Serial killers are often some of the most unsuspecting people. Would a sweet-presenting preacher’s wife plot to kill her entire family? Who’d a cute couple would spend their dates on a killing spree? Yes and yes.
However, the most shocking thing about these suspects is that they’re Black.
Among the plethora of Netflix crime documentaries, you’d think the only serial killers to exist had white skin. I’m here to inform you that is simply not true. Now, Black serial killers may not be as “popular” or widely known as your typical Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy or Jack The Ripper, but they exist. Though seemingly rare, their crimes are just as heinous and claimed hundreds of innocent lives – one man catching an alleged 90 bodies.
Because of the disparity of press coverage, Black serial killers were nearly always able to fly under the radar. I bet you can’t think of any off the top of your head. Scroll on and you’ll leave familiar with 16 of them.
Billy Chemirmir
Between 2016 to 2018, over 20 women were killed in their Texas retirement homes. Police assumed they died of natural causes because they were all older than 70 years old. However, it was none other than Billy Chemirmir, a former health care worker originally from Kenya. He was finally caught after one 91-year-old lady was able to survive his attack and reported to the police what happened, per PEOPLE. Authorities discovered Chemirmir used his job to target wealthy, older women to rob and kill them.
He was charged with 22 counts of murder although he was convicted on two of them. He was also found guilty on two unrelated murder charges. He was sentenced to life in prison but after one year of serving his sentence, he was reportedly killed by another inmate, according to AP News.
Eric Adams
Police said connected Adams to the fatal shooting of five women and the critical injury of a teen girl. In a release, police said a woman in her 40s and another woman in her 50s were found shot to death at an apartment. Amidst the investigation, the police department stated officers received word of a 13-year-old girl who had been transferred to the hospital in critical condition from gunshot wounds. The cops then scoured the apartment building for anymore shooting victims and found the remains of two women and a man – all of whom had been shot to death. However, by the time officers tracked him down in North Vegas, Adams fatally shot himself with his weapon.
Henry Louis Wallace
Wallace, also known as the “Taco Bell Strangler,” raped and murdered 11 Black women in the span of four years in the 90s. Most of the victims were women he knew such as friends and co-workers at the Taco Bell he managed in Charlotte, NC. Ol boy even attended some of their funerals. It wasn’t until Wallace killed two women back-to-back in the same building that the police were onto him. He was arrested in 1994 and sentenced to death.
Roberta Elder
The wife of Reverend William M. Elder was not only responsible for his death but also the death of two of his children whom she poisoned with her cooking. She was charged for their murders but during her trial, it was found that her killings didn’t stop at her household. She was accused of killing up to 13 people including two ex-husbands, three of her own children, a grandson, a cousin and her own mother. She was sentenced to life in prison.
Collins Jumaisi Khalusha
Who Kenyan National Police considered a “psychopathic serial killer” was arrested after being connected to a series of killings dating back to 2022. They became aware of the killings after discovering a series of remains of women ages 18 through 30 just last week. Police said they were found mutilated, stuffed in sacks and discarded near a dump in Kware. One victim’s phone helped police track down Khalusha at a club where he was arrested. Police say he confessed to luring in the victims, killing them and disposing of their bodies – all 42 of them including his wife who he confessed to making his first kill.
Anthony Robinson
The 37-year-old targeted a woman in Mechanicsburg, Pa. named Monica White in 2020. She told PEOPLE they dated for a few weeks until she cut him off after he displayed a series of concerning behavioral patterns. After their breakup, he was blasted in the news after being connected to the alleged murders of six women across the DMV. Police said each of the victims connected with Robinson through a dating app, were killed and then dumped with a shopping cart. He was charged with first-degree murder in two of the murders in 2022, per WTOP News.
Keith Gibson
The 41-year-old was already on probation for manslaughter ahead of his killing spree, per WHYY News. Delaware police said in 2021, he began with killing Leslie Ruiz-Basilio during a robbery at a Metro by T-Mobile store in Elsmere, Del. A month after the killing, he murdered Ronald Wright during a street robbery. The police caught him days later, sticking up a Rite-Aid. However, Gibson’s name popped up in Pennsylvania police systems connecting him to a slew of crimes that occurred in Philadelphia around the time the two victims were killed. He was sentenced to seven life terms, per NBC Philadelphia.
