On July 18, 2004, the chief of the Seoul Metropolitan Police, Heo Jun-young, told reporters that a man in custody had confessed to at least 19 killings: eight people in four households in 2003 and 11 young women in 2004. It was the lowest total Yoo Young-chul would give. Within days he had said 26. By the time the case reached a courtroom in the fall, the figure that mattered was the one on the indictment, and when judges finally ruled, it was 20.
A victim count is usually reported as a fact. In most of these cases it was a claim, made by a suspect, a police chief, a newspaper or a prosecutor, at one particular moment, and then it moved. Confessions raised it. Retractions, alibis and plain arithmetic cut it. Courts, where they were asked, produced a number of their own, and that number is often the smallest in the file. Each case gives the count, the person who gave it and the date, and says which of the numbers a court actually tested.
Yoo Young-chul was caught in the early hours of July 15, 2004, not by detectives but by the operators of outcall massage businesses whose workers kept vanishing. They held him in the Sinchon area of Seoul until police took him into custody. After about eight hours of questioning, according to Yonhap, he confessed.
The announcement of July 18 set the first figure at 19. Yoo then added a vendor he said he had killed in April 2004, and gave a total of 26, including two killings in Busan. On July 20 he nodded when reporters asked whether there was a 21st victim, and police began checking his statement that in mid-April he had killed a woman in her twenties whom he had met through a phone room in Sinchon. Search dogs turned up nothing. In custody and later he spoke of more than 30. Police and later reporting judged most of those further claims unsupported.
The indictment of August 2004 covered 21 deaths. Among them was a February 2004 killing in Imun-dong, in which a 24-year-old woman had died, a case Yoo first admitted. In September 2004, Pressian and the Kyunghyang Shinmun reported that he now said the Imun-dong confession was false and that he had made it because police told him they would look after his son. He repeated the claim at a hearing on October 25. On December 13, 2004, the Seoul Central District Court convicted him of 20 murders and sentenced him to death. It acquitted him of the Imun-dong count and of a bathhouse theft charge. He did not appeal, but prosecutors did, on the acquittal, and the Supreme Court rejected their appeal on June 9, 2005.
The 20 convicted counts were not listed one by one in reports of the verdict, so it is unclear whether the vendor, whom police considered the most credible of his additional claims, was among them. A May 2004 killing of a 65-year-old woman in Wonnam-dong, which a former police official said Yoo included in a handwritten list, was never charged and is unsolved. The count that stands is a court’s: 20. Yoo was still on death row at the Seoul Detention Center in Uiwang as of October 6, 2026. South Korea has carried out no execution since December 30, 1997.
The Lucas numbers ran in both directions, and over a longer stretch than in any of the others. Lucas had been convicted in Michigan in 1960 of the second-degree murder of his mother. In June 1983 he was arrested in Montague County, Texas, on a charge of possessing a pistol as an ex-convict. He confessed to the deaths of Kate Rich, an elderly widow, and of his teenage traveling companion. Eleven days after the arrest, the Associated Press reported, he had admitted 77 killings. At a hearing in Montague County that year he claimed 100, and at his arraignment he asked what was going to be done about "these other hundred women." Later the figure became about 600, spread over more than two dozen states.
Police from across the country came to interview him, and a Texas task force was organized around his statements. By 1985 more than 200 killings had been cleared on his word. The reversal came in April 1985. The Dallas Times Herald published records placing Lucas in other states on the dates of killings he had claimed, and he told the paper his confessions were a hoax. The Texas attorney general, Jim Mattox, opened an inquiry, and the Associated Press reported that Mattox called the mass confessions doubtful. The attorney general’s office spent about a year on it and in 1986 called the confessions a hoax.
Courts had by then tested only a handful of the claims. The press reported his convictions as nine, ten or eleven, without naming all of them. The most serious was a capital murder conviction in San Angelo in 1984 for the death of a young woman who was then unidentified and known as "Orange Socks." In June 1998, after the attorney general’s office located work records placing him in Florida at the time, Governor George W. Bush commuted his death sentence to life. ABC News wrote in 2001 that physical evidence tied him to only two murders, those of Rich and the teenager.
The count officials would stand behind fell further. In 1990 an investigator told the Associated Press that police were "pretty sure" he had killed three people. Lucas died in the Ellis I Unit at Huntsville in March 2001, and prison officials said the death appeared to be from natural causes. In 2019 the "Orange Socks" woman was identified as Debra Jackson, 23, of Abilene. Her killing is an open case with the Williamson County Sheriff’s Office as of a July 2024 report. DNA testing in 2008 excluded Lucas from one more of his convictions, that of Laura Marie Purchase; another man was charged in her case in 2021 and died before trial.
