The Most Infamous Crime Committed in Every State

A quiet day at Virginia Tech was shattered when Korean-born Seung-Hui Cho shot and killed 32 people on campus. At the time, it was the worst mass murder on a college campus since the Texas Tower shooting at the University of Texas in Austin in 1966. A letter Cho mailed before the crime referenced the Columbine school shooters, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris. Cho killed himself before he could be taken into custody.

Charming Ted Bundy hid a vicious secret: While living in Washington state, he would abduct, rape, and murder women. He often took their corpses back to his apartment. Although Bundy became a suspect in the 1970s, he was dismissed by authorities because of his clean-cut appearance. He was arrested in 1975 and 1977, but escaped both times. Finally, after Bundy was arrested for a traffic violation on Feb. 15, 1978, he was tried for his crimes, sentenced to death, and executed in the electric chair in 1989. Although he confessed to 30 murders, Bundy may have committed many more crimes.

Sixteen-year-old Skylar Neese from Star City thought she was going on a joyride after midnight with her best friends, Sheila Eddy and Rachel Shoaf, when she snuck out her bedroom window in Star City. When she didn’t come home, it was initially assumed that she was a runaway. When police began interviewing Neese’s schoolmates, though, Shoaf confessed, saying that she and Eddy had decided that they no longer wanted to be friends with Neese and so they killed her, dumping her body in the Pennsylvania woods. Shoaf and Eddy are currently in prison.

Jeffrey Dahmer cruised gay bars, malls, and bus stops, looking for men and boys he could lure to his home with promises of sex or money. But the men, mostly African-American, were strangled to death instead. Dahmer kept grisly reminders of his victims, such as skulls, and in some later cases ate some of their flesh or had sex with their dead bodies. All told, Dahmer killed 17 men and boys. Sentenced to 16 life terms, Dahmer was killed by another inmate in 1995.

When openly gay student Matthew Shepard walked into a bar in Laramie, he chatted up two patrons, Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney. Rather than seeing him as a new friend, the two men hatched a plan to kill the 21-year-old slightly built Shepard. After driving out of town with him, the two brutally beat Shepard and tied him to a fence in the frigid cold. He died five days after he was discovered with four skull fractures and a crushed brain stem. Henderson and McKinney are serving two consecutive life terms for kidnapping and murder in what authorities believe was a hate crime against gay people. Although tragic, Shepard’s murder propelled the LGBTQ rights movement into national prominence.