The decision to kill can be reversed at any stage. Some people reverse it in the last seconds, with the weapon already in hand. Some reverse it after the killing is done, by walking into a police station. Some reverse it years later, in a courtroom or a prison cell, by giving up the appeals that might have saved them or by retracting confessions that had made them famous. The cases that follow cover the whole span, from a young woman who carried a bomb into an Israeli city and carried it out again to a Congolese general who drove into an American embassy and asked to be sent to The Hague.
None of these turns undid what had already been done, and several came only when the alternatives had run out. They are worth setting down precisely, with the dates and the legal outcomes, because the stories told about them tend to drift.
Arin Ahmed was 20 when she agreed to become a suicide bomber. The Washington Times described her as a computer student at Bethlehem University; an Israeli writer, Smadar Peri, later called her a student of English literature who, two years before her arrest, had joined the Peace Now movement and traveled to kibbutzim to try to make friends with Israelis. She had talked often with friends about the occupation, Israeli military power and Palestinian poverty. After a friend of hers was killed, she said she would carry out an attack. Four days after she signed up, her contact congratulated her.
She was sent to Rishon le-Zion, south of Tel Aviv, with a bomb in her backpack. She was dressed to pass as an Israeli, in tight trousers and a short top. Her partner, a 16-year-old boy, carried out his own attack in the city at about the same time.
Arin Ahmed did not. On the pedestrian street, looking at the faces in the crowd, she changed her mind. "I suddenly understood what I was about to do," she told the Washington Times, "and I said to myself, 'How can I do such a thing?'" She told her two handlers she was calling off the mission. They were furious, but they drove her back to Bethlehem with the bomb still unexploded. Peri, writing in 2008, said she was the only one of the many women detainees she had met who changed her mind at the last moment.
Israeli security forces arrested her and her accomplices several days later; the Washington Times identified them as members of the military wing of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah. In jail she was visited by the Israeli defense minister, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer. She called her decision to volunteer a "momentary stumble." The charges against her and the length of her sentence have not been reported.
In 2011, in Pindobaçu, a small town in the interior of Bahia state in northeastern Brazil, a woman discovered that her partner was living a double life with a second woman. She decided to have the rival killed, and she hired Carlos Roberto de Jesus, a former prisoner, to do it, according to MercoPress.
He did not carry out the job. MercoPress reported that de Jesus was himself in a relationship with the intended victim, a fact he kept from the woman who was paying him. Bahia Notícias described it as an agreement between the gunman and the target that he would not kill her. Either way, the two staged her death. She was posed as a murder victim, covered in tomato ketchup as false blood, and de Jesus photographed her with his cell phone. He gave the photograph to the woman as proof and collected his fee, which MercoPress put at about 575 U.S. dollars in one passage and 550 in another.
The deception lasted only until the two were seen together in town. Bahia Notícias reported that the woman who had paid for the killing saw her supposed victim alive at the town market, kissing the gunman. She went to the police to complain about the loss of her money. Officers found the staged photographs on the couple’s phone. All three were jailed: the woman for planning a crime, de Jesus and his partner for extortion, according to MercoPress. Bahia Notícias reported that de Jesus was charged with fraud, estelionato, for deceiving the woman out of her money.
The story ran in newspapers around the world. It had a coda. On March 29, 2013, de Jesus was among 11 prisoners who escaped from the police station in Senhor do Bonfim using a rope of knotted sheets. Bahia Notícias reported on April 9, 2013, that he had been recaptured in Pindobaçu and returned to the police complex in Senhor do Bonfim.
Rudolf Brazda was born on June 26, 1913, in Brossen, now part of Meuselwitz in Germany, the youngest son of Czech immigrants. His father died in a mining accident when Rudolf was seven. At 20 he met his first boyfriend, Werner, at a swimming pool, according to the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust.
Nazi Germany prosecuted him for it. He was arrested in 1937 on a charge of "debauchery between men," The Jewish Chronicle reported; love letters and poems he had written to Werner were used against him. He served six months and was deported to Czechoslovakia. He found work as a roofer in the Sudetenland, which Germany soon occupied, and in 1941 he was arrested again and served another 14 months.
In August 1942, according to the Trust, he was sent to Buchenwald. He was prisoner number 7952 and wore the pink triangle that marked men held as homosexuals. The Jewish Chronicle, which dated his arrival to 1943, reported that up to 15,000 men were sent to the camps for being identified as homosexual. Brazda was beaten, once so badly that he lost teeth, and spent 32 months at forced labor.
