Before her arrest, Bremen had a gentle name for Gesche Margarethe Gottfried. She was the Engel von Bremen, the Angel of Bremen, a woman who sat with sick relatives and friends through their last days. On the evening of March 6, 1828, her forty-third birthday, she was arrested, and the city lost the word it had been using. A Bremen court sentenced her to death for 15 murders. She confessed to 15 killings between 1813 and 1827, and she was executed on the Domshof, the square beside the cathedral, on April 21, 1831, before a crowd that the Bremen edition of the taz puts at 35,000. It was the last public execution in the city.
What the city said about her afterward is the subject here, and so is what other places said about other people in the same century. The courts in the cases below tried what they could prove, usually one death at a time, and the newspapers reached for older words: ripper, assassin, angel. What follows are the labels the record preserves, and the arguments that grew up around them.
The taz reported in 2010 that for years the later story of Gottfried rested on a contemporary biography by Friedrich Leopold Voget. The trial files were long believed lost. They turned up in East Germany in 1987, according to the taz, and passed to the Bremen State Archive; WEB.DE dates their return to 1988. The writer Peer Meter spent about two decades with them, and in March 2010 he published a study of the trial files, described by the taz as the first complete analysis of them, together with a graphic novel.
His conclusion was that Voget had misquoted the files to turn her into a greedy murderer, and that after her arrest the city’s middle class tried to make it appear that her crimes had been committed in secret. The files, he told WEB.DE, show leading citizens trying to hide their own share of responsibility. He argued that many people had raised warnings and that the community met them with indifference. In the taz he pointed to the Bremen astronomer Wilhelm Olbers, who examined one of the dead and misjudged the cause of death; without that error, Meter said, she might have been exposed by about the sixth death. WEB.DE reported that in the year before her arrest, food she prepared had raised suspicion, but it was thrown away and not examined further.
Each death, in other words, had been read separately, and each time with a gentle explanation. The angel was not a disguise that fooled a city so much as a frame the city kept placing around her.
The court’s frame was different, and so was Meter’s. The judges named inheritance, relief from debt and access to sexual partners as her motives, the taz reported in 2023. Meter has disputed any single motive; he told the taz in 2010 that no plausible motive exists and that she was a severely mentally ill woman, neither the greedy murderer of the standard account nor an efficient, fascinating killer. Her trial was, by the taz’s account, the first anywhere in which the defense argued that the accused lacked criminal responsibility. The court refused a psychiatric examination, and she was sentenced to death. Of those who fell ill, 19 survived by the taz’s count in 2010, or at least 20 by Meter’s in WEB.DE in 2022. How many of the 15 deaths were charged one by one has not been reported.
The city’s second name for her is physical. A stone marks the place of her execution, and the taz and the City of Bremen tourism portal call it the Spuckstein, the spitting stone, and the stone is still spat on. The angel became something Bremen spat at.
When the same question was asked in County Durham, the answer was narrower, and the law supplied it. Mary Ann Cotton was executed at Durham County Gaol on March 24, 1873, for the murder of her stepson, Charles Edward Cotton, a boy of seven who had died at West Auckland the summer before. The jury at the Durham Assizes was out for 50 minutes. It was the only killing for which she was ever tried.
She had been married four times by then, the fourth time while her third husband was still alive. Husbands, children, stepchildren, her mother, a sister-in-law and a lover had died around her over two decades, many of them insured. The deaths had been certified at the time as natural, several as gastric fever, and the first inquest into Charles’s death returned a verdict of natural causes. Only a doctor’s further examination reopened it. After her arrest in July 1872, the deaths of three more West Auckland victims, Joseph Nattrass, Frederick Cotton junior and Robert Robson Cotton, were investigated, according to Durham University Library, and she was charged with those deaths as well. The Crown went ahead on Charles’s case alone.
Beamish, the open-air museum of the North East, says she may have had as many as 21 victims, including three of her four husbands and 11 of her 13 children. Almost all of that figure rests on suspicion, inquest records and later research, not on a court’s finding. A reader could take the number as a statement about one woman, but in 1873 the only statement the law made was about one boy.
