5 Real-Life Murderers More Terrifying Than Any Horror Movie

5

Fred West Drove An Ice Cream Truck To Abduct Girls, Joined Forces With Another Psychopath

The running theme of today's article is going to be "Why in the fuck did it take so long to catch this monster?" Look, we get that nobody wants to rat out their neighbors or unfairly judge people based on, say, having an incredibly creepy hobby. But it's hard to come away from any serial killer account without thinking that maybe, just maybe, society isn't paranoid enough. Let's start with Fred West.

West had his first brush with the law in 1961, when police arrested him for having sex with minors ... a case which collapsed when he successfully argued that his actions were due to head injuries he sustained during his teenage years. (We imagine he left the courtroom saying, "Wow, that worked?") Not long after, he married Rena Costello and they moved to Coatbridge, Scotland, where, sigh, Fred got a job as a freaking ice cream truck driver. You know, the guy who had previously told a court of law that he had a brain injury that made him molest children?

It was around this time that West became a father. When his marriage started falling apart, he gave up his ice cream gig and moved to England, taking a job at a slaughterhouse, because real life is a bad B-movie written by a hack over a weekend. He met a girl named Rose, and not long after, his first wife Rena and his stepdaughter Charmaine disappeared. (No prizes for guessing what happened to them.) Fred and Rose started their own family (raising two daughters and a son) undisturbed, because cops just were not paying attention. Did we mention that Rose was also a psychopath?

via Wiki Commons

Yeah, their house on 25 Cromwell Street in Gloucester is known today as the House of Horrors. West and his new wife (and sometimes other "clients") would rape and kill young women there. They would lure girls into their home with a promise of a nanny job, or Fred would abduct them off the street. Then they would drag them into the basement, Fred would rape them while Rose held them down, and they'd dismember and bury the bodies under the cellar.

When one of Fred's own daughters, Heather, told a friend about the things her parents were doing to her and her siblings, Fred and Rose killed her and buried her in the garden. Still, after all of that, only Fred's big dumb mouth is what got him caught. Police finally caught wind of a joke the Wests would tell, that "Heather was buried under the patio." Well, that's less of a joke and more of a casual confession. Either way, police got a search warrant and found a whole bunch of bodies -- the couple was responsible for at least a dozen murders.

Rose West is currently serving a life sentence with no chance of parole. Fred, on the other hand, never made it to trial. He committed suicide in his prison cell -- an act which hopefully caused him an incredible amount of pain.

4

A Female Professional Wrestler Was An Old Lady Strangler

Starting in 2003, little old grandmas who lived alone in Mexico started dying. That wouldn't be so weird -- dying is what grandmas eventually do -- but these women were all strangled to death. The police believed the killer to be a man disguised as a woman, because an eyewitness saw someone rather muscular in a dress fleeing one of the homes. They assumed the killer had a "confused sexual identity," and started bringing in known crossdressers for questioning.

3

Ervil Lebaron Led A Mormon Death Squad From Beyond The Grave

Another big difference between slasher movie villains and real-life pieces of shit is that the latter don't get sequels. No cult ritual is going to bring Ted Bundy back to life. Yet Ervil LeBaron kept his body count climbing even after he died, using a method that is arguably even creepier.

When the Mormon church decided they weren't cool with polygamy anymore, the LeBaron family decided to head for greener pastures in Mexico. Two patriarchs of the family were Joel LeBaron and Ervil LeBaron, the latter of whom you've noticed has a name that would be considered too on-the-nose for a cartoon villain. Ervil LeBaron (thunder crash) had 13 wives and 50 children, and as expected from any good cult leader, he claimed he was the sole representative of God on Earth. This guy's entire life was red flags.

AP

2

A Nurse Intentionally Caused Dozens Of Heart Failures To Play Hero

Niels Hogel was a nurse at several intensive care units in Germany from the late 1990s to the early 2000s, and he was the shit at resuscitating patients. He enjoyed saving lives so much that if there was nobody in need of saving, he'd help them along a little so he could have his time to shine.

Since Hogel had easy access to cardiovascular drugs, he'd quietly inject patients' IVs with a little something extra to stop their hearts. Then he would save them. Or not. Sometimes they would die. Look, you can't save everyone! A co-worker noted later that when he failed to revive them, he would always appear distraught. "What kind of cruel god would let this happen?!?"

Hogel did this many, many times. He bounced around from hospital to hospital, wasting medicine and lives wherever he went. At a hospital in Oldenburg, suspicions arose about the increasing number of deaths in his unit. They tried moving him to another (thinking maybe he was just bad luck, or something?), but eventually they pressured him to quit because he acted really weird whenever anyone needed resuscitation, always muscling in to do it himself. All the same, they gave him a nice recommendation which would lead to his job in Delmenhorst. Sure, the guy's a bit of a glory hog, but damn if he doesn't save a lot of lives!

Rainer Fromm

1

Moses Sithole Killed A Bunch Of Women, Jerked Off During His Confession

Moses Sithole (seriously, these names) was sometimes described as the Ted Bundy of South Africa, though he could also have been described as the turd in the punch bowl of society. Police arrested him in 1989 for raping a woman, and released him in 1993 on good behavior. The lesson Sithole seemed to learn from this is that society is oddly forgiving of people like him. It was time to escalate.

His modus operandi was nightmarish on several levels, the first being that he would rape women, then kill them by strangling them with their own underwear. Specifically, this fucker would hogtie his victims in such a way that if they tried to relax their muscles, their underwear around their neck would strangle them, basically making them fight themselves for their own lives. He would masturbate while they died.

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