Every serial case starts with a decision about where one series ends and another begins. Police draw the line, the press names it, and for a time the name does the thinking. A map fills with pins, a list of victims becomes a single story, and a single suspect is expected to explain it. Sometimes the line is right. In the cases that follow it was drawn in the wrong place: a series that turned out to be several killers, a death put on one man that belonged to another, a list closed on one man’s conviction without a trial. The mistake was not always a wrongful conviction. More often it was a boundary.
For years the deaths of women in South Los Angeles were grouped under one name, the "Southside Slayer," on the belief that a single man was responsible. Louis Craine was never the whole of that story, though two of the killings he was convicted of had been counted in it.
Craine was 32, an unemployed construction worker from Watts. In April 1989 a jury in Compton convicted him of four counts of first-degree murder with special-circumstance allegations, covering Gail Marie Ficklin, Loretta Perry, Vivian Collins and Carolyn Barney, killed between August 1985 and May 1987. The same jury acquitted him of the murder of a fifth woman, Sheila Ray Burris, 30, and then recommended death. According to UPI, formal sentencing was set for June 6, 1989. ABC News reported in 2008 that he died in prison in 1989; the date, place and cause were not reported.
The name outlived the case. In December 2008 ABC News reported that Los Angeles prosecutors believed four or more men may have been responsible for the deaths of dozens of women in the city in the 1980s and 1990s. Detectives reinvestigating unsolved cases with DNA had come to believe that many killings once attributed to the Southside Slayer were the work of several men working the same area at the same time. Prosecutors put the number of women at as many as 80. The killings came during the crack cocaine epidemic, and many victims were poor. "I don’t think there’s ever been anything similar to this where you have multiple people targeting the same type of victim," Deputy District Attorney Bobby Grace told ABC News.
By then ABC listed Craine as one of at least two men already convicted in South Los Angeles. The other, Chester Turner, a pizza deliveryman, had been sentenced to death the year before for killing ten women and the unborn child of one of them. A third man, Michael Hughes, already serving a life sentence for murder, had been charged in December 2008 with four more killings committed between 1986 and 1993. One name, then, had covered at least three convicted or charged men, and prosecutors thought there were more.
The most famous boundary in American crime is the one drawn in Atlanta. Between July 1979 and May 1981 a long series of Black children, teenagers and young men in the city died. On July 17, 1980, after nine deaths, five Atlanta police investigators were assigned to a task force that later grew past fifty officers. The FBI’s own history says its involvement began in June 1980, when local police asked whether the federal kidnapping law applied. Attorney General William French Smith authorized a preliminary federal inquiry on November 6, 1980, and on November 17 the Bureau began a major case. The city lived with a fear that one killer, or several, was taking its children.
Wayne Williams, 23, a freelance cameraman and would-be music promoter, was indicted on July 17, 1981, on two counts of murder. On February 27, 1982, a Fulton County jury convicted him of murdering Jimmy Ray Payne, 21, and Nathaniel Cater, 27, both adults, after a trial of about nine weeks. Judge Clarence Cooper sentenced him to two consecutive life terms. Prosecutors had put evidence about ten of the other deaths before the jury as "similar transactions," to show a pattern.
Then the list was closed. On March 1, 1982, the task force announced it would close 21 more cases, with one more to follow, and all 22 were linked to Williams, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s chronology records. The FBI’s history says the task force concluded there was enough evidence to link him to 20 more of the 29 deaths. In 2022 Atlanta News First reported that police believe him responsible for at least 24 of the 30. None of these attributions has been tested in court. The cases of the two girls on the list, and that of Darron Glass, were never closed against him.
Williams has always said he is innocent. His appeals failed in state and federal court. In February 2006 U.S. District Judge Beverly Martin refused to reconsider, finding he had offered no new evidence that anyone else had committed the two murders or the 22 others attributed to him, the Associated Press reported. In November 2007 the Eleventh Circuit dismissed his remaining claims. Parole was denied in November 2019, with the next consideration set for November 2027.
