A death belongs in law to the ground where it happened. The man accused of it belongs, in practice, to whichever country has him in a cell. Between those two facts lies most of the story of the cases that follow: men and one woman whose crimes crossed borders, and whose trials were divided, traded, postponed or quietly abandoned by the states that had a claim on them.
Some of the divisions were tidy. One country took every charge, including deaths on foreign soil, and the others stood aside. Some were not tidy at all. A defendant sat in one country’s prison while another country’s statute of limitations ran out. A court passed a 40-year sentence on a man who was not in the room and never would be. A plea bargain written in New York closed a criminal case in Zimbabwe. In each, the question of where justice would be done was answered less by principle than by custody, timing and the sentences each system could impose.
Michel Fourniret was arrested in Belgium in June 2003, after a 13-year-old girl got away from him in Ciney, in the province of Namur. Belgian police held him at Dinant on that one charge of attempted abduction. For a year no one connected him with the dead girls in France.
The connection came from his wife. In June 2004, questioned by Belgian police, Monique Olivier began to describe her husband’s past, and over 2004 and 2005 she named killings to Belgian investigators. Faced with her statements, Fourniret admitted eight homicides in France and Belgium since 1987. The investigation that broke the series was a Belgian one, conducted in Belgian police stations, about crimes that were mostly French.
The trials were French. Belgium handed the couple to France in December 2005 and January 2006, and the Ardennes assize court at Charleville-Mézières took up the whole series in March 2008. The indictment did not stop at the frontier. Among the seven murders, with other charges, was that of Elisabeth Brichet, a 12-year-old Belgian girl abducted in Saint-Servais, Namur, on December 20, 1989. Among the offenses against three girls or young women who survived was the Ciney case itself, the Belgian arrest that had started everything.
On May 28, 2008, the court convicted Fourniret, then 66, of the seven murders and sentenced him to life with no possibility of release, a sentence that made him one of very few people in France to receive a security period with no end. A second French court, the Yvelines assize court at Versailles, gave him another life sentence on November 16, 2018, for the 1988 murder of Farida Hammiche, the only killing in the series committed for money.
He confessed in February 2018 to two more deaths, of Marie-Angèle Domèce and Joanna Parrish, and in March 2020 the Paris prosecutor announced that he had acknowledged his part in the case of Estelle Mouzin, 9. He was placed under formal investigation in a fourth case, that of Lydie Logé, in December 2020. He died in custody in Paris on May 10, 2021, aged 79, before any of the four could reach a courtroom. Didier Seban, a lawyer for several of the families, spoke of anger "after so many years of inaction."
The division between the two countries outlived Fourniret as well. Monique Olivier had made her first statements to Belgian police, and she was tried on them in France, three times over 15 years.
At Charleville-Mézières in 2008 she was convicted of complicity in four of the murders, with other charges, and sentenced to life with a security period of 28 years. At Versailles in 2018 she was sentenced to 20 years for her part in the Hammiche case. In late November 2023 she stood trial alone before the Hauts-de-Seine assize court at Nanterre, the first case brought by that court’s unit for serial and unsolved crimes.
"He used me," she said of her former husband on the first day. On December 19, 2023, the court convicted Olivier, then 75, of complicity in the abduction, confinement and murder of Marie-Angèle Domèce, Joanna Parrish and Estelle Mouzin, with other charges, and sentenced her to life with a 20-year security period. AFP reported that the combined minimum terms meant she could not be released before 2035.
In January 2025 she admitted, before an investigating judge of the Nanterre unit, that she had been involved in the Lydie Logé case, and she was taken to the Orne that month to help investigators. No trial date in that case had been reported as of October 2026. A Belgian report in September 2026 still counted four victims of the couple who had never been returned to their families.
Jack Unterweger’s first murder conviction was already an international case. On December 11, 1974, he killed Margret Schäfer, 18, in Herborn, in the West German state of Hesse. He was arrested in Salzburg, and an Austrian court sentenced him to life imprisonment on May 31, 1976. That conviction became final, and it is the only final murder conviction in his record.
