5 Terrifying Murderers to Haunt Your Dreams

5 The Killer of 100 Children

A story about police catching a serial killer of a hundred children should begin with an outcry about a hundred murders or disappearances, followed by an investigation. That is not how this story begins. Instead, it begins with Pakistani police receiving a note. “Today, November 25, 1999, I have decided to commit suicide,” wrote the author. “Yesterday, I killed my employee, Sajid, and incinerated his body... I have killed 100 beggar children and put their bodies in a vat.”

The writer was presumably a crank. And indeed, at Javed Iqbal’s eventual trial, he’d say he made the whole thing up. But the letter mentioned his address, and police had to follow up on this lead. Inside, they found vats of hydrochloric acid containing human remains. They also found a large collection of children’s clothing. Then they found an album of photographs of children, many being sexually abused. These photos seemed to match descriptions in Iqbal’s journal about each of his hundred victims.

Police now launched a manhunt, which ended when Iqbal, who did not yet kill himself as promised, turned himself in at a newspaper office. “I have no regrets,” he told the newspaper. “I killed 100 children. I could have killed 500; this wasn’t a problem. But the pledge I had taken was of 100 children, and I never wanted to violate this.” His motive, he claimed, was revenge against police, who had severely beaten him a few years back when he’d been accused of raping children. He didn’t claim the accusation was false, just that the beating was severe. 

Prosecutors put together a case, while Iqbal changed his story and now claimed not to have killed anyone. Police didn’t manage to identify all the children in the photos, who’d been beggars like the original note had said, but they did manage to identify many of them. At the trial, 105 witnesses testified about knowing the missing children pictured in the album and recognizing pieces of clothing. 

The court found Iqbal guilty, and the judge pronounced the sentence. “You will be strangled to death in front of the parents whose children you killed,” he said. “Your body will then be cut into 100 pieces and put in acid, the same way you killed the children.” Department of Justice officials intervened at this point, pointing out the government couldn’t legally carry out that punishment. He would presumably instead have been executed using more traditional means, but before he could be, he hanged himself in his cell. 

4 The Demon-Possessed Husband

In 1974, Christine Taylor caught her husband Michael kissing a woman from his religious group. Michael responded in an unusual fashion to being caught: He started beating the woman he’d just been kissing. He now announced that he’d had a vision in which they were both naked and she had seduced him, and he felt some deep evil within him.

At those religious meetings, Michael and the woman (Marie Robinson) had been speaking in tongues, which isn’t a euphemism for sexual congress but refers to a babel of unintelligible speech when in a spiritual trance. He now concluded that demons had invaded his body. His local community in West Yorkshire was happy to help. Two priests — one Anglican and one Methodist — conducted an exorcism on him, which lasted all night. They said they had cast out 40 demons from him, including the demons of lewdness and incest. But they said three demons remained: insanity, murder and violence.

The next the public heard from Michael Taylor was when police saw him on the street, naked and covered in blood. “It is the blood of Satan,” he said. It was actually Christine’s, as police learned when they checked in at his house. He had ripped the tongue out of her mouth and gouged out her eyes. Michael was a butcher by trade and had some experience with dismemberment, but he evidently hadn’t used his butcher tools for this but stuck to his bare hands. He had also killed the family dog. 

Michael Taylor was acquitted of the murder due to insanity. This meant being committed to an asylum, but it also meant being released four years later. He is still alive today, as far as we can tell, at the age of 80.

If you believe that he really was driven to kill his wife by three demons inside him, that’s your choice. The alternative is that he was mentally ill, the religious group fostered his delusions and the priests’ talk of murder demons pushed him over the edge. That explanation is really no less scary. 

3 The Child Under the Bed

An eight-year-old girl named Maddie Clifton went missing from Jacksonville in 1998, and the area put together a search party. A neighbor of Maddie’s, 14-year-old Josh Phillips, took part in the search, which seemed nice of him. A few days after the disappearance, he also visited the Cliftons, transporting a gift: a picnic table, so they could better accommodate all their visitors during this time. 

One week into the search, Josh’s mother entered his room. She noticed a wet spot on the carpet under the waterbed. She looked underneath and saw a corpse, which had once been Maddie. It had been decomposing there for the past seven days. The smell should perhaps have alerted her to its presence before now, but Josh covered it up by spraying air freshener and lighting incense.

