Vicious Killers Who Showed Absolutely No Remorse At Trial

If there's anything scarier than a serial killer, it's a remorseless serial killer that feels no guilt for their actions. While some murderers have attempted to seek redemption for their crimes, there are some truly cold-hearted monsters who lack empathy entirely. These are the killers who never apologized for their crimes. Merciless killers like this would probably have never stopped if they weren't apprehended by law enforcement, given they horrifying ways they acted at trial.

Killers without remorse, entirely devoid of empathy. That's what we're dealing with here. The pure evil fiends who never felt bad for what they did. This list explores the most sinister, inhuman serial killers. They not only didn't apologize to the families of their victims, but often reveled in their crimes. It's almost as if they received sick, twisted gratification from their amoral stance on unthinkable crimes.  

Between 1924-1934, Albert Fish, who would come to be known as "The Gray Man," committed as many as 10 murders in New York state. He was ultimately convicted of three - all young children - in 1935.

A paraphile (a person who seeks masochistic sexual gratification), Fish had unique fetishes, including placing kerosene-soaked wool in his anus and lighting it on fire, as well as shoving needles into his abdomen, and consuming huge quantities of raw meat. Fish later went on to acquire a taste for human flesh, and after murdering, dismembering, and consuming 10-year-old Grace Budd in 1928. He detailed his culinary process in a cruel letter to the child's mother: 

"First I stripped her naked. How she did kick - bite and scratch. I choked her to death, then cut her in small pieces so I could take my meat to my rooms. Cook and eat it. How sweet and tender her little ass was roasted in the oven. It took me 9 days to eat her entire body. I did not f*ck her tho I could of had I wished. She died a virgin."

During his trial, Fish did not even attempt to feign remorse, at one point bragging that he "had a child in every state." When finally sent to the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, New York, he even declared his final moments on Earth to be "The supreme thrill of my life."

Dubbed the "Butcher of Rostov," Andrei Chikatilo is the most grimly successful serial killer in Russian history. From 1978-1990, he killed 53 people, 35 of which were children or young teens, in a horrific spree of violence puts him among history's worst mass murderers. 

A charismatic family man, Chikatilo would lure his victims - frequently the homeless or disabled - from bus and train stations to the forests outside of Rostov, where he would rape, torture, kill, and mutilate them, sometimes eating their organs. He was finally arrested in November of 1990, and during his trial he offered no semblance of remorse, only feeling sorry for himself. "When I used my knife, it brought psychological relief," he said. "I was like a crazed wolf. [I] just turned into a beast, into a wild animal."

As punishment for his horrendous crimes, Chikatilo was executed by a single bullet to the back of the skull in 1994. For his final words, he offered the darkly humorous, if unnerving plea "Don’t blow my brains out! The Japanese want to buy them!"

Carl Panzram is considered by some to be the most sadistic serial killer in history. Committing a total of 21 murders and an unknown number of rapes - all of young boys and men - the Minnesota native carried out his crimes across not just the United States, but also the African country of Angola, where he claimed to have killed six local guides before feeding them to crocodiles.

Panzram was ultimately sent to the gallows at Leavenworth Penitentiary in 1930 after he smashed a fellow inmate's skull in with an iron bar (he was doing a 25 year bid at the time for the murder and rape of two boys in Washington D.C.). He greeted his execution with anger and defiance, his final words being “Hurry it up, you Hoosier bastard!”

In an autobiography he left behind, penned by a cellmate with Panzram dictating, he got in his true last words. These nihilistic screeds showed no humanity, not even for his most chilling crimes, including this infamous passage:

"In my lifetime I have murdered 21 human beings, I have committed thousands of burglaries, robberies, larcenies, arsons and, last but not least, I have committed sodomy on more than 1,000 male human beings. For all these things I am not in the least bit sorry."

Dennis Rader, better known as "BTK" (an abbreviation for his modus operandi: "bind, torture, kill"), was sentenced to 10 consecutive life terms in 2005 for committing a string of murders dating back to 1974 in Wichita, KS. During his trial, Rader - who was also a Boy Scout leader and church deacon - stunned the courtroom as he gleefully recounted the grisly details of his crimes, exhibiting a smug, almost sexual gratification in the retelling of his murder spree.

