20 Horrific Crimes You've Never Heard Of

20 Horrific Crimes Youve Never Heard Of

Welcome to WatchMojo, and today were looking at twenty disturbing but lesser-known cases of true crime.

The Denver Spiderman

Dont let the name fool you - this guy is no hero. Theodore Coneys was struggling, living in poverty and suffering from poor health. In September of 1941, he went to visit an old acquaintance, Philip Peters, hoping to ask for help. Peters wasnt home, so Coneys simply moved into his attic and lived there for about five weeks, often sneaking out at night to get food. On October 17, Coneys was discovered by Peters, and Coneys bludgeoned him to death in a panic. The following July, police were investigating the vacant house when they found the emaciated Coneys still living in the attic. He was sentenced to life and dubbed The Denver Spiderman owing to his dark and reclusive lair.

The Woodchipper Murder

You know the end of Fargo, when Peter Stormare puts Steve Buscemi through a woodchipper? Yeah, that actually happened. Mother of three Helle Crafts disappeared on November 19, 1986. Her unfaithful husband Richard told people that she went to visit her mother in Denmark, but this was quickly proven false. A plow driver soon reported suspicious activity involving a woodchipper near Lake Zoar, and when police investigated, they found human remains, blue fibers matching Helles nightgown, and a chainsaw with traces of blonde human hair. Richard received fifty years in prison, and the case became the first time in Connecticut history that a murder was convicted without a body.

The Icebox Murders

To this day, the Icebox murders are considered one of the weirdest unsolved cases in Texas history. On June 23, 1965, Houston police conducted a welfare check on the elderly Fred and Edwina Rogers after the couple had not been heard from in several days. Inside the house, they opened the refrigerator and found what remained of the couple. The house itself appeared clean and tidy, suggesting that the killer was highly methodical. The prime suspect was and remains the couples adult son, Charles Rogers, who lived with them at the time. Police found blood in Charless bedroom, but the man disappeared after the murders and was never found. The case remains officially unsolved, and Charles Rogers was declared legally dead in 1975.

Amelia Dyer

Behold one of the most notorious serial killers of Victorian England. Amelia Dyer initially worked as a nurse until she began baby farming - a common practice at the time which saw women adopting babies for money. Usually they promised to raise and support them, but Dyer wouldwell, you know. It's unknown exactly how many, but estimates range from six to possibly four hundred during a 20-year period. In the end, Dyer was tried for just one, but it was enough. She was found guilty and hanged at Newgate Prison on June 10, 1896. Luckily, Dyers crimes led to widespread public outrage and spurred reforms in child protection laws and adoption procedures in the UK.

The Walk of Death

One of the first mass shootings in modern American history occurred on September 6, 1949. 28-year-old Howard Unruh was a World War II veteran who reportedly showed signs of psychological trauma after returning home. He was a recluse, and he kept detailed notes on perceived slights from people in his neighborhood while developing a growing list of enemies. On that fateful September morning, Unruh unleashed his pent-up fury. In a span of just twelve minutes, Unruh embarked on a massacre throughout his Camden neighborhood, injuring three and killing thirteen. After his arrest, Unruh was declared criminally insane and committed to a mental institution, where he remained for the rest of his life. His attack later became known as The Walk of Death.

Anatoly Moskvin

Russian linguist and historian Anatoly Moskvin had a lifelong interest in death and burial rituals. He was even known to walk thirty kilometers a day to visit various cemeteries around his home city of Nizhny Novgorod. In 2011, police came to the realization that someone had been exhuming bodies from these cemeteries, and their search took them to Moskvins apartment. There, they found the mummified remains of 29 people. Moskvin had exhumed the bodies, turned them into mummies, then dressed them as dolls. His parents, who Moskin actually lived with at the time, simply believed they were bizarre homemade dolls and not mummified corpses. He was found to suffer from paranoid schizophrenia and has been institutionalized ever since.

