We’ve talked about this before in our piece “Who is the smartest serial killer?” The average IQ is between 95 and 105. The Serial Killer Information Center says that the average IQ of a serial killer is 94.5.
But which one is worse than the average? Let’s find out The Shocking Truth About the Least Intelligent serial killers.
The Shocking Truth About the Least Intelligent Serial Killers
Fred West
Fred West, a rapist and killer from Gloucestershire, couldn’t read or write and didn’t care much about the rest of the world. He was only interested in sex and sexual sadism. He never really went to school and had a lot of major head injuries, many of which he got when he tried to sexually assault women in the area.
IQ tests aren’t perfect, but they can give you a good idea of how smart you are. Still, someone who gets an IQ score of 81 is not likely to be the smartest person in the room. Even though most people think that when Aileen Wuornos got an 81 on her tests, she did so by answering questions wrongly on purpose to make them not count. So angry was she at being forced to take them.
No matter what, most people still think that the most famous female serial killer in history was not very smart. It’s hard to say how much of that was because of her very rough, chaotic, and violent youth.
Henry Lee Lucas
Henry Lee Lucas did not have a lot of intelligence. Even though he didn’t go to school and grew up in a shack where he watched his sex-worker mother every day, he was able to fool the cops for a long time as an adult.
No one knows for sure how many people he killed. He constantly admitted to murders all over America to hide the real number and keep being useful to the police. Police were happy to let him in and listen to his stories because they wanted to close some open cases. During these statements, Lucas was treated much better than a common killer who was just sitting in jail.
Otis Toole
If you want to be “The Smart One” in a dangerous twosome and your IQ is 84, you need to find someone with a very low IQ to team up with. Henry Lee Lucas hired Otis Toole, who was just as evil as he was but had nine IQ points less than he did.
Of course, a person’s IQ has nothing to do with whether or not they want to or can commit a crime, but Otis Toole was thought to be a simpleton regardless of his score.
Gary Ridgway
Gary Ridgway was a serial killer who killed a lot of people, even though he had an IQ in the low 80s and barely made it through school. He was called “The Green River Killer,” and he was found guilty of killing 49 people, though the real number may have been closer to 90.
For nearly two decades, the investigation into one of the country’s most prolific serial killers remained unsolved.
Then, in late 2001, authorities credited a breakthrough in DNA technology for the arrest of suspect Gary Ridgway. https://t.co/I1g1LDfi3P pic.twitter.com/pIwTFtjtGy
— NBC News (@NBCNews) March 3, 2023
The killer from Washington State seems to have put what little intelligence he did have into the killing. He might not have been smart in school, but he was well-organized and easy to talk to. This helped him gain faith and hide what he had done.
Derrick Todd Lee
Between 1992 and 2003, ‘The Baton Rouge Killer’ brutally killed seven women. He did this even though his IQ was only 65, which is a very low number.
But the people who were looking into him weren’t doing a great job of being smart. Lee was a strong suspect, but profilers often ignored him because they thought the killer was a white guy. Lee wasn’t in the picture because he was black.
The tweet below confirms the death of Derrick Todd Lee:
Louisiana serial killer Derrick Todd Lee dies, official says https://t.co/8YgDRwXndd pic.twitter.com/n4nIVVbzhg
— Fox News (@FoxNews) January 21, 2016
With the help of DNA proof, he was finally caught and convicted. Even though his IQ was below the normal level for someone to be able to stand trial.
Dennis Rader
Between 1974 and 1991, a man who called himself “The BTK Killer” (which stands for “Bind, Torture, Kill”) terrorized Kansas by killing ten people in some of the most brutal home attacks ever. The world didn’t find out his real name, Dennis Rader, until 2005.
Rader was free for 14 years, which means he got away with his terrible acts.
So you’re not so dumb, huh? The problem is that he couldn’t stop thinking about it. In 2004, he started sending insulting letters to the police, probably because he was bored and wanted to relive his bad past for fun.
Even though he was found guilty mostly because of a DNA match, Rader had already put himself on the police’s radar by sending them floppy disks with papers on them. Disks with information that led the cops right to him.
Now, it might be tempting to let Rader off the hook for being stupid. After all, back in 2005, who knew much about metadata? But he didn’t start sending floppy disks until he asked if it was safe. “Can I talk to Floppy without being linked to a computer?” “Tell the truth,” he wrote.
Wichita cops lied and then found out who BTK was. They were shocked by how much he trusted them. It was Dennis Rader, a man who was almost too stupid to believe for getting caught the way he did.
Get ahead of the curve by accessing breaking news and insightful articles on californiaexaminer.net – start exploring today!