On February 28, 2024, the state of Idaho tried to carry out a death sentence first imposed on Thomas Eugene Creech in January 1982. The execution team made eight attempts to set an IV line, then stopped. Creech, 73, went back to death row alive. The Associated Press had described him that week as one of the longest-serving death row inmates in the United States, and the Idaho Capital Sun, covering his clemency hearing a month earlier, had called him the state’s longest-serving man on death row.
His case is extreme only in its last chapter. Across the country, the men convicted of serial murder and sentenced to die have tended to spend decades in the condemned units of state prisons, and the record of how they left them is plain. Douglas Clark died of natural causes in California after forty years under sentence. Lawrence Bittaker died the same way after nearly thirty-nine. Richard Ramirez and Rodney Alcala died in custody with appeals still moving. In Georgia, Carlton Gary was put to death in 2018, more than thirty-one years after a jury sentenced him. The rest are still waiting, in California, in Idaho, in Kansas, while their cases pass through state supreme courts, federal habeas proceedings, moratoriums and changes of execution method.
The reasons are not hidden. Every death judgment in these states goes up on appeal. Many are argued for years before a ruling. Federal review follows, and then the fights over DNA, counsel, clemency and the means of execution. The cases below show how that machinery has worked for ten men convicted of killing again and again.
Creech, an Ohio native, was convicted of five murders in three states. Two of the victims, Edward Thomas Arnold, 34, and John Wayne Bradford, 40, were house painters killed in Valley County, Idaho, in November 1974. Creech was arrested in Idaho that month. In March 1976 he was sentenced to death by hanging for those killings. The sentence did not last: it was reduced to life after the U.S. Supreme Court barred mandatory death sentences. Oregon and California added murder convictions in 1979 and 1980.
The death sentence that has followed him since came from a killing inside the Idaho State Correctional Institution. On May 13, 1981, David Dale Jensen, a disabled 23-year-old fellow prisoner, was beaten to death. Creech pleaded guilty to first-degree murder on August 28, 1981, against his lawyer’s advice. Judge Robert Newhouse sentenced him to death in January 1982.
That sentence was vacated on procedure, reimposed in 1983, and affirmed by the Idaho Supreme Court on May 23 of that year. In 1991 the Ninth Circuit granted habeas relief on the sentence. On March 30, 1993, in Arave v. Creech, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the "utter disregard" aggravating circumstance Idaho had relied on, but left the resentencing in place. Newhouse sentenced him to death again on April 17, 1995. A federal court stayed a scheduled execution on June 14, 1999.
Then came more than two decades of federal litigation. The Ninth Circuit did not affirm the denial of habeas relief until July 20, 2022, in an opinion amended on February 6, 2023. The U.S. Supreme Court declined review on October 10, 2023, and two days later the state issued a death warrant for November 8, 2023. That date gave way to a clemency hearing on January 19, 2024, at which the judge who had sentenced him to death asked the state to spare him. On January 29, the Idaho Commission of Pardons and Parole split three to three, and clemency was denied.
The failed execution of February 28 did not end the case. On October 16, 2024, Idaho issued a new death warrant for November 13. U.S. District Judge G. Murray Snow stayed it. In March 2025 Idaho’s governor signed a bill making the firing squad the state’s primary method of execution, effective July 1, 2026; the Idaho Capital Sun reported that Idaho would be the only state with the firing squad as its main method. Judge Snow ruled against Creech in August 2025 and dismissed two related suits, and the cases went to the Ninth Circuit.
In July 2026, Creech and another Idaho death row prisoner, Gerald Pizzuto, sued over the new firing squad procedures, citing 13 disputed points. As of October 1, 2026, KBOI reported, Creech was still on Idaho’s death row with no execution date. His first death sentence, for the Valley County killings, was imposed fifty years earlier.
Douglas Clark was a licensed steam engineer working at a plant in Burbank, California, in 1980. A Los Angeles County jury convicted him of six counts of first-degree murder for the killings of Gina Marano, 15, Cynthia Chandler, 16, Karen Jones, Exxie Wilson, Marnette Comer and a young woman who has never been identified, all in the summer of 1980. He was taken into custody that August after Carol Bundy, who had been involved with him, confessed to a separate killing and named him to police. Bundy later pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree murder.
