An exhumation is the one step in a murder investigation that cannot be taken quietly. Someone has to ask for it, someone has to authorize it, and a family has to live through it. The cases below are among the best documented in which exhumations drove the investigation, where a single death led to the reopening of several others and a jury or a judge was then asked what the tests meant.
Two cautions come before the ranking. The phrase "ordered by a court" over-promises. In most of these cases the order came from a coroner, a medical examiner, a prosecutor or the police, and who signed it is often unknown; each case below says who ordered what, where that is known. And the number of exhumations is not the number of deaths a court decided. In case after case, the count of the exhumed ran far ahead of the count of convictions.
Harold Shipman was a family doctor in Hyde, on the eastern edge of Greater Manchester. On January 31, 2000, a jury at Preston Crown Court convicted him of murdering 15 of his patients and of forging the will of the last of them, Kathleen Grundy. The judge, Mr. Justice Forbes, told him: "In your case, life must mean life. You must spend the remainder of your days in prison." That is the record of what a court decided. The record of what was exhumed is larger.
The case reached exhumation only on its second attempt. On March 24, 1998, Dr. Linda Reynolds of another Hyde practice telephoned the coroner for Greater Manchester South, John Pollard. In the previous three months, she told him, Shipman had signed 16 certificates confirming deaths, while her own much larger practice had recorded 14 deaths, later corrected to 15. Pollard referred the matter to the police that day. The first police investigation was closed on April 17 without a written report. The Shipman Inquiry’s Second Report, published in July 2003, called it a failure at every level and concluded that "if the police and the Coroner had moved with reasonable expedition, the lives of Shipman’s last three victims would probably have been saved." It added that a post-mortem examination with toxicology tests, ordered by the coroner on two of those patients in late March, would probably have detected a toxic substance. The coroner did not order one.
The second investigation was led by Detective Superintendent Bernard Postles. Kathleen Grundy had died on June 24, 1998, and in the early days of August police exhumed her. Mikaela Sitford, a reporter, wrote later that the story reached the press about three weeks after the exhumation, when police admitted they were looking at 20 deaths. Shipman was arrested on September 7, 1998, and charged with Grundy’s murder and the forged will.
The investigation widened to other patients who had died suddenly. Police exhumed 12 people in all, ITV News later reported. A toxic substance was detected in nine of the exhumed women, RTÉ and the Associated Press reported; six other women in the case could not be tested that way. By the time of the trial police had opened investigations into more than 120 other deaths, Newsweek reported. Shipman was charged with 14 further murders, the Gosport Independent Panel’s report records, bringing the total to 15.
The exhumations were therefore the origin of a count, not the end of it. In July 2002 the Inquiry’s first report, chaired by the High Court judge Dame Janet Smith, concluded that Shipman had killed 215 of his patients, the Associated Press reported; the Inquiry’s final report in January 2005 put the figure at about 250. These are findings of a public inquiry, not verdicts. The jury convicted him of 15. He never admitted any killing.
Ordered by: the police, in the second investigation; who authorized each exhumation has not been made public. Exhumed: 12. Result in court: 15 murder convictions and one conviction for forgery. Families: no family statement on the exhumations has been published.
Donald Harvey spent most of his working life in hospitals, first as a teenage orderly in London, Kentucky, and later as a morgue attendant and nurse’s aide in Cincinnati. In March 1987 a pathologist at the Hamilton County Coroner’s Office examining John Powell, a 44-year-old patient at Drake Memorial Hospital, detected a toxic substance. Harvey was charged on April 6, 1987, with that single death. The pathologist, Dr. Lee Lehman, ruled the death a homicide; FOX19 reported that deaths at Drake had been ruled accidental until then.
The charge might have stopped at one death. It did not, because nurses on Harvey’s ward went to a Cincinnati television anchor, Minarcin of WCPO, with suspicions about other deaths. A half-hour special on June 23, 1987, set out the case for other killings. A special Hamilton County grand jury took up the Drake deaths, and the county coroner exhumed ten people; Time reported on August 24, 1987, that traces of a toxic substance were detected in several of them.
In August 1987, facing the possibility of a death sentence, Harvey pleaded guilty in Hamilton County. The prosecutor, Arthur Ney, said Harvey had confessed to 29 murders and five attempted murders, but that the grand jury judged there was too little evidence to indict him on five of the killings. Ney also pointed out that the toxic substance in Powell’s case would have been hard to detect once embalming had taken place. Ohio’s prison record shows the sentences taking effect on October 26, 1987. In Kentucky, a Laurel County investigation reviewed the files of patients who had died at Marymount Hospital in 1970 and 1971, and Harvey admitted to eight killings there, his lawyer William Whalen said; he pleaded guilty to eight counts of murder and one of voluntary manslaughter, Judge Lewis Hopper sentenced him to eight life terms plus 20 years, and news reports have since totaled his killings at 37.
