SERIAL KILLERS Profile: Donald Harvey

A man addicted to killing, the ‘Angel of Death’ was anything but an angel.

• Full Name – Donald Harvey
• Nickname – Angel of Death
• Born – April 15, 1952
• Location of Activity – Kentucky and Ohio, USA
• Years of Activity –1970 - 1987
• Number of Kills – 37-57 (up to 87 claimed)
• Date of Death – n/a
• Cause of Death – n/a

Born in Boonville, Kentucky, Donald Harvey was a man who was destined to become one of the mostprolific killers the world has seen.  At 18 he entered into the medical field, starting out as an orderly.  He displayed signs of criminal behavior early on and was mentally disturbed for most of his life.

His first arrest was for a burglary attempt, after which the judge assigned him to undergo psychiatric treatment.  In order to avoid this, he instead joined the U.S. Air Force.  That didn’t last long either and he was discharged after 10 months.  Upon returning to the real world, he bounced in and out of mental institutions.

Harvey concealed his record of mental illness and went back into the medical profession once again.  He ended up working at a variety of these jobs, including as a nurse, in housekeeping and in various technician and assistant positions.  All the while, he was claiming victim after victim.

According to Harvey, his first dozen victims were taken when he was still a young orderly.  The rest came later, over the course of 17 years.  He would usually poison his victims, using a number of different toxins.  Other times he would suffocate them or inject them with hepatitis B or HIV to ensure their death. 

Almost all of his victims were patients at the hospitals where he worked, but as he became more comfortable killing he also made an attempt on his lover and some of his neighbors.  All-in-all he laid claim to 87 victims, though the official estimate places that number somewhere between 37 and 57.

When asked about why he killed, Harvey said he was at first trying to ease the pain of the terminally ill.  As the act turned to enjoyment, he did it for the thrill or for revenge.  He is also said to have used ritual magic, taking hair or fingernail clippings from potential victims and then casting a spell to see if they were to be his next.

He was caught in 1987 when people finally put the clues together and discovered that he was very near many of those who turned up dead.  He is currently serving 28 life sentences and is likely to die in prison.

SERIAL KILLERS Profile: Manuel Delgado Villegas

After nearly 8 years of wandering about and leaving bodies behind, he was finally arrested in 1971."

• Full Name – Manuel Delgado Villegas
• Nickname – The Puerto Strangler
• Born – January 25, 1943
• Location of Activity – Spain, Italy, France
• Years of Activity – 1964 - 1971
• Number of Kills – 48
• Date of Death – February 2, 1998
• Cause of Death – Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

Born in Seville, Spain, Manuel Villegas’s mother died during childbirth.  His father being a salesman that traveled a lot, he and his sister were sent to live with their grandmother.  Once he turned 18, he enlisted in the Spanish Legion, where he would learn many of the skills needed to benefit him in his killing career, such as how to murder a person with nothing but his bare hands.

Villegas’s first kill was on January 21, 1964.  He often traveled out of Spain, to Italy and France, before he found a victim.  His choice of victims was seemingly at random and numbered among them are people whom he robbed, cases of revenge and those he killed for insulting him.  It almost appeared that Villegas murdered whoever happened to piss him off at the time, if it weren’t for the fact that some of his victims showed evidence of necrophilia.

After nearly 8 years of wandering about and leaving bodies behind, he was finally arrested in 1971.  Police investigated him based on reports that he was repeatedly seen in the company of a retarded woman who had disappeared.  Eventually, his girlfriend’s body was found as well and Villegas confessed.

Though 48 murders were attributed to him, only 8 charges were solid enough to earn convictions.  Villegas got out even easier, however, when he was diagnosed with a mental illness.  He served 27 years in prison for the 8 murders and was released in 1998.  He died very soon afterwards from a disease of the lungs.

SERIAL KILLERS Profile: The Lainz Angels of Death

Four nurses that went from mercy killings to cold-blooded murder

• Full Name – Maria Gruber, Irene Leidolf, Stephanija Meyer, Waltraud Wagner
• Nickname – The Lainz Angels of Death
• Born – 1964, 1962, 1940, 1960
• Location of Activity – Austria
• Years of Activity – 1983 - 1989
• Number of Kills – 49 known (more than 200 suspected)
• Date of Death – n/a
• Cause of Death – n/a

The Lonely Hearts Killers

A pair of killers that chose their victims in the personal ads.

• Full Name – Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck
• Nickname – The Lonely Hearts Killers
• Born – Dec 17, 1914 / May 6, 1920
• Location of Activity – New York, Michigan
• Years of Activity – 1947 - 1949
• Number of Kills – up to 20
• Date of Death – Both March 8, 1951
• Cause of Death – Electric Chair

Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck were a pair of serial killers that ended up meeting later in their lives.  Fernandez was, at the time, making his way by ripping off women that he would meet through personal ads.  Beck was a single mother of two that ended up answering one of those ads.  Instead of ripping her off as he had his previous victims, the two decided to team up and turn their attention to murder.

Ending up in New York, Fernandez only kept Beck around because she was obedient to him.  Even when she found out what he did for a living, she still stood with him and even offered to help him run his scams.  Though they were lovers, Beck played the part of his sister whenever he was in the process of working a mark.  Beck also happened to be extremely jealous and would murder these women whenever she found out that they had slept with Fernandez.  For his part, he was content to help her cover up the murders and even assist her in most cases.

They continued in this fashion for nearly two years until finally moving to Michigan due to too much suspicion in New York.  They were running one more scam, just as always, but the end result was not only the death of the victim, but also of her two-year-old daughter.  They neighbors got suspicious when the victim disappeared but Beck and Fernandez stuck around living in her house.  On February 28^th, 1949, the police showed up and the two were arrested.

In order to avoid extradition to New York, which carried the possibility of a death penalty, Fernandez confessed to everything immediately.  But the deal never held and the two ended up in New York anyways.  There, they were tried and sentenced to die in the electric chair.  Two years after their arrest, the sentence was carried out.

RAPE-SADOMY STRANGE INDIA PAKISTAN BOTH THE RAPIST HANGED THEMSELVES IN JAIL?

• Full Name – Javed Iqbal Mughal
• Nickname – n/a
• Born – 1956
• Location of Activity – Pakistan
• Years of Activity – 1998 - 1999
• Number of Kills – 100?
• Date of Death – October 7, 2001
• Cause of Death – Strangled

Javed Iqbal Mughal may be the worst serial killer than Pakistan has ever seen.  He claimed responsibility for the deaths of 100 young boys, aged from six to 16.  Though he was apparently working with accomplices, one of which sexually abused the victims and another who provided supplies to him to dispose of the bodies, Iqbal will remain in history as the infamous face in these horrible crimes.

His victims were almost all runaways or orphans.  He would sexually assault them and then strangle them with a chain he kept in his house.  The bodies would then be disposed of using hydrochloric acid.  What was left of the liquefied remains he dumped first into a nearby sewer and later into a river.

The police conducted one of the largest manhunts in the history of Pakistan searching for the then-unknown killer of so many children.  But they would not find Iqbal until he finally chose to notify them of his identity and turn himself in.  He wrote them a letter telling of his crimes and left all the evidence he had not gotten rid of in plain sight at his home.

Upon searching his house, police found photographs of the victims that Iqbal kept as trophies.  They also found clothing, shoes and some vats of acid that contained undissolved remains of his last few victims.

Though Iqbal confessed to 100 murders, several of the children he named were later found, leaving the exact number of his victims in question.  He was sentenced to death by hanging, but would not survive long enough to face it.  Javed Iqbal was found strangled to death with his own sheets in his prison bed.