He was an unassuming man whose Jekyll and Hyde personality obscured increasingly violent tendencies. And in 2006, in the small English town of Ipswich, Steve Wright began targeting sex workers — abducting, strangling, and dumping the bodies of five women.

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It was called the crime of the century: In 1966, Richard Speck drifted into Chicago, and unleashed a whirlwind of violence and rage onto a group of student nurses.

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In the early 1980s, emergency services in St. Paul, Minnesota began receiving odd calls from a distraught-sounding man. At first reporting brutal attacks on women, he quickly began taking credit for the murders, and begged police to stop him.

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Throughout his shocking rampage that left dozens of people injured or dead, the newly dubbed “Vampire of Düsseldorf” Peter Kürten grew more and more confident — even writing into a local paper with the location of a victim’s body. But his confidence would be his undoing.

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Unfulfilled by bestiality, a young Peter Kürten turned to murder — and discovered his body’s reaction to the sight of blood. As his dark desires festered, he embraced sadism in all its forms. And in 1929, a gruesome killing spree earned him a chilling moniker.

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When British heiresses Dora and Claire Williamson reached out to Linda Hazzard, she might have thought draining their bank accounts would be easy enough. But she didn't count on the sisters’ resilience, or the might of one formidable governess...

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In the early 1900s, Linda Hazzard marketed herself as a doctor, and claimed that she could cure any ailment with her special starvation regimens. Except, instead of curing her patients, she was killing them.

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After spending years in and out of prison, Charles “The Serpent” Sobhraj was determined to make something of himself. To do that, he needed money — only now, he knew better than to leave behind any witnesses.

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Growing up in Vietnam, India and France in the 1940s and ‘50s, Charles Sobhraj never truly fit in anywhere — not even with his family. When they turned their backs on him for good, he became a con man smuggling cars, escaping debts, stealing from tourists… and breaking out of prisons around the world. 

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