A death before trial is neither an acquittal nor a conviction. It is an ending without a verdict. The indictment lapses, the exhibits go back into storage, and whatever the investigators believed on the last day becomes the account that the newspapers repeat. Between 1974 and 2013, eight people died in custody with killings charged against them, confessed by them or attributed to them by the police, and with no judgment on any of it. Their cases run from a Montana valley to a Gloucester terrace, from Blackpool to the Mississippi, from Bavaria to Anchorage, from an industrial city in western Japan to the suburbs of Orange County. In every one of them the question a jury exists to answer was left open. In several, the figures attached to a name have been passed down ever since as if a court had settled them.
Susie Jaeger was seven, one of five children of a Michigan family on its first long camping trip, when she disappeared from a state park campground near Three Forks, Montana, in June 1973. The FBI took the case. For a year the family learned almost nothing. Then, on June 25, 1974, the first anniversary, a man telephoned her mother, Marietta Jaeger, at home in Michigan in the small hours and said he had taken her daughter.
She did not rage at him. She asked whether Susie was safe, told him she was worried about him too, and kept him on the line for more than an hour while the FBI recorded the call. The bureau said the recording helped identify the caller as David Meirhofer, a 24-year-old contractor from Manhattan, Montana, a few miles from the campground, described by those who knew of him as a loner. He had earlier passed a polygraph examination and a test with a so-called truth serum. A later call, also recorded, incriminated him. He was arrested and, according to a 2023 newspaper column, charged with Susie’s death and with the death of a young woman.
Marietta Jaeger had told the FBI she did not want him executed. A plea arrangement that spared him the death penalty was offered in exchange for a full confession, and he confessed to four deaths in Gallatin County: a 13-year-old boy in 1967; a 12-year-old Boy Scout in 1968; Sandra Smallegan, 19, of Manhattan, in February 1974; and Susie Jaeger. On September 29, 1974, a few hours after he confessed, he hanged himself in his cell. Accounts differ on the timing, one placing his death about four hours after the confession and another on his first night in jail. The FBI believed him severely mentally ill, a judgment no court ever weighed.
The case is remembered less for him than for her. Marietta Jaeger, who later used the name Marietta Jaeger Lane, forgave him, met his mother years afterward, and spent decades speaking against capital punishment, as an early member of Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation and, with Bill Pelke, one of the people who started Journey of Hope: From Violence to Healing. Speaking in Bozeman in 2008 about what executions give to families, she said: "It is not closure. It is not healing."
Frederick West was a builder in Gloucester when police arrested him on February 25, 1994, on suspicion of murdering his eldest daughter, Heather, who had been missing since 1987, when she was 16. No one had reported her missing. Over the spring of 1994 the deaths of others came to light in Gloucester and in the Herefordshire countryside near Much Marcle, where he was born.
He admitted killing Heather when he first appeared before the Gloucester magistrates. In the long series of police interviews that followed, 151 of them by one documentary’s count, his accounts swung between admission, denial and fresh claims. He insisted that his wife knew nothing, and he denied killing Anne McFall. He was charged with twelve murders: Anne McFall; his first wife, Catherine (Rena) Costello; his stepdaughter, Charmaine; Lynda Gough; Carol Ann Cooper; Lucy Partington; Therese Siegenthaler; Shirley Hubbard; Juanita Mott; Shirley Robinson; Alison Chambers; and Heather. Ten of the counts were brought jointly against him and his wife, Rosemary. The McFall and Costello counts were his alone.
On New Year’s Day 1995 he hanged himself in his remand cell at Winson Green prison in Birmingham, before facing trial. He was 53. His death ended every proceeding against him.
