The Green River Killer" (48+) The most prolific unidentified killer of the Archives. The Green River Killer tallied forty-eight kills between 1982 and 1984 in the Seattle-Tacoma area. It's believed that the killer is a white, middle-aged male. During his two year rampage he enjoyed leaving his victims near the banks of the Green River outside Seattle, thus explaining his moniker. All his victims have been women. He prefers prostitutes, but will kill a runaway or a hitchhiker in a pinch. Some believe that the killer might have died, moved away, was incarcerated, institutionalized, or perhaps just retired. As of August 1988 authorities think that he might have resurfaced in San Diego where he has already bagged ten more women. A viable suspect, ex-law student William J. Stevens II, was arrested in 1989 and subsequently released, died of cancer in 1991. Stevens, an ex-con who used over 30 aliases had a fully equipped ambulance and a police cruiser which he could have used to commit the killings. Robert Stevens, his adopted brother, claims that many of William's alibis were fake. During many of the killings Billy would be on a trip with his family. According to his brother Bill was in the habit of disappearing for a couple of days and rejoining the family before returning to Seattle. Robert believes that during these disappearances his brother would go to Seattle to commit murder.
David Berkowitz: The Son Of Sam(6)- The time was between 1976 and 1977. Disco music, mirrored spinning globes and platform shoes. A gun wielding man prowled city streets. His weapon was a .44 revolver, and at first the tabloid tagged him the “. 44-Caliber Killer. On July 29, 1976, two young women were shot in a parked car in the Bronx. A Younger person, often in parked cars, or dating couples was the target of the killer. One time he shot two women sitting on a stoop. Another time he shot a women walking home from school, trying to protect herself she frantically tried to cover herself with her book, but to no avail. He simply raised the weapon and blasted her. His rampage was not yet over; he’d already killed six people and severely wounded seven more.
At a scene of a double murder, police found a long letter ranting from the killer. “I am ‘Son of Sam.’ I am a little brat,” he wrote. From now on the killer was known by that nickname. The police made no headway and the city was in panic. Finally a break came through when a car was ticketed. On July 31, 1977, a couple was shot and a witness noticed a car driving that had just been ticketed. The ticket was traced through their computer. And name and address came up for one Jewish David Berkowitz, a pudgy-faced postal worker living in Yonkers.
When police picked him up they found an arsenal in the trunk of Berkowitz’s car. Son of Sam had been planning an apocalyptic act, a kamikaze assault on a Long Island disco. Now under arrest, Berkowitz explained his bizarre moniker.
Sam turned out to be the name of his neighbor, Sam Carr. Who, in Berkowitz twisted mind, believed he was a “high demon”. Carr transmitted his order to kill though his pet dog, a black Labrador retriever. Insane as this story is, Berkowitz was found mentally fit to stand trial. He was sentenced to three hundred years in the pen. While in prison David was assaulted and had his throat slit. He survived, but now has a fifty-six stitch scar permanently marring his throat. He has recently undergone a religious conversion and became a jailhouse televangelist, preaching the gospel on public access TV.
Bianchi and Buono (10+) – Their reign of terror started in 1977. Corpses, young women started pilling up raped, tortured, and strangled. The newspapers soon ran stories that a serial killer was loose. They branded the serial killer as the “Hillside Strangler”. The name originated because the bodies were deposited on hillsides. The newspaper was wrong. The news ran stories about one serial killer when in fact there were two. The first of the victims to die was a black prostitute, whose naked corpse was dumped near Forest Lawn Cemetery in mid-October, 1977. About two weeks later, in the suburbs of Glendale a fifteen-year-old female runaway turned up. The victim’s ages ranged from twelve to twenty-eight. All were sexual assaulted, tortured and strangled. One had been burned with and electrical cord; another injected with cleaning solution. And probably the worst of all, one victim was strangled to unconsciousness, revived, then strangled again and so on until the tormentor finally put her to death. Early on in the investigation the police thought there to be two killers involved. Since in the victims two different types of semen were found, also indicating rape. This suspicion was later confirmed when an eyewitness saw two men forcing a female into their car. As a rule, serial killers kill till they are caught. Except in February 1978, four months after they started, the Hillside Strangling abruptly ceased. If it wasn’t for the twisted compulsions of one member of the unspeakable duo, they might have gotten away with their atrocities. After a year of the last Los Angles murders, two young women were found raped and strangled in Bellingham, Washington. Suspicion immediately lighted on a twenty-six-year-old security guard named Kenneth Bianchi, who recently moved from Los Angeles to Bellingham. Before long, police were able to search out that Bianchi and his forty four-year-old cousin, a brutish sociopath named Angelo Buono were the Hillside Stranglers. Even though Buono led and outwardly respectable life as the owner of a successful autos upholstery business he was also a pimp with a long history of violence against women. He was, allegedly did some very bad stuff in front of his children to his wife because she wouldn’t do ask she was told. Bianchi was a small time con artist who moved in with his cousin after relocating from Rochester, New York in 1976. Separately, neither one of them were known to commit murder. But when they were together they would commit unspeakable acts among humans, they brought out the most monstrous impulses in each other. For a while Bianchi had authorities believing that he has a split personality “Steve”, who participated in the murders. But soon, under hypnosis the psychiatrist was able to determine that “Steve” a sadistic sex killer was a fake. In the end, Bianchi agreed to plead guilty and testify against in cousin Buono in order to avoid the death sentence. Both the Hillside Stranglers are currently serving life sentence.
