The Most Famous

EXTREMISTS from United States

This page contains a list of the greatest American Extremists. The pantheon dataset contains 283 Extremists, 92 of which were born in United States. This makes United States the birth place of the most number of Extremists.

Top 10

The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the top 10 most legendary American Extremists of all time. This list of famous American Extremists is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography's online popularity. Visit the rankings page to view the entire list of American Extremists.

1. John Wilkes Booth (1838 - 1865)

With an HPI of 83.65, John Wilkes Booth is the most famous American Extremist. His biography has been translated into 57 different languages on wikipedia.

John Wilkes Booth (May 10, 1838 – April 26, 1865) was an American stage actor who assassinated United States president Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C., on April 14, 1865. A member of the prominent 19th-century Booth theatrical family from Maryland, he was a noted actor who was also a Confederate sympathizer; denouncing Lincoln, he lamented the then-recent abolition of slavery in the United States. Originally, Booth and his small group of conspirators had plotted to kidnap Lincoln to aid the Confederate cause. They later decided to murder him, as well as Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William H. Seward. Although the Army of Northern Virginia, commanded by General Robert E. Lee, had surrendered to the Union Army four days earlier, Booth believed that the American Civil War remained unresolved because the Army of Tennessee of General Joseph E. Johnston continued fighting. Booth shot Lincoln once in the back of the head. Lincoln's death the next morning completed Booth's piece of the plot. Seward, severely wounded, recovered, whereas Vice President Johnson was never attacked. Booth fled on horseback to Southern Maryland; twelve days later, at a farm in rural Northern Virginia, he was tracked down sheltered in a barn. Booth's companion David Herold surrendered, but Booth maintained a standoff. After the authorities set the barn ablaze, Union soldier Boston Corbett fatally shot him in the neck. Paralyzed, he died a few hours later. Of the eight conspirators later convicted, four were soon hanged.

2. Charles Manson (1934 - 2017)

With an HPI of 80.31, Charles Manson is the 2nd most famous American Extremist. His biography has been translated into 84 different languages.

Charles Milles Manson (né Maddox; November 12, 1934 – November 19, 2017) was an American criminal, cult leader, and musician who led the Manson Family, a cult based in California in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Some cult members committed a series of at least nine murders at four locations in July and August 1969. In 1971, Manson was convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder for the deaths of seven people, including the film actress Sharon Tate. The prosecution contended that, while Manson never directly ordered the murders, his ideology constituted an overt act of conspiracy. Before the murders, Manson had spent more than half of his life in correctional institutions. While gathering his cult following, he was a singer-songwriter on the fringe of the Los Angeles music industry, chiefly through a chance association with Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, who introduced Manson to record producer Terry Melcher. In 1968, the Beach Boys recorded Manson's song "Cease to Exist", renamed "Never Learn Not to Love" as a single B-side, but Manson was uncredited. Afterward, he attempted to secure a record contract through Melcher, but was unsuccessful. Manson would often talk about the Beatles, including their eponymous 1968 album. According to Los Angeles County District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi, Manson felt guided by his interpretation of the Beatles' lyrics and adopted the term "Helter Skelter" to describe an impending apocalyptic race war. During his trial, Bugliosi argued that Manson had intended to start a race war, although Manson and others disputed this. Contemporary interviews and trial witness testimony insisted that the Tate–LaBianca murders were copycat crimes intended to exonerate Manson's friend Bobby Beausoleil. Manson denied having ordered any murders. He served his time in prison and died from complications from colon cancer in 2017.

3. Ted Bundy (1946 - 1989)

With an HPI of 79.00, Ted Bundy is the 3rd most famous American Extremist. His biography has been translated into 70 different languages.

Theodore Robert Bundy (né Cowell; November 24, 1946 – January 24, 1989) was an American serial killer who kidnapped, raped and murdered dozens of young women and girls between 1974 and 1978. His modus operandi typically consisted of convincing his target that he was in need of assistance or duping them into believing he was an authority figure. He would then lure his victim to his vehicle, at which point he would bludgeon them unconscious, then restrain them with handcuffs before driving them to a remote location to be sexually assaulted and killed. Bundy killed his first definitively-known victim in February 1974 in Washington, and his later crimes stretched to Oregon, Colorado, Utah and Idaho. He frequently revisited the bodies of his victims, grooming and performing sex acts on the corpses until decomposition and destruction by wild animals made further interactions impossible. Along with the murders, Bundy was also a prolific burglar, and on a few occasions he broke into homes at night and bludgeoned, maimed, strangled and sexually assaulted his victims in their sleep. In 1975, Bundy was arrested and jailed in Utah for aggravated kidnapping and attempted criminal assault. He then became a suspect in a progressively longer list of unsolved homicides in several states. Facing murder charges in Colorado, Bundy engineered two dramatic escapes and committed further assaults in Florida, including three murders, before being recaptured in 1978. For the Florida homicides, he received three death sentences in two trials and was executed in the electric chair at Florida State Prison on January 24, 1989. Biographer Ann Rule characterized Bundy as "a sadistic sociopath who took pleasure from another human's pain and the control he had over his victims, to the point of death and even after". He once described himself as "the most cold-hearted son of a bitch you'll ever meet", a statement with which attorney Polly Nelson, a member of his last defense team, agreed. She wrote that "Ted was the very definition of heartless evil".

