When most people think of college and university campuses, a variety of images come to mind: peaceful, ivy covered walls, gorgeous architecture and landscaping, students walking and chatting between classes, hours of deep thought spent in silent libraries, and raucous parties. For some reason, there is a feeling of innocence and security. After all, college is a bubble and not like the real world.

And yet, the trusted exteriors obscure a darker character. Crimes committed by sorority girls have been exposed, along with dorm room murders at universities across the globe. Brutal hazing practices by fraternities are disquieting and the number of sexual assaults is alarming. Yet many of these crimes are not reported on the news. 

When murders on college campuses do make headlines, the public gasps in horror and colleges everywhere again turn to focus on how to make their students and campuses safer for everyone. Despite preconceived and old-fashioned notions of campus life, there are indeed college killers. Read on to discover terrifying tales that will shake you out of naïveté for the next time you visit a university. 

Gallaudet University is considered of the best colleges for hearing impaired students and has high academic standards. So, when two students were murdered in a span of six months, the entire community was stunned. Back in September 2000, student Eric Plunkett (19) was beginning his second year of college before he was stabbed to death in his dorm room. Just a few months later, in February 2001, Benjamin Varner (19) was found dead in his dorm room, under similar circumstances. 

The Gallaudet community was completely heartbroken and shocked to discover that the murderer was one of their own. Police investigations revealed that Gallaudet student, Joseph Mesa, Jr., had committed the heinous crimes. In fact, once discovered, he freely confessed to robbing and murdering his fellow students.

Mesa was born and raised in Guam, a US territory in the South Pacific. He'd had some mental issues earlier in this life, so his lawyers tried to argue that Mesa was insane and should not be convicted of murder. Mesa's jurors were unimpressed with the excuses offered and found him guilty as charged. He received a sentence of six life sentences with no possibility of parole. 

Haruka Weiser (18) was a student at the University of Texas at Austin. She was a dedicated theatre major, as well as a trained ballerina, and had stayed late at the campus drama building one evening in April 2016. She never made it back to her dorm and was reported missing. Three long days later, her body was found floating in a creek right on the university campus.

Police later reported that Weiser had been sexually assaulted, strangled to death, and then thrown into the creek. The entire community was shocked and desperate to find who had done such a thing to the young student. In a matter of days, a homeless teenager named Meechail Criner was arrested and charged with Weiser's murder.

But how did investigators know who to look for? The campus security cameras caught Crimer riding a bicycle on campus, including the moment he decided to follow Weiser. Additionally, a local citizen came forward and told police they had seen Crimer setting a fire on campus. He appeared to be burning a bag, which investigators concluded contained Weiser's backpack. 

Eve Carson might best be described as a "Super Student." Friendly, beautiful, and brilliant, she was a pre-med student on a full merit scholarship who served as the student body president at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, until the wee hours of March 5, 2008. 

Strangers entered her home just off campus, where they threatened and kidnapped her. They stopped at a bank ATM and took $1000 from Carson's account. Just before dawn, the kidnappers released Carson near campus before shooting her repeatedly in the street. Police discovered her body around 5 am that morning, noting that she had suffered gunshot wounds, including a devastating one to her head. According to police, Carson's kidnapping and murder were totally random.

Thanks to the ATM security video, the two suspects, Demario James Atwater and Laurence Alvin Lovette Jr., were charged with her murder. They were also charged with felonious larceny, kidnapping, weapons charges, and armed robbery. Both men pleaded guilty to most of the charges, but both worked out a plea agreement that would save them from the death penalty. Both men were found guilty and are serving life sentences in high security prisons.

Hull University student, Rebecca Love, claimed to be happier than she'd ever been in her life. And then, her former boyfriend smothered her to death with his "love," but not before torturing her first. Jason Webster, also a student at Hull University, was upset and jealous over the breakup, so he stabbed Love dozens of times in the neck with a ball-point pen.

Detectives later described one of his stab wounds as particularly ferocious, jamming the pen down her throat. In total, the stabbing resulted in 93 injuries to Love's body. Even after such prolonged and painful torture, Webster finished her off by strangling her to death. Once he was sure she was dead, he stripped her body, washed the clothes with fabric conditioner, and forged a note that suggested her new boyfriend had killed Love.

Webster was sentenced to 21 years in prison, but not before Judge Michael Mettyear made the following statement to Webster before the court: "[Love] said before her death she was enjoying herself and it was one of the happiest times of her life. At the time she was feeling lonely and she turned to you. In the end that turned out to be a tragic mistake that caused her death." 

It's understandable that a parent would rush to defend their child from a bully, but this is the story of a woman whose motherly devotion transformed to murder. Unbeknownst to officials at Indiana University-Purdue University, Fort Wayne, the mother of a resident student was living in her daughter's campus apartment, which was not permitted. The mom, Tina Morris, had been living there for around two weeks when she stabbed her daughter's roommate, Liette Martinez (22), to death. Morris said she killed Martinez because she was rude to her daughter. 

The murder occurred on April 18, but by August 20, Morris was ready to plead guilty of murder. Other charges, including felony murder, robbery, and auto theft were dropped as part of Harris' plea bargain. Both the Harris and Martinez families embraced and cried together when the guilty verdict was announced. 

Perhaps the most infamous of campus murders, this story is a tale of horror, rape, blood, murder, and Ted Bundy, the famous and prolific serial murderer. The horror began on the evening of January 15, 1978, at the Omega Chi Sorority house on the Florida State University campus. The Omega Chi sisters were mostly settled in for the evening, though earlier some had gone out and were now returning home. One of the young women had just said good night to her date, and as she entered the back door she could see a man preparing to leave out the front door of the house. This was strange, as men were not allowed past curfew and it was nearly 3 am, so she found the sorority president to discuss the strange event. 

As they stood in the corridor, Karen Chandler came stumbling out into the hall with a broken jaw and arm. Through Karen’s open room door, they could see Karen’s roommate, Kathy Kleiner, sitting on her bed cross-legged with blood running down her chin. The young women in the corridor were suddenly frightened and ran to each of the rooms, flinging open the doors and discovering more horrors. Margaret Bowman lay dead in her room, choked to death with nylon pantyhose, her skull crushed by Bundy’s club. Lisa Levy was mortally wounded, also bludgeoned in the same manner with one of her nipples nearly bitten off.

Thirty days passed before Bundy was arrested. During that time, the Chi Omega sisters lived in fear of further attacks and male friends of the sorority slept outside the bedrooms at Chi Omega house. During the month Bundy was still on the run, he managed to murder another victim, a 12-year-old girl. By the time he was caught, he was suspected of more than 36 murders. Over ten years after Bundy was tried and convicted, he was put to death for his horrendous crimes. 

New Jersey Institute of Technology student, Joe Micalizzi, was inside his Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity house during the wee hours of an early May morning in 2016. Micalizzi, who was 23 and described by all who knew him as "a really nice guy," may have still been awake when burglars entered the house through the rear entrance around 3 am. There was a struggle, and the burglars fired several shots, hitting Micalizzi twice. One bullet struck his hand, and the other, his head.

Police later confirmed that Micalizzi's body bore defensive wounds. Several of his friends and a professor stated they were not surprised the young man fought back. Police immediately began to look for suspects, and a few days later, arrested local men Nafee Cotman and Taquan Harris. Cotman (19)  and Harris (22) were indicted in October of 2016 and charged with murder, felony murder, robbery, burglary, and weapons offenses. 

Yeardley Love and George Huguely were campus sweethearts on the bucolic University of Virginia campus in Charlottesville. Both were star lacrosse players with equally stellar futures awaiting them. They dated for two years, but Love was worried about her boyfriend's propensity for violence. She had reached the point where she decided to break up with Huguely, but she knew he would take it hard and the fact that the two still lived literally next door to each other in off-campus housing must have been a concern.

A little after 2:00 am on May 3, 2010, police received a call to check on a disturbance at an apartment in the University Corner area of town. Upon arrival, they found Love, who was unresponsive and pronounced dead at the scene. Detectives went next door to question Huguely, who waived his Miranda Rights and immediately began a stunningly grisly account of how he was let into Love's apartment, where he kicked in her locked bedroom door. He then claimed that he grabbed Love and shook her, over and over again, her head repeatedly banging on the wall behind her.

Upon this unexpected and detailed confession, Huguely was charged with Love's murder and held in the local jail. Huguely's trial by jury began on February 6, 2012, and he was ultimately convicted of second degree murder and grand larceny. Judge Edward  Hogshire ordered Huguely to 23 years in prison. Huguely has attempted to appeal his conviction, but in November 2014, the Virginia State Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal.

Nick Armstrong was a freshman at Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos. His bid to join the Kappa Epsilon fraternity was accepted and Armstrong eagerly attended the bid-night party. It was a party like any other - lots of alcohol, music, laughter, and pranks. At some point, Nick landed on a sofa, and fell asleep.

Around 3 am, frat member Clint Hart entered the nearly empty house and was somewhat startled to see two young men searching Armstrong for his wallet. Eventually they left, along with Hart, but Hart remained suspicious and turned back to see the taller of the two men run into the KE house again. Hart reentered the frat house to find Armstrong with his head was now split in two, blood was flowing and pooling around his head and body. Hart was able to get Armstrong to a hospital, but he never regained consciousness and died the following day.

Within a day of Armstrong's death and with the help of Hart, police had arrested Jeremiah Wilkerson (21), a former UT student. Apparently his anger that night stemmed from being asked to leave the party at the KE house. When he ran back into the frat house, his anger drove him to smash a baseball bat into the sleeping Armstrong's head. Naturally, Wilkerson was the police departments chief suspect, but before they could question him in the murder of Armstrong, Wilkerson had committed suicide. 

Katie Hall was a freshman student at Millersville University, an enthusiastic rugby player who volunteered at an animal shelter. She was nearly halfway through her second semester at college when stress came in the form of her on-again, off-again relationship with her boyfriend, Gregorio Orrostieta. He was twenty years old and not a Millersville student, but he spent a good deal of time on campus and in Hall's dorm room. He was the jealous type, and no matter what Hall did or did not do, he was ready to accuse her of cheating and would regularly confront her or antagonize her in other ways.

It was clear to friends and family that Orrostieta physically assaulted her at least twice and that the relationship was abusive. Despite their pleas to get help, Hall stayed with Orrostieta. In the early hours of February 8, 2015, the local 911 center received a call from Orrostietia. Authorities arrived to find Hall beaten to death in her dorm room, and later concluded that Orrostieta had done nothing to save Hall's life. 

Orrostietia was indicted and charged with Hall's murder, and later received a sentence of forty years in prison. Since Hall's death, Millersville University has developed programs that encourage and educate students and the entire community on the warning signs and dangers of toxic relationships.

In October 1996, Sharon Lopatka and Robert "Bobby" Frederick Glass's first in-person meeting ended in what several people have referred to as "consensual homicide," causing many to question whether or not someone can consent to their own murder. While Lopatka died after spending just three days at Glass's home, the pair had communicated for weeks prior to her death, having met in August 1996 in a pornographic online chat room.

After exchanging hundreds of messages in which they shared their darkest sexual desires, Glass agreed to fulfill Lopatka's fantasy of being tortured to death. What transpired between Lopatka and Glass once they met in person, as well as in the weeks before her death, shocked and horrified not only the people who knew both the victim and her killer, but also the members of their communities and citizens all around the world.

In August 1996, 34-year-old Sharon Lopatka met Robert Frederick Glass, a 45-year-old computer analyst in a pornographic online chat room. However, before Lopatka, an internet entrepreneur, met Glass, the man who eventually killed her, she posted messages in a variety of online groups, including one in which she wrote:  "I kind of have a fascination with torturing till death."

Through these messages, including one posted to a group about necrophilia, Lopatka met multiple people with whom she discussed her fantasies about being tortured to death. In fact, she actually went to New Jersey to meet one of these men in person, but when he realized Lopatka seriously wanted someone to torture her until she died, he refused to help her fulfill her macabre fantasy.

After Lopatka's husband found his wife's letter, he contacted the police. Law enforcement officials searched Lopatka's computer, and they discovered hundreds of disturbing messages she'd exchanged with Glass, including the ones in which they'd arranged their meeting.

After discovering these messages, authorities surveilled Glass's home for a number of days in hopes of spotting Lopatka alive. However, when they didn't see the missing woman, a judge issued a search warrant on October 25, 1996. While investigators found several alarming items inside Glass's trailer, buried just feet from his home was the most shocking find of all: Lopatka's decomposing corpse.

Initially, Glass was charged with first-degree murder for her death. However, the prosecution eventually changed this charge to voluntary manslaughter, and more than three years after Lopatka's death, Glass entered a guilty plea on January 27, 2000.

In addition to pleading guilty to voluntary manslaughter, Glass also pleaded guilty to six counts related to the child pornography discovered on his computer. Glass was sentenced to serve 36 to 53 months for killing Lopatka and 21 to 26 months for multiple counts of sexual exploitation of a minor.

While the medical examiner who performed an autopsy on Lopatka's corpse didn't find any signs to indicate she'd been tortured before she died, he did find evidence her death had probably been caused by asphyxiation. According to Glass, he didn't kill Lopatka intentionally, despite having communicated with her for weeks about her desire to be tortured to death.

Instead, Glass said they were engaged in erotic asphyxiation while having sex, and she died when he accidentally strangled her to death with a nylon cord. Interestingly, the medical examiner didn't find any marks or bruises on Lopatka's neck.

After traveling to North Carolina from Maryland, Glass picked Lopatka up from the train station and took her back to his trailer in Lenoir. According to the medical examiner who performed her autopsy, Lopatka most likely died after spending just three days at Glass's home.

While they had talked for weeks about Lopatka's desire to be tortured to death, the medical examiner didn't find any evidence she had been beaten or wounded before she died. To this day, no one knows for certain exactly what transpired between Lopatka and Glass in the time between when she arrived at his home and ended up dead.

In addition to discovering Lopatka's lifeless body buried under less than three feet of dirt just 25 yards from Glass's trailer, the search of the 45-year-old computer analyst's humble home yielded a number of other disturbing items. In Glass's home, investigators found bondage gear, drug paraphernalia, and a .357 Magnum pistol, as well as pornography, some of which featured children.

Glass - who had three young children at the time of the search - had pornographic images on his computer that depicted minors engaged in sexual activity. Eventually, Glass pleaded guilty to a federal charge for possession of child pornography, and he received a sentence of 27 months in prison.

In addition to selling pornographic videos online, Lopatka - claiming to be a beautiful blonde woman named Nancy - posted on a message board to see if anyone was interested in buying her worn underwear.

However, not all of Lopatka's online money-making schemes were pornographic in nature. She had one business where she offered her skills as a copywriter to companies that needed someone to write content for their internet advertisements, and Lopatka and a friend ran a website where they sold home decorating guides. Lopatka also advertised her services as a medium, using the name Vilado Dion to sell love potions and psychic readings.

On October 13, 1996, Lopatka left the home she shared with her husband Victor in rural Maryland and drove her car to the train station in Baltimore. Then Lopatka (who had told her husband she was traveling to Georgia to see some friends) took a 9:15 AM train to Charlotte, arriving at her destination just before 9:00 PM.

Glass picked Lopatka up from Charlotte and drove the two of them 80 miles north to his trailer in Lenoir, while back home in Maryland, Lopatka's husband Victor discovered a note his wife had left for him before she started her journey south. In the letter, Lopatka told Victor she would not be coming back to Maryland, and she asked her husband not to try to find the person she had asked to torture her to death. Instead, she told her husband: "If my body is never retrieved, don't worry: know that I'm at peace."

In addition to using the Internet - which was still novel in 1996 - to find people to help her fulfill her extreme sexual fantasies, Lopatka sold a number of different products and services online. In October 1996, shortly before she went to meet Glass in North Carolina, Lopatka posted an ad online - using the name Nancy Carlson - to promote pornographic videos of women being raped after they'd been drugged, hypnotized, or rendered unconscious with chloroform.

Lopatka advertised a number of other videos that catered to different sexual preferences, including foot fetishes, extreme weight gain, and large women crushing men. She also offered to create custom 30-minute videos in which she would fulfill any request for just $100.

After Lopatka (who lived in Hampstead, Maryland, with her husband) met Glass (who lived by himself in a trailer in Lenoir, North Carolina) in a chat room, the two started communicating via email.  Over the course of just six weeks, Lopatka and Glass exchanged nearly 900 emails with one another, many of which were sexually graphic and violent.

In the messages she sent to Glass, Lopatka told him she wanted to be tortured to death, and she even asked him if he would be willing fulfill her shocking fantasy. Glass responded to her bizarre request by agreeing to kill her, even telling Lopatka exactly how he would abuse her and end her life. After communicating through online chat and email for a month and a half, the pair agreed that Lopatka would travel more than 400 miles from Maryland to North Carolina to meet Glass in person.

While many serious criminals - like serial killers and terrorists - have been caught by law enforcement after years of tireless police work, others have been captured by the authorities after being arrested or stopped for relatively minor infractions, like theft and driving violations. One such criminal who was caught for a minor crime was a fugitive wanted for murder, and he was apprehended by law enforcement after he stole a chicken salad sandwich, a newspaper, and some Band-Aids from a grocery store.

