A boarding house sells a bed, a meal and a measure of trust. The lodger hands over rent, often a pension or benefit check, often the whole of it, and in return expects to be fed, left alone and noticed if something goes wrong. The keeper is the only person who sees every day of that arrangement. In most such houses the arrangement worked well enough. In a handful of cases that reached courts, newspapers and, in time, ghost tours, the keeper was the danger.
Six of those cases run from a Charleston roadside house in 1819 to a Gloucester house in 1994. Two more are the reverse of the rest: Earle Nelson, who was linked to the deaths of women who let rooms or showed houses to strangers, and Sante Kimes, who rented an apartment from a landlady with the aim of taking her house. In those two, the killer was the caller or the tenant, and the landlady was the victim. The legal status of the cases varies a great deal. Where a court reached a verdict, the verdict is stated. Where it did not, the deaths are described as attributed or charged, nothing more.
The contract between keeper and lodger was rarely written down, and that is much of the point. A lodger might pay by the night, by the week, or in one lump sum for care until death. A traveler paid for a meal and a place to sleep at a house on a route into a city. A pensioner or a person receiving disability support paid with a monthly check that the keeper could be authorized to collect. Who checked? Usually no one. Social workers placed clients and moved on to the next file. Relatives lived elsewhere. Neighbors saw comings and goings but not the books. Where there was a safeguard, such as the parole conditions placed on one Sacramento landlady or the coroner who signed a death certificate in Connecticut, it depended on someone reading the paperwork closely at the right moment.
Lavinia Fisher was executed in Charleston, South Carolina, on February 18, 1820, beside her husband, John Fisher. A Charleston court had convicted the couple of highway robbery in May 1819, and in South Carolina at that time the offense could carry a sentence of death. No court charged either of them with murder.
Two centuries later she is better known by another description. Ghost tours of the old Charleston jail, paranormal television programs and a concept album present her as America’s first female serial killer, a charming innkeeper who killed travelers while her husband robbed them. The Post and Courier, reporting on the research of the Charleston author Bruce Orr, set that story against what the records of 1819 and 1820 contain. They show a married couple running a roadside boarding house, a raid by a sheriff and a crowd of citizens, two indictments for assault, a conviction for robbery, a failed jail escape, a delayed execution and a double execution. They do not show a series of murdered travelers.
In the early nineteenth century, traders from the South Carolina backcountry carried their goods into Charleston along the route that ran down the neck of land north of the city. Boarding houses stood along it at intervals named for their distance from town. The route carried wagons, livestock and money in both directions, and the houses gave drivers a place to water horses, eat and sleep. The Fishers kept one of them, about six miles out. Where either was born, when they married and how they came to run the house have never been established. Almost everything known about them comes from the months between their arrest and their execution. The Post and Courier gives their ages at the time as 29 for John and 28 for Lavinia.
In early 1819 the house came under suspicion of sheltering men who robbed travelers. A sheriff and what the paper calls a lynch mob raided it, and the Fishers and others were arrested on February 18, 1819. One of those taken with them, William Heyward, was tried separately and was executed later. Local residents burned the house with the couple’s belongings still inside, and a neighboring boarding house burned as well.
The charges began as two assaults on two men at the house on a single day: assault with intent to murder, and common assault. The charge was later changed to highway robbery, and the robbery on which the case finally rested was the robbery of a trader who had stopped there to water his horse. The couple were convicted in May 1819, held in the Charleston jail for about a year, and refused a new trial in January 1820. Execution was first set for February 4 and put back by the governor to February 18. John Fisher tried to escape and was recaptured the next day. Orr’s conclusion, as the paper reports it, is that the authorities of the time never attributed any murders to the Fishers. At the end John said he had been framed. Lavinia protested her innocence, cursed, and damned the governor. One story has her leaping from the platform; the paper says she mistook a document in the sheriff’s hand for a pardon and was about to jump with excitement before the sheriff told her none was coming.
