Christmas is meant to be a time of love and celebration with presents stacked under Christmas trees and delicious feasts filling tables across the world.
However, sadly for some it will always be remembered as a time of distress and heartache when their loved ones were taken too soon by cruel criminals.
Christmas crime is unfortunately all too common with some of the worst murderous rampages and chilling deaths associated with the festive season.
Of those is the “Santa killer” who brutally murdered nine people at a Christmas Eve party in Los Angeles in 2008.
Dressed in a santa costume, Bruce Pardo, 45, used handguns and a flame thrower to kill his victims, including his ex-wife who he had recently separated from.
It was around 11.30pm when Pardo entered the home of his former in-laws and opened fire, killing several people immediately before spraying the house with fuel and setting it and some of the party guests on fire.
Sustaining burns to his body, the criminal fled the scene, travelling almost 50 kilometres to his brother’s house with the polyester Santa suit melting into his skin.
When he arrived at the property his brother was not home, but he still entered and ended up taking his own life with a shotgun.
One of the most widely publicised, and still unsolved murders, is that of JonBenet Ramsey.
The six-year-old was found dead on December 26, 1996 at her home in Colorado, just eight hours after her mother, Patsy, had reported her missing after finding a ransom note.
It was the American beauty queen’s father, John, who found her lifeless body in the basement of their home. She had been strangled and had sustained a broken skull from a blow to the head.
Her death was ruled a homicide with Patsy, John and JonBenet’s brother Burke all considered suspects of the brutal crime. This was mainly because the ransom note which, to police, seemed staged due to its unusually long length of two-and-a-half pages.
It did not contain any fingerprints and included an apparent unusual use of exclamation marks and acronyms. The note was also compiled with a pen and a pad of paper from the Ramsey home.
Police believed at the time that Patsy had written the note and staged her daughter’s body to cover up the crime. However, all three family members were later cleared of any involvement with no further evidence connecting them to JonBenet’s death.
Since then, the young girl’s death has remained in headlines across the world due to its mysterious nature and the fact that it still remains unsolved.
Just as shocking was the Dayton Christmas killing spree. On Christmas eve 1992, Laura Taylor, Mavallous Keene, Heather Matthews and Demarcus Smith began their murderous rampage.
The girls lured their way into the home of a 34-year-old man by promising sex. They soon shot and killed him and then partied in his house for three days, eating his food and driving his cars while he lay dead in a bedroom.
On the same night, the group of teenagers, killed an 18-year-old female and stole her shoes, jacket and bag. On Christmas Day the body of a third victim, 19-year-old Richard Maddox, was found in a car with a gunshot wound to the head. It was later revealed he was the ex-boyfriend of Laura.
Continuing their spree, the teens shot another man, who luckily survived, outside his home on Christmas Day. The following day they shot a 38-year-old mother while she was working at a local store. She sadly died in hospital five days later.
After a horrific three days, the group was finally arrested for their crimes after being pulled over by the police while driving in a stolen car. It was shortly after this that Laura also confessed to the murder of a further two victims aged 16 and 19.
Marvallous was the only one of the group to receive the death penalty and was executed in 2009 after 17 years behind bars. The other three were sentenced to life in prison.