Josh had beaten Maddie to death with a baseball bat, while also cutting her throat. Then he stabbed her nine times, after she was already dead. The way Josh would later tell the story, she came by and asked to play baseball, and he’d accidentally hit her with the ball. He’d then killed her to stop her from crying. Prosecutors didn’t buy this story (for starters, it did not explain why the body was found naked from the waist down), and even if they did, that wouldn’t be much of a defense. 

Evidence that he had watched porn on his computer immediately after killing her didn’t earn Josh much sympathy from the jury. Nor did the knowledge that he had spent every night that week sleeping on that bed that hid the body. He received a life sentence. Twenty years later, with a new public belief that perhaps no child of 14 should ever be sent to prison for life, he got a resentencing hearing to discuss perhaps changing that. Nope, agreed the committee after assessing his current state — it’s still life without parole for him.

2 Lovelorn Grant

Your takeaway from the last story shouldn’t be that all horny guys at computers are dangerous. But this next one, also out of Florida, won’t do much to disabuse you of that notion.

Grant Amato got fired from his job as a nurse in 2018 for stealing drugs and now asked his family to fund his new career: Twitch streamer. That wouldn’t paint him in a very positive light even if he were telling the truth, and he was not. He really used the new computer setup mainly for chatting with camgirls. He soon fixated on one particular Bulgarian model, and he stole his family’s credit cards to tip her to the tune of $200,000. 

His parents found out and sent him to a rehab facility specifically for porn addicts. He emerged uncured and discovered to his shock that his parents were now forbidding him from all further contact with that model. Still dependent on them (though 29 years old by this point), Grant did the reasonable thing and killed them all.

First, he shot his mother in the head, as she sat in front of her own computer. Then he waited for his father to return from work so he could kill him in the kitchen. Last was his brother, Cody. Cody was important because the plan was to pin the other deaths on him and call it a murder-suicide. 

Grant called him to tell him to hurry back from his job as a hospital, and when he did come four hours after the first murder, Grant shot him then placed the gun beside the body. Then he took off for a hotel, bringing with him a letter that he claimed Cody wrote. “Grant, I’ll take care of all your problems,” said the letter. “I just need you back. I can’t live without you, brother.”

It took just one day of Cody not coming into work for his coworkers to call 9-1-1, some of them already suspecting Grant may have done something. Police broke down the door into the home and found the scene Grant had set up to be not at all convincing. The gun was beside Cody’s body but didn’t appear to have really been held by him. They picked up Grant, got him to quickly confess faking the letter and the case against him was pretty easy to build after that. He is now serving a life sentence in prison, where it is unclear if he is being granted computer access.

1 The Pig Man

In 1997, a driver in Vancouver spotted a woman on the street covered with blood. Her name was Wendy Eistetter, and she’d just escaped from a bar called Piggy Palace that stood next to a pig farm. Inside the bar, owner Robert Pickton had started stabbing her, but she’d knocked the knife from his hand and fled the place. Police checked in on Pickton now, but they ultimately dropped charges.

Given that they had that story on record, and that the Piggy Palace was known as a spot a lot of sex workers went for drugs, maybe police should have checked in on there some more over the next couple years, when dozens of women in the city went missing. Instead, what ultimately drew them to Pickton’s pig farm was a tip that the man illegally owned guns. This being Canada, gun possession was a more serious crime than actual violence, so police now arrived to investigate.

Inside, they found collections of (human) teeth and I.D. cards. They opened a freezer and found preserved skulls (again human) cut in two, and they found buckets of feet. Whole bags were filled with ground-up human flesh. They needed a more thorough search now, which meant spending the following years combing through nearly 100 million gallons of mud and manure. It became clear that Pickton had fed the remains of many victims to his pigs. Other human meat, he’d mashed up and sold with pork to customers. 

Investigators identified the remains of 33 women at the farm. Pickton confessed to killing 49, and he was convicted of killing six, which was more than enough to earn him a life sentence. 

Pickton is the most famous of the murderers we’re talking about today, so it’s possible you’ve heard of him before. If you have, here’s a little update for you: He became eligible for parole this year. Then in May, before any final word could come down on that, another inmate beat him to death. 

“I’m elated, I’m happy,” said the mother of one victim, whose vertebrae were at the farm but then were forgotten in storage a dozen years before being returned to her family. Meanwhile, the province’s head of government and opposition leader both simply issued statements saying, “Good riddance.” 

Follow Ryan Menezes on Twitter for more stuff no one should see.