He believed he survived because of two men who could have done otherwise. Both were kapos, prisoners whom the SS used to supervise other prisoners. The first, in charge of his roofing work detail, kept him from being sent to the Dora subcamp after Brazda had shown disrespect to an SS guard. The second, during the death march at the end of the war, hid him for several days in a shed beside a pigsty. American forces liberated Buchenwald on April 11, 1945.
Brazda settled in Alsace and became a French citizen in 1960. In the 1950s he met Edouard Mayer at a costume ball; they were together for nearly 50 years, and Brazda cared for him for three decades after a workplace accident. He did not speak publicly about the camp until 2008, when he learned of the planned Berlin memorial to the homosexual victims of Nazism. He described the treatment of gay prisoners as "unspeakable," the Associated Press reported, and said the Nazis "had absolutely no mercy." France made him a knight of the Legion of Honor in 2011. He died in his sleep on August 3, 2011, at 98, in Bantzenheim, and was described at his death as the last known survivor of the men who wore the pink triangle.
On the morning of Thursday, January 10, 2013, a 16-year-old student named Bryan Oliver walked into Taft Union High School in Kern County, California, carrying a 12-gauge shotgun. He went to his first-period science class, where students were finishing an oceanography test. He fired once and seriously wounded a 16-year-old classmate, a student athlete. He fired a second round at students running from the room and missed. "All I want is Jacob," he said, according to an Associated Press account, naming another classmate.
Investigators believed he had planned the attack and had picked out two students he thought had bullied him, CBS Los Angeles reported. Classmates told the Associated Press that he had been teased for his red hair and his bookish manner, and many said he had been suspended the year before for keeping a list of students he wanted to harm; investigators would not comment on that.
The teacher, Ryan Heber, stayed in the room. A witness told the Associated Press that he quietly dialed his cellphone and said, "Bryan don’t shoot," which she took to be a way of alerting someone. Heber kept talking to the boy until he put the shotgun down. A campus security administrator, Kim Fields, then took hold of him. Oliver had dozens of rounds of ammunition with him. Heber suffered minor injuries and refused treatment at the scene. The wounded student was airlifted to Kern Medical Center in Bakersfield, where his surgeon said the injuries could have been fatal; he survived.
The Kern County District Attorney’s office charged Oliver as an adult with two counts of attempted murder and three counts of assault with a firearm. In the end he pleaded no contest to two counts of attempted murder. On February 26, 2015, he was sentenced to 27 years and four months in prison, The Mountain Enterprise reported, with the possibility of parole in 13 years.
Seven years earlier, a teacher in Nevada had done much the same with no weapon but her voice. Just after 9 a.m. on Tuesday, March 14, 2006, a 14-year-old boy fired a .38-caliber revolver three times in the main corridor of Pine Middle School in Reno. A boy was wounded, and a girl was hurt by a bullet that ricocheted off the floor.
Jencie Fagan, a 43-year-old physical education teacher, was in the gymnasium next door. She ran toward the shots, told other people to get to safety, and walked to within about 12 feet of the boy, according to the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission, which later recognized her. She told him to put the gun down. He threw it to the floor. "He tossed the gun down, and then I hugged him, and I told him I wouldn’t leave him," she told ABC News. She held him until the police arrived.
Both injured students recovered. Detectives searching the boy’s locker found stick-figure drawings and a note that read, "No one knows who I am now, but they will tomorrow." He was booked on suspicion of attempted murder, with bail set at $150,000, and ABC News reported that he would be tried as an adult. The final outcome of the case has not been reported. Fagan rejected the idea that she had done anything unusual. "I think anybody else would have done it," she said.
John Veasey’s change of heart came later and at a much higher price. He grew up in South Philadelphia, lost his father when he was three and his mother when he was a teenager, and by his twenties was robbing drug dealers to pay for a cocaine habit, according to Ralph Cipriano’s 2010 profile in Philadelphia Magazine. In 1990 he was arrested after beating a man who died a few hours later; the death was ruled a drug overdose, Veasey pleaded guilty to related charges, and he served about two years before his parole in 1993.
