12 Cryptic and Chilling Messages Left at Murder Scenes

When serial killers leave cryptic messages at their crime scenes, they’re either trying to spread panic throughout the city, or they’ve decided to up the ante on their killing spree by playing a deadly game with the police. Many chilling messages at crime scenes are hastily written sentences that reveal the criminals to be barely holding on to whatever sanity they have left, but a few of the more well-written notes open a gateway into the psyche of a mass murderer in a way that no biography or 20/20 interview can.

Some of the notes that you’ll read about are obvious cries for help from mentally unstable people who believed they had no other way of acting out their aggression than to kill, but most of them are a step-by-step guide on how to taunt the police, your victim’s families, and any amateur sleuths that think they can help put you behind bars. Beyond being creepy, there aren’t a lot of similarities between each of these notes. Some are lengthy diatribes, others are a few simple words, but they’re all gruesome windows into the minds of heartless killers.

In 1968, an 11-year-old girl murdered two young boys over the course of three months. Both were strangled to death: one was found in an abandoned house, and the other, lying on a barren stretch of road in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in England. After the first murder, Bell ransacked a nearby nursery and left a series of notes where she promised to kill again. 

In 2012, a machete with the message "This is what cheaters get" scrawled across the blade was left alongside the mutilated body of Nellie Brown-Cox. The other side of the blade contained the message "Your Next George Sawyer." The murderer, Prince Hepburn, was found sitting on steps outside the house with minor slashes on his wrists and was arrested immediately. 

 

When Charles Manson convinced his cadre of junked-up followers that the Beatles were speaking to them about a coming race war through a song about a roller coaster, he probably didn't believe that his gang of ne'er-do-wells would ever get the chance to get his message out there. Well, after Tex Watson and his crew killed Sharon Tate, they not only let everyone know about their airtight White Album theory, but they also made a surprisingly succinct case for the invention of spell-check. 

By now we've all come to the conclusion that Jack the Ripper was actually multiple, disconnected killers who were using Scotland Yard's obsession with a singular boogeyman as an excuse to get their murder on, right? Well, it turns out that one of them was a bit of an anti-Semite, and they let everyone know by leaving a message scrawled in chalk above their most recent kill. 

Richie Ramirez is that serial killer you love to hate. During his killing spree, the Satanic Panic was ramping up and all you had to do to inspire fear in the hearts of God-fearing folks everywhere was draw a pentagram your most recent victim's wall with some lipstick - and Richie played to his audience like he was Angus Young. The pentagrams became his calling card, so much so that even after he was caught, Ramirez would draw the symbol on his hand and flash it in court. What a f*cking nerd. 

The story of the Lipstick Killer starts with the vicious murder of three people in Chicago in 1946 and ends with the arrest of William Heirens, who still maintains his innocence to this day, claiming he was the victim of an abusive and overzealous police force determined to pin the murders on someone. But whoever the Lipstick Killer is, he left this chilling note, scrawled in lipstick on one of the walls of victim Frances Brown’s apartment. 

After repeatedly stabbing Bryan Hartnell and Cecelia Shepard, the Zodiac Killer made some artwork on Hartnell's car door to let police know that the case of the Zodiac was growing more out of control with each passing day. 

If you think you hate your parents, you've got nothing on Hasib bin Golamrabbi, who shot his parents to death before writing this cryptic message on the wall of his parents' home and heading off to an anime convention. 

Authorities say that Micah Johnson, the spree killer who murdered five police officers and injured nine others in 2016, used his own blood to write the mysterious message "RB" on a wall shortly before his death. No one knows exactly what he meant by "RB," but the most common theory is that it had something to do with the Biblical passage Matthew 23:35, which says, "Upon you may come all the righteous blood shed on the earth".

After David Kalac murdered 30-year-old Amber Coplin in 2014, he went all out with his cryptic note-making skills. First, he wrote “dead” Coplin's driver’s license, then scrawled “bad news” across the blinds and “she killed me first” on a photo hanging on her bedroom wall. And as if that weren't horrific enough, he posted photos of her body on 4chan with the comment, "Turns out it’s way harder to strangle someone to death than it looks in the movies."