4. Lee Harvey Oswald (1939 - 1963)

With an HPI of 76.93, Lee Harvey Oswald is the 4th most famous American Extremist. His biography has been translated into 69 different languages.

Lee Harvey Oswald (October 18, 1939 – November 24, 1963) was a U.S. Marine veteran who assassinated John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, on November 22, 1963. Oswald was placed in juvenile detention at age twelve for truancy, during which he was assessed by a psychiatrist as "emotionally disturbed" due to a lack of normal family life. He attended twelve schools in his youth, quitting repeatedly, and at age seventeen he joined the Marines, where he was court-martialed twice and jailed. In 1959, he was discharged from active duty into the Marine Corps Reserve, then flew to Europe and defected to the Soviet Union. He lived in Minsk, married a Russian woman named Marina, and had a daughter. In June 1962, he returned to the United States with his wife, and eventually settled in Dallas, Texas, where their second daughter was born. Oswald shot and killed Kennedy on November 22, 1963, from a sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository as Kennedy traveled by motorcade through Dealey Plaza in Dallas. About 45 minutes after assassinating Kennedy, Oswald murdered Dallas police officer J. D. Tippit on a local street. He then slipped into a movie theater, where he was arrested for Tippit's murder. Oswald was charged with the assassination of Kennedy, but he denied responsibility for the killing, claiming that he was a "patsy" (a fall guy). Two days later, Oswald himself was murdered by local nightclub owner Jack Ruby on live television in the basement of Dallas Police Headquarters. In September 1964, the Warren Commission concluded that both Oswald and Ruby had acted alone. This conclusion, though controversial, was supported by investigations from the Dallas Police Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the United States Secret Service, and the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). Despite forensic, ballistic, and eyewitness accounts supporting the official findings, public opinion polls have shown that most Americans still do not believe that the official version tells the whole truth of the events, and the assassination has spawned numerous conspiracy theories.

5. Leon Czolgosz (1873 - 1901)

With an HPI of 76.01, Leon Czolgosz is the 5th most famous American Extremist. His biography has been translated into 33 different languages.

Leon Frank Czolgosz ( CHOL-gosh; Polish: [ˈlɛɔn ˈt͡ʂɔwɡɔʂ]; May 5, 1873 – October 29, 1901) was an American wireworker and anarchist who assassinated United States president William McKinley on September 6, 1901, in Buffalo, New York. McKinley died on September 14 after his wound became infected. Caught immediately after shooting McKinley, Czolgosz was tried, convicted, and executed by the State of New York seven weeks later on October 29, 1901.

6. Ted Kaczynski (1942 - 2023)

With an HPI of 73.35, Ted Kaczynski is the 6th most famous American Extremist. His biography has been translated into 60 different languages.

Theodore John Kaczynski ( kə-ZIN-skee; May 22, 1942 – June 10, 2023), also known as the Unabomber ( YOO-nə-bom-ər), was an American mathematician, serial killer and domestic terrorist. A mathematics prodigy, he abandoned his academic career in 1969 to pursue a reclusive primitive lifestyle and lone wolf terrorism campaign. Kaczynski murdered 3 people and injured 23 others between 1978 and 1995 in a nationwide mail bombing campaign against people he believed to be advancing modern technology and the destruction of the natural environment. He authored a roughly 35,000-word manifesto and social critique called Industrial Society and Its Future (1995) which opposes all forms of technology, rejects leftism and fascism, advocates cultural primitivism, and ultimately suggests violent revolution. In 1971, Kaczynski moved to a remote cabin without electricity or running water near Lincoln, Montana, where he lived as a recluse while learning survival skills to become self-sufficient. After witnessing the destruction of the wilderness surrounding his cabin, he concluded that living in nature was becoming impossible and resolved to fight industrialization and its destruction of nature through terrorism. In 1979, Kaczynski became the subject of what was, by the time of his arrest in 1996, the longest and most expensive investigation in the history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The FBI used the case identifier UNABOM (University and Airline Bomber) before his identity was known, resulting in the media naming him the "Unabomber". In 1995, Kaczynski sent a letter to The New York Times promising to "desist from terrorism" if the Times or The Washington Post published his manifesto, in which he argued that his bombings were extreme but necessary in attracting attention to the erosion of human freedom and dignity by modern technologies. The FBI and U.S. attorney general Janet Reno pushed for the publication of the essay, which appeared in The Washington Post in September 1995. Upon reading it, Kaczynski's brother, David, recognized the prose style and reported his suspicions to the FBI. After his arrest in 1996, Kaczynski—maintaining that he was sane—tried and failed to dismiss his court-appointed lawyers because they wished him to plead insanity to avoid the death penalty. He pleaded guilty to all charges in 1998 and was sentenced to several consecutive life terms in prison without the possibility of parole. In 2021, he received a cancer diagnosis and stopped treatment in March 2023. Kaczynski hanged himself in prison in June 2023.

