Most murders are solitary acts, and most killers keep their secrets alone. The cases that follow are different. In each, two people bound to one another took part in the same crimes, and in each the law had to do what the partners themselves never did: separate them. Sometimes one partner testified while the other was tried; sometimes one partner died before any jury sat, and the survivor stood trial alone. The verdicts that came out of these partnerships are rarely symmetrical, and the gap between them is often the most revealing part of the story.
In the summer of 1984 Alton Coleman and Debra Denise Brown moved through Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Kentucky, in a spree of killings, abductions and robberies, and were arrested together in a park in Evanston, Illinois, on July 20. Brown was 21, as WCPO in Cincinnati later described her. FBI memoranda that surfaced in her appeals said she had lived with Coleman and his grandmother for about two years before the spree, that he beat her, and that agents believed she was completely under his control.
The first death of that summer did not involve her. On May 29, 1984, Coleman took Vernita Wheat, 9, from Kenosha, Wisconsin, to Waukegan, Illinois, where her body was later found; an Illinois jury convicted him of murder and sentenced him to death. The Daily Herald of Arlington Heights reported in 2008 that Brown played no part in that case.
On June 18, 1984, in Gary, Indiana, Brown led two young girls on a long walk to a wooded area where Coleman joined them. Tamika Turks, 7, was killed. Her companion, a nine-year-old girl, was left for dead and survived. In Cincinnati, Tonnie Storey, 15, disappeared on July 11 while walking to summer classes; her body was found on July 19, and the coroner found that she had been strangled. A button bearing Brown’s fingerprint was recovered at the scene. On July 13, in the suburb of Norwood, the couple talked their way into the home of Marlene Walters and her husband, who had a camping trailer for sale. Marlene Walters, 44, a Sunday school teacher and part-time librarian, was beaten to death. Her husband survived. The couple’s car was taken.
Ohio tried both partners first. Brown was convicted in Hamilton County in 1985 of the aggravated murders of Tonnie Storey and Marlene Walters and sentenced to death for the Storey killing. A Lake County, Indiana, jury convicted her of Tamika’s murder, with other charges, and on June 23, 1986, Judge Richard W. Maroc sentenced her to death; the Indiana Supreme Court affirmed in 1991, over a dissent that would have thrown out the statement she gave the FBI after asking for a lawyer. In January 1991, days before leaving office, Governor Richard Celeste of Ohio commuted her death sentence to life, one of eight he commuted that month. In November 2018 Indiana withdrew its demand for her execution, citing evidence that she is likely intellectually disabled, and she was ordered to serve 140 years. Tamika’s mother told the Associated Press that Brown had been beside Coleman, committing the same crimes, and should share his punishment. In 2018 Brown was held at the Dayton Correctional Institution.
Coleman was sentenced to death in Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. He was executed at Lucasville, Ohio, on April 26, 2002, for the murder of Marlene Walters, maintaining to the end that Brown, not he, had killed her.
Over about five weeks in October and November 1986, David Birnie and his partner, Catherine Birnie, abducted four people in Perth, Western Australia, held them at the couple’s home in the suburb of Willagee, and killed them. ABC News named the dead as Mary Nielson, 22; Susanna Candy, 15; Noelene Patterson, 31; and Denise Brown, 21. A former detective on the case said in 2026 that the victims had been made to telephone or write to their families with stories about staying with friends or travelling, so that no one would raise the alarm.
The killings ended when a fifth captive, a girl of 17, got out of the house and went to the police. Both Birnies pleaded guilty to four murders and were sentenced to life imprisonment in 1987. The judge, Justice Wallace, said David Birnie should never be released; Catherine Birnie’s sentence carried a minimum term of 20 years.
David Birnie was found dead in his cell at Casuarina Prison on October 7, 2005, aged 54. The state’s director of prisons said Catherine Birnie, still listed as his next of kin, had been told, and would not be allowed to attend the funeral.
Her minimum term ran out in 2007, and the review that followed set a pattern. The Prisoners Review Board refused her parole in May 2007, and her release was refused again at each later review, including in March 2016. In 2018 Western Australia passed a law allowing the Attorney General to direct that the worst multiple murderers not be considered for parole at all. In November 2024 Attorney General John Quigley used it, directing that Catherine Birnie not be considered before December 13, 2030. ABC News reported in February 2026 that she remained in prison.
