A "respectable" Chicago-area businessman, he hired young men to work in his contracting company, then raped and murdered scores of them, burying their bodies on his properties. In prison, he became the focus of researching the psychopathic mind.

Bundy was a very adept and glib con artist who faked a broken arm in a sling to convince young women to help him carry his textbooks to his car. Once there, he battered them with a baseball bat and carried them off for ghoulish rituals.

This homicide began a ghoulish series of murders that panicked the people of the San Francisco area. For years the Zodiac taunted the police with weird ciphers, phone calls, insulting and cryptic messages.

Even though police investigated over 2,500 potential suspects, the case was never solved. There were a few suspects that stood out, but the forensic technology of the times was not advanced enough to nail any one of them conclusively.

Burakov then embarked on a cat-and-mouse game with Russia's worst serial killer. Once he suspected Andrei Chikatilo, a former teacher, he placed him in a cell with a gifted informant, hoping that Chikatilo would slip up. By law, he could only hold him for 10 days. On the 9th day, he tried something daring: he brought in a brilliant psychiatrist.

Into this bleak industrial graveyard, walked the well-dressed, handsome and highly educated Eliot Ness, fresh from victories over Al Capone, playing a cat-and-mouse game with a most brilliant and diabolical serial killer.

It was here in 1985 where the first victim was found in a railroad yard.

Helen Patent was nude from the waist down and she had been posed in a sexually provocative position, with her legs open and her blouse pulled up to expose her breasts. She was 52 when she died, and while it was clear to the police that she had been stabbed many times, it took an autopsy to determine the official cause and manner of death. She had been sexually assaulted and had died from 47 stab wounds to her head and chest. She had also been stabbed in the right arm, and one vicious and deep slash across her abdomen had exposed the internal organs.

Between seven and eight women from 28-68 became the victims of this violent rapist and serial killer in an old section of Philadelphia. Leonard Christopher, a quiet black man who worked in the area, was arrested and convicted for the murder of one victim in the series. But the quality of the evidence used to convict Christopher is controversial, especially since another likely killing in the series occurred while he was in jail.

The film adopts Karla's point of view throughout, and if you believe the performance you'll regard Karla as the prototypical battered wife and compliant accomplice. This can get annoying for anyone familiar with the facts, but in the end it's made clear that her story is pretty much a self-serving "reorganization" of what happened: she never apologized to victims' families, never expressed public remorse, and seemed as narcissistic upon her release as she'd ever been.

John Borowski's film about the demented child killer is an engaging piece of visual art that has raised the bar on this type of subject.