The Most Infamous Crime Committed in Every State

A peaceful town in rural Kansas was the site of one of the country’s most horrific crimes. Parolees Eugene Hickock and Perry Smith were looking for money when they broke into the home of Herbert Clutter, a farmer and community leader in Holcomb. Hickock and Smith savagely killed Herbert; his wife, Bonnie Mae Fox; and their children, 15-year-old Kenyon and 16-year-old Nancy. Both men confessed to the crime, and were later executed. Truman Capote wrote about the murders in one of the great works of crime literature, “In Cold Blood,” made into a movie in 1967.

Working as a hospital orderly at a hospital in the Kentucky town of London, Donald Harvey was anything but a healer. Over a 10-month period, he killed at least 12 patients at Marymount Hospital, and later claimed to have killed 87 more. Although it took two decades, Harvey was eventually convicted and sentenced for his crimes in 1987. He died in prison in 2017.

During the Depression era, lovers and crime partners Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow fascinated the public. In reality, though, they were cold-blooded killers who murdered at least 13 people, including law enforcement officers. Their crimes caught up to them in a shootout in Louisiana when both were killed in a hail of gunfire. Their legend lives on in books and movies, including 1967’s “Bonnie and Clyde.”

Christian Charles Nielsen, a cook at the Sudbury Inn in Bethel, shot the live-in handyman at the Black Bear Bed & Breakfast in nearby Newry, where he was lodging. The next day, he murdered innkeeper Julie Bullard, and the following day dispatched the innkeeper’s daughter and one of her friends – and even killed three dogs that lived on the property. He burned the handyman’s body and dumped it in the woods about 15 miles away, but dismembered the other bodies and left them, along with the dogs, outside the Black Bear. When Nielsen’s father arrived at the B&B after the killings, he discovered those bodies and told police he thought his son was responsible. After Nielsen was arrested, he told police he had had no motive for the crime, but had been thinking about killing people for years. He is serving a life sentence in Maine State Prison.

Between Aug. 29 and Sept. 1, John Thanos killed three teenagers with a sawed-off semi-automatic rifle. One was a hitchhiker he picked up and the others were a gas station attendant and his girlfriend. Found guilty of the crimes, the hardened killer was killed by lethal injection in 1994, the first person executed in the Maryland Penitentiary in 33 years. Unrepentant, Thanos taunted the families of the victims at his trial and claimed that he wished he could dig up their bodies and defile them. As he was about to be executed, he reportedly said “Get on with it.”