That summer the Philadelphia Mafia was at war with itself. The boss, John Stanfa, and his older crew were fighting a faction of younger men led by Joseph Merlino. Stanfa’s underboss, Frank Martines, offered Veasey $10,000 to kill Merlino. On August 5, 1993, Veasey and Phil Colletti opened fire on Merlino and Michael Ciancaglini on a Philadelphia street. Ciancaglini was killed; Merlino was wounded. Veasey said his own target had been Ciancaglini. On September 17, 1993, he shot and killed Frank Baldino as Baldino sat in his car outside a diner, a man he had argued was harmless.
His brother Billy, a demolition contractor who disapproved of his life, began pressing him to give himself up and cooperate. In late December 1993 John agreed. "All right. Do whatever you got to do. I don’t want to see you cry," he told his brother, according to the magazine. Billy telephoned an assistant United States attorney, Barry Gross, and John went to the federal prosecutors and admitted to killing people. Gross later said he knew that day that the case against the Philadelphia mob had turned. "I’m doing the right thing, aren’t I?" Veasey asked him.
The mob learned of it within weeks. On January 14, 1994, Martines and Vincent Pagano took Veasey to an apartment, where Martines shot him and told him he talked too much. Veasey survived, fought his way out and was taken to Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. On October 5, 1995, as he was about to testify against Stanfa, Billy Veasey was shot dead while driving in Philadelphia. He was 35. Federal agents told John that the Stanfa crew had killed his brother in retaliation. He testified for three days. "I robbed to support my drug habit. I murdered for money," he told the jury.
He went to prison for the murders of Baldino and Ciancaglini and served nearly ten years, 37 months of them in solitary confinement. On his release he entered the federal witness protection program, worked as a hotel janitor, married a hotel administrator and later became a car salesman so successful his employer wrote to a prosecutor about it. He left the program to make his own way. His past did not entirely leave him: in 2007 he struck a man in a restaurant argument and later pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor. When his new identity was exposed, he refused to be relocated again and took a job in another city, still marked, Cipriano wrote, by his brother’s murder.
On November 3, 1998, a 36-year-old long-haul truck driver walked into the main station of the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office in Eureka, California, and gave himself up. Wayne Adam Ford lived in nearby Arcata. He had been born in Petaluma, served in the Marines and lived for a time in Las Vegas with his wife and their son. The marriage had ended in divorce about two years earlier, and the decree gave him only limited visits with the boy.
Over the following days Ford confessed to killing four women he had met on the road. Their bodies had been found between October 1997 and October 1998: a woman near Eureka whom no one could identify; Tina Gibbs, 26, in Kern County in June 1998; Lanett White, 25, of Fontana, near Lodi in September 1998; and Patricia Tamez, 29, near Hesperia in October 1998. He led detectives to evidence in Humboldt County and told them where to find more, the Deseret News reported.
His reason for coming in was not remorse for the dead, at least as he first explained it. He was tormented by urges to kill his former wife, the North Coast Journal reported. The Humboldt County coroner, Frank Jager Jr., who spoke with him before his first court appearance, said Ford had come in so that he would not kill her; if anything happened to her, Jager said, the boy would be an orphan. Jager said Ford could not really give a reason for the killings and was "ashamed of what he was doing." His former father-in-law was unmoved. "This is incredible that an accused murderer would blame anybody but himself for what he’s done," he told CBS News.
Ford was arraigned on November 6, 1998, on a single count of first-degree murder, and his public defender entered a plea of not guilty. The four killings had happened in four counties, and the case was eventually brought in San Bernardino County, where a grand jury indicted him on four counts of murder. In December 2001 a judge there ruled that the four could be tried together if prosecutors showed they were connected. In June 2006 a San Bernardino County jury convicted Ford of four counts of first-degree murder, and he was sentenced to death, according to the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office.
On death row at San Quentin he told a Petaluma360 reporter, at a time when California voters were weighing Proposition 62, a measure to replace the death penalty with life without parole, that he would sooner be executed than spend his life there. "I’d rather be executed than stay here," he said.
The woman found near Eureka remained a Jane Doe for 25 years. In December 2022 the sheriff’s office and the California Department of Justice brought in Othram, a forensic genealogy laboratory. Its work led investigators to a relative and then to her sister, whose DNA confirmed the match. On June 7, 2023, the sheriff’s office announced her name: Kerry Ann Cummings, born in 1972, an artist whose family had lost track of her in the mid-1990s when she developed a mental illness that went untreated. "She was dearly loved," her sister said.
