Compiling a definitive list of the most evil people in history is nearly impossible, as countless atrocities have been committed in silence, with them never being documented or exposed. While mainstream media often highlights political tyrants and military leaders due to the scale of their impact, this focus can obscure equally horrifying individuals whose crimes defy logic and morality.
In this article, we’ll uncover 10 chilling and lesser-known facts about some of the most twisted people in history—figures whose actions crossed every boundary of human compassion, leaving behind a legacy of cruelty, terror, and psychological torment.
1. Ted Bundy’s Necrophilia: The Chilling Secret Behind His Crimes
Ted Bundy is an infamous serial killer who, during his prime, took the lives of tens of women. He had a charming personality that masked the evil within him, and he used this alluring trait to make women feel comfortable around him before murdering them.
A survivor of Ted's deadly rampage, Kathy Kleiner Rubin, gave a glimpse into his alluring personality in an interview with PEOPLE in 2023. She said,
He wanted people to see what he wanted them to see. He portrayed himself as the good guy. Then at night, he would turn into another thing. That’s when he would go hunting for women. He killed most of his victims in their bedrooms at night. He wanted to take their souls, and keep them, not face them and fight them.
Read more about Bundy's crime timeline at People's Magazine.
What some people may not know is that, besides the crazed killing, Ted also enjoyed having sex with corpses. After ending the lives of his victims, he would clean up their bodies and store them in his hideout, then occasionally visit to perform sexual acts. He only stopped when the bodies began decomposing badly or were eaten by wild animals.
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Necrophilia is a paraphilia that involves a person being attracted to corpses. There are three broad categories of necrophilia: necrophilic homicide, regular necrophilia, and necrophilic fantasy. Bundy belonged in the first category as that involves murdering to acquire a corpse.
Learn more about this paraphilia at JAAPL.
Bundy was eventually captured and killed by electrocution on January 24, 1989.
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Hybristophilia is a strange phenomenon that results in sexual interest in a criminal. Though Bundy was known to have killed more than 30 women and committed heinous acts to their bodies, there were surprisingly some women who fell in love with him. These women, who were Hybristophiles, would send Bundy love letters, with some even containing nude images. During the court trial, Bundy's so-called lovers would try to dress up like his victims, with many even going as far as dying their hair brown.
Read more about the women who fell in love with Ted Bundy at Refinery29.
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| An Image of Ted Bundy |
2. Was Adolf Hitler Addicted to Drugs? The Secret Behind the Führer’s Frenzy
It's almost impossible for a relatively sane person to start a conflict that leads to the loss of tens of millions of lives and the destruction of property without overwhelming guilt and demoralization.
If there's anything history has taught us, it's that wars break people mentally. Though many revered Hitler as their unstoppable Führer, he was just another human who faced severe demoralization from the wars he caused.
Some sources claim that Hitler had a secret that made him appear unfazed: drugs. The German leader was prescribed cocaine and was surprisingly a good patient, taking it regularly.
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Jerrold M. Post, M.D., a doctor who worked with the CIA for 21 years to produce medical and psychological profiles of world leaders, said, "Hitler’s drug use was of epic proportions. In addition to cocaine, the German dictator also took amphetamines, sedatives, and hormones, prescribed by a quack doctor, and he was not the only world leader dependent on drugs."
Read more at the Yale School of Medicine.
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| Adolf Hitler Visiting Soldiers |
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3. Married to Murder: The Twisted Crimes of Charlene and Gerald Gallego
The world has seen a large number of evil people who enjoy torturing and ending the lives of others. However, things get particularly interesting when couples become serial killers; this is the story of Charlene Adell Gallego and Gerald Armond Gallego.
After two failed marriages, Charlene Williams, who had come from a supportive home but fell into the rabbit hole of drugs, met Gerald Gallego, a man who had been married five times, whose mother was a sex worker, and whose father was the first man to be executed with the gas chamber in Mississippi for murdering a police officer during a prison escape and married him.
Their marriage would eventually become the holy grail of nightmares as Gerald would go on to murder over 11 victims, with some being as young as 13. Charlene claimed to enjoy watching the events occur as she told a cellmate that watching Rhonda Scheffler and Kippi Vaught's ordeal made her ecstatic.
