Infamous, But Not Famous: Psycho Serial Killers You’ve Never Heard Of

Albert Hicks

On the morning of March 21, 1860, an unmanned ship, the E. A. Johnson, drifted into New York Harbor and upon boarding the boat, searchers found pools of blood everywhere and the cabin in a shambles. The "shocking signs of carnage" left no doubt that the crew had fallen victim to a "dreadful and bloody tragedy."

Following the leads of several witnesses, police swiftly tracked down and arrested a suspect, Albert Hicks, a hulking brute who prided himself on being "the worst man who ever lived," and eventually confessed that, after shipping out on the vessel he had butchered the other three crew members with an axe, stolen the money, and absconded in a lifeboat.

She then married a wealthy, much older farmer who perished one year later after consuming a bowl of his wife's specially seasoned clam chowder. Like other psychopathic killers, Lydia murdered not for profit but for fun. She continued her joy ride by marrying again and killing her two stepchildren and new husband with arsenic-spiked hot chocolate. Due to a Victorian rule against executing women, she escaped the gallows following her arrest and conviction in 1871 and was sentenced to life in prison.

Anton Probst

This unskilled German laborer was hired as a field hand by a kindhearted Philadelphia farmer named Christopher Deering, but then repaid his employer's generosity by slaughtering his entire family - father, mother, four children (including an infant in its cradle) - along with two other innocents who happened to be on the scene.

His motive was to steal the small sum of cash the farmer kept at home. Following his execution two months later on June 8, 1866, Probst's right arm was amputated and sold to a Bowery dime museum, where it attracted hordes of morbid curiosity seekers, eager to view the ghoulish relic of the man the New York Times called "the greatest criminal of the nineteenth century."

Franklin Evans

In the summer of 1872, 64-year-old Franklin Evans – aka the Northwood Monster - lured his adolescent grandniece, Georgianna Lovering, into the woods near her home, strangled her to death, then raped and sexually mutilated her corpse.

Following his arrest, he confessed to a string of unsolved atrocities, among them the random mutilation-murder of a physically deformed five-year-old girl he snatched from her New Hampshire home, the rape-murder of a 14-year-old schoolgirl in Maine, and the butchering of a 15-year-year-old Massachusetts girl, along with her 12-year-old brother who had witnessed the crime. He was eventually caught for his "unnamable and incredible crimes," and "swung like a dog" in his execution.

Joseph LaPage

On the morning of October 8, 1876, a 17-year-old girl named Josie Langmaid set out on her daily two-mile walk to school in the town of Pembroke, New Hampshire. She never arrived. That night, searchers discovered her butchered and decapitated corpse in the woods, with her head a quarter-mile away. The culprit turned out to be a serial sex-killer named Joseph LaPage who had fled his native Quebec in 1871 after raping his 13-year-old sister-in-law and, three years later, had escaped punishment for the mutilation-murder of a Vermont schoolteacher.

Harry Powers

Paunchy, middle-aged vacuum cleaner salesman Harry Powers used a fake name to make contact with a string of widows, divorcees, and spinsters through a midwestern "lonely hearts" club. But instead of giving them romance, in the summer of 1931, he lured two of these women, Dorothy Lemke and Asta Eichler -- along with Mrs. Eichler's three young children -- to a remote cabin in the rural hamlet of Quiet Dell, Virginia, where he starved, tortured and murdered all five victims before disposing of their bodies in a drainage ditch.

Convicted in December of that year, "The Bluebeard of Quiet Dell" (as the tabloids dubbed him) was hanged three months later. The exact tally of his victims is unknown, though Powers ultimately suggested that he had slain as many as 50.

Eddie Leoniski

While hailing from America, Eddie Leoniski performed his murderous spree on the other side of the globe in Australia at the outbreak of World War II, where he prowled the streets of Melbourne during the nightly "brownouts," when street lights were dimmed and window shades drawn to protect against possible Japanese aerial bombardment.