The murder story did not wait long to appear. The Post and Courier identifies an account published about ten years after the execution as the first to describe a great number of victims at the house. That version already disagrees with the record: it turns a robbery case into a murder case, and it has the house burned during the arrest rather than by residents afterward. The National Park Service page on the old jail states that the Fishers and members of their gang were convicted of robbery and murder. The conviction described by Orr and the paper was for highway robbery. As far as the published record shows, Lavinia Fisher was never tried for a killing, and she belongs here as a keeper whose reputation outran her file.
William Hare was never tried for any crime. In the winter of 1828 the Lord Advocate of Scotland, Sir William Rae, chose him as the witness who would let the Crown convict William Burke, and offered him immunity in return. Hare gave evidence at Burke’s trial on Christmas Eve 1828. Burke was convicted and executed on January 28, 1829. Hare was released from prison on February 5, 1829, and within days had vanished from the record.
By the mid-1820s Hare was in Edinburgh. The National Library of Scotland says he lodged with a man named Logue and his wife, Maggie, and that after Logue’s death he took up with her and married her in 1826. The University of Edinburgh’s Anatomical Museum names her Margaret Laird and tells it slightly differently: Hare became attached to the lodging-house keeper’s wife and was put out of the house, then moved back in and took over the business when her husband died soon afterward. Either way, by 1827 Hare and the woman known as Margaret Hare kept a lodging house in the West Port, a poor district of the city. That year, according to the National Library, Hare met Burke while both were working the harvest at Penicuik, south of Edinburgh. Burke, born in 1792, was also Irish, and had come to Scotland as a laborer. Burke and his partner, Helen McDougal, took rooms in the Hares' lodging house.
The trade began with a death that nobody caused. An elderly pensioner who lodged with Hare, an old soldier named Donald, died owing rent. Encyclopaedia Britannica dates his death to November 29 and puts the debt at four pounds. Hare and Burke sold the body to the school of the anatomist Robert Knox. The Anatomical Museum says Knox reportedly let it be known that he would be glad to see them again in like circumstances. In his confession Burke said this first body was of a person who had died naturally, and that all those sold after it were of people who had been killed. The University of Edinburgh attributes at least sixteen killings in 1828 to the pair.
Among the victims named in the record was James Wilson, 18, known in the West Port as Daft Jamie, a familiar figure who entertained local children, according to a broadside printed after his death. The two surviving accounts of Burke’s confession differ on who did what in his case, a Paisley chapbook placing Hare and his wife in the room and a version in All the Year Round placing Hare beside Burke. Both put Hare there. The last death came on October 31, 1828. Its victim, an elderly Irish woman, is called Margery Campbell in the published trial report and Margaret Docherty by the National Library and the Faculty of Advocates.
What ended the run was an act by lodgers. The next day two of Burke’s fellow lodgers, a man named Gray and his wife, went to the police. Helen McDougal had offered them money to stay silent. The National Library says that Burke and McDougal gave differing accounts of the woman, which raised suspicion. The sources differ on the arrests: the University of Edinburgh’s medical college says police acted on November 1 and that Hare was arrested the day after Burke, while the National Library says Burke, McDougal and both Hares were detained on November 3 and charged with murder.
The Crown’s case needed a witness from inside. Burke and McDougal were tried before the High Court of Justiciary in Edinburgh. The trial began on December 24 and ran through the night, and the verdict came on Christmas morning, just under 24 hours later. Hare’s evidence was the center of it. According to the Faculty of Advocates, he described to the court how Mrs. Docherty died but said he had no hand in it himself. Margaret Hare gave evidence with her infant, who had whooping cough, in her arms. Writing in 1867, All the Year Round said that on the stand Hare would give a knowing nod to avoid a damaging question, and that afterward he seemed pleased with his own escape.
He did not enjoy it for long. The Gazetteer for Scotland says a crowd forced its way into the room he had taken in Dumfries. History Scotland says the crowd forced him out of the town and that he fled to England. A correspondent in History Ireland put his last reliable sighting on the way to Carlisle on February 7, 1829. A broadside of 1829 claimed that he and McDougal had both been killed by a mob; the National Library’s description of the sheet notes that Hare survived and apparently died in obscurity in London around 1860. Neither woman was convicted of anything. McDougal left Edinburgh two days after the trial and what became of her is unknown. Margaret Hare went to Ireland, and nothing is known of her later life.