Ordered by: the Hamilton County coroner. Exhumed: ten. Result in court: guilty pleas, not trials; five confessed killings were never indicted. Families: the reaction reported came from prosecutors, not from the families of the ten.
In February 1978 a Belgian nun known as Sister Godfrieda, head nurse of a geriatric ward in the Flemish town of Wetteren, confessed to killing three elderly residents in her care and was charged with three murders. She was 44. The case drew reporters and photographers from across Europe, while much of the Flemish press, closely tied to the Catholic Church, gave it little space. Her name appears in several forms: Time called her Sister Godfrida and gave her birth name as Cecile Bombeek, while the Flemish journalist Tom De Smet, who published a book on the case in 2023, spells it Cecile Bombeke.
The judicial investigation tried to establish whether there were more. Time reported in March 1978 that a judge had ordered five people exhumed, those of the three residents she had confessed to killing and two other possible victims, and that police were waiting for test results before deciding on further murder charges. De Smet, writing in 2023, gives a larger figure: seven other possible victims besides the three, which would make ten. The results of the tests have not been reported.
The investigating judge, Leo Tas, listed 17 people whose deaths she may have caused, De Smet writes; the list was not made public until his book appeared in 2023, and VRT also reported that a document from the judge referred to 17 murders. Much of the evidence, according to De Smet, consisted of statements and circumstantial details. In 1980, experts ruled her insane, and she was interned instead of tried. She was released in 1990, and died in 2019, aged 86, without any court ruling on the deaths.
Ordered by: an investigating judge, according to Time. Exhumed: five (Time) or ten (De Smet). Result in court: none; she was never tried. Families: nothing the families of the exhumed said has been reported.
Blanche Taylor Moore has been under sentence of death in North Carolina since November 16, 1990. A Forsyth County jury convicted her of first-degree murder in the death of Raymond Reid, a store manager who had been her companion for years, and in October 2026, at 93, she was still listed by the North Carolina Department of Adult Correction as an active inmate on death row. She has always said she is innocent.
The case began in May 1989, when doctors at North Carolina Memorial Hospital in Chapel Hill diagnosed a toxic substance in her second husband, the Reverend Dwight Moore, who had married her a few weeks earlier. He survived. Police interviewed him in what was expected to be his deathbed, and he told them about his wife’s former companion, Raymond Reid, who had died in October 1986 of what doctors called a nerve disorder.
Dr. John Butts, the state’s chief medical examiner, sought permission to exhume Reid; who granted it has not been reported. Reid was exhumed in Alamance County on June 13, 1989. Butts told CBS 17 that Reid’s medical history had been "very suspicious," and that the tests showed lethal concentrations in his tissues. A chemistry professor, Dr. Vincent Guinn, analyzed Reid’s hair and described a pattern consistent with multiple doses over a long period, as the Supreme Court of North Carolina summarized the evidence in 1994.
Butts said the results started a process of examining others connected to her. Five people were exhumed in Alamance County in the summer of 1989, the Associated Press reported. Her first husband, James Taylor, showed levels about 60 times normal. Her father, P. D. Kiser Sr., and her mother-in-law, Isla Taylor, showed elevated levels that the medical examiner concluded were not fatal. The last exhumed, a former co-worker, showed no unusual level. The state supreme court summarized the exhumations of Reid, Taylor and Kiser by saying that all of those tested positive.
Only one death was tried. Moore was charged over Taylor’s death and the illness of Dwight Moore, and the supreme court records an indictment over her father’s death as well; those charges were dropped after she was sentenced, and no court has ruled on whether she caused any death but Reid’s. David Hedgecock, an agent of the State Bureau of Investigation, told the Associated Press in 2015 that more than 30 people had been named as possible victims. "There was a good bit of hysteria going on," he said. Years later Dwight Moore said he had no doubt that he had been deliberately harmed.
Ordered by: the state’s chief medical examiner sought it; the authorizing court has not been named. Exhumed: five. Result in court: one conviction, a death sentence affirmed in 1994; four of five exhumations produced positive results, and the co-worker’s produced none. Families: no statement from Reid’s family on the exhumations has been reported.
Amy Archer-Gilligan ran a house for elderly lodgers in Windsor, Connecticut, from 1907. Residents paid by the week, or paid a single sum in return for care for the rest of their lives. Between 1907 and 1916, sixty of them died there, forty-eight in the last five years of that span. A newspaper correspondent, a dead man’s sister and the editors of the Hartford Courant pressed the authorities to look closer, and in May 1916 she was arrested.
