Texas' 11 Worst Serial Killers

Editor's Note, 01/30/2025: This list was originally published in 2016. It has been revised and updated to include more current information. 

Serial killers continue to capture the attention of Americans by way of popular podcasts, best-selling books, acclaimed documentaries and buzzed-about TV series. Although Texas wasn't home to the most notorious serial killers, such as the Green River Killer, the Golden State Killer, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer or Richard Ramirez, the Lone Star State has been been the scene of many prolific murderers. 

To be clear, this list doesn't include Texas' deadliest mass killers — those who murdered many in a single attack the way George Hennard did when he gunned down 23 at a Luby's Cafeteria in Killeen in 1991; or Charles Whitman, the UT Tower sniper, who killed 18 in 1966; or Nidal Hasan, who killed 13 at Fort Hood in 2009. Also not included in this list are the single-incident mass shootings in Sutherland Springs (2017), Santa Fe (2018), El Paso (2019) and Uvalde (2022).  

As sobering as the list of recent mass shootings in Texas is, the numbers involved in even those instances pale in comparison to the likely body counts left by the most prolific serial killers in state history. In most cases, these murderers spread their crimes out over a number of years, and some did so in a variety of locales. For the purpose of this list, we've added the murders each killer is suspected of committing (or claims to have committed) to the ones for which they have been convicted.  

1. Carl “Coral” Eugene Watts

Suspected to have up to 100 victims (12 confirmed victims in Texas)
One could argue the Killeen native beat the system when he died of cancer a week after he was sentenced to his second life term in Michigan, just three years into his first one. Watts told authorities he killed 80 women in Texas and Michigan and possibly as many as 100.

Call it dumb luck for the man known as the Sunday Morning Slasher, who used all kinds of methods to kill his victims, females between the ages of 14 and 44. The son of an Army officer and a kindergarten teacher, Watts confessed to murder fantasies when he was an adolescent but operated for eight years as an adult — from 1974 to 1982 — without being tagged, largely because he left no DNA.

In 1982, he was busted breaking into a Houston home where two young women lived. He served a couple of decades in the Texas justice system, which gave him 60 years in exchange for his confessing to 12 murders, and then Michigan nailed him with life sentences in 2004 and 2007 for two more killings. But he died in prison at age 53.

2. Robert Ben Rhoades

Suspected to have up to 50 victims (two confirmed victims were Texans)
Robert Ben Rhoades, a long-haul truck driver known as "The Truck Stop Killer," had his home base in Houston but carted his victims all over the U.S., picking them up and then torturing them in his cab for so many highway miles that their hair was reportedly longer when their bodies were finally dumped than it was when they were captured. Though suspected of an attempted murder in 1980 in Houston (and as many as three per month in the months or even years before that), his first confirmed kill was in January 1990.

Rhoades picked up a married couple from Seattle who were hitchhiking in Texas, Candace Walsh and her husband Douglas Zyskowski. The husband was killed and dumped in Texas right away, but he kept Walsh in his torture chamber for more than a week, taking pictures of her, raping and beating her, and then killing her and dumping her hundreds of miles away in Utah.

Two young runaways from Texas were his next victims a month later. Regina Kay Walters, 14, and her boyfriend, Ricky Lee Jones, were scooped up and met the same end: The boy was killed and dumped immediately, but Walters was kept for what investigators believe could have been more than a month, with Rhoades taking photos of her and calling her father intermittently — once from Oklahoma, another time from Ennis. Her body was finally found in a barn in Illinois, and it was her death that eventually landed Rhoades in prison for life.

3. Genene Jones

Suspected to have up to 60 victims
The details of how Genene Jones killed babies are especially brutal. According to an ABC News interview with the mother of one of her victims in 2013, Jones, a nurse, would administer doses of succinylcholine, a muscle relaxant, with a syringe. Authorities believe Jones murdered as many as 60 babies through lethal injection. She was sentenced to life in prison 1985, was nearly a beneficiary of a 1977 Texas law that would have allowed her release in 2018. But new murder charges were filed, and in 2020, Jones pleased guilty to the 1981 murder of an 11-year-old boy. The soonest Jones can be eligible for parole now is in 2037. 

