A diary is the one exhibit that a defendant produced before anyone thought of a trial. It is dated, in his own handwriting or in her own words, and it was written for no jury. That is the reason prosecutors want it and the reason it so often disappoints them. What reaches a courtroom is a selection: a detective reads a page, a prosecutor quotes a line in an opening statement, a witness describes what the pages contained. The defense answers with the oldest argument available, that a person who writes something down is not necessarily recording what happened.
The cases here run from a Florida courtroom in 1988 to a St. Petersburg court in 2017. Some involve a diary that was read aloud to a jury. Others involve a diary that was recovered, described to the press and never used, or a journal whose existence helped shape a guilty plea so that no jury ever heard it.
Manuel Pardo Jr. had been a Florida state trooper and an officer of the Sweetwater Police Department in Miami-Dade County. In April 1988 a Dade County jury convicted him of nine counts of first-degree murder, for killings in five episodes between January and April 1986. He was sentenced to death on every count.
The diary was part of what searches of Pardo’s residence produced. The courts describe it as a diary in his handwriting that held newspaper clippings about the killings. At trial a detective read entries from it to the jury. The Associated Press reported that the diary also contained photographs of victims and some details of the crimes. A second route into evidence came through a witness. Carlo Ribera, a former informant and the state’s first witness, testified that Pardo had described the killings to him and had shown him diary entries, clippings and instant photographs to back up what he said, according to the Eleventh Circuit’s account of the trial.
What the diary proved was authorship and knowledge: that the person who kept the clippings also kept the account of what the clippings reported. It did not have to prove much more, because Pardo took the witness stand against his lawyer’s advice and admitted that he had intentionally killed all nine. His lawyer, Ronald Guralnick, had given notice of an insanity defense only about two weeks before trial, on March 22, 1988, believing the state’s evidence overwhelming. Three court-appointed experts judged Pardo sane. The defense psychologist, Syvil Marquit, testified that Pardo was psychotic, though the Florida Supreme Court recorded the testimony as saying he knew murder was illegal and wrong.
Prosecutors also relied on the diary and on Nazi memorabilia taken from his apartment, including evidence of anti-Semitism, FlaglerLive reported. The theory they presented was that Pardo was himself in the drug trade and killed for money and drugs, which sat badly with the version he gave the jury, that his victims were drug dealers with no right to live.
The diary outlasted the trial in a different way. In a written statement before he was executed on December 11, 2012, at 56, Pardo accepted responsibility for killing six men and said he never harmed a woman. That contradicted his sworn testimony of 1988 and the verdicts on all nine counts, and the Florida Supreme Court, in 2006, had already relied on the testimony in rejecting an alibi claim for two of the deaths.
The Naso case begins with a probation check. In April 2010 Nevada probation officers visited a house in Reno, where Joseph Naso was serving probation for a theft, and came upon ammunition. Further searches followed on April 23 and May 7, 2010. On an aluminum clipboard on the dining room table a probation officer, David LeBaker, came across a journal. He testified that it described assaults on girls and women in several states, and that after reading a few paragraphs he told his supervisor to look at it. In another room was a handwritten list of ten women, each called "girl" or "lady" and followed by a place name. Prosecutors came to believe that four of the entries described the four women named in the charges. Hundreds of photographs, ledgers, calendars and drawings were part of the same material, and it took five detectives eight weeks to process.
Press coverage of the January 2012 preliminary hearing in Marin County gave the journal a lurid nickname that stuck to the case through sentencing. Naso was 77 when he was arrested in April 2011. He denied everything and, for a two-month trial that opened in 2013, acted as his own lawyer.
The journal was read to the jury twice, in different ways. In her opening statement the prosecutor, Deputy District Attorney Rosemary Slote, called him a serial rapist and murderer and read entries from it, including one about an assault in the Berkeley Hills in 1961 for which he had been arrested at the time. Prosecutors said that woman would testify. The second use was a single line in a ledger. An entry in Naso’s handwriting dated August 5, 1994, recorded meeting a woman named Tracy, and Richard Brown, the lead investigator for the Nevada Department of Public Safety, testified that he read it as a reference to a sexual assault.
