^{A list you most definitely don’t want to be on.}

What is it that makes serial killers so interesting to the collective psyche? Is it morbid curiosity, or the desire to understand evil? Whatever the reason, America is seemingly obsessed with serial killers. Although serial murders make up less than 1% of murders in the United States, there are hundreds of podcasts, TV shows, and documentaries that are dedicated to studying American serial killers.

Although serial killings are rare, the United States’ fascination with them makes more sense when you keep in mind that the U.S. has the most serial killings of any country in the world. We are also, unfortunately, home to some of the most notorious serial killers of all time.

While every state in America has produced at least one serial killer, some states are worse than others. Some are the birthplace of dozens of serial killers, while others are home to only a few. Care to know where your home state lines up? Check out the list below to discover the eight states with the most serial killers.

New York

Coming in at number one, we have New York. As of 2023, New York has been home to 18 serial killers, and has a total number of 677 serial killer victims.

David Richard Berkowitz, known as “The Son of Sam,” is New York’s most infamous serial killer. From 1976 to 1977, Berkowitz murdered six people and wounded 11. He earned the moniker “Son of Sam” after the police received a letter in which he referred to himself by that name, which is a reference to his next door neighbor. Berkowitz believed his neighbor’s dog was possessed and wanted him to kill. He was sentenced to life in prison on May 18th, 1978.

Other serial killers from New York include Richard Angelo, Paul Bateson, and Joseph G. Christopher, “The Midtown Slasher.”

California

California is in second place for the number of serial killers, but in first place by almost double for the number of serial killer victims. California has 15 serial killers who slew over 1,770 innocent victims. California is home to several of the most notorious serial killers of all time, which accounts for the exceedingly high kill rate.

You have probably heard of the Zodiac Killer, whose work has been described as the most famous unsolved case in American history. He terrorized Southern California between 1968 and 1969. In taunting letters to the police, he claimed to have murdered 37 men and women. Of the 37, seven have been confirmed: five dead, and two survivors. The case remains open to this day.

Other notorious killers include Kenneth Alesso Bianchi, more commonly known as “The Hillside Strangler,” and Ricardo Ramirez, “The Night Stalker.”

Texas

Texas accounts for eight serial killers and 948 victims, putting them in second place for number of victims, although that is still a shocking 829 victims behind California.

One of Texas’ most awful serial killers is Genene Jones, aka “The Angel of Death,” who in the early 80’s killed between 11 and 46 innocent children while working as a pediatric nurse. A truly evil individual, Genene would inject the children—as young as 1 month old—with lethal doses of drugs that would induce fatal paralysis or heart failure. She has been sentenced to life in prison and won’t be eligible for parole until she is 87 years old.

Infamous serial killers from Texas also include Ángel Maturino Reséndiez, nicknamed the “Railroad Killer”; Dean Corll, “The Candy Man”; and Kenneth McDuff, “The Broomstick Killer.”

Illinois

From Illinois, there have been seven serial killers, with a total kill count of 680 victims. They are the only state on this list to have the same ranking for both killers and victims, as they are in fourth place for both.

John Wayne Gacy, commonly referred to as “The Killer Clown,” is one of the most well-known serial killers in U.S. history. His number of victims is disgustingly high, as he killed at least 33 young men and boys. He stored most of the victims in the crawl space underneath his home in the Chicago suburbs. Terrifyingly, Gacy’s side job involved playing a clown at children’s birthday parties, hence the creepy nickname. He was executed by lethal injection on May 10th, 1994.

Other “famous” serial killers from Illinois are “The Chicago Rippers,” a satanic cult made up of Robin Gecht, Edward Spreitzer, and brothers Andrew and Thomas Korkoraleis, as well as “The Lipstick Killer” William Heirens, who famously on the wall with one of his victim’s lipstick.

Ohio

Ohio has the same amount of serial killers as Illinois—seven—-but is ranked lower due to the fact that it has fewer serial killer victims at 505 total.

Ohio’s most notorious serial killer is Shawn Grate, who raped and murdered five young women between 2006 and 2016. In September of 2016, the police received a 911 call from a woman who whispered that she had been kidnapped and was currently only a few feet away from her sleeping kidnapper. As 911 tried to coach her out of Grate’s home, she accidentally woke him up, and the race to find her before she could become his next victim began. When law enforcement arrived at the scene, they found trash piled up to the ceiling and multiple decomposing bodies. Grate was arrested and is scheduled to be executed in 2025.

