Finding one serial killer is a long enough labor for any police department. Finding two in the same years, in the same metropolitan area, adds problems that a single hunt never has: which deaths belong to whom, which suspects can be set aside, and when an arrest has really ended the danger. Five pairs of cases follow, and each is put the same questions. Did the years truly overlap? What was linked that should not have been? And how did a city carry on while it held two series at once?
The answer to the first question differs from pair to pair. In Santa Cruz County, California, the overlap lasted four months. In South Los Angeles it ran for more than a decade. In Mexico City two men were arrested within days of each other. In the Moscow region the two series ran side by side for more than four years, and the mistaken link between them shows up in both case histories. In Southern California in the 1970s the two series that people tend to put together did not overlap at all, which is why that pair comes last.
Herbert Mullin was 25 years old and living in the San Lorenzo Valley when, on October 13, 1972, he began killing people. By February 13, 1973, he had killed 13 of them in Santa Cruz County and in Los Gatos, in neighboring Santa Clara County. The youngest was a 4-year-old boy, and the oldest a retired fisherman in his seventies. Among them were a Catholic priest, a former classmate and his wife, a mother and her two young sons, and four young campers aged 15 to 19. Mullin had a long history of mental illness. He later said that voices had told him the killings would save California from earthquakes. A Santa Cruz jury rejected his insanity defense in 1973 and convicted him of ten murders, two in the first degree and eight in the second. In Santa Clara County he pleaded guilty to the second-degree murder of the Rev. Henri Tomei, the priest, killed in Los Gatos on November 2, 1972. He admitted two more killings, of Lawrence White and Mary Guilfoyle, that were never brought to trial. He was refused parole repeatedly, including in 2011 and again in March 2021, and he died of natural causes in state custody on August 18, 2022, at 75.
In the same county, in the same months, Edmund Kemper was killing young women. The eight counts on which a Santa Cruz jury convicted him on November 8, 1973, begin on May 7, 1972, with two Fresno State students, Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa. They continue through a 15-year-old high school student, Aiko Koo, and Cindy Schall in January 1973, and then Rosalind Thorpe and Alice Liu, killed on February 5, 1973, near the University of California, Santa Cruz. The last two were Kemper’s mother, Clarnell Strandberg, who worked at the university, and her friend Sara Hallett, killed in Aptos in April 1973. Kemper stood 6 feet 9 inches tall. SF Weekly reported that local police officers who drank at a bar called the Jury Room liked him and had no idea that he had killed his grandparents at 15. That 1964 case was handled in juvenile court, and Lookout Santa Cruz reported that he was released to his mother’s care on his 21st birthday. It was not an adult conviction, whatever later accounts say.
The years overlap from October 1972 to February 1973, a stretch of about four months in which both men were killing, and the first of Kemper’s counts predates the first of Mullin’s by five months. The record shows two men with no known connection to each other. Mullin’s victims were of every age, in the mountains around Santa Cruz and in Los Gatos; Kemper’s were six young women and girls and then, in the end, his mother and her friend. Little is known about how detectives sorted one set of deaths from the other during those months, and the arrests did the sorting. Mullin was arrested in Santa Cruz on February 13, 1973. For the people of Santa Cruz that date could have looked like the end. It was not. Kemper’s two last victims died two months afterward, and in April 1973 he telephoned the Santa Cruz police from Pueblo, Colorado, to say what he had done. He was arrested there and arraigned in Santa Cruz on eight murder charges at the end of the month.
What the county did with two series is better documented in memory than in procedure. The historian Geoffrey Dunn, writing in Good Times in 2022, described how the cases, coming soon after the 1970 case of John Linley Frazier, handed Santa Cruz a label its residents resented for years: "the Murder Capital of the World." The label did not distinguish between the men. Kemper received a life term, and the board that has heard his case since 1979 has kept him in the California Medical Facility at Vacaville; it denied parole again on July 9, 2024, and reports then put his next hearing in 2031.
