Create a free profile to get unlimited access to exclusive videos, breaking news, sweepstakes, and more!
How Many Serial Killers Are in the State of California? A Comprehensive List
Typically known for Hollywood and sunny beaches, California has been the hunting ground for a disturbing number of serial killers, as evident in Oxygen's Serial Killer Capital: Los Angeles.
California is known for its sunny beaches, Hollywood starlets and rich wine country — but the nation’s third largest state also has a more ominous history.
The Golden State has been the hunting grounds for countless serial killers, from the cold-blooded murders of The Night Stalker Richard Ramirez to the still unsolved slayings of the Zodiac Killer, giving it a much darker reputation.
The exact number of serial killers who have operated in California remains a mystery, in part, because some killers have never been caught and the opinions about who fits the definition of a "serial killer" versus "spree killer" label often vary. Yet, there's still a long list of cold-blooded killers who have been identified over the years and are linked to some of the state's most disturbing murders, some of which are featured in the upcoming Oxygen special Serial Killer Capital: Los Angeles, Sunday, October 20 at 7 p.m. ET/PT.
To find out more about the state’s most notorious cases, Oxygen.com compiled a list of California's most notable serial killers to date:
Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono
Although they are often referred to by the single moniker the Hillside Strangler, serial killers and cousins Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono operated as a team in the late 1970s. Often posing as police officers, the pair lured teenage girls and young women to their death, leaving the bodies in the hills surrounding Los Angeles, according to Peacock’s The Hillside Strangler: Devil in Disguise. After Bianchi’s arrest in 1979, he ultimately implicated Buono in the slayings as well and both men were sentenced to life behind bars.
Lawrence Sigmund Bittaker and Roy Lewis Norris
Sadistic duo Lawrence Sigmund Bittaker and Roy Lewis Norris were known as the Toolbox Killers because of their predilection to rape and torture their teenage female victims with instruments during the 1970s, according to Peacock’s special The Toolbox Killer. After abducting, raping and torturing the teens, the pair — who met in prison — killed them and then dumped their bodies. Norris later agreed to testify against Bittaker in exchange for a lesser sentence. Both men died behind bars.
William Bonin
William Bonin was dubbed the “Freeway Killer” by the media after using his dilapidated van to pick up boys and young men along the roads of Southern California from 1979 to 1980, often recruiting a partner to help carry out the crimes, according to the California Department of Corrections. He sexually assaulted, tortured, and then killed his victims before dumping their bodies along the freeway. Bonin was convicted of killing 14 victims, but is suspected of killing up to 15 more people. He was executed by lethal injection in 1996.
RELATED: Everything To Know About The Menendez Brothers’ Murder Trial
Ted Bundy
Prolific serial killer Ted Bundy is mostly known for his murders in the Pacific Northwest and Florida, but there’s a possibility the killer may have struck in California as well. Before his 1989 electrocution, Bundy confessed to killing at least one unidentified victim in California, according to The San Francisco Gate, however, that victim (or possibly victims) has never been identified.
Juan Corona
Notorious serial killer Juan Corona, known as the Machete Murderer, was convicted of slaughtering 25 farm workers near his home in Sacramento Valley in California, then burying the bodies in shallow graves in orchards, farms, and ranches nearby. All of the victims, which were later recovered by authorities, had been hacked and stabbed, according to The New York Times. Corona was arrested after a farmer discovered a freshly dug hole on his property that had been filled back up by the next day, leading the farmer to reach out to the local sheriff’s office. Corona died behind bars in 2019 while serving out 25 life sentences for the brutal crimes.
Joseph DeAngelo Jr.
For years, the Golden State Killer remained one of California’s most elusive serial killers, until advances in genetic genealogy linked the heinous crimes to former police officer Joseph DeAngelo Jr. in 2018. DeAngelo — who was also known as the East Area Rapist — was linked to a string of home invasions in the Sacramento area, beginning in 1976, that often targeted couples. He’d tie up the victims, rape the woman and then help himself to a snack, according to KABC-TV. In the late 1970s, DeAngelo Jr. moved to Southern California where his attacks soon turned deadly. After his arrest, DeAngelo admitted to raping nearly 50 people and killing 13.
RELATED: Where Are The Murderers Featured In 'Serial Killer Capital: Baton Rouge' Now?
The Doodler
Although the name may sound innocuous, there was nothing harmless about The Doodler, a serial killer that targeted gay men in San Francisco in the 1970s. The killer, who has never been identified, was dubbed The Doodler after one of his surviving victims told police he had been drawing on a napkin when they met and mentioned that he was attending art school, according to San Francisco Police. Police have linked him to the deaths of at least five men. In 2023, San Francisco Police sent out a plea to try to identify the killer, but to date, no arrests have been made.
Lonnie David Franklin Jr.
Los Angeles sanitation worker Lonnie Franklin Jr. was known in the media as The Grim Sleeper, for the lengthy time between his brutal killing sprees. The killings began in the 1980s when multiple women were found shot to death by a .25-caliber gun and discarded in Los Angeles area alleys. After one victim survived and provided a description of the killer, the case went cold for two decades until another victim was found in a dumpster in 2007. The discovery ultimately linked the killer to a string of other murders in the early 2000s. Franklin Jr. was apprehended in 2010 after advances in DNA technology led investigators to his doorstep. He was convicted of killing nine women and died in prison in 2020 while on death row, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
Charles Ray Hatcher
Although drifter Charles Ray Hatcher was only ever convicted of killing two children in Missouri, the troubled killer confessed to killing 16 people before taking his own life behind bars in 1984, including the 1969 abduction and strangulation of William Freeman, a 12-year-old boy from Antioch, California, according to The Lineup.
