Accused serial killer blames ‘kill gene’ for fatally stabbing six in California

A California man accused of fatally stabbing six people during a weeks-long murder spree blamed a “kill gene” in his DNA that gave him a thrill for blood. Itzcoatl (Izzy) Ocampo, a former U.S. Marine, smiled when he recalled the Ocean County killings during an interview with police after he was arrested in January 2012, according to a recording of the confession obtained by KTLA-TV. “It felt weird,” Ocampo, then 25, said in the clip. “My testicles ... the f--king kill gene hit my sperm. Like, that’s the way I feel right now, like my sperm had f--king kill in them. Like, all right, you’re not a b---h anymore.” Ocampo — who died after apparently drinking a bottle of Ajax in his jail cell in November 2013 — allegedly began his killing spree when he stabbed Juan Herrera, 34, and his 53-year-old mother, Raquel Estrada, in their Yorba Linda home on Oct. 25, 2011.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/accused-serial-killer-blames-kill-gene-fatally-stabbing-california-article-1.1775192

Genesee River Killer Arthur Shawcross drew blood on the outside and pictures behind bars

His paintings were big splashes of primary colors, butterflies, flocks of brilliant blue and yellow birds, and wildlife around a water hole, a peaceable kingdom. So placid were these images that they would seem the work of a gentle nature lover. Yet, when the paintings came up for sale in April 2001, one lawman described them as “sickening.” Gov. George Pataki had the artist banned from any other exhibitions. Arthur Shawcross, 55, the artist, was also an inmate at the maximum-security Sullivan Correctional Facility where he was serving a sentence of more than 250 years for his other hobby — serial killing. It’s not clear when he took up his paints, but his other pastime had started some 30 years earlier with the slaughter of two children. He went to prison, was paroled, and started again. At least 13 victims would die at the hands of this jailhouse Rembrandt, known throughout the community around upstate Rochester, as the Genesee River Killer.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/justice-story/serial-killer-jailhouse-artist-article-1.1762308

Two killers leave a trail of bodies along Interstate 5 in California in the 1980s

Interstate 5 stretches nearly 1,400 miles from the Mexican border to British Columbia. Except for a brief section where it is known as the San Diego Freeway, most natives simply refer to the road as “The Five.” But in the 1980s, it might just as well have been called the Highway of Death. Two serial killers, working separately, stalked women along the interstate through the decade. One would become known as the I-5 Killer, the other the I-5 Strangler. Together, they are responsible for more than a dozen confirmed killings, but investigators believe that the actual number could be at least four times as high.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/justice-story/killers-leave-trail-bodies-i-5-article-1.1730863

Serial killer IS on the loose gunning down respected figures on doorsteps, say cops

-Police believe the February murder of Ruthanne Lodato, 59, is connected to two other unsolved slayings in Alexandria, Virgina

-The prominent community member is the third person to die in eerily similar circumstances within two miles of each other's homes

-Ronald Kirby, 69, was gunned down in November and in December 2003, sheriff's wife Nancy Dunning was also killed inside her home

-On Thursday, police announced that they had discovered similar bullet fragments in all three murders

-The three victims were killed at the same time of day after presenting themselves at the front door of their homes

-Police have warned the affluent neighborhood not to panic

-Law enforcement released a sketch of a bearded, balding man they suspect in the murders

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2575189/Serial-killer-IS-loose-affluent-Washington-D-C-suburb-say-cops-respected-teacher-gunned-doorstep.html

NYPD slow to make the connection in Park Plaza Hotel slayings that claimed lives of eight women

No doubt New York’s Finest would just as soon forget that the Park Plaza Hotel ever existed. Eight women who lived alone there turned up dead in their rooms over a 16-month stretch, and the NYPD failed to make a connection. The first to die was Theresa Jordan, 39. Her decomposed body was found April 10, 1973, at the hotel, at 50 W. 77th St., opposite the American Museum of Natural History. Today, the rebranded building is called Parc 77, and closet-sized apartments go for three grand a month. But 40 years ago, it was a welfare flop where rooms rented for 40 bucks a month to down-and-outers. The coroner was summoned to the Park Plaza again 16 weeks after Jordan died. Kate Lewinsohn, 65, a retired stenographer, was found suffocated and raped in Room 221. Bodies really began piling up at the hotel in the spring of 1974.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/justice-story/doom-service-upper-west-side-flophouse-article-1.1707471

Is Louis Myers the Zodiac Killer? Man says now-dead buddy confessed to being Bay Area murderer

