Jack the Ripper, known as the most famous serial ki.er of all time, ki.ed prostitutes in 1888 London, and the first American serial ki.er was H.H. Holmes in 1896, who m.dered 27. Throughout history, nothing has received more media attention or extracted more fear than a. While we hope that you do not give your baby an evil name, we have a list of the 60 best evil baby names for boys and girls. Hopefully, you will be able to use these unique names for story writing and not baby naming. Whatever the case, enjoy these names that range from sinister to supernatural. 30 Evil Baby Names for Boys.
Jack the Ripper, the Zodiac, Son of Sam … serial killer nicknames are definitely A Thing. But while names like “the Zodiac” may not inspire fear unless you know their context, there are a huge number of absolutely terrifying monikers that will give you the wiggins whether or not you're familiar with the real-life murderers to whom they belong. I’m actually willing to bet that you may not have heard of a lot of them before; once you learn about them, though, I doubt very much that you’ll ever forget them. It’s hard to scrub a phrase like “The Acid Bath Murderer” from your brain.
As it turns out, there actually is a technical term for serial killer nicknames; it falls under the umbrella of criminal nomenclature — and there’s actually been some research done in it. According to Tom Clark of the University of Sheffield, serial killer nicknames have a couple of common characteristics and serve a few different purposes. First, you’ll notice that the names themselves have a particular structure — they usually feature “the ordinary… juxtaposed with the extraordinary,” as Clark puts it in his paper “Jack’s Back: Toward A Sociological Understanding of Serial Killer Nicknames.” I’d argue that this is part of what makes them so freaky to us; they’re the very definition of the uncanny as laid out by Freud — the familiar made strange.
But if they freak us out, then why do we use them? That’s the other part of what Clark’s paper gets at. They “symbolically serve to sustain and alleviate both order and disorder” — or, as Clark later writes, “Serial killer nicknames represent a reminder of the ongoing threat to the normative ideals of contemporary society, whilst also implying that this threat can be overcome.” They simultaneously send us “DANGER!” signals, while also reassuring us that we’ll be able to neutralize the danger.
Sometimes these nicknames come out of the investigation;sometimes they come out of the media coverage of the crimes; sometimes they’re even dreamed up by the killers themselves. But one thing’s for sure: These serial killer nicknames — and these real-life crimes — will definitely keep you up at night.
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British serial killer John George Haigh was convicted in 1949 of murdering six people, although he claimed responsibility for up to nine. He seems mostly to have killed for money; a career criminal, he had trouble holding a job, and routinely took over or sold his victims’ assets once he had dispatched them. His nickname, as you may have guessed, came from his method: After killing his victims — usually by bludgeoning them or shooting them — he dissolved their bodies in vats of sulfuric acid.
Here’s the kicker: Haigh’s reasoning for doing so was a misunderstanding of the term “corpus delicti.” Cornell Law’s Legal Information Institute defines the term as “the idea that the requisite elements of a crime must be proven before an individual can be tried for the crime” — but directly translated from the Latin, it means “body of the crime.” Haigh took it to mean that if there wasn’t a literal body, he couldn’t be tried for murder... so he went ahead and dissolved the bodies.
Haigh was eventually caught thanks to a tip from a friend of his last victim, tried, and found guilty. He was executed by hanging on Aug. 10, 1949.
The ick factor of the Cleveland Torso Murderer is sheer body horror. During the 1930s, a series of human remains were found in and around Cleveland, Ohio, often in the Kingsbury Run area. The bodies were typically beheaded and/or dismembered, and the torso was sometimes cut in half—hence the nickname “the Cleveland Torso Murderer.” Authorities weren’t always able to identify the victims, either; the heads weren’t always found, and in some cases, death had occurred several months — or even a year — prior to discovery.
Twelve victims were originally attributed to the Cleveland Torso Murderer, although the “Lady of the Lake,” who was found in 1934 before any of the other victims, is thought to be an additional victim; indeed, some theories posit that up the Cleveland Torso Murderer may have been responsible for up to 20 deaths. The murders remain unsolved.
By the way, the Cleveland Torso Murderer had a second nickname that’s just as terrifying as the first: They were also referred to as “The Mad Butcher Of Kingsbury Run.”