A number of other serious criminals who were caught for minor crimes were captured by police when they were simply caught driving around with missing or stolen license plates, demonstrating how a huge break in a case can come from a seemingly inconsequential transgression like stealing a ceiling fan from a mosque, shoplifting a vise from a hardware store, parking in front of a fire hydrant, or making an illegal U-turn.

After killing women and girls from coast to coast and escaping from police custody on two different occasions, 31-year-old Ted Bundy was pulled over in West Pensacola, FL, at around 1:00 am on February 15, 1978, for driving a stolen vehicle. After Bundy made a failed attempt to flee the scene, officials searched the car - an orange Volkswagen Beetle - and discovered ID cards belonging to three female students at FSU, the same school where several members of a sorority had been brutally murdered a month earlier.

Eventually, the Pensacola officers learned that Bundy was one of the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives, bringing an end to a horrifying reign of terror that had lasted from 1961 to 1978 and resulted in the deaths of at least 20 young women and girls in Washington, Utah, Colorado, Idaho, Oregon, Florida, and California. Following multiple trials for his crimes, Bundy was given the death penalty, and he was executed in Florida's electric chair on January 24, 1989.

In April 2010, a police officer went to the home of 76-year-old Joseph Naso to conduct a search of the elderly man's Reno, NV, home as part of the terms of his parole after he was convicted of stealing from a California grocery store. While the officer was looking for prohibited items like alcohol, drugs, and guns, he quickly became disturbed when he noticed a large amount of woman's clothing in the bachelor's home, as well as mannequin legs and hundreds of photos of nude women - some of whom appeared to be unconscious.

The officer continued searching Naso's home until he discovered a journal that contained multiple entries about the various rapes the 76-year-old had committed over the course of several decades. With the help of Naso's diary, investigators were able to link the elderly man - who had worked as a freelance photographer - with the murders of four women from 1977 to 1994, although they suspect he killed at least six other victims.

Around 2:30 am on August 1, 1977, a gunman fired into a car parked near New York's Gravesend Bay, killing 20-year-old Stacy Moskowitz. Shortly after the young woman was murdered, Cacilia Davis, a middle-aged woman who lived near the crime scene, contacted law enforcement to say that around the time Moskowitz was shot, she saw a man ripping up a parking ticket not far from where the killing had occurred. Armed with this information, officials tracked every ticket issued in the area that night, and discovered that 24-year-old David Berkowitz - who lived more than 20 miles away in Yonkers - had been cited for parking his car in front of a fire hydrant.

When investigators searched Berkowitz's vehicle, they discovered a rifle, ammunition, and maps of crime scenes, and when they interrogated the 24-year-old on the morning of August 11, 1977, Berkowitz confessed to being the "Son of Sam," the person who had murdered six people, including Moskowitz, and wounded eight others, in a series of attacks in the New York City area during the summer of 1977. In June 12, 1978, Berkowitz was given 25-years-to-life for each murder he committed, with his sentences to be served consecutively. He had his last parole hearing in 2016, and his release was denied.

On April 19, 1995, a trooper from the Oklahoma Highway Patrol pulled over a 1977 Mercury Marquis that was heading north on Interstate 35 because the vehicle was missing a license plate. The driver was 26-year-old Timothy McVeigh. The U.S. Army veteran was wearing a shirt featuring a picture of Abraham Lincoln and quotes from John Wilkes Booth and Thomas Jefferson. When McVeigh reached into his pocket to retrieve his driver's license, the trooper noticed the pistol that the 26-year-old had in a shoulder holster, and he arrested McVeigh for unlawfully carrying a concealed weapon and driving without license plates.

While McVeigh was being held in jail for these offenses, investigators realized that he was the same person who had rented the truck that was transformed into a bomb and detonated outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, OK. The blast - which occurred the same morning McVeigh was stopped for driving without a license plate - killed 168 people and injured more than 600 other victims. In August 1995, McVeigh was indicted on multiple federal counts, and in June 1997, he was found guilty and sentenced to death. On June 11, 2001, 33-year-old McVeigh was executed by lethal injection in a federal prison in Indiana.

On November 30, 2001, police arrested 57-year-old Robert Durst for trying to steal a chicken salad sandwich, a newspaper, and Band-Aids from a grocery store in Bethlehem, PA. When officers searched his vehicle, they found nearly $40,000 in cash, marijuana, and two guns, as well as a driver's license belonging to Morris Black. The authorities quickly learned that Durst was a fugitive from the law who had been arrested the previous month and charged with Black's murder when the elderly man's dismembered corpse was found in a body of water near Galveston, TX. 

Two years after he was arrested in Pennsylvania, Durst went on trial for killing Black, his former neighbor, but he was acquitted by the jury. In addition to murdering Black, many members of law enforcement suspect Durst - who is an heir to a real estate fortune worth billions - also killed his wife, Kathleen, in 1982 and one of his closest friends, Susan Berman, in 2000. However, Durst has never been convicted of murdering anyone.

In the early hours of June 28, 1993, state troopers attempted to pull over a vehicle driven by 34-year-old Joel Rifkin because the truck he was driving didn't have a license plate. However, Rifkin refused to stop for law enforcement, leading the state troopers on a high-speed chase that lasted until he crashed his truck into a utility pole in Mineola, NY.  

When officers approached Rifkin's vehicle, they noticed the unmistakable scent of rotting human flesh coming from the bed of the truck and quickly discovered the dead body of 22-year-old Tiffany Bresciani. Shocked by their grisly find, investigators were even more surprised when Rifkin not only admitted to killing Bresciani, but later confessed to murdering several other victims and dumping their bodies all over New York state. Rifkin was convicted of killing nine women - although experts believe he murdered several others as well. The serial killer from Long Island was sentenced to more than 200 years in prison for his brutal crimes.

On January 9, 1992, an officer in Riverside County, CA, pulled over William Suff after they witnessed the 41-year-old make an illegal U-turn. The officer discovered that Suff was wanted for a parole violation in relation to the killing of his infant daughter, and when law enforcement searched the man's vehicle, they found a bloody knife and a rope. Suspicious, officials impounded Suff's van and searched his home, eventually uncovering evidence that would tie him to the murders of several women who had disappeared while walking the very same street where Suff had been stopped for a traffic violation.

In July 1995, Suff was convicted of 12 counts of murder and one count of attempted murder - although the authorities suspect he may have killed more than 20 victims - and in October 1995 he was sentenced to death for his crimes. Suff - a serial murderer who was dubbed the "Lake Elsinore Killer" - is currently on death row at California's San Quentin State Prison.

In 1985, law enforcement discovered Charles Ng and Leonard Lake's horrifying crimes of rape, torture, and murder when Ng tried to steal a vise from a San Francisco hardware store. Ng ran from the scene, but Lake was taken into police custody. However, Lake died shortly after he arrived at the police station, having taken a cyanide tablet to kill himself. Eventually, investigators found the isolated cabin that Ng and Lake had shared in the Sierra Nevada foothills, and when officials searched the property, they found evidence that the two men had killed several people - including men, women, and babies - burying the bodies on the land surrounding the remote cabin.

In addition to the human remains found on the property, authorities discovered several videotapes the men had made of themselves viciously raping and torturing their female victims. Law enforcement eventually captured Ng in Canada, and he was extradited to the United States where he was convicted of murdering 11 victims. In 1999, Ng was sentenced to death and remains on California's death row.

On January 2, 1981, two police officers in South Yorkshire, England, stopped to investigate a vehicle parked on a private street when they noticed the car had a second set of license plates taped on top of the plates that were screwed onto the vehicle. Inside the car they found the vehicle's owner, Peter Sutcliffe, and a known sex worker.

When they brought Sutcliffe down to the police station to talk to him about his stolen plates, they noticed his resemblance to a composite sketch of the Yorkshire Ripper, an unidentified serial killer who had murdered several women - some of them sex workers. Eventually, Sutcliffe confessed to being the notorious serial killer who had eluded law enforcement for five years and taken the lives of at least 13 women and teenage girls. Sutcliffe was tried and found guilty for the killings, and he was given 20 life sentences for his crimes.

In September 2009, police in Bangladesh arrested 37-year-old Rasu Miah - a married father of four - for stealing a ceiling fan from a mosque. When law enforcement interrogated Miah about the theft, they searched his cell phone and discovered that he had the phone number of a woman who had recently been murdered in Chandpur. Initially, Miah denied having anything to do the with the woman's death, but when he appeared in court in October 2009, he admitted to killing her and 10 other victims over the course of two years.

According to Miah, a woman refused to marry him when he proposed to her in 1994, so he decided that he was going to murder 101 women in his hometown as revenge. Miah's victims ranged in age from 17 to 20, and they were all poor garment workers whom he lured to the Chandpur region of Bangladesh by promising to make them his wives. Once he was alone with the young women, Miah tortured and murdered them, tossing their lifeless bodies into a river. He also admitted to raping some of his victims before killing them.

From 1979 to 1981, Nikolai Dzhumagaliev (nicknamed Metal Fang by the press) brutally murdered at least seven young women in his home country of Kazakh SSR, Soviet Union, the nation that is known today as Kazakhstan. Unlike Alexander Pichushkin, who killed mostly men, Dzhumagaliev targeted women to rape, kill, and even cannibalize. Over the course of just two years, Dzhumagaliev took the lives of several victims, making him one of the world's most notorious Soviet serial killers. 

While his manner of killing was particularly gruesome, the acts he subjected his victims to after death are what make Dzhumagaliev one of the Soviet Union's most disturbing murderers. Incredibly, this confessed Kazakh serial killer might not even be in custody today. Dzhumagaliev could actually be free at this very moment, hunting for his latest victim somewhere in Kazahkstan, Russia, or beyond. So, lock your doors before you read on to uncover some grisly facts about Dzhumagaliev and his sickening methods of murder. 

 Dzhumagaliev's crimes were discovered on December 18, 1981, when he invited two men to his home in Uzynagash, Kazakhstan. Apparently, when the two went into their host's kitchen, they found the severed head of Dzhumagaliev's latest victim. Shocked and frightened by the horrifying discovery, the two men fled Dzhumagaliev's home. When the police arrived a short while later, Dzhumagaliev managed to escape the authorities, but he was arrested the following day at his cousin's home.

In 2011, Hungarian philosopher and poet István Cs. Bartos posted a video of himself reading a short story he'd written about Dzhumagaliev. The story is called Igaz Történet a Kazahsztáni Kannibálról, which is Hungarian for True Story of the Kazakstani Cannibal. Interestingly, Bartos has referred to himself as a "philosophical cannibal," and during his work as a performance artist, he has consumed human bodily fluids. However, unlike Dzhumagaliev, Bartos didn't consume another person's blood. Instead, the voluntarily homeless Hungarian artist is known for drinking his own urine and eating his own feces.

In 1989, Dzhumagaliev escaped from police custody while he was being moved to another facility. For two years, Dzhumagaliev remained at large. His exact whereabouts during this two-year span are unknown, although investigators believe Dzhumagaliev may have been living in the Kyrgystan mountains while he was a fugitive. However, after more than two years on the run, the cannibal serial killer was captured in Uzbekistan in April 1991. 

Dzhumagaliev raped his victims, reportedly before killing them and even after they were dead, making him a necrophiliac. According to Dzhumagaliev, he enjoyed the process of finding his victims, which he referred to as "hunting a woman." In addition to raping his victims vaginally before and after killing them, Dzhumagaliev allegedly used his penis to penetrate the stab wounds he inflicted on young women with his knife. Incredibly, raping his victims' wounds wasn't even the most disturbing act Dzhumagaliev subjected his victims to after murdering them.

While Dzhumagaliev was tried for murdering seven women from 1979 to 1981, some experts believe he may have killed 50 to 100 victims. In an interview after he was recaptured in 1989, Dzhumagaliev claimed he murdered sex workers because he wanted to "rid the world of prostitutes." However, not all of Dzhumagaliev's known victims were sex workers, making it more likely his murders were motivated by his admitted hatred of all women and not by a mission to end prostitution. 

As a young man, Dzhumagaliev's front teeth were knocked out during a fight, requiring false teeth replacements. However, instead of receiving teeth comprised of plastic or acrylic resin, Dzhumagaliev's new front teeth were made from white metal. Consequently, when his gruesome crimes of rape, murder, dismemberment, and cannibalism came to light, the press dubbed him "Metal Fang" because of his unusual teeth. In addition to being called Metal Fang, he was known as "Kolya the Man-eater," with Kolya being the diminutive for his first name, Nikolai.

According to some reports, Dzhumagaliev didn't keep the flesh from his victims all to himself. Allegedly, Dzhumagaliev used his victims' body parts to make ethnic dishes like "manty," a traditional type of Mongolian dumpling. Then, Dzhumagaliev served these meals to his dinner guests, watching as they unknowingly feasted on human flesh. However, after Dzhumagaliev was captured, he denied making his friends unwitting cannibals, stating: "I saved the meat for myself; I never served it to anyone else."

Shortly after he was arrested at his cousin's home on December 19, 1981, Dzhumagaliev was tried for multiple counts of murder. However, Dzhumagaliev had previously been diagnosed with schizophrenia and was found not guilty by reason of insanity. He was sent to a psychiatric hospital for treatment.

While schizophrenia is a very serious mental disorder that impacts how people behave, think, and feel, the majority of people with schizophrenia do not commit acts of violence. Dzhumagaliev spent eight years in a secure mental hospital in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, where he presumably received treatment for schizophrenia until 1989.

After murdering his victims by stabbing them to death with a knife or attacking them with an axe, Dzhumagaliev dismembered their corpses. According to Dzhumagaliev, he removed his first victim's ovaries and cut her breasts into strips, which he placed in his backpack and took back to his home. Dzhumagaliev also said that at the scene of his first murder, he drank the young woman's blood after slitting her throat.

The confessed serial killer told the authorities that he melted his victims' flesh to create fat that he used to fry his food and also claimed he made dumplings filled with human flesh he'd put through a meat grinder. According to Dzhumagaliev, it took him a month to eat all of the flesh he'd taken from just one of his victims' bodies.

Over the course of two years, Nikolai Dzhumagaliev murdered at least seven women, killing his first victim in January 1979 when he was 27 years old. He attacked his first victim while she was walking alone in an isolated area. After choking the young woman with his arm, Dzhumagaliev dragged her to a landfill and killed her by slitting her throat with a knife. He murdered many of his other victims near the riverfront in a public park after he lured them to a secluded area and hacked them to death with an axe.

They're supposed to protect and serve, but sometimes law enforcement officers cross the line and carry out injustice. While it's not exactly common, there are plenty of cases where cops framed innocent people to "solve" a case and make themselves look good. Whether its because of a clash of personalities, a score to settle, or because they want to cover up their own wrong doings, these criminal cops ignored their oath to uphold the law. 

For people who were framed by cops, their lives will never be the same. From people framed for murder to entrapping otherwise innocent people, these cases where the cops framed someone show the law isn't always blind. Whether by making up false accusations or extracting false confessions these police frame-ups, it seems no department or agency is too big or too small to employ bad cops. 

Since 9/11, the War on Terror has had global impacts - both good and bad. FBI informants have played a pivotal role in breaking up some legitimate terrorist plots, but also have a history of entrapping otherwise innocent people in acts they never intended to commit. Eric McDavid and two other activists were sentenced to serious jail time for allegedly plotting to commit acts of ecoterrorism. The activists were entrapped by informant Zoe Elizabeth Voss, who called herself Anna. She provoked McDavid to set fire to corporate offices in exchange for a sexual relationship.

Voss was posing as 17-year-old ecoactivist Anna in 2004, trying to infiltrate a small green anarchist group, which McDavid was part of. Using funds from the FBI, Voss became close to McDavid and suggested they make bombs and obtain a cache of guns. He initially said no, but she persisted, insinuating she wanted to start a romantic relationship. He agreed to go along with the bombing. Anna recruited Lauren Weiner and Zach Jensen for the plot, telling them McDavid was the leader. She then drove them to targets she identified for a bombing and helped the group assemble bomb materials. 

McDavid was convicted based on the testimony of Jensen and Weiner, and sentenced to 20 years in prison. His lawyers asserted Anna had entrapped him by promising sex if he went along with her plot. He was convicted despite this. Then, in 2015, the FBI revealed it had withheld 2,500 pages of evidence and documents. In it was proof that Anna was the instigator of the plot, not McDavid. 

Because he helped gather the materials, he was only allowed to plea to a lesser crime. When he asked the government about why he was framed, he was threatened to be retried. 

In 1977, police officers shot and killed 17-year-old Randy Webster. They said he had stolen a van, led police on a high speed chase, spun out of control and crashing, before getting out of the vehicle with a gun in his hand. They also accused him of possessing Quaaludes, and the shooting was ruled a justifiable homicide.

However, Webster's parents were not convinced and demanded answers. The District Attorney in Houston was behind the police, and whenever they sought information the boys in blue, officials blocked their efforts or gave them the runaround. Webster's father wrote a letter to the FBI, hoping they could help him file a civil suit against the department. They did - and helped prove that Webster could not have possibly had the gun police said he had. They proved the police planted it on him. Most of the officers involved went free, but the one accused of shooting him was found guilty of perjury. He served no jail time. 

