Films about real life serial killers & murderers.

[link]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zodiac_Killer[/link] The Zodiac Killer was a serial killer who operated in Northern California in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The killer's identity remains unknown. The Zodiac murdered victims in Benicia, Vallejo, Lake Berryessa and San Francisco between December 1968 and October 1969. Four men and three women between the ages of 16 and 29 were targeted. The killer originated the name "Zodiac" in a series of taunting letters sent to the local Bay Area press. These letters included four cryptograms (or ciphers). Of the four cryptograms sent, only one has been definitively solved.

[link]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Christie_(murderer)[/link] John Reginald Halliday Christie (8 April 1899 – 15 July 1953), born in Halifax, West Yorkshire, was a notorious English serial killer active in the 1940s and '50s. He murdered at least eight females – including his wife Ethel – by strangling them in his flat at 10 Rillington Place, Notting Hill, London. Christie moved out of Rillington Place in March 1953, and shortly afterwards the bodies of three of his victims were discovered hidden in an alcove in his kitchen. His wife was concealed beneath the floorboards of the front room at Rillington Place. Christie was arrested and convicted of his wife's murder, for which he was hanged in 1953.

[link]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_River_Killer[/link] Gary Leon Ridgway (born February 18, 1949) is an American serial killer known as the Green River Killer. He murdered numerous women in Washington during the 1980s and 1990s, earning his nickname when the first five victims were found in the Green River. He strangled them, usually with his arm but sometimes using ligatures. After strangling the women, he would dump their bodies throughout forested and overgrown areas in King County. On November 30, 2001, as he was leaving the Renton, Washington Kenworth Truck factory where he worked, he was arrested for the murders of four women whose cases were linked to him through DNA evidence. As part of a plea bargain wherein he agreed to disclose the whereabouts of still missing women, he was spared the death penalty and received a sentence of life imprisonment without parole.

[link]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Lee_Lucas[/link] Henry Lee Lucas (August 23, 1936 – March 13, 2001) was an American criminal, indicted in 189 cases of murder and once listed as America's most prolific serial killer. In June 1983, Lucas was taken into custody for illegal possession of a firearm. He then began bragging about a cross country murder spree spanning several decades. Lucas took police to the crime scenes and burial sites of 246 people and was charged with 189 of the crimes. Lucas confessed to, or implicated himself in, more than 600 murders. He later recanted his confessions, despite professing information only the assailant would know as well as taking police to the crime scenes and grave sites to flatly stating "I'm a liar" in a letter to researcher Brad Shellady. Lucas confessed to involvement in about 600 murders, but a more widely circulated total of about 350 murders committed by Lucas is based on confessions deemed "believable" by a Texas-based Lucas Task Force, a group which was later criticized by then-Attorney General of Texas, Jim Mattox, and others for sloppy police work. Many critics believe his recantations were a tactic to brew reasonable doubt and evade execution. Lucas had a known accomplice named Ottis Toole.

[link]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_Williams[/link] Wayne Bertram Williams (born May 27, 1958) is an American serial killer who committed most of the Atlanta Child Murders that occurred in 1979 through 1981. In January 1982, Williams was found guilty of the murder of two adult men. After his conviction, the Atlanta, Georgia police declared that an additional 23 of the 29 child murders were solved, with Williams shown to be the murderer.

[link]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Chikatilo[/link] Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo (Ukrainian: Андрі́й Рома́нович Чикати́ло; 16 October 1936 – 14 February 1994) was a Ukrainian-born Soviet serial killer, nicknamed The Butcher of Rostov, The Red Ripper or The Rostov Ripper who murdered at least 52 women and children between 1978 and 1990. He was convicted of 52 murders in October 1992 (although he confessed to a total of 56 murders and was tried for 53 of these killings), and was executed in February 1994.

[link]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Strangler[/link] The Boston Strangler is a name attributed to the murderer (or murderers) of several women in Boston, Massachusetts, United States, in the early 1960s. Though the crimes were attributed to Albert DeSalvo, investigators of the case have since suggested the murders (sometimes known as the silk stocking murders) were not committed by one person.

[link]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wayne_Gacy[/link] John Wayne Gacy, Jr. (March 17, 1942 – May 10, 1994) was an American serial killer and rapist who sexually assaulted and murdered at least 33 teenage boys and young men between 1972 and 1978. Gacy buried 26 of his victims in the crawl space of his home, buried three others elsewhere on his property, and discarded the remains of his last four known victims in a nearby river. He was convicted of 33 murders and sentenced to death for 12 of these killings. He was executed in May 1994 Gacy later became known as the "Killer Clown" due to his charitable services at fundraising events, parades and children's parties where he would dress as "Pogo the Clown", a character he devised himself.

