Thirty-one people in this archive escaped from custody. Most were retaken within days and the escape is a line in the middle of the entry, between the arrest and the sentence. For eight of them it is the reason the rest of the entry exists.
Mukosi Mulaudzi escaped from prison in South Africa in 1996. Between 2004 and 2006 he killed eleven more people in Venda, almost all of them women and children, sometimes wiping out an entire household. Everything he is known for happened after the state had already had him.
Daniel Camargo Barbosa left the Colombian penal colony on Gorgona Island in 1984 on a raft he built himself. The authorities assumed the sea had taken him. He reached the mainland, crossed into Ecuador, and killed at least seventy-two more people before he was caught in 1986. His victim count is one of the highest in this archive and nearly all of it dates from after the escape.
Roberto Succo killed his parents at fifteen and was detained in a psychiatric hospital. He escaped in 1986 and killed five more people across Italy and France before he was caught in 1988. Bartolomeo Gagliano, who has no murder conviction and was found not criminally responsible each time, escaped from a psychiatric facility with another patient on January 11, 1989, and two people were shot dead within six weeks, one of them on Valentine's Day, which is where the Italian press got the name they gave him. He escaped five times in all.
Vinko Pintaric escaped in September 1989 and stayed at large in the hills of his home region in Croatia for almost two years. Three more of his neighbors were shot during that time: Rudolf Belina, Barbara Sipek and Bozo Habek. He was living close to the people he was killing, in country he knew better than anyone looking for him.
Allan Legere escaped from custody in New Brunswick in 1989 and murdered four people in the Miramichi valley over the following seven months. Michael St Clair escaped from an Oklahoma prison in 1991 and killed a man in Kentucky during the flight itself. Elifasi Msomi was arrested, escaped, and killed again before he was recaptured, which is part of why the case is still remembered in KwaZulu-Natal.
Ted Bundy is the case everyone knows, and it is worth being precise about what happened. He escaped twice in Colorado. The second time he reached Florida, and the Chi Omega attacks and the killing of Kimberly Leach followed. The trials that produced his death sentences were for crimes committed while he was a fugitive from a courthouse.
The other twenty-three escapes ended without another death, and several of them are almost comic. Albert DeSalvo walked out of Bridgewater and gave himself up the following month. Lydia Trueblood escaped once during a twenty-year sentence and was paroled in 1941 anyway. Linwood Briley got off Virginia's death row in 1984 with four other men and was back within three weeks; he was electrocuted that October.
Two are unresolved in a way the others are not. Sharon Kinne escaped from a Mexican prison in 1969 and was never recaptured, she lived in Alberta under another name for fifty-three years, and was only identified after her death in 2022. The Bender family of Labette County simply were not there when anyone went to look, and the official position remains that they escaped.
Read together, the eight that mattered have something in common that the twenty-three do not. Six of the eight were held on a psychiatric or medical detention rather than in a prison. Succo, Gagliano, Camargo Barbosa and Msomi among them, and the escape was from a hospital, a transfer, or an island colony that was not built to hold anyone. The prison escapes were mostly recaptured quickly. The failures were in the places that were never really custody in the first place.
The other thing they share is time. Mulaudzi was free for eight years before he killed again. Pintaric lasted two, Legere seven months, Camargo Barbosa two years. There is no case here of a man escaping and killing immediately, which is the version the film industry prefers. What happened instead is that the state lost track of someone, and years later the consequence arrived somewhere else.