Top 10 Gruesome Murders World Will Never Forget
Murders have always been the most heinous act of crimes for ages. Ceasing someone’s right of life by anyone has always been a matter of discussion. Taking someone’s life is considered inhuman and immoral in nature, because of this mindset even now in many countries including India, the death penalty is given in some cases. No doubt, murder is one of the most inhumane acts whenever done apart from self-defense.
We have heard a lot of crime stories including both serious and not so serious kinds of criminal offenses. Murders are among the serious ones of the list. It has always been enticing to watch, hear or read stories of the scariest murderers and serial killers. This article will take you to a bone-chilling ride of reading about the most well-known murder cases that shook the world.
Top 10 Scariest Murders You Should Know About
1. The Worst Women On Earth
In the 1890s this was the nickname given to Lizzie Halliday, New York’s first known female serial killer. She was also the first woman to ever be sentenced to death by the electric chair although that sentence was never carried out.
Lizzie emigrated to the states as a child and as she got older showed a propensity to experience what would be later called “spells of insanity.” Halliday committed at least four murders including two women she was old friends with and her sixth husband who she stabbed, shot, and mutilated.
Yes, her sixth husband. Of the previous five, she is suspected of killing possibly two of them and attempted to kill another by poisoning with arsenic. She also had a love of burning things. In 1888, she burned down the saloon of the two female “old friends” whom she later murdered. She also burned both the barn and house of her sixth husband.
Apprehended and sentenced to death by electrocution, the governor of New York went on to commute her sentence and instead institutionalized her for being mentally insane. She was sent to the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, where she would live out the rest of her life. While there, she attacked and killed a nurse by stabbing her 200 times with a pair of scissors.
2. The Boy In The Box
This is a 60-year-old mystery of the boy in the box, a case that remains unsolved till date. It started on a chilly day of February in 1957, on a roadside highway just outside of Philadelphia. A muskrat hunter, checking his traps, stumbled upon a cardboard box lying in the woods.
In the box he found the dead body of a young boy aged between 3 to7 years, malnourished and covered with small scars, stripped naked but wrapped tightly in a blanket and mutilated. But he kept quiet to keep his own illegal traps away from the police. And so, for days, until a fearless soul found him, the boy’s body lay cold and rotting, alone in the woods.
The police fingerprinted the boy in hopes of finding a match, but nothing came up. Hundreds of thousands of flyers were sent out to the surrounding area, begging for information about the unidentified boy, but no one came forward. The investigators tried everything they could. They analyzed the evidence from the crime scene, from the cardboard box to the blanket he was wrapped in.
Every clue they followed, though, just led to a new dead end. To this day, more than 60 years later, one of America’s most famous murder cases remains unsolved. Nobody knows who the child was, who his parents were, or how he ended up naked and mutilated in a box in the woods.
3. The Papin Sisters
Christine and Lea Papin were two French sisters and live-in maids. In 1933, after working for and living with the Lancelin family for seven years, they murdered Madame Lancelin and her daughter, Genevieve.
Both were beaten and stabbed to the point where the bodies were practically unrecognizable. Their eyes were also gouged out. The police discovered the Papin sisters in their room, naked, in bed together with the murder weapon.
4. The Vengeance Got Too Far
For decades, Hollywood and the rest of America have been scared by actress Sharon Tate’s horrible murder by the Manson Family while she was more than eight months pregnant. Tate was at home with friends Wojciech Frykowski, Abigail Folger, and celebrity hairstylist Jay Sebring on the night of August 8, 1969.
Her spouse, who was a director named Roman Polanski, was filming a picture out of the country. At the time, the couple was renting a posh home in Los Angeles’ Benedict Canyon neighborhood, which would later become the site of the heinous killings.
Charles Manson, the infamous cult leader, ordered a couple of his faithful followers to break into the house and kill everyone inside “as gruesomely as they can.” The cult members assassinated 18-year-old Steven Parent, who was visiting with the estate’s caretaker.
As soon as they entered the premises, they went inside and their sights were set on the people who lived there. They rounded up the four people and tied them up in the living room. Sebring objected, claiming that the eight-months-pregnant Tate was being tormented badly. But all he got was a bullet in the chest, a foot in the face, and a knife after a knife driven into his body until he died.
Folger and Frykowski managed to liberate themselves from their shackles and attempted to flee but were unsuccessful. They were pursued by the killers, who savagely stabbed them dozens of times. Tate begged her abductors to let her live so that her unborn child may live.
The Manson Family, on the other hand, was unmoved. They stabbed her to death and drew the word “Pig” on the front door with her blood. The house itself was Manson’s purpose for the attack. Manson wanted vengeance on the previous renter, music producer Terry Melcher, who had denied him a record deal.
All of the assaults from that night, as well as Manson himself, were apprehended by the end of the year. They were given the death penalty and were sentenced to life in prison. Every plea for parole has been turned down.
5. The Japanese Cannibal
The famous Japanese cannibal, Issei Sagawa is notorious in his country. He grew up in a wealthy family but always had the urge for human flesh. At 23, Sagawa was arrested for attempted rape, according to Culture Crossfire. He entered the apartment of a tall German woman living in Tokyo and attacked her.
Police, however, didn’t realize that he was actually attempting to eat her, even though he bit off a piece of her flesh. He was obsessed with taller “Western” women. He befriended a classmate, a 25-year-old Dutch woman named Renee Hartebeest.