Ray and Faye Copeland farmed near Mooresville, in Livingston County, Missouri, about 65 miles northeast of Kansas City. At their arraignment at the start of 1990, United Press International gave his age as 75 and hers as 68. The courts later described a scheme of plain economy. Ray Copeland recruited homeless men from missions in Springfield and Joplin, had each open a bank account and rent a post office box with money the couple supplied, and sent the man to livestock auctions to buy cattle with checks the account could not cover. The cattle were resold at once. Before the checks came back, the man was killed.
The case broke because one recruit got away. In August 1989 a man hired from a Springfield mission saw what he believed were human remains on the property, left, and later called a crime-stoppers line from Nebraska. Officers searched the farm in October 1989. In a closet they found men’s clothing later identified as the victims'; in a camera case they found a list of names in Faye Copeland’s handwriting, some marked "back" and some marked with an X. Three of the dead men’s names carried an X. That autumn the bodies of five men were recovered on farms in the county where Ray Copeland had worked. All had been shot: Paul Cowart, John Freeman, Jimmie Harvey, Dennis Murphy and Wayne Warner. A bullet was matched to a .22 rifle from the Copeland home.
There was no evidence that Faye Copeland fired a shot. The state tried her as an accomplice, and a Chillicothe jury convicted her on November 10, 1990, of five counts of first-degree murder, recommending death on four and life without parole on the fifth. Her lawyers had argued that she was a battered wife; the judge kept the expert evidence out of the guilt phase. The Eighth Circuit later called the list perhaps the strongest evidence against her. Ray Copeland was convicted of the same five murders on March 20, 1991, and sentenced to death. He died at the Potosi Correctional Center in 1993, aged 78, before any execution.
The federal courts set aside Faye Copeland’s death sentences in 1999 and 2000, finding the prosecutor’s penalty-phase argument improper and her lawyers' failure to object a denial of effective counsel. She was resentenced to life without parole in May 2001. After a stroke in August 2002 left her partly paralyzed and unable to speak, she was released on medical parole to a nursing home, and she died in Chillicothe in December 2003, aged 82.
For two decades the Wests' household in Gloucester, England, absorbed young women and girls without anyone outside it asking where they had gone. Fred West, a builder, had married Catherine "Rena" Costello before he married Rosemary Letts, who was born in 1953, and he brought into the second marriage his stepdaughter Charmaine. Charmaine was about eight when she disappeared in 1971. Her school took her off its register that year, after her parents said she had gone to live with her mother in London, and accepted the explanation.
The others were Lynda Gough, 19; Carol Ann Cooper, 15; Lucy Partington, 21; Therese Siegenthaler, 21; Shirley Hubbard, 15; Juanita Mott, 18; Shirley Robinson, 18, who was pregnant with Fred West’s child; Alison Chambers, 17; and Heather West, the couple’s eldest daughter, who had just finished her school exams when she vanished in 1987, at the age of 16.
The case began with children talking. In 1992 the five youngest West children were taken into care, and they kept repeating what they called a family joke: that their sister Heather was under the patio. Their social workers believed them and went to the police. In February 1994 officers began digging at the family home, Fred West admitted killing Heather, and both Wests were arrested. The remains of nine young women were found at the house, Heather’s among them. The remains of Rena Costello and of Anne McFall, 18, a former girlfriend of Fred West, were found in fields at Kempley, in rural Gloucestershire.
Fred West was charged with 12 murders, ten of them jointly with his wife. On New Year’s Day 1995 he was found hanged in his remand cell at Winson Green prison in Birmingham, and he was never tried or convicted of any killing.
Rosemary West stood trial alone at Winchester Crown Court in the autumn of 1995. She denied everything. On November 22, 1995, the jury convicted her of all ten murders, and Mr. Justice Mantell sentenced her to life on each count, saying he hoped she would never be released. The Court of Appeal refused her leave to appeal in March 1996, rejecting the argument that publicity and press payments to witnesses had made a fair trial impossible. She is serving a whole-life term. In June 2019 she was moved from a prison in County Durham to HMP New Hall in West Yorkshire.
Charlene Williams was almost 21 when she met Gerald Armond Gallego in 1977. He was 31 and told a court he had already been married five times. They went through a wedding in Reno in 1978, but he had never ended a 1967 marriage, and the courts of two states later held their marriage void, a finding that cleared the way for her to testify against him.
Between September 1978 and November 1980, by her own sworn account, she was the one who approached the girls and young women he wanted, offering a party, a walk to the van or a ride. Ten people died in that period in California, Nevada and Oregon, according to what she told investigators. Only four of those deaths were tried. Stacey Redican and Karen Chipman Twiggs, both 17, disappeared from a shopping mall in Citrus Heights, near Sacramento, on April 24, 1980; their bodies were found in Pershing County, Nevada, on July 27, and both had been beaten to death. On the night of November 1, 1980, the couple forced two Sacramento State students, Craig Miller, 22, and Mary Beth Sowers, 21, into their car outside a shopping center. A friend of Craig Miller came to the car and was told to leave; as it drove away he wrote down the license number. Both students were shot.