In describing the strangulation murder of 24-year-old Shirley Vian, he explained that he had first tied her children up in another room in an effort to keep them quiet. When this didn't work, and he had no choice but to force them to witness their mother's execution:  

"We moved them to the bathroom. She helped me. Then I tied the door shut. We put some toys and blankets and odds and ends in there for the kids to make them as comfortable as we could. Tied one of the bathroom doors shut so they couldn't open it then we shoved, she went back and helped me shove the bed against the other bathroom door. Then I proceeded to tie her up. She got sick, threw up. I got her a glass of water, comforted her a little, then I went ahead and tied her up and put a bag over her head and strangled her."

Serial killer, rapist, and perhaps the root of clowns being derided as creepy, John Wayne Gacy carried out 33 murders between 1972-1978 in suburban Chicago, IL. The contractor and part-time children's birthday clown would lure teenage boys back to his home, enticing them with the promise of partying or construction job opportunities, before raping, strangling, and burying them in his crawlspace.

The law finally caught up to Gacy in 1978 when a concerned mother alerted authorities that her son had disappeared with the man. Gacy would confess to detectives the entirety of his crimes, though he would later recant and joke at his trial that the only thing he was guilty of was "running a cemetery without a license." The jury found him guilty of dozens of murders and sentenced him to death. Gacy was executed in 1994, and he offered some very succinct last words as a retrospective of his life and crimes: "Kiss my ass."

Joseph Paul Franklin was a neo-Nazi serial killer, perhaps best known for having shot pornography magnate Larry Flynt. Though Flynt survived the attack, Franklin was convicted of murdering five others between 1977-1980 in Missouri, Utah, and Wisconsin. While authorities suspect him to be responsible for as many as 22 racially-motivated murders, it was his killing of 42-year-old Gerald Gordon outside a synagogue in St. Louis that netted him the death penalty.

Never showing an inch of remorse in the courtroom, Franklin would later attempt to justify his crusade to CNN: "I felt like I was at war. The survival of the white race was at stake. I consider it my mission, my three-year mission. Same length of time Jesus was on his mission, from the time he was 30 to 33." 

Richard Ramirez terrified southern California with a rampage of violence during the summer of 1985. The murderous drifter from Texas - who would come to be known as the "Night Stalker" - beat, raped, strangled, shot, and cut the throats of his victims in a spree of violence which he claimed was a tribute to Satan. 

Upon being convicted of 13 murders and 30 other felonies - a body of work that sentenced him to the gas chamber - Ramirez delivered a remorseless, chilling monologue: "You don't understand me. You are not expected to. You are not capable of it. I am beyond your experience. I am beyond good and evil. I will be avenged. Lucifer dwells in us all. That's it."

Lawrence Bittaker, along with his accomplice Roy Norris, committed a string of murders in the Los Angeles area in the late '70s. The duo's victims - all young women - were put through hell, often raped and tortured with pliers and other implements from Bittaker's tool kit before having their young lives snuffed out. 

Bittaker and Norris - "The Toolbox Killers" - were eventually apprehended and Bittaker was sent to California's death row. At his trial, however, Bittaker was said to be quite jovial and defiant, even laughing at times, despite torrents of horrifying evidence. The remorseless monster that he is, he was said to sign his letters Lawrence "Pliers" Bittaker.  

A PhD student in criminology at England's Bradford University, Stephen Griffiths desired fame beyond what was attainable in academia. Griffiths had sinister ambitions, modeled after his idol Peter Sutcliffe - a man better known as "The Yorkshire Ripper." Craving a brand of infamy that would put him in the annals of history's great mass murderers, Griffiths began carrying out the first of three homicides in 2009, a series of crimes that would rock Bradford and earn him the self-explanatory nickname of "The Crossbow Cannibal."

Shortly after his apprehension, CCTV video emerged in the English press showing a brazen Griffiths celebrating the murder of his final victim, 36-year-old Suzanne Blamires, by holding up his crossbow and giving the finger directly at a camera in the hallway of his apartment building. As disturbing as the video was, it was never shown in court, as the fame-hungry Griffiths was eager to confess to his crimes, graphically describing how he dismembered his victims in his bathtub before consuming pieces of their flesh.

Joanna Dennehy is only the third woman in UK history to be given a life sentence - a rare punishment for a rare brand of criminal: the female serial killer. Dennehy killed three men in March of 2013 in Peterborough, England. Upon her arrest she pled guilty, sparing the justice system a lengthy trial, but she made the most of her brief time in court. 

While standing in the dock awaiting her judge's summation, Dennehy was seen to be completely remorseless, smirking and laughing in the face of her crimes, even yelling out the word "b*tches" at one point. This probably didn't earn her any sympathy and she appeared shocked and stunned when given a life sentence by a particularly humorless judge.