Serial Killers: Lorenzo Gilyard

Born: May 24, 1950

Number of victims: 13 

Date of murders: 1977 - 1993 

Method of murder: Strangulation 

Location: Kansas City, Missouri
 



A prolific strangler, Lorenzo Gilyard preyed on prostitutes in Kansas City, Missouri, claiming at least 13 victims over a murderous career that stretched from 1977 to 1993. 

Gilyard was already a hardened criminal by the time he started killing. He had spent time in prison for child molestation and also for assault. In addition, he was the only a suspect in a series of five rapes committed between 1969 to 1974, although he was never convicted. Then on April 17, 1977, he graduated to murder, killing 17-year-old hooker Stacie Swofford.

The Swofford murder had already gone cold by the time Gilyard struck again on January 23, 1980, strangling 15-year-old prostitute Gwendolyn Kizine, 15. With this latest murder, the police picked up a pattern, one that they would see repeated over and over again in the years that followed. All of the victims were found without shoes, dumped in overgrown lots and abandoned buildings. Most had been gagged by having cloth or paper towels stuffed into their mouths.

The police knew they had a serial killer on their streets but despite their efforts, the Kansas City Strangler remained at large, claiming victim after victim. One woman was killed in 1982, three in 1986, five more in 1987. Gilyard then took a break from murder, returning in 1993 to claim one final victim. After that, he mysteriously stopped, something serial killers seldom do of their own volition.

The Kansas City Strangler case might well have gone unsolved. But in 2003, cold case detectives linked Gilyard’s DNA to the 1987 murder of Sheila Ingold. A crime lab later linked all 13 victims to the killer using DNA testing.

Gilyard was arrested in April 2004 and accepted a plea bargain in order to avoid the death penalty. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole.


Read the full, horrific story of Lorenzo Gilyard, plus 11 more serial killer cases in  American Monsters Volume 7. Available now on Amazon  

 

Serial Killer Video: Lawrence Bittaker & Roy Norris

This depraved serial killer pair met in prison, where they hatched a plan to kidnap, torture and rape teenaged girls. After their release they bought a Transit van which they dubbed “Murder Mack” and put their diabolical scheme into action. Five teenagers were brutalized and murdered in the space of just five months, the killers recording their vile deeds on camera and tape. Then Norris shot his mouth off about the murders and the duo were thankfully caught. Bittaker has sentenced to death, while Norris is currently serving a life term. 

Australian Monsters

The Lives and Horrific Deeds of 24 Australian Monsters, including;

Ivan Milat: Arguably Australia’s most notorious serial killer, Milat was convicted of the rape, torture and murder of seven backpackers.

Kathleen Folbigg: Murderous mother who sent four of her infant children to an early grave.

Paul Denyer: Sexually obsessed young man who hacked three women to death in Frankston, Victoria.

Bevan von Einem: Gay torture slayer convicted of one murder and suspected of at least four more. But was he part of a sinister pedophile murder gang?

William MacDonald: Serial slasher who terrorized Sydney and was at the center of the bizarre “Case of the Walking Corpse.”

Caroline Grills: “Aunty Thally” routinely killed members of her family, adding rat poison to the cakes and cookies she baked for them.

David and Catherine Birnie: Depraved couple who kidnapped, sexual tortured, and murdered four young women in and around Perth, Western Australia.

Archibald McCafferty: Psychotic killer who believed that the voice of his dead baby son was instructing him to kill.

Francis Knorr: One of only four women to be hanged in Victoria, Francis Knorr was a baby farmer believed to have killed upwards of 18 infants.

John Wayne Glover: A repulsive sex fiend who preyed on elderly women in Sydney’s Mosman suburb, battering at least 6 victims to death.
Plus 12 more riveting cases….

Available Now Amazon

Click the "Read More" link below to read a sample chapter from

Australian Monsters

Serial Killers: Jeffrey Feltner

Born: 1963

Number of victims: 8 

Date of murders: 1988 - 1989 

Method of murder: Suffocation 

Location: Florida  

In July 1988, an anonymous caller phoned a Florida TV station and confessed to killing several patients at a nursing home. He also warned that he was likely to kill again. The information was passed on to the police and their investigation led them to a nurses’ aide named Jeffrey Lynn Feltner. Feltner was questioned but denied making the call. With no evidence to the contrary, the police were forced to let the matter drop.

A short while later, the calls started up again. This time the caller claimed to have murdered a specific patient, although the information he gave was easily disproven. Nonetheless, the police were able to positively link the call to Feltner and he was arrested for filing a false report. Found guilty, he was sentenced to four months in jail.

After his release, Feltner moved to Daytona Beach and signed up with a temporary agency for healthcare professionals. He worked at several nursing homes over the next year, and sure enough the calls started up again. This time, however, the police knew exactly who was responsible. Feltner was arrested again and this time the police investigation revealed that his confessions were not fake after all. At least one of the seven patients he claimed to have asphyxiated had indeed been murdered. As many of the other patients had been cremated, it was impossible to verify all of Feltner’s confessions. 

Feltner was arrested in August of 1989, on one charge of first-degree murder. Under interrogation, he claimed to have killed one patient for every year he’d worked as a nurses aid. At least one of those claims was verified, leading to a second murder charge being added.

However, by the time the matter came to trial, Feltner had retracted his confessions, saying it had all been a stunt to draw attention to the poor conditions in nursing homes. It did him no good. Found guilty of murder, Jeffrey Feltner was sentenced to life in prison.


