts, his victims comprise of more than a hundred young
women, having some as young as twelve years old.

Allegedly, Ted started his killings in 1974, which is exactly when various women
started to go missing in the area. The method used by the killer was luring his victims
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into his car by pretending injured, in need of help, or that his car broke down. As the
women reached out to help, he would kidnap them right away. There was a fixed
pattern that Ted’s killings usually followed, which involved brutally raping victims,
and then beating or strangling them to death. Moreover, he beheaded twelve of his
victims, and killed a few in their sleep. Sometimes, the killer would even keep heads
of the poor victims in his apartment as ‘trophies’ and touch or look at them for his
satisfaction.

To make it worse, Ted often went back to the bodies of his victims and performed
sexual acts with the corpses until they were decomposed. One of the victims that
suffered the abuse on 1 February 1974 was a 21-year-old woman (name not
mentioned to maintain confidentiality). Ted bludgeoned and abducted the woman in
her sleep, and later, officials discovered her skull and jawbone on Taylor Mountain in
California. The same year, Ted Bundy attended law school in Utah, where women
started disappearing as well. He disposed and buried many of these victims’ bodies,
which is why most of them are unidentified to this day.

On August 16, 1975, Ted drove past a red light traffic signal, which is why a police
officer asked him to pull over. Upon looking inside his car, the officer noticed a
missing passenger seat, and asked him to step out of the vehicle. While searching
Ted’s car, the officer found a “murder kit” in the backseat that contained a mask,
ropes, handcuffs, trash bags, and various tools. Moreover, the police officer
recognized Ted’s car description from a previous kidnapping, and therefore arrested
him. After forensic testing in labs, the officials found hairs of two missing women in
the car. Ted was imprisoned, but managed to escape countless times, and went back
to raping and killing young women again.

The abuse and killings continued until February 15 1979, when the police asked Ted
to pull over for driving a stolen vehicle. This is when they arrested Ted, and found
ID’s of three victims in his car along with twenty-one stolen credit cards and
television set. Ted was once again imprisoned and a after a few months of
investigations, court convicted him for first-degree murders. The court declared
death sentences for Ted in 1979 and 1980 as well, after declaring him psychologically
competent to stand trial. Finally, on 24 January 1989, the court lawfully executed Ted
Bundy by strapping him to an electrocuting chair in the Florida State Prison.

2. Richard Ramirez-The Nightstalker:

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Richard Ramirez (known as the Night Stalker) was an American serial killer, rapist,
kidnapper, and burglar. Ramirez was born on 29 February 1960 to Ricardo Leyva
Muoz Ramirez in Texas, U.S. His father was a police officer with severe anger issues,
which could be one of the reasons behind the behavior that Richard reflected
throughout his life.

Ramirez, also known as Ricky, suffered multiple head injuries as a child and began to
experience epileptic fits after knocking unconscious by a swing at the age of five. His
older cousin, Miguel, who had recently returned from the Vietnam War, heavily
influenced Ramirez as a teenager. Miguel told Ramirez about the torture and
mutilation he had inflicted on several Vietnamese women while they smoked
marijuana together, with photographic evidence to back up his claims. Furthermore,
Ramirez witnessed his cousin murder his wife when he was just thirteen.

After Ramirez dropped out of ninth grade, police arrested him for marijuana
possession for the first time in 1977. He later developed a cocaine addiction, habits
involving burglary, and an odd obsession with Satanism. On June 28, 1984, Ramirez's
first known murder occurred; the victim was seventy-nine-year-old Jennie Vincow,
who he sexually assaulted, stabbed, and killed in her own home during a burglary.
Following that, a wave of brutal murders, rapes, and robberies committed by
Ramirez claimed the lives of dozens of people.

On March 27, Ramirez shot and killed Vincent Zazzara, sixty-four, and his forty-four-
year-old wife, Maxine, utilizing an assault style that would turn into an example for
the executioner. He shot the husband and then his wife after brutally attacking and
wounding her to death. Ramirez also scratched out Maxine’s eyes in this case. He
headed north to San Francisco on August 17 and murdered two more people, Peter
and Barbara Pan. The "Valley Intruder" moniker was no longer appropriate because
of his unmistakable M.O., which included satanic symbolism; the press quickly coined
a new moniker, the "Night Stalker," because majority of his assaults took place at
night in the homes of his victims.

