Countless accounts of serial killers have been shocking and, creepily, intriguing the public increasingly in current years. However, have you ever wondered how old some of these murderers were upon committing the crimes? Youth and agility seem to add a fresh exuberance to the following fifteen youngsters who cemented their reputations and careers before the age of 30.
Minor #1
Unfortunately, #1 on our list committed noteworthy crimes under protection of a silly minority privacy law, and therefore our sixteen-year-old trigger-happy culprit remains unnamed. But Minor #1 has the same cool demeanor and clear disconnect as the hardened greats of seasoned offenders, officer Enizaldo Jose Plentz said upon taking this young Brazilian under arrest. The high-school dropout has confessed to twelve killings, but only six have been verified for sure as his handiwork. The last we’ve heard of him, he was required to undergo 45 days of psychological testing – probably due, in part, to his closing comments to the police, when he explained that one of the people he killed had tried to date his sister and thus deserved the consequences.
Dmitriy Kopilov (1988)
Kopilov is another confident teenage killer who set the bar at Chelyabinsk Prison in Russia for serving the maximum imprisonment for a minor – ten short years. By seventeen, he had brutally murdered six women and one male witness to his last attack; the women had been traveling alone, were easy to overcome and consequently dragged into nearby tree cover (Kopilov’s preferred hideout). Officials say he had then used various materials – knives, stones, even animal bones – to finish off his victims, robbing their bodies before discarding them. If you’d like to contact him directly for a first-person account, you can for some reason get his prison address here.
Elmer Wayne Henley (1956)
One of three acquitted accomplices in the rape and murder of twenty-seven underage boys between the years of 1970-73, Henley deserves a special mention for the final murder of Dean Corll, the ringleader and organizer of the abductions. Corll paid Henley and his similarly teenage counterpart, David Brooks, $200 for every boy that they brought back to his apartment. There, the three would sexually torture their victims before killing them and dumping their bodies at boat sheds and beaches around Houston. The events culminated on a night in 1973 when Henley brought his customary order of a fresh teenage boy and a fifteen-year-old girl as a potential victim to the apartment. Corll, outraged by the female’s presence, in turn attacked and tied up Henley along with the other two, informing Henley that he was to endure the same outcome as the two unknowing victims. Henley convinced Corll to untie him so that he could assist the older man with the standard rape and torture, and while Corll was freshly mounting the male victim, Henley shot him in the back of the head. He then called the police. At age 17, Henley was held responsible for six of the 27 murders and is incarcerated for life.
Jeffrey Dahmer (1960-1994)
By definition, a “serial killer” is “someone who murders more than three victims one at a time in a relatively short interval.” Dahmer could not technically hold the title until age 30 in 1990, but by then he had already murdered five victims beginning at the fresh age of 18. Dahmer, noted sex offender, cannibal, necrophiliac, and disembowelment enthusiast, became infamous after his would-be eighteenth victim, Tracy Edwards, wriggled from his grasp and led authority figures to Dahmer’s incriminating crib, boasting pictures of his mangled victims, refrigerated remains of heads, penises, miscellaneous body parts, and a candle-and-human-skull altar construction half-completed in his closet. Dahmer died in prison after being attacked by an inmate at the age of 34.
Alexander Pichushkin (1974 – )
Nicknamed “The Chessboard Killer” for allegedly hoping to kill enough people to fill up a chessboard (64), and “The Bitsa Park Maniac” for famously detailing to police the disposal of his victims’ bodies in the park upon capture, this ambitious young killer destroyed his first human soul at the age of 18. Although he took a long hiatus, Pichushkin’s career blossomed again at 27 when he began luring older men into the infamous park where he would supply them with vodka before killing them from behind using a hammer. Some sources claim he would force the vodka bottle into their skulls to finalize the killing. Pichushkin alerted national attention upon capture due to his chillingly theatrical accounts of the murders and his blasphemous insistence that he was operating under higher jurisdiction. “For me, life without killing is like life without food for you,” he said. “I felt like a father of all these people, since it was I who opened the door for them to another world.”
Charles Starkweather (1938-1959)
Starkweather takes the cake for having the shortest and most stunning swipe with destruction which ended violently in the electric chair at age twenty-one, a story that inspired the feature film Natural Born Killers and Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska.” As someone with physical and mental handicaps growing up, Starkweather endured ruthless bullying that clearly had an effected his psyche; the end of 1957 found him bloodied with the remnants of his first murder — that of a station attendant, which brought him into a higher frequency of consciousness above the law – or so he later claimed. The following year brought him to his infamous killing spree of ten victims, many of them in the company of his 14-year-old girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate, who was later charged with accessory.
Michael Bruce Ross (1959-2005)
Connecticut had not executed a man for over forty years before Michael Ross took his last breath, but many inhabitants of the state which Ross could also call his home welcomed the decision in 2005 for this Cornell University graduate. Although Ross was 45 when he died, his eight-person killing spree began when he was only 22. All of Ross’ victims were women, many were minors and, except one case, all were raped before being strangled to death. Ross allegedly turned his life around in prison and became a devout Catholic; it is also stated that he refused a closing statement before being given the lethal injection.
