Serial Killers

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French 'serial killer' on trial

The trial has opened in France of a man accused of being among the country's worst serial killers in decades. Michel Fourniret, 65, is charged with murdering seven girls and women in France and Belgium. He is also charged with raping some of them. His wife, accused of helping lure women into a car, is separately charged with complicity in murder and kidnapping. Mr Fourniret, dubbed the "Ogre of the Ardennes", is accused of carrying out the murders between 1987 and 2001.


Mr Fourniret appeared in court in the northern French town of Charleville-Mezieres alongside his wife, Monique Olivier. When the judge asked him to identify himself, he held up a piece of paper on which was written: "My lips are sealed if there is no closed-door hearing." The judge did not appear to respond. Mr Fourniret also passed to the judge a rolled-up document tied with a red ribbon, which his lawyer said was a message to the victims' families. The judge said he would read it in due course.


MURDER VICTIMS
Isabelle Laville: Kidnapped in 1987 in Auxerre, central France, aged 17, and raped. Body found in 2000
Fabienne Leroy: Kidnapped and raped in Chalons-en-Champagne, eastern France, in 1988 aged 20. Found next day
Jeanne-Marie Desramault: Kidnapped in Charleville-Mezieres in 1989, aged 22. Body found in 2004 at Fourniret's ex property nearby
Elisabeth Brichet: Abducted in Namur, Belgium, in 1989, aged 12. Found in 2004 at Fourniret's ex-property
Natacha Danais: Kidnapped in 1990 near Nantes, western France, aged 13. Found three days later on nearby beach
Celine Saison: Kidnapped in Charleville-Mezieres in 2000, aged 18, and raped. Body found three months later in Belgium
Mananya Thumphong: Abducted in 2001 in Sedan, north-east France, aged 13, and raped. Found in Belgium in 2002

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After having looked at quite a few examples of these cases over the past few years it's interesting to hear about a case where the wife is also on trial. That's not happened to my knowledge since Fred West. Also, his decision not to speak and the red-ribbon tied statement suggests a bit of added arrogance - Hannibalisitic almost...

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Grim Sleeper Serial Killer Hunted
September 04, 2008

Officials in Los Angeles are offering half a million dollars to help catch a serial killer who has murdered at least 10 women and one man in two sprees over the past 20 years.

All the victims were black and were found in or near South Los Angeles. Police believe some of the women were prostitutes. Seven women and a man were killed by the same handgun in a three-year period starting in August 1985. The women had been sexually assaulted and their bodies were often dumped in the same alley. Los Angeles City Council has now approved a reward first proposed by city councilman Bernard Parks, who as police chief in 2001 ordered the department to look into a backlog of unsolved cases.

Alicia Monique Alexander was the last known victim in the first round of killings. Porter Alexander last saw his youngest daughter one evening in September 1988 as the 18-year-old ran out for what was supposed to be a quick trip to the shop. "I said make sure you go to the store and come back. She says, 'okay'," Porter Alexander said. "She left, and that was the last time I saw my baby." Four days later, police knocked at the front door of the family home. They had found her body in a nearby alley with a gunshot wound in the chest.

A 13-year break followed Miss Alexander's death, police said, and investigators retired or moved on to other cases. "What accounted for that gap, we still don't know," police Captain Denis Cremins said at a news conference. "We try not to engage in conjecture."

The break ended in March 2002, when 14-year-old Princess Berthomieux was found beaten and strangled in an alley in the city of Inglewood. DNA samples linked her to the suspect in the earlier murders. Another killing came in 2003, and the most recent homicide was in January 2007 when the body of Janecia Peters, 25, was found shot and covered in a rubbish bag.

The length of time between the killings prompted the LA Weekly newspaper, which first reported the case, to dub the killer the "Grim Sleeper". Though police have a DNA sample, only one physical description of the killer exists, taken from a victim who survived a 1988 attack. She said the assailant was a black man in his 30s driving an orange Ford Pinto. "But that's one person's account who was traumatised," Captain Cremins said.

