serial killer - Dark Stories True Crime Tours

1977: Fake Detectives, Real Killers: the Hillside Strangler Murder That Broke the Pattern

Elissa Kastin was driving home from her waitressing shift when two men flashing police badges pulled her over, the same ruse the Hillside Stranglers used to lure women into their car. Her body was later round on an embankment near a Glendale country club on this day in 1977, strangled like the others before her.

But Kastin broke the pattern investigators thought they understood. Every previous victim had been a sex worker or runaway, a detail police had quietly used to narrow their search. Kastin was a professional dancer with no such history, and her murder forced detectives to confront a harder truth: the killers were not hunting a type, they were simply hunting whoever stopped for the badge.

Hillside Strangler: Aerial view of rush hour traffic on the 101 Ventura Freeway

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1990: The Rostov Ripper Claims His Final Victim, Then Is Undone by a Suspicious Walk From the Woods

A 350-officer manhunt across the Rostov region had already failed once to stop him, and on this day in 1990 Andrei Chikatilo killed again, murdering Svetlana Korostik in woodland near a rural train station. It was his last victim.

Days later a plainclothes officer, part of the same exhausted operation, spotted a dishevelled man emerging from the trees near the station, wiping his face and straightening his clothes. Something about him seemed wrong enough to stop him and take his details. A records check turned up a prior arrest from 1984, and surveillance was quietly placed on him. Weeks later, Chikatilo, dubbed the Rostov Ripper and found to have killed and in some cases cannibalised dozens of victims over more than a decade, was arrested.

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1995: He Phoned a Journalist to Boast of 76 Victims: The Capture of the ABC Serial Killer

Moses Sithole murdered at least 37 women and a toddler across South Africa between July 1994 and late 1995, the killings spread between three towns so that newspapers dubbed him the ABC Killer. Police lost his trail that August after linking him to one victim and uncovering an earlier conviction for an assault on a woman, and the case went cold until Sithole himself broke the silence, phoning a journalist to claim the murders were revenge for his unjust imprisonment and boasting of 76 victims, twice the official count, before giving directions to a body to prove he was telling the truth.

The call let investigators close in, and on 6 November 1995 police cornered Sithole in Johannesburg. He attacked a constable with a hatchet during the confrontation and was shot by officers, bringing the manhunt to an end.

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1986: The Birnies Abduct Denise Brown From a Perth Bus Stop

David and Catherine Birnie offered Denise Brown, 21, a lift while she waited for a bus on Stirling Highway in Perth on 5 November 1986. Instead of taking her home, they drove her to their house in the suburb of Willagee, where she was held captive. Later, the couple drove Denise north to a pine plantation near Wanneroo, where she was stabbed and struck with an axe before being buried in a shallow grave. Her disappearance became part of a series of murders that would leave Perth in fear, until another young woman escaped the Birnies' home and alerted police later that month.

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