Clark twice acted as his own lawyer during a trial that began with jury selection on September 7, 1982. On March 16, 1983, he received six consecutive death sentences. The California Supreme Court took until July 30, 1992, to decide his automatic appeal. It reversed two lesser convictions from a consolidated case and set aside all but one special-circumstance finding, but it affirmed the six murder convictions and the death judgment.
The federal phase ran longer than the state one. Clark filed his first federal request on October 23, 1992. A habeas petition with 27 claims followed on April 23, 1997, and an amended petition with 23 claims on June 22, 2004. The California Supreme Court summarily denied his state petitions in 2003. The Ninth Circuit heard argument on September 19, 2023, and on October 10, 2023, it affirmed the denial of habeas relief.
Clark died of natural causes the next day, October 11, 2023, aged 75, while held on condemned status at San Quentin. He had been under sentence of death for forty years and seven months. The appeal that finally closed his case outlived him by a single day.
Lawrence Bittaker was a paroled machinist living in Burbank when he and Roy Norris, a man he had met in state prison, abducted and killed five teenage girls in Los Angeles County between June and October 1979: Lucinda Lynn Schaefer, Andrea Joy Hall, Jacqueline Doris Gilliam, Jacqueline Leah Lamp and Shirley Lynette Ledford. Norris pleaded guilty and testified against him. On February 17, 1981, a jury in Torrance convicted Bittaker of all 26 counts, including five counts of murder, with other charges. A week later the same jury returned a death verdict, and he was sentenced to death in March 1981. He was 40.
The California Supreme Court affirmed the conviction and sentence on June 22, 1989, eight years after the trial. State habeas relief was denied on November 29, 2000. By 2003 his federal habeas case was in the Ninth Circuit, which ruled on June 6 of that year on the scope of the privilege waiver he had made by challenging his trial lawyers' performance.
His federal case had not reached an end when Governor Gavin Newsom ordered a halt to executions in California on March 13, 2019, reprieving every person on the state’s death row. Bittaker died of natural causes at San Quentin on December 13, 2019, aged 79. The California Globe headline on his death said he had died "despite receiving death sentence." He had held that sentence for thirty-eight years and nine months.
No case in this group shows the reach of appellate review more plainly than Rodney Alcala’s. The UCLA-trained photographer was first convicted of the 1979 murder of Robin Samsoe, 12, of Huntington Beach, in 1980, and sentenced to death. The California Supreme Court reversed that conviction on August 23, 1984. He was convicted again and sentenced to death in 1986; the state high court affirmed on December 31, 1992. In 2001 a federal district court granted habeas corpus, and the Ninth Circuit affirmed on June 27, 2003.
By then DNA testing had tied Alcala to killings in Los Angeles County. Prosecutors refiled in 2006 with four more murders added, and on June 12, 2008, the California Supreme Court allowed all five to be tried together in Orange County. On February 25, 2010, a jury convicted him of five counts of first-degree murder: Robin Samsoe, Jill Barcomb, 18, Georgia Wixted, 27, Charlotte Lamb, 32, and Jill Parenteau, 21. Judge Francisco Briseño sentenced him to death on March 30, 2010. It was his third death sentence for the Samsoe murder. CBS News, the week before, put it bluntly: he had dodged death row before.
He was extradited to New York in June 2012, pleaded guilty on December 14 of that year to the murders of Cornelia Crilley and Ellen Hover in Manhattan, and was sentenced there to 25 years to life on January 7, 2013. In 2016 he was charged in Sweetwater County, Wyoming, with the murder of Christine Ruth Thornton, but was declared too ill to be moved and never tried.
Alcala died of natural causes on July 24, 2021, aged 77. No ruling on the automatic appeal of his 2010 judgment had been reported. The Wyoming charge was dropped that August. Measured from his first death sentence, he had spent roughly four decades under one sentence of death or another, with the longest gaps opened by the courts themselves.
Randy Steven Kraft, a Long Beach computer programmer, was arrested in southern Orange County on May 14, 1983. An Orange County jury convicted him in 1989 of 16 counts of first-degree murder, with other charges, for the deaths of young men killed in Southern California between 1972 and 1983. Judge Donald A. McCartin sentenced him to death on November 29, 1989.