Naso’s answer, in his own opening statement, was to refuse the reading. He told jurors that not one picture of a dead person had been recovered from his house, called the clothing evidence inconclusive and dismissed a journal entry as "loose talk." "I dated, I danced, I took pictures, but I don’t kill people, and there’s no evidence of that," he said. He did not testify. On August 20, 2013, the jury convicted him of the first-degree murders of Roxene Roggasch, Carmen Colon, Pamela Parsons and Tracy Tafoya, with the special circumstance of multiple murder. The jury recommended death on September 17, and on November 22, 2013, Judge Andrew Sweet sentenced him to death for the murders of Colon, Parsons and Tafoya and to life without parole for the murder of Roggasch.
At the penalty phase prosecutors went further than the verdicts. They attributed two more deaths to him, those of Sharieea Patton and Sara Dylan, neither charged, and told the jury that Patton’s name appeared twice in his writings, as the seventh entry on the list of ten and on a longer list of 40. He has said, in a jailhouse interview with ABC7, that he was saving the meaning of the list for his appeal. That appeal was still pending in the California Supreme Court in 2024, and Naso was 91 in September 2025.
Theodore Kaczynski’s journals belong here for the opposite reason. They were seized, they were read by the people who built the case, and a jury never heard a page of them.
When agents arrested him on April 3, 1996, at his cabin near Lincoln, Montana, they recovered what the task force had never had: about 40,000 handwritten journal pages, some in a code of his own, describing experiments and the crimes, FBI interviewees said in a 2021 podcast. A manila envelope held detailed admissions to all 16 bombings in the series that the FBI had investigated since 1979 under the name UNABOM, one of the case’s investigators, Terry Turchie, said. The journals were different from the essay he had sent newspapers in 1995, which his brother and sister-in-law had recognized, and different again from the letters he wrote to his family. They were private and extensive, and in the investigators' view they set out what the bombings were for.
His writing from earlier years showed how long the anger had run. "I act merely from a desire for revenge," he wrote in a journal entry dated April 6, 1971, according to investigators who read his private papers after his arrest, a date two years after he resigned an assistant professorship in mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, and the year he moved to Montana.
A federal grand jury in Sacramento indicted him on June 18, 1996, on ten counts over four incidents, two of them fatal. In the end the journals did not have to be read aloud. On January 22, 1998, Kaczynski pleaded guilty in federal court in Sacramento to charges covering all three deaths and two of the injuries, and admitted the remaining incidents, to avoid a trial at which his lawyers intended to argue that he was mentally ill. On May 4, 1998, he was sentenced to four consecutive life terms plus 30 years. No journal passage is reported to have been read aloud at either the plea hearing or the sentencing. Kaczynski died in federal custody on June 10, 2023, at 81, and the Associated Press reported, citing sources, that he died by suicide.
In January 2012 police in Belinsky, a town of about nine thousand people in Penza Oblast, Russia, detained 23-year-old Alexander Bychkov over a burglary at a household goods shop. Within days the case had changed. He told investigators about men he had killed, and a personal diary taken from his residence became the center of the prosecution. Pravo.ru, reporting a statement from the regional prosecutor’s office, said all the killings were described in it.
The reports disagree about what the diary contained. Moskovsky Komsomolets said in March 2012 that it described nine killings. The regional news site 360 wrote in 2025 that it described 11, and press reports in 2012 said investigators were checking him against 17 deaths. The Investigative Committee said in March 2012 that the diary’s claims could not be confirmed. The prosecutor’s office said a large number of violent films had also been recovered from his residence.
As to motive, there are several versions, all of them either Bychkov’s own words or investigators' readings of them. Life.ru reported on March 26, 2012, that the diary showed he killed to prove himself to a former girlfriend who had called him weak. Investigator Oleg Troshin, quoted through Interfax, spoke of revenge for his brother. Moskovsky Komsomolets suggested he might have invented some details because he liked the attention. This is the problem the diary poses in a Russian courtroom as much as in any other: a text that confesses can also be a text that boasts.