Patrick Kearney
Patrick Kearney, dubbed the Trash Bag Killer, was another serial killer who preyed on young California men in the 1970s, often picking them up in gay bars or while they were hitchhiking, according to The New Zealand Herald. He was known to torture his victims, mutilate their remains, and then put them in trash bags, which he dumped along the freeways, landfills, or deserts. He confessed to killing 35 people, though he agreed to plead guilty to the murders of 21 in exchange for taking the death penalty off the table.
RELATED: 3 Men Were Killing The Women Of Baton Rouge At The Same Time — Who Were They?
Roger Kibbe
Serial Killer Roger Kibbe, known as the I-5 Strangler, had an unusual calling card. He was known for cutting the clothes of his victims in odd patterns, according to The Associated Press. Kibbe was known to target women in their teens or 20s along Interstate 5 in Sacramento and Stockton, leading to his distinctive nickname. He was initially convicted of the 1991 strangling death of 17-year-old Darcine Frackenpohl, before pleading guilty to six murders. The former furniture maker was killed in prison in 2021.
Randy Kraft
Randy Kraft was known as the Scorecard Killer after he was stopped by a California Highway Patrol officer for a traffic stop in 1983 and was found with a dead male victim in the passenger seat and a “coded list” detailing upwards of 67 victims, according to the Orange County Sheriff’s Department. Kraft, who was convicted of carrying out 16 murders, often targeted young men in Southern California and Orange County, and lured them in with drugs or alcohol. He’s currently on death row at San Quentin State Prison.
Leonard Lake and Charles Ng
Another killing duo Leonard Lake and Charles Ng used their remote California cabin as a disturbing killing ground, raping, torturing and killing at least 11 people in a hidden bunker in the home, according to Oxygen's Manifesto of a Serial Killer. The two men recorded themselves on video using their victims as sex slaves before their deaths. After he was taken into custody in 1985, Lake killed himself with a hidden cyanide capsule. Ng fled to Canada but was later extradited back to the United States, where he stood trial. Ng remains on California’s death row.
RELATED: Why Baton Rouge Had Multiple Serial Killers Operating At One Time
Samuel Little
Dubbed by the FBI as “the most prolific serial killer in U.S. history,” Samuel Little terrorized and killed victims across America, spanning from California to Florida. Little, a transient, often targeted drug users and sex workers. He ultimately confessed to killing 93 people. According to the FBI, 50 of those murders have been verified, but investigators have reason to believe that all the confessions were credible. Although he spent time behind bars for other crimes, he was not linked to any murders until 2012, when his DNA was matched to the 1989 murders of Audrey Nelson and Guadalupe Apodaca in Los Angeles, according to the Los Angeles Daily News.
Dorothea Puente
As the only female serial killer on the list, Dorothea Puente was distinctive because she often lured her victims in through supposed compassion. Puente ran a boarding house in Sacramento in the 1980s and 1990s for those in need and often held meetings to offer help to alcoholics or homeless people in the area, according to KXTL. She used the ruse to gain access to their social security accounts and killed some of her tenants to cash in on their social security payments, then buried them in the backyard. Although she was charged with nine murders, Puente was only convicted of three. She died behind bars in 2011.
Richard Ramirez
Known as the “Night Stalker,” Richard Ramirez terrorized southern California from 1984 to 1985 as he carried out a series of gruesome burglaries, rapes, and murders. He was known as a satanist and even forced one victim to declare her love for Satan, according to Biography. After being apprehended in 1985, Ramirez was ultimately convicted four years later of 13 counts of murder, five counts of attempted murder, 11 sexual assault charges, and 14 burglary charges. He died behind bars in 2013 as a result of complications from B-cell lymphoma.
Chester Turner
Chester Turner stalked the streets of Los Angeles in the 1980s and ‘90s, killing 14 women. Many of his victims were sex workers or homeless women, who were found raped and strangled to death, according to KABC-TV. The body of one of his victims was found just 50 feet from his home at the time. Turner was convicted in 2007 for killing 10 women, then was convicted again in 2014 for four additional murders. The serial killer, who is sitting on death row, made headlines again in 2024, when Utah authorities linked him to the murder of Itisha Camp, a woman found strangled to death in 1998 with a scarf still wrapped around her neck, Law & Crime reported earlier this year.
Randall Woodfield
Once drafted by the Green Bay Packers, former football player turned killer Randall Woodfield would become known as the I-5 Killer, due to his penchant for finding his victims along the Interstate 5 corridor running from Northern California to Washington, as detailed in Oxygen's Mark of a Killer. Woodfield went up and down the corridor, robbing, raping and killing others. He’s serving out a life sentence for the murder of Shari Hull, an Oregon cleaning woman attacked while cleaning an office building, but DNA evidence later linked him to five other murders, including a mother and daughter from California’s Shasta County, according to The Oregonian.
The Zodiac Killer
It’s been more than 50 years since the infamous Zodiac Killer terrorized California’s bay area in the late 1960s, but the elusive culprit has never been caught. The killer often attacked young couples, shooting or stabbing them to death in romantic spots around town. Cecelia Shepard, who had been on a picnic with her boyfriend Bryan Hartnell when the killer attacked in 1969, was able to offer a description of a man wearing a medieval executioner-style hood approaching the couple, before she died of her injuries, according to CNN. Hartnell, who survived the attack, never saw the killer’s face. Authorities have linked at least five murders to The Zodiac Killer—who often taunted police and the media using complex ciphers—but there could be even more victims.
To learn more about how investigators solved a series of slayings in Southern California, watch Serial Killer Capital: Los Angeles Sunday, Oct. 20 at 7 p.m.