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After abducting a couple, Craig Miller and Mary Elizabeth Sowers, a friend noticed Gerald's plate number and reported it to the police, who tracked the car to a Western Union office, where Charlene was expecting a wire transfer from her parents. The couple was arrested on charges of kidnapping and murder. However, they pleaded not guilty. Eventually, Charlene's lawyers got her a plea deal to reduce her sentence to 16 years because she testified against her husband, Gerald. In June 1983, Gerald was sentenced to death in California for Craig Miller and Mary Beth Sowers's death. Charlene was released in July 1997, but Gerald died from cancer on July 18, 2002, while in prison.
Read more about Charlene and Gerald's murders on Wikipedia.
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| Charlene and Gerald's Mugshot |
4. When the Crowd Turns Evil: The Lynching of Will Brown
Many times, people argue that the evilest humans are those who have committed the most grandiose murders. However, they fail to mention events where supposedly average people partake in the most demented acts. Such was the case of William Brown, an African American man lynched by a white mob during the 1919 Omaha race riot.
Brown was accused of raping Agnes Loebeck, a white woman, and this resulted in his demise.
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Preston Love Jr., an author and adjunct professor at the University of Nebraska Omaha Black Studies Department, explained that Will Brown couldn't have assaulted the white woman because it was just physically impossible. He stated, "He had a physical impediment. He was not even able to commit the crime. He had problems on, I forget which side, but he was not strong enough to assault. So that was not taken into effect, so he was a victim of racist criminal justice."
What makes Will Brown's case particularly jarring is the fact that his murderers, who took justice into their own hands without any due legal course, took photos of his corpse and were seemingly happy and proud of their actions. Also, he limped due to his health condition, chronic rheumatism, which would make physically assaulting someone impossible.
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Kathy Aultz with the Douglas County Historical Society recounted how the mob almost killed the mayor, Ed Smith, at the time when he tried desperately to stop them from lynching the innocent Will. She said, "They were attacking it from the south, they were attacking it from the north side, they were ramming through, trying to get through the doors, slashing fire hoses, just really talk about mob mentality. Just really out of control."
Read more about Will Brown at First Alert 6.
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| William Brown's Gravestone |
5. Genghis Khan and the Black Death: Did His Army Spread the Plague?
Was Genghis Khan responsible for the black death? Not directly—but the empire he built undeniably laid the groundwork for its catastrophic spread.
The black death was a bubonic plague pandemic that devastated humanity to its core. It sits at the top of pandemics with a death count of 75 - 200 million people. Some sources claim Genghis Khan had a hand in the rise of the disease, and the facts align with their stance.
At the start of the Mongol Empire, Genghis led a brutal campaign that resulted in the death of about 10% of the world's population. Decades later, remnants of his empire directly led to the black death reaching Europe, with the siege of the city of Caffa.
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The siege of Caffa began in 1343 when Jani Beg of the Golden Horde (originally a Mongol and later a Turkicized khanate), led a blockade of the city. Despite enduring a brutal two-year siege, the fortified Caffa refused to fall. Its defenders held their ground against overwhelming Mongol forces until 1344 when an Italian relief fleet finally arrived. The reinforcements turned the tide—more than 15,000 Mongol soldiers died, with their siege engines destroyed in a decisive counterassault. Riddled with heavy losses and unable to breach the city, the Mongols abandoned the siege. However, Jani Beg restarted the blockade in 1345. In a twist of fate, a new illness ravaged the Mongol army. In a desperate attempt, Jani Beg ordered the corpses of infected soldiers hurled into the city—an act regarded as one of the earliest uses of biological warfare. The disease quickly spread through Caffa and resulted in widespread infection and death. The Genoese defenders of the city—on witnessing the carnage—fled to Europe. However, unknown to them, they were carrying the disease that would eventually come to be known as the Bubonic Plague, or Black Death.
Read more about the Siege of Caffa at Wikipedia.
Fascinated by these disturbing facts? Don’t miss our article on 5 Shocking Government Atrocities and Bizarre Human Experiments—uncover the dark secrets behind real-life government conspiracies and unethical science.
6. Executed Too Late: Innocents Died Before Serial Killer Abul Djabar Was Caught
One thing many people fail to realize is that catching serial killers can be almost impossible because each murder case appears to be slightly different. In the case of Abul Djabar, an Afghan serial killer, things took a dark turn.
In the search for the mysterious killer raping and ending people's lives, the authorities hanged two innocent people. Abul was caught trying to kill a victim and hanged. He killed between 65 and 300 people.
