14 Disturbed Killers Who Skinned Their Victims

Many of us have seen Silence of the Lambs, and cringed at everything Buffalo Bill did involving skinning those girls. But did you know that there are many murderers throughout history who did exactly that (and worse) with their victims? That's right, there are killers who skinned their victim and then... did things with the skin, to quote Dr. Lector. From Ed Gein to Vlad the Impaler, these killers live on in our history books and in our nightmares. Still, it's hard not to be morbidly curious, right?

It probably goes without saying, but let's be clear: this article contains graphic descriptions of murder and torture, and even a few horrifying pictures. If you have a weak stomach, this is not the article for you. If, on the other hand, you want to learn about the more horrific parts of mankind, and learn about just how depraved a person can get, then this group of killers is sure to disgust and fascinate you. 

So, hang on to your skin, or at least your lunch, as we take a look into the crimes and minds of killers who found new and terrifying uses for human skin. 

Ed Gein is probably the closest the world has ever actually come to Buffalo Bill, though you might argue that he was far worse. In November of 1957, a woman named Bernice Worden vanished from her job at a hardware store. Police investigation eventually lead to Ed Gein's house, and when they went to have a look around, they were horrified by what they found. Initially, they found Worden, strung up and dismembered and gutted like a deer (done after she was already dead, thankfully), but it only got worse from there.

It seems that Gein had, for years, both been killing people and robbing graves, then skinning the bodies and using them to make all manner of utensils, furniture, and art. Findings by police included human skin chairs, lamp shades, gloves, corsets, leggings, a belt made of nipples and noses, bone eating utensils, lips hung as decoration, and many more nightmarish artifacts. The items were photographed before being destroyed, for obvious reasons. Gein died in a mental health institute in 1984.

One of America's most notorious serial killers goes by the name of Jeffrey Dahmer. He murdered at least 17 people during the 1970s, '80s, and '90s. He killed mostly young boys and men, and also raped them both before and well after death. In one case, when he murdered Anthony Sears in 1989, after he was done having sex with the dead body, he dismembered the corpse. He took the skull and boiled it to remove the skin, then painted the skull to make it look like a plastic model. He did all this while awaiting sentencing after he had already been charged for sexual exploitation!

But this wasn't the last time Dahmer played around with removing the skin from his victims. In 1991, Dahmer met a young boy named Errol Lindsey and invited him back to his apartment. Once there, Dahmer killed the boy by strangulation, then flayed the body. He took the skin and soaked it in a bath of cold water and salt for several weeks, in hopes of preserving it. After a few weeks, he says he had to discard the skin, as it was going bad.

Dahmer was killed by a fellow inmate in 1994, who claimed God had told him to do it.

The case of Mary Bell is both tragic and horrifying. Bell was only 11 years old when she killed not one, but two little boys. Why? Well, her mother was a prostitute who had forced her daughter into sexually servicing men starting at the age of four. Her mother also supposedly tried to kill her multiple times, so this was one disturbed little girl. In 1968, Bell killed a four-year-old boy, then killed a second just two months later, strangling them both before mutilating the bodies. She carved their skin, cut their hair, and, most horribly, mutilated their penises.

That last detail is why she's on this list. Upon inspection of the second corpse, police found that the 11-year-old girl had actually skinned the boy's penis, and had perhaps tried to cut it off as well. While this is likely linked to her own abuse, no one is sure what Mary intended to do with the skin. She has been released from prison, received a huge amount of psychiatric care, and now lives under a new name.

If you want an unusual resume, look no further than Masnah Ismail, also known as Mona Fandey. She was a Malaysian pop singer, witch doctor, and ultimately murderer, who was executed in 2001 for her horrific crimes. After her singing career, she was known locally as a shaman, and she eventually turned to dark witchcraft so strong that politicians would come to her for aid. One such politician came to her for help, and as he laid down for a cleansing ritual to be performed, she instead hacked off his head and limbs with an axe. She then skinned his body and sectioned it into 18 parts.

The ensuing trial was so traumatic that it actually contributed to Malaysia ceasing jury trials. Throughout her trial, Fandey constantly smiled, dressed extravagantly, and posed for the press. She was reported as saying that she knew she "would never die."