On March 22, 2013, the Penza Regional Court convicted him of the murder of nine people under the counts of murder of two or more people and murder to conceal another crime, and of theft with unlawful entry, and sentenced him to life in a special regime colony. The prosecutor withdrew a charge of desecrating a dead body before the verdict, PenzaInform reported. The Supreme Court of the Russian Federation upheld the verdict, according to Pravo.ru’s report of June 21, 2013. The court proved nine killings; whatever the diary said beyond that, no court ruled on it. Whether the diary was read out in open court has not been reported, and coverage of the verdict reaches it only through the prosecutor’s office and investigators. Bychkov told an interviewer in 2018 that some of the reports about his crimes were false, NEWS.ru reported.
Tamara Samsonova is the cleanest example of a diary that never became evidence. In July 2015 a 68-year-old retired hotel worker was detained in St. Petersburg and charged with the murder of Valentina Ulanova, 79, an acquaintance who had taken her in. Police who searched her apartment recovered diaries in Russian, English and German, along with foreign-language books and works on esoteric subjects, Business FM and Moskovsky Komsomolets reported. Russian outlets said the diaries described about ten killings. AFP said it was unclear whether the accounts rested on fact.
Investigators declined to build on them. A law enforcement source told Interfax on August 5, 2015, that a case could not be assembled from diary entries, and that each episode she described could go to court only if a victim’s body or other physical evidence were located. Her statements and notes should not be taken seriously, the source said, until the expert examinations were finished. NTV obtained part of a diary and described it the same month: most of it was in German and recorded ordinary routines, little sleep, a great deal of coffee, reading, the regular counting of money, trips to the city center to walk and see films, and some entries about feeling unwell and crying. The part NTV saw contained no mention of any killing or of preparing for one. NTV noted that it might have seen only part of the diary. The news site 360.ru reported in 2025 that the diaries were never added to the case file because investigators regarded them as the writings of a mentally disturbed person.
She did confess after her arrest, in a formal written statement, and then withdrew parts of it. The investigator Nakhshunov told NTV that she had confessed on the day of her detention to four killings, later withdrew two, and that one of the men she named was alive. Investigators came to believe there were two in all: Ulanova in 2015 and a lodger in 2003. The claims that she was linked to ten, eleven or fourteen deaths rest on press accounts of the diaries and on unnamed sources. She was never tried. A forensic psychiatric examination diagnosed chronic paranoid schizophrenia, and in March 2017 a court released her from criminal liability and ordered compulsory psychiatric treatment, Vesti.ru reported. She was not convicted of any crime.
The case of Miyoko Sumida, of Amagasaki in Hyogo Prefecture, Japan, has two diaries in it, and neither was hers by the time a court heard them. Sumida was indicted in February 2012 over the death of a 66-year-old woman and re-arrested in November 2012 on charges that included murder. On December 12, 2012, she died in a holding cell at the Hyogo Prefectural Police headquarters in Kobe, and police said she died by suicide. No court tried her. Between November 2014 and February 2016 the Kobe District Court convicted seven members of her household, finding in each trial that they had acted in conspiracy with her.
The first diary was her sister-in-law’s. At the trial over the death of a man in Okinawa in 2005, where prosecutors said the household had pushed him into a position from which he could not escape so that his life insurance would be paid, the sister-in-law testified in May 2015 that the household had been short of money and that she had wanted him to do it quickly. Prosecutors pointed out that she had written in her diary at the time that he had no guts. She said the insurance money went to pay debts. The defense argued that he had chosen to die to help the family and that the defendants were guilty at most of assisting a suicide. The courts disagreed: the 2016 judgment against the daughter-in-law called his death a murder for insurance money, and the court that sentenced the second son ruled that the household had created a situation in which he could not escape death, Kobe Shimbun reported.
The second diary was Sumida’s own, the one she kept in her cell. She tried to give it to her sister-in-law, who refused it. On the day she died, one investigator told a Kobe Shimbun reporter that her death was the greatest destruction of evidence in the case. What the cell diary contained, and whether it was ever examined, has not been reported.
