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et's daddy
was wondering who you thought was the worst

not including Hitler and them

Bundy ?

that nurse guy ?

should be interesting
distortedpandy
Andras Pandy was always one of my favs...

probably not the worst, but still a serial killer...

hence my stage name, Dr. Pandy Massacre yes.gif
MJB222
Jack the Ripper. Although other people have killed a lot more people than him, the mystery that surronds him is so.....creepy. blink.gif
Hoagy
Again, not so much quantity as the creepiness of how he did things, but Peter Sutcliffe (The Yorkshire Ripper) I think is one unhealthy individual, yet I find him strangely interesting.

Definately a brutal and vicious individual. *shudders* dontgetit.gif
Yelekiah
Jack the Ripper is one of my favorites although he is not the worst of them. In fact Andrei Chikatilo eclipses the Ripper by death count.
distortedpandy
The Zodiac Killer yes.gif

Yelekiah
Elizabeth Bathory (varying spelling) for worst female serial killer.
louie
QUOTE(Yelekiah @ Mar 8 2006, 10:08 PM) [snapback]1094935[/snapback]

Elizabeth Bathory (varying spelling) for worst female serial killer.



what about Albert Fish, he murdered an abused many young girls an when he was caught an put to the electric chair he short circuted it because he had years worth of pins an needles inserted in his testacles wich led them to discover even more horrific details of his own self abuse..
scary monsters.
sleep tight
Yelekiah
Sure but the death count wasn't that high imo. He was a Christian pedophile if I'm not mistaken. And a masochist perhaps.
Pax Unum
Last Call Killer:
Richard W. Rogers finally convicted of the murder of two of his numerous gay male victims. VMD, vacuum metal deposition, technology which saves fingerprints from plastic bags, was a key factor in his trial. Rogers disposed of his victims in plastic trash bags which he dumped along the roadways in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Jeremy Bryan Jones:
Glib, good-looking psychopath rapes & kills over a dozen people for fun, bragging he can "talk the panties off a nun." Mistaken FBI fingerprint system allows him to hide under another criminal's identity for years, resulting in the unnecessary death of several women.

Henry Lee Lucas:
Along with psychopath sidekick Ottis Toole, he traveled the U.S. raping, robbing, killing, and mutilating men, women & children. Originally thought to have killed 360 people, some of his confessions are now discredited. Whatever number of murders he & Toole committed, these two serial killers set a new standard in depravity.

Joel Patrick Courtney:
Violent, middle-aged drunk with a long rap sheet faces 19-count indictment for 2004 abduction, rape & murder of beautiful college freshman Brooke Wilberger and the sexual assault & kidnapping of a New Mexico exchange student.

Steven Avery:
DNA evidence exculpates him from one rape/attempted murder, but nails him on the rape and murder of Teresa Halbach, a young photographer who visited him for business reasons.

Serial Killer Culture:
A grim fascination with serial killers has created a robust "murderabilia" market. Many millions are spent each year not on serial killer movies and books, but on everything from paintings and other artwork created by serial killers to tacky souvenirs, coloring books, games and joke gifts. Some women are so attracted that they become serial killer groupies and even wives. A close look at why we are so fascinated by serial murder.

Joseph Edward Duncan III:
The story of how a monstrous convicted serial child molester was released to destroy an Idaho family.

Uday Hussein:
Iraq's mythically malevolent force. The story of his childhood and how he grew up to be the most feared man in his country.

Derrick Todd Lee:
Small-town investigators with sharp instincts identify Baton Rouge serial killer while big agencies are derailed with flawed FBI profile guiding their activities.

Robert Zarinski:
While he's in prison, his sister embezzles money from him. She makes a deal with prosecutors for leniency in exchange for info proving her brother killed a cop and is a sexual predator.

Werewolf Killers:
Traces the long history of the belief that men could become wolves and rip apart their victims. Shocking recent cases are profiled as well as classics like Vacher the Ripper and the Monster of Florence. Psychologists debate the nature of the mental disorder responsible for werewolf killers.

Yoo Young-cheol:
When he got out of a South Korean prison in 2003, his first goal was to capture a lot of stray dogs so that he could beat them to death and perfect his killing technique. That done, he planned to murder 100 wealthy people and steal their money.