What sets his case apart is that the evidence was still heard, against someone else. Rosemary West stood trial alone at Winchester Crown Court before Mr Justice Mantell. On November 22, 1995, the jury convicted her of all ten murders she faced, and she was sentenced to life imprisonment. The Court of Appeal refused her leave to appeal in 1996, and in October 1997 the European Commission of Human Rights declared her application inadmissible because it had been lodged too late. A jury did rule on ten of the twelve deaths; it ruled on her. On the two deaths charged against him alone, no court reached any conclusion. Nor did any court reach one on the 1968 disappearance of Mary Bastholm, 15, in Gloucester, a case long linked to him in public discussion. He denied any part in it and was never charged.
Eric Boardman, 76, was a retired seaman well known in Blackpool’s seafaring community. His wife, Joan, 74, was remembered by neighbors as friendly and always ready to help. Their deaths came to light in Blackpool on October 30, 1998. Two days later, on November 1, police arrested Stephen Akinmurele, 20, on suspicion of their murders.
The inquiry widened quickly. By December 11, 1998, Akinmurele had also been charged with the murder of his former landlady, Jemima Cargill, 75, who had died in Blackpool on October 2, and with the murders of two older women in the Isle of Man village of Ballasalla: Marjorie Ashton, 72, who died in May 1995, and Dorothy Harris, 68, partly blind and partly deaf, who died in February 1996. The two Manx charges were later withdrawn on what the Blackpool Gazette called a legal technicality. In custody, the paper reported, he confessed to three further killings, among them a rambler on the Isle of Man. No charge followed from any of the three.
He had twice tried to take his own life, and his girlfriend had warned the prison authorities that he was a danger to himself. In August 1999, weeks before his trial was due, he hanged himself in his cell at Manchester Prison. He was 21. An inquest heard that he had left a note for his mother. Detective Superintendent Bob Denmark, who led the inquiry, later called him one of the most dangerous men he had ever met and said there would have been enough evidence to convict him. Dorothy Harris’s brother said he had no doubt who was responsible for her death. Both were private certainties, and neither was ever put to a jury.
By the spring of 2002 investigators on both sides of the Mississippi were examining the deaths of ten Black women in the St. Louis area since April 2001, the Associated Press reported. In May a reporter at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch received an anonymous letter with a computer-printed map. Investigators matched the map to Expedia.com and, through records obtained from Expedia and Microsoft, traced it to an internet user at a house in Ferguson, Missouri, a suburb north of the city. Maury Troy Travis, 36, a hotel waiter and a paroled robber, lived there.
FBI agents and St. Louis detectives took him into custody on June 7, 2002. A federal criminal complaint, filed that Friday in the U.S. District Court in East St. Louis, Illinois, and unsealed the following Monday, accused him of kidnapping two women, Alysia Greenwade and Betty James, and causing their deaths. He was not charged over any of the other women. His federal public defender declined to comment, and a hearing was set for that Wednesday to decide bond and whether he would be sent to Illinois to face the charges.
The hearing never took place. On June 10, three days after his arrest, Travis hanged himself in his jail cell and left a note. A month later the St. Louis journalist Traci Angel, writing in The Commonspace, recorded the questions that followed: he had been reported to be on suicide watch, and the authorities were being asked why the checks on him came only every 15 minutes.
The numbers grew after his death, in the absence of any court to test them. On June 24 the city’s police chief, Joe Mokwa, said evidence from the Ferguson house linked Travis to 12 women, and investigators said as many as six more might not yet have been identified. ABC News later reported that police believed he had killed between 12 and 20 women. The identifications went on for decades. Carol Jean Hemphill, whose death came to light in Columbia, Illinois, on March 28, 2002, was named in March 2025; in July 2025 the Illinois State Police and Southern Illinois University Edwardsville announced that two more women, Kelly Johnson and Crystal Lay, had been identified, and said all three were believed to have been victims of Travis. The state police director, Brendan Kelly, spoke of 17 women. The only accusations ever filed were the two in the complaint, and no judge heard evidence on either.