The families have never agreed. Some believe he killed their children, some believe he did not, and many believe he was not the only killer. In 2019 Atlanta reopened the investigation and sent evidence for modern DNA testing. As of December 2022 no results had been made public. "No lab results have ever been given to the families," said Jimmy Howard, a spokesman for some of them. Police said the investigation was open. In June 2023 the city unveiled a memorial with an eternal flame at City Hall. The conviction covers two deaths. The attribution covers twenty-two more, and no court has weighed it.
The killings that frightened Brooklyn and Queens in the winter of 2003 were first drawn as one group, and the first drawing was not the one that ended in court. Between February 8 and March 20, 2003, four men were killed and a fifth wounded in the two boroughs. By mid-March, the TimesLedger of Queens reported, more than 20 detectives had been assigned to a task force, and police believed four early-morning killings had been carried out by the same people. A reward of about $12,000 was offered, and at that stage police spoke of two suspects.
That first grouping was not the same as the four killings with which Larme Price was later charged. The paper’s list of four included the deaths of John Freddy, Sukhjit Khajala and Albert Kotlyar, and a fourth killing, on March 1, 2003, in East New York, Brooklyn. Police also said a February 1 killing in Jamaica, Queens, might be connected. Neither was among the charges Price faced. The Queens Chronicle reported that he had not been charged in the March 1 killing and that police were pursuing other leads in it.
Price, 30, unemployed, of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, was arrested in Brooklyn on March 29, 2003, after admitting the killings to a detective by telephone, police said. Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly announced the arrest on Sunday, March 30. Price told investigators he had set out to kill Middle Eastern men in revenge for September 11, 2001. According to the Associated Press, at least two of the dead were not Middle Eastern. He was charged with four counts of first-degree murder and two of attempted murder; the first-degree charges made him eligible for the death penalty. A judgment of conviction was entered in Kings County on February 11, 2004. The Appellate Division affirmed his sentence in 2005, and his federal challenges failed between 2014 and 2024.
Who was responsible for the March 1 killing or the February 1 killing has not been reported. Price was charged in four deaths. The group police described in mid-March was a different group.
When Anthony Hardy was arrested in January 2003, police looked again at the unsolved death of Paula Fields, whose death had come to light in February 2001. The Irish Examiner reported at the time that police were reconsidering it, and some newspapers linked her death to Hardy. The link was wrong.
Hardy, a former engineer living alone in Camden Town, pleaded guilty at the Central Criminal Court on November 25, 2003, to the murders of Sally White, Elizabeth Valad and Bridgette MacLennan. Mr Justice Keith sentenced him to life on each count. In May 2010 the same judge made a whole life order, so that Hardy would never be released, the Camden New Journal and the Yorkshire Post reported. Sally White’s death had first been recorded as natural. Channel 4 News reported in March 2011 that the pathologist, Freddy Patel, was later convicted of incompetence by a disciplinary tribunal in a separate case. Hardy killed two more women eleven months after her death was recorded.
Fields’s death ended with another man. In April 2011 an Old Bailey jury convicted John Sweeney of murdering Paula Fields and Melissa Halstead, and he was given a whole life term, the Islington Tribune reported. At that trial Sweeney’s defense suggested that Hardy might have been responsible. The jury did not accept it. Paula Fields, a mother of three, was 29 when she died, her sister told the court.
Hardy’s name was carried further. In April 2013 the criminologist David Wilson, in the Channel 5 programme Killers Behind Bars, named him a prime suspect in two unsolved deaths and called for both to be reopened: Sharon Hoare, killed in Chelsea in 1991, and Christine McGovern, who died in Walthamstow in 1995. Wilson argued that both deaths resembled the Camden killings, that a photofit of a man sought in west London in the 1990s looked like Hardy, and that Hardy was working as a minicab driver around the time of the Hoare killing. He accepted that the leads were circumstantial. The Metropolitan Police said in 2013 that the possibility of other killings "was fully investigated at the time" and that "no evidence to support this was uncovered"; it said there would be no further action. Hardy died on November 25, 2020, aged 69, in the Ombudsman’s account, of COVID-19 pneumonia.
