The 35-year old Dale Devon Scheanette from Texas, convicted in a 1996 case in Arlington known as the bathtub murders is to be executed. The Dallas Morning News reported Sunday that, 13 years after the crimes, the state plans to execute him. He was found guilty of killing Wendie Prescott, 22, and Christine Vu, 26, who were found strangled in the bathtubs of their east Arlington apartment complex.

“The crime scenes were absolutely horrific – brutal and violent, the worst nightmare for anyone confronted with that kind of attack,” the homicide detective LeNoir recalls. “I don’t like to think what the ladies went through.”

First victim’s aunt and uncle, concerned when she failed to show up for a shopping appointment with her sister, went to her apartment and found her dead in a partially filled bathtub. Her neck, wrists and ankles were wrapped in duct tape and she’d been raped and strangled.

Detectives found a fingerprint on the TV stand in her apartment but couldn’t identify it until almost four years later as databases expanded and technology improved. Scheanette’s prints first became available after he was arrested in 1999 for a burglary of a car audio shop in DeSoto, just south of Dallas.

“We got a search warrant, blood samples and made a DNA hit on two murders,” LeNoir said. “From that point, we started getting hits on other cases, the sexual assaults. It just snowballed.”

The DNA and a fingerprint match tied Scheanette to the slaying of Christine Vu, 25, who was killed three months before Prescott and lived in the same apartment complex. They also tied him to five rapes in 1998 and 1999. He was charged but not tried for Vu’s slaying.

After jurors convicted him of capital murder for the Prescott slaying, prosecutors in the punishment phase of the trial called to the witness stand five women evidence showed Scheanette had raped.
“To hear and see these women talk about these events, quite honestly, I hope I never get exposed to something like this again,” said Greg Miller, the Tarrant County district attorney who prosecuted Scheanette. “I will never forget him. But most importantly, I will never forget the seven women.”

He would be the seventh condemned killer executed this year in Texas and the first of two set to die this week in the nation’s most active death penalty state.

-original article by By Michael Graczyk, from Chron.com-

Kang Ho-soon, 38, a South Korean serial killer, suspected of murdering seven women, was arrested on Januray 25th, for murdering a female university student. Last Friday,he confessed to the slaying and to fatally strangling six other women, who went missing between December 2006 and November 2008, with stockings in one of South Korea’s worst serial murder cases.

“Appearances are often deceiving”. This saying can be used no better to describe a serial killer Kang, whom his neighbors and co-workers described as kind and faithful. He was also good-looking and affable. His smiling face, appearing in some newspapers, is enough to belie the brutal nature of his crime. The suspect was apparently dexterous in hiding his true identity behind his docile appearance.

His first homicide allegedly took place Dec. 13, 2006, when he strangled a 45-year-old karaoke bar employee to death after the two had sex. He killed four other women by Jan. 7, 2007. Twenty-two months later, Kang reportedly killed a 48-year housewife in Suwon on November 19, 2008 and a 20-year-old student in Gunpo a month later.

Investigators found four bodies on Friday and sent them to the National Institute of Scientific Investigation for DNA analysis, said Na Won-ho, another police official involved with the case. Another body was found last year. Investigators have not found the body of one victim. Kang said he buried it in an area that has undergone terrain changes since a golf training facility was built there, Na said.

Kang is also suspected in the 2005 arson deaths of his fourth wife and her mother (which he denied), police said in a statement. Police also said he told investigators he felt “helpless” after his wife’s death and developed the urge to kill about a year later.

Investigators, crime experts and the public are wondering what motivated Kang to go on a killing spree. Criminal psychologists point out that Kang might be a typical psychopath, lacking feelings of compunction and guilt. He told police he approached his victims for sex — or with the intent to rape them — and then strangled them with a pair of stockings, Park said at a briefing Friday. He said he then buried their bodies. “I couldn’t suppress my urges after committing the first murder,” investigators quoted Kang as saying.

-articles from The Korea Times and FoxNews rewritten and adapted by admin-

New Evidence suggest that notorious serial killer, Jack The Ripper, who stalked London’s East End, butchering prostitutes and terrorizing the population, might have been a woman. This story first appeared on May, 2006, but now there is more reason to believe those speculations are true. His victims were all prostitutes, murdered and mutilated in the foggy alleyways of Whitechapel. By the surgical nature of the wounds, the killer was assumed to have some surgical knowledge.

An Australian scientist has used swabs from letters supposedly sent to police by the Ripper to build a partial DNA profile of the killer. The results suggest that the person who murdered and mutilated at least five women from 1888 onwards may have been a woman.

Ian Findlay, a professor of molecular and forensic diagnostics had developed a profiling technique that could extract DNA from a single cell or strand of hair up to 160 years old, while conventional DNA sampling methods required at least 200 cells.

He examined the material, which was kept by Scotland Yard until 1961. It includes letters sent to police at the time, some of them signed “Jack the Ripper”. Most are believed to be fakes, but a handful are thought to have been written by the killer. Dr Findlay took swabs from the back of stamps and from the gum used to seal envelopes, and possible bloodstains. He took his haul back to Brisbane, where – concentrating on swabs from the so-called “Openshaw letter” (click on the picture for the full size view of the letter), the one believed most likely to be genuine – he extracted the DNA and then amplified the information to create a profile. The results were “inconclusive” and not forensically reliable, but he did construct a partial profile and based on this analysis, he said, “it’s possible the Ripper could be female”.

