In 1996 a court clerk in Auxerre, in Burgundy, went through a box of archived files that had been closed for years and came upon a document that should have changed a great deal. It was a gendarme’s report, twelve years old, setting out troubling links between six young women who had been recorded as runaways and a bus driver named Émile Louis. No decision to close it appeared anywhere. No magistrate would admit to having put it in the box. The inspectors who later looked into the matter could not establish how it had been lost or who was to blame.
Evidence that is lost is a different thing from evidence that was never gathered, and a different thing again from evidence a defendant destroys. These cases concern the second kind of failure, the quiet one: a report filed against the wrong inquiry, a Crown file destroyed by mistake, exhibits destroyed lawfully, an officer’s notes erased, a DNA sample logged under another man’s name. None of these losses was dramatic when it happened. Each became visible years later, when someone reached for the document, the exhibit or the sample and it was not there. The consequences ran in different directions. In some cases a convicted man went on to be sentenced anyway, and the loss shows up only in what a review later said. In others a prosecution, a retrial or a family’s hopes depended on material that no longer existed.
Between 1975 and 1979, seven young women vanished from the Auxerre area, the main town of the Yonne department. All had mild intellectual disabilities, and all were wards or former wards of the state, placed by the child welfare services with foster families or in institutions. Most traveled to their day programs on a bus driven by the same man. The institutions recorded the young women as runaways, and only three of the seven cases were ever formally reported to the police or the gendarmerie, according to the report of the Inspectorate General of Judicial Services, signed by Jean-Louis Nadal in March 2001.
That report, which the Ministry of Justice published, is the main account of how the judicial system handled the case, and it is a document about paper. It records that in 1979 the Auxerre prosecutor’s office received the file on Martine Renault, 16. The file reached the office on October 15, 1979, and was closed on December 4, 1979, on the conclusion that she had run away. Louis, questioned, denied any part in her leaving. That was the first official contact between the bus driver and one of the women in the case, and it ended within weeks.
The second came in 1981. An investigation for intentional homicide, with other charges, opened on September 16, 1981, into the death of Sylviane Durand, wife Lesage, a woman whose case had opened early that year. Louis was taken into custody on December 28, 1981, and was charged and jailed the next day. During that custody a gendarme, Christian Jambert, questioned him about the young women of the Auxerre institutions. Nothing came of the questions. The inspectors later called the prosecutor’s passivity on that point surprising and attributed it to a lack of rigor. On May 4, 1984, the investigating judge dismissed the Lesage case against Louis for insufficient evidence.
Jambert had by then come to suspect Louis. In the spring of 1984 he drew up a preliminary report on six of the women: Martine Renault, Françoise and Bernadette Lemoine, Madeleine Dejust, Jacqueline Weiss and Chantal Gras. The inspectors who read it in 2001 concluded that it established beyond doubt that the six women were gone and that it laid out troubling links between each woman and Louis. The report was not finished. Seven witnesses were still to be heard, and postcards were out for expert examination. On June 26, 1984, it went to the Auxerre prosecutor’s office, and a deputy prosecutor forwarded it to the investigating judge in the Lesage case with a handwritten note: "A joindre à l’information en cours sur l’homicide volontaire," to be added to the inquiry then under way.
That inquiry had been dismissed the month before. The inspectors judged the referral legally unsound. The only way to put the new material to use was to open a fresh judicial investigation, and nobody did. What followed is the part the Inspectorate could not reconstruct. A court clerk located the Jambert report in 1996, in a box of archived, closed files. The registry recorded only that it had been joined to the Lesage file. No decision to close it appears in the record, and no magistrate admitted to having closed it. The judge who received it denied reading it or writing the word "NON" on the covering note. The inspectors placed the main responsibility on the prosecutor in office in 1984, who had discussed the case with Jambert and asked him to keep working on it but gave him no written instructions. Jambert, for his part, went on working on the case privately for about nine years without reporting to his superiors or to the prosecutor.