Sture Bergwall, a patient at the forensic psychiatric hospital in Säter, Sweden, took the name Thomas Quick in the early 1990s and told therapists and then police that he had committed murders. Between 1994 and 2001 six Swedish district courts convicted him of eight of them, in Piteå, Gällivare, Falun, Hedemora and Sundsvall. A police compilation presented at one of his trials listed 29 killings in Sweden, Norway and Finland between 1964 and 1993 that he had claimed. Some were time-barred, some were dropped when he stopped cooperating, and some lacked detail. Outside counts of the confessions ranged from more than 20 (TT and AFP) to more than 30 (the Associated Press) and 39 (Store norske leksikon).
The courts gave Bergwall his eight. It took a change in his own account, and then prosecutors, to take them away. In 2008 Bergwall withdrew every confession. Lawyers asked for a retrial in the Yenon Levi case in April 2009, the Svea Court of Appeal granted it that December, and on May 28, 2010, the chief prosecutor, Eva Finné, dropped the charge. Falu District Court entered an acquittal in September 2010. The Court of Appeal for Upper Norrland ordered retrials in the Stegehuis case on February 1, 2013, and in May 2013 prosecutors said there was "not sufficient evidence" and dropped both charges, AFP reported. In the first of the eight cases, that of a 15-year-old in Piteå, the chief prosecutor Håkan Nyman dropped the charge on July 31, 2013. He said it had rested mainly on Bergwall’s confession and his wish to be convicted, with no technical evidence, and that no one knew whether the teenager had been killed at all. The last acquittal became final on November 26, 2013.
The number of Quick killings believed by Swedish courts therefore went from eight to none. A government commission under Daniel Tarschys reported in June 2015 that investigators, the prosecutor, the courts and the hospital had all failed; when Bergwall gave incomplete or wrong answers, it wrote, investigators accepted that he struggled to remember or was departing from the truth, and the explanation was never questioned. Bergwall was moved to open care in March 2014. No conviction against him for any killing stands.
Samuel Little was arrested in Louisville, Kentucky, in September 2012 on a 2009 Los Angeles drug warrant, and in January 2013 he was charged with three murders there. A Los Angeles jury convicted him in September 2014 of the three killings of 1987 to 1989 and he received three terms of life without parole on September 25. His record then ran to more than 100 pages across 24 states, about 75 arrests in 56 years and under ten years in prison in all, according to the Calcasieu Parish Sheriff’s Office and the Associated Press.
Then the count began to climb. In 2018 a Texas Ranger, James Holland, went to interview him about a woman who had died in Odessa in 1994. Over more than 700 hours of interviews Little described killings in some 19 states between 1970 and 2005. Reports in late 2018 put the figure at 90. By October 2019 the FBI said it believed all 93 confessions were credible and called him the most prolific serial killer in American history. He pleaded guilty to one more murder in Texas in December 2018 and to four in Ohio in August 2019, bringing the number of convictions to eight.
The gap between 93 and 8 did not close. By Little’s death on December 30, 2020, investigators had verified about 60 of his claims, and the Texas Department of Public Safety listed 62 by December 2021. He had been indicted in Mississippi, Kentucky and Florida without being brought to trial in any of them. Authorities at the same time went on matching named women to his unattributed claims: in May 2023 Georgia agencies announced that a woman unnamed for 46 years was Yvonne Pless, whom Little had described as his first victim in Macon. Little never took his number back. It has been checked, one name at a time, by investigators.
Sataro Fukiage was released from prison in March 1922 after serving a sentence for a killing committed in Kyoto in 1906, when he was a minor. In July 1924 Tokyo police arrested him at a workers' camp on the northern edge of the city. The newspapers then printed a series of totals. The Tokyo Asahi Shimbun said on the next day that he had confessed to killing more than 20 girls from Hokkaido to Tokyo, then that the number was 17. The Yomiuri Shimbun reported on July 30, 1924, that he had killed 13. He told the Metropolitan Police that 18 or 19 killings were being put down to him, and, according to Gendai Business, told questioners he had assaulted 91 women and killed 13. The writer 小池新, who reread the contemporary newspapers for Bunshun Online in 2022, doubted the larger figures and suggested that reporters of the day attributed unsolved cases to him freely.
The indictment of August 9, 1924, was the document that fixed the number. It listed assaults on 27 girls and six killings, in Gunma, Nagano, Chiba and Saitama prefectures between August 1923 and April 1924. Only three of the six were tried. The Maebashi District Court convicted him of those three, with other charges, and sentenced him to death on May 7, 1925. The Tokyo Court of Appeal affirmed the sentence on April 24, 1926. The last appeal was dismissed on July 2, 1926, and he was hanged at Ichigaya Prison on September 28.