The Monster of Florence:
For decades, this bizarre predator stalked men and women in love, murdered them and sexually mutilated the women. A number of men were suspected of being the Monster and there were several trials associated with this unsolved case. The unusual story inspired author Thomas Harris to locate one of his Hannibal Lecter books in Florence.

Capital City Murders:
Abduction and murder of 8 young women associated with the University of Wisconsin in Madison began suddenly in 1968 and ended without a clue in 1984.

Martha Beck & Raymond Fernandez:
The story of a desperately lonely overweight woman who lets herself fall into partnership with a man who murders women for money. The so-called Lonely Hearts Murders, entwined in voodoo magic and kinky sex, becomes one of the most sensational cases of the 1940s.

Charles Ng and Leonard Lake:
Cruel, psychopathic son of wealthy Hong Kong businessman, discharged from the Marines for stealing, and his accomplice kidnapped, raped, tortured and murdered an estimated 25 captives in a fortified bunker in California -- all caught on video. When Lake killed himself with hidden cyanide tablets, Ng fled to Canada, setting the stage for one of the most expensive legal battles in U.S. history, dwarfing the O.J. Simpson trial.

Bible John:
That's what they called the tall, very handsome well-dressed young man, who kept reciting passages from the scriptures. He was the last person seen with a three young murder victims, none of them sexually assaulted, but oddly all three were menstruating at the time of their death. DNA has brought forward new leads in this strange unsolved case.

Carl Panzram:
A remorseless, vicious killer, a child rapist, a man with no soul who was the essence of evil. The shocking two-part story of this monster who hated the human race, one of Americas most ferocious, unrepentant serial killers.

serial killers

Yelekiah
Ted Bundy was pretty bad too. They still can't find some of the bodies.
Good link btw. thumbsup.gif
Tangerine Sheri
John gacy and Ted bundy IMO nasmate sheri
TK0001
The story of Ed Gein was particularly disturbing when I first read it. He was the inspiration for Leatherface (from Texas Chainsaw Massacre), I believe.
GhostHunter79
I gotta go with Albert Fish
He's done it all and covered all the sick & twisted things you can think of
He always stuck in my mind & creeps me out!
Searching for the Truth
Albert Fish

There are few killers in American history that are remembered today as being as deranged and fiendish as the seemingly kind and harmless, Albert Fish. He looked like every child's favorite grandfather but behind the quiet facade of his silver hair and mustache lurked a hideous monster who preyed on the young and the innocent with his horrific "instruments of hell" -- a meat cleaver, a butcher knife and a saw. He was the self-admitted molester of more than 400 children during a span of 20 years and in the words of one of the shocked psychiatrists who examined him, he lived a life of "unparalleled perversity." Albert Fish remains one of the oldest men ever executed in the electric chair but it was a death that came too late for many of his victims.

Jeffrey Dahmer

Jeffrey Dahmer, was born May 21, 1960, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S. When young, he impaled the heads of animals he killed on stakes in his yard. As an adolescent, he had fantasies of killing and mutilating men. His first murder was in Bath Township, Ohio, in 1978. A second murder followed in 1987. He killed another 15 young men, most of them in Milwaukee, over the next five years. Dahmer's gruesome crimes involved cannibalism and necrophilia. Some claimed Dahmer escaped detection for so long was because police attached a low priority to investigating the disappearance of homosexual or racial minority victims.
BornInTheCasket
All those people are great and all, but I believe that the "worst" serial killer of all time has yet to come.
tiddlyjen
blink.gif aaaaaaaaaand he/she would be??
DaKong
I have my own way of ranking tongue.gif

"My God..."-- James Huberty, shot up a McDonald's.

Best sniper-- Charles Whitman a.k.a. The Sniper in the Tower (you can read some of his story from the book The Anatomy of Motive by John Douglas or here

Best at not getting caught-- the Unabomber

Stupidest motive ever-- Richard Paul White (more info here)



And finally...



