Frederick Cowan
A hulk of a man at 250 pounds, Freddie was a weightlifter and an ex-GI. Neighbors remebered him as a quiet young man from a nice family. When Freddie came back from his military service in Germany, he had turned into a racist, hitler worshipper. For 11 years, Freddie worked in a warehouse called The Neptune Worldwide Moving Company in New Rochelle, NY. In 1977, when his Jewish boss suspended him for refusing to carry a refrigerator, he snapped. On St. Valentine's Day, the 33 year old walked into the warehouse, guns in hand, looking for his boss, Norman Bing. At 7:45 am, Freddie opened fired on Joseph Hicks, Frederick Holmes, and James Green, killing all 3 black men instantly. Moving on to the cafeteria, he then shot Indian immigrant Pariyarathu Varghese and the first policeman to arrive on the scene, Allen Mcleod. Three more police officers were wounding in the ensuing 10 hour stand off. After hours of not hearing from Freddie, police stormed the building. Inside they found Freddie had decided to end it with a single, self inflicted, shot to the head. They also found 14 employees hiding in an office, Norman Bing included.
 
 
William Bryan Cruse
Bill Cruse was convinced that his neighbors in Palm Bay, FL gossiped about him, spreading the rumour that he was a homosexual. A retired librarian, Bill was 59 years old when he went on an all night shooting spree. Around 6 pm on April 23, 1987, 2 boys decided to taunt Bill by continually walking back and forth past his house shouting obscenties. The librarian grabbed his guns and a bag of ammunition and headed out after the boys. When he fired at them, he missed, instead hitting an innocent 14 year old bystander who was playing basketball in his driveway. Frustrated, Bill jumped into his truck and drove to the local Publix supermarket. Once there, he opened fire in the parking lot, killing 2 students instantly. A stray bullet wounded a women as she sat in her car. Hearing her cries for help, Bill walked over and shot her in the head to finish the job. After failing to get into Publix, he drove across the street to Winn Dixie Supermarket where he was met by two policemen. The first policeman was mortally wounded when Bill opened fired on his patrol car. The second policeman emptied his revolver at Bill without ever hitting him. In return, he nearly severed the lawman's leg with one shot, then walked over and shot him in the head as he tried frantically to reload. Once inside the Winn Dixie, he executed one customer as he tried to flee and secured himself a hostage. After a 6 hour stand off, he finally surrendered, releasing the hostage unharmed. In all, the death count stood at 6, with 10 people wounded. At trial he pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity and several psychiatrists testified that he was a paranoid schizophrenic. The jury, however, did not agree and he was sentenced to death. As of this writing, Bill is still on death row, and his sentence is under appeal.
 
 
Mark Essex
Shortly after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Mark Essex decided to avenge his death by calling himself Mata (the Swahili word for a hunter's bow) and killing as many white people as possible, specifically cops. Ironically, his first victim was black officer Alfred Harrell, who was new to the New Orleans police department. He shot Harrell accidently while aiming for a white officer. Twenty minutes later, Essex struck again after setting a trap for officers Edwin Hosli and Harold Blappert. Hosli was shot through the abdomen from behind and died two months later. Blappert escaped unhurt. During the scuffle, Essex was hurt and would not be heard from again for a couple days. On January 7th, 1972, Essex made his way to the Howard Johnson's in downtown New Orleans. Along the way he stopped and shot a local grocer, Joe Perniciaro, who had reported him to the police as suspicious. Once inside the hotel, Essex chased a maid through the hallway on the 18th floor. Hearing the comotion from their room, Dr. Robert Steagall, a black man, jumped Mata in the hallway trying to disarm him. He was shot in the chest and died instantly. His wife, Betty, raced to her dead husband's side and Essex calmly shot her through the base of the skull, then he continued down to the 11th floor setting several fires along the way. By this time, front office manager, Frank Schneider and bellman, Don Roberts, decided to investigate what was happening upstairs. When the elevator doors opened and Schneider and Roberts stepped out onto the 11th floor, a maid shouted a warning and both men turned to run. Essex coolly raised his shotgun and squeezed off two shots. The second bullet caught Schneider in the back of the head and tore away half of his skull. Roberts managed to reach the safety of a stairwell. On the 10th floor, Essex came across the hotel's general manager, Walter Collins, trying to warn people about the fires. He shot him in the back without breaking stride. Continuing through the hotel, Essex stopped and shot Robert Beamish, a hotel guest, in the stomache. In the ensuing panic 2 policeman accidentally trapped themselves in an elevator, police fired randomly throughout the building, a fire truck crashed in panic on the way to the scene, and another was abandoned due to sniper fire and left to pump water into the streets for 6 hours. Spectators began to gather outside the hotel and a large group of young black men shouted, "kill the pigs." Fireman Tim Ursin was shot, by Essex, from a balcony while climbing a ladder. By the end of the day, more than 600 police officers had turned up, coming from as far away as Texas, but only Mark Essex seemed to be following a plan.