In the meantime the question was being put to the authorities by the families and by the association that spoke for them. In 1993 Pierre Monnoir, of the Association de défense des handicapés de l’Yonne, handed a deputy prosecutor a handwritten note naming Chantal Gras, Bernadette Lemoine, Christine Marlot and Madeleine Dejust. The prosecutor’s office checked its own files and wrote to the child welfare service on May 3, 1993, and nothing came of that. In 1995 the president of the Yonne branch of the APAJH met the prosecutor on April 24 and gave him a list of women recorded as runaways. On June 6, 1995, the prosecutor replied that without evidence of a criminal offense he could not order a criminal inquiry. The inspectors noted that the prosecutor’s office never asked the gendarmerie to search its own records, a step that might have led straight to Jambert’s work.
The association had been founded on May 6, 1992, by parents of disabled people in the care of the APAJH. After appeals on the radio station RTL in the spring of 1995 and on the television program "Perdu de vue" late that year, the women of the Yonne became its central cause. On July 3, 1996, six complaints were filed, with the families joining as civil parties, covering Jacqueline Weiss, Chantal Gras, Martine Renault, Bernadette and Françoise Lemoine, Madeleine Dejust and Christine Marlot. Louis, who had left the Yonne for the Var after serving an earlier sentence, was arrested in Draguignan on December 12, 2000, and charged two days later with abduction and unlawful detention. In 2004 he was convicted of the murders, with other charges, of seven young women and sentenced to life imprisonment, a verdict confirmed on appeal in 2006. He died in October 2013, at 79.
The official reckoning came earlier than the trial. Within days of the arrest the case reached the National Assembly, where a question to the government from the deputy Alain Tourret and a reply from the justice minister, Marylise Lebranchu, were entered in the Journal officiel on December 20, 2000. The Nadal report of March 2001 called the handling of the case a failure of the prosecution service, the product of a series of negligent acts that together amounted to an institutional breakdown. A second Inspectorate report, in March 2002, took up the handling of criminal cases and the loss of archives at the Auxerre court. In October 2008 a legal news report said the families would be compensated.
Between April 1971 and September 1972, six Black girls and young women, aged 10 to 18, were killed in the Washington, D.C., area in deaths that police attribute to a single unidentified person. Local reporters gave the unknown person a nickname, the Freeway Phantom. No one has been arrested or charged. The Metropolitan Police Department still lists the case on its appeal for information, naming its Major Case/Cold Case Unit and the Prince George’s County Police Homicide Unit, and a police poster offers a reward of up to $150,000. Over five decades the case passed through a task force, a reopening by a determined detective, a cold case review, a box of evidence that turned up years later, a book and a podcast. Along the way much of what investigators had gathered in the 1970s was lost.
The loss came to light in 1987, when Romaine Jenkins reopened the case after her promotion to sergeant. What she encountered, Boundary Stones reports, was that case files and forensic evidence had been destroyed or lost, some of it in a warehouse. A relative of one of the girls, quoted by the same publication, put the loss in a single line: "And now, it’s gone!" Jenkins rebuilt the files as well as she could, with help from the FBI and from other detectives who had worked the original cases. The physical evidence, Boundary Stones concludes, was probably gone for good. In 1990 FBI analysts drew up a profile of the person from what survived, describing a misogynist probably between 27 and 32 years old at the time of the killings, who may have lived or worked in Southeast Washington. Jenkins retired in 1994 without seeing the case solved. She did not let go of it. In 2023 Washingtonian reported that she had gathered material from several law enforcement agencies while at the department and kept it in boxes of her own, and that she believed the case could still be solved. Boundary Stones adds that the D.C. Council later required evidence in unsolved homicide cases to be kept for at least 65 years.
The same story repeated itself in 2009. Washingtonian reported in July of that year that D.C. police had lost the entire case file and that none of the case’s evidence could be located in the police evidence warehouse. Trainum, by then the director of the cold case unit, and a group of interns had reconstructed the files from information supplied by retired D.C. detectives, the FBI and the Prince George’s County police. The rebuilt files filled a row of binders in his office. He allowed that the missing evidence might still surface. "Maybe it’s over there in some box and we haven’t stumbled across it," he said. "Who knows?"
