Terrifying Serial Killers Still On The Loose

If you're going to be a serial killer, you should have a slick name like "The Night Stalker." The name was so slick that some other serial killer copied it.

There were two serial killers called "The Night Stalker." Night Stalker II was Richard Ramirez, who killed 14 people in California in 1985 and liked to leave Satanic symbols at his crime scenes, just to make himself even more terrifying. Happily, he was apprehended with a year, and he died in prison in 2013 at the age of 53.

The Original Night Stalker, now called the Golden State Killer, was also operating in California — he is believed to have killed at least 12 people between 1976 and 1986 alone. According to the Sacramento Bee, he was fond of class rings and liked to steal them from his victims. He frequently tied his victims up before killing them, sometimes with intricate knots, and used a variety of murder weapons. The trail was cold for a long time, but in April 2018 Sacramento police arrested Joseph James DeAngelo, a former cop who still lived in the area where many of the crimes took place. CNN reported that DNA linked DeAngelo to several of the crimes, and in August Rolling Stone noted that he has been charged in connection with 13 rapes and 13 murders. If he's found guilty, this long nightmare might finally have some closure. Like all accused criminals in the U.S., DeAngelo is innocent until proven guilty.

Let's just call him "Il Mostro di Firenze" because everything sounds less terrifying when you say it in Italian. This killer was active between 1974 and 1985, and he always targeted couples, though his motive and MO were extra-specially horrible: he killed only couples who were getting busy outside their homes — a common practice in Italy, where young people usually live with their parents until marriage. And because just killing people isn't horrible enough, he also mutilated the women's bodies, cutting off their genitals with a surgical precision that led police to suspect that he was someone with a medical background.

According to The Atlantic, more than 100,000 men were investigated in connection with the murders, which by the way is just over one quarter of the entire current population of Florence. It was the most expensive investigation in Italy's history, but police never closed the case. They made several arrests, but either had the wrong man or had captured a killer who was adept at escaping, murdering additional people, and then sneaking back into custody undetected.

The killings ceased in 1985, but that didn't end police obsession with the crimes. They were still arresting suspects in 2004 and were still coming up with wild theories, which usually included Satan worship because there always has to be Satan worship in there somewhere. (Thanks, Night Stalker II.) Despite all the effort, Il Mostro di Firenze has not been captured.

In April 1992, a 26-year-old clerk was shot to death in the Indianapolis store where she worked. Three days later, two female store clerks were shot at a Wichita, Kansas, bridal shop. Three weeks after that, the victim was the 24-year-old manager of a boot shop in St. Charles, Missouri. Each of the three crime scenes was in a different state, but they were all in shopping malls off Interstate 70. All the victims were murdered with the same gun, probably a semi-automatic .22-caliber pistol. 

In May of that same year, the killer murdered a 37-year-old woman working at a gift shop in a mall. He'd also killed a 40-year-old man working at a ceramics store. In 1993 and 1994 there were three more murders in Texas, which police have also linked to the I-70 killer.

So besides the obvious lesson here, that you should never take a job as a store clerk at a shopping mall located just off Interstate 70, you should probably also not be a brunette female working as a store clerk at a shopping mall located just off Interstate 70. According to Vox Magazine, five of the first six victims were brunette women, and the sixth might have been mistaken for a woman because of his ponytail.

The killings stopped after 1994, but no one has ever been definitively identified as the I-70 killer.

Between 1985 and 1990, someone raped and murdered nine women in Philadelphia, most of whom spent time in bars along Frankford Avenue. The really bizarre thing about this killer was his brazenness. According to CBS 3 in Philadelphia, he even rented an office in a church in order to establish himself as a professional counselor, though he stopped short of using a giveaway name like "Frank the problem slasher" or a catchy slogan like "I'll end your troubles ... for good."

The Frankford Slasher gained the trust of troubled bar patrons, and then took them out and killed them. Some of their bodies would turn up in apartments, while others were discarded in weird places like under a car or in a train yard.

Police had a suspect who abruptly moved away before an arrest could be made, and that person died a couple of years later. Of course that doesn't mean the case is closed — unless someone comes forward with damning evidence, the Frankford Slasher could still be on the prowl, or maybe sitting in his own little office in a church in your hometown. How's that for terrifying?

Serial killers aren't just a product of Western culture and Showtime; they can lurk almost anywhere. In the mid- to late 1980s, a killer dubbed "Stoneman" was busy in urban India. His victims were homeless people sleeping alone on the streets, and his murder weapons were concrete blocks or stones, sometimes weighing up to 65 pounds, which he would use to crush his victims' heads. According to India TV, he killed 12 people in Mumbai between 1985 and 1988 and then moved to Calcutta, where he killed another 12 people in a single year, although police can't be sure the Calcutta murders were the work of the same person as the Mumbai murders — it's possible that a copycat took over where the original killer had left off.

It wasn't until the seventh victim died in Calcutta that police really started trying to find the killer — at one point they even disguised undercover agents as sleeping homeless people, which frankly sounds like the most terrifying assignment of all time.

The killings stopped after police started arresting people, but investigators were never able to prove the killer's identity, so all suspects had to be released. That might have been just enough to scare the Stoneman into retirement because he never struck again.

In 1986 a woman was found dead in a rice field outside of Hwaseong City in South Korea. She'd been raped and strangled and bound with her own clothing. Not long after that, a second woman was found in pretty much the same state, and by 1991 the total number of victims was 10. 

The investigation rivaled the Monster of Florence in its scale, with more than 20,000 suspects, 40,000 fingerprints, 570 DNA samples, and 180 hair samples. But after a 69-year-old woman was murdered in a similar way in 1991, the killer retired and the police were no closer to finding answers.

In an especially sucky twist, the law said that murderers in South Korea could only be prosecuted up to 15 years after the crime, and that 15-year window closed in 2006. But the statute of limitations for first-degree murder was extended to 25 years in 2007 and then abolished altogether in 2015, according to AFP. Thank goodness for progress.

InfoBarrel calls this dude "Hawaii's first-ever serial killer," as if the accomplishment were on par with Hawaii's first-ever golf champion or its first-ever celebrity chef. It's frankly a pretty weird descriptor for a guy who kills people for fun, but okay. The Honolulu strangler killed at least five women between 1985 and 1986, and his MO was always exactly the same. He bound his victims' hands behind their backs, then raped and strangled them.

Here's what happened next: Police arrested a guy whose girlfriend and ex-wife both said he liked to tie their hands behind their backs while they would do the horizontal tango. Even more damning, the man's girlfriend told police that the murders occurred on nights when he'd gone out after a lover's quarrel.

The suspect even failed a polygraph test, but polygraphs aren't admissible evidence, so police had to let him go. And after that, the murders stopped. It's okay, though, if Hawaii is lucky maybe one day it'll get its "second-ever serial killer," which should be awesome for everyone, but not really.

So to sum up, don't sell yourself, don't work in a mall off Interstate 70, don't be a brunette, don't kiss anyone in a parked car, don't go anywhere with therapists you meet in bars, don't open your door on February 9, don't sleep on the streets of Calcutta, don't get a flat tire, and mostly just don't be female. That ought to protect you from becoming a serial killer's victim. But not really.