Nobody can put a price on a daughter, a husband or a ten-year-old boy, and the courts and governments in the cases that follow did not try to say they could. What they did was write numbers down. A hospital trust offered up to 25,000 pounds to each of more than 90 families. A Brazilian state agreed to pay mothers 500 reais a month. A Spanish court set aside roughly 600,000 euros for the relatives of six people and refused to make the state pay it if the killer could not. A Mexican court attached 94,515 pesos to every death. In Portugal the largest single award to a family was ordered by a court and then, by a newspaper’s count 14 years later, paid at about 12 percent. The record of who paid, who did not, and what families said about the money is uneven.
The word scheme overstates what most of these cases produced. Only one, the arrangement for the families affected by the hospital electrician David Fuller, was built as a compensation scheme in the ordinary sense of the term. The others were court orders, settlements after an international complaint, civil judgments against institutions, a killer’s forfeited money and a private reward fund. Each is taken in turn, with what was paid and what was promised.
David Fuller murdered two young women in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, in 1987. Wendy Knell was 25 and Caroline Pierce was 20, and the two did not know each other. Their deaths became one of the longest unsolved double homicides in the United Kingdom. Fuller, a married hospital electrician, was arrested in Heathfield, East Sussex, on December 3, 2020, after familial DNA work traced the 1987 profile to a relative of his, and he was charged the next day. On November 4, 2021, midway through his trial, he pleaded guilty to both murders. At Maidstone Crown Court on December 15, 2021, Mrs. Justice Cheema-Grubb sentenced him to a whole life order for the murders, with a concurrent 12-year term for 51 other offenses to which he had also pleaded guilty. Forty-four of those offenses concerned 78 identified women and girls who had died and were in hospital mortuaries where he worked. In November 2022 he admitted 16 further offenses concerning 23 more dead women, and on December 7, 2022, he received a further four years, concurrent. CBS News and Agence France-Presse put the total at 101 women.
The second group of victims was larger than the first. They were the families of women and girls who had died of other causes and who had been in the care of two hospital mortuaries. They were not the families of homicide victims, and the compensation question they raised was of a different kind. The hospital trust that employed Fuller worked with NHS Resolution on a compensation scheme. In November 2022 it was announced that more than 90 family members would receive up to 25,000 pounds each.
The inquiry that followed set out why the payment had to be made at all. The independent inquiry chaired by Sir Jonathan Michael published its Phase 1 report in November 2023, with 17 recommendations. It reported that mortuary staff were largely unsupervised and often did not follow written procedures; that storage rules were not always followed overnight while Fuller worked unsupervised; that senior managers had known of problems in the mortuary since 2008 with little evidence of effective action; and that requests to install closed-circuit television were not acted on for more than a decade. The Human Tissue Authority had recorded shortfalls in inspections in 2015 and 2018. Poor practice persisted after his arrest: in January 2021 the trust identified a similar storage breach, which was reported to the Authority as a serious incident. The chair said the case showed that serious hidden problems could exist in organizations that appeared to be performing well.
The families had other claims on the state besides money. In May 2022, ITV News Meridian reported that the daughter of a woman who had died in hospital and was among those named in the case had lost a High Court fight over an inquiry. The inquiry’s Phase 2 report followed on July 15, 2025, and ITV reported its conclusion that Fuller’s crimes could be repeated. The government published an interim update on its response in a written ministerial statement of December 16, 2025. The Crime and Policing Act 2026 now carries a section headed "Sexual activity with a corpse." The local member of Parliament Nus Ghani had called for an increased penalty for such offenses in January 2022. The sums are public; what the relatives made of the money has not been reported.
Francisco das Chagas Rodrigues de Brito was a bicycle mechanic on the island of São Luís, in the northern Brazilian state of Maranhão. In 2004 he was in custody and had confessed, in most accounts, to killing 42 boys over more than a decade: 30 in Maranhão and 12 in Pará, where he had earlier lived in Altamira. Maranhão police attributed 30 deaths of children in their state to him. Juries in Maranhão convicted him of homicide, with other charges, in a long series of separate trials, one or a few boys at a time. The reported sentences ran from 26 years to 108 years and 6 months per trial, and the totals reported grew from 237 years in March 2010 to 580 years and 10 months in the prosecutors' count of May 2018. The Pará killings were never tried against him. He was held at the Pedrinhas prison complex in São Luís as of August 2024.
