True Crime

Ted Bundy seemed to be a friendly young law student. But behind his pleasant façade lurked a demonic psychopath who preyed on young girls. At 7.18 a.m. on the morning of 24 January 1989, an executioner hired by the state of Florida flipped a switch and sent a 2,000-volt surge of electricity coursing through the body of Ted Bundy. For 60 seconds the mass killer arched and twisted against the straps that held him, as if fighting death. Then, as the power was switched off, he sank back, his life extinguished. ‘Old Sparky’, the oldest electric chair in America, had done its duty once again. It was nice years and 277 days since the death sentence had been passed. Across the USA, in a nation used to outbreaks of bizarre and horrific crime, work stopped as people stood around TV sets, popping champagne corks and cheering at the news. After 15 years, America’s most loathed mass killer had finally been dealt with. On the eve of his death, Bundy, the handsome young lawyer, by now 42, finally...

Henry Lee Lucas might be the most evil killer ever. But it is equally possible that most of his victims are products of his own highly active imagination. Cindy was 16 or 17 years old, a runaway from somewhere up north, hitch-hiking through the southern United States to nowhere in particular. She was heavily made-up, “very sext and well built, large bust,” according to the scruffy, one-eyed man driving south on the interstate, and that was enough to make him pull over and offer the girl a ride. In the car, she was glad to take his offer of a beer. “We kept talking,” he wrote later, in his half-literate but strangely vivid style, “and I ask her to slide over beside me and she did. I become to feel of her tittys and she ask me if I like that and I said yes. She was only playing me I could tell so I said I wanted to **** her and she said maybe. I said I was going to stop and get some and she said not yet we’ll have plenty of time and I said no we don’t.” Cindy shifted away from the d...