Serial Killer / Other Media

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Myths & Religion

• Classical Mythology: When Theseus travels on the road to Athens, he encounters numerous bandits who have unique murder methods. Theseus offs them with their own methods. These includes:
  • Periphetes, who beats people to death with his club.
  • Sinis, who ties people between two trees that he has bent down. Then, he let go of the trees, ripping them in half.
  • Sciron, an elderly man who asks passersby to wash his feet as a sign of respect. When they bend over to comply, he punts them off a cliff and into the jaws of a sea monster at the bottom.
  • Cercyon, who challenges passersby to wrestling matches, then kills them after they have lost.
  • Procrustes, who invites passersby to stay the night at his place. If they are too short for the bed, he stretches their bodies until they fit. If they are too tall for the bed, he chops off the excess. If they fit just right, he would swap the bed for a different sized bed so he could still kill them.
• Aṅgulimāla, whose name literally translates to "necklace of fingers" after his method of Creepy Souvenir collection and display, was a bandit and a serial murderer, who meets Gautama Buddha and after being amazed by his power, converts to his teachings and becomes a Reformed Criminal.

Radio

• The Price of Fear features several. A mission-based example would be the Brigadier in "The Ninth Removal", a fundamentalist who murders women he sees as sinful or promiscuous. In "Fish", Jane's husband is a power/control example who murders several men out of jealousy if he suspects them of getting involved with his wife. There's also Spiro in "Speciality of the House", whose restaurant serves human meat.

Tabletop Games

• Mutants & Masterminds: Jack-a-Knives, the Murder Spirit, manipulates people into this role.
• New World of Darkness has slashers, humans who find themselves compelled to kill. Strangely enough, they're playable, and you can opt for a game in which the people the slashers kill often deserve it. Each slasher archetype, or Undertaking, has two tiers: Ripper (steps above your standard serial killer, but still conceivably human) and Scourge (outright supernatural incarnation of murder).
  • The rules presented allow you to make every character seen on this page:
    • Avenger/Legend: Paul Kersey from Death Wish starts killing criminal punks, but eventually becomes so fed up with "the filth on the streets" that he becomes Candyman, haunting the urban projects.
    • Brute/Mask: Mickey from Natural Born Killers gets off on killing so much that he trades all that makes him human — language, literacy, the ability to be around others — to become Jason Voorhees, unkillable but lurking in the woods for the pain human contact causes.
    • Charmer/Psycho (Hypno in Hunter 2E): Reverend Powell from The Night of the Hunter gets by on the thin veneer of humanity for so long that it eventually turns inside out and he becomes the freak you can't help but stare at, not unlike The Joker.
    • Freak (Undesirables in Hunter 2E)/Mutant: The families from The Hills Have Eyes (2006) take to the caves and degrade until they become the Crawlers.
    • Genius (Virtuoso in Hunter 2E)/Maniac (Puppeteer in Hunter 2E): Hannibal Lecter tells people how much they suck so many times, he comes to believe he must teach people to overcome their flaws via traps and sadistic choices a la Jigsaw.
• Old World of Darkness:
  • Changeling: The Lost makes mention of Ernest Marker and the Shrike. The former is a serial child murderer, the latter is a True Fae named after the bird that impales animals on thorns. She had considered taking Marker back to Arcadia, but then she became curious about just how his madness worked. As she studied him, she became so interested in his insanity that (as far as "sanity" counts for The Fair Folk) she went mad exactly the same way. Now the two have pooled Marker's knowledge of the mortal world and the Shrike's ages of hunting experience, planning the most heinous crime in human history...
  • Mage: The Ascension: The Euthanatos are a group of the mission-based style. In their case, there really are monsters out there, and they're warned against judging too quickly. They have to be careful and not turn into the hedonistic type, otherwise they might become one of their colleagues' next targets.
• Pathfinder: The Vigilante class is well suited to this. Their dual identity defeats efforts to find the killer through scrying, and emphasize deflecting suspicion by being a well-respected member of the community, while secretly specializing in attacking from stealth and downing a single target swiftly. They have three archetypes that are even better suited to the role: the Cabalist, who's associated with dark magic and blood sacrifice, the Hangman, who specializes in choking people to death, and...the Serial Killer. The other two are sinister but can be heroic (the Hangman's description suggests it's executing condemned criminals who escaped justice), but the last has to be evil. It leaves a Calling Card, and murders so brutally it gives those who inspect the body nightmares.
• Ravenloft: Subverted in the adventure Hour of the Knife. What seems like a hunt for Jack-the-Ripper expy "Bloody Jack" is complicated by the revelation that A) "Jack" is a doppelganger, and B) the killings aren't insane at all, but a murderous ritual to empower an artifact-caliber cursed knife.
• Rippers: Dr. John Dee, the Elizabethan sorcerer, becomes Jack the Ripper. Oddly as Jack the Ripper, he's initially a heroic figure (he was hunting succubi among prostitutes) and with Van Helsing, he created "the Rippers" - a monster hunting group. Then he goes off the deep-end and makes villainous organization "the Cabal".
• Sentinels of the Multiverse: Spite is, well, let's just say he's a horrible person and a vicious serial killer and leave it at that. We don't need to go into the messier details. Besides, they're all in the nightmare fuel and character sheet pages anyway. In both editions, playing against him tends to involve trying to protect innocent bystanders from ending up dead.
• Shadowrun: There have been several: the Mealtime Killer, the Emerald City Ripper, the Mayan Cutter and his copycats, and the "We are Free" killer(s) are just a few.
• SLA Industries: In the dystopian future of the setting, between the endemic violent entertainment and hopeless dreary lives of Mort City's inhabitants, serial killers are commonplace. The deadliest of these are ex-operatives who have gone rogue and taken to killing for fun. The most famous of the serial killers is the immortal, pumpkin-masked Halloween Jack.
• They Came From Beyond The Grave has the Slasher and Stalking Killer monster archetypes, with the Stalking Killer being secretive and leaving the police deeply confused, and the Slasher being a rampaging death machine specialising in slasher movie tropes. Then the publisher released an expansion that leaned even harder into the dead-teenager concept and called it "They Came From Camp Murder Lake".
• Warhammer 40,000: The background material for the Hivecult mentions that, when they were first establishing themselves in the hive cities of New Gidlam, the cult's Magus, Vockor Mai, posed as a serial killer known as the White Creeper to kill those that stood in the way of the cult's rise to power.

