A Shopping Addiction
American serial killer Dana Sue Gray murdered three elderly women and attempted to kill a fourth in 1994, all so she could steal their money and credit cards to go on shopping sprees. She plead guilty, but claimed she had an addiction and could not control her urge to shop. She was sentenced to life in prison without a chance at parole
A Serious Hero Complex
Richard Angelo, “The Angel of Death,” was a nurse for Good Samaritan Hospital in Long Island. He felt he wasn’t praised enough for all his “hard work” and “valuable contributions,” so he decided to start killing patients and then save them so everyone would think he was a hero.
To Win Jodie Foster’s Heart—Why Else?
John Hinckley Jr. saw Jodie Foster in “Taxi Driver” and it was love at first sight. He tried multiple times to contact her and ended up moving to New Haven, Connecticut to stalk her while she was as Yale. He even enrolled at Yale, taking a writing class to hone his skills, writing her creepy poems that he’d slip under her door. He fantasized about all the ways he’d get Jodie Foster’s attention and settled on assassinating the president to secure himself a place in history—and a mental ward.
The Looming Nazi Threat
Richard Trenton Chase was an American serial killer nicknamed “The Vampire of Sacramento” because he drank the blood of his victims and cannibalized their remains. His first victim was on December 29, 1977 and he went on to kill five more people in the following month, consuming as much of their remains as he could. What was the reason he gave after being apprehended? Nazis with superpowers forced his hand—naturally.
He thought the Nazis hid poison in his soap dish and were trying to turn his blood to powder, so to stay alive, he had to consume the blood and flesh from others. Apparently, a Nazi UFO was stalking him and he asked interviewer Robert Ressler to get him a radar gun, so he could apprehend the Nazi UFO and have them tried for his crimes (since it was really all their fault in the first place). During this interview, he also pulled out gobs of macaroni and cheese from inside his pants and gave it Ressler, claiming the Nazis were trying to poison his prison food as well.
Chase was tried in 1979 on six counts of first-degree murder. On December 26, 1980, a prison guard found Chase dead in his cell. The autopsy revealed he overdosed on his prescribed anti-depressants—or maybe the Nazis finally poisoned him
Over Concert Tickets
In 2011, a 39-year-old man named Robert Lyons smashed a bottle over his mother’s head and stabbed her in the back so hard the blade broke off. But he didn’t stop there; he grabbed another knife and kept stabbing her—nine times to be exact. After killing her, he went under the sink and grabbed various cleaning products to throw at/on her, not in efforts to clean, just to continue assaulting her. Then he just went out shopping and was arrested at Hooters. What caused this massive explosion? She refused to get him Skybox tickets for an Avril Lavigne concert in Chicago. He suffered from bi-polar disorder, but insisted that wasn’t why he killed her. He was convicted and sentenced to 40 years in prison.
