Violence Against Animals and Humans – The Link Personified

• David Berkowitz – also known as the Son of Sam killer, killed a neighbor’s dog, which he claimed had told him to commit murder.
   
• Ted Bundy – well known serial killer of perhaps as many as 40 women. As a child he spent time with his grandfather who was known to torment animals. Bundy admitted to killing animals when young, before killing women.
   
• Carroll Cole – executed for 5 murders and suspected of 30 more. Admitted that his first murder was the strangulation of a puppy.
   
• Jeffrey Dahmer – imprisoned for killing, mutilating, and occasionally eating 17 men. When young, he was fascinated with dead animals and often practiced taxidermy on roadkill. He was known to have impaled the heads of animals he had killed on stakes in his yard. Neighbors were disgusted, but never reported this to animal welfare or social services.
   
• Richard Davis – imprisoned for the murder of Polly Klaas. As a youngster he had set cats on fire and laughed when his own dog broke its neck and died while chasing a boulder he had pushed down a hill.
   
• Albert DeSalvo – also known as the Boston Strangler, killed 13 women. As a youth, he had trapped dogs and cats in orange crates and shot arrows through the boxes for fun.
   
• Edmund Kemper – convicted of killing 8 women including his mother. Admitted to a history of torturing dogs and cats.
   
• Shawn Novak – at age 15, sentenced to life in prison for slashing the throats of two young boys. Only after he was accused of the murders, schoolmates and neighbors reported that he wore a cat’s paw on a necklace, bragged about killing animals, and showed them dead birds, cat heads, and animal bones.
   
• Patrick Sherrill – killed 14 co-workers before committing suicide. He was known to have stolen the pets of neighbors and given them to his dog to kill and mutilate.
   
• Earl Shriner – imprisoned for sexually mutilating a young boy. Admitted to hanging cats, slaughtering chickens, and sticking firecrackers in the anuses of dogs.
   
• Eric Smith – at the young age of 13, beat a four-year-old neighbor to death. Four years earlier, he had choked his neighbor’s cat to death with a hose clamp.
   
• Bobby Thompson – at age 11, kidnapped and killed a two-year-old boy. He was found to have shot pigeons with a BB gun and cut off their heads while still alive. He also placed a kitten on a railroad track to watch it be cut in half by an oncoming train.