Kevin Cooper had escaped from asylums and prisons 12 times before 4 June, 1983, on the night of which he broke into a random house in Chino Hills, California, where the Ryen family lived. The father, Bill, went there the next day and found the entire family hacked to death all over the house. There was blood on the ceiling. His ex-wife, Peggy, and her husband Franklin, were dead, with as many as 30 stab wounds each, as were their 10-year-old daughter, Jessica, and Bill’s 11-year-old son, Christopher. The youngest, 8-year-old Joshua Ryen, was still alive, and miraculously survived with a slashed throat and hatchet wound through his skull. Cooper has sworn his innocence ever since, but DNA evidence says otherwise. The fact that he is attempting to save himself by lying seems to indicate his sanity.
posts tagged "True Crime"
“If I gave a shit about the parents, I wouldn’t have killed the kid.”
Born in Vancouver British Columbia on the first day of January 1940, Clifford Robert Olson Jr killed a total of eleven people before being caught. From a young age, Clifford Olson was in trouble with the law. Olson was a known bully who it was rumored tortured and killed animals. By the time he started killing, he had spent long stretches in jail for crimes ranging from armed robbery to fraud. Clifford Olson’s first victim was twelve year-old Christine Weller. Her body was found strangled with a belt and repeatedly stabbed. Olson was married in May 1981, but by then had committed a total of three murders. It was around this time that Olson fell under police suspicion of child molestation, but there was never enough evidence to charge him. Only four days after his wedding, Olson abducted and then murdered 16-year-old Sandra Wolfsteiner. He would murder yet again the very next month, this time killing a 13-year old. By now Olson had began to increase the pace of his killings. In the month of July 1981, Olson would claim six more young victims, none of whom were over the age of 18. It was this varied range of ages and sexes that at first made him hard to catch, but police early on suspected a serial killer was at work. Clifford Olson’s final victim was Louise Chartrand aged 17. She was killed with a hammer on July 30 1981. Olson buried her body in a shallow grave. Due to his extensive criminal record, Olson quickly became a prime suspect in the murders and disappearances of young adults in Greater Vancouver. He was questioned by police but released for lack of evidence. But Olson did himself in when he was caught and arrested for attempting to abduct two girls. Olson confessed to eleven murders on the promise that his new wife gets $10,000 for each murder he admitted to, and for showing police the locations of missing people he had killed. Families’ desperately wanting closure agreed to this move and $100,000 was given to his wife. Olson gave the first location to police as a ‘freebie’. Olson would be given 11 concurrent life sentences. Clifford Olson due to Canada’s legal system, was eligible for parole after a minimum of 25 years served. His first parole hearing occurred in July 2006 where his application for parole was denied. Olson was once again eligible for parole in 2008 and every two years after that.
According to Colombian police, Luis Alfredo Garavito is a glib predator and a “solitary sadist” who stands accused as one of the world’s worst serial killers. In 1999, Garavito, a 42-year-old drifter, confessed to the slayings of at least 140 boys between the ages of 8 and 16 during a 5-year killing spree. Garavito would befriend the children and take them on long walks until they were tired. Then he would tie them up with nylon rope, slit their throats or behead them, and then bury their bodies. Most of Garavito’s victims were street children, children from poor families, or children seperated from their parents by poverty or political violence. Authorities said it was beacause there was no one to notive that the children were missing or to inquire about their whereabouts that Garavito was able to go on killing for so long without being detected.
Kenneth Erskine is an English serial killer who became known as the Stockwell Strangler. During 1986, Erskine murdered as many as 11 elderly men and women, breaking into their homes and strangling them; most often they were sexually assaulted. The crimes took place in the Stockwell area of London. A homeless drifter and solvent abuser, Erskine was 24 years old when he committed the crimes, but had the mental age of a 12-year-old. He was convicted of seven murders, although police believe that he was responsible for four other murders with which he was never charged. Erskine was jailed for a minimum term of 40 years, but has since been found to be suffering from mental disorder within the meaning of the Mental Health Act 1983, and is therefore now held at the maximum security Broadmoor Hospital. He is unlikely to be freed until at least 2028 and the age of 66. Almost 20 years on, the trial judge’s recommendation is still one of the heaviest ever handed out in British legal history. In February 1996 Erskine was again in the news, this time for preventing the possible murder of Peter Sutcliffe, the “Yorkshire Ripper”, by raising the alarm as a fellow inmate, Paul Wilson, attempted to strangle Sutcliffe with the flex from a pair of stereo headphones
Paul John Knowles was already on parole for burglary when he was picked up by police in Jacksonville, Florida in July 1974, on suspicion of murder. He escaped from his police cell, however, and that same evening he robbed and murdered Alice Curtis. During the next four months he drove all over America, killing at least 17 others. His method was to approach a house and threaten the occupants with a gun, then rape, rob and kill his victims, two of whom were young children. Knowles was eventually caught whilst trying to drive through a police roadblock, but on 18 November he was shot dead by an FBI agent when he tried to seize the sheriff’s pistol during an escape attempt. It may never be known how many people fell victim to Knowles’ attacks.