Hardy was convicted of three murders and no others. Paula Fields’s death, which some newspapers had linked to him, ended in another man’s conviction.
Angus Sinclair is remembered for three convictions. He was convicted of culpable homicide as a teenager in 1961; of the murder of Mary Gallacher in Glasgow in 2001; and in 2014 of the murders of Christine Eadie and Helen Scott, both 17, who left Edinburgh’s World’s End pub in October 1977, with other charges. The last verdict came after a judge had acquitted him of the same crimes in 2007. In September of that year Lord Clarke upheld a submission of no case to answer, telling the court that there was no forensic evidence to link the accused to the items used in the killings. The Scottish Parliament passed the Double Jeopardy (Scotland) Act 2011, allowing an acquittal to be set aside on new evidence. DNA work by the forensic company Cellmark in 2011 and 2012, using a light source called Crime-Lite, produced a full profile of Sinclair on clothing used in the killings. A jury at the High Court sitting in Livingston convicted him on November 14, 2014, acting together with a second man, Hamilton, who was dead by then and was linked through relatives' DNA. The judge set a punishment part of 37 years, the longest a Scottish court had imposed. Sinclair died in prison on March 11, 2019, aged 73, without admitting any of it.
The wrong-series question is the one on either side of those convictions. In 2004 police began a review of seven unsolved killings of young women, including the World’s End case. The Sunday Post reported in 2019 that the review linked Sinclair to four killings in Glasgow as well as the deaths of the two girls. The four were those of Frances Barker, 37, Hilda McAuley, 36, Agnes Cooney, 23, and Anna Kenny, 20, in 1977. Sinclair was never charged in any of them, and he admitted none. One of the four had already been closed: another man, Thomas Ross Young, was convicted of the murder of Frances Barker.
The review therefore tied a man who had been in prison since 1982 to one death that already had a conviction and three that did not. Former detectives and the press have named him in other unsolved cases too, and he has never been charged in any of them. Young’s conviction for the murder of Frances Barker is the one court outcome among the four.
Joseph Paul Franklin attacked strangers between 1977 and 1980, and the courts convicted him of eight murders in Utah, Wisconsin, Missouri, Tennessee and Ohio, along with a federal conviction for bombing a synagogue. Missouri executed him on November 20, 2013, for the 1977 killing of Gerald Gordon. He was acquitted in 1982 of the attempted murder of Vernon Jordan, an attack he later admitted in a 1996 interview; the Associated Press quoted a federal prosecutor saying the double jeopardy rule barred a second trial. Other confessions were never tried at all, among them killings in Georgia, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. He told interviewers at different times that he had killed as many as 20 people, or about 22.
The West Virginia confession was different, because by the time Franklin made it someone else had already been convicted. On June 25, 1980, Nancy Santomero, 19, and Vicki Durian, 26, were killed in Pocahontas County. In 1992 the state charged a local man, J.B., and six others; those charges were dismissed, and in 1993 five men were indicted, though only J.B. was tried. On June 4, 1993, a Greenbrier County jury convicted J.B. of both murders and he was sentenced to life without mercy. The trial judge excluded Franklin’s confession and a map he had drawn as unreliable hearsay, because in the judge’s words Franklin made "one statement today and then won’t talk to you after that about it." The state Supreme Court saw no error in that ruling in 1995, though it sent the case back on a separate immunity issue.
Then Franklin swore to it. In January 1999 a habeas petition supported by a sworn deposition from Franklin, saying he had killed the women, was granted, and a new trial was ordered. A Braxton County jury acquitted J.B. on May 31, 2000, after less than three hours of deliberation. He later settled a wrongful conviction claim for $2 million, and the National Registry of Exonerations lists the case as an exoneration. Franklin was never charged in West Virginia. The Santomero and Durian deaths belong to his count by his own account, and to no court’s.
