Book Review
Title: The 10 Worst Serial Killers: Monsters Whose Crimes Shocked The World
Author: Victor McQueen
Genre: Non-Fiction
Rating: *****
Review: As this is a non-fiction book and each chapter related to a different killer, this review is going to be structured in section, each relating to one of the killers. Now, I love anything relating to serial killers as they fascinate me and I have been watching a lot of great Netflix shows like Making a Murderer which I recommend you want. These killers come from all over the world and even I am unfamiliar with some of the names.
Luis Alfredo Garavito Cubillos, ‘The Beast’
Luis Cubillos was one of the most infamous serial killers to come out of Colombia, he was found guilty of killing 138 people mainly young boys between 1992 to 1999 but was suspected of killing over 400. During his childhood Colombia was one of the violent and brutal places to be growing up, Luis was sexually abused on two separate occasions and was physically and mentally abused by his own father. As he grew up, Luis began to develop an attraction to young boys and frequently abused his younger brothers but hated himself for it. Over a few years he systematically sexually abused over 200 young boys often taking them in the day with the excuse of needing help and offering to pay them, giving the poor nature of the country these boys were eager to help. He didn’t commit his first murder until 1992 and he claims to have summoned a demon which ordered him to kill because he has agreed to serve it. Luis was brutal often mutilating the boys but removed their genitals and in the early months of 1993 he discovered disembowelling.
While he was arrested for sexually assaulting a young boy he bribed the police officer to let him go, once he started killing he kept a journal recording all of the details and even kept bus tickets, newspaper clippings and photographs of the children he killed. One such murder was almost his last when the child fought back but was quickly overpowered. Luis also injured himself which left him with a distinct limp which would be a key feature in his identification when he was eventually stopped. By 1996 Luis had killed a 100 children but it wasn’t until 1998 that the manhunt for the serial began in earnest as there was a lot of disagreement about whether so many crimes were committed by the same person, but a coroner agreed that it was one person as Luis was beginning to get sloppy in his killings. Once he was arrested Luis quickly confessed once he realises he was being charged with 110 murders and confessed to a further 24 that hadn’t been connected to him. Despite being sentenced to over 1800 years in prison, under Colombian law the death penalty and life sentences are prohibited meaning in 2002, Luis only had to serve another 22 years before he had to be released and while he would be required to check in with law enforcement, other killers before him had fled the country and their whereabouts are still unknown to this day.
Eric Edgar Cooke, ‘The Night Caller’
Cooke was a serial killer in Australia, in Perth in the 60’s violent crime was virtually unheard of and people rarely locked their door at night giving Cooke the opportunities he needed to find his victims. Perth also has the disadvantage of being one of the remotest area in Australia even today as its nearest city is Adelaide over 1300 miles away. Cooke would shot and kill random people in the street with no apparent motive, initially he killed 2 and injured 3. Cooke like Luis had a troubled childhood and was often beaten by his alcoholic father and was mercilessly teased at school for having a cleft lip and palate, treatments for which weren’t available in the 40’s. Cooke was academically gifted but was frequently expelled stealing, by his mid-teen he was committed petty crimes in order to supplement his income but this lead to him committing arson which led to his first stint in prison. This merger 3 months of a 3 year sentence cost him his dream of joining the Australian Armed Services. Despite this he lied and was accepted into training but was ultimately dishonourably discharged more than once, he eventually gives up on the army and becomes a truck driver, married his wife and had seven children including one son with a mental disability.
His crimes begin to escalate with him committing more burglaries and several hit and runs although some survive despite the serious injuries they are left with for the rest of their life. This continues for months and no one connects the crimes to Cooke or each other as it is seemingly random, the only thing that connects them is the method which changes when he steals the gun, he would kill people with on Australia Day and then he switched again to strangulation making it difficult for police to get a read on him, however, it isn’t long before they get a lucky break. Cooke is arrested and charged with one murder that he is going to hang for and quickly confesses to the shooting, other murders, hit and runs and the numerous assaults and burglaries. However, the people had already convicted 2 other men for two of the murders, one only served a few years before his sentence was overturned but the other was in prison for 39 years before he was released. Cooke was hung for his crimes much to the relief of the Australian public and his wife who had also buried one of her children was drown while his father was in prison.
