American serial homicide perpetrator, arrested for fatally strangling a prostitute, dismembering and decapitating her and removing her heart with a Rambo-style knife in early 2002. After his arrest, police began a wide probe on similar cases, investigating whether or not McCollom was a serial killed.
McCollom was the third child in his family, a tiny baby of just under 5 lbs.. He graduated from Winthrop High School with average guy-next-door appearance. His parents died two years apart in the mid 1990s and his younger brother, Patrick, was killed in a fight at the Revere Beach club on 5/11/1996. McCollom had occasional run-ins with the law, offenses such as assault and battery on a cop.
A truck driver, he beat, stabbed and decapitated a man in Boston on March 3, 2001 and buried the head in Ft. Lauderdate. Fl. He had met the victim at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. With a plea-bargain deal and confession, McCollom was convicted of manslaughter. In February 2005 he was sentenced to 12-15 years in jail but later that month received a life sentence for murdering a prostitue he had picked up in November 2000 and dismembering her as well. McCollom is a suspect in the murders and beheadings of at least two other people, one of whom was decaptitated in October 2001.
At the trial for killing a prostitute, he said that he had become a “ticking time bomb” after his brother Patrick, age 27, was stabbed to death at a Revere, MA night club in 1996 and the alleged killer was acquitted. McCollom added, “I was engulfed in bitterness, hatred of our judicial system … I killed two people out of all that anger and bitterness.”