Michael Ross changed his mind about the one thing most condemned prisoners never stop fighting for. He was a 1981 graduate of Cornell University, where he studied agricultural economics, and afterward sold insurance in eastern Connecticut. He was arrested in June 1984 and in time admitted killing eight girls and young women in Connecticut and New York over three years.
In 1987 he was sentenced to death for the murders of four of them, all from eastern Connecticut: Robin Stavinsky, 19; Wendy Baribeault, 17; and April Brunais and Leslie Shelley, both 14. He was serving life sentences for the murders of Tammy Williams, 17, and Debra Smith Taylor, 23, and a sentence of up to 25 years in New York for the murder of Paula Perrera, 16, according to Amnesty International. He admitted killing Dzung Ngoc Tu, 25, a Cornell student who died in Ithaca in May 1981, but he was never prosecuted for her death. At the time, investigators could not say whether she had died by accident, suicide or homicide, and the local district attorney, George Dentes, told The Cornell Daily Sun in 2004 that he saw "no real point in prosecuting" Ross while he was under sentence of death.
The death sentences were overturned in 1994, because the jury had not been allowed to consider evidence that the killings arose from a psychiatric disorder. A new jury rejected that argument and sentenced him to death again in 2000. Ross said he had changed in prison, through medication and religious faith, and he wrote a monthly newsletter of reflections and prayers. He also said he opposed the death penalty.
In the fall of 2004 he gave up his remaining appeals and asked to be executed. He said the families of his victims had suffered enough. "I owe these people. I killed their daughters," he said, according to the Associated Press. An execution was set for January 26, 2005. It would have been Connecticut’s first since 1960.
The state’s public defenders refused to accept his choice. They argued that nearly 20 years in solitary confinement on death row had left him unable to make a free decision, and in January 2005 a federal judge, Robert N. Chatigny, agreed that the question deserved a hearing. He gave the Office of the Chief Public Defender standing to act for Ross, ordered a competency hearing and stayed the execution. A psychiatrist who specialized in the effects of solitary confinement, Stuart Grassian, had testified that Ross understood his legal position but might not be able to make a rational, voluntary choice, and that he could appear more competent than he was. The judge also had before him a letter Ross wrote in 1998 in which he said privately that his main reason was to put himself out of his own misery. The stay did not last, and the January date passed amid further litigation.
In April 2005 a Connecticut court found Ross competent to waive his appeals. His father filed a federal lawsuit arguing that the execution would set off suicide attempts among inmates, and his sister also tried to stop it; the courts rejected both. Michael Ross was put to death by lethal injection at Osborn Correctional Institution in Somers at 2:25 a.m. on May 13, 2005. He was 45. It was the first execution in New England in 45 years. The sister of one of the girls he killed watched, and said afterward that she felt anger rather than the relief she had expected.
Henry Lee Lucas changed his mind in the opposite direction, and more than once. Arrested on a weapons charge in Montague County, Texas, in June 1983, he began confessing to murders and did not stop. He had already served prison time for the second-degree murder of his mother in Michigan in 1960. Within months he had confessed to more than 150 killings; by early 1984 the claimed total was near 600, across more than two dozen states. A task force formed around him, and police from across the country came to clear their files. By April 1985, 210 killings had been closed on his word, the Associated Press reported.
Two of the confessions were supported by physical evidence. In September 1983 Lucas pleaded guilty to killing Kate Rich, an elderly woman from Montague County, and was sentenced to 75 years. In November 1983 a Denton County jury convicted him of murdering Frieda "Becky" Powell, 15, his traveling companion, and sentenced him to life. "I expected it," he said. "I am relieved. This is what I asked for."
The first retraction came within months. At a pretrial hearing in Georgetown in February 1984, in the case of a young woman found beside Interstate 35 in Williamson County on Halloween 1979 and known for years only as Orange Socks, Lucas testified that his confession was false. He said he had picked up the details from a police bulletin and had wanted to commit "legal suicide" as penance for killing Becky Powell. "I just told them what they wanted to hear," he said, according to United Press International. A jury in San Angelo convicted him of capital murder anyway in 1984, on evidence that consisted largely of his own statements, and he was sentenced to death.
