Capital punishment is a hotly debate topic throughout the United States, in part due to the number of death row inmates who were exonerated. Since 1937, over 150 people have been exonerated, leading many people to believe that the justice system just isn't airtight enough to condemn people to death. With shaky evidence, unreliable witness testimony, and corruption within the police forces and the courts, it's hard to be completely sure whether a death sentence is the right answer.

Some of these released death row inmates were exonerated right before their last meals, with the message that they'd be freed coming within hours of their scheduled execution. Though the men and women on death row represent many different backgrounds, their stories all share a chilling through line: they were ultimately absolved of blame. The stories of these exonerated people on death row demonstrate that the justice system is not infallible, and that harsh sentences should never be handed out lightly.

Anthony Porter was charged with the murder of two teenagers in 1982. Witnesses gave inconsistent testimony about whether they'd seen him actually shoot the victims, or whether they had seen him leave the scene. The trial was riddled with problems as well: Porter's lawyer admitted to halting his investigations into the case, and an IQ test revealed that Porter may have a mental handicap. Nevertheless, he was convicted and sentenced to death.

The bungled trial eventually led to an appeal, and Porter was granted a stay of execution on the grounds of his inability to understand his punishment. The order came just 48 hours before he was due to be executed in 1998. The real killer was caught in 1999 and sentenced to 37 years in prison.

The case of Randall Dale Adams inspired the Errol Morris documentary The Thin Blue Line. Adams was accused of killing a police officer in 1976, after witnesses, including a teenager with whom Adams had spent the day, identified him as the killer.

Adams's attempts to appeal were overturned, and it wasn't until three days before his scheduled execution that the Supreme Court ordered a stay. Apparently, jurors who had felt uneasy about the death penalty were excluded during selection for his trial. His sentence was changed to life in prison, until further evidence clearing him of the crime was revealed. Adams was released in 1989, one year after the film was released.

Rodricus Crawford was accused of murdering his infant son in 2012. The child was found unresponsive in Crawford's bed, and the initial examiner claimed that a bruise on the child's lip could indicate that Crawford had smothered the child in his sleep. Crawford was convicted and sentenced to death.

Later investigations revealed that the death was likely caused by illness. Crawford was freed in April of 2017.

James Edward Creamer, along with six other individuals, was convicted for the murder of two doctors during a robbery in 1971. Creamer was sentenced to death after the chief witness, Deborah Ann Kidd, said that he was the shooter. She first claimed that she'd been on drugs and was unable to remember anything about witnessing the crime, but under hypnosis, she named Creamer as the culprit.

Later evidence showed that Kidd was not only romantically linked to one of the detectives on the case but that, under hypnosis, she had also claimed to be the murderer herself. The real killer confessed, and Creamer and the six other people were released in 1975.

Sabrina Butler was 18 years old when she was sentenced to death for the murder of her 9-month-old son in 1989. Butler said that her son had stopped breathing and that she had attempted to resuscitate him, leaving bruises on his chest that were later used as evidence of abuse. According to Butler, police yelled that she had murdered her son for three hours, rather than letting her describe what had happened.

It took seven years before Butler was cleared of the charges. Her son had died from a kidney condition, not murder or abuse, meaning Butler had spent years in isolation on death row for a crime that had not taken place at all.

Clifford Henry Bowen, a professional poker player with a history of burglary, was accused of killing three men in 1980 with a unique weapon: a gun loaded with silver-tipped, hollow-point bullets. Bowen matched the description of the killer, but his alibi placed him some 300 miles away. But Bowen was still put on trial for the crime, with the prosecution going so far as to allege that Bowen took a private, late-night flight to an abandoned airfield to kill the men.

Bowen was sentenced to death for the murder, and it took two years before an important piece of information came to light: a police lieutenant in the same town had a similar description and carried the unique weapon. The sentence was reversed due to the evidence that had been withheld, and Bowen was released in 1986.

Anthony Hinton was one of the longest-serving prisoners on death row, having served 30 years for a crime he didn't commit. He was sentenced for the 1985 murders of two local fast food restaurant managers in Birmingham, AL. Hinton was charged with the two killings because the weapon supposedly used to commit them belonged to his mother, but firearms examiners could not verify that claim. His lawyer also hired an examiner without qualifications, setting Hinton's case back even further.

Thankfully, Hinton's sentence was overturned in light of all that went wrong with his trial. He was subsequently freed in 2015.

Due to terrible testimony, falsified information, and other coercion, the Ford Heights Four were falsely accused of the murder and rape of a couple in Chicago in 1978. Witnesses claimed to have seen the four men - Dennis Williams, Kenneth Adams, Verneal Jimerson, and Willie Rainge - in the area where the crimes occurred, and testimony from a state expert said that hairs found at the scene matched those of the accused. Adams was sentenced to death, while the other men were sentenced to life or lengthy prison sentences.

Three unpaid journalism students eventually uncovered the faulty testimony and took it upon themselves to do DNA testing. Their investigation cleared the Ford Heights Four in 1996, and their case was later used as an example of why Illinois should do away with the death penalty.

Juan Ramos, an immigrant from Cuba, was sentenced to death after being accused of raping and murdering a woman in 1982. The evidence came from a bloodhound, who, after being exposed to Ramos's scent, seemed to identify the same scent on the blouse and knife that belonged to the victim. However, these were the only two items with blood on them. The bloodhound was likely identifying the scent of the blood, rather than Ramos's scent.

Still, Ramos was sentenced to death. But some investigative reporting by 20/20 eventually exposed the unreliability of dog-scent evidence. Ramos's sentence was overturned, and he was released in 1987. Other than the dog's response, there was no evidence linking Ramos to the crime.

Johnny Ross is the youngest man to have been placed on death row at just 16 years old. Accused of rape in Louisiana in 1975, Ross was sentenced to death. This harsh verdict was handed down after a 90-minute trial, and in spite of his claim that his confession had been signed on a blank sheet of paper after hours of beatings from the police.

The Southern Poverty Law Center believed that Ross's case required more investigation, and found evidence that Ross's blood type did not match that of semen found in the victim. Ross was released in 1981 thanks to the SPLC's investigation.

Serving as the inspiration behind Fritz Lang's classic film M, Peter Kürten remains one of the most infamous serial killers in European history. Nicknamed the "Vampire of Düsseldorf," Kürten terrorized Germany between 1913 and 1929, claiming the lives of at least nine in a series of bloody knifings and hammer attacks.   

Kürten holds a prominent position among German serial killers, as he was a sadist without bounds whose sensational exploits instilled fear in an entire nation. Sometimes referred to as the "Düsseldorf Monster," Kürten was a child killer who also practiced necrophilia, cannibalism, and bestiality - a real-life bogeyman capable of unfathomable evil.

Peter Kürten was born in Köln-Mullheim, a suburb of Cologne, Germany, on May 26, 1883. He was the eldest of a staggering 13 children, and his parents struggled to provide for their massive brood, which was confined to a small, one-room apartment. 

Growing up in extreme poverty, Peter - and the rest of his family - also had to endure an abusive and alcoholic father. Coming home after an evening of drinking, the Kürtens' patriarch would often rape his wife in plain view of his children. His father also served three years in prison for committing crimes of incest on Peter's 13-year-old sister.

Traumatic childhoods are often a unifying trait among serial killers, and Peter Kürten's experience as a youth - particularly as a witness to extreme sexual violence - certainly puts him that group. 

It's typical for a serial killer to ramp up to the act of murder by committing a series of escalating crimes, and Peter Kürten certainly accumulated an impressive criminal resume on his road to killing. With convictions for arson, burglary, sexual assault, and even desertion during WWI, Kürten did almost 30 prison bids before his final arrest. He would later blame the conditions in the German penal system for fostering his sadistic tendencies, particularly his time spent in solitary confinement. It was in those isolated cells that Kürten began experiencing strong, murderous fantasies - visions that he enjoyed so much he committed further crimes while in prison just to be sent to solitary. 

Suffering from a chaotic and unstable life at home, at the age of nine, Kürten formed a strange and unhealthy bond with a neighbor. The man - who happened to be a dog-catcher - would introduce Kürten to the practice of bestiality, another dark turn on his path to mass murder.

As he grew into his late teens and early twenties, Kürten expanded his bestiality to farm animals, including cattle, goats, and sheep. It was during this experimentation that he discovered how much pleasure he derived from stabbing a creature to death during intercourse, a practice he would carry on as he graduated to violating humans. 

One does not acquire a nickname like "The Vampire of Düsseldorf" for committing run-of-the-mill homicides. Peter Kürten earned that charming title from the German press after a startling discovery was made at his various crime scenes. It seemed that Kürten suffered from a particularly unusual paraphilia - he received sexual pleasure from drinking the blood of victims. His usual modus operandi was to stab his victims, then put his mouth on their open wounds and drink directly from their bloodstream. 

Peter Kürten's reign of terror came to a merciful halt in 1930, when he was finally arrested. In an uncharacteristic act of kindness to his wife, he had colluded with her to turn himself in to authorities in hopes that she would recover the reward, leaving her with some financial security. Though he confessed to dozens of crimes, he was only convicted of nine murders. Through his vivid courtroom accounts, and later descriptions to psychiatrist Karl Berg, the his actual body count is thought to be around 68.

Before escalating to murdering his victims directly, Kürten set a series of fires. He told police he set the fires because he found them sexually stimulating, and also because he hoped they might burn sleeping homeless men alive, an idea he found sexually thrilling. He said, "When my desire for injuring people awoke, the love of setting fire to things awoke as well."

Later profilers would say that Kürten's desire to start fires - and later, to murder - were manifestations of his desire for control after his unstable and chaotic childhood.

As he began getting more press for heinous crimes, Peter Kürten reveled in his newfound celebrity. Feeding the rampant hysteria, Kürten reached out to a local newspaper on November 9, 1929, and provided a map to the body of his most recent victim. The map proved to be accurate, and led authorities to the body of five-year-old Gertrude Albermann, who had been stabbed to death placed under a pile of rubble. It's believed that she was killed two days before Kürten had sent his letter.

It's not uncommon for serial killers - especially necrophiles - to return to the scenes of their crimes. Famous murderers like Ted Bundy and Gary Ridgeway were both known to re-visit the corpses of their victims. Peter Kürten also engaged in this practice, most notably after he had murdered 10-year-old Christine Klein.

Kürten had killed the young girl in her home while her parents were working downstairs in the pub. When he returned to the scene the next day, he looked on in delight as horror had swept the community. Klein's uncle would later become a suspect in the murder and face trial, a proceeding which Kürten followed quite closely.

When Peter Kürten advanced to regularly committing murder, he did so with an unflinching brutality. His victims, more often than not, were young girls who were subjected to unthinkable horrors in their final moments. He often raped his victims while simultaneously stabbing them - sometimes upwards of 25 times - climaxing at the perceived moment of their death. 

His homicidal fantasies were strong and sadistic and gave him unique sexual pleasure. After his conviction, he recalled an instance to his psychologist where he had witnessed a man fall under a train. Feigning an effort to help the injured and dying man, he simply wanted to get close to the sight of blood, which caused him to reflexively climax on the spot.

Peter Kürten, by his own accounts, got an early start on his murderous career. After he was apprehended in 1930, he described to a court-appointed psychologist that at the age of just nine years old, he killed two of his classmates. In his version of the events, he pushed one boy into a nearby river, and when another jumped into help him, Kürten held the second boy under the water, resulting in the drowning death of both children. He never faced any consequences for this particular crime, which at the time was deemed to be a tragic accident.

We all know the urban legend: some unfortunate man or woman wakes up in a bathtub, submerged in ice, only to realize that one of their kidneys has been removed á la the 2002 film Dirty Pretty Things. It's a horrifying situation, to be sure, and the truth is, this kind of organ trafficking is not exactly fiction. 

Organ theft is a very lucrative black market trade. The victims of this barbaric practice, however, are not the hapless teenagers from the cautionary tales we've all heard; rather, they are the marginalized and impoverished, people who easily fall prey to ruthless criminal organizations (or in some cases, governments).

The stories below are very much true. Real life cases of organ theft are more common that you would think and – as this list illustrates – often much more brutal than you could ever imagine.

The slave-like treatment of migrant workers in the oil-rich nation of Qatar has been well-documented. As the grueling hours and grim living conditions have claimed over 1,000 lives by some estimates, the promise of work – much of which is due to a controversial 2022 World Cup bid – still attracts desperate laborers from India, Nepal, Indonesia, and elsewhere. And while the prospect of working one's self to death is horrifying enough, some workers who don't perish on the job are finding themselves unwittingly surrendering their organs.

Sri Rabitah, a 25-year-old migrant worker from North Lombok, Indonesia, began to have suspicions that something in her body was not right when she left Doha, Qatar, in 2014. Besieged by pain on the right side of her waist, Rabitah had an X-ray taken that revealed a stunning reality – she was missing a kidney. 

Working in Qatar as a personal assistant for a Palestinian woman named "Madam Gada," Rabitah recalled that, in July of 2014, she was suddenly rushed to a hospital – though she was suffering no ailment – and forced into sedation. When she awoke, she was full of tubes and urinating blood. Shortly thereafter, Gada deemed the woman unfit for work, and she returned to Indonesia.  

In 2015, amidst reports of widespread abuse, Indonesia issued a permanent ban on sending women to the Middle East as domestic workers.

The story told by Mohammad Salim Khan is really something befitting a horror film. Waking up in a weary haze in an unfamiliar house on the outskirts of Delhi, India, Khan was greeted by a stranger in a surgical mask and gloves. As he begin to ask where he was and what had happened, he was told very curtly, "[your] kidney has been removed."

Mr. Khan's traumatic tale is unfortunately not a rarity, as poor laborers like him – lured by the false promise of work – are often preyed upon by illegal organ harvesters. In some instances, these donors are offered a paltry sum for their organs, but, in other cases, they are simply mutilated against their will. 

Khan's surgeon gave him a warning that didn't mince words: "If you tell anyone that your kidney has been removed at this very place or if you tell anyone that your kidney has been removed at all, there is a man who is following you who will shoot you."

Though it was too little, too late in some respects, authorities raided the house where Khan was being held just a few hours after his surgery. As it would turn out, he had fallen victim to a scam in which his kidney was to be sold to an American couple that was seeking to circumvent the long wait of transplant lists in the US.

A 2011 CNN Documentary called Death in the Desert revealed a grim human trafficking practice taking place in north Africa. As displaced refugees from Sudan, Ethiopia, and Eritrea were attempting to cross the Sinai Desert into Israel, the perils of the arid, unforgiving terrain proved secondary to the awful fate that met of some of these weary travelers, as they found themselves sold into the black market organ trade.

Kidnapped by some Bedouin tribes of the region, these refugees – frequently tortured and raped while in captivity – were often used for extortion of overseas relatives. In the event of a failure to secure funds from desperate family members, the kidnapped men and women were frequently sold off to organ harvesters.

Surgeons from Cairo willing to do this off-the-books work would travel to the desert, paying anywhere from $1,000 to $20,000 for kidneys, livers, and eyeballs from living donors. With the help of mobile refrigeration units, these organs would then be brought back to Egypt's capital city to be resold.

Human rights workers uncovered a high number of discarded bodies in the area bearing surgical scars. Medical experts, when shown pictures of the corpses, verified that these surgeries took place while the victims were still alive.

In 2012, Chinese authorities broke up an organ trafficking ring that had been holding 127 captives as future donors. The criminal network, based in the city of Shijiazhuang, had lured in unsuspecting men and women via the Internet, before imprisoning them against their will. The would-be donors were allowed computer time and some ability to roam their residential confines, but they were largely kept from the outside world before they were matched for an illegal transplant.

The bust resulted in the arrest of 137 people, 18 of whom were doctors who had performed illegal transplant surgeries under fake names.  

ISIS, in its endless streak of inventive malevolence, has naturally ventured into the business of forced organ harvesting. In 2015, a prisoner who had escaped the terrorist group's stronghold in Raqqa, Syria, described in vivid, horrifying detail how his fellow captives were treated like living blood and organ banks. 

Prisoners were often told, point blank, that their certain fate was death, and it would be noble for them to donate their organs to more faithful jihadists. Of course, there was really no choice in the matter – these men would be forced to surrender their kidneys and corneas so they could be transplanted into maimed members of ISIS, regardless. 

Many of these prisoners were kept alive after the forced surgeries, so that they could be further harvested at a later date. It's a slow, agonizing death that eventually found these victims; meanwhile, those not strong enough to donate were simply tortured to death. 

In March of 2014, Manuel Plancarte Gaspar, a high-ranking member of Mexico's Knights Templar drug cartel, was arrested while possessing crystal meth in a stolen car. Gaspar had been apprehended in the western state of Michoacan, and, in announcing the arrest on Twitter, the state's Public Safety Secretary, Carlos Castellanos Becerra, revealed that the Knights Templar leader was under investigation for much more sinister crimes. 

Becerra tweeted that Gaspar "belonged to a criminal group and is being investigated for the death of children, who drew their organs for sale."

Clarifying the sensational announcement in a later press conference, Becerra went on to detail that the Knights Templar had been kidnapping children of certain physical characteristics, before then bringing them to nearby safe houses and harvesting them for organs.

The cartel's organ trafficking operation had come to light earlier that year after a group of vigilantes in the town of Tepalcatepec seized a refrigerated van that was carrying several captive children. The children, who were all from the same Mexico City school, were being taken to Lazaro Cardenas, Mexico's biggest Pacific Ocean port, where they were then to be sold off for their organs.

In 2015, aid organizations in Italy revealed that nearly 10,000 refugees, many of whom were children, had vanished from the country without a trace. Though it was widely suspected that the missing people had simply moved into other parts of Europe, it later came to light that some of them likely met a much darker fate.

An Eritrean human trafficker who was apprehended by Italian authorities in 2014 revealed to investigators a grim reality that likely accounted for some of those disappearances. Unable to pay their debts to their traffickers, the man – who is now hiding in Italy's witness protection program – explained that refugees were frequently sold off for their organs in order to recoup funds. The buyers, he stated, were members of an Egyptian crime ring that would pay up to 30,000 Euros per donor. 

The refugee victims were often killed in the harvesting process, as multiple organs were typically taken. With the hearts and kidneys that were removed sent into the wealthy European black market, the dead were then dumped into the sea or buried in ditches en masse. 

The Kosovo conflict of 1999-2000 claimed the lives of nearly 10,000 people as Albanian Rebels and Serbian forces clashed in the southeastern European territory. The Kosovo Liberation Army rebels – an ethinic-Albanian paramilitary organization – sought to cleanse Kosovo of its ethnic Serb population, and the ensuing conflict resulted in atrocities and war crimes that have brought some members of the KLA to face charges at the Hague.