Dorothea Helen Puente derived her income from two sources in Sacramento, Calif.: She ran a 16-room boarding house for elderly and infirm people located at 1426 F Street, and she rented out an upstairs apartment in downtown Sacramento. But her income didn’t just come from rent; she had a habit of cashing her tenants’ Social Security checks, for one thing. Her tenants, meanwhile, had a habit of… going missing.
Nov. 11, 1988 changed all that, though. That’s the day that homicide detectives visited the boarding house at the behest of a social worker who was concerned about a missing client — the boarding house being said client’s last known address. The house was searched, but the search yielded nothing. The backyard, however? That’s another story. After a tenant reported having seen the backyard full of holes that were later filled in, the detectives did some literal digging… and found human remains.
Puente wasn’t a person of interest yet, so she was able to escape Sacramento and head to Los Angeles — after which police excavating the backyard of the house on F Street found more six bodies in the ground. She was eventually caught in Los Angeles and charged with a total nine counts of murder; in 1993, she was convicted of three killings and given a sentence of life without parole. The newspapers came up with the nickname “The Death House Landlady.'
She died in prison on March 27, 2011.
Admittedly, Dennis Rader’s nickname isn’t at all frightening if you don’t know what it stands for. But, uh, it’s short for “Bind, Torture, Kill,” sooooo… yeah.
If you’re at all interested in serial killers, you almost certainly already know about Rader; he’s one of the most infamous killers in history. Like Ted Bundy, Rader had a carefully constructed image that belied his crimes — he was even able to hide it all from his family, who didn’t discover he was BTK until the FBI told them after they arrested him in 2005. Between 1974 and 1991, Rader killed 10 people in Wichita, Kan., typically by strangling them with any one of a variety of materials: Rope, plastic bags, nylon stockings, his hands, you name it. He named himself; in letters he wrote to the media, he always signed off as BTK, which he at one point had clarified as standing for “Bind, Torture, Kill.”
After killing his last known victim — Dolores E. Davis in 1991 — he actually stopped both killing and writing for over a decade. When he started writing letters and leaving a trail of puzzles for the police and the media in 2004, though, it signaled the beginning of the end: The police tracked him down, and he was arrested at his home on Feb. 25, 2005.
He was charged with 10 counts of first degree murder on Feb. 28, 2005; he pleaded guilty on June 27 and was sentenced on Aug. 18 to 10 consecutive life sentences. He’s currently incarcerated at the El Dorado Corrections Facility in Kansas.
No, not Jack Kevorkian. I’m talking about two different serial killers here: Maxim Petrov, a Russian physician who killed and robbed his patients; and Harold Shipman, who is one of the most prolific serial killers in history. Both of them have been called 'Doctor Death.'
Petrov began robbing his patients in 1997; he would arrive unannounced at their homes, anesthetize them, and make off with valuable belongings while they were unconscious. In 1999, though, he committed his first murder when the daughter of a patient arrived home while he was in the middle of committing the crime. He killed both of them, completed the robbery, and then changed his MO: Instead of simply anesthetizing his victims, he began lethally injecting them instead. He set fire to their homes afterward to destroy all the evidence.
Eventually the police figured out the pattern and arrested Petrov in January of 2000. He was tried for 17 murders, although it’s suspected that he actually may have committed up to 19; he was found guilty of 12 of them in 2002 and sentenced to life in prison.
Shipman, meanwhile, graduated from the Leeds School of Medicine in 1970; by the time he was arrested in 1998, he may have killed as many as 260 of his patients. He was actually investigated early in 1998 after several colleagues became concerned about the high death rate of Shipman’s patients; however, the police didn’t find sufficient evidence and let the investigation go. After relatives of Kathleen Grundy, who had been found dead on June 24, 1998, became concerned about the authenticity of Grundy’s will, they had Grundy exhumed — and a subsequent examination found traces of diamorphine in her body. Shipman had been the last person to see her alive; he signed her death certificate; and most astonishingly, the will left hundreds of thousands of pounds to him.
He was arrested, and on Sept. 7, 1998, he was charged with 15 counts of murder, plus one count of forgery. On Jan. 31, 2000, he was found guilty of all 15 and sentenced to 15 consecutive life sentences. He died by suicide while incarcerated on Jan. 13, 2004.