[link]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_West[/link] Frederick Walter Stephen West (29 September 1941 – 1 January 1995), was a British serial killer. Between 1967 and 1987, he alone, and later, he and his wife Rosemary, tortured, raped and murdered at least 11 young women and girls, many at the couple's homes. Rosemary West also murdered Fred's stepdaughter (his first wife's biological daughter) Charmaine, while he was serving a prison sentence for theft. The majority of the murders occurred between May 1973 and September 1979 at their home in 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester. The house was demolished in 1996 and the space converted into a landscaped footpath connecting Cromwell Street to St. Michaels Square.

[link]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Bundy[/link] Theodore Robert "Ted" Bundy (born Theodore Robert Cowell; November 24, 1946 – January 24, 1989) was an American serial killer, rapist, kidnapper, and necrophile who assaulted and murdered numerous young women during the 1970s, and possibly earlier. After more than a decade of denials, he confessed shortly before his execution to 30 homicides committed in seven states between 1974 and 1978; the true total remains unknown, and could be much higher.

Based on the Charles Starkweather case [link]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Starkweather[/link] Charles Raymond Starkweather (November 24, 1938 – June 25, 1959) was an American teenaged spree killer who murdered eleven people in Nebraska and Wyoming during a two-month road trip with his 14-year-old girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate. The couple was captured on January 29, 1958. Starkweather was executed seventeen months later, while Fugate served 17 years in prison.

[link]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Hickock[/link] [link]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_Smith_(murderer)[/link] Richard "Dick" Eugene Hickock & Perry Smith were two ex-convicts who murdered four members of the Herbert Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas on November 15, 1959, a crime made famous by Truman Capote in his 1966 non-fiction novel In Cold Blood.

[link]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tate-LaBianca_murders#Tate_murders[/link] Charles Milles Manson (born November 12, 1934) is an American criminal who led what became known as the Manson Family, a quasi-commune that arose in California in the late 1960s. He was found guilty of conspiracy to commit the Tate/LaBianca murders carried out by members of the group at his instruction. He was convicted of the murders through the joint-responsibility rule, which makes each member of a conspiracy guilty of crimes his fellow conspirators commit in furtherance of the conspiracy's object. Manson believed in what he called "Helter Skelter," a term he took from the song of the same name by The Beatles. Manson believed Helter Skelter to be an impending apocalyptic race war, which he described in his own version of the lyrics to the Beatles' song. He believed his murders would help precipitate that war. From the beginning of his notoriety, this connection with rock music linked him with a pop culture in which he ultimately became an emblem of insanity, violence and the macabre.

[link]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Justin_Bunting[/link] John Justin Bunting (born 4 September 1966) is an Australian serial killer from Brisbane, Queensland, currently serving eleven consecutive sentences of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for his role in the murder of 11 victims of the Snowtown murders. Bunting was the ringleader of a "degenerate sub-culture" of murderers whose victims were people they already knew. Under the instruction of Bunting, the group would prey upon the weak and steal their welfare payments. His crimes led to the longest and most expensive investigations and criminal trials in Australia's history. Bunting's targets consisted primarily of people he thought to be pedophiles and homosexuals. He has been described as a skilled manipulator of people and "Australia's worst serial killer".

[link]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aileen_Wuornos[/link] Aileen Carol Wuornos (29 February 1956 – 9 October 2002) was an American serial killer who killed seven men in Florida in 1989 and 1990, claiming they raped or attempted to rape her while she was working as a prostitute. She was convicted and sentenced to death for six of the murders and executed by lethal injection on October 9, 2002.

[link]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_massacre[/link] The École Polytechnique Massacre, also known as the Montreal Massacre, was crime that occurred on December 6, 1989 at the École Polytechnique in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Twenty-five-year-old Marc Lépine, armed with a legally obtained Mini-14 rifle and a hunting knife, shot twenty-eight people before killing himself.