The law’s vocabulary shows in the sentencing, which the Durham Chronicle reported and Durham University Library has published. The judge told her she had killed a child she ought to have cared for. He suggested she had shared a delusion common among weak-minded people, the belief that such crimes could be committed without detection, and he called the offense among the most serious of crimes, one that left traces leading to punishment. The Northern Echo, in its account of her last weeks, described a woman sometimes deeply depressed who wrote to friends urging a reprieve and who valued the visits of the prison chaplain and a Wesleyan minister. Its editorial of March 24, 1873, called her letters from the condemned cell badly written, desperate pleas to be allowed to live.
The prosecution itself became a question in Parliament. On March 4, 1873, William Wheelhouse asked the Prime Minister, William Gladstone, in the House of Commons about a resolution of the Northern Circuit on the way the case of the Queen against Cotton was being conducted at the Durham Assizes, and about the place of the County Palatine’s own law officers. Gladstone said he could not see what the matter had to do with him: it was, as he understood it, a point of legal practice about who should lead for the prosecution. The dispute was about lawyers, and Hansard does not name the barristers. In the Commons, as in the courtroom, the question was framed as a matter of one case against one defendant.
A modern book title, noted in a 2013 review in feminists@law, calls her Britain’s first female serial killer. The phrase belongs to the twentieth century and later. The record from 1873 has a different grammar: a trial for the murder of Charles Edward Cotton, and a list of other deaths that never reached a jury.
France gave its courts the same constraint, and the record of Hélène Jégado shows how a legal limit shaped what a jury was allowed to hear. A cook and domestic servant from Morbihan in Brittany, Jégado was arrested in Rennes on July 1, 1851, at the household of the law professor Théophile Bidard, on the day the third of the Rennes deaths occurred. The Archives départementales d’Ille-et-Vilaine hold the trial file and give the court’s own estimate as 37 victims, 23 of them fatal. Most of those cases were never tried. The deaths in Morbihan between 1833 and 1841 were more than ten years old, and French law then put crimes of that age beyond prosecution. Two recent Rennes deaths, those of Louis Rabot in 1849 and Clodomir Ozanne in 1850, were not charged either; the archives say the court seems not to have wanted to put the two families through further examinations and judged the other charges sufficient.
The indictment that went to trial had 18 counts: one theft of money, ten thefts of household goods, four attempted murders and three murders, those of Pérotte Macé, Rose Tessier and Rosalie Sarrazin. On December 14, 1851, after eight days of trial, the jury convicted her on all 18, without mitigating circumstances. A printed sheet on the case in the French Execution Ballads database at the University of Melbourne gave a different count, 37 people targeted and 25 dead, which is not the figure in the archives. The number moved with the teller.
The words used about her moved too. In 1835, at Locminé, the gossip called her "les foies blancs," a coward and a traitor, according to the archives. At Auray in 1836, the curators write, rumor put the deaths around her down to sorcery. Her name was written "Jigadeau" on the arrest papers, and when officials made inquiries in Morbihan the news spread that a servant named Hélène had been arrested, and the court at Pontivy warned the chief prosecutor in Rennes of local talk linking such a servant to old, unexplained deaths. Bretons, the archives write, followed each step.
In court the vocabulary became medical and legal. Her court-appointed lawyer, Magloire Dorange, a republican who campaigned against the death penalty at a time when few did, argued against her wishes that she suffered from monomania, a fixation on a single act. The prosecution had painted her as a wicked woman who took pleasure in killing; the defense itself called her "un monstre" and "une erreur de la nature," an error of nature, and in the closing speech a "phénomène," born with a "malheureuse organisation cérébrale," an unhappy makeup of the brain. The experts Dorange called supported the prosecution instead. The chemist François-Vincent Raspail, writing from prison, said that her conduct was not that of a monomaniac, because she had prepared her acts with care. A Dr. Pitois offered the jury a reading of her skull and face in the manner of the physiognomy of the day, telling them she had a wide forehead and well-developed organs of hypocrisy and cunning.
