The history of the United States is replete with heinous cases of serial murders that are still extant. According to estimates by John Edward Douglas, a former FBI special agent with vast experience in profiling and criminal psychology, United States is the home of 35 to 50 serial killers at any point in time. But how did this all start?
America’s First Serial Killers
The earliest known case of serial murders in the United States involved the Harpe brothers, from Wilderness Trail, during the 1970s. Micajah and Wiley quickly became known as Harpe brothers, even though they were not actually siblings, but cousins. According to the Encyclopedia of Serial Killers, the infamous criminals used to eviscerate their unfortunate victims and throw their corpses into rivers and lakes to avoid discovery. More specifically, according to records of legendsofamerica.com, Harpe brothers were purely driven by their blood lust instincts, which led them to fill their disemboweled victims’ abdominal area with rocks and let them sink in the water.
19th Century
During the 19th century, United States witnessed several notorious serial murderers, such as “New England slayer” Samuel Green, the vengeful Espinoza brothers, and the “Nebraska Fiend” Stephen Richards, who was arrested in 1879.
In 1880, a nurse from New England named Jane Toppan initiated the poisoning of her patients, which resulted in an estimated victim count of 100. Even though she was charismatic as a student, Jane succumbed to her family’s problematic mental history after her boyfriend suddenly abandoned her. Toppan was working at a hospital in Cambridge Massachusetts, when macabre incidents, including the enigmatic death of two patients under her care, started occurring. As a result, the nurse was dismissed, but that did not give an end to her despicable crimes.
On the contrary, the murderous nurse forged her way into private nursing in order to continue the spree of poisonings with dangerous cocktail overdoses of morphine until she was caught in 1901.
Toppan was found not guilty for reason of insanity, even though she confessed to the murders of 31 people. The prosecutors were under the notion that the actual number of the murders she committed was between 70 and 100. In her testimony before the court in 1903, Toppan stated "[t]hat is my ambition, to have killed more people -- more helpless people -- than any man or woman who has ever lived."
Later on, within the 20th century, several notorious serial killers made their appearance. Among them was the “Bible-quoting strangler” Leonard Nelson, who according to the Encyclopedia of Serial Killers, “raped and murdered landladies from coast to coast.” Similarly, in the 1930s, Cleveland’s “Mad Butcher,” dissected 16 victims with such precision that “10 of the skulls were never found.” Resembling slayings also occurred by “Sex Beast” Melvin Rees, who murdered eight people in Maryland and Virginia between 1957 and 1959, and Albert Desalvo, who confessed for the murders of 13 victims in Boston, but managed to make a “crafty plea bargain in 1967.”
In overall, serial killing has been a prominent sector in the United States' history of crime. The trends of serial killing have an incremental tendency as data from the Encyclopedia of Serial Killers indicate that "the number of killers and victims have increased dramatically in recent years."
