Netflix recently released Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, to a mixed reception of controversy and acclaim. Detailing his early life, his killings, and his conviction, the show made a point of spending as much if not more time on those he killed, than the killer himself, trying – and failing in some ways – not to glorify the killer.
Many true crime buffs enjoyed the series for what it was and the dramatizations, factual inaccuracies, and more aside, it was good television. Dahmer is arguably one of, if not the most famous serial killer, besides perhaps Jack the Ripper or the Zodiac Killer, and unfortunately, there are scores of lesser-known serial killers that have a story that is just as interesting, and victims that need to be heard just as much as Dahmer and his victims. Here are three such serial killers Netflix could go to next, all just as horrifying and terrible as Dahmer.
Please note, the following article contains brief descriptions of some truly disgusting crimes including murder, kidnap, rape and more. Read on at your own discretion.
Leonard Lake & Charles Ng
Leonard Lake and Charles Ng are surprisingly unknown by most when it comes to serial killers, which is surprising considering the severity and depravity of their crimes, as well as the volume over a small number of years.
Leonard Lake started life as a troubled child, blackmailing and photographing his sisters in various forced sexual acts, before growing up and turning the same attention to other women in his local area. He enlisted in the army and served two tours during the Vietnam War, each time coming back and telling the locals in his hometown fabricated war stories when in reality he was far from the front line in a comms room.
Charles Ng had a less troubled life, albeit considerably more strict being a British-born Hong Kong resident. His family was hard on him, once even taking his beloved turtle and cooking it, then allowing Ng to eat it before being told the truth. Ng participated in petty theft and other such crimes growing up, but the real trouble began when he ran into Leonard Lake.
Over a matter of years, the pair killed anywhere between eleven and twenty-five different people, mostly women. They constructed a little dungeon in a cabin out in the sticks, using it to videotape their heinous crimes including rape, torture, and murder over a period between 1983 and 1985.
One particular harrowing example of their crimes was the kidnapping and murder of Lonnie Bond, his girlfriend Brenda O’Connor, and their infant son. If that wasn’t bad enough, they had created a system for this scenario, where they’d kill the boyfriend and any infants, and then rape and torture the poor women over days, weeks, or longer, before they grew bored and wanted a new victim.
Charles Ng is still on death row all these years later, having been sentenced to various crimes, whilst Leonard Lake swallowed a cyanide capsule after being arrested for unrelated crimes back in 1985, dying some four days later, further proving how much of a coward he was.
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The Toybox Killer
David Parker Ray was never officially convicted of any killings, however, was strongly suspected of murdering sixty-plus women over the years. A sadistic, perverted, and barbarous human, he spent his time in his earlier years sound-proofing a semi-trailer which he called his ‘toybox’. In this trailer, he had numerous different items he’d use for different sexual torture, and along with his wife (who disgustingly helped and participated in the crimes willingly), would kidnap and torture women until he grew bored.
He’d kidnap between five and six women a year, usually hitchhikers or lonely women from bars in his surrounding area, generally traveling alone and wouldn’t be missed. He’d then play them a harrowing tape, where he’d be talking to the victim, detailing everything he would do to them and how.
For the next two to four months, he’d do everything you can think of, always threatening death if they disobeyed, and having no issue with bringing violence upon them if they didn’t listen. Once he’d had enough, he would drug them with a heavy mixture, in the hope they’d forget what had happened, to which some did, and then drop them sometimes hundreds of miles away, so they wouldn’t know where they were, or more importantly, where they’d been.
As already mentioned, this entry is a bit of a cheat, as he was never actually convicted of murder, but the police had a considerable amount of circumstantial evidence, just nothing concrete to pin on him, but there were over sixty murders he was suspected of during 1957 and 1999.
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Andrei Chikatilo
Andrei Chikatilo was a Soviet-era-loving serial killer nicknamed The Butcher of Rostov, among other things. Born in 1936, he grew up not only constantly hungry and suffering from the effects of malnutrition and a lack of family support, but also ended up seeing the effects of the Nazi occupation of Ukraine, from bombings to mutilations and much more.
During his adolescence, he became a model student and an avid reader of communist literature, eventually graduating from his class with top grades, which was rare for the time. After being shamed for being impotent to the point the majority of his friends, family, and locals in his hometown knew, he ran away to Rostov, where the horrors of his crimes took hold.
In the run-up to his first murder in 1978, he’d been convicted of sexual assault and suspected numerous times, and this time he went even further. He lured an innocent nine-year-old girl to his home before murdering her and throwing her corpse into the river behind his house. Somehow he escaped suspicion, and coincidentally another man down his road was convicted and put to death for the crime, who also was a convicted sexual predator.
Through the next twelve years, he killed at least fifty-two women, possibly more, finally being caught in 1990. His crimes were numerous and disgusting, and he was one of many serial killers who showed zero remorse for his actions, regularly being shown laughing on the stand, as well as vocalizing his enjoyment. A serial killer that spent as much time mutilating and spreading the remains of his victims as he did killing them, the man was an unhinged, if not an interesting case study for true crime buffs.
There is our choice of the three serial killers Netflix could choose to make a series about next. However, there are plenty of others they could focus on, but whether it’s these three or a completely different serial killer, there will be plenty of controversy surrounding the release.
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