The serial killer murdered at least fourteen people and tortured dozens more before
his arrest and interrogation in 1985. Police arrested Ramirez shortly after his final
night of terror on August 24. He unintentionally left a footprint outside Mission Viejo
home, before the witness noticed his car and number plate. After Ramirez raped and

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shot another woman at her home, the victim gave a detailed description of her
attacker, who had forced her to swear her love for Satan.

A few days later, the police discovered an abandoned car that had a fingerprint to
make a match with Ramirez. Moreover, his criminal record allowed the police to
identify the "Night Stalker." Thanks to national TV and print media coverage
featuring his prison photo and a series of clues from witnesses and survivors, Police
captured Ramirez on August 31 after East L.A. residents while attempting two
carjackings beat him.

Ramirez’s drug abuse and interest in Satanism after developing epilepsy as a child
became a calling card for investigators at his crime scenes. Ramirez used a wide
variety of weapons and different murder methods involving guns, tire irons,
handcuffs, thumb cuffs, knives, and claw hammers. Police arrested Ramirez in August
1985 and sentenced him to death at the end of his trial in 1989. He died of cancer on
June 7, 2013, at the age of fifty-three, at San Quentin Prison in California.

Ramirez sat in jail as his trial repeatedly postponed due to plenty of other motions
between the prosecutors and defense attorney. Some of the charges against Ramirez
dropped to speed up what was becoming a long journey to justice due to the
geographical spread of the crimes; jurisdictional issues also complicated the scope of
the trial. The jury selection process completed on July 22, 1988, and the trial began in
January of the following year. Ramirez gathered a cult-like following of supporters
during this time, many of whom were black-clad Satan worshippers. For his court
appearances, Ramirez wore many black and dark shades.

On August 14, 1989, one of the jurors was murdered, but rumors that Ramirez was
responsible for her death were untrue. On September 20, 1989, jury found the
defendants guilty of all forty-three charges, including thirteen counts of murder, five
counts of attempted murder, eleven counts of sexual assault, and fourteen counts of
burglary. Moreover, Ramirez had link to many other heinous crimes. In 2009, a DNA
sample linked him to the rape and murder of a nine-year-old girl on April 10, 1984 in
San Francisco.

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The same jury suggested the death penalty on nineteen counts two weeks later.
"Hey, big deal, Death comes with the territory. I'll see you in Disneyland," Ramirez
said as he walked out of the courtroom." On November 7, 1989, the court sentenced
the convicted murderer to death by gas chamber and sent him to San Quentin Prison
in California. Lastly, Ramirez died on June 7, 2013 at the age of fifty-three from
complications related to B-cell lymphoma, after nearly twenty-four years on death
row.

3. Jack the Ripper:

Jack the Ripper was a serial killer, who usually killed victims around Whitechapel
district area in London around 1970s. In criminal case files and news reports, the
killer had names like Leather apron, Whitechapel murderer and The Ripper. The
attacks of Jack the Ripper usually involved female prostitutes who lived and worked
in the slums of East End London. Moreover, he cut their throat off before the
disfigurement. The killer removed organs of at least three of his victims, which led to
the proposal that the killer has some kind of knowledge about anatomy.

The name Jack the Ripper came in front of newspapers after a man claiming to be the
killer wrote a letter to the police, signing off by the name “Jack the Ripper”. The
police also received a tape from the killer where he was counting down all the
murdered he has already done and that he does not think of stopping anytime soon.

From August 1975 to June 1977, “Jack the Ripper" terrorized the Whitechapel District
in London's East End where he murdered four female prostitutes and one innocent
teenage girl who he misinterpreted as a prostitute. After this incident, everything
changed and the police investigated the case even more because now an innocent
teenage girl was involved in this case.

