Who is the most gruesome serial killer of all time

Jack the Ripper may be a name that everyone knows, but no one can be certain of his true identity. Whoever he or she really was, Jack the Ripper was definitely deranged. In , Jack the Ripper terrorized the Whitechapel neighborhood of London by slitting the throats and abdomens of at least five prostitutes and leaving them for dead. German serial killer Joachim Kroll murdered at least 14 people, including young children, between and After strangling his victims with his bare hands, Kroll would have sex with their corpses, then cut them up in pieces to eat.

Interestingly, Kroll was finally caught after a neighbor complained about a backup in the plumbing. The pipes were clogged with human remains. When Kroll was arrested, he was in the process of simmering body parts taken from his most recent victim, 4-year old Marion Ketter. Over the course of three separate crime sprees, DeAngelo murdered at least 13 people, raped more than 50, and committed well over burglaries.

One of the reasons why DeAngelo was able to evade identification and capture for so long is because he was a former police officer. His training undoubtedly helped him in planning and executing his crimes while minimizing the physical evidence he left behind.

In fact, he was known to have called some of his victims months before he attacked them so he could learn about their routines to more effectively plan his crimes. In some instances, he even broke into the homes of his victims so he could unlock doors and windows and even leave items like ropes and other ligatures he could use to tie up his victims upon his return.

In some cases, he targeted couples, whom he would separate. He would sometimes force the female victim to tie up the male victim. DeAngelo would then commence with raping the female victim in another room. The native of Colombia claims to have raped and killed more than women across Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. At least of these were tribal women.

He also confessed to an additional murders in Peru and Colombia, and was declared insane. Gilles de Rais was a wealthy knight and lord, a leader in the French army, and a companion-in-arms to Joan of Arc. He was also a totally deranged serial killer. Between and , Gilles reportedly sodomized and then murdered or ordered the murder of at least 40 children. Many naked bodies of young boys were found at his estate in A biography of de Rais describes the way the knight lured the boys to their deaths.

This charming, handsome young deviant was a real lady killer in more ways than one. Good looking, ruthless and cunning, Bundy has become the gold standard of evil the world over, as is evident by the sheer amount of books, movies, TV shows, podcasts and even Ted Bundy shirts that have chronicled his story. Ted had a thing for young, brunette coeds, and would often pretend to be injured in order to lure these unlucky women into his now-infamous VW Beetle.

Once inside, Bundy would attack them with a crowbar, rape them, then strangle them to death in the woods. As he progressed, Bundy began to take more risks, even going as far as to invade a sorority house and attack four women within a span of 15 minutes. Unfortunately, his desires were unquenchable, and like most serial killers, he took too many risks. Bundy was caught in and sentenced to death by electric chair.

He was executed in and remains probably the most famous serial killer of all time. But what we do know is that he killed at least five women by gutting, disemboweling and leaving them for dead on the midnight streets of London, England in Not content with just spilling the blood of innocent women, the elusive Jack taunted London police with letters and postcards, one of which was sent alongside the extracted kidney of one of his victims.

Jack obliterated her to the point that she was unrecognizable, and to this day, the crime scene photos of the aftermath remain a disturbing image. No serial killer list is complete without mention of the grave-robbing ghoul whose grim antics spawned one of the best horror characters of all time - Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. He lived with his mother in their farmhouse in Plainfield, Wisconsin until she died in , at which time Gein was 40 years old.

Soon after, Gein began paying visits to local cemeteries, where he would unearth the bodies of recently-deceased women, steal them and fashion them into various household items. He shot and killed two local women with a rifle, loaded their corpses into his truck and took them home to his decaying house. Human bones, bowls made of skulls, mutilated vaginas, a lampshade made from human skin , clothes made from flayed skin — and much more. Because of his affinity for making furniture out of human skin, the character Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs was based on Ed Gein's creations.

Gein died in a mental hospital in , but his presence still haunts the backwoods of Plainfield. But by night, he was a sadistic, murdering rapist who ran an unlicensed cemetery beneath his house. As Gacy murdered the young boy, he claimed to experience an orgasm, and from that point on, chased that same feeling with 32 more victims. You see, every other serial killer on this list had a preferred victim type. Bundy liked young women, Gacy liked teen boys, Gein liked dead women.