Essex moved rapidly from floor to floor, firing through broken windows and setting new fires. He reversed his jacket on several occasions and threw firecrackers down stairwells to convince listeners that guns were going off all over the hotel. Reports soon started pouring in of more than one gunman. Sharpshooter, Charles Arnold, took up position at an office building across the street, but before he could set up, Essex shot him in the face. Suprisingly, he walked several blocks to the hospital and lived. Patrolmen Kenneth Solis was shot in the shoulder while trying to get onlookers to move back. Responding to his cry for help officers David McCann, Emanuel Palmisano, Philip Coleman, and Leo Newman rushed to his aide in their patrol car. Officer Palmisano was shot in the arm and Officer Coleman, while reaching out of the car to assist Solis, was shot in the head, he died a few hours later. Essex decided to move to a different side of the building. Officer Paul Persigo was shot in the mouth and killed while trying to clear the sidewalk. Deputy Superintendent Louis Sirgo, a white man who had championed racial justice, was shot to death by Essex while attempting to rescue the 2 officers he believed were still trapped in the elevator. The officers had escaped severals minutes before. After killing Sirgo, Essex made his way to the roof, where he hid in a concrete cubicle that housed water pipes. Officer Larry Arthur and his team were the first to make it to the roof. Upon exiting the doorway, Officer Arthur was shot in the chest and knocked backwards down the stairs. Remarkably, he lived. After several hours in the cubicle, Essex finally gave up. He rushed from the bunker to be met by hundreds of bullets. He was shot so many times that his leg and most of his face were blown off, his flesh completely torn from his body. For 19 hours after his death police still believed his was not alone. In several attempts to find the other gunman, police searched the hotel, sometimes accidentally firing on each other. After hours of searching, police determined the last possible place another gunman could be hiding was a boiler room on the roof. When the doors wouldn't open they opened fire on the metal doors, at close range, causing bullets to ricochet with deadly force and knocking down cops like dominoes. In all, 9 more officers were wounded after Mark Essex was already dead.
 
 
Eric Harris & Dylan Klebold
Around 11:30 am a 9-1-1 call came into Jefferson County sheriff's office reporting numerous gunshots at Columbine High School. Sheriff's deputies arrived a few minutes later and heard gunshots and explosions coming from inside the school. They also saw a number of small fires burning inside. Students have told that two people came into the school wearing long, black trench coats and face masks. They were carrying shotguns, grenades and pipe bombs. The sheriff says when the suspects were discovered dead inside the school, they still had a number of small explosives on their bodies. The police also found more explosives at their homes.

The gunmen's names were Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, both seniors at Columbine, and members of "the Trenchcoat Mafia". Before they shot and killed themselves, 12 students and a teacher were murdered, and numerous people injured. This is the worst school shooting in the U.S. history.
 
 
George Hennard
On October 16th, 1991 George smashed a pickup truck through a restaurant window at Luby's Cafeteria in Killean, Texas and fired on the lunchtime crowd with a high-powered pistol, killing 22 people in the deadliest mass shooting in US history. Witnesses said the gunman methodically shot his victims at close range, making sure each was mortally wounded before moving on to the next.

As terrified patrons scrambled across the blood-drenched floor and hid behind toppled tables, police arrived and wounded the gunman, who then shot himself in the head.
 
