800 Weird But True Serial Killer Facts E-Book

Blake Seaforth

• Herausgeber: epubli
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 275

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

800 weird and often grisly facts about the bizarre and gruesome history of serial killers. There are a varied range of facts on the background of serial killers, their eating habits and last meals, strange habits, unusual aspects of their crimes, anecdotes and interesting statements from the killers and other pieces of fascinating trivia about them. Read on if you dare!

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800 Weird But True Serial Killer Facts 

Blake Seaforth© Copyright 2023 Blake Seaforth

ContentsIntroduction800 Weird But True Serial Killer FactsIntroduction800 weird and often grisly facts about the bizarre and gruesome history of serial killers. Facts on the background of killers, their eating habits and last meals, strange habits, unusual crimes and other pieces of fascinating trivia about them.  Read on if you dare!800 Weird But True Serial Killer Facts(1) During his time in Germany serving in the British Army, Dennis Nilsen got to know a fellow soldier named Leslie Grantham - who was in the same regiment. Grantham would later become an actor and play 'Dirty' Den Watts in the BBC soap opera Eastenders.(2) Ahmad Suradji was born in Medan, Indonesia in 1952. Suradji was found to have killed 42 girls and young women on a sugarcane plantation near his home. Suradji considered himself to be a mystical shaman and killed the women as part of a black magic ritual. He buried them up to their heads in the ground, collected their saliva (which he believed gave him magic powers), and then strangled the victims but left them buried with their heads pointing at his house because he believed this ritual gave him extra power. The whole idea for this had apparently come in a message delivered by his late father in a dream. Yes, it's probably safe to say that Ahmad Suradji was absolutely insane. Ahmad Suradji was sentenced to death and executed on 10 July 2008. His alleged mystical powers proved to be pretty useless in front of a firing squad. (3) The Smiley face murder theory was proposed by retired New York City detectives Kevin Gannon and Anthony Duarte. They were supported by the crime academic Dr Lee Gilbertson. Their theory was that a large number of supposedly accidental drownings of young men in several Midwestern American states were not accidents at all but the work of a serial killer or even a group of killers. Their evidence for this was that the drowning victims commonly fit into a specific category in that they were male, young, students, and good looking. Gannon and Duarte noted that a number of victims showed tiny traces of a date rape drug. They also noted that in many areas where these victims drowned there was graffiti of a smiley face. They argued that this was the calling card or signature of the killer. The two retired detectives argued that many drownings were the result of rape, murder and being deliberately pushed in a river or lake. Kevin Gannon and Anthony Duarte believe that over forty drownings of young men dating back to the 1990s can be slotted into their serial killer theory. The police in the United States believe that the culprit in these deaths is alcohol. They point out that in many of these drowning cases smiley face graffiti wasn't even found near the scene anyway. They also pointed out that a smiley face is not exactly uncommon when it comes to graffiti so even if it were present in the immediate vicinity of a drowning it doesn't necessarily have to have any dark or chilling subtext in relation to a tragic death which occurred there. (4) Ted Bundy was said to receive 200 letters a day from female 'groupies' while he was awaiting his last trials.(5) Reginald Oates is an American killer who killed four young boys within the span of two days in April 1968, in Baltimore, Maryland. Oates had sex with the bodies of the victims after their death. When he was captured he had body parts (including genitals) from the murdered victims in a bag. Oates was deemed too insane to stand trial and sent to the Clifton T. Perkins State Hospital in Jessup. (6) Özgür Dengiz was a Turkish killer who killed two people and attempted to kill another. His crimes took place from 1997 to 2007. When he was captured, Dengiz was found to have human flesh in his fridge. Dengiz said he liked human flesh so much he would even eat it raw.(7) Jeffrey Dahmer was employed at Ambrosia Chocolate Factory in Milwaukee. Dahmer worked the night shift for $8.75 an hour.