Something did turn up. In a WUSA9 cold case report, Trainum said that a box of evidence located the previous year contained clothing from Diane Williams, the last of the six, which might hold the DNA of the person responsible. He was hopeful and careful at once: other clothing and hair evidence in the case had deteriorated or vanished. Washingtonian had reported in 2009 that material on the clothing could identify the person but that testing was on hold. Like most of the District’s cold case DNA work at the time, it depended on the FBI’s overloaded laboratory at Quantico, where cold cases went to the back of the queue. Trainum admitted that the unit had been "sitting on a lot of stuff." A new D.C. police laboratory was expected to ease the backlog.
The two police departments involved still describe the case differently. In the WUSA9 report on a book about the killings, Jennifer Donelan, a spokeswoman for the Prince George’s County Police Department, said the department was still actively investigating. Alaina Gertz, a spokeswoman for the Metropolitan Police Department, said the District’s cases had been purged years earlier and were no longer active investigations. Retired investigators told the station that so much evidence had been lost or misfiled that it was unclear whether enough survived to recover any DNA at all.
Robert William Pickton was a pig farmer in Port Coquitlam, a suburb east of Vancouver. In December 2007 a jury in New Westminster convicted him of the second-degree murders of six women from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside: Sereena Abotsway, Mona Wilson, Andrea Joesbury, Brenda Ann Wolfe, Georgina Faith Papin and Marnie Frey. He was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years. Twenty more first-degree murder counts were stayed on August 4, 2010. The Missing Women Commission of Inquiry, which reported in 2012, counted 33 women whose DNA had been identified on the farm, and it noted that 12 of them were Aboriginal.
The case against him began with a search for illegal firearms on February 5, 2002, and he was charged with murder on February 22 of that year. Part of the answer to why he was not stopped sooner lies in a prosecutor’s file room. In March 1997 Pickton was charged with attempted murder and other offenses after a woman reported that she had escaped from his farm. Crown counsel stayed the charges on January 26, 1998. The commission’s report says the woman, whom it identified only by a pseudonym because of a publication ban, was interviewed by police only once and that no formal statement was taken from her. The Canadian Encyclopedia records that the charges were stayed because prosecutors did not consider her a competent witness.
Then the paper trail ended. The Crown file in that case was destroyed by mistake in 2001, and the commission concluded that neither of the prosecutors involved was responsible for the destruction. It stayed within a narrow mandate on the stay itself, limiting itself to neutral findings of fact and declining to second-guess the Crown’s decision. It was less restrained about the police work, concluding that there were "serious limitations on the initial investigation" by the Coquitlam RCMP and calling it "patently unreasonable" that the investigation had not been pursued more fully.
A second loss was less a matter of destruction than of neglect. Clothing that police seized from Pickton after the 1997 incident was never tested at the time. When the publication bans were lifted in 2010, CTV News reported that the clothes held evidence that could have linked him to two other women. By then the stay had been in place for twelve years.
Doug LePard, a Vancouver deputy chief, reviewed his own department’s handling of the case, and his report of about 400 pages, based on more than 20,000 police documents, was released in August 2010. It concluded that police had received information pointing to Pickton in 1998 and 1999 that should have led to a more vigorous investigation of him and his farm. It put most of the blame for the delays on the RCMP but said that Vancouver’s senior officers had also failed to press the Mounties to act, and LePard said the delays likely cost the lives of more than a dozen women. CBC reported that the geographic profiler Kim Rossmo, within the Vancouver department, had concluded that a serial killer was responsible and that his analysis was set aside. The RCMP apologized to the victims' families in January 2012, and the Vancouver police followed in December of that year. In March 2014 the federal and provincial governments and the City of Vancouver announced a joint compensation framework for the victims' children. Pickton died on May 31, 2024, in hospital, after being assaulted by another inmate in prison.