Investigators are poring through prison and jail records to screen prisoners with a violent history who were locked up during the break in the killings. Authorities also hope to search DNA databases to see if there are any possible matches to the killer's family members. Parts of Los Angeles suffered extreme violence in the 1980s and 1990s and many young women turned to the streets to fund newfound addictions to crack cocaine and other drugs.

Mr Alexander said police initially seemed to drag their heels when it came to investigating his daughter's death. He said he did not believe his daughter was a prostitute but that she did have a drug problem.

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For a minute I was wondering why I'd not heard of this case before - then I saw that it was only black people being killed. If there had been even 2 or 3 young white women killed this would have been international news for years...

For a serial killer to just shoot his victims is fairly uncommon though - it's the most impersonal way to kill, which goes against the usual desire to see suffering etc.

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Two Jehovah's Witnesses 'murdered 13 people on mission from God to cleanse world of sinners'
By Will Stewart
25th September 2008

Two twisted Jehovah's Witnesses have been arrested as suspected serial killers, accused of murdering 13 people during a nine-month killing spree in Russia. Claiming to be on a mission from God, Vladimir Gurianov, 44, and Elvira Egorycheva 46, hacked, shot and bludgeoned their victims in a case that left even hardened Russian detectives shocked.

The pair were finally spotted in a supermarket in a suburb of the city and arrested. By then they were on nationwide search lists and their photographs had been widely circulated in the region. When they were searched Egorycheva had a revolver, two axes, an electric-shock device and a rope in her belongings. Another gun and a knife were found in Gurianov's jacket.

Gurianov - who locals said had 'mad eyes' - and Egorycheva first met at a Jehovah's Witnesses sect meeting 16 years ago. When they were reunited late last year, Egorycheva allegedly told him she had a vision and they must travel to the Volga region to carry out God's wishes. She said: "God wants us to go to Nizhniy Novgorod and cleanse the world of sinners".

A neighbour said: "They were very odd. He called her "mother" or "Princess Elena". She called him "my son, Prince Mikhail". Gurianov used to say they had a certain mission. No-one took them very seriously but then the killings began."

The first victim was a fortune teller Ludmila Kostina, 51, with whom they made an appointment after seeing her advert in a local papers. A day after the first murder they went to another fortune-teller, Nina Mashtakova, 66, who they killed before stealing valuables. One victim was killed around January 10, when Gurianov answered an advert advertising Pekingese puppies. A 17-year-old boy, returning home, found Gurianov killing his mother, who only managed to scream: "Run, boy!"

Gurianov later boasted to detectives about one particularly brutal slaying. He said: "I shot at the head of this woman, but she was still alive. I shot her a second time and she fell down, but just as I was digging a grave for her I realised she was still alive and just watching me. So you'll understand I had to stab her."

Also in January this year, Gurianov, a convicted rapist, and Egorycheva met a 17 year-old girl by the garage complex in the city's outskirts. Police believe the couple stopped the girl, and Egorycheva told her: "Stop, sinner! I, Princess Elena, and my son Prince Mikhail, have been sent by God to punish you!" Gurianov then allegedly raped the girl, killed her with a hammer and buried her next to the garage complex. He later told investigators: "Mother explained to me that every woman killed or raped by me would become my wives in the afterlife."

They are also suspected of killing 18 year-old student Masha Maslennikova, missing since May, whose body has not been found, as well as Ludmila Kotelnikova, 45, and Elena Lomteva, 37, whose corpses were found near their holiday homes. One detective said: "Apparently, they didn't care who became their next victim, whether it was a woman, a young girl or a child. Their only criterion was to carry out the killing in remote parts of the city where no one could help the victims."

Later police asked the pair why they killed innocent people. Gurianov, clearly enjoying recounting his deeds, replied: "God told us to go and take the money. He said: 'Go there and take as much as you need.' So we did".

One shocked detective said: "Our hearts are bleeding. They seem to enjoy talking about the things they have done. They feel safe as well. What is prison to them? Even if they are sentenced to life, they'll live until old age.If ever there was a case for capital punishment, this is it."

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Just as well they weren't Islamic or they'd have been on the front page all over the world!