(8) One of the victims of Fred and Rose West was Lucy Katherine Partington. Lucy, a student at Exeter University, was the cousin of the writer Martin Amis. (9) Paula Clennell, one of the victims of The Suffolk Strangler, was interviewed on the television news two weeks before she was murdered. Paula, a prostitute, was asked why she was still on the street when there was a serial killer targeting sex workers in the area. She said she had no choice because she needed the money. (10) A murderer named James Edward Smith once requested a lump of dirt as his last meal on death row because he wanted to perform a black magic ritual with the soil. His request was declined. In case you were wondering, he ended up having some yogurt as his last meal - which was a rather odd selection. Who would choose yogurt as their last meal? (11) Ted Bundy once worked as the Assistant Director of the Seattle Crime Prevention Advisory Commission. As part of his duties there he wrote a pamphlet for women advising them on rape prevention. (12) You can buy an Albert Fish action figure (this charming item has Fish brandishing a meat cleaver behind his back).(13) Frank Spisak was a lunatic with a Hitler toothbrush moustache who committed three racially motivated murders in Cleveland in 1982. He was a transvestite who wanted to have a sex change operation but then changed his mind. He no longer wanted to become a woman anymore. He NOW wanted to become Adolf Hitler. Spisak was given a death sentence and finally executed by lethal injection in Ohio in 2011. Spisak hadn't done himself too many favours in court by giving the Nazi salute each time he entered. Frank Spisak went for a fairly modest and simple last meal on death row. He had spaghetti in a light tomato sauce. It is probably no coincidence at all that this is the last thing Hitler ever ate too.(14) After his death there was a battle for custody of Jeffrey Dahmer's brain between his parents. Dahmer's mother wanted his brain to be donated to science because this was what Jeffrey Dahmer had apparently requested. Dahmer's father didn't want this to happen though. In the end Dahmer's father got his way and Jeffrey Dahmer's brain was cremated along with the rest of him. (15) The Ratcliff Highway murders were murders which took place over less than two weeks in Wapping in 1811. There were two multiple attacks which left seven victims. The first attack took place in the shop of the Marr family. The victims were Timothy Marr, a 24-year-old linen draper and hosier, his wife Celia, their 3-month-old son Timothy, and James Gowan, their shop boy. The infant had had his throat cut in his crib while the others had been beaten with a hammer. It was a truly horrific scene. One person from the household who survived the attack was a servant girl who had been fortunate enough to be out buying oysters when the killer struck. The errand to purchase oysters had saved her life. (16) The Crime Through Time museum in Gloucestershire is home to a shovel that belonged to Fred West. (17) Daniel Camargo Barbosa was born in Columbia in 1930. He is believed to have raped and murdered well over one hundred young girls. In 1994, the 67 year-old Daniel Camargo Barbosa was stabbed to death in prison by Geovanny Noguera. Noguera was a relative of one of Barbosa's victims and took his chance to extract revenge for the family.(18) Nikolai Espolovich Dzhumagaliev was a Soviet serial killer who was convicted of seven murders committed from 1979 to 1980. He is known as Kolya the Maneater because he ate the flesh of some of his victims. Of his first murder, Dzhumagaliev told the police - "I cut the corpse's breast into strips, removed the ovaries, and separated the pelvis and hips; I then put these pieces into a backpack and carried them home. I melted the fat to fry with, and some parts I pickled. Once, I put the parts through a meat grinder and made dumplings. I saved the meat for myself; I never served it to anyone else. Twice, I grilled parts—the heart and the kidneys. Grilled meat, too. But it was tough, and I had to cook it for a long time in its own fat. The meat of this woman took me a month to eat. The first time I ate human flesh, I had to force myself, but then I got used to it."(19) Fred West used to drive an ice cream van as a young man. (20) When the police arrested Peter Sutcliffe on suspicion of being The Yorkshire Ripper, they noticed, upon inspection, that under his trousers Sutcliffe seemed to be secretly wearing a pullover on his legs with the padded elbows covering his knees. Sutcliffe spent a lot of time kneeling over victims outside so had come up with this bizarre fashion piece to protect his knees from getting grazed. (21) Vlado Taneski was a Macedonian serial killer who brutally raped and murdered three women from 2005 to 2008. The odd thing about this case is that Taneski was a journalistwho had actually written articles about the murders!(22) Herbert Mullin was born in Salinas, California, in 1947. Mullin had paranoid schizophrenia and believed that he had to murder people as part of a blood sacrifice to prevent earthquakes from happening in California. He ended up killing thirteen people. (23) In 2010, Colonel Russell Williams was apprehended in connection to two murders. Williams commanded CFB Trenton, Canada's largest military airbase. Although a decorated and respected officer and pilot, he had a secret life as a prowler and rapist who broke into homes to steal female underwear and - eventually - kill.