Famous killers from every state
Trooper Charlie Hanger had no idea who he’d pulled over. The car in front of him had no license plate, so he stopped it, and that was the end of the story. It was April 19, 1995, and 80 miles south, the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was already in ruins. The driver was Timothy McVeigh.
Many cases end that way. No chase, no brilliant profile. Somebody just notices something small: a teenager in handcuffs, two warning shots at a stolen Volkswagen, a church’s name buried on a floppy disk.
That’s the rule, anyway: one killer for each of the fifty states. A person lands in a state if he was born there, killed there, or got arrested there, and a few states have nobody famous at all, so for those we picked whatever case is best documented. A couple of people show up twice. Sorry.
Alabama: Nannie Doss
Born in Blue Mountain, undone in Tulsa. On October 12, 1954, her fifth husband, Samuel Doss, died in a hospital there; the doctors didn’t like it, and Nannie confessed. She’d been poisoning people since 1927, across four states. Guilty plea in May 1955, life, and she died in prison in 1965.
Alaska: Robert Hansen
Anchorage baker. From 1971 to 1983, he was also killing women, at least 17 of them. Trooper Glenn Flothe couldn’t prove a thing, not until a 17-year-old got out of Hansen’s house in June 1983 with the handcuffs still on and told police about the house and a plane. That was the search warrant. Hansen got 461 years plus life in 1984. He died in 2014.
Arizona: Jodi Arias
Two juries, no decision. Jodi Arias was convicted in May 2013 of killing Travis Alexander at his Mesa home in 2008, but both sentencing juries deadlocked, and Judge Sherry Stephens settled it on April 13, 2015. Life without parole.
Arkansas: the Texarkana Phantom
Never caught, never named. Five people were killed around Texarkana in 1946, police arrested nearly 400 suspects, and the file stayed open.
California: Richard Ramirez
Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker, was sentenced to death for 13 California murders and died of cancer on death row at San Quentin in 2013, never executed.
Colorado: Alferd Packer
Who walks out of the San Juan Mountains alone? Packer did, in April 1874, heading straight to the Los Pinos Indian Agency, while the rest of his prospecting party didn’t. He vanished for nine years, surfaced in Wyoming under another name, and got 40 years in 1886 for manslaughter. Out on parole by 1901.
Connecticut: Michael Ross
Forty-five years. That’s how long New England had gone without an execution when Connecticut put Michael Ross to death on May 13, 2005. He’d admitted to killing eight women in Connecticut and New York, and it was the first in the region since 1960.
Delaware: Steven Pennell
Picture it: September 14, 1988, Route 40, an undercover officer named Renée Taschner in a parked car, acting as a decoy. The van that stopped had carpet fibers matching fibers found with earlier victims, and it belonged to electrician Steven Pennell. Two murder convictions. Then he asked for death, and on March 14, 1992, Delaware said yes.
Florida: Ted Bundy
Florida State Prison is where Ted Bundy died in the electric chair on January 24, 1989, after killing women in several states and getting caught in a stolen car in Pensacola in 1978.
Georgia: Wayne Williams
Fibers decided it. Two adult murders: that’s all a jury ever heard against Wayne Williams, on February 27, 1982, when it convicted him. A task force tied him to 20 more of the 29 Atlanta deaths. He’s said all along that he didn’t do it.
Hawaii: the Honolulu Strangler
Honolulu, 1985 and 1986: five women dead, a $25,000 reward on the table, and no arrest.
Idaho: Bryan Kohberger
Bryan Kohberger is at the Idaho Maximum Security Institution in Kuna, serving four consecutive life sentences plus 10 years for killing four University of Idaho students in Moscow in 2022.
Illinois: John Wayne Gacy
A 15-year-old named Robert Piest had vanished, and the search for him led police to John Wayne Gacy, whom they arrested outside a McDonald’s in Niles on December 21, 1978. A jury convicted him of 33 murders in 1980.
Indiana: Belle Gunness
Asle Helgelien came to La Porte in 1908 looking for his brother Andrew. By then Belle Gunness’s farmhouse had burned down (April 28), and investigators had found bodies. Her farmhand, Ray Lamphere, was convicted of arson. Belle herself? Nobody has ever confirmed she died in that fire.
Iowa: the Villisca axe murders
June 9, 1912. Eight people dead in a Villisca house. A traveling minister was tried twice and never convicted, and no one else was either.
Kansas: Dennis Rader
Ten consecutive life terms at the El Dorado Correctional Facility: that’s what Dennis Rader got for the ten killings around Wichita between 1974 and 1991.
Kentucky: Donald Harvey
Hospital orderly, 1970 to 1987. Donald Harvey killed patients in Kentucky and Ohio, and he admitted to 37.
Louisiana: Lee Harvey Oswald
Born in New Orleans, 1939. Arrested November 22, 1963, after officer J.D. Tippit was shot, and four federal investigations named him the gunman in Kennedy’s assassination. Two days later, Jack Ruby shot him. There was never a trial.
Maine: Arthur Shawcross
Maine native, New York killer. Arthur Shawcross got out of prison in 1987, killed in upstate New York, and was arrested again in 1990. 250 years.
Maryland: John Wilkes Booth
He was born near Bel Air and shot Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865. Twelve days later, Union soldiers set a Virginia barn on fire to force him out, and Sgt. Boston Corbett shot him through the gap.
Massachusetts: Albert DeSalvo
Albert DeSalvo confessed to the Boston Strangler killings, got life in 1967 for unrelated assaults, and was stabbed to death at Walpole prison in 1973.