Southeast Kansas was newly open to settlement in 1870. Frank Blackmar’s Kansas encyclopedia of 1912 says a family of four moved into Osage Township, Labette County, at about the end of that year. The Kansas Historical Society says the two men came first, John Bender Sr. and John Bender Jr., took up a claim, built a one-room timber cabin, and then sent for the two women. HistoryNet puts the cabin on a 160-acre claim and says an inn and store opened in the front of it in 1871. A canvas cloth divided the cabin into two rooms, according to the Society. The front room held a table, a stove and the groceries the family sold, and travelers could buy a meal and stay the night. Blackmar describes a sign reading "Groceries" and a small stock of tobacco, crackers, sardines, candy, powder and shot.
Who the four people were is still unsettled. Kansas papers in 1873 described two men and two women, the older man past sixty, the older woman about fifty-five and the daughter, Kate, about twenty-three. The family was described as German, and the Wichita Eagle in 1889 said they came from Alsace; accounts of their nationality were inconsistent. The Kansas Historical Society calls the older woman Kate, like her daughter. Even the relationships are in doubt. The first report of the discovery to reach Emporia, taken from the Lawrence Tribune, called the young woman the younger man’s wife, not his sister. HistoryNet says some sources describe the younger pair as married, others say John Jr. was Ma Bender’s son by an earlier marriage, and some say none of them was related. Smithsonian Magazine noted that some researchers have questioned whether they were a family at all.
Kate Bender was the one the neighbors remembered. The Kansas Historical Society says she was the only one of the four with social skills, that she claimed a gift of second sight and spiritualism, and that she handed out circulars around the county advertising her powers. Thomas Duke, writing in 1910 from old reports, reprinted the gist: she called herself a "Professor" and said she could heal disease, blindness, fits and deafness. The Wichita Eagle in 1889 said John Jr. peddled her handbills. An Emporia News report said a neighbor, a woman who called herself a magnetic healer, had attended two "circles" at the Bender house the summer before. The parents were described as dull and seldom speaking.
The alarm came from outside, as it so often does. Travelers had been failing to reach their destinations in the district. Dr. William H. York of Independence set out in March 1873 and was not heard from again. His brothers searched for him. The Lawrence Tribune said his trail was followed to the neighborhood of Cherryvale, "where all further trace was lost." The Kansas Historical Society says Alexander and Edward York traced the doctor to the Bender inn, where the family admitted that he had stopped. HistoryNet describes a visit by the York brothers in late March or early April. Kate offered to consult the spirits about the missing man, and John Jr. told a story of having been waylaid himself and led them to the place where he said it happened. Blackmar says that Kate, claiming to be clairvoyant, put off the Yorks' request for help. The district then met at a schoolhouse, where, in Blackmar’s account, the Benders kept silent while other settlers offered to have their own land searched.
A neighbor passing the claim noticed that the stock had not been fed or watered. In the first week of May 1873, the township trustee broke the lock on the door of an empty cabin. The family had gone. The state’s count, repeated by the Kansas Historical Society in its encyclopedia entries, was eleven people. The state’s historical marker says the family was "believed to have killed about a dozen people, including one child." Newspapers at the time gave figures from eight to fourteen. Dr. York, whose brothers had been searching for him since March, was the first to be identified.
The Benders were never traced. Governor Thomas A. Osborn offered a $2,000 reward in May 1873, and it was never paid. For decades people claimed to have seen the family, caught them or killed them. In 1889 two women arrested in Niles, Michigan, as Ma and Kate Bender were held in the Labette County jail at Oswego and then released. No court ever heard a case against any of the four, and the deaths are attributed to the family rather than proven against any of them.
Amy Archer-Gilligan ran a house for elderly lodgers in Windsor, Connecticut, in the years before the First World War. She was born Amy Duggan in Milton, Connecticut, the eighth of ten children, according to the Windsor Historical Society. The year of her birth is recorded differently: Connecticut History, the online encyclopedia published by Connecticut Humanities, gives 1873, and the Society gives 1868. By about 1901 the Archers were living in the Newington house of an elderly widower who had hired them as live-in caretakers, giving them room and board for looking after him. He died in 1904, and the Archers rented the house from his heirs and kept caring for elderly boarders there. In 1907 they used their savings to buy a house in Windsor and opened it for elderly people and chronic invalids.