In April 1985 the Dallas Times Herald published records placing Lucas in other states on the days of killings he had confessed to. He told the paper that all but three of his confessions were false: his mother, Becky Powell and Kate Rich. The Texas attorney general, Jim Mattox, said on April 15 that his office doubted Lucas had committed all the killings he claimed. "There’s no evidence there with the exception of his own confessions," he said. A year later his office’s report concluded that Lucas had carried out a massive hoax, drawing details from the officers who interviewed him, and found reliable work records placing him in Jacksonville, Florida, when the woman known as Orange Socks was killed. Investigators were never unanimous. In 1990 an investigator told the Associated Press that police were "pretty sure" Lucas had killed three people and that every other case remained suspect.
The federal courts refused to set aside the capital conviction. In January 1998 the Fifth Circuit held that "a claim of 'actual innocence' is not itself a constitutional claim." Five months later, after the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles recommended it, Governor George W. Bush commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment, saying the jurors had not known of Lucas’s pattern of lying and confessing to crimes. "They’re going to execute me for lying," Lucas had said that month. He died in prison in Huntsville in March 2001, at 64, of what officials said appeared to be natural causes. In August 2019 the Williamson County Sheriff’s Office identified the woman known as Orange Socks as Debra Jackson, 23, of Abilene.
On the morning of March 18, 2013, Bosco Ntaganda walked into the United States Embassy in Kigali, Rwanda, and asked to be sent to the International Criminal Court in The Hague. He was the first suspect to surrender to the court of his own accord, the Nation reported.
The court had wanted him since 2006, when it issued a warrant charging him with enlisting and conscripting children under 15 and using them in hostilities while he commanded operations for the Union of Congolese Patriots in Ituri, in northeastern Congo, in 2002 and 2003. A second warrant in July 2012 added murder, rape, sexual slavery, pillage and persecution. In the meantime, under a 2009 peace deal, the Congolese government had made him a general in its army, a post he held until April 2012, when he led a mutiny that became the M23 rebellion, Human Rights Watch reported. His nickname was "the Terminator," a name he told the judges did not fit him.
Why he gave himself up was never fully explained. Human Rights Watch noted that a clash between two M23 factions appeared to have left the faction opposed to him with the upper hand. Neither Rwanda nor the United States was a party to the court’s founding treaty, Al Jazeera reported, so neither was obliged to hand him over. The transfer was arranged, and he entered the court’s detention on March 22, 2013.
His trial opened on September 2, 2015. On July 8, 2019, the court found him guilty of 18 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Ituri in 2002 and 2003, including murder and attempted murder, rape, sexual slavery, persecution, forcible transfer, attacks on civilians, and conscripting and enlisting children under 15 and using them in hostilities. He was the first person the court convicted of sexual slavery. On November 7, 2019, he was sentenced to 30 years in prison, with credit for his time in detention. On March 30, 2021, the Appeals Chamber confirmed the conviction by a majority and the sentence unanimously, and both became final. He was later transferred to Belgium to serve the sentence in the prison at Leuze-en-Hainaut.
Sean O’Callaghan, from County Kerry, joined the Provisional IRA as a teenager. By the time he was 20, the writer Gary Kent recalled in the New Statesman, he had killed a woman soldier in a mortar attack and shot dead a police officer. What turned him, by his own account, was a remark from an IRA superior about the soldier: that he hoped she had been pregnant, so that they had got "two for the price of one."
He left the organization and moved to England, where he built an ordinary life. In 1979, after the IRA murdered Lord Mountbatten, he went back to Kerry and rejoined, this time as an informer for the Irish police, working without pay, according to Kent. Accounts of when the informing began differ; TheJournal.ie put it at 1979 to 1989. He was credited with helping to stop a large IRA arms shipment and with sabotaging a plan to attack a London theater concert attended by the Prince and Princess of Wales.
Then he gave himself up. He walked into a police station in England and admitted two IRA murders, the Irish Post and the Irish Echo reported. TheJournal.ie said he was jailed in 1990; when Kent met him in Maghaberry prison in 1995, he was serving a total of 539 years. He was released by royal prerogative in 1996, according to TheJournal.ie and Kent, or in 1997 by other accounts. He wrote a memoir, The Informer, testified in a libel action about the IRA’s leadership in the late 1990s, supported families of the 1998 Omagh bombing in a civil action, and in 2017 testified from a secret location to the Kingsmill inquest. Senior republicans called his claims exaggerated or untrue. He died in August 2017 while swimming in a pool in Jamaica, where he was visiting his daughter; the Irish Post reported that he drowned, while Kent wrote that he died of natural causes. He was 62 or 63; reports differed.