The victims were boys from poor families in São Luís, São José de Ribamar and Paço do Lumiar, aged roughly 4 to 15. Before he was identified, their families and the groups that worked with them had taken Brazil before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, arguing that the police had failed to investigate the deaths of poor children. A 2021 study in the Revista de Direitos Humanos e Efetividade, built on the accounts of the boys' mothers, describes families living in informal settlements. The petition ended in a friendly settlement between Brazil, the state of Maranhão and the two petitioning groups. The CONPEDI paper of 2025 cites the settlement report as number 43 of 2006. On December 15, 2005, the state recognized 28 boys as victims for the purposes of the settlement, according to the 2021 study, and a 2018 release from the state prosecutors gives the same number of 28.
Under the settlement, according to the CONPEDI paper, Brazil acknowledged international responsibility at a public ceremony in São Luís. The state promised to reopen the criminal investigations and to hold the confessed perpetrator to account; to pay the families a monthly pension of 500 reais for 15 years; to include them in income and housing programs; to place a commemorative plaque; and to train police and set up services for children. Band reports that Maranhão, in its submission to the Commission, acknowledged errors and difficulties in the investigations, citing weaknesses in its security system, the complexity of the crimes, their spread across several towns and technical flaws in some police work.
The settlement is the rare case among these where a state made a continuing payment. The 2021 study says the families received houses, though the property titles were still pending when it was written, and that the pension was later made lifelong and raised to one minimum wage. It says a specialized police station and a public defender’s office were opened in Paço do Lumiar and a child protection center in São Luís, while promised schools and prevention programs were never fully delivered. It also says the Organization of American States considered the case closed in 2010. The state prosecutors reported in 2018 that Governor Flávio Dino had sent the legislature a proposal to make the pension lifelong, that houses built for the families were being repaired and their ownership formalized, and that a forensic center for children and adolescents was to be built. Sálvio Dino, a former state secretary, said at that 2018 event that parts of the government had first viewed the agreement with suspicion and that the arrest of Chagas and political changes had made it possible.
The agreement is still being monitored. On June 27, 2025, the prosecutors held a public hearing in São Luís on six items of the agreement that had not been carried out in practice, O Imparcial reported. The prosecutors' own record lists the gaps: only one property title had been handed over, the inclusion of the families in state income programs had not been shown, and the state forensic institute for children had too few staff, an average wait of 120 days and 277 cases pending. Five state departments sent no one to the hearing. A mother whose four-year-old son was killed in 2003 told the hearing that the agreement had not been fully met and that families needed better support.
The numbers around the case do not settle. The figure of 42 comes from his own confession as reported by ConJur in 2006 and Band in 2024; the 2025 CONPEDI paper gives 41; Maranhão investigators attributed 30 deaths in their state to him; the state recognized 28 boys for the settlement. The number of deaths proven against him in court is smaller than any of these. Other men were arrested and convicted in Pará, and in Maranhão before he was identified, according to the CONPEDI paper.
Petr Zelenka was a nurse on the anesthesiology and resuscitation ward of the hospital in Havlíčkův Brod, in the Vysočina Region of the Czech Republic. Between May and September 2006 he gave patients a medicine no doctor had prescribed. Seven died and ten survived. He was arrested on December 1, 2006, at a hospital in Jihlava where he had taken new work, and on February 21, 2008, the Regional Court in Hradec Králové convicted him of seven murders and ten attempted murders and sentenced him to life imprisonment in a high-security prison. The High Court in Prague, on June 11, 2008, annulled the first-instance judgment and issued its own, again convicting him on all 17 counts. The Supreme Court rejected his appeal in April 2009 and the Constitutional Court rejected his complaint in November 2009.
The payments began long before any verdict. On a Czech Television discussion program on December 10, 2006, Julínek and the former health minister David Rath agreed that the hospital had suffered from failures in its system, and both said the region should seek settlements with the families out of court. In February 2007 the Vysočina Region decided to pay the families more than one million crowns in all: 100,000 crowns to each bereaved family and 20,000 crowns to each surviving patient. Those were gestures by the owner of the hospital, offered before a court had said anything about liability.