Stephen Miller, Yusef Abdullahi and Anthony Paris were framed for the murder of sex worker Lynette White on Valentine's Day of 1988. Five men were initially charged for the crime, but two of them were cleared while the others were sentenced to life in prison. Miller, who was White's boyfriend, filed an appeal on his case and in 2000, DNA from the crime scene was tested using enhanced forensic technologies. In 2002, the men were exonerated when their DNA was not a match to the alleged suspect - Jeffrey Gafoor. 

A closer examination of the case revealed the police were unable to find a suspect in the case, and rather than doing their jobs to find evidence, chase down leads, and arrest the killer, officers fabricated evidence. Ultimately 12 police officers were implicated on charges of pressuring witnesses to testify against the five suspects.

Camden, NJ, police officer Kevin Parry went above and beyond the call of duty in order to protect and serve. And in doing so he actually committed crimes himself. His actions included illegally searching people's homes, creating false reports, stealing cash, falsifying testimony, and planting evidence. Rather than just focusing his efforts on one or two cases, he victimized 171 innocent people.

A 2010 FBI investigation uncovered his activities, and also discovered three other police officers conspired with him to engage in illegal search and seizures. They were all sentenced to prison. 

Sgt. Ronald Watts of the Chicago Police Department was doing more than making arrests and stopping crime: he was a criminal himself, who framed those who wouldn't play by his rules. He would plant evidence to trump up charges, before allowing suspects to pay their way out of a trip to jail. He also took drug money from drug dealers without submitting it as evidence, and threatened to arrest the dealers if they ratted on him.

Watts was arrested in 2012 and sent to prison for planting evidence on residents of Chicago public housing units, where he was a police officer. Two other officers, Shannon Spalding and Daniel Echeverria, worked with the FBI to provide the evidence to put Watts and another officer in jail. 

Rather than being rewarded for their fine police work putting a member of the force behind bars who betrayed the public trust, their fellow officers intimidated the two whistleblowers. They were denied promotions and given unfavorable assignments in retribution. In 2016, Spalding and Echeverria won a $2 million suit against Watts and the department. 

In 1993, New York State Police lieutenant Craig D. Harvey and four other officers faked fingerprint evidence in drug, violent crime, and mafia cases. The investigation uncovered cases dating back to 1982 in which the officers created evidence to convict people they picked up for crimes much worse than the ones they had committed.

A special prosecutor was appointed by the governor of New York who discovered widespread evidence planting across more than a decade in the force. The crooked cops weren't even discreet about their activities, and one of them even bragged to the CIA -during a job interview about his exploits. Officers implicated in the scandal were sentenced to prison sentences of two and a half to up to 18 years in jail.

In 2012, Douglas Dendinger - a disabled Army veteran working as a process server - handed a lawsuit to Bogalusa, LA, police officer Chad Cassard. It shouldn't have been that big of a deal: a process server's job is to make sure people receive legal summons. But Cassard wasn't having it. 

Cassard and some fellow officers quickly surrounded Dendinger, throwing the paper back in his face and yelling at him. Scared, he walked away from the situation and went home. But things didn't end there - Cassard accused Dendinger of attacking him, and he was arrested. Seven eyewitnesses, including two prosecutors, came forward and said Dendinger assaulted Cassard, but cellphone video of the incident ultimately set him free in 2015. No charges have been brought against Cassard or any of the witnesses who lied in the police report. 

Perhaps no case has had more twists and turns than that of Steven Avery. The Wisconsin man was found guilty and convicted of sexual assault in 1985. In 2003, his conviction was vacated after DNA evidence proved he was not the suspect involved. He sought a $36 million lawsuit against his local sheriff's office, and a few months later was charged with murder. 

Avery's case gained national attention in 2015 when the Netflix documentary Making a Murderer became one of the streaming service's most popular titles. Avery was found guilty in 2007 of killing 25-year-old photographer Teresa Halbach, but new evidence sheds doubt on whether that really was the case, and has some asking whether evidence was planted by vindictive sheriff's deputies. 

Avery's lawyer, Kathleen Zellner, said some of the evidence found on Avery's property - including Halbach's car - was planted there. As well as the blood found inside of it. She claimed Avery's blood could have come from a sample that police had from his prior false conviction. Zellner further contends the eyewitness accounts that led to his imprisonment were false, and that Halbach's ex-boyfriend Ryan Hillegas is the real killer.

Not all evidence presented in the court of law is truth. For William Broghamer, a Pasadena, CA, detective, the fact the courts were supposed to only discern truthful facts didn't deter him from pressuring witnesses to testify against other criminals. He was proud of his misdeeds - in 2011 he bragged on tape about lying and framing those accused of crimes. Then, in 2012, someone caught on to Broghamer and complained. Two years later, the tapes surfaced and an internal investigation was launched by the chief of police.

One lawyer said Broghamer threatened to have a woman's car seized if she didn't identify a certain person in a photo line up. On the tape, Broghamer said he would "just pin it on anybody" to solve a case. He bragged about lying to get people convicted of major crimes - including in death penalty cases. He was suspended from the force, and in 2015 was found guilty of misconduct.

In 2012, officials found the Special Cell of Delhi Police framed 16 people on charges of terrorist activity. This group was a special counter-terrorism force that wrongly accused people of being operatives of various terrorist organizations on little to no evidence at all. 

Human rights groups say that pressure on police to convict suspects in cases of terrorism causes them to fabricate evidence against suspects. What makes this even more troubling is the backlog of cases the Indian government has to deal with - 20 million cases currently clog the courts - and the fact that serious sentences like terrorism carry a life sentence. Those accused can wait years in jail before being found not guilty. 

Who was the King of Bank Robbers? A man by the name of George Leonidas Leslie was given the nickname back in the mid-1800s thanks to his ability to pull off massive bank heists across New York City. George Leslie was born in Cincinnati, OH, in 1842 to a well-off family that owned a brewery. He originally went to college to study architecture, but turned to a life of crime instead. George Leonidas Leslie successfully hobnobbed with New York City's upper class, using them to inadvertently pull off his heists. Among the most infamous of George Leslie's robberies are the Ocean National Bank heist and the Manhattan Savings Institution robbery. Together, they brought in a total of $2 million in 1800s money - so around $45 million today. Below are just a few of the most scandalous events from Leslie's life.

Leslie was a chameleon. On one hand, he was able to keep up with - and garner respect from - members of New York City's crime-filled underworld. And on the other, he could blend in with the big names in the city's high society. He hobnobbed with such characters as John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and Cornelius Vanderbilt, among others. This was part of his larger scheme. He befriended them, asked to see the blueprints for their banks and other buildings under the guise of helping them out as an architect, and then used those diagrams to break into the structures.

Throughout the 1800s, most bank robberies took place in a rather dramatic fashion. The burglars would usually show up with a lot of dynamite and some matches, which they used to blow open the safe and, with a little luck, they'd do so without hurting themselves or damaging anything in the safe in the process. Leslie changed all of that with an invention he dubbed the "little joker." The little joker was a tin wheel with some metal wire attached to it. The device could be slipped onto the dial portion of a combination safe and, once the dial wheel (the part with the numbers) was slipped off, the little joker was put on, and the dial placed right over it. None of the bank employees would know it was there, and the next time they turned the dial, the mechanism would slice the tin wheel to indicate which numbers were used. With the little joker, Leslie could get into safes quickly and easily - not to mention quietly. 

Tuesday, January 25, 1876, went down in history as the date of one of the biggest bank robberies in history. On this day, Leslie and his co-conspirators successfully stole $1.6 million (over $26 million in today's money) from the Northampton Bank in Northampton, MA. They started by breaking into the house of bank employee, John Whittelsey, tying up him and his family, breaking their watches (so they couldn't see how much time was passing), and leaving under the guard of two members of Leslie's gang. Leslie and the others then took the key to the bank from Whittelsey, walked right into the bank while it was closed, opened the safe, and emptied it. They got away clean, and rich.

Between 1869 and 1878, plenty of bank robberies took place throughout the United States. Law enforcement at the time stated that George Leslie and his gang of burglars and criminal masterminds were responsible for 80% of them. But not every heist was wildly successful. In some cases, the take was only in the hundreds or thousands - not the millions. Leslie and his cohorts would steal more than cash as well. They would walk away with jewels and other expensive items that were kept in the bank's safety deposit boxes.

George Leonidas Leslie was born in Cincinnati, OH. Growing up, he actually wanted to be an architect, and went on to study the profession at the University of Cincinnati where he graduated with honors. However, he moved to New York City with no intention of finding work in his new trade. He told his friends and family that he was moving to the city to get rich - but didn't specify how. Apparently, he already had a plan in mind - to use his architectural skills to rob banks.

Fredericka Mandelbaum, nicknamed "Marm," was George Leslie's secret weapon. Marm was the queen of New York's underworld and was known for her ability to successfully fence stolen goods - plus she had a huge warehouse that Leslie could take advantage of. He not only used her fencing skills for some of the jewels and other valuables that he stole, but he utilized her warehouse space as a rehearsal area, setting up the layouts of the various banks that he wanted to rob. He even purchased the exact same models of the safes that the banks used, and kept them in Marm's warehouse. He and his gang would then practice breaking into them before trying it out on the real thing.

Leslie used his rich and powerful friends as sources for bank blueprints. After all, who better to ask than the people who owned them? However, when that didn't work, or his friends didn't have connections to the banks that he wanted to rob, Leslie simply went into a bank, asked for the manager, and explained that he wished to make a large cash deposit, but first wanted to ensure that the bank was safe. The ruse worked, and in most cases the blueprints to the building were handed directly over to him.

Although Leslie is best known for the spectacular bank heists that he pulled off, there were plenty of others where he didn't net a fortune. In those cases, quantity counted more than quality, and all of his little burglaries added up. Even if he didn't commit the burglary himself, he still participated in the preparation phase, which meant that he was owed a percentage of the proceeds, so to speak. 

While in New York City, Leslie met and married Molly Coath Leslie. She was only 15 at the time, and was the daughter of a boardinghouse owner. George met her when he stayed at the boardinghouse upon his arrival in New York City. The two never had children, and at first, Molly didn't know anything about his real "career" as a bank robber - she thought that she had married a successful architect. Over time, she found out and was actually okay with his criminal enterprises, as long as her "lifestyle" was supported. As soon as she realized that he was spending money on other women, though, she was unhappy. She did stay married to him, however, and last saw him several weeks before his death.

One key to Leslie's success was the fact that he and his gang usually robbed banks on the weekends. They made exceptions to this if they had a man on the inside, or a stolen key to the bank, but for the most part, they "broke in" on weekends and made off with as much money as possible. There were two main reasons for this - they could take their time when going through the safe, as there weren't a lot of witnesses present who could call the police at any moment, and the burglary wouldn't be discovered until several days later, on Monday morning when the bank re-opened.

Believe it or not, you can find love on Death Row. Yes, there plenty of men and women who married criminals despite the fact they committed some of the most gruesome crimes on Earth. Why in the world would anyone want to carry on a romance with a convicted, brutal killer who sits on Death Row? Some clearly believe they have good reason. Most people who become involved in Death Row romances start by exchanging letters. This often leads to prison visits, and in some cases, even marriage. Killers getting married in prison is not that unusual.

Women who married killers do not fit into any stereotype. Some are highly educated, some are wealthy, many of them are young and beautiful. Their death row love stories are strange, yet compelling. Some people who love Death Row inmates say they believe in the innocence of their beloved, others enjoy the challenge of the ultimate human fixer-upper. Some are in denial, some hope in some way to cash in on their loved one's notoriety. What must also be taken into account that plenty of Death Row inmates are also incredibly charming killers who are also extremely persuasive. Whatever the reason, these killers who got married in jail truly found love in a hopeless place.

Much has been written about women who fall in love with convicted killers on Death Row. Most people have trouble comprehending why any sane person would involve themselves with such criminals, especially on a very personal basis.

Some women make the coddling and nurturing of an imprisoned man their life's work. Certainly this is the case with Sandie Blanton, an Englishwoman and a grandmother. She wrote to imprisoned men for years, but in 2008 she took it a step farther and married Charles Mamou, a convicted murderer on Texas's Death Row. Almost right away she regretted her decision. Weeks after the wedding she discovered he had been writing letters of a sexual nature to another woman in the UK.

But that experience wasn't enough for Sandie. She continued to write letters to men on Death Row. At one point she had 30 prison pen pals. She finally settled on 28-year-old Reginald Blanton, who was convicted of shooting his friend in the head back in 2000. He, of course, denied his guilt. The couple continued their romance and eventually married, despite their age difference. However, in 2009 Blanton lost his last appeal and was executed the following year. No word if Sandie is on the prowl for yet another prison lover.

Many people remember the Menendez brothers' murder trial back in the 1990s. Eric and Lyle were rich and handsome, educated, and purportedly raised to be gentlemen. And yet the brothers were convicted of brutally murdering their parents. Sentenced to life in prison, the murderous siblings have never wanted for female attention, despite being behind bars.

Both men are married to women who began correspondences with them, even though the only physical contact they have with their wives is during supervised meetings in prison visiting rooms. Lyle Menendez has married twice. His first wife was a Playboy model, which must have made those prison visits particularly frustrating. His second wife is an attorney.

Citizens of Charlotte, NC, spent some terrifying years during the 1990s. There was a brutal killer on the loose. Over the course of a few years 10 women were raped and killed. At least one of them was raped and murdered while she held her baby in her arms. Finally, police apprehended the man responsible for so much terror and grief. His name was Henry Louis Wallace and the Charlotte community was shocked. Wallace was one of their own. He had even attended some of the murdered women's funerals. 

Despite the overall outrage, at least one woman had a soft spot for the killer. Prison nurse Rebecca Torrijas was 32 when she wed Wallace, not long after he was convicted and sent to Death Row, which is where Wallace remains today.

Everybody knows this guy. But what do some women see in him? For decades, convicted murderer Charles Manson has been the recipient of numerous letters from women who would like to start a relationship with him. Most of these women are - to put it lightly - a little unhinged themselves, but some have an ulterior motive, primarily having to do with cashing in on the Manson brand upon his death, which, in his 80s, could be at any time.

It is unknown as to which category 29-year-old Afton Burton falls into. But she is the only woman to nudge old Charlie towards the altar. Their engagement was announced in 2014, but the marriage never took place due to logistics, regulations, and probably interference on part of Burton's parents. In early 2017 Manson was hospitalized in serious condition. Burton attempted to visit her former paramour there, but her attempts were thwarted. She claims to still care deeply for him. Manson has had no comment.

One might imagine that the type of woman who would seek love on Death Row would be rather, well, desperate. Perhaps unattractive. Or in possession of a dull personality. In reality, all sorts of women develop a taste for convicted murderers.

Take the example of Romina Deeken, who hails from Germany. Pretty, blond, and lithe, she never wanted for male company. But in 2007, when she was in her mid 20s, Deeken fell in love with a convicted killer on Texas's Death Row. It seems a number of European women enjoy the exotic appeal of imprisoned American men. Particularly those in Texas. Perhaps they believe the men to be misunderstood cowboys. Deeken, however, claimed her interest was purely altruistic. However, over time and lots of letters, she began to fall in love with one inmate, and he with her.

"I have a connection with him,"she stated. "Everyone in life has a vision, has dreams, has fears, is searching for something. He is the person I can talk deeply with about these things."

Back in 1994, Rosalie Bolin was working as a paralegal and advocate specialist for death row cases. She was married to a successful lawyer, and the couple lived a cushy lifestyle, including parties with celebrities and exotic vacations.

Until she met Oscar Bolin, who was a successful serial rapist and murderer. You could say she met him on the job - because she did. She became captivated with his story and was convinced he was innocent. She claimed she could tell just by looking into his eyes.

The couple fell in love. Rosalie divorced her husband and one year later, in 1996, she and Oscar were wed. It was a different sort of wedding. The bride wore a wedding gown and the groom wore a flashy prison-issued orange jumpsuit. But they did not meet for their wedding, it was carried out over the phone. Rosalie phoned from her apartment; Oscar from his death row cell.

Scotsman Kenny Richey was on Death Row in the United States during the 2000s. He was convicted of murdering a two-year-old girl. As if that wasn't a big enough problem, he was having woman troubles as well. At the time, he was engaged to a woman named Karen Torley, who had led an effort to have him exonerated. She had given up 12 years of her life to support and love him, in the hope he might one day be free. Richey viewed it rather differently, claiming in 2006 the relationship had been over for a long time and that Torley had done well for herself with the publication of books about his case. But this was no ordinary breakup.

Richey was in close contact with his ex-wife, and that, despite prison bars between them, had reunited. Poor Richey felt torn, and was quoted saying, "I still love Karen but I'm not in love with her. I wish her luck in life and I wish her the best, but I can't keep going on the way I am. I'm just being torn apart." Eventually Richey was released from prison as part of a plea deal. It remains uncertain if he was finally reunited with his ex-wife and their son.

Apparently not even the brightest and most logical among us can resist the lure of a death row romance. Or so it seems when one examines the case of math expert, Susan Powers. She began writing letters to convicted rapist and killer, Michael Ross. He was otherwise known as "The Roadside Strangler." But, she fell in love with him and believed in his innocence. The couple corresponded until 2003, when they broke off the relationship, but rekindled it again in 2005. That was a bad year for Ross, as he was out of appeals and was executed. 