The terms were simple. Lodgers paid between $7 and $25 a week. They could instead pay $1,000 once, in return for care for life, and many chose that option, the Windsor Historical Society said. Connecticut History adds that some residents or their families signed over insurance policies in exchange for lifetime care. There were early disputes. In 1909 the family of an elderly woman from West Hartford sued over the care she had received, and the case was settled for $5,000.
The numbers were what drew attention. Between 1907 and 1916, sixty residents died at the house: twelve from 1907 to 1910 and forty-eight from 1911 to 1916. Over the same 1911 to 1916 period, a large institution for the elderly in Hartford recorded about the same number of deaths, though it housed about seven times as many people. Townspeople also noticed her purchases. According to Connecticut History, people in Windsor said she seemed to buy unusually large quantities, and she told them it was for rats; the Windsor Historical Society says she gave rats and bedbugs as her reasons, and that one of her largest purchases came shortly before the death of her second husband, Michael Gilligan, in February 1914.
Franklin Andrews was 60 and lodged at the house. In May 1914 he was active and, by every outward sign, well. Connecticut History says he had been working on the lawn the day before he died; the Windsor Historical Society says he collapsed while painting a fence and died two days later. The death certificate gave the cause as a gastric ulcer. His sister went through his papers and came upon letters in which the keeper pressed him for money, the Society says, and Connecticut History says she also came upon records of a $500 loan from him to Archer-Gilligan. She took her concerns to the state’s attorney and to the Hartford Courant. The prosecutor showed little interest at first. A Courant correspondent then turned to the counting of obituaries from one house, and the authorities were pressed to look more closely. She was arrested in Windsor on May 8, 1916.
She was charged with five murders. In June 1917 a jury convicted her of the first-degree murder of Andrews, and she was sentenced to death. In April 1918 the Connecticut Supreme Court of Errors held that the trial judge had wrongly let the jury hear evidence of other deaths. The court explained that evidence of other, unconnected crimes is excluded not because it proves nothing but because it tends to prejudice a jury against the accused, and it held that admitting proof of the deaths of Gilligan and two lodgers on top of the state’s other evidence was an abuse of discretion. At a retrial in 1919 she was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. She was later declared insane and spent the rest of her life in the state hospital at Middletown, where she died in 1962. The other deaths at the house were never tried to a final judgment. They are attributed to her by prosecutors, by the press of the time and by later historians, not proven in court. The case is best known through a comedy: the playwright Joseph Kesselring followed it and turned it into Arsenic and Old Lace, a long Broadway run and later a Frank Capra film.
The case did not end with her death. Ron Robillard, an East Hartford newspaper editor writing a book about her, asked the state for her hospital records. As the Connecticut Mirror reported in 2011, he was told at different times that the records had been destroyed, that they were locked in a vault, and then that they were missing and presumed destroyed. The state Freedom of Information Commission ruled that her psychiatric records were confidential but that her physical and dental examination records should be released. The Connecticut Supreme Court held on September 22, 2015, that her hospital records were exempt from public disclosure.
Dorothea Puente was 59 when she was arrested in November 1988. She had kept a room-and-board operation in the upstairs flat of a rented two-story Victorian house in downtown Sacramento, California. Social workers and other placement workers sent her people who were hard to house: elderly men and women, people living with mental illness, and long-term drinkers, most of them living on Social Security or Supplemental Security Income. A Sacramento reporter who covered the case later wrote that she crowded as many as 20 tenants into three small bedrooms and a living room.
Her record began well before the deaths. A 1978 arrest for forgery led to five years of probation, and the terms barred her from running a boarding house; she then worked as a caregiver for clients in their residences, according to the Center for Sacramento History’s guide to the case records. Members of the Senate Special Committee on Aging said in 1989 that her record included 30 counts of Social Security fraud. In August 1982 she was convicted in Sacramento of administering a controlled substance to another person, grand theft and forgery, and was sent to state prison for five years. She served about three years. She was paroled in September 1985, and the conditions of her parole barred her from running a boarding house, from caring for the elderly and from handling other people’s government checks. She went back to taking in tenants.