The Courant’s editor, Clifford Sherman, then opened an investigation, according to the Windsor Historical Society. The paper reviewed Windsor’s death certificates for the house and compared them with the records of the much larger Hartford institution. A state police investigation followed, and several former residents were exhumed and examined. FOX61 reported that the exhumed included Franklin Andrews, a lodger, and that a toxic substance was detected. Connecticut History says that more than two dozen former residents tested positive, a figure that is larger than the number of deaths charged and is not given in the court record.
The defense contested how the substance came to be there at all. Connecticut had banned embalming fluids containing it in 1908, the Windsor Historical Society notes, and the science of the day could not reliably tell whether such a substance in a person came from deliberate harm or from embalming. Some undertakers were still using it illegally, and that became a key defense argument.
She was charged with five murders and tried in June 1917 for that of Andrews, who died in May 1914. A jury convicted her of first-degree murder, and she was sentenced to death. The Connecticut Supreme Court of Errors set the verdict aside on April 30, 1918, in State v. Gilligan, and at the retrial in June 1919 she was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. She was declared insane in 1924, moved to the state hospital in Middletown, and died there in 1962.
Ordered by: not reported; a state police investigation preceded the exhumations. Exhumed: several; the count is not given in the court record, and one historical account says more than two dozen tested positive. Result in court: one conviction, for one death, after one reversal. Families: a dead man’s sister was among those who pressed for the inquiry.
Daisy de Melker was executed in Pretoria on December 30, 1932, for murdering her son. Rhodes Cecil Cowle was 20 when he died in 1932, a little over a year after his mother’s third marriage. His death led investigators back to her two earlier husbands, William Alfred Cowle and Robert Sproat, who had died in 1923 and 1927 and had left her money. According to Ted Botha, writing in the Mail & Guardian, Cowle’s widow inherited the family house and a sum under his will; the World Rugby Museum says she was the sole beneficiary of both men’s wills.
Sproat’s brother became suspicious and went to the police, the museum account says. Rhodes Cowle, William Cowle and Robert Sproat were exhumed. Who issued the order has not been reported. The museum says the tests detected a toxic substance in her son, and that the prosecution’s experts reported a different one in the two husbands. It also says a chemist who had sold her the substance recognized her from a newspaper photograph, and that she had signed the register under the name "Mrs D L Sproat." She was arrested and charged with all three murders.
After a trial of about a month that filled the courtroom and the crowds outside, the court convicted her of her son’s murder and acquitted her of both husbands' deaths, finding the evidence on those counts insufficient. The prosecution’s allegation about the husbands was tried and the court did not find it proved. She was sentenced to death and went to her execution without confessing. Much of what is repeated about her, including how many people she may have killed, goes beyond what the court found.
Ordered by: not reported. Exhumed: three. Result in court: one conviction and two acquittals. Families: the brother of her second husband took his suspicions to the police.
Between March and June 2022, thirteen babies who had been born in good health at the Hospital Materno Neonatal Ramón Carrillo, the public maternity hospital in the city of Córdoba, suddenly fell seriously ill in the hours after birth. Five of them died and eight survived. Prosecutors said Brenda Agüero, a nurse, was the one member of staff present at every one of those events. She was arrested on August 19, 2022, on the order of the prosecutor Raúl Garzón.
The question of why the babies died had to be answered largely from evidence gathered after the fact. Only the last two babies to die had been examined soon afterward, and Diario de Cuyo reported on August 22, 2022, that those tests attributed both deaths to an excess of a substance that sources in the case described as having been injected deliberately. For the earlier deaths, Cadena 3 reported in November 2022, citing the state news agency Télam and judicial sources, that the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team had exhumed three of the babies the week before to try to establish their causes of death. Who ordered the exhumations has not been reported. That month Garzón extended the homicide charges to the earlier deaths of March 18, April 23 and May 23 and charged eight attempted homicides.
On June 18, 2025, a court of three professional judges and eight citizen jurors convicted Agüero of five counts of aggravated homicide and eight attempts, by six votes to four, and sentenced her to life imprisonment. The presiding judge wrote the reasoning of the minority that would have acquitted her. The cause of the earliest deaths remained disputed even in the written grounds: the defense argued that infection and poor hygiene explained them, while the families' lawyers and the majority pointed to levels they said could only have come from outside. The court also awarded the families about 550 million pesos in damages, to be paid by the Province of Córdoba jointly with those convicted once the judgment is final. Agüero denies harming any child. Her appeal was admitted on September 4, 2025, and sent to the Superior Tribunal of Justice of Córdoba.
Ordered by: not reported. Exhumed: three. Result in court: convictions on all thirteen counts, on a divided vote; appeal pending. Families: awarded damages; the court said no legal process could repair the loss of the five.
