12 Terrifying Murderers Who Had Their Own Signature Killing Style

Murder is always horrendous, but when it’s committed in a unique, deviant way, there’s something even more sinister to the crime. While some serial killers stick to gunshots or stab wounds, others prefer a strange, distinctive act that satisfies their demented curiosity or perverse sexual needs. Here are some historic killers and the strange and unusual ways they killed their victims.

Charles Albright is known as the Texas Eyeball Killer and the Dallas Ripper for good reason. In 1990 and 1991, Albright terrorized the Dallas community by going after what he felt were easy targets: female prostitutes. 

Albright’s technique was anything but basic. He’d pick up the women, shoot them, and then dump their half-naked bodies - but not before he removed the eyes from his victims and kept them as souvenirs.

Some could say it began at age 11, when Albright started a taxidermy class at the behest of his overprotective adoptive mother, Delle Albright. Young Albright took to it immediately, going so far as to removing the eyes from birds, leaving two buttons sewn on where the eyes used to be. Throughout his life he proved to be obsessed with women's eyes, including painting them and cutting them out of photographs.

In December 1991, Albeit was charged with the murder of Shirley Williams, only one of three suspected victims, thanks to her hairs turning up inside his vacuum. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

Andrei Chikatilo was known as the Butcher of Rostov for his love of dismembering his victims and much more. The Ukrainian-born criminal terrorized the Soviet Union between 1978 and 1990, especially at the bus and train stations where Chikatilo met most of his 52 victims.

Women and children (both boys and girls) were his targets of choice, viciously killing and mutilating them. When he first started out, he was mainly attracted to his victim’s eyes, lacerating the sockets and sometimes removing the eyes completely.

As time went on and Chikatilo’s need to torture grew stronger, he began removing other organs, including tongues. However, what makes his disgusting acts more horrifying is that he apparently ate the genitals from some victims.

Chikatilo eventually confessed to his crimes, stating that he killed 56 victims, not just 52. He was convicted in 1992 and executed by gunshot two years later.

Richard Trenton Chase was granted the title Vampire of Sacramento - and not because he couldn’t stand the sunlight. In the '70s, he went on a murder spree, killing six people in one month and an entire family a couple years after that.

What made his crimes so disturbing is that he not only cut up his victims, but he drank their blood, hence his alarming nickname. Chase also supposedly ate part of the brain from one of his victims, who was also pregnant at the time.

Growing up, Chase always displayed an abnormal personality that eventually led him to frequent mental hospitals. His love of blood became evident in his early 20s, when he killed animals and devoured them.

In 1979, Chase was convicted and surprisingly, this time he was not sent to a mental hospital. Instead, he was sentenced to death row. However, Chase ended up killing himself by an overdose the following year in his cell. 

A once successful pig farmer, Robert Pickton became known as plenty more than a multimillion dollar rancher in Vancouver, Canada. His rampage began in 2002, as he began going after young, vulnerable women and viciously killing and disfiguring them.

This crazed serial killer targeted local prostitutes, kidnapping and then murdering them at his farm. After these terrible acts, he’d toss their lifeless bodies into the pigpen and let the hogs feed off their flesh. There were also claims that Pickton sold human remains mixed with his pork to customers without them knowing.

While Pickton was charged for 20 murders, he was only convicted of six in the second degree in 2007. He was given life in prison without any possibility of parole for 25 years.

Ted Bundy was a lot like Jeffrey Dahmer when it came to his sadistic criminal acts. He too was a vile serial killer who favored rape and torture, but his targets were young women. Between 1974 and 1978, Bundy committed unspeakable acts of violence and traveled to several different states to do it. He was charming and attractive, making it relatively easy to lure in members of the opposite sex, some as young as 15. 

Also like Dahmer, Bundy dismembered his victims after he brutally killed them and kept the heads he removed from the bodies as a trophy, as he once told a detective he did with victim Georgeann Hawkins. He was also known to have sex with the corpses, and was thought to be sexually attracted only to unconscious women.

