Curated playlist

20th-century American murderers

Eric Harris and Dylan KleboldEric Harris and Dylan Klebold carried out the Columbine High School massacre in Littleton, Colorado, on the 20th of April 1999. They killed 13 students and one teacher and wounded 23 others. Then both died by suicide in the school library.…
Susan AtkinsOn the 24th of September 2009, Susan Atkins died at the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla. Her husband, James Whitehouse, told reporters that her last whispered word was "Amen." At that moment she was California's…
John Wayne GacyOn the 21st of December 1978, an evidence technician named Daniel Genty crawled into a space measuring 28 by 38 feet beneath a ranch-style house outside Chicago. He worked his way to the southwest corner and began to dig. Within minutes he…
Dean CorllDean Corll was the man whose death a frightened caller reported to the Pasadena Police Department at 8:24 on the morning of the 8th of August 1973. The operator who answered was named Velma Lines. The caller was a teenager, and he blurted…
Ted BundyIn June 1974, Ted Bundy walked into the middle of an active Seattle police investigation to collect evidence he had left behind. Bundy would murder dozens of young women and girls in 1974-1975 and 1978. On the night of the 11th of June…
Zodiac KillerA letter postmarked the 29th of January 1974 reached the San Francisco Chronicle and ended with a tally: Me = 37, SFPD = 0. The writer was the Zodiac Killer, an unidentified serial killer who treated the San Francisco Police Department as…
Charles HarrelsonCharles Harrelson went to prison for the murder of federal judge John H. Wood Jr., who was shot dead on the 29th of May 1979 in the parking lot outside his townhouse in San Antonio, Texas. No federal judge in the 20th century had been…
Elmer Wayne HenleyAt 8:24 on the morning of the 8th of August 1973, Elmer Wayne Henley Jr. phoned the Pasadena Police Department from Dean Corll's home in Pasadena, Texas. He was seventeen years old. He told the operator: "Y'all better come here right now!…
James Burke (gangster)James Burke, nicknamed Jimmy the Gent, spent his criminal life beside the Lucchese crime family without ever being allowed to join it. He was born on the 5th of July 1931. He is believed to have organized the 1978 Lufthansa heist. His…
Jim JonesJim Jones was an American preacher who founded the Peoples Temple. On the 18th of November 1978, 912 people died at his jungle commune in Jonestown, Guyana. Among them were 304 children. Jones called the event "revolutionary suicide," a…
Bugsy SiegelBenjamin Siegel, the American mobster the world remembers as Bugsy, despised that name. It came from slang for crazy, and he told people to call him Ben or Mr. Siegel. During his murder trial in 1941, some reporters wrote that his eyes…
Meyer LanskyShortly after The Godfather Part II reached theaters in 1974, Meyer Lansky picked up the telephone and called the actor Lee Strasberg. Strasberg had played Hyman Roth, a gangster based on Lansky, and had earned an Oscar nomination for it.…
Charles CullenCharles Cullen told detectives that he had killed as many as 40 patients, and that figure marks only the beginning of the uncertainty around him. Investigators have confirmed at least 29 of those deaths. Researchers who studied his career…
Jeffrey DahmerJeffrey Dahmer killed seventeen men and boys between 1978 and 1991. He became known as the Milwaukee Cannibal and the Milwaukee Monster. On the night of the 22nd of July 1991, police officers in a Milwaukee apartment pinned him to the…
Timothy McVeighTimothy McVeigh was driving on Interstate 35 in Noble County, Oklahoma, when state trooper Charles J. Hanger noticed his yellow 1977 Mercury Marquis had no license plate. Hanger also noticed a bulge under the driver's jacket. McVeigh…
West Memphis ThreeThe West Memphis Three are three men who were convicted as teenagers of murdering three young boys in West Memphis, Arkansas, in 1993. Around 7:00 pm on the 5th of May 1993, John Mark Byers made the first report to police. His adopted…
Franklin Delano FloydFranklin Delano Floyd died of natural causes on the 23rd of January 2023, at the age of 79, while still on death row. He was an American murderer and child sex offender, and he spent most of his life moving under borrowed names. For years,…
Lyle and Erik MenendezLyle and Erik Menendez became known to the public through a telephone call placed late on the 20th of August 1989. Lyle told a 9-1-1 operator, "Someone killed my parents!" He said he had just come home and found their bodies. Erik could be…
Bonnie and ClydeBonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, together known as Bonnie and Clyde, died on the 23rd of May 1934 on Louisiana Highway 154 in Bienville Parish. Six lawmen crouched in the roadside bushes as a car came toward them at high speed. They fired…
Richard RamirezRichard Ramirez was an American burglar, sex offender and serial killer who terrorized Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area. A California judge, upholding nineteen death sentences against him, said his deeds showed "cruelty,…
Robert Eugene BrashersRobert Eugene Brashers died in January 1999, and while he lived, no investigator ever named him as a suspect in any of his murders. Investigators now link him to at least eight murders in Kentucky, Missouri, South Carolina and Texas…
Andrew CunananAndrew Cunanan killed five people in the space of three months in 1997. Four of them had been his friends, lovers, or strangers who simply owned something he wanted. The fifth was one of the most famous fashion designers in the world. For…
Mark David ChapmanMark David Chapman, who killed John Lennon, was once a beloved summer camp counselor nicknamed "Nemo."