The first case of his murder was around 1975, where police discovered a woman’s
body not far from where she was currently living with her children. Her name was
Wilma McCann, a twenty-eight year old single mother, had three children and to
earn money, she worked as a prostitute. Next, around January 1976, police found
another body at the rear of a bakery in Chapel Town. The police identified the body

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as a forty-three-year-old Emily Jackson, who was a mother of four, her husband was
convict, and the only way she could give her debts, help her husband and support
her children was prostitution. At this stage, it was clear that the killer is going after
the prostitutes.

There were various similarities in the way he killed his victims. The stab wounds were
either round shaped or cross-shaped, possibly the weapon that he used was a
hammer or a screwdriver. In addition, the list of his murders grew over months.
Then in June 1977, everything totally changed when a sixteen-year-old Jayne
McDonald was murdered, who was not a prostitute and was working in a super
market. The women of London were actually scared because now any women could
be his new target.

In July 1977, the Ripper attacked a woman named Maureen Long but she survived.
He struck her on the back of her head and stabbed four to five times. This was a new
turn in the case because the victims usually never survived. Police interviewed
Maureen and they made a sketch of the killer according to what she saw the man
looked time. Again, everything leads to a dead-end. The killer killed more females
over the year, and the police was unable to do anything. Out of a blue, the police
station received a tape of a man claiming to be Jack the Ripper. He identified all the
women he killed in the past and he said that he does not wish to stop anytime soon.
The voice of the killer as well as the handwriting sent through a mail to the police
were an asset to the case but again the police got no luck finding him.

After five years of killing more than twenty-five women, police arrested Jack the
Ripper. On that night, two of the police officers were patrolling around the area
where prostitutes usually worked. They saw a man and a woman in the car parked in
a long and abandoned street. The police officer ran a number plate check and found
out that the number plate did not belong to the car. The police took them into
custody under the charges of vehicle offense. While in the police station the police
officer saw a huge resemblance between Jack the Ripper and the man they had taken
into custody. Being a responsible officer, he said that he would go back to the place
where we arrested him and I am going to search the whole area. Moreover, police
officials also found a hammer and a knife on the site where the police took him into
custody.

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Later, the name of the killer identified as Peter Sutcliffe. Peter was born on 2 June
1946 and died on 13 November 2020. Through his childhood and his early
adolescence, Sutcliffe showed no signs of abnormality. But one of his brothers
admitted that their father was an abusive alcoholic, stating that their father once
smashed a beer glass over Peter's head for sitting in his chair at the Christmas table,
after arguing, when the brother was four or five years old. Their father used to whip
them with a belt as well. Furthermore, Peter’s father was abusive towards his
mother as well, and in that situation, Peter always used to take his mother’s side.

Peter was always the quiet one and did not really fit in his class because of his slow
growing pace. His father reported that while passing through his school, in the break
time he used to sit alone in the corner of the ground. Visibly, he showed no signs that
he could be a suspect as a killer, however, all the anger and social norms led him into
becoming one.

4. Jeffrey Dahmer:

Jeffrey Dahmer was born on May 21, 1960 in Milwaukee. He defined as an active and
joyful child until the age of four when a surgery to correct a double hernia appeared
to effect a change in the boy. By his early adolescences, he was disengaged, stressed
and largely friendless. Dahmer claims that his obligations toward murder began
when he was fourteen years old, but it seems that the breakdown of his parents'
marriage and their divorce a few years later may have been the substance for turning
these thoughts into actions.

Jeffrey Dahmer murdered seventeen men between 1978 and 1991. He was cautious
to choose victims on the fringes of society, who were often travelling or marginal
criminals, making their disappearances less obvious and reducing the possibility of
his arrest. He lured them to his home with promises of money or sexual activity, and
then stifled them to death.

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 In July 1978, right after his graduation his first murder occurred, when he picked up
a traveler named Steven Hicks and took him home. Dahmer continued to get the boy
drunk; when Steven Hicks tried to go, Dahmer killed him. Over the following two
years, Dahmer's victim count accelerated, bringing his total from four to seventeen.
He built rituals as he progressed, experimenting with chemical means of removal,
and often consuming the skin of his victims. Dahmer also tried crude lobotomies,
drilling into victims' skulls while they were still alive and injecting them with muriatic
acid. Dahmer usually packed the body parts of his victims in the plastic bags and
buried them behind his parent’s home. He later crushed the human bones with a
sledgehammer and scattered them across a wooded ravine.