In a 2012 interview with Serbia's war crimes prosecutor Vladimir Vukcevic, one KLA witness described in horrifying detail a medical procedure he was forced to perform on a kidnapped Serb in northern Albania:

"They gave me a scalpel. I put my left hand on his chest and began cutting. When I got near the bottom (of the ribs), the blood started pouring. As soon as I started cutting, he began screaming not to kill him and then he lost consciousness. I don't know if he fainted or died."

The witness described the victim as being in his mid 20s and claimed that he was accompanied by two doctors as he performed the surgery.

"We cut veins and when I took the heart, it was still beating, " the witness said. The organ was then placed in a cooler for transport. 

Though the KLA has long been suspected of being involved in wartime organ trafficking, they have steadfastly denied these claims.

Though claims from officials in Beijing paint China as having the largest voluntary organ donation system in Asia, a report that surfaced in 2016 suggests that the acquisition process is actually much more nefarious. The report – assembled by a Canadian lawmaker, a human rights lawyer, and an independent journalist – found that adding up the transplant numbers from just a few hospitals easily surpassed China's reported official number of 10,000 for the year 2015. This discrepancy, the authors claim, is due to mass organ harvesting from China's executed prisoners taking place.

China does not disclose the number of executions it carries out annually, but human rights group Amnesty International claims the figure is more than all other nations with the death penalty combined. This wealth of corpses is certainly fertile ground for organ harvesting, a practice China has acknowledged in the past but now claims to have moved away from. 

The imprisoned, and ultimately condemned, are largely ethnic and religious minorities at odds with the communist state. One such group in that category would be practitioners of the banned spiritual movement Falun Gong, whom the report details as being forced to undergo blood tests and medical exams. The information forcibly obtained from those detainees is then stored in an organ transplant database, serving as a catalog of prisoners who could be killed should a transplant be necessary. 

Organ trafficking is an incredibly lucrative global enterprise, generating an estimated $500 million to $1 billion annually. In this bloody black market trade, the most in-demand organ is the kidney, of which roughly 7,000 are illegally acquired every year, often from poor, unsuspecting populations. One such group being preyed upon by organ traffickers is the residents of Kavre, a small district outside of Kathmandu known as Nepal's "Kidney Bank." 

Since 2010, over 300 people in Kavre have reported falling victim to kidney traffickers. One of these victims, a man named Nawaraj Pariyar, relayed to CNN how he was duped by harvesters in heartbreaking fashion. 

In 2000, Pariyar, a farmer who also picks up seasonal labor work, was approached by his foreman at a construction site and promised 30 lakhs, which comes out to about $30,000, for the removal of a "hunk of meat" from his body. The foreman assured Pariyar that the meat would grow back, a promise that the impoverished, uneducated man believed. He was then taken – under a fake name – across the border to a hospital in India where a procedure took place.

Unaware of what was performed on him, Pariyar was discharged and given 20,000 Nepali rupees, which is about 1% of what he was promised. Upon returning to Nepal, he began having back and urinary problems, which took him to a doctor who discovered that he was missing a kidney. Pariyar was never given the remaining balance of the funds he was promised.

People have claimed to possess clairvoyant powers allowing them to predict the future and solve mysteries for thousands of years. Today, many are scornful of the idea that psychics help the police with criminal cases, yet law enforcement personnel, trained to be skeptical and discerning, admit to using psychics as investigative tools.

While serious publications may resist the idea that there are psychics who aided the police, there is one medium that allows police, psychics, and victim's family members to tell their stories to the public: reality television. Shows like Psychic Investigators and Psychic Detectives present viewers with firsthand accounts of citizens who use their paranormal abilities to uncover clues in criminal cases. In going public with these stories, law enforcement personnel are willing to put their professional integrity on the line. 

The stigma surrounding psychic ability is apparent in the dated cliches some reporters use to describe psychics, painting them as carny types staring into crystal balls. The New York Times manages to sniff at the idea of cops working with psychics while simultaneously citing a survey that acknowledges 35% of the 50 largest US police stations admit to doing just that. That percentage could be even higher. As Captain Bob Ingalls notes in the "Blood Money" episode of Psychic Detectives, "using psychics is employed by many police agencies. Some agencies don’t talk about it, and some do.”

It's clear that many psychic claims are bogus and may even hinder investigations, but the testimony of detectives and police officers who've worked successfully with psychics is difficult to summarily dismiss. In the following police investigations that used psychics, the psychic was credited by law enforcement as providing helpful information.

In 2009, Psychic Investigators aired the episode "Till Death Do Us Part" about the 1996 murder of Jenifer McCrady. Ohio state trooper Jack McCrady reported his wife Jenifer missing to the Belpre Police Department, claiming she “cleaned out everything she owns. Wedding rings were lying on the kitchen counter.” Jenifer’s mother immediately dismissed the idea that her daughter ran off with another man and abandoned her children. 

Georgia Rudolph was a local psychic said to have worked with the police for two decades. Rudolph told Belpre Police that “she was connecting with Jenifer’s spirit, and that Jenifer was dead.” Rudolph went on to tell Detective Dave Garvey that Jenifer was “shot in the back of her head” and that the man who murdered Jenifer was “like a cop.”

Rudolph also reportedly told Garvey that he could find Jenifer’s body south of town, near a road with the numbers “298." A day later, Detective Garvey checked out a local woman’s report of seeing a State Highway Patrol car in an out-of-town area "off Highway 298" around the time of Jenifer's disappearance. Garvey called a local detective to the scene, and together they found the fresh grave of Jenifer McCrady. A jury later found Jack McCrady guilty of the murder.

In the episode, former Belpre Police Dispatcher Moni Tanner states, “Georgia’s information made a world of difference. It solved the case.”

Kevin Rings, Assistant Prosecuting Attorney, also says, “Without that information and the resultant discovery of Jen’s body, I don’t think there would have even been a charge filed in the case against Mr. McCrady. It would have been simply an unsolved missing person’s case. Not only did she (Rudolph) say where the body would be discovered. She said she (Jenifer) was dead before anyone else had reached the conclusion. And then she said, you might not want to hear this, but the person who killed her is a cop.”

Now-retired Detective Sergeant Garvey added, "Following Georgia’s guidelines, or thoughts, whatever you want to say, led us to finding Jennifer. We found Jennifer. We found the bad guy.”

In August 2010, Aboriginal elder Cheryl Carroll-Lagerwey claimed to see the location of a missing child in a dream. Carroll-Lagerwey went to that location, Nurragingy Reserve (a suburb of Sydney, Australia), and reportedly succeeded in finding human remains. Police were called to the scene and later identified the body as Kristi McDougall, a 31-year-old woman reported missing in June.

At the time, Chief Homicide Inspector Pam Young said that she had “certain strong feelings about people who claim they are psychic.”

No word on whether Young thanked Carroll-Lagerwey for finding the body of Kristi McDougall. The inspector was only quoted as saying that it was ''interesting that a woman had a sense or a feeling that it was worth her while to come to this particular part of the park."

On a stormy night in 1975, psychic Phil Jordan was contacted by the father of a boy who went missing after picnicking with his family at Empire Lake in Tioga County, New York. Earlier that day, five-year-old Tommy Kennedy, wearing nothing but a swimsuit, reportedly had a temper tantrum and ran into the national forest surrounding the lake.

After an initial search by the family and park rangers failed to find the boy, the Tioga County Sheriff’s Department were called to the scene as “hundreds of volunteers searched in vain.” By the time Detective David Redsicker and Phil Jordan arrived at the lake, the search was about to be halted until the next morning due to thunderstorms. 

Jordan brought a map with him that he reportedly drew at home to prevent the chaos at the scene from clouding his psychic impressions. Jordan’s map is said to have led searchers through dense forest to an area that had yet to be searched. And in that area, cold and exhausted, was little Tommy Kennedy. 

Now-retired Detective Redsicker said on Larry King Live, “We had spent well over 12 hours with a couple hundred searchers without success, and it was actually less than an hour before Phil led us right to the boy.” 

A few miles south of San Francisco lies the town of Pacifica. Known for its rugged coastline intersected by California’s famously scenic Highway 1, the town is flanked by plenty of hiking trails and a national park. When local resident and former paratrooper 71-year-old Dennis Prado was reported missing in May of 1997, cops discovered Prado liked to go for walks and knew they had a tough job in front of them. 

“Finally, about nine to ten weeks into his disappearance,” Detective Fernando Realyvasquez of the Pacifica Police told Nancy Grace in 2005, “His family had come to me and asked me if I would go see a psychic on their behalf.”

Despite razzing from his colleagues, Detective Realyvasquez contacted psychic Annette Martin.  Martin reportedly pinpointed a small area on a map that covered over 2,000 acres, a small area that Nancy Grace measured out to be “the size of two city blocks." Searchers went to the location Martin chose and discovered Prado’s body, just as she predicted. “Based on the final conclusion,” Realyvasquez told Grace, “she was very, very accurate.”

According to the Mercury News, “Prado’s appreciative family invited Realyvasquez to join them spreading the the man’s ashes at sea under the Golden Gate."

In 1979, a Central New York town was rocked by a quadruple murder inside a local nursery. In the "Blood Money" episode of Psychic Detectives, Sheriff Bill Hasenauer says the killings were “probably the most hideous crime during my term of office.” Shot execution-style, the victims were the owner of the nursery, who also ran a coin shop out of the building, his employee, and two bystanders.

After an extensive investigation that led nowhere, Sheriff Hasenauer called psychic Phil Jordan to ask for help in the case. Jordan was reportedly able to describe the murders from the point of view of the perpetrators. He led detectives to a location outside of the nursery where stolen coins dropped by the killers were then discovered - an area the police had previously searched, finding nothing. 

Jordan also said the getaway car was “a small vehicle, with a custom design.” He reportedly stressed that the “front end was funny, and it looked like a Rolls Royce, with that kind of front grill.” His vision corroborated a report left on a police tip line that a Volkswagen was seen near the crime scene. 

When detectives tracked down a suspect in Florida, the suspect was driving a Volkswagen.  Authorities canvassed local body shops and confirmed that the suspect had altered the car so it no longer had the customized “Rolls Royce” front end. Detectives now had probable cause to search the Volkswagen, where they found some of the stolen coins.

That suspect and two other men stood trial for the murders. All were found guilty.
Kurt Hameline, Assistant D.A. of Oneida County, concluded that, “We were able to use a psychic who gave us certain information that helped us in the investigation.”

On June 1st of 1996, 22-year-old single mother Nicole Arochas left her daughter with her parents to go out for the evening. As told in an episode of Psychic Investigators, when Nicole didn’t return that night, her father reported her missing to Detective Jim Novak of the Sayreville, New Jersey Police Department.

Detectives interviewed Nicole’s boyfriend Michael Reid, who reportedly claimed that he last saw Nicole before she "went out drinking" the night she disappeared. According to Detective Novak, he knew that Nicole was dead when Reid referred to her in the past tense, telling Novak, "I didn’t love Nicole. We were only friends.” But the detective had no evidence to back up his suspicions.

Two days passed with no sign of Nicole or her black Chevy Malibu. With no leads in the case, Nicole’s mother Pat Arochas says in the episode, “My uncle, Walt Werner, worked for the Hackensack Police dept. and he suggested a psychic that the police force sometimes used.” That psychic was New Jersey resident Frank St. James, said to be known for finding missing persons. 

After seeing Nicole’s picture, St. James delivers the bad news on the third day of Nicole’s disappearance. Nicole was no longer alive. The Arochas family invited the psychic to their home to see if he could get more information. In their kitchen, St. James claimed to connect with Nicole’s spirit who showed him her car in a marshy area "close to home" that could only be seen from the air.

Detective Novak was able secure a helicopter to search local marshy areas on June 6, five days after Nicole's disappearance. Novak says he remembers thinking, “Please God let us find something. If we don’t, I am never going to be able to live this down.”

The helicopter pilot spotted a car that looked like Nicole’s in a secluded, marshy area. Police did a ground search and found Nicole’s body inside her Chevy Malibu. Reid was reportedly charged in her drug-induced death and sentenced to ten years in prison.

“We had nothing,” now-retired Detective Novak says about the case. “We found Nicole based on the information supplied to us by the psychic Frank St. James. And that’s it. I don’t see how anyone could dispute it.”

Rosemarie Kerr is a psychic featured in Psychic Detectives's 2007 "Midnight Strangers" episode on the murder of Andre Daigle.

Daigle went missing in 1987, after leaving a Louisiana bar with an unknown woman. Police and Andre’s family immediately began an exhaustive search of the New Orleans area. After three frustrating days, Daigle’s sister reached out to California psychic Rosemarie Kerr, sending her a photo of Andre and a map of Louisiana.

After touching the photograph, Kerr says she “knew something terrible had happened, and felt an urgency stronger than any other urgency she’d felt in a reading.” After opening the map, Kerr was drawn to the New Orleans suburb of Slidell. Kerr called the Daigle family and told them to go to Slidell immediately. “Do it now. Do it quick.” Andre’s family members reportedly raced toward Slidell, and when they got off at the Slidell exit, they spotted Andre’s truck on the road next to them.

According to Captain James Gallagher of the Kenner police department, “They pull up to the truck and they see two strangers.” Andre’s brother reportedly flagged down a cop car, and the truck was pulled over. The two suspects in the car were arrested for being in possession of a stolen vehicle, but there was no evidence of foul play. 

Captain James Gallagher took psychic Kerr to the bar where Daigle was last seen. Andre Daigle was no longer alive, Kerr said. He'd been murdered by two men. Kerr was able to reportedly connect with Andre's spirit and was shown images of a body of water and railroad tracks. Captain Gallagher said, “She described the location in great detail” and stressed that the number 7 was also “very, very important.”

Detective Gallagher searched a previous apartment of the two suspects (apartment number 7) and found a “huge bloodstain” later confirmed as Daigle's blood. The suspects, already in jail thanks to Kerr, confessed to using a female accomplice to lure Daigle from the bar, then killing him in a convoluted plot to “get into the mafia.”

When the suspects led police to Daigle's body (next to Interstate 7), Detective Gallagher confirmed that the location had “everything she (Kerr) described. I was stunned and amazed.”

Kerr later testified in the trial of one of the suspects. She was reportedly “the first psychic to ever testify in a criminal trial” because, as Detective Gallagher states, “she led directly to the killer. You can’t dispute that. That is fact.”

Both suspects were eventually convicted and are reportedly serving life sentences.

Etta Louise Smith lived in north Los Angeles and worked at a Lockheed aerospace plant. It was 1980, and Smith was listening to a news update on the radio about nurse Melanie Uribe, missing for two days. Smith didn’t consider herself a psychic, yet when she heard police were doing a house-to-house search, she felt certain the search was heading in the wrong direction.

“She’s not in the house,” Smith thought. In her mind’s eye, Smith reportedly "saw" where Uribe was: in brush, less than two miles away in Lopez Canyon. In 2004, Smith described her psychic vision on Larry King Live, “I could visually see where she was. I didn't know the name of the street, but I knew how to get there. And I couldn't shake this.” 

After work, Smith went straight to the Foothill station of the LAPD and showed Detective Lee Ryan on a wall map where she "saw" Uribe’s body. On Larry King Live, Detective Ryan said that Smith "had top security clearances. She lived in the community. She was obviously a professional businesswoman." 

Smith left the station with plans to meet up with Detective Ryan the next morning, but instead, feeling an intense sense of urgency, she went to Lopez Canyon where she discovered the body of Melanie Uribe.

After Smith alerted the cops of her discovery, she quickly became a suspect in Uribe’s death. According to the LA Times, “Detectives questioned Smith for about 10 hours before arresting her on suspicion of having murdered the nurse. Smith was released four days later and never charged. Three men with no known connection to Smith eventually were convicted of the murder and are serving sentences of up to life in state prison.”

Smith ended up suing the LAPD for wrongful arrest, and was awarded $26,184 in damages.

In 2006, Psychic Investigators aired an episode about the murder of Jacquie Poole. Jacquie’s body was found in her West London apartment in February of 1983. She’d been sexually assaulted and strangled with a cord. 

The night after Jacquie’s body was found, local psychic Christine Holohan claimed that the spirit of the murdered woman appeared to her, identifying herself as Jacquie Hunt. Jacquie was recently divorced, and Hunt was her maiden name. 

Constable Tony Batters was sent to interview Holohan, and she shared details about her visions of the crime, which included a sweater that she felt was important to the case. The psychic reportedly "amazed" Constable Batters by giving him detailed information about Jacquie’s life.

Holohan is said to have described the appearance of Jacquie’s killer, including his tattoos, also revealing the killer's name as “Pokie” through a process known as "automatic writing." “It was like someone had taken my hand and very, very slowly written out the name,” Holohan says of the experience.

“Pokie” was discovered to be the nickname of a friend of Jacquie’s boyfriend, a man named Anthony Ruark, already one of the suspects in the crime. His physical appearance was also said to match Holohan’s description.

Police found a a sweater which “forensically linked Ruark with Jacquie," but it was not enough to stop the 15-month investigation from being disbanded.

Eighteen years later, skin from under Jacquie’s fingernails was examined along with a “bodily swab” from the crime scene. The DNA was positively identified as Ruark’s, whose DNA was on record because of a crime he had committed in 2000. Ruark was reportedly “linked to Jacquie’s murder by a one-in-one-billion match.” 

Retired Constable Tony Batters attended Ruark’s trial. According to Psychic Investigators, “The retired police officer had listed 130 specific points that Christine (Holohan) claims she received from Jacquie’s spirit. Now he wanted to see just how many were correct. An amazing 120 facts matched information brought out during the trial.”

Ann Batters, the Constable's widow, confirms in the episode that her husband believed that "the information must have come directly from Jacquie.”

The jury found Ruark guilty and sentenced him to life in prison.

Known as the Boca Raton "high school sweethearts,” Cynthia Rediger and John Futch were reported missing in January of 1978.  

As detailed in an episode of Psychic Detectives, Palm Beach County police contacted psychic Phil Jordan for help after John Futch’s car was found submerged in a canal. Jordan was brought to a picnic site that the cops believed the teen couple had visited on the day of their disappearance.

At the scene, Jordan reportedly told investigators that “they (the couple) were approached by two men. One had a shotgun, and one had a rifle. I'm pretty sure they’re dead.The cause of death was gunshot wounds to the head.”

