The Most Dangerous Serial Killers Of The 1970s

The 1970s played host not only to disco and a gas crisis but the criminal careers of 13 men who collectively ended over 600 lives.

What allowed these men to commit atrocities was the specter of inept police work and the mildest of cunning. Some remained active because they could hold down family life and pretend at respectability. Others could not have made their deviance plainer, and were still let off the hook repeatedly.

Be warned: these men were monsters, and the things they did were horrific. Also, if you like cabbage soup (for some reason), this might turn you off it. As Ted Bundy said to the New York Times, "For people to want to condemn someone, to dehumanize someone like me is a very popular and effective, understandable way of dealing with a fear and a threat that is incomprehensible." But he was a serial killer, so maybe he is not the best judge.

José Paz Bezerra, the Morumbi Monster, killed from 1960 to 1971. Aventuras Na História stated that his father contracted leprosy, making him unable to work. His mother turned to sex work to support the family. 

Bezerra was in and out of juvenile detention for petty crimes until 18, when he joined the Brazilian Army. However, he was accused of theft and lost his position, returning to São Paulo. That was his hunting ground. He carried his overwhelming hatred for his mother into murdering women who reminded him of her. His good looks and easy charm helped him to lower his victims' defenses. He would leave their corpses in vacant lots bound, gagged, and sexually abused. 

In the end, he was turned in by his girlfriend, who immediately confessed what he had done when she was questioned about a theft. But because Brazil has a maximum sentence of 30 years, Folha De S. Paulo reported that Bezerra has been free since 2001. He said that his years in prison had caused him to reflect on what he had done and change how he thought.

Pedro López earned his nickname the Monster of the Andes. According to Biography, he is confirmed to have murdered 110 girls across Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador in the 1970s. In 1980, he led the police to over 50 graves. It's possible that he murdered 350 girls in total.

Edit International reported that, in 1978, having already killed a hundred girls, López was captured by the indigenous Ayacucho community. They buried him up to his neck and covered his head with syrup, intending to let ants eat him alive. An American missionary stopped this, promising that she would bring him to the police. Either she or the Peruvian police instead drove to the border of Colombia and released him, where he immediately resumed killing.

For his crimes, he served just 14 years (he received time off for good behavior) before being deported to Colombia in 1994, where he was institutionalized. In February 1998, he was declared sane and released on $50 bail. Today, no one knows where he is, although he may be connected to a 2002 murder. In an interview with Edit International, he said, "Someday, when I am released ... I will be happy to kill again. It is my mission."

Randy Steven Kraft was convicted in 1989 for killing 16 men between 1972 and 1983. According to OrangeCoast Magazine, investigators suspect that he murdered 65 others, all males between 13 and 35. Kraft was nicknamed the Scorecard Killer. The LA Times reported that, when arrested, the police found a coded list of all his kills, referring to them by nicknames of places he picked them up ("Stable"), initials ("EDM"), or outstanding features ("MC HB Tattoo"), according to All That's Interesting. He had a predilection for Marines, having himself been discharged from the Air Force after coming out as gay. 

Kraft maintained that the names on his scorecard were just a list of friends, but photos of them being tortured were found under the floor mats of his car. A poor friend indeed. His modus operandi was to get his victims drunk on beer that had been laced with sedatives, then torture them before strangling or bludgeoning them. He would burn some with cigarette lighters and, if this were not enough, remove their genitals.

The judge in his trial said, according to OrangeCoast Magazine, "I sat there for a year and looked at Mr. Kraft. I didn't see any remorse, feelings, or regret."

Yes, John Wayne Gacy had a gig playing Pogo the Clown. No, he did not use his clowning to lure his victims, nor did he kill while dressed as a clown.

He murdered 33 young men from 1972 to 1978. (The FBI also charged him with sodomy and the use of cannabis.) According to the Times of Northwest Indiana, he buried 26 in a crawlspace in his home — so many that he ran out of room. According to Last Podcast on the Left, one of his methods was to ask these young men if they wanted to learn how to escape handcuffs. Once he cuffed them, he informed them that the trick was that he had the key. Now bound, Gacy would take his time strangling them.

Before all the murders were known, Chicago Tribune reported, Gacy was suspected in the abduction of a 9-year-old boy and was found guilty of drugging and sexually assaulting a man. He kidnapped another boy at gunpoint and raped him, but the assistant attorney general didn't prosecute. Officials ignored it because Gacy was otherwise an upstanding member of the community. He threw parties for the neighborhood, ran a remodeling business, and played a clown. Gacy volunteered with the local Democratic Party (even taking a photo with first lady Rosalynn Carter). How could he possibly be a serial killer?

Referred to by the FBI as "perhaps society's most infamous and notorious serial killer," witnesses called Ted Bundy good-looking and charming, allowing him to make a name for himself both in Republican politics and to hide in plain sight as he murdered at least 30 women from 1974 to 1978. The actual number may be closer to 100. 

Like other killers, Bundy claimed inspiration from being rejected by a woman, according to Biography. Upon their breakup, he began stalking college-aged women who resembled her. His method was to wear a fake cast to get help moving something. He would also pretend to be a police officer. Once he had victims alone, he would strangle them before sexually abusing and mutilating the corpses. Bundy — who received romantic proposals while on trial — would return to the bodies to groom them to look like his ex-girlfriend and then commit necrophilia until their bodies were too decayed.

He was executed by the electric chair in 1989. His last words were "give my love to my family and friends." A more apt quote from him might be, "I feel sorry for people who feel guilt."

Beginning his career as the Yorkshire Ripper in 1975, Peter Sutcliffe was convicted of murdering 13 women and attempted to murder seven more in a decade. He focused his murder on sex workers, understanding them to be uniquely vulnerable and unlikely to be missed. According to the Law Society Gazette, a voice he heard while working as a gravedigger gave him a mission to rid the earth of them. Prosecutor Michael Havers said to jurors, "Some [victims] were prostitutes, but perhaps the saddest part is that some were not. The last six attacks were on totally respectable women." It seemed he shared Sutcliffe's perspective.

The Yorkshire Post reported that the police searched for Sutcliffe for five years, speaking to a quarter of a million people and logging nearly 30,000 statements. Sutcliffe remained on the streets because this added to a backlog of 36,000 documents in need of filing. He had been questioned and released 11 times by detectives and the police.

Initially, psychiatrists diagnosed him as having paranoid schizophrenia, thus possessing a diminished capacity, and so sent him to Broadmoor Hospital. He was later judged sane enough to return to prison. In 2020, he died from COVID-19.

The Canberra Times puts Andrei Chikatilo's number of proven victims at 53 over a decade, most of whom were young boys and girls. Chikatilo kept his identity a secret by wearing the guise of a middle-aged grandfather, a kindly teacher, and an active member of the Communist Party. This stood in stark contrast to his later confessions, where the so-called Forest Strip Killer detailed raping, killing, then cannibalizing his victims out of sexual inadequacy, according to the New York Times. All this because his wife asked her friends how she might help him overcome his inability to have an erection during normal sex, according to Comrade Chikatilo.

As Communist Russia thought that crime was a capitalist problem, the press there rarely publicized it. Residents of Rostov were not warned for more than five years that they had a serial killer in their midst. Russia's policy of silence was Chikatilo's playground. Before Chikatilo was caught, the authorities admitted that they executed the wrong man to quiet fears.

During the three-hour reading of the verdict, Chikatilo shrieked, "Why me?" from inside a cage. He was executed in 1994.