In prison at Stein he became a celebrated writer. His autobiographical novel Fegefeuer (Purgatory) was filmed, writers campaigned for his release, and he was paroled on May 23, 1990, as a symbol of rehabilitation. Within months women began to die in places he had visited for readings or reporting assignments: one in Prague in September 1990, others near Graz and Bregenz, four in the Vienna Woods in the spring of 1991, and three in the Los Angeles area in June and July 1991, while he was in California on a freelance assignment.
The Graz Regional Court issued a warrant for his arrest on February 13, 1992. He left Europe and was arrested in Miami on February 27, 1992. American immigration authorities held him, because he had entered the United States on a tourist visa without disclosing his felony conviction.
Here the two countries had to choose. Los Angeles police wanted to try him for the three California deaths, the historian Kristina E. Poznan writes, but the forensic work was slow, and he was sent to Austria first. California had the death penalty; Austria did not. He was extradited at the end of May 1992 and never returned. The Austrian prosecutors did not limit themselves to Austrian soil. The Graz indictment charged eleven murders, including the death in Prague and the three in Los Angeles, and help with the forensic work came from Switzerland and the United States, the former Vienna detective Ernst Geiger said in 2024.
The trial opened on April 20, 1994, the first in Austria in which DNA analysis was used to support a circumstantial case. On the evening of June 28 the jury returned guilty verdicts in nine of the eleven cases; in two the cause of death could not be determined with certainty. He was sentenced to life imprisonment a second time. A few hours later, at 3:40 a.m. on June 29, guards discovered that he had taken his own life in his cell at the Graz court prison. He was 43.
Because he died before the judgment became legally final, no final conviction exists for any of the deaths of 1990 and 1991. The Los Angeles cases were heard only as counts in an Austrian indictment, and the American courts never sat on them at all.
Charles Sobhraj, a French citizen born in Saigon in 1944, spent the mid-1970s on the overland route through Asia, and the countries along it were left to sort out his cases for the next half century. Thai police linked him to the deaths of several young travelers around Bangkok and Pattaya in 1975. Two more travelers, Connie Jo Bronzich, 29, an American from Santa Cruz, California, and Laurent Carrière, 26, a Canadian, died in the Kathmandu Valley in late December 1975, and Nepali police registered murder cases at the Kathmandu and Bhaktapur district courts.
India had him first. He was arrested in New Delhi on July 5, 1976, after a group of French tourists was drugged in the city, and Indian courts convicted him of offenses arising from that case. Accounts of the charge differ: AFP reported it as culpable homicide not amounting to murder and other charges, while other accounts describe the sentence as 12 years for an attempt to rob the group. In May 1982 an Indian court sentenced him to life for the 1976 murder of Alan Jacob, an Israeli tourist; a year later an appeal court acquitted him for lack of evidence, and he stayed in prison on his other sentences.
Thailand’s claim waited behind India’s. In late 1985 India agreed to extradite him to Thailand over the deaths of Teresa Knowlton, an American, and a Turkish tourist, and in Thailand he faced the possibility of a death sentence. In March 1986 he broke out of Tihar jail in New Delhi. Inspector Madhukar Zende of the Mumbai police rearrested him in Goa on April 6, 1986, about three weeks later, and he was given another 10 years for the escape, the Asia correspondent John McBeth writes.
That sentence decided the Thai case. The escape charge took years to come to trial in India, and by the time he walked out of Tihar in 1997 the Thai warrant had expired. Accounts differ on the year the Thai charges lapsed, 1995 or 1996, but not on the result. No court has ever ruled on any of the deaths in Thailand. Sompol Suthimai, the Thai officer who had pushed for his extradition, told AFP in 2022, at 90, that Sobhraj "has already paid for his actions." India sent him to France in 1997, and he lived openly in Paris for six years.
Nepal had never closed its files. In September 2003 Sobhraj went back to Kathmandu, and police arrested him there days after The Himalayan Times reported that he was living in the city. The old files took months to locate. On August 12, 2004, the Kathmandu District Court convicted him of the murder of Connie Jo Bronzich and sentenced him to life, which in Nepal means 20 years; the conviction rested largely on handwriting experts who matched his signature to 1975 registration records, AFP reported. The Patan Appellate Court upheld it in August 2005, the Supreme Court upheld it on July 30, 2010, and in December 2011 the Supreme Court declined to review its decision. A Nepali court convicted him of the murder of Laurent Carrière in 2014. He denied both killings and said he had never set foot in Nepal before 2003.