(24) The Flat-Tire murders were five connected, unsolved murders in Dade County, Florida in 1975. The killer in the Flat-Tire murders is believed to have let air out of his victims cars and then offered them assistance on the road before killing them. These were brutal murders (some of the victims were injured so badly they couldn't be identified) and the killer was clearly very cunning. Ted Bundy is sometimes cited as a possible suspect in the Flat-Tire murders although he denied this accusation. (25) Harold Shipman (the GP who killed hundreds of his own patients) appeared on the British documentary television show World in Action in 1982 talking about new treatments for the mentally ill. You'd never guess in a million years that the placid Shipman was a serial killer from watching his appearance in this documentary. (26) When he briefly worked in a sandwich shop in Miami, Jeffrey Dahmer once found a dead body in the alley out the back of the shop. This was a rare case of a dead body in Dahmer's life that he had nothing to do with! (27) Gordon Frederick Cummins was a killer who became known as The Blackout Ripper for murdering four women during the German bombing raids on London in World War 2. Cummins, who was in the Royal Air Force, was a very sick and savage killer. He slashed one woman's throat with a can opener and would sexually mutilate the victims. Cummins was hanged in Wandsworth Prison in 1942. The crimes of the 'Blackout Ripper' during World War 2 were suppressed by the authorities because Londoners already had enough to worry about with the Luftwaffe bombing them. They didn't need a serial killer panic thrown in too. (28) A set of cutlery belonging to Jeffrey Dahmer sold for $300 per item in 2022.(29) The Atlanta Ripper was a killer who is believed to have killed around fifteen (and probably) more women in Atlanta in 1911 and 1912. However, this killer was never captured or identified. All the victims were young black women and the killer had a grisly habit of slashing the throats of his targets. The killer had a rather strange habit too of removing the clothes of the victim and then stacking them in a neat bundle next to the body. Emma Lou Sharp, who survived an encounter with the killer, described him as a tall dark skinned man who wore a black hat. The killer was very brutal. One victim was nearly decapitated and another had part of her skull crushed. A coupling pin from a train was used to bludgeon one victim. It is said that the Ripper cut the heart out of another victim and left it by the body.(30) Dennis Nilsen liked to write poetry and campaigned in prison to get his poetry published. In a strange quirk of fate, Nilsen had dealings with a probation officer in Wakefield Prison named Simon Armitage. Armitage later became the poet laureate.(31) Thomas J. Grasso was born in 1962. Grasso was a thief and killer - and a ruthless and heartless one too as Grasso tended to choose elderly and vulnerable people as victims. Grasso was eventually was killed by lethal injection in 1995. Grasso requested a can of Spaghetti-Os as part of his last meal on death row. However, the prison authorities failed to supply a can of Spaghetti-Os and gave him some spaghetti instead. Grasso was rather annoyed by this mix-up. As he headed towards his imminent date with a lethal injection his last ever words on planet Earth were - "I did not get my Spaghetti-Os, I got spaghetti! I want the press to know this!" Still fuming at being denied a can of Spaghetti-Os, Thomas J. Grasso was finally executed. (32) One of the things that helped convict the Golden State Killer was the surviving victims all testifying that he had small genitalia. (33) Andrei Chikatilo killed over 50 people (mostly children) in Ukraine from 1978 to 1990. Believe it or not, Chikatilo worked as a teacher in the early 1970s. (34) Joel Rifkin was a Long Island based serial killer who was convicted in 1993 for nine murders. Rifkin targeted sex workers and was especially gruesome in the fashion in which he left his victims. He once left the decapitated head of one victim on a golf course.(35) Zhang Yongming was a Chinese serial killer responsible for at least eleven murders from 2008 to 2012. He sold the flesh of his victims at a local market and pretended it was ostrich meat. When he was arrested, the police found that Yongming had preserved human eyeballs in jars. The flesh of his victims was hanging up to dry.(36) Jeffrey Dahmer's name has thirteen letters. His murder spree lasted for thirteen years. Guess what his apartment number was? That's right. Number 13. (37) About 3% of executions in the United States have gone wrong in some way. Mishaps have included people catching fire in the electric chair and decapitations during hanging. (38) Ted Bundy once saved a toddler from drowning. This happened at Green Lake in Seattle in 1970.