Bundy reportedly killed 30 people during his crime spree in the '70s. He was convicted and in 1980 was sentenced to death in Florida. He died by the electric chair in 1989.

Ed Grin was as nasty as you get. In Wisconsin during the '50s, he killed women and didn’t just dump their bodies afterward. Instead, he used their remains for his own sick and twisted creations. 

It seemed Gein was doomed from the start, especially after the death of his mother. It was then he began roaming the cemeteries and digging up corpses that looked like - you guess it - his deceased mom. What he did after that is even more haunting. Gain used the decomposing skin and made rotten-flesh upholstery for his furniture. His love of the dead later took him to having sex with corpses and to doing taxidermy on people. And when that wasn’t enough, he tried his hand at murder, beheading one female and stringing her up in the barn with her torso gutted like a hunted animal.

Gein’s was only convicted of two murders - though it’s said there were many more - and sent to a mental health facility because he wasn’t mentally fit to stand trial. In 1984, Gein died from cancer. 

Jeffrey Dahmer didn’t get his nickname, the Milwaukee Cannibal, for nothing. From 1978 to 1991, the community was on high alert with this serial killer running around. He preyed on teenage boys and men, subjecting them to the extremes of torture.

As if raping and killing wasn’t bad enough, Dahmer was also known to dismember his male victims and later to eat parts of their bodies. Dahmer was also reported to have sex with the corpses he left behind.

Dahmer’s motivation was to create the perfect zombie sex slave that would do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted. He’d capture his victims and then drill a hole in their heads as a crude form of "brain surgery," thinking he’d be able to take over their minds. 

Dahmer was arrested in July 1991 and at that time, the authorities made quite a discovery. Inside his apartment were severed heads and male organs. He was convicted and given life in prison, but was killed by another inmate, Charles Sarver, in 1994.

Albert DeSalvo was dubbed the Boston Strangler back in the 1960s, when he went on a killing spree from 1962 to 1964. He preyed on the weak and lonely, sneaking into women’s homes - many of them older women - savagely raping and then strangling them to death. 

But the kicker is how he strangled these women: DeSalvo used the victim’s own underwear or stockings to kill them. Once he was finished choking them, he’d then tie the underwear into a bow around the woman's neck. To make matters worse, he’d ransack the homes and take some of the victim’s belongings for a keepsake.

DeSalvo found himself in jail, but not for murder. While he was a convicted rapist, he was never found guilty for killing, even after he confessed to strangling 13 women. 

It took 49 years for authorities to properly match DeSalvo to the murders, thanks to a DNA sample that showed up at the home of his last and final victim, Mary Sullivan. After DeSalvo’s nephew linked his uncle to the crime, his remains were dug up and matched what was found at the scene.

From around 1971 until 1983, Robert Hansen terrified Alaska as the Butcher Baker and killed anywhere from 17 to 30 women, most of whom were prostitutes.

But Kidnapping and rape was not nearly enough for this peculiar huntsman. He’d take his victims to remote places, like the Knik River, torture them, and then let them go. But that was just the start of Hansen’s sick game. He would then hunting the fleeing women like a wild animal, striking at them with a knife or gunning them down with a rifle.

Hansen was convicted for only four of his crimes in 1983, getting a sentence of over 400 years in prison, without parole. In 2014, he died in a nearby hospital.

From 1986 to 1997, Indonesia dealt with a gruesome serial killer named Ahmad Suradji, or the Black Magic Killer. Throughout those 11 years, this deviant murderer killed 42 women and young girls, starting at just 11 years old. He lured them in with his supposed magic healing powers, offering to help them with their troubles. 

His murders were as demented as he was: he buried his victims waist-deep in the dirt before using a cable to strangle them to death. Afterward, it was said he drank their saliva. Suradji believed his dead father told him to commit these crimes in order to become a true healer. 

Suradji was arrested in 1997 and executed by firing squad in 2008. One of Suradji’s three wives was also held accountable. She was originally given the death penalty, but later it was changed to a life sentence.