He is survived by a number of love letters to Powers, heavily decorated with hand-drawn hearts and flowers. In one of the letters, he wrote, “The woman of my life who I love, who abandoned me, has come back into my life. But now I must go and abandon her. And I hate that, because while I never hated her when she abandoned me, I fear that she will hate me and not be able to forgive me. And that I fear even more than the execution itself.”

In 1986, Doug Huntley was sitting in jail for drug charges. His cell mate was a man named James Marlow. Huntley had a girlfriend waiting at home for him. He also liked to talk, especially about how wonderful his girlfriend, Cynthia Coffman, was. He eagerly provided details of her attributes to anyone who would listen. Marlow had nothing else to do, so he paid close attention. 

Marlow was released just a few days after making Huntley's acquaintance. He immediately headed to Coffman's residence, since Huntley had shared that detail along with all the others, and he knew that Huntley still had six weeks to serve. It would prove to be more than enough time, because Coffman and Marlow began an affair almost immediately upon meeting.

The two went off on a criminal spree, leaving a trail of destruction, torture, rape, and murder in their wake. When they were finally caught and convicted, Coffman had managed to go from a small time thief's girlfriend, to the big time. Both she and her new lover were sent to Death Row.

Back in the 1980s, a crazy killer was unleashing havoc up and down California. The unknown killer was dubbed the "Night Stalker" by the media. This murderer tended not to follow a pattern or method for his kills. He murdered both men and women, as well as children, all in a variety of terrifying ways. At last he was captured and revealed to be a Satanist named Richard Ramirez. He was tried and convicted of more than 13 murders, among other charges.

Even someone as frightful as Ramirez attracted a loyal following of women interested in getting to know him better. In fact, he married one of these women. Her name was Doreen Lioy and the couple remained together - yet separated physically - for 15 years.

Gangs like the Bloods and Crips are well-known criminal enterprises and are often vilified as evils of society. But another gang, a gang in blue, walked the streets of Los Angeles in the 1990s: the C.R.A.S.H. Unit of the Rampart Division of the Los Angeles Police Department.

In one of the biggest LAPD screw-ups of all time, the impact of the LAPD Rampart Scandal was widespread, rippled through thousands of cases, cost the City of Los Angeles millions of dollars, and ruined countless lives. Los Angeles Police corruption included planting evidence and beating people in custody, but went beyond pedestrian fraud to include potentially murdering rapper The Notorious B.I.G. and working with gang members so they could get away with their crimes. Misconduct is common in undercover cop stories, but the scandal involving the Los Angeles Police Department's Rampart Division actually led to reforms and changes in the police department and sent several officers to jail.

A main source of revenue for the corrupt cops of Rampart was selling confiscated drugs to dealers. Rafael Perez was a former Marine who joined the LAPD in 1989. He was a good cop, until he started committing the kinds of crimes he was sworn to prevent.

In 1995 he joined an anti-gang unit called CRASH, where he started stealing money and drugs at the direction, he says, of his partner Nino Durden. The scandal broke in 1998, when Perez was caught stealing eight pounds of cocaine. Rather than serve a hefty sentence, Perez informed on his fellow cops. Even so, it seems he bent the investigation to serve his agenda, accused other cops of misconduct as revenge. 

On March 9, 1997, rapper Notorious B.I.G. was leaving a party while visiting Los Angeles, when he was shot to death in a car. The murder has gone unsolved for over 20 years, but one theory holds that the LAPD and Rampart officers were involved in the plot to kill Biggie.

The rapper's mother was so convinced the police were involved, she filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the department on the grounds that police officer David Mack (who later went to jail for robbing a bank) and Death Row Records owner Suge Knight planned the murder. The suit, which was dropped in 2010, alleged that Mack asked a friend from college to kill the 24 year-old rapper. 

Though some of the people ensnared in the web of corruption, evidence planting, and drug dealing were known gang members, CRASH officers also brought cases against totally innocent people that ruined their lives. Israel Cid Carrillo lost his green card and was deported when officers planted a gun on him. He also served 18 months in prison for a crime he did not commit.

A warehouse worker making minimum wage, Nestor Zetino also had a gun planted on him and racked up tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees fighting for his freedom and right to stay in his adopted country. Others lost their life savings, homes, and were forced into drug programs they didn't need. Once an honor student with a bright future, Miguel Fuentes was wrongfully deported to Mexico and has a stain on his name after being duped by police into pleading guilty to a cocaine charge for drugs he wasn't carrying.

These and hundreds of other lives were ruined needlessly by overzealous cops who claimed their heavy-handed tactics were needed to "clean up the city" when they really destroyed the lives of those they were sworn to protect.

One of the most disturbing revelations the scandal uncovered involved the death of Juan Salanda, who was killed by police in 1996. According to Rafael Perez, CRASH unit officers stormed an apartment building looking for gang members involved in a drive by shooting. When officers entered the building, there was a shootout and police wounded two men and killed one, a 21-year-old named Juan Saldana, who they shot in the back.

Police claimed that Saldana had a gun, but officer-turned-witness Perez said they planted a gun on him while he lay bleeding to death rather than calling an ambulance, in order to justify the killing. One officer involved in the shooting was fired from the force for an unrelated reason, while the others were suspended. 

Sometimes breaking the law also means breaking arms, and several Rampart Scandal cops did just that. Rampart officers practiced intimidation, illegal detention, assault, and intimidation of gang members, even when they were not accused of a crime and there was no justification for detaining them.

In once case Gabriel Aguirre, an alleged gang member, accused officers Rafael Perez and Ethan Cohan of breaking his arm. Another man, Ismael Jimenez, accused officer Brian Hewitt of beating him so severely while he was restrained that he vomited blood. Jimenez said that the officer assaulted him because he wouldn't give him an untraceable gun. 

It can be said that thanks to the Rampart Scandal, justice was served. Rafael Perez admitted to improperly investigating crimes, planting evidence, and framing suspects to get them convicted, and over 100 of his convictions were overturned.

Investigators further scrutinized an additional 15,000 cases due to the corrupt actions of police officers. In addition to the overturned cases, civil lawsuits brought against the City of Los Angeles cost over $125 million.

The cops who formed the CRASH unit were able to get away with their crimes because they created an insulated membership that avoided oversight from the LAPD leadership structure. To join CRASH, an officer needed an existing member of the unit to sponsor him. This ensured corrupt officers could choose like-minded individuals for the unit.

Once a part of CRASH, cops had to prove their loyalty by planting evidence on suspects, and were monitored to ensure they didn't turn snitch against their fellow officers. The Rampart division gained notoriety within the department as an entirely corrupt section. Thus, honest cops requested to be transferred out of the division, while corrupt officers flooded its ranks.

The officers reduced crime in their division, but their brutal tactics and criminal activity undermined any success they had. One gang member said that, "CRASH was basically an organization that was created like a gang." While it may seem that a gang member comparing the police to criminals is a cliche, officers in the unit would get tattoos commemorating kills in the line of duty, and used covert symbols to identify themselves in the same way gangs do. 

Some officers in the LAPD apparently had no problem with working for a record label that produced a song called "F*ck tha Police." In fact, Death Row Records employed several off-duty officers as security guards. At the time, the label was under investigation by federal agencies for crimes ranging from drug trafficking to money laundering.

The police officers working for the label included Rafael Perez, a central figure in breaking the case. The cops working for Death Row were also not exactly discrete. One officer didn't hide his extra income at all. He regularly wore pricey clothing, and drove a Mercedes Benz.

During the Rampart Scandal, it was revealed some officers thought playing cops and robbers meant they could be both at the same time. Officer David Mack crossed that line in 1997, when he stole $722,000 from a Bank of America.

He was implicated when he traveled to Las Vegas with his undercover partner Rafael Perez, and the two gambled away exorbitant amounts of money for men on a public service salary. Mack was also accused of working for Death Row Records by providing tips and advice about police tactics, and even watching out for police activity while gang members associated with the record label carried out drug deals. Later, Mack completely disassociated himself from the police force and joined the Bloods.

In 1997, undercover LAPD cop Frank Lyga, a white man, shot and killed a black, off-duty officer named Kevin Gaines. Initially, investigators were told by other officers seeking to exonerate Gaines that Lyga was a part of a white-supremacist group, and killed Gaines in an act of racial hatred. However, they uncovered a much more surprising, and complex, web of intrigue.

In reality, Gaines was the aggressor in the incident and Lyga was cleared of any wrongdoing. The investigation uncovered that Gaines had been working for Death Row Records, was driving a car registered to a company related to the label, and was dating Suge Knight's ex-wife at the time he was murdered. Interestingly, the Rampart Scandal broke when officer Rafael Perez was caught trying to steal cocaine from an evidence locker, to get revenge on Lyga for the killing.

While there are scary stories of murders in universities, Jennifer Levin's horror story occurs between high school and college. In the summer of 1986, Jennifer Levin was happily college-bound when she was killed by Robert Chambers. Both of the teenagers lived in Manhattan and attended elite preparatory schools, causing the media to dub Chambers the "Preppy Killer."

Chambers strangled Levin to death in Central Park, later claiming he accidentally killed the teenager during an early morning session of kinky sex gone awry. Throughout his trial, Chambers's defense attorney attempted to paint Levin as a wanton young woman who was somehow to blame for her own death. As a result of this strategy, Chambers spent less time behind bars for killing Levin than he would for selling drugs after he was released from prison for manslaughter. Read on to discover the chilling and disquieting facts about the man who brutally asphyxiated a young, 18-year-old woman. 

According to detectives, after providing a videotaped confession to law enforcement, Chambers was surprised when he was placed under arrest. As he was being booked, Chambers reportedly said to his father: "That f*cking b*tch, why didn't she leave me alone?" Sadly, while Chambers may have been the first person to blame Levin for her death, he was hardly the last.

The press referred to Levin's journal as her "sex diary" because according to Chambers's defense attorney, it included details of "kinky and aggressive sexual activity by Jennifer Levin with many lovers." There was even article about how Levin, who had been strangled by a man who weighed twice as much as her, should be blamed for her own murder in a piece titled, "How Jennifer Courted Death."

In 1988, Levin's parents filed a wrongful death suit against Chambers, seeking $25 million dollars in damages. Chambers pleaded no contest to the charges, so he was ordered to pay any lump sum payments to the Levins, as well as 10 percent of his wages, until the amount was paid in full.

In a note Chambers wrote to the court, he said:  "I elect not to contest the action for damages brought against me by the Levins. My only wish is for the nightmare to end, for both families and friends. I do not wish the Levins to endure any more pain."

While Chambers' mother sent her son to private schools to help him make connections with wealthy and influential people, Chambers took advantage of these relationships by routinely stealing from his affluent friends. In fact, just months before he strangled Levin in Central Park, he stole his friend's credit card. He racked up thousands of dollars in fraudulent charges, but Chambers' mother convinced the victim not to press charges.

Stealing wasn't a one-time thing with Chambers. After killing Levin, he was convicted of committing a number of burglaries, stealing approximately $70,000 from penthouses on the Upper East Side. It is alleged that Chambers committed burglary, petty theft, and credit card fraud to pay for his cocaine habit.

While Chambers wasn't wealthy, his mother wanted him to network with the elite, so she arranged for him to have a play date with John F. Kennedy Jr. Apparently, Chambers' mother had cared for JFK Jr. as a nurse when he was sick with bronchitis. During that time, she suggested the young patient and her son go to a restaurant and theater. According to the woman who was Jaqueline Kennedy Onassis's assistant at the time, Chambers's mother repeatedly got upset with her then-five-year-old son for "saying the wrong thing."

Soon after Chambers was arrested for murdering Levin, the press dubbed him the "Preppy Murderer" and the "Preppy Killer" because he'd attended private preparatory schools, including York Prep, Choate, and Browning. However, while he'd gone to private schools and lived on Manhattan's Upper East Side, Chambers's parents weren't particularly wealthy. In fact, his mother worked as a nurse and his father was a videotape distributor, and Chambers attended expensive prep schools with the help of scholarships.

In contrast, Levin lived in Manhattan with her father, who was a successful real estate agent, and her stepmother. She had attended The Baldwin School, an elite private school for girls. Levin was also planning to go to college, while Chambers had been kicked out of Boston University after just one semester.

After his arrest in 1986, Chambers roamed about for two years, free on bond. His trial began on January 4, 1988, and lasted approximately three months. The jury deliberated for nine days, but they were unable to reach a unanimous verdict. In the end, Chambers accept a plea bargain which required him to plead guilty to first-degree manslaughter and was sentenced to 15 years in prison. 

Shortly after Chambers went to jail, a videotape which had been taken shortly after he was charged with murder in 1986 was leaked to the press. The recording featured Chambers with several young women in lingerie. At one point in the tape, Chambers strangled a doll and said to the camera, "Oops, I think I killed it."

After Levin's sister, Danielle Levin Roberts, viewed the videotape, in which it appeared as though Chambers was mocking Jennifers's death, she told the media: "He's not even a person. He's an animal."

After the police told Chambers to leave the park, he went to the Manhattan apartment he shared with his parents and fell asleep. After learning Levin's identity and discovering she had been at Dorrian's Red Hand shortly before she died, police questioned the patrons who had been at the bar with the teenager. Investigators quickly learned the victim had left Dorrian's Red Hand with Chambers, so they went to his home to question him about his possible involvement in Levin's death.

When they arrived at the apartment, the officers noticed Chambers had scratches on his neck and face, so they brought him in for questioning. When investigators asked Chambers how he got the deep scratches on his body, he told the officers his cat - who detectives later learned had been declawed - had caused the injuries. Eventually, Chambers confessed to killing Levin, but he denied strangling her, instead telling officers it was a case of rough sex gone wrong.

After killing Levin, Chambers didn't flee the scene. Instead, he sat on a wall not far from Levin's corpse until around a passing cyclist noticed the 18-year-old's lifeless body around 6 am and called 911 for help. When law enforcement and emergency services arrived at the park, Chambers was still in the area, but he didn't tell any of the officers that he knew Levin; consequently, police told Chambers, along with members of the public who were at the scene, to leave.

When detectives examined Levin's body, they found she was partially clothed and covered with bruises and cuts. They also noticed marks on her neck and the medical examiner later determined she had been strangled to death, not killed by a single blow to the throat as Chambers had claimed. 

Chambers' first request for parole was denied, in part because Levin's mother told the board: "In my eyes, anything less than the maximum would devalue my daughter's life." The members of the parole board denied his release in 1992, because they believed Chambers would most likely break the law if he was paroled. 

While Chambers seemed to be somewhat contrite in the note he wrote to the court in 1988 about the wrongful death suit filed against him by the Levins, he didn't express any remorse at his 1994 parole hearing. According to the transcript of the hearing, Chambers told the board: ''I guess I could also give you the party line and say I have learned my lesson, I will never do this again. But that's not how I feel at this moment, because I have a lot of conflicting emotions.'' 

On August 26, 1986, 19-year-old Robert Chambers and Jennifer Levin, who had casually dated one another over the summer, left the Dorrian's Red Hand bar on Manhattan's Upper East Side together at approximately 4 am. According to Chambers, he and Levin went to Central Park to have rough sex and she used her underwear to bind his hands behind his back. However, Chambers claimed he became upset when she repeatedly squeezed his testicles.

In response to the pain, Chambers (6'5" and weighing 220 pounds) angrily reacted by knocking Levin off, hitting her in the throat with his arm. Levin was 5'4" and half his weight, and immediately fell backward onto the ground. Chambers said he knew "something was wrong," but he left the scene without attempting to revive Levin and didn't call 911 to get the young woman medical attention.

There are many defining characteristics of the different decades that we have lived through and, for the '70s and '80s, serial killers were a large part of the narrative. But why were there so many serial killers in the '70s and '80s? What was it about that particular span of time that made mentally unstable people lean toward serial murder rather than a spree killing or domestic terrorism? Well-known serial killers from the 1970s and 1980s such as David Berkowitz, AKA the Son of Sam, Ted Bundy, and Jeffrey Dahmer are just a few of the killers who made up the rich tapestry of serial murderers at the time, but what drove them to kill? And why aren’t people killing at the same rate now?

Theories about the crime rate shed some light on why there are fewer serial killers now than there were in the '70s and '80s, but there’s still no definitive answer as to why that time period was such a breeding ground for sadistic killers. There are some obvious reasons why there were more serial killers in the '70s and '80s - it was just easier to do at the time - but there is also a plethora of other oblique possibilities as to why there may never be another serial killer boom as terrifying as the one that America endured during the '70s and '80s.

Theory: It's safe to say that the police in the '70s and '80s weren't prepared for the wave of serial murders that were about to sweep the country. In some cases, like the Dean Corll case in Houston, the police simply didn't care that teenage boys were vanishing, so they never looked into a possible link between the numerous disappearances. Not every cop was terrible at their job, though - most of them just weren't keen on communicating with police departments in other cities or states, which is how guys like John Wayne Gacy and Ted Bundy were able to move around and murder so freely. Today's cops, though, are ready for this kind of thing - there's better communication between departments and all around better detective work, which keeps a one-time killer from becoming a serial killer.