On December 21, 2022, Nepal’s Supreme Court ordered his release under rules that allow older prisoners a remission of up to 75 percent of their sentences for good conduct. He left the Central Jail in Kathmandu on December 23 after 19 years, three months and seven days, was deported the same evening and was barred from Nepal for 10 years. He landed in Paris the next morning, where, an airport source told AFP, French authorities did not want him. "I have never killed anybody in my life," he told Al Jazeera in August 2023.
Two countries tried him for murder. One of those convictions was overturned. The only murder convictions that stand against him are Nepali, and the country that once held the longest list of charges against him never put him in a dock.
Silvo Plut’s case is the reverse of Sobhraj’s. Two countries both reached judgment, one of them in his absence, and the failure that cost a life lay in the gap between them.
Plut was convicted in Slovenia of the 1990 murder of Marjanca Matjašič, a former schoolmate, and sentenced to 15 years. He served 13 and was released early for good behavior. He went to Aleksinac, in Serbia. On November 18, 2004, Jasmina Djošić, 25 and pregnant, was killed near the town, and Serbian investigators later linked the killing to Plut. By then he had made his way back to Slovenia.
Slovenia arrested him in April 2005 over two armed robberies and released him in December 2005 for lack of evidence. The Slovenian authorities knew of the suspicion over the Serbian killing, but they neither arrested him for it nor opened criminal proceedings. Slovenian law did not allow his extradition, RTV Slovenija reported, and so he stayed free.
On February 24, 2006, he killed Ljubica Ulčar, a wife and mother of two sons, at Dolgo Brdo, near Janče, outside Ljubljana. Her husband, who had reported Plut to police over a post office robbery, survived. Plut was arrested the next day. On October 2, 2006, the court in Ljubljana convicted him of murder and attempted murder and sentenced him to 30 years, the maximum under Slovenian law.
Serbia went ahead without him. In April 2007 the criminal panel of the Niš District Court sentenced Plut in absentia to 40 years for the killing of Jasmina Djošić. He learned of the sentence in pretrial detention in Ljubljana, and on April 28, 2007, he was dead in custody there, aged 38. His death was reported as a suicide. Whether the Serbian judgment ever became final was not reported.
The courts of Slovenia were not finished with the case. Ljubica Ulčar’s husband sued the state, and in August 2009 the Ljubljana District Court ruled that the state was not responsible. The family appealed. In March 2012 the Supreme Court confirmed the state’s liability, and the courts held that Slovenia should have started a criminal case of its own over the killing in Serbia and sought Plut’s detention. A country that could not hand its own citizen to a neighbor had, in the courts' view, a duty to try him on its own soil for the neighbor’s crime. By February 2014 the state had paid the family 33,000 euros including interest.
Between December 2011 and March 2012 four women were killed in the South Kazakhstan region around Shymkent. Kazakh police formed a special group, and, suspecting that the killers were traveling offenders hiding across a border, sent requests to Russia, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan under the Minsk Convention. The answer came from Uzbekistan’s Interior Ministry. Seven women had been killed there in the same way, and the two countries' investigators combined the 11 cases into one investigation.
The suspects were two Uzbek citizens who had known each other since school. Uzbek police arrested Abduseit Ormanov; his accomplice, Polatbay Berdaliyev, was detained in May 2012 on the Kazakh side. Each was tried first where he was held.
At his trial in Kazakhstan, Berdaliyev said he had confessed under physical and psychological pressure from the police. The court rejected the claim and sentenced him to life imprisonment, the most severe penalty available. Relatives of the victims had wanted death. Ormanov was sentenced to life in a strict-regime colony in Uzbekistan.
Uzbekistan then took the accomplice as well. The prosecutor Azizbek Nazarov said in February 2014 that the second man, named in Uzbek reports as Polat Pardaliev, had been sentenced in Kazakhstan and then extradited to Uzbekistan, and that both men had been convicted of robbery and murder, with other charges, covering all 11 women, the seven in Uzbekistan and the four in Kazakhstan. The case was unusual for the completeness of the exchange: one defendant tried in both countries, and a single Uzbek judgment that reached across the border for the Kazakh dead. The names of the seven women killed in Uzbekistan, and the date of the Uzbek judgment, were never made public.