"It's still a mystery..."-- Jack the Ripper
starlitkate
My favs are Count Elizabeth Bathory' and Ed Gein. Though I wouldn't call them favs cuz they are after all serial killers disgust.gif . Still they have fascinated me the most. Hey does Freddy Krueger and Michael Myers count. I always have nightmares about them two. wacko.gif
Yelekiah
QUOTE(BornInTheCasket @ Mar 8 2006, 04:05 PM) [snapback]1095320[/snapback]

All those people are great and all, but I believe that the "worst" serial killer of all time has yet to come.

What with forensics etc, perhaps not. More and more people are being caught imo.
The individual would have to be pretty clever.
Disinterested
Clifford Olson. The guy has one of the highest ratings ever recorded on the Psychopathy Checklist. He's considered the 'ultimate' psychopath, and a very dangerous person.
et's daddy
QUOTE(Yelekiah @ Mar 8 2006, 06:06 PM) [snapback]1095525[/snapback]

What with forensics etc, perhaps not. More and more people are being caught imo.
The individual would have to be pretty clever.


unfortunately im not sure i agree

those beltway snipers just got lazy

i think someone like that could carry on for a long time
Unlimited
probably dahmer was the worst when you got 35 guys in the fridge thats pretty bad. unsure.gif
jobot37
Totally Jefferey Dahmer.
Exterminator
Albert Fish is probably the worst serial killer of all time.
Read this topic if you want to know his extraordinary evil deeds.
http://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/forum...showtopic=63550
evil_E.T
the moors murderers, ian brady and myra hindley
Dowdy
QUOTE(TK0001 @ Mar 8 2006, 08:35 PM) [snapback]1095290[/snapback]

The story of Ed Gein was particularly disturbing when I first read it. He was the inspiration for Leatherface (from Texas Chainsaw Massacre), I believe.



Also the inspiration for Hanibal Lector
Glacies
Definately Dahmer, though i'd also say the pig farmer robert pickton would be a candidate
Yelekiah
QUOTE(et's daddy @ Mar 8 2006, 08:32 PM) [snapback]1095717[/snapback]

unfortunately im not sure i agree

Read up on forensics, perhaps you'll change your mind.

QUOTE(limited @ Mar 8 2006, 08:42 PM) [snapback]1095736[/snapback]

probably dahmer was the worst when you got 35 guys in the fridge thats pretty bad.

No way, Andrei Chikatilo killed at least 53, possibly more. yes.gif
He was the quintessential sick f.
et's daddy
QUOTE(Yelekiah @ Mar 9 2006, 09:33 AM) [snapback]1096408[/snapback]

Read up on forensics, perhaps you'll change your mind.



some trucker in a rest area caught the snipers not forensics thumbsup.gif

the cops seemed to have no clue
louie
QUOTE(TK0001 @ Mar 9 2006, 01:35 AM) [snapback]1095290[/snapback]

The story of Ed Gein was particularly disturbing when I first read it. He was the inspiration for Leatherface (from Texas Chainsaw Massacre), I believe.

Ed Gein was the inspiration for physco
__Kratos__
My vote still goes to Countess Elizabeth Bathory. As she brutally tortured and killed hundres of young women. The number that was counted was over 600 but nobody knows for sure and I believe the number could yet be much higher. ph34r.gif
Yelekiah
QUOTE(et's daddy @ Mar 9 2006, 10:15 AM) [snapback]1096459[/snapback]

some trucker in a rest area caught the snipers not forensics

A lot of people get caught due to forensics as well. yes.gif
__Kratos__
QUOTE(Yelekiah @ Mar 9 2006, 06:53 PM) [snapback]1097570[/snapback]

A lot of people get caught due to forensics as well. yes.gif


Less and less now. tongue.gif I saw on the news last week a group saying shows like CSI are making smarter criminals. ph34r.gif



Yelekiah
That is to be expected, but not all the techniques are open to the public.
They had a documentary on forensics on A&E. The technology is advancing, which is also to be expected.
frogfish
Forensics are still the best way to catch criminals, if not the best for obtaining warrants.
et's daddy
QUOTE(frogfish @ Mar 9 2006, 08:39 PM) [snapback]1097665[/snapback]

Forensics are still the best way to catch criminals, if not the best for obtaining warrants.


stupid criminals is the best way to catch criminals grin2.gif
DaKong
I'm still on Charles Whitman- committed the largest single mass murder ever. Also known as "The Sniper In The Tower"
Perfect Imperfection
Fred and Rosemary West
Ebony
Finally!! A forum where I actually know what I'm talking about for sure...