Verdict: Whether cops were driven to be better at their jobs because they were embarrassed at having had so many murders committed on their watch, or because they simply had to get better to keep up with killers who were tallying up an insane number of victims doesn't really matter. What does matter is that today's police usually know what to look for when they're hunting for a serial killer. But a more knowledgeable police force alone can't be the only reason that there are fewer serial killers now than there were in the '70s and '80s.

Theory: In the '70s and '80s, popular media became obsessed with serial killers. They splashed their murderous faces across newspapers, magazines, and television sets while reporting bonkers-sounding inaccuracies like the lie that there were 5,000 serial murder victims every year. This obsession created an echo chamber where people began to try to outdo media darlings like Ted Bundy (the handsome, Republican guy next door), John Wayne Gacy (the guy who dressed up like a clown and killed teenage boys), and Richard Ramirez (the man dubbed "The Night Stalker," who claimed that Satan gave him the power to kill). But as the '90s turned into the 2000s, the media began covering more acts of domestic terrorism and squashed the symbiotic relationship between serial killers and the media. 

Verdict: Saying that the media - as bloodthirsty as it can be - influenced potential serial killers to follow in the footsteps of Timothy McVeigh or Ted Kaczynski by covering those horrific crimes only provides only a partial answer as to why there are fewer serial killers now than there were 30 years ago. But it is possible that, by changing their coverage away from lionizing serial killers, that a few killers decided to go into woodworking or whatever else could hold their interest instead.

Theory: Mike Aamodt, a psychology professor who focuses on serial killers, believes that the Internet has created "an identity layer that... prevents predators from moving between communities and staying unnoticed as they did in decades past." He continues by saying that a cursory Google search about someone can reveal their entire past - specifically if they've moved across multiple states because they've been killing prostitutes.

Verdict: Not to be churlish, but Google isn't going to stop weirdos from killing people; however, it might stop you from being killed by some weirdo. When in doubt, Google 'em.

Theory: Slate reported that one of the main reasons there aren't as many serial killers now is because it's become harder to kill multiple people over a long period of time without police being able to register and track your methods, DNA, and MO. Rather than being gumshoes and putting in long hours on the streets, police are working smarter to find potential serial killers.

Verdict: Even if a potential serial murderer hasn't been located by the police (yet), they're still providing data about where they are, who they're with, and what they're wearing to apps like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. And if they're using a Fitbit? Forget about it. Police aren't just able to track their steps, but are able to obtain time-stamped information about the places this would-be killer has been and the routes they take on a daily basis.

Theory: An article on The Verge hypothesizes that "the sharing culture" has not only sent people flocking to cities en masse, but that because we live stacked on top of one another people are forced to place more trust in one another than they were in the '70s and '80s. The article points out:

"The techies who once clustered in suburban locales... have now returned to cities and begun creating peer-to-peer apps and services that leverage these crowded, metropolitan centers. Increasingly we have less confidence in these established hierarchies. We have come to trust in the network, in the web of connections between people."

Verdict: Could it be that these two unrelated things have more to do with each other than we thought? Do we trust people more than we used to? Or are we just more lazy now and passively accepting of the fact that a complete stranger may actually kill us after delivering our groceries? Honestly, this idea seems more like an advertisement for tech startups than an explanation as to why serial killers have become a crime dinosaur (Crimeosaur).

Theory: A New York Times article posited the idea that mass shootings have begun to draw the same type of attention from the media that serial killers once did. In the '70s and '80s, a loner with an axe to grind would have to spend months, if not years, murdering teens and arranging their bodies along a river in their home town in order to become infamous and maybe get a best seller written about them. Now all some misguided soul has to do is take 10 minutes out of their day to go shoot up a mall.

Verdict: This is an incredibly cynical look at a highly sensitive subject - and while the idea that the media has control over what kind of murder spree grips the country next is more than a little ridiculous, it does make sense that the more the news fetishizes gun violence the more people will be inspired to go on a spree killing. But is that the reason there are more spree killers now than there were before? It's unfortunate that this jives so well with the news coverage of the '70s and '80s.

Theory: In the '70s and '80s, most of the serial killers that you would read about or see on the news were... kind of hot. Or at least people believed them to be attractive, and the bad-boy appeal of viciously murdering people definitely added to whatever allure they had. Modern killers just aren't the same - guys like the "Crossbow Killer" and the "Kensington Killer" are murderers who have done their homework, which makes them dorks. And while nerds may be de rigueur, there's nothing sexy about dorks who kill.

Verdict: The wave of people finding serial killers sexy definitely crested in the '90s with the publishing of American Psycho, but are there fewer serial murderers now simply because creeps want people to think they're hot stuff? Probably not.

Theory: The technology of using DNA to catch a criminal has come a long way since the '90s. At that time, cops didn't know how to properly handle the cases, and juries didn't have any context for the gruesome information. But now - thanks to the development of DNA technology and simple things like email and GPS location technology - police have been able to catch serial murderers after their first or second kills, cutting down on the number of victims and stopping long-term sprees from gaining momentum.

Verdict: It must have been great to be a serial killer in the '70s when you could just go wherever you wanted to and the cops couldn't do anything about it - and they probably didn't even know that there was a serial killer around because there was no concept of what a serial killer was. So, of course technological advances have made it harder to be a career serial killer.

Theory: In the '70s and '80s, the FBI was doing its best to chase down serial killers, but there's only so much that can be done when you're Dale-Coopering around. It wasn't until the '90s that Howard Teten, an FBI criminal investigator, created a way to profile serial killers by analyzing their lifestyles, their physical attributes, the location of their victims, the way these killers committed their murders, and exactly how they left their victims. Patterns emerged and suddenly it became easier to catch killers before they begin serializing their work.

Verdict: Howard Teten didn't solve a bunch of serial murders by himself, but he definitely helped catch a lot of nightmare people through his research. Go, Teten, Go!

Theory: 1974 was a crazy year that may have been built on a Native American burial ground. Vietnam was still happening (it ended the next year), Watergate was ruining the conservative party, Patty Hearst was kidnapped, "Waterloo" won the Eurovision song contest, and 92 people died in a plane crash. It wasn't great. And aside from all of that, Ted Bundy committed his first murder, Dennis Rader (BTK) killed his fist victim, John Wayne Gacy committed his second murder, Paul John Knowles went on a murder spree, and Coral Eugene Watts killed the first of his 90 victims the same year - 1974 was cursed. 

Verdict: Okay, 1974 probably was not cursed - it is weird that all that stuff happened, though.

Serial killers aren't solely an American phenomenon. There are plenty of serial killers in other countries, such as Ahmad Suradji, an Indonesian murderer. Suradji, also known as the Black Magic Killer, had a bizarre modus operandi and an insane motivation. He killed his victims in order to gain more spiritual power, as he believed he was a shaman. He was a ritual murderer and he had a very specific pattern to his kills. He believed that this ritual killing would enhance his abilities. This led to the creation of his aforementioned serial killer nickname. 

Suradji was born in 1949, and started his killing spree nearly 40 years later, in 1986. Over the next 11 years, he killed upward of 40 women. He was executed by the Indonesian government in 2008.  

Many serial killers do unsettling, ritualistic things with their victims. Ahmad Suradji's preferred methods were downright bizarre. He believed that his victims' saliva improved his shamanic powers, so he drank it after strangling them to death.

He wasn't very specific about how he drank it. Did he somehow manage to get it into a cup? Did he drink it straight from their mouths? Either way, he performed this strange ritual on every woman he killed. 

After Ahmad Suradji killed his victims and drank their saliva, he buried them in a sugarcane field near his house. While they were still alive, he placed them in the ground feet first, up to their waists. After he strangled them to death, he stripped them naked, and then buried the rest of their bodies with their heads pointed towards his house, thinking the placement would further enhance his magical powers. 

Ahmad Suradji had three wives, all sisters. Although all three were questioned after the murders were discovered, only one, Tumini, was charged as his accomplice. She went on trial at the same time he did, and received life in prison for her involvement in his crimes. His other two wives apparently didn't know about his evil activities. 

Ahmad Suradji claimed to be a type of spiritual healer called a "dutak." Technically, the Indonesian government only recognizes six different religions (including Islam and Christianity), but some people who live there also believe in magic and various healing practices. Suradji was a shaman who, people believed, could make women more beautiful and help them get rich or find a faithful boyfriend, thanks to his "magical powers." 

Ahmad Suradji's killing spree lasted from 1986 until 1997, when he was finally captured. It's possible he could have continued his sinister work, had the body of one his victims not been discovered in a local sugarcane field.

After the police identified her and local residents realized she was last seen alive on her way to Suradji for a shamanic ritual, officials searched his house. Inside, authorities found the woman's belongings, as well as those of several other missing women. 

After entering prison, Ahmad Suradji stopped trying to be a shaman. He converted to Islam, and became very devout. In fact, he started giving religious advice to his fellow prisoners. Apparently, he was also very popular. His infamy as a serial killer led to a kind of celebrity status while he was incarcerated.  

Because of his shamanic powers, Ahmad Suradji rarely had to go out and find victims. Most of them came to him for help improving their lives. Word spread around his village – and nearby villages – of his healing powers, so women came from all over the place to receive his help. 

As a part of his magical healing ritual (which, they quickly found out, was solely for his own benefit), his victims helped him by digging their own graves. He then covered the women waist-deep in dirt as part of his "cure," and then strangled them to death once they were immobilized. When Suradji went through a dry spell and didn't have any "clients" come to him, he reportedly went out and picked up prostitutes to kill in order to fulfill his quota. 

10 years after his capture and trial in 2008, Ahmad Suradji was executed in his home country of Indonesia by firing squad. Before he died, he gave one last interview, in which he stated, "The black magic came from God. I don't have it anymore, I have repented. I hope I have a chance to live."

Suradji was one of 10 people executed that year. Indonesia enforces the death penalty for everything from terrorism to possession of narcotics. Mass murder, of course, is punished with extreme prejudice. 

Ahmad Suradji started his killing spree in 1986, after his father came to him in a dream with an important message. If Suradji killed 70 women, he would become even more powerful and be able to perform stronger acts of magic. He would also become a mystical healer.

However, Suradji failed at his goal, and "only" killed 42 victims. However, there might be others women still unaccounted for. After his capture, local police put word out, asking people to come forward with the names of women missing in the area. This added an additional 80 people to his list of possible victims. 

Most serial killers have a day job. For example, John Wayne Gacy owned a construction and maintenance business. Things were a bit different in Indonesia, where Ahmad Suradji worked as a cattle breeder. His profession required quite a bit of open land, which provided him with a place to bury his victims. 

The most prevalent pop culture images of gangs in Los Angeles can be traced to the explosion of gangsta rap in the late 1980s, when NWA, led by Ice Cube, Eazy-E, Dr. Dre, and MC Ren burst out of Compton with vivid, aggressive descriptions of violence, drugs, police brutality, urban blight, and economic depression. The popularity of gangsta rap gave rise to a new movie genre, Hood films, about the conditions described by the music. Boyz n the Hood and Menace II Society led the charge, winning critical acclaim and finding box office success. Part and parcel of this milieu was the Los Angeles riots.

The popularity of Hood films and gangsta rap, as well as international media coverage of the Los Angeles riots, put a spotlight on gang culture in southern California that titillated white people, the media, and capitalists eager to package the culture with its gritty "realness," lurid violence, and desperately American ethos, which held echoes of the Old West in its lawlessness and veneration of strength, force, and masculine archetypes. LA gang photos are a testament to lurid mainstream obsession with the effects of systemic failure and an inability to examine the causes of sweeping social problems, only its victims and their desperate actions. 

The 1980s were hardly the beginning of gangs in Los Angeles. Gang culture in LA can be traced to the 1920s, when groups of black and Latino friends created local culture and customs, and got involved in petty crime such as robbery. The rise of violent gangs began in the 1940s, when the city's African American and Latino populations exploded as opportunities to work for the war effort arose. At the time, African American and Latino families were only permitted to live in certain parts of the city, and white gangs, such as branches of the KKK and groups called Spook Hunters, policed neighborhoods to keep blacks and Latinos out. African American and Latino communities formed their own gangs in response to this intimidation and violence. 

In the 1960s, white flight resulted in black and Latino gangs having no white gangs left to fight. Though gangs occasionally turned on each other, though the emphasis on nonviolent protest promoted by the Civil Rights movement put a stop to gang violence until the 1970s, when revolutionary resistance groups like the Black Panthers, formed from a sense of futility in the wake of the failed promises of equality that flowed from the government in the 1960s, helped re-establish gangs in southern California. These gangs led directly into the conditions described by gangsta rap, as Reaganomics, the crack epidemic, the rapid proliferation of drug culture, and urban blight created the perfect pressure cooker for violence and the development of isolated, highly localized cultures shown in these Los Angeles gang pictures. 

The practice of backpacking comes with all sorts of risks, the least of which is ending up on a list of the many backpacker disappearances over the years. Given the various creepy experiences backpackers go through, it comes as little surprise that some missing backpackers never get the chance to tell their own stories. No one location remains safe, with backpackers vanishing everywhere from urban centers to national parks to their own hostels. 

The backpackers who disappeared in these reports all vanished mysteriously; while a few of these travel nightmares end with some closure, the vast majority of backpackers who disappeared did so without rhyme or reason. Even the bodies unearthed offer little evidence, in some cases being found hundreds of miles away from where they disappeared.

Thirty-year-old Arthur Angé was last seen in Dhaka City after disappearing in January of 2017. A skilled backpacker who preferred to travel alone, Angé never used taxis or trains, and avoided cities and urban hubs. According to his cousin, Angé intended to go to Thailand and Malaysia by sea or by crossing through Myanmar without a legal visa. He was meant to meet a friend in Malaysia in February, but never showed up.

His friends contacted the French embassies in Bangladesh, India, Myanmar, Malaysia, and Thailand, but no one could locate him. His friends conjectured that he was arrested trying to cross the border from Bangladesh or India into Myanmar, but authorities have not provided any information. Police claimed they had no knowledge of Arthur and if he tried to cross over the border, they would know.

Arthur's friends and family have launched a Faceook page called Arthur Whereareyou to help widen their search, but as of April, they've received no leads.

In 1989, a 20-year-old backpacker by the name of Charles Horvath decided to embark on a months-long, cross-country hitchhiking trip in Canada. He arrived in British Columbia and was staying at a campground in Kelowna when he disappeared.

Horvath had faxed his mother Denise Allan saying he would meet her in Hong Kong for his 21st birthday. When months passed and she never heard from him, Allen became worried, especially because Horvath maintained constant contact up until that point. She traveled to British Columbia to try to find him, but when she arrived at the campground, she found his tent and all of his possessions.

Allan started posting missing persons flyers and publicizing her son's disappearance. She returned one day to her hotel room to find a note that said, "I seen him May 26. We were partying and two people knocked him out. But he died. His body is in a lake by the bridge." Divers searched the lake but never found his body. After Denise was contacted a second time, she told police they were looking on the wrong side of the bridge, so they launched another search. A body was uncovered, but it turned out to be a local resident who committed suicide. Horvath's body was never found, but a witness did come forward saying he attended an all-night party before he disappeared.

Shane Marsden sent a very, very concerning text to his mother when he went missing in March of 2017. He simply wrote "I'm sorry." Police have still been unable to locate the 28-year-old, who some believe traveled to Thailand from New Zealand after he split with his girlfriend. At the time of his disappearance, his parents had no idea their son was in Thailand, only finding out after police traced his phone. Anyone with information has been advised to contact the Gloucestershire police, as this case remains in development.

Back in 2000, 27 year old Brenda Searle planned to meet her Dutch boyfriend Andre Van Der Vooren in Chichen Itza, an archeological site in southern Mexico. A globally traveled backpacker, Searle flew to Mexico alone, but never made it to her destination. After her mysterious disappearance, her credit card was used to withdraw over £1,000.

Searle's family, friends, and co-workers organized a search party for the missing woman. Eight of her friends flew out to Mexico to join in the search, and eight months later she was found murdered. Police arrested a Cuban man who had used her credit card, who eventually led them to the woman's remains hidden under a shrub on the side of a random road.

In September of 2008, 21-year-old Britt Lapthorne went missing in the Croatian seaside resort town of Dubrovnik. She was enjoying a night out a popular club for young travelers, also the last place anyone saw her. Lapthorne left her passport and papers behind, unusual for such a seasoned traveler.

It took police a whopping eight days to begin their investigation after Lapthorne's parents began to raise questions and the Australian government began putting pressure on Croatia. A bouncer at the nightclub reported seeing the 21-year-old leaving with two men and five women. The women appeared to be reluctant to get into the men's vehicle.

Three weeks later, Britt's decomposing body was found by a fisherman in Boninovo Bay. Police believe it was unlikely that she had entered the water intentionally considering the weather that day, but they have never solved the mystery of why she disappeared.

In 1997, Judy Smith joined her husband Jeffrey Smith on his business trip to Philadelphia. Jeffrey was attending a conference, so Judy went sightseeing in the city by herself, and she never returned. Five months later, hikers came across her partially buried, decomposing body in an isolated mountain area in North Carolina – over 600 miles from Philly.