4. Tommy Lynn Sells

Suspected to have between 22 and 70 victims (at least three in Texas)
Tommy Lynn Sells was convicted of two murders and officially suspected of 22. But authorities were ready to believe he had committed at least 70 by the time he was executed in Texas in 2014. The death of 13-year-old Kaylene Jo "Katy" Harris of Del Rio in 1999 sent him to the death chamber, but he was also convicted in the rape and killing of a 9-year-old in San Antonio and linked to dozens more spanning more than a decade.

Nicknamed "The Coast to Coast Killer," Sells experienced a childhood rife with trauma, from the death of his twin sister at a young age to his systematic sexual victimization by his mother’s boyfriend (with her blessing) throughout his formative years — and it was this he blamed for his actions. His first confirmed killing was in 1985, but Sells has said his first was earlier than that — when he was 16. He claims he walked in on a man molesting a young boy and killed the man in a rage.

5. Dean Corll

Suspected to have up to 29 victims
Know as "The Candy Man," Corll was killed in 1973 by two young men who helped him round up more than two dozen boys, mostly teens, whom he raped and killed in Houston in the early 1970s. An Army officer and radio repairman at Fort Hood, Corll was honorably discharged to help run the family candy business in Houston in 1965.

The Corll Candy Co. was across the street from an elementary school, and Corll was known for giving out free candy, especially to teenage boys. His teen accomplices would lure victims to Corll’s home with promises of a party or a ride home, and then Corll would handcuff them to what authorities called a “torture board” and assault them for days until he killed them, either by strangling or shooting them. The accomplices would get $200 for each victim. During Corll’s last abduction, one of the accomplices told him he’d gone too far, grabbed his gun and shot him in the head. Police said Corll was officially connected to 28 murders, and possibly 29.

6. Billy Chemirmir

Suspected to have 22 to 24 victims
Billy Chemirmir, the most recent addition to this list, was arrested in 2018, ending at least a two-year stretch of terror. The Kenyan immigrant was convicted of only two murders, but he was indicted for 20 more. Those who have followed Chemirmir’s case closely have said it’s impossible to know just how many people he killed, thanks in part to the method he most commonly used.

Chemirmir often posed as a healthcare worker or a maintenance worker to gain access to elderly women’s homes. By suffocating his victims with a pillow, he often made it difficult for authorities to investigate the deaths as murders.

“The method Chemirmir used is a big crack,” journalist and podcaster Charlie Scudder, the host of the Chemirmir-focused Unnatural Causes podcast, says. “Smothering deaths don’t leave the same signs as a strangulation, where there’s bruising, hand marks, a broken trachea and that kind of thing. When someone gets stabbed, there’s a knife wound. Someone gets shot, there’s a bullet wound, right? Smothering deaths don't do that; they leave very few traces.”

Chemirmir was killed in his cell by another inmate in Texas on Sept. 19, 2023.

7. Joe Ball

Suspected to have up to 20 victims
Known as "The Butcher of Elmendorf" and "The Bluebeard of South Texas," Ball called himself the Alligator Man because he reportedly liked to throw live cats and dogs to the gators that lived in the pond he built behind the bar he owned in suburban San Antonio. But that wasn’t the bootlegger-turned-bar owner's most violent hobby.

He killed two women who worked at his bar and buried them at the beach, police believe, then shot himself to death when confronted by authorities. The reports of his murders in the double digits are said to be exaggerated and the exploits of the Alligator Man are reportedly more believed in South Texas than outside it. But some of his employees, ex-girlfriends and his wife went missing before he died and never turned up again. The man who led authorities to the bodies of the two women claimed that he had been Ball’s accomplice and swore there were as many as 20 victims but the gators had eaten the bodies.