In between came the one confession that went the other way. In Maebashi he said that he had also killed a 16-year-old girl at Shimodate, Ibaraki, on March 7, 1924. A local man had already been tried for that killing and acquitted for lack of evidence; the prosecution had appealed. Judges from the Tokyo Court of Appeal took Fukiage to Ibaraki and concluded that parts of his account fitted the evidence. On August 22, 1925, he took it back from the witness stand. He had confessed to six killings in Maebashi, he said, only three had been taken up, and he had stopped admitting the rest. The Shimodate confession was his own invention, built from newspapers and rumor. The acquitted man had been due to go free that day after more than a year in custody. The count credited to him in court stayed at three, and the one killing he had offered beyond the indictment was gone.
Pedro Pablo Nakada Ludeña, a mechanic arrested in Huaral, Peru, on December 28, 2006, is the case in which the press count has drifted furthest from anything a court said. Peruvian newspapers reported that he confessed to 25 killings and told police his mission was "to clean Peru of the scum," and that is the number AFP repeated when he spoke to television reporters from prison in 2011.
The figures printed since then do not agree. Trome’s 2024 account lists 17 people, with dates running from January 1, 2005, to December 27, 2006, and says that although he confessed to 25, only 17 were taken to court. El Espectador wrote in 2018 that the authorities pursued him for eight murders. EFE and El Comercio reported in 2018 that he had been sentenced for 18 killings; Voz de América, citing El Comercio, gave 17. AFP, citing Peru’s identity registry in 2015, wrote that he had been convicted of killing 25 people between 2000 and 2006.
The court record is narrower than every one of those. On May 9, 2008, a trial court in Huacho convicted him of aggravated homicide, in the case of one named man "and others," and of aggravated robbery, and sentenced him to 35 years and 7,000 nuevos soles in civil reparation. It acquitted him the same day on the charges concerning seven named people. On March 13, 2009, an appeals chamber declared the judgment null and ordered a new trial. The Supreme Court’s ruling of March 12, 2010, which settled a dispute over procedure and not guilt, gives no total. Press reports from 2015 onward say he was declared not criminally responsible because of paranoid schizophrenia and confined to the psychiatric ward of Lurigancho prison in Lima, where Trome said in August 2024 he still was. The figure of 25 has never been tested by a verdict.
Michel Peiry was arrested on May 1, 1987, during military service, and in October 1989 the district court of Entremont, in the canton of Valais, sentenced him to life imprisonment for four murders and two attempted murders, with other charges including abduction, unlawful deprivation of liberty, coercion and theft. That is the part that is settled. Everything outside it has moved over the years, and in 2026 the Swiss press printed three different versions of it within five months.
Keystone-ATS, reporting the Federal Supreme Court’s refusal of accompanied outings in March 2026, gave the confessions as three teenagers killed in Switzerland and two outside it, plus three further killings he admitted during the inquiry and then retracted. In August 2026 20 Minuten put the number of teenagers he had targeted at about ten and said the exact figure was unclear because he sometimes confessed and then withdrew the confession. The same month Blick reported that he had been linked to at least eleven killings in Switzerland, France, Italy, Croatia and the United States, five of them proven. Blick’s "five proven" sits beside a court count of four murders; which killing makes the difference has not been reported.
The earliest case attributed to him, according to Blick, is a young Canadian man he met in the United States in September 1981. Peiry confessed to killing him during an argument, withdrew the confession, and then confirmed it again; the case was never conclusively proven, and no charge was reported. In questioning at Bellinzona after his arrest he also confessed, RSI reported in 2025, to the killing of a young man in Cresciano, in Ticino, and whether that death was one of the four in the Valais judgment has not been reported. Even the victims' ages differ by source: 14 to 18 in the Keystone-ATS count, 14 to 24 in Blick’s.
Peiry has applied for conditional release twelve times since 2002 and been refused every time. In 2026 the Federal Supreme Court twice ruled against him, in a ruling published March 11 on accompanied outings and in one published August 13 on parole. He is still in custody. The number a court has put on his case has not moved since 1989.
Wesley Brownlee is not a convicted man, and his count is a prosecutor’s count: how many shootings the state has chosen, at each stage, to put in a charging document. He has pleaded not guilty, has not been tried, and is presumed innocent. The numbers below are allegations.