On 22 of July 1991, police arrested Dahmer and his killing spree ended. They also
discovered body parts in Dahmer’s refrigerator along photograph catalog of his
victims. Two Milwaukee police officers commanded to Dahmer when they picked up
Tracy Edwards, a thirty-two-year-old African American man who was wandering the
streets. They decided to investigate the man's claims that a "weird dude" had
drugged and restrained him. When police officers arrived at Dahmer's apartment,
Edwards claimed that the knife Dahmer had endangered him with was in the
bedroom. When the officers went there, they noticed Polaroid photographs of
dissected bodies. Following searches exposed a head in the refrigerator and three
more heads in the freezer.

In 1992, Dahmer’s trial began. Analysis states that the most of Dahmer's victims were
African American. During his trials, strict security precautions like eight-foot barrier
of bulletproof glass separated him from the gallery. Lionel Dahmer, Jeffrey’s father
along his second wife attended all the trial thoroughly. Dahmer firstly pleaded not
guilty, despite having admitted to the killings during police investigation. He
eventually changed guilty by virtue of irrationality. His defense then offered the
horrible details of his behavior as a proof that only insane person could do such
terrible acts.

The jury chose to believe the prosecution's statement that Jeffrey Dahmer was fully
aware of his terrible acts. On 15 of February 1992, prosecutors returned after a ten-

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hour discussion to find him guilty. He was sentenced to fifteen years, a life terms in
prison. Finally, his fellow prison inmate named Christopher Scarver killed Jeffrey
Dahmer on 28 November 1994.

5. Ed Gein:

Ed Gein was born on 27 August 1906 in the U.S. His real name was Edward Theodore
Gein but the world knew him by different names such as Eddie, The Mad Butcher,
The Plainfield Ghoul, or The Plainfield Butcher. The killer’s parents were George
Philip Gein and Augusta Wilhelmina, who were not in good terms with each other as
his father was an alcoholic who did not work for their living and was unable to earn a
job.

On 16 November 1957, the storeowner of a hardware store where Gein used to work
disappeared. The store saw a few customers that day, and people thought that it was
because of deer hunting season. However, when deputy sheriff and the owner’s son
Frank Worden visited the store, he found the cash register open and blood stains on
the floor. Through investigation, they came to know that before his mother’s
disappearance, Gein had been in the store. On the evening of the same day, police
arrested the killer at West Plainfield, as they found Worden's beheaded body in a
shed located on Gein's property. She hung upside down by her legs with a crossbar at
her ankles and ropes at her wrists. The torso had been "dressed up like a deer." He
has shot the woman with a twenty-two caliber rifle, and the mutilated her body after
she died.

Upon searching Gein’s house, the authorities found human bone fragments, a
wastebasket and chair covers made of human skin, skulls on Gein’s bedposts along
with a pair of lips on a window shade drawstring. In addition, there were female
skulls with tops sawn off along with bowls made from human skulls. Likewise, various
items such as corsets made from a female torso skinned from shoulders to waist,
leggings and masks made from human facial and body skin. Gein had stored nine
vulvae in a shoebox and even made a lampshade out of a human face. Apart from

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this, Gein had also begun working on a "woman suit" soon after his mother died so
that he could become his "mother to really crawl inside her flesh."

For some time, the police kept the items in a crime laboratory to click their pictures
after which they disposed them decently. Gein told investigators that between 1947
and 1952, he made up to forty midnight visits to three local cemeteries to exhume
recently buried bodies while in a "daze-like" state. On roughly thirty of those visits,
he claimed to have awoken from his trance in the cemetery, left the grave in fine
condition, and gone home empty-handed. On other occasions, he dug up the graves
of recently buried middle-aged women who looked like his mother and carried their
remains home, where he tanned their skins to construct his paraphernalia.