The criminal court made its own order. It required Zelenka to pay more than 2.5 million crowns to the bereaved, and referred some families to the civil courts. On appeal in June 2008 the High Court changed the compensation order: 11 injured parties and a health insurer were awarded sums by the court, and the remaining claims were sent to the civil courts. In September 2008 the first lawsuits against the hospital came before the Regional Court in Hradec Králové, with relatives seeking a million crowns each for non-material harm; one family asked for ten million.
The reported rulings went against the families. ČT24 reported in November 2011 that the hospital did not have to pay compensation. Novinky reported in November 2016 that relatives of one victim would not receive compensation. And Seznam Zprávy reported in May 2020 that the Constitutional Court had refused the million-crown compensation sought by relatives of a victim. The hospital’s former director, for his part, was sentenced to prison in 2008 for failing to report the murders, Radio Prague reported on July 31, 2008, and in June 2009 he demanded an apology from the state and 1.5 million crowns, ČT24 reported. The picture is a regional payment of 100,000 crowns per family against civil claims that ran for a dozen years and failed.
Andrzej N. worked as a paramedic for the emergency ambulance service in Łódź, Poland’s third largest city. In January 2007 the Łódź Regional Court convicted him of murdering four patients while they were being carried to hospital and of aiding a fellow paramedic in the murder of a fifth. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. The Łódź Court of Appeal upheld the verdict on June 9, 2008, and it became final on October 27, 2009, when the Supreme Court dismissed the last defense appeals. The case, known in Poland as that of the skin hunters, grew out of a January 2002 exposé by Gazeta Wyborcza and Radio Łódź on ambulance staff selling news of patients' deaths to funeral directors. According to the Polish Press Agency’s account of the verdict, the court held that the two paramedics had accepted 30,000 and 10,000 zloty from funeral directors and the two doctors 16,000 and 13,000 zloty, and all four were convicted of fraud against the families of dead patients. In that case the money flowed the wrong way: bereaved families were targets of payments, not recipients.
The widow of one of the dead, Wiesław S., 72, went to the civil courts. She sued the regional ambulance station for 100,000 zloty. In December 2006 a district court ruled that the station was not liable for the death itself but was liable for a poor resuscitation. An expert listed several errors by the ambulance doctor: using air instead of oxygen, failing to give the proper drugs, and riding beside the driver rather than beside the patient. The court set compensation at 38,000 zloty, taking into account that the widow had a small pension and that her husband had been the family’s main earner.
Both sides and the station’s insurer, PZU, appealed. In November 2007 the appeal court raised the award to 50,000 zloty, to be paid by the station and its insurer. Judge Małgorzata Dzięciołowska said the station’s disorganization had given the paramedic unrestricted access to the medicine, because there were no rules governing how it was handled, and that the resuscitation had lacked due care. A doctor sitting beside the patient, she said, might have prevented the act or started resuscitation sooner. The court raised the award after a psychologist’s report showed that the widow had developed severe depression after her husband’s death and had needed help with daily life for months. "Although six years have passed, she still has not returned to normal," the judge said. TVN24 reported that several similar claims were pending.
The award is small beside the sums in the other cases, and what it was for matters. The court did not compensate the death as a murder, since it held that the station was not liable for the act of the paramedic. It compensated a failure of care and of organization. The widow had to prove an ambulance doctor’s mistakes to recover anything, and the amount, 50,000 zloty six years after her husband’s death, was tied to her pension and to the depression a psychologist described.
Between January 24 and March 18, 2003, six people were killed in Madrid and three towns around it, and three more were targeted and survived. The victims had nothing in common. Alfredo Galán Sotillo, a former army corporal from Puertollano who had served in Bosnia and worked as a security guard at Madrid’s Barajas airport, gave himself up in Puertollano on July 3, 2003, and confessed. He later retracted and, according to Diario de León in September 2003, blamed two other men. In March 2005 the Audiencia Provincial de Madrid, Section 16, convicted him of six murders and three attempted murders, with a weapons offense, and sentenced him to 142 years and three months, with an effective maximum of 25 years under the court’s ruling. Castilla-La Mancha Media reported that Galán signed his own copy of the ruling.