Michael Swango was a physician whose career crossed two continents on falsified papers. He had been imprisoned in Illinois in 1985 for aggravated battery over the poisoning of ambulance co-workers in Quincy. He then lied about that conviction to obtain posts in South Dakota and New York, and in November 1994 he arrived in Zimbabwe, where a Lutheran mission hospital in the Mberengwa district took him on. Nurses there came to call him "an angel of death," the Mail & Guardian reported. The hospital suspended him on July 21, 1995.
Zimbabwe issued a warrant for his arrest, and in January 1998 the Associated Press reported that he had been charged there with killing five patients. By then he was in American custody. He was arrested at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago on June 27, 1997, on a federal fraud warrant, on his way to a hospital post in Saudi Arabia, and in March 1998 he pleaded guilty to a false-statement charge and was sentenced to 42 months.
The United States used the time. Federal investigators spent years building a murder case and filed it on July 11, 2000, days before his scheduled release: the murders of three patients at the veterans' hospital in Northport, New York, in 1993. The charges could carry the death penalty. On September 6, 2000, in federal court in Central Islip, he pleaded guilty to the three murders and two fraud counts and was sentenced to three consecutive life terms without parole. In return prosecutors did not seek death, and Zimbabwe agreed to drop its charges, the Daily Egyptian reported. On October 18, 2000, he pleaded guilty in Ohio to the 1984 aggravated murder of Cynthia McGee, 19.
The bargain closed the African case without a trial. Religion Unplugged reported in July 2026 that families of patients at the mission hospital still felt justice had eluded them. David Coltart, a Bulawayo lawyer who had once represented Swango in a wrongful-dismissal suit, said: "He conned the lot of us, ably assisted by the authorities who refused to prosecute him." As of October 19, 2026, the Federal Bureau of Prisons listed Swango at the maximum-security penitentiary in Florence, Colorado, with a release date of "LIFE."
Ricardo Caputo, an Argentine born in Mendoza in 1949, confessed in March 1994 to the killings of four women in the 1970s, each a woman he had been romantically involved with. Two died in New York. The others died in San Francisco and in Mexico City, where Laura Gomez, 23, was killed in 1977.
Caputo had been charged with murder in Nassau County after the 1971 killing of his fiancée, Natalie Brown, 19, and committed to a state hospital as incompetent to stand trial. In October 1974 Judith Becker, 26, a psychologist who had treated him there, was killed in Yonkers, and he vanished. For two decades he lived under about 17 false names, crossing into Mexico as Ricardo Martinez Diaz and later living in Los Angeles, Guadalajara and Chicago. In 1994 he returned to Mendoza to tell his mother what he had done, recorded an interview with ABC News, and surrendered in New York on March 9, 1994.
New York tried the New York cases. A Long Island grand jury re-indicted him in the Brown killing in May 1994, and he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 8 to 25 years. He pleaded guilty to Becker’s killing in Westchester County and on August 16, 1995, a court in White Plains sentenced him to the maximum, 25 years to life, to run consecutively. Neither California nor Mexico brought him to trial for the other two deaths. He died of natural causes at Attica Correctional Facility on October 1, 1997, aged 48, two years into his sentences, with the Mexico City case never put before a Mexican judge.
Read together, the cases sort into a few patterns. Some states reached across their own borders. Austria tried a West German killing in 1976 and charged Los Angeles deaths in 1994; France tried a Belgian child’s murder and a Belgian abduction case; Uzbekistan convicted two men of killings in Kazakhstan. The custody of the defendant, more than the location of the crimes, decided where the trials were held.
Other claims simply ran out. Thailand waited on India and lost its case to the calendar. Zimbabwe gave up its charges as part of an American plea bargain. Mexico never moved against a man who had confessed to a killing in Mexico City. And Serbia, unable to obtain a defendant whom Slovenia would not surrender, passed sentence on him in his absence, days before he died.