The checks were the point of the arrangement, the prosecution said. Puente became the representative payee, the person the Social Security Administration pays on a beneficiary’s behalf, for several tenants, and obtained power of attorney for others. She forged endorsements on their checks and filed applications in their names for state energy and rent assistance and renter’s tax credits. What is known about each of the people whose deaths were charged comes from the trial evidence, as the California Court of Appeal later summarized it.
Leona Carpenter was 78 and had received Supplemental Security Income since 1974. She was taken to a hospital in September 1986. On October 21, 1986, Puente brought a notary to her hospital room and obtained power of attorney, and she cashed Carpenter’s next check, signing it "Dorothea Puente for Leona Carpenter." Over time she forged checks in Carpenter’s name totaling more than $7,000. Carpenter lived at the house for two weeks in December 1986, went back to the hospital, and returned in late February 1987, looking close to death. A few weeks later she was gone. Puente told one tenant that Carpenter’s daughter had taken her away, and later said she had taken her to a nursing home. The jury convicted Puente of second-degree murder in her death.
Dorothy Miller, 65, was introduced in late October 1987 to a man who became her representative payee in early November. Within a few weeks of her arrival, Puente gave different accounts of where she had gone: that Miller had been arrested for shoplifting and put out, that a nurse had taken her away, and that she was in a hospital in Martinez being treated for alcoholism. Puente forged endorsements on Miller’s checks totaling more than $11,000, beginning that October. The jury convicted Puente of first-degree murder in her death.
Benjamin Fink, 55, had been hurt in a car accident in 1980, walked with a cane and drank heavily. A few days before he moved in, a plasma center had turned him away for general feebleness. He was placed with Puente on March 9, 1988, and his brother visited him every week for about six weeks. By the end of April he was no longer in the house. Puente forged endorsements on about $6,000 of his checks, and later told police that Fink had left for Marysville in the summer of 1988 after she told him never to come back. The jury convicted her of first-degree murder in his death.
Alvaro Montoya, whom friends called Bert, was 51. The court described him as an innocent, passive man who drank whenever he could and heard voices he called spirits of the dead. He had lived at a detox center for five years before he was placed with Puente in early February 1988, and in January 1988 he had qualified for Supplemental Security Income. In March 1988 Puente made herself his representative payee, listing herself as his cousin. She received his first check, for $637, in June, and a retroactive payment of $1,598.97 in July. She also took his food stamps. Within a day of his last medical appointment in late August, Puente told a tenant she had sent him to Mexico, and she kept saying she was in touch with him there.
This is where the system that had placed him began to work. Montoya’s social workers did not accept the story. Judy Moise, a social worker who had referred him to the house, reported him to the Sacramento police, the Associated Press reported in 2011. A man claiming to be Montoya’s brother-in-law telephoned with conflicting stories; the court determined that the caller was a man staying at the house, acting at Puente’s direction, who also mailed a letter for her from Reno, Nevada. In November 1988 the report brought police to the house, and Puente left Sacramento while the work continued. She was arrested in Los Angeles on November 16, 1988, and charged with nine murders: the seven people tied to the house, a man who had died in 1985, and a woman who had died in 1982.
A Monterey County jury convicted her in 1993 of three of them, those of Miller, Fink and Carpenter. It could not reach verdicts on the other six, and those counts were dismissed. The jury also deadlocked on whether she should be executed. She was sentenced on December 10, 1993, to life without parole. She denied killing anyone, and she died of natural causes at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla on March 27, 2011, aged 82.
Fred West was never convicted of killing anyone. He was charged with the murders of 12 people, young women and girls among them his first wife, his stepdaughter and his eldest daughter, and he died in custody at Winson Green prison in Birmingham on January 1, 1995, before any of those charges came to trial. He was 53. What is known about the deaths attributed to him rests on what he told detectives, on the evidence heard at the one trial that did take place, that of his wife, Rosemary West, who was convicted of ten of the murders at Winchester Crown Court in November 1995, and on the work of the Gloucestershire Police Archives and later reporters.