Peter Kurten, ‘The Vampire of Dusseldorf’
Peter Kurten lived and operated mainly in Cologne in the early 1900’s and he was around at a time when he remembers Jack the Ripper causing terror in London. He had an horrific childhood as he watched his father beat and sexually abuse his mother and sister, and as a young boy he repeated these behaviours in sexually abusing his sister. He also met someone who taught hm to masturbate and torture animals which he took to easily and he began to get sexual gratification from acts of pain. By 1914 when he is called to fight for his county which he later deserts landing him in prison and not for the first time, he has already gotten away with killing several people and he even drops a handkerchief with his initials on it and he still isn’t caught. After the First World War, Germany is crippled and Kurten continues his assaults but these are minor in what is to come in 1929. It is worth noting that Kurten spent 20 of his 47 years in prison and a lot of his behaviours, including sexual violence, were taught to him and normalised. Over days Kurten attacked many people, killing several of them but as his victims differ in age, gender and occupation and he often varies his weapon of choice, the police don’t even consider him. Even when a suspicious police officer asks him how he knew about the crime scene so quickly, he accepts Kurten’s simple and vague answers. Now the police believe there are several killers on the loose and an elite ‘murder squad’ is called in from Berlin to Dusseldorf and for the first time someone connects all the murders to one killer and the hunt begins.
For quite a while longer Kurten evades capture as the police try desperately to piece everything together but they didn’t have the technology we have today to identify criminals. Kurten’s MO also changes again as he stops killing, he still attacks people and is responsible for a string of violent rapes but every single one of the victims live and this is his downfall. One such victim is only spared because she tells him she doesn’t remember the way back to his home where he had taken her but she does and when police eventually get hold of her she takes them to his home but he evades them. That night he tells his wife that his is the mass murderer the police are hunting and offers no resistance when they pick him up at Church. In 1931 he is sentenced to death by guillotine and here we see the most disturbing aspect of his character as he supposedly says that the sound of his own gushing blood will be the ultimate thrill for him and despite many examinations of his brain for any biological explanation of his violent nature, none are found, he is completely normal.
Tsutomu Miyazaki, ‘The Otaku Murderer’
Compared to the previous killers in this book the story of Miyazaki is relatively simple. Miyazaki born with a deformity in his hands was teased as a child and found it difficult to make friends, he was a loner and found solace in comic and anime. As he grew older was disinterested in education despite being intelligent and began working at a printing company owed by a friend of his father’s. However, due to his introverted nature he struggled forming adult relationship and turned his sexual desires towards children and over the next several months he abducted, killed and sexually assaulted several young girl all under the age of 10. As Japan is a country we crime, especially murders are extremely rare even the most seasoned police officers struggled with the limited evidence they had but Miyazaki had a habit of sending letters to the families of his victims.
One day while he is assaulting another child and is chased away by her father, Miyazaki returns for his car and is arrested. While on trial he is declared insane but ultimately receives the death penalty for his crimes as before 2009 Japan had no jury trials instead criminals were convicted by a set of judges and Japan is one of the only countries in the world that still uses the death penalty. However, the justice minister at the time refused to execute death row inmates because it went against his Buddhist belief but this all changed when his replacement was brought in and he executed criminals at an alarming rate that astonished the country and before too long it is Miyazaki’s turn to face the hangman’s noose. Miyazaki was killed in 2009 and I was surprised to see how recent this crime was and I had never heard of it, but for people like myself who wish to go to Japan, these kinds of crimes are extraordinarily rare.
Robert William Pickton, ‘The Pig Farmer Killer’
The case of Robert William “Willy” Pickton was another relatively simple one. He was a slow boy with an IQ of only 86 who liked to pick up prostitutes from the red light district of British Columbia and rumours quickly began circulating that women that went up to his family’s pig farm had a habit of never coming back. The Pickton family are quite wealthy after selling a lot of their land beside some they kept for farming and Willy offered any type of drugs to prostitutes willing to go up there and the supply of women was never ending. However, it isn’t long before a housekeeper finds out what Willy is doing and is threatened to keep silent or she will suffer the same fate. The list of women that have disappeared continues to grow and eventually a Mountie gets a tip that there are illegal firearms being kept at the farmhouse and they obtain a warrant to search the address and there they make the gruesome discovery of many dismembered bodies belonging to the women and the DNA of several more was found in the meat the farm produced as Willy was feeding the remains of his victims to the pigs, which will eat just about anything.
The trial and conviction of Willy Pickton still remains controversial to this day, despite confessing to the murder of 49 women, he was only charged with 6, 20 weren’t prosecuted because of lack of evidence among other reasons and the other 20 were stayed in the late 2000’s. It was argued that Willy was being controlled by his older, more dominate brother Dave although he has never been investigated or committed. The Canadian police also faced a lot of backlash in this trial claiming the aboriginal women were treated as second class citizens which is why it took the police so long to catch Willy Pickton, they also passed a law which made prostitution illegal in 2010 which was dubbed the Willy Pickton Law as it made sex workers more vulnerable to men like Pickton, not protect them from these monsters.