Between 1985 and 2007, nine women and a 15-year-old girl died in South Los Angeles at the hands of Lonnie David Franklin Jr. For more than twenty years nobody was charged. Franklin was a city worker, a former garage attendant for the Los Angeles Police Department who repaired cars on the side. He was arrested on July 7, 2010, after the state’s familial DNA search program pointed investigators to a relative of his. On May 5, 2016, a Los Angeles County jury convicted him of 10 counts of first-degree murder with the special circumstance of multiple murder and one count of attempted murder. He was sentenced to death on August 10, 2016, and died at San Quentin State Prison on March 28, 2020, while his automatic appeal was still pending. The press called him the Grim Sleeper.
Chester Turner was killing women in the same part of the city during those years. Turner, a former pizza delivery driver who had moved from Arkansas to Los Angeles as a child, has been convicted of killing 14 women between March 1987 and April 1998, most of them in South Los Angeles and the last two downtown. The jury that convicted him in April 2007 of ten murders recommended death, and Judge William Pounders sentenced him that July. A second jury convicted him on June 19, 2014, of four more, and he received four further death sentences on August 1, 2014. In November 2020 the California Supreme Court upheld the first judgment, except for a separate count for the death of an unborn child, which it reversed because the jury had heard inadmissible hearsay about whether the fetus could have survived. In June 2024 prosecutors in Salt Lake County, Utah, charged him with aggravated murder in the 1998 death of Itisha Camp in Salt Lake City. That charge has not been tried.
The years overlap by eleven: Turner’s first killing, in March 1987, falls inside the span of Franklin’s, and Turner’s last, in 1998, came nine years before Franklin’s final one in 2007. Neither man was identified for decades. The killings took place in the middle of the crack cocaine epidemic, and the Associated Press reported in 2014 that more than 100 women were killed in South Los Angeles in that era. For a time the police attributed many deaths to one unknown offender, whom they called the "Southside Slayer," and a task force pursued him. It then became clear that more than one man had been at work. Turner was one of at least three men blamed for deaths once grouped under that name, along with Franklin and a third man, Michael Hughes, who was convicted of killing women in South Los Angeles in those years and was given a life term.
The wrong link in this pair is the hardest to read. In 1995 a Los Angeles jury convicted a janitor with an intellectual disability of the 1992 deaths of women near an elementary school. When the state began testing old evidence against a new DNA sample, two of those cases matched Turner. The sample had been taken from him after a 2002 conviction, and the match came in September 2003. The janitor was released in March 2004 after almost 11 years in prison. The Los Angeles Police Department said in 2004 that detectives were confident of his innocence in the death of a third woman, Tammie Christmas, for which Turner has never been charged. Turner was later tried and convicted of two of the school-area killings himself.
Relatives and community members said for years that the police had not pursued the deaths with full force because the women were Black and poor. Investigators eventually reached both men through DNA, by different routes and seven years apart: Turner through a sample he was required to give after his 2002 conviction, which led to his identification in 2003 and a charge of ten murders in 2004, and Franklin through a search of the state’s databank for his relatives in 2010.
In January 2006 the Mexico City attorney general’s office announced that the killer of elderly women the press had called "el Mataviejitas" for two years was in custody. She was Juana Barraza Samperio, a 48-year-old former professional wrestler who had fought as La Dama del Silencio, the Lady of Silence, and who sold popcorn at lucha libre arenas. She was arrested in Mexico City on January 25, 2006. The attorney general’s office said her fingerprints tied her to at least ten earlier deaths. On March 31, 2008, a Mexico City criminal court convicted her of 16 homicides and 12 aggravated robberies against elderly people and sentenced her to 759 years and 17 days; Mexico City law then capped the time actually served at 50 years. She has said since that she killed one woman, not the others, and that she confessed under pressure. As of September 14, 2026, she was in prison in a wheelchair, aged 68.
Her arrest was reported in the same story, by the Associated Press, as that of a second man. Raúl Osiel Marroquín Reyes was a former sergeant in the Mexican Army from Tampico who, from October to December 2005, kidnapped young men he met in the bars of the Zona Rosa and held them while he demanded ransoms from their families. Four were killed. Two were released alive. His accomplice, a man police named, escaped and had not been caught as of a 2021 report. Marroquín was arrested in Mexico City on January 23, 2006, and presented to the press by Genaro García Luna, head of the Federal Investigation Agency, on January 26; the reports differ on the date of the arrest. Mexico City courts convicted him of the kidnapping and murder of four men in separate judgments, 60 years for the killing of Ricardo López Hernández in October 2006 and 147 years for the kidnapping and killing of Jonathan Razo Ayala and Armando Rivas Pérez in May 2007, with a total reported as about 280 years. The fourth victim was Víctor Ángel Iván Gutiérrez.
