10 Cold-Blooded Professional Killers

Hollywood loves to glamorize the life of the hit man. In the real world, however, people willing to kill for money tend to share many traits with those who frequently kill for any other reason. The assassins on this list gained a reputation of being particularly brutal, even by the standards of their chosen profession.

10 Abdullah Catli

Turkish killer Abdullah Catli made a name for himself as a leader of a far-right nationalist group known as the Grey Wolves. In 1978, he and other members of the group murdered seven students whom they believed to be communist revolutionaries. The students were members of the left-wing Turkish Workers’ Party, and the Grey Wolves raided their apartment expecting to find weapons, but the students were completely unarmed. The militants tied them up and shot them anyway.

[amazon asin=B006CR2OOA&template=*lrc ad (left)]Another member of Catli’s Grey Wolves was Mehmet Ali Agca, who tried to assassinate Pope John Paul II in 1981. Two years before that, Agca had been locked up for the murder of a journalist, and Catli got him out of prison. Some believe Catli arranged the assassination attempt on the Pope for money.

After this, Catli was recruited by Turkish intelligence agency MIT. He carried out attacks against the Armenian liberation movement, for which MIT paid him in heroin. Smuggling drugs landed Catli in prison in France in 1984, then in Switzerland in 1988.

He escaped in 1990 and once again became a killer, this time working for the Turkish police. Starting in 1993, the police began kidnapping and executing members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which fought for autonomy for the Kurds in Turkey. Catli not only carried out the killings, he also conned money from his victims by promising to protect them, before having them kidnapped and murdered.[amazon asin=B000NTPDSW&template=*lrc ad (right)]

Catli died in a car crash in 1996, an event that caused a scandal in Turkey. He was traveling with a senior police officer and a member of parliament though he was still officially wanted by the police for his murders during the 1970s. The crash revealed the relationship between authorities and the Turkish mafia.

Estimates suggest Catli’s gang murdered 4,000 people whose activities were thought contrary to state interests.

9 John Childs

John Childs is one of the most prolific contract killers in British history. One crime writer who interviewed Childs said, “the only time he laughs is when he talks about killing.”[amazon asin=B000LPS4BG&template=*lrc ad (left)]

Childs’s first contract was in November 1974. For £1,800, Childs shot a businessman named George Brett with a submachine gun. He also killed Brett’s10-year-old son to eliminate him as a witness. Childs’s next victim, for £4,000, was a nursing home manager named Fred Sherwood. Childs beat Sherwood to death with a hammer before shooting him.

None of the bodies of Childs’s victims have ever been found. He claimed that he chopped up the remains, passed them through an industrial mincer, then burned them in his living room.

When Childs was caught, he claimed he’d been working for a man named Terry Pinfold and alongside one named Harry Mackenny. In 1980, both men were sentenced to long prison terms based on Childs’s testimony. They [amazon asin=B000C20VPA&template=*lrc ad (right)]spent over 20 years in prison before their convictions were quashed, with a judge deciding that Childs was a pathological liar.

8 Sretko Kalinic

Between 2000 and 2003, the Zemun Clan was perhaps the most powerful criminal organization in southeastern Europe. The group was an offshoot of the Serbian mafia, with the typical gangster fondness for nicknames. Among their ranks were criminals known as “The Fool” and “The Rat.” Their most brutal member was Sretko “The Beast” Kalinic.

Kalinic earned his nickname partly because of his fondness for dismembering bodies. He was also willing to kill as a favor. When he killed a man named Branko Jeftovic in 2004, he claimed to do so out of “friendship and not for money,” as a revenge attack requested by another Zemun Clan member.

In 2003, the Zemun Clan assassinated the Serbian Prime Minister, Zoran Djindjic. Kalinic was one of the masterminds behind the attack and was sentenced in absentia to 30 years in prison, finally being caught in 2010. He and another inmate tried to break out of prison in 2012. He cut through bars, leaped from a window, and overpowered a guard but was caught and imprisoned once more.

While Prime Minister Djindjic is undoubtedly the most famous of Kalinic’s victims, the killing of Milan Jurisic is his most infamous murder. Jurisic, a Zemun member himself, was bludgeoned to death in 2006. Kalinic, working with two others, cut the body into pieces. Much of the body was flushed away, but some of it was ground up, cooked, and eaten, marking one of several cannibalistic kills with which the Beast has been linked. The skin from Jurisic’s face was cut off and used to make a mask.

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