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The Most Famous

EXTREMISTS from United States

This page contains a list of the greatest American Extremists. The pantheon dataset contains 209 Extremists, 78 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 79.24, John Wilkes Booth is the most famous American Extremist. His biography has been translated into 53 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 President 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 Civil War remained unresolved because the Army of Tennessee of General Joseph E. Johnston continued fighting. Booth shot President 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 78.85, Charles Manson is the 2nd most famous American Extremist. His biography has been translated into 79 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. Some of the 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 without a credit to Manson. Afterward, Manson 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 himself denied having ordered any murders.

3. Ted Bundy (1946 - 1989)

With an HPI of 75.74, Ted Bundy is the 3rd most famous American Extremist. His biography has been translated into 59 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 during the 1970s and possibly earlier. After more than a decade of denials, he confessed to 30 murders committed in seven states between 1974 and 1978. His true victim total is unknown. Bundy often employed charm to disguise his murderous intent when kidnapping victims, and with law enforcement, the media and the criminal justice system to maintain his claims of innocence. His usual technique involved approaching a female in public and luring her to a vehicle parked in a more secluded area, at which point he would beat her unconscious, restrain her with handcuffs and take her elsewhere to be sexually assaulted and killed. Bundy typically simulated having a physical impairment such as an injury to convince his target that he was in need of assistance, or would dupe her into believing he was an authority figure. He frequently revisited the bodies of those he abducted, grooming and performing sex acts on the corpses until decomposition and destruction by wild animals made further interactions impossible. He decapitated at least 12 of his victims, keeping their severed heads as mementos in his apartment. On a few occasions, he broke into homes at night and bludgeoned, maimed, strangled and/or 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 in Raiford on January 24, 1989. Biographer Ann Rule characterized him 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." Bundy 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. "Ted", she wrote, "was the very definition of heartless evil."

4. Lee Harvey Oswald (1939 - 1963)

With an HPI of 72.83, Lee Harvey Oswald is the 4th most famous American Extremist. His biography has been translated into 64 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 the age of 12 for truancy, during which time he was assessed by a psychiatrist as "emotionally disturbed", due to a lack of normal family life. After attending 12 schools in his youth, he quit repeatedly, and finally when he was 17, joined the Marines. Oswald was court-martialed twice while in the Marines, and jailed. He was honorably released from active duty in the Marine Corps into the Marine Corps Reserve, then flew to Europe and defected to the Soviet Union in October 1959. He lived in Minsk, Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic, 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 shot and killed 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". Two days later, Oswald was fatally shot by local nightclub owner Jack Ruby on live television in the basement of Dallas Police Headquarters. In September 1964, the Warren Commission concluded that Oswald had acted alone when assassinating Kennedy. 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 evidence 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 spawned numerous conspiracy theories.

5. Ted Kaczynski (1942 - 2023)

With an HPI of 70.46, Ted Kaczynski is the 5th most famous American Extremist. His biography has been translated into 51 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 and domestic terrorist. He was a mathematics prodigy, but abandoned his academic career in 1969 to pursue a primitive lifestyle. Between 1978 and 1995, Kaczynski murdered three individuals and injured 23 others in a nationwide mail bombing campaign against people he believed to be advancing modern technology and the destruction of the natural environment. He authored Industrial Society and Its Future, a 35,000-word manifesto and social critique opposing industrialization, rejecting leftism, and advocating for a nature-centered form of anarchism. 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 eight consecutive life terms in prison without the possibility of parole. In June 2023, Kaczynski died by suicide in prison.

6. Zodiac Killer (1940 - )

With an HPI of 68.43, Zodiac Killer is the 6th most famous American Extremist. His biography has been translated into 50 different languages.

The Zodiac Killer is the pseudonym of an unidentified serial killer who operated in Northern California in the late 1960s. The Zodiac murdered five known victims in the San Francisco Bay Area between December 1968 and October 1969, operating in rural, urban and suburban settings. He targeted three young couples and a lone male cab driver. The case has been described as "arguably the most famous unsolved murder case in American history", and has become both a fixture of popular culture and a focus for efforts by amateur detectives. The Zodiac's known attacks took place in Benicia, Vallejo, unincorporated Napa County, and the city of San Francisco proper. Five of his known wounded victims died, and two survived. He coined his name in a series of taunting messages that he mailed to regional newspapers, in which he threatened killing sprees and bombings if they were not printed. Some of the letters included cryptograms, or ciphers, in which the killer claimed that he was collecting his victims as slaves for the afterlife. Of the four ciphers he produced, two remain unsolved, and one was cracked only in 2020. The last confirmed Zodiac letter was in 1974, when he claimed to have killed 37 victims. While many theories regarding the identity of the killer have been suggested, the only suspect authorities ever publicly named was Arthur Leigh Allen, a former elementary school teacher and convicted sex offender who died in 1992. The unusual nature of the case led to international interest that has been sustained throughout the years. The San Francisco Police Department marked the case "inactive" in 2004, but re-opened it at some point prior to 2007. The case also remains open in the city of Vallejo, as well as in Napa and Solano counties. The California Department of Justice has maintained an open case file on the Zodiac murders since 1969.