Among the psychic images Jordan said he received, one was a dilapidated white house with dark trim. “We had already looked at an old white house," says Detective Rendell of the Palm Beach County sheriff’s office. "But now that Phil mentioned this, I wanted to go back again. So I went back. Now, the house is empty. We find shell casings for a .22 rifle.”

The investigation stalled until two months later, when a bicyclist reportedly found the bodies of Rediger and Futch in a rural area east of the picnic site. The cause of death for both teens was gunshots to the head. A bullet fragment pulled from John’s skull reportedly came from a .22 rifle.

Detective Rendell contacted Phil Jordan again, asking him to try and get a description of the two suspects. Jordan gave Rendell a composite drawing of what he envisioned the shooter looked like. He reportedly also stressed that the initial "A" was tied to the suspects, and that one or both of them were “Latino or Mexican.” Finally, Jordan told Rendell that "a dog" would be important to the case.

Another crime rocked the area: a young woman was reportedly kidnapped and sexually battered, but she was able to escape. Palm Beach County's Detective Sessa tells Psychic Detectives that the victim identified a man named Adam Herrera as the man who kidnapped and assaulted her. "I subsequently placed him in hand cuffs and arrested him,” says Sessa.

Then a tipster contacted police claiming that he'd sold his dog to a man who said, "I know who killed the Boca Raton high school sweethearts. He’s in the Palm Beach County jail. He just got arrested for sexual battery.”

Detective Rendell compared Herrara’s photo with Phil Jordan’s composite sketch. “It was a strong match,” said Rendell. Palm beach County detectives also determined that Herrera had once lived in the same white house where Rendell found the shell casings.

Herrera and an accomplice were found guilty in the killings of Rediger and Futch, with Herrera eventually receiving two life sentences with no chance of parole.

“Every cop in this investigation did their best,” Detective Rendell says about the convictions. “Phil (Jordan) had that investigative ability too, he just had it in a different way.”

From 1975 to 1980, Peter William Sutcliffe terrorized the people of Yorkshire, England, with his bizarre serial killing style – viciously attacking young woman and teenage girls with a hammer and a screwdriver. Sutcliffe murdered at least 13 women and girls and seriously injured several others, and the brutality of his killings and assaults reminded many Britons of one of the most famous English serial killers in history, Jack the Ripper. Because of the similarities between the crimes committed by Jack the Ripper and Peter Sutcliffe, the media dubbed the then-unidentified perpetrator of the crimes the "Yorkshire Ripper."

Witnesses provided descriptions that matched Sutcliffe; someone named him as a suspect to police; and he surfaced multiple times in the course of the investigation. However, a heartless hoax played by a member of the public, as well as errors made by law enforcement, meant the man known as the Yorkshire Ripper was able to get away with murder for five straight years. However, after he was apprehended, a jury was forced to decide whether Sutcliffe was a blood-thirsty killer who had murdered victims to satisfy his own depraved needs or a mentally ill man who was driven to kill by dangerous delusions.

In 1967, 21-year-old Peter Sutcliffe met 16-year-old Sonia Szurma at a Yorkshire pub, and they quickly became a couple. While Sutcliffe worked various jobs, including as a truck driver and a grave digger, Szurma, the daughter of Czech immigrants, studied to become a teacher. However, while attending school in London in the early 1970s, Szurma experienced delusions and behaved erratically, leading doctors to diagnose her with schizophrenia.

Szurma had difficulty coping with her mental health issues, and she repeatedly withdrew from school, overwhelmed by the pressures of her classes and the sometimes debilitating symptoms of her schizophrenia. However, Sutcliffe remained committed to his relationship with Szurma, and the couple married in 1974. While they both desperately wanted to have children, all of Szurma's pregnancies ended with miscarriages, preventing them from ever having a child together.

On January 2, 1981, 35-year-old Peter Sutcliffe was stopped by police while driving through the city of Sheffield with Olivia Reivers, a sex worker, because the officers thought he was behind the wheel of a stolen car. However, the officers quickly realized that Sutcliffe looked very similar to composite sketches provided by surviving victims of the Yorkshire Ripper, so they questioned him about his possible involvement in the killings. The officers became even more suspicious when they realized Sutcliffe had tried to dispose of a rope, a hammer, and a knife under the pretense of using the bathroom, so they brought him into the station for further questioning. 

Once at the station, law enforcement asked Sutcliffe to undress, and they discovered that, underneath his pants, he was wearing a v-neck sweater on his legs. Officials later determined this bizarre outfit enabled Sutcliffe to keep his penis exposed via the neck opening while keeping his legs covered, allowing him to rape women on the ground without risking injury to his knees which were protected by the sweater's elbow pads.

One of the contributing factors to Peter Sutcliffe's hatred towards women may have been his shock at discovering his beloved mother, Katherine, had been unfaithful to his father, John. When Sutcliffe's father learned his wife had been cheating on him, instead of confronting Katherine privately about her infidelity, he decided to humiliate and embarrass her in front of their children.

When John discovered his wife planned to meet her lover at a local hotel, Sutcliffe's father invited his children, including Peter and his girlfriend, to wait with him in the room Katherine and her loved had booked. When Katherine opened the door to the room, she was shocked to find her husband and family, not her lover, waiting for her. John called her a prostitute and forced Katherine to open up her purse, revealing the lingerie she had packed for the romantic evening.

The ordeal had a devastating effect on the family, including Peter Sutcliffe, who was horrified his mother, whom he had always held in high esteem, had been having an extra-marital affair.

Peter Sutcliffe was able to get away with killing women and girls for five years for a number of different reasons, including the actions of a deranged man who contacted police, claiming to be the person responsible for the murders. In March 1978, when Yorkshire officials and residents were desperate to find the man who had taken the lives of several local girls and women, a man sent the first of three letters purporting to be the sought-after serial killer.

From March 1978 to March 1979, the man, who was eventually dubbed "Wearside Jack," sent two written communications to the authorities and another to a newspaper, as well as an audio tape, convincing the police he was the person who had committed the killings. Using information gleaned from the letters and the tape, officers focused on tracking down a man with a Wearside accent, causing them to eliminate any suspects who didn't speak in the manner of people from Sunderland, a city in Northeast England.

During the course of his five-year crime spree, Peter Sutcliffe was questioned multiple times by police about his possible connection to the killings attributed to the Yorkshire Ripper. Sutcliffe regularly drove through the red-light district in Bradford, and police who were searching for the Yorkshire Ripper wrote down the license plate numbers of vehicles frequently seen in the area. Consequently, law enforcement officials interviewed Sutcliffe about his possible connection to the killings, but the questioning didn't yield enough information for them to classify him as a suspect, despite a number of details that should have raised their suspicions.

Police also interviewed Sutcliffe when a new £5 bill was found in the purse belonging to Jean Jordan, a murdered sex worker, and law enforcement officials eventually traced the note to money distributed by three local firms to their employees. Using this information, the authorities made a list of all the men who could have received this specific bill, questioning everyone, including Jordan's killer, Peter Sutcliffe. However, Sutcliffe's wife provided him with an alibi, claiming she and her husband were hosting a housewarming party on the night the young woman was murdered.

In November 1980, Trevor Birdsall sent an anonymous letter to the West Yorkshire Police, telling law enforcement that he suspected his close friend Peter Sutcliffe was the man responsible for the attacks and murders attributed to the Yorkshire Ripper. In the note, he told investigators about Sutcliffe's negative feelings towards sex workers, and he provided details about an attack that had occurred five years earlier. Birdsall also included Sutcliffe's name, occupation, and address, giving officers plenty of information to help them follow up on the anonymous tip.

Not content just to send the letter, Birdsall, at the urging of his girlfriend, went to Bradford Police headquarters and told an officer about the note he'd mailed and also provided additional details about Sutcliffe. While the constable wrote down the information Birdsall gave about his friend, no one ever followed up on the tips, allowing Sutcliffe to remain free.

Years after Peter Sutcliffe was apprehended and confessed to his crimes, he told his brother the reason he had attacked and murdered women and girls was because he was "cleaning up the streets." Many of the people Sutcliffe assaulted and killed had been involved in prostitution, and he felt as though he was doing some sort of public service by viciously beating and stabbing sex workers.

However, not all of the girls and women who were subjected to Sutcliffe's extreme violence were involved in prostitution, with some of the Yorkshire Ripper's victims being students, a shop worker, and a bank clerk. Because he didn't exclusively kill sex workers, it appears as though Sutcliffe attacked victims of opportunity, many of whom just happened to be involved in prostitution.

From 1975-1980, Peter William Sutcliffe, who was born in Yorkshire, England, on June 2, 1946, murdered 13 women and girls who ranged in age from 16 to 47. During this five-year period, Sutcliffe viciously attacked seven other victims who survived their violent assaults, leaving them with long-lasting psychological, mental, and physical scars.

Sutcliffe killed many of his victims by bludgeoning them with a hammer and then repeatedly stabbing them with a screwdriver, causing the press to dub him the "Yorkshire Ripper." In Leeds in 1976, Sutcliffe attacked Marcella Claxton, one of the few women who survived a violent encounter with the Yorkshire Ripper, giving her blows to the head that required the young woman to have emergency brain surgery.

Peter Sutcliffe's crimes had a devastating effect on everyone involved, especially the families and friends of the women and girls he had attacked and murdered. Sutcliffe's first known murder victim, 28-year-old Wilma McCann, was killed on October 29, 1975, leaving her four children without a mother.

One of McCann's children, Sonia Newslands, was particularly shattered by her mother's murder, leading to a debilitating alcohol addiction. Despite time spent in a rehabilitation center, Newslands was unable to cope with the destruction Sutcliffe had visited upon her and her family, causing McCann's oldest daughter to commit suicide in December 2007.

Shortly after he was arrested in 1981, Peter Sutcliffe confessed to being the Yorkshire Ripper, the killer responsible for ending the lives of 13 innocent women and girls. At his trial, Sutcliffe claimed he was guilty of manslaughter, not murder, because of diminished responsibility caused by mental health issues. He also pleaded guilty to seven counts of attempted murder, and, at the conclusion of his two-week trial, he was found guilty of all charges and given 20 life sentences for his crimes.

Despite Sutcliffe's confession and conviction, his wife Sonia remained loyal to him for several years, regularly visiting her husband in prison. In fact, she didn't divorce Sutcliffe until 1994, 13 years after he was incarcerated for his gruesome crimes and two decades after they married on August 10, 1974.

Serial killers are supposed to be rare. When one terrorizes a city, there usually isn't another lurking around the corner, committing his (or even her) own horrifying crimes. However, there have been times when serial killers overlap in the same city. This makes it tricky for law enforcement to determine which murderer is to blame for the crimes - they might even think that it's just one killer, not the work of two active killers. Some huge cities, like Los Angeles and New York, have had multiple serial killers scaring their citizenry at the same time. Small cities have also been terrorized by serial killers who were active at the same time.

It's hard to believe so much chaos was happening all at once - and that some of these killers managed to get away with it for a long time. 

When most people think of serial killers in Milwaukee, WI, Jeffrey Dahmer is the first person to come to mind. Dahmer is best known for his cannibalization of his victims, all of whom were male. He killed at least 17 between the years of 1978 and 1991. While that was going on, Walter E. Ellis - another Milwaukee resident - murdered seven women over a 21 year span - 1986 to 2007. Ellis raped and strangled his victims, and was caught in 2009 thanks to a series of DNA matches. He died in South Dakota in 2013 while serving out the life sentences that were handed to him. Dahmer died in prison in 1994 at the hands of his fellow inmates. 

In the late 1970s, the city of Los Angeles, was besieged by two high profile serial killers - although one of them turned out to be a pair of killers. The Hillside Stranglers, cousins Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono, murdered 10 women and girls, raping, torturing, and strangling them before dumping their naked bodies in various locations. Both Bianchi and Buono received life sentences; Buono died of a heart attack in 2002, but Bianchi is still in prison.

At the tail end of the Hillside Strangler killings, the Freeway Killer William Bonin was on a murderous rampage of his own, picking up young male hitchhikers, prostitutes, and schoolboys, who he then beat, tortured, raped, and strangled to death before dumping their bodies alongside the freeway. In all, he committed between 20 and 36 murders, for which he received the death penalty. Bonin was executed in 1996. 

The 1980s were a dangerous time in Los Angeles. There were three serial killers on the loose, all preying on women. Michael Hughes, Lonnie Franklin Jr. (also known as the Grim Sleeper), and Chester Turner all committed their murders primarily in the 1980s, although the Grim Sleeper took a break and went back to killing in the 2000s.

Hughes sexually assaulted his seven victims before strangling them to death and dumping them in various areas around the city. He was caught in 1993 and is currently on death row. Franklin was apprehended in 2010, and was sentenced to death for the murders of 11 victims, all women who were raped, shot, and then dumped in back alleys. Turner also killed 11 women by strangling them to death. He was caught in 2003, and is on death row alongside Hughes and Franklin. 

The years of 2005 and 2006 were a bad time for Phoenix, AZ, residents. Not only did they have to deal with a serial rapist and murderer, but a serial shooter as well. The former was Mark Goudeau, whose final tally stands at nine murders, 15 rapes, and 11 kidnappings. Nicknamed the Baseline Killer after the street where his crime spree began, he received nine death sentences in 2011, and may have had an accomplice.

Serial shooter Dale Shawn Hausner killed at least eight people. Hausner was known to drive around and shoot people at random, usually targeting pedestrians. Police believe he may have shot at at least 38 people. Hausner had an accomplice as well - his roommate, Samuel Dieteman. Dieteman is spending his sentence - life without parole - in an area prison, while Hausner committed suicide in his cell in 2013. 

London, Ontario, is a Canadian city located midway between Detroit, MI, and Toronto, also in Ontario. It currently has almost 400,000 residents, and is known for having upwards of three active serial killers at the same time. The three known killers - Christian Magee (nicknamed the Mad Slasher), Gerald Thomas Archer (the London Chambermaid Slayer), and Russell Johnson (the Bedroom Strangler) - combined are responsible for 13 of the 29 people who have been brutally slain in the city over the last 25 years.

Of the known killers, Johnson has the largest body count. He confessed to the murder of seven women and the attack of 10 others, all of whom he followed to their homes and then broke into their bedrooms, where he would rape and strangle them. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity, and remains in a psychiatric hospital. MaGee killed three teenagers - one who was only 14 - by slashing their throats during a sexual assault. He spent some time in a maximum security prison, but is now in a secure hospital, due to his health issues. Archer was convicted of only one murder, but is suspected of killing others. He preyed on women who worked in hotels (hence his nickname, the London Chambermaid Slayer). Archer was released from prison around 1985, and died shortly thereafter. 

New York City is known for its cultural institutions, interesting history, and, of course, its serial killers. Richard Cottingham and David Berkowitz both were active in the city back in the 1970s. Cottingham, also known as the Torso Killer, has six confirmed victims - all women - but he claims to have killed between 85 and 100. He mutilated the bodies of his victims, often leaving just a torso behind.

Berkowitz, aka the Son of Sam, shot 14 women with a .44 caliber gun during his murderous spree, killing six and wounding eight. Cottingham is currently serving the first of several life sentences, while Berkowitz is up for parole every two years, but each time, he tells the parole board he shouldn't be released. Berkowitz became devoutly religious in prison and has taken responsibility for his crimes, saying, "In all honesty I believe that I deserve to be in prison for the rest of my life."

Throughout the 1990s and well into the early 2000s, the city of Baton Rouge, LA, was besieged by two serial killers, both of whom preyed on women. To make it even more confusing, one of the murderers - Derrick Todd Lee - changed his modus operandi every time he killed, leaving police unable to connect the crimes. Lee started off stalking women, and then quickly progressed to murdering them. In all, he killed at least 7 between the years of 1992 and 2003.

During this same time period (to be specific, 1994 to 2004) Sean Vincent Gillis was out murdering women as well. He raped and mutilated their bodies, keeping photographs and body parts as souvenirs. Lee died in 2016 of heart disease while on death row, while Gillis is serving life in prison at the Louisiana State Penitentiary. 

In the early 1990s, people living on Long Island had the right be scared. There were three serial killers active during the period - Joel Rifkin, who murdered at least 16 women between 1989 and 1993; Robert Schulman, a former postal worker who killed five sex workers in a five-year span starting in 1991; and Colin Ferguson, who killed six people on a commuter train in 1993.

Rifkin picked his victims up on Long Island and in the city - similar to Schulman - and is suspected to also be the Gilgo Beach Killer. Schulman was caught after a person saw him dumping a body from his brother's Cadillac. Ferguson shot and killed six people on a commuter train, injuring 19 others. 

Rifkin was sentenced to 203 years in prison back in 1994, Schulman received a death sentence in 1999, and Ferguson was sentenced to 315 years in prison. Schulman died in 2006 of undisclosed causes, and Rifkin will be up for parole in 2197. Interestingly, Rifkin and Ferguson were housed at the same prison—Attica Correctional Facility. The two got in an argument over the telephone and allegedly bragged to one another about how many people they killed. 

In the early 1970s, Santa Cruz, CA, had not one, not two, but three serial killers lurking about. One was Edmund Kemper, a Department of Transportation employee who had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in his youth. He killed at least six women, all of whom were hitchhikers that he picked up at the side of the road, as well as his mother and one of his female friends. He was caught in 1973, and has been incarcerated in the California Medical Facility in Vacaville, CA, ever since.

While Kemper was killing young women, Herbert Mullin was on a killing spree of his own, believing that each death helped him prevent earthquakes. In all, he committed 13 murders. His victims ranged in age from four to 72, and were mostly men. Mullin was caught in 1973. He pled guilty, and received a sentence of life in prison. He is currently at Mule Creek State Prison, where he will be up for parole in 2021. 

And to round out the Santa Cruz killers was John Linley Frazier who, in 1970, killed five people. Frazier attacked and killed ophthalmologist Victor Ohta, his wife, their two sons, and his secretary after spiraling into a rampage. Frazier said he was an agent of God. He was arrested and sentenced to death in 1970. In 2009, he hung himself in his prison cell. 

Police officers have a bond like no other - both to each other and their communities.  Sometimes called the "thin blue line," officers are sworn to protect people against the horrible things of the world. But what happens when that bond is broken, and police officers aren't the ones stopping crime but creating it? Sadly, there are plenty of examples of cops who committed heinous crimes, and often the only reason these rogue cops are caught is thanks to whistleblowers in police departments. 

These whistleblower cops should be counted among the most honorable and noble police officers because of their dedication to justice. These anti-corruption cops were against the misdeeds of their fellow officers, and fought against the system when they saw something wrong. Some of them were hailed as heroes, while the others paid dire consequences. 