Ted Bundy (28+) – He was a genuine Jekyll and Hyde. A clean- cut college type. So charming and attractive that young woman, meeting him for the first time would climb into his car without hesitation. Once there, however, they found themselves face to face with a monster: a lust murderer who tortured and killed with maniacal glee. When attending the University of Washington, Ted Bundy’s best alter ego came charging to the surface. In the 1974, he killed seven women in a few months, and inflicted permanent brain damage on another, using a metal rod to fracture her skull and than ramming it places. From Seattle, he moved to Salt Lack City enrolling in the University of Utah School of law. Before long he was established as an up and coming young Republican with bright political prospects. However, that the same time, the creature underneath was a brilliant psycho lurking and continuing for the lust of blood. Young women began to disappear from Salt Lake City including a police chief’s teenage daughter, whose nude and mutilated remains were eventually found in a canyon. Bundy also made occasional trips into Colorado. Where are least five women vanished and died. In 1976 he was finally arrested but managed to escape twice. Once by climbing through a courthouse window and the second time but climbing through a hole in his cell. In 1978 he turned up in Tallahassee, Florida. By now the monster inside had taken over. Bundy no long would coax women into his car; he would simply slip into their rooms and destroy them. In one case he was in such a fury that he nearly bit the nipple off on one victim and in another he bit the girl buttock that he left teeth marks. Those marks were later used in court. After Florida police arrested him in February for driving a stolen vehicle they were able to match Bundy’s teeth marks with the one’s on the victim. In trial, Bundy acted as his own attorney. He failed to impress the judge or jury, but he was able to delay his execution by ten years. In desperate efforts to fend off his death, he began cooperating with the authorities. He was interviewed the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, he offered invaluable insights into the psychology if serial killers. He also confessed to twenty-eight murders, but is suspected of more, possibly as many as one hundred. Ultimately the legal process caught up with his. He was electrocuted January 24, 1989. Outside the prison walls, hundreds of people toasted his death with champagne.
Andrei Chikatilo (53+) According to the party line, serial killers didn’t exist in the Soviet State. There was only one problem with this assertion. Even while communist official swore that serial murder was strictly “a decadent Western phenomenon,” one of the most monstrous psychopaths in the annals of crime was at large in the Russian port-city of Rostov. He was Andrei Chikatilo, a mousy looking forty-two-year-old factory clerk. Married with children. He was possessed by a monstrous blood lust; he targeted easy prey, boys, girl, and defenseless young women. He’d usually lure them away from bus stops with a promise for a meal and a ride. But leading them into lonely stretch of woods, he would pounce on his victims like a werewolf. He would commit unspeakable atrocities on his victims while they were still alive. (Biting off their nipples, cutting off their tongues, gorging out their eyes, slicing off their nose, etc.) He was so fierce that in a four week span he butchered no less than six young victims. Chikatilo’s crimes were totalitarian to the Soviet’s system. According to the Communist, no such crime existed in a classless republic like the USSR. Rather than admit that they were wrong, they covered up Chikatilo’s crime. As a result, during the twelve-year reign of terror, Soviet citizens didn’t even know there was a serial killer at large. Leaving them off their guard and vulnerable. The police finally tracked him down in 1900. He was charged with fifty- three murders, but the count is suspected higher. During his trial he was kept in a steel cage to protect him from his victims relatives. He was executed by a gunshot to his head in 1994.
Zodiac Killer ( ) – It was in California in the 1960s. Hippies everywhere, the Summer of Love, the birthplace of the “be-in”, and the land where visitors were advised to were flowers in their hair. At that same time it was the homeland of many notorious psychos. Manson and his “family”, killing seven people in Los Angles, or John Linley Frazier wiped out a family in Santa Cruz. But the worst and perhaps the most unnerving what the night prowling gun man known only as the “Zodiac” who terror began in San Francisco in December in 1968. Before he was finish he had killed five people and seriously wounded two more.
His motive was “I like killing people because it’s so much fun, ” he explained in an anonymous letter. First to die was a teenage couple, shot dead in a lovers’ lane. He killed another couple. Killing the young women with nine blasts from his 9mm pistol (the man shot four times survived). Forty minutes later, the first chilling conversation to place. He caller, a gruffed voiced man told the police “If you will go one mile east on Columbus Parkway to a public park, you will find the kids in a brown car. They have been shot with a 9mm Luger. I also killed those kids last year. Good-bye.”
Panic quickly spread through the area, and the killer began sending letter to the local newspapers, sign by the astrological symbol of the zodiac. Each letter contained a line to be ciphered. A teacher of a local high school did the decoding, the single lined message explained the killers’ motive: “I will be reborn in Paradise, and then all that I have killed will become my slaves. I will not give you my name because you will try to slow or stop my collecting of slaves for my afterlife.”
Two months later the Zodiac killer (as he was now called) set out on a crusade for more slaves. Wearing a black hood with the slits cut out for his eyes and the zodiac symbol painted on it in white. The killed accosted a young couple. First he bounded them with rope, then attacked them with a hunting knife. The young man of the couple survived with five wounds in the back, but the girl stabbed at least fourteen times died.
His last known victim was a San Francisco cabdriver. He shot him in the back of the head taking apiece of his shirt. Which he later sent to the San Francisco Chronicle along with a letter that he promised to take out a school bus in the morning of an unknown date. Fortunately, he never made good with his threat. Nor as far as anyone knows, did the Zodiac ever killer again. The Zodiac simply vanished. He remains one of the great-unsolved mysteries of modern crime.