There are some really excellent ones here already, so I'm going to go and add one no one's mentioned yet- Joachim Kroll.

The information on the net is not brilliant and quite a lot of it is innaccurate and tamer than the reality. I've studied his case (and many, many others) and even used him in my last thesis. He truly was twisted...calculating, rational, logical, motivated, sexually deviated. The works, basically.

Someone a little older and very fitting for the entire forum as the residence is a renowned haunting- Madame LaLaurie.

It is accepted that in all probability LaLaurie's crimes were blown out of proportion, but to be honest they had to be bad enough to stir these kind of rumours in the first place, especially considering the time frame.
_Nyx_
Javed Iqbal

On March 16, 2000, a Pakistani court in Lahore sentenced serial child killer Javed Iqbal to death, saying he would be strangled in front of the parents whose children he was convicted of murdering. Judge Allah Baksh Ranja added that Iqbal's body "will then be cut into a 100 pieces and put in acid the same way you killed the children." His three accomplices, including a 13-year-old boy identified only as Sabir, also were found guilty. Sabir was sentenced to 42 years in jail; the other two accomplices were sentenced to death.

Iqbal, 42, initially confessed to the killings in a letter last year to police. He said he strangled the children, dismembered their bodies and placed them in a vat of acid. He later recanted his confession. Police found the remains of two bodies in a blue vat in his home after his arrest. Police also found pictures of 100 children whom Iqbal in his letter confessed to having killed. They also found clothes belonging to the young victims. Previously, the worst killing in akistani history was in mid-1980s when dozens of people were killed in the Punjab, Sindh and North West Frontier provinces in a series of mysterious night attacks that police blamed on a so-called "hammer group." The attackers broke into houses and bludgeoned victims to death with hammers. They were never found.

Parents of missing children were contacted to sort through clothes and pictures to try to identify their missing children. Most were identified, but police did not recover any bodies. The search for Iqbal was one of the largest manhunts in Pakistan. On December 30 Iqbal walked into the Lahore office of a leading newspaper and turned himself in. He refused to go directly to the police, saying he feared for his life. During his trial, the child killer testified that he was only a witness to the killings. He said his earlier confession was sent as a message to the parents of the missing children, whom he accused of neglect.

Iqbal wrote in his letter to the police that he killed the children, who were mostly beggars, in retaliation for the abuse they inflicted on him following a previous arrest when he was accused of sodomy. He claimed he had been wrongly picked up and badly beaten while in police custody. Curiously, and I guess generously, he also claimed to have killed the street children to highlight their plight. During his six-month killing spree, Iqbal kept a detailed account of the murders, listing his victims' names, ages and the dates of their deaths. He also kept their shoes and bundles of their clothing. Healso recorded the exact cost of disposing of each kid. "In terms of expense, including the acid, it coast me 120 rupees ($2.40) to erase each victim," he wrote.

A week after his sentencing, a Pakistan's top religious said the planned execution of serial killer Javed Iqbal went against Islamic tenets. Though the sentence of the killer called for his body to be cut into 100 pieces and dissolved in a vat of acid, the Council of Islamic Ideology said that would desecrate the killer's body, which would go against the Islamic teaching of respect for the body of the deceased.

On October 25, 2001, the Iqbal and Sabir were found dead in their cell from apparent poinsoning. Their apparent suicides -- as declared by prison authorities -- came just four days after the country's highest Islamic Court had agreed to hear their appeal against the death sentence. Iqbal had voiced fears after his conviction that police would kill him. His lawyer said Iqbal was victim of a police conspiracy. Jail officials said Iqbal had twice made abortive suicide attempts in the past.
source

"I could have killed five hundred, this was not a problem. But the pledge I had taken was one hundred children, and I did not want to violate this. My mother had cried for me. I wanted one hundred mothers to cry for their children."
-Javed Iqbal


There's a special place in hell for those who harm children...... disgust.gif
Trix
the worst killers are the killers that kill and then kill themselfs hmm.gif
Yelekiah
Serial killers rarely kill themselves. And yes, I agree that that is a bad thing. Actually I can't recall a serial killer that committed suicide. I know there's one but the name totally escapes me.
distortedpandy
Didn't Robert Leroy Anderson commit suicide?
_Nyx_
Joe Ball committed suicide.....