An upstate New Yorker claims his best buddy was the notorious Zodiac Killer, who paralyzed California’s Bay Area with fear during the late 1960s. The reason the man, then a teen, went on his bloody spree of at least five murders? Over a girl, Randy Kenney says.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/man-now-dead-buddy-confessed-zodiac-killer-article-1.1703245

The real-life 'Dexter' who claims to have murdered more than 22 people she met on Craigslist in Satanic killing spree

As law enforcement investigating the sensational serial killing claims of Miranda Barbour admit her boasts could be real - others are dubbing the 19-year-old Pennsylvania girl, a 'real life Dexter'. Claiming that she only killed 'bad people who do bad things' in her self-confessed nationwide murder-spree, Barbour, 19, has been compared to the fictitious 'moral' serial killer played by Michael C. Hall on the Showtime cable network. In an interview given from prison and published on Saturday with the Daily Item in Sunbury, Pennsylvania, Barbour said that she participated in at least 22 killings in the past six years in Alaska, Texas, North Carolina and California.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2561025/North-Pole-Alaska-center-sick-story-Satanism-serial-killers-Miranda-Barbour-19-confesses-22-murders.html

Joachim Georg Kroll

Joachim Georg Kroll (17 April 1933 - 1 July 1991) was a German serial killer and cannibal. He was known as the Ruhr Cannibal (Ruhrkannibale), Ruhr Hunter (Ruhrjäger) and the Duisburg Man-Eater (Duisburger Menschenfresser). He was convicted of eight murders but confessed to a total of 13.

(...)

The corpses of five young women were found in small villages in West Germany. Each body had been raped, stabbed and or strangled, as well as mutilated. The cuts were of a strange nature. Parts of the victims had been removed. Slices from the buttocks, thighs, and belly were taken. This type of cut was suggestive of a cannibal. The parts were the meatiest parts of the body. The wounds were about steak size. The police questioned people in the area of the murders. One man suggested the name of Joachim Kroll. Kroll had told the man not to use the toilet in their apartment building. When the man asked Kroll what it was stopped up with Kroll replied "With guts..."

Murderpedia     Crime Library

Female serial killer stabbed three men to death before dumping their bodies in ditches then stabbed another two men at random in 10-day spree of violence

Female serial killer Joanna Dennehy 'cast a spell' over her victims before embarking on a 10-day spree of violence, a court has heard. Dennehy, 31, has admitted stabbing three men in the heart and dumping their bodies in ditches in Cambridgeshire but until now little has been known about the killings. As the trial of her alleged accomplices Gary Stretch and Leslie Layton, began, prosecutor Peter Wright QC said both men helped Dennehy in her bid to cover up the 'terrible truth' of the murders. He added: 'These men came under the spell of Dennehy.' The bodies of Lukasz Slaboszewski, 31, Kevin Lee, 48, and John Chapman, 56, were found dumped in ditches in March and April last year. The prosecutor described how, after the killings, Dennehy and Stretch drove to Hereford where they selected two other men at random. She repeatedly stabbed them both in the street but both survived. Mr Wright added that both Mr Slaboszewski and Mr Lee were also drawn by Dennehy's spell. He said: 'They paid for that with their lives.'

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2539849/Female-serial-killer-stabbed-three-men-death-dumping-bodies-ditches-stabbed-two-men-random-street-10-day-spree-violence.html

Aussie teen Matthew Meuleman adopts the name of killer uncle and his murderous ways

It is a troubling sign when a child changes his name to that of a serial killer, and even worse when the criminal is a member of the family. That is just what Matthew Meuleman did. In 2007, at 14, he took on the surname of his great- uncle Ivan Milat, who was in prison for life for seven murders. Three years later, the Austral­ian teenager would prove that he was cut of the same monstrous cloth. On Nov. 20, 2010, the younger Milat and another teen, Cohen Klein, 18, lured schoolmate David Auchterlonie, 17, into the Belanglo State Forest in New South Wales. Milat held out the promise of a booze-and-pot celebration for David’s birthday, but a party was the last thing on his mind.