Andrei Chikatilo, ‘The Rostov Ripper’
The case of Andrei Chikatilo shows not only the inadequacies of the Russian police and justice systems but also how serial killers can appear to be normal people, living right under the noses of the very people trying to catch them. Andrei was most active in the 1980’s, killing a total of 53 young girls and boys although a few of his victims were adults, mainly related to the child he has targeted. His victims were distinctive because of the violent stabbings along with the mutilation of their eyes and genital areas especially in the case of the boys who had the sexual organs removed. The state of the Soviet Union at the time of his killing meant that information about the crimes was not available to the media or general public meaning these children weren’t protected because no one had any reason to worry about them and it also rejected Western ideas about criminal profiling and psychologists.
The head of investigation was forced to use these very methods as the body count continued to rise where it was found the killer was heterosexual, not homosexual as they first thought, suffering with some form of sexual dysfunction and this murders were the only way he could become sexual aroused and achieved orgasm. Andrei himself wasn’t a suspect as he was meek, mild-mannered and in his early days been a teacher, even though he has been dismissed due to allegations of sexual assault against his students, he didn’t stand out to police. Even when he was questioned for carrying a knife and rope with him in his car, he wasn’t suspected of the murders, the police also failed to notice the killings stopped while Andrei was briefly imprisoned for theft and then started again once he was released. Andrei went quiet in the late 1980’s for reasons unknown before resuming his killing spree towards the end of the decade but a change in leadership and laws allowing the media to now report on the crimes and the police tried desperately to bait the killer and while this kind of works they fail to capture him until one officer reported he spotted a suspicious man exiting the wood where the latest victim would be found but after seeing his papers were in order, he left him go. This man was identified as Andrei and the police quickly moved in, he was arrested and while he initially denied the crimes after being confronted with the criminal profile confessed to 53 murders and was subsequently charged with 52 murders and was ordered to face the firing squad. He was executed on the 14th of February 1994.
John Reginald Christie, ‘The Rillington Strangler’
Coming from the UK myself, it is impossible to not know John Christie and the horrific events that took place at 10 Rillington Place. John Christie was a quiet, soft spoken man who had served in the First World War and was injured with mustard gas leaving him speaking in a very soft voice that could barely be understand, he also served in the Second World War in the War Reserve Force, which should have been allowed because of his previous violent convictions. However, living in London he took up with a number of prostitutes which seemed to be the only cure for his sexual dysfunction which had caused a lot of tension in his marriage. For the majority of his time in London his wife was living in Sheffield, leaving him to do as he pleased, he killed a number of women, first burying them in his garden even using the femur of one victim to prop up his fence then hiding them beneath the floorboards of his flat and in a storage cupboard.
By far the most horrific crimes he committed were those involving abortions he offered although he had no medical training. One such crime involved a newly wed couple who frequently argued and became violent with each other. Christie offered the wife an abortion when she became pregnant with her second child who they couldn’t support and most procedures like this were illegal in the UK. Christie murdered both mother and the both infants, the foetus and the small baby before hiding the bodies, the husband was eventually convicted and executed for killing his daughter but not his wife. As he was running out of space in his flat, Christie illegally rented it to someone else before going on the run as he knew the net was closing in on him, when the bodies were discovered a man hunt began for him and despite his best effort he was caught, convicted and executed very swiftly. Christie still remains high in the ranks of well-known serial killers here in the UK, along with infamous killers such as Jack the Ripper.
Moses Sithole, ‘The ABC Killer’
In December of 1994, The Cleveland Strangler was shot by police, a man who has previously confessed to 15 murders in Johannesburg and was eventually dubbed the ABC killer by the media as the two towns he haunted began with A, Atteridgeville, B, Boksburg and finally C, Cleveland. However, after being arrested David Selepe, tried to escape from police and was shot but when another body turns up bearing the signature of the Strangler, questions are raised as to whether this is a copy cat or whether the real killer was out there all along. It turns out the real killer Moses Sithole hadn’t even been looked at, Sithole had been serving 7 years for rape which he still maintained he didn’t commit and this was the basis for his defence saying his killing were revenge against the government and the injustice he suffered. Sithole targeted young black women who often resembled the woman who accused him of raping her and over his killed spree he killed 37 women and raped at least 40 more, he was found guilty on all charges.