Officer Adrian Schoolcraft felt there was something wrong in his Brooklyn precinct, but he didn't know what to do about it. He decided to carry around a digital audio recorder at all times and capture as much evidence of what he believed was top-to-bottom corruption in the NYPD.

From June 1, 2008, to October 31, 2009, Schoolcraft recorded hundreds of hours of audio from within the precinct and out on the streets. His recordings revealed cops in his precinct were expected to meet quotas for stop-and-frisks and arrests or face punishment. Commanding officers instructed beat cops to neglect some robbery reports to manipulate crime statistics, and even intimidated crime victims who filed complaints.

Schoolcraft released the tapes to The Village Voice, which ran a series of damning articles. An investigation opened up that corroborating Schoolcraft's claims. On October 7, 2010, Schoolcraft was interviewed by the Quality Assistance Division for three hours about his allegations. Later that month, after he left work early because he felt sick, he was visited at home by precinct supervisors. He was thrown to the floor, handcuffed, and admitted to the psychiatric ward at Jamaica Hospital against his will.

Schoolcraft was forcibly held at the psych ward for six days. He returned home to find that officers had removed paperwork detailing his grievances against the NYPD's actions. Fortunately for Schoolcraft, the digital audio recorder that initially got him into hot water was running when he was cuffed and taken to the psych ward, proving he was coherent and rational and had refused medical assistance. Schoolcraft sued the city for $50 million for violating his civil rights and finally settled the case for $600,000 in 2015. Only four cops from his precinct received internal disciplinary charges - none were fired or arrested.

Francesco "Frank" Serpico was one of the original whistleblower cops in modern times. He joined the NYPD in September 1959. During his time in the police academy, Serpico said many of his fellow students complained about being off the streets during their time in school because they were missing out on illegal payoffs called "the nut."

Serpico began speaking about the corruption in the department, and he was reportedly told to "go along" with the other officers. He continued complaining, and was ostracized from the officers he worked with. Realizing he wasn't getting anywhere within the system, Serpico took his story of police corruption to the New York Times, which printed a story in 1970 detailing how corrupt cops were making more than $1 million a year from their shady dealings with drug dealers and gangsters. City Hall demanded an investigation. 

Serpico became even more hated in his department when he testified in June 1970 against fellow officers for taking bribes and receiving payoffs. During a drug arrest attempt in Brooklyn on February 3, 1971, Serpico faced an armed assailant and called for back-up, but the three officers conducting the raid with him failed to respond. The assailant shot Serpico in the face with a .22 pistol, the bullet lodging just below his eye.

Serpico's fellow officers left him to bleed out rather than call in a "Officer Down." After an elderly man who lived in the neighborhood called 911, Serpico made it to the hospital and recovered. He still experiences chronic pain from the bullet fragments lodged in his brain. Serpico received the Medal of Honor, the NYPD's highest honor, in May 1972, and retired from the force a month later. He moved to Europe and spent a decade in Switzerland and the Netherlands. His exploits with the NYPD inspired the Peter Maas book Serpico, and the 1973 film of the same name that earned Al Pacino an Oscar nomination.

Former Buffalo Police Officer Cariol Horne was a veteran with the department when she stopped one of her fellow police officers from brutalizing a handcuffed suspect. On November 1, 2006, Horne responded to a call of domestic abuse at the home of Neal Mack and found him in handcuffs for resisting arrest.

Horne and nine other officers dragged Mack from his home, at which point Horne claims the arresting officer, Gregory Kwiatkowski, began choking the handcuffed Mack. She told him to stop. Instead of standing down, Kwiatkowski flew into a rage and punched Horne so hard she had to have the bridge in her teeth replaced. Horne was fired and charged with obstruction of justice for interceding. She was two months shy of earning her pension.

It might be small consolation for Horne, but her actions were vindicated when Kwiatkowski was forced to retire from the police department for choking an officer and for an off-duty scuffle with another office. In May 2014, Kwiatowski was indicted for violating the civil rights of several black teen suspects.

When a former Bogota, NJ, city council member called police, she was hoping they would assist her emotionally-disturbed son. Instead, they tackled the boy - who never threatened the officers and did not have a weapon - punched him in the head and continued to beat him until 20-year veteran Officer Roberta Tasca stepped in to stop them. The boy's mother later commended Officer Tasca saying: "I appreciate you protecting him when the other officers attacked him. I can't figure out what I would have done without you on the scene."

Rather than start an investigation into the excessive violence, which was caught on dash cam and in photos taken by the boy's mother, the Bogota Police Department suspended Tasca and told her to turn in her weapon. No charges were ever filed against the offending officers and Tasca told a local news station she was fired for doing the right thing. Tasca was the first female officer to work at the Bogota Police Department, and the "first and only gay female" officer, which she believes factored in her firing.

Tosca filed a federal lawsuit for wrongful termination and won the case. The presiding superior court judge invalidated her firing, ruling that the then-mayor and then-councilman who had decided her fate had conflicts of interest and should have been recused from disciplinary matters regarding Tasca's termination and ordered that she be reinstated and given back pay.

Scott Germond wanted nothing more in life than to serve and protect. He worked for the Chenango County Corrections Division and then landed his dream job with the Norwich Police Department (NPD) in 2014. As soon as he started at the NPD, Germond was asked by a commanding officer to help him get another officer fired. Germond wouldn't do it and suddenly he did not "fit the norm" and became the target of harassment from his fellow officers.

When Germond reported the misconduct within the department to the city, things really started to heat up. One of the accused officers got "violently confrontational" and another threatened to burn down Germond's house and kill him. The commanding officer who asked Germond to get another officer fired was relieved of duty, but the harassment continued and even worsened.

When fellow officers told Germond they would not back him up in dangerous situations on the job, he was diagnosed with PTSD and took a medical leave. "I took an oath to protect and serve the public," Germond said in June 2016. "I’m not going to uphold the 'blue line' when people are doing things they shouldn’t. My ethics are better than that."

Beginning in the early 2000s, suspicions arose that members of the Chicago Police Department's (CPD) Second District were shaking down drug dealers and pocketing the cash. Officers Shannon Spalding and Daniel Echeverria went undercover in a joint CPD and FBI investigation to find evidence of the claims.

In February 2012, tactical unit Sgt. Ronald Watts and tactical team officer Kallat Mohamed were arrested after being videotaped taking money from a drug dealer, who was actually an undercover informant. The department called the case closed, despite rumors more than a half dozen other cops were involved in illegal activity - including two unsolved homicides.

The investigation was stopped after the arrest of Watts and Mohamed. In an interview with NBC 5, Spalding said she was told the investigation was "too big" and included too many high-ranking officers. Spalding and Echeverria were ostracized and intimidated after their role in the undercover investigation was intentionally leaked within the department. "My life, my safety my freedom was threatened," Spalding said. "I was subjected to daily harassment."

The two officers filed a civil rights lawsuit against the CPD and a third officer stepped forward to corroborate their claims. Spalding and Echeverria were given dead-end assignments and supervisors instructed other officers in their unit to ignore their calls for backup. A sergeant was heard saying Spalding "better wear her bulletproof vest" or she might "go home in a casket." In November 2016, the city of Chicago settled the with Spalding and Echeverria, awarding them $2 million.

Before Baltimore became synonymous with police brutality in the wake of the death of Freddie Gray in 2015, one officer attempted to blow the whistle on police misconduct and paid the price for it. Baltimore Police Department officer Joseph Crystal reported a fellow officer for beating a suspect while in custody and he was harassed for being a "rat" and eventually forced out of the department.

Crystal was working a drug arrest in October 2011 where a suspect threw away what his fellow officers believed were drugs. They pursued the man and later found them hiding in the home of an officer's girlfriend. According to Crystal, the suspect, while still handcuffed, was taken out of the police wagon and back into the house where he was found, at which point an off-duty officer proceeded to beat the man.

Crystal did what any honorable officer would do and reported the misconduct. After cooperating with prosecutors, Crystal became the target of harassment by his fellow officers, who called him "rat" and even left a dead rat on his car.

Feeling the Baltimore Police Department had become a hostile workplace environment, Crystal quit the force and filed a $5 million lawsuit contending that "nothing has come of the investigation into what the department did and allowed to continue to happen to plaintiff for whistleblowing police misconduct." The city eventually settled with Crystal for $42,000, a paltry sum in light of the stress he was subjected to and the loss of his career and reputation.

Florida Highway Patrol Trooper Donna "Jane" Watts was patrolling a section of her highway on October 11th, 2011, when she was passed by a Miami Police Department cruiser traveling at an alarming speed without its emergency lights or siren. When the cruiser continued to weave through traffic at nearly 120 miles an hour, she attempted to pull the driver over. Rather than finding a car thief on a joy ride, Trooper Watts found the driver to be Miami Police Officer Fausto Lopez.

Officer Lopez was defensive initially, but attempted to apologize when Trooper Watts put handcuffs on him. On the dashcam footage of the incident, Trooper Watts can be heard telling Officer Lopez that she is tired of Miami PD driving recklessly. Officer Lopez was charged with misdemeanor reckless driving, but the trouble was only beginning.

Soon after the incident, Trooper Watts was subjected to a constant stream of "gang-like harassment," from threatening phone calls to police cruisers idling outside of her house. She filled a public records request and discovered her person information had been accessed more than 200 times from officers in 25 different jurisdictions. The gang of stalkers turned out to be corrupt police officers who were angry that Watts arrested an officer.

In 2014, Watts's attorney filed a lawsuit that listed privacy grievances against 100 officers, as well as 200 unidentified violators from different governmental agencies. The lawsuit brought to light many off-duty police officers speeding in South Florida, and earned the South Florida Sun Sentinel a Pulitzer Prize for its investigation into the matter. In 2016, the Broward County Sheriff's Office settled the lawsuit with Trooper Watts, who continues to work for the Florida Highway Patrol as a traffic homicide investigator.

Shanna Lopez wanted to be a cop since she was four years old. She worked hard, studied hard, and even sacrificed her marriage for the job, only to find out as a rookie cop with the Dallas Police Department (DPD) that the law was being trampled by the very officers sworn to uphold it.

In Dallas, male cops are not allowed to search female suspects, so she was often called to assist one of four male cops known as "old heads" who typically searched sex workers. The old heads were abusive to the sex workers, and Lopez said she "became tired, angry, and eventually numb to the daily verbal abuse I heard directed at the women." Lopez also learned they would use the county database to pull up the names and addresses of known sex workers and write them tickets without having witnessed any infractions. When she mentioned the practice to one of her supervisors, he told her that it was illegal, but did not pursue the matter.

Her supervisor apparently did make inquiries, however, because she was immediately ostracized for "talking s***" about "illegal arrests and other activities." She completed her training and received a commendation, but two days later she was placed on administrative leave. Shortly thereafter, she was told her supervisors did not have faith in her and she was effectively fired.

After she left the DPD, several other cops came forward to speak out about the old heads and their bogus tickets, falsification of evidence, and abuse of suspects. In March 2007, three of the four old heads Lopez had mentioned to her supervisor were reportedly being investigated for misconduct. In 2015, one of the old heads, Senior Cpl. David Kattner, was arrested for sexually assaulting a sex worker, which Lopez said seemed like a "natural progression" for him. With much of her earlier statements now corroborated, Lopez was allowed to reapply to the DPD if she agreed she wouldn't sue the department for firing her. She did so and was denied admittance to the DPD.

Racial profiling is a controversial (and illegal) practice used by some law enforcement officers throughout the country. One of the biggest methods police use to racially profile is through stop-and-frisks, where civilians can be temporarily detained and questioned without probable cause. According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), racial profiling is rampant in Florida. So when Officer Jose Rosado observed the practice first hand at his own Miami Gardens Police Department (MGPD), he decided to blow the whistle on the department and he was fired for speaking out.

Rosado had worked for the MGPD for seven years before he was terminated in June 2015. While working on the Crime Suppression Team (CST), Rosado claims the team conducted "countless" stop-and-frisks without "the reasonable articulable suspicion and/or probable cause required" and that he was ordered to conduct those illegal activities himself. Believing he was protected by the Whistleblower Protection Act, Rosado sent a disclosure documenting the policies of the CST and of his supervisor, Major Anthony Chapman. Just over one year later, Rosado was fired.

Believing his firing was retaliation for speaking out, Rosado filed a lawsuit against the city for violating the Whistleblower Protection Act by firing him. In his affidavit, Rosado claimed Major Chapman told the department that "all crimes in the city were being committed by black males ages 15 to 30" and that the MGPD "needed to stop all such males." He further claimed Major Chapman told officers to perform a version of stop-and-frisks called "field contacts" of "black males even if they were in front of their house."

As of May 2017, the lawsuit is still ongoing.

One of the most frightening things about living in a big city is the possibility of a break-in. Even if you aren’t home when the invasion occurs, the thought of someone going through your things is incredibly unnerving. In order to give themselves peace of mind, many homeowners outfit their domiciles with security cameras, but that does little to deter thieves. Instead, those cameras only serve to create terrifying surveillance footage of home break-ins. While some of the following home intruders caught on camera were apprehended after their videos made it to air, many of the criminals who starred in a straight-to-evening-news breaking and entering security video remained free, even after their faces were burned across regional reports.

Are you worried that people may be breaking into your home at night and eating your food or trying on your clothes? If so, set up a home camera to capture those home invaders and see if your suspicions are correct. As you’ll soon find out, it’s not all that crazy to believe someone might be watching you sleep. And even if this list doesn’t inspire you to set up a web of security cameras to monitor unintended guests, you should at least be motivated to start locking your doors and checking under your bed at night for rogue clowns and general creeps.

When an 11-year-old boy from New Jersey returned home from school in 2016, all he wanted to do was get a snack and shake off his pre-teen anxieties before returning to the drudgery of elementary school for yet another day. Instead, he came face-to-face with a creep who was robbing his house. According to NBC New York, the boy, named Allan, went into his home and immediately saw a man peeking out at him from a closet. He said, "My heart immediately started pounding and I didn't know what to do except just run out. The way he looked and the way he shuffled scared me." 

He was shuffling? That's terror of a Lynchian degree. The kid took off running and luckily found a neighbor who was more equipped to handle the insane situation.  She continued the story, "He was running and I said, 'Allan, are you OK? Is everything OK?' And he said, 'No, there's a stranger in my house and I saw him and he saw me.'" The burglar escaped with nothing more than a cell phone, which he dropped in the woods. He was caught less than 24 hours later. 

This story is definitely the kind of thing you don't want to read before you fall asleep, so sorry if you're already in your jammies. In 2016, a Chicago couple fell asleep (like all long-term couples do) on the couch in front of their TV. Sometime after they were both conked out, a man broke into their home and watched them sleep before stealing the woman's purse. Jack Mackercher and his girlfriend, Jordan Buranskas, got into an argument about the purse the next morning. "We actually got into a little bit of an argument about it. He thought I left it at the restaurant the night before," Buranskas said. When they decided to settle the argument by watching the surveillance footage of the previous day, what they saw sent a shiver up their collective spine. 

Mackercher said, "I'm like, 'Why are you at the top of the stairs wearing a white hoodie before we went to bed?' She's like, 'I wasn't at the top of the stairs.' So that's when you go flush and start to freak out a little bit." Well said. After the intruder made his way through their unlocked door, he stood above them and watched as they slept before making his way back into the night. 

In the summer of 2016, a burglar made his way through multiple Atlanta-area homes, stealing thousands of dollars worth of valuables, all the while armed with an assault rifle. The above video shows the super creep making his way through a home, his gun ready to fire. According to Barbara Lyles-Anderson, the woman who encountered the assailant in another home, the intruder came through her unlocked door and told her to lie down on the bed and to put her face in the pillow. She told her local news station, "I thought then he was going to rape me and shoot me in the back of the head." 

A couple in Victoria, Australia, started off 2017 in a terrifying way when they returned to their home with a friend to find that someone (read: a trash person) dragged a bed from their bedroom into the living room and passed out. They filmed the man sleeping for a bit before he woke up, pulled out a knife, and threatened to cut the couple before fleeing on foot. Thankfully, no one was hurt and nothing was stolen. Regardless, the couple is probably going to want to buy a new bed. 

Somehow, a family of eight who live in a (hopefully giant) house in Oregon slept through a stranger wearing face paint rummaging through their home in the middle of the night. When the family woke up to find their house completely ransacked, they went to the home surveillance footage and what they saw was profoundly unsettling.

The footage shows the intruder making food, trying on clothes, and just being generally disrespectful to the surroundings. Michelle Phelps, one of the home owners said, "We can laugh about it because nothing was done or harmed, but it's terrifying to know that your house isn't even safe." But don't worry, Oregon, you can sleep safe because the Douglas County Sheriff's Office arrested 24-year-old Tanisha Camille Mann in connection with the very weird break in.

In 2016, a 33-year-old man named Lonnie Jones was arrested after a very busy evening of watching a woman through her window, before breaking into a couple's home to watch them sleep in their bedroom. 

One of the people that was being peeped on, Jarred Morris, said his girlfriend sensed somebody was in the room, but she thought it might have been Morris's son, or his cat (cats are the creeps of the animal kingdom). It was Jones, however, who was going for gold in the super creep Olympics by watching the couple. Morris's girlfriend said she saw Jones crouching in corner before Morris chased him away. Morris told ABC 13 that Jones, "made his way through the hallway and bolted to the front door which is kinda odd to me, like he knew the layout of the house already." 

In 2013, one of the most horrible crimes to be captured on a CCTV occurred in New Jersey, when a burglar entered a house in the middle of the day while a mother and her daughter were watching cartoons on their couch. In the above video (which is very intense) the burglar throws the woman down before punching her in the face and throwing her around the room. Keep in mind, all of this happens in front of her three-year-old daughter, while her 18-month-old was asleep upstairs. After the brutal assault, the man goes upstairs, pillages the house, and comes back downstairs to kick the woman in the face and throw her down the basement steps. 

The woman described the living nightmare to a local New Jersey news station, "I knew that if I started screaming, my daughter would, too, and I was afraid she would get hurt. I took it. I didn't cry the entire time." Thankfully, this story has a positive ending. The criminal who broke into her home was caught and received life in prison.

In what might be the most ironic (but still super awful) crime on this list, a woman in Fort Worth, TX, fell asleep while watching Investigation Discovery's A Stranger in My Home when a man broke in through a window and tried to rape and assault her. "I woke up to him putting his hand over my mouth and nose and strangling me with the other hand. At first I was immobile because I thought I was in a dream."

The woman told ABC News that the intruder instructed her to take her pants off before she tried to escape through an open window. As she tried to escape, the man dragged her back in. According to the footage, the intruder then gave up on the assault and fled the home, before anyone in her neighborhood could call the police.