Theater

• Arsenic and Old Lace pits Only Sane Man Mortimer Brewster against two separate serial killers: his old maiden aunts, Abby and Martha, who poison lonely old men as a "charity" and bury them in their cellar (falling under Visionary as they are clearly insane); and his older brother Jonathan, who is a psychotic murderer with kills all over the world (falling under Power/Control). When they discover each other's crimes, they wind up comparing notes, Body-Count Competition-style, which is played for Black Comedy.
• In the Mrs. Hawking series: Part VI: Fallen Women concerns the hunt for Jack the Ripper, one of the most famous historical serial killers of all time.
• The Quality Of Mercy: The protagonist of the play is a real person, serial killer Harold Frederick ('Fred') Shipman. Shipman was an English doctor who's believed to have murdered up to 250 of his patients. The play, largely set in his cell, shows him recording the history of his crimes.
• Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street: In a rare sympathetic (but not noble) example, Sweeney Todd becomes one of these after he fails to kill Turpin.
  • Even more applicable in the original penny dreadful The String of Pearls, in which he's just a Hedonistic sociopath out to profit - in every unspeakable way possible - from his victims.
• While not in the original Novella, Edward Hyde becomes this in Jekyll & Hyde. The opening of act two is a sequence of him killing off the majority of St. Jude's Board of Governors.