Police could never determine how Judy Smith died, but believed it was a murder. They ruled out robbery as Smith still had her wedding ring and $167 in cash. Mysteriously, a blue backpack was found at the scene, though Smith carried a red backpack. There were even indications that Judy traveled to the area voluntarily. Witnesses placed her in Asheville, and said she was in a friendly mood. She told witnesses that her husband was a lawyer, but a friend reports that Judy's marriage was sometimes difficult and she wanted to temporarily get away. Her adult children from another marriage believed Judy was in love with Jeffrey and would never disappear on purpose. No one could ever figure out why a woman with a family would disappear on her own or how she could have ended up dead on a mountain hundreds of miles from where she disappeared.

Caroline Clarke and Joanne Walters were just 22 years old when they vanished on April 17, 1992, after leaving a backpackers' hotel in Sydney, Australia. Clarke and Walters arrived to Australia separately, both on a working holiday. They kept in constant contact and teamed up in Sydney with plans to travel through Victoria, Queensland, and the Northern Territory. Both of the women worked a number of short-term jobs to support their backpacking lifestyle, and managed to stay in touch with their families in Britain.

Right before Walters and Clarke disappeared, Walters told her family that she planned to travel to Darwin in Australia's Northern Territory and China before going home. Meanwhile, Clarke wrote to a friend outlining plans to travel to Western and Central Australia. The women were last seen on April 17, 1992. Australian immigration records show neither of them left the country, and their bank accounts and phones had not been used since that day.

When both of the women's families failed to hear from the girls in two months, police launched a nationwide search. They set up a hotline which got swamped with calls, claiming the girls worked as cooks in the small town of Mount Isa or that they were seen in Alice Springs and Yulara in the Northern Territory. In September of that year, the bodies of Clarke and Walters were found in the Belanglo State Forest. Walters had been stabbed 14 times, and Clarke had been shot 10 times. Police believe she was used as target practice by Ivan Milat, a serial killer who was convicted in 1996 and thought to be responsible for seven disappearances.

Dale Rehr, a British backpacker from Portsmouth, England, mysteriously disappeared when he drunkenly jumped into the Brisbane River in 2016 in front of three of his friends. Though the stunt was dangerous, the four men weren't strangers when it came to making risky jumps. A few weeks before, three of the men received fines of £340 after police found them celebrating a jump from a nearby bridge.

The fact that these friends had experience with jumping from extreme heights makes Rehr's disappearance all that much more strange. Furthermore, Rehr swam excellently and handled difficult waters with ease. He competed in an Ironman challenge in Britain and had been training for an Australian triathlon but, after the jump, he was never seen again.

Rehr had been drinking at a nearby youth hostel when he and three of his friends decided to jump off the William Jolly Bridge at around 10:30 p.m. It was only 30 feet above the Brisbane River. Rehr took a running start, and jumped over the railing into the water. He rolled onto his side when he landed and was seen one more time above water before disappearing. Police deployed helicopters, bikes, and divers to search the water, but no trace of him was ever found.

Twenty-three-year-old Aubrey Sacco never returned home from her solo, week-long trek in Nepal's Langtang National Park. While backpacking across Asia in 2014, Sacco kept in constant contact with her parents. After a few days of no contact, Sacco's mother alerted the U.S. Embassy in Kathmandu, who told her that civil unrest in Nepal may have delayed their daughter. After three more days and no word from Sacco, her father and older brother flew from their home in Colorado to Kathmandu to join the search party. Between May and July of 2014, over 200 people searched the Himalayan Mountains near the Tibetan border. They searched the main trail, both sides of the river and smaller paths and monasteries hidden in the hills, but she was never found.

Scott MacLennan, who led medical trips in Langtang for a decade and joined Sacco's father on his search, believed she became the victim of abusive army soldiers who act as rangers in the national park. In July of 2010, three French women reported being sexually assaulted by soldiers manning a check post near where Sacco vanished. Two more western women were attacked the following years in the same area. While this is the soundest possibility, it's just one theory.

Some locals conjecture that Sacco drowned trying to cross the river in Kathmandu's tough terrain. Others say they saw Sacco get into a helicopter in Langtang Village. Some believe she was killed by a hunter, and others say her disappearance was sacrificial. She was possibly killed by witches who worship Kali, the Hindu goddess of death. Regardless of what happened, Sacco has never been found.

Dutch tourists Kris Kremers and Lisanne Froon both in their 20s, traveled to Panama to study Spanish. They mysteriously vanished on April 1, 2014, after taking a hike near the town of Boquete. Though the girls' bodies haven't been found, locals found small bone fragments and a backpack they believed was owned by one of the women. In addition to a pelvic bone, police found a hiking boot with a severed foot still inside. DNA tests confirmed their suspicions, but the reason for the disappearance remains a mystery. Police believe the girls possibly got injured and died after having no food and water.

A camera recovered from the backpack offered some clues. It contained over 100 photos taken during the 10 days the pair were missing. Based on cellphone data, the girls tried to contact 911 two hours after one of the pictures was taken, but there was no cellphone reception. The camera also showed a mysterious photo of what looks like red plastic stuck to a twig that was taken eight days after the girls disappeared. At least 90 photos were taken in total darkness 10 days after the girls disappeared – but who could have taken them?

On March 24, 1998, Amy Lynn Bradley went missing from a cruise ship en route to Curacao from Aruba. Although the disappearance of Amy Lynn Bradley did not initially generate the same media response precipitated by other cruise ship disappearances (like those of George Smith or Rebecca Coriam), over time the baffling circumstances of her case and repeated accounts of her being sighted throughout the Caribbean have elevated the mystery surrounding her fate to a high profile incident.

Additionally, a sinister photograph, purportedly of Amy, surfaced on an adult website in 2005, added fuel to the theory that the missing woman was kidnapped and forced into a sex trafficking. Around 20 years after her mysterious disappearance, theories about what happened to Amy Lynn Bradley only add to the uncertainty and dread surrounding one of the most disturbing missing persons cases in history. 

Since her disappearance in 1998, there have been several alleged sightings of Amy Lynn Bradley. The most disturbing was a 2005 email sent to the Bradley family website, which contained two photographs of a female. These photographs were observed by a member of an organization that attempts to track potential victims of sex trafficking on adult websites that feature prostitutes.

The photos depict a scantily clad female who closely resembles Amy, but who also appears to be both distraught and despondent. One of these photos was seen publicly when the Bradley family appeared on the Dr. Phil show in November of 2005.

In August of 1998, a Canadian named David Carmichael encountered two men and a woman walking on the beach near Port of Maria, Curacao. When he spoke in a loud voice in English to a friend who was a few feet away, the woman suddenly turned around and began to walk in his direction. Just as the woman was about to speak with him, one of the the two men distinctly signaled to her to walk away.

She dejectedly entered a small cafe with the two men, but continued to stare at Carmichael whenever she could get his attention. Carmichael had no idea who Amy was, until he eventually saw her profiled on the television show Unsolved Mysteries. When he contacted the Bradleys, he was able to describe Amy's distinctive tattoos, as he observed her from only a few feet away. He claims to be "100%" certain that the woman he saw was Amy Bradley.  

Another disturbing sighting occurred in January of 1999, when a Navy Petty Officer claimed to have encountered Amy in a hotel brothel in Curacao. Recognizing him as an American, Amy supposedly told the individual her name, said that she was being held against her will, and asked for help.

Unfortunately, the officer kept the information to himself, fearing the repercussions that would come with his solicitation of a prostitue. He only contacted the Bradleys through their website, after his retirement. The brothel in question burned down under suspicious circumstances before the officer came forward. 

Even before Amy disappeared, there were a few odd instances around the ship. Three of the waiters on the ship were quite friendly with Amy, almost immediately. While the ship was docked in Aruba, one of them even asked Amy's father about her whereabouts by name. When asked why he was looking for her, he told Mr. Bradley that "they," presumably members of the wait staff, wanted to take her to Carlos and Charlie's, the same bar that Natalee Holloway disappeared from in 2005.

Amy subsequently told her father that the waiters "gave her the creeps," and she didn't want anything to do with them. That night, when the ship staff posted photos taken of all of the dinner participants, Amy's mother noticed that all of her daughter's photos were missing, despite the gallery supervisor clearly remembering they were posted earlier.

On March 23, 1998, Ron and Iva Bradley, their 23-year-old daughter Amy, and their son Brad were enjoying their third day on the Royal Caribbean cruise ship Rhapsody of the Seas. As the ship docked in Curacao after visiting Aruba, the family attended a dinner party on the upper deck of the ship. Amy and Brad both danced until the early morning hours, and Amy was seen dancing with a band member on a ship disco dance floor. However, both Brad and Amy entered their stateroom between 3:30 and 4 AM.

Ron Bradley would recall seeing his daughter in a chair on the room's balcony when he briefly woke up at approximately 5 AM. When he woke up again around 6AM, Amy was gone, the only missing items were her cigarettes and a lighter. She clearly intended to leave briefly, as she did not even bring shoes, identification, or any other important items with her. Her family never saw her again.   

After dinner on the evening of March 23, Amy Bradley entered the disco of the ship and was observed dancing continuously with a member of a band was performing on the ship. This individual, Alister "Yellow" Douglas, and Amy were even videotaped repeatedly by a cameraman producing a promotional piece for the cruise line. Footage surfaced when the video producer heard about Amy's disappearance, and assumed she must be in some of the video he shot from the evening in question.

After Amy left her room, she was seen near the disco with Douglas on ship security footage at approximately 6 AM. A witness would subsequently claim to have seen Douglas hand Bradley a dark drink, possibly coffee. Other witnesses saw Douglas leaving the area by himself, but Amy was never seen again. Footage of Amy dancing with "Yellow" Douglas appears in the above video. Police eventually cleared Douglas after a polygraph, before the FBI got a hold of the disco video.

The FBI conducted a thorough investigation of Amy Bradley, her hometown friends, co-workers, neighbors, and associates and concluded she had no reason to disappear or leave her family. The rest of her family also successfully underwent polygraph examinations, and even her college athletic coaches were interviewed and exonerated.

Additionally, Amy sent numerous postcards on the first days of the voyage, had just adopted a dog, recently graduated from college, and was supposed to start a new job. In other words, hardly the behaviors or outlook of someone who was suicidal or intent on disappearing. All of the background checks and investigations pointed to an involuntary disappearance.

In 2005, a woman named Judy Maurer was in a Kingstown, Barbados women's restroom stall when she suddenly heard two men loudly enter the bathroom and begin screaming and threatening another woman in a different stall. Maurer waited for a few minutes and then exited the stall to find a very upset woman hunched over the sink area.

The woman allegedly told Judy Maurer her name was Amy, and that she was from Virginia. Seconds later the two men re-entered the bathroom and forcibly removed "Amy from Virginia." Judy Maurer provided the FBI with descriptions of the two men and the woman. "Amy from Virginia" strongly resembled the two online, adult website photos sent around the same time to the Bradleys.

In probably the most reprehensible chapter of the entire Amy Lynn Bradley incident, in the fall of 1999 an individual named Frank Jones contacted the Bradleys and claimed that Columbian gangsters were holding Amy Lynn on the island of Curacao. Jones claimed to be a former member of American Special Forces, and he offered to help set Amy free.

He also claimed he had an eyewitness to Amy's location, a female cook who accurately described Amy's tattoos, and even a lullaby she heard Amy sing (which she was taught by Mrs. Bradley). Two other former Navy SEALs were sent to Curacao to specifically determine Amy's location. When Jones demanded more money to underwrite the actual armed rescue, the Bradleys asled for concrete proof their daughter was actually under Jones's teams' surveillance. He responded with a photo of a similarly tattooed woman (who resembled Amy) and the Bradleys paid him the rest of the money. The total came to $210,000.

The Bradleys were instructed to fly to Florida to wait for a call from Jones as soon as Amy was recovered. They waited in a hotel for a week before they got a call from one of Jones's associates (who had also been duped) and determined the whole operation was a scam. The cook, the photos, the Colombians, and the house under surveillance were all a fraud. Jones, who had never been in the Special Forces, eventually plead guilty to mail fraud and got a five year sentence and an order to make restitution. 

After the Bradleys determined Amy was missin,g they frantically asked the ship's purser to back the ship away from the dock and prevent any guests from leaving. They also requested an announcement be made concerning Amy's disappearance. Other than the usual announced request for Amy to report to the purser's desk, no other special effort was undertaken to find her.

By the time a cursory search of the ship began at 8 AM, many of the ship's guests and staff already left the vessel for the day. The family was subsequently told that no announcement would be made, and no photographs would be posted concerning Amy's disappearance, as this would be too disturbing to other passengers. The Bradleys left the ship in Curacao, but flew to St. Maarten and subsequently reboarded when they were told by the FBI the search for Amy had only included bathrooms and common areas, and ignored staterooms and employee living quarters.

The FBI eventually boarded the ship, but their investigation went nowhere and Royal Caribbean went on to claim Amy probably was intoxicated and fell overboard, despite having no evidence such an incident occurred.

There is perhaps no American criminal more recognizable than Charles Manson. The diminutive cult leader and madman who led his followers on a streak of bloody homicides during the late 1960s - including that of Sharon Tate - intended for the murders to give birth to a race war he called "Helter Skelter." His personal ties to celebrities and the fierce loyalty he inspired from his followers has given Manson an aura of intrigue that - when coupled with the brutality of his crimes - turned him into a household name. 

The man who has been credited with effectively ending the "Peace and Love" attitude of the 1960s, Charles Manson, now over 80 years old, is still a figure of public interest. With a swastika tattooed on his forehead just above his trademark fervid stare, it seems like little time passes before another one of his interviews pops up, documenting his ever-impassioned, incoherent ramblings. 

Manson is a quintessential oddball. The man is undoubtedly a psychopath and criminal mastermind, but he's also just a strange guy who has lived an eventful, if bizarre, life. Let's take a look at some of the weird facts that you may not have known about the man known to many as simply "Charlie."

The brilliantly named Alvin "Creepy" Karpis was a prominent gangster during the Great Depression - at one point even earning the FBI's illustrious distinction of "Public Enemy No. 1." A member of the famous Ma Barker Gang, Karpis killed at least 10 people and kidnapped about a half-dozen others before being sentenced to life in prison in 1936.  

During his stay in a Washington state prison, Karpis met a young Charles Manson and taught him how to play the guitar. It's not often that one famous criminal can be credited with launching the career of another, but Manson's dreams of being a musician led him to develop an obsession with the Beatles, thus sparking his whole "Helter Skelter" fantasy. Well done, Karpis.

Charles Manson is driven by deeply-rooted, virulent racism. The genesis for the gruesome murders in 1969 came from his belief that an apocalyptic race war was imminent - an event he called "Helter Skelter" after the Beatles's song of the same name. The murders, which he hoped to frame as having been committed by black people, were meant to be a catalyst to outrage white America and usher in a great racial divide.

Though he cut his teeth in California, so to speak, he was a product of Appalachia, and some have speculated that racist family members may have indoctrinated him with pro-confederate beliefs from a young age. Manson also carved a swastika into his forehead while in prison in 1971, which he gave a pretty long, rambling explanation for, and that ultimately made no sense.

As horrifying as his treatment of others was (including that of his own followers), it's worth noting that Manson himself never actually killed anyone. (At least, it's never been proven that he did.) It's a pretty interesting distinction to make for a man who has been convicted of first-degree murder, but Manson's crimes actually served as a landmark case for what's known as "murder by proxy," an act wherein a third party carries out an individual's premeditated homicide (think: hiring a hit man). 

While Charlie was nowhere near the scenes of the famous Tate and LaBianca murders, he did mastermind both operations down to their finest details. The very fact that he was able to charm others into committing such gruesome acts puts Manson into a different echelon of psychopaths.

Barbara Hoyt was a one-time member of the Manson Family who was set to become a key witness in the Tate-LaBianca murder trial. In an effort to prevent her from testifying, other members of the "family" lured her to Honolulu, HI, in December of 1970. While out for hamburgers to discuss their beloved leader's looming case, someone mentioned to Hoyt, who had just taken a bite of her food, "Just imagine if there were 10 tabs of acid in that."

A stranger came to Hoyt's aid just before she lost consciousness and called for help. She was placed in a Honolulu psych ward and treated for an overdose of LSD, but she made a full recovery. Hoyt's damning testimony would later prove instrumental to Manson's conviction.

Charles Manson, criminal monster that he would become, wasn't exactly born with a good example of how to operate on the straight and narrow. Charles was born to a 16-year-old girl named Kathleen Maddox who thought so little of him that she didn't bother to give him a name. When the time came for something to be put on his birth documents, Maddox simply opted for the words "No Name," and to this day his birth certificate reads "No Name Maddox."  

Quickly tiring of the demands of parenting, Kathleen Maddox offered a bar room waitress one hell of a bargain. After being told how cute her baby was, Maddox suggested to her server, "A pitcher of beer and he's yours." Assuming it to be a joke, the waitress brought the beer out as a good humored gesture. She was taken aback, however, when Maddox left the establishment and little Charles was still at the table. A concerned uncle eventually tracked down the waitress and returned baby Charles to his less than thrilled mother. 

While Manson certainly clouded the vision of his followers in a figurative sense, he also did so quite literally. When his small commune took up residence at Spahn Ranch, Manson prohibited watches, calendars, clocks, and yes, even eyeglasses. The banning of these items served to disorient his followers and put them into a more malleable state, but Manson also insisted that the removal of their glasses would allow them to see the world in a more "natural" way. This organic approach to vision correction led some of his followers to develop permanent squints.