(39) The youngest serial killer is usually cited as Amardeep Sada. Amardeep Sada killed three people in India when he was eight years-old. The victims were all children and included Sada's sister. (40) When he was captured, Richard Chase said he killed to protect himself from aliens and that the Nazis had framed him.(41) The last public execution held in the United States was in 1936. They used to get good crowds at public hangings. (42) The Japanese killer Tsutomu Miyazaki once cut off the hands of a victim and drank the blood from them.(43) In 2009 a serial killer named The Phantom of Heilbronn was linked to several murders and many crimes. However, it turned out contaminated DNA swabs had been confused and that in reality there was no Phantom of Heilbronn serial killer at all.(44) John E. Robinson has been dubbed the first ever Internet serial killer. Robinson's victims were women he had made contact with through online chatrooms.(45) Charlie Chop-off was the name given to a serial killer who murdered three black children and one Puerto Rican child in New York in 1972 and 1973. All the victims were male. the killer got his name because he had a habit of removing the genitals and taking them away as a memento. While three of the murders and one attack attributed to Charlie Chop-off remain officially 'unsolved', it seems more than likely that Erno Soto was the killer. It doesn't appear to be a coincidence either that the murders came to an abrupt halt once Soto was in custody. (46) Fritz Haarmann was born in Hanover on 25 October 1879. This German serial killer murdered over twenty people and became known as the Vampire of Hanover. Haarmann was undone by his habit of dumping the remains of his victims in the Leine River. Some of the grisly remains washed ashore and the police decided to drag the river to see what else might be down there. They found over 500 human bones - which were estimated to come from 22 different victims. The police, knowing of Haarmann's criminal history, put him under surveillance and saw him approaching youths at Hanover Station. When the police searched Haarmann's home, the signs of blood stains were obvious and apparent. (47) Soilex, which Jeffrey Dahmer used to boil heads, is more commonly used to remove wallpaper.(48) Dr Eric Hickey, professor of forensic psychology at Walden University, estimated that around only around five to ten out of every two thousand serial killers are cannibals. It is very rare for serial killers to eat the flesh of their victims. This fact makes the known cannibal serial killers all the more infamous(49) Sachiko Eto was born in Japan in 1947. She is known as The Drumstick Killer and her case is strange to say the least. She was apparently married as a young women but in later years got involved in a bogus religious group. Eto set herself up as a guru in Sukagawa City and had a number of followers (which included her daughter). Although she liked to think of herself as a great religious mystic she was essentially a cult leader who espoused meaningless mumbo jumbo. Sachiko Eto claimed to have psychic and supernatural powers but the only superpower she actually possessed was the ability to attract gullible and vulnerable people into her cult. Sachiko Eto persuaded her followers that they were infested with demons and that the only way to remove these demons was a beating with taiko sticks (a broad range of Japanese percussion instruments). Eto naturally took the prominent role in these beatings and they were clearly a trifle over the top because six people died as a result. Eto and other followers had literally beaten them to death.(50) The Saw-Killer of Hanover was responsible for four murders in Germany in the 1970s. The victims usually had their bodies sawn in half or their limbs cut off. However, none of the victims could be identified and this made capturing the killer even more difficult. Although similar grisly murders have occasionally happened in Germany in later decades no one has ever been connected to the 1970s killings or convicted for the crimes.(51) Joachim Kroll killed fourteen people between 1955 and 1976 in Germany. When he was asked to explain why he had eaten parts of his victims, Kroll replied that he had done this to reduce his supermarket shopping bills for food. (52) Jerry Brudos was a serial killer who murdered four women in Oregon from 1968 to 1969. Brudos was a rapist and necrophile who killed because he couldn't control his foot fetish. He sawed off the foot of one victim and put in the freezer. He would then often take the foot out of the freezer and put ladies shoes on it. Jerry Brudos cut off the breasts of one of his victims so he could make plastic moulds with it. Jerry Brudos actually got married. It was said that he liked his wife to do the housework naked wearing nothing but a pair of high heeled shoes. His prison cell was said to be full of ladies shoe catalogues when he died.