“Someone’s going to die,” he told friends in the days leading up to the deadly trip. As soon as they got into the forest, Milat took a double-bladed battle-ax and knocked David to the ground. “You keep looking at me and I’ll cut your head off,” he shrieked as David begged for his life. Thanks to Klein, who used a cell phone to make an audio recording of the attack, investigators heard every sickening detail — the verbal torment, screams, cries and the sound of an ax tearing into bone and flesh. The victim’s family endured some of it at Milat’s sentencing hearing in May 2012, in which acting Justice Jane Mathews gave him 43 years in prison. Klein got 30 years for his role as an accomplice.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/justice-story/teen-adopted-kin-murderous-ways-article-1.1576627

Crime Library

Hadden Irving Clark

The strange sight of a 47-year-old handcuffed man surrounded by police walking through the woods while wearing a woman's wig must have puzzled many Cape Cod residents on the morning of April 9, 2000. The man, Hadden Clark, a cross-dressing cannibal killer convicted in Maryland of two murders, was looking for the graves of two women he claimed to have buried nearly two decades ago. The woods, located in the town of Wellfleet, were part of a 7.3-acre property once owned by his grandfather, Silas Clark. Though Clark grew up in Pennsylvania, the alleged serial killer spent his summers in Wellfleet where he worked in restaurants. Clark also met with authorities in Meriden, Connecticut, where he claims to have buried another body around 1980 in a family property owned by his maternal grandfather Maynard Scranton. According to Maryland prison authorities Clark told a fellow inmate whom he believes is Jesus Christ that he killed as many as a dozen women and girls along the Eastern Seaboard between the mid-70s and 1993, the year he was arrested.

Murderpedia    Crime Library

Arthur Shawcross, the Genessee River Strangler

Arthur John Shawcross (June 6, 1945 – November 10, 2008) was an American serial killer, also known as the Genesee River Killer in Rochester, New York. He claimed most of his victims after being paroled early following a conviction in the manslaughter of two children, which led to criticism of the justice system.

Starting in March 1988, Shawcross began murdering prostitutes in the area, claiming 11 victims before his capture less than two years later. The victims were:

 Patricia Ives, 25
 Frances Brown, 22
 June Cicero, 34
 Darlene Trippi, 32
 Anne Marie Steffen, 28
 Dorothy Blackburn, 27
 Kimberly Logan June Stotts, 30
 Marie Welch, 22
 Elizabeth Gibson
 Dorothy Keller, 59

Wikipedia   Crime Library   Murderpedia

Karl Denke a.k.a. "The Cannibal of Ziębice"

For reasons unknown, Denke engaged in cannibalism, killing his first victim, one 25-year-old Emma Sander, in 1909. From that point on, he continued his series of killings, claiming the lives of dozens of people. Reports suggested that he also disposed of the flesh of his victims by selling it as pork and/or offering to what guests he had in the house. His killings ended on December 21, 1924, when he attacked a man named Vincenz Olivier with an axe. Olivier escaped and identified his attacker as Denke to a coachman named Gabriel, who then called in the authorities. Denke was investigated, and officers found identification papers for twelve travelers, assorted clothing, a pair of drums holding large pieces of meat in brine, numerous types of bones, and pots full of fat. Officers speculated from the amount of remains that Denke had killed about thirty victims. He was arrested, and the following day, Denke committed suicide by hanging himself in his prison cell. Decades later, the case has been mostly forgotten, with those who are still aware of Denke addressing him as "the unusual case" or "the forgotten cannibal".

Criminal Minds

Murderpedia

Fritz Haarmann: The Butcher of Hannover

Friedrich Heinrich Karl "Fritz" Haarmann (October 25, 1879 – April 15, 1925), also known as the Butcher of Hanover and the Vampire of Hanover was a German serial killer who is believed to have been responsible for the murder of 27 boys and young men between 1918 and 1924. He was convicted, found guilty of 24 murders and executed.

Wikipedia

Murderpedia

Crime Library

Szilveszter Matuska

Szilveszter Matuska (January 29, 1892 – disappeared c. 1945), was a Hungarian mass murderer and mechanical engineer who made two successful and at least two unsuccessful attempts to derail passenger trains in Hungary, Germany and Austria in 1930 and 1931. He was born in Csantavér (now Čantavir, Serbia).

Matuska made at least two failed attempts to derail trains in Austria in December 1930 and January 1931.

Matuska's first successful crime was the derailment of the Berlin-Basel express train south of Berlin on August 8, 1931. Scores of people were injured, but there were no deaths. Because of the discovery of a defaced Nazi newspaper at the scene of the crime, among other things, the attack was believed to have been politically motivated. A bounty of 100,000 reichsmark was put on the perpetrator.

Matuska's second and more notorious successful crime was the derailment of the Vienna Express headed towards Vienna as it was crossing the Biatorbágy bridge near Budapest at 12.20am on 13 September 1931. 22 people died and 120 others were injured, 17 of them severely. Matuska carried out his crime by blowing up a portion of the bridge, causing the engine and nine of the eleven coaches forming the train to plunge into a ravine 30 meters deep. Matuska was discovered at the scene of the crime but, having passed himself off as a surviving passenger, he was released.

