A-bomb /ā′bŏm′/

Here’s a fun little murder by numbers exercise. I think you’ll like it:

#10: Yang Xinhai of China was credited with 67 murders by axe, meat cleaver, shovel etc. before being executed in 2004.

#9: India’s Kampatimar Shankariya hammered at least seventy people to death in the course of two years until he was hanged in 1979.

And now we move to South America for the crème de la crème of non-state-sponsored killers:

#8: Since Brazil has a thirty-year cap on prison sentences, that’s all Pedro Rodrigues Filho got for taking 71 lives and claiming responsibility for at least thirty more. Included among his victims was his own delicious father who’s heart Filho did some nibbling on.

#7. Columbia, officially world’s worst place to be if you’re an unaccompanied child, was home to Daniel Camargo, strangler of at least 72 virgin girls; possibly as many as 150. He escaped Columbian prison, resumed his hobby in Ecuador and was there caught and murdered while in jail.

#6. Pedro Lopez confessed to killing 300-plus girls and was convicted for 110 of them. He was released from that same Columbian prison in 1998. Current whereabouts unknown.

#5. Columbia’s king of child-murderers, Luis Garavito, a.k.a. La Bestia confessed to the murder of 140 street children in the course of five years and was suspected of about 300 more.

Moving on to the real pros:

#4. U.S.A. president Harry S. Truman directed the efficient deaths of at least 129,000 Japanese civilians, largely women and children, by means of atomic bomb. There were plans for three bombings but he quit after two on account of being such a humanitarian. He passed away in a medical center at the age of 88 and has received many honors from adoring Americans.

#3. Cambodian dictator Pol Pot drove up to three million of his own citizens to death through executions and predatory policies.

#2. Joseph Stalin’s communist regime is open to debate in terms of its murderousness but its victims are widely agreed to be in the order of millions.

#1. And of course… Germany’s wacky and lovable Chancellor Adolf Hitler, through his spiffy S.S. organization, orchestrated the murders of approximately eleven million victims including two-thirds of all European Jews. He had specific plans for the dispatch of another thirty million lives if he had won his little war. Alas, he did not. But he did manage to add a last-minute tally to his score by taking his own life; undoubtedly his single greatest achievement.