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The 'Rainbow killer' stalks Brazilian gays
São Paulo governor vows to catch the murderer who targets men in a park used as a rendezvous
Tom Phillips in Rio de Janeiro
The Observer,
Sunday 14 December 2008

São Paulo is the annual stage for the largest gay pride march on Earth and home to one of South America's most vibrant gay communities. But a wave of homophobic murders has cast a shadow over one of the most tolerant cities in Latin America. Six months after 3.5 million revellers gathered on the streets to celebrate gay pride, police announced last week that they were hunting for a serial killer thought to be responsible for as many as 16 murders on the western outskirts of São Paulo, Brazil's largest city.

Police believe the killer - labelled the Rainbow Maniac by the press - is behind the murders of 13 men in Carapicuíba, a city of nearly 400,000 people in greater São Paulo. They were killed in a park used as a gay meeting point. Police are now investigating whether the same killer was behind three murders in the neighbouring city of Osasco, where a similar weapon was reportedly used.

One of the victims was a transvestite, shot in one of the city's many love motels. 'In his head, he thinks he is doing a clean-up job,' said Paulo Fernando Fortunato, the police chief heading the inquiries. 'He doesn't like homosexuals, he hates them.'

The killing began on 4 July 2007 when 32-year-old José Cicero Henrique was murdered in the Paturis park. Since then another 12 men have been killed in the park, nine in virtually identical circumstances. Their half-naked bodies were dumped in the undergrowth with a .38 bullet in the back of the head and their trousers wrapped around their knees.

Fortunato said one of the men was beaten to death while the latest victim, whose body was found in August and has not yet been identified, was shot 12 times. Police sources told newspapers the hail of bullets had turned his body into a 'sieve'. One local newspaper suggested the killer may have arranged meetings with his victims over the internet, using the social networking service Orkut.

No link was made between the 13 murders until recently. Last week the governor of São Paulo, José Serra, visited Carapicuíba and vowed that police would catch the Rainbow Maniac. Plainclothes officers are now patrolling the park at night. The 13-month killing spree coincides with a recent study by the Grupo Gay da Bahia, Brazil's oldest gay rights group, that described Brazil as leading the world in the murder of homosexuals. According to the study, there were 122 homophobic murders in Brazil in 2007, compared with 35 in Mexico and 25 in the US. A previous study claimed that between 1980 and 2006 at least 2,680 gay people were killed in Brazil, mostly as a result of homophobic violence.

Brazil has some of the world's most progressive laws on sexual discrimination. Until 2005 the government lobbied the UN to adopt a resolution condemning discrimination against gays and lesbians. Both Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo are major destinations for gay tourists from the US and Europe, while the federal government recently launched a drive to make the country more 'gay friendly'.

Next year Rio de Janeiro's first gay samba school, nicknamed the Rainbow School, will join the carnival. But activists say prejudice remains widespread. Openly gay figures remain a rarity in Brazilian politics and sport. A 2006 study at São Paulo's gay pride march found that 65 per cent of those polled had suffered physical or verbal abuse as a result of their sexuality. 'People don't understand, so they attack,' said Alessandra Saraiva, a representative of São Paulo's gay pride association and one of the organisers of a recent campaign, 'Homofobia Mata!' ('homophobia kills'). Saraiva said a study by her organisation found that 70 per cent of São Paulo's transvestites had suffered some kind of violence. Many blame the intolerance on ultra-conservative evangelical sects which see homosexuality as the work of the devil. One church performs 'exorcisms' of gays and lesbians live on TV, while churches promising to 'cure' gays and lesbians can be found across the country.

Police stepped up patrols of the park last week, despite the arrest of a suspect. Jairo Francisco Franco, 46, a retired police sergeant, was seen by two witnesses committing the 13th murder in the park, police said. João Batista, owner of the supermarket where Franco was a security guard, said on TV that his employee had seemed like 'a calm guy'.

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I'd imagine the killer doesn't even see himself as doing anything wrong.

