July 2020 West Virginia
Reta May worked at the Veterans Affairs Medical centre in Clarksburg, West Virginia, and has just pleaded guilty of 7 second-degree murders of patients at the hospital.
May had been a nursing assistant at the hospital from 2015 to 2018 and killed the 7 by injecting them with insulin. Colleagues reported their concerns to the management in 2018, and May was fired and reported to the police.
July 2020 Sacramento, California
The “Golden State Killer” terrorised California for over two decades, but now former police officer Joseph James DeAngelo have been convicted.
DeAngelo burgled houses, sexually assaulted more than 50 women and killed 13 people during the 1970s and 1980s. He pleaded guilty to 13 murder counts and 13 counts of kidnapping in deal that meant he avoided the death penalty. He will now spend the rest of his life in prison with no possibility of parole for the 74-year-old.
More details here:
July 2020 South Korea
South Korean police have apologised for mistakes they made in the investigation of the country’s most notorious serial killer.
The investigation, the inspiration for the 2003 movie Memories of Murder, ended with the jailing of an innocent man for 20 years.
A new probe has just ended with Lee Chun-jae pleading guilty as the killer of 14 women and rapist of 9 girls and women in a rural area of South Korea between 1986 and 1991. Police say Lee admitted 4 more murders and a total of 34 rapes, but there was not enough evidence to take all the cases to court.
For more details, see here:
May 2020, Telangana, India
Police in India say they have arrested a 26 year old man called Sanjy Yadav for the murder of 9 people.
Police say he killed the remaining 8 members of his first victim’s family to hide his original murder. The family are known to have suspected Yadav of the original murder, but did not go to the police. Their bodies were found in a well near their family home.
Click on the link to hear a TV report from the area.
May 2020, Slovakia
Slovakian police have announced that they have arrested Miroslav Lehotsky for child abuse, but that he has also admitted several murders.
He told police that he strangled his first partner in 2010 and then burned her body.
He also admitted the murder of a mother of a young child, and the ex-partner of his last girlfriend.
If convicted, Lehotsky will be one of very few serial killers convicted in Slovakia.
May 2020, Nairobi
Police seeking the serial killer who has killed and mutilated women in the county of Isiolo have made an arrest.
Victims of the murder included two women killed in separate attacks in 2019. The sexual motivation of the crimes is confirmed, as the killer removed the genitals of his victims.
The unnamed suspect was arrested after work by multiple agencies. There may be other victims, and police have asked that the public tell them about any similar deaths.
May 2020
Samuel Little is probably the worst US serial killer ever. He has admitted over 90 murders between 1970 and 2005, across 14 states. He was convicted in 2014 of three murders: women he had strangled in Los Angeles in the 1980s. He then confessed to the other murders in return for a transfer to another prison.
However, in the 1980s he was charged with the murder of Patricia Ann Mount. At the time, the prosecution said Little met Mount in a bar in Gainesville, Florida, and strangled her to death in a field. A witness said they had seen Little leaving the murder scene, but the jury acquitted Little after less than 30 minutes.
But now he has admitted that he did in fact kill Mount in a murder that went exactly the way the prosecution said it had.
Germany, June 2020
In a sensational development in the 13 year investigation into the disappearance of Madeline McCann, German police have said they are investigating a man known as Christian B.
Madeline McCann disappeared from her parent’s holiday apartment in Portugal in May 2007. The UK police investigation has never closed and has pursued hundreds of false leads.
But now German police have identified that Christian B was in that area of Portugal at the time. Christian B is now aged 43 and is in jail for paedophile crimes and rape.
But it is possible he is a serial killer, as now German police are investigating him as a possible murderer of a six year old boy who disappeared in 1996 in Portugal and a five year old German girl in 2015. And Belgian police believe he could be linked to the murder of 16 year old Carola Titze in 1996 in De Hann.
France, May 2020
Stephane Bourgoin is France’s most famous expert on serial killers, the author of more than 75 books and dozens of TV programmes. He was so highly regarded that he acted as a guest lecturer at the national Police Academy.
But now he has confessed that his work was based on many lies, after an anonymous internet collective 4e Oeil (Fourth Eye) reported that many of his books had been plagiarised from books published in English, and that there are inconsistencies between facts in his various books.
“It is true that when I was in the public eye I sometimes happened to embellish, to extrapolate, to exaggerate my importance because I always had the deep feeling of not really ‘being loved.” He told Le Parisien.
One of the worst examples of his lies what that he claimed a woman murdered in Los Angeles in 1976 was his wife, when in fact she was just someone he had met a few times. Bourgoin also falsely claimed he had met Charles Manson.
Cyprus, May 2020
The Attorney General of Cyprus has announced a criminal investigation after police bungled the investigation into Cyprus’ first serial killer.
15 officers are being investigated as they could have been negligent or even broken the law by not taking reports of disappearing people seriously. The police complaints authority reported that some police officers may have gone just making oversights, although no details are available of what they did yet.
The killer himself was army captain Nicholas Metaxas, a 35 year old who was sentenced to seven consecutive life terms after convicted of killing 3 Filipino women and the daughter of one of these women; a Romanian mother and daughter; and a woman from Nepal.