(53) The Railway Killers were John Francis Duffy and David Mulcahy. In the early 1980s these two men attacked young women at various railway stations in the London area. They were serial rapists and killed three of their victims. The two men would drive around and look for vulnerable women who were making their way home at night. Duffy said that he and Mulcahy would play Michael Jackson's Thriller song in the car before they raped a woman as a means to 'pysch' themselves up.(54) The portable freezer in Jeffrey Dahmer's apartment contained 3480 g of human tissue when he was arrested. (55) Monster of the Mangones was the name given to an unidentified serial killer who killed 30+ victims in Cali, Columbia, in the 1960s and 70s. The victims were children or young teenagers and all boys. The victims were often killed in isolated empty parking lots. There was plenty of evidence that the killer tortured the victims before he murdered them with signs that many had needles stuck into them. The killer would rape the victims before he killed them. One victim was found mummified. There was, as you might imagine, great concern in Columbia over the murders. At some point the killer seemed to confuse the boundaries between fact and fiction. In fact, at certain points it was even suggested that the Monster of the Mangones was an urban myth or folk tale. This probably stems from the fact that it was alleged the killer drained the blood from his victims and might be a vampire. This killer was very real and although a few embellishments might have been added to his dark and harrowing infamy he was terrifying enough even without fiction. The killer, for example, removed the eyes of one victim. The police never made any breakthrough in this case or had the faintest idea who the killer really was. A local legend says the main suspect is Don Adolfo Aristizabal - who owned a hotel in Cali. Legend has it that Don Adolfo Aristizabal had a blood disease that could only be kept at bay by drinking fresh blood (which, according to the legend, he obtained by murdering all of these boys). You won't be surprised to learn that the legend of Don Adolfo Aristizabal as a vampiric serial killing hotel owner is not taken very seriously.(56) Westley Allan Dodd was a child killer sentenced to death in 1990. Under Washington state law, Dodd was given the choice of hanging or lethal injection. He chose hanging as he had murdered one of his victims by this method and felt it would be fitting. (57) Joey "The Cannibal" Methney is a killer convicted of two murders. He might have killed thirteen people in all. Methney would put the blood of his victims in the burgers he sold at his food stall. (58) Kendall Francois was a serial killer arrested in 1998 in Poughkeepsie. When the police searched his house they found that he had some of the skulls of his victims in a plastic kiddie pool in the attic. (59) More serial killers have been born in November than any other month. (60) In 1972, Fred and Rose West hired 17-year-old Caroline Owens as a nanny. Fred assaulted and imprisoned Caroline but she managed to escape. It was ruled by the police that Caroline had consented to the sexual advances of Fred West. It was a baffling decision - made all the more preposterous and tragic by later events. Owens had been too frightened to face Fred West in court so he escaped with a fine. (61) Donald Henry Gaskins was born on March 31, 1933 in Florence County, South Carolina. He was known as 'Pee Wee' and the 'Redneck Charles Manson'. Gaskins claimed to have killed over a hundred people although - officially - the authorities only found concrete evidence of nine victims linked to him. Gaskins had a difficult childhood and was only 5'2 as a grown man so he suffered from a lot of bullying. He was a criminal from an early age and involved in theft and rape. Gaskins escaped from prison in 1955 but was eventually arrested again in 1961. He was found working for a travelling fair. On his next release from prison he went back to the life of crime he was familiar with and wound up back in prison (yet) again after he raped a twelve year-old girl. Gaskins first verifiable (non prison) kill apparently came in 1969 when he was out of prison again. Gaskins killed a hitch-hiker and said that he would drive around the coast looking for victims. Gaskins was a rather sadistic killer who like to torture his victims. He used stabbing and suffocation as his methods of murder and claimed that he sometimes ate parts of his victims.In 1970, Gaskins killed his own niece, Janice Kirby, aged 15, and her friend Patricia Ann Alsbrook, aged 17. It was a sign of how out of control he was that he had now targeted relatives rather than strangers. Gaskins tried to sexually abuse both of these victims before he shot them. Gaskins, in addition to being a serial killer purely for his own pleasure, was - oddly - also a more conventional 'contract' killer. For a fee, he would shoot someone, rather like a hitman. He was also known to shoot people who irritated him. If he owed someone some money and they were starting to get on his nerves requesting the debt, Gaskins was likely to shoot them. The activities of Gaskins finally came to an end in 1975 when a criminal connection told the police that he had seen Gaskins murder two young men. The man also said that Gaskins had confessed to many murders. Gaskins was tried on eight charges of murder on May 24, 1976, found guilty on May 28 and sentenced to death, which was later commuted to life in prison when the South Carolina General Assembly's 1974 ruling on capital punishment was changed. In 1982, Gaskins killed a death row inmate named Rudolph Tyner. Gaskins had been asked to do this by a relative of Tyner's victims. For this murder Gaskins received the death penalty he had evaded at his trial.