The years overlap only at one end. La Jornada, counting from the attorney general’s records the day after Barraza’s arrest, reported 49 killings of elderly people from 1998 through 2005: 12 in 2003, 17 in 2004 and 11 in 2005. Police had solved eight of those cases, with three people jailed. The prosecutor’s office itself spoke of 48 homicides in eight years, 38 of them with similar features. Marroquín’s four killings fell into the last three months of 2005, the same weeks in which the city’s police were still looking for a man. They were also separate investigations. Marroquín’s was run by the Federal Investigation Agency together with SIEDO, a unit of the federal attorney general’s office, and began, according to Infobae, with a kidnapping complaint made on November 30, 2005, thirteen days after Renato Sales Heredia, the Mexico City deputy attorney general for central investigations, had told reporters that a single killer might have committed 24 of the 32 killings of elderly women recorded since 2003.
What was wrongly linked in Mexico City was the identity of the person being hunted. Investigators told the public that the killer was most likely a man dressed as a woman, and over the following years the police produced more than 64 composite sketches, and Susana Vargas Cervantes, a researcher at Carleton University, has noted that two of them, printed side by side under the heading "Wanted," did not look like each other. By early October 2005, 46 people had been brought in and fingerprinted. In late October the police detained between 38 and 50 transgender women and took their fingerprints; none matched. The scholar Vek Lewis connected the raids to a television soap opera, La Madrastra, whose plot had turned on a man disguised as a woman who killed. In January 2006, 100 Mexico City officers also took a 30-hour course taught by three French police officers, because investigators saw parallels with the Paris case of Thierry Paulin. The person arrested that month was a woman. One of the deaths later attributed to her, that of María Guadalupe González on October 9, 2003, had first been charged against another man, M.T., who was arrested in September 2004. In April 2006 the attorney general, Bernardo Bátiz, told La Jornada that fingerprints showed that Barraza, not M.T., had killed her, and that the file would be corrected.
The two arrests were announced within days of each other, and the writer Carlos Monsiváis argued that both should be understood as crimes of hatred. He thought the nickname the press gave Marroquín, El Sádico, was probably a police invention. Investigators of the Mexico City prosecutor’s office classified Marroquín’s killings in the same terms, according to Infobae. Beyond that, the two cases ran on separate tracks, with separate victims, separate agencies and no suggestion in any report that one affected the other. The city lived with them in the same weeks of the winter of 2005 and 2006, and learned of the second only when the first was announced.
The two series in the Moscow region overlapped most fully of the five, and they were the most confused with one another. Sergei Golovkin killed 11 boys, aged 10 to 16, in the countryside west and north of Moscow between April 1986 and September 1992. He was a graduate of the Timiryazev Agricultural Academy and a livestock specialist at Moscow Horse Plant No. 1, a stud farm in the Odintsovo district, where he had won a silver medal at the national exhibition of economic achievements in 1989. Sergei Ryakhovsky killed men and women in Moscow and the Moscow region from June 1988 to April 1993. He was a former electrician from Balashikha who had served four years in the early 1980s for assaults on elderly women. Both were active at the same time for four years, and both worked in the Odintsovo district.
Their victims did not resemble each other. Golovkin’s were boys. The first, Andrei Pavlov, died on April 19, 1986; on September 15, 1992, three more, Yuri Sidyakin, Vadim Sharikov and Denis Efremov, aged 12 and 13, died in one day. Ryakhovsky’s, according to News.ru and 360.ru, ran from teenagers to people in their seventies: pensioners, a postman, a veteran of the Second World War, and two boys aged 16 and 14. For six years investigators chased a figure called "Fisher." After the death of Andrei Gulyaev in July 1986, a teenager who said he was the boy’s friend described to police a man with a tattoo and the word "Fisher"; the 360 television channel reported that the boy had invented him. Moskvich Mag traced the name to the 1972 chess championship between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky. The police checked an enormous number of people: in two years, Moskvich Mag wrote, 5,799 psychiatric patients, 1,628 people with criminal records and 443 others from police registers, about 50,000 people in all, and in the course of that search they solved more than 2,000 other crimes. Staff at the horse farm were among those checked, without result. Golovkin was registered as a Moscow resident and so did not appear in the district’s lists.
