Earle Leonard Nelson was a quiet boy, an avid student of the Bible, who aspired one day to be a minister. And then there was the accident, the blow to the head that unleashed the terrible voices that commanded him to kill all the Jezebels of the world. Somehow equating hardworking landladies with prostitutes, Nelson became the “Gorilla Man” who strangled 22 female victims before he was captured and the demonic voices were silenced.

       The voices told Herbert Mullin that California was about to be destroyed by a cataclysmic earthquake and a giant tidal wave unless he immediately began sacrificing human life to Satan. The voices nullified Mullin’s squeamishness by declaring that the sacrificial victims would actually be grateful for being given the opportunity to serve the greater good of California. Before he was stopped on February 13, 1972, Mullin had sacrificed thirteen victims and, in his mind, had become the Savior of California.The worship of the horned image of Satan has been a trait among a number of serial killers (iStock).

       Albert Fish killed and ate between eight and fifteen children, castrated a large number of small boys, and molested more than 100 children during the course of a long criminal career. Among his perversions: he was the writer of obscene letters, a coprophage (eater of excrements), a pedophile, a masochist who inserted needles into his body, a sadist, vampire, cannibal, and lust-murderer. All was well in Fish’s worldview, however, because the voices had informed him that he was the new messiah, come to be an instrument of God’s vengeance upon a sinful and depraved humanity. When he was executed in 1935, he displayed no fear, seeming to take an interest and even pleasure in the operation of the electric chair.

       In October 1981, Satanic High Priest Robin Gecht and three of his followers were arrested following a series of grisly cannibalistic murders in Chicago. Gecht heeded the demonic voices that ordered him to conduct elaborate sadistic rituals of mutilations and the eating of the flesh of their female victims.

       When the jury passed sentence on Richard Ramirez in 1985, he was convicted of twelve first-degree murders and 30 other major offenses of rape and burglary. Throughout his trial, the infamous “Night Stalker” flashed the devil’s pentagram scratched into his hand or placed his fingers to the side of his head to fashion demon’s horns. Defiantly, he declared his worship of Satan.

       In 1977, young Jimmy Riva began to hear the voices that told him to haunt graveyards and to kill small animals and drink their blood. Eventually, on a cold, rainy day in April 1980, the demon whispers pronounced him a vampire who would gain strength from drinking his grandmother’s blood.

       In May 1983, Michael and Suzan Carlson went on trial in San Francisco for obeying their demonic visions to hunt down and kill three victims that the voices identified as witches that must be slain to set California right.

       While other households in the Queens district of New York watched the Thanksgiving Day parade on November 22, 1990, Joseph Bergamini honored the satanic promise that he was immortal by stabbing and killing his mother and wounding his father.

       As a teenager, Mark David Chapman had experienced a vision of Jesus which led him to become an advocate for the common man. When the visions later revealed the popular idol John Lennon was no longer a working-class hero, but a prosperous businessman, the voices decreed that the former Beatle must die on the night of December 8, 1980.

       In June 1988, Jason Rose and John Jones were indicted for the ritual sacrifice of nineteen-year-old Melissa Ann Meyer. The two Satanists cast their own fate in the form of life imprisonment when it was revealed that they videotaped their human sacrifice.

       Inspired by the vampire movie Lost Boys, Tim Erickson and other Minnesota teenagers decide to form a vampire cult in March 1987. They murdered a drifter and drank his blood.

       July 1991, Jaime Rodriguez is convicted and sentenced to life for beheading a teenage runaway as a sacrifice to Satan. He also severed all of her fingers to wear as a charm around his neck. Augustin Pena, a fellow Satanist, kept the girl’s head in his refrigerator.

       April 1994, Carey Grayson and three others murdered a female hitchhiker in Birmingham. Police say the victim was mutilated in an apparent ritual that involved cannibalism.

       May 1996, three Satanists in San Luis Obispo tortured and murdered a fifteen-year-old girl. The demon-possessed tell arresting officers that they hoped the sacrifice of a virgin would put them in good with Satan.

       September 1997, a teenager in Kobe, Japan, claimed that an evil spirit possessed him when he bludgeoned to death a primary school girl and killed and decapitated an eleven-year-old boy.

       January 1998, Charity Miranda, a 17-year-old cheerleader from New York, was killed by her mother who feared that the girl was possessed by demons. The teenager’s sisters witnessed the murder and chanted and prayed over Charity’s body.

       October 2000, Brandi Blackbear, a 15-year-old Oklahoma high school student, was suspended for fifteen days for casting a spell on her teacher and causing her to become ill.

       January 2008, Lawrence Douglas Harris, Sr., murdered his two stepdaughters in their Sioux City, Iowa, home after an ill-performed ritual caused the casting of a spell to go bad.