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Dnepropetrovsk Maniacs

The Dnepropetrovsk Maniacs was a group of three 19 year old boys. Within a span of one month, the teens brutally murdered 21 people. They started off torturing and killing cats and later moved onto killing people. Their first victim was murdered by beating with metal rods, but since it took him a while to die, they’d used hammers to finish him off. Hammer must have seemed like a decent tool for killing as they’d continue with their killing spree using hammers as primary object with which to kill. They would video tape their murders on a cell phone camera and would attend the funerals of the people they’d killed.

One of three teens later on quit but the other two continued with murders. The police eventually tracked Dnepropetrovsk Maniacs down and detained the teens, which brought immense relief to the people of Dnepropetrovsk and the rest of Ukraine who watched with terror as there was one brutally murdered victim after another. The computer that was seized by the police contained videos of 21 murders and over 300 photographs, including images from funerals as the boys would capture themselves flipping off the graves of their victims.

The police did not reveal how they caught Dnepropetrovsk Maniacs but investigation on motives uncovered brutal truth - the teens were killing as a hobby. They were murdering people to have a collection of memories when they get old. Each of the boys, who were classmates and come from wealthy families admitted that they were killing just for fun. They were picking their victims at random - mostly people who looked like they would not fight back.

The names of Dnepropetrovsk killers are:

Igor Suprunyuck
Viktor Sayenko
Alexander Hanzha

English translation of what the killers are saying:

“Hold on, hold on. Be neater, fuck!” likely saying that to watch out for the blood.
*Laughing*
“Hold on, hold on, hold on, don’t hit him, don’t hit him. Watch him…” the rest of the sentence is indistinct, but he’s likely telling the guy to watch for the blood as he’s zooming in to capture the close up
The following audio is unclear.
[After the screwdriver stabbing]
“What? With what?” as the cameraman responds to the boy who stabs the victim
“What, he’s still alive?” says the guy stabbing the victim
“He’s still moving his arms after I ripped up his intestines” the cameraman muffles indistinctly
“He’s having a fucked up day” says the stabbing guy after he’d stepped on his stomach.
[More muffled talk as he proceeds to stab him in the eyes with the screwdriver]
“Get over here fast. Kill him already.”
“What?” says the stabber
“Kill him already.”
“I already put the hammer back. He’s already dead.”
“I poked out his eyes and he’s still not dead” says the cameraman
“Get the knife” cameraman continues
*Proceeds to bludgeon him then interrupts by saying something indistinct*
“More, more” cameraman telling the other guy to keep bludgeoning him to make sure he’s dead
“Hold on, hold on”
*They start walking back to the car*
More muffled talk from the blond killer
“Wash your hands” cameraman says and tells him to spray cleaning chemical on the hammer
“I’ll hold it”
*Muffled talk from the guy washing the hammer*
*More muffled talk from the guy washing his face and walking back from his car*
“I stuck the screwdriver in his brain” says the camera man
*Muffled talk from the guy washing his hands*
“I got him in the nose from his eye” or something along those lines
“I don’t understand how he was alive? I felt his brain” says the camera man
“I was holding the screw driver like this *muffled/don’t understand*”
Before the video ends the blond guy says “Alright, let’s get a picture”

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I watched a few seconds of this video and was genuinely shocked. I've not posted it here because it really is gruesome. If you want to see it, after reading the translation, then you can find it on various sites.

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It took 1 min 47 seconds for my memory to become host to a horror that will never go
It is the details in watching someone die that are the most awful and rattle you the most
Caitlin Moran
January 12, 2009

Four weeks ago I saw a murder on the internet. There isn't a punchline to this; it is not an intriguing play on words. Four weeks ago someone on a chatboard posted a link, with the exhortation: “See if you can keep your breakfast down after watching this! I couldn't!”

Since “See if you can keep your breakfast down after watching this!” is, as one poster pointed out later, the kind of comment that, in the 21st century, precedes a link to a very fat woman trying to get out of a very small car or - if the chatboard is really bitchy - that shot where Mischa Barton is mixing Lacroix and Chanel very badly, quite a few of us clicked on the link. Instead, it took us to some footage shot on a mobile phone, in some bland, murky woodland. It appears to be early summer. Fifteen feet away there's a man on the ground. It's immediately clear that a great many terrible things have happened to him quite recently, and that he will die very, very soon.