Mikhail Popkov was a police officer in Angarsk, an industrial city of about 260,000 people some 40 kilometers from Irkutsk, in eastern Siberia. He left the force in 1998 as a junior lieutenant. He was identified in 2012, nearly twenty years after the first killing attributed to him, when a long DNA screening of local men reached his name. Courts in Irkutsk and Angarsk have since convicted him in six verdicts: 22 murders and attempted murders in January 2015, 56 murders in December 2018, and further cases in 2021, 2023 and 2025. The Supreme Court of Russia rejected his appeal in the second case, according to Interfax in April 2019. By October 2025 the Investigative Committee was putting the total at 91 murders.
According to Meduza, the local police had essentially ignored the series until 1998. In December 1998 the murder cases were combined into one, Mediazona reported, and that year the Irkutsk regional prosecutor sent Nikolai Kitaev, an investigator with about twenty years in the prosecutor’s service, to Angarsk to review them. Kitaev identified more than a dozen cases of young women killed late in the evening or at night, and he was the first to argue that a single person was responsible. He drew up a list of suspects that included seven police officers, though Popkov was not among them, and proposed testing about 100 officers under cover of a vaccination program.
Kitaev took his findings to the regional prosecutor, Anatoly Merzlyakov. According to Meduza’s sources, Merzlyakov ordered that they be kept confidential and warned that if they leaked, Moscow would "fire us all." The investigation stalled. Meduza, citing a 2002 report in Moskovsky Komsomolets, said the case was effectively suspended in 2001. In 2000 the transport prosecutor’s office where Kitaev worked was dissolved, and he retired a few months later. Mediazona reported that the combined case was closed for lack of evidence several years after it was opened.
When a task force from Moscow took up the cases afterward, its leader at that time, Derzhavin, told Meduza that the team had to start from scratch. Local investigators had not carried out most of the basic steps, he said, and about a third of the physical evidence had been lost. Local officers were reluctant to help, and the victims' relatives did not trust outsiders at first. The team won their confidence by solving other crimes, including arresting the leaders of several local gangs, and the relatives then gave detailed statements. From material linked to three of the killings the team established the genetic profile of the person it was looking for. The laboratory work itself was a bottleneck: until 2008 DNA testing could be done only in Moscow, each test cost about 10,000 dollars, and only about five could be run in a year, Meduza reported.
So the investigation turned to arithmetic. A list of more than 30,000 people matched at least one of three known features of the person sought. Those who matched two or more came to about 600, and Meduza, citing a 2015 report in Novaya Gazeta, put the number at 589. From late 2010 the team worked through the list in alphabetical order, about 400 people a year, faster now that the regional forensic center in Irkutsk could run the tests locally. The Investigative Committee said in 2014 that more than 2,500 DNA tests were carried out across the whole investigation. In March 2012 the team reached the letter P, and Popkov received a summons. He came to the directorate, answered questions and gave a sample. There were no grounds to hold him, and he was released. At the forensic center, Natalya Davydova, deputy head of the biology department, determined that his sample matched the profile. The Investigative Committee said the DNA tests linked him to the crimes in June 2012.
The genetic profile that ended the search did survive. What the loss cost cannot be measured: the years before it included a prosecutor’s order of silence, a suspended case, an office dissolved, and a third of the physical evidence gone before the Moscow team arrived.
Michael Wayne McGray, a drifter from the Yarmouth area of Nova Scotia, was convicted through guilty pleas between 2000 and 2011 of seven murders: a teenager in Nova Scotia in 1985, a man in Saint John, New Brunswick, in 1987, two men in Montreal in 1991, a mother and her 11-year-old daughter in Moncton in 1998, and, in 2010, a fellow prisoner in British Columbia, according to The Canadian Encyclopedia. About a year and a half after his arrest in 1998, CBC News reported that Codiac RCMP were holding a possible serial killer: McGray, then 34, had talked while awaiting trial about other killings, and police said that details he gave could be checked in Montreal and Saint John. In 2000 Saint John police linked him to an older death, that of James Lloyd Beyea in 1986. He was never charged in that case.