When it comes to clowns, "creepy" tends to be an unnecessary modifier. In this case, however, we need to make an exception. In October 2016, a Texas man's personal CCTV captured a person dressed as a clown carrying a knife, apparently in hopes of entering his house and beginning a carnival-themed killing spree. In the video, the clown tries out the locks, looks through some windows, and tries to open a gate. 

The homeowner uploaded the footage to Liveleak with the caption, "This morning I noticed my gate was open. I checked my surveillance cameras and found someone in a clown costume was trying to get into my house. I'm sure we would all be dead today if he was able to get in." It's possible that the whole thing is a hoax, but if not it's legitimately bone-chilling. 

Did you think Florida wouldn't be represented on a list of people breaking into homes and being weird? In March 2017, CCTV footage recorded in a home showed a very spooky female burglar sneaking into a house and standing over the homeowner, Laura Lucas, as she sleeps on the sofa. It's unsettling, to say the least.

The burglar then goes on to rifle through Lucas's stuff, before leaving with cash and jewelry. The woman didn't leave until Lucas's amiable dog began to hop up and down on its hind legs, to say hello to the creepy burglar. 

John Wayne Gacy was a prolific American serial killer who terrorized the state of Illinois in the 1970s. Known for his predilection for wearing clown costumes, getting involved in his community, and most notably, killing at least 25 young men, there are plenty of odd facts about John Wayne Gacy that circulated in the news after his capture.

Not only were his crimes gruesome and horrific, his life itself was pretty bizarre. Among the true stories about John Wayne Gacy - who was executed on May 10, 1994 after receiving the death penalty for his crimes in 1980 - is the fact his brain was saved for medical research purposes. There were many unbelievable things that happened in the John Wayne Gacy case that are so odd, they can only be true.

In 1962, Gacy escaped the clutches of his physically and mentally abusive father and moved to Las Vegas. While there, he spent three months working as a janitor, and found he enjoyed being around dead bodies. He reportedly slept on a cot near the morgue during his stay, and even ventured into the coffin of a deceased young man, lying down beside his body. After a few months, Gacy realized that his love for the job produced weird feelings, so he called his mother and asked her to help him come back home. 

In 2012, years after Gacy's execution, witnesses came forward saying they believed he had at least one accomplice - possibly one of his employees. The revelation came after the friends of John Mowery, one of Gacy's victims, came forward. 

They said an unidentified man who knew Gacy moved into Mowery's apartment complex days before he disappeared. The man said he knew a house where bodies were buried underneath and he was former employee of Gacy's. The day after Mowery's murder, Gacy was at a job in Michigan, leading lawyers to believe he had help disposing of his bodies.

They suspect at least three of Gacy's murders happened with accomplices because he wouldn't have time to move around the dead bodies based on his work schedule. One of his victims, Robert Gilroy, disappeared while Gacy was in Pittsburgh. Another, Russell Nelson, was nabbed outside of a bar.  They doubt Gacy could've overpowered the man by himself. 

Despite multiple appeals, Gacy was put to death on May 10, 1994. He was killed via lethal injection at the Stateville Penitentiary in Joliet, IL. According to his lawyers, Gacy was chatty and jovial before his death, even cracking jokes. 

Gacy's elaborate last meal included 12 fried shrimp, a bucket of original recipe KFC chicken, fries, and a pound of strawberries. His lawyer Karen Conti later said he requested the strawberries as a joke, because they were out of season. 

Gacy's father, John Sr., was an extremely abusive man who used to ruthlessly beat his son in drunken rages. At school he was also ridiculed, adding to his anxiety. Because of a congenital heart issue, Gacy wasn't allowed to play sports or engage in physical activity when he was a kid. That, coupled with his discovery he was bisexual, made him extremely isolated from his friends and family. 

Despite having a terrible childhood, Gacy actually became fairly successful. He ran a chain of Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants in Waterloo, IA. During his time in Norwood Park, IL, Gacy started his own business. He called it PDM, short for Painting Decorating and Maintenance. 

In Iowa, Gacy became involved with the local Jaycees, short for the United States Junior Chamber. Gacy was such a successful Jaycee that he was named the Third Most Outstanding Jaycee in his state back in 1965. He was truly dedicated to the cause. Ironically, he isn't the only serial killer to be a former member of the organization - Edmund Kemper, the Co-Ed Killer - was one as well. 

Gacy's civic mindedness extended to his local Democratic Party in Illinois, too. He became an Assistant Precinct Captain in the mid-1970s, which is a electable position - his fellow Democratic citizens had to vote him into it. Gacy also served on the Norwood Park Township street lighting committee, and his neighbors highly respected him.

In May 1978, he served as the leader of Chicago's Polish Constitution Day Parade. Part of his job involved inviting a celebrity to take part in the parade festivities, so he reached out to the White House and got Rosalynn Carter to come to Chicago. He managed to pass the required Secret Service background check to get close enough to her to have his picture taken with her. 

While in prison awaiting his execution, Gacy started a new hobby - painting. However, he didn't paint pretty landscapes or nice still lives; he painted clowns. Creepy pictures of clowns that were displayed at a Chicago art gallery and sold for upwards of $4,500. He also painted religious art, disturbing self-portraits, and works inspired by other serial killers, such as a skull he called "Dahmer Skull." 

While living in Norwood Park, IL, in the 1970s, Gacy became involved in a local group called the Jolly Jokers. The men dressed up like clowns and went around entertaining children at hospitals. They also went to children's parties, ostensibly to make the birthday boy or girl laugh, not cower in fear. Gacy's "clown" personas were Patches the Clown and Pogo the Clown. After his arrest, this led to his nickname - the Killer Clown. 

Gacy allegedly told psychiatrists after his arrest he thought of Pogo as a good and evil character. There was the side of Pogo he called "compassion clown" and another called "hatred clown." He could turn to be the good version of the clown or the bad. In once case, he recalled cussing out a child who lied to him about not getting any candy at a birthday party before he skipped off in a jovial manner. Even when he killed, he would do one of the tricks he used during "clowning" - which involved getting out of a pair of handcuffs. He challenged his victims to do the same, essentially trapping them. 

In 1967, Gacy was living in Iowa and started to give in to his desires. He lured several teenage boys to his house under the guise of "homosexual experiments." One of those boys was Donald Voorhees, the son of one of his fellow Jaycee club members. Voorhees told his dad what had happened, and Gacy was arrested. Gacy maintained his innocence, saying Voorhees was a rival who wanted to ruin his political aspirations. In fact, Gacy had many supporters after his original arrest because many believed an upstanding citizen like him was innocent. 

He pled guilty to sodomy and spent 18 months in prison. During part of his pre-trial examinations, he was diagnosed with an antisocial personality disorder by two different psychiatrists. Despite this, he was never placed on any sort of treatment program. 

John Wayne Gacy's first murder was in 1975. While it's unclear he attempted killing anyone before this time, he did sexually assault (or attempted to) several young boys he knew through community groups or work. In total, police believe he killed 33 people. His first victim, 17-year-old John Butkovitch, was an employee of his who came to Gacy's house asking for back pay. Gacy strangled him to death and then buried him underneath his house. 

Between 1976 and 1976, Gacy began murdering exponentially. His wife divorced him and left him alone in his house, giving him plenty of free time to pick up young men. Many of them were employees at his contracting company, others he abducted off the street and at bus stops. His last victim, 15-year-old Robert Piest, was lured to his house by the prospect of a job. 

After killing his young victims by strangling them to death, he buried their bodies in the crawl space under his house and around his garage. His neighbors suspected that something odd was going on, as they would see him removing trash bags or dirt and even digging in his yard, but no one seemed to believe that a man who was so involved with his community could possibly be burying the bodies of his victims, despite the smell. 

At least two people had some knowledge Gacy was digging underneath his house. Gacy employed two young men - Michael Rossi and David Cram - who were instructed to spread lime underneath the house to mitigate how "damp" it was. Cram said he saw holes in the ground that were about the size of graves. 

Dennis Nilsen is one of the more well-known serial killers to emerge from the UK in the late 1970s and early '80s. Dubbed the Muswell Hill Murderer by the British press, Nilsen amassed over a dozen kills, his victims often homeless young men and prostitutes - easy prey for a seemingly benevolent stranger. 

Nilsen's predilection for necrophilia - coupled with his habit of keeping corpses around for weeks on end - has drawn comparisons to Jeffrey Dahmer, one of America's more deranged murderers. While Nilsen did not quite share the Milwaukee cannibal's culinary palette, he certainly engaged in enough strange corpse play to put him in that same unique echelon of killers. He was also the inspiration for the movie Cold Light of Day.

The following list explores some of the most bizarre and gruesome facts about a man sometimes called "The Kindly Killer"; the deadly dossier of a charming English stranger who just happened to keep a heap of dead bodies back at his flat.

After successfully luring a man back to his flat, Nilsen would often feel overcome with a sense of abandonment when they attempted to leave - and this was usually a death sentence for his guests. Using household items like electrical cables or neckties, Nilsen would strangle his victims to death with whatever he had handy, ensuring they could never exit his company.

If his evening guests were incapacitated enough by drugs or alcohol, Nilsen would sometimes drown them. He did this by either drawing a bath and submerging his victims underwater, or by more simply placing their heads in a bucket full of water.

Curiously, Nilsen claims to have revived at least three men he asphyxiated, all of whom he then let go, ironically stating that he took great satisfaction in saving a life. In at least one instance, a young man went directly to authorities, who simply brushed off his claims and allowed Nilsen to continue his grim streak.

Say what you want about him being a brutal murderer, Dennis Nilsen was not the "love 'em and leave 'em" type. Though he indeed had a serious passion for necrophilia, it was not just the sexual gratification aspect he enjoyed about keeping a corpse in his bed - he also simply enjoyed the company. 

Not only did Dennis Nilsen sleep next to the dead bodies of his victims, he watched TV with them, ate dinner in their company, and even let loose and got drunk with them.

Bizarrely (for a serial killer anyway), the dead bodies of the men he killed also evoked a sense of remorse from Nilsen, who after his arrest remarked that when he looked at them he wished nothing more than for them to be alive again.

After the murder was over and the body was cleaned, Nilsen would carry his departed guest to his room, where he would take several photos of the body before engaging in depraved sexual activity. 

Treating his corpses as dolls - dressing them, talking to them, posing them - Nilsen had the ultimate submissive partner. As such, he had a hard time letting go of his dead friends, sometimes keeping them around for weeks. 

Dennis Nilsen's innate separation anxiety meant that he had a difficult time parting with the dead bodies he'd grown so fond of. Not wanting potential new victims to be put off by a rotting corpse sitting on his sofa, Nilsen would often hide dead bodies under his floor boards or beneath his kitchen sink. 

Being sent to storage, however, did not mean that Nilsen had tired of his fleshy prizes. In the case of one of his victims, a Canadian man named Kenneth Ockenden (whom Dennis would later describe as his "favorite"), his dead body was brought out from under the floorboards four times before finally being disposed of. You can imagine the romantic evenings they likely shared.

After completing the act of murder, Dennis Nilsen went to great lengths to tend to the appearance of his victims. He would immediately bathe and clean his newly possessed corpses, all the while speaking to them as though they were still alive. Once his dead victims were sufficiently spick and span, Nilsen would dress them in pajamas and haul them off to bed, where things would proceed to get really weird. 

As Dennis Nilsen was brazenly attempting to flush human flesh down the drain of his kitchen sink, the sewer system that accommodated his apartment building proved ill-equipped for such removal. In February 1983, one of his neighbors called a plumber to check on their backed-up system, and when the technician descended into a manhole below the building he made a startling discovery - a lot of stuff that looked human. 

Police were called in shortly thereafter, and when they went to Nilsen's flat to question him - where he had spent a long night attempting to clean his drains - they were overcome by a pervasive odor. After a bit of prodding, Nilsen confessed rather easily and he was apprehended. In his home, police also recovered several garbage bags of human remains that Nilsen had not yet gotten around to removing. 

By the time Dennis Nilsen had acquired six corpses, his modest apartment was becoming cramped for space - bodies were literally bursting out of the floorboards and cabinets. Beyond that, flies were hatching from the decomposing human flesh and becoming a real nuisance, and that's to say nothing about what must have been an unthinkable odor. Nilsen claims that at this point he was dousing his apartment with air freshener twice a day, but while that may have been good enough for him, his neighbors began to complain.

Pacifying nearby residents with explanations that the odor must be a structural defect, Nilsen began to devise ways to evict his pungent roommates.

Dennis Nilsen did a brief stint in the British army as a cook. It was during his time in the kitchen that he gleaned valuable skills as a butcher - skills he was able to employ when it became time to dispose of his decomposing collection of corpses. 

Using a simple butcher's knife, Nilsen severed hands, feet, heads, and limbs from his victims' bodies before placing them in black garbage bags. With his deceased guests in a more toteable state, he threw the bags on a large bonfire in his backyard, where he also included a large tire to mask the smell of the bodies.

This system worked well for Nilsen until he had to relocate to a smaller flat in 1982 - then he had to get a bit more creative.

Unable to burn the corpses of his victims, Nilsen had to further dismember their bodies, which now included boiling their heads to separate the flesh and brains from their skulls. Nilsen also began getting a little lazy with his disposal methods, and resorted to attempting to send large chunks of flesh down the drain - a practice that would ultimately lead to his downfall.

Dennis Nilsen was born in Fraserburgh, Scotland, in 1942. A child of an unhappy marriage, Nilsen spent a lot of time with his maternal grandfather and was traumatized by his sudden death; he would later claim that viewing his grandfather's corpse at his funeral was the root of his later obsession with the dead. After his mother married again and had several more children, Nilsen became isolated and distant, eventually leaving Scotland for a stint in the army.  

Settling into north London in 1975, it was a few short years later that he began his murderous spree. Between December of 1978 and February of 1983, Nilsen murdered and dismembered at least 15 young men. He committed these crimes over a six-year period at two different addresses, always just barely avoiding the suspicion of his neighbors.

Dennis Nilsen's M.O. was to prey on the vulnerable. He often went out and picked up young, destitute men, or even those who were more plainly homeless. He would ply his victims with offers of food, booze, or shelter - phantom promises that lured them into his house of horrors. 

In the case of 20-year-old Steven Sinclair - his final victim - Nilsen actually claims to have tried to help the young man with his drug addiction, in hopes that the two could have a prolonged sexual relationship. It was not meant to be, however, as Nilsen could not control his urges and killed him hours after bringing him home.

In 1957, law enforcement made a shocking discovery: the battered body of a young boy, stuffed inside a cardboard box and dumped by the side of a road just outside of Philadelphia. When Philadelphia police made the disturbing find (based on a tip called in by a local college student) they had no idea it was just the beginning of a mystery that is still unsolved to this day.

While the authorities know that the child - dubbed the "Boy in the Box" by the media - died as a result of multiple blows to his head, they have no idea how he sustained the fatal injuries. In fact, despite chasing down countless leads over the course of six decades, investigators still don't even know the boy's name - much less if he was murdered or died accidentally - causing many to call him "America's Unknown Child."

In 1961, Philadelphia investigators questioned Kenneth Dudley and his wife Irene Dudley to determine if the Boy in the Box had been one of the middle-age couple's ten children. Mr. Dudley was an itinerant carnival worker, so the entire family traveled up and down the east coast as he looked for work. However, the Dudleys came to the attention of law enforcement when one of their children - seven-year-old Carol Ann - died as a result of neglect, malnutrition, and exposure. Instead of burying their young child's body in a cemetery, the couple wrapped their daughter in a blanket and placed her corpse in a wooded area in Virginia.

Eventually, the authorities learned that seven of the Dudleys' 10 known children had died as a result of malnutrition and neglect, and none of them had received proper burials, causing Philadelphia investigators to suspect the Boy in the Box had been one of their sons. However, after questioning the Dudleys and investigating their movements in 1957, law enforcement officials in Philadelphia determined the couple - while negligent parents - were not connected to the Boy in the Box.

While police didn't discover the Boy in the Box until February 26, 1957, the child's corpse had actually been found the day before by Frederick Benonis. Benonis, a 27-year-old student at LaSalle College, told law enforcement he discovered the boy's body the day before when he was chasing a rabbit, but he didn't contact the authorities because he thought the child's corpse was a doll.

The college student said he decided to call the police the next day when he learned that a New Jersey child - who later proved not to be the Boy in the Box - had gone missing. Eventually, investigators learned why Benonis - a man who some people considered a suspect in the Boy in the Box's death - didn't immediately contact law enforcement: he'd actually been spying on girls at a nearby school when he made his grisly discovery.

Another popular theory about the Boy in the Box is that he had been raised as a girl, which is why investigators had difficulty finding out his true identity. One of the biggest proponents of this theory is Frank Bender, a forensic artist and co-founder of the Vidocqu Society, a private group of skilled professionals who are dedicated to solving crimes.

According to Bender, the reason the child's hair was cut around the time of his death was to hide the fact that he'd been raised as a girl. Bender also said pictures taken of the Boy in the Box show evidence that the child's eyebrows had been plucked before or after his death, indicating someone had altered the boy's appearance to make him appear more feminine.

In an effort to help identify the child if he had in fact been raised as a girl, Bender drew a sketch of what he thought the Boy in the Box would have looked like with long hair and bangs.

Around the time of his death, someone had cut off most of the child's light brown hair, because he had tufts of his own hair stuck to his body when he was discovered. However, according to the medical examiner, the person who cut the boy's hair had done so in a rushed and haphazard manner.

Apparently, there were four distinct bruises on the child's forehead, as well as signs of a cerebral hemorrhage, causing at least one member of law enforcement to theorize the person who killed the Boy in the Box may have done so accidentally when they applied too much pressure while holding the child's head in place as they trimmed his hair with clippers.

A Philadelphia barber came forward shortly after the boy was found to say he was certain he'd cut the child's hair approximately one week before his corpse was discovered. The barber said the boy had come into his shop with his older brother and he had left unharmed. However, no one was ever able find the mansion where the barber said the boy lived, making it impossible for investigators to follow up on this particular lead.

In addition to finding evidence the Boy in the Box had been underwater around the time he died, doctors who examined his body discovered many signs that indicated the child suffered greatly long before he was most likely beaten to death. With the help of X-rays, a doctor determined the child had probably been between the ages of three and five, but he weighed just 30 pounds and stood at only 40.5 inches tall at the time he was killed. According to a medical examiner, the Boy in the Box had the body of a child who was just over two years old, and the X-rays showed evidence of arrested growth.

