Executed
1432–1440 · France
Gilles de Rais
A Marshal of France who fought beside Joan of Arc was hanged at Nantes in 1440 for murdering children. Can his confession be trusted?
Kind of crime
Serial murder
Repeat killers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the investigations that stopped them.
15 cases11 solved2 unsolved1432–1946
Executed
Disputed verdict
1602–1614 · Hungary
Elizabeth Báthory
Hundreds of witnesses accused a Hungarian countess of killing young women. She was walled up without trial in 1610. Was it justice or a political purge?
Executed
1827–1829 · United Kingdom
Burke and Hare
Two Irish labourers killed sixteen people in Edinburgh in 1828 and sold the bodies to an anatomy lecturer. Only one of them hanged.
Legend
1846–1847 · United Kingdom
Sweeney Todd
The demon barber of Fleet Street was born in a penny serial in 1846. No record shows he ever lived, yet the 'true story' claim has never quite died.
Executed
1872–1873 · United Kingdom
Mary Ann Cotton
A County Durham nurse buried husbands, children and a lover to 'gastric fever'. A seven-year-old stepson's death finally brought arsenic to light.
Unsolved
1888 · United Kingdom
Jack the Ripper
Five women killed in ten weeks in London's East End in 1888, a name invented in a letter, and a killer the police never identified.
Executed
1891–1896 · Ontario
H. H. Holmes
Swindler, bigamist and killer of at least nine people, hanged in 1896. The '200 victims' and the murder castle of legend are another matter.
Executed
1891–1892 · United Kingdom
Thomas Neill Cream
A McGill-trained doctor gave strychnine to young women in south London in 1891-92, then wrote blackmail letters that led Scotland Yard straight to him.
Executed
1896 · United Kingdom
Amelia Dyer
For £10 'Mrs Harding' promised a mother's love to babies born outside marriage. In 1896 the Thames at Reading gave up what she had done with them.
Never caught
1900–1908 · Indiana
Belle Gunness
When her Indiana farmhouse burned in 1908, searchers found a dozen people buried on her land. Belle Gunness was declared dead. Many doubted it.
Executed
1912–1915 · United Kingdom
George Joseph Smith
Three newly married women drowned in small baths in three towns. A grieving father's newspaper cutting exposed the bigamist behind all of them.
Executed
1915–1922 · France
Henri Désiré Landru
A fugitive swindler answered wartime France's lonely-hearts columns. Eleven people who went with him to rented villas outside Paris were never seen again.
Unsolved
1918–1919 · Louisiana
Axeman of New Orleans
In 1918-19 an intruder with an axe terrorized New Orleans, above all its Italian grocers. He was never caught, and his famous jazz letter may be a hoax.
Executed
1929–1931 · Germany
Peter Kürten
For fifteen months Düsseldorf hunted a killer it could not see. The break came from a survivor's letter, misaddressed and opened at the post office.
Executed
1942–1946 · France
Marcel Petiot
In occupied Paris a doctor sold a secret route to safety for 25,000 francs a head. In March 1944 smoke from his chimney showed where his clients had gone.