Juan Corona was born in Mexico but moved to California in the 1950s. Both he and his brother, Nativadad, were homosexual with homicidal tendencies. Nativadad had attacked a man in a cafe in 1970 with a machete. The true scope of their crimes - for which Juan would subsequently receive 25 life sentences - began before May 1971. Juan had been working as a contract labourer in an orchard in California. The orchard-owner discovered a fresh grave and contacted the authorities; it contained the body of Kenneth Whittaker, who had been stabbed and his skull torn open with a sharp object, possibly a machete. After nine days of intensive searching, investigators discovered 25 graves; in each of these they found the heavily mutilated bodies of migrant workers, alcoholics and drifters, none of whom had been reported missing. All showed signs of homosexual rape. Juan had foolishly left receipts containing his signature in two of the graves. Nonetheless, it took the jury 45 hours to convict him on all murder counts. Juan’s defense lawyers had tried to place the blame upon Nativadad.
Eric Harris’ ‘Guns in School’ Essay which he wrote two years before he commited the Columbine High School Massacre.
(click the photoset pictures to read)
(via theodorecowell)
Robert Hansen was born in Pocahontas, Iowa, and was a troubled child, given to wetting his pants, setting fires, and shoplifting. He moved to Anchorage, Alaska, following in the footsteps of his father, and there he opened a bakery. During times when his wife and kids were away, he started trolling areas where prostitutes plied their trade, and eventually he started to murder them. Sometimes he would pick them up in his truck and go to his house. He was a licensed pilot, so other times he would fly them into the Alaskan wild, release them, and then hunt them down with a rifle or bow and arrow. Hansen admitted to seventeen murders, but Alaska state investigator Glenn Forthe felt that Hansen had killed four or five women a year from the early 1970s to 1983, the year he was tracked down.
Hansen was finally caught when one of the women, Kitty Larson, he took to his house escaped, running from his house dressed only in the handcuffs he had put on her. Larson went to the police. In February of 1984, he admitted to some of the killings during questioning, though at times for investigators it was like pulling teeth. In his confession Hansen went into great pains to rationalize his behavior. He explained that he had had problems with women since he was a teenager and that women wouldn’t go out with him because of his acne and his stutter, “I was I guess what you might call very frustrated, upset all the time. I would see my friends and so forth going out on dates and so forth and I had tremendous desire to do the same thing.” He said he always “loved” women, but he made a distinction - a sharp distinction - between good and bad girls. Bad girls could die, “I’m not saying that I hate all women. I don’t. Quite the contrary, if, I guess in my own mind what I’m classifying is a good woman, not a prostitute.”
To avoid scandal, Father Guy Desnoyers decided it would be best to kill the girl he had impregenated and her unborn child. As the priest of the small town of Uruffe, France, in the province of Lorraine, Desnoyerss was still rather young and greatly attracted to the village’s young women. Such was the case of 19-year-old Regine Fay, who was noticeably pregnant in the fall of 1956. Fay decided against leaving home to have the baby or having an abortion - a decision which greatly concerned the priest, who feared the child-to-be might have features similar to his and thus tarnish his name. On December 2, 1956, Desnoyers told his parishoners that he would be out of town for a few days. However, he returned two nights later to keep an appointment he had with Fay. Desnoyers claims he attempted to absolve Fay of her sins. But upon her refusal, he killed her. The priest shot her though the back of the neck, and then proceeded with a grotesque mutilation which he declared was in keeping with his religious faith. He took a pocket-knife and slit open the girls abdomen, and then after further slashing her, Desnoyers baptized the child he had ripped from Fay and proceeded to destroy any likeness to him the baby might have had. Later that evening, Desnoyers conducted the search for the missing girl and was the leader of the party when they discovered her body. Police soon discovered that the bullet that killed Fay was of the same caliber as the 6.35-mm gun owned by Desnoyers, and with the discovery of a blood-stained handkerchief, the priest confessed his guilt. Although the prosecution sought the death penalty, the jury found him Guilty with extenuating circumstances, and the President of the Nancy Court, Judge Louis Facq, sentenced Desnoyers to life in prison.
Herbert Mullin came from a religious background and appears to have become mentally unbalanced following the death of his best friend Dean Richardson, in a car accident in July 1965. Mullin created a shrine to Dean in his bedroom, broke of his engagement, claimed he was homosexual and declared he was a conscientious objector when he was called up in 1969. Hallucinogenic drugs fuelled his paranoid schizophrenia. Mullin committed his first murder in October 1972, beating a tramp to death with a baseball bat. Eleven days later he stabbed college student and disembowelled her, leaving her body for the vultures. In January 1973 he shot five people, and a further four the following month. He was soon captured and found guilty of 10 murders; he will be eligable for parole in 2025.