Mary Bell

Britains youngest female killer is Mary Bell, who committed her crimes in 1968 at the ages of ten and eleven. Mary had a deeply troubled childhood, growing up in an abusive and chaotic environment, with her mother allegedly trying to kill her on more than one occasion. So, in 1968, Bell killed two young victims in what psychologists believe was a misaimed act of exerting power and control in her life. Others believe that she was merely psychotic. Bell was eventually convicted of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility and sentenced to indefinite detention. However, she was released in 1980 at the age of 23, granted legal anonymity, and had a family. She currently lives under a pseudonym in an unknown location.

The Harpe Brothers

To see Americas first documented serial killers, we have to go back to the late 18th century, when Micajah and Wiley Harpe terrorized frontier Appalachia. After the American Revolution, the cousins became drifters and criminals, participating in banditry and possibly joining Native American raids. They eventually settled in the area of the Appalachian Mountains, killing innkeepers and settlers who were heading south. The Harpes crimes were exceptionally brutal, even by frontier standards, and while they did rob their victims, they often killed without motive. Though exact numbers are uncertain due to poor recordkeeping on the American frontier, they are believed to have killed between forty and fifty people. Wiley was eventually caught, tried, and executed, while Micajah was violently murdered by a posse.

Issei Sagawa

How would you feel knowing that a cannibal was freely walking your streets? On June 11, 1981, Japanese man Issei Sagawa murdered and cannibalized Dutch student Renée Hartevelt in his Paris apartment. He was then caught trying to dispose of her remains in various suitcases. Declared insane by French authorities, Sagawa was institutionalized but later extradited to Japan, where doctors found him sane. Thanks to a number of legal loopholes, Sagawa was never formally charged in Japan and was released in 1986. Sagawa lived freely until his death in 2022, profiting from his notoriety by writing a book about the murder and performing public speaking engagements. He even briefly worked as a food critic, which is grotesquely ironic given the nature of his crime.

The Soap Maker of Correggio

Leonarda Cianciulli thought she was cursed. She endured a troubled childhood, and only four of her seventeen pregnancies resulted in children. She then became deeply paranoid and resorted to crime, driven by a distorted belief that human sacrifices would protect her eldest son, Giuseppe, who was leaving to join the Italian army. Cianciulli proceeded to murder three women in her small town of Correggio. She also made soap from their remains and baked their blood into tea cakes - both the soap and the cakes were given to friends and acquaintances around town. She openly confessed to the crimes and was sentenced to thirty years prison, and she ultimately died in a psychiatric institution in 1970.

The Death of Sylvia Likens

Sylvia and Jenny Likens were born to two carnival workers who regularly traveled around the country. During one of their parents trips in 1965, the girls were left in the care of Gertrude Baniszewski, who agreed to house them for a weekly $20 payment. When this money began coming in late, Baniszewski took out her anger on the Likens girls. Eventually, she directed the extreme abuse almost entirely at Sylvia, sometimes to the point of starvation. Sylvias maltreatment came not only from Baniszewski, but also from her children and other neighborhood kids, culminating in Sylvias tragic death on October 26th 1965. Baniszewski served less than twenty years in prison, while the others arrested for the crime were handed much shorter sentences.

The Crimes of Jerry Brudos

Born in Webster, South Dakota in 1939, Jerry Brudos developed a fetish for womens shoes at a very young age. As he grew older, this obsession manifested in the form of attacking women, only to steal their shoes and keep them for himself. When the bodies of Linda Salee and Karen Sprinker, two young Oregon women, were discovered in the Long Tom River in 1969, police were quick to identify similarities in their deaths. They questioned students at the nearby Oregon State University and were led to Brudos, who later confessed to the murders in gory detail. Brudos opted for a guilty plea and was sentenced to three consecutive life terms. He died of liver cancer in 2006 while incarcerated.

Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer

In February 2005, Dennis Rader, a family man and local church leader in Wichita, Kansas, was arrested and charged with the murders of ten people. Between 1974 and 1991, Rader had stalked most of his victims to their homes, where they were bound, tortured and then killed. He derived his own nickname, the BTK killer, from this method. Rader stopped his spree after 1991, only to begin sending taunting letters to police and media houses a little over a decade later. He may have gotten away with the crimes, if not for a floppy disk he sent to police, which was traced back to him. Rader pleaded guilty to the killings and was sentenced to ten consecutive life terms.