The chief suspects were all man, and only Frederick Abberline, the detective who led the investigation, thought it possible the killer was a woman. This was because the fifth victim, Mary Kelly, was “seen” by witnesses hours after she was killed. Abberline thought this was the murderer running away, in Kelly’s clothes.

The only female suspect was Mary Pearcey, who was convicted of murdering her lover’s wife, Phoebe Hogg, in 1890 and hanged. She apparently employed a similar modus operandi to the Ripper.

-article by Kathy Marks, rewritten and addapted by admin-

A 27-year-old German construction laborer who met around 150 women in Internet chat rooms went on trial in Germany on Wednesday charged with murdering two of them. Dubbed “Germany’s First Internet Murderer” in the press, he has confessed to the killings, but denies he’s a serial killer.

Christian Grotheer, 27, admitted he had killed two women he met online, but claimed the first death was an accident and the second was after the victim accused him of being a rapist, which resulted in an uncontrollable fit of rage that stemmed from his traumatic childhood. He used the online nicknames “Rosenboy0207″ or “Riddick300″ in the chat rooms, the latter after a fictional serial killer in the movie Pitch Black. He spent tens of thousands of hours on dating sites, going on dates with 100 of women, two of them ending dead.

“I spent whole nights in these chat rooms and I saw them as my family”, he said, “From my point of view the Internet was the ideal way to meet people because you get talking to people very quickly and almost all visitors, male and female, are looking for sexual contact.”

Mr. Grotheer is accused of stabbing to death Jessica K., 26, on June 5, 2008, and Regina B., 39, 12 days later. With the first woman, who went by the Web name “babylove,” Mr. Grotheer said he got into a heated argument, during which he only “touched her on the throat” when she suddenly dropped dead, his lawyer said. Her corpse was found 14 days later. The prosecution alleges that he stabbed her in the back.

In the second case, Spiegel Online reported that after the two had sex at her apartment, she cooked a meal for them and they went for a walk. However, Mr. Grotheer allegedly knocked her over by a field, stabbing her 12 times in the back and 14 times in the chest with a knife. Her body was discovered the next day by a passerby, Spiegel said.

Christian G. was taken into care a number of times during his childhood as a result of his father’s behavior. He then started taking drugs and claims Internet chatting helped him recover from his addiction.
“I can still remember my mother’s cries for help,” Christian G. said, adding that anger and fear had driven him to kill. He said he couldn’t remember details of the deed.
“I felt remote controlled. I can only say that if Regina hadn’t said things like that to me, and especially if she hadn’t called me a rapist, she would definitely be alive today.”

-articles by Julia Jüttner and Agence France-Presse, rewritten and adapted by admin-

Robert Napper, the man who killed young mother Rachel Nickell, more than 16 years ago, may also be responsible for a string of attacks and murders throughout the 1990s. He faces questioning over the murder of at least three other women whose brutal deaths bear a striking resemblance to the killing of Rachel Nickell.

Robert Clive Napper was born in February 1966, the oldest of four children. He was brought up in a violent household and was abused by a family friend who was jailed for the offense. His father Brian, a driving instructor, emigrated when his son was 12, leaving Napper’s mother to bring the family up alone. As a child he was diagnosed as having a “highly toxic mixture” of paranoid schizophrenia and Aspergers’ syndrome and received psychiatric counseling for six years.

All three Robert Napper’s victims were repeatedly stabbed and left for dead within a year of Miss Nickell, who was knifed 49 times by Napper in front of her son Alex. The unsolved murders have tormented police for the past 18 years who, despite arresting several suspects, have never tracked down who was responsible. Officers will now visit Napper at Broadmoor – where he has been detained indefinitely. It is likely they will question him about the deaths of Claire Tiltman, 16, Penny Bell, 43, and 47-year-old Jean Bradley.

Napper has been held at Broadmoor mental hospital since 1995 after admitting killing 27-year-old Samantha Bisset and her four-year-old daughter Jazmine the year before. It is feared he could be linked to as many as 106 rapes and sexual offenses on 86 victims.

Professor Laurence Alison and Marie Eyre, co-authors of an upcoming book on Napper, claim that it is difficult to pinpoint the psychological mechanism that can explain such a hatred of young women. Napper is an example of the psychoanalytical ideas of what Freud called the sex and death instincts, dualities that are constantly in tension, generating conflict and the potential for aggression directed at ourselves (masochism), as well as at others (sadism), at the points in our lives where birth and death and sex and violence combine.

He was obsessed with knives and – coupled with impotence – these constituted the most consistent feature of his crimes. Knives were used frequently.The fact he targeted mothers who had recently had children combines sex and death symbolism and perhaps speaks volumes about his views of his own childhood and his own mother. It enraged him to see a mother as a sexual, desirous partner for an adult man…

To get inside the mind of this notorious serial killer and rapist, get ready to read the book Killer in the Shadows: the monstrous crimes of Robert Napper, by Professor Laurence Alison and Marie Eyre, that will be published on 12 January 2009.

-original articles from telegraph.co.uk rewritten and adapted by admin-