I mean, “baby farming” in and of itself is both a terrifying phrase and concept; as you may remember from our discussion of Amelia Dyer a little while ago, “baby farmers” during the Victorian era took in unwanted babies and children for money. Rather a lot of baby farmers also became serial killers (as Dyer did), dispatching their charges so as to make the money they collected for them go further. There’s obviously a lot that’s disturbing about… well, all of this, but to me, the most disturbing thing of all is the fact that we have no real idea of just how many children lost their lives to baby farmers-turned-murderers.
Amelia Sachs and Annie Walters, for example — the duo known as the Finchley Baby Farmers — operated for just a few years at the turn of the century, but killed an unknown number of babies and children; some estimates peg the number at around 20, but honestly, we don’t know and we probably never will. They were caught when Walters’ landlord became suspicious, and after a phenomenally short trial and jury deliberation — the trial took place over two days in January of 1903 and the jury arrived at their verdict within 40 minutes, they were found guilty. They were executed by hanging on Feb. 3, 1903 — the first women ever to be hanged at Holloway prison in London.
Nannie Doss earned a lot of nicknames: The Giggling Nanny, the Lonely Hearts Killer, the Jolly Black Widow… but none of them freaks me out in quite the same way “The Giggling Granny” does. I suspect it has something to do with the reasons we often find old people scary in horror movies. (That video is worth watching, as is all of Blue Lavasix’s YouTube channel — long story short, it all goes back to the trope of the “old hag” in folklore.)
In any event, Nancy Hazel was born on Nov. 4, 1905 in Alabama. She was married no fewer than five times and had a whole bunch of children from all those unions — but mysteriously, her husbands and other relatives periodically disappeared or died unexpectedly. She was caught after her fifth husband, Samuel Doss, was admitted to the hospital with something that looked like the flu in the fall of 1953; the hospital diagnosed him with a severe digestive tract infection, treated him, and released him. He died that night — a death which would have enabled Doss to collect on his two life insurance policies. An autopsy revealed a massive amount of arsenic in his system, leading to the arrest of Nannie Doss.
The case against Doss focused only on Samuel; she pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison in 1955. However, it’s suspected that she killed four of her husbands, two of her children, two of her sisters, her mother, one of her grandsons, and one of her mothers-in-law. She died of leukemia while incarcerated in 1965.
OK, so technically, this one is a serial murder nickname, not a serial killer nickname; the case itself is what's referred to as the Brides in the Bath Murders, while the killer is usually just called by his given name, George Joseph Smith. It’s still pretty freaky sounding, though, and to be honest, in my head, I keep calling Smith the Brides in the Bath Murderer, so… let’s roll with it.
Smith just barely meets the FBI's definition of 'serial killer'; he married, then murdered three women in the UK between 1912 and 1914. Those weren’t his only wives, although they were the least fortunate of all of them: He married seven women over the course of his life, cleaning out their savings and vanishing each and every time. It was after he killed Margaret Elizabeth Lloyd, however, that everything began to unravel: After Lloyd was found drowned in the bath, a former landlord of Smith’s, Joseph Crossley, wrote to the Metropolitan Police, pointing out how similar the circumstances of her death were to two other cases — those of Bessie Williams and Alice Smith, both of whom had been married to George Joseph Smith. The ensuing investigation was rather successful indeed.
Although Smith was only charged with the murder of Bessie Smith, née Munday, the other two deaths were used in court to establish Smith’s MO — and when the time came for the jury to deliberate, it took them a mere 20 minutes to find him guilty. Smith was executed by hanging on Aug. 13, 1915.
Charles Albright was only convicted of the murder of one person, which means that he’s not officially a serial killer. He was charged with the murders of two additional people, though; if he had been convicted of all three, he would have fit the FBI’s definition. (According to the FBI, a serial murder is “the unlawful killing of two or more victims by the same offender(s), in separate events.”)
Here are the facts:
On Dec. 13, 1990, Dallas-based sex worker Mary Lou Pratt was found dead. She had been shot in the back of her head, and her eyes were missing.
On Feb. 19, 1991, Susan Peterson, also a sex worker in Dallas, was found dead. She had been shot three times; her eyes, too, were missing.