The mistake the two cases shared was a 16-year-old boy, Vitaly Zaikov, who was killed in January 1989. Golovkin was suspected in his case, and he had an alibi; in 1993, 360 reported, it emerged that Zaikov had been killed by Ryakhovsky. MSK1.RU told the same episode from the other side: a killing in January 1989 was first linked to a different serial killer who was active in the region and arrested in October 1992, but that man had an alibi, and the case stalled for months. Investigators also wondered for a time whether Andrei Chikatilo, then still at large in the Rostov region, could be responsible; Pravo.ru wrote that the two series were at one point thought the work of one man, and Moskvich Mag wrote that the methods differed. Chikatilo was sentenced to death by the Rostov Regional Court four days before Golovkin was arrested.
In the spring of 1992 the Golovkin case was taken over by Yevgeny Bakin, a senior investigator from the Prosecutor General’s office who had worked on the Chikatilo case. Forensic work pointed to someone who worked with livestock, since traces of a salt used in horse feed had been recorded, according to Moskvich Mag, Life.ru and 360. After three boys died on the same day, September 15, 1992, information from a friend of theirs turned the inquiry toward him. Golovkin was arrested on October 19, 1992, near Zhavoronki in the Odintsovo district, charged on October 30, and confessed to 11 killings. A court sentenced him to death on October 19, 1994. After President Boris Yeltsin refused clemency, he was executed at Butyrka prison in Moscow in 1996, and most reports date it to August 2. Most Russian outlets describe it as the last execution in Russia before the country stopped carrying them out; some reporting places one more, of a man who has not been named, a month later.
Golovkin’s arrest did not end the killing in the Moscow region. Ryakhovsky’s reported killings continued after it: a 29-year-old man died in December 1992, and three more people, a 55-year-old woman, a 14-year-old boy and a 62-year-old woman, died between March and April 1993. On December 25, 1992, a woman escaped him. News.ru and MSK1.RU both reported that her description of a large, sullen man was the basis of the first composite sketch. Ryakhovsky was arrested on April 13, 1993, in the Odintsovo district, six months after Golovkin. He confessed, later withdrew his confessions, and in July 1995 a court convicted him of 18 murders and two attempted murders; the sentence of death, pronounced on July 11, 1995, was never carried out. 360.ru reported that he confessed to 24 incidents and that investigators suspected him in at least three dozen deaths, and Moskovsky Komsomolets in 2002 credited him with 19 victims; only the counts the court held proven are convictions. He died of tuberculosis on November 12, 2007, in a colony for life prisoners in Mordovia.
MSK1.RU wrote that police did not tie the killings of adults together for years. The man who had been convicted of the boys' deaths was in a cell for the last six months of that run, and the cases that remained open were scattered across the city and its districts.
The two Southern California series that people most often place side by side were never active at the same time. On July 18, 1977, Time reported that police had linked ten deaths of young men in the south of the state, and that investigators thought the total might be 28 or more. The man behind them was Patrick Kearney, then 37, an electronics engineer at Hughes Aircraft Co. in Redondo Beach. He surrendered with his roommate, who was never charged, at a sheriff’s office in Riverside in July 1977. Kearney pleaded guilty to 21 murders, three in Riverside County and 18 in Los Angeles County, and received two life sentences. He also admitted 11 killings he was never charged with, which UPI reported in 1981 as a total of 32; none of the 11 was brought to court. In 1981 he wrote to a newspaper that he had killed no one, and a judge denied his petition for release. A grand jury declined to charge his roommate.