The timing added its own noise. The trial opened on December 6, 1851, four days after Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte seized power in Paris. Dorange asked for a postponement because several witnesses were missing, among them the deputy Baudin, who he said had been killed in Paris defending the constitution; the court refused. The Journal de Rennes reported that she came into court wrapped in a black mantelet with the hood drawn down over her face. Crowds gathered outside, police had to protect her from a hostile public, and local newspapers raised their prices while the case ran, although national coverage was overshadowed by the coup. The Cour de cassation rejected her appeal on January 16, 1852, a pardon was refused by Louis-Napoléon on February 22, and she was executed at Rennes on February 26, 1852.
In Vienna, the label that stuck to Hugo Schenk came from the trade he practiced before the killings. Hugo Schenk, born in 1849 in Teschen according to the Czech daily Právo, was first a marriage swindler. Právo’s 2021 historical feature on him still carries that word in its headline. From 1881 he placed matrimonial advertisements, and in September 1881 he was arrested for defrauding a woman he had met that way of 1,800 gulden. He was sentenced to two years of hard imprisonment and released in March 1883.
By December of that year, four women were dead. In March 1884 a Vienna court convicted Schenk, his brother Karl Schenk and Karl Schlossarek of murder in the deaths of Josefine Timal, Katharina Timal, Theresia Ketterl and Rosa Ferenczy, all in 1883. The court also heard of two robbery attempts on men earlier that year, one of whom was wounded and survived to testify. The frame is worth noticing. The press and the court told one story from spring to winter, but the prosecution proved it as a set of separate counts. A local paper in Durlach, Baden, the Durlacher Wochenblatt, reported the proceedings before the Vienna court in its issue of March 20, 1884, which shows that a trial in the Austrian capital was news in a small Baden town. The presiding judge was Count Lamezan, the paper reported. It described Schenk as elegant, handsome and calm, and quoted him telling the court: "I did not want to murder." On the last day the presiding judge read aloud a letter Schenk had written from prison to his lover; she collapsed in an anteroom of the court. Schenk and Schlossarek were executed in Vienna on April 22, 1884.
The case outlived its verdict as paper. Právo reported that photographs of the defendants taken in 1884 by Alois Hynek were circulated, and that the killings became the subject of printed ballads in the later nineteenth century. When a case was not yet a type, it was a sheet to be sold.
The case that gave the nineteenth century its most durable label had no defendant. In the fall of 1888, five women, Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly, were killed in Whitechapel and Spitalfields in London between August 31 and November 9. The police file that came to be called the Whitechapel murders took in eleven deaths between April 1888 and February 1891, and which of them belong to one killer is still argued. Two earlier deaths, those of Emma Smith in April and Martha Tabram in August, were folded into the file, though most researchers today do not believe either was the work of the man who came to be called Jack the Ripper.
The unknown killer was also called the Whitechapel Murderer, which describes a place, while "the Ripper" describes an act and has been repeated for more than a century. No one was charged with any of the five canonical deaths. The state’s formal responses were separate inquests. The coroner Wynne Baxter opened the inquest on Mary Ann Nichols on September 1, and it ran on and off until September 23; the inquest on Annie Chapman opened on September 10 and closed on September 26, according to Casebook: Jack the Ripper, which also tabulates the inquest dates for all eleven Whitechapel deaths. Each woman had a file of her own long before there was a series.
The historian Hallie Rubenhold, in her 2019 book The Five, set out to reverse that order. "It is only by bringing these women back to life," she wrote, "that we can silence the Ripper and what he represents." Smithsonian magazine, summarizing her findings in 2019, reported that the women had in common ordinary losses, a marriage that failed, a child who died, an allowance that stopped. A 2019 claim of DNA evidence for the identity of the killer rested on limited testing of a shawl that has no proven link to the crime, Live Science reported. In January 2025, CBS News and Agence France-Presse reported that a relative of one of the women was demanding a new inquest into her death. After 138 years the Ripper is still a name without a person attached.
