16 Killers Who Deliberately Prolonged Their Victims' Suffering

Believe it or not, there are some things worse than death. Just look to the victims of torture killers, who went out of their way to keep their victims alive and in psychological and physical pain before killing them. Many of the victims begged for death, and that alone should tell you how bad some of these tortures were. Be warned, what you read here may give you nightmares.

Many of these sadistic killers are in fact serial killers, so they tortured and killed more than once. Some had dungeons built, and others found ways to mentally manipulate those they were hurting. No matter how you look at it, these twisted murderers put movie killers to shame. You can take comfort in that fact that everyone mentioned here has been caught and brought to justice.

As a final warning, this article is not for the faint of heart, so read at your own risk. This a look at the very depths of what human depravity can do.

**WARNING: Graphic and disturbing content.**

Albert Fish is a special sort of terrible, because he preyed almost solely on children. Fish began torturing people around 1910, starting with a young man named Thomas Kedden. Fish lured the 19-year-old into a barn and then tortured him for two full weeks before at last tying him up and cutting off half his penis. No one knows what happened to Kedden after that, but things only got worse from there.

Fish began to torture himself as well, inserting needles into his abdomen and penis. He would also select mentally handicapped or African-American children (those he deemed least likely to be missed) and kidnap them. Once alone at his home, he would torture them with meat cleavers and hand saws, prolonging their deaths, and even consuming parts of their flesh. He later claimed that God was telling him to kill the children in this terrible way, and he was eventually executed in 1936.

No one is sure exactly how many children he killed, but in his day he was commonly called "the boogeyman" by frightened children. He claimed to have attacked a child in every state, though it's unclear what exactly he meant in this chilling confession.

David Parker Ray is easily one of the most twisted minds on this list. In 1999, Cynthia Vigil Jaramillo escaped a small motor home, running naked into the desert after overpowering Ray's girlfriend. Police followed her directions back to the trailer, where they found a horrifying dungeon built specifically for the purpose of torturing women. After that, Ray became known as the Toy Box Killer. 

He would pick up women, sometimes only young girls, and then rape and torture them systematically for weeks and months, with his friends and his girlfriend participating. When they first arrived, the girls would hear a recording in which Ray would tell them all the horrors they were about to endure, including mutilation, beatings, rape, and even forced bestiality. It is suspected that he tortured as many as 60 women over a 40-year span.

Slave owners regularly tortured their slaves, but this lady took it to a whole new and horrible level. Madame LaLaurie lived in New Orleans around the 1830s, and she was known for being the worst sort of sadist. She would take her slaves and chain them to the walls in her house. Some accounts speak of their eyes being gouged out, their skin being ripped off, and their nails being torn out at the roots. Then, she would eventually disembowel her victims and let them die slowly.

She did all this in an attic room of her house, and when people finally tore it open, they found the place had obviously been used for a long time. The sorts of things described from witnesses go down in legend and folklore, to the point where it's hard to separate fact from fiction.

No one is sure exactly when she died, or where she is buried, though it may have been in either 1842 or 1849.

You probably know Dennis Rader by the name BTK, or the BTK Strangler. The acronym stands for "bind, torture, kill" and that's precisely what Rader used to do. From the 1970s to the 1990s, he strangled people, sometimes in their own homes, and then sent the police letters taunting them and asking for them to try to catch him. He would also take souvenirs from the scenes of the crimes.

But that's not the really horrifying part. One of Rader's favorite things to do was to strangle someone, then resuscitate them, then strangle them again, over and over without letting them fully die. This gave him immense sexual gratification, especially if they tried to speak to him or beg for help. He referred to his victims as "projects," and would fantasize about doing these sorts of things to people as he stalked them before eventually attacking them and torturing them to death. He did this to adults, children, and even a whole family, and enjoyed seeing his victims suffering.

He is currently serving out life in prison.

You may notice that a lot of people on this list come in pairs, and this is one such example. Fred and Rosemary met in 1968, when Fred was 27 and Rosemary was only 15 years old. A year later, she gave birth to their first daughter, and that's when things started to get really horrible. Rosemary's stepdaughter vanished, probably killed by Rosemary (as was her birth mother), and then Fred started raping his daughter while Rosemary watched. Rosemary would also have sex with her father while Fred watched from a peephole he'd made in their bedroom wall. They also attacked, bound, and raped their nanny, Caroline, who was still only a teen at the time. It started with this sort of sexual perversion, but then the pair developed a lust for blood.

