Serial Killers: Fritz Honka

Born: July 31, 1935 

Number of victims: 4    

Date of murders: 1971 - 1974 

Method of murder: Strangulation    

Location: Hamburg, Germany   


   

Fritz Honka had a thing about his height, he also had a preference for oral sex, although he harboured a morbid fear of his penis being bitten during the act. Standing just five-foot-five, the alcoholic nightwatchman solved his twin problems by only using toothless prostitutes who were shorter than him. However, such were his insecurities that he immediately attacked anyone who made fun of his lack of inches, or of his sexual performance, as four Hamburg prostitutes would discover to their cost between 1971 and late 1974.

All of the women had been brought back to Honka’s attic apartment in St. Pauli. There they had gotten drunk and engaged in sex with Honka. However, in each case the encounter had turned violent, resulting in Honka strangling the woman.

Faced with the problem of disposal, Honka took the easy way out. He simply dragged the bodies to a crawl space and left them to rot. When neighbors complained about the stench, he blamed foreigners living in the building.

In January 1975, a fire broke out in the apartment block. Firefighters were summoned and as they worked their way through the building, they discovered four badly decomposed female bodies. When Honka arrived home from his night shift, the police were waiting for him.

Faced with irrefutable prove of his deeds, Honka admitted murder. He was sentenced to life in prison in 1975. Paroled in 1993, he died in an old age home on October 19, 1998.    

      Read the full, horrific story of Fritz Honka, plus 23 more serial killer cases in    German Monsters. Available now on Amazon  

   

 

Serial Killers: Bruce Peter George Lee

Born: July 31, 1960 

Number of victims: 26    

Date of murders: 1973 - 1979

Method of murder: Fire   

Location: Yorkshire, United Kingdom 



One of Britain’s most prolific serial killers, Bruce Lee (born Peter George Dinsdale) had an unusual method of murder. He was a pyromaniac, who burned people to death in their homes.

Lee, who changed his name by deed poll to that of his favorite kung-fu star, set his first lethal fire in 1973, when he was just 13. Thereafter, he began using fire as a means of gaining revenge. A fire he set on January 5, 1977, killed eleven men at an old age home, after an altercation with one of the residents. After another old man reprimanded him for disturbing his pigeons, Lee returned to wring the birds’ necks, then set the old man alight in an armchair. The fire was ruled an accident, as were many that Lee set over the years. 

Lee was eventually arrested in 1980, after a fire at Selby Street, Hull killed three young members of the Hastie family. The investigation revealed that 15-year-old Peter Hastie had been working as a male prostitute. Lee had been one of his customers, but after Hastie started blackmailing him, Lee decided to kill him.  

In all, 26 people died in fires set by Bruce Lee. However, he would serve no jail time for the murders. Found legally insane, he was sentenced to an indefinite term in a mental hospital.

Read the full, horrific story of Bruce Peter George Lee, plus 14 more serial killer cases in    British Monsters Volume 1.  Available now on Amazon  

 

 

 

Serial Killers: Mark Smith

Born: June 27, 1949

Number of victims:  12 

Date of murders:  1966 - 1970

Method of murder: Stabbing / Strangulation 

Location: Germany / Arkansas / Illinois   




By the time he returned to home in 1969, after serving in Germany with the US Army, Mark Smith was already a serial killer, suspected of murdering eight German women during his tour of duty. Back Stateside, he wasted little time in continuing his killing spree.

Smith’s first known US victim was Obie Faye Ash, killed on December 3, 1969, in Mountain Home, Arkansas. Just over one month later, Smith abducted Jean Irene Bianchi from a laundromat in McHenry, Illinois. Her body was found the following morning, frozen solid in a nearby field. She had been raped and strangled. 

On May 27, exactly four months after murdering Jean Bianchi, Smith viciously raped and murdered 17-year-old high school senior Jean Ann Lingenfelter. He then assisted in the search for her body and it was he who “discovered” it, floating in a small lake nearby. That immediately roused suspicion and Smith was brought in for questioning. He soon cracked and admitted killing Jean Ann, as well as three other women. 

Found guilty of first-degree murder at his trial in 1971, Mark Smith was sentenced to a total of 500 years behind bars.


Read the horrific story of Mark Smith, plus 49 more serial killer cases in  50 American Serial Killers You’ve Probably Never Heard Of Volume 5.  Available now on Amazon  

 

 

 

Serial Killers: Alexander Watson

Born: 1970

Number of victims: 4   

Date of murders: 1986 - 1994 

Method of murder: Strangulation / Stabbing  

Location: Maryland 



Alexander Watson was already serving a life sentence for stabbing a woman to death in Prince George County, Maryland when cold case investigators got a hit on the State’s DNA database linking him to three unsolved homicides.

The first of those dated back to October 1986, when 34-year-old Boontem Anderson was stabbed to death in her Fort Meade apartment. The mother-of-two had stayed home sick from work that day. Her 11-year-old son found her lying face down in the bathtub when he returned from school.