Gein confessed to stealing from nine local cemeteries and guided investigators to
their locations. The state crime laboratory's Allan Wilimovsky assisted in the opening
of three test graves indicated by Gein. The caskets were within wooden boxes. In
sandy soil, the tops of the boxes were roughly two feet below the surface. Gein had
plundered the tombs shortly after the funerals, when the graves were still
unfinished. Authorities exhumed the test graves as they were unsure whether the
small Gein could dig up a cemetery by himself in a single evening; but they
discovered things exactly as Gein described. There were two of the empty excavated
tombs (one had a crowbar in place of the body). One casket was empty while there
was one coffin Gein had failed to open when he misplaced his pry bar. This finally
confirmed the reality of Gein’s confession.

Ed Gein died on 26 July 1984 at the Mendota Mental Health Institute due to a
respiratory failure at the age of seventy-seven. Souvenir seekers chipped away his
gravestone at Plainfield Cemetery throughout the years, until someone stole the
stone itself. Finally found in June 2001 near Seattle, Washington, it was stored at the
Waushara County Sheriff's Department. Ed’s gravesite is now unmarked, but
definitely not forgotten.

6. John Wayne Gacy:

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John Wayne Gacy was born on 17 March 1942. He was a seemingly normal man from
Chicago, Illinois, however, in reality, is one of the most prominent serial killers in
American history. Court convicted Gacy of murdering and sexually assaulting thirty-
three young men in the 1970’s and his case has received plenty of attention from the
media worldwide. Most of the remains and bodies of his victims recovered from
different parts of his house and a nearby river called the “Des Plaines River”.

During his childhood, John had to deal with an abusive father and faced great turmoil
coming to terms with his homosexuality. He had worked as a manager for a fast
food-chain during the 60s and had been married and divorced twice, with two
biological children. In 1968, Gacy sexually assaulted two young boys and later, found
guilty. After undergoing arrest, the police released him on parole in 1970. The
following year, he underwent another arrest after a teenage boy accused him of
sexual assault, but again, charges dropped. Gacy returned to Chicago and founded a
successful construction business; moreover, he bought a house in suburban Chicago
and remarried after getting divorced during his imprisonment.

Gacy was a sociable and amiable man, and the people in his community respected
and admired him. He would often perform as a clown at children’s parties and
charitable events in the Chicago suburbs. His alter ego referred to as “Pogo the
Clown” which was later known as the “Killer Clown”.

From the year 1972 up to 1978, Gacy committed most of his murders that he refers
to as his “cruising years”. He would lure young boys to his house by promising them
construction jobs or by impersonating a police officer. He raped them, tortured them
and then strangled them using his hands or ropes. Moreover, he stabbed one of his
victims. In 1978, the killer clown came to the authority’s attention when Robert Piest,
a fifteen-year old boy, who had gone to John’s house to discuss a potential
construction job, was reported missing.

This time, the police got involved by executing a search warrant and uncovered
evidence at his house of his involvement in multiple crimes. They found various
suspicious items like a high school class rings and small-sized clothing. After a

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prolonged period of investigation, the police located bodies or remains of twenty-
nine boys. They discovered some buried in the crawl space beneath his house, some
near his house and others in the Des Plaines River. His gruesome acts shocked the
suburban Chicago community. Eight of the victims were unidentified, and three of
them recently identified with the help of DNA testing technology, in the years 2011,
2017 and 2021 respectively. For years, John’s house emitted a foul stench, but when
inquired about it, he would blame it on moisture buildup. Eventually, the court
convicted Gacy of killing about thirty people.

In 1980, Gacy used an insanity plea and claimed that the crimes had been committed
by an alter personality. Various psychologists testified for his mental state and
diagnosed him as schizophrenic. However, the ruse was unsuccessful as the jury
found him guilty of thirty-three murders. He received twelve death sentences along
with twenty-one natural life sentences.

For almost a decade and a half, John kept on appealing against his sentence and
offering inconsistent statements about his crimes in interviews while he was
imprisoned. Although he had already confessed, he later denied being guilty of the
charges against him and declared his innocence. Ultimately, in 1994, the execution of
John Wayne Gacy took place by lethal injection at the Statesville Correctional Center.

Examining this case, various questions arise; did Gacy commit these horrendous
crimes with a sound mind? Or was he really mentally ill like he claimed? One cannot
say for sure. However, one thing is certain that Gacy is one of the most ruthless
murderers in U.S. history until date.

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