Though Jeffrey Dahmer committed the majority of his murders in his native state of Wisconsin—and would therefore fall under Wisconsin on this list—it is important to note that he grew up in Ohio, and that is also where he committed his first murder.

Indiana

Indiana is the home state to six serial killers, who in total killed 349 victims. This puts it at sixth on the list of serial killers, but only 12th on the list of victims.

Herb Baumeister was a prominent businessman from Indiana who lived on an 18-acre estate with his wife and two children. In June 1996, the skeletal remains of 11 missing young men from the Indiana gay community were found on his property, leading Baumseister to take his own life before he could be charged. Interestingly, while Baumeister’s wife denies knowing anything related to her husband’s sinister ways, she does admit to one of their children finding a skeleton in the backyard—which Baumeister explained belonged to his deceased father, who was a doctor.

Other notorious serial killers from Indiana include Belle Gunness, Larry Eyler, and Darren Deon Vann.

Louisiana

Louisiana has had six serial killers who were responsible for the death of 344 victims.

Samuel Little is known by many to be the most prolific killer in American history. He confessed to 93 murders, of which 60 are confirmed. Based on his confession, Little would be responsible for more than a quarter of all serial killings in the state. Almost all of his victims were female drug addicts or sex workers, whom he believed would leave the least evidence behind for law enforcement to follow. He died in prison at age 80 while serving four life sentences without the possibility of parole.

Infamous serial killers from Louisiana also include Henry Lee Lucas, the “Deadly Drifter”; Ronald Joseph Dominique, the “Bayou Killer”; and Danny Rolling, the “Gainesville Ripper.”

Pennsylvania

In eighth place is Pennsylvania, with five serial killers. The five killers from Pennsylvania were responsible for 462 deaths, which outranks both Indiana and Louisiana.

Pennsylvania’s most well-known serial killer is Harvey Miguel Robinson, who is known for being one of the youngest serial killers reported in the U.S. When he was just 18, Robinson went on a violent killing spree, during which he killed three young women and seriously injured two. One of Robinson’s surviving victims led to his eventual arrest. After the victim escaped his evil grasp, the police used her to bait Robinson. They managed to shoot him before he fled to a hospital, where he was arrested. Robinson is currently on death row in Pennsylvania.

Other notorious serial killers in Pennsylvania are the “House of Horrors” killer Gary Heidnik, Harrison Graham, and Mark Spotz.

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^{More questions than answers in this tragic crime.}

On August 15, 2002, the bodies of Michael Short and his wife Mary were found, shot “execution-style” while they slept. Of their 9-year-old daughter Jennifer, there was no sign. The discovery helped to kick off the largest criminal investigation the county had ever seen—and yet the case remains unsolved to this day.

On that August morning more than 20 years ago, it was one of Michael Short’s employees who found the bodies. Chris Thompson was also one of the last people to see the Shorts alive. The night before, he had been working with Michael on a vehicle until late, and that morning he was supposed to meet him just before 9 a.m. to head to nearby Christiansburg to pick up a truck for the mobile home moving business that Michael owned and operated.

When he arrived at the house, Chris Thompson found Michael where he expected to find him—on a couch in the garage, where he often slept so that his snoring wouldn’t bother his wife. That morning, however, Michael wasn’t sleeping. The garage door was open, and Michael had been shot once in the head by a small-caliber gun.

Mary’s body was found inside the house. She, too, had been shot in the head with the same gun, lying in her bed. Evidence suggested that both had been killed in their sleep, without ever knowing that their executioner was there. The most chilling discovery wasn’t a body at all—but rather, the absence of one.

The couple’s 9-year-old daughter was nowhere to be found.

The search for 9-year-old Jennifer Short

Chris called the police, who searched the house for two weeks, picking up hundreds of pieces of evidence. At the same time, a massive sweep was underway to try to find Jennifer Short, who authorities hoped had merely escaped the slaying on her own and gotten lost in the surrounding woods. Unfortunately, that did not prove to be the case. Despite volunteers, dogs, ATVs, Amber Alerts, and even a helicopter, as well as a search perimeter that stretched for hundreds of miles, there was no sign of Jennifer Short.

Jennifer’s body was finally found

Some six weeks later and about 35 miles south of the Shorts’ home in Oak Level, Virginia, two dogs belonging to Eddie Albert turned up what he thought was simply a piece of a wig. It wasn’t until two days later, when the dogs brought him another grisly trophy, a piece of a skull, that Albert would phone the police.