Herb Baumeister killed himself as well....

original.gif

Not sure about Anderson, though.....I can keep looking... yes.gif
et's daddy
how about Jim Jones ?
the_sasquatch_hunter
Sorry if any of these have been mentioned already:


Behram, the 'Indian Thug'

It was established at the trial of Behram, the 'Indian Thug', that he had strangled at least 931 victims with his yellow and white cloth strip or 'ruhmal' in the Oudh district (now in Uttar Pradesh, India) between 1790 and 1840.


Elizabeth Bathori

Historically the most prolific serial murderer of the western world was Elizabeth Bathori (Hungary), who practised vampirism on girls and young women. Throughout the 15th century, she killed more than 600 virgins in order to drink their blood and bathe in it. When her murderous career was discovered, the countess was locked up in her castle from 1610 until her death in 1614.


Pedro López

The most prolific substantiated modern serial killer is Pedro López (Columbia), who confessed to raping and killing 300 girls in Columbia, Peru and Ecuador. Charged on 57 counts of murder in Ecuador, the 'Monster of the Andes' was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1980.


Delfina and María de Jesús Gonzáles

Sisters Delfina and María de Jesús Gonzáles (Mexico) abducted girls to work in brothels and are known to have murdered at least 90 of their victims. The sisters were sentenced to 40 years' imprisonment in 1964.


Harold Shipman

Family doctor Harold Shipman (UK) murdered at 215 of his patients between 1975 and 1998. Shipman killed his elderly victims, most of whom were women, with high doses of diamorphine injections. In January 2000, he was sentenced to a life term in prison for the 15 murders of which he was found guilty. Shipman hanged himself in his prison cell on 13 January 2004.
Infrazael
NO ONE mentioned Charles Manson yet?

You guys are nuts.
_Nyx_
Manson is one of the better known ones.....but I don't think he was the worst....he may very well have been the most insane.... ph34r.gif
Dossman
You should look up the story of Big Harp and Little Harp, if you're not familiar with it. They killed between 35 - 40 people in the early 1800's before meeting their deaths. They were two evil men. devil.gif

The story of Micajah (Big) and Wiley (Little) Harp, America’s first known serial killers.
They passed for brothers, but were cousins, sons of brothers John and William Harpe, Scottish immigrants to Orange County, N.C. The boys were named William (Micajah/Big), son of John, and Joshua (Wiley/Little), son of William. Big Harp and Little Harp left home as young men in 1775, aiming to become overseers of slaves in Virginia. Career plans diverted by the American Revolution, the Harps instead became Tory outlaws in a gang that roved the North Carolina countryside, raping farmers’ daughters, pillaging livestock and crops, and burning farmhouses. In the attempted kidnapping of one young girl by a Tory rape gang, Little Harp was shot and wounded by local Patriot Captain James Wood.
In 1780, the British took the Tory irregulars and their Cherokee allies into their ranks. The Harps fought under Tarleton's command at King’s Mountain, near the Carolinas’ border, in October; in the Battle of Blackstocks in November, and in January 1781 in the Battle of Cowpens. Shortly after Cowpens, the Harps left the army and joined up with their Cherokee confederates, taking part in the Indian raid on Station Bluff, now Nashville, Tenn. They soon returned to North Carolina, where they kidnapped Captain Wood’s daughter, Susan, and another local girl, Maria Davidson. The kidnapped women would serve as wives to the Harps until the bitter end.