The sentences themselves often decided the order of trials. Los Angeles let Unterweger go to a country without the death penalty because its own case was not ready. Thailand’s possible death sentence waited behind India’s prison terms until it could no longer be imposed. In New York the threat of a federal death penalty bought Zimbabwe’s silence.
The Slovenian courts drew the sharpest conclusion. When one country will not extradite and another cannot prosecute, someone has to act, and in Plut’s case no one did until Ljubica Ulčar was dead. The Supreme Court in Ljubljana put a price on that gap in 2012. It came to 33,000 euros.
• December 11, 1974: Jack Unterweger kills Margret Schäfer in Herborn, West Germany.
• May 31, 1976: an Austrian court sentences Unterweger to life for the Schäfer murder.
• July 5, 1976: Charles Sobhraj is arrested in New Delhi.
• 1977: Laura Gomez is killed in Mexico City; Ricardo Caputo later confesses to her killing.
• May 1982: an Indian court sentences Sobhraj to life for the murder of Alan Jacob; acquitted on appeal in 1983.
• Late 1985: India agrees to extradite Sobhraj to Thailand.
• March 1986: Sobhraj breaks out of Tihar jail; rearrested in Goa on April 6, 1986.
• December 20, 1989: Elisabeth Brichet, 12, is abducted in Saint-Servais, Namur, Belgium.
• 1990: Silvo Plut kills Marjanca Matjašič in Slovenia.
• May 23, 1990: Unterweger is paroled.
• September 1990 to July 1991: the eleven deaths later charged against Unterweger, in Prague, Austria and Los Angeles.
• February 27, 1992: Unterweger is arrested in Miami; extradited to Austria at the end of May 1992.
• March 9, 1994: Caputo surrenders in New York.
• June 28, 1994: a Graz jury returns guilty verdicts against Unterweger in nine of eleven cases; he dies in his cell hours later.
• July 21, 1995: Michael Swango is suspended at a mission hospital in Zimbabwe.
• August 16, 1995: Caputo is sentenced in White Plains to 25 years to life for the Becker killing.
• 1995 or 1996: the Thai case against Sobhraj lapses.
• 1997: India releases Sobhraj and sends him to France.
• June 27, 1997: Swango is arrested in Chicago.
• October 1, 1997: Caputo dies at Attica.
• January 1998: Swango is reported charged in Zimbabwe with five deaths.
• September 6, 2000: Swango pleads guilty in federal court; Zimbabwe agrees to drop its charges.
• June 26, 2003: a 13-year-old gets away from Michel Fourniret in Ciney, Belgium; he is arrested in June 2003.
• September 2003: Sobhraj is arrested in Kathmandu.
• August 12, 2004: the Kathmandu District Court convicts Sobhraj of the Bronzich murder.
• November 18, 2004: Jasmina Djošić is killed near Aleksinac, Serbia.
• December 2005 and January 2006: Belgium hands Fourniret and Olivier to France.
• February 24, 2006: Plut kills Ljubica Ulčar near Ljubljana.
• October 2, 2006: Plut is sentenced in Ljubljana to 30 years.
• April 2007: the Niš District Court sentences Plut in absentia to 40 years; he dies in custody on April 28, 2007.
• May 28, 2008: Fourniret and Olivier are convicted at Charleville-Mézières.
• July 30, 2010: Nepal’s Supreme Court upholds the Bronzich conviction.
• December 2011 to March 2012: four women are killed in South Kazakhstan.
• March 2012: Slovenia’s Supreme Court confirms the state’s liability in the Ulčar case.
• May 2012: Polatbay Berdaliyev is detained; Ormanov has been arrested in Uzbekistan shortly before.
• February 26, 2014: an Uzbek prosecutor confirms life sentences for Ormanov and his accomplice.
• 2014: a Nepali court convicts Sobhraj of the Carrière murder.
• November 16, 2018: Fourniret receives a second life sentence at Versailles.
• May 10, 2021: Fourniret dies in custody in Paris.
• December 23, 2022: Sobhraj is released in Nepal and deported to France.
• December 19, 2023: Olivier is convicted at Nanterre.
• January 2025: Olivier admits involvement in the Lydie Logé case.