History Main / SerialKiller

* ''Series/AmericanHorrorStoryAsylum'' has Bloody Face, a masked serial killer running the unspecified area where Briarcliff is located in the 1960s and the ruins of Briarcliff in the present day somehow. In the past Kit Walker is falsely accused of being him after his wife disappears. He turns out to be [[spoiler: Dr. Oliver Thredson, the mild-mannered psychiatrist, in the 1960s, and his son in the present day. Incidentally, the iroginal is played by ZacharyQuinto, who portrayed Sylar as mentioned above.]]

* Two stories in Creator/StephenKing's ''NightShift'' features a serial killer: "Springheel Jack" in ''Strawberry Spring'' and the hammer murderer in ''The Man who Loved Flowers''. [[spoiler:In both, the protagonist is the killer; in the former it's a case of TheKillerInMe, in the latter an extreme example of BreadEggsMilkSquick.]]

* The murderous truck driver from Steven Spielberg's MadeForTVMovie ''Film/{{Duel}}'' is revealed to be one of these, as we see several license plates mounted on his truck, presumably as trophies from drivers he previously killed.
** Wrong. Most are marked MC, which is the designation for motor carrier. The plates are most likely nothing more than his licenses for operating in various states.

** Then there's Michael Swango, a medical student and one-time [=EMT=] believed to have poisoned between four and sixty of his patients between 1983 and 1997. He also slipped arsenic into his coworker's food to try and poison them too.

* [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Bundy Ted Bundy]].

* [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Wilson_Spencer Timothy Spencer]] is notable for two reasons: he was a rare interracial serial killer, and he was the first murderer to be convicted on the basis of DNA evidence, which also exonerated an innocent man convicted of one of his crimes. Executed in 1994, he raped and killed five women. Medical examinations revealed extensive petechial hemmorhaging, indicating he also tortured them by strangulation.]]
* [[MonsterClown John Wayne Gacey]], most notable for being a party clown when not slaughtering young men and hiding them in the crawlspace under his house. Notably, when he realized the cops were after him, he taunted them by publicly smoking weed and breaking traffic laws, knowing they didn't want him on lesser charges and even picked up the restaurant tabs of the detectives who had him under surveillance. Eventually he got so bold, he invited cops to his house for dinner, where they caught the smell of rotting flesh that was his ultimate undoing.

* [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Kemper Edmund Kemper]], who started with his grandparents (at 15) and worked his way from there. When asked by the judge what he thought a suitable punishment for his crimes would be, Kemper answered, "Death by torture."

** Originally Panzram was only sentenced to ''twenty-five years''. Why was he executed? When they sent him to Leavenworth, he told the warden, "I'll kill the first man that bothers me." You hear this a lot, but Panzram ''kept'' that promise - he beat the laundry foreman to death with an iron bar, and then threatened to kill the human rights groups that tried to appeal the death sentence he got for it!

Serial Killer plots tend to be men killing women, although ''TheBill'' subverted this. This is [[TruthInTelevision somewhat realistic]], however, because in the real world, the vast majority of serial killers are men -- or, more exactly, men tend to murder in ways that make it easier for them to get caught. Female serial killers will typically be Angels of Death and may work in health care or similar vocations. In fiction, they'll often have a TortureCellar or do their killings in a SinisterSubway.

** Wrong. Most are marked MC, which is the designation for motor carrier. The plates are nothing more than his licenses for operating in various states.

* JackTheRipper

* [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Berkowitz David "Son of Sam" Berkowitz]]. Claim to fame: claiming a dog told him to kill.

* [[MonsterClown John Wayne Gacey]], most notable for being a party clown when not slaughtering young men and hiding them in his crawlspace. Notably, when he realized the cops were after him, he taunted them by publicly smoking weed and breaking traffic laws, knowing they didn't want him on lesser charges. (Eventually he invited cops to his house for dinner, where they caught the smell of rotting flesh.)

** It is worth noting, however, that Gein himself is a subversion via the most technical details. As disturbing as his story is, he was only convicted of two murders. Three murders is the baseline for law enforcement when classifying serial killers. Though he was suspected of killing his brother and a number of other local women who "disappeared" while he was active.

* ''Film/{{Monster}}'', the one with CharlizeTheron (but not Charlize Theron's eyebrows) as Aileen Wuornos.

* SteelyDan's "Midnight Cruiser"
* {{Queen}}'s "Killer Queen"

* TalkingHeads' "Psycho Killer"

* {{Radiohead}}'s "Climbing Up The Walls".

* TheDeadKennedys' "I Kill Children".

* OzzyOsbourne has several, most notably ''Little Dolls'' and ''No More Tears.''

* ''Series/{{The X-Files}}'' provided a plenty of them in MonsterOfTheWeek episodes, many of them were truly horrifying. Some of them embodied pure human evil while other times the killers were genetic {{Mutants}} who needed to kill to satisfy their HorrorHunger. Sometimes they might play with MaybeMagicMaybeMundane or TheyLookJustLikeEveryoneElse.

* The murderous truck driver from Steven Spielberg's MadeForTVMovie ''Duel'' is revealed to be one of these, as we see several license plates mounted on his truck, presumably as trophies from drivers he previously killed.

*** Season 7: Serial poisoner Hanna McKay. People who gave her trouble had a mysterious tendency to die of heart attacks...

-->"Wow. So you're like a serial killer."
-->"I'm not a serial killer."
-->"But you've got a pattern. You go after specific victims. You collect mementos."
-->"Okay, technically, I'm a serial killer."

* '''[[TheSociopath Antisocial]]''' killers are those suffering from a severe case of a [[HollywoodPersonalityDisorders Personality Disorder]] or sociopathy. Impulsive and impatient, they pathologically violate social norms and values, such as repeatedly committing serious and petty crimes. Serial murder is usually just one of many crimes they regularly commit, and they often do so in the course of other crimes, such as robbery, rape, and various forms of [[ManipulativeBastard manipulation]].