Tag: Macabre

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November 30, 2001 — Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, is arrested

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Gary Ridgway is one of the most prolific serial killers in American history. He was convicted of 48 separate counts of murder – but he has confessed to a total of 71, and some authorities believe that he may have murdered more than 90 people, almost all of them women. Favouring strangulation as his method of murder, Ridgway dumped the bodies in forested areas of King County, Washington state or in the Green River – it was the latter which led to him being dubbed the Green River Killer.

The murders took place over a span of about twenty years, beginning in 1982. Although no murders have been confirmed later than 1998, it is believed that Ridgway may have committed more murders between 19998 and his arrest in 2001. Ridgway’s arrest was as a result of DNA evidence gathered in 1987 – he had been a suspect for some of his killings since at least 1983.

Gary Ridgway Mugshot 11302001.jpg
By King County Sheriff’s Office. –
This file has been extracted from another file: Gary Ridgway Booking Photo 11302001.pdf
, Public Domain, Link

As mentioned in:

Deep Red Bells — Neko Case
Skeletons in the River — Divine Pustulence
The Green River Murderer (He’s Still Out There) — Macabre

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March 9, 2001 — Armin Meiwes kills and eats Bernd Brandes

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Rather disturbingly, the man now known as Der Metzgermeister (The Master Butcher) is not a simple murderer. Armin Meiwes – now serving a life sentence for killing and devouring Bernd Brandes – did not begin eating his victim without that victim’s consent.

Meiwes and Brandes met through a website called The Cannibal Cafe. Although the website was only intended as an outlet for fantasies, both men wanted to take it further. On March 9, 2001, they did so. With Brandes’ apparent consent, Meiwes amputated his penis, and both men ate portions of it (the remainder Meiwes fed to his dog). While Brandes continued to bleed freely from his wound, he was stabbed several times by Meiwes, and after his death, Meiwes ate approximately 20kg of Brandes’ body over the next few months, before his arrest in December of 2002.

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November 28, 1994 — Jeffrey Dahmer is beaten to death in prison

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In February 1992, Jeffrey Dahmer’s trial began. He was convicted of fifteen charges of murder, for a total sentence of 957 years, after his attempt to plead insanity was rejected.

He was attacked once in July of 1994 by another inmate who attempted to cut his throat. On November 28, 1994, he was attacked by Christropher Scarver, another inmate, who beat Dahmer to death with a bar taken from a weight-lifting device.

Couldn’t have happened to a nicer asshole.

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May 10, 1994 — John Wayne Gacy is executed for murder

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John Wayne Gacy was a serial rapist and murderer who lived in Chicago, Illinois. He is known to have raped and murdered at least 33 young men – 26 of whom he buried under his house. Most infamously, he often dressed as a character of his own invention, Pogo the Clown, in order to lure children into his clutches.

Gacy was arrested for his murders on December 20, 1978, and confessed two days later – in fact, he confessed to more murders than there was evidence to confirm. He attempted to plead insanity, but failed to convince the court. On March 13, 1980, he was found guilty of 33 counts of murder and sentenced to death. His execution by lethal injection took place in 1994, after years of appeals failed to overturn his convictions.

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June 24, 1993 — Dr David Gerlertner is injured by the Unabomber’s mail bomb

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Gerlertner was a professor of computer science at Yale University who made important contributions to his discipline in the seventies and eighties. He is credited (along with Nicholas Carriero) as the inventor of tuple spaces, a programming concept originally created in the Linda programming language, which inspired similar ideas in several other languages, including Java, Lisp, Python, Ruby and .NET.

In June of 1993, he was the first person to receive a letter bomb from the newly active Unabomber, who had last bombed someone six years earlier. Gerlertner was badly injured by the bomb’s detonation, and although he later recovered, his right hand and eye sustained permanent damage. Gerlertner returned to studying and teaching after his convalescence, and the Unabomber was eventually caught a little under three years later. A violent anti-technologist, he had deliberately targeted Gerlertner and others.