[link]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_the_Ripper[/link] "Jack the Ripper" is the best-known name given to an unidentified serial killer who was active in the largely impoverished areas in and around the Whitechapel district of London in 1888. The name originated in a letter, written by someone claiming to be the murderer, that was disseminated in the media. The letter is widely believed to have been a hoax, and may have been written by a journalist in a deliberate attempt to heighten interest in the story. Other nicknames used for the killer at the time were "The Whitechapel Murderer" and "Leather Apron". Attacks ascribed to the Ripper typically involved female prostitutes from the slums whose throats were cut prior to abdominal mutilations. The removal of internal organs from at least three of the victims led to proposals that their killer possessed anatomical or surgical knowledge. Rumours that the murders were connected intensified in September and October 1888, and letters from a writer or writers purporting to be the murderer were received by media outlets and Scotland Yard. The "From Hell" letter, received by George Lusk of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, included half of a preserved human kidney, supposedly from one of the victims. Mainly because of the extraordinarily brutal character of the murders, and because of media treatment of the events, the public came increasingly to believe in a single serial killer known as "Jack the Ripper". Extensive newspaper coverage bestowed widespread and enduring international notoriety on the Ripper. An investigation into a series of brutal killings in Whitechapel up to 1891 was unable to connect all the killings conclusively to the murders of 1888, but the legend of Jack the Ripper solidified. As the murders were never solved, the legends surrounding them became a combination of genuine historical research, folklore, and pseudohistory. The term "ripperology" was coined to describe the study and analysis of the Ripper cases. There are now over one hundred theories about the Ripper's identity, and the murders have inspired multiple works of fiction.

[link]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffolk_murders[/link] The Ipswich serial murders took place between 30 October and 10 December 2006 when the bodies of five murdered women were discovered at different locations near Ipswich, Suffolk, England. All the victims were women who worked as prostitutes in the Ipswich area. Their bodies were discovered naked, but there was no sign of sexual assault. Two of the victims, Anneli Alderton and Paula Clennell were confirmed to have been killed by asphyxiation. A cause of death for the other victims, Gemma Adams, Tania Nicol and Annette Nicholls, was not established. Suffolk Police linked the killings and launched a murder investigation codenamed Operation Sumac. Due to the size of the investigation police officers were drafted from several other police forces. Two arrests were made in connection with the murders. The first suspect, who was never officially named by police, was released without charge. Forklift truck driver Steven Gerald James Wright, then aged 48, was arrested on suspicion of murder on 19 December 2006 and charged with the murders of all five women on 21 December. He was found guilty of all five murders on 21 February 2008 and was sentenced the following day to life imprisonment with a recommendation that he should never be released from prison.

based on - [link]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre[/link] The Columbine High School massacre (often known simply as Columbine) occurred on Tuesday, April 20, 1999, at Columbine High School in Columbine, an unincorporated area of Jefferson County, Colorado, United States, near Denver and Littleton. Two senior students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, embarked on a massacre, killing 12 students and 1 teacher. They also injured 21 other students directly, and three people were injured while attempting to escape. The pair then committed suicide. It is the fourth-deadliest school massacre in United States history, after the 1927 Bath School disaster, 2007 Virginia Tech massacre, and the 1966 University of Texas massacre, and the deadliest for an American high school.

[link]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Sutcliffe[/link] Peter William Sutcliffe (born 2 June 1946) is a British serial killer who was dubbed "The Yorkshire Ripper". In 1981 Sutcliffe was convicted of murdering 13 women and attacking seven others. He is currently serving 20 sentences of life imprisonment in Broadmoor Hospital. After his conviction, Sutcliffe began using his mother's maiden name and became known as Peter William Coonan. A High Court ruling rejected an appeal in 2010, confirming that he would serve a whole life tariff and would never be released from imprisonment.

[link]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Shipman[/link] Harold Fredrick Shipman (14 January 1946 – 13 January 2004) was an English doctor and one of the most prolific serial killers in recorded history with 218 murders being positively ascribed to him. On 31 January 2000, a jury found Shipman guilty of 15 murders. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and the judge recommended that he never be released. After his trial, the Shipman Inquiry, chaired by Dame Janet Smith, investigated all deaths certified by Shipman. About 80% of his victims were women. His youngest victim was a 41-year-old man. Much of Britain's legal structure concerning health care and medicine was reviewed and modified as a direct and indirect result of Shipman's crimes, especially after the findings of the Shipman Inquiry, which began on 1 September 2000 and lasted almost two years. Shipman is the only British doctor who has been found guilty of murdering his patients. Shipman died on 13 January 2004, after hanging himself in his cell at Wakefield Prison in West Yorkshire.

[link]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Whitman[/link] Charles Joseph Whitman (June 24, 1941 – August 1, 1966) was a student at the University of Texas at Austin and a former Marine who killed 16 people and wounded 32 others during a shooting rampage on and around the university's campus on August 1, 1966.

[link]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moors_murders[/link] The Moors murders were carried out by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley between July 1963 and October 1965, in and around what is now Greater Manchester, England. The victims were five children aged between 10 and 17—Pauline Reade, John Kilbride, Keith Bennett, Lesley Ann Downey and Edward Evans—at least four of whom were sexually assaulted. The murders are so named because two of the victims were discovered in graves dug on Saddleworth Moor, with a third grave also being discovered there in 1987, over 20 years after Brady and Hindley's trial in 1966. The body of a fourth victim, Keith Bennett, is also suspected to be buried there, but despite repeated searches it remains undiscovered. The police were initially aware of only three killings, those of Edward Evans, Lesley Ann Downey, and John Kilbride. The investigation was reopened in 1985, after Brady was reported in the press as having confessed to the murders of Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett. Brady and Hindley were taken separately to Saddleworth Moor to assist the police in their search for the graves, both by then having confessed to the additional murders.