On March 19, 1991, Shirley Williams — a third sex worker operating in Dallas — was found dead. She had been shot twice; she also had bruises on her face and a broken nose. Her eyes were missing.
You can see where the name “The Eyeball Killer” came from.
Albright was arrested at home on March 22, 1991, charged with all three murders, and tried in December of that year. He was found guilty of the murder of Shirley Williams and sentenced to life in prison. According to “See No Evil,” a long form piece about Albright and the Eyeball Murders published in Texas Monthly in 1993, Albright’s friends and lawyers maintain that the person who should have been arrested for the crimes was Axton Schindler, who was another person of interest in the case — but even so, I feel confident in saying that the name “The Eyeball Killer” wins the award for Most Terrifying Serial Killer Name In History.
Childhood normally is considered a time to eat, play, read story book and cause petty nuisance. Sometimes that nuisance – if not kept under close observance – can take extremely ugly turns.
The number of child killers is increasing every year. Their crimes are not as petty as stealing candy or toy but abduction and murder even sexual assault. Can a child commit such crimes? Here is a list that will change your scepticism into belief – the horrific children who were killers:
10. George Stinney (Born – 1929)
On June 16, 1944, when 14 years old young George Stinney was executed the US set a record of the youngest person to be legally executed during the twentieth century. Stinney had murder of two girls named Betty June Binnicker (11 years old) and Mary Emma Thames (8 years old). Their bodies were found in a hole full of mud. The girls had severe fractured skulls, which were supposedly inflicted by a railroad spike found at some distance from the town. In his confession Stinney said that he intended to have s.x with Betty but somehow ended up killing the girls. He was put up for and was immediately sentenced to death by the electric chair.
Interesting Fact: There was no physical evidence to convict him of the murder; his execution was passed off based on circumstantial evidence in a trial of only 2 hour long. More importantly the sole evidence of Stinner’s crime was that the girls had spoken with Stinney and his sister shortly before they were murdered. Stinney was an African-American belonging to a poor working class family. In this light the case was later criticized as “suspicious at best and a miscarriage of justice at worst”.
9. Lionel Tate (Born – 1987)
Mother Kathleen Grossett-Tate was babysitting Tiffany when one day she left the baby with her son Lionel (14 years old) who was watching the television while she went upstairs. At one time she heard the children screaming and yelled back at them to be quiet, but didn’t go downstairs to check what the commotion was all about. An hour later Lionel called to his mother and told her that they were wrestling and he had slammed baby Tiffany’s head on the table; the girl was not breathing.
Medical examination reported the cause of death was sharp stomping that lacerated Tiffany’s liver. The girl also suffered from brain-swelling and fractured skull & rib from a beating that lasted from one to five minutes, and 35 other injuries. Tate later said that he had jumped on her from the staircase. In 2001 Tate was sentenced to lifetime imprisonment without parole, but his sentence was overturned as his mental competency was not tested before or during the trial. He was released in 2004 with on one year’s house arrest and 10 years’ probation.
8. Barry Dale Loukaitis (born – 1981)
In 1996, the Frontier Middle School witnessed the death of two students and a teacher in the algebra class. 14-year-old boy Barry Dale Loukaitis, suffering delusional and messianic thoughts went on a shooting spree. He was dressed up like a gunslinger from the Wild West in a black duster, and armed with as many as 3 guns (a .30-30 caliber rifle, a .357 caliber pistol and a .25 caliber pistol) all of which belongs to his father. The students in the class were held hostage for 10 minutes before a gym coach outwitted Loukaitis.
It was also reported that when Loukaitis saw his classmates panic he said “This sure beats algebra, doesn’t it?” The quote is from Stephen King’s novel – Rage, in which the protagonist kills two teachers and takes his algebra class hostage. Barry was convicted to two life sentences, and in addition to that 205 more years in prison.
7. Craig Price (Born – 1974)
In 1989 Price was charged with the murder of Joan Heaton (39), her two daughters, Jennifer (10) and Melissa (8), at their home. He had stabbed the 8 year old so fiercely that the knife broke off in Melissa’s neck. Joan was stabbed about 60 times while the girls had 30 stab wound inflicted on them. Initially the authorities suspected a burglar and looked around the neighborhood for cut or wound in the hand of any man. They found Craig Price with a wound in his wrist.