David Berkowitz – Son of Sam (1953 – )
Berkowitz began his harrowing career at 24 by shooting two female teenage victims outside of a suburban home with a .44 caliber handgun, the incriminating bullets of which would define his handiwork over the next few terrifying years of seemingly unrelated shootings in various NYC boroughs. Insisting first that he was operating under instructions from a cult and later testifying that he was actually following demands made from the spirit trapped within his neighbor’s dog, the “Son of Sam” sent letters to the police during his terrorizing spree explaining his dedication to “Father Sam’s” thirst for blood and his interest in the police’s involvement. It is said upon capture he merely stated, “You got me. What took you so long?” Berkowitz is sentenced to a life in prison and has since the killings become a born-again Christian.
Richard Trenton Chase (1950-1980)
Known as the “Vampire of Sacramento,” Richard Chase suffered from a long history of mental instability which caused him to be involuntarily institutionalized at age 25 after he was rushed to the hospital for blood poisoning. It was later discovered he had injected rabbit blood into his veins. Chase terrorized the hospital staff by capturing birds and smearing their blood across his face. Morbid behavior progressed after his release; he would trap or purchase animals so he could kill them and ingest their juices, which he also eventually did to his victims when he began killing humans at age 27. Of his six killings, the most horrifying is that of young David, the 22-month-old whose brains and internal organs he ate before disposing of the remains. “Dracula,” as the nurses at the hospital called him, killed with a .22 caliber gun, had sex with two of his victims after murdering them, and bathed in the blood of one woman who had been three months pregnant upon the attack. Chase committed suicide in prison, after being encouraged to do so by his inmates.
Thug Behram (1765-1840)
Although the actual number of murders is unknown, Behram was associated with nearly 1,000 cases in India over a forty-year period, beginning at age 25. Thuggee, the cult Behram committed these atrocities under, was a centuries-old practice some considered religious but others only associated with pointless gang robberies and group killings. Thuggee’s, who tended to interbreed in order to keep their practices within the family, were well-known for using rumals (handkerchiefs) for strangulation. Behram, who later admitted, “I may have strangled with my own hands about 125 men,” was executed by hanging.
Kenneth Bianchi (1951 – )
The younger of the two “Hillside Stranglers,” Bianchi deserves a special mention. During his bloodthirsty career, his training at a local police force to become a officer included him in an investigation team attempting to hunt down himself and his partner in crime. Bianchi and his teammate, Angelo Buono, Jr., raped and killed ten women between October and February of 1977-78; despite their adjoined nickname, the pair often experimented with lethal injections and electric shocks as well. Bianchi was finally captured after a sloppy solo mission during which he did succeed in murdering two more victims, but left incriminating evidence behind that linked him and his cousin to the Stranglers. Bianchi is currently serving his life sentence in Walla Walla, Washington.
Ted Bundy (1946-1989)
As Bundy famously never admitted to his first attack or even the culminated number of victims (est. between 30-100), there is no knowing how young this handsome and charismatic homicidal maniac was when he took his first. However, the first of his thirty documented murders brought him in at 27. Bundy’s fame lies in the swift completeness of his crimes — his dozens of victims seemingly just vanishing without any witnesses, and his escape attempts after being caught were very close to successful. Although his first try only bought him freedom for four days, he thwarted the police for nearly two months after his second escape, during which time he had committed four murders in a sorority in under half an hour. Bundy was later discovered to be a necrophiliac and – fun fact – a foot fetishist.
Andrew Cunanan (1969-1997)
Cunanan was only 28 when he went on a three-month killing spree that ended with his own suicide in a Miami apartment while he was being hunted by the police. The case, which became famous after he killed fashion designer Gianni Versace, puzzled investigators since Cunanan seemed to have no motive; his first victim was a close friend. Upon leaving his childhood household, Cunanan prostituted himself to older men in order to achieve wealth and status, and upon the discovery of his homosexuality he allegedly got into an argument with his mother that ended violently. Cunanan threw her into a wall, dislocating her shoulder. Despite his generally violent nature, his motives remain undiscovered.
Gilles de Rais (1404-1440)
Rais, a successful leader in the French army, retired from military life at 28 in order to flesh out another interest: that of drugging, raping, and murdering children. Although the number of supposed victims ranks in the hundreds, there is no way of knowing due to poor record keeping and the general miscommunication between the classes; many of his victims were apprentices or ragamuffins that Rais considered easily overlooked. He would lure the children, generally male, into his home to be fed and watered. As soon as the youngster was drunk enough, Rais would chain him in his private apartments and masturbate onto his belly or thighs. Then Rais, comforting the terrified child, would untie him, saying that he “only wanted to play with him,” upon which the child would be decapitated with a braquemard (double-edged sword) kept on hand especially for the occasion. Rais’ crimes were discovered through an unrelated investigation and he was executed by simultaneous hanging and burning.
Ian Brady (1938 – ) and Myra Hindley (1942-2002)
Brady and Hindley were in their earlier twenties at the beginning of their joint career as torturers, rapists, and murderers of young children in Greater Manchester, England. Although Hindley initially denied her role, both were found guilty of luring the underage innocents into their van so that they could take advantage of them in the privacy of their own home. The pair were caught with thirteen minutes of audio recordings containing both of their voices overlapping the pleading and screaming of a young female victim, several pictures of a tied and tortured body, and a beaten, mutilated body of a young male victim stuffed into a closet. Although the couple were incarcerated before either could turn thirty, Hindley didn’t confess to the murders until she was forty-five in a seventeen-hour testimonial officials called “a performance.” Brady only confessed after Hindley, and first insisted he be given the means to commit suicide in return for his declaration.
