History is chock full of some very scary events. Many of these events we know nothing about today, but they horrified many in their day. Others we do know about. There was a man who authorities believe killed at least 60 people while torturing them in various ways, before he was finally captured. His name was David Parker Ray. This is one of the cases you may have heard about. Ray’s nickname was the Toy-Box Killer. He acquired that name, because he had customized a trailer into a torture chamber he called his toy box. In it he was said to have various whips, chains, blades and a custom made electrical device he used on people. Here is the thing, he was never convicted of murder only kidnapping and torture. Among the other devices he had in his toy box were straps, leg spreaders, pulleys, clamps and saws. He was into sexual torture and was assisted by a couple of other people in these terrible things. He once remarked he wanted his victims to see everything he was doing to them. He was caught when in 1999 one of his victims escaped. She had been tortured for three days. One of Ray’s accomplices was a woman who also enjoyed this grisly work along with his daughter and a man named Dennis Yancy. Yancy was convicted of murder when he confessed to strangling his former girlfriend after she was abducted by Ray and tortured. His first trial was declared a mistrial, but at the second trial he was convicted of all counts the DA had presented.

Edmund Kemper created quite a name for himself as a vicious killer. His nicknames are Co-ed Butcher and Co-ed Killer. His killing spree took place in the 1970s. Not only was this guy an animal, he was a necrophile. In case you are not sure what I am talking about, he like to have sex with dead people. Sometimes genius and insanity border each other and may overlap and this guy was said to be extremely intelligent. He was also very large making escape for his victims much harder. Kemper started his murder spree in 1964 when he had an argument with his grandmother, Maude Matilda Hughey Kemper. She was sitting at the kitchen table when an aggravated Edmund pulled out a gun and shot her in the head. When he had been asked why he did this, he replied he just wanted to know what it felt like to kill her. It was 1972 when he decided to embark on a murder spree. He killed six female students then went on to kill his mother and her best friend. This should be a good lesson to never hitchhike. He started this spree by picking up two 18 year old female students and drove them to a secluded spot in the woods and stabbed them to death. His next murder was a female who was only 15 years old and was hitchhiking. He strangled her. He then picked up another female student and shot her and kept her body in his room overnight. He went back to a university and picked up two more female students and shot them before sexually assaulting their dead bodies. He then called the police and confessed to the murders of his mother and her friend and waited until the police arrived to arrest him.

Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris worked together as serial killers. They were given the nickname of the Tool Box Killers. The reason for this is they enjoyed using an assortment of tools to torture their victims before killing them. They both were also rapists. An FBI agent said Bittaker was the most disturbed person he ever performed a criminal profile on. Bittaker had a high IQ. He was constantly committing petty crimes and acquired a juvenile record and was finally sent to the California Youth Authority where he served until he was 18 years old. His adoptive parents moved away and kept their location secret after that and he never saw them again. Norris was the child of a drug addicted mother. His was placed with many different foster families. He said he was the victim of sexual abuse by a Hispanic family and hated Hispanic people. When the two got together they had decided to torture and rape young women and strangely they picked up over 20 female hitchhikers and did absolutely nothing to them. These were practice runs. In 1979 they killed a 16 year old girl, their first victim, she had been dragged into their van. They had installed a bed in their van. Under the bed were their tools and a cooler with beer and soft drinks. They took turns raping the girl then strangled her. A couple of weeks later they forced another girl into the van. They raped her three times and forced her to perform different sexual acts while taking photos. Bittaker then shoved an ice pick into her brain. The pair then captured two more girls. They were taken to a remote location and held for about two days. One girl was horribly tortured with an ice pick and pliers and eventually the girls were murdered after sexual explicit photos were taken. The final victim was a 16 year old girl. She was a hitchhiker. She felt safe with Bittaker since she knew him as she was a waitress at a restaurant he used. Once she got into the van Norris jumped out from the back and she was bound. Then she began to be slapped and made fun of. When she screamed she was hit with a hammer and tortured with pliers. She was then raped repeatedly. The two used a tape recorder to record the torture sessions before killing her. Bittaker had met an old friend and told him what he had done and the friend told police. The pair were arrested. Norris made a deal to avoid the death penalty and received 45 years in prison and Bittaker was convicted of murder and is still sitting on death row.

One has to wonder how a fellow human being could be so cruel to another. Is it mental illness or just plain evil? If we look at the atrocities committed during the Second World War by the Nazis, which involved many thousands of participants, we have to say they could not all have mental illness. On top of that mental health workers will tell you most people with mental illness are not cruel killers, but have a problem which affects them. Whatever the reason, there is some really bad people out there and one of the last things anyone should be doing is hitchhiking.