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Growing up gay was tough on Ronald Dominique. But that's not why Ronald began to kill African American men.

Serial killer Arthur Shawcross tells a lot of stories about his life before he began to kill. Abuse, bestiality, cannibalism...but is any of it true?

Someone is killing young African American women in Charlotte, North Carolina and the police seem unable to stop it. What the police don't realise is that the cases all have a commonality: a connection with Henry Louis Wallace.

In rural Epping, N.H., everyone knows Sheila LaBarre as an eccentric widow who loves her rabbits; her turbulent childhood in Alabama, a coma-induced vision, and the death of her wealthy husband all send Sheila on a warped mission to kill.

The articulate adn boastful killer, known for his intelligence and charm, is remembered for terrifying the coastal town of Santa Cruz where he picked up and dismembered hitchhiking college students in the early 1970s. But his desire to kill started when he was much younger, as a child fantasizing about murdering members of his own family.

African American women in the Mt. Pleasant neighborhood of Cleveland were vanishing. Their families were desperate for help, but no one seemed to know what was happening to them, no one except the helpful resident of 12205 Imperial Avenue, Anthony Sowell. From a young age, Anthony was desperate for some sort of control and ultimately found it when he overpowered his first vulnerable victim, a woman only hoping to connect with a friendly face.

First Blood examines some of America's most notorious serial killers through the prism of their first known kills to reveal what drove them to the moment when violent fantasy and curiosity became a devastating reality.

Danny Rolling: The Gainesville Ripper

Before he hunted down his first victim in the wilds of Alaska, Robert Hansen was working at his father's bakery in a small town in Iowa, slowly developing an animosity for women. Even as a successful business and family man in Anchorage, his intense feelings would build into a dark desire to exert the ultimate control over 17 victims.

In 1989, Richard Mallory is found shot dead in the brush off the side of a Florida highway, just the first of seven murdered men found in a similar setting. Their predator is Aileen Wuornos, a woman fleeing a troubled past and yearning for a connection. Instead of finding of love, The Damsel of Death develops a simmering rage in her heart, that finally explodes when she picks up her first victim.