Male Killers

Al-Mutahan McLean is an American man convicted of the prolonged abuse and murder of his 10-year-old son in Dayton, Ohio, in 2019. The case became nationally known due to the sustained nature of the abuse and the severity of the conditions the child endured over several years. He later pleaded guilty to multiple charges and received a lengthy prison sentence, with the case highlighting both extreme intra-family violence and systemic failures in child protection oversight.

Albert Henry DeSalvo is best known for confessing to the infamous Boston Strangler murders, in which 13 women were killed in the Boston, Massachusetts, area between 1962 and 1964. Although he was never tried for those murders, modern DNA testing later linked him to the final victim, strengthening the case against him. DeSalvo was imprisoned for unrelated crimes and was murdered in prison in 1973.

Albert Fish became one of the most horrifying killers in American history after murdering children during the early 1900s and later sending grotesque letters to victims’ families. Known for extreme sadism, self-harm and cannibalistic behavior, Fish terrorized New York and surrounding states while hiding behind the appearance of a quiet elderly man. Often referred to as “The Gray Man,” “The Boogeyman” and “The Werewolf of Wysteria,” Fish shocked investigators and the public because of the disturbing nature of his crimes and psychological abnormalities. His case became one of the earliest high-profile examples of criminal profiling and remains one of the darkest child murder cases in American true crime history.

Alexander Christopher Ewing was responsible for four murders during a series of violent attacks in the Denver metropolitan area in January 1984. On January 10, he sexually assaulted and murdered 50-year-old Patricia Louise Smith in her Lakewood home, and six days later attacked the Bennett family in Aurora, killing Bruce Bennett, his wife Debra and their seven-year-old daughter Melissa with a hammer. The crimes remained unsolved for more than three decades until DNA evidence linked Ewing, who was already serving a prison sentence in Nevada, to the killings. He was convicted of the three Bennett murders in 2021 and Patricia Smith's murder in 2022, receiving three consecutive life sentences for the Bennett killings and another life sentence for Smith's murder.

Alex Murdaugh became one of America’s most infamous disgraced legal figures after being convicted of murdering members of his own family in South Carolina in 2021. The case exploded into national headlines because Murdaugh came from one of the most powerful legal dynasties in the American South, with generations of influence over law enforcement, prosecutions and politics throughout the region. As investigators examined the murders, they uncovered a far larger web of corruption involving financial fraud, opioid addiction, theft, insurance schemes and abuse of legal power spanning many years. The collapse of the Murdaugh family empire transformed the case into one of the most heavily publicized American criminal scandals of the modern era.

Allan Joseph Legere, known as the "Monster of the Miramichi," was a Canadian serial killer, rapist and arsonist who murdered five people in New Brunswick between 1986 and 1989. Already serving a life sentence for the 1986 murder of shopkeeper John Glendenning, Legere escaped from a hospital in May 1989 and spent seven months terrorising the Miramichi region, murdering Annie Flam, sisters Donna and Linda Daughney, and Catholic priest James Smith. He was captured in November 1989 following a massive manhunt and convicted of the four murders in 1991, with DNA evidence playing a major role in the prosecution. Legere remained imprisoned for the rest of his life and died at Edmonton Institution in March 2026.

Allen Lee "Tiny" Davis was convicted of murdering Nancy Weiler and her two young daughters, Kristina and Katherine, during a violent attack at their Jacksonville, Florida, home on May 11, 1982. Davis entered the house armed with a handgun and a length of rope, brutally beat Nancy and shot both children before fleeing with property taken from the home. He was already on parole for previous robbery convictions when the murders occurred. Convicted of three counts of first-degree murder in 1983 and sentenced to death, Davis exhausted numerous appeals before being executed by electrocution at Florida State Prison on July 8, 1999.

Anders Behring Breivik is a Norwegian domestic terrorist responsible for the 2011 attacks in Oslo and on the island of Utøya, the deadliest act of violence in Norway since World War II. His coordinated attack involved a car bombing followed by a mass shooting, resulting in 77 deaths. Breivik was arrested on the day of the attacks and later convicted of terrorism and mass murder. He received the maximum sentence under Norwegian law, with provisions allowing for indefinite extension based on continued risk.