That license number led police to the home of Charlene’s parents. The couple fled through Reno, Salt Lake City and Colorado to Omaha, Nebraska, where they were arrested when they went to collect money her parents had wired.
Her first statement, she later admitted, was invented. Her second described the earlier killings. In California she pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree murder under an agreement for a term of 16 years and 8 months; in Nevada she pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder. A Contra Costa County jury convicted Gerald Gallego of the Miller and Sowers murders in April 1983 and chose death. A Lovelock, Nevada, jury convicted him of the Redican and Twiggs murders in 1984 and also chose death. "Gerald was security," she told the Nevada jurors, through tears, when asked why she had not shot him herself.
A federal appeals court ordered a new Nevada penalty hearing in 1997; a new jury returned death again in September 1999. Gerald Gallego died of colon cancer on July 18, 2002, at the Nevada prison system’s medical center in Carson City, his appeals unfinished. The remains of Brenda Judd and Sandra Colley, two girls from Sparks, Nevada, who disappeared from a county fair in Reno in 1979 and whose deaths Charlene had described, were later found in Lassen County, California, and identified by DNA tests. He was never tried for their deaths or for the others she described.
Charlene Gallego was released in 1997, CBS Sacramento reported in 2013, and has lived under another name since. In interviews with the station that year she said she had killed no one and had acted out of fear. Mary Beth Sowers’s father told the station she was just as guilty as he was.
Not every couple in these pages killed more than once. Derek and Nancy Haysom, a South African steel executive and an artist, were found stabbed to death in their home in Bedford County, Virginia, in the spring of 1985. Their daughter, Elizabeth, was an honors student at the University of Virginia. Her boyfriend, Jens Söring, the son of a German diplomat, had arrived on a full scholarship at 18.
The two were not early suspects. In October 1985, days after an investigator questioned Söring, they left the United States, and in April 1986 they were arrested in England over check fraud. Under questioning there Söring confessed to the killings. His extradition became a landmark: on July 7, 1989, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that sending him to face a possible death sentence and years on Virginia’s death row would violate the bar on inhuman treatment, and he was returned only on the condition that the death penalty would not be imposed.
Elizabeth Haysom pleaded guilty as an accessory before the fact to the murders of her parents and received 90 years. She testified against Söring. By then he had recanted, saying he had confessed to shield her from execution. A jury convicted him in 1990 of two counts of first-degree murder, and he received two consecutive life sentences.
He spent the next three decades insisting on his innocence, and he won supporters, among them a retired Albemarle County sheriff, who pointed to a 2009 blood analysis suggesting that blood at the scene came from another man. In November 2019 Governor Ralph Northam denied his request for a pardon, and the Virginia Parole Board voted to release both prisoners to immigration authorities for deportation, he to Germany and she to Canada. The board’s chair said Söring’s claims of innocence were without merit.
On September 25, 1982, Alvin and Judith Neelley abducted Lisa Ann Millican, 13, from a shopping mall in Rome, Georgia, and took her across the state line into Alabama. She was killed, and her body was found a few days later near Fort Payne. The couple were also tied to a second abduction: Janice Kay Chatman, 22, was kidnapped and killed in Chattooga County, Georgia, and her fiancé survived an attempt on his life. Weeks later the Neelleys were arrested in Murfreesboro.
The two cases were divided between the states. In Georgia, Alvin Neelley received a life sentence for the kidnapping and murder of Janice Chatman, and Judith Neelley agreed to plead guilty to that murder as well. In Alabama, Judith Neelley was tried in 1983 for the murder of Lisa Millican. A DeKalb County jury convicted her of capital murder and recommended life in prison. Judge Randall Cole overrode the jury and sentenced her to death.
Days before he left office in 1999, Governor Fob James commuted her sentence to life, which made her eligible for parole. The Alabama Legislature answered with a 2003 law, sponsored by a state senator from DeKalb County, meant to keep prisoners whose sentences had been commuted by a governor behind bars, and made it retroactive to 1998. The law was challenged in federal court, and the parole hearings came anyway. At the first of them the Board of Pardons and Paroles denied her release after about a minute’s deliberation, with a Georgia sheriff writing that he would take her back to serve her Georgia life sentence if she were ever freed. In May 2023, two days after Governor Kay Ivey wrote to the board, reminding it that it had refused parole five years earlier, and saying that Neelley "should not be allowed to set foot outside of an Alabama prison," the board denied parole again.
