We asked the BuzzFeed Community to tell us which serial killer couples freak them out the most. Here are the terrifying results.
🚨WARNING: This post contains highly disturbing content. Please continue at your own discretion. 🚨Not all submissions are from Community users.
1. Gwendolyn Graham and Cathy Wood
Also called "The Lethal Lovers," they met and fell in love while working together at a nursing home in Michigan. There, they smothered five elderly women to death in 1987, and were later convicted for each murder. Graham was given life in prison, and Wood was sentenced to up to 40 years.
2. Suzan and Michael Bear Carson
In the early '80s, the Carsons killed three people, including one woman who was their roommate in San Francisco. Michael later said they "had no choice" but to commit the murders, because "higher powers called upon them to dispose of their enemies" and perform deadly rituals. They were both arrested in 1983 and given 75 years to life.
3. Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo
This Canadian couple killed in the '90s. They raped and murdered three women — including Homolka's own sister. In 1993, Karla told authorities she was forced to participate in the murders, but videos that resurfaced years later proved she was more involved than she'd led on. She's currently free, while he serves a life sentence.
4. Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow
The two met in Texas in 1930 and, with a small group of accomplices, began robbing people. They murdered anyone who tried to intervene, most of their victims being cops. Once they were finally caught in Louisiana in 1934, police shot them to death as Bonnie and Clyde tried to escape.
5. Martha Jule Beck and Raymond Fernandez
Also known as the "Lonely Hearts Killers," Beck and Fernandez would meet women in the late 1940s via personal ads in a magazine before killing them. In the end, however, they were only convicted for one murder, and then executed in 1951.
6. Faye and Ray Copeland
In 1990, the Copelands were convicted of killing five men they'd hired to work on their farm in the late '80s. One man who managed to escape told the police he knew where bodies were buried on their property. At the time, the Copelands were the oldest couple ever sentenced to death in the US: Faye was 69, and Ray was 76.
7. Catherine and David Birnie
Over the span of five weeks in 1986, this Australian couple lured four women to their home on separate occasions, where they then raped and brutally murdered them. Fortunately, one girl escaped. Both were given life sentences, but David committed suicide in prison in 2005.
8. Caril Ann Fugate and Charles Starkweather
She was 14 and he was 19 when he killed 11 people in the late '50s — including Fugate's mom, stepdad, and sister. His crimes were technically "spree killings," because he acted over such a short period of time. Fugate was treated as an accomplice. She is still alive, and he was executed in 1959.
9. Judith and Alvin Neelley
This couple abducted, tortured, and killed two women in separate incidents in 1982: A 13-year-old named Lisa Ann Millican, and a young woman named Janice Chatman. They were both served life sentences, and Alvin died during his in 2005. Judith is still alive in prison in Alabama.
—Britney Hose, Facebook
10. Sara Aldrete and Alfonso de Jesús Constanzo
They were the "godparents" of a satanic cult that abducted Texas college student Mark Kilroy in 1989 while he was on vacation in Mexico, and killed him and many others in satanic rituals. Constanzo was killed by police while trying to flee in 1989, and she is still in prison.
11. Monique Olivier and Michel Fourniret
From 1987 to 2003, Olivier found virgins for Fourniret to torture and kill. Their crimes have been described as "one of France's worst serial murder cases in recent history." He was convicted in 2008 of seven murders and given a life sentence, and she was given a 28-year minimum sentence for being an accomplice.
12. Charlene and Gerald Gallego
Gerald supposedly forced and threatened Charlene into luring young girls to be sexually tortured and killed in the late 1970s. There were 10 victims, but Charlene swears she did not participate in the murders. Gerald died from cancer while awaiting execution, and Charlene was released from prison in 1997.
13. Debra Brown and Alton Coleman
In 1984, the couple killed eight people in the Midwest over a period of three months. Their methods ranged from luring victims into the woods to straight-up knocking on their front doors and barging in to commit their crimes. She was initially sentenced to death in 1986, which was later changed to life without parole, and he was executed in Ohio in 2002.
14. Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole
They confessed to over 100 homicides, but Lucas was convicted of only 11 (one being his mother), while Toole was convicted of six. They started killing together after their relationship began in the '70s, and at some point, Toole filleted part of a victim's leg. Lucas didn't eat it because he didn't "like barbecue sauce." They are both now dead from natural causes.
15. Sarah Jane and John Makin
In the 1890s, the Makins were "baby farmers," which meant they took in unwanted babies in exchange for payment. A man later found several infant corpses in a nearby drain, one of which the Makins' daughter recognized, so she turned her parents in. They were convicted of murder and John was hanged in 1893 while Sarah Jane served 19 years in prison.
16. Cindy Hendy and David Parker Ray
Hendy would help Ray, also known as the "Toy Box Killer," to kidnap women so he could torture and kill them in his "toy box" — a trailer filled with medical equipment to use on victims. The crimes took place in New Mexico in the 1950s through 1999, and he possibly killed at least 40 women. She was sentenced to 36 years behind bars, while he was given 224 years and died in 2003 of a heart attack.
17. And Carol Bundy and Doug Clark
In 1980, Clark was accused of killing around 25 people, most of them sex workers on Sunset Boulevard, and Bundy was assumed to have helped. He eventually was convicted of six murders and given the death penalty, while she was convicted of two murders and given life in prison. She died in 2003 of heart failure, and no, she wasn't related to Ted Bundy.