Three years earlier, Austin, Texas, had produced its own labels without any help from London. For almost exactly a year, from the last night of 1884 to Christmas Eve 1885, eight people were killed in a run of night violence and several more were injured. The police and the press came to believe that one man was behind it, a view later writers such as Skip Hollandsworth and D. Kim Rossmo have shared, although the PBS series History Detectives allowed that more than one killer may have been involved. The Austin killer was called the Midnight Assassin, the name a reporter gave him at the time. The other name, the Servant Girl Annihilator, is traced to William Sydney Porter, the future O. Henry, who was living in Austin in 1885.
The two names tell different stories. One is about the hour and the silence. The other is about whom the city thought was at risk: the dead were Mollie Smith, Eliza Shelley, Irene Cross, Mary Ramey, Gracie Vance, Orange Washington, Susan Hancock and Eula Phillips. Six were Black and two were white, and most of the early victims worked in household service, which is how the series came to be called the servant girl murders and why race shaped so much of the way the city responded. When two white women died on Christmas Eve, Hollandsworth wrote in 2018, word traveled across the city by party-line telephone and at least 4,000 frightened people gathered downtown. The Statesman’s Christmas morning headline, as quoted by the columnist Bartee Haile, read "Blood! Blood! Blood!"
What Austin did with the series was to try single deaths and arrest in bulk. Rossmo writes that about 400 people, mainly Black men, were arrested in 1885 and questioned severely. The police, under Chief Grooms Lee, whom Hollandsworth’s Texas Monthly account describes as weak and in places corrupt, produced few cases that held. The man hurt in the first assault was tried for that death and acquitted by an all-white jury after a two-day trial in early December 1885. James Phillips, the husband of Eula Phillips, was convicted and sentenced to seven years; about six months later the Court of Appeals of Texas reversed the conviction for insufficient evidence, and he was not tried again. Moses Hancock was tried for the death of his wife Susan and the trial ended without a conviction. Three men stood trial; no conviction stood. The district attorney did not try to tie either husband to the earlier deaths, Haile noted, and Hollandsworth regards the idea of two husbands separately imitating one killer on the same night as implausible.
The city’s response is also recorded in the vocabulary of policing. Lee was replaced after about nine months by James Lucy, a former Texas Ranger, who brought in about twenty former Rangers and ordered strangers stopped and questioned; anyone who could not give a satisfactory answer had 24 hours to leave town. Hollandsworth, quoted by Haile, said the city was turning into a police state. Doctors and so-called alienists, the experts of the day on insanity and criminal behavior, offered theories; most were guesses, Doug Swanson noted, and Mayor John Robertson admitted that no one could find a motive that made sense.
Then the Atlantic entered the picture. A few years later, Whitechapel produced a famous killer without a name, and the question was asked whether the Austin killer had crossed the ocean. Hollandsworth discussed it in his 2016 book and with the Houston Press, without reaching a conclusion; the reviewer Jim Swearingen judged that the attempt to link the cases ended in inconclusive speculation, and Swanson thought the idea far-fetched. Rossmo notes only that, like his more famous Whitechapel counterpart, the Austin killer was never caught. The labels traveled by book and column long after the crimes.
A ready-made word sat in the headline writer’s drawer in Kansas in 1873. The Emporia News of May 16, 1873, headed its report on the case from Labette County "The Cherryvale Fiends." The family at the center of it, known to neighbors as the Benders, had kept a small store and inn on a claim between Osage Mission and Independence, and they had left in the spring. When neighbors went onto the empty claim in early May, the first body to come to light was that of Dr. William H. York, a physician from Independence.
The count is the instructive part. The Thayer Head Light listed eight dead and expected more. The Emporia News reported on May 16 that three more had been uncovered, "fourteen in all." The Kansas Historical Society settles on eleven, and the state’s historical marker says the family was "believed to have killed about a dozen people, including one child." In a few weeks of printed reports, a single event was counted at eight, eleven, a dozen and fourteen, and each figure went into someone’s record.