The compensation was part of the same judgment. The Diario de Arganda later set out the components of the total as separate terms for each killing, for the three attempts and for the weapons offense. Compensation of about 600,000 euros was reported by Telecinco and by a Dominican retrospective. The court declined to make the Spanish state liable for it as a secondary payer, because the crimes were not committed at a state-owned establishment, and left open a separate administrative case on other points, including his mental state. Lawyers for the victims welcomed the verdict but said they would appeal to the Tribunal Supremo over that point. The defense announced an appeal as well. How the appeals ended has not been reported, and later retrospectives still give the 142-year total and the 25-year limit.
The award therefore rested on one man, who was reported in March 2026, by Telecinco, to be in prison with release expected around 2028.
César Armando Librado Legorreta drove a public-transport microbus in the State of Mexico. He was arrested in February 2012, after a woman he had assaulted in June 2010 identified him, and, according to the state prosecutor’s office and the press, he confessed to assaulting eight women, seven of whom died. He asked for an abbreviated trial on November 21, 2012. On December 4, 2012, he was sentenced to 61 years for attempted homicide, with other charges, against the woman who survived. On Wednesday, December 12, 2012, the court sentenced him to 240 years for six feminicides, one of the six women a girl of 17, for 301 years in all.
Because he had chosen the abbreviated procedure, the judge applied the minimum penalty: 40 years for each woman, a fine of 700 days' minimum wage per victim, and compensation of 94,515 pesos for each death, Notimex reported. The Quadratín news agency named the judge as Juan Arturo Velázquez of the Seventh Criminal Chamber for oral trials of the State of Mexico, and described the term as the highest penalty applied in the state, in effect life imprisonment. In the judge’s view, Notimex reported, he showed a high level of criminality and a likelihood of offending again. Azteca Jalisco reported in 2026 that the sentence also ordered the seizure of the vehicle he drove.
At the last hearing he watched the families calmly and, in their words, challenged them with his eyes. The families said their ordeal was over but that they were not satisfied. Justice, in their view, would have meant arresting him after his first crime, not after six women had died.
The woman who survived told a similar story. She spoke to the Mexican news site Sin Embargo in 2015, in an interview reprinted by the New York Spanish-language daily El Diario. She said she had given the police the bus, the place where she boarded it, the driver’s approximate age and his route, and that she was repeatedly told officers would act, but they did not. She said she and her family paid about 10,000 pesos to investigators, and that she did not know whether the money reached the officials it was meant for. She described the agent who took her statement as an official "with little experience, little judgment and no sensitivity," and said it took about three and a half hours to finish. She believed that if the police had acted on her case, at least three more women would still be alive. The prosecutors' office had been reported, by La Razón in March 2012, as having been able to arrest him in 2010. Against that, 94,515 pesos for each death is a figure fixed by a procedure the killer chose.
In June 2004 a 15-year-old girl named Sandra died in a hospital in Melilla, the Spanish city on the north coast of Africa, and her 12-year-old brother was admitted with a similar illness. Within days police arrested their mother, Francisca Ballesteros Maravilla, known as Paqui. She confessed, and later that month admitted that she had also killed a baby daughter, Florinda, in 1990. Her husband, Antonio González, a state customs official, had died that January.
On September 26, 2005, the Audiencia Provincial de Málaga, sitting in Melilla, sentenced her to 84 years in all. She was convicted of the murder of her husband, of the murder, with other charges, of both daughters, and of the attempted murder, with other charges, of her son, who survived. El Español summarized the judgment as four parricide offenses, three completed and one attempted, with the aggravating circumstances of treachery, cruelty and the family relationship. The Supreme Court upheld the sentence.
The only claimant was the boy. The court stripped his mother of parental authority and ordered her to compensate him. Noticias Argentinas reported 180,000 euros for his sister’s death, 200,000 euros for his father’s death and 11,390 euros for his own injuries; MelillaHoy put the total awarded to him for the deaths of his father and sisters at more than 500,000 euros. The two reports do not give the same figure, and neither explains the difference. The son was 12 when it began, according to most reports; MelillaHoy, writing in 2024, gave his age as 14. The court’s award covered injuries that took eight months to heal, Noticias Argentinas wrote, while other reports described a shorter hospital stay of about two weeks. In June 2024 MelillaHoy reported that she was serving her sentence in a prison far from Melilla. A child who survived a household’s deaths was awarded money to be paid by the person who had caused them. El Español wrote in 2019 that he had been left without his father and his sisters, and so, in effect, without his mother as well.