A third matter involved him only at one remove, and it is the one that matters for this subject. Brenda Way was killed in Halifax on November 12, 1995. Her former boyfriend, Glen Assoun, was convicted of second-degree murder on September 17, 1999, after a 36-day trial, and sentenced to life with parole eligibility after 18 and a half years. No physical evidence tied him to the killing. He always said he was innocent. The Nova Scotia Court of Appeal dismissed his appeal on April 20, 2006, and the Supreme Court of Canada refused to hear a further appeal on September 14, 2006.
In 2003 an RCMP constable, Dave Moore, used the force’s ViCLAS analytical database. His work led him to consider McGray, and another man, as suspects in Way’s death. His analysis of welfare payments placed McGray in the area where Way lived and worked, The Canadian Press reported. Moore’s superiors told him to stop working on the file, and his notes went missing while he was on vacation. Most of the material was later erased or destroyed. The information was never given to Assoun’s defense, even though his appeal lawyer had asked the Crown for exactly that kind of material. When the Court of Appeal heard the case in 2006, it discounted theories about McGray for lack of evidence.
The loss has a precise shape. A theory that might have pointed elsewhere was dismissed for lack of evidence by a court that had never been given the material. On March 1, 2019, the federal Department of Justice announced that the Minister of Justice had ordered a new trial in a Nova Scotia murder case following a conviction review. In July 2019 The Canadian Press reported, under a headline that put it plainly, that evidence of a possible serial killer in the Halifax wrongful conviction case was destroyed, according to a report released that month. CBC News reported in the same month that the province’s justice minister called the case a "miscarriage of justice." In January 2024, The Canadian Press was still reporting on why lawyers said alleged police wrongdoing in the Assoun case could not be forgotten.
Pedro Alonso López is a Colombian man who confessed to killing more than a hundred girls in Ecuador, and many more children in Colombia and Peru by his own account. An Ecuadorian court sentenced him to 16 years in prison, the maximum term Ecuadorian law then allowed. The numbers attached to him range widely. AFP reported in March 1994 that he had confessed to more than 100 killings of Ecuadorian girls and dozens of Colombian children. The freelance writer Ron Laytner, writing in 1992, gave other figures, and Semana said in 2002 that the authorities estimated about 300 victims in the three countries. None of the totals above 100 has been tested in court.
What happened in Colombia is a matter of paper. In September 1994 López, released from Ecuador after sentence reductions, was transferred to El Espinal, in the department of Tolima, where he was accused of the murder of eleven children about fourteen years earlier. The case file had been destroyed. El Tiempo reported that a fire around 1991 in the building that housed the Juzgado Quinto de Instrucción Criminal, the court handling the investigation, had burned the bulky file. Two of the eleven cases had been identified again by the time he arrived.
The law gave the authorities little time. Prosecutor 52, Fernando Vanegas, had 72 hours to determine López’s legal situation, El Tiempo explained, and there was a risk that he would have to be released at the end of that period. Vanegas questioned him for an hour and a half, trying to understand how he thought, what he intended and whether he remembered the accusations. Days later another mother came forward. El Tiempo reported on September 8, 1994, that a mother went to the justice house in El Espinal to say that her daughter, Flor Alba Sánchez Ospina, had been killed by López fourteen years before. She was the only parent who came to the prosecutor’s office to give evidence against him again; the parents of the other children did not come forward. A 2012 El Tiempo report said Flor Alba was 12 and was killed in December 1979. About two thousand people gathered outside the justice house on the day of the hearings, many of them demanding a longer sentence. Orlando Ospitia, the regional director of prosecutions, told the paper that the official in charge had five working days to decide: if the evidence was weak, López would go free; if it was strong, he would be held in preventive detention; and a psychiatric report might instead find that he suffered from a mental illness and should be confined in a care facility.