[link]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Dahmer[/link] Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer (May 21, 1960 – November 28, 1994) was an American serial killer and sex offender. Dahmer murdered 17 men and boys between 1978 and 1991, with the majority of the murders occurring between 1987 and 1991. His murders involved rape, dismemberment, necrophilia and cannibalism. On November 28, 1994, he was beaten to death by an inmate at the Columbia Correctional Institution, where he had been incarcerated.

[link]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BTK_Killer[/link] Dennis Lynn Rader (born March 9, 1945) is an American serial killer who murdered ten people in Sedgwick County (in and around Wichita, Kansas), between 1974 and 1991. He was known as the BTK killer (or the BTK strangler). "BTK" stands for "Bind, Torture, Kill", which was his famous signature. He sent letters describing the details of the killings to police and to local news outlets during the period of time in which the murders took place. After a long hiatus in the 1990s through early 2000s, Rader resumed sending letters in 2004, leading to his 2005 arrest and subsequent conviction. He is serving 10 consecutive life sentences at El Dorado Correctional Facility, with an earliest possible release date of February 26, 2180.

[link]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwaseong_serial_murders[/link] The Hwaseong serial murders were a series of unsolved serial murders that occurred in the South Korean city of Hwaseong between 1986 and 1991. Ten women were found bound, raped, and murdered. The murders are considered to be the most infamous in the modern history of South Korea.

[link]http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Kniesek[/link] (German) Werner Kniesek (born 17 November 1946 in Salzburg ) is a murderer who went down in crime history as one of Austria's most dangerous criminals. This was because while already in custody for a homicide he tortured and killed a family of three while on prison leave to look for work for his up-coming release. When he was 16 he attempted to kill his mother by stabbing her with a bread knife, he was arrested and served two years in juvenile custody. After his release he committed a series of burglaries and in 1972 he shot and killed a 73 year old woman, due to an insanity plea he was sentenced to only eight and a half years. A few week before he was due to be released he was allowed out of prison for three days on prison leave to look for work, this was when he committed the triple murder in St. Pölten.

[link]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Son_of_Sam[/link] David Richard Berkowitz (born Richard David Falco; June 1, 1953), also known as Son of Sam and the .44 Caliber Killer, is an American serial killer and arsonist whose crimes terrorized New York City from July 1976 until his arrest in August 1977. Shortly after his arrest in August 1977, Berkowitz confessed to killing six people and wounding several others in the course of eight shootings in New York between 1976 and 1977; he has been imprisoned for these crimes since 1977. Berkowitz subsequently claimed that he was commanded to kill by a demon who possessed his neighbor's dog.

[link]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Fernandez_and_Martha_Beck[/link] Raymond Fernandez (December 17, 1914 – March 8, 1951) and Martha Beck (May 6, 1920 – March 8, 1951) became known as "The Lonely Hearts Killers" after their arrest and trial for serial murder in 1949. Between 1947 and 1949 they are believed to have killed as many as twenty women.

[link]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_Killer[/link] The Phantom Killer is an unidentified serial killer thought to be responsible for a series of slayings between February 22 and May 3, 1946. which became known as the Texarkana Moonlight Murders. The murders occurred in and around the city of Texarkana, which sits astride the border between Texas and Arkansas. The attacks took place at approximately three-week intervals. The Phantom Killer was also known as The Texarkana Phantom or simply The Phantom, The Phantom Slayer and The Moonlight Murderer because he often killed late at night.

Based on - [link]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Kürten[/link] Peter Kürten (26 May 1883–2 July 1931) was a German serial killer dubbed The Vampire of Düsseldorf by the contemporary media. He committed a series of sex crimes, assaults and murders against adults and children, most notoriously from February to November 1929 in Düsseldorf. Kürten confessed to 79 offenses, and was charged with nine murders and seven attempted murders. He went on trial in April 1931. He initially pleaded not guilty, but after some weeks changed his plea. He was found guilty and sentenced to death.

[link]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillside_strangler[/link] The Hillside Strangler is the media epithet for two men, cousins Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono, who were convicted of kidnapping, raping, torturing, and killing girls and women ranging in age from 12 to 28 years old during a four-month period from late 1977 to early 1978. They committed their crimes in the hills above Los Angeles, California.