But there are plenty more deranged killers out there. Some of them are the last people you'd suspect, and others have just faded into obscurity. Here are ten of the creepiest killers you've never heard of.
1. Cordelia Botkin (1854 - 1910)
In 1895, Cordelia Botkin — a married woman —
started an affair with John Preston Dunning, also married. Their sordid
affair lasted three years, until Dunning left Botkin and reunited with
his wife. So Botkin decided to send her some chocolate. She sent it
anonymously and — single-handedly proving why you should never take
candy from strangers — laced the chocolate with arsenic. Mrs. Dunning
and her sister were both killed, and the three people with whom she'd
shared the candies were also sickened, but survived. Botkin's flaw,
though, was that she'd written a note along with the chocolate, and her
handwriting was matched to letters she'd written to Dunning and his wife
detailing their affair. She was sentenced to life in prison, and died
in 1910 in San Quentin.
2. Jane Toppan (1857 - 1938)
Jane Toppan was a nurse at Cambridge Hospital
in Boston. Her favorite hobby was experimenting on her patients with
morphine and atropine to see what it'd do to their nervous systems. She
also cuddled with her victims in their hospital beds while they died,
later explaining that she was sexually aroused by death. She was
eventually fired for her reckless opiate abuse, but soon got jobs as a
private nurse and continued to poison just about everyone she came in
contact with. She even poisoned herself to gain sympathy. She was
eventually arrested, confessing to the murder of 31 people. She spent
the rest of her life in a psychiatric hospital.
3. Joseph Vacher (1869 - 1898)
After being released from a psychiatric
hospital as "completely cured" in 1894, Vacher began a three-year
killing streak, culminating in the deaths of 11 people — most of them
shepherds watching over flocks alone. He sexually assaulted, stabbed,
and dismembered his victims. This eventually earned him the nickname
"The French Ripper" because his M.O. was similar to that of England's
Jack the Ripper. He was arrested after his twelfth victim fought back,
and readily confessed to the killings. He was executed for his crimes in
1898.
4. "The Servant Girl Annihilator" (event took place from 1884 to 1885)
The name makes this sound like a really bad
video game, but this was the name given to an unknown serial killer who
preyed on servant women in Austin, Texas, while they slept in their
beds. Seven women and one man were killed, and an additional six women
and two men were seriously injured during the spree. Although more than
400 people were arrested on suspicion, the killer was never identified.
The killings stopped abruptly on Christmas Eve of 1885. Three years
later, Jack the Ripper terrorized London, leading some to believe that
he and the Servant Girl Annihilator were the same person.
5. Bela Kiss (1877 - ?)
When Kiss started collecting large metal
drums and keeping them on his property, his neighbors thought he was
stocking up on gasoline in preparation for WWI. In 1914, he was drafted
and left for war. Two years later, a town constable remembered the drums
on his property and offered their use to soldiers in need. When they
opened them, though, they found that each drum actually contained the
body of a strangled woman. There were 24 in total, and all had puncture
marks on their necks, from which he drained their blood. They were then
essentially pickled in alcohol. Kiss was to be arrested in a hospital
where he was recovering, but he placed the body of a dead soldier in his
bed and fled. He was never caught, though someone claimed to see him in
Times Square in 1932.
6. Leonarda Cianciulli (1894 - 1970)
Known as a loving wife, doting mother, and
kind neighbor, people were shocked when this woman turned out to be
responsible for the deaths of three women in Correggio, Italy. Extremely
superstitious, she turned to killing when her son was drafted into the
Italian army in WWII believing that only human sacrifices could ensure
his safety. Not only did she drug, bludgeon, and dismember her three
victims, but she also collected and dried their blood to bake into tea
cakes. The third woman was turned into soap. All of Cianciulli's
"handicrafts" were shared with friends and neighbors, earning her the
nickname "The Soap Maker of Correggio." She died in a criminal asylum in
1970.
7. Henri Landru (1869 - 1922)
Landru was considered to be the real life
Bluebeard, who lured women — specifically widows — to his home and then
killed them (only after they'd granted him access to their money, of
course). Between 1914 and 1919, he killed 10 women, as well as one of
their teenage sons. He used so many aliases and so many alibis that he
had to keep a detailed ledger of it all, which eventually led to his
capture and conviction. The ledger was all that the authorities had to
go on, since Landru disposed of his victims by burning their bodies in
his stove. He was executed in 1922, and his head is currently on display
in the Museum of Death in Hollywood.
8. Fritz Haarmann (1879 - 1924)
Haarmann was known as both the "Vampire" and
"Wolf Man" of Hanover, Germany, because his preferred method of killing
was biting into his victims' throats, sometimes right through the
trachea. He called this his "love bite." He killed at least 24 boys and
young men in Hanover between 1918 and 1924. He also stole their
possessions and, according to legend, sold the bodies as "mincemeat" on
the black market. He eventually confessed, saying that he didn't mean to
kill them, but did so in the throes of sexual passion. His deliberate
dismemberment of the bodies, however, suggests otherwise. He was
executed in 1925.
9. Dorothea Puente (1929 - 2011)
During the 1980s, Puente ran a boarding house
for elderly and mentally disabled tenants. She liked to cash their
Social Security checks and, if they complained, she murdered them and
buried them in the backyard. During her stint as a landlady, she killed
as many as nine people and had other people unknowingly dispose of their
bodies, including one homeless man who subsequently disappeared. The
bodies were later found buried on her property. She was sentenced to
life in prison.
10. Kristen Gilbert (b. 1967)
Taking a cue from Jane Toppan, Gilbert also
earned the title "Angel of Death" by injecting large doses of
epinephrine into patients at the medical center where she worked as a
nurse, inducing cardiac arrest. When the emergency happened, she would
then resuscitate the patients, saving the day. Four men died from this
practice. When the hospital staff grew suspicious of the increase in
heart attacks and depletion of epinephrine, she called in a bomb threat
to distract investigators. Convicted in 2001, she is currently serving a
life sentence.
It just goes to show you that anyone's personality can have a twisted side. Luckily, forensic technology is always improving, so more and more people who commit terrible crimes can be brought to justice.
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