The opening brief in his automatic appeal was not filed until 1997, according to Orange Coast magazine. The California Supreme Court affirmed the judgment in full on August 10, 2000, in People v. Kraft. Federal habeas proceedings began the next year. A 2009 federal ruling rejected many of his claims and let others go forward, and Kraft filed a Ninth Circuit appeal that May; another petition to the Ninth Circuit followed in 2014. Two magazine features caught the mood of those years in their headlines. Orange Coast asked in 2013, "Why Isn’t Randy Kraft Dead?" Vice asked a year later, "Why Hasn’t the Government Killed This Man?"
In a 2016 interview with the Bay Area Reporter at San Quentin, Kraft denied the killings. Investigators have kept working on deaths he was never charged with. In November 2023 the Orange County Sheriff’s Department identified Michael Ray Schlicht, long thought to be an early victim, and in May 2025 Oregon State Police said Kraft was the only person under investigation in the 1980 death of Larry Eugene Parks. Neither case has led to a charge.
Since March 13, 2019, his sentence has been suspended under the statewide moratorium, along with every other death sentence in California. The Habeas Corpus Resource Center’s list of persons under sentence of death, updated June 1, 2026, still carries him. By November 2026 he had been under sentence for nearly thirty-seven years.
Richard Ramirez, a drifter from El Paso, Texas, was arrested in East Los Angeles on August 31, 1985. He was arraigned that year on 68 felony counts, including 14 murders, and tried on 43. Jury selection did not begin until July 21, 1988. On September 20, 1989, a Los Angeles jury convicted him on all 43 counts, among them 12 counts of first-degree murder and one of second-degree murder, covering killings across Los Angeles County between June 1984 and August 1985. On November 7, 1989, Judge Michael Tynan sentenced him to die in the gas chamber.
His automatic appeal was argued in June 2006. The California Supreme Court affirmed the death judgment on August 7, 2006, almost seventeen years after sentencing, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined review in 2007. In October 2009 San Francisco police announced that DNA linked him to the 1984 killing of Mei Leung, 9, a case that was attributed to him and never charged.
Ramirez died on June 7, 2013, at Marin General Hospital, aged 53, while on San Quentin’s death row. The Marin County coroner reported on June 17 that the cause was complications of B-cell lymphoma. News reports at his death said other appeals were still pending. He had been under sentence of death for twenty-three years and seven months, and the state had never set a date.
Charles Chitat Ng was born in Hong Kong and served in the U.S. Marines. After his associate Leonard Lake was arrested in South San Francisco on June 2, 1985, Ng fled. He was arrested in Calgary, Alberta, on July 6, 1985, and convicted in Canada of the store theft and shooting that led to his arrest, for which he was sentenced to four and a half years. Lake died in June 1985 and was never tried; his part in the killings is attributed, not adjudicated.
The United States asked for Ng’s extradition in February 1987 on 19 counts, including 12 murders. Canada had abolished the death penalty, and the question was whether it could hand him over without assurances that he would not be executed. An Alberta court ordered him committed for extradition on November 29, 1988. The Alberta Court of Appeal dismissed his appeal on May 2, 1989. The Minister of Justice decided on October 26, 1989, not to seek assurances, and the matter was referred to the Supreme Court of Canada, which heard it on February 21, 1991. On September 26, 1991, the court ruled four to three against him. He was extradited the same day and appeared in Calaveras County, California, on September 27.
The trial took seven more years to start. The case was moved to Orange County on April 8, 1994; Ng was allowed to represent himself in May 1998 and lost that status in August. Jury selection began in Santa Ana on September 14, 1998. On February 24, 1999, the jury convicted him of 11 counts of first-degree murder: Harvey, Deborah and Sean Dubs; Clifford Peranteau; Jeffrey Gerald; Michael Carroll; Kathleen Allen; Lonnie Bond Sr.; Brenda O’Connor; Lonnie Bond Jr.; and Robin Scott Stapley. It could not agree on a twelfth count, for Paul Cosner, which was dropped. He was sentenced to death on June 30, 1999.
The California Supreme Court did not rule on his automatic appeal until July 28, 2022, when it affirmed the judgment in its entirety. The Associated Press, reporting the decision, noted that federal appeals were still possible. In June 2026 the Lancashire Post reported that Ng, who had attended school in England, had been moved from San Quentin to the California Medical Facility in Vacaville. By then he had spent more than forty years in custody in two countries, twenty-seven of them under sentence of death.
