Harvey began a killing spree in 1971 when he smothered a patient who was a stroke victim with a pillow.
Nilsen immediately confessed to killing 15 people.ĭonald Harvey is sometimes referred to as the “Angel of Death.” In 1987 he appeared to be an unassuming nurse’s aide who became an orderly after frequently visiting his dying grandfather in a Kentucky hospital. They promptly detected a foul odor and discovered body parts. Someone saw Nilsen trying to remove flesh from the drains that night and sent the police to his apartment.
The police caught Nilsen after a tenant called about a drain blockage and the technician found decomposing body parts as he entered a manhole on the property. When he moved into an apartment, he allegedly also boiled the body parts to remove the flesh for disposal and flushed small parts down the toilet. Eventually, Nilsen dismembered the bodies, stuffed some organs and limbs in bags to dispose of, bury, or burn on his property. He had many post-mortem sexual encounters with his victims and took some corpses out from time to time to engage in conversation. Nilsen kept the corpses under his floorboards of his home. During a five- year period, Nilsen picked up young men from bars and took them home where he strangled or drowned them. Haigh was sentenced to death and executed shortly thereafter.ĭennis Nilsen terrorized Londoners during the late 1970s and early 1980s, and subsequently confessed to killing at least a dozen men. A jury convicted him of murder after just minutes of deliberation. Haigh quickly became known as the Acid Bath Killer. He had to dispose of the corpse-sludge in a pile of rubble behind the warehouse where the police could easily find it. Unfortunately for Haigh, the new digs did not have an appropriate drainage system for his dissolved victims. Haigh was finally caught after murdering his final victim Olive Durand-Deacon, a wealthy widow who met with Haigh at his newest warehouse to discuss an idea she had for an invention. He dissolved them in acid as well after moving his operation into a larger warehouse. Haigh lost his money gambling, and sought out a wealthy couple to kill and rob.
When the victim’s family became suspicious of Haigh and his stories of the victim’s whereabouts, he killed them as well, also employing acid to eliminate their remains. After killing him with a blow to the head, Haigh dissolved the entire corpse in a barrel of sulphuric acid, pouring the sludge down a drain in a warehouse he acquired. Haigh also learned that you could dissolve bodies in acid and get rid of the victims entirely.Īfter getting out of jail Haigh, despite landing a lucrative engineering job, he killed an acquaintance to insert himself into the man’s lavish and successful life. He decided while in prison that his money-swindling schemes failed because he left the victims of his crimes alive. Haigh’s murders began after being convicted of fraud and spending time in jail. “I would be skeptical that there was a complete shutdown at age 40.In the late 1940s, John George Haigh, made himself into an iconic serial killer after being convicted of killing 6 people. “I would want to look at other rapes and murders in the areas where he lived over time,” Dr. DeAngelo - including most significantly whether he committed the crimes - wondered whether the criminal behavior did stop entirely in 1986. Several experts, underlining the notion that so little is yet known about Mr. The public was becoming familiar with it, he said, particularly through television dramas. Safarik, is that he was becoming aware of the ability to collect DNA evidence, left by the most meager material. One reason the rapist-murderer may have stopped in the late 80s, speculated Mr. Then as now, police believed that the suspect had military or law enforcement training, which helped him evade detection. and remembers being on stakeouts for the Golden State Killer, watching with night surveillance scopes for a man scrambling over rooftops or escaping into nearby fields. crime profiler, was a beat cop in the late 1970s in Davis, Calif. Harry, a retired forensic psychiatrist with the University of Missouri medical school: “Maybe they get tired or bored and just don’t want to do it anymore.”