The third possibility is what happened. López was declared inimputable, not criminally responsible, and held in the psychiatric annex of La Modelo prison in Bogotá. El Tiempo reported in 2012 that he was declared sound and released on bail of 80,000 pesos in 1998, with an obligation to report to the court, which he did not meet. According to El Tiempo’s later reporting on the search for him, the last confirmed record is an identity card he renewed in Bogotá on September 22, 1999. His fate is unknown. Vanguardia, in March 2023, set out the competing versions: that he died and was recorded by Medicina Legal in 2005; that he was living in Lérida or Mariquita, in Tolima; that he was living in destitution in Bogotá; or that relatives of his victims had taken revenge. Reports that he had fled to Ecuador were never confirmed. As of March 2023, there was no confirmed evidence that he was alive or dead.
In El Espinal, the families of the children he was accused of killing did not see a trial. The file had burned before he returned, and only one mother came forward in 1994 to renew her complaint. In Ecuador, the families of the girls whose cases reached a courtroom saw him convicted, but under a law that capped his punishment at 16 years.
Francis Heaulme was arrested in Bischwiller, in Alsace, on January 7, 1992, and has been held ever since. By June 2026 he was serving sentences for 11 murders committed between 1984 and 1992, according to reports by Sud Radio and by AFP as printed by the Swiss outlet blue News. The French press called him the "routard du crime," the drifter of crime, because the killings followed his wanderings through 37 departments of France.
The last two murders on his record are the ones he has always denied: the killings of two eight-year-old boys, Cyril Beining and Alexandre Beckrich, in Montigny-lès-Metz, near Metz, on September 28, 1986. A teenager was wrongly convicted of those killings and was acquitted in 2002; the Rhône assize court in Lyon acquitted him after he had spent 15 years in prison, and what weighed most, Lyon Capitale reported, was evidence that Heaulme had been in Montigny-lès-Metz, near the town, on the day. Heaulme was convicted of the killings in 2017, the conviction was upheld on appeal in 2018, and it became final in June 2020.
The physical exhibits from 1986 were gone by then. They had been destroyed lawfully in 1995, at a time when the authorities believed the culprit was already in prison, according to AFP reporting carried by Europe 1. Lyon Capitale wrote in 2014 that some of the destroyed items might have allowed DNA testing. Heaulme was placed under formal investigation in the case in 2006, Lyon Capitale reported; in 2007 the case against him was dismissed, and Cyril’s mother appealed. Two further rounds of investigation were ordered. In 2013 he was sent to the Moselle assize court, and in June 2013 the Cour de cassation upheld that referral.
The first trial, in Metz, did not survive its opening days. New testimony about another man, a warehouse worker, H. L., who had confessed twice in 1986 and retracted, arrived just before and during the first days. On April 1, 2014, at the request of the advocate general, the presiding judge, Gabriel Steffanus, adjourned the trial. "L’entière vérité est à ce prix," he said, the whole truth comes at this price. A new judicial investigation of H. L. followed, and it ended with his clearance. Heaulme would be tried alone.
The second trial opened before the Moselle assize court in Metz on April 25, 2017. The defense lawyer, Glock, told the court that the trial could no longer be fair, pointing to the evidence destroyed in 1995, and asked for Heaulme’s immediate acquittal. The request was refused. As the presiding judge read out the summary of the case, Heaulme stood up. "J’ai commis des meurtres, mais Montigny, ce n’est pas moi," he said: I have committed murders, but Montigny was not me. On May 17, 2017, the court convicted him of both murders and sentenced him to life imprisonment. The Yvelines assize court in Versailles upheld the life sentence in December 2018, his third, and in June 2020 the Cour de cassation rejected his appeal. Glock called the outcome a disappointment and said she was considering an application to the European Court of Human Rights. Cyril’s mother did not live to see the end of the case; she died in October 2019, at 75.
Two juries convicted him on circumstantial evidence, without exhibits that might once have been tested, and some civil parties in 2017 still believed in the guilt of the teenager the courts had cleared.
In June 2026 an investigating judge sent Heaulme to trial for one more killing, that of Jean-Joseph Clément, 60, at Bédarrides in the Vaucluse in August 1989. In that case he is accused only. Didier Seban, the lawyer for Clément’s daughter, greeted the decision with "Enfin un procès!", at last a trial. He said the family wanted the authorities to face past failures in the case, among them destroyed exhibits and years without work on the file.
