THE perpetrator of the Dunblane massacre enters a gruesome list of British mass murderers:
John Thompson: 37 victims. A petty thief and drug addict, the motive for his petrol attack on The Spanish Club, Denmark Street, London, was rage at being overcharged for a rum and coke. Jailed for life, 1981.
Mary Ann Cotton: 20 or more victims. She married three times and in 20 years poisoned husbands, children, step children, friends and relatives with arsenic. Motive - insurance money, remarriage or sheer spite. Hanged, 1873.
Dennis Nilsen: 16 victims. He strangled young men "for company" at his home in Muswell Hill, North London, stowing their bodies under the floorboards and bringing them out to watch TV. Jailed for life, 1983.
Michael Ryan: 16 victims. The Hungerford murderer fired 119 shots in a one hour rampage with an M1 carbine Kalashnikov rifle and Biretta pistol through the Berkshire town. Suicide, 1987.
Bruce Lee: 15 victims. This 20 year old arsonist started a series of blazes in Humberside. Convicted of 26 murders, but the number was reduced to 15 on appeal. Detained for life, 1977.
Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper: 13 victims. With seven more victims than Jack the Ripper 100 years earlier, Sutcliffe preyed on prostitutes and young women in the Leeds area. He was sent to Broadmoor high security mental hospital. Jailed for life, 1981.
Fred West: at least 12 victims. The Gloucester builder hanged himself in jail in January last year. His wife Rosemary was jailed for life for 10 murders last November.
John Haigh: nine victims. He plunged the corpses of wealthy widows, whom he had defrauded of cash, into a drum of acid. Haigh boasted there was no evidence, but a forensic expert found a plastic denture. Hanged, 1949.
John Christie: eight victims. He gassed, strangled and then raped six women. In London's Ladbroke Grove he is also believed to have killed the wife and child of his tenant, Timothy Evans. Hanged, 1953.
Kenneth Erskine, the Stockwell Strangler: seven victims, all frail pensioners. After throttling each victim, he would clean up the home and leave the body lying in bed with sheets pulled tidily up to the chin. Jailed for 40 years, 1988.
John Childs: six victims, killed for cash, dismembered and then burned in the grate of Childs's flat in Poplar, East London. He carried out two of the contract killings all in black, complete with an undertaker's hat. Jailed for life, 1980.
Ian Brady and Myra Hindley: The Moors murderers. At least five victims. Jailed for life in 1966 for the murders of Lesley Ann Downey (10), John Kilbride (12), and Edward Evans (17). They were later convicted of killing Pauline Reade (16), and Keith Bennett (12), whose body was never found.
Colin Ireland: five victims. Ireland, an unemployed drifter, wanted to make his mark in life. He targeted London's vulnerable group of homosexual men who indulge in sado masochistic sex after deliberately setting out to be classed as a serial killer. Jailed for life, 1993.
Jeremy Bamber: five victims. He slaughtered his adoptive parents, his sister and her twin six year old sons at their farmhouse in Essex. He wanted to inherit all his family's money. Jailed for life, 1986.
Since Jack The Ripper, criminologists say there have been roughly 100 known cases of serial killers around the world, including Pedro Lopez, the "Monster of the Andes", who confessed to killing 360 pre teenage girls in Bolivia in the 1970s.
The world's most prolific murderer was the Indian Thug, Behram, who strangled 931 victims with a yellow and white cloth between 1790 and 1840.