In early November 2006 the death of Miglena Petrova, 20, came to light outside Hostalric, a small town in the Catalan province of Girona. She came from Bulgaria and had worked as a waitress in a restaurant in the town of Dobrich; her relatives said she was three months pregnant. "We were expecting a baby," her husband told the Bulgarian daily 24 Hours. Investigators of the Mossos d’Esquadra, the Catalan police, identified a truck, traced it to its haulage company, and from there to the man who had been driving it: Volker Eckert, 47, a long-distance driver from Hof, in Bavaria.
A judge in Girona signed a European arrest warrant, and on Friday, November 17, 2006, German officers from Hof and agents sent from Catalonia arrested Eckert at his employer’s headquarters in Wesseling, near Cologne. Within days, the Girona prosecutor’s office said, he admitted killing Petrova and four other women, two in Spain and two in France. German police said he later told them of another death in the former East Germany in the 1970s, that of a 14-year-old schoolmate in his hometown of Plauen in 1974, when he was 15. He already had a record: in 1987, according to the Argentine newspaper Diario UNO, an East German court had sentenced him to 12 years for attempted murder involving two women.
He was held in Bavaria while a special commission of the Hof police checked his confessions and forces across Europe went back through their files on unsolved deaths of women near the roads he drove. No indictment or trial date was reported. On July 2, 2007, aged 48, he hanged himself in his cell at the prison in Bayreuth. By Diario UNO’s account, investigators by then held evidence in nine deaths in Germany, France, Spain and Italy and had linked as many as 19 to him, and German police closed the inquiry in December 2007. That higher figure was never put to a court, and no official source for it has been named. The six deaths he confessed to were never put to one either.
Samantha Koenig was 18 and worked at a drive-up coffee stand in midtown Anchorage. She was abducted on February 1, 2012, according to the federal indictment. Hundreds of people came to her memorial at West High School that April, where photographs of her lined the hall outside the auditorium. On March 13 a Texas Highway Patrol corporal stopped a rented car in Lufkin, Texas. The driver was Israel Keyes, 34, an Anchorage contractor and Army veteran. Her phone was in the car, and in his wallet was a debit card that had been used to collect a ransom paid for her return.
On April 18, 2012, a federal grand jury in Anchorage indicted him on three counts: kidnapping resulting in death, receiving and possessing ransom money, and access device fraud. The U.S. Attorney’s announcement carried the customary reminder that an indictment is only a charge and not evidence of guilt. He pleaded not guilty the next day. He was not charged with murder, and he was never charged in Vermont or anywhere else.
Over months of interviews with federal prosecutors, FBI agents and Anchorage detectives, he confessed to Samantha Koenig’s death and to the deaths in June 2011 of Bill and Lorraine Currier of Essex, Vermont, a couple he had never met. Bill Currier, 50, was an animal care technician at the University of Vermont; Lorraine, 55, worked at Fletcher Allen Health Care. Keyes described other killings but refused to name the victims. He bargained for a quick execution and for secrecy, chiefly to shield his young daughter.
He was held at the Anchorage Correctional Complex awaiting a trial set for the following year. On December 2, 2012, he died by suicide in his cell. The next day the federal prosecutor Kevin Feldis said Keyes had admitted killing at least five others besides Samantha Koenig and the Curriers. In Burlington, the U.S. Attorney for Vermont, Tristram Coffin, named him the only suspect in the Curriers' deaths and said the Vermont case was closed. In August 2013 the FBI, relying mainly on his own statements, said it believed him responsible for 11 homicides in fewer than ten states between 2001 and 2012, released video of his interviews, and asked the public for help. Only three of the eleven have names. In October 2026 the Vermont State Police still listed the Curriers among the state’s unsolved missing persons cases.