Moses was an anomaly for South Africa at the time because he was calm, collected and seemed to be a nice guy which hid his darker nature. As he used the same job scam to lure his victims to the remote locations where he killed them, one women who disappeared, her parents offered up the name of the man she was going to meet and the police immediately began closing in on Sithole. Sithole has phoned a family member asking for a gun to protect himself from the police, he agreed but called the police who had an officer posing as a security guard but the other guards weren’t aware of this and ordered the officer to fetch the man Sithole was going to meet, when he refused Sithole tried to run and was shot twice but these were minors wounds. Sithole was arrested and taken to hospital for treatment before he was incarcerated. During his trial he was found guilty of all the murders and rapes as well as some other minor crimes, as the death penalty was outlawed in South Africa he was sentence to over 2000 years in prison and would be eligible for parole in 930 years. However, Sithole was HIV positive and was therefore entitled to serve out his sentence in a hospital but this hospital was considered a living hell as the patients were often treated worse than the prisoners in jail and there is some satisfaction in knowing Sithole has another 900 years to serve there.
The Zodiac Killer
The Zodiac Killer is one of the most infamous killers to come out of the USA, which still remains unsolved to this day. The killings began in California in 1968 with the murder of a young couple, although the boy was still clinging to life from a gunshot wound to the head when police arrived. 1968 was an important year for the USA as Nixon was elected, the Apollo 8 mission launched and Charles Manson preached to his family in the desert but the USA was just coming back from the race riots, the JFK assassinations, the assassination of Martin Luther King and much more when the Zodiac Killer began his reign of terror. After killing the young couple, his next few target were groups of young people and two victims survived and gave description to the police but they were vague at best, coupled with racism in the police depart he evaded capture on more than one occasion. The Zodiac Killer was also fond of sending encrypted messages to the police and media, some of these were cracked and gave hints to more crimes and victims although none were linked to him.
The Zodiac Killer’s reign of terror continues for years with the police received messages telling them that the body count has continued to rise ultimately claiming 37 victims before the communications mysteriously stopped but only the known murders can be definitely linked to the Zodiac Killer. The reasons why the killings stopped are unknown, it could be that the killers warnings that his new crimes will look innocent, crimes of rage, accident etc. could be true and that he was killing and the police just didn’t link them to the Zodiac Killer, or it could be he got bored and stopped, died or was imprisoned but much like Jack the Ripper, the identity of the Zodiac Killer has remained elusive since the 1960’s and will remain so, making it one of the most well-known unsolved serial murder cases in US history.
Charles Sobhjar, ‘The Serpent’
The final serial killer mentioned in this book is Charles Sobhjar and his murders take place in 1975 in Thailand, a well-known tourist destination for young people across the globe. Sobhjar killed several people in Thailand but they weren’t automatically identified as the killing spree of a serial killer and when Sobhjar headed to Nepal, the trail went cold but started up again in his new destination. Sobhjar claimed victims by befriending them since he was a charming gem salesman, drugging and killing them to steal their money and passports, feeding his high maintenance lifestyle. This trend continues in Thailand, India, Nepal as well as South America before Sobhjar is finally apprehended their to claim the passports of a group of travelling students.
He was arrested and convicted to life imprisonment in India but quickly made friends with the guards and prisoners, and at a party he threw with the money he had access to he drugged them all and escaped prison, but the extradition to Thailand was hanging over him where he would face the firing squad. However, he was later re-arrested and sent back to prison for another ten years, bringing his total time served in India to 21 years, one year more than the Statue of Limitations in Thailand meaning he couldn’t be arrested for those murders. What is strange is Sobhjar heads back to Nepal where he can still be arrested for the murders he committed there as the Statue of Limitations didn’t apply there instead of heading back to Thailand where he would be relatively safe. He is arrested and convicted in 2003 for the two murders he committed there and will have to serve life sentences for them. I think this was his goal to out last the Statue of Limitations in Thailand meaning that ultimately he won because he still has access to his assets and manage to masterfully evade a death sentence using his charm and money.
Overall, The 10 Worst Serial Killers was a really interesting book to read, especially since it concerns a topic that fascinates me, however, I was surprised that I hadn’t never of half of the killers that this book talk about and I will definitely be reading more about them in the future. I really liked the fact that the killers chosen for the book aren’t all from one time period or location, these murders take place all over the world, anywhere from the early 1900’s right up to 2010, so some happened in my lifetime, other didn’t. If you are interested in serial killers or murders in general then definitely pick this up and at less than 200 pages I read it in a day.
Buy it here:
Paperback: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
Kindle Edition: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
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