The point of writing about this is that I have not really felt the same since I saw the murder, so I am not going to describe things in great detail - even though it is the details in watching someone die that are the most awful, and fascinating, and that rattle you the most. Of the non-gory things, it is the man's trousers - grey, slightly worn but ironed; the kind that a poor, proud man would wear if he were going to the bank, say, or visiting more well-to-do friends - that were the most upsetting. He had dressed in great calm, and great order. He was now dying in unimaginable disorder and distress.

I do have to tell you that the man was being tortured - and not torture as shown on television dramas or films, which often looks like an aerobics session with a particularly strict personal trainer. One where you just have to “work through the burn” for a few minutes, like Madonna, before effecting an exciting escape. Two similar-looking teenagers were gathered around the man, and their torture was about brutally killing someone very slowly.

The footage is nearly seven minutes long. I stopped watching after 1.47. I felt physically different - very very high, in a bad way, as if I were going to pass out. I was also, with sudden irrationality, worried that the footage might in some way damage my computer, which I turned off, then unplugged, then covered with a cloth. I think really that that is what I would have liked to do with my brain, but I couldn't. I still wasn't really sure what I'd seen. A large part of me was working on the hopeful premise that it was a very convincing drama project by some students - the kind of thing that was about to become a big viral hit, and about which the Daily Mail would become enjoyably enraged.

Simultaneously, I was telling myself that it was probably a revenge attack - that this man had attacked a lover, killed a child, and although his murder was awful, in a world of almost infinite sorrow it was not the unconscionably profane insult to humanity that it first appeared to be. I was using the thought of torturous retribution as a comfort.

At 3pm, doing the school run, I walked past the zebra crossings and recycling boxes, thinking what a surreal, inappropriate thing it was to be a mother of two, in a pair of bourgeois Ugg boots, going to pick up her children from school while thinking of a man being murdered in a wood. Of course, it did occur to me that for whole generations - whole populations - walking down a street thinking of murder and death is absolutely commonplace. I could see why my granddad - in common with most men returning from the front - never talked about what had happened. I'd always thought that it was because they didn't want to say “I've killed a man” or “I saw a man being killed”, as the simple immensity of the fact would be upsetting. I realised now that it wasn't the simple, enormous facts that were upsetting but, as I mentioned before, the details, instead.

Any follow-up statement to “I killed a man” would involve the unexpected, quiet, horrible sounds; the sudden crash course in the structure of the skull; the slowness and then the quickness of blood. Best not to make the initial pronouncement in the first place. By the time I got back home - on a walk during which I held the girls' hands far more tightly than usual - everyone on the messageboard was in uproar. Ric had found out more about the footage, and posted a Wikipedia link on the subject. The murder really was a murder - and not a drama project after all.

It happened in 2007, as part of a summer-long spree in which 21 people were murdered in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine. The trial is still going on. With possibly the biggest and most immediate sadness I have ever felt in my life, one penultimate sentence noted that most of the victims were vulnerable people - vagrants, the elderly, a pregnant woman, children. There was no comforting aspect of revenge. And now, the additional nauseous business of the subconscious - for one unstoppable, white-light second - reimagining it all with children.

I don't want to overstate the whole thing, or be too dramatic. I had two subsequent nights during which getting to sleep was quite difficult, and I had to climb into my youngest child's bed and wrap myself right round her while pints of anxiety sat, like bad alcohol, in my guts. But it hasn't driven me insane, or made me question my world view. I am still an essentially shallow optimist. I am not damaged.

What I am, however, is host to something that will never leave. It made me realise that you should take great care in what you choose - often in a cavalier moment - to place in your memory, because some things will sit there for ever, like a bad seed; like a shadow on the moon; like a crow on a fence in a dream.

A very tiny part of me now, and will always, consist of an elderly man dying in a wood in Ukraine.

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'Phantom' German Serial Killer Never Existed
March 28, 2009
skynews.com

A mysterious serial killer who has been hunted for 16 years and nicknamed "The Phantom" never existed, red-faced German authorities have revealed.