The family’s identity was no steadier. The Kansas papers described two men and two women. The Library of Congress notes that their nationality was reported inconsistently; the Wichita Eagle said in 1889 that they came from Alsace. The older man was called John in some accounts and William in others, and the older woman is called Kate by the Kansas Historical Society, like her daughter. Smithsonian Magazine noted in 2020 that some researchers have questioned whether they were a family at all. The Benders were never caught, no court heard a case against any of them, and Governor Thomas Osborn’s reward of $2,000 was never paid. In 1889, two women arrested in Niles, Michigan, as Ma and Kate Bender were held in the Labette County jail at Oswego and released; they were never tried.
The Kansas record shows how a vague band of unnamed killers acquires a surname and a family tree. HistoryNet in 2012 called them America’s first serial-killer family, a phrase that, like the Cotton book title, belongs to a later vocabulary. In 1873 the word in the headline was the older one.
The label can run ahead of the facts by a decade. Lavinia Fisher was executed in Charleston, South Carolina, on February 18, 1820, beside her husband, John, after a Charleston court convicted the couple of highway robbery in May 1819. In South Carolina at that time robbery on the highway could be punished with death. No court charged either of them with a killing. Yet she is promoted on Charleston ghost tours as America’s first female serial killer, and The Post and Courier’s 2019 article about her carried the phrase in its headline, with the question of whether she was instead wrongly accused.
The murder story, the Post and Courier reports, did not wait long. In 1830 the Scottish writer Peter Neilson published Recollections of a Six Years' Residence in the United States of America in Glasgow and Edinburgh. In a passage on executions in Charleston he described a man and wife who kept a tavern about six miles from the city and were put to death for murder and robbery carried out, he said, to an unknown but terrible extent, and he wrote that a great number of victims were discovered afterward. The record as historians describe it has an indictment for two assaults, a conviction for robbery and two discoveries near the house that were never tied to the couple. Neilson’s book converted two into a multitude.
The Fisher account is the clearest case here of a label manufactured by repetition. The National Park Service page on the Old Jail still says the Fishers and their gang were convicted of robbery and murder, which the Post and Courier says the trial record does not support. The historian Nic Butler told the paper that he had not researched the case himself because so much of it had been distorted.
In New South Wales, the count belongs to a historical society. John Lynch, an Irish convict transported in 1832, was convicted at the Berrima Court House on March 21, 1842, of the murder of Kearns Landregan and was executed at Berrima Gaol in 1842. He had earlier been tried with two other men for the murder of a fellow servant, Thomas Smith, and all three were acquitted. The Berrima District Historical and Family History Society counts ten people as his victims in all, among them members of a farming family at Wombat Brush, and in 2019 placed a plaque at All Saints, Sutton Forest, in memory of six of them. That figure of ten is the Society’s. It was never proved in a court, which heard one death.
Some labels did not name a person but an occupation, and the occupation’s name was the argument. The trade Amelia Dyer followed came to be called baby farming. Mothers who could not keep a child, most often because it had been born outside marriage, paid a woman to nurse it or to place it with a family, by a weekly fee or with a single lump sum. The historian Joanna Bourke, in a 2021 Gresham College lecture, calls it a fairly unregulated business. Parliament had passed the Infant Life Protection Act in 1872, which required people who took in infants for payment to register; it covered only children under one year, and in the House of Lords on March 9, 1896, three weeks before the first of the 1896 deaths came to light at Reading, the Earl of Denbigh said the existing act was in danger of remaining "a dead-letter."
Bourke gives figures from the period. The Metropolitan Police divisional returns recorded the deaths of 225 infants in the year to the end of April 1896, and more than 60 percent of the murder cases that came before coroners involved infants under a year old. Illegitimate children were reported to die at three times the rate of legitimate children. A name for a trade is a way of seeing a whole class of deaths as one thing, and the statistics show that Victorian officials did see it. What they lacked was a way of charging it.