Alvin Neelley died in 2005, aged 52, while serving his Georgia life sentence.
James Anthony Daveggio and Michelle Lyn Michaud met in 1996, and within a few months he had moved into the Sacramento house where she lived. After she was evicted in August 1997 they lived out of her green minivan.
On December 2, 1997, Vanessa Samson, 22, set out on foot for the insurance office where she worked, about a mile from her home in Pleasanton, California. She never arrived. The next evening, December 3, FBI agents arrested Daveggio on the casino floor of a hotel in Douglas County, Nevada, and Michaud was arrested in a guest room at about the same time on a state warrant. Vanessa Samson’s body was found the following morning. The prosecution’s pathologist testified that she had been strangled; a defense expert suggested exposure.
An Alameda County jury convicted both of first-degree murder, with other charges, and found true two special circumstances, kidnapping and rape by instrument. It returned death verdicts against both, and the trial court imposed them. At trial a witness said Daveggio had once remarked that if he were ever going to be a serial killer he would be like the Gallegos, and Michaud owned a set of serial killer trading cards with the Gallegos on top. The jury also heard evidence of uncharged offenses against other women and girls. On April 26, 2018, the Supreme Court of California affirmed both death sentences.
Karla Homolka was a 17-year-old high school student in St. Catharines, Ontario, when she met Paul Bernardo, then 23, in October 1987. The crimes the couple committed together began inside her own family. On December 24, 1990, her sister Tammy Lyn Homolka, 15, died after being drugged at the family home with a sedative and an animal anesthetic Karla had taken from the veterinary clinic where she worked. The death was treated at the time as an accident.
The couple married and moved to a rented house in Port Dalhousie, a lakeside part of St. Catharines. In June 1991 Leslie Mahaffy, 14, of Burlington, was abducted and held there; she was killed and was found dead on June 29. In April 1992 Kristen French, 15, of St. Catharines, was abducted and held at the house; her body was found on April 30 in Burlington.
Bernardo was arrested on February 17, 1993, after forensic scientists matched his DNA to a long series of sexual assaults in Scarborough, Toronto. The sample had been taken in November 1990 and had sat untested for more than two years. Homolka, who had hired a lawyer, offered the Crown her account. Under an agreement finalized on May 14, 1993, she pleaded guilty to two counts of manslaughter in the deaths of Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French and on July 6, 1993, received two concurrent terms of 12 years, in return for testifying against her husband.
A week before the agreement was signed, Bernardo’s lawyer had removed six videotapes from the house that a 71-day police search had missed. When they reached the police in September 1994 they showed Homolka as a participant, not a frightened witness, and the agreement became known as the deal with the devil. A federal Justice Department paper later stated that prosecutors would never have made it had they had the tapes. A provincial review in 1996 concluded that the Crown had been left with no alternative and that the agreement must stand.
A Toronto jury convicted Bernardo on September 1, 1995, of the first-degree murders of Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French, with other charges, and he was sentenced to life with no parole for 25 years; in November 1995 he was declared a dangerous offender. He was denied parole in 2018, 2021 and 2024. In 2023 he was moved to La Macaza Institution, a medium-security prison in Quebec. As of September 2026 a further parole hearing had been postponed to January 2027. Homolka was released on July 4, 2005, at the end of her full sentence.
Richard Davis had served nearly 18 years for a 1987 rape conviction when, in 2006, he and his girlfriend, Dena Riley, were living in Independence, Missouri. In April 2006 they abducted Michelle Huff-Ricci, 36, whose body was found in Clay County. In May 2006 Marsha Spicer, 41, was assaulted and suffocated in the couple’s apartment, and her body was found in Lafayette County. Prosecutors said the couple videotaped the assaults on both women, and the tapes became central evidence.
The pair ran for eight days. During that time they kidnapped a five-year-old girl in southeastern Kansas, and they were captured in southwestern Missouri.
Riley pleaded guilty in Jackson County to Marsha Spicer’s murder, with other charges, and received life sentences; she also received a federal life sentence in Kansas for the kidnapping of the child. Davis went to trial. A Jackson County jury convicted him in August 2008 of Marsha Spicer’s murder, with other charges, and he was sentenced to death. In August 2012 both pleaded guilty in Clay County to the first-degree murder of Michelle Huff-Ricci, avoiding a capital trial, and each received life without parole. The Missouri Supreme Court heard his challenge to the Spicer conviction in 2015 and rejected it in 2016. Davis died of natural causes at the Potosi Correctional Center in December 2020, aged 56, while still under sentence of death. Riley was then serving multiple life sentences.