The Orange County trial of Charles Ng, who was convicted on February 24, 1999, of 11 counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to death on June 30, 1999, included a videotape that the court treated as important evidence and that was played for the jury. No diary figures in the accounts of what the jury heard. The Associated Press reported that investigators recovered Leonard Lake’s diary, which ran to 250 pages.
Lake had died in custody in June 1985, days after his arrest in South San Francisco on a weapons charge, and was never charged with any killing. His writing therefore could not be used against him, and Ng, who had left for Canada, was the only defendant. Whether any passage of Lake’s diary was read to Ng’s jury has not been reported. The California Supreme Court affirmed the death sentence on July 28, 2022.
A diary can be lost before it ever becomes an exhibit. Alexander Pichushkin, a Moscow store worker, was convicted by a jury at the Moscow City Court on October 24, 2007, of 48 murders and 3 attempted murders and sentenced to life on October 29. Radio Svoboda reported in June 2006 that he had kept a diary with dates and names, and newspaper clippings about the killings and about Andrei Chikatilo, and that he destroyed them when he sensed arrest was near. What he wrote, if the report is right, was therefore never before the court. The Supreme Court of Russia upheld the sentence on February 14, 2008.
A diary can show that the defendant knew a thing, as with Pardo’s clippings. It can supply a motive in the defendant’s own voice, as in the contested readings of Bychkov’s. It can be a list that hands a prosecutor the names, as with Naso. It can sit in a file for years, unread by anyone in authority who matters, as with Samsonova’s, or never leave the room where it was kept. In the two cases where it was read to a jury, in Florida and in California, the defendant answered it directly, one by admitting everything and the other by calling a line "loose talk." In the others the court, or the investigators acting before it, had to decide how much of a private text could be trusted, and in the Samsonova and Pichushkin files the answer was either very little or nothing at all.
• 1971 (Apr 6): date of the journal entry Kaczynski wrote, "I act merely from a desire for revenge."
• 1985 (Jun): Leonard Lake dies in custody after his arrest in South San Francisco.
• 1986 (May): Manuel Pardo arrested in Miami-Dade County.
• 1988 (Mar 22): Pardo’s lawyer gives notice of an insanity defense.
• 1988 (Apr 15): jury in Dade County convicts Pardo of nine counts of first-degree murder.
• 1996 (Apr 3): Kaczynski arrested at his cabin near Lincoln, Montana.
• 1996 (Jun 18): federal grand jury in Sacramento indicts Kaczynski.
• 1998 (Jan 22): Kaczynski pleads guilty in Sacramento.
• 1998 (May 4): Kaczynski sentenced to four consecutive life terms plus 30 years.
• 1999 (Feb 24): Ng convicted of 11 counts of first-degree murder; sentenced to death June 30.
• 2006 (Jun): Pichushkin arrested in Moscow; Radio Svoboda reports his destroyed diary.
• 2007 (Oct 24): jury convicts Pichushkin of 48 murders and 3 attempted murders.
• 2008 (Feb 14): Supreme Court of Russia upholds Pichushkin’s sentence.
• 2010 (Apr and May): Nevada probation officers search Naso’s house in Reno.
• 2011 (Apr): Naso arrested by Marin County detectives.
• 2012 (Jan): Bychkov detained in Belinsky, Penza Oblast.
• 2012 (Dec 11): Pardo executed.
• 2012 (Dec 12): Sumida dies in a holding cell in Kobe.
• 2013 (Mar 22): Penza Regional Court convicts Bychkov of nine murders.
• 2013 (Aug 20): jury convicts Naso of four murders; death sentence imposed November 22.
• 2015 (May): Sumida’s sister-in-law testifies in Kobe about her own diary.
• 2015 (Jul): Samsonova detained in St. Petersburg.
• 2015 (Aug 5): Interfax source says a case cannot be built on diary entries.
• 2017 (Mar 27): court releases Samsonova from criminal liability and orders compulsory treatment.
• 2022 (Jul 28): California Supreme Court affirms Ng’s death sentence.
• 2023 (Jun 10): Kaczynski dies in federal custody.