Hugo Banzer seized power in Bolivia on August 22, 1971, overthrowing General Juan José Torres. His government restricted unions and constitutional liberties and severely repressed its opponents, labor leaders, clergy, peasants and students among them, according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. In 1978 he was forced out by another general and sent into exile in Argentina.
He came back in 1979 and founded a party, Nationalist Democratic Action, and he went on to run as a democrat in every election of the 1980s and 1990s, the Associated Press reported. In 1985 he won the popular vote but lost the runoff in Congress. In 1997 he won the presidency. Supporters credited him with strengthening democracy and sharply reducing coca cultivation; critics pointed to human rights abuses, corruption and an autocratic style. In July 2001, while he was being treated at Walter Reed Army Medical Center for lung cancer that had spread to his liver, his government announced that he would resign; his information minister said the decision was voluntary. He died in Santa Cruz on May 5, 2002, at 75.
• June 26, 1913: Rudolf Brazda is born in Brossen, Germany.
• 1937: Brazda is arrested on a charge of "debauchery between men."
• August 1942: Brazda is sent to Buchenwald (1943 in another account).
• April 11, 1945: American forces liberate Buchenwald.
• 1960: Henry Lee Lucas is convicted of the second-degree murder of his mother in Michigan.
• August 22, 1971: Hugo Banzer takes power in Bolivia.
• 1978: Banzer is forced from office.
• 1979: Banzer founds Nationalist Democratic Action; Sean O’Callaghan rejoins the IRA as an informer, by Kent’s account.
• May 1981: Dzung Ngoc Tu dies in Ithaca, New York; Michael Ross later admits killing her.
• June 1983: Lucas is arrested in Montague County, Texas, and begins confessing.
• February 1984: Lucas testifies in Georgetown that his confession in the Orange Socks case is false.
• June 1984: Ross is arrested in Connecticut and begins confessing.
• 1984: A San Angelo jury convicts Lucas of capital murder; he is sentenced to death.
• April 1985: Lucas tells the Dallas Times Herald that all but three of his confessions are false.
• 1985: Banzer wins the popular vote but loses the presidential runoff in Congress.
• 1987: Ross is sentenced to death for four murders.
• August 5, 1993: John Veasey takes part in the shooting that kills Michael Ciancaglini in Philadelphia.
• September 17, 1993: Veasey shoots and kills Frank Baldino.
• Late December 1993: Veasey goes to federal prosecutors.
• January 14, 1994: Veasey is shot and survives.
• October 5, 1995: Billy Veasey is shot dead.
• 1996 or 1997: O’Callaghan is released from prison.
• 1997: Banzer is elected president of Bolivia.
• January 9, 1998: The Fifth Circuit affirms the denial of relief to Lucas.
• June 1998: Governor George W. Bush commutes Lucas’s death sentence to life.
• November 3, 1998: Wayne Adam Ford turns himself in at the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office.
• March 2001: Lucas dies in prison.
• July 2001: Banzer announces his resignation.
• May 5, 2002: Banzer dies in Santa Cruz.
• Fall 2004: Ross gives up his appeals.
• January 2005: Judge Chatigny stays Ross’s execution pending a competency hearing.
• May 13, 2005: Ross is executed at Osborn Correctional Institution.
• March 14, 2006: Jencie Fagan persuades a 14-year-old gunman to drop his revolver at Pine Middle School in Reno.
• June 2006: A San Bernardino County jury convicts Ford of four counts of first-degree murder.
• 2011: Carlos Roberto de Jesus stages a killing in Pindobaçu, Brazil, instead of carrying it out.
• August 3, 2011: Brazda dies in Bantzenheim, France.
• January 10, 2013: Ryan Heber talks Bryan Oliver into putting down a shotgun at Taft Union High School.
• March 18, 2013: Bosco Ntaganda surrenders at the United States Embassy in Kigali.
• February 26, 2015: Oliver is sentenced to 27 years and four months.
• August 2017: O’Callaghan dies in Jamaica.
• July 8, 2019: The International Criminal Court convicts Ntaganda on 18 counts.
• August 2019: The woman known as Orange Socks is identified as Debra Jackson.
• November 7, 2019: Ntaganda is sentenced to 30 years.
• March 30, 2021: The Appeals Chamber confirms Ntaganda’s conviction and sentence.
• June 7, 2023: The Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office identifies the woman found near Eureka as Kerry Ann Cummings.