The friendship proved deadly for Hartebeest as one night in 1981, Sagawa invited her over under the guise of working on a poetry assignment but ended up shooting her in the neck and eating various parts of her body over a two-day span. He attempted to dump the leftovers of her body in a lake nearby but was caught in the act.
He was held in police custody for two years before being deemed legally insane and deported back to Japan. Once in Japan, he was declared sane by psychologists and signed himself out of the mental institution where he was being held. He currently lives as a free man in Japan.
6. Remorseless Killer Chandrakant Jha
It was one of the mass murders ever reported. Chandrakant Jha’s first murder was recorded in 1998 and he remained behind bars for more than 3 years but was released in 2002 for lack of evidence. Following this, he went on to murder and mutilate at least 6 more.
Jha consistently evaded the police by dismembering his victims and scattering the body parts around the city, making it hard for the cops to identify the victims and the perpetrator of the crimes. He would do all this for the sheer thrill of challenging the law enforcement agencies, and this was his way of taking revenge on the Delhi Police for their “atrocities” against him, according to Jha.
In two cases, a note was also recovered with the mutilated body parts found outside Tihar Jail. Judge Lau took serious note of Jha’s allegation that he committed the murders to avenge the police harassment he faced. Jha used to help young men, usually migrants from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, to get petty jobs.
He would keep them at his house in JJ Colony, Hyderpur, and is said to have treated them like his children. But, at times, petty things such as drinking, smoking, lying, and being non-vegetarian would be enough to prompt a murder. He would begin the “death ritual” mostly around 8 pm by tying his victim’s hands on the pretext of punishing him. He would then strangle him using a nunchaku.
After killing his victims, he preferred to have dinner in the same room where his victims lay lifeless. In his own words, he is a specialist in chopping bodies. Following his arrest after his final murder in 2007, he confessed that he had perfected the art of cutting bodies leading to minimum blood oozing out after mutilation. Jha has been sent to the gallows for his gruesome crimes.
7. The Ghost of Dead Women Named Her Murderer
A Chicago respiratory therapist was murdered in her residence in 1977. Teresita Basa was discovered with a butcher knife buried in her chest under a blazing mattress. Police tried to locate her stolen jewelry but were not successful nor they could manage to connect any of the suspects to the crime.
It appeared hard to discover the offender until Remy Chua, a coworker who hardly knew the victim, became an unexpected source of information. Chua began to have images and dreams about Basa regularly. It all started in her workplace’s locker room, where she saw a man’s face behind Basa. This would happen again and again in her dreams.
Chua then began communicating with her husband while channeling Basa’s spirit. Chua told her husband the entire story of Basa’s murder while channeling Basa’s spirit. She alleged that an elderly person at the hospital called Alan Showery molested her while assisting Basa with her television.
He then murdered her and set fire to her mattress. Showery’s common-law wife received her jewelry, and the spirit was able to provide specifics about what happened to it. Mr. Chua persuaded his wife to share these things with the police. The police were initially doubtful, but after seeing Basa’s jewelry on Showery’s wife (which Basa’s cousin was able to confirm precisely as the spirit claimed she could), the guy was found guilty and sentenced to fourteen years in prison.
Unfortunately, the evidence was insufficient to convict him any longer. Was it, however, Basa’s ghost that identified her assailant? Maybe Chua knew something about the case and hid it behind the guise of a spirit controlling her. What brought authorities to the murderer is still a mystery.
8.The Tandoor Murder Case
In 2003, Sushil Sharma, the former president of the Delhi Pradesh Youth Congress, was found guilty of the murder of his wife Naina Sahni, a former Mahila Congress functionary in Delhi. In July of 1995, a murder occurred. Sharma had been in a live-in relationship with Naina for a while before they married, and he chose to keep the wedding a secret.
Sharma allegedly noticed Naina on the phone when he entered the house on July 2, 1995. She hung up, but when he pressed the redial button, the call was answered by a former classmate and Congress colleague of Naina’s.
Enraged by the scene, he shot her with his pistol, then brought her body to the restaurant, where he chopped it off and attempted to burn it in the tandoor. The matter went to trial later that year, with the verdict in the so-called “Tandoor Murder Case” arriving in 2003, when he was sentenced to death. In 2013, the Supreme Court modified his death sentence to a life sentence.
9. The Wife Who Cooked Her Husband
Katherine Knight, an Australian woman stabbed her partner, John Price, to death 37-times in 2000. Knight then skinned him, decapitated his head, and cooked up parts of his body. She set her dining room table for two and served the cooked meat with baked potatoes and side vegetables.
She placed handwritten notes next to each table setting with the names of Price’s children on them — she was attempting to serve them their father for dinner. When police finally arrived at the house they found Knight in a comatose state with pills spilled out on the floor.
They also found Price’s head boiling in a pot of soup on the stove. Knight was the first woman to be sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. She is currently serving her sentence in Silverwater Correctional Complex in New South Wales, Australia.
10.The Nithari Kaand
In 2007, Indians were shocked by the discovery of bodies of deceased children and adults in the house of Moninder Singh Pandher in Noida’s Nithari village. When the investigation began, it was discovered that Pandher’s servant, Surender Koli, had been raping and killing women, sometimes minors, and had even eaten their body parts, in one case even cooking them.
Pandher was acquitted of charges in one case in 2009, but he remained co-accused in another, and his death sentence was overturned. Koli has been found guilty in five of the fifteen cases. Meanwhile, the Allahabad high court remitted his death sentence to life imprisonment.