The child's body was covered in bruises, his lips were dry and bloody, and he was so emaciated, his ribs were showing through his skin. They also found evidence the child may have had an eye infection that was treated with medication prior to his death. Due to the cold weather in Philadelphia around the time the Boy in the Box died, the medical examiner was unable to pinpoint his exact time of death, saying it could have occurred days or weeks before his corpse was recovered.

One of the reasons Bristow thought the Boy in the Box could have drowned after falling in a lake - despite having multiple head injuries - was because the bottoms of the child's feet and the palm of one of his hands were wrinkled, as if they had been in water for an extended period of time. Investigators were unable to determine if the boy had been submerged in water before or after his death, but they were able to conclude that he had died from several blows to the head, not drowning.

In addition to his wrinkled soles and palm, a medical examiner found the child had small clumps of hair from his head stuck to his body, reinforcing the doctor's belief that the boy had been wet around the time of his death.

Years after the child's body was found, fingerprint expert Billy Kelly theorized that the Boy in the Box may have been one of the many Hungarian refugees who came to America in the 1950s. Kelly developed this theory after he saw a a newspaper article - published in 1956, the year boy the boy's corpse was discovered - about people who had recently relocated to the United States from Hungary. The article was accompanied by a picture of Hungarian refugees, and one of the the immigrants in the photo looked remarkably similar to the Boy in the Box.

Thinking the child's status as a recent immigrant may have explained why no one had been able to identify the boy and there were no records of his existence, Kelly followed up on this theory. However, after going through more than 11,000 passport photos, Kelly tracked down the Hungarian boy from the 1956 article and learned the child was alive and well and living with his family in North Carolina.

One of the most popular theories about the Boy in the Box is that he was an orphan who was living at a foster home when he died accidentally, either by falling out of a window or drowning in a lake. This particular theory came from Remington Bristow, a Philadelphia medical examiner, who had been told by a psychic that she thought the child had died while he was living in an old mansion that a couple had turned into a foster home.

Apparently, Bristow had already interviewed a husband and wife who ran a children's home out of a mansion, and when he attended an estate sale at the home in 1961 after the family moved away, he said he discovered a bassinet in the house similar to the sort that would have been packaged in a cardboard box like the one the child's body was found in.

Bristow believed the boy may have been the secret son of the couple's young daughter, and when he died in some sort of accident, they simply dumped his body because they didn't want to be suspected of murder or have anyone find out about the existence of their illegitimate grandchild.

Decades later, a detective followed up this lead by interviewing the woman Bristow thought was the boy's mother, only to find out that she did have a son who died in a freak accident in 1957. However, morgue records proved the Boy in the Box couldn't have been her child, essentially eliminating this theory.

Over the course of their investigation, detectives received many tips from people who claimed to know the true identity of the Boy in the Box and how he died. One of these tips came from a woman known only as Martha who said when she was a girl, her mother (who worked as a librarian) purchased the child and brought him to their home in Philadelphia. According to Martha, she was told the boy's name was Jonathan, and her mother made him sleep in their dank and dirty basement.

Martha said her mother - who had subjected her to sexual abuse - bought Jonathan for the express purpose of using the boy as a sex slave.  However, one day, Jonathan vomited in the bathtub, and her mother responded by slamming the boy on the floor, killing him. After the child died, Martha said she accompanied her mother when she went to dump the boy's lifeless body somewhere in Philadelphia.

While detectives investigated Martha's claims - which came decades after the Boy in the Box was discovered - they were unable to find evidence that proved the information she provided was either true or false.

On February 25, 1957, police - acting on a tip from an informant - discovered a cardboard box that had been dumped off the side of a country road near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Inside the box, which had once contained a bassinet purchased from J.C. Penney, officers found the nude corpse of a young boy, partially wrapped in an inexpensive flannel blanket.

The child's lifeless corpse was covered in bruises, and a medical examiner later concluded the boy had died after he sustained multiple blows to the head. Almost immediately, detectives set about trying to learn the identity of the child - who was eventually dubbed the "Boy in the Box" - not realizing the many twists and turns their investigation would take as they attempted to find out who the boy was and how he'd died.

In July 2007, the Petit family's idyllic life in Cheshire, Connecticut, became a living nightmare when two convicted criminals, Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky, broke into their house with the intention of robbing the upscale home of a respected doctor, William; his wife, Jennifer (a former nurse who had recently been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis); and their two daughters, Michaela and Hayley. However, the burglary quickly transformed into a terrifying home invasion that included multiple acts of sexual assault and ended with a frightening crescendo of arson and murder.

After the perpetrators were captured by law enforcement, many people in the wealthy town were left asking how such a brutal crime could have occurred in their quiet community, as well as what, if anything, could have been done to prevent one woman and two girls from losing their lives on that fateful summer day. The Cheshire, Connecticut, home invasion murders, as they came to be called, are a terrifying example of a "simple" robbery spinning out of control.

After they tied up Dr. Petit in the basement, Hayes and Komisarjevksy went upstairs where they discovered 11-year-old Michaela and her mother asleep next to one another in bed, while 17-year-old Hayley was asleep in her own bedroom. The pair tied up the woman and her two daughters and placed pillowcases over their heads. Then the two men searched the home at 300 Sorghum Mill Drive for valuable items they could steal.

Disappointed by the family's belongings, Hayes took Mrs. Petit to the bank to withdraw some money, leaving his 26-year-old accomplice in the house with the two girls. While Hayes was at Bank of America with Jennifer, 26-year-old Komisarjevksy performed oral sex on 11-year-old Michaela and made the girl pose in a variety of sexually explicit positions while he masturbated in front of her.

At approximately 3 AM on July 23, 2007, Joshua Komisarjevsky, 26, and Steven Hayes, 44, broke into the Cheshire, Connecticut, home of the Petit family, which included parents Jennifer, 48, and William, 50, and their two daughters, Hayley, 17, and Michaela, 11. The pair discovered William, a successful endocrinologist, asleep on a sofa on the porch, causing Komisarjevsky to hit the father of the family in the head with a baseball bat.

After striking Petit in the head, Hayes and Komisarjevsky tied the doctor up and took him down to the basement, where they secured him to a pipe. With Dr. Petit restrained and out of their way, the two men went upstairs to continue their horrifying reign of terror that lasted approximately seven hours and left three people dead and much of the house destroyed by fire.

After committing murder and multiple acts of rape and robbery, Komisarjevsky and Hayes decided to get rid of any evidence of their crimes by setting the house on fire. Before Hayes took Mrs. Petit to the bank to withdraw money, he'd actually left the house hours earlier to go to a nearby gas station, where he purchased two containers and filled them with several gallons of gasoline.

Together, Komisarjevsky and Hayes poured gas all over the house, making sure to douse Mrs. Petit's dead body with accelerant. The pair also poured gas all over Michaela and Hayley, who were both still alive and tied to their beds with pillowcases covering their heads. With the house and their victims soaked with accelerant, one of the men lit a match and set the home ablaze. However, both Komisarjevsky and Hayes have denied being the person responsible for setting the fire, with each man saying the other one struck the match that started the blaze.

Prior to breaking into the Petit home, Hayes and Komisarjevsky had burglarized at least two other houses in Cheshire, stealing money and credit cards. They decided to target the Petit family after Komisarjevsky spotted 11-year-old Michaela and her mother buying groceries at Stop & Shop and followed them back to their house.

According to Komisarjevsky, he thought the family had "a very nice house and very nice car and thought it would be nice to be there someday."

That evening, Komisarjevsky met up with Hayes and the two men made the decision to rob the Petit family's home.

After Dr. Petit managed to escape his burning home, he tried to get help for his wife and two daughters, unaware that the police had already been notified of an incident at his home approximately one hour earlier. Apparently, when Hayes forced his wife to withdraw $15,000 from their bank, Jennifer told one of the tellers about the situation, even letting the employee know her children were tied up at her house. After Mrs. Petit left Bank of America with Hayes - who had been waiting in the car - a bank employee called 911 to inform the authorities about the disturbing situation.

Shortly after the call was made, officers were dispatched to the Petit home, but they were instructed by their superiors not to enter the house. They were also told not to attempt to speak with Hayes when he arrived back at the house and drove into the garage, nor were they allowed to try to contact someone inside the residence via phone.

Instead, law enforcement officials were told to set up a perimeter and monitor the situation, leaving officers just outside the home while Hayes raped and murdered Mrs. Petit and the men set the house on fire.

After the two men were arrested as they tried to flee, they were charged with multiple counts, including sexual assault, murder, kidnapping, and arson. In October 2010, Hayes was convicted of 16 counts, and the following month he was given the death penalty. In October 2011, Komisarjevsky was convicted of 17 counts, and in December 2017 he - like his accomplice - was sentenced to death for his crimes.

During both of their trials, members of the jury were exposed to horrifying evidence, including autopsy photos of the victims' bodies and images Komisarjevsky had taken of 11-year-old Michaela as he sexually assaulted her. As a result of these pictures - as well as disturbing witness testimony - many members of the jury experienced severe psychological and emotional trauma, so the state of Connecticut offered to provided free counseling the jurors.

After Komisarjevsky and Hayes started the blaze, they hopped into the Petit family's SUV and tried to leave the scene of their shocking crimes. However, the pair only managed to drive one block before they crashed the vehicle and were apprehended by law enforcement.

Investigators soon discovered both men had extensive criminal histories, and they'd actually met one another the previous year while they were both living at a halfway house in Hartford, CT. Shortly after meeting, Hayes and Komisarjevsky decided to become partners in crime, committing burglaries together in order to steal cash and credit cards from wealthy families.

Shortly after Komisarjevksy and Hayes set the house on fire and fled the scene, Dr. Petit - who had been tied up in the basement - managed to free himself from his restraints and escape from the burning home. Petit ran to a neighbor's house - with his ankles still bound together - to get help for himself and his family, not realizing his wife had already been strangled to death by one of the men.

When his neighbor discovered William at his door around 10 AM, he didn't recognize the doctor because he'd been beaten so severely with a baseball bat. Tragically, Dr. Petit was unable to save the lives of his wife and daughters, making him the only survivor of the sickening home invasion.

Before Komisarjevsky and Hayes set the house on fire, they shut the doors to Michaela and Hayley's bedrooms, leaving the two girls tied to their beds with pillowcases on their heads. According to Komisarjevsky, before one of them put a match to the gasoline they'd poured all over the house, he said to his accomplice, "You can't seriously be contemplating burning these two girls alive."

After they started the fire, the two men fled the house, and 17-year-old Hayley actually managed to escape from her room, but she was overcome by the heavy smoke that filled the Sorghum Mill Road home. Hayley's body was found at the top of the stairs, while Michaela's corpse was discovered still bound to her bed. A medical examiner later determined both girls had died of smoke inhalation.

When Hayes returned from Bank of America with Jennifer - having forced Mrs. Petit to withdraw $15,000 from her account - he learned that his accomplice had sexually assaulted 11-year-old Michaela. According to Hayes, Komisarjevsky encouraged him to assault Mrs. Petit in order to "square things up" between the two of them, so he raped Jennifer on the floor of the family's living room.

However, as the 44-year-old was assaulting Mrs. Petit, his 26-year-old accomplice came into the room to tell him Dr. Petit had escaped from the basement, causing Hayes to strangle Jennifer to death. After Hayes murdered Mrs. Petit, the two men decided there was only one way for them to destroy evidence of their horrible crimes.

When Philadelphia police made a grisly discovery in the closet of Ira Einhorn's apartment in 1977, they promptly arrested the self-proclaimed environmental activist and Earth Day master of ceremonies for murder. However, before the authorities were able to prosecute the accused murderer for viciously ending the life of a young woman, Einhorn fled to Europe and evaded law enforcement for more than two decades.

Einhorn - who referred to himself as the "Unicorn" because his last name means "one horn" in German - was dubbed the "Unicorn Killer" by the media, and investigators worked tirelessly to find the mystical guru turned murderer. When Einhorn was finally captured while living in France, the people in his hometown of Philadelphia were overjoyed to learn the hated Unicorn Killer was finally going to be held accountable for beating his former girlfriend - Holly Maddux - to death more than 20 years earlier.

After killing Maddux, Einhorn placed her lifeless body in a large trunk, surrounding her corpse with Styrofoam packing peanuts and newspaper. Einhorn also put air fresheners in his former girlfriend's makeshift casket, presumably to disguise the unmistakable odor of decomposing human flesh. His deadly deed went undiscovered until March 28, 1979 - approximately 18 months after Einhorn killed Maddux - when Einhorn's neighbors called the police to complain about a foul smell coming from his home and a reddish-brown liquid leaking through Einhorn's floor into the apartment below.

When investigators opened Einhorn's bedroom closet, they discovered the trunk containing Maddux's partially mummified corpse; her remains weighed just 37 pounds. An autopsy revealed multiple skull fractures, indicating Einhorn had most likely bludgeoned her to death with a blunt object.

On September 9, 1977, 37-year-old Ira Einhorn's former girlfriend visited his Philadelphia apartment to retrieve some of her belongings following the end of their five-year relationship. Shortly after 30-year-old Helen "Holly" Maddux entered Einhorn's home, her former boyfriend attacked her, ending her life.

Following Maddux's disappearance, Philadelphia police questioned Einhorn about the whereabouts of his former girlfriend, but he told investigators the last time he saw her, she was leaving his home to go grocery shopping. Without any solid evidence to arrest Einhorn in connection with his ex-girlfriend's disappearance, Maddux's location remained a mystery for more than a year.

After investigators discovered the body of Einhorn's former girlfriend hidden in a trunk in his closet, officers started looking into his past relationships with women. While they determined Maddux was probably the first person he'd ever killed - most likely beating her to death by hitting her in the head with a blunt object - he'd physically abused at least two of his ex-girlfriends.

One of the women had to seek medical attention after she tried to end her relationship with Einhorn and he responded by nearly strangling her to death. Another one of Einhorn's former girlfriends went to the hospital after he broke a glass bottle over her head when she tried to break up with him, indicating he often reacted violently when he was rejected by women.

Despite his poor personal hygiene and his many personality flaws, Einhorn was very successful with women, even though he treated his girlfriends in a sexist and chauvinistic manner. According to people who know both Einhorn and Maddux, he ordered his girlfriend to do his bidding, demanding that she brush his hair and tend to his every need.

He also expected Maddux to be faithful to him, but he openly cheated on her during their relationship. According to a friend who knew the couple, Einhorn went to a party with Maddux, but when he met a new woman that evening, he arranged for another guest to give his girlfriend a ride home so that he could have sex with his new friend, all in front of Maddux.

Einhorn had sadistic tendencies, writing in 1962, "[I] contemplate with joy the pain of others." According to one of the women he dated, not only was he violent towards his girlfriends - he choked her into unconsciousness - but Einhorn also enjoyed tormenting small animals. Einhorn's former girlfriend said he liked to take cats into the shower simply to listen to them "scream," indicating he got a perverse pleasure from the pain and suffering of other living beings.

Perhaps Einhorn best summed up his own attitudes towards women and animals when he wrote, "Beauty and innocence must be violated for they can't be possessed."

Einhorn considered himself to be a radical hippie, causing him to eschew societal norms like bathing regularly and using deodorant. As a result of his attitudes towards personal hygiene, the people who knew Einhorn said he emitted an unpleasant odor one friend described as "a hoagie with onions."

In addition to his distinctive body odor, Einhorn refused to regularly groom his long hair and beard, giving him a decidedly unkempt appearance. While he was a teacher at the University of Pennsylvania, Einhorn reportedly removed his clothing in front of his students, and those who knew him said he sometimes greeted visitors to his home wearing nothing at all.

After Maddux's badly decomposed body was discovered in a trunk in his Philadelphia apartment, Einhorn told his friends he had nothing to do with his former girlfriend's death. According to Einhorn, Maddux had been killed by the CIA or the KGB (a security agency in the Soviet Union) because he had discovered evidence of secret mind control experiments performed by the government.

Einhorn claimed that his former girlfriend was murdered by one of the large intelligence agencies and her body was placed in his apartment in an effort to frame him for her killing. He insisted that the CIA or the KGB wanted to make him look like a murderer so that people wouldn't believe him when he revealed the classified information he had uncovered about covert government activities.

On April 22, 1970, Einhorn - who claimed to be an environmental activist - was the master of ceremonies at the inaugural Earth Day event in Philadelphia, seven years before he murdered his former girlfriend in his apartment. Many people - including Einhorn himself - have identified the convicted killer as one of the founders and organizers of the first Earth Day event.

However, the event was actually the brainchild of Gaylord Nelson, a United States senator and former Wisconsin governor who established the holiday to bring attention to the need for environmental protection laws and regulations. While Einhorn hosted the first Earth Day event, people who participated in establishing the holiday have said he had very little involvement its organization, going on to refer to him as disruptive and "a fraud."

After staying in Ireland for a short period of time, Einhorn went on to live in a number of European countries, including Sweden, the United Kingdom, Spain, Denmark, and France. During his European travels, Einhorn met Annika Flodin, a Swedish woman, and the couple got married and moved to rural France in 1993.

Einhorn - who used the alias "Eugene Mallon" - lived as a fugitive in Europe for more than two decades, successfully avoiding apprehension with the help of his wife, who knew her husband was wanted by the authorities for killing his former girlfriend. According to Flodin, she didn't think Einhorn had murdered Maddux, which is why she knowingly supported the wanted fugitive.

Confronted by his former girlfriend's severely decomposed corpse, Einhorn reportedly told an officer simply, "You found what you found." Einhorn was arrested for killing Maddux, but his lawyer convinced the court to set him free on just $4,000 bail - a fee that was paid by one of Einhorn's many wealthy and influential friends. The accused killer repeatedly proclaimed his innocence, telling his friends that his trial would prove he wasn't the person responsible for his ex-girlfriend's death.

However, less than a week before his trial was scheduled to begin, Einhorn fled the United States in January 1981, going first to Ireland - most likely because the two countries didn't have an extradition treaty at that time - and then on to other countries in Europe.

There are crimes, and then there are crimes. In the case of Tim McLean, a young man stabbed, dismembered, and cannibalized while riding home on a Greyhound bus bound for Winnipeg, the details are beyond words. They would leave an indelible mark on witnesses and put the normally tame Canadian justice system to the test. This bus ride gone horribly wrong would not only cost the 22-year-old victim his life, but it exposed the frightening reality of mental illness run rampant.