Sam GiancanaSam Giancana, who once ran the Chicago Outfit, died on the night of the 19th of June 1975 in the basement kitchen of his house in Oak Park, Illinois. At around 11 p.m., his caretaker, Joseph DiPersio, found the body on the floor. A gunman…
Joseph James DeAngeloDeputies arrested Joseph James DeAngelo Jr. in the side yard of his Sacramento home on the afternoon of the 24th of April 2018. He was 72 years old, a retired truck mechanic and a former police officer. For more than four decades,…
James Earl RayJames Earl Ray escaped from the Missouri State Penitentiary on the 23rd of April 1967 by hiding in a truck that carried bread out of the prison bakery. Thirty-one years later, on that same date, he died. In the years between, he became the…
Whitey BulgerOn the 22nd of June 2011, agents in Santa Monica, California, used a ruse to lure an 81-year-old man out of his apartment. They arrested him without incident. He was James Joseph "Whitey" Bulger Jr., who had once led the Winter Hill Gang,…
Richard SpeckRichard Benjamin Speck entered a townhouse at 2319 East 100th Street in Chicago on the night of the 13th of July 1966. By the next morning, eight young women who lived there were dead. The building stood in the Jeffery Manor neighborhood…
David BerkowitzDavid Berkowitz was sitting in his parked car outside a Yonkers apartment building at about 10:00 on the night of the 10th of August 1977 when Detective John Falotico aimed a gun at him. A second detective, Sergeant William Gardella,…
Ed GeinEd Gein was a quiet handyman from Plainfield, Wisconsin, and the last receipt Bernice Worden ever wrote was for him. It was a sales slip for a gallon of antifreeze, written on the morning of the 16th of November 1957. By that evening, the…
Albert FishAlbert Fish was caught because of a letter he mailed in November 1934 to the mother of a girl he had killed six years earlier. Mrs. Budd could not read, so her son read the pages aloud to her. The letter carried no signature. Police traced…
John List (murderer)John Emil List left behind a mansion in Westfield, New Jersey, that blazed with light in the autumn of 1971. Every room was lit, day and night, and yet nobody seemed to be living there. Neighbors waited and watched. Then the light bulbs…
Albert AnastasiaAlbert Anastasia was born Umberto Anastasio in Calabria, Italy, and died in a barber's chair in Manhattan on the 25th of October 1957. Along the way he collected the nicknames The Earthquake and The One-Man Army. Few figures in American…
Gregory ScarpaGregory Scarpa Sr. sometimes left the numbers 666, the biblical number of the beast, on his victims' pagers. His longtime girlfriend Linda Schiro later recalled the habit. Scarpa was called the Grim Reaper and the Mad Hatter. He was a…
Aileen WuornosAileen Carol Wuornos was born on the 29th of February 1956, a leap day that comes around only once every four years. She became an American serial killer, and she was executed in 2002 after a long wait on Florida's death row. Her story has…
Sammy GravanoSammy Gravano, known to the world as Sammy the Bull, once faced up to 20 years in prison and received a sentence that amounted to less than one year. In 1994 a federal judge gave him five years, but he had already served four. The judge…
Roy DeMeoRoy DeMeo, a Brooklyn mobster in the Gambino crime family, was found dead on the 20th of January 1983. His body lay in the trunk of his own Cadillac Coupe DeVille, parked in the lot of the Varuna Boat Club in Sheepshead Bay. The corpse was…
Leopold and LoebLeopold and Loeb, two University of Chicago students, killed 14-year-old Bobby Franks on the 21st of May 1924. Nathan Leopold was 19, and Richard Loeb was 18. Afterward Leopold described his state of mind to a psychiatrist with a single…