Murderers are synonimous with humans since, if you believe in the Bible, Cain and Abel. After this event (if it really happened, this could be allegorical), murder has been a common manifestation of the hate, greed and lack of empathy that we humans have for each other. I will make a list of some of the most deadliest killers I have heard about, I won’t go too far back, only to the American West of the 1800’s and I won’t include killings by governments because that is on another level, this is individual:
I’ll start with James “Wild Bill” Hickock, he was a gambler, gunslinger, law officer, showman and is claimed to have killed 100 men, but an autobiographer says that is a “Wild” exaggeration and he probably didn’t actually kill more than ten men, he was a famous gunslinger though so I guess he deserves to be named here.
John Wesley Hardin, I guess this guy was the deadliest one in the west, a person you couldn’t mess around with, he was an outlaw and is believed to have killed at least 27 men, probably more than that.
Now I’ll move on to serial killers, I guess I will start with the most famous one, Jack the Ripper, as far as I know nobody knows who he really was and some people even are sure Jack was a woman, well Jack killed at least 5 women in London, probably more, I guess you could say he was successful as he was never caught.
John Wayne Gacy who in 6 years tortured, raped and killed at least 33 young men in the Chicago area.
David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam who terrorized New York in the 1970’s, he was caught and convicted, apparently he heard a voice in his head “Sam” who ordered him to do the killings, he killed at least 6 people.
Jeffrey Dammer who killed raped and dismembered at least 17 men and boys from 1978 to 1991, he was caught and died in prison.
Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo from the Soviet Union, he admitted to have killed 56 women and children between 1978 and 1990, he was executed in 1994.
Moses Sithole – The ABC Killer from South Africa believed to have killed 38 people, he is now in prison.
Luis Alfredo Garavito Cubillos from Colombia, also known as the Beast or Goofy, is believed to have killed at least 138 children and teenagers, probably he killed a lot more, he is now in prison.
And of course in Honduras we have Canuto Montalvan who was an outlaw from Olancho department, he reportedly killed between 30 and 50 people, until he was himself killed in a shootout in 1992. He was famous because people who knew him said he never missed a shot.
Of course this is just a short list, just in the USA there are supposed to have been over 2000 serial killers, and I guess some of these guys go unnoticed all their lives without people even knowing that there was a serial killer behind a lot of murders.
Were all of these guys crazy (excepting the outlaws, these guys were just criminals)? Who knows, probably once caught all of them looked at that alternative in order to save themselves, didn't work for the Russian guy though.