But Panzram was a different type of beast. Born in Minnesota in , Panzram lived a reckless life from a young age. He started train-hopping as a young man to get around the country, attacking and burgling random people along the way to sustain himself. He lured American soldiers away from bars and shot and killed them. While only convicted of 3 murders, he actually confessed to killing over twenty people.

Panzram despised humanity and fantasized about killing on a mass scale. Between the years of and , the Milwaukee Cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer raped, killed and violated the remains of 17 young men. Dahmer mostly killed young black men because that was the demographic he was sexually attracted to.

He lured them back to his apartment with promises of sex, booze or drugs, then blitz-attacked them and strangled them to death. Read next: 21 serial killer quotes and the chilling stories behind them. As Dahmer became more confident, he began to drug his victims so he could toy with them while they were still alive.

In some cases, he drilled into their heads and injected them with chemicals in a strange attempt to create human zombies. Gacy managed to shock everyone when his crimes were uncovered, as he was a popular political and local figure at the time, living a seemingly normal life. The photo of Gacy here is of him with First Lady Rosalynn Carter, which proved to be somewhat embarrassing for the Secret Service when his crimes were uncovered.

He would abduct runaways or prostitutes and murder them after sexually assaulting them. Ridgeway was convicted in for murders that he had committed 20 years previously and this was down to a breakthrough in DNA evidence linking him to his victims.

He would lead his victims out into deserted fields under false pretences, where he would then overpower, rape and murder them. After his capture in and then conviction in , he was sentenced to 2, years, with the possibility of parole in years. An American, starting around the late s to early s and the continuing on for as many as years, Stano picked up a number of hitch-hikers and young women, murdering them via shooting, stabbing or strangulation.

He was found to be mentally unstable and sent to a mental asylum. He died of Cancer on July 26, The Zodiac killer was active in Northern California from the late s. The name "zodiac" originated from the fact that he sent challenging encrypted messages to the press. Of the four messages sent, only one could be deciphered. He is known to have killed at least 5 people and this number could be as high as The first attack took place on December 20, , when David Faraday and his girlfriend, Betty Lou Jensen were shot dead near their car.

There was no motive for the killings and the police could not identify the suspect. The police got the sketch of the Zodiac killer from eyewitnesses but he was never caught. Theodore Robert Bundy was an American serial killer, rapist, and burglar who assaulted and murdered over 30 young women. He used his charm to exploit women into trusting him. He would them take them to a secluded spot, overpower and kill them. He would sometimes revisit the body several hours at a time to perform sexual acts on the decomposing corpse until the stench was unbearable.

Ted Bundy's killing spree started around He lured his victims to his car by feigning injury. During his trial, he was something of a celebrity because of his charm and intelligence. He fought for his life for years to prevent his death sentence.

However he could not escape justice forever and on January 24, , he was executed. Harold Frederick Shipman was a British practitioner worthy of the title "Dr. He was found guilty of murdering over of his patients although the count could go as high as He is also the only British doctor to have been found guilty of murdering his patients. He was also known as "The Angel of Death". He killed his victims by injecting lethal doses of painkillers. Shipman would forge the will of his patients so that he would get their money and then kill them with an overdose of morphine.

The local undertaker was concerned with the death rate of Shipman's patients but the police could not find anything against Shipman. After the death of Kathleen Grundy, a wealthy year-old widow, a post-mortem revealed that she had died of a morphine overdose.

He was imprisoned and on 13 January , he hanged himself in his prison cell. Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer also was known as the "Milwaukee Cannibal" was an American serial killer who was active between and He is known to have raped, murdered and dismembered 17 men and boys. He is also known to have indulged in necrophilia, cannibalism and the permanent preservation of body parts. Dahmer killed his first victim in the summer of when he was just 18 years old.

He picked up an year-old hitchhiker named Steven Mark Hicks, took him to his house and strangled him to death. He would often keep body parts of his victims as trophies. When police found three heads and body parts in the fridge, he admitted to cooking and eating his victims. Dahmer also tried to convert his victims into zombies. He initially tried using sleeping pills. Then he tried drilling holes in their skulls while they were alive and pouring boiling water and acid into their skulls.