Steven Grieveson is serving four life sentences for murdering four teenage boys in Sunderland. A jury convicted him in February 1996 of the murders of Thomas Kelly, 18, David Hanson, 15, and David Grieff, 15, who died in 1993 and 1994. He asked in January 2012 to speak to detectives and confessed to killing a fourth boy, Simon Martin, 14, in 1990. At trial in October 2013 he admitted the killing and denied murder, citing diminished responsibility; a Newcastle Crown Court jury convicted him of murder on October 24, 2013, and Mr Justice Ramsey passed a fourth life sentence with a minimum term of 35 years. The Sunderland Echo, in 2016 and 2023, reported him held at Full Sutton.
The wider question arrived in February 2014, when Northumbria Police arrested Grieveson on suspicion of the murder of Nikki Allan, a seven-year-old girl from Sunderland, who had died in October 1992. A neighbor, then 24, had been tried for her murder at Leeds Crown Court in 1993 and acquitted, after the judge excluded recordings of his police interviews and criticized the police for oppressive questioning. Northumbria Police denied the criticism. Grieveson was questioned and released on bail. Detectives later said his bail had been cancelled and no further action was being taken, the Echo reported in 2016. He was never charged.
The answer came from somewhere else. On May 12, 2023, a jury convicted David Boyd, a former neighbor of the family, of the murder of Nikki Allan, and on May 23 Mrs Justice Lambert jailed him for life with a minimum term of 29 years. One man had been tried and acquitted in 1993; another, already convicted of four murders, had been arrested and released in 2014. Boyd was neither.
The Chicago case runs the other way. In it, a nonprofit claims one series and the police say there is none. In 2019 the Murder Accountability Project said that 51 killings of women in Chicago from 2001 to 2018, most of them Black women, had the characteristics of serial murder. The project’s head, the retired journalist Thomas Hargrove, told VICE that he believed there were probably more than one serial killer active in Chicago. The project’s group was built by a computer program designed to cluster unsolved killings of the same type, defined by asphyxia as the cause of death.
Police did not accept the grouping. Under pressure from families, activists and elected officials, the department assigned homicide detectives working on an FBI violent crimes task force to examine the cases in April 2019. Superintendent Johnson told the Chicago Sun-Times there was no evidence linking the killings and no serial killer had been identified, but that detectives had begun a review, with a spokesman describing an inventory of evidence and an audit of forensic material. Then came the DNA. In June 2019 police said that testable DNA existed in 21 of the cases, and that it came from 21 different men. Their position since then has been that there is no evidence of a serial killer and that each case is investigated by itself.
The disagreement is a disagreement over what a pattern is. The project says the likeness of the victims and the cause of death is the pattern. The police say the likeness is a feature of who is killed in the city, and the DNA does not join the cases.
One case on the list has left it. Diamond Turner, 21, died in 2017. In January 2020 a man, A.H., was charged with first-degree murder in her death, and police said he did not appear to be linked to the other cases. That is one death accounted for, outside the series, and fifty remaining in the project’s group. Chicago has had a proven series before: Andre Crawford was convicted in 2009 of killing 11 women, seven of them linked by DNA, the Sun-Times recalled in 2019.
Before the arrest of Moses Sithole, South African police were dealing with what looked like three separate series of killings of young women around Johannesburg and Pretoria. In 1995 the Mail & Guardian set them out. The first was in Cleveland, Johannesburg. In December 1994, police arrested a man, D.S., for the killings of 15 young women in and around Cleveland. Many believed the killings had stopped. D.S. was then killed by a policeman while in police hands. He was never tried, and police continued to say in 1995 that forensic evidence conclusively linked him to the Cleveland deaths. South African History Online, citing Keesing’s Record of World Events, gives a different account, that Sithole’s crimes first came to light in June 1994 in Cleveland. The Sunday Tribune, describing a 2025 documentary, wrote that another man had first been arrested for the crimes and had died in custody, and that Sithole contacted The Star newspaper to say the police had the wrong man.