7. John Wayne Gacy (1942 - 1994)

With an HPI of 73.09, John Wayne Gacy is the 7th most famous American Extremist. His biography has been translated into 43 different languages.

John Wayne Gacy (March 17, 1942 – May 10, 1994) was an American serial killer and sex offender who raped, tortured and murdered at least thirty-three young men and boys between 1972 and 1978 in Norwood Park Township, a suburb of Chicago, Illinois. He became known as the "Killer Clown" due to his public performances as a clown prior to the discovery of his crimes. Gacy committed all of his known murders inside his ranch-style house. Typically, he would lure a victim to his home and dupe them into donning handcuffs on the pretext of demonstrating a magic trick. He would then rape and torture his captive before killing his victim by either asphyxiation or strangulation with a garrote. Twenty-six victims were buried in the crawl space of his home, and three were buried elsewhere on his property; four were discarded in the Des Plaines River. Gacy had previously been convicted in 1968 of the sodomy of a teenage boy in Waterloo, Iowa, and was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment, but served eighteen months. He murdered his first victim in 1972, had murdered twice more by the end of 1975, and murdered at least thirty victims after his divorce from his second wife in 1976. The investigation into the disappearance of Des Plaines teenager Robert Piest led to Gacy's arrest on December 21, 1978. Gacy's conviction for thirty-three murders (by one individual) then covered the most homicides in United States legal history. Gacy was sentenced to death on March 13, 1980. He was executed by lethal injection at Stateville Correctional Center on May 10, 1994.

8. Ed Gein (1906 - 1984)

With an HPI of 72.70, Ed Gein is the 8th most famous American Extremist. His biography has been translated into 41 different languages.

Edward Theodore Gein (August 27, 1906 – July 26, 1984), also known as the Butcher of Plainfield and the Plainfield Ghoul, was an American murderer, serial killer, and body snatcher. His crimes, committed around his hometown of Plainfield, Wisconsin, gathered widespread notoriety in 1957 after authorities discovered that he stole corpses from local graveyards and fashioned keepsakes from their bones and skin. He also confessed to killing two women: tavern owner Mary Hogan in 1954 and hardware store owner Bernice Worden in 1957. Gein was initially found unfit to stand trial and confined to a mental health facility. By 1968 he was judged competent to stand trial. He was found guilty of the murder of Worden, but was found legally insane and thus was remanded to a psychiatric institution.

9. Albert Fish (1870 - 1936)

With an HPI of 72.34, Albert Fish is the 9th most famous American Extremist. His biography has been translated into 42 different languages.

Hamilton Howard "Albert" Fish (May 19, 1870 – January 16, 1936) was an American serial killer, rapist, child molester and cannibal who committed at least three child murders between July 1924 and June 1928. He was also known as the Gray Man, the Werewolf of Wysteria, the Brooklyn Vampire, the Moon Maniac, and the Boogey Man. Fish was a suspect in at least ten murders during his lifetime, although he only confessed to three murders that police were able to trace to a known homicide. He also confessed to stabbing at least two other people. Fish once boasted that he "had children in every state", and at one time stated his number of victims was about 100. However, it is not known whether he was referring to rapes or cannibalization, nor is it known if the statement was truthful. Fish was apprehended on December 13, 1934, and put on trial for the kidnapping and murder of Grace Budd. He was convicted and executed by electric chair on January 16, 1936, at the age of 65.

10. Frank Sheeran (1920 - 2003)

With an HPI of 71.60, Frank Sheeran is the 10th most famous American Extremist. His biography has been translated into 24 different languages.

Francis Joseph Sheeran (October 25, 1920 – December 14, 2003), also known as "The Irishman", was an American labor union official and enforcer for Jimmy Hoffa and Russell Bufalino. He was accused of having links to the Bufalino crime family in his capacity as a high-ranking official in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), the president of Local 326. Sheeran was a leading figure involved in the infiltration of unions by organized crime in the 1960s and ‘70s. In 1980, he was convicted of labor racketeering and sentenced to 32 years in prison, of which he served 13 years. Shortly before his death in 2003, he said he had killed Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa in 1975. Author Charles Brandt detailed what Sheeran told him about Hoffa in the narrative nonfiction work I Heard You Paint Houses (2004). The truthfulness of the book, including Sheeran's confessions to killing Hoffa and Joe Gallo, has been disputed by some. The book is the basis for the 2019 film The Irishman directed by Martin Scorsese which starred Robert De Niro as Sheeran, Al Pacino as Hoffa, and Joe Pesci as Bufalino.

People

Pantheon has 102 people classified as American extremists born between 1787 and 2003. Of these 102, 28 (27.45%) of them are still alive today. The most famous living American extremists include Yolanda Saldívar, Charles Cullen, and Robert William Fisher. The most famous deceased American extremists include John Wilkes Booth, Charles Manson, and Ted Bundy. As of April 2024, 10 new American extremists have been added to Pantheon including Richard Jewell, Yolanda Saldívar, and Charles Cullen.