When Vincent Li, a diagnosed schizophrenic, randomly boarded the bus that day, no one could have ever anticipated the depth of his depravity or the severity of the voices in his head. Later dubbed the Canadian Cannibal, Li committed one of the most shocking and unbelievable crimes of the decade that night, reminding anyone who heard the tale that humans are, indeed, the real monsters. What makes the case truly stunning, however, are not the grisly details but the fact that Vince Li is now a free man. 

It was around 6 pm on July 30, 2008 when Vince Li, a tall, well-built Asian man, boarded a Greyhound bus traveling from British Columbia to Winnipeg. Standing over six feet tall, he cut an imposing (if quiet) figure. Some passengers say he seemed agitated and possibly confused as he climbed aboard, but he did not seem to be a threat. He chose a seat near the front of the bus, spoke to no one, and eventually disembarked briefly to smoke a cigarette at a rest stop. When Li returned to the bus, he seemed dissatisfied with his original seat, choosing instead to sit next to Tim McLean towards the rear of the bus. 

When police boarded the bus, they were faced with an intensely gruesome scene. Not only had McLean's remains been hacked apart and decapitated, but there seemed to be some missing body parts as well. When they searched Li, they found the victim's nose and tongue in his pocket. Findings later revealed McLean's eyes and part of his heart were never recovered, supposedly eaten by his killer that night. 

The horror of the situation took its toll on everyone involved. Many of the passengers from that night suffered from reoccurring nightmares and feelings of severe anxiety. The Mountie who first boarded the bus the night of McLean's death never recovered from his shock. Although he had been exposed to many gruesome and frightening scenes over the years, he could not seem to shake those bloody images from his mind. Burdened and overwhelmed by his PTSD, he finally took his life six years after the murder. The trauma had simply become too much, and he could not longer do his job or handle the daily torment of his own private hell. 

As the passengers ran screaming from the bus, the driver and two other brave men carefully boarded the bus again to see if they could help the victim. Li chased them away with the knife, forcing them to exit the bus and lock the door from the outside. Li grabbed McLean's severed head and brandished it for the stunned passengers, dropping it near the door and then retreating to eat some flesh from the mutilated body. 

Born on October 3, 1985, McLean was an active athlete and a beloved son, father, brother, and uncle. He had a large extended family. He was known as an adventurous person who loved traveling and meeting new people. He took up employment as a carnival employee in 2008 and was returning home on Greyhound bus 1170 through Saskatchewan. He had boarded the bus earlier in the day, around noon, and sat in the rear, one row ahead of the restroom.  

When Li moved to the seat next to him, he thought nothing of it. He barely acknowledged him and proceeded to fall asleep, his head against the window and headphones in. He was awoken just five minutes later as Li began to stab him in the neck. 

Vince Li was 44 years old at the time of the crime, having immigrated to Winnipeg, Canada from China in 2001. Although he studied computer science in China, he was unable to find steady work in Canada, moving from jobs at McDonalds to Meatland Food to Walmart, where he was eventually fired over a disagreement with a coworker. All the while, he harbored deeply disturbing thoughts about aliens and how he had been chosen by God to vanquish them.

It was only later he understood this voice to be a symptom of schizophrenia, and not the work of a divine power. Li traveled around trying to find the aliens he was supposed to destroy, and he felt he finally came to the end of his search when he saw McLean that day. McLean was the alien he was destined to kill. According the voices in his head, he was doing everyone a service by killing the sleeping man, even though he knows now it was completely wrong. 

There were dozens of witnesses that day when Li changed his seat and positioned himself next the sleeping McLean. Just moments after the bus began moving, Li calmly pulled out a massive hunting knife and began stabbing it repeatedly into McLean's neck. The young man instantly snapped to attention and began screaming in pain and horror — a scream that haunts many of the other passengers to this day. Although he fought desperately for a few moments, he was no match for the crazed killer.

As Li stabbed McLean over and over, he was calm and methodical, never changing his expression or showing emotion. Onlookers were shocked by his lack of rage and the way he committed the killing almost robotically, stabbing him close to 60 times according to one witness. As the screams of horror filled the bus and the driver pulled urgently to the side of the road, Li began to cut off McLean's head and dismember his body.

For those who witnessed the horrific killing of Tim McLean, there can be no peace. Some tried to drink the memories away, while others have sought therapy and even moved to new locations. For many, their lives have been destroyed by the PTSD they experienced after the killing, and some are paralyzed by large crowds or loud sounds.

The thing most of the passengers seem to recall with perfect clarity is the sound of McLean's scream as he woke to the terror of what was happening. They just can't seem to rid themselves of the sound. For others, they can only feel numbness. 

Vince Li was not a well man. Before he boarded the bus that fateful evening, he was already showing signs of someone on the brink of a mental episode. He was observed sitting at the bus stop, long before his ride was scheduled to arrive. Emotionless and quiet, he posted a sign reading "Laptop For Sale $600 O.B.O." in front of his luggage and sat. And sat. In fact, he sat there through the entire night, bolt upright with his eyes open.

The next morning, just hours before he would board the bus with Tim McLean, he sold his laptop to a 15-year-old boy for $60. Once Li's gruesome crime was uncovered, however, the computer was quickly confiscated. 

Although Li was obviously responsible for his actions that evening, Canadian law has surprisingly lax requirements for those with mental illness. Li refused to hire a lawyer. However, those who represented him stated he could not be accountable for what he did due to his untreated schizophrenia — and the judge agreed. As a result, Li was committed to a high-security psychiatric ward for one year so he could be evaluated and treated according to his condition. 

McLean's parents, on the other hand, were looking for answers, none of which they found that day. Their lives were shattered by their son's untimely death, and it seemed no one could be held responsible for their pain. 

The report soon came into the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that there had been a stabbing on a Greyhound bus west of the city, but authorities were not remotely prepared for what they would find. They arrived to find Li still on the bus, and a group of men guarding the the door with a crowbar and hammers. Cleverly, the driver engaged the emergency immobilizer system so the killer could not attempt to drive the bus away.

By 9 pm, the police were in a standoff with Li and as he paced the length of the bus, trapped inside, until special negotiators and heavily armed tactical units arrived on the scene. When he tried to escape through a back window of the bus, he was Tasered twice and handcuffed. 

People often think of serial killers as modern savants, men and women who gleefully lead homicide detectives in a game of cat and mouse that ends with a dramatic climax and maybe even a skin suit. The reality is, there are serial killers who evaded the police for years while the detectives working on their case were either ignoring clues, disregarding hot tips, or just screwing around while the killers continued to go about their business.

These stories of serial killers who left obvious clues and the cops who ignored them in favor of going on a wild goose chase are extremely frustrating. The levels of police incompetence on display here will hopefully give you an appreciation for the detectives who actually do catch killers, but you’ll probably develop a deep-seated hatred for the police, too.

It won’t come as a surprise that the killers who weren't caught because of police incompetence tend to have higher body counts, although many of them were only convicted of murdering a handful of people because the evidence of their mass slayings had either decomposed, or it had become inadmissible due to the ineptitude of the police working the case. These stories offer up some of the most glaring tropes of shoddy police work; the wrong suspects being apprehended, police agencies refusing to work together, and quite possibly the most frustrating thing of all: police blatantly ignoring a victim’s pleas for help. Keep reading to lose all faith in humanity.

The story of Arthur Shawcross is one that sheds light on how a strained correctional justice system that doesn't take care to curb recidivism can lead to mentally unstable criminals acting out until they completely snap and become next-level bogeymen. Shawcross was a classic serial killer: he was a bed wetter, he set fires, and he was allegedly the victim of sexual assault by his mother. All of those things are the perfect combination of what you need to make a deranged serial murderer. In 1972, Shawcross raped and murdered two children; as part of a plea deal, the charges were dropped to manslaughter, and in 1987, he was released from prison despite psychiatrists assessing Shawcross as being a "schizoid psychopath." 

After prison, Shawcross didn't live anywhere for long. Whenever he moved into a community and they were informed of his past they would flip out, he would lose his job, and he and his wife would be forced to leave town. Because of this, the authorities made the worst decision they could have and sealed his records. Shawcross moved to Rochester, New York, in June 1987, and his parole officer failed to notify Rochester authorities of Shawcross's arrival. Less than a year later, Shawcross would begin a year and a half-long killing spree that would claim the lives of 12 women.

If the incredibly strange and horrifying case of Dean Corll, a Houston-area serial killer who was murdered by one of his teenage accomplices in 1973, sheds light on anything, it's the way in which law enforcement agents will go out of their way to avoid facts that are staring them in the face. Because Corll died before he could be apprehended, the only facts that are available come from Jack Olsen's spectacular biography of Corll's life, The Man with the Candy, and what Corll's teenage accomplices, Wayne Henley and David Brooks, have said about their time spent with the murderer.

Despite the inconsistencies that come with jailhouse tall tales and a tight-lipped good ol' boy sheriff's department, it's agreed upon by everyone involved that between 1970 and 1973, Corll molested and murdered at least 28 teenage boys, and that there were probably more victims, but no one knows for sure. 

So how did the Houston Sheriff's Department botch this job? In the early 70s, Houston was in a period of steep economic decline that effected every aspect of the city and its surrounding suburbs. There was a severe lack of homicide detectives in the area, and when teenage boys went missing they tended to chalk the young men up as runaways and call it a day. That method of detective work would come back to bite everyone in the ass when Wayne Henley and David Brooks led the police to a storage shed where Corll had buried the bodies of most of his known victims. If the police had followed up on just one of the reports from the families of one of the boys that Corll killed, they could have saved the lives of dozens of young men. 

The police have never been closer to arresting a serial killer without actually arresting him than they were when Gary Ridgway took a polygraph test in 1984 to prove that he hadn't murdered a series of prostitutes and runaways near Seattle and Tacoma, Washington, before posing their naked bodies by the Green River. Because polygraph technology was still in its infancy (it never really became very trustworthy) the whole thing was a waste of time for the police, and it made Ridgway aware that he was on their radar.

Ridgway began to work smarter and between 1982 and his arrest in 2001, Ridgway supposedly murdered so many woman that he forgot his kill count (he was convicted of 49 murders but is presumed to have more than 90), and when he was finally arrested, he admitted to planting fake evidence and generally just screwing around with the cops who were chasing him. Fun!

The detectives working on the Green River case suspected Ridgway for decades. The polygraph test was the first roadblock in their investigation; then in 1987, they took a DNA swab from the killer, but that didn't pay off for over a decade when the technology finally came along that would allow the police to match the saliva sample to semen that was found on multiple victims. This finally allowed the police to arrest Ridgway and bring some kind of closure to the families of the victims.

Out of all the serial killers who could have had their orgies of murder cut short, Jeffrey Dahmer proved to be the luckiest of them all. Not only had tenants in his apartment building been complaining to their landlord about the smell of "rotting meat" coming from Dahmer's apartment for over a year, but prior to his arrest, he had a run in with a cop who was more than happy to let Dahmer off the hook. 

After Dahmer's neighbors called the police about a naked boy covered in blood running from the killer cannibal's apartment, one of Milwaukee's finest came down and spoke with Dahmer and the 14 year-old boy, Konerak Sinthasomphone. Dahmer convinced the officer, Joseph T. Gabrish, that he and the boy were lovers and that they had simply had an argument. After the incident, Dahmer killed four more men - including Sinthasomphone - before he was finally apprehended on July 22, 1991. 

There are few serial killers who haunt the psyche of America as thoroughly as John Wayne Gacy. Not only did he have one of the creepiest alter egos known to history, Pogo the Clown, but for all intents and purposes, he seemed like a regular guy. It turns out that the white bread, upstanding member of the Democratic party that was known to Cook County, Illinois, was nothing more than a poorly crafted persona that hid the soul of an aberrant nightmare beast.

Gacy is most known for raping and murdering 33 boys before hiding them in the crawl space of his Illinois home between 1972 and 1978, but prior to that, he ran into some trouble in Iowa that should have been the key to keeping him off the street forever.  

In 1967, Gacy was living in Iowa, where he was molesting the sons of his fellow Jacees, including 15-year-old Donald Voorhees. When Voorhees reported the sexual assault to the police, Gacy paid another teen to assault Voorhees in a park to keep him from testifying in Gacy's case. Gacy was sentenced to a decade in prison, but got out on parole two years later before immediately running away to Illinois. In 1971, Gacy was charged for impersonating a police officer and sexually assaulting a teenage boy, the kid didn't show up to court so the charges were dismissed, and no one thought to contact the Iowa Board of Parole. Eight months later, Gacy's parole ended, giving him a clean record that allow himself to ensconce within the community and begin committing his most heinous crimes. 

Between 1984 and 1985, Richard "The Screen-Door Intruder" Ramirez broke into homes across Los Angeles, where he murdered 14 people, sexually assaulted 11 women, and terrified anyone who thought they were safe from the kind of gruesome violence that Ramirez inflicted on his victims. According to biographer Philip Carlo in the book The Night Stalker: The Life and Crimes of Richard Ramirez, the killer was almost caught by a police officer who pulled him over on suspicion of driving a stolen vehicle. 

Carlo's books recalls a run-in between Ramirez and one Officer Stavros where the officer asked Ramirez point blank, "Hey, you're not that guy killing people in their homes, are you?" Ramirez played it off, and when Officer Stavros went to back to his motorcycle for some reason, the killer "said a prayer to Satan, drew a pentagram on the hood of the car," and ran away. 

Anthony Sowell (or the Cleveland Strangler) was a sex offender who strangled women to death before lazily burying them in shallow graves in his backyard and basement - and there were even a few bodies that he allowed to decompose on the floor of his home. By the time he assaulted his final victim, his death count had reached 11 women who were murdered after he promised to smoke crack with them. On top of that staggering body count, Sowell also had three living rape victims who never reported the crime over fears of past drug arrests. 

Some of the atrocities Sowell committed could have been avoided had the police seriously considered a 2008 call where a woman claimed that Sowell had repeatedly raped her before she escaped to the bathroom, where she found a decapitated body wrapped in plastic sitting in the bath tub. Rather than respond immediately to this call, the police informed the woman that she would have to come to the station to make a statement. At Sowell's 2011 trial, the woman was allowed to testify and she said that after making the call she "felt less than human. I didn’t know who to turn to.”

On the other side of the pond, a little known murderer named Stephen Port (or the Grindr Killer) moved silently through the London gay scene, drugging his victims with GHB and a loose collection of party drugs before watching them die. His first murder occurred in June 2014 when he contacted a student who was moonlighting as an escort, drugged him at the Barking Station bus terminal, and then left the student for dead at Port's own apartment.

Port called an emergency services line to report the death, and was arrested for giving a variety of conflicting stories to the police before being released. Yet when he started killing again with the same exact M.O., leaving bodies in cemeteries, and walking around in public with a jug of GHB, the police were dumbfounded with how to proceed. 

After Port was finally arrested for murdering four young men, Scotland Yard realized that there were at least 58 other suspicious GHB-related deaths in London that shared multiple similarities with Port's style and launched an investigation into 17 of its officers who they say may have mishandled the case from the jump. 

The police investigation that surrounded the Claremont serial murders that occurred in Western Australia throughout the mid '90s has the air of a comedy of errors that would honestly be very funny if it didn't involve the murders of at least four young women and the possible sexual assault of a teenage girl in the same area prior to the murder.

The three confirmed victims of the Claremont Killer disappeared from the same wealthy shopping center in suburban Perth under the same circumstances. Newspaper editor Bret Christian, who has followed the case for a decade, believes that by ignoring the connection between the teenager's rape and the murders that they may have set their investigation back by years and endangered the lives of multiple Perth area women. 

In the 20 years that it took to bring in a suspect, Bradley Robert Edwards, how did the police investigate the appalling crimes? At one point detectives handed out questionnaires to persons of interest that read, "Are you the killer?" They took DNA tests of local cab drivers, and they asked other serial killers who had already been arrested if they had committed the crimes. Top-notch detective work all around. 

In 2016, Todd Kohlhepp, a real estate agent in South Carolina, was arrested after authorities traced the cell phone signal of a missing woman and her boyfriend to Kohlhepp's property. Police discovered the woman, Kala Brown, alive and chained inside a shark cage inside of a metal storage shed where she could be heard banging on the walls. A search of Brown's property revealed the graves of Brown's boyfriend and two more victims who had the unfortunate luck of coming into Kohlhepp's orbit.

Thirteen years prior to the murders of the people on his property, Kohlhepp shot and killed four people inside Superbike Motorsports, a motorcycle shop in Chesnee, South Carolina. Could he have been stopped earlier than he was? Yes. 

While living with his father at the age of 15, Todd Kohlhepp kidnapped a 14 year old girl using a .22-caliber revolver, tied her up in his home, taped her mouth shut, and raped her. Then he took her home and threatened to kill her family if she told anyone. The girl didn't even blink and had Kohlhepp arrested for kidnapping and sexual assault. At the end of his trial, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison and registered as a sex offender.

How was this man allowed to become a real estate agent? One woman who met with Kohlhepp alone at a listing in her area researched him after he began behaving erratically during their walk -through, discovered that he was a sex offender, and not only contacted the Greenville Board of Realtors, but she also reached out to the Spartanburg County Sheriff's Department, who said that Kohlhepp had "special approval" to work as a real estate agent.

But that's not the full story. When Kohlhepp applied for his real estate license in 2006, there were no background checks in place, and when asked if he had any past felonies he said yes and explained, "I entered into a verbal argument with my girlfriend who was also 15 at the time. I was charged with felony kidnapping due to the fact that I did have a firearm on me." Obviously that's a lie - and legitimately crazy that he believes that's a less damning version of the story - but it's distressing that the people in his real estate company were fine with making themselves complicit in a series of murders because they didn't want to follow up on his felony kidnapping charge.

The life of a child actor might seem like a dream come true. They have fame, fortune, and way more interesting summer vacations than other kids their age. But the transition from younger years marked by superstardom into adulthood can be difficult. Fame can fade, and Hollywood is a difficult place to succeed. Perhaps it's not surprising that there are some former child actors who committed crimes as they got older.

Sometimes, these former stars who broke the law struggled with drug and alcohol problems brought on by their unconventional upbringing in the spotlight. At other times, their criminal records seemed to stem from deep-seated mental illness. True, a few of these celebs may have gotten off easy compared to everyday members of the public. But the fact they all sat for mug shots and were charged with crimes proves that even celebrity kids turned criminals can’t escape the law.

Amanda Bynes was the breakout star of Nickelodeon's All That, and she went on to star in a string of successful teen movies and television series. Her driving troubles started in 2012, when Bynes was pulled over by police for talking on a cell phone. She drove off before she was given a ticket. Over the course of the next few months, Bynes was arrested for several DUIs, two alleged hit and runs, and other charges of reckless driving. The seven driving offenses led to her getting her license suspended and being put on probation for three years.