The second series was in Atteridgeville, near Pretoria, where more deaths came to light after the Cleveland arrest. Police said this was probably not the same killer, and by September 1995 fifteen victims had been connected to him. The third was near Boksburg, where in the week before September 22, 1995, the deaths of ten young women came to light. That brought the number of victims linked to D.S. and to possible copycats to 40, the Mail & Guardian wrote. The paper reported that investigators appeared to agree that the three sets of murders were related in motive, that police were officially silent, perhaps so as not to warn the killer and perhaps because investigators disagreed among themselves, and that rumors suggested the cases might be linked, or that the later killings were the work of a copycat.
Sithole was arrested at Benoni on October 18, 1995, and police in Pretoria announced the arrest the next day. In December 1997 he was convicted of 38 murders, with other charges: 37 women and a two-year-old boy killed with his mother. Judge David Curlewis sentenced him to 2,410 years and ordered that he serve at least 930 before parole could be considered. The press name for him, the ABC Killer, came from the initials of Atteridgeville, Boksburg and Cleveland. Later accounts, IOL in 2026 and SA People in 2025, say the nickname reflects deaths in all three areas. Which of the 38 convictions, if any, relate to Cleveland has not been reported. He told the press he had killed 76 people; that figure is his own claim, and he was convicted of 38.
In Los Angeles and South Africa, a name meant to describe a single hand described several. In Atlanta the list was closed on a conviction for two deaths, and the other twenty-two have never been tried. In New York the first grouping never became the charged group. In London a newspaper’s link to Hardy was undone by a second man’s conviction in 2011. In Glasgow a 2004 review set one already-solved death beside three unsolved ones. In West Virginia a man spent years in prison for killings another man swore he had committed. In Sunderland two other men were suspected of a child’s death before a third was convicted. In Chicago, the label is still the dispute.
A court weighs the deaths a prosecutor brings. The series, as the police and the press drew it, was never before any court.
• 1977: Frances Barker, Hilda McAuley, Agnes Cooney and Anna Kenny die in Glasgow; Christine Eadie and Helen Scott die in October.
• July 1979 to May 1981: the Atlanta child murders list grows to 30 deaths.
• June 25, 1980: Nancy Santomero and Vicki Durian die in Pocahontas County, West Virginia.
• February 27, 1982: Wayne Williams is convicted of two murders; on March 1 the task force closes 22 more cases.
• August 1985 to May 1987: the four killings for which Louis Craine is convicted.
• 1990: Simon Martin, 14, dies in Sunderland.
• October 1992: Nikki Allan dies in Sunderland.
• 1993 and 1994: Thomas Kelly, David Hanson and David Grieff die in Sunderland.
• June 4, 1993: J.B. is convicted in Greenbrier County.
• December 1994: a man arrested over 15 Cleveland killings is killed in custody.
• October 18, 1995: Moses Sithole is arrested at Benoni.
• February 1996: Steven Grieveson is convicted of three murders.
• December 1997: Sithole is convicted of 38 murders, with other charges.
• May 31, 2000: J.B. is acquitted at a retrial.
• January 2003: Anthony Hardy is arrested; police look again at the Paula Fields death.
• February 11, 2004: judgment of conviction against Larme Price.
• September 10, 2007: Lord Clarke acquits Angus Sinclair of the World’s End murders.
• December 2008: Los Angeles prosecutors say four or more men may be behind the Southside Slayer deaths.
• April 2011: John Sweeney is convicted of murdering Paula Fields and Melissa Halstead.
• November 14, 2014: Sinclair is convicted at a retrial.
• April 2019: Chicago police begin reviewing 51 killings.
• 2019: Atlanta reopens the child murders investigation.
• May 12, 2023: David Boyd is convicted of murdering Nikki Allan.