David BerkowitzCarl Panzram"I have no desire whatever to reform myself. My only desire is to reform peole who try to reform me, and I believe the only way to reform people is to kill 'em. My motto is: Rob 'em all, rape 'em all, and kill 'em all."
"I sat down to think things over a bit. White I was sitting there, a little kid about eleven or twelve years old came bumming around. He was looking for something. He found it too. I took him out to a gravel pit about one-quarter mile away. I left him there, but first committed sodomy on him and then killed him. His brains were coming out of his ears when I left him, and he will never be any deader."
David Berkowitz
"I didn't want to hurt them, I only wanted to kill them."
"I am deeply hurt by your calling me a wemon (woman) hater. I am not. But I am a monster. I am the "Son of Sam." I am a little brat."
George Joseph Smith (The "Brides in the Bath" murderer)
"I may be a bit peculiar."
Ted Bundy
"We serial killers are your sons, we are your husbands, we are everywhere. And there will be more of your children dead tomorrow."
"You feel the last bit of breath leaving their body. You're looking into their eyes. A person in that situation is God!" (on the joy of murder)
Andrei Chikatilo
"What I did was not for sexual pleasure. Rather it brought me some peace of mind."
Jeffrey Dahmer
"I really screwed up this time." (addressed to his father)
"I think in some way I wanted it to end, even if it meant my own destruction..."
"I was completely swept along with my own compulsion. I don't know how else to put it. It didn't satisfy me completely so maybe I was thinking another one will. Maybe this one will, and the numbers started growing and growing and just got out of control, as you can see..."
Henri Blot
"Every man to his own tastes. Mine is for corpses."
Dr. H.H. Holmes
"I was born with the devil in me. I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing... I was born with the Evil One standing as my sponsor beside the bed where I was ushered into the world, and he has been with me since." (from his confession)
Edmund Kemper
Q: "What do you think when you see a pretty girl walking down the street?"
A: "One side of me says, 'I'd like to talk to her, date her.' The other side of me says, 'I wonder how her head would look on a stick?'" (during a magazine interview)
"... I had thought about annihilating the entire block that I lived on..."
"... you know the head's where everything is at, the brain, the eyes, mouth. That's the person. I remember being told as a kid, you cut off the head and the body dies. The body is nothing after the head is cut off... well that's not quite true. With a girl there's a lot left in the girl's body without the head."
"I just wanted to see what it would be like to shoot grandma."
"I wanted them to be a part of me, and now they are."
"... I am the hunter, and they are the hunted."
Peter Kurten
"In the case of Ohliger, I also sucked blood from the wound of her temple, and from Scheer from the stab in the neck. From the girl Schulte I only licked the blood from her hands. It was the same with the swan in the Hofgarten. I used to stroll at night through the Hofgarten very often, and in the spring of 1930 I noticed a swan sleeping at the edge of the lake. I cut its throat. The blood spurted up and I drank from the stump and ejaculated." (from his confession)
Henry Lee Lucas
"Sex is one of my downfalls. I get sex any way I can get it. If I have to force somebody to do it, I do. I rape them; I've done that. I've killed animals to have sex with them, and I've had sex while they're alive."
"I took her bra and panties off and had sex with her. That's one of those things I guess that got to be a part of my life - having sexual intercourse with the dead." (describing his reaction to the death of his beloved common-law wife, twelve year old Becky Powell, whom he had just stabbed in the chest during an argument)
"I hated all my life. I hated everybody. When I first grew up and can remember, I was dressed as a girl by mother. And I stayed that way for two or three years. And after that I was treated like what I call the dog of the family. I was beaten. I was made to do things that no human bein' would want to do."
Charles Manson
"Look down on me, you will see a fool. Look up at me, you will see your Lord. Look straight at me, you will see yourself."
Dennis Nilsen
"I wished I could stop but I could not. I had no other thrill or happiness."
Peter "The Yorkshire Ripper" Sutcliffe
"The women I killed were filth - bastard prostitutes who were littering the streets. I was just cleaning up the place a bit."
Richard "The Night Stalker" Ramirez
"You maggots make me sick. I will be avenged. Lucifer dwells within all of us!" (addressing the court after being convicted of 13 murders)
"Big deal, death comes with the territory... see you in Disneyland."
"We've all got the power in our hands to kill, but most people are afraid to use it. The ones who aren't afraid control life itself."
Albert Fish
"I always had a desire to inflict pain on others and to have others inflict pain on me. I always seemed to enjoy everything that hurt. The desire to inflict pain, that is all that is uppermost."
Jane Toppan (a woman!)
"That is my ambition, to have killed more people - more helpless people - than any other man or woman who has ever lived."
David Bullock
"He started messing with the Christmas tree, telling me how nice the Christmas tree was. So I shot him." (explaining why he murdered an acquaintance following a 1981 Christmas party)
Herbert Mullin, "Visionary" Serial Killer
"Satan gets into people and makes them do things they don't want to."
Vincenz Verzeni
"I had an unspeakable delight in strangling women, experiencing during the act erections and real sexual pleasure. The feeling of pleasure while strangling them was much greater than that which I experienced while masturbating... it never occured to me to touch or look at the genitals. It satisfied me to seize the women by the neck and suck their blood."
John Reginald Christie
"I remember, as I gazed down at the still form of my first victim, experiencing a strange and peaceful thrill."
John Wayne Gacy
"A clown can get away with murder."
Albert DeSalvo
"I did this not as a sex act... but out of hate for her. I don't mean out of hate for her in particular, really I mean out of hate for a woman."
"It wasn't as dark and scary as it sounds. I had a lotto fun... killing somebody's a funny experience."