5 Real-Life Murderers More Terrifying Than Any Horror Movie

But when police finally caught the killer leaving the house of a victim, they discovered she was Juana Barraza, a professional masked wrestler who went by the name the Silent Lady.

It turned out Barraza was dressing up as a nurse and strolling into random old women's houses, offering them help with chores, as real nurses totally do. (The last victim had been strangled with a stethoscope. Again, we're all extras in a direct-to-video slasher movie.) She'd then steal things from the victims as trophies, presumably to offer at the altar to Santa Muerte she'd set up in her home. She said that her fixation with killing old ladies was a means of getting revenge against her mother, who gave her away to a man who raped her, though at that point it feels like she's trying to pile on too many gimmicks.

Juana was convicted of killing 17 women, but police believed she was guilty of twice that many. A judge sentenced her to 759 years in prison, but under Mexican law, she will likely only spend a maximum of 50 years there.

When his older brother Joel kicked Ervil out of his sect for being a dick, Ervil started his own branch of Mormonism, the Church of the Lamb of God. Ervil brought back a long-forgotten rule of Mormonism: the "blood atonement," which allowed him to murder sinners in order to cleanse their spirits and send them to heaven. The fact that his victims were people who challenged his authority was probably a coincidence. Ervil's first victim was, unsurprisingly, his brother Joel.

Granted, Ervil wasn't big on getting his own hands dirty. He had his large family and gang of followers act as his hitmen, killing dissident family members and carrying out raids on Mormon towns that didn't accept him as their leader. In 1974, the LeBaron gang firebombed the town of Los Molinos, and then shot at anyone brave enough to try to put out the fires. They gunned down 16-year-old Morone Mendez while he was on the roof of his burning house. Another man, Edmundo Aguilar, woke up to find a bomb had set his bed on fire. When he tried to escape, he got a bullet in the head.

Ervil was finally arrested by the FBI (after previously getting arrested for Joel's murder and escaping on a technicality). In jail, Ervil wrote the final book of his Bible, called The Book of the New Covenants, which was in reality a hit list of people he hadn't got around to killing yet. Ervil died in prison, but that fucking book is the reason death only made him more powerful. Everyone in that book lived in fear for decades after, and for good reason.

On June 27, 1988, at 4:00 p.m., the remaining LeBarons simultaneously killed four different dissident members in three different locations, hundreds of miles apart. Kind of like the prison killing scene from Breaking Bad, but with Mormons instead of Neo-Nazis. Oh, and one of the victims was an eight-year-old girl.

The media dubbed it the 4 O'Clock Murders, and it was so coordinated and well-planned that they didn't catch the final killer until 2010. All told, authorities credit around 25 murders to Ervil's cult, though we'll never know for sure. There are cases like Ervil's pregnant 17-year-old daughter, Rebecca, who is thought to still be buried out in the desert somewhere after Ervil had her strangled to death.

The remaining family still lives in Mexico, and still practices Mormonism. But they've calmed down quite a bit from their heyday. Now they're merely at war with a cartel.

It was at Delmenhorst that Hogel was finally caught in the act. An employee saw him injecting a patient with a drug which soon killed the man, and thought that seemed a little out of the ordinary. The witness told their boss, and they immediately confronted Hogel. And by "immediately" we mean two days later. You know how it is, there's a flash sale at IKEA and that pretty much takes up your whole day, then Tuesday seems like a weird day to deal with serial murder.

During that two-day wait, Hogel did in fact kill another patient, causing a judge to later charge some of the staff with manslaughter for their negligence. After police arrested Hogel and charged him with the two murders, he confessed to 88 more -- though it's believed that his actual kill count could be double that.

The breakthrough in the investigation came in 1995, when police discovered mass graves at the Van Dyk Mine. Forensic experts were able to recover ten bodies. It was so horrific that President Mandela had to console the traumatized public. Police caught their first real lead when they discovered that most of the victims died on the day they were to meet Sithole about a job opportunity.

Yeah, the second part of Sithole's method puts him above and beyond even his fellow monsters. He had created an organization called Youth Against Human Abuse to exploit both the job scarcity in Gauteng and the good natures of various young women. He claimed the organization helped the many homeless children in South Africa and worked toward the eradication of child abuse. It's like he made it his mission to only torture the best, most selfless women. When he was finally caught, Sithole had already raped and killed 38 of them.

Oh, and during interrogations, he refused to talk to male detectives. He would only talk about his crimes with female detectives, masturbating while he confessed. The court sentenced Sithole to 2,410 years in prison, with no possible parole for at least 930 years. Once again, he got off easy.

Laura H uses her Cracked money to feed her reading habit. Follow her on Twitter. Abraham lives in Mexico, but he likes eating tacos de suadero a lot more than murders. You can say hi to him on Twitter here , or you can laugh at his deviant art here. Michael Battaglino is a new contributor to Cracked.com. Be sure to check out some of his other work if you enjoyed this article. Zanandi follows some questionable people on Twitter.

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