The 5 Most Terrifying Serial Killers You've Never Heard Of

Honora Kelly, later renamed Jane Toppan by her adoptive parents, endured a childhood so bizarre and tragic that it would be equally at home in either a Dickens novel or an episode of Black Mirror. She lost her mother as a child, so her father surrendered his daughters to the Boston Female Asylum before sewing his own eyelids shut. Toppan, a bratty but brilliant student turned effervescent nurse, was nicknamed "Jolly Jane" by her patients. Her only shortcoming as a nurse? All of her patients died.

Yes, of course Jane was poisoning her patients. Her childhood memories looked like the video from The Ring. The odds against her turning out normal were astronomical. And no, she didn't kill them quickly. Jane toyed with her victims, administering alternating doses of morphine and atropine -- medicine's most potent downer and upper, respectively. She delighted in delivering her victims as close to death's door as possible via morphine, only to yank them back to life with a stimulating shot of atropine. Then, with the victim teetering between life and death, Jane joined them in bed, embraced them, and sometimes even stroked their hair as she injected the lethal dose.

Jane even poisoned her more popular foster sister, Elizabeth Brigham. On a Cape Cod summer day in 1899, Jane invited Elizabeth to a picnic on the beach. Jane supplied corned beef, taffy, and fresh water ... laced with strychnine. Years later, Jane recounted that she clutched her sister lovingly "... and watched with delight as she gasped her life out."

But much like Al Capone getting nailed for tax crimes, Jane was undone by her more mundane transgressions. She lived in a Cape Cod residence owned by the Davis family, and when she stopped paying rent, the Davis matriarch came to personally collect, unaware of her tenant's love of poison and poison-related activities. To everyone's surprise but yours, hopefully, Mrs. Davis soon fell ill and died, followed by the other members of her family.

Finally arousing suspicion, Toppan was captured and confessed to 33 murders, blaming it all on the fact that she had no husband or family to keep her busy. Yes, if only she had a bit more laundry to wash, she wouldn't have had to poison a few dozen people to keep busy.

Up until its bloody crescendo, Romand's day-to-day life was a straight-up sitcom plotline. He spent his days in town, often doing nothing but sitting in his car and reading magazines, other times going on hikes. Romand even occasioned his supposed workplace, where he'd acquire a visitor pass and hang out in the library, write letters, or plan vacations through the in-house booking agent. To maintain the ruse at home, Roman pilfered or bought WHO stationery from the gift shop, and supplied his parents a photo of his office (taken from the outside, of course).

To make ends meet, Romand convinced other members of his family to give him money -- as a high-ranking member of WHO, he could invest their funds at an 18-percent return. Because the World Health Organization includes everything, even the health of your bank account. Ultimately, he scammed his wife's parents out of their retirement, sold her uncle a phony cancer cure, and when those wellsprings dried up, he took a mistress and embezzled from her too.

On January 9, 1993, Romand decided he couldn't keep up the lies any longer, but rather than come clean, he instead began systematically murdering his family. He bludgeoned his wife with a rolling pin. He poured his kids a farewell bowl of Cocoa Pops, they watched the Three Little Pigs together, then Romand shot them both. He drove to his parents' place and murdered them as well. He tried to kill his mistress, but that, of all things, turned out to be murder he couldn't go through with. He went back to his house and staged a suicide by taking a nonlethal dose of pills and setting a fire, knowing that the firemen would arrive in time to save him. He was sentenced to life in prison in 1996, leaving behind a saga of petty deception and brutal violence that even the most time-crunched SVU producer would reject.

Tyler replied: "They won't. Trust me."

Tyler popped three tabs of E, cranked Lil' Boosie to hype himself up, and proceeded to brain both of his parents with a claw hammer. He dragged their bodies into the master bedroom, covered them with towels, then jumped on Facebook to confirm that the party was ON.

The party itself was, by all accounts, a real-life Project X affair, with at least a hundred revelers in attendance, even if most only knew Tyler as "that weird kid from school, maybe?" No one knew until long afterward that two bodies were stashed upstairs.

Eventually, late in the evening, Tyler confided in childhood friend Michael Mandell, who refused to believe it until Tyler showed him the bodies. Mandell called Crime Stoppers, and police quickly arrived, found the corpses, and arrested Tyler.

In jailhouse interviews, Hadley claims to regret the unceremonious slaying of his parents. Yet according to fellow prisoners, he's proudly monikered himself "hammer boy," signs "hammertime" autographs for other inmates, and often fondly recalls the awesomeness of the party. It is not explicitly stated, but we can only assume the other inmates are downright sick of his "I got so hammered" puns.

After a homeless man showed up in a local police station to complain about the nagging ax wound in his head, Denke was arrested and placed in a holding cell. He promptly committed suicide with a handkerchief, because he knew it was only a matter of time before authorities discovered what he'd been up to: using his apartment / homeless shelter as a human meat-processing facility. Apparently, Denke was making a fairly decent living taking in recently released hospital patients and vagrants (around 40 of them over the course of three to four years) and then de-boning them, pickling the flesh, selling their tastiest bits as pork on the open market, and turning the rest into belts and soap, like a gritty prequel to Tyler Durden.

Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Grossmann also turned his apartment into a meatpacking plant, but he preferred the taste of destitute young women, whom he rendered into steak and sausages to sell from his train station hot dog stand. We don't know if there's really a preconceived "look" to a man who turns other people into sausages, but Carl is sure working it:

Seriously, do not eat at unlicensed sausage stands. We cannot stress how many ways it is a bad idea.

You know all those facts you've learned about psychology from movies and that one guy at the party who says, "Actually ..." a lot? Please forget them. Chances are none of them are true. Take the Stanford Prison Experiment, the one famous psychology study people can name. It was complete bullshit. Funny story actually, it turns out that when you post flyers that say, "Hey, do you wanna be a prison guard for the weekend? Free food and nightsticks," you might not get the most stable group of young men. So join Jack O'Brien, Cracked staff members Dan O'Brien and Michael Swaim, and Psychology Professor Martie G. Haselton of UCLA as they debunk Rorschach tests, the Mozart effec,t and middle child syndrome, so soon you can be that person at the party who says, "Actually ..." Get your tickets here!

For more reasons to never trust anybody, ever, check out 8 Real Craigslist Ads That Were Clearly Written By Murderers and 5 Real Killers More Terrifying Than Any Horror Movie.

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