Walter E. Ellis was convicted in February 2011 of killing seven women in Milwaukee between 1986 and 2007. He entered no-contest pleas in Milwaukee County Circuit Court to five counts of first-degree intentional homicide and two counts of first-degree murder, and Judge Dennis Cimpl sentenced him to seven consecutive life terms with no chance of parole. He died in custody in South Dakota in December 2013.
The case was solved by DNA, and it was also delayed by DNA. Wisconsin law required a sample from every convicted felon, and Ellis was in prison around 2000 and 2001, when his was due. Authorities later said that he had another inmate give it in his name, so the state databank held no profile under his name for the rest of the decade while the killings went unsolved. The Associated Press reported in 2015 that the inmate who gave the sample had himself been convicted of a sex crime. The cost of the gap became clear in hindsight. Police said that a sample taken from Ellis when it was due might have led them to him before the killing of Ouithreaun Stokes in 2007. The search for him led Wisconsin to discover that thousands of required offender samples had never reached the databank, according to the Associated Press in December 2009, under the headline "Gaps in DNA databanks have led to tragedy."
The investigation that reached Ellis grew from a review of unsolved killings of women on Milwaukee’s north side. In May 2009 Police Chief Flynn and District Attorney John Chisholm announced that DNA linked the deaths of several women killed between 1986 and 2007 to one unknown man. CBS News, reporting the announcement with the Associated Press on May 19, named Deborah Harris and Tanya Miller (October 1986), Sheila Farrior (1995), Joyce Mims (1997) and Ouithreaun Stokes (April 2007), as well as a 16-year-old girl killed in 1995, and said police had then added Florence McCormick, who died in April 1995. The man, police said, did not appear in any database. Flynn said more than 20 DNA samples from other unsolved homicides were being sent back to the state crime laboratory to check for links. "We’re convinced we’re going to be able to bring justice to these victims and their families," Chisholm said.
On August 29, 2009, detectives executed a search warrant and took a toothbrush and razors that a woman sharing the residence said were his. The state crime lab matched DNA from the toothbrush to evidence from two of the victims. He was arrested in the suburb of Franklin; later Associated Press reports give the date as September 5, 2009. At a news conference Flynn announced that DNA tied Ellis to the deaths of nine women, aged 16 to 41, killed on the north side between 1986 and 2007. By September 10, CBS News reported, prosecutors had filed the full set of charges: five counts of first-degree intentional homicide and two counts of first-degree murder, the second being the equivalent charge under state law at the time the earliest deaths occurred. He was not charged in the deaths of two of the nine.
Chisholm told the court at sentencing that Ellis was one of the few defendants he had seen who truly deserved to be called evil, and that Ellis’s later crimes and the deception over his DNA sample showed a growing awareness of forensic evidence. Ellis declined to speak. His lawyer, Richard Hart, argued on appeal that Ellis pleaded no contest only because the trial court’s refusals to move the case or separate the counts left him no chance of a fair trial. The Court of Appeals agreed with the trial judge’s reasoning, and in March 2013 the Wisconsin Supreme Court declined to hear the case.
The databank failure had a second set of consequences, for men who were not Ellis. The National Registry of Exonerations records that in 2007 the DNA profile from the 1995 killing of the 16-year-old girl matched two other unsolved killings in the same neighborhood. One man, identified here as C.O., was convicted in that case in 1996, and another, S.H., pleaded guilty in 1996. A third man, W.A., was convicted in 2005 in the 1998 killing of Maryetta Griffin, 39. All three were later cleared or acquitted. In April 2011 the Associated Press reported that a man wrongly convicted of murder was suing the city and police, and in April 2015 it reported that Milwaukee might pay $6.5 million to a man wrongly convicted of murder.