John Haighs Life of Crimes

Dubbed the Acid Bath Murderer, John George Haigh was a British serial killer who was active between 1944 and 1949. Haigh began his life of crime selling fraudulent stocks under a false identity. He was eventually caught and served multiple prison terms for his scams. After leaving prison in 1943, Haigh started targeting wealthy individuals and killing them for their money. He would then dissolve the bodies in sulphuric acid, believing it would leave no trace of the crime. Haigh claimed five lives in this manner without getting caught, but his sixth victim would prove to be his downfall. At his trial, Haigh pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity but regardless, he was convicted and executed by hanging.

The Disappearance of the Sodder Children

George and Jennie Sodder, alongside nine of their ten children, were asleep on Christmas Eve 1945, when their Fayetteville, West Virginia house caught fire. The couple managed to escape with four of the children, but all attempts to rescue the other five trapped upstairs proved futile. The family initially believed all five children died in the fire, only to find no remains of them in the rubble. Despite multiple theories and investigations at the state and federal levels, the case turned up no new leads and eventually grew cold. For decades, the Sodder family kept up a billboard at the site offering a $5,000 reward for any information about the disappearance. It was, however, taken down after Jennies death in 1989.

The Cleveland Torso Murders

In the 1930s, a serial killer reigned terror in Cleveland, Ohio, murdering and dismembering at least twelve people in the span of four years. The remains of these individuals were found scattered around the city, with most of them having died from decapitation. Of the twelve known victims, only two were positively identified as Edward Andrassy and Florence Polillo. A third victim was thought to be a woman named Rose Wallace, but her identity was never confirmed. The investigation into the murders, which was the largest in Cleveland history, turned up two suspects, but no charges stuck. Today, the identity of the Torso Murderer remains unknown.

The Hunts of Robert Hansen

Growing up in Iowa, Robert Hansen was a shy loner who spent his free time hunting. After serving multiple jail sentences for petty theft, he moved to Anchorage, Alaska, where he settled with his family. While there, Hansen began abducting young women to his home at gunpoint and assaulting them. With his private plane, he flew some of these women out into the wild, where he hunted them like prey before taking their lives. In total, Hansen killed at least seventeen women. With the help of one of his victims who escaped, police were able to nail Hansen in 1983, and succeeded in sending him to prison. He died in 2014 of natural causes.

The Murder of John Price

In 2001, Katherine Knight became the first woman in Australian history to be sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. Her crime was the gruesome murder of her romantic partner, John Price. Price had kicked Knight out of his house after years of living together, during which she was repeatedly violent towards him. On the night of February 29th 2000, Knight returned to Prices house and stabbed him repeatedly before doing and planning far more heinous actions. Police, responding to a call from Prices neighbor and co-worker, found Knight comatose in the house and placed her under arrest.

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Heist

Around 1:24 am on March 18th 1990, guards at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Massachusetts buzzed in two men who appeared to be police officers. Once inside, the men subdued the guards and set about what would become one of the largest museum heists in history. Over the next hour, the robbers stole thirteen works of art, worth over half a billion dollars, leaving empty frames hanging in their place. The FBI jumped on the case immediately, but their investigation stalled due to a lack of physical evidence at the crime scene. The heist remains unsolved to this day, but one popular theory is that it was orchestrated by the Boston Mafia.

The Disappearance of Dorothy Jane Scott

Dorothy Jane Scott was a thirty-two-year-old single mother who was working as a retail store secretary in California when she disappeared in 1980. In the months leading up to the incident, Scott had received multiple calls from an anonymous man who claimed to love her, but also threatened her life. Those threats were ostensibly made manifest on May 28th when Scott was abducted in her own car after driving a co-worker to the hospital. Her car was later abandoned and set on fire in an alley, where it was found the next day. Scott, however, remained missing until four years later, when her burnt remains were discovered by a construction worker.

Do you know of any other crazy stories? Let us know in the comments below!