Category: Murder
Andrei Chikatilo
A note before this article: the Chikatilo case involves the murder of children, sustained physical mutilation of victims, and the wrongful execution of an innocent man for crimes he did not commit. The physical details of the murders are described…
Jeffrey Dahmer
The Dahmer case involves murder, necrophilia, cannibalism, and the sexual abuse and killing of a fourteen-year-old child. It also involves documented and sustained failures by Milwaukee law enforcement that allowed killings to continue, rooted in the marginalisation of the victims.…
The Yorkshire Ripper
A warning before this article. The Yorkshire Ripper case involves sustained physical violence against women, including women who survived attacks that left them with lifelong injuries. The investigation itself was, by the eventual official assessment, profoundly compromised by attitudes that…
The Moors Murders
A serious warning before this article. The Moors Murders involved the abduction, sexual abuse, and killing of children. The youngest victim was ten years old. The trial included the playing in open court of an audio tape recording of one…
Lizzie Borden
Lizzie Borden took an axe / And gave her mother forty whacks. / When she saw what she had done / She gave her father forty-one. The schoolyard rhyme is wrong on almost every count. Abby Borden was not Lizzie’s…
The Son Of Sam
For thirteen months between July 1976 and August 1977, a man with a .44 calibre revolver shot couples in parked cars across the outer boroughs of New York City. He killed six people and wounded seven. He wrote letters to…
Patrick Mackay
He has been called Britain’s forgotten serial killer. He was diagnosed as a psychopath at fifteen, was convicted of three killings at twenty-three, confessed at the time to eight more, and has been imprisoned continuously since 1975 — making him,…
Fred & Rose West
A warning before this article. What follows is an account of one of the most disturbing criminal cases in modern British history. It involves rape, torture, the murder of children, and prolonged abuse over more than two decades. There is…