On investigating Craig’s room they found the knife, gloves and other items with blood dry on them. He admitted his crime and of another murder for which he had been a suspect for two years. Craig was tried and convicted of murder before his 16th birthday.
6. Joshua Phillip (Born – 1984)
One day, after Joshua Phillips left for school, his mother went to clean his room. While cleaning she noticed a wet spot under her son’s bed and imagined it was probably a leak from his waterbed. So she dug deep and found electrical tape holding the frame together. Then she removed enough tape to discover the body of an 8 year-old girl hidden inside the pedestal of Phillips’s waterbed. It was the dead body of Maddie Clifton, a neighbour girl who had been missing for the past 7 days.
People were quiet shocked because Phillips was one of the neighbors who had volunteered to search for the missing girl. He said he accidentally hit her in the eye with a baseball bat, and then dragged her to his room where he stabbed her 11 times and clubbed with a baseball bat out of panic. Because he was under 16, Phillips could not be sent for death penalty. He was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.
5. Eric Smith (Born – 1980)
At 13, Eric Smith was subjected to bullying for of his thick glasses, freckles, long red hair, and his elongated ears. These were supposedly the side effect of a medicine his mother had taken for her epilepsy when she was pregnant. One day Smith was charged for the murder of a 4 year-old boy, Derrick Robie. Smith had strangled the boy and had smashed his head by large stones, and after all this had even sexual assaulted the corpse. For some reason Smith could not give a definite answer as to why he had committed the crime. A psychiatrist diagnosed Smith and found out the answer, he was suffering from intermittent explosive disorder (a dangerous condition where a person loses control of the inner rage). Smith was convicted of second-degree murder and sent to prison.
Serial Killer Names For Girls Boys
4. Graham Young (Born – 1947)
Graham Young, from an early age was fascinated with chemistry, especially poison. He idolized murderers such as Adolf Hitler, William Palmer, Dr. Hawley Crippen, among others. Young began experimenting with poisons at the age of 14 and started buying chemicals in the name of school experiment. His family and friends were his victims. His father suddenly on day becomes ill, next the wife and then the daughter. All of them suffered from continuous vomiting, diarrhea and stomach pains. In 1962, Young kills his grandmother via poison.
Suspicious about the odd experiments, a teacher inspected Young’s desk after school and found poisons, essays about famous prisoners, and sketches of dying men. Young was sent to hospital where he started poisoning hospital staff and fellow inmates even causing a death. At the age of 23 Young was released and he went to live with his sister. But his old urge remained and he started poisoning people again. Young was sent back to prison where he eventually died many years later.
3. Jon Venables And Robert Thompson (Both Born – 1982)
Jon and Robert found a little boy – James Bulger, waiting for his mother and the idea of the little boy getting knocked over by a vehicle thrilled them. They took the little boy and started walking while punching, kicking him all the way. They picked little James up and dropped him on his head. Then they took him to the local railway and flung paint in his left eye beat him with bricks, and hit him with an iron bar and finally laid James’s body on the railroad track. James reportedly died sometime before the train hit him.
2. Jesse Pomeroy (Born – 1859)
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Pomeroy showed cruel streaks at the age 11. He had once trapped seven children and tied and tortured them using a knife or pins. He was soon caught and sent to a reform school, where he was to stay until he was 21, but was released after a year on accounts of good behaviour.
After three years he reportedly kidnapped and killed a 10 year old girl, named Katie Curran. He was also accused of murdering a 4 year old boy, whose mutilated body was found in a Bay. Jesse Pomeroy was sentenced to life imprisonment making him the youngest human convicted of first degree murder, in the history of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
1. Mary Bell (Born – 1957)
3 year old Brian Howe had been strangled by 11 year old Mary Bell. His hair was cut, his thighs were gull of punch marks, his genitals were partially skinned and the letter “M” had been imprinted on his stomach.
Famous Serial Killer Nicknames
Mary such behaviour can be reason with the terrible life she was born in. She, for some reason grew up believing her father (Billy Bell) was a criminal who had been earlier arrested for armed robbery. No one really knows her biological father’s identity. Mary at the age of 4 was forced into engagements with men by her prostitute mother. After her trial Mary- on account of her generousness- was sent to all-boys facility.