The number began with the police. On September 30, 2022, after a fifth man was killed in Stockton between July 8 and September 27 of that year, Stockton police announced that the 2022 killings appeared to be linked. In early October they said ballistics tests and video tied two more cases to the series: an April 2021 death in Oakland and the April 2021 wounding of a woman in Stockton. The Associated Press reported it as six deaths and a wounding. The chief, Stanley McFadden, referred to a single pistol, though police would not confirm one gun in all seven shootings.
Brownlee was arrested in Stockton early on October 15, 2022, and on October 18 charged with three murders, in the deaths of Jonathan Hernandez Rodriguez, Juan Carlos Carranza-Cruz and Lawrence Lopez Sr. The district attorney, Tori Verber Salazar, said the charges rested only on the evidence processed so far: "There are two more murder victims and an attempted murder." A deputy district attorney said prosecutors in Texas, Arizona, Illinois and Florida had contacted the office about similar cases. On December 27, 2022, an amended complaint added four murders, two in Alameda County and two in Stockton, and one attempted murder, which made seven murders in all.
In November 2025 a San Joaquin County grand jury indicted him on six counts of murder, one of attempted murder, and one count each for possessing a gun and ammunition. The indictment left out an Oakland homicide, Stocktonia reported. In January 2026 the district attorney announced he would seek the death penalty if Brownlee were convicted. The case has since turned on whether Brownlee is competent to stand trial; a jury began hearing that question in September 2026, and as of September 18 the evidence was still being presented. A count that went from three to seven and back to six describes the charging file. It says nothing yet about guilt.
Set side by side, the cases divide into three groups. In the first, a court heard the evidence and gave a number: Yoo’s 20, Peiry’s four, the three killings for which Fukiage was convicted, and the handful of Lucas verdicts, some of which have since been undermined. The numbers around them, 26, 91, 100, 600, remain only what a man said in a police station. In the second, a court gave a number and later withdrew it: Bergwall’s eight, reduced to none by prosecutors and judges between 2010 and 2013, and Nakada’s 2008 judgment, annulled in 2009. In the third, no court has spoken: Brownlee’s seven, then six, await a ruling on whether a trial can happen, and for Little the 85 killings beyond his eight convictions are being checked by investigators case by case.
Confessions explain why the figures rise so fast. Lucas gave 77 in eleven days. Yoo moved from 19 to 26 within days. Fukiage told questioners 91 and 13 in the same account. They do not explain why the figures fall. In Sweden it took a retraction, a government commission and a run of retrials. In Texas it took a reporter, an attorney general and a year of checking dates. In Ibaraki it took a defendant on a witness stand in August 1925, and a man who had been in custody for more than a year.
• September 24, 1906: the Kyoto killing for which Fukiage was sentenced to life imprisonment (date from his autobiography).
• March 18, 1922: Fukiage released from prison.
• July 28, 1924: Fukiage arrested in Tokyo; newspapers print totals of 13, 17 and more than 20 in the days after.
• August 9, 1924: indictment names six killings and assaults on 27 girls; three go to trial.
• May 7, 1925: Maebashi District Court sentences Fukiage to death.
• August 22, 1925: Fukiage withdraws his Shimodate confession at the Tokyo Court of Appeal.
• September 28, 1926: Fukiage executed at Ichigaya Prison.
• 1960: Lucas convicted of second-degree murder in Michigan.
• June 11, 1983: Lucas arrested in Montague County, Texas; 77 confessed killings within eleven days.
• April 1985: records place Lucas elsewhere on the dates of claimed killings; Texas attorney general opens an inquiry; 1986 report calls the confessions a hoax.
• May 1, 1987: Peiry arrested during military service; life sentence in Valais in October 1989.
• 1994 to 2001: six Swedish district courts convict Thomas Quick of eight murders.
• June 1998: Governor George W. Bush commutes Lucas’s death sentence to life.
• July 18, 2004: Seoul police announce Yoo’s confession to at least 19 killings; December 13, 2004, death sentence for 20 murders.
• December 28, 2006: Nakada arrested in Huaral; May 9, 2008 first-instance conviction; March 13, 2009 judgment declared null.
• 2008: Bergwall withdraws all his confessions.
• 2010 to 2013: retrials, dropped charges and acquittals in all eight Quick cases; last acquittal final November 26, 2013.
• September 25, 2014: Little sentenced to three terms of life without parole in Los Angeles.
• June 2015: Bergwall Commission report published.
• October 2019: FBI says Little’s 93 confessions are credible; Little dies December 30, 2020.
• October 18 and December 27, 2022: Brownlee charged with three murders, then seven; November 2025 grand jury indictment on six murder counts.
• March and August 2026: Federal Supreme Court rejects Peiry’s requests for outings and for parole.
• September 18, 2026: Brownlee competency trial under way, no verdict reported.