Visual Novels

• Ace Attorney has multiple serial killers, by definition [three or more murders, with time between each one]. A list of serial killers and the people they killed are as follows:
  • Joe Darke (Edward Jones, Jason Knight, Edith Kirby, Rachael Moss, Jeb Bates, Neil Marshall Except he didn't kill the last one. Things are more complicated than it seems.) Technically, he's a spree killer, but the game identifies him as a serial killer. If he had actually killed Neil Marshall, then he would be a serial killer. Since this murder was the only one they were actually able to get him on, that's probably why official police documents refer to him as a serial killer.
  • Professional Killer Shelly de Killer (Juan Corrida, many unseen others as mentioned through in-game conversations)
  • Dahlia Hawthorne (Valerie Hawthorne, Terry Fawles (by proxy), Doug Swallow. Attempted to murder Diego Armando, Phoenix Wright, and Maya Fey)
  • Sirhan Dogen, another Professional Killer (Di-Jun Huang, many unseen others)
  • Kristoph Gavin comes close, and succeeds in the bad ending of Apollo Justice. (Zak Gramarye, Drew Misham, Vera Misham in bad ending)
  • The Big Bad of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies counts, having three named victims (Metis Cykes, Bobby Fulbright, Clay Terran) by the end of the game.
  • The Great Ace Attorney has "The Professor," who systematically killed four people with a hunting dog (inspiring the Sholmes novel The Hound of the Baskervilles) and fatally stabbed Barok van Ziek's brother Klint. Except not really. Klint himself was The Professor, and he only killed one person willingly. Then someone found out about it and blackmailed him into killing the others, which he didn't want to do and felt great remorse over. While the man thought to be the Professor did kill Klint, it was through an honorable Duel to the Death which Klint consented to even though he knew he would lose, either because he knew he was outmatched or because he was intending to lose on purpose, making it more of a Suicide by Cop than an actual duel.
• The most common type of criminal in Cause of Death, due in part to the efforts of the Connoisseur to cultivate them when possible. We have Power/Control (the Maskmaker, Zero, arguably Livewire, the dispenser of Nightmare), Hedonistic (the Hunter, the Ladykiller), and Mission-Based (the Hand of Justice, the Boogeyman).
• Cemetery Mary: Reginald Tetra is the Blackwood Butcher killing innocent people, usually the elderly via a special antifreeze. He does this so that Mary will show up at their funerals where he can stalk her.
• Danganronpa:
  • Genocide(r) Syo/Jack/Jill from Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc is apparently well-known enough in-universe that they're one of the first suggestions when the students are speculating on the identity of the mastermind who locked them in the school. Genocider is rumored to have killed thousands of young men, writing "BLOODBATH FEVER" (or "BLOODLUST") on the wall of each scene in the victim's blood and crucifying them with hand-made scissors. When a student turns up crucified in the locker room, with the aforementioned message, it becomes clear Genocider is indeed among them. Except that Genocider, who is Fukawa's Split Personality, didn't kill Fujisaki; Togami strung the body up to resemble her MO in order to make the trial more interesting. Genocider is a Hedonistic type, as all the boys she's killed were Fukawa's crushes, and is therefore (somewhat ironically) the least likely to kill in the Deadly Game, as not using her normal MO wouldn't satisfy her, and using it would make the culprit obvious, and Syo is pragmatic enough to avoid that.
  • Played with in Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair. Early into the game, the same set-up that Genocider Syo has is run though again, with the killer Kirakira Seigi/Sparkling Justice and their MO being introduced, and then a character being killed with the serial killer's calling card left nearby. It turns out to be a ruse. Peko isn't Sparkling Justice, though she is Fuyuhiko's bodyguard and hitman. She wanted people to vote for her because she saw herself as a tool for Fuyuhiko instead of a person, and thought that her killing Mahiru was the same as Fuyuhiko doing it. Monokuma rules otherwise, since she had acted without his orders and Fuyuhiko never wanted a weapon, he wanted a friend.
  • Chapter 3 of Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony reveals the rather threatening-looking Korekiyo Shinguuji is one of these, specifically a Misson-based type (early on in the game, he even admits that he has the appearance of a potential murderer). In a similar case to Genocider Syo, all of his victims are women, meant to become friends with his deceased older sister in the afterlife. He almost reaches triple digits, with the deaths of Angie and Tenko bringing him closer to his goal, and before he is executed, his only regret is not reaching this goal.
  • Maki and Ryoma are also serial killers, though neither kills in the game. Maki is a Professional Killer, and Ryoma is a vigilante who killed mafia members with special metal tennis balls.
• Discussed in Daughter for Dessert. Kathy talks about the true crime shows that she watches at one point, and they go over which serial killer that Kathy sees in the protagonist.
• Extra Case: My Girlfriend's Secrets: As Marty goes through loops to investigate Sally's secrets, he learns that her alter ego, "Seira"/Shadow, killed her boyfriends in order to sew their body parts into her first boyfriend, John.
• Hinimizawa Syndrome in Higurashi: When They Cry tends to induce people to become the Visionary type with the revenge subtype. Most notable case akin to a serial killer being Shion Sonozaki.
• Kara no Shoujo: There are three serial killers, though one has disappeared from the police radar a few years back. They all appear to be a mix of type one and two.
• In Nanairo Reincarnation, the villain is a lust killer who targets lonely young women. Makoto needs to expose the killer’s crimes so that the ghosts of his victims can find closure and move on to the afterlife.
• The 9-nine- Series has the mysterious Evil Eye User, who kills people by turning them to stone with the power of their eponymous Evil Eye. Uncovering their identity and stopping them forms the crux of the series' plot.
• SHIKI in Tsukihime in the routes where he's in control over Roa. He doesn't actually enjoy killing and unlike Satsuki he isn't doing it to live. He just doesn't possess the power to stop. It's revealed that he's trying to find and kill Shiki because their mind-connection is driving him mad, but he can never find him because he was given false information about what he looks like. So instead he kills women who bear a resemblance to his sister Akiha because he wants to drink their blood.
• Zero Time Dilemma has the attractive and seemingly-normal Mira, AKA the Heart Ripper, a sociopathic killer who can't comprehend human emotions and who cuts the hearts out of their victims in a vain attempt to understand them.

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