The pair would hire young girls as nannies, lure them in, and abduct them. They would then keep them in a small room, raping and torturing them for days in elaborate ways before at last killing them by strangulation or suffocation. Eventually, they killed their own daughter, and this was when they were caught, complete with a video tape they had made of the incestuous rape. 

Fred killed himself in 1995, and Rosemary will spend the rest of her life in prison. 

Some say that money is the root of all evil, and when it comes to H. H. Holmes, they may have been right. An accomplished con man, Holmes always found ways to get enough money to get by, and he eventually got enough to build a hotel catering to visitors to Chicago for the 1893 World's Fair. This hotel would later become known as "the Murder Castle," and for good reason. 

During the hotel's construction, Holmes built secret stairways, doors that lead to nowhere, and locks that could seal people inside rooms. Bedrooms were made soundproof, and certain rooms were only accessible by trap doors. Once the hotel was done, Holmes would lure in victims as guests and then keep them there to play with. He would leave them sealed in rooms to starve, torture them to death, hang them, and then eventually dissect their bodies and sell the cadavers to the medical community.

Luckily, he was eventually caught, and the Murder Castle was torn down, never to harm anyone again.

While these killers are not serial killers, this sad and horrifying story deserves to be heard for the victim's sake. In 1988, Junko Furuta began walking home from school, but she never made it there. Instead, she was abducted by a group of older teenagers, who confined her in one of their homes, even with the knowledge of the boy's parents. What followed can best be described as a month and a half of the worst torture imaginable.

The boys raped her at least 400 times in total, fed her cockroaches and urine, set off fireworks in her ears, mouth, and vagina, and beat her constantly. They would drop heavy objects on her, burn her with cigarettes, and even broke her bones. They would also force her to call her parents to say she was okay, so that they would not be caught. Eventually, she begged the boys to kill her, and they mutilated her to death.

The boys responsible were arrested, but one, Kamisaku, has since been released, because he was a minor at the time of his arrest.

Another deadly pair, Bittaker and Norris killed at least five teenage girls over a period of five months in 1979. And they didn't do it quickly. They prowled Southern California, picking up young girls, all of different ages, and pulling them into their van. Then they would rape and torture the girls with items they'd picked up at the hardware store. They would use hammers and wire hangers on them, all the whole recording it or taking pictures to use for sexual gratification later.

Once they were done torturing the girls, they would strangle them to death. Once, they used an ice pick to beat in one girl's head. The tape of one girl's slow torture and death was played in court, during which Bittaker claimed it was just a consensual threesome, and that they were acting out a fantasy scene. Luckily, no one was buying it, and both men are still in prison to this day.

John Bunting (along with Robert Wagner and James Vlassakis) committed a series of grisly murders that are often called the "bodies-in-barrels murders." In the '90s, in South Australia, the trio killed at least eleven people, then put their bodies in plastic barrels for disposal. Police discovered the bodies, and the men were arrested, then tried over the course of a long and disturbing trial. All men are still in jail.

But the reason these murders are really so terrifying is the fact that Bunting liked to torture his victims first. He said he liked to look into the eyes of his victims so he could see the exact moment of their death. He would use an electric shock machine to electrocute his victims' genitals, then try to get them to confess to horrible crimes like pedophilia. He would torture victims with pliers, hammers, and thumb cuffs, and would burn and mutilate their flesh. In one case, he even cooked and ate part of a victim.

It all started with a routine call. Leonard Lake was found to be shoplifting and in possession of an illegal weapon, but as police investigated, they found there was more to it. There were bloodstains in his car, and Lake was soon linked to disappearances. This lead police to a cabin and bunker in Wilseyville, where they found signs of murder and torture. There was a bed with electrical cords tied to each of the posts. They found women's lingerie, and a whole lot of blood. It became apparent that the place had been used for horrifying murders and tortures.

Lake and Charles Chi-Tat Ng, his accomplice, were arrested, and they are now believed to have murdered up to 25 women. They verbally degraded the women they kidnapped, electrocuted them, mutilated them, raped them, and kept them alive before at last killing them and disposing of their remains. There was also video that showed women being so sexually abused that there was no hope they could have survived. They did this over and over, threatening to shoot the women if they didn't do as they were told.

Leonard Lake is now dead, having swallowed a cyanide pill. Charles Ng is on death row at San Quentin State Prison.