Between May 2005 and May 2006, three young women from the village of Cabecinha de Rei, in the municipality of Santa Comba Dão, in central Portugal, were killed. António Luís Costa, a retired corporal of the Guarda Nacional Republicana, the rural police force, had known the three since they were children and was respected by his neighbors; neighbors thought well of him. The Polícia Judiciária arrested him in June 2006 and he was brought before the Figueira da Foz court on June 23, 2006, and remanded in custody. He confessed to the police, retracted in court, and blamed a relative of one of the victims. On July 31, 2007, the court convicted him of the homicides of Isabel Cristina Isidoro, Mariana Lourenço and Joana Oliveira, two of them qualified homicide, with other charges including aggravated calumnious denunciation. The prosecutor had asked for 25 years because, as Jornal de Notícias headlined it, "there is no more." Jornal de Notícias described a surprised judge who imposed the 25-year maximum. The Court of Appeal in Coimbra dismissed his appeals in February 2008, and the Supreme Court of Justice in June 2008.
The compensation the court awarded the families was largely unpaid. Correio da Manhã reported in 2021 that the largest award, 150,000 euros to Joana’s family, had been paid only in part: the family had received about 12 percent, or 18,000 euros. The man ordered to pay was a prisoner in Évora, and no one else is reported to have paid.
On May 31, 2021, Costa left Évora prison for the first time, for a three-day temporary leave that ran to June 3. TVI Notícias and Jornal do Centro reported the departure, and Jornal do Centro’s headline said relatives of the victims were shocked. Correio da Manhã had earlier reported a refusal of leave, 14 years after his arrest. He returned to prison on June 3, 2021. On August 31, 2026, Diário de Viseu, citing SIC, reported that he would be released in April 2027. By that account the largest award had been paid at about 12 percent, and the man ordered to pay was due to be released within months.
Cary Stayner was a maintenance worker near Yosemite National Park, in California. In February 1999, three visitors to the area, Carole Sund, 42, of Eureka, California; her daughter Juli, 15; and Silvina Pelosso, 16, a family friend from Argentina, were killed. For five months the FBI and local agencies investigated, and most of the attention fell on other men. In July 1999 a fourth woman, Joie Armstrong, 26, was killed. Stayner was arrested on July 24, 1999, and confessed to all four killings.
In Eureka, schools brought in crisis counselors. In April 1999 Francis and Carole Carrington gave 200,000 dollars to create the Carole Sund/Carrington Memorial Reward Foundation, to post rewards for families of crime victims who could not afford to do so themselves. A trust fund was opened at Bank of America in Silvina Pelosso’s name to help her family. Scott Webb, the foundation’s executive director, later told ABC30 that it had posted 3.5 million dollars in rewards in more than 540 cases in 47 states, including the Laci Peterson case in Modesto and the Sandra Cantu case in Tracy, before the Carringtons, then in their 70s, announced they could no longer fund it. The grief of one family had become a fund for the families of strangers, paid for by private people.
By April 1999 the investigation had settled on a group of ex-convicts in the Modesto area. CBS News reported on April 8 that a federal grand jury in Fresno was hearing witnesses and that agents were focusing on four men, two of them half-brothers, M.L. and E.D., with long criminal records. Both denied any part in the killings. None of these men was ever charged. In July 1999 the FBI said Armstrong’s death was not connected to the Sund case and that the key suspects in that case were in jail on unrelated charges. Within days that position had collapsed.
Stayner’s case in federal court ended in a plea. Stayner, his lawyer and federal prosecutors signed an agreement on September 6, 2000, and on September 13, 2000, before Judge Anthony Ishii in Fresno, he pleaded guilty to the kidnapping and murder of Joie Armstrong, among other charges. Prosecutors had weighed her family’s wishes; her mother, Lesli Armstrong, had said she would prefer not to sit through a trial. Under the agreement Stayner would be sentenced to life without parole, would pay 10 million dollars in restitution to a fund in Armstrong’s name so that he could never profit from the case, would meet her family if they asked, and would never "speak to anyone, write to anyone, or communicate to anyone about the death of Joie Ruth Armstrong," apart from testimony and talks with his lawyers. His lawyer, Assistant Federal Defender Robert Rainwater, said, "A young woman died in the prime of her life."