Michigan: Benjamin Atkins
Eleven women over eight months in Detroit. Police arrested Benjamin Atkins in August 1992, and he got 11 life terms.
Minnesota: Paul Stephani
He kept calling the police, and that’s how he got his nickname. A survivor identified Paul Stephani in 1982, and detectives matched his voice to the calls.
Mississippi: Glen Rogers
Drifter. Glen Rogers killed people in four states in 1994 and 1995; a high-speed chase in Kentucky ended it, and he’s on death row.
Missouri: Charles Hatcher
In 1982, Charles Hatcher tried to check himself into a state hospital and confessed instead. A jury recommended life that December. Four days later, he died by suicide.
Montana: Ted Kaczynski
ADX Florence, the federal supermax in Colorado, held Ted Kaczynski on four life terms plus 30 years for the three people his mail bombs killed between 1978 and 1995.
Nebraska: Charles Starkweather
A Lincoln native. Eleven people died across Nebraska and Wyoming between December 1957 and January 1958, and Starkweather had a 14-year-old, Caril Ann Fugate, with him. The state executed him on June 25, 1959. Fugate was paroled in 1976.
Nevada: Carroll Cole
Carroll Cole told Las Vegas police he’d killed at least 14 people after they arrested him in 1980. Nevada executed him in 1985.
New Hampshire: H.H. Holmes
H.H. Holmes came from Gilmanton, New Hampshire (born 1861), and the number he gave, 27 killings, shrinks to nine once you demand proof. Philadelphia hanged him in 1896.
New Jersey: Charles Cullen
At New Jersey State Prison in Trenton, nurse Charles Cullen is serving 18 consecutive life terms for killing 29 patients in New Jersey and Pennsylvania hospitals.
New Mexico: Billy the Kid
April 1, 1878: Sheriff William Brady is ambushed, and Billy the Kid is involved. In April 1881, a court convicted him of that killing, and on April 28 he escaped by killing two guards. Sheriff Pat Garrett shot him at Fort Sumner on July 14.
New York: David Berkowitz
David Berkowitz killed six people in New York City in 1976 and 1977, got 25-to-life for each, and is held at Shawangunk Correctional Facility.
North Carolina: Henry Louis Wallace
Two years of killings in Charlotte, then on March 13, 1994, an arrest. Henry Louis Wallace was sentenced to death in 1997.
North Dakota: Eugene Butler
Butler died in an asylum in 1914. A year later, workers digging at his old Niagara home hit six sets of remains in a hidden cellar.
Ohio: Charles Manson
Born in Cincinnati in 1934, and here’s the part people forget: Manson never carried out the killings himself. In August 1969, his followers killed seven people in Los Angeles at his direction, and it took until January 1971 for prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi to win convictions. Manson was still in prison when he died on November 19, 2017.
Oklahoma: Timothy McVeigh
168 dead. April 19, 1995: the bomb at the Murrah Federal Building, and then the traffic stop that ended the run. 168 people died. McVeigh was executed on June 11, 2001.
Oregon: Randall Woodfield
The I-5 Killer played receiver at Portland State and got drafted by Green Bay in 1974. Randall Woodfield was convicted in 1981, and the sentence was life plus 165 years.
Pennsylvania: Gary Heidnik
March 1987: A woman gets out of Gary Heidnik’s Philadelphia basement, and police raid the house. A jury convicted him in July 1988, and he was executed on July 6, 1999. He was the last person put to death in the state.
Rhode Island: Craig Price
Craig Price killed four neighbors in Warwick. He was 13 for the first one in 1987, and 15 for the others in 1989. Rhode Island changed its juvenile-holding laws because of it.
South Carolina: Donald “Pee Wee” Gaskins
Convicted in the mid-1970s, and then, while waiting on death row, he killed another inmate. South Carolina executed him in 1991.
South Dakota: William Kunnecke
A German-born farmer. Arrested, escaped prison more than once, then gone. Last seen in 1919.
Tennessee: James Earl Ray
James Earl Ray shot Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968. Two months later, at Heathrow Airport halfway around the world, he was arrested. Guilty plea in March 1969. 99 years.
Texas: Bonnie and Clyde
Both born in Texas. Between 1932 and 1934, they killed 12 people, nine of them officers, and on May 23, 1934, Frank Hamer’s posse ambushed them on a Louisiana road.
Utah: Gary Gilmore
Gilmore killed two men in Orem and Provo on July 19 and 20, 1976, then asked to be put to death, which almost never happens. Utah carried out the execution on January 17, 1977, and Norman Mailer’s “The Executioner’s Song” came next.
Vermont: Ted Bundy
Vermont is a cheat. Ted Bundy was born in Burlington in 1946 and left the state as an infant, so his Vermont story is short.
Virginia: Alfredo Prieto
California convicted him in 1990. Later, DNA tied Alfredo Prieto to 1988 killings in Virginia, and the state executed him on October 1, 2015.
Washington: Gary Ridgway
Gary Ridgway killed at least 49 women in Washington state between 1982 and 1998 and is serving life at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla.
West Virginia: Harry Powers
Harry Powers lured a woman and her three children to Quiet Dell in 1931. West Virginia hanged him in March 1932.
Wisconsin: Jeffrey Dahmer
Columbia Correctional Institution is where Jeffrey Dahmer served the 16 life terms handed down in 1992 for murdering 16 men, and where an inmate killed him in 1994.
Wyoming: Charles Starkweather
Wyoming gets the last chapter of Starkweather’s run. Authorities captured him and Fugate near Douglas on January 29, 1958.
The bottom line
Bundy and McVeigh both got stopped in their cars. Starkweather and Bundy each show up under two states.
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