Two years before he embarked on a killing spree in Buffalo and New York City, Joseph G. Christopher’s friends and family noticed a seismic shift in his personality. The 23-year-old was beset by mood swings and paranoia. His hold on reality was unraveling. In the end, it would prove fatal.

Thanks to an unsuspecting benefactor, Duncan gets a fresh start in North Dakota. But his blog entries begin leaving chilling clues as to what lies ahead. In 2005, his violent impulses lead him to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho and his worst crime yet.

A teenage sex offender carried out horrific crimes against young boys in Washington in the late 1970s before being sent to a treatment program, followed by prison. Fourteen years later, Joseph Edward Duncan III was paroled, free to carry out a murder spree that claimed the lives of three kids.

In the 1970s, after abusing his children and getting away with it, Joseph Kallinger enlists his son in a mission from God that terrorizes the suburbs of Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

The adopted son of cobblers began having hallucinations as early as 15 years old. They were harmless at first — but tragically, they wouldn’t stay that way.

After years of charming women into getting engaged to him, Henri Désiré Landru had perfected his system of making his fiances, and all of their wealth, disappear.

In France, a con man charmed women into getting engaged before robbing them and taking them to his country villa. Where they all mysteriously disappeared.

Numerous childhood traumas led Tsutomu Miyazaki to create a monstrous character in his head named "Rat Man" that eventually took control of his thoughts and actions.

In 2010 a serial killer terrorized an area of Philadelphia known as the Badlands. Police swabbed hundreds of men for DNA before a CODIS backlog revealed they’d had what they needed all along.

Mack Ray Edwards was proud of his career as a heavy machine operator. It made him important on construction sites. But the very same machine he used to build a series of freeways in Los Angeles would also be used to hide the bodies of his murder victims.

When Veronica Compton met Kenneth Bianchi, she was working on a play about serial killers. She interviewed the “Hillside Strangler” as part of her process. But then he charmed his way from research subject to love interest, and Veronica found herself wrapped up in a horrifying scheme.

Wesley Shermantine and Loren Herzog went from hunting animals to preying on humans. Even as they grew older and settled down, they continued their spree.

Wesley Shermantine and Loren Herzog grew up in the California countryside, hunting for deer and elk. In high school, they turned to methamphetamine to recreate the thrill they once got from hunting. But as their drug use intensified, they needed something stronger to maintain their high. They needed to kill, and this time, their prey was human.

At a young age, Mikhail Popkov developed a deeply misogynistic view of the world. As an adult, he used his power as a police officer to act on these feelings, murdering women he deemed to be morally defunct.