(62) Under questioning, Ed Gein confessed to stealing nine bodies from the local graveyards.(63) During his police interviews after his arrest, Dennis Nilsen said that he sometimes left a dead body in a chair before he went to work because that meant he had someone to come home to in the evening.(64) The police searched 20,000 homes during the Yorkshire Ripper case. (65) Jeffrey Dahmer was baptized in prison on the same day that the notorious serial killer John Wayne Gacy was executed.(66) Karen Hylen, a therapist at Summit Malibu Treatment Center, said that cannibalism is addictive. If a killer samples human flesh they will do it again. (67) Dennis Nilsen used to drink in The Coleherne in Earls Court. Gay celebrities like Freddie Mercury, Kenny Everett, Anthony Perkins, Ian McKellen and Derek Jarman were sometimes seen in this pub.(68) We don't know what the last meal of Richard Chase was but there is a fair chance it might have been cold congealed macaroni cheese. In prison, Chase was still hostage to paranoid delusions and came to believe that the prison staff were trying to poison his food. He therefore took to stuffing his pockets with macaroni cheese as he believed it was the only safe thing to eat. Why he thought the macaroni cheese was safe and everything else was poisoned is anyone's guess. (69) Andrei Chikatilo's signature was to remove the eyes of his victims. He said he believed in an old Russian superstition that the imprint of the murderer is left in the eyes of victims.(70) Moses Sithole was born in Vosloorus, South Africa in 1964. He tends to be known as The ABC Killer because his murders took place in the towns of Atteridgeville, Boksburg, and Cleveland. He is credited with 38 murders but (as usual with serial killers) the true number of victims is most likely much higher than that figure. Sithole spent some time in an orphanage as a youngster and then developed into a rather nasty rapist. Unsurprisingly, he soon wound up in prison. Believe it or not, around the time that his murders began, Sithole was working for a group who campaigned against child abuse. As they say, villainy wears many masks, none so dangerous as the mask of virtue. It turned out though that this group was essentially cobbled together by Sithole himself and something of a bogus sham. He naturally though used this group to make himself more trustworthy to victims. In this regard then he was a disturbingly creative killer who used his skills as a conman to lure victims. (71) Edward Kemper suggested that death by torture should be his own punishment when asked by a judge at his trial. (72) Dennis Nilsen would sometimes flush pieces of flesh that weighed two pounds down the toilet. (73) Anatoly Onoprienko was born in Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union) in 1959. Onoprienko became known as The Terminator in Ukraine for the way he would slaughter and kill nearly anyone he stumbled across. Onoprienko said that when he killed he felt like a robot controlled by dark forces. Onoprienko murdered a dozen women at first and then upgraded his activities to wiping out entire families. He would kill any male he found in the house first and then move onto other family embers. After taking any valuables or possessions that interested him he would then set light to the house so that little evidence would be left. Sometimes the police would find family photographs scattered in the charred ruins. Onoprienko seemed to be enraged by happy families and determined to take his revenge upon them. He killed in a terrifyingly random way. He would shoot people sitting in cars and once killed a police officer. If you passed Onoprienko by chance on a quiet road or in the country your chances of survival were just about zero. Before you knew what was happening he would have simply shot you. When he fled from crime scenes, Onoprienko would shoot anyone who saw him so that there would be no witnesses. Onoprienko was captured when a police manhunt discovered he had been booted out a house for having a large stash of weapons. One of his favourite weapons was a shotgun. Once in custody, Onoprienko eventually confessed to 52 murders. He said that voices in his head had made him become a mass killer. (74) A shirt worn by Peter Sutcliffe in prison can go for about $1,000 on collectibles websites.