Fred and Rosemary West married in Gloucester in 1972, and that year they moved with the children to a house in the city that remained the family residence until 1994. The case brought against Rosemary West, as summarized by the European Commission of Human Rights, was that the house took in lodgers, and that some of the young women who lived there or visited were teenagers who had been in council care or had run away. Juanita Mott, 18, had lodged at the house, TIME reported in 2025. She died in April 1975, and the charge in her case was one of the twelve.
What the neighbors and officials saw was thin. Charmaine West, Fred West’s stepdaughter, was about 8 when she was taken out of her school in 1971; her parents said she had gone to London to live with her natural mother, and the school accepted that, as was then normal practice, the education journalist Josephine Gardiner reported in 1995. She was never reported missing. Their eldest child, Heather West, was 16 in 1987; her parents gave changing accounts of what had become of her, and nobody reported her absence. Her younger siblings, by then in council care, repeated a family joke that anyone who misbehaved would end up like Heather. In February 1994 Gloucestershire police obtained a warrant, and Fred West was arrested in Gloucester on February 25, 1994, on suspicion of murdering his daughter. He admitted killing Heather, and the investigation led to charges in eleven further cases, among them Anne McFall, who had known him in Glasgow in the 1960s. He denied killing McFall. Ten children grew up in the West household in all, according to Howard Sounes’s account of the case.
Rosemary West, 15 when she met her future husband in 1969, according to the Press and Journal and TIME, is serving a whole life sentence. The lodging arrangement is the smaller part of this case, and it is set down for what it shows: a house that took in young people with few adults watching them, and an institution, the school, that accepted a parental explanation as normal practice.
In the cases above, the danger sat behind the landlord’s desk. In the next two, the lodging house is the setting for the victim rather than the offender. Earle Nelson was linked to the deaths of women who let rooms. Sante Kimes became the tenant of a landlady in order to take her building. The legal findings differ again, and they are stated as they stand.
Earle Nelson was executed in Winnipeg on January 13, 1928, for the murder of Emily Patterson, a 27-year-old Winnipeg housewife. That conviction is the only one in his record. Yet by the time the sentence was carried out, police in the United States and Canada had linked him to a long series of deaths that began in San Francisco in February 1926 and ran east across the continent to Manitoba. The Canadian Press, looking back in 1967, wrote that police in both countries closed the files on 22 murder cases when he died. Most of the dead were women who rented out rooms or showed houses to prospective tenants or buyers.
He never confessed. The Manitoba Historical Society notes that the link between Nelson and the American deaths was purely circumstantial. Alvin Esau, a retired University of Manitoba law professor who has written two books on the case, believes the conventional count falls at least ten short. The record that a court actually tested is narrower: one Winnipeg jury, one victim, and a defense of insanity that the jury rejected.
The San Francisco crime historian Paul Drexler, writing in the San Francisco Examiner in 2015, said that both of Nelson’s parents died before he was two and that a strict, deeply religious grandmother raised him. Esau, who obtained the Manitoba Attorney General’s files through a freedom of information request, has said Nelson was indeed interested in religion and often quoted the Bible, but told the University of Manitoba’s news service in 2022 that there is no evidence for the familiar stories about a fanatically religious upbringing, and called them myths endlessly repeated in the literature. Esau and other recent writers agree that Nelson had escaped from a California mental institution.
The deaths attributed to Nelson followed a pattern. A polite young man answered a sign or a notice for a room to let or a house for sale. A woman, often a landlady or a widow who earned her living from lodgers, showed him the property. Drexler wrote that all but two of the women attributed to him were landladies. In almost every case, the Canadian Press summarized in 1967, a woman died after showing a property that was advertised for rent or had rooms to let. The press called the unknown man the "Gorilla Man," and the Canadian Press described a trail some 7,000 miles long over 17 months. A Portland woman who refused to follow him into a house she was showing described a small man with black hair and a dark complexion. People who shared a lodging house with him there thought him polite, soft-spoken and intelligent, though something of a religious fanatic, Finn J.D. John wrote.