From his home, authorities began a sweep of the surrounding area, finding teeth and bone fragments, as well as part of a small ribcage dumped under a nearby bridge and along a rural road. Due to the amount of time that had passed and the heavy decomposition of the body, the police were unable to determine much about what had happened to Jennifer Short after her abduction, but one thing was clear from the skull fragments they recovered: she had been killed the same way her parents had, with a single shot to the head from a small-caliber weapon.

“She’s gone now,” Sheriff H. F. Cassell told the press, after the remains had been positively identified as belonging to Jennifer Short, “she’s safe now, and no evil can befall her.”

But who had killed the Short family?

Though the fate of Jennifer Short was now known, authorities were no closer to solving the baffling and heinous crime that had befallen the girl and her parents. Making matters worse, the motive was unclear. Robbery seemed to be out, as nothing of value was taken, but the crime had clearly been premeditated, as the phone lines had been cut. While the abduction of Jennifer Short seemed to be the most likely motive, why she was taken from her home and then shot like her parents was something that could only be a subject of conjecture.

Despite numerous leads from as far away as Missouri, police seemed to grow no closer to a resolution of the case. Early on, much attention was focused on Garrison Bowman, a 66-year-old carpenter with a possible grudge against Michael Short, who had “fled” to Canada the day after the murders. By November, Bowman had been extradited from Canada, where he was being held on charges of drunk driving and violating immigration laws, and appeared in front of a grand jury in Roanoke, Virginia. However, no indictment was forthcoming.

Garrison Bowman cleared as a suspect

By 2007, the police finally admitted that Bowman was no longer a suspect. In the interim, it came out that some of the claims that initially drove police to suspect Bowman had been fabricated by three men looking to claim the reward money that was offered in connection with the crime. All three were eventually convicted of crimes including perjury and providing false information to law enforcement, and sentenced to several years in prison.

The damage had already been done, however, and thousands of hours had been spent investigating Bowman, to no avail. Would the authorities have had better luck if they hadn’t been led astray early on? It’s impossible to say. What we do know is that, more than 20 years later, the identity of the assassin who so cruelly ended the lives of the Short family remains unknown.

The mystery continues to this day

Every year since, neighbors and friends of the family have organized a motorcycle ride to raise awareness and help to keep the crime in the public spotlight. The ride crosses the bridge beneath which some of Jennifer Short’s remains were discovered, which has since been renamed the Jennifer Renee Short Memorial Bridge. According to the sheriff’s office, each time the ride takes place, they receive new information about the case, though so far it has not led to any arrests.

Only a few months after the Short family was gunned down, their house was sold at auction, yet it stood vacant for most of the years since. Then, in 2019, it burned down under mysterious circumstances. Was the fire set by the killer, returning to clear up any evidence that might have been left behind nearly twenty years earlier? It seems unlikely but, like so much else about the case, the answers may never be known for sure.

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A beautiful life taken far too soon.

15-year-old Sharmini Anandavel wanted to save up some spending money to buy new shoes to wear to her upcoming 9th-grade graduation. That’s why she left her family’s Toronto apartment in June of 1999, headed to what she told her parents was a new job. She never returned.

It would be four months before her body was found, in a shallow grave beside the Don River. During that time, conflicting accounts of her last days came to light. Her parents were under the impression that a neighbor had set her up with a job, but by the time they went to his door, Stanley Tippett and his family had already moved out. Different people saw her in different places on the day she disappeared, but no one knew what Sharmini was doing in her last hours of life.

The search for her brought out dozens of volunteers and police officers, as well as helicopters searching the neighborhood. But it was a father and son who were out for a walk in the nearby parkland that found her body months later. By then, her bones had already been strewn about by coyotes, and any hope of obtaining DNA from her killer, or even determining a conclusive cause of death, was long gone.

Piecing together the clues after Sharmini Anandavel went missing

In spite of this, both the police and Sharmini’s family were pretty sure that they knew who had killed her. Even before her body was found, fingers were pointing at Stanley Tippett, the neighbor who had allegedly helped her find the job she was headed to when she went missing.

Tippett had a history of impersonating a police officer and had already had a couple of brushes with the law, dating back as far as 1991, when he was just 16 years old. Born with Treacher Collins syndrome, Tippett had a sunken facial structure and lopsided ears that, according to his mother, led him to be bullied by classmates and neighborhood kids when he was younger.