The losses in these cases did not look alike, and they did not cost the same things. In Auxerre the document survived, in a box, and what failed was the system that should have read it. In Washington, files and forensic evidence were destroyed or lost, some of it in a warehouse, and by 2009 the entire case file had been lost; the D.C. Council later required evidence in unsolved homicide cases to be kept for at least 65 years, and no one has been charged. In Vancouver a Crown file was destroyed by mistake after charges had been stayed, and clothing seized in 1997 was never tested at the time. In Angarsk about a third of the physical evidence was gone before the Moscow team arrived. In Halifax an officer’s notes went missing while he was on vacation, and a court weighed a theory about another man without them. In El Espinal a fire in a courthouse destroyed a file that might have supported a trial. In Montigny-lès-Metz exhibits were destroyed lawfully in 1995, and a defense lawyer, twenty-two years later, argued that a fair trial was no longer possible. In Milwaukee a sample that existed on paper belonged to someone else.
Courts took these losses differently. The Montigny judges refused an acquittal and went on to convict. The Court of Appeal in Nova Scotia did not know what it was missing. In Colombia one mother came forward to renew her complaint. The inspectors in France could not establish who was responsible for the loss of the Jambert report.
• 1971 to 1972: six girls and young women, aged 10 to 18, are killed in the Washington, D.C., area; no one is ever charged.
• 1975 to 1979: seven young women from the Auxerre institutions are recorded as runaways.
• October 15 to December 4, 1979: the Auxerre prosecutor’s office receives and closes the file on Martine Renault.
• December 1979: Flor Alba Sánchez Ospina is killed in El Espinal (El Tiempo, 2012).
• September 16, 1981: a judicial investigation opens in the Lesage case; Louis is in custody from December 28, 1981.
• May 4, 1984: the investigating judge dismisses the Lesage case against Louis.
• June 26, 1984: Jambert’s preliminary report on six women is sent to the investigating judge with a note to add it to the closed inquiry.
• September 28, 1986: two eight-year-old boys are killed in Montigny-lès-Metz.
• 1987: Romaine Jenkins reopens the Washington case and learns that files and forensic evidence were destroyed or lost.
• Around 1991: a fire at the El Espinal court building burns the file on the eleven children.
• January 7, 1992: Francis Heaulme is arrested at Bischwiller.
• 1994: López is released in Ecuador and transferred to Colombia; in September he is brought to El Espinal.
• 1995: the physical exhibits from Montigny-lès-Metz are destroyed lawfully.
• 1996: a court clerk in Auxerre locates the Jambert report in a box of archived files; on July 3 six complaints are filed.
• 1998: López is released on bail in Colombia after being declared inimputable; on January 26 Crown counsel stays the 1997 charges against Pickton; in December the Angarsk cases are combined into one.
• December 12, 2000: Émile Louis is arrested in Draguignan.
• March 2001: the Nadal report on the Auxerre case.
• 2001: the Crown file in the 1997 Pickton case is destroyed by mistake; the Angarsk case is effectively suspended.
• 2002: the teenager convicted in the Montigny case is acquitted at Lyon; Pickton is charged with murder on February 22.
• 2003: RCMP Constable Dave Moore analyzes the Brenda Way case; his notes later go missing.
• 2007: the DNA profile from a 1995 Milwaukee case is matched to two other unsolved killings.
• December 9, 2007: Pickton is convicted of six counts of second-degree murder.
• July 2009: Washingtonian reports that D.C. police have lost the entire Freeway Phantom case file.
• September 2009: Walter Ellis is arrested in Franklin, Wisconsin.
• August 2010: the LePard report on the Vancouver police investigation is released.
• February 24, 2011: Ellis is sentenced to seven consecutive life terms.
• March 2012: Popkov gives a DNA sample when the screening reaches the letter P.
• April 25, 2017: Heaulme’s second Montigny trial opens in Metz; he is convicted on May 17.
• March 1, 2019: the federal Minister of Justice orders a new trial in the Assoun case.
• June 2020: the Cour de cassation makes Heaulme’s Montigny conviction final.
• June 16, 2026: an investigating judge sends Heaulme to trial in the Bédarrides case.