David Gelernter.jpg
By Repdan – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

As mentioned in:

Unabomber — Macabre

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November 26, 1986 — Gary Heidnik begins his kidnappings

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A former US Army media and diagnosed schizoid, Gary Heidnik was 43 years old when he committed the first of a series of six kidnappings in Philadelphia, all of which featured assault and rape, two of which ended in murder. The victim, Josefina Rivera, was forced into helping Heidnik with his subsequent crimes – but also later managed to escape and bring the police down on her captor.

The cops found three other women chained in Heidnik’s basement, as well as the remains of the two he had killed. Heidnik was arrested, and although tried and convicted in 1988, he was not executed for his crimes until 1999.

Var behindscenes hist 04.gif
By Philadelphia Police Department – Philadelphia Police Department photographic records., Link

As mentioned in:

Morbid Minister — Macabre

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December 30, 1978 — Dennis Nilsen commits his first murder

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Also known as ‘The Kindly Killer’ and ‘The Muswell Hill Murderer’, Dennis Nilsen was 33 years old when he made his first killing, that of Stephen Holmes. Holmes, like most of Nilsen’s victims, was a teenaged male. Nilsen strangled and drowned him, then indulged his necrophiliac tastes by masturbating twice over the body. Unlike his later victims (and while Nilsen was convicted of six murders, his own confession to police lists 15), Holmes was not dissected after his death.

Nilsen would finally be caught in 1983, and sentenced to life imprisonment. It is known that he killed at least 12 people (although he claimed more) and attempted at least seven more murders. At the time of this writing, he remains in HMP Full Sutton, a maximum security prison in Yorkshire.

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May 23, 1962 — Graham Young is arrested for murder

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Graham Young was only 14 years old when he was arrested for murder – and the murder in question was that of his stepmother, Molly. He had also been trying to poison his father, sister and a friend of his from school.

Young was convicted on three counts of attempted murder (the murder of his stepmother could not be verified, as she had been cremated) and served nine years in a prison for the mentally unstable. After his release, he poisoned at least another seventy-two people, two of them fatally. He was once again arrested, and this time sentenced to life in prison. He eventually died in Parkhurst prison at the age of 42.

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September 6, 1949 — Howard Unruh goes on a killing spree

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Sometimes, you really think that these things should have been caught earlier than they were.

Surely, for example, someone in Howard Unruh’s unit, back in World War Two, must have noticed the meticulous notes he kept about each German he killed? And although many men came home with souvenir firearms, not many of them went on to decorate their bedrooms with military paraphernalia, or built shooting ranges in their basements.

Whatever the reason, Howard Unruh’s madness went unnoticed until the morning of September 6, 1949. On this day, Howard loaded his captured luger, left his Camden, New Jersey home, and in only twelve minutes, killed 13 people and wounded 3 more.

A siege developed, but Unruh surrendered to police fairly quickly, and at his trial was ruled not guilty by reason of insanity. He was placed in the Trenton Psychiatric Hospital, where he died in 2009. He was 88 years old.

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August 10, 1949 — John George Haigh is executed for murder

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The murderous career of John George Haigh is an object lesson in the importance of forensics in obtaining convictions. Haigh disposed of the bodies of people he killed by dissolving them in baths full of acid – he believed that the police needed a body in order to convict.

He was wrong, of course – although police originally began investigating him based on the items he stole from his victims, an analysis of the residue in his acid bath revealed three human gallstones and part of of denture. Haigh was arrested, and confessed to nine murders although he was convicted of only six. He was hanged in Wandsworth Prison, an execution that caused considerable controversy at the time (for its method – his guilt was not contested).

JohnGeorgeHaigh.jpg
By Sussex Constabulary – Police photograph taken at Horsham Police Station, 1949, taken in the same session as Oates, Jonathan John George Haigh, the Acid-Bath Murderer: A Portrait of a Serial Killer and His Victims, Barnslesy, Yorks: Pen and Sword Crime, p. 147 ISBN: 978-1-78346-214-8. This particular file was found on blogspot.com., Public Domain, Link

As mentioned in:

Acid Bath Vampire — Macabre
Make Them Die Slowly (John George Haigh) — Church of Misery