By the time Sharmini Anandavel went missing, Tippett was in his early 20s, living downstairs from Sharmini’s family with his own wife and toddler. At the time, he claimed to have a relationship with many of the children in the building, often taking them swimming at a nearby pool.

Stanley Tippett becomes a suspect in Sharmini Anandavel’s disappearance

Sharmini had been tight-lipped about the nature of her new job, at least where her parents were concerned. And maybe for good reason, as her friends were under the impression that she was going to work undercover for a police anti-drug operation. When authorities searched her room, they found a bogus application for something called the “Metro Search Unit”—not a real police operation at all.

All these things and more pointed to Tippett, but all were circumstantial. There was no way to directly connect Tippett to the application found in Sharmini’s room, or to her death. No one had seen him with her on the day she disappeared, and there was no forensic evidence linking him to the crime. Tippett apparently sold his car to a junkyard for just $10 shortly after police first interrogated him, but though the authorities were able to seize it before it was destroyed, they found no evidence inside to link him to Sharmini’s death.

Ultimately, police had to let Tippett go, and the case remains technically unsolved, classified as a cold case more than twenty years later. “When I retired, I found myself apologizing to the Anandavel family,” Matt Crone, one of the lead investigators on Sharmini’s case, later told CBC News. “I think they deserve resolution for this, which they haven’t had, which nobody’s given them.”

Tippett’s continued run-ins with the law

Though Stanley Tippett was never charged in Sharmini’s death, he had several more encounters with the law in the years since, one of which ultimately landed him indefinitely behind bars. Tippett and his family moved from Toronto to Ontario following Sharmini’s disappearance, and there he was accused of stalking on several occasions, eventually given a short stint of jail time for harassing a neighbor.

Once he was released, he allegedly approached a 12-year-old neighbor girl and another young woman with offers of a fake job at the YMCA. When the second woman notified police, they searched Tippett’s home and seized his van, where they found the “sorts of stuff that could be your abduction kit 101,” according to authorities. This included duct tape, rope, plastic sheets, cable ties, and a hammer and knife. He pled guilty to criminal harassment and received two years in prison.

It was not long after his release that Tippett was once again in trouble with the law. This time, he was accused of sexually assaulting a 12-year-old girl. According to court records, Tippett picked up two girls, both of them visibly drunk, just after midnight and offered them a ride home. After dropping one off in the park, he allegedly assaulted the other. Police answered calls from concerned citizens who said they heard someone screaming.

Tippett’s story was that he had been carjacked by two men, who were the actual perpetrators of the attack. This story did not stand up in court, however, and in 2009, Tippett was convicted of seven counts, despite continuing to maintain his innocence. He was classified as a “dangerous offender,” and denied parole as recently as 2018. To this day, he likely remains behind bars.

Stanley Tippett arrested

The arrest and incarceration of Stanley Tippett may well keep a dangerous predator off the streets, assuming the allegations against him are accurate. And yet, it does little to shed light on the tragic death of Sharmini Anandavel. Tippett continues to maintain his innocence in that case, as well. In interviews, he refers to it only as the “Don Mills incident,” for the neighborhood where he and Sharmini lived at the time, and doesn’t use Sharmini’s name.

As for the authorities, while investigators like Matt Crone may be “absolutely certain” that Tippett is the culprit, they have never had enough evidence to charge him in Sharmini’s death, and it’s possible that they never will. So for now, Sharmini’s murder remains classified as a cold case, listed as Homicide 36 for 1999, and both authorities and Sharmini’s family must live without the closure that a charge against Tippett—or anyone else—might bring.

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A gruesome killing a few days after Christmas.

In December of 1978—just three days after Christmas—Bob Young and his girlfriend Elizabeth Andes were moving out of the apartment they had surreptitiously shared with another young couple, Sue Parmelee and her boyfriend John. As far as the girls’ fathers were concerned, the two young ladies were sharing the apartment to keep costs down. Their straight-laced fathers didn’t know that they were also sharing it with their beaus.

That evening, December 28, Bob Young returned to the apartment with a bag of clothes and a vacuum cleaner, to help his girlfriend clean up so as to ensure that they got back their deposit when they moved out. When he pulled up in the parking lot, however, the windows of their apartment were dark.

Expecting to find a note explaining Beth’s absence, he instead found something much more horrific. A bedroom spattered with blood, a toppled dresser, and his girlfriend’s dead body, where she had been strangled and stabbed.