William Lester Suff had already been convicted of murder once before California sentenced him to die. In 1974 a Tarrant County, Texas, court convicted him of murder in the death of his two-month-old daughter, and he was sentenced to seventy years. He was paroled to California in 1984, after about ten.
Suff was arrested in Riverside on January 9, 1992. In July 1995 a Riverside County jury convicted him of 12 counts of first-degree murder and one count of attempted murder, covering women killed in the western part of the county between 1989 and 1991; it deadlocked on a thirteenth murder count, and a mistrial was declared on it. The jury returned true findings on the multiple-murder and lying-in-wait special circumstances, and he was sentenced to death on each murder count that year.
The California Supreme Court affirmed the judgment on April 28, 2014, nearly nineteen years later. A decade after that, the case opened again in a different direction. Los Angeles County sheriff’s detectives reopened the 1986 killing of Cathy Small, 19, in South Pasadena in October 2019; DNA testing in August 2020 produced a profile that matched Suff, and in May 2022 he confessed in a two-day interview. The department announced the result on August 13, 2024. No charges were filed. Reports that month described him as 73 and still under sentence of death.
Carlton Gary was born in Columbus, Georgia, and was convicted there of the murders of three older women in late 1977: Florence Scheible, 89, Martha Thurmond, 69, and Kathleen Woodruff, 74. He was taken into custody in Albany, Georgia, on May 3, 1984, and indicted in Muscogee County the next day. His trial opened on July 28, 1986. On August 26 the jury returned guilty verdicts on all nine counts, three each of malice murder, rape and burglary, and on August 27, 1986, he was sentenced to death. Four other Columbus deaths of 1977 and 1978 were put before the jury as similar transactions but never charged.
The Supreme Court of Georgia affirmed on March 6, 1990. State habeas relief was refused in 1996. A federal court denied habeas relief in 2004, and the Eleventh Circuit affirmed on February 12, 2009. Georgia then set an execution date, and on December 16, 2009, hours before it, the execution was stayed and DNA testing ordered. A consent order for the testing followed in February 2010. Gary filed an extraordinary motion for a new trial on July 9, 2012. It took Superior Court Judge Frank J. Jordan Jr. until September 1, 2017, to deny it.
From there the end came quickly. The Supreme Court of Georgia denied his appeal on December 1, 2017, and reconsideration on January 16, 2018. The State Board of Pardons and Paroles denied clemency on March 14, 2018. The next day the U.S. Supreme Court denied review, and at 10:33 p.m. on March 15, 2018, Georgia executed him by lethal injection at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson. He was 67. He had denied the killings for more than thirty years. Amnesty International’s appeal for him, issued three days earlier, carried a title that summed up the timing: "Georgia Execution Set 40 Years After Crimes."
John Edward Robinson Sr., an Olathe businessman with a fraud record going back to 1969, was arrested in Olathe on June 2, 2000. A Johnson County jury convicted him on October 29, 2002, on six counts, and in January 2003 he was sentenced to death on both capital counts. In October 2003 he pleaded guilty in Cass County, Missouri, to five counts of first-degree murder, for Beverly Bonner, Sheila Faith, Debbie Faith, Paula Godfrey and Catherine Clampitt, and received life without parole on each. The plea, Missourinet reported, spared him a death penalty trial in Missouri.
The Kansas Supreme Court heard his direct appeal in March 2015 and ruled on November 6, 2015, more than twelve years after sentencing. It affirmed his capital murder conviction for Suzette Trouten, charged as part of a common scheme that took in five other killings, and the death sentence on it. It reversed as multiplicitous, not on any finding of innocence, the separate capital murder conviction for Izabela Lewicka and the first-degree murder conviction for Lisa Stasi. The U.S. Supreme Court declined review in October 2016.
On June 18, 2026, Governor Laura Kelly denied his request for clemency. In September 2026 the Kansas Supreme Court heard his post-conviction appeal, and as of September 15, 2026, no decision had been reported. He is held at El Dorado Correctional Facility. Kansas has carried out no execution since 1965, more than six decades before the governor’s decision.
Set side by side, the dates tell their own story. Clark waited nine years for his first appeal to be decided and thirty-one more for the last. Ramirez waited almost seventeen for his. Ng waited twenty-three, Suff nineteen, Robinson twelve. Bittaker’s state habeas petition was not denied until nearly twenty years after his trial. Alcala’s case was tried three times, reversed twice, and still open when he died.