William Bonin began killing in 1979, two years after Kearney was in custody. Between 1979 and 1980 he killed boys and young men aged 12 to 19 in Los Angeles and Orange counties. Two juries, one in each county, convicted him of 14 murders, and both chose death. He was executed by lethal injection at San Quentin on February 23, 1996, at the age of 49, the first person California put to death by that method.
Kearney was in custody from July 1977, and Bonin’s convicted killings began two years afterward. There was no overlap, and no report ties one series to the other, so the question of what was wrongly linked does not arise here. The pair is useful for contrast: two series in one region, one after the other, with no period in which police had to hold both in mind.
The arrests did the sorting, and they came at different times. In Santa Cruz the first arrest, in February 1973, was followed by more deaths and a second arrest in April. In South Los Angeles one DNA record in 2003 and another in 2010 divided the decades between two men, and a janitor served almost eleven years for deaths that belonged to the first of them. In Mexico City the search for a man dressed as a woman ended with the arrest of a woman wrestler, and a separate federal inquiry into kidnappings ran through the same weeks. In the Moscow region a boy killed in January 1989 was first tied to one killer and later to the other. In Southern California, where the series came one after the other, nothing had to be untangled at all.
• 1964: Edmund Kemper, at 15, kills his paternal grandparents; the case is handled in juvenile court.
• May 7, 1972: first of the eight counts on which Kemper is convicted, Santa Cruz County.
• October 13, 1972: Herbert Mullin’s first killing, Santa Cruz County.
• November 2, 1972: Mullin kills the Rev. Henri Tomei in Los Gatos.
• February 13, 1973: Mullin is arrested in Santa Cruz.
• April 1973: Kemper kills his mother and her friend in Aptos, telephones the Santa Cruz police from Pueblo, Colorado, and is arrested.
• November 8, 1973: a Santa Cruz jury convicts Kemper of eight counts of first-degree murder.
• July 1977: Patrick Kearney surrenders in Riverside, California.
• 1979 to 1980: William Bonin’s convicted killings in Los Angeles and Orange counties.
• 1985: first death in Lonnie Franklin’s convicted series, South Los Angeles.
• April 19, 1986: first death in Sergei Golovkin’s convicted series, Moscow Oblast.
• March 1987: first of Chester Turner’s convicted killings, South Los Angeles.
• June 1988: Sergei Ryakhovsky’s first convicted killing, Moscow region.
• January 1989: a 16-year-old boy is killed in the Moscow region; Golovkin is suspected and has an alibi; in 1993 the death is tied to Ryakhovsky.
• September 15, 1992: three boys die in one day in the Moscow region.
• October 19, 1992: Golovkin is arrested; Chikatilo had been sentenced four days earlier.
• April 13, 1993: Ryakhovsky is arrested.
• October 19, 1994: Golovkin is sentenced to death.
• July 1995: Ryakhovsky is convicted; sentenced to death July 11.
• February 23, 1996: Bonin is executed at San Quentin.
• 1996: Golovkin is executed at Butyrka prison.
• September 2003: DNA from a 2002 case matches unsolved killings and points to Turner.
• March 2004: the janitor convicted in 1995 of 1992 deaths in Los Angeles is released.
• October to December 2005: Raúl Osiel Marroquín’s four killings, Mexico City.
• November 17, 2005: Renato Sales Heredia says one killer could be responsible for 24 of 32 killings of elderly women.
• January 23 and 25, 2006: Marroquín and Juana Barraza are arrested in Mexico City.
• April 30, 2007: Turner is convicted of 10 murders; sentenced to death that July.
• November 12, 2007: Ryakhovsky dies in prison in Mordovia.
• March 31, 2008: Barraza is convicted of 16 homicides and sentenced to 759 years.
• July 7, 2010: Franklin is arrested.
• June 19, 2014: Turner is convicted of four more murders.
• May 5, 2016: Franklin is convicted; sentenced to death August 10.
• March 28, 2020: Franklin dies at San Quentin.
• November 30, 2020: the California Supreme Court upholds Turner’s first judgment, except one count.
• August 18, 2022: Mullin dies in state custody.
• June 14, 2024: Turner is charged in Utah.
• July 9, 2024: Kemper is denied parole again.