The prosecutors' office in Heilbronn in the southwest of the country said the forensic evidence belonged to a "woman working in a company in southern Germany". Reports in the magazine Der Spiegel claimed the samples were those of a Bavarian packaging firm employee involved in producing the cotton swabs used to collect evidence.

Doubts about the 'phantom theory' surfaced this week and officials took saliva samples from workers involved in making forensic evidence supplies. Traces of a woman's DNA had been found at the site of the murder of a policewoman at Heilbronn in April 2007. The same genetic code was also identified in connection with dozens of other crimes in Germany, Austria and France during the past 16 years. Investigation into a triple killing that The Phantom could not have been involved in yielded traces of the DNA too. The alleged killer was also linked to the murders of a 62-year-old woman in 1993 and 61-year-old-man in 2001. Both cases remain unsolved.

"The puzzle of the phantom killer has been solved," said Volker Link, a prosecutor from Heilbronn.

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It's pretty crazy to think that all the forensic scientists didn't consider this possibility a long time ago.

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Serial killers working as long-haul lorry drivers have murdered at least 500 women across America, the FBI believes.
Tom Leonard in New York
06 Apr 2009

The women – a mixture of prostitutes, hitchhikers and stranded motorists – have been killed along popular trucking routes over the past three decades. Their bodies have been dumped on highways and at rest stops or motels popular with truckers.

Since the FBI launched a Highway Serial Killings database collecting crime information from around the US and searching for patterns, the bureau has helped solve more than two dozen murders. US truck drivers often criss-cross huge swathes of the entire country, making it easy for homicidal ones to evade detection by police in each state, said the FBI.

"You've got a mobile crime scene. You can pick a girl up on the East Coast, kill her two states away and then dump her three states after that," an investigator told the Los Angeles Times. Many of the victims have been prostitutes and other women with "high-risk lifestyles", the FBI stressed after revealing the hitherto unpublicised initiative to the newspaper. "We don't want to scare the public and make it seem like every time you stop for gas you should look over your shoulder," said Michael Harrigan, the special agent in charge of the initiative. However, he added that "many of these women made poor choices but that doesn't mean they deserved to die".

The bureau said it first saw a connection between truckers and serial killings five years ago when they were asked to help police build a case against a trucker for seven unsolved murders along Interstate 40 in Oklahoma. In each case, the victim was a truck-stop prostitute whose body was found near the roadside.

When the FBI consulted its general crime database and the internet, it discovered around 350 similar cases, prompting the bureau to create a separate highways murder database and a full-time analyst to trawl through the figures. FBI agents said the more than 500 cases in the database "grossly" underestimated the number of such crimes.

Investigators later identified the Oklahoma serial killer as John Williams, a 28-year-old trucker, after he and his girlfriend allegedly killed a woman they had kidnapped from a Mississippi casino. Fearing they had been seen, the girlfriend went to police to say they had simply discovered the body, but, under questioning, Williams admitted more than a dozen murders in several states.

In the case of Buffie Rae Brawley, a truck-stop prostitute he said he bludgeoned with a truncheon-type tool used to test the pressure in lorry tires, Williams reportedly told investigators: "The second she tapped on my window, she was a dead woman." Although he later retracted his confession, Williams now faces the death penalty when he goes on trial in Texas for one of the murders later this year.

Another alleged serial killing trucker, Bruce Mendenhall, awaits trial in Nashville, Tennessee, for four murders after information was supplied by the FBI database. Mendenhall, who denies the charges, was arrested after detectives started investigating a string of prostitutes founded murdered with a .22 handgun along highways in Tennessee and Georgia. After police searched Meldenhall's cab at the truck stop where one of the victims had been found, they allegedly found blood or DNA linking the driver to at least seven victims.

Prostitutes are not always the targets. Adam Lane, a 44-year-old North Carolina trucker, was jailed for 50 years after breaking into a family home in a Boston suburb at night. He was found holding a knife to a 15-year-old girl as she lay in bed. After the information was put into the FBI database, he was subsequently charged with two killings in other states.

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Iran catches its 'first female serial killer'
An Iranian woman has been arrested over the serial murders of five elderly women in the northern city of Qazvin, it has been reported.
22 May 2009
telegraph.co.uk

The woman identified only by her first name as Mahin, 32, has confessed to the murders which were committed between February and May, the Etemad Melli and several other dailies said.

