Everything is bigger in Texas, and Texas killers are among the most brutal and notorious in the country. There are and have long been more than a few genuine serial killers in Texas, and a Texas serial killer is much like any other. Beyond the sheer number of serial murderers in the Lone Star State, there are some killers whose crimes are especially shocking and terrible.
This list of serial killers in Texas covers gruesome territory, so the squeamish should be advised. Quite a few of these criminals were captured, incarcerated, and ultimately executed, but some, like the Servant Girl Annihilator and the Phantom Killer, were never identified, let alone caught.
Serial killers from Texas are covered on this list, as well as those who killed in the state but were not Texas natives.
Serial Killers from the Great State of Texas,
Ángel Maturino Reséndiz
"The Railway Killer" robbed, raped and murdered at least 15 people from 1986 to 1999, eight of them in Texas. Resendiz was a nationwide killer, stabbing, bludgeoning, and strangling his way through Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Illinois, and California.
Charles Albright
Convicted of killing at least three prostitutes from 1990 to 1991, the "Dallas Ripper" has another nickname (The Eyeball Killer) that tells you all you need to know about him. As the name suggests, Albright surgically removed the eyes of all three of his victims.
Carl Eugene Watts
"The Sunday Morning Slasher" is believed to have killed as many as 100 women between the ages of 14 to 44, kidnapping and torturing them before killing them. The murders took place in several different states, including his native Texas. Watts was active for eight years throughout the '70s. He died of prostate cancer while in prison.
Dean Corll
"The Candyman" was the stuff of Hollywood horror. In the early 1970s, Corll drugged, raped, mutilated, and murdered at least 27 boys aged 13 to 18 years old.
Joe Ball
In the 1930s, Joe Ball's murder spree was such a media sensation that it nearly became the stuff of tall tales, but Ball's 20 female victims were quite real - as were the alligators he fed their bodies to.
Servant Girl Annihilator
Before Jack the Ripper began his spree in England, the killer known as the Servant Girl Annihilator terrorized Texas like a demonic tall tale. Around New Year's of 1885, at least seven women and one man woke up being dragged out of their beds before being stabbed to death. While the crime remains technically unsolved, a 19-year-old named Nathan Elgin is strongly suspected. Elgin had connections to all the victims, a club foot that matched a footprint found at one of the scenes, and he was shot to death in March of 1886 while attempting to stab a woman to death.
William Suff
"The Lake Elsinore Killer" is one of the most textbook cases of serial murder in American history. From 1974 to 1991, Suff raped, beat, strangled, and stabbed at least 13 - probably more than 20 - women in California and Texas. Even worse, all of those murders occurred after Suff was released from prison for beating his infant child to death. He was sentenced to 70 years in 1974, but was then released on parole after ten years. He was barely out of prison for 18 months before going on his decade-long murder spree.
The Phantom Killer
One of the first serial killers in Texas history, the Phantom killer killed five people and wounded three others from February to May of 1946. "The Texarkana Moonlight Murders" sent the border town of Texarkana into a panic. The entire town spent months going into lockdown at sunset. The entire ordeal reads like a bad campfire ghost story, with teens murdered on lover's lane, harrowing escapes, and a killer who was never found.
John Robert Williams
This over-the-road truck driver killed at least two and possibly as many as a dozen women during 2002 and 2003. His spree covered several states in the Midwest, including Texas, Oklahoma, and Indiana.
Billy Frank Vickers
Vickers was a small-time robber with a decades long history of murdering his victims. He was finally caught an convicted on the last in 1993, and was executed in 2004. During his execution, as his last words, Vickers confessed to 14 more murders - including one that someone else had taken the rap for. In this final confession, Vickers exonerated the man, who had at that point been in prison for more than a decade for the murder of his wife.