The Amagasaki case came to light in November 2011 in Hyogo Prefecture, in the industrial belt between Osaka and Kobe. At its center was Miyoko Sumida, head of a household of relatives by blood, marriage and adoption. She was arrested that month on suspicion of injuring a woman confined in the household. In February 2012 she and others were indicted over the death of a 66-year-old woman, charged as injury resulting in death. On November 7, 2012, she was re-arrested with several relatives on charges that included murder. The Hyogo police eventually confirmed eight deaths around the household.
On December 12, 2012, she died in a holding cell at the Hyogo Prefectural Police headquarters in Kobe. She was 64. The police treated the death as suicide and said there had been no breach of the rules on supervising detainees. Her lawyer told the Kobe Shimbun that at their last meeting, the day before, she had asked him to put his hand on hers. On the day she died, an investigator told a reporter from the same paper that her death was the greatest destruction of evidence in the whole case.
The courts then did, with the people around her, what they could not do with her. Between November 2014 and February 2016 the Kobe District Court tried seven members of the household: her sister-in-law, her two sons, her common-law husband, a cousin by marriage, her daughter-in-law, and a man who had married into the family. All seven were convicted of offenses over five deaths, three of them as murder, one as injury resulting in death and one as confinement, and in every trial the court ruled that the defendants had acted in conspiracy with her. The sentences ran from 15 years to life. The life term, imposed on the cousin by marriage, became final when the Supreme Court rejected his appeal in March 2018. Several defendants argued that they had only obeyed her. The judges accepted that they were subordinate and held that it did not excuse them. Jurors at the last trial said afterward how hard their decisions had been without her in the courtroom. Her own guilt was never adjudicated; she appears in the judgments only as the courts described her in convicting others.
Raquel Estrada, 53, and her son Juan Herrera, 34, died in their home in Yorba Linda, California, on October 25, 2011. Police first arrested and charged her other son, who spent about four months in jail. Between late December 2011 and mid-January 2012 the deaths of four men living outdoors in north Orange County came to light: James Patrick McGillivray, 53, in Placentia; Lloyd "Jimmy" Middaugh, 42, in Anaheim; Paulus Cornelius "Dutch" Smit, 57, in Yorba Linda; and John Berry, 64, a Vietnam veteran, in Anaheim. Police arrested Itzcoatl Ocampo, 23, a former Marine who had served in Iraq and who had been a school friend of the Estrada family’s surviving son, in Anaheim on January 13, 2012, the day John Berry died.
On February 3 the district attorney’s office dismissed the charges against the son and said it would add two murder counts against Ocampo, citing forensic evidence. District Attorney Tony Rackauckas said his office could no longer hold the son. On February 16 an Orange County grand jury indicted Ocampo on six counts of murder with special circumstances, including lying in wait. He pleaded not guilty in Santa Ana on February 21, and in May the district attorney announced that he would seek the death penalty. The trial slipped while his lawyers prepared an insanity defense, and in April 2013 OC Weekly reported that it would probably not begin until May 2014.
On the evening of November 27, 2013, he fell ill in his single cell at the Central Men’s Jail in Santa Ana. He died at Western Medical Center the next afternoon, Thanksgiving Day, aged 25. His lawyers called for an independent inquiry. The sheriff’s department declined to give a cause of death in the first days, and the autopsy went to an outside pathologist. In June 2015 the district attorney’s office issued its custodial death report; by the account of the journalist León Krauze, it concluded that no one in law enforcement bore criminal responsibility. No court ever ruled on Ocampo’s guilt, his sanity or the defense his lawyers had been building. Marie Middaugh, Lloyd’s mother, told CBS Los Angeles that her family felt "a little injustice because there wasn’t going to be a trial," and relief as well. "This is over," she said.
Set side by side, the eight cases show how little a charge sheet says by the time it is all that survives. Travis died facing a complaint naming two women. Keyes died indicted in a single case. Akinmurele had been charged with five murders and saw two of the counts withdrawn before he died. Eckert was held on a European arrest warrant over one death, with no indictment reported. Sumida had been indicted over one death and re-arrested on charges that included murder. Meirhofer, by one account, had been charged in two of the four deaths he confessed to. Only West and Ocampo died facing every death the prosecutors had attributed to them, and neither faced a jury.