The Etemad Melli said Mahin's murderous modus operandi would be to approach her victims, who were aged between 50 and 70 years old, and offer to give them a ride in her yellow Renault. "The murderer strangled the victims after feeding them fruit juice which contained anaesthetics," the report said.

A local police chief in Qazvin said psychologists believed Mahin's motives could be traced to her troubled relation with her parents in childhood. "It is likely that the murderer took revenge on women who resembled her mother and were of the same age because of her intense hatred of her own mother," the police chief, Akbar Hedayati said.

He said, Mahin, a heavy-built track and field athlete and mother of two, had been arrested after her last prey – a 60-year-old woman – managed to get away from her car on May 11 and provided the police with major leads.

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Russian maniac 'murdered five in home-made electric chair'
By Adrian Blomfield in Moscow
29 May 2009
telegraph.co.uk

A serial killer obsessed with electricity murdered at least five people in a series of lurid experiments to test his home-made electric chair, Russian police said on Friday. The 30-year-old electrician, identified only as Dmitry K, lured victims to his house by posting adverts for computer equipment on the internet. Police in Yekaterinburg, a city in Russia's Urals region, tracked the suspect down after finding the charred body of a law student in a roadside ditch.

Dmitry K admitted murdering the student, investigators said, before claiming that he had also killed several other victims as he conducted experiments on an improvised electric chair that he had invented. The suspect, who worked at a local power plant, told detectives he would confess to the other murders if they found the bodies.

Police say they are investigating at least four other incidents in which Yekaterinburg residents went missing after responding to internet adverts for computer supplies over the past 12 months. "There is reason to believe that the number of victims is higher," Vladimir Davydov, a senior detective in the Yekaterinburg police force, told reporters.

The dead student, named only as Anton A, was the first victim of the killer's research and was murdered in a correspondingly rudimentary way. After persuading the student to come into his garage, Dmitry K overpowered his victim and then wrapped his body with copper wire connected to a generator. The suspect told police he hit a button on his computer which triggered a surge of current through the student's body, killing him almost instantly. As he honed his technique, Dmitry K then fashioned an improvised electric chair which he used to practice on subsequent victims.

According to police, the suspect also claimed to have designed a doormat that would electrocute anyone who stood on it, but had yet to test it. He also asked detectives to return a camera he had invented which used an electro-magnetic ray to erase the memory of anyone he photographed with it.

Russia has established a reputation for bizarre serial killings. In 2007, Alexander Pichushkin, placed coins on a chessboard to keep track of the number of victims he had murdered. He is believed to have killed as many as 61 people, according to detectives. Andrei Chikatilo, known as the Red Ripper, was executed in 1994 after being convicted of murdering and "sexually cannibalising" 52 women and children.

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Girl aged 17 knifes 30 men to death
By VIRGINIA WHEELER
and DEAN VALLER
thesun.co.uk
18th August 2009

A GYMSLIP murderess aged just 17 was being held last night for knifing THIRTY men to death. The schoolgirl stunned cops by owning up to a serial killing spree that started when she was a 15-year-old. She told detectives she wanted to confess before she turned 18 and could be tried as an adult.

The girl - too young even to be named - said she began targeting men in her home city of Sao Paulo, Brazil "for money, revenge and to bring justice". She even SMILED as she reeled off her list of victims - which is feared to make her the world's most prolific teenage serial killer. She calmly bragged to police: "I don't have enough courage to hold a gun - but I can hold a knife. I am confessing because I promised I would do so before becoming 18 - to avoid upsetting my family."

The schoolgirl told how she always used the same knife - butchering one man for throwing a glass of brandy in her face in a bar row. But police were last night still unclear about what drove her to keep on killing. Sources said one theory is she was hired by gangland bosses as an assassin because she was so innocent-looking. The teenager's sensational confession came after she was arrested over a Sao Paulo street fight.