Anna Marie Hahn was 31 when a Cincinnati jury convicted her, in November 1937, of the murder of Jacob Wagner, a 78-year-old German-American. Time magazine described her as a Bavarian immigrant who had taken about $50,000 from elderly friends over eight years, much of it to bet on horse races. The jury of eleven women and one man returned its verdict without a recommendation of mercy, which meant death. The Supreme Court of Ohio’s history page records that Judge Charles S. Bell sentenced her, and she was executed on December 7, 1938.
The inquiry began in Colorado Springs over missing jewelry; an elderly man who had visited the hotel with her died the next day. Back in Cincinnati, Time reported, several of her elderly German-American friends were exhumed and tested, and toxic substances were detected. She was arrested on her return to the city, the Clermont Sun column says, and tests also detected a toxic substance in Wagner. Neither the number exhumed nor who ordered the exhumations has been reported.
By August 19, 1937, she was under indictment for first-degree murder in two deaths, according to an Associated Press report printed the next day in the Michigan Daily. The same report said the inquiry had reached at least eleven deaths. The prosecutor, Dudley Miller, called it "the biggest mass murder in this country." That day Assistant Prosecutor Loyal Martin asked for a post-mortem examination of a 79-year-old woman who had died after several weeks of illness; her sister suspected Hahn.
Her defense took an unusual line: her lawyers admitted, Time reported, that she was guilty of thefts, adultery and forgery, in order to argue that she was not guilty of anything worse. She was tried on one death. The second indictment was never tried.
Ordered by: not stated; a prosecutor sought one further examination. Exhumed: several, number not given. Result in court: one conviction, one untried indictment. Families: a sister’s suspicion lay behind the request for one examination.
Caroline Grills was the relative who brought the tea. She often visited her in-laws and friends, made tea for them and baked cakes and biscuits, and to her extended family she was "Aunty Carrie." In May 1953 she was arrested and charged with trying to kill two of those relatives. Police went on to charge her with four murders and another attempted murder. Only one charge went to trial.
Police speculated that the trouble had begun in 1947, with the death of her stepmother. Two of the people she was charged with killing were exhumed, and traces of a toxic substance were detected, according to the Australian Dictionary of Biography. Detectives believed they had a strong circumstantial case on the murder charges, Stephen Garton writes in that entry, but the Crown proceeded only with the charge of attempting to murder her sister-in-law. On October 15, 1953, she was convicted of that offense in the Central Criminal Court and sentenced to death. The Court of Criminal Appeal dismissed her appeal in April 1954, and the sentence was commuted to life. She died of peritonitis in hospital on October 6, 1960.
The four deaths were therefore never tested in court. The exhumation results were never put to a jury as murder counts, and the allegations about the stepmother, the family friend and the in-laws remained allegations.
Ordered by: not reported. Exhumed: two. Result in court: one conviction for attempted murder; four murder charges not pursued. Families: the sister-in-law and her daughter, both of whom recovered, were the targets of the attempted-murder charges; no family statement has been reported.
Ranked by the number exhumed, the order is Shipman (12), Harvey (10), the Wetteren case (five on Time’s count, ten on De Smet’s), Moore (five), de Melker and Agüero (three each), Grills (two), with Archer-Gilligan and Hahn unquantified on the record. Ranked by what happened in court, the picture changes. Shipman’s exhumations led to a jury trial and 15 murder convictions. Harvey’s ended in guilty pleas, not trials. The Belgian nun’s ended with no trial, and Grills’s with a conviction on a lesser charge than the one the exhumations were meant to support.
Who ordered them is harder to rank. A judge ordered five in one case, a county coroner ten in another, a chief medical examiner sought permission in a third, and in most of the others the record is silent. The word "court" fits few of them.
• 1907 to 1916: sixty residents die at the house for the elderly run by Amy Archer-Gilligan; arrested May 1916; tried June 1917; verdict set aside April 30, 1918; retrial 1919.
• 1923: death of William Alfred Cowle, later exhumed in the de Melker case; Daisy de Melker tried in 1932 and executed December 30, 1932.
• August to November 1937: Anna Marie Hahn indicted, then convicted; executed December 7, 1938.
• 1947: start of the deaths police later alleged against Caroline Grills; arrested May 1953; convicted of attempted murder October 15, 1953.
• February to March 1978: Sister Godfrieda confesses; a judge orders five exhumations (Time, March 1978).
• March to April 1987: Donald Harvey charged; the county coroner exhumes ten; guilty pleas follow in August 1987.
• May to June 1989: Blanche Taylor Moore’s husband treated; Raymond Reid exhumed June 13, 1989; five exhumed in all.
• March 24 to April 17, 1998: Shipman’s first police investigation, closed without a report.
• August 1998: Kathleen Grundy exhumed; September 7, 1998, Shipman arrested; 12 exhumed in all.
• January 31, 2000: Shipman convicted of 15 murders.
• November 2022: three babies exhumed in the Córdoba case; June 18, 2025: Brenda Agüero convicted.