Elizabeth’s boyfriend finds her dead in their apartment

The apartment had no phone, so he had to run out into the cold December night to find someone who could call the police. Oxford, Ohio, where the two had attended Miami University, was a small college town that hadn’t seen a murder in decades—and certainly not one as grisly as this.

When police arrived, they found Elizabeth Andes on the floor of her bedroom. Her feet and hands had been tied and a piece of cloth had been shoved into her mouth, possibly to stifle her screams. A fashion student, Andes had been stabbed with a pair of her own sewing shears, which police found wrapped in a sweater on the floor.

Andes was nude save for one knee-high blue sock, and Young had covered her body with a sheet by the time the police arrived. A robe sash had been tied around her neck, one of her earrings had been torn from her ear, and there was blood everywhere from the stab wounds in her torso.

Is Bob Young to blame?

Within 15 hours of the discovery of the body, police were sure they had their man. Young was a soft-spoken football player who had been dating Andes for three years. According to most of her friends, the two had been an enviable couple. Yet, it didn’t take long for authorities to zero in on him as their only suspect and, before long, Young had been spirited to another town for a polygraph test—which he was told he failed—and pressured into signing a confession, which he would immediately recant.

It wasn’t just Young changing his tune that suggested that the story may not be as cut and dry as the authorities were making it out to be. Young’s attorney noticed that the details of the confession didn’t match the actual facts of the crime scene. “This just doesn’t add up,” he later told the Cincinnati Enquirer. “There were four or five of them, those inconsistencies. You started thinking, ‘Well, what? He lied about things that were physical evidence? Or was he told that and then he put it in his statement?’”

Despite the holes in the case, police were certain they had their killer, and Young was arrested and taken to trial—where he was acquitted. With authorities assuring them that Young was the culprit and the case treated as closed, Beth’s family sought justice the only way they knew how; by filing a wrongful death suit in civil court against Young. In a civil trial, the threshold of certainty for a jury is much lower than in a criminal case, and yet, once again, the jury sided with Young.

Countless potential suspects

Decades later, reporters Amber Hunt and Amanda Rossman made the case the focus of the first season of their hit podcast Accused, and what they kept coming back to was how the police’s fixation on Young prevented the case from being properly investigated. Without a conviction, they had nothing else to go on.

Not only had they focused all of their energies on Young, neglecting other potential leads, but they had also logged the case as closed, meaning that it wasn’t entered into unsolved murder databases, and the details of the crime were never compared to other slayings with similar M.O.s. Perhaps even worse, evidence was misplaced after Young’s trial, making the odds of finding the real killer almost impossible—assuming that the jury was right, and Young didn’t do it.

According to their reporting, the single-minded focus of the police wasn’t due to a lack of other potential suspects. Beth’s boss, Robert “Buzz” Caul, called police shortly after the murder and said, “You might want to talk to me.” He claimed that Andes had invited him over to her apartment the night before she died, a thing that had never happened previously. He claimed that the two smoked weed, drank wine, and watched a movie on TV.

Beth’s friends had their doubts. According to them, Caul had a “terrific crush” on his employee, one that Andes neither reciprocated nor appreciated. One of her coworkers identified Caul as a “creepy” guy and said that she and Beth always walked home together on the nights that he was there.

Nor was Caul the only one. There had been a conflict with the maintenance man at the apartment, who Andes claimed had left her door unlocked, an incident which angered her so much that she reported it to the apartment complex on the day of her murder.  There was an old flame from high school, who also had a crush on the slain girl. And then there was Boyd Glascock.

Did unrequited love lead to homicide?

Days after Young’s arrest, while he was out on bail, Glascock stopped by his house, something he had never done before. The two men had worked as house painters during the summer but, according to Young, hardly knew each other. That day, however, Glascock admitted that he had loved Young for years—and claimed that he knew that Young loved him, too. That Beth had been in the way. And when Young asked him to leave, he shoved a wrapped gift into his hands: a pincushion drizzled in some red substance that could have been blood.

Unfortunately, none of these leads—or any others—were pursued at the time, due to the focus the police had placed on Young. Though he still maintains his innocence, even today, Young blames himself for the lack of closure in the death of the young woman he loved. If he hadn’t been pressured into signing that confession, he reasons, the authorities would have been forced to pursue other leads, and maybe catch the real killer.

As it is, we may never know the answer to the question that Elizabeth Andes’ father reportedly blurted out when Young’s acquittal was announced in court, “Then who killed my daughter?”

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