Drexler named the first woman in San Francisco as Clara Newman, 60, a landlady, and a second, Lillian St. Mary, among the women attributed to the same man. No court ever heard evidence about those deaths. Portland, Oregon, saw a cluster in one week in the fall of 1926, which John described in a 2013 newspaper column drawing on the Morning Oregonian and on J.D. Chandler’s history of the city. Beata Withers, 35, had been showing a room for rent. Virginia Grant, 59, had a house for rent. Mabel Fluke, 37, a widow, had been showing a house. After Thanksgiving, by John’s account, Blanche Myers, 48, a landlady, died, and Portland police went on high alert. At another Portland lodging house the same man had taken a room under the name Adrian Harris. The landlady there thought him pleasant, and John wrote that jewelry he gave to her and to one of her lodgers had been taken from the dead women. These Portland deaths, too, were never tried.
From the West Coast, the deaths attributed to Nelson moved east. Drexler and John list Council Bluffs, Iowa; Kansas City, Missouri; Philadelphia; Buffalo, New York; Detroit; and Chicago, in the winter of 1926 and the spring of 1927. One of the dead was an eight-month-old baby, John wrote, and the Canadian Press noted the same in 1967. The Winnipeg Police Museum’s history of the department says he was linked to 24 American deaths, while other similar cases could not be attributed to him.
In early June 1927 Nelson crossed from the United States into Canada. No one knows why, Kirkus Reviews observed. According to Drexler, he arrived in Winnipeg on June 8 and took lodgings in a rooming house. Within a few days two people were dead in the city: Lola Cowan, a girl whom the Manitoba Historical Society gives as 14 and Kirkus as 13, and Emily Patterson. Cowan’s death was attributed to Nelson by the Winnipeg police and by the historians who have written about the case; he was tried for one death only. The Canadian Press later wrote that police traced him through clothing and jewelry taken from one of the Winnipeg victims.
The search spread across three provinces. The Manitoba Historical Society calls it Canada’s largest manhunt. Nelson was arrested near Wakopa, Manitoba, on June 15, 1927, by the Manitoba Provincial Police. He escaped the same day from the lockup in Killarney and was recaptured the next morning near the town. A jury in Winnipeg convicted him of Patterson’s murder in November 1927, rejecting the insanity defense, and he was sentenced to death. Esau’s second book on the case, 31 Murders, published by McFarland in 2024, re-examines the American cases one by one.
Irene Silverman, 82, was a former professional dancer and the widow of a businessman, and she lived in a Manhattan townhouse reported to be worth between $4 million and $10 million. She ran part of it as a business. About ten employees worked in the building, and she rented apartments on its lower floors to short-term visitors. The Appellate Division described her as in good physical and mental health. She rarely went out without members of her staff, had not slept away overnight in more than fifteen years, and planned to leave the townhouse to an arts foundation named for her mother.
In May 1998 a woman calling herself "Ava Guerra" telephoned Silverman and mentioned the name of one of Silverman’s friends. Her son, using the name "Manny Guerrin," arranged to lease a ground-floor apartment, the court determined. He arrived on June 13 with his mother and an employee and moved in the next day, paying $6,000 in cash for a month’s rent, according to the prosecution’s opening statement. Silverman soon distrusted him, telling people he smelled "like jail." The court determined that the Kimeses installed eavesdropping devices on her telephone and questioned her staff about her habits. In late June and early July the pair forged Silverman’s signature on a deed transferring the townhouse. A first notary refused to notarize it after meeting Sante Kimes posing as a bedridden Silverman. A second, on July 2, notarized the signature without watching it being signed. The deed purported to sell the house to the Kimeses for $395,000. On July 4 Silverman told her building manager to serve "Manny" with an eviction letter on Monday morning.
On the evening of July 5, 1998, federal fugitive agents arrested a woman of 63 and her 23-year-old son in Manhattan on a warrant from Utah. The charge was minor: they were accused of buying a used car with a check that bounced. But the son carried Silverman’s own keys, and among the papers the pair had was the deed. The woman was Sante Kimes. She had a record of fraud and a federal conviction for holding young women from Mexico as household servants: a federal jury in Nevada convicted her in 1986 of five counts of involuntary servitude and of transporting undocumented immigrants, conspiracy, aiding and abetting, and escape. The Ninth Circuit summarized the government’s evidence that she kept the women isolated from their families, from mail and from the telephone, used locks, fences and threats of deportation to keep them from leaving, and physically abused some of them. She was sentenced to five years.