Judge Ishii sentenced him to life without parole later that fall. Stayner, 39, sobbed in court. "I am sorry and ashamed," he said, and turned to Lesli Armstrong: "I wish I could take it back, but I can’t." Lesli Armstrong wept during the hearing and said afterward that her family was devastated but that she might one day forgive him. "I will not live my life festering with anger, hatred and vengeance," she said. "I won’t do that." The ten-million-dollar figure was a restitution term; no payment under it has been reported.
Armstrong’s family and friends made something else. They created the Armstrong Scholars program at NatureBridge, which began in 2000. Each summer a group of young women aged 15 to 18 spends about ten days backpacking in the Yosemite backcountry with two women educators. Two of her friends founded an organization called Balanced Rock in 1999, named for the promise she and one of them had made to each other.
The state case was heavier and more expensive. It was tried in Santa Clara County Superior Court in San Jose before Judge Thomas Hastings. Mariposa County had spent 940,000 dollars on the case by mid-2002 and expected to spend at least 2 million more, most of it to be repaid by the state, wire reports said in July 2002. In August 2002 a jury convicted Stayner of the first-degree murders of Carole Sund, Juli Sund and Silvina Pelosso, with special circumstances, and in December 2002 he was sentenced to death plus a consecutive 45-year term. The California Supreme Court affirmed the judgment on April 30, 2026. He is serving the federal life sentence, and California executions are under a moratorium.
Zhao Zhihong belongs among these cases for a reason that has nothing to do with money paid to his victims' families. His case produced the best-documented state payment in it, and the payment went to the parents of a man who had been executed for a killing Zhao confessed to. It is set apart here because it compensates a wrongful conviction, not a victim’s loss.
Zhao was arrested in Inner Mongolia, in northern China, in October 2005, and he confessed to more than 20 crimes, among them robberies and killings, committed over almost a decade. One of them was a killing that, as far as the courts were concerned, had been solved long before. On April 9, 1996, a woman surnamed Yang was killed in Hohhot, the regional capital. An 18-year-old factory worker named Hugjiltu was convicted of her murder and executed in June 1996, 61 days after her death. In December 2014 the Inner Mongolia Higher People’s Court, on retrial, declared him not guilty.
The Inner Mongolia Higher People’s Court said that the case met the conditions for state compensation and that work on holding those responsible to account had begun. AFP, citing Xinhua, reported that a deputy president of the court gave the parents 30,000 yuan, a personal gift rather than an official payment. On social media, AFP wrote, many people said the sum was not enough and called for the officials involved to answer for the case.
On December 25, 2014, Hugjiltu’s parents applied for state compensation of 3,723,335.50 yuan. On December 30, the Inner Mongolia Higher People’s Court decided to pay them 2,059,621.40 yuan, and the decision was delivered on the morning of December 31, Xinhua reported. The award was made up of 1,047,580 yuan for his death and funeral costs, 12,041.40 yuan for the 60 days he had been held, and 1,000,000 yuan for emotional harm. The Philippine Daily Inquirer put it at about 330,000 dollars. The parents told Xinhua that money could not bring back a life. His father said the question was not whether they were satisfied with the amount: it was a kind of comfort for the spirit, and no more.
The payment was followed by other steps. China’s chief justice expressed regret over wrongful convictions in March 2015, the Inquirer reported. In February 2016 the Inquirer and Radio Free Asia reported that 27 officials had been punished over the wrongful execution; Radio Free Asia’s headline called the discipline a light one.