Delay of that kind does not run in only one direction. Some of the time went to claims the courts accepted: the Ninth Circuit’s 1991 ruling in Creech’s case, the reversals of Alcala’s first two convictions, the 1992 ruling that trimmed Clark’s judgment, the reversals in Robinson’s. Some went to new evidence, such as the DNA testing Georgia was ordered to allow in Gary’s case. And some went to policy rather than law, as with California’s moratorium in 2019 and Idaho’s turn to the firing squad.
What the cases share is the outcome. Of the ten men here, one was executed. Four died in custody under sentence, of natural causes or illness, one of them a day after his final appeal was rejected. Five were still under sentence of death in the latest reports, the oldest of those sentences more than four decades old. Thomas Creech, who survived the state’s attempt in 2024, is still in the condemned unit at Idaho’s maximum security prison, waiting to learn whether the next method will work where the last one did not.
• November 1974: Edward Thomas Arnold and John Wayne Bradford are killed in Valley County, Idaho; Thomas Creech is arrested the same month.
• March 1976: Creech is sentenced to death for the Valley County murders; the sentence is later reduced to life.
• February 17, 1981: Lawrence Bittaker is convicted of all 26 counts in Torrance; he is sentenced to death in March 1981.
• January 1982: Creech is sentenced to death for the murder of David Dale Jensen.
• March 16, 1983: Douglas Clark receives six consecutive death sentences.
• August 23, 1984: The California Supreme Court reverses Rodney Alcala’s 1980 conviction.
• August 27, 1986: Carlton Gary is sentenced to death in Columbus, Georgia.
• June 22, 1989: The California Supreme Court affirms Bittaker’s conviction and sentence.
• November 7, 1989: Richard Ramirez is sentenced to death.
• November 29, 1989: Randy Kraft is sentenced to death.
• March 6, 1990: The Supreme Court of Georgia affirms Gary’s conviction.
• September 26, 1991: The Supreme Court of Canada rules four to three in Charles Ng’s case; he is extradited the same day.
• July 30, 1992: The California Supreme Court affirms Clark’s murder convictions and death judgment.
• March 30, 1993: Arave v. Creech is decided.
• April 17, 1995: Creech is resentenced to death.
• 1995: William Lester Suff is convicted of 12 murders and sentenced to death.
• June 30, 1999: Ng is sentenced to death.
• August 10, 2000: The California Supreme Court affirms Kraft’s judgment.
• January 2003: John Edward Robinson Sr. is sentenced to death in Kansas.
• June 27, 2003: The Ninth Circuit affirms habeas relief for Alcala.
• August 7, 2006: The California Supreme Court affirms Ramirez’s death judgment.
• December 16, 2009: Gary’s execution is stayed hours before it was due, and DNA testing is ordered.
• March 30, 2010: Alcala is sentenced to death for the third time.
• June 7, 2013: Ramirez dies at Marin General Hospital.
• April 28, 2014: The California Supreme Court affirms Suff’s judgment.
• November 6, 2015: The Kansas Supreme Court affirms Robinson’s death sentence.
• March 15, 2018: Gary is executed in Jackson, Georgia.
• March 13, 2019: Governor Gavin Newsom orders a halt to executions in California.
• December 13, 2019: Bittaker dies at San Quentin.
• July 24, 2021: Alcala dies.
• July 28, 2022: The California Supreme Court affirms Ng’s judgment.
• October 10, 2023: The Ninth Circuit affirms the denial of Clark’s federal petition; he dies the next day.
• January 29, 2024: Idaho’s parole commission splits three to three on Creech’s clemency petition.
• February 28, 2024: Creech’s execution is halted after eight failed attempts to set an IV line.
• August 13, 2024: Los Angeles County sheriff’s officials announce Suff’s confession in the Cathy Small case.
• March 12, 2025: Idaho makes the firing squad its primary method, effective July 1, 2026.
• June 18, 2026: Governor Laura Kelly denies Robinson’s request for clemency.
• September 15, 2026: Robinson’s post-conviction appeal is reported pending before the Kansas Supreme Court.
• October 1, 2026: Creech is reported still on Idaho’s death row with no execution date.