The Smartest Serial Killers ever
Not all serial killers are smart, some are average and some even possess low IQ but today I’ll talk about some of the smartest serial killers who ever lived. The IQs can vary so I’ll use the highest recorded IQ of the killers to make it simple, I did not include Ted Kaczynski as he’s considered more of a terrorist than a serial killer apparently.
Rodney Alcala (The Dating Game Killer)
Rodney Alcala had a reported IQ of 170. He killed at least 8 people but it could be up to 130. He got the death penalty.
In 1961, at the age of 17, Alcala joined the Army and served as a clerk. Three years later he suffered a nervous breakdown and went AWOL hitchhiking to his mother’s house. He was diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder discharged on medical grounds. Other diagnoses later proposed by various psychiatric experts at his trials included narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, and malignant narcissism with psychopathy and sexual sadism comorbidities.
Alcala committed his first known crime in 1968. An eyewitness in LA called police after watching him lure an eight-year-old girl into his Hollywood apartment. The girl was found alive, having been raped and beaten with a steel bar, but Alcala had fled. Alcala left the state and enrolled in the NYU film school, a new name“John Berger”.
In 1978, Alcala was a contestant on the popular game show The Dating Game.
Host Jim Lange introduced him as a“successful photographer who got his start when his father found him in the darkroom at the age of 13, fully developed. Between takes, you might find him skydiving or motorcycling.”
A fellow “bachelor” contestant later described Alcala as a “very strange guy” with “bizarre opinions”. Alcala won the competition, and a date with bachelorette Cheryl Bradshaw, who subsequently refused to go out with him because she found him “creepy”.Criminal profiler Pat Brown, noting that Alcala killed at least three women after his Dating Game appearance, speculated that this rejection might have been an exacerbating factor. “One wonders what that did in his mind”, Brown said. “That is something he would not take too well. [Serial killers] don’t understand the rejection. They think that something is wrong with that girl: ‘She played me. She played hard to get.’
For the third trial, Alcala elected to act as his own attorney. He took the stand in his own defense, and for five hours played the roles of both interrogator and witness, asking himself questions (addressing himself as “Mr. Alcala” in a deeper-than-normal voice), and then answering them. During this self-questioning and answering session, he told jurors, often in a rambling monotone, that he was at Knott’s Berry Farm applying for a job as a photographer at the time Samsoe was kidnapped. He showed the jury a portion of his 1978 appearance on The Dating Game in an attempt to prove that the earrings found in his Seattle locker were his, not Samsoe’s. Jed Mills, the actor who competed against Alcala on the show, told a reporter that earrings were not yet a socially acceptable accoutrement for men in 1978. “I had never seen a man with an earring in his ear,” he said. “I would have noticed them on him.”
In September 2016, Alcala was charged with the murder of 28-year-old
Christine Ruth Thornton, who disappeared in 1977. Alcala admitted taking the photo, but not to killing the woman, who was approximately six months pregnant at the time of her death. Thornton is the first alleged murder victim linked to the Alcala photos made public in 2010. The 73-year-old Alcala was reportedly “too ill” to make the journey from California to Wyoming to stand trial on the new charges. He remains in California State Prison, Corcoran at the age of 77.
Charlene Gallego ( The Love Slave Killers)
Charlene and her husband Gerald Gallego were serial killers who kidnapped, raped, and killed 9 young girls and killed one young man. Charlene Gallego was reported to have an IQ of 160. Charlene was given a reduced sentence after testifying against her husband and blaming him for the murders. She was sentenced to 16 years and 8 months in jail with two counts of first-degree murder in California and one count of second-degree murder in Nevada and was released in July 1997. Her husband Gerald Gallego received death sentences in Nevada and California.
Years later she agreed to do an interview and this is what she said about the murders many years later.
Williams agreed to The Chronicle interview, then, in a panic, canceled just minutes before it was to begin. Murphy calmed her, and an hour later she arrived at the cafe with him. Despite the warm day, Williams kept a coat pulled tightly around her. She said she wanted to do the interview so she can help women who are victims of abusive men. After nearly two decades of counseling, that is how she sees herself, as a victim rather than a criminal.
When the rapes and killings began, Williams said, she didn’t escape because she believed Gallego would have hunted her down, even if she turned to the police. “There were victims who died and there were victims who lived,” she said. “It’s taken me a hell of a long time to realize that I’m one of the ones who lived.”
In prison, Gallego studied a wide range of subjects, from psychology to business to Icelandic literature.
