Curated playlist

American torturers

Lawrence Bittaker and Roy NorrisLawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris, two men later known as the Tool Box Killers, kidnapped five teenage girls in Southern California during 1979. None of the five survived. Everything happened within a span of just five months. The nickname…
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…
William BoninWilliam George Bonin was an American serial killer, and the prosecution against him once called him "the most arch-evil person who ever existed." Between 1968 and 1980 he attacked boys and young men in southern California, and briefly in…
Leonard LakeLeonard Thomas Lake was born on the 29th of October 1945 and died on the 6th of June 1985, four days after police arrested him. He had swallowed cyanide pills that he sewed into his own clothing. Because of that, no jury ever weighed a…
Rodney AlcalaRodney Alcala walked onto the set of the television game show The Dating Game in 1978, and host Jim Lange introduced him as a successful photographer. Lange promised that between takes he might be found skydiving or motorcycling. The…
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,…
Randy KraftAmong the things investigators found after Randy Kraft's arrest was a ring binder. Inside it was a hand-written list of 61 terms and phrases, neatly printed. Some entries were a single word. One read Dog. Another read Deodorant. A third…
Larry Hall (criminal)Larry DeWayne Hall has confessed to more than thirty-five murders, and he has taken back every single confession. He is an American man convicted of kidnapping and suspected of far worse. Hall was devoted to the history of the American…
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…
Christopher WilderOn the 13th of April 1984, a man stopped at Vic's Getty service station in Colebrook, New Hampshire, and asked for directions to Canada. He was Christopher Wilder, an Australian-American whom the press would call the Beauty Queen Killer…
David CarpenterDavid Joseph Carpenter is the American serial killer whom the press came to call the Trailside Killer. In 1980, detectives in Marin County, California, were searching for a man in his twenties or thirties. Carpenter was 50. Pathologists…
Richard CottinghamRichard Cottingham, an American serial killer born in 1946, claimed in 2009 that he had committed at least eighty "perfect murders" of women in various regions of the United States. By then he was already serving multiple life sentences in…
Dennis RaderDennis Rader, the man who called himself BTK, made a strange request while police questioned him in February 2005. He asked an officer to write "BTK" on the lid of his cup before it went into the refrigerator, instead of his own name. The…
Carl PanzramCarl Panzram told investigators that he had murdered twenty-one boys and men, yet only five of those killings could ever be confirmed. Authorities suspect the real toll in the United States alone passes one hundred, with more victims in…
Joseph Edward DuncanJoseph Edward Duncan III was recognized by strangers in a Denny's restaurant in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, in the early morning of the 2nd of July 2005. A waitress, a manager and two customers noticed a girl sitting with a man none of them…