Dengiz is probably the most famous serial killer to ever come out of Turkey, mostly because of the grotesque details of his killings. On June 5, 2007, Dengiz killed a computer engineer he knew in a dispute over a laptop. Once he'd done this, he took teh laptops and the victim's cell phone as a trophy. In his next killing, things escalated quite a bit. On September 15, he shot a garbage man in his area, then dragged the body away and took it home. Over the next day, he skinned the corpse with a cleaver, and began to eat the body. He ate some of it raw, then cooked more of it for later. He dropped the remains off at the dump, and gave some of the skin to a stray dog in his neighborhood. 

He was arrested in 2007 and deemed too insane to stand trial. He now lives in a mental institute, but still shows no remorse for skinning and eating his victim. All this lead to him being nicknamed the "Cannibal of Ankara."

Michael W. Ryan is just about as deplorable a person as you can find. During the 1980s, he was a leader of a religious white supremacist group, which focused on the evilness of Jews, the destruction of authority, and the inferiority of other races. This alone makes him pretty terrible, but the reason for his imprisonment is what will really make you queasy. 

In 1982, Ryan was arrested for the murder of five-year-old Luke Stice, the son of one of his followers, as well as the murder of another member of his society named James Thimm. Reports indicated that Ryan had, over the course of several days, abused the child (including forcing him to have sex with his father) before killing him. Ryan then beat Thimm, forced him to have sexual intercourse with a goat, and then eventually skinned him while he was still alive. Thim eventually died when Ryan stomped on his skinned and bleeding chest. 

It's not surprising that Ryan was sentenced to death, though he died on death row in 2015 before his execution. 

Katherine Knight was the first Australian woman to ever be sentenced to life without parole, and for very good reason. One fateful night in the year 2000, Knight went to see her boyfriend, John Price, with whom she was currently having a fight. During the night, Price stabbed him at least 37 times with a butcher knife, as he bled out on the floor of his home. But, unfortunately, it didn't stop there.

Knight then skinned him and hung the skin on a meat hook in the lounge. She then butchered parts of his body and made an extravagant meal out of them, "serving up the meat with baked potato, pumpkin, zucchini, cabbage, yellow squash and gravy." When police discovered the dishes, they were set neatly at the table, with the names of his children on cards at each place setting. It appears that she was planning on serving his body parts to his own children.

Knight claimed to remember doing none of this, but a judge didn't buy it. She is still serving out her life imprisonment in New South Wales.

While Mary Bell is definitely the youngest skinning killer on this list, Sandy Charles is a close second. When Charles was just 14 years old, he and an unnamed seven-year-old accomplice lured a young boy into the bushes. Charles claimed he wanted to play a game with the boy, but once the boy got there, he bludgeoned the child to death. From there, he cut skin off the body in around 30 strips to take home, then boiled the skin until the attached fat reduced to liquid. It makes one wonder: why?

Well, apparently Charles wanted to fly. He claimed that he had gotten the idea from a movie titled Warlock, in which an evil warlock kills a young boy and then uses the skin and fat in order to make a potion that enables him to fly. Accounts differ on whether or not he and the other boy actually drank the fat and skin, but Charles did claim that there was a spirit in his room that told him he needed to do it. 

Even the beautiful can be ugly killers. On Thanksgiving Day in 1991, aspiring Egyptian American model Omaima Nelson attacked her husband, Bill, at their apartment in Costa Mesa, California. She stabbed him with scissors, then beat him with a clothes iron before he at last died. She then did the only logical thing: she skinned and cooked him.

She boiled his hands in oil, and boiled his head as well, and dismembered the rest of him. She skinned his torso entirely, and also castrated him for revenge, as she claimed he had sexually assaulted her numerous times. She then mixed his meat in with the Thanksgiving turkey, and claimed to have eaten parts of his remains before throwing the rest into the trash, including the removed skin.

Nelson is currently serving out a 27 years to life sentence in the Central California Women's Facility.

In 1985, a woman named Beverly Capone went missing in Westchester, New York. Police suspected the disappearance was linked to a murder from just a few days before, in which a man named Alex Mengel had killed a cop and stolen his car. When the police found Capone's body, they found that she had been scalped, and that parts of her face had been skinned. Apparently, Mengel had done this in order to wear the skin of her head as a wig, in triumph, during his next crime. They could not tell if she had been scalped while still alive.

All this is pretty gruesome, but even more frightening, investigators think he may have been responsible for even more killings than we yet know of, and he may have scalped more women. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), Mengel was killed in a shootout with police, so we may never find out.