Set side by side, the verdicts show how rarely the law treats a couple as one. Faye Copeland and Debra Brown were sentenced to death and lived to see their sentences lifted. Charlene Gallego and Karla Homolka traded testimony for fixed terms and walked out when those terms ended. Rosemary West answered alone for crimes her husband had partly admitted and never faced in court. Elizabeth Haysom pleaded to a lesser role, and the man she accused spent 33 years insisting he had played none. In each case the courts sorted out the shares of guilt that the couples themselves had blurred, and in each case the families of the dead were left to measure the difference.
• 1971: Charmaine West, about eight, disappears in Gloucester, England.
• 1987: Heather West, 16, vanishes in Gloucester.
• September 1978: by Charlene Gallego’s account, the first two killings with Gerald Gallego, near Sacramento.
• April 24, 1980: Stacey Redican and Karen Chipman Twiggs, both 17, disappear in Citrus Heights, California.
• November 1, 1980: Craig Miller and Mary Beth Sowers are abducted in Sacramento; the Gallegos are later arrested in Omaha.
• September 25, 1982: Lisa Ann Millican, 13, is abducted in Rome, Georgia, by Alvin and Judith Neelley.
• 1983: Judith Neelley is convicted in Alabama, and the judge overrides the jury to sentence her to death; Gerald Gallego is convicted in California.
• May 29 to July 20, 1984: the Coleman and Brown spree, ending with their arrest in Evanston, Illinois.
• Spring 1985: Derek and Nancy Haysom are killed in Bedford County, Virginia.
• 1985: Debra Brown is convicted in Ohio of two aggravated murders.
• April 1986: Jens Söring and Elizabeth Haysom are arrested in England.
• June 23, 1986: Brown is sentenced to death in Indiana.
• October to November 1986: David and Catherine Birnie kill four people in Perth; both plead guilty and are sentenced in 1987.
• October 1986 to May 1989: five men hired by Ray Copeland are killed, prosecutors say.
• July 7, 1989: the European Court of Human Rights rules on Söring’s extradition.
• 1990: Söring is convicted of two first-degree murders.
• November 10, 1990: Faye Copeland is convicted of five murders.
• December 24, 1990: Tammy Homolka, 15, dies in St. Catharines, Ontario.
• January 1991: Ohio’s governor commutes Brown’s death sentence.
• March 20, 1991: Ray Copeland is convicted of the same five murders.
• June 1991 and April 1992: Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French are abducted and killed.
• July 6, 1993: Karla Homolka is sentenced to 12 years for manslaughter.
• 1993: Ray Copeland dies at the Potosi Correctional Center.
• February 1994: police dig at the Wests' home in Gloucester; both are arrested.
• January 1, 1995: Fred West is found dead in his cell before trial.
• September 1, 1995: Paul Bernardo is convicted of two first-degree murders.
• November 22, 1995: Rosemary West is convicted of ten murders.
• 1997: Charlene Gallego is released.
• December 2 and 3, 1997: Vanessa Samson is abducted in Pleasanton, California; Daveggio and Michaud are arrested in Nevada.
• 1999: Alabama’s governor commutes Judith Neelley’s death sentence; a Nevada jury again sentences Gerald Gallego to death.
• April 26, 2002: Alton Coleman is executed in Ohio.
• July 18, 2002: Gerald Gallego dies at a Nevada prison medical center.
• 2002 and 2003: Faye Copeland is released on medical parole and dies in Chillicothe.
• July 4, 2005: Homolka is released at the end of her sentence.
• 2005: David Birnie dies in his cell; Alvin Neelley dies while serving his Georgia sentence.
• April and May 2006: Michelle Huff-Ricci and Marsha Spicer are killed in Missouri.
• August 2008: Richard Davis is convicted of Marsha Spicer’s murder and sentenced to death.
• August 2012: Davis and Riley plead guilty to the Huff-Ricci murder.
• April 26, 2018: the Supreme Court of California affirms the Daveggio and Michaud death sentences.
• November 2018: Indiana drops its death demand against Brown.
• November 2019: Söring and Haysom are paroled and deported.
• December 2020: Davis dies at the Potosi Correctional Center.
• May 2023: Judith Neelley is again denied parole.
• November 2024: Catherine Birnie is barred from parole consideration until December 13, 2030; Bernardo is denied parole a third time.
• September 2026: Bernardo’s next parole hearing is postponed to January 2027.