11 Killers Who Evaded Capture for Years

Serial killers: are they living among us? Probably. If there's one thing to learn from the lives of the elusive criminals on this list, it’s that there might very well be crafty murderers walking through your city streets right now plotting their next crime.

But how are these killers able to be active for years, sometimes decades, without detection? Some of them managed to blend in with society by wearing a mask of civic engagement. They donate their time to local organizations and work alongside the police department in order to make their communities a better place - not counting their many killings Others are simply career criminals who spent their lives perfecting their craft. 

The Butcher of Rostov, Andrei Chikatilo, is believed to have murdered more than 56 people across Eastern Europe from the late 1970s to 1990. He was finally caught after the KGB ran a blood analysis against DNA that had been collected from a previously unsolved murder. Chikatilo avoided capture for so long because he constantly moved around for work.

Initially, he worked as a teacher and was shuffled from school to school every time he would molest a student. He found work at a locomotive factory in Novocherkassk where he was shipped off to various parts of Eastern Europe. Everywhere he'd go, someone in the area would end up dead. Chikatilo finally confessed to the murders after a two-hour interrogation by a psychiatrist. 

"Candyman" Dean Corll used his work as a candy store owner to help groom his victims.  He worked in his family's candy factory where he was known to give away free samples to school children - earning the trust of the community and his future victims. He targeted young men, some of whom he knew from the store and one of whom he employed there. Corll's molestation and murder spree officially lasts for the three year span of 1970 to 1973, but police speculate there were many other victims. Corll's crime spree ended after one of his teenage accomplices shot and killed him. 

Because of Houston's rising poverty levels in the early 1970s, and the promise of a better life away from the job-strapped Texas community, young people were hitchhiking out of town at an unusually high rate. Corll knew this and used it to his advantage.

From 1964 to 1973, Ed Kemper, known as The Coed Killer, killed 10 people - beginning with his grandparents when he was 16. He was sent to the Atascadero State Hospital as a criminally insane juvenile. There he became a model prisoner and was released at the age of 21.

For the next four years Kemper would murder, dismember, and commit necrophilia with female college students at schools surrounding the Berkley area. His final two murders were committed on the same nigh. First he decapitated his mother, screamed at her severed head, and tried destroy her tongue and larynx in the garbage disposal. Then he choked one of his mother's friends to death before shoving her body in a closet.

He drove to Colorado, phoned police back in California, and confessed to the murders. 

From the outside looking in, Edmund Kemper was a dorky and seemingly normal guy. He had a genius-level IQ that allowed him to put on a mask of normalcy when it was needed. Because of this, he slipped under the radar of many, and wasn't considered a shifty character to avoid. 

Eric Edgar Cooke, a killer known as the Night Caller, was a serial killer in Australia during the 1960s who murdered eight people in seemingly random incidents unconnected by a modus operandi or methodology. His victims were shot in their sleep, stabbed with scissors, and hit with a car - Cooke didn't care how he killed his victims. In his most vile crime, he stabbed a victim to death, drank lemonade from their refrigerator, and raped their corpse with a whiskey bottle before dragging the body into a nearby yard. 

It's likely that if Cooke had been committing these crimes even 10 years later he would have been apprehended much earlier because of advances in technology. At the time, police relied on fingerprints basic ballistics research to solve crimes. Police caught a break in the case when they found a rifle matching the murder weapon hiding in a bush near Mount Pleasant. They waited for the killer to return for the weapon, and Cooke showed up.

After his arrest he confessed to the killings. 

Henry Lee Lucas zipped up and down the country for years, killing at least 11 people during a 23-year period. After he was apprehended by the police in 1983, Lucas confessed to around 360 murders, most of which were unsolved. Of those, 11 were conclusively committed by Lee.

There are a lot of reasons why Lucas was able to avoid detective for so long, but the biggest one was that he was a drifter who never drew much attention to himself. In 1983, he was arrested for the unlawful possession of a firearm by Texas Ranger Phil Ryan and after spending a few days in the local prison, his confession spree began. 

Police do not believe he committed all of the murders he claimed to, but did have proof he was a ruthless killer. He was sentenced to death for one of his killings, an unidentified woman only known as Orange Socks. He died in prison from heart failure.

From the outside, John Wayne Gacy was the mild-mannered owner of PDM Contractors, a construction company, and a local entertainer who dressed up as a clown for charity events. He was even appointed director of Chicago's annual Polish Constitution Day Parade — an event he supervised from 1975 until 1978.

But unbeknownst to those in the community, he was also a sex-crazed murderer who assaulted and murdered young men and boys before burying them beneath the floorboards of his house. He targeted runaways and transients. He was caught after one of the men he assaulted lived through the ordeal and gave a description of Gacy's car. 

Gacy was convicted of 33 murders and sentenced to death in 1980. He is one of the most prolific American serial killers. 

Israel Keyes was a career criminal who admitted to murder, rape, burglary, bank robbing, and arson in states ranging from Alaska, New York, Texas, Vermont, and Washington. Despite his massive killing spree, he had no apparent motive. 

Keyes manage to avoid detection by the police from the late 1990s to 2012 by maintaining a methodology that involved turning off his phone when he traveled for murder, paying for things in cash, and going thousands of miles out of his way to cover his tracks. He also picked people who did not match a particular pattern to avoid suspicion. 

In some instances, he would even prep for a kill years before carrying out the murder. Keyes was finally caught when he began using the credit card of one of his victims while traveling across the American southwest. Before Keyes could be sent to trial he committed suicide in his cell in December 2012. 

Todd Kohlhepp was just an average guy to most who met him. But secretly, he was a vicious killer with a violent past. 

Despite being convicted in a 1987 kidnapping case for abducting and raping a teen girl before threatening to kill her family - and serving 15 years in prison - Kohlhepp received his real estate license and move to South Carolina. He became one of the top agents in his region. 

He also bought nearly 100 acres of land in the middle of nowhere. While he appeared to be a relatively normal guy, between 2003 and 2016, Kohlhepp murdered seven people, and kept one woman chained by a dog collar in a storage container on his property. 

Kohlhepp avoided being caught for so long by killing intermittently, and by lying about his status as a sexual predator to everyone he met. It wasn't until the disappearance of Kala Brown and her boyfriend Charles David Carver that Kohlhepp lost his nerve and admitted to the earlier slayings. Brown was found chained on his property while her boyfriend was found in a shallow grave. 

Gary Ridgway lived a serious double life. By day, he was proselytizing door-to-door, reading the Bible aloud at work and at home, and insisting that his wife follow the strict teachings of their church pastor. By night, he was having sex with prostitutes and subsequently killing them. 

He was apprehended in 2001 when his DNA positively matched that of four women linked to the Green River murders. Ridgway admitted to 71 murders, but admitted there were probably more.

He took advantage of the fact that cops weren't trying to solve the murders of stray prostitutes. Ridgway took advantage of their vulnerability and was able to kill so many because no one was looking for them when they disappeared.

From 1985 to 2007, Lonnie David Franklin Jr., or The Grim Sleeper, murdered at least 12 people - 11 of whom were black women - across Los Angeles. He targeted women of color because he knew at the time, the Los Angeles Police Department had little interest in investigating the disappearances of poor, black women. 

Franklin was a career criminal who had been investigated for multiple crimes before the LAPD were able to connect his DNA to key pieces of evidence left at some of the crime scenes. He got his nickname because from 1988 to 2002 he appeared to have stopped killing.  When he struck again, the case finally gained momentum in the media and police started actively searching for him. He was arrested in 2010 and sentenced to death in August 2016.