“She’s a pretty intellectual woman,” said Nevada District Judge Richard Wagner who was the lead prosecutor in Gallego’s Nevada trial. “She has a phenomenal mind, which made her a tremendous witness. . . . She had almost a photographic memory about the victims, down to their shoes and clothes.”
In July 1997, Charlene completed her sentence and was released
Carroll Edward Cole
Carroll Edward Cole had a reported IQ of 152, he killed 16 people by strangulation. Cole’s mother was emotionally abusive to Cole and dressed him as a girl. At school, he was teased about his “girl’s name” by his peers. At age 8, he retaliated against one of his classmates, by drowning him in a lake. Authorities thought it was an accident until Cole confessed to it many years later in an autobiography he wrote in prison.
During a press interview, Cole said of this event, “I was primed, I had made the mental commitment I was going to get even with my mother, and things just built up and built up and became an obsession.”
In September 1979, Cole strangled a woman to death. A suspicious neighbor called the police eight days later, but although they found the victim’s body wrapped in a blanket and stuffed in a closet, they decided that she had died because of her heavy drinking, and Cole was released without charge after questioning.
Cole was a suspect again in killing and was found on the scene of the murder. He was arrested and held in custody but the police then came to the conclusion that the victim had probably died of natural causes. Cole was about to be ruled out as a suspect before he confessed to all of his killings, Cole claimed that he had murdered at least fourteen women over the previous nine years, although he added that there may have been more and he couldn’t remember exactly, as he was usually drunk when he committed his crimes.
Cole was executed by lethal injection at Nevada State Prison on December 6, 1985.
Andrew Cunanan
Andrew Cunanan had an IQ of 147, his behavior indicates that he may have suffered from an antisocial personality disorder. At around 10 years old, he had read the whole set of encyclopedias and memorized them according to his brother. Cunanan murdered five people during a three-month period in mid-1997.
It is said he could describe the texture of the blowfish he claimed to have eaten at an $850 Japanese lunch, the year a painting had been painted among other things. After his fourth murder, Andrew was one of America’s most wanted fugitives. Cunanan went to Miami and stayed for almost two months at the Normandy Plaza Hotel, about four miles away from this fifth and last victim. The hotel’s night manager said Cunanan paid in cash and would often change his appearance.
Cunanan committed suicide 8 days after his fifth murder, he shot himself in the head, Andrew’s body was found in a luxury houseboat in Miami Beach
In an ABC News interview in 1997, Andrew’s brother and sister had a few things to say.
Christopher Cunanan said, “He was my father’s pride and joy. (He was) very smart. When he was about 10 years old, he had read the whole set of encyclopedias … and memorized it. And you could ask him any question. Pick up any edition and ask him any question, and he would tell you.”
Cunanan’s sister attested to the fact that their brother received special treatment said, “He got everything that he needed. My dad gave him a sports car. He had the master bedroom. He had his own bath and everything.
One month after Cunanan’s death, a service was held, but his siblings and father did not attend, according to Romper. His mother, however, was in attendance. A memory card at the service reportedly included an excerpt that read,
“I’d like the memory of me, to be a happy one … I’d like to leave an echo, of happy times and laughing times.”
Edmund Kemper (The Co-ed Killer)
Edmund Kemper had a reported IQ of 145. His first murders were at only age 15, he murdered his grandparents. He was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic by court psychiatrists and sentenced to the Atascadero State Hospital as a criminally insane juvenile.
Somehow he was released six years later at the age of 21, no doubt using his intelligence to convince the psychiatrists he was rehabilitated. He targeted young female hitchhikers luring them into his vehicle and driving them to secluded areas where he would murder them. He took their corpses back to his home to be decapitated, dismembered and violated.
Kemper’s last murders were of his mother and one of her friends, unlike most serial killers, he turned himself in, he killed 8 people in total. He got
sentenced to eight life sentences.
In interviews he said his favorite games to play as a kid were“Gas Chamber” and “Electric Chair,” in which he asked his younger sister to tie him up and flip an imaginary switch, he would then pretend he was being executed by gas inhalation or electric shock.
His mother often made her son sleep in a locked basement because she feared that he would harm his sisters, regularly mocked him for his large size by the age of 15 referred to him as “a real weirdo. She also refused to show him affection out of fear that she would “turn him gay” and told the young Kemper that he reminded her of his father and that no woman would ever love him.
Kemper later described her as a “sick angry woman,” and it has been postulated that she suffered from a borderline personality disorder.
Found sane and guilty at his trial in 1973, Kemper requested the death penalty for his crimes. Capital punishment was suspended in California at the time, and he instead received eight concurrent life sentences. Since then, he has been incarcerated in the California Medical Facility, he is now 72 years old