8. Angel Maturino Resendiz 

Suspected to have up to 18 or more victims (nine in Texas)
The train-hopping Maturino Resendiz, aka "The Railroad Killer," confessed to 15 murders in Texas, Florida, Illinois, Georgia and Kentucky. He is suspected of another in California.

Sometimes he would rape his victims; most of the time he would take their money and jewelry and send it home to his wife in Mexico. Some of the dead were attacked in their homes — Leafie Mason, 87, was beaten to death with her antique iron in her home in Hughes Springs, Texas. On June 4, 1999, Noemi Dominguez, 26, was raped and killed with a pickax in her Houston home. Hours later on that day, the same pickax was used to kill Josephine Konvicka, 73, in Schulenberg, where Resendiz had driven Dominguez’s car. He left the pickax in Konvicka’s head.

Most of the murders occurred near the railroad tracks, where he would jump on and off passing trains. Some authorities also believe he’s responsible for at least some of the murders of the young women of Juarez, Mexico, whose bodies turned up by the dozens in the 1990s, several near the tracks. Texas executed him in 2006.

9. Carroll Cole

Suspected to have up to 16 or more victims (three in Texas)
As a kid, Cole endured taunting by classmates for his “girl’s name” and, as an adult, confessed to killing one of them at age 10 by drowning him — a death that, for decades, was thought to be an accident. In addition to the bullying, his mother cheated on his father, dressed him up as a girl and beat him into keeping his mouth shut about her affairs.

All of this, he would later tell authorities, would trigger his killing spree across three states, starting with a woman he picked up at a bar in San Diego. In 1980, his travels across the country brought him to Dallas, where he strangled three women that year. The third time, the authorities caught him with the body. If it weren’t for his confession of the murder of some 14 women in Texas and elsewhere, he might have been released. He was sentenced to life in prison in Texas in 1981 but Nevada gave him the death penalty in 1984, and he was executed a year later.

10. Kenneth McDuff

Suspected to have up to 14 victims
After evading three death sentences and eventually walking free after killing three people, including a 16-year-old girl he raped and choked with a broomstick in suburban Fort Worth, McDuff was allowed to continue murdering a new generation of young women in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Convicted of bribing a member of the parole board that freed him, McDuff carried the nickname “The Broomstick Killer” into Waco and points in North Texas, where he is believed to have killed 10 more people, including several teenage prostitutes, and to have been responsible for at least 14 total murders. In 1992, he was living under an assumed name in Kansas City when a coworker saw him on the TV show America’s Most Wanted.” McDuff was executed in 1998 for the death of a young store clerk in Waco. 

11. Henry Lee Lucas

Suspected to have at least 11 victims
Lucas, aka "The Confession Killer," could arguably be at the top of our list, as he confessed to hundreds of murders, but he’s not because it is assumed that he’s lying about most of them. Convicted of 11 murders, Lucas is still, however, a unique case.

His upbringing in Virginia, it could be reasonably argued, was a textbook example of how to create a serial killer. He was massively rejected as a child at school because his mother forced him to cross dress and because he had to wear a glass eye after his brother poked out his real one with a knife. His mother was a prostitute who forced him to watch her have sex with her clients. His drunken dad died when Lucas was an adolescent. A few years later, Henry said he killed a girl but took back his confession.

In 1960, Lucas killed his mother during an argument, claimed self-defense and served 10 years in prison before getting an early release. In custody in 1983 in Texas, where he was suspected of two murders, Lucas was again a special case: He was handled with care by authorities, credited with clearing hundreds or even thousands of murders, given special treatment, taken out to eat and generally plied with the perks reserved only for those who say they did it.

A Dallas journalist eventually got wind of his agenda and outed him as a liar. Lucas was eventually convicted of 11 homicides and sentenced to death for the murder of an unidentified woman whose body was found in 1979 and who authorities and the media nicknamed “Orange Socks.” But after new evidence cast his confession into doubt, then-Gov. George W. Bush commuted his sentence to life imprisonment in 1998. Lucas died of a heart failure in prison in 2001 at age 64.