There is a good chance the mystery of Jack the Ripper has been solved, with forensic evidence pointing to Aaron Kosminski, a Jewish Polish immigrant living in London at the time. But the real mystery still persists—how are serial killers born and can we stop them from happening? This may never truly be known, but we decided to take a look at some other notorious serial killers and see if we can find some similarities.
Here are some of Jack’s colleagues in the eternal league of evil.
1.) In the early 1980’s a British man named Dennis Linsen would lure boys and young men to his flat and they’d never be heard from again. Linsen would invite them up for sex and company, strangle them to death and lay their bodies in bed with him until the corpse was completely rotten, supposedly as a way to alleviate his insane loneliness. He was eventually caught when a worker found the neighborhood pipes clogged with human meat.
2.) Gilles De Rais is said to be the father of serial killing. During the 1400’s, he was a captain in St. Joan of Arc’s army. He also captured, tortured, raped and murdered at least 80 children, but given his rank and power some estimate the number to be 200 or even as high as 600. He would lure the children in with candies and then torture them for his own sexual pleasure. He would eventually kill them, making sure to sit on them so he could feel them dying. He also enjoyed bathing in their blood. Curiously, after each victim he would go to his family’s chapel and whip himself, praying for forgiveness.
3.) Adolfo Constanzo started a cult around a deity named ‘Kadiempembe’, a sort of Satan-like figure. He acted as an advisor and seer for members of the Mexican community, using fortune telling techniques and supposedly bestowing upon their men powers of invisibility and invincibility. All he required was blood sacrifice. When police finally caught him at his ranch outside Matamoros, they found buried corpses with their genitals chopped off and organs removed. Constanzo would have the parts boiled and the gang members would drink the brother to give them strength.
4.) Charles Sobhraj is known as “The Serpent” both for his penchant for poisoning his victims, finishing them off only when they are too weak to fight back, and for his uncanny skill as an escape artist. Between 1975 and 1976, Sobhraj killed 20 people along the “hippie trail” that winds its way through Asia. He would befriend the peace loving western tourists and poison them with pills and powders before strangling them or burning them alive. He has escaped at least five times from different prisons, using his concoctions to poison his guards.
5.) Amongst all the senseless killing done on behalf of the Nazi party in Germany, many people forget the murders Paul Ogorzow committed purely to fulfill his own extremely misogynistic fantasies. During the time of WWII, Berlin would black out the street lights after a certain hour to reduce the risk of being bombed by enemy forces. Orgozow used this to his advantage, brutally stabbing and choking women coming home on the S-Bahn train after their late shifts at the factories. Eight times he got away with these killings, before being guillotined by the Nazi party, who told the public he was a British spy.
6.) Vlado Taneski was a respected journalist in Macedonia who got the inside scoop of a story about the murders of three cleaning ladies. Macedonian police wondered if the his scoop was a little TOO inside. Some of the details of Tanseki described in in his article were never released to the public, including how the killer tied the victims using a telephone cord. His DNA matched that of the semen left at the scene of the crime and before going to trial Taneski killed himself in his cell. It was later revealed that he had a troubling relationship with his mother who was also a cleaning lady. All three of his victims creepily resembled her.
7.) Hiroshi Maeue suffered from paraphillic psychosexual disorder, which is a disorder where the person can only get off by hurting other people, and in Maeue’s case, choking them to death. Maeue had an unusual method of choosing his victims, using online suicide pacts where people would meet up to commit suicide without the feeling of dying alone. Maeue would tell his victims that he wanted to die peacefully together, but then force himself upon them sexually and strangle them. He would record the deaths on camera and watch them later.
8.) Karl Denke was a popular guy around the town of Muensterberg, Germany (now technically part of Poland), so popular in fact that nobody suspected that he was in fact a very successful cannibal. Indeed, it seemed “Papa Denke” as he was called in town would invite people over to his home, butcher them, then use their remains to make suspenders or pickle their meat and sell it to the townspeople as pickled pork.
9.) Robert Ben Rhoades was a trucker who in the late 80’s to early 90’s went on a killing spree, picking up female hitchhikers on the road and sexually torturing them before murdering them in the back of his truck. Rhoades was really into bondage and S&M and even carried a “rape kit” consisting of needles, whips and dildos. When he was arrested they found a naked woman chained to his cab along with a journal cataloging all of his victims.
It seems to me a lot of these killers suffer from some kind of mental illness or extreme loneliness. As creepy as it is reading about them, maybe it’s good that we be able to see the signs of lunacy and catch a maniac before he strikes. (Also, guys, let’s all agree not to hitchhike.)
That just sounds like your asking for a bad time to me.