Famous for playing Danny Partridge on The Partridge Family, Danny Bonaduce ran into a number of legal problems in the 1990s. He was arrested on March 31, 1991, in Phoenix, AZ, for violently beating and robbing Darius Barney. He pleaded guilty to lesser charges related to violence against the prostitute, and was ordered to pay the costs of Barney’s medical bills and face a lengthy period of probation.

Dustin Diamond is best known for his role as Screech in Saved by the Bell. He has been sued several times over the years for delinquent taxes, but his biggest run-in with the law came after a bar fight in 2014. Allegedly, the actor pulled a switchblade out and stabbed another man during the confrontation. He was later found guilty of two charges related to the incident, but was acquitted of the more serious felony accusation. After admitting to stabbing the man accidentally, Diamond was sentenced him to four months in jail and 15 months of probation.

Since appearing in Terminator 2: Judgement Day as a 14-year-old, the life of Edward Furlong has not been as rosy as he might have liked. He has been involved in a number of domestic violence disputes with his girlfriends. Claims by several partners stated that he had been aggressive in their relationships, and he was arrested for "using force" against Monica Keena in May 2013. Both Keena and his former wife, Rachael Kneeland, have protective orders against Furlong.

Furlong has blamed these incidents largely on his battle with drug addiction. According to the actor, he was both a heroin and cocaine addict.

Lillo Brancato Jr. had roles in shows including The Sopranos. He was arrested in 2005 following a shootout with an off-duty police officer, who had confronted him and another man attempting to enter a vacant house. During the shooting, police officer Daniel Enchategui was killed, and both assailants were critically wounded.

Following a lengthy trial, Brancato, Jr. was acquitted of the murder of the officer, but was found guilty of first-degree attempted burglary and given a jail sentence of 10 years.

Lindsay Lohan skyrocketed to fame with the release of The Parent Trap, but has publicly struggled with alcohol and drug abuse as she's matured. Since May of 2007, she has been involved in a number of traffic accidents. On several occasions, she was driving under the influence or had drugs in her car. Lohan later released a statement to MTV News, stating, "It is clear to me that my life has become completely unmanageable because I am addicted to alcohol and drugs.”

Lohan checked into rehab several times, but continued to have run-ins with the law. She's had short stays in prison as well.

Macaulay Culkin is best known as the mischievous Kevin McCallister in Home Alone. In 2004, police pulled over a car in which Culkin was a passenger. During the stop, they found a number of controlled substances in his possession, including marijuana and Xanax. The actor was arrested and jailed for a short time before he was released on bail.

Although Culkin initially pleaded not guilty to the charges brought against him at trial in 2005, he later changed his plea to guilty. The judge gave him a one-year deferred sentence and ordered him to pay just over $500 in fees and fines.

Shia LaBeouf was a successful child actor on the Disney Channel, and his fame didn't fade once he grew up: he appeared in major films like Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Transformers. However, he has also been involved in a number of violent incidents. In 2005, the actor get into a confrontation with a neighbor; LaBeouf allegedly rammed his car into another vehicle while he was waiting to gain access to his garage. A few hours later, another fight broke out between the pair - LaBeouf went to his neighbor’s house with a kitchen knife to threaten him.

In January of 2017, the actor was arrested at an anti-Trump rally in New York City. He was charged with misdemeanor assault and a harassment violation. 

Winona Ryder was the "it" girl of the late '80s and early '90s, starring in favorites like Beetlejuice and Heathers. Her career showed no signs of slowing down, but in 2001, Ryder was arrested after she was accused of stealing more than $5,000 worth of designer goods from a department store in Beverly Hills. After being discovered by security, she was arrested by the Los Angeles Police Department.

In 2002, the prosecution brought a number of charges against Ryder, including shoplifting, grand theft, and vandalism, and accused her of using restricted drugs without a prescription. The jury found her guilty of several of the charges, leading to judge to sentence her to 480 hours of community service, thousands of dollars in fines and restitution, and three years probation. Ryder later claimed that the incident was the result of depression and a dependency on painkillers that she was taking due to a broken arm.

Skylar Deleon was a child actor who appeared in a number of commercials, as well as shows like Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. Her acting career fizzled, but she made headlines in 2008 when she was convicted of killing an Arizona couple, Tom and Jackie Hawks.

In 2004, Deleon faked interest in buying the couple's yacht, and went out on the boat with them for a test ride. She then tied up the Hawkses and flung them overboard, tied to the yacht’s anchor. Deleon's aim was to steal the ship and the couple’s life savings. Deleon was also convicted of killing another person, John Jarvi, in 2003. According to the prosecution, Deleon slit Jarvi's throat after conning him out of money in Mexico.

Deleon is currently on death row at San Quentin State Prison. After attempting to remove her penis with a razor blade, she came out as transgender. She says her motive for killing the Hawkses was to get the money for gender reassignment surgery.

Football players are the most frequently arrested athletes in professional sports, and this also appears to be true for their crazy fans and their funny mugshots. When you mix high levels of alcohol consumption with a violent, high-stakes interpretation of keep-away, you're going to end up with a few football fan arrests and football fan mugshots. Both fans of pro and collegiate football fumbled their ways out of the stadium and into a holding cell. As Deflategate showed everybody, football isn't always played by the rules, so why should the fans be expected to do so either?

As you can see by these funny mugshots of football fans, fans may lose their freedom, but they never lose their pride. The next time you attend a game of your favorite football team, remember to root responsibly. 

Over the course of several years, Robert John Maudsley killed four victims - including a convicted child molester and a convicted murderer - three of whom he attacked while in prison or a psychiatric hospital. Because Maudsley was able to fatally injure people despite being in high-security facilities, a special cell was constructed to protect other inmates from the man the press has called "Britain's Most Dangerous Prisoner."

Maudsley has also been referred to as the real "Hannibal the Cannibal" - the fictional doctor turned murderer from Silence of the Lambs - not just because of his glass cell and high IQ, but also because he allegedly ate the brain of one of his victims. While Maudsley has murdered far fewer people than many of his counterparts, he is considered one of the worst British serial killers simply because of the sheer brutality of his crimes.

Maudsley has spent more than half his life in prison, and much of the time he's been incarcerated, he's been kept in solitary confinement. The convicted killer isn't allowed to interact with any of his fellow inmates in Wakefield Prison, and he is only let out of his cell for an hour a day in order to exercise.

Every time Maudsley - who has been dubbed "Britain's Most Dangerous Prisoner" - leaves his cell to go to the exercise yard, he is escorted by a minimum of five corrections officers who watch his every move. Maudlsey has said his lack of meaningful human contact has been incredibly difficult for him, referring to life in solitary confinement as "one long period of unbroken depression."

The British press dubbed Maudlsey "Hannibal the Cannibal" largely because a guard at Broadmoor Hospital said he ate a portion of his second victim's brain, but also because of his special cell is made up mainly of Plexiglas. Like the character created by Thomas Harris, Maudsley also murdered people while behind bars, making him a uniquely dangerous criminal.

Plus, like Lecter, Maudsley is incredibly intelligent - with a genius-level IQ - and he shares the fictitious doctor's love of art, literature, and classical music. He is reportedly interested in taking college classes on art and music, and the people have remained in contact with Maudsley during his time in prison have described him as smart, funny, and gentle.

Maudsley was convicted of murdering his fellow inmates Bill Roberts and Salney Darwood, and he was returned back to Wakefield Prison to serve his sentences in solitary confinement. In 1983, prison officials decided it was too dangerous for them to house Maudsley in an ordinary cell, so they built a special unit for the convicted killer in the prison's basement.

The cell consists of two rooms, and it's made primarily out of bulletproof Plexiglas, causing many to compare the special accommodations to the cage designed to house Hannibal Lecter in the movie The Silence of the Lambs. Maudsley's only furnishings are a bed made from concrete and a table and chair comprised of compressed cardboard; his toilet and sink are bolted to the floor of his cell.

On July 28, 1978, while serving his sentence in Wakefield Prison for killing John Francis, Maudsley allegedly told his fellow inmates he wanted to murder seven people in a single day. After successfully getting Salney Darwood - a man who had been convicted of killing his wife - to enter his cell, Maudsley killed the inmate by slitting his throat and hid Darwood's lifeless body underneath his bed. 

According to his fellow prisoners, Maudsley tried to get other inmates to enter his cell, but they all refused. Consequently, Maudsley went into the cell of Bill Roberts and viciously attacked the 56-year-old with a shiv and beat the man's head against a wall. After killing Roberts, Maudsley gave the makeshift knife to prison authorities, telling the guards he'd murdered two men.

After killing John Francis while serving a life sentence in Broadmoor Hospital, Maudsley was tried and convicted of manslaughter. Instead of being remanded to the high-security psychiatric hospital in which he'd tortured and garroted his second victim, Maudsley was sentenced to serve his time for the killing at Wakefield Prison in West Yorkshire, England.

When Maudsley arrived at the prison, his fellow inmates were already aware of the brutal crimes he'd committed while in Broadmoor, causing other prisoners to give him the nickname "Spoons" because of the utensil he'd allegedly left jutting out of Francis's brain. However, it didn't take long for inmates at Wakefield to experience and witness Maudsley's brutality first hand.

In 1977, while serving his life sentence in Broadmoor Hospital, Maudsley and another patient, David Cheeseman, forced a third patient, convicted pedophile David Francis, into an office and tied him up with an electrical cord. Over the course of several hours, Maudlsey and Cheeseman tortured Francis, claiming the child molester had sexually assaulted one of their friends. The two men repeatedly kicked and punched Francis and cut him with a knife as he pleaded for Maudsley and Cheeseman to spare his life.

After subjecting Francis to nine hours of sadistic abuse, Maudsley strangled Francis to death with a garrote. Following the murder, Maudsley and Cheeseman allowed hospital staff to enter the room where the horrifying acts had taken place, and according to a guard who was present on the scene, the victim's head had been cracked open and a spoon was sticking out from his skull.

Reportedly, a section of Francis's brain was missing, leading many to speculate that Maudsley had cannibalized a portion of his victim's body. However, this account has been deemed false by several people familiar with the case.

Before killing his first victim, Maudsley had attempted suicide multiple times, and he'd even told a psychiatrist that he'd heard voices commanding him to murder his mother and father. Due to Maudsley's personal history and the extenuating circumstances surrounding John Farrell's killing, he was convicted of manslaughter - not murder - because of diminished responsibility.

Maudsley was given a life sentence for the killing, and he was sent to Broadmoor Hospital in Crowthorne, England, to serve his time. Broadmoor Hospital is a high-security psychiatric facility that has housed some of Britian's most notorious criminals.

When he was just 16 years old, Maudsley left his foster family's home and moved to London on his own. Soon after arriving in England's capital city, Maudsley became addicted to drugs, and the teenager got involved with sex work to pay for his expensive habit.

It was while working as a prostitute that Maudsley met his first murder victim, a laborer named John Farrell. After having sex with Farrell on March 14, 1974, Maudsley claims the laborer showed him photographs of children he had sexually abused. Angered and upset by the pictures of Farrell's innocent victims, 20-year-old Maudsley - who claims he was sexually abused as a boy - strangled the man to death with a garrote.

Maudsley was convicted of manslaughter - not murder - for ending Farrell's life, and he actually avoided going to prison for killing his first victim. However, it didn't take Maudsley long to viciously murder his second known victim.

Shortly before he turned two, Maudsley and his two brothers and one sister were removed from their family home because the authorities found the children were being neglected by their parents. Maudsley and his siblings were placed in a Catholic orphanage in Liverpool, and the children developed close relationships with one another and the nuns who ran the children's home.

However, Maudsley's parents returned to the orphanage many years later and brought the four children back to their home to live with the additional eight kids they'd had while Maudsley and his sibilings were being looked after by the nuns. Not long after Maudsley and his brothers moved back in with their mother and father, they were repeatedly and viciously abused by the family's patriarch.

Maudsley left his parents' home after just one year, after being placed with a foster family when he was around 10 years old.

In February 2000, Katherine Knight - a mother of four - committed a crime so shocking and unsettling, many people drew comparisons between her and some of the most depraved and prolific Australian serial killers. While she only murdered one victim - her boyfriend of several years, John Price - the acts Knight subjected the man's body to after viciously stabbing him to death reminded many in Australia of crimes perpetrated by the world's worst cannibal serial killers.

When police discovered Knight's deeds the morning after she ended Price's life in the home the couple had shared in New South Wales, they were disgusted by what they found at the bloody crime scene. The following year, Knight was convicted of the shocking murder, and the judge in charge of sentencing the middle-aged mother was so disturbed by her crimes, he imposed a penalty no other woman in Australia has ever received.

After her marriage to her first husband ended, Knight met David Saunders in 1986 and the couple quickly moved in together. However, like with her past and future relationships, Knight became violent and jealous shortly after they started dating.

During their tumultuous relationship, Knight stabbed Saunders with scissors and hit him with an iron - causing him to require stitches and suffer broken ribs - but one day she decided to hurt her boyfriend not by assaulting him but by harming his two-month-old dingo puppy. While Knight later said she killed the puppy by cutting his throat with a knife because Saunders had punched her in the stomach while she was pregnant, Saunders claimed she hurt the baby dingo simply to upset him.

After decapitating Price's corpse, Knight placed his head in a pot on her stove and cooked it with a variety of vegetables to created a grotesque and grisly stew. In addition to boiling her dead boyfriend's head, Knight cut pieces of meat from Price's buttocks, which she roasted in the oven.

Then, Knight placed plates of her boyfriend's cooked flesh - which she served with vegetables, baked potatoes, and gravy - on the dining table, even writing place cards complete with malicious messages for Price's adult children that she set next to each repulsive meal. An additional portion of Price's cooked buttocks was discovered in the backyard, leading some to suspect Knight may have engaged in cannibalism before tossing the meat outside for her dogs to eat.

On Febrary 29, 2000, 44-year-old Katherine Knight put on a black negligee and had sex with her boyfriend, 45-year-old John Price, at their home in Aberdeen, New South Wales, Australia. Shortly after the couple had sex, Price fell asleep, only to be awoken moments later by his girlfriend of several years stabbing him repeatedly in the chest.

Despite suffering multiple injuries, Price managed to escape from the bedroom, leaving a bloody trail behind him as he made his way to the front door. Tragically, Price was unable to the flee the house, and he ultimately died of the 37 stab wounds Knight had inflicted with a butcher's knife.

After Price died from the nearly 40 stab wounds Knight inflicted on both the front and back of his body - hitting multiple vital organs in the process - she used her experience butchering animals to dismember his lifeless corpse. Knight used a knife to remove Price's skin from his body, hanging his hide from a meat hook she'd installed in her living room.

After skinning Price's corpse, Knight cut off his head and sliced hunks of flesh from his buttocks. While stabbing her boyfriend to death, skinning his corpse, and dismembering his body was horrifying enough, what Knight did next was particularly depraved and disturbing.

During her five year relationship with Price - which began when she started having an affair with him while she was still dating one of her co-workers from the slaughterhouse - Knight violently attacked her boyfriend multiple times, often over his refusal to marry her.

In the 1970s, Knight was married to her first husband, David Kellet, and she actually fractured his skull by hitting him in the head with a frying pan simply because he came home late one night.

After Knight split from Kellet in August 1976, she convinced a neighbor and her 16-year-old daughter to give her a ride, claiming she needed to take her child to the hospital for medical treatment. However, once inside the vehicle, Knight pulled a knife on the woman and her daughter, demanding that they take her to find her estranged husband. A struggle ensued, and Knight ended up slashing the woman underneath her eye, an incident that resulted in Knight spending time in a psychiatric hospital, not jail.

In the weeks leading up to his murder, Price was subjected to multiple violent attacks by Knight. In fact, just prior to killing her boyfriend on February 29, 2000, Knight stabbed Price in the chest, an assault that caused him to kick his girlfriend out of the home they shared in Aberdeen.

Fearing she would harm him again, Price went to a magistrate's court on the morning of his murder and got a restraining order to keep Knight away from him and his children. Later that day, Price told his co-workers he was afraid of his girlfriend, even stating that if he didn't come in to work the next day, it would probably be because Knight had killed him.

Not surprisingly, Knight's violence didn't end with the men she dated and married, and her children were also subjected to her violent and unstable behavior. Soon after Knight gave birth to her first child in 1976 - a daughter she and her first husband named Melissa - people saw her pushing her newborn around town in a stroller, purposefully slamming the baby carriage into the fences that lined the streets. Following this incident, Knight was hospitalized and diagnosed with post-partum depression.

While she received treatment for post-partum depression, Knight's disturbing behavior towards her young daughter continued when she placed the stroller - with two-month-old Melissa inside - on the railroad tracks shortly before a train was set to arrive. Thankfully, an elderly man spotted the baby carriage and moved the infant out of harm's way, most likely saving the girl's life.

When Price failed to show up for work on March 1, 2000, his supervisor sent someone to the home he shared with Knight to check on his well-being. Price's co-worker immediately noticed blood on the house's front door, so he contacted law enforcement to report his concerns.

When officers arrived at the home, they forced the door open and found a bloody scene, including Price's skinned body and his hide hanging from a meat hook. In the house, officials also discovered Knight, who was in a coma after she's taken a large quantity of pills in an effort to end her own life. Knight was rushed to the hospital for medical treatment and she eventually recovered from the failed suicide attempt. When investigators asked Knight why she killed her boyfriend, she told the authorities she had no memory of stabbing Price 37 times, skinning his body, cutting of his head, and cooking his remains.

From the very beginning of their marriage, Knight subjected her first husband Kellet to disturbing acts of violence. In fact, on the couple's wedding night, Knight actually choked her new husband because he fell asleep after having sex with her three times, a sexual performance she deemed inadequate.

Despite the ominous beginning to their marriage, Knight and Kellet - who started dating in 1973 - were together until 1984 and their union produced two daughters. After their relationship ended, Knight went on to have two more children with two other men, making this unstable and dangerous woman a mother of four.

Knight - who had once worked in a slaughterhouse where she dismembered animals - removed Price's head and skin using the same knives she'd used to decapitate pigs. In fact, Knight skinned her boyfriend's corpse with such expertise and precision, she was able to leave the entire hide intact, including Price's nose, ears, genitals, mouth, and hair.

Investigators discovered Price's pelt hanging from a butcher's hook in the home the dead man had once shared with his girlfriend, as well as his head in a pot on the stove. They also found his skinned, headless corpse, and because Knight had removed Price's skin so cleanly, medical officials were later able to sew it back on to his body.