It shocked a country still reeling from the arrest of a TV crime show host for allegedly arranging killings to boost ratings. Ex-cop Wallace Souza, in his fifties, built up a massive audience with dramatic film of police chases, raids and arrests. Former colleagues became suspicious that camera crews from his Canal Livre show always seemed to be on the scene. He denies charges that also include drug trafficking, threatening witnesses and possessing firearms. His son is among 15 others also arrested in the scandal.

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Suspected serial killer arrested in Ohio, after six bodies discovered in house
Paul Harris in New York
guardian.co.uk,
31 October 2009

A suspected serial killer has been arrested in America after six bodes were discovered hidden in and around his house. Anthony Sowell, 50, was arrested in Cleveland, Ohio, after police received a tip-off as to his whereabouts. Sowell had become the subject of a major manhunt after the gruesome discovery of half a dozen corpses at his house in a poor neighbourhood that has struggled with crime and drug problems. Police had set up an emergency response centre and celebrated when news broke that he had been picked up.

Police had originally been looking to question Sowell after a woman accused him of rape and assault a month ago. Cops then obtained an arrest and search warrant and went to his house last Thursday looking to question him about the attack.

Sowell, however, was not at home. But cops quickly made the horrific discovery that the property hid the bodies of several suspected murder victims. On the third floor of the home two badly decomposed corpses were found. Then they found a freshly dug grave containing another body in the basement. Later two more bodies were found in a crawl space in the house. Finally a search of the land around the house turned up yet another grave, containing a sixth body.

Officials were continuing the search today, using cadaver dogs and extending the hunt to nearby houses and vacant lots, thus raising the prospect that even more bodies could eventually turn up. But in a grim twist none of the bodies discovered so far have been identified because they were in such an advanced state of decay. Indeed only two have had their sex determined, both of them being women.

Sowell, who spent 15 years in prison for a rape committed in 1989, was known as a local "scrapper" who would earn money by harvesting metal from rubbish and skips. "He walks around and picks up scrap metal and takes it to junk yards to make a few pennies," said police spokesman Lt Thomas Stacho.

Local people with missing relatives have gathered outside the house where the bodies were discovered, some of them clutching photographs of their missing loved ones. Police have asked anyone who fears they may be related to one of the victims to come forward with DNA samples so that they can eventually help with identification.

[Skylace]

I'm surprised this hasn't been on the local news here. We're very close to Cleveland.

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Death Row Sniper Has Final Appeal Refused
November 10, 2009
Greg Milam

The Washington DC Sniper who went on a three-week shooting spree which left 10 people dead, is to be executed tonight after the US Supreme Court refused a last-minute appeal.

John Allen Muhammad, a decorated veteran of the first Gulf War, will be given a lethal injection at Greensville Correctional Centre in Jarratt, Virginia. Along with his accomplice Lee Boyd Malvo, Muhammad brought terror to Washington DC and neighbouring Maryland and Virginia in October 2002, picking off victims at random in petrol stations and shopping malls. Malvo, who was 17 at the time of the killings, is serving life in prison.

Muhammad’s ex-wife Mildred, who has written a book detailing the abuse she suffered during her 12-year marriage, says police told her she was the intended victim of her ex-husband’s killing spree, with the other shootings designed to divert suspicion away from him.

Mrs Muhammad told Sky News: "It made me feel then, and it makes me feel now, just terrible. I did not ever fathom that John would kill innocent people the way he did. I knew he would kill me and I knew he would do it in a way that wouldn’t come back to him, I just didn’t think he would include other people in his plan. I just don’t have the words to describe the emotions I feel."

Mrs Muhammad says her family decided a long time ago to respect the verdict of the jury who found her ex-husband guilty. But she admits she will think of Muhammad at the moment he is due to be executed. "My concern is for my children. I, as his ex-wife, and my children’s feelings, as their father, are two different emotions. I need to be there for them because I just don’t have a clue what they’ll be feeling."

The case has reopened the discussion about the use of the death penalty in the US - but for some, there is no question of controversy. Marion Lewis, whose daughter Lori was among Muhammad's victims, wanted to witness the execution but could not afford the trip to Virginia. He said: "We had to look at our daughter in a coffin. I want to see him headed for his."