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5 Strange Ways Murderers Were Caught

Blood Bank- 

Joseph Paul Franklin was an American serial killer who committed his first murder in 1977, the alleged Golden Age of Serial Killers. He was a rabid white supremacist and neo-Nazi who looked up to Joseph Goebbels, the nefarious Nazi who killed his own children with suicide capsules. He started off with minor assaults, using pepper spray on people of color, and then graduated to robbery and eventually murder, using a hunting rifle as his tool of the trade to claim the lives of over 20 people and injure more. He considered his murders a "mission" whereby he would fight against people who were not of the white race. On October 8, 1977, Franklin would commit the crime that he would later be sentenced to die for, when he climbed a telephone pole by hammering 25-centimeter (10 in) nails into the pole, setting up a makeshift gun rest, and firing, killing a man who was leaving a synagogue. But Franklin would mark a major change in the way criminals were captured by being one of the first notable serial killers to be caught by using criminal profilingFranklin was able to evade detection for a few years, until a police officer noticed his gun in his car and pulled him over, ultimately arresting him. He was brought in for questioning on warrants but escaped police custody. However, the FBI had their man, or so they were pretty certain from the profile at the time. 

They noted two details which helped them pin Franklin to the murders: his tattoos, which were provocative and racist in nature, and his drifter lifestyle, which helped him evade capture but also forced him to rely on payments from blood banks to survive. After he escaped to Florida, Franklin was recognized by someone who operated a blood bank and was turned in to the FBI from there. His reliance on blood donations ended up being his downfall, in combination with the criminal profile the FBI was able to put together.

High School-

Richard Trenton Chase, otherwise known as the Vampire of Sacramento, was a serial killer from Northern California, and he was quite the literal vampire. Chase was a complete oddity of a human being, even as far as serial murderers go, in that he not only believed that he needed to drink blood to be happy, but he delusionally believed that it was the only thing that would make and keep him well. Suffering from bouts of hypochondria, Chase thought that the only thing that would cure him of the various sicknesses that his sick mind would dream up was the consumption—or even injection—of animal or human blood. 

Chase would ultimately kill six people. He would test front doors at random, and if he found one unlocked, he would go inside and murder whoever lived there to consume their blood. The guy was obsessed with blood, to the point of being hospitalized for injecting animal blood into his veins. In the end, Chase was caught by a quite unusual turn of events, when a young woman he had gone to high school with recognized him when he approached her car. Richard had bloodstains on his shirt. She notified the police of her suspicion that Richard Chase was indeed the vampire who'd been murdering people, and the police were able to track him down in his apartment, where they found his blood-soaked sweatshirt. He was brought to trial, surprisingly found competent, and sentenced to die. Richard Trenton Chase killed himself in prison via a drug overdose in 1980.

Footprints-

Gordon Veitch, unlike the other people on much of this list, wasn't a serial killer but a murderer who killed one person in Scotland. On March 15, 2013, he killed Brian Bathgate with a knife. After Veitch stabbed Bathgate in the neck and fled the scene, an 18-month-long investigation ensued, in which detectives tried to piece together what happened on that fateful night in 2013. Left behind, unbeknownst to Veitch, was the one thing that would get him caught through new investigative analyses: footprints. Gordon Veitch left bloody footprints at the scene, and forensics were able to determine his specific walk, with his right foot pointed outward, and match the footprints to the crime scene, gaining them a conviction. Under Scottish law, Veitch was sentenced to a minimum of 16 years in prison for the murder of Brian Bathgate.

Chewing Gum-

Gary Raub was a murderer who killed a 70-year-old woman from Augusta, Maine, named Blanche Kimbal after entering her home way back in 1976. Blanche Kimbal fought her attacker, but it was a losing battle, and she was stabbed over a dozen times in her head and chest. It took decades to solve the case, but Raub was finally arrested for his crime in October 2012, when the police department in Augusta conducted a review and some lab tests which singled Raub out as a possible match for DNA, making him a suspect.

Raub had been held and questioned back in 1976, but it wasn't until DNA testing on blood found at the Kimbal crime scene proved to be from a man that the focus really narrowed on Raub, who was living in Seattle. Then, the police devised a genius ruse, a plan to trick this killer into submission: They held a fake experiment that involved chewing gum, and an undercover officer got the now-63-year-old Raub to participate. They were able to extract DNA from the gum and match it to the blood found at the crime scene all the way back from 1976. Gary Raub would be brought up on murder charges for the slaying of Blanche Kimbal.

Exhumation-

This was an unusually cold case, and an unusual, long path was necessary to catch a murderer. Way back in 1957, Maria Ridulph was murdered in the middle of town. A man walked up to her and her friend, gave her a piggyback ride, and then left. Maria would then go home to get some toys and was never seen alive again. Jack McCollough (aka John Tessier) was the man, and he was questioned but never charged with anything for lack of evidence. In 1994, Jack McCollough's mother confessed on her deathbed that she had made a false alibi for Jack back in 1957. His mother even implicated him in the crime, claiming that he did it. 

But the case wouldn't be reopened until 2008. As detectives pieced the puzzle together, they were forced to exhume the body of Maria Ridulph in 2011, in hopes of gathering evidence against McCollough. Their efforts paid off. Jack McCollough was brought to trial for the 1957 murder of Maria Ridulph in 2012 and convicted. However, a judge dismissed his conviction in 2017.