Dyer was convicted in 1879 of an offense under the 1872 act and sentenced to six months' hard labor; Bourke describes it as child neglect, and Wells Nub News, citing the reports of the time, as failing to obtain the required license. She was tried at the Central Criminal Court in May 1896 for one death only, the wilful murder of Doris Marmon, a baby of about ten weeks. She pleaded, through counsel and doctors, that she was insane. The trial evidence included periods in asylums from 1891, and on December 14, 1894, a doctor had certified her of unsound mind. The jury did not accept the defense. Amelia Dyer was executed at Newgate on June 10, 1896, aged 57. How many children died in her care over the years has never been established.
Across the Channel, the word that London made famous in 1888 was borrowed within a decade. Joseph Vacher, a discharged army sergeant released from an asylum as cured on April 1, 1894, traveled the countryside of southeastern and central France for three years. In October 1897 he confessed to eleven killings, most of the dead being young people. The Lyon professor Alexandre Lacassagne, who led the panel of experts that judged him responsible for his acts, published an account in 1898 titled "Vacher l'éventreur," the ripper, and Lyon Capitale’s 2019 retrospective carries the same word in quotation marks in its headline. The magistrate who caught him, Émile Fourquet, gave his 1931 memoir a longer title: Vacher, the greatest criminal of modern times.
Fourquet’s achievement was a way of seeing. Deaths in several départements, Isère, Var, Côte-d’Or, Savoie, Ain, Ardèche, Drôme, Allier, Haute-Loire and Rhône, had been handled by separate magistrates as separate cases, and in the Bénonces case a formal finding that there was no case to pursue had been entered. It was Fourquet who read of the killing at Courzieu in the Lyon Républicain, and who assembled a description from witnesses until a chance arrest in the Ardèche in August 1897 gave him a man to match it. He believed Vacher was responsible for more than fifty deaths; Vacher confessed to eleven; and he was tried for one, the murder of 16-year-old Victor Portalier at Bénonces, at the Ain assizes in October 1898. The real issue at the trial was whether he was insane. He was sentenced to death on October 28, 1898, and executed at Bourg-en-Bresse on December 31.
The French provincial press had done damage before the magistrate did any good. Before the confession, innocent local men were blamed for the deaths. Gérard Corneloup writes that a prosperous farmer was harassed by crowds and that the local newspapers fed the campaign against him. The Kan.bzh study of a Breton ballad on the case says he was held for a few days, partly to protect him from mob violence, before he was cleared. In the foreword to his 1931 book, Fourquet named three men who had become, in his words, victims of popular fury. A label that has not yet been given to the right person goes to the nearest suspect.
The most famous American label of the century, the Murder Castle, was built largely in print. Herman Webster Mudgett, who called himself H. H. Holmes, was convicted of one murder: a Philadelphia jury convicted him in November 1895 of the murder of Benjamin F. Pitezel, a business associate who had joined him in a scheme to cheat a life insurance company. The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania upheld the verdict in March 1896, and he was executed at Moyamensing Prison on May 7, 1896. The deaths of three of Pitezel’s children were attributed to him by investigators, but he was never tried for them, and the Philadelphia trial judge refused to let the jury hear about them.
Most of what is now told about his Chicago building, Smithsonian magazine and the historian Adam Selzer agree, came from a few weeks of newspaper reports in the summer of 1895. Selzer, whose 2017 book is built on the primary records, argues that the building "never for one day truly functioned as a hotel." Smithsonian reported in 2021 that its third floor was never finished, furnished or opened. The building did have hidden rooms, and the city knew about them before the World’s Columbian Exposition opened: in March 1893 the Chicago Tribune ran a long article after Holmes was caught using concealed rooms to hide furniture he had bought on credit and never paid for. In 1893, in other words, he was known in Chicago as an inventive swindler, not as a suspected killer.
While awaiting execution, he sold a confession to 27 murders that a Philadelphia newspaper printed in full. Several of the people named in it were alive, and before his execution he denied killing any member of the Pitezel family. Historians who have gone back to the records accept far smaller numbers than the hundreds of victims claimed in later books and television. The legend of the building grew in the summer of 1895, and the number attached to it is one the evidence does not support.