 
James Huberty
On July 18, 1984, James Huberty took his wife and two daughters, ages 11 and 9, to the San Diego Zoo. On the way back to their San Ysidro apartment, they stopped for lunch at McDonald's. Perhaps the girls ordered Happy Meals.

After arriving home, Huberty made a trip to a different McDonald's, this one just 200 yards from his apartment. But instead of a couple of bucks for McNuggets, Huberty carried a pistol, a shotgun, and a rifle. When he walked into the fast-food chain around 4 p.m. he began shooting indiscriminately. Ten minutes later 19 were wounded; 21 lay dead. His victims ranged from a four-month-old infant to a 74-year-old man.

A police sharpshooter, firing from the roof of a post office next door, took out James Huberty, putting an end to the bloody carnage. Huberty kept several loaded guns around the house and had talked at various times of "shooting somebody." While his motive remains unclear, Huberty was reportedly despondent over his recent loss of a security guard job.
 
 
Julian Knight
A failed Australian military cadet, Julian shot his way into infamy on August 7, 1987, as he mowed down 7 and wounded 19 on a busy Melbourne street. After his arrest, the 19-year-old maniac blamed the military for his rampage: "They trained me to kill, and I killed." At one with his role of media star, Julian criticized local police for their slow response to his attack and announced plans to write the definitive account of his rampage, casting himself as the hero.

Julian thought his behavior was a result of being ousted from the Royal Military College, where He was he was regularly beat up by his fellow cadets who thought he was a wimp. Adding insult to injury, he was rejected by his girlfriend. And, when the gear box of his car blew up, it pushed him right over the edge. Curiously, the killer counted being adopted and not being breast-fed among his list of reasons for his actions.

On August 7, at 9:35 p.m., Julian took up his position in the shrubbery on the median strip of Hoddle Street and fantasized that the homeland was being invaded. Armed to the teeth with a Ruger semiautomatic rifle, a Mossberg pump-action shotgun, an M-14 and 200 rounds of ammunition, he started shooting at everything that moved. After 38 minutes he ran out of bullets and was captured by police. Later he claimed that he had saved a round for himself and lost it, prompting his surrender. Otherwise, he thought he deserved to be praised for his actions. "I performed exactly as my Army superiors would have expected me to perform in a combat situation... In other circumstances I would have gotten a medal for what I did."
 
 
Marc Lepine
Marc loved guns and hated women, a combination that proved fatal in the fall of 1989. Marc went to the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal dressed in typical mass-murdering fatigues looking for "feminists". In the twenty minutes that followed, he became Canada's reigning Mayhem King by killing fourteen female students and a school secretary, saving the last bullet for himself. He shot his first female in the hallway, then walked into a class, asked the men to leave and shouted "You're all a bunch of feminists! I hate feminists!" He killed six of them. With a big smile on his face he proceeded to kill three more "feminists" in the cafeteria and four on another floor before blowing his head off.
 
 
Timothy McVeigh
Speed freak Timothy McVeigh and fellow white-trash-neo-nazi-ex-soldier Terry Nichols are believed to be responsible for blowing up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. McVeigh and Co. thought the assault on the Branch Davidian compound by federal authorities in 1993 was a step towards civil war.

To avenge this transgression by the feds, McVeigh, Nichols, and other possible paramilitary freaks decided to blow up a government building. On the two-year anniversary of the fiery assault in Waco they parked a Ryder rental truck full of gas and fertilizer in front of the federal building and blew it to smithereens killing 168 people, including twenty children.

On June 15, 2001 Tim Mcveigh was executed by lethal injection for the worst mass murders in the history of the United States.
 
 
Michael Ryan
27-year-old Michael Ryan shot to death 16 people and wounded 14 others in the small farming community of Hungerford during the summer of 1987. After a "Rambo style" blood feast through the streets of Hungerford, he barricaded himself in a school building where he killed himself with a single gunshot to his head. The gunman, a loner who lived with his elderly mother, loved guns and television violence. The killing spree started in a forest outside of Hungerford. Wearing combat fatigues Ryan killed a woman who was preparing a picnic for her two children. Then he drove back to his house and killed his mother and the dog and set fire to the house. For the next two hours Ryan moved through the town, randomly killing or wounding anyone he met.