Read the full, horrific story of Jeffrey Feltner, 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: Steven Judy

Born: 1956

Number of victims: 11 + 

Date of murders: 70s  

Method of murder: Strangulation / Drowning

Location: Indiana / Texas / Louisiana / California  




However many murders Steven Judy committed (and there were at least eight, according to his confession), the incident that will always be associated with this heartless criminal was the atrocity he committed at White Lick Creek in 1979.

On April 28, 1979, a group of mushroom hunters found a woman's naked body floating in White Lick Creek, just outside Indianapolis. Further downstream, the bodies of three small children, two boys and a girl, were also found in the water. The woman had been raped and strangled. Her children had drowned after apparently being thrown into the creek. A bank book found at the scene identified the murdered woman as 20-year-old Terry Chasteen. That would make the children, Misty, 5, Stephen, 4, and Mark, just two years old.

As the police began investigating the atrocious crime, they got reports of a red-and-silver pickup truck, that had been spotted near the murder scene. The distinctive vehicle was soon traced to Steven Judy, a local bricklayer. Judy immediately confessed to the murders, saying that he had tricked Terry Chasteen into stopping her car at the side of the road. He had then offered to look under the hood and had deliberately disabled the vehicle. Then he’d offered to drive Terry and the children to their destination. Instead he drove them to White Lick Creek.

Judy sent the children to play and began raping Terry. When she started screaming, he strangled her. In an act of inhuman cruelty, he then threw the children one by one into the water, where they all drowned.

At his trial, Judy pleaded guilty and asked for the death penalty. “You’d better put me to death,” he said, “because next time it might be one of your daughters.” The jury was happy to oblige. Judy was sentenced to die in the electric chair.

Steven Judy was executed by electrocution on March 8, 1981. Few killers have been more deserving of that fate.


Read the full, horrific story of Steven Judy, 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: Li Wenxian

Born: 1952

Number of victims: 13 

Date of murders: 1991 - 1996  

Method of murder: Stabbing / Strangulation / Bludgeoning

Location: Guangzhou, China

In 1991, police in the Chinese province of  Guangdong were hunting a ferocious serial killer. The fiend first emerged on February 22, when he stabbed a 20-year-old woman to death, then severely mutilated her genitals with a knife. 

Over the next six months, five more women fell prey to the vicious killer. Each of the victims was raped, then either strangled or stabbed to death before being mutilated and dismembered. The bodies were then dumped at the many informal rubbish dumps that dotted the the city of Guangzhou. 

So far there had been no press coverage of the crimes in China, since the Communist regime denies the existence of serial killers and thus suppresses all such information. But after the seventh victim washed up in Hong Kong in March of 1992, the story of the "Guangzhou Ripper" was out.

Not that it helped the police in any way. The Ripper remained at large for another four years, claiming an eventual 13 victims and all the while adding new levels of depravity to his crimes. Some women were suffocated with plastic bags, others were bludgeoned to death with a hammer.

Then in 1996, the Ripper made his first mistake. A victim escaped his clutches and went to the police. Given a photo array to sift through, the women unerringly picked out Li Wenxian as her attacker. Li had once been a farmer, but hard times had forced him to move to Guangzhou in 1991 to look for work. The murders had started soon after his arrival.
 
In custody, Li confessed to the attacks, telling police that he had acted out of revenge, after a prostitute cheated him. He was convicted and sentenced to death in December 1996. Given the protocols of the Chinese state he would have been executed soon after.   


Read the horrific story of the Li Wenxian, plus 29 more serial killer cases in  Human Monsters Volume 3. Available now on Amazon  

 

Serial Killers: Richard Evonitz

Born: July 29, 1963

Number of victims: 3+ 

Date of murders: 1996-2002 

Method of murder: Strangulation 

Location: Virginia / South Carolina / California / Florida  




On the afternoon of September 9, 1996, 16-year-old Sofia Silva disappeared from her home in Spotsylvania County, Virgina. A police search was launched for the teenager, but she remained missing until six weeks later, when her naked body was found in a marsh, some twenty miles away. She had been strangled and was wrapped in a white sheet. Her pubic hair had been shaved off.

Police were still in the midst of investigating Sofia’s murder when sisters Kristin and Kati Lisk, 15 and 12 respectively, went missing. The siblings were found dead five days later, in a river forty miles from their home. As in the case of Sofia Silva, the killer had shaved their pubic hair.

It was obvious that the murders were the work of the same man. All three girls had been abducted at their homes, all had their pubic hair shaved off, all had been strangled or suffocated, and all had been dumped in water. It was therefore no surprise when DNA samples lifted from the victims revealed a common perpetrator. However, hopes of catching the killer diminished when no matching sample was found in the national DNA database. All the police could do was wait until the killer struck again.

On June 24, 2002 a 15-year-old girl was abducted from the streets in Columbia, South Carolina. The kidnapper took his victim back to his apartment, where he raped her several times over the next 18 hours. Eventually, the man dozed off and the girl was able to loosen her bonds and escape. She went directly to the police and later led officers back to the building where she’d been held. By the time they arrived, the kidnapper had already fled.

The owner of the apartment was identified as 38-year-old Richard Evonitz and a major operation was launched to find him. Two days later, he was tracked to Sarasota, Florida, where a terse stand-off ended with Evonitz shooting himself in the head. Subsequent DNA tests proved that he was the killer of Sofia Silva and the Lisk sisters. Evonitz is also believed to be responsible for the 1996 murder of Alicia Reynolds in Culpeper, Virginia, plus several other homicides across the United States.


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