(75) Jeffrey Dahmer trained as an army medical specialist at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas. The ironic thing about Dahmer is that he was trained to saved lives but was more interested in taking them. (76) California murderer Clarence Ray Allen requested for his last meal a buffalo steak, KFC, and pecan pie with black-walnut ice cream. As per his instructions, the pie and ice cream were sugar free. (77) After his arrest, Dennis Nilsen's flat was decorated and put back on the market at £60,000 (this was 1983). The tabloids dubbed the flat the 'house of horrors' and wondered who on earth would want to live there. A surprisingly large number of people viewed the flat merely so they could gawp at the place where all these grisly and awful things took place. (78) The Sleepy Hollow Killer is the name of an unidentified South African rapist and serial killer responsible for the rapes and murders of at least thirteen women around Pietermaritzburg and the Midlands of KwaZulu-Natal. The Sleepy Hollow Killer was never caught. The murders took place from the late 1990s to 2007. The MO of the killer was to strangle the victims with their own panties. The initial investigation was closed due to lack of any real progress but three later murders then reactivated the case. In 2008 a man was arrested in the general area for murdering a woman and dumping her body in a forest. She had been bound and most likely raped. There was a lot of speculation that this man could be The Sleepy Hollow Killer but - alas - the police found there was no connection between this killer and the murders ascribed to the Hollow serial killer. As a consequence of this the true identity of The Sleepy Hollow Killer remains a mystery. (79) According to a study, 1.5% of serial killer victims were axed to death. (80) Kathy Kleiner, who survived Ted Bundy's attack on the Florida University Chi Omega sorority house, never went back to the college to finish her studies. When she picked up her belongings from the dorm a week later she noticed there was still blood on the wall.(81) During the preparation for the Richard Ramirez trial, one of the jurors was shot dead. This created much publicity with speculation that Ramirez had somehow orchestrated the death from prison to influence the jury. There was of course no actual truth to this rumour.(82) A lethal injection will kill someone in less than five minutes. Three different drugs are used. Sodium thiopental renders you unconscious, pancuronium bromide stops you breathing, and potassium chloride stops the heart.(83) When the authorities demolished the house of Fred West at 25 Cromwell Street, they crushed every single brick and beam of wood so that ghoulish souvenir hunters wouldn't be able to take anything. (84) In Inside Time (a newspaper for prisoners and detainees), someone who once spent time in prison with Dennis Nilsen said Nilsen would constantly cheat when they played Scrabble.(85) Case studies have suggested that 4% of condemned death row prisoners in the United States are innocent and were wrongly convicted. (86) Ed Gein had nine vulvae in a shoe-box when the police searched his farmhouse. (87) In order to abuct women from parks, Ted Bundy would wear tennis clothes as if he had just stepped off the court. He would also pretend that he had a sailing boat. The police said that Bundy even put on a fake 'British' accent to make himself sound polite and urbane to victims. (88) John A. Cameron, a retired detective, wrote a book in which he claimed that Ed Edwards (a killer convicted of five murders) was not only the Zodiac killer but also the Black Dahlia killer. Cameron also claims that Edwards murdered JonBenet Ramsey and Jimmy Hoffa. You probably won't be surprised to hear that the book is not taken all that seriously. Just about the only thing that Cameron didn't accuse Edwards of was smuggling Hitler out of his Berlin bunker to Argentina. (89) The album on Jeffrey Dahmer's record player when he was arrested was Buried Dreams by Clock DVA. (90) Kenneth Erskine was born in Hammersmith, London, in 1963. Erskine was a serial killer known as The Stockwell Strangler. This was an especially disturbed and evil man because he would target old people (of either gender) and sexually abuse and kill them in their homes. Kenneth Erskine was so detached from reality he would tuck his victims into bed after he had assaulted and killed them in the preposterous hope that the death would be classified as natural causes. He seemed to be completely oblivious to the fact that he was leaving DNA, evidence of sexual assault, and bruises and injuries on his victims.(91) Anthony Hardy was a London serial killer known as The Camden Ripper. His background was unusual for a serial killer. He had a degree from Imperial College and was once the director of his own company. His mental health seemed to crumble later on though. He tried to strangle his wife and became an alcoholic.