What the real life serial killers looked like compared to the Mindhunter cast (2024)

Charles Manson features in series 2, episode 5 of Mindhunter, and he's perhaps one of the most infamous serial killers included in the Netflix show. Manson is played by actor Damon Herriman in Mindhunter, and - here's a fun fact for you - he also plays the ex-cult leader in Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

Charles Manson was the leader of 'The Family' cult, and he inspired his followers to carry out violent killings - as well as murdering several people himself. Perhaps the most notorious of The Family's murders was the massacre of some of Hollywood's "most beautiful people" on August 9, 1969. Charles Manson didn't physically carry out the mass murders, but directed a group of 'Family members' to kill famous actress Sharon Tate (who was 8 months pregnant at the time with director Roman Polanski's baby), writer Wojciech Frykowski, and three others. The following night, the same group murdered a wealthy couple, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, who lived nearby.

The Family is thought to have been responsible for 35 murders, although not all of the cases were tried in court so this number is unverified.

Charles Manson was found guilty in 1971 of first-degree murder for directing the Hollywood killings, and was sentenced to death. This was later reduced to life imprisonment when California suspended the death penalty retrospectively in 1972.

Charles Manson lived the rest of his life in prison until his death in 2017, in a state hospital in Bakersfield, California. He was 83-years-old.

Mindhunter's creepy ADT serviceman is a storyline threading through both series. Played by actor Sonny Valicenti, the character is widely thought to be based on Dennis Rader - also known as the BTK (bind, torture, kill) killer.

Former church leader Rader murdered 10 people - mostly women - in their homes in Wichita, Kansas, between 1974 and 1991. After each kill, the murderer would write letters to both the media and the police to boast about having "Bound, Tortured and Killed" the victims.

It wasn't until 2005, however, that Dennis Rader was found to be the BTK killer. Aged 60 at the time, he was charged with the murder of all 10 victims, to which he pleaded guilty. He was sentenced to 10 life sentences, without possibility of parole for at least 40 years, by which time he would be 100.

Rader is currently serving out his sentence in the El Dorado Correctional Facility in Kansas. In an interview with Oxygen last year, the murderer described what drove him to kill: "I actually think it’s a demon that’s within me," he said. "At some point and time, it entered me when I was young. And it basically controlled me."

Charles 'Tex' Watson, portrayed in Mindhunter by Christopher Backus, was one of Charles Manson's Family members. He was responsible for the deaths of Sharon Tate and friends in August 1969, with many reports suggesting he was the 'leader' of the massacre.

Two months after the killings, Watson fled to Texas. He was arrested 8 weeks later, but managed to resist being extradited to California for a trial alongside Manson and the other three women accused of murdering the La Biancas and the 'Hollywood elite'.

Despite this, Watson was charged with seven counts of first-degree murder, for which he was tried in a separate Californian case. He was found guilty and sentenced to death, but just like Charles Manson, had his sentence revised to life imprisonment when the death penalty was quashed.

Now 73, Charles 'Tex' Watson is still serving his sentence in Mule Creek prison near Sacramento. Before conjugal visits were banned in Californian prisons in 2003, the prisoner married a woman and fathered four children all while residing in jail.

Elmer Wayne Henley Jnr. is featured in Mindhunter when members of the FBI Behavioural Science Unit interview him for his role in the Houston Mass Murders.

Henley is played by actor Robert Aramayo in the Netflix show, and the real life serial killer is currently serving out six life sentences in the Mark W. Michael Unit prison in Tennessee.

Henley was just 15-years-old when he began hanging out regularly with Dean Corll, also known as "The Candyman", who was responsible for what was known as "the deadliest case of serial murders in American history" at the time.

Edmund Kemper was a recurring 'character' in series 1 of Mindhunter - and actor Cameron Britton is back playing the real life murderer in the second series, too.

Kemper talks in the series about his damaged relationship with his mother and grandmother - and his subsequent crimes evidence that. In 1964, at the age of just 15, Kemper shot his grandmother, Maude Matilda Hughey Kemper, after the two had an argument. Shortly afterwards, when his grandfather returned home from doing the shopping, Kemper killed him with a rifle in the driveway. He murdered his grandad because, that way, he 'would not have to find out that his wife was dead'.

The teenager was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, and Kemper was sent to the California Youth Authority. There, however, psychiatrists disagreed with the young killer's initial diagnosis, and re-assessed him as having a personality trait disorder. Kemper displayed the perfect prisoner behaviour, and managed to endear himself enough to be awarded parole. He was released from prison on his 21st birthday, on December 18, 1969.

Kemper - by this time, a 6ft 9, 21 stone man - didn't kill again for another three years. But by 1972, he began another murdering spree. He murdered 18-year-old hitchhiking students, Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Mary Luchessa, in May 1972, and over the next 9 months killed four more young women. Kemper's string of murders came to an end when he ended up murdering his own mother, Clarnell Strandberg, and her friend Sally Hallett.

Kemper decapitated his mother and proceeded to do unthinkable things to her body. Years later, describing why he'd attempted to cut out his mother's vocal cords after her death, Kemper said: "That seemed appropriate - as much as she'd bitched and screamed and yelled at me over so many years."

Edmund Kemper turned himself into the police following those last murders, and even requested the death sentence. Instead, after he was found to be legally sane and guilty of eight further murders, he was sentenced to eight consecutive life sentences. Kemper is now 70, and is still serving his prison time in the California Medical Facility.

In season 2, episode 3 of Mindhunter, FBI Agent Jim Barney gives William Pierce Jr - known as "Junior" - sweets in exchange for talking about his murders. The edible incentive is a reference to the black and white photograph above of Pierce in prison surrounded by confectionary. Michael Filipowich portrays the killer in the Netflix series.

Pierce was released from prison on parole in 1970, less than halfway through a 10-20 year sentence for burglary. Prison psychologists warned he was likely a sociopath, and that he "may be dangerous to himself or others," but he was freed nonetheless.

One month after being released from prison, Pierce killed his first victim, and later murdered a further eight people throughout the following year. One of his victims was a 13-year-old girl, Margaret "Peg" Cuttino.

William Pierce Jr was arrested in March 1971, and confessed to the murders. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1973, but later appealed the conviction after saying his confession to the murders didn't count because he 'wasn't read his Miranda rights'.

Pierce's appeals were continuously denied, and he is still alive, aged 88, serving his time at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification State Prison.

Richard Speck, played by Jack Erdie, is a serial killer responsible for 8 deaths, and is featured in season 1 of Mindhunter.

The murderer had a history of violence, but in July 1966 it escalated when he committed one of the most brutal mass murders in American history. Speck broke in to a townhouse inhabited by student nurses in Chicago's South Side, and proceeded to stab or strangle eight to death.

Four days after the murder, after having attempted suicide, Richard Speck was arrested by police. Fingerprints found at the scene matched his, and he was charged with eight counts of murder. At trial, a jury took just 49 minutes to deliberate, ultimately finding Speck guilty. He was sentenced to the death penalty by electric chair in 1967, but this sentence was later overturned in 1971. The Supreme Court upheld the murderer's conviction, but altered his initial death penalty to eight consecutive sentences of 50 to 150 years - a combined sentence of anywhere between 400 and 1,200 years in prison.

Richard Speck remained in prison at the Stateville Correctional Center in Illinois until he died of a heart attack on December 5, 1991 at age 49. It was the eve of his 50th birthday.