Ryan's rampage ended at the Local High School. Despondent over having killed his mum and dog, Ryan commented "I wish I had stayed in bed". After 4 hours and several talks with the police, he ended his life with the last round in his 9-mm. pistol. After his deadly rampage the British government took steps to end the right to have firearms, and to curtail television violence. Also, the film Rambo III was banned in several towns in the UK, because of Ryan's claim of being inspired by Rambo movies.
 
 
Patrick Sherrill
The worst post office massacre took place on 20 August 1986, at Edmond, Oklahoma.

Patrick ‘Sandy’ Sherill, a forty-four-year-old part-time postal worker attached to the main post office in this suburb of Oklahoma County, had been warned the day before his killing spree that he was facing a dismissal for unsatisfactory work. It was not the first time Sherill had been in trouble, and reports from the postal authorities claimed that he had already been under suspension once in the year since he joined as a postman in 1985.

Sherill was always prepared to tell anybody that with an inclination to listen that he was a Vietnam veteran, which was quite untrue. However, he was a member of the Oklahoma National Guard, and a considerable marksman with their competition team. In this position of trust, Pat Sherill was able to withdraw guns from the ONG arsenal for the purpose of entering shooting competitions, and on 5 April 1986 he borrowed a .45-calibre automatic pistol. On 10 August he borrowed another, identical, weapon and three hundred rounds of ammunition.

On the hot Wednesday morning of 20 August, Patrick Sherill, wearing his regulation postman’s uniform, drove to work as usual, taking with him the two .45s plus his own .22-calibre handgun and the ammunition. He walked towards the post office, stopping just once to shoot dead a fellow-worker who was crossing the car park, before passing through the employees’ entrance into the single storey building. After locking several doors in order to maximise his kill, Sherill began, in the words of the police, ‘shooting people as though they were sitting ducks’. Although FBI marksmen were deployed around the building after an employee escaped and raised the alarm, Sherill refused to speak to the specially trained siege negotiators.

When the police eventually stormed the building they found the bodies of fourteen men and women, and seven other badly wounded victims. Patrick Sherill lay dead where he had put a single bullet through his own head, his arsenal of guns and ammunition beside him.
 
 
Richard Speck
Richard Speck had a tattoo on his arm that read "Born to raise hell". In 1966 that's exactly what this garbage man and apprentice seaman did when he leisurely slaughtered eight student nurses in Chicago. Rich, a possible serial killer, is believed to be responsible for at least four more deaths in the three month preceeding his blood-soaked swan song.

On the night of July 13, Rich, tanked up with booze and tripping, knocked on the door of the two-story town house occupied by the nurses. He corralled the six women inside and hog-tied them with torn bed-sheets. He then led the first victim upstairs to a separate room and stabbed her to death. Methodically, he smoked the rest of the nurses at a clip of three per hour. Throughout the slow-motion butchery, he only raped one of the women.

As the night wore on three more nurses arrived from their dates to fall prey to his mania. One nurse, Corazon Amurao, survived the deadly visit by scooting under a bed. Rich left the townhouses when he thought there was no one left alive and headed back to a bar. Days later, as police closed in on him, Rich tried to kill himself by slashing his wrist. When he was rushed to the hospital a doctor recognized his tattoo from a news report and turned him in. In 1991 Ricky died of a heart attack while serving a 400 year sentence. He was forty-nine. At the time of his death he was "overweight, a chain-smoker and had poor eating habits."
 
 
Charles Whitman
On August 1st, 1966 in Austin, Texas After killing his mother and wife, Charlie went to the top of the University clock tower after the lunch break and began to pick off the stragglers who remained. In all, sixteen people were killed.

3 police and one retired Air Force Tailgunner found their way into the Tower, where they shot him 6 times with a .38, and twice in the face with a 12-gauge shotgun from 5 feet away. An autopsy report found a malignant brain tumor that may have played a part in Charlie's killing spree.

 

Because there are so many serial killers, I have selected only the most popular and most interesting (in my opinion) to do biographies for. If you would like more information about a specific killer that isn't listed here, please send me an email at ajas30@sccoast.net. I will list the information as quick as possible. All killers are listed in alphabetical order.
 

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Many thanks to The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers by Michael Newton, and Time Life Books!