Samuel Little
Little is known as the most prolific serial killer not just because of his crimes but because he confessed to a large number of unsolved murders just two years before he died. Little had been killing since the 50s but was sentenced for good in 2014 for killing three women in the 80s. His DNA was then connected to another string of strangulations. In an interview with a Texas Ranger, he confessed to unsolved killings in over a dozen states bringing the total up to 93 people dead.
Maury Travis
The infamous “Videotape Killer” was linked to the murders of 12 sex workers in St. Louis by investigators, per Fox 2 Now. He would lure women to his home with money or drugs, then tie them up and kill them. After committing each murder, Travis would discard the bodies along the road and carried on this heinous act for three years.
Police identified Travis after tracing his steps through a series of interactive maps and found his home. Bloodstains covered every part of his house and various women’s items were recovered in the basement along with several videotapes of him torturing, abusing and raping his victims. Travis committed suicide in his jail cell before he could be convicted.
Eddie Lee Mosley
Dubbed as the “Rape Man,” Mosley was accused of terrorizing the women of South Florida in the 70s. DNA linked him to dozens of murders and rapes in the Fort Lauderdale area. He was charged three times for rape and was found not guilty in two cases and entered a plea deal in the third, per Sun Sentinel. Two innocent men were even convicted for Mosley’s crimes, one of them being the rape and murder of an 8-year-old girl.
Once the police got to him in the late 1980s, he was declared unfit to stand trial and was secluded to mental hospitals until he died in 2020.
John Floyd Thomas
The insurance claim adjuster turn serial killer was named the Westside Rapist for the terror he brought on women from Inglewood to Claremont, Ca. His targets were older women between the ages of 50 and 90. He would break into their homes, rape them and choke them to death. Thomas was finally sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for seven murders but remains a suspect in another 15 unsolved killings, per LA Times.
Harrison Graham
One summer in 1987, Graham’s neighbor complained to their landlord about a stench coming from Harrison’s apartment. He was ordered to vacate the premises but refused and boarded up his doors and windows. He then fled from the fire escape and the landlord called the police to break into the apartment. What they found were two dead Black women, blood splatters and a slew of skeletal remains. Bones and body parts of other victims were found in bags.
For the following week, Harrison ditched the police until his mother convinced him to turn himself in. When he was arrested, he confessed to the killings of seven women and was convicted in each case. He received the death penalty but was ordered to serve life in prison first, meaning he wouldn’t actually be executed.
Chester Turner
Over a span of 11 years, Turner killed 10 women in Los Angeles. He was sentenced to 10 counts of second-degree murder and the superior court judge said the evidence showed Turner would strangle each woman to death for his own sexual pleasure, a nature of cruelty rarely seen in murder trials. By 2014, he was sentenced to death after being found guilty in the killings of an additional four women, per Los Angeles Daily News.
Paul Durousseau
Durousseau was a cab driver in Jacksonville when he raped and killed a 26-year-old woman. Following her death, Durousseau took the lives of six other women all under the age of 25. He was finally arrested in 2003 on five counts of murder but DNA linked him to his first killing, upgrading his punishment to the death sentence. In 2021, he had his death penalty conviction overthrown to serve life in prison instead, per News4Jax.
Lonnie Franklin Jr.
The “Grim Sleeper” was known to target young Black women who struggled with drug addiction. Franklin was found guilty of killing nine women and one teenager in 2016 and sentenced to death. His killing spree lasted from 1984, all the way to 2007 ; he kept souvenirs from his victims including their jewelry or pictures of them. He was finally arrested in 2010; prosecutors speculated he may have been behind even more murders. Before his execution date, he died in 2020 in his prison cell, per People.
Wayne Williams
In 1981, Williams was arrested for the murders of two adult men. However, during his trial, prosecutors suggested he was also behind a string of 22 murders of children in Atlanta. Though he maintained his innocence, forensic evidence from his home and vehicle connected him to several victims. He was sentenced to life in prison, though many people still believe he is innocent.
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