1.The Golden State Killer, who committed at least 13 murders between 1974 and 1986, was known for breaking into his victims' houses, undressing and then standing at the entrance of their bedroom, tapping and scraping his long knife against the doorframe until they woke up.
2.He was also known for turning on the victim's TV, placing a cloth over the screen and using the glow as a light source while he tortured them.
3.When he was eventually arrested, the police noted that the computer in his bedroom also had a cloth over it. It was suggested that this was done purposely so he could relive the murders.
4.In the early 1920s, a German family and their new maid were brutally murdered on their farm. However, the family's patriarch had reported several strange incidents in the months before the murders.
5.These included footprints in the snow leading up to the farm and in the attic despite there being none leading away from the property. Keys went missing and a strange newspaper was found. In fact, the family's former housekeeper had left her job in the months leading up to the murders because she believed the house was haunted.
6.It's therefore been posited that the killer was actually hiding in the attic for a period of six months before the murders.
7.Jeffrey Dahmer, who was convicted of 15 homicides, admitted to cooking and eating some of his victims. In fact, he even gave the people in his apartment building sandwiches which may have contained their flesh.
8.Dahmer was also known to drill holes in the heads of his victims before injecting acid into their brains in a bid to turn them into compliant "zombies".
9.In fact, the life of one such victim could have been spared had Dahmer not been so charming to the police.
10.The Oakland County Child Killer murdered at least four children between 1976-1977. The parents of one of the abducted boys held a press conference in which they begged for their son to be returned. His mother directed part of the appeal to her son, saying she would feed him his "favourite meal of KFC" when he got home.
11.Days later, the boy's body was discovered. He was wearing freshley cleaned and pressed clothing. And his stomach contents revealed that his last meal had been KFC chicken.
12.Joe Metheny would gut his victims and then mix their flesh with animal meat to sell as burgers at his fast food stand.
13.Robert Hansen, who killed 17 women over 12 years, was known for kidnapping his victims before setting them loose in the Knit River Valley where he would track and hunt them like animals using a knife and rifle.
14.Issei Sagawa, a Japanese student studying for a PhD in France, killed and then ate part of his classmate’s remains. After being caught attempting to dump the rest of her body in a lake, Sagawa was eventually sent back to Japan.
15.However, he was never tried for the crime in his homeland and actually became a celebrity there. He appeared on talk shows, embarked on speaking tours, wrote 18 books, worked as a food critic and even starred in soft-core porn movies.
16.Most chillingly of all though, Sagawa admitted in 2013 that he still has “the same desires” to kill and devour other women. “I like elegant women,” he said. “I like intelligence and beauty. And when I am able to see all of that in one person, then I cannot help but wonder what she might taste like."
17.Serial-killer Robert Pickton fed some of the bodies of his 49 victims to pigs on his farm, or else put them through an industrial meat grinder, mixed it with pork and sold it to meat processing businesses, family members, friends and even the local police.
18.The body of pharmacology student, Annie Le, was discovered in a cable chase inside the wall of a university basement laboratory five days after going missing, and on the day she was due to be married.
19.A university laboratory technician was charged and convicted of the crime. Described by those that knew him as a "clean freak," it's believed that he committed the murder after becoming angry with the conditions of Le's lab.
20.David Parker Ray, the Toy Box Killer, abducted and drugged his victims. When they woke up, they were played recordings in which he described in detail the torture they’d experience over the next 30 days.
21.Rodney Alcala, aka the "Dating Game Killer," won an episode of The Dating Game in 1978 — right in the middle of his murder spree.
22.Despite being one of the most prolific serial killers of all time, Ted Bundy actually once worked at a suicide hotline and saved a three-year-old child from drowning in a pool.
23.Leonarda Cianciulli was an Italian woman who, in 1939, learned that her eldest and favourite son was to join the Italian Army. She believed that the only way to ensure his safety was through human sacrifices.
24.Over the course of a couple of months, she murdered three women from her neighbourhood. Afterwards she boiled their bodies and turned them into teacakes and bars of soap which she distributed to friends and neighbours.
25.And, finally, after Albert Fish killed and ate a 10 year-old girl, he wrote a letter to her mother describing how "sweet and tender" her body was, and how it had taken him nine days to consume all of the corpse.
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