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In the United States, there have been about 200 exonerations of death row inmates from 1972 to the present day. 1 out of every 8 people executed in the U.S. is exonerated from death row, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. The center cited official misconduct and perjury or false accusations as the primary reason for wrongful death row convictions. A death row case that sent waves worldwide was the execution of Marcellus Williams, a man charged with the murder of Felicia Gayle, a former newspaper reporter. Marcellus was executed on September 25, 2024, even though there were many objections from both the victim's family and lawyers. One of his lawyers, Tricia Rojo Bushnell, told CNN, “They will do it even though the prosecutor doesn’t want him to be executed, the jurors who sentenced him to death don’t want him executed and the victims themselves don’t want him to be executed. We have a system that values finality over fairness, and this is the result that we will get from that.”
Read more at the Death Penalty Information Center.
Read more about Marcellus Williams's case at CNN.
7. The Man Tortured by a Thousand Cuts: Zhang Liangbi’s Gruesome Sentence
Sometimes, some people are so evil that they need new laws to punish them. Zhang Liangbi was a man who sexually mutilated 16 underage girls, killing 11 of them. He managed to evade capture until he was about 70 years old. Zhang was sentenced to death by Lingchi and slowly tortured till he died.
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Lingchi, translated to slow slicing or death by a thousand cuts, is a torture method used in China from the year 900 to 1905. It involves slowly mutilating a person by removing portions of their body until they meet their end. This execution method was reserved for people who were said to have committed the worst of crimes.
Read more about Lingchi on Wikipedia.
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| Illustration of Zhang Liangbi's Punishment |
8. Buried Alive: The Sadistic Crimes of Egyptian Gang Leader Ramadan Mansour
The deeper you dig into the human capacity for cruelty, the more you uncover horrifying layers that defy belief. Ramadan Abdel Rehim Mansour is a chilling example. Known as “al-Tourbini,” Mansour was the leader of a ruthless Egyptian street gang and orchestrated a seven-year killing spree that left over 32 boys, aged between 10 and 14, dead across multiple cities.
His crimes were shockingly brutal. After raping his victims, Mansour often threw them from moving trains or, in some cases, buried them alive. His methods were both sadistic and ritualistic, and for years, he managed to evade arrest by constantly relocating and using a network of loyal accomplices who helped conceal his crimes.
When Mansour was captured, his explanation was as twisted as his actions—he claimed a female jinn (a supernatural spirit in Islamic folklore) had possessed him and commanded him to commit the murders. His confession shocked even seasoned investigators. After a high-profile trial, he was sentenced to death and executed in 2010.
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Mansour stated his reason for sexually assaulting boys on a train was his experience as a 10-year-old. He said an older man abused him on the roof of a train, and he decided to do the same. Mansour's family claimed he was mentally ill—stating he was a gentle soul with a good reputation.
9. India’s Deadliest Cult Leader? Thug Behram and His 900 Alleged Murders
In the dark annals of history, very few individuals have personally claimed the lives of more than 150 people. But Thug Behram, the notorious leader of the Thuggee cult in Awadh, central India, stands out as a terrifying exception. Active during the 1830s, Behram is alleged to have murdered over 900 victims, many of them strangled in ritual killings dedicated to the goddess Kali.
While only 125 murders were officially confirmed, the staggering scale of his involvement remains one of the most disturbing records ever documented. Even if just those 125 are accurate, it still places him among the most prolific serial killers in history.
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British authorities captured Thug Behram during their crackdown on the Thuggee cult. Though he initially denied direct involvement, Behram later confessed to witnessing over 900 ritual killings and personally strangling more than 100 victims. He was tried, found guilty, and executed by hanging in 1840.
10. Vlad the Impaler: Evil Monster or National Hero of Romania?
Many articles populate the internet about Vlad the Impaler, the brutal killer who murdered his victims by impaling them with a stake. However, it's shocking to learn that he was considered a hero by some Romanian people who praised him for punishing and executing criminals and unpatriotic boyars.
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| Vlad Tepes |
Conclusion
From political dictators to serial killers, these facts show that evil isn't only systemic but deeply personal, psychological, and historical. In examining these hidden truths, we gain a disturbing but necessary understanding of what happens when morality vanishes.
Have more dark facts to share? Drop a comment below and help us uncover more forgotten horrors.
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