The Disturbing True Crime Stories of Nine Serial Killers Who Murdered Sex WorkersRobert Hansen: An award-winning big game hunter who stalked Alaska's frozen tundra in the 1970s and 1980s, taking the lives of elk, sheep, wolves, and at least seventeen women. Arthur Shawcross: After raping and murdering two young children in New York, he was sent to prison, but he was paroled after serving fifteen years of his twenty-five year sentence. As a free man, he prowled the streets of Rochester's seedy red-light district, picking up drug-addicted prostitutes, choking the life out of their bodies, and discarding their corpses near the Genesee River. Johann Unterweger: At the age of twenty-four, this Austrian native committed his first murder, beating and strangling a young woman to death, and he received a life sentence for his crime. While incarcerated, he wrote plays, poems, short stories, and an autobiography, earning him the support of influential literary figures, intellectuals, politicians, and scholars who helped get him freed from prison after serving fifteen years. Within a year of his release, he murdered seven prostitutes in Europe, and while working in Los Angeles as a journalist, he killed three sex workers over the course of just a few weeks.Peter Sutcliffe: Over the course of five years, the Yorkshire Ripper terrorized the English county of West Yorkshire, murdering thirteen victims and leaving seven others near death with severe physical and emotional damage. He attacked women ranging in age from sixteen to forty-seven, using a variety of methods that included crushing their skulls with a hammer, strangling them with his hands, and viciously slashing their bodies with a knife or screwdriver, inflicting as many as fifty stab wounds on a single victim. Gary Ridgway: Known as the Green River Killer because of the body of water where he dumped some of his earliest confirmed victims, he methodically murdered at least forty-nine women, many of them teenage prostitutes who were as young as fifteen years old. Thanks to advancements in DNA, Gary Ridgway, who had long been a prime suspect in the killings that spanned sixteen years, was finally apprehended in 2001.Joel Rifkin: An outsider in his own life, he had difficulty forging connections with other people, so he regularly left his family's suburban home on Long Island to search the streets of New York City for prostitutes who could alleviate his crushing sense of loneliness. However, he soon discovered the drug-addicted women he picked up for sex and companionship only cared about getting money or narcotics, leading him to take the lives of at least seventeen victims over the course of four years.Keith Jesperson: Known as the Happy Face Killer because he signed anonymous murder confessions with a smiley face, he was a long-haul truck driver who traversed the U.S., picking up prostitutes and drifters in one part of the country and dumping their corpses in another. The trucker went to great lengths to conceal the identities of the people he killed, even strapping the body of a victim to the bottom of his vehicle and driving at high speeds to grind off her skin. Volker Eckert: He got away with his first murder when he strangled a girl days before his fifteenth birthday, staging the crime scene to convince German authorities that the young woman had taken her own life. At the age of forty, he became a long-haul truck driver, which enabled him to crisscross Europe, picking up a foreign-born sex worker in one location and discarding her body in a different country. Steven Wright: Dubbed the Suffolk Strangler and the Ipswich Ripper by the British press, this English serial killer ruthlessly murdered five young woman over the course of just six weeks, posing some of their nude corpses in the shape of a crucifix.