Investigators in the three countries were on his trail, however, and he was arrested in Vienna one month later, on 10 October 1931, whereupon he soon confessed. Matuska was tried and convicted in Austria for two unsuccessful attempts. He was later extradited to Hungary on condition that he not be executed. He was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment as agreed with Austria.

Matuska reportedly escaped from jail in Vác in 1944. According to some reports, he served as an explosives expert during the latter stages of World War II; he was never recaptured and his fate is unknown. Rumours have circulated that he appeared on the communist side in the Korean War, but there is no evidence to support this. Matuska's motives remain unclear. His first attack was initially thought to have been politically motivated. At his trial, Matuska claimed to have been ordered to derail the express by God. Matuska has also been quoted as explaining his crimes by saying: "I wrecked trains because I like to see people die. I like to hear them scream." It was reported that he achieved orgasm while watching the trains he had sabotaged crash.

Wikipedia

Murderpedia

Symphorophilia

British Maniac Patrick Mackay

Patrick David Mackay (born 25 September 1952) is a British serial killer who confessed to murdering eleven people in Britain in the mid 1970s.

Wikipedia

Murderpedia

Crime Library

Joseph Paul Franklin, white supremacist serial killer who shot Hustler's Larry Flynt, put to death by lethal injection

Franklin, who was blamed for as many as 20 killings, also confessed to shooting and paralyzing the Hustler magazine publisher. He targeted blacks and Jews and said he was trying to spark a race war. Missouri executed him for the 1977 sniper attack that killed Gerald Gordon, a 42-year-old father of three.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/white-supremacist-serial-killer-joseph-paul-franklin-put-death-lethal-injection-article-1.1523170

Woman, 31, admits to being a SERIAL KILLER as she pleads guilty to murdering THREE men and dumping their bodies in ditches

A woman today admitted she was a serial killer by pleading guilty to murdering three men before dumping their bodies in ditches. Joanna Dennehy admitted killing Kevin Lee, 48, Lukasz Slaboszewski, 31, and John Chapman, 56, who were found with multiple stab wounds between March and April in Cambridgeshire. The 31-year-old from Peterborough also pleaded guilty today at the Old Bailey in Central London to the attempted murders of another two men, Robin Bereza and John Rogers. Property developer Mr Lee's body was found in a ditch in Newborough, Cambridgeshire, on March 30, and her other two victims were discovered nearby at Thorney Dyke.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2509256/Joanna-Dennehy-pleads-guilty-killing-3-Cambridgeshire-men.html

Hunt for serial killer after skeletal remains of four people including a skull with 'Death to paedophiles' written on it are found off the French coast

A hunt for a serial killer is underway after the skeletal remains of four people including a skull with ‘Death to paedophiles’ written across it were found off the French coast. The bones were found by a diver in February in the shallow waters off the Cotes d'Azur and have been identified as belonging to two women and two men. French detectives have opened a murder investigation and are now investigating how the victims died and whether they were kidnapped.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2492476/Hunt-serial-killer-skeletal-remains-4-people-French-coast.html

Former Russian policeman dubbed The Werewolf raped and slaughtered 24 women who 'resembled his mother'

A former policeman known as a 'perfect husband and father' led a secret life as serial killer who murdered at least two dozen women in Siberia. Mikhail Popkov axed, stabbed or strangled full-figured women 'who resembled his mother' who allegedly abused him in childhood, it was revealed today. Russian investigators say the 49-year-old has confessed to 24 murders, though police suspect him of at least 29 and crime experts fear even more. Nicknamed variously The Werewolf and the Wednesday Murderer - after the day of the week when many of his victims were found in forests - he eluded police for two decades as investigators catastrophically ignored evidence that the mystery killer could be one of their own officers who used his uniform to gain trust.

The father of one - who faces life in jail - selected victims who resembled his mother, say Russian reports of the case, which is centred on Angarsk in the Irkutsk region of Siberia. Police earlier said that of the 29 he was suspected of killing, 25 were aged 19 to 28, and four were from 35 to 40. 'He beheaded at least one woman and gouged the heart out of a victim,' reported The Siberian Times. 'Popkov claimed he suddenly stopped killing after he "became impotent", suggesting a sexual motive to his murder spree. 'Typically, his victims were slightly intoxicated when he lured them to their deaths. 'He snared them after they had been to bars or parties. He is suspected of seeking revenge on his mother who was an alcoholic and allegedly abused him in his childhood.'

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2490477/Former-policeman-nicknamed-The-Werewolf-murdered-24-women-resembled-mother.html