The larger figures that travel with these names come from somewhere else: a police chief’s estimate in St. Louis, the FBI’s reading of a man’s own words in Alaska, a newspaper’s count of victims linked by German police, a prefectural police tally in Hyogo. Some of those figures may be right. None of them was ever tested by cross-examination, by a defense expert or by twelve people weighing the evidence.
In two of the cases a court did hear the evidence, through other defendants. Rosemary West was convicted of ten of the murders charged against her husband, and seven members of Miyoko Sumida’s household were convicted of crimes that the Kobe District Court said they had committed in conspiracy with her. Those were real verdicts with real sentences. They were not verdicts on the dead.
For the families, the absence of a trial lands in different ways. Marie Middaugh felt both cheated and spared. Marietta Jaeger had told the FBI she did not want the man who took her daughter executed, even before he confessed, and she spent the rest of her working life arguing that a killing by the state would not have helped her either. Between those two responses lie the families of the women in St. Louis whose names came back only in 2025, and of the people Israel Keyes described and never named, for whom there is no charge, no file closed by a judge and no one left to ask.
• June 1973: Susie Jaeger, 7, disappears during a family camping trip near Three Forks, Montana.
• June 25, 1974: a man who says he took her telephones her mother; the FBI records the call.
• September 29, 1974: David Meirhofer, who had confessed to four deaths, dies by hanging in his cell, untried.
• February 25, 1994: Fred West is arrested in Gloucester on suspicion of murdering his daughter Heather.
• January 1, 1995: West dies by hanging at Winson Green prison, Birmingham, charged with 12 murders and untried.
• November 22, 1995: Rosemary West is convicted of ten murders at Winchester Crown Court.
• October 30, 1998: the deaths of Eric and Joan Boardman come to light in Blackpool.
• November 1, 1998: Stephen Akinmurele, 20, is arrested.
• December 11, 1998: by this date he faces five murder charges; the two Isle of Man counts are later withdrawn.
• August 1999: Akinmurele dies by hanging in Manchester Prison, weeks before his trial.
• June 7, 2002: Maury Travis is taken into custody in Ferguson, Missouri; a federal complaint accuses him of kidnapping causing the deaths of two women.
• June 10, 2002: Travis dies by hanging in his jail cell.
• November 17, 2006: Volker Eckert is arrested in Wesseling, near Cologne, on a Spanish warrant.
• July 2, 2007: Eckert dies by hanging in his cell in Bayreuth, untried.
• December 2007: German police close their inquiry into Eckert, according to Diario UNO.
• November 2011: the Amagasaki case comes to light; Miyoko Sumida is arrested.
• January 13, 2012: Itzcoatl Ocampo is arrested in Anaheim.
• February 16, 2012: Ocampo is indicted on six counts of murder with special circumstances.
• March 13, 2012: Israel Keyes is arrested in Lufkin, Texas.
• April 18, 2012: Keyes is indicted in Anchorage on kidnapping resulting in death and two other counts.
• November 7, 2012: Sumida is re-arrested on charges including murder.
• December 2, 2012: Keyes dies by suicide at the Anchorage Correctional Complex.
• December 12, 2012: Sumida dies in a police holding cell in Kobe.
• August 2013: the FBI attributes 11 homicides to Keyes and appeals for help.
• November 28, 2013: Ocampo dies in hospital in Santa Ana, months before his trial.
• November 2014 to February 2016: seven members of Sumida’s household are convicted at the Kobe District Court.
• June 2015: the Orange County district attorney issues its custodial death report on Ocampo.
• March 2018: the Supreme Court of Japan rejects the last appeal in the Sumida household trials.
• March and July 2025: three women from Illinois cases linked to Travis are identified.