Some eighteen months later, on May 23, 1988 Elaine Shereika went for her usual early morning run before heading to work. She never returned. A farmer found her partially clothed body in a field the following day.

The third victim was 14-year-old Lisa Haenel, a ninth-grader at Old Mill High School. Lisa went missing on January 15, 1993. Her mother's boyfriend found her nude body the next morning, near the path she usually walked to school. Her case and the others had lain dormant until the DNA match. Now at last the police had a suspect.

And Alexander Watson was not about to argue with a positive DNA match. Faced with the possibility of a death sentence if found guilty, Watson confessed to the three murders. He was given three additional life terms, without parole, on August 16, 2007.


Read the full, horrific story of Alexander Watson, plus 49 more serial killer cases in   50 American Serial Killers You’ve Probably Never Heard of Vol. 3. Available now on Amazon  

   

 

Serial Killers: Mark Goudeau

Born: September 6, 1964

Number of victims: 9   

Date of murders: 2005 - 2006 

Method of murder: Shooting

Location:  Phoenix, Arizona  




Between 2005 and 2006, a killer was stalking the city of Phoenix, Arizona. Known as the ‘Baseline Killer’ after the area in which he carried out his attacks, the monster first appeared on August 6, 2005, when he sexually molested two teenagers behind a church on Baseline Road. Another sexual assault followed, before he committed his first murder on September 9. Over the months that followed, he would reappear sporadically, robbing, raping and killing, claiming 9 victims, with the Phoenix police apparently unable to stop him.

The break in the case came eventually on September 7, 2006 when a man named Mark Goudeau was arrested for sexually assaulting two sisters, one of them heavily pregnant. Once in custody, Goudeau was required to provide a DNA sample and it wasn’t long before investigators were able to link him to evidence lifted from the Baseline Killer crime scenes. Goudeau denied the charges, but the forensic and DNA evidence told a different story.

Despite his continued protestations of innocence, Mark Goudeau was found guilty on 19 charges and sentenced to 438 years in prison.


Read the horrific story of Mark Goudeau , plus 49 more serial killer cases in  50 American Serial Killers You’ve Probably Never Heard Of Volume 2.  Available now on Amazon  

 

Serial Killers: Joseph Edward Duncan III

Born: February 25, 1963

Number of victims:  7+ 

Date of murders:  1996 - 2005

Method of murder: Bludgeoning / Hanging  

Location: Washington / California / Idaho    




A horrifically depraved child killer, Duncan first came to national media attention in May 2005, when he murdered Brenda Groene, 40; her son Slade, 13; and her boyfriend, Mark McKenzie, 37. He then kidnapped Brenda Groene's two younger children, Dylan, 9, and Shasta, 8.

A massive search was launched for the missing children but Duncan had driven them deep into the dense forests surrounding Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. Their whereabouts would remain a mystery until July 2, when Duncan casually walked into a Denny's restaurant in Coeur d'Alene with Shasta in tow. The child was recognized by staff who called the police. Duncan was arrested at the scene.

It emerged that Duncan had held the children at a makeshift camp in the woods for over a month, raping and abusing them. When Dylan became too much of a burden he killed him by hanging him from a tree.

And that wasn't the full extent of Duncan's criminal career. He had a long arrest record, mainly for raping and molesting children. He was also implicated in three more child murders, in Washington State and in California.

Duncan faced both state and federal charges. On the state charges he received three life sentences while the federal charges (for kidnapping Shasta and Dylan Groene and for murdering Dylan) saw him sentenced to death.
  

Read the horrific story of Joseph Edward Duncan III, plus 11 more serial killer cases in  American Monsters Volume 6. Available now on Amazon  

 

Serial Killers: Chung Nam-gyu

Born: 1968

Number of victims: 13   

Date of murders: 2004 - 2006 

Method of murder:  Stabbing / Bludgeoning

Location:  Seoul, South Korea   

Motivated by a burning hatred for society, Chung Nam-gyu set out on a campaign of murder in March 2004. He professed to have a particular dislike for the rich, but he was not too picky when selecting his victims. Anyone living within his chosen hunting ground in Seoul, South Korea, was a potential victim, whether old or young, rich or poor, male or female.

Chung's usual M.O. was to enter a home late at night and attack whoever was there, bludgeoning  and stabbing them to death. He would then ransack the place before torching it, in an effort to destroy evidence.

Thirteen people would eventually fall prey to this deadly psychopath before the police tracked him down. Once in custody he gleefully confessed to the murders, boasting about how he had prepared for his killing spree by watching thrillers like “The Silence of the Lambs,” reading books on human anatomy, and running 10 km every day to build up his physical strength and stamina.

Convicted in September 2006, Chung was sentenced to death. He saved the executioner the trouble by hanging himself with a trash bag in his cell on November 22, 2009.


Read the horrific story of Chung Nam-gyu, plus 29 more serial killer cases in  Human Monsters Volume 4. Available now on Amazon