10 Currently Recent and Active Serial Killers

10 Currently Recent and Active Serial Killers

When we hear the topic of serial killers being talked about, we often imagine people who were caught and charged for their crimes. We do not imagine that there could be ones that are currently active and claiming victims in real-time. This is because the stories we interact with from true crime podcasts and documentaries are usually about crimes in which the killer has already been identified. Therefore, in this article, we will change things up and explore the ten current serial killers who are still active to expand the knowledge of the reader on the genre of true crime.

1 The Long Island Serial Killer

A picture of a highway by Ken Lund-Wikimedia

The Long Island Serial killer has been terrorizing New York for the past twenty years leaving behind ten victims during that period. The number of victims could be more as there are some that authorities may not have discovered yet. The serial killer was discovered after local authorities were searching for a missing sex worker known as Shannan Gilbert in Gilgo beach when they stumbled on eight bodies of women who were escorts.

They quickly realized that the killer could be using the beach as a dumping site. They also found the body of a child and a cross-dressing male which made it harder to determine the motive of the killer. To date, the killer has not been identified.

 2 1-70 Killer

The killer killed six people between April 8 and May 7 in 1992. This is quite terrifying as that is only one month in which the killer claimed six lives. According to Vox, there were startling commonalities between the people killed between Terre Haute, Indiana, and Wichita, Kansas. All were brunettes, worked at stores close to the roadway, and five were women and police suspect the sixth was mistaken for a woman when the killer spotted his long ponytail.

3 The Texas Killing Fields

The Texas state flag by Pumbaa-Wikimedia

The 1-45 highway from Houston to Galveston has been a spot the murderers like to commit their crimes. From 1971, thirty corpses belonging to women were retrieved with the most recent one being in 2006. Not all cases are victims of serial killers but there have been two clusters of killings that seemed related. The first instance was in the 1970s when six young girls were found dead and the second one was in the mid-1980s when four women and girls turned up dead and it seemed that they had been killed by the same person.

4 The West Mesa Bone Collector

A mass grave containing the remains of eleven women was discovered in Albuquerque, New Mexico when a dog returned with a human born while playing a game of fetch. The victims were women who had disappeared in that area between 2001 and 2005. The grave was no help in tracking the person responsible for such heinous acts and all the police had to carry out their investigation was satellite photos showing tire tracks and the fresh graves which were no help.

5 The Chicago Strangler

A crime scene tape by Kat Wilcox-Wikimedia

Since 2001, corpses of more than 55 black women who had been strangled in a similar manner started turning up. The victims were often killed in abandoned buildings and their corpses were discarded on alleys, dumpsters and other places rarely frequented by the public.

 Speculations that this might be the work of a serial killer started when the Murder Accountability Project was alerted by an algorithm that showed similarities in the murders and then alerted the local authorities. Since the DNA sample found on the victims did not match anyone in the FBI database, they could not locate their killer and the case is still open to date.

6 The Eastbound Strangler

Two women came across the body of a woman in a ditch behind the Golden Key Hotel in Atlantic City in 2006. They alerted the local authorities and when they arrived they discovered three more bodies placed about 60 meters apart from each other.  The victims’ heads had been placed facedown and they did not have any shoes but were fully dressed which thus made it more creepy. The police suspected a handyman who lived at the hotels but they appeared to be no links between him and the women. There was also a woman who is alleged to have confessed to the murders but was never charged.

7 Jeff Davis 8

A picture of a crime scene by vorhanden-Wikimedia

In the period between 2005 and 2008, women’s bodies began appearing in the canals and swamps of Jefferson Davis parish. The victims were involved in sex work and drugs and it seemed that they had died after being strangled. What was more shocking is the fact that all the victims knew each other which made the deaths to be the work of a serial killer more likely. There were some speculations that the victims may have snitched and thus got killed. The killer has never been identified.

8 The Rainbow Maniac

This is a serial killer in Brazil who targeted gay men as victims. In a period of 18 months from 2007 to 2008, the serial killer murdered 13 men with a bullet to the head. The victims were killed in Paturis Park and their corpses were dumped in the bushes. They were found with trousers around their ankles. The killings happened at a time when there were ultra-conservative groups that were vocal about their intolerance of homosexuality. No one was convicted for the murders as one suspect was found not guilty by a jury.

9 Ibadan Forest Killers

In Nigeria, a motorcyclist came across some abandoned buildings in what is known as the Ibadan Forest of Horror in 2014. What he found inside the buildings was shocking as there were more than twenty corpses that had started rotting and there were people who had been chained to the slaughter benches. In the scene, there were also passports but the local authorities had no luck tracing the owners. The one responsible for the crime is not known to date but authorities suspect religious fanatics who were doing rituals as Nigeria is a highly religious country and such acts are usually associated with them.

10 The Smiley Face Killers

This is the story of 45 college students that drowned in different states while intoxicated but police officers believe that it was the work of a serial killer. Officers claim that they found smiley faces around the location where more than 12 men were found. It is believed that the men were murdered and then dumped in the river to look like they drowned. This theory is backed up by the fact that they found traces of a date rape drug in their system which would have made them unconscious.

Here is an article on the ten infamous serial killers