The Harps took the women across the Appalachians to the Cherokee-Chickamauga town of Nickjack, in the vicinity of what is now Chattanooga, Tenn. Along the way, a member of the gang, Moses Doss, objected to the brutal treatment of the women and the Harps killed him. The Harps, with their wives, lived in the Indian village at Nickjack for over a decade. In that time, they participated in British-backed Indian raids on Kentucky settlers west of the mountains, such as the Battle of Blue Licks in 1782. Later they took part in the Indian attack on Bledsoe's Lick in Tennessee. The night before the Americans finally wiped out Nickjack in 1794, the Harps received warning and managed to escape with their women before the battle.

While living at Nickjack, both women had given birth twice; each time, the fathers murdered their babies. Counted with Moses Doss, the four infanticides made five known killings before 1797, or so, when the Harps settled in a cabin on Beaver’s Creek near the frontier capital of Knoxville, Tenn. On June 1, 1797 Little Harp legitimately married Sally Rice, the daughter of a local minister, bringing the number of Harp wives to three.

After two killings, one in Knox County and one on the Wilderness Trail, the Harps left Tennessee in December 1798 for Kentucky, where they killed two traveling men from Maryland. The Harps liked to gut their victims and fill their stomach cavities with rocks to weight them down so they’d sink in a river.
When they stopped for breakfast on Dec. 12, 1798 at John Farris’ Wayside House near the Big Rock Castle River, despite the thieving and killing along the way, the Harps were hungry and flat broke, filthy and bedraggled. But there was a kind and generous young man who was staying at the inn who invited them to be his guests at his table.
His name was John Langford. He was traveling from Virginia to pay a visit to a friend in Crab Orchard, Ky. A halfway house, such as Farris’, was a place many travelers stopped and waited in order to join up with others heading in the same direction. It was wild and dangerous countryside and earned its name, The Wilderness. Two cattle drovers found Langford’s mutilated corpse in The Wilderness two days later, when their cattle shied off Boone’s Trace into the woods at the scent of blood.

The body was taken back to John Farris’ Wayside House and the innkeeper pointed the way to the Harps and their women, who were apprehended outside Crab Orchard. All five were imprisoned, but the Harp men managed to escape, leaving their women to face justice alone. The Harps fled for the barely settled and ill-defined Henderson County, Ky. Eventually, the Harp wives were released, escorted out of town with three infants born in jail, and one gift horse among them.

As abused and frightened women are wont to do, they immediately swapped the horse for a canoe, traveled west along the Green River toward the Ohio River, and a reunion with the husbands Harp at a pirates’ den called Cave-In-The-Rock on the Illinois side.
The Kentucky frontier had gone on alert after the Langford killing and the Harps’s subsequent escape from the law in Danville. Kentucky Gov. James Garrard ordered out a posse after the Harps. The posse caught up with the Harps in a cane field in Central Kentucky, but the posse members were too afraid to try to capture them, allowing them to get away through the cane.

In disgust, one of the posse members, Henry Scaggs, went to the home of Col. Daniel Trabue, a Revolutionary War veteran and wilderness pioneer, who lived near the present Columbia in Adair County, to report the posse’s cowardice. As Scaggs sat in Trabue’s house discussing the critical situation, Trabue’s young son’s dog, covered in blood, came limping into the yard. The dog had left the house earlier with Trabue’s 13-year-old son, John, who had been sent along the old buffalo trace to borrow some flour and seed beans from a neighbor. About two weeks later the boy’s body was found, decomposed, dismembered, and dumped in a sinkhole. The seed beans were there, but the flour was gone. In response to the boy’s murder, the governor issued a $300 reward on each of the Harp heads.

In the reward notice issued at Frankfort, Ky., Micajah Harp was described as being about six feet tall, as robustly built with an erect carriage, about 32 years old, with short black hair growing low on his forehead. He wore "a striped nankeen coat, dark blue woolen stockings, leggins of drab cloth and trousers of the same as the coat." Wiley was "very meagre in the face…looks older but really younger, and has likewise a downcast countenance. He had on a coat of the same stuff as his brother’s, and had a drab surtout coat over the close-bodied one."

Moving north, the Harps killed a man named Edmonton, a settler named Stump, and, upon reaching the Potts Plantation near the mouth of the Saline River, they killed three men sitting around a campfire. Meanwhile, the posse, out after the Harps on their race across the state, summarily hanged some dozen criminals along the way, and ran a host of outlaws out of Kentucky. They stopped just short of Cave-in-The-Rock, on the Illinois side of the Ohio River, or they might have had the Harps that day.