Though well into his 80s, Charles Manson still maintains an influence from his jail cell in California's Corcoran State Prison. The now elderly criminal mastermind boasts an impassioned collection of fans, some of whom have even moved from across the country just to be closer to him. He draws in curious new followers with everything from his ostensibly progressive environmental concerns to his, let's say, eclectic charisma.  

Manson receives a staggering 60,000 letters per year, more than any other inmate in the California prison system.

After the brutal murder of actress Sharon Tate in August of 1969, the authorities started closing in on the Manson Family. Less than two months later, police arrested 24 members of the burgeoning cult, including Manson himself. While in a Los Angeles County jail cell, Mansonite Susan Atkins bragged to another inmate about the Tate murder as well as claimed that the group kept a celebrity "hit list" of who they'd kill next. That list included names like Steve McQueen, Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra, Richard Burton, and Tom Jones.

While Charles Manson was never confirmed to have killed anyone himself, his devoted followers were more than capable of carrying out his murderous bidding. The Tate-LaBianca slayings, in which seven people were killed, are perhaps the most well-known crimes perpetrated by the Manson Family, but they also killed a man named Gary Hinman, putting their official body count at eight.

Experts have long suspected that the cult was responsible for additional murders, but with most of the suspects now behind bars they have only been lightly pursued. Manson, for what it's worth, once bragged to a fellow inmate that his "family" killed 35 people.

In November 2013, some bizarre, shocking news started making the rounds: Charles Manson had gotten engaged. The then 79-year-old convict, who continues to serve a life sentence in California's Corcoran State Prison, had become betrothed to 27-year-old Afton Elaine Burton, a woman 53 years his junior. 

The engagement, however, was short lived. In a twist crazy enough to befit Manson, it eventually came to light that Burton only wished to marry him so that she could have first dibs on his body after he died, planning to turn a profit by putting him on display. Manson ultimately called off the wedding, though for a reason you may not expect: he believes, sincerely, that will never die.

What happens when you combine hardcore hallucinogenic drugs and dangerous cults? A terrifying and often deadly situation.

Cult leaders are known for being megalomaniacs who will use a variety of tactics to influence their followers. One of the craziest ways these people institute control is turning their group into a drug cult, one driven by drugs like LSD, Acid, and methamphetamines. These drugs already put people in a vulnerable state, but when users are being led by a psychopath hell bent on revenge - or who has visions of grandeur about their place in the world - things can get crazy pretty quickly, and even lead to cult murders.

From the famed Charles Manson to the lesser-known Antares of the Light, these acid cults took drug use to an entirely new and horrifying level. 

Australian Anne Hamilton-Byrne believed herself to be a reincarnation of Jesus Christ. In 1964, she developed a hybrid Christian-Hindu “religion,” and convinced multiple parents to sign over custody of their children. Hamilton-Byrne’s goal was to create a “master race,” as she believed the future held an impending race war.

The children were beaten viciously during their lives at the commune. Most disturbingly, they were injected with LSD and locked in dark rooms. Hamilton-Byrne funded the cult through LSD sales. When a child was expelled from the cult, she went to the police, and Hamilton-Byrne was arrested in 1987 and fined. As of 2017, she lives in a mental ward in a nursing home in Melbourne.

The Ordo Templi Orientis is a collection of fraternal organizations centered around the principles of famed occultist Aleister Crowley. In 1965, under instruction from her dying mentor, Georgina “Jean” Brayton constructed an unauthorized offshoot of the OTO called “The Solar Lodge.”

The Lodge operated The Eye of Horus, a bookstore in Southern California, where they recruited new members. Allegedly, the Manson Family was a frequent guest of the Solar Lodge. They performed rituals under the influence of LSD, ether, and jimsonweed.

Jimson weed is an intensely powerful dissociative hallucinogenic. It’s also extremely dangerous, as only a slight overdose typically results in death. In 1969, one of the members' six-year-old children burned down a barn on the Lodge’s property. As punishment, Brayton had him locked in a box, to cook in the sun. When onlookers called the police, the members of the cult were arrested, and the body of the child was found - dead from an overdose of jimsonweed.

The Satanic Panic of the 1980s made people hyper aware of possible murder cults in their own backyards. And while most of them were not real, some people actually did kill people in the name of Satan. Most notable was Long Island, NY, teen Ricky Kasso, who formed a loose-knit Satanic cult with several other teenage burnouts called “The Knights of the Black Circle.”

Kasso became known as the Acid King after the murder of Gary Lauwers in 1984. Kasso had been using PCP for years, and convinced a couple of his friends they needed to sacrifice Lauwers to Satan. He was also angry at Lauwers, who he accused of stealing his PCP stash. So they lured him out to the woods, gouged out his eyes, and stuffed stones into his mouth. Kasso yelled at Lauwers to say he loved Satan, to which Lauwers replied he loved his mother.

Kasso was caught after he brought his friends around to view his handiwork. He committed suicide in jail. He was under the influence of either PCP or LSD at the time of the murder.

December 21, 2012, was a popular date amongst cults and conspiracy theorists. The Mayan calendar stopped counting after that date, and many believed it was the day the world was supposed to end. 

One of the most heinous believers of the 12-21-12 prophecy was Ramon Gustavo Castillo Gaete, the leader of Antares from the Light, a Peruvian cult. Members of the cult consumed ayahuasca at all of their rituals. Native to the region, ayahuasca has been used for centuries by shamans and laypeople alike as a mind-expanding entheogen. Ayahuasca contains DMT, a naturally-occurring psychoactive, the most intense and potent known to man. It is essentially a “slow drip” of DMT, inducing nausea and visions. In most cases, users report being changed for the better after an ayahuasca trip.

But in the case of Gaete - who told his followers he was a god - he used it as a means of mind control. On the eve of the impending apocalypse, Gaete convinced Natalia Guerra, a member of the cult, to hand over her baby in what was called a “cleansing ceremony.” Gaete taped the baby’s mouth shut, tied her to a board, and tossed her into a giant bonfire. It is believed Gaete himself was the father of the child.

Archibald McCafferty grew up in an abusive household in Scotland, and from a young age showed serial killer tendencies: namely, the murder of animals. He was in and out of jail after his parents emigrated to Australia, and by the time he was an adult, he formed a cult-like gang of prison buddies. In 1972, he got married. A year later, his wife accidentally suffocated their infant son. 

Enraged, McCafferty took a heavy dose of PCP and heard the voice of his dead son telling him to kill seven people. He believed if he did, his son would be resurrected. He enlisted his buddies - who were also PCP users - and they named themselves the "Kill Seven" cult. The first to die was George Anson, a WWII veteran McCafferty had previously planned to beat and rob.

They kidnapped a man named Ronald Cox, drove him to the baby’s grave, and executed him. McCafferty then killed Evangelos Kolias, a local driving instructor. He planned to use the car to visit his ex-wife, and murder her and her parents. But that fell apart when one of the members of his gang went to the police after he sensed he might be the seventh victim. 

McCafferty attempted to use his cult of personality to get others to kill for him when he was in prison, but he was unsuccessful. He was released on parole in 1997. As of 2017, he lives in Scotland.

The Peoples Temple of the Disciples of Christ, commonly referred to as the Peoples Temple, was a cult started by Jim Jones in 1955. Initially started as a Christian "religious" movement that embraced socialist policies and racial equality, it quickly devolved into a super strict faction with Jones at the helm. 

The group had a strict no-drug policy. The only member who seemed to be above that rule was the cult’s leader himself, Jim Jones. He was known to take several drugs, including amphetamines and barbiturates. That, mixed with his undiagnosed mental illness, caused him to become extremely paranoid.

The church moved to Guyana in 1977 and formed a commune there called Jonestown. Jones cut off everyone from the outside world. When members of the media and the US government started becoming critical of the situation in Jonestown, Jones began putting into motion a plot for everyone in the group to commit mass suicide. 

In 1978, US Congressman Leo Ryan traveled to Guyana to investigate the cult with a delegation of people. While some cult members wanted to travel back to the US with Ryan, he concluded there wasn't enough evidence to support the claims of abuse. He and members of his group went to the airport, but were gunned down by members of the cult's "police" force. Ryan died, as well as an NBC cameraman, a newspaper photographer, a reporter, and at least one defector. 

After that, Jones forced (or simply coerced) 918 members of his cult to drink cyanide mixed into Flavor-Aid. Believing that The Peoples Temple would face impending doom, Jones gave a recorded goodbye. The tape of his final sermon is chilling.

On March 20, 1995, 10 members of the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult released sarin gas on three of Tokyo’s subway lines. At least 13 people died, 54 were injured, and around 5,000 people experienced residual health problems. At the time it was Japan’s deadliest terrorist attack.

Aum Shinrikyo follows the doomsday cult playbook pretty solidly. It had a charismatic leader named Shoko Ashara who believed he was the reincarnation of Christ. They believed the world was going to end in 1997, and that the United States was going to bring about the apocalypse. Ashara used a number of methods to brainwash his followers, including LSD. 

Members of the cult had to give up all of their possessions, they couldn't have sex or masturbate, they ate strictly rice and veggies, and they had to routinely confess their darkest secrets and failures to “The Lord of Hell,” essentially a high priest. What separates them from most cults is their use of liquid LSD to invoke visions in their followers.

Studies show people on LSD tend to have poor judgment, and are known to act impulsively. The inductees of Aum Shinrikyo were forced to take LSD before becoming official members, which helped Ashara instill his influence over them. 

Charles Manson is one of the most recognizable American cult leaders from the 20th century. He and his cult, called the Manson Family, believed there was an impending race war called "Helter Skelter," inspired by The Beatles song of the same name. They believed committing murder would exacerbate said war, and in 1969 killed nine people including Director Roman Polanski's pregnant wife Sharon Tate.

While it's difficult to determine the influence LSD had on the cult, Manson did dose his followers with the drug before ranting about the coming race war. Those rants, along with copious drug use, poisoned the minds of the cult members. His brainwashing techniques also allowed him to keep his hands clean of any actual murder. Manson never technically killed anyone - he just influenced his followers to do so on his behalf. 

Juan Vallejo Corona was an infamous serial killer who killed at least 25 men in 1971. An immigrant from his native Mexico, Corona worked as a labor contractor in Yuba City, CA, where he hired migrant workers for nearby fruit farms. Preying on the desperate men he so often encountered, Corona became one of the most prolific serial killers in California's history. 

At odds with mental illness and a loathing for his own sexuality, something in Corona snapped in the spring of 1971. He went on a crazy killing spree and became a murderer who defined a type, as all his victims were essentially farmworkers. He didn't admit culpability until nearly 50 years later. A man as mysterious as he is sadistic, here are some startling facts about Juan Vallejo Corona and the crimes he committed. 

Juan Corona was born in Mexico in 1934 and moved to Yuba City, CA, in the '50s. In 1956, well before his string of murders, Corona was diagnosed as schizophrenic and was institutionalized after a series of intense hallucinations related to a flood that had killed dozens in the area. After several rounds of electroshock therapy, Corona was released and went on to marry and have several children. Though his illness seemed to be at bay - he had quickly worked up to a labor contractor position - Corona became unraveled in February of 1971 when the murders began, and some speculate that he was battling an intense self-loathing with his own homosexuality. 

Aside from being stabbed and mutilated, Juan Corona's victims were also sodomized prior to their deaths. Believed to be a sexual sadist, Corona developed a pattern of picking a victim, digging a hole, and then sexually assaulting them prior to their murder. His habits as a serial rapist are believed to have began much earlier, but very little is known about his life in Mexico. Much of that chapter remains a mystery. 

Around the time of the murders, Juan's half-brother, Natividad Corona, mysteriously fled from his home in Marysville, CA, allegedly taking refuge in Mexico. Natividad had owned a restaurant called the Guadalajara Cafe and he had just been sued by a former patron for $250,000. The plaintiff in that suit alleged he had been brutally attacked by Natividad with a machete in the restaurant's men's room after re-buffing his sexual advances. Natividad defaulted on the judgment and opted to skip town.

Later, when Juan Corona went to trial, his defense team attempted to pin the murders on Natividad, whom they claimed suffered from syphilis, which sent him into fits of rage. Conveniently, Corona's lawyers claimed Natividad had passed away from his disease, though some light investigation showed that this was likely false. Though Natividad seemed to have some history of violence, it was widely assumed he had left the country prior to the migrant murders.

After the discovery of evidence in some victims' graves that led to Corona, authorities descended on his property and executed a full search. During their investigation, police found a machete, a meat cleaver, a pistol, blood-spattered clothing, and digging equipment. Beyond those items, authorities also found a "death ledger," that contained the names of eight of Corona's victims, as well as the dates of their murders.

When all was said and done, 25 bodies were uncovered along the banks of the Feather River near Yuba City. All the victims were men and itinerant workers that Corona personally oversaw. At the time of the discovery, it was one of the worst cases of serial murder in US history. Juan Corona remains one of the most prolific serial killers in California's history.

Though he amassed a staggering body count, Juan Corona's murder spree only lasted about six weeks. Beginning in the Spring of 1971, Corona went crazy with killing, as his bloodlust seemed to be accelerating at an unsustainable rate. It's likely that the frequency of his crimes is what ultimately made him reckless about covering his tracks. Some psychiatrists theorized that the warming weather set something off in Corona. 

Juan Corona's method of murder was a particularly brutal one. Save for one victim, who was shot, he repeatedly stabbed people in the chest. All of his victims were buried face up, with their arms above their heads and their shirts over their faces. Occasionally, their corpses were further desecrated by having their pants pulled down to their ankles. 

On May 20, 1971, a local peach grower named Goro Kagehiro noticed a freshly filled hole on his property. Believing that someone had illegally buried their garbage, he called authorities. When local police did a little digging, they uncovered what would be the first of 25 bodies - a man repeatedly stabbed, his head mutilated by a machete or cleaver. 

As police uncovered more bodies, they found some pretty damning evidence. For whatever reason, Corona had buried some of his victims with grocery receipts that featured his own name. This was enough to put authorities on his trail. 

Corona provided for his family by working as a successful labor contractor. He was a man of some repute around Yuba City for his ability to set up farmers with migrant workers, and though he had a short-temper, he was mostly thought of as a normal guy. 

His line of work meant that Corona dealt with a lot of destitute men with no family in the area. These workers were often elderly, alcoholic, and on the margins of the community. This meant that their absence often went unnoticed, making them the perfect targets for a serial killer. As Corona housed these man and dictated their whereabouts, it's quite possible that without his own eventual error, he would have never been caught. 

As authorities uncovered more and more bodies, a strange, grisly pattern emerged. Beyond succumbing to a deep puncture to the chest, Corona's victims also bore significant facial mutilation. The men's heads, as it appeared, had been brutally hacked at by either a machete or large knife shortly after their death. Bizarrely, Corona also carved a cross on the back of each victim's skull. 

People travel every day, stopping, at times, in rest areas to take quick breaks. As anyone who has been on a road trip knows, some rest stops are creepier than others, and some travelers become the victims of unsolved rest stop murders. Their stories are so frightening that they read like horror movie plots... but no one knows the ending.

These rest stop killings that haven't been solved have stumped investigators and broken the hearts of victims' families, but it's the creepy details of these murders that will have you hesitant to stop off at a rest area ever again. Whether the rest stops in question were dumping grounds for serial killers, hunting grounds for victims, or places vagrants looked to take advantage of tourists, rest areas have been the unfortunate sites of untimely deaths, as these tragic stories show.

29-year-old Xavier Baligant was a divorced man from Belgium who took his children on a camping trip in France. The three were on their way home when Xavier needed to make a quick detour to use the bathroom at the Malvaux Rest Area in the French Alps at 2:00 am.

Xavier ran into the rest room while he left his sleeping children in the backseat of his vehicle. Some time went by before an employee from the Autoroutes Paris-Rhin-Rhône motorway company was on patrol of the highway and heard gunshots in the rest area. While trying to find the source of the noise, he discovered Xavier's body slumped on the floor in front of the toilets. He had been shot four times, and his hands were injured, indicating he fought with his murderer before he lost his life.

Police interviewed the drivers of the 24 trucks that were parked just across the street, but none of them claimed to have heard any shots. Their hands were tested for gunshot residue, and all of them came up clean. His killer has never been caught, and his case remains unsolved.

Coincidentally, one year later, a British tourist name Saad Al-Hilli was in his car on a deserted road in the French Alps with his wife, mother-in-law, and two children, just 100 miles away from where Xavier was murdered. Everyone in Saad's family was shot and killed, except for the children who were left to survive. Police don't know if the two crimes are related, but, like Xavier, the case hasn't had any leads, and no one has been arrested. Is it the work of a tourist hating serial killer? 

When it comes to tales about truckers and rest stops, the drivers aren't always shown in a positive light. Dwayne Allen McCorkendale, 28, however, was just trying to do his job. On November 12, 1988, McCorkendale was making his way from Detroit, Michigan, to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, when he pulled into a rest stop near Chandler, Oklahoma, wanting to use a pay phone so that he could check in with his wife.

Police speculate that Dwayne called in his stop on the CB radio, and someone was listening, waiting to find their perfect victim. They believe that when Dwayne pulled in, his assailants were already waiting for him, and, as he approached the phone booth, he was ambushed and shot in the back as he pulled the coins out of his pocket. The thieves left with nothing more than Dwayne's keys and $25 out of his wallet. 