Zhao’s own case moved on a separate track. On December 16, 2014, the Hohhot People’s Procuratorate announced that it had added the 1996 killing to the charges against Zhao. The Hohhot Intermediate People’s Court tried him on January 5, 2015, and judgment dated January 26, 2015, was announced on February 9. He appealed, and the Inner Mongolia Higher People’s Court rejected the appeal in a ruling dated April 26, 2015. On July 2, 2019, the Supreme People’s Court approved a death sentence on 17 crimes between September 1996 and July 2005 in which six people were killed. It declined to confirm four of the trial courts' 21 counts, which had counted ten killed, for lack of proof, and held that Zhao’s own guilt in the 1996 killing was not proved. Zhao was executed at Hohhot on the morning of July 30, 2019. The court also ordered him to pay 102,768 yuan to the civil plaintiffs in the cases it confirmed. That figure is one-twentieth of the sum paid to Hugjiltu’s parents, and it came from the guilty man, not the state.
Set side by side, the amounts follow the payer and not the loss. The hospital trust that failed the dead in its mortuaries designed a scheme and published a ceiling, 25,000 pounds. A state that accepted responsibility for the deaths of boys it had not protected agreed to a monthly pension, and then spent two decades being asked in public hearings why six items were undone. The region that owned the hospital paid 100,000 crowns per family without being sued, and the civil suits that followed were pursued from 2008 to 2020 and, as reported, did not succeed. An ambulance station paid for a failed resuscitation and not for the killing. A Spanish court assigned 600,000 euros to a convicted man and refused to ask the state to guarantee it, and a Portuguese court assigned 150,000 euros to one family and saw 18,000 of it paid. In Mexico a court multiplied a minimum by six. In California a ten-million-dollar restitution promise and a reward fund built by private donors stood where a public scheme might have been. The best-documented state payment went to the parents of a young man the state had executed and later declared not guilty.
The families rarely asked for the numbers to be larger. The mothers in São Luís wanted the agreement carried out. The widow in Łódź had a psychologist document her depression. The family in Mexico wanted an arrest after the first crime. The parents in Hohhot said money was a comfort for the spirit and no more.
• 1987: Wendy Knell and Caroline Pierce killed in Tunbridge Wells, Kent.
• 1989 or 1991 to 2003: killings in Maranhão attributed to Francisco das Chagas Rodrigues de Brito.
• April 1996: a woman surnamed Yang killed in Hohhot; June 1996: Hugjiltu, 18, executed.
• 1999: Carole Sund, Juli Sund, Silvina Pelosso and Joie Armstrong killed near Yosemite; April, the Carole Sund/Carrington Memorial Reward Foundation created; July 24, Cary Stayner arrested.
• September 13, 2000: Stayner pleads guilty in federal court in Fresno.
• January 24 to March 18, 2003: six people killed in the Madrid region.
• June 2004: Francisca Ballesteros Maravilla arrested in Melilla.
• March 2005: Alfredo Galán sentenced to 142 years and three months, with about 600,000 euros in compensation.
• September 26, 2005: Ballesteros sentenced to 84 years.
• October 2005: Zhao Zhihong arrested in Inner Mongolia.
• December 15, 2005: Maranhão recognizes 28 boys as victims for the settlement.
• 2006: settlement report number 43 of the Inter-American Commission; December 1, Petr Zelenka arrested in Jihlava; December, Łódź district court sets 38,000 zloty for a widow.
• January 2007: Łódź Regional Court convicts Andrzej N.; life imprisonment.
• February 2007: Vysočina Region decides to pay the families more than one million crowns.
• July 31, 2007: António Luís Costa convicted; 25 years.
• November 2007: Łódź appeal court raises the widow’s award to 50,000 zloty.
• February 21, 2008: Zelenka convicted; life.
• October 27, 2009: Łódź verdicts final.
• December 12, 2012: César Armando Librado Legorreta sentenced to 240 years for six feminicides; 301 in all.
• December 2014: Hugjiltu declared not guilty; December 31, his parents awarded 2,059,621.40 yuan.
• July 30, 2019: Zhao executed at Hohhot.
• June 2021: Costa’s first leave; a newspaper reports 12 percent of the largest award paid.
• December 15, 2021: David Fuller given a whole life order at Maidstone Crown Court.
• November 2022: Fuller families told that more than 90 relatives would receive up to 25,000 pounds each.
• June 27, 2025: Maranhão prosecutors hold a public hearing on unmet items of the settlement.
• April 30, 2026: California Supreme Court affirms Stayner’s death sentence.
• August 31, 2026: Diário de Viseu reports Costa’s release expected in April 2027.