This limestone opening in a bluff above the Ohio River at its junction with the Saline, was a well-known natural landmark throughout the 18th century, a rest stop for river travelers migrating west. Beginning in the 1790s and until the 1830s, it was home base to an entire corporation of river pirates. In 1798, the most famous among them was Samuel Mason, a Revolutionary War veteran turned river bandit. His large sign outside invited weary travelers to "Wilson’s Liquor Vault and House for Entertainment." His unwary victims were beaten and robbed in the cave, and sometimes they lived to tell about it.
Mason’s favorite prey was the slow-moving flatboats laden with produce for Natchez and New Orleans. Pretending to be local pilots guiding the boats through shallow parts of the rapidly flowing and eddy-ridden Ohio, the pirate/pilot would steer the craft onto a shoal, where Mason’s gang would pick it clean and take the goods to market themselves. With the arrival of the Harps and their three wives and three babies, the relatively non-violent ways of the river pirates took a murderous turn. After a few Harp games of taking travelers to the top of the bluff, stripping them naked, and throwing them off, they were politely asked to leave.

The final stretch of slaughter took place soon after this, in July 1798, when the Harps returned to Eastern Tennessee. The victims included a farmer named Bradbury; a man named Hardin; a boy named Coffey; William Ballard, who was cut open, filled with stones, and dumped in the Holston River; James Brassel, with his throat ripped apart on Brassel’s Knob; John Tully, father of eight. On the Marrowbone Creek in south central Kentucky, John Graves and his teenaged son, out planting crops, had their heads axed. Moving toward Logan County, the Harps came upon a little girl, whom they killed, as they did a young slave on his way to the mill. Once in Logan County, near today’s Adairville, near the Whippoorwill River, they butchered an entire migrating family asleep in their camp, but for one son who survived.

Stopping at a spot on land owned by Samuel Wilson on the Mud River near Russellville, they rested, thinking what to do to escape the posse in close pursuit. (The clearing in which the Harps rested later became a staging ground for Methodist revivals.) Sally’s four-month-old daughter was fretful, perhaps hungry. Big Harp took the baby from her mother’s arms, swung her by her tiny ankles, and brained her little head against the trunk of a tree.
Still, the killing continued.

A man named Trowbridge who’d gone for salt at Robertson’s Lick, his torso hollowed out, loaded with stones and sunk in Highland Creek; Maj. William Love, an overnight guest at the Stegall home in Webster County, who snored; the Stegall’s baby who cried; Mrs. Stegall who screamed when she saw her infant’s throat was slit. Gilmore and Hudgens, returning from the salt lick with their hounds, came upon the Harps. Pretending to be the posse, the Harps accused the two men of being Harps, arrested, and executed them. As they prepared to kill settler George Smith, near where the Harps were living in the cave that came to be known as Harp’s Home, the posse rode in.

After a chase, the posse left Big Harp’s body on Harp’s Hill, took his head to the crossroads, Harp’s Head, and displayed it there on Harp’s Head Road, attached to an oak tree, for the sober contemplation of passers-by. Before dying, Big Harp confessed to 20 murders, probably not counting the babies. Estimates are as high as 40, but usually around 30.

The three captive Harp wives lived on: Sally Rice returning to her family in Knoxville, remarrying, and migrating west with her new husband and her father, by way of Cave-In-The-Rock; Maria Davidson, called Betsey Roberts, marrying, moving to Illinois and raising a large family; Susan Wood becoming a weaver, raising her surviving daughter in Tennessee, and dying there.

As for Wiley, Little Harp, he rejoined the pirate Mason at Cave-In-The-Rock for about four years, when he showed up in Natchez with Mason’s head for the reward money. Little Harp was recognized, hanged, cut down, and decapitated, his own head impaled along the side of the Natchez Trace outside Old Greenville in Mississippi Territory, as a warning to outlaws.
At least that is one story of the end of Wylie Harp, and it makes a good ending to the story of The Harps, Big and Little.

crimemagazine.com/harps.htm
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