7. Ed Gein (1906 - 1984)

With an HPI of 68.39, Ed Gein is the 7th most famous American Extremist. His biography has been translated into 38 different languages.

Edward Theodore Gein (; August 27, 1906 – July 26, 1984), also known as the Butcher of Plainfield or the Plainfield Ghoul, was an American murderer, suspected serial killer and body snatcher. Gein's crimes, committed around his hometown of Plainfield, Wisconsin, gathered widespread notoriety in 1957 after authorities discovered that he had exhumed 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 he was found legally insane and was remanded to a psychiatric institution. Gein died at Mendota Mental Health Institute from respiratory failure resulting from lung cancer, on July 26, 1984, aged 77. He is buried next to his family in the Plainfield Cemetery, in a now-unmarked grave.

8. Albert Fish (1870 - 1936)

With an HPI of 67.74, Albert Fish is the 8th most famous American Extremist. His biography has been translated into 37 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.

9. John Wayne Gacy (1942 - 1994)

With an HPI of 67.33, John Wayne Gacy is the 9th most famous American Extremist. His biography has been translated into 38 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 33 young men and boys in Norwood Park Township, near 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. His 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.

10. Jim Jones (1931 - 1978)

With an HPI of 67.28, Jim Jones is the 10th most famous American Extremist. His biography has been translated into 41 different languages.

James Warren Jones (May 13, 1931 – November 18, 1978) was an American cult leader and mass murderer who led the Peoples Temple between 1955 and 1978. In what he termed "revolutionary suicide", Jones and the members of his inner circle planned and orchestrated a mass murder-suicide in his remote jungle commune at Jonestown, Guyana, on November 18, 1978. Jones and the events that occurred at Jonestown have had a defining influence on society's perception of cults. As a child, Jones developed an affinity for Pentecostalism and a desire to preach. He was ordained as a Christian minister in the Independent Assemblies of God, attracting his first group of followers while participating in the Pentecostal Latter Rain movement and the Healing Revival during the 1950s. Jones's initial popularity arose from his joint campaign appearances with the movement's prominent leaders, William Branham and Joseph Mattsson-Boze, and their endorsement of his ministry. Jones founded the organization that would become the Peoples Temple in Indianapolis in 1955. In 1956, Jones began to be influenced by Father Divine and the Peace Mission movement. Jones distinguished himself through civil rights activism, founding the Temple as a fully integrated congregation. In 1964, Jones joined and was ordained a minister by the Disciples of Christ; his attraction to the Disciples was largely due to the autonomy and tolerance they granted to differing views within their denomination. In 1965, Jones moved the Temple to California. The group established its headquarters in San Francisco, where he became heavily involved in political and charitable activity throughout the 1970s. Jones developed connections with prominent California politicians and was appointed as chairman of the San Francisco Housing Authority Commission in 1975. Beginning in the late 1960s, reports of abuse began to surface as Jones became increasingly vocal in his rejection of traditional Christianity and began promoting a form of anti-capitalism he called "Apostolic Socialism" and making claims of his own divinity. Jones became progressively more controlling of his followers in Peoples Temple, which at its peak had over 3,000 members. Jones's followers engaged in a communal lifestyle in which many turned over all their income and property to Jones and Peoples Temple who directed all aspects of community life. Following a period of negative media publicity and reports of abuse at Peoples Temple, Jones ordered the construction of the Jonestown commune in Guyana in 1974 and convinced or compelled many of his followers to live there with him. Jones claimed that he was constructing a socialist paradise free from the oppression of the United States government. By 1978, reports surfaced of human rights abuses and accusations that people were being held in Jonestown against their will. U.S. Representative Leo Ryan led a delegation to the commune in November of that year to investigate these reports. While boarding a return flight with some former Temple members who wished to leave, Ryan and four others were murdered by gunmen from Jonestown. Jones then ordered a mass murder-suicide that claimed the lives of 909 commune members, 304 of them children; almost all of the members died by drinking Flavor Aid laced with cyanide.

People

Pantheon has 79 people classified as extremists born between 1787 and 1987. Of these 79, 17 (21.52%) of them are still alive today. The most famous living extremists include Zodiac Killer, Edmund Kemper, and Jordan Belfort. The most famous deceased extremists include John Wilkes Booth, Charles Manson, and Ted Bundy. As of April 2022, 6 new extremists have been added to Pantheon including Patricia Krenwinkel, Samuel Little, and Stephen Paddock.