Following Dwayne's death, calls from truckers began to pour in from the area about a brown Ford Pinto, equipped with a CB radio, that was spotted driving erratically on the highway. The Pinto reportedly targeted truckers and would weave in and out of lanes, making driving difficult. The suspects in the car were described as a white male, a white female, and a black male. No one has ever been identified, and Dwayne's family laid him to rest hoping for decades that his murderers would be brought into custody.

After Dexter Stefonek's wife passed away, he wanted to leave his home in Wisconsin and visit his son in Oregon. As the first anniversary of losing his wife was just around the corner, Dexter became homesick and decided to make the long road trip home. He planned to sleep at rest stops and save money by not stopping at motels, and he headed out early in the morning on November 18, 1985.

The next morning, a call came into the sheriff's station regarding a car that was on fire at the Bad Route rest area in Montana. It didn't take long for investigators to find out that it was Dexter's vehicle, and, soon, a search ensued for the missing man. Employees at the rest stop said that they saw a tall man in his late 30s getting out of Fred's car, carrying large plastic containers, but that wasn't suspicious. It wasn't until four months later that a couple rummaging through a landfill 17 miles away from the rest area came across Fred's body under a mattress. Dexter's wallet with his I.D. was near the body. He'd been beaten violently and shot in the head, twice.

There was still money in Dexter's suitcase, so robbery was discarded as a motive. Graffiti inside of one of the rest stop bathrooms suggested that the murderer wanted to slyly brag about his crime because they included the expression: "HOT JOCK SHOT WAD FROM WISCONSIN 11/85 SATURDAY THE 3rd." Police believe that "Hot Jock" could be a trucker's CB handle, but Dexter's death remains a mystery. 

In 1979, just a week and a half after celebrating the coming of the new year, DeLand, Florida, couple Franklin Shumaker and Patricia Doyle were inside their motor home, parked at a rest stop near the town of Grant. Eventually, deputies became suspicious of the home because it hadn't moved, and it looked to be abandoned. What they found inside proved to be a far more unsettling reality.

Doyle was shot in the face and strangled to death. Her body was found underneath Shumaker who had been shot six times with two guns. Four of those bullets went into his head – one in the leg and one in the neck. According to witnesses and acquaintances, Shumaker kept with some shady characters and was known to be involved with drugs, but, for over 35 years, no one has been arrested for the slaying of the couple.

Jane Snow left her home in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on May 15, 1979, to take a trip with her sons, aged 8 and 9, to visit her parents in Escanaba, Michigan. The family of three needed a bathroom break that evening and stopped off at the Loon Lake Rest Area near Gaylord, Michigan. While Jane hurried off to the ladies' room, the boys went in the opposite direction. They were the only car in the rest stop.

Minutes dragged on, so the the boys played in a grassy area near the women's restroom as they waited for their mother. One of the boys grew impatient so he went to check on his mom, and what he found was horrifying. There was Jane, sprawled out on the floor in a bathroom covered in blood. She had been stabbed 23 times. 

Her sons ran to the highway and flagged down the first vehicle they saw on the road, and the kind citizen drove the boys to a police station where they recalled their tragic discovery. The boys said they never saw another person in the area, and the murder weapon has never been found.

On Interstate 75 where the rest area is located, a state trooper picked up John McGawley for hitchhiking less than half a mile from the murder scene. The trooper noticed there were markings and scratches on McGawley's hands, but because the officer wasn't aware that a murder had occurred, he dropped McGawley off at his destination – but he did take down his information. After the murder, McGawley was questioned about Jane's death, and he claimed that on the evening of the crime, he was at a bar having a fight with his wife. He said he stormed off angry and left her there, and that's why he was hitchhiking down the road. A bloodstained shirt McGawley was wearing was tested, but the blood didn't match Jane's, and he was never arrested.

Jane's murder has be a cold case for over 35 years and remains one of the most controversial unsolved homicides in Michigan.

Gordon and Jackie McAllister from Lindsey, Ontario, were a typical elderly couple who wanted to enjoy their retirement by going on a road trip. On June 28, 1991, they parked their motor home at the deserted Blind River, Ontario, rest stop to catch their breath and re-energize before the next leg of their journey. Just minutes before one o' clock in the morning, the pair were in a deep sleep when they were awakened by a man claiming to be a police officer. He was pounding on their window violently while screaming that the couple needed to move their vehicle.

When Jackie opened the door to see what the commotion was all about, the stranger made his way into the motor home with a rifle and a shotgun, telling the pair that he wanted all their money and jewelry. Poor Jackie immediately began digging around her purse to find anything of value, but the impatient stranger shot her before she could give him anything. The assailant shot Gordon, as well, but he was able to escape and hide under the RV undetected. It was then that 29-year-old Bryan Major pulled up to the rest stop in his car completely unaware of what was happening just a few feet away. The stranger shot and killed him, too, before taking off.

Gordon was able to flag down a passing trucker, but, by that time, the murderer was gone, and two lives were lost. The grieving husband gave police a description of his attacker, but no one was ever apprehended. There were no new leads into the crime until 1999 when DNA testing linked a former police officer named Ronald Glenn West to two unrelated unsolved murders, and he became a suspect, though, never directly linked to the crime.

A crew was working in Wright City, Missouri, in June of 2004 – trimming bushes at a rest area off of Interstate 70 – when they made a gruesome discovery. When they made their way around to the back entrance, they came across the torso of a body in an area used by travelers as a place to picnic. There is a small circular driveway where cars and vans can access, and it looked as if someone pulled around, threw the torso out of their vehicle, and kept driving. Police don't believe the victim, who was later determined to be a woman, was killed at the rest area.

What makes this story so much more creepy is that the coroner determined that the woman was killed just hours before her torso was placed in the rest area, and her remains were only there for 12 hours. These facts led authorities to conclude that she was killed within a 50- to 100-mile radius of where she was found, but the rest of her body parts have never been located. 

The woman remained a mystery for 12 years until authorities identified her as Deanna Denise Howland, a prostitute and drug user known in the area; however, her killer remains at large.

St. Francis Cathedral in Santa Fe, New Mexico, received a call in August of 1982 from a man saying that he needed a priest to come and administer his last rites. Father Patrick Gerard took the call but told the man that he wasn't available to leave – or talk – at that very moment. The Father asked the man to call again in 15 minutes, and, the next time, it was Father Renaldo Rivera who answered the phone. The man on the phone called himself Michael Carmello and repeated his request; this time, however, he wouldn't take no for an answer. 

Carmello told Father Rivera that he was at a rest stop in Waldo, New Mexico, and needed a priest immediately. Father Rivera left to meet the man. Three days later, Rivera's body was found on isolated road just a few miles from the rest area. He had been shot; however, where his body was found wasn't where he was murdered. 

Investigators pieced together that the "Carmello" character was sitting in a blue pickup truck at the rest stop waiting for Father Rivera to arrive, possibly with other assailants. Police say that after killing Father Rivera, the murderer returned to the rest stop and drove his car to another rest area about two hours away, where it was wiped clean of any physical evidence and abandoned. Father Rivera's last rites kit was stolen, but nothing else was, and authorities believe the killers just wanted to murder a priest, no matter who it was.

Kimyala Henson was planning a trip with her daughters, two-year-old Shaina and four-month-old Shausha, to British Columbia, but, first, she needed to stop off in Sacramento, California, to pick up her birth certificate. Not wanting her friend to make the long trip alone with two baby girls, Henson's friend Christina Mayer said that she and her husband, Curtis, would keep the family company.

The group left on April 4, 2001, and successfully picked up Kimyala's birth certificate. Later, the mother checked her family into a motel in nearby Redding, California. That was the last time the Hensons were seen alive. 

16 days later on April 20 at a rest stop in Collier County, Florida, Curtis and Christina Mayer were found shot to death. Investigators determined that Curtis killed Christina before he shot himself. Police searched the trash cans in the rest stop for clues and came across Kimyala's birth certificate. Her wallet and credit cards were found inside the Mayer's car, along with a blood-stained hatchet. The blood matched that of Kimyala.

Thousands of miles away in a desert near Reno, Nevada, a week after the Mayers were discovered, police found the half-buried body of Kimyala Henson. Little Shaina and baby Shausha were nowhere to be found. Their car seats and birth certificates were also missing, leaving authorities to believe that they were murdered, left to die, given over to someone as orphans, or sold.

Investigators pieced together as much information as they could. The man everyone knew as Curtis Mayer was really Frank Oehring, a fugitive who was wanted in Missouri for the attempted murder of his first wife. It's believed that the Mayers saw an opportunity to steal Kimyala's birth certificate, so that Christina could later take over her identity. What the criminal couple did from California to Florida can only be speculated about, and the two baby girls are still missing.

In August of 2005, police believe that a woman was dragged and left beside a remote rest area in Rockwood, Ontario. By the time her remains were found, she had been out there for a month, unnoticed. She had been covered with a sleeping bag and didn't have any visible recent injuries that gave investigators any clues as to how she died. 

Her face, however, showed that she had recovered from a broken cheek and a left eye socket that had since healed but may have left her with a physical deformity. Because of this, she wore a dental plate, and it looked as if the clothing she was wearing was purchased in Montreal. Other than that, the police remain clueless as to who this mystery woman is, but they are sure that someone, somewhere, used that rest area to dump her like she was garbage. They're so sure that she was the victim of foul play that the government is offering up a $50,000 reward, but, even with all of the calls that have come in, the woman has yet to be identified.

For many, the thought of California elicits notions of surf and sunshine. The massive, majestic state forming a boarder between much of the US and the Pacific Ocean represents a dream: a laid-back, low-stress lifestyle and maybe even the chance to chase stardom.  

But just as the palm trees that line its sunny streets can harbor nests of rats, California has been home to some of America's most famous killers. From the Zodiac to the Night Stalker to the Grim Sleeper, a who's-who of serial killers have either passed through the Golden State or committed the heft of their crimes there.

This list explores some of the scariest serial killers who have operated in California. From the historic to the very recent, California's bloody history of mass murderers is almost unparalleled elsewhere in America, casting a grim cloud over a state known for its sunshine.

Angelo Buono, Jr. was a serial killer who, along with his cousin Kenneth Bianchi, tortured and killed 15 women in the late 1970s. Operating in the Los Angeles area, the two men became known as a singular entity called "The Hillside Strangler," a moniker given to them based on where they dumped their bodies in the Highland Park area. 

Posing as police officers, Buono and Bianchi subjected their victims to a range of horrors, including rape, electric shock, and the injection of poisonous chemicals. Bianchi's desire to be an actual cop - he applied to the LAPD while the two were killing - actually led to the duo's downfall, as he had been going on ride-alongs with police officers and uncontrollably talking about the Hillside Strangler case. 

The two men were eventually arrested in 1979 and sentenced to life in prison after one of the longest trials in American legal history.

When Charles Ng was arrested for a seemingly innocuous shoplifting incident in June of 1985, authorities could not have possibly predicted what they would uncover. The northern California man would eventually lead police to a property he shared with another man named Leonard Lake, a compound of sorts in a remote area of Calaveras County near the Sierra Nevada Foothills. 

What police uncovered was truly horrifying - Lake and Ng had built a torture cabin, complete with a false wall, that was designed to hold women who had been forced into slavery. A search of the property would reveal extensive video recordings of the men with their captives, as well as over 40 pounds of charred human remains. Lake and Ng would later be linked to the disappearances of two families - both with infant children they had killed, along with their fathers, to isolate the women before ultimately killing them, too.  

It's believed the two men killed at least 12 people, but the actual number remains unknown. Lake, shortly after his arrest, swallowed a cyanide pill and died in custody. Ng was convicted of murder in 1999 and sentenced to death.

Richard Ramirez, otherwise known as the Night Stalker, was the consummate bogeyman. A deranged satanist, Ramirez raped and tortured an estimated 25 victims, killing at least 13 during his bloody streak in mid-1980s Los Angeles and San Francisco. 

A native of Texas, Ramirez moved to northern California in the early 1980s, where he began committing a series of escalating crimes. By the time he was apprehended in November of 1985, Ramirez had struck fear into millions of Los Angeles residents, as he had murdered swaths of men and woman of all ages in a variety of brutal ways, including strangulation, bludgeoning, and execution-style shootings.

In 1988, Ramirez was convicted of 13 counts of murder and sentenced to death. He died of lymphoma in San Quentin State Prison in 2013.

The Zodiac Killer is perhaps one of the most notorious American murderers to evade capture. Striking in northern California in the late '60s, the Zodiac killed at least five victims, typically targeting young couples and either shooting or stabbing them to death. 

The man who witnesses said donned a black hood, the Zodiac gained notoriety for taunting the police via a series of ciphers he mailed to the San Francisco Examiner. Thought to have contained clues to his identity, some have speculated that they were simply nonsense designed to be a red herring, but amateur sleuths still toil over them to this day. For whatever reason, the Zodiac's correspondence abruptly stopped in 1974, but the case remains open. No suspect has ever been arrested.

In 1979, Lawrence Bittaker and his accomplice Roy Norris terrorized the Los Angeles area kidnapping, raping, and murdering five young women within the span of about six months. After first meeting while in prison, the two men quickly cultivated a bond over torture and sexual assault, and in June 1979 they picked up their first victim, 16-year-old Lucinda Lynn Schaefer.

Bittaker's M.O. was to lure young women into his van where he and Norris would violently assault their victim with a series of torture implements from his notorious tool box. They even recorded their actions on audio, which when played in the courtroom during their trial induced some to actually vomit.

Lawrence Bittaker still sits on California's death row, where he sadistically goes by the nickname "Pliers."

Depicted in the 2008 Clint Eastwood film Changeling, The Wineville Chicken Coop Murders are a grim stain on the history of Los Angeles County. In the 1920s, in what's now called Mira Loma (the town changed its name from Wineville in 1930 to escape the attention) young boys were being held captive on a ranch after being abducted from neighboring towns. Their captor, a young Canadian man named Gordon Northcott, would molest the kidnapped boys before killing them with an ax and dissolving their bodies in quicklime.

Northcott's young cousin, Sanford Clark, had been living on the Wineville property and witnessed several murders, and was subjected to abuse himself. Upon his return to his native Canada, Clark alerted authorities to his cousin's crimes, and the property was raided in September of 1928. 

Northcott was convicted of three murders, but was suspected in up to 20. He was sent to the gallows where he was reported to have been sobbing and visibly frightened - a noticeable shift from his courtroom demeanor, which found him defiant and snickering.  

Lonnie Franklin, Jr. - whom the Los Angeles press dubbed "The Grim Sleeper" due to his apparent period of dormancy in the 1990s - may have murdered as many as 25 women, making him one of the most prolific serial killers in US history. 

Preying on marginalized individuals - sex workers, drug addicts, and the homeless - Franklin carried out his offenses in 1980s south-central LA where police were either woefully inept or willfully turning a blind eye. It wasn't until 2010 that DNA evidence finally connected Franklin to at least 10 murders, though a cache of photos found in his home suggests that he could be responsible for many more.  

Lonnie Franklin, Jr. was convicted of 10 counts of murder in 2016 and sentenced to death. He currently sits on death row in San Quentin State Prison.

In 1978, Rodney Alcala - an aspiring photographer - appeared on the popular television show The Dating Game. Though his competitors would later describe him as "bizarre," Alcala managed to win a date with the bachelorette, Cheryl Bradshaw. It wasn't meant to be, however, as the young woman whose affection he had been seeking turned him down, citing the fact that he was "creepy."

Bradshaw was, in no uncertain terms, correct. Alcala had managed to appear on the game show despite his 1972 conviction for the rape of an eight-year-old girl. Beyond that, prior to the program's 1978 broadcast, he had already killed 4 victims, including the brutal murder of 12-year-old Robin Samsoe in Huntington Beach, CA.  

Alcala was convicted in 1980 and sentenced to death. In 2010, Huntington Beach Police released 120 photographs they had found in Alcala's possession, believing at least some of them to be additional victims. His official body count remains unknown, but it's speculated to be in the dozens. 

The Golden State Killer - also known as the East Area Rapist and the Original Night Stalker - is a prolific serial killer who remains a fugitive to this day. Before suddenly stopping his rampage in 1986, this violent predator was responsible for 12 murders and at least 45 rapes up and down the California coast.

Described by survivors as a small, agile man, the Golden State Killer would break into his victims homes - often those of married couples - and subdue the male while sexually assaulting the female, sometimes escalating to murdering both parties. This killer also had an eerie habit of prank calling his victims if they survived the nightmare he imposed on them.

Though it's been over 40 years since his first offense, some in the FBI believe that the Golden State Killer is still very much alive.

Randy Steven Kraft committed a string of grisly murders between 1972 and 1983. With the majority of his crimes taking place in southern California, Kraft's M.O. was to pick up young men, ply them with alcohol, then systematically rape, torture, and kill them. 

When Kraft was finally arrested in 1983, authorities made an interesting discovery in the trunk of his car: a list containing the names of 61 men, all of whom were thought to be murder victims of Kraft dating back to 1972. His attorneys fought the list's inclusion as evidence, and Kraft was ultimately convicted of 16 counts of murder. His actual kill count remains a mystery.