Dennis Rader
For more than three decades, Dennis Rader lived a double life. To neighbors in Park City, Kan., he was a church council president, Cub Scout leader and family man. In reality he was the notorious “BTK Killer”—an acronym for his method of “bind, torture, kill.” Between 1974 and 1991, Rader murdered 10 people, carefully documenting his crimes in letters he mailed to the media and police.
Following years of silence, Rader resurfaced in 2004 after a local newspaper ran a story that said the killer was likely dead or in prison. Rader, unable to help himself, sent a series of messages to local news outlets, including evidence of one of his previous murders. In one message, contained in a cereal box, he asked whether a floppy disk could be traced if he used one for future communication. Investigators, replying through a newspaper classified ad that he monitored, assured him it couldn’t. Trusting them, Rader mailed a disk in February 2005, a mistake that led directly to his capture.
Forensic analysts discovered metadata linking the disk to “Christ Lutheran Church” and a user named “Dennis.” Detectives quickly connected it to Rader, the church’s council president. A DNA sample taken from his daughter’s Pap smear confirmed the match. Rader confessed in chilling detail and was sentenced to 10 consecutive life terms.
Derek Daigneault
In April 2023, authorities in Robinson, Texas, made a gruesome discovery after responding to brush fire: the burned, unrecognizable body of a young woman. Nearby was a white dog frantically barking. The dog evaded attempts to capture it, and police left it there when they removed the body. When the dog was still at the location the next day, authorities used its microchip to identify its owner, Mandy Rose Reynolds.
When police discovered Reynolds’s San Marcos home was empty and her car was missing, they sent out an alert and received a report that the car’s license plate was in Wichita, Kan. Three days later, Reynolds’s cousin, Derek Daigneault, was apprehended following a high-speed car chase.
Evidence revealed Daigneault, who had been living in Reynolds’s home before the murder, had brutally killed his cousin and abandoned her body, while her dog, Titan, remained beside her until police arrived. In 2024, Daigneault was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Investigators credited Titan’s loyalty as the key to solving the case.
Israel Keyes
Israel Keyes prided himself on being methodical. The contractor committed multiple murders across the United States, often flying to different states, renting cars and using “kill caches” he had buried in specific locations years earlier. Despite this consistency, his choice of victims was random, allowing him to avoid detection for more than a decade.
His downfall came in 2012 after he kidnapped and murdered 18-year-old Samantha Koenig from an Anchorage, Alaska, coffee stand. Keyes used her debit card to withdraw ransom money, first in Alaska, then thousands of miles away in New Mexico, Arizona and Texas. Police tracked the card’s use across multiple states, eventually spotting his white rental car in a surveillance photo at an ATM in Lufkin, Texas.
On March 13, 2012, officers pulled him over for speeding and discovered Koenig’s card and her phone in the vehicle. After his arrest, Keyes confessed to at least 11 murders but refused to name all his victims. He died by suicide in jail that December, leaving investigators to piece together his crimes from cryptic notes and maps.
Dennis Nilsen
A former police officer turned civil servant, Dennis Nilsen lived an unassuming life in his North London home. But behind that ordinary facade lay one of the United Kingdom’s most chilling serial killers. Between 1978 and 1983, Nilsen murdered at least a dozen young men and boys, many transient or unhoused, that he lured from pubs or bus stops with promises of food or shelter. After strangling his victims, he kept their bodies in his home for days or weeks, bathing, dressing and talking to them before eventually dismembering and disposing of the remains, often under the floorboards of his ground-level home.
His crimes unraveled not through careful detective work, but through plumbing. When Nilsen moved to a new apartment in the attic of a building, he could no longer dispose of his victims underground. So he started to dissect the bodies and flush them down his toilet.
Amazingly, in 1983, Nilsen and other building residents began complaining to their landlord about plumbing blockages, and crews sent to check it out discovered the decomposing remains in the drains. Police searched Nilsen’s apartment, and he soon confessed to the crimes. He was convicted of six murders and two attempted murders, receiving a life sentence. Nilsen remained imprisoned until his death in 2018 following complications after surgery.
Luis Garavito
Known as “The Beast,” Luis Garavito is believed to be one of the most prolific serial killers in history. Between 1992 and 1999, he lured impoverished young boys across Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela with promises of money, food or work. Once isolated, he subjected his victims to horrific sexual torture before killing them. Investigators uncovered multiple mass graves in 1997, revealing the scale of his crimes and sparking a nationwide manhunt.
Garavito was arrested in 1999 for attempting to assault a child and soon became the prime suspect in the murders. An eye condition—found only in men within a specific age range—helped confirm his identity when a broken pair of glasses recovered from a crime scene matched his prescription.
In 2001, he was sentenced to 1,853 years in prison. However, under Colombian law, no person can be imprisoned for more than 40 years, raising fears that he might later be released. He served 24 years before his death in 2023, closing one of the darkest chapters in Latin America’s criminal history.