She and her son, Kenneth Kimes, were convicted of Silverman’s murder in 2000, although no body was ever recovered, and she received an aggregate sentence of 120 years to life on June 27, 2000; the sentence was affirmed in 2006. In 2004 a Los Angeles jury convicted her of the first-degree murder of David Kazdin, a businessman her son admitted killing on her instructions. He pleaded guilty and testified against her. She was sentenced to life without parole. She denied every killing until her death at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility on May 19, 2014, aged 79. Two other deaths, a banker in the Bahamas in 1996 and a Los Angeles lawyer who worked for the family in 1991, were never charged against her. The lawyer, Elmer Holmgren, 59, was identified in 2026 by the Inglewood Police Department and the FBI working with a DNA laboratory; no one has been charged.
The six keepers here share a trade and little else. One was convicted of robbery and executed beside her husband, with a murder legend added afterward. One was never tried and walked out of an Edinburgh jail. One family left an inn behind in Kansas and was never caught. One woman in Connecticut was convicted of a single death among sixty. One in Sacramento was convicted of three of nine, after the people who placed her tenants refused to accept her explanations. One in Gloucester died in custody facing twelve charges. What the lodgers had in common was dependence: a bed, a pension check, a stranger’s route. The two reverse cases show the same arrangement from the other side. The same business of letting rooms made a landlady a person who opened the door to strangers, and in Manhattan it handed a tenant the keys.
• 1819, February 18: Lavinia and John Fisher arrested near Charleston after a raid on their roadside boarding house.
• 1819, May: the Fishers convicted of highway robbery.
• 1820, February 18: the Fishers executed in Charleston.
• 1826 to 1827: William Hare and Margaret Hare keep a lodging house in the West Port, Edinburgh.
• 1828, October 31: the last death attributed to Burke and Hare.
• 1828, December 24 to 25: trial of Burke and McDougal; Hare gives evidence for the Crown.
• 1829, January 28: William Burke executed.
• 1829, February 5: Hare released from prison.
• 1870 to 1871: the Bender family settle in Labette County, Kansas, and open an inn and store.
• 1873, March: Dr. William H. York of Independence sets out; his brothers search.
• 1873, May: neighbors enter the empty claim; governor offers a $2,000 reward.
• 1889: two women arrested in Michigan as Ma and Kate Bender are held at Oswego and released.
• 1907: Amy Archer opens a house for elderly lodgers in Windsor, Connecticut.
• 1914, May: Franklin Andrews dies.
• 1916, May 8: Archer-Gilligan arrested in Windsor.
• 1917, June: convicted of first-degree murder; 1918, April 30: conviction reversed; 1919: convicted of second-degree murder.
• 1926, February: first death in San Francisco attributed to Earle Nelson.
• 1927, June 15: Nelson arrested near Wakopa, Manitoba; November: convicted in Winnipeg.
• 1928, January 13: Nelson executed.
• 1962: Archer-Gilligan dies at the state hospital in Middletown.
• 1972: Fred and Rosemary West move to a house in Gloucester.
• 1982, August: Dorothea Puente convicted in Sacramento; paroled September 1985.
• 1987: Heather West, 16, is no longer in the family household; her parents give changing accounts of what became of her.
• 1988, November 16: Puente arrested in Los Angeles.
• 1993, August 26: Puente convicted of three murders; December 10 sentenced to life without parole.
• 1994, February 25: Fred West arrested in Gloucester.
• 1995, January 1: Fred West dies in custody; November: Rosemary West convicted of ten murders.
• 1998, July 5: Sante Kimes and Kenneth Kimes arrested in Manhattan.
• 2000, June 27: the Kimeses sentenced in New York.
• 2004, July: Sante Kimes convicted of the murder of David Kazdin.
• 2011, March 27: Puente dies in prison.
• 2014, May 19: Sante Kimes dies in prison.