Lay the words side by side. Gottfried was an angel and then a spectacle of mental illness; Jégado was "un monstre" in her own defense lawyer’s mouth, an error of nature, a phenomenon; Schenk was a marriage swindler; the unknown killers were an assassin, an annihilator and a ripper; the Benders were a headline from Cherryvale; the Fishers were a murder story that the courts never told; Dyer was a baby farmer; Vacher was an éventreur and Holmes was the keeper of a castle. A court’s category changed only slowly. A newspaper’s changed in a week.
The cases also show a habit of counting. Cotton, up to 21, according to Beamish; Jégado, 37 or 25 depending on the sheet; the Benders, from eight to fourteen; Lynch, ten, by a historical society; Vacher, eleven or more than fifty; Holmes, 27 by his own paid confession and hundreds by later retelling. The legal figures were small: one count for Cotton, three murders for Jégado, four for Schenk, one each for Dyer, Vacher and Holmes, none for the Ripper, the Austin killer or the Benders. The gap between the two sets of figures is where the century’s words lived.
Later headlines continue the habit. Texas Monthly’s 2018 article calls the Austin killings the city’s first serial killer case; The Post and Courier asks whether Fisher was the nation’s first female serial killer; Smithsonian calls Holmes America’s first serial killer, in quotation marks; HistoryNet gives the Benders the first serial-killer family. Each of those claims is a first. Each is a modern label applied to a nineteenth-century case, and the word first is claimed in a different place each time.
• March 6, 1785: Gesche Margarethe Timm (later Gottfried) is born in Bremen.
• 1813 to 1827: the period of the 15 deaths for which Gottfried confessed and was convicted (the City of Bremen portal gives 1813 to 1828).
• February 1819: John and Lavinia Fisher are arrested near Charleston; they are convicted of highway robbery in May 1819 and executed on February 18, 1820.
• March 6, 1828: Gottfried is arrested in Bremen on her birthday.
• 1830: Peter Neilson’s book prints the murder version of the Fisher story.
• April 21, 1831: Gottfried is executed on the Domshof in Bremen before a crowd estimated at 35,000.
• 1833 to 1841: deaths in Morbihan later attributed to Hélène Jégado, beyond the ten-year limit for prosecution.
• March 21, 1842: John Lynch is convicted at Berrima Court House.
• July 1, 1851: Jégado is arrested in Rennes.
• December 6 to 14, 1851: Jégado is tried at the Ille-et-Vilaine assizes; on December 14 the jury convicts her on all 18 counts.
• February 26, 1852: Jégado is executed in Rennes.
• July 1872: Mary Ann Cotton is arrested at West Auckland.
• March 4, 1873: the question about the Cotton prosecution is put in the House of Commons.
• March 24, 1873: Cotton is executed at Durham County Gaol.
• May 1873: the first deaths attributed to the Benders come to light near Cherryvale, Kansas; the Emporia News of May 16 runs "The Cherryvale Fiends."
• May to December 1883: the four deaths for which Hugo Schenk and two others were convicted.
• March 1884: Schenk, Karl Schenk and Karl Schlossarek are convicted in Vienna; Schenk and Schlossarek are executed on April 22, 1884.
• December 31, 1884: Mollie Smith is killed in Austin, the first of the eight deaths of the Austin series.
• December 24 and 25, 1885: Susan Hancock and Eula Phillips die in Austin.
• August 31 to November 9, 1888: the five canonical Whitechapel deaths in London.
• 1889: two women arrested in Niles, Michigan, as the Bender women are held in Kansas and released.
• November 1895: H. H. Holmes is convicted of the murder of Benjamin F. Pitezel; he is executed in Philadelphia on May 7, 1896.
• May 18, 1896: Amelia Dyer is tried at the Central Criminal Court; she is executed at Newgate on June 10, 1896.
• August 4, 1897: Joseph Vacher is arrested at Champis, Ardèche.
• October 28, 1898: Vacher is sentenced to death at Bourg-en-Bresse; he is executed on December 31, 1898.