Yeah - I didn’t mean Elizabeth Bathory as a response to the OP (I’m another vote for Jack the Ripper on that). I was just responding to ScubaQueen saying that Jack the Ripper was the first documented serial killer in history. Sorry if I was unclear!
You’ve never heard of Gilles deRais?
Ah, I see. Carry on!
It might count, except that it didn’t happen in England. It probably happened because of England, though.
Argh. Clearly this is one of those days where I make no sense anywhere except inside my own head.
Sure, I know about Gilles de Rais. My point was that there were serial killers before Jack the Ripper. I picked Elizabeth Bathory out of the air as one example, the first that sprang to mind, not as the first serial killer ever.
He’s not the answer to the question, tragic though it was.
Wrong Cromwell.
Though I guess that speaks to the right Cromwell not being famous. That’s a sad state of affairs, though.
Post 52, I even said who the right Cromwell was.
What you say makes perfect sense to me, I think other posters are just a little bit too eager to add their voices to the thread to properly read what has come before.
FWIW, while Jack the Ripper is the first English murderer that comes to mind (mine, at least), James Bulger is the first victim I thought of.
I recall reading about a guy who murdered several people in London, during WWII.
He claimed to be a vampire, and he murdered his victims during German bombing raids (he figured that his victims would have been assumed to be killed by the bombs).
At any rate, he was convicted and hung-anyone know the deatils?
I read about it long ago, in an anthology-I think it was called “Journey Into Crime”.
I think you have John George Haigh in mind. His vampire claims, I have read elsewhere, have been thought to have been a failed ploy for a “Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity” verdict.
Not by a long shot. He’s not even the first documented serial killer in England.
It probably depends on where in the country you are from and how old you are. The first answer that sprung to my mind was the Moors Murders, the Yorkshire Ripper and then Jamie Bulger. The World’s End murders are pretty infamous in Scotland but not really known elsewhere, too.
Jamie Bulger’s been murdered!?
Colonel Mustard did it in the Ballroom with a candlestick.
It was so far beyond the pale that nobody wanted to think of it, I suppose.