This archive keeps convicted counts and claimed counts in separate fields, and a companion piece, SEVEN COUNTS THAT ARE ONLY A CONFESSION, deals with the numbers that came from the killer's own mouth. These eight are the other problem. In every one of them the number attached to the name is large, famous, and repeated everywhere, and no court has ever tested any part of it, because no court ever convicted the person of a murder at all.
Elizabeth Bathory is the oldest and the largest. Witnesses at the 1611 proceedings testified to figures in the region of thirty-seven to fifty-one. One of them, a woman named Susannah, referred to a book kept by Bathory listing six hundred and fifty. No such book was ever produced and nobody else corroborated it. Bathory was never tried. Four of her servants were, and three were executed. She was confined at Csejte by royal order in December 1610 and died there in 1614. The number the world remembers is the one that came from a single witness describing a document nobody has seen.
Dr John Bodkin Adams was tried at the Old Bailey in 1957 for the murder of Edith Alice Morrell, an eighty-one-year-old stroke patient, in what was then the longest murder trial in English history. The defense produced the nurses' own day books, which contradicted their evidence about the doses given. He was acquitted. The figure of up to a hundred and sixty-three suspected deaths follows him through every account written since. This archive does not treat him as a murderer, and what he actually was remains the argument: a man who killed wealthy patients for their legacies, or a greedy and incompetent doctor easing the deaths of the dying at a time when the law had not settled what that meant.
Marie Besnard was first charged in 1949 and acquitted in December 1961, after three trials and years in custody. Up to twelve deaths were suspected. Nothing was ever proved. Her case is remembered in France as a landmark in forensic evidence, the trial at which soil contamination and laboratory practice were put to a jury and won, and this roster carries her victim count as null.
Kazeem Adeyemo was killed in a shoot-out with Nigerian police in April 2006. Around fifty deaths were attributed to him afterwards. There is no trial, no court record, no victim list, no autopsy findings and no independent account: everything attached to his name comes from statements made by the police who shot him, reported in the Nigerian press over the following days. That is not a reason to assume the statements were false. It is a reason to be exact about what the entry is, which is a police account of a man who cannot answer it, with a round figure attached.
Felicitas Sanchez Aguillon, whom the Mexican press called the Ogress of Colonia Roma, was processed in April 1941 on charges of abortion and illegal burial. She was never charged with murder. She died that June, weeks later, so the allegations were never tested at all. The figure of forty to fifty that the press of the period attached to her cannot be confirmed and never was.
Gladys Lila Young ran a maternity home in Nova Scotia. Estimates in the Nova Scotia literature run from four hundred to six hundred deaths over nineteen years. She was charged in 1936 with two counts of manslaughter over the deaths of Eva Nieforth and her newborn child, and acquitted at a three-day trial that May. In the 1940s she and her husband were convicted repeatedly under the province's maternity boarding house legislation and fined small sums, which they paid before carrying on trading. No exhumation program was ever carried out and no register of the dead exists.
David Parker Ray was convicted in 2000 and 2001 of kidnapping, criminal sexual penetration and conspiracy, and sentenced to two hundred and twenty-four years. He was never convicted of any murder and no victim's body was ever recovered. The figure of sixty deaths that attaches to his name in almost every account of the case comes from an unrecorded remark attributed to an investigator. What he was convicted of is established and is bad enough.
Cecile Bombeek, a nun in charge of a Catholic geriatric ward in Belgium, was found unfit to stand trial and committed to a psychiatric facility, so there is no conviction and no judgment. Three deaths are established and more were suspected. The accessible sourcing is Belgian press reporting from 1977 and encyclopaedia summaries, and the count has never been tested in any court.
Trace the eight figures back and none of them originates with a court. Bathory's six hundred and fifty is one witness describing a book. Ray's sixty is an unrecorded remark by an investigator. Adeyemo's fifty is a statement by the officers who shot him. Sanchez's forty to fifty is the press of 1941. Young's four to six hundred is an estimate in the secondary literature. Adams's hundred and sixty-three is an inference drawn from the wills of patients who died. What these have in common is that each was produced by somebody with no obligation to be right, and then repeated by everyone who came afterwards.
There is an obvious objection and it deserves answering. Several of these people almost certainly did kill somebody. Bombeek's three deaths are established. Ray's trailer and the equipment in it are a matter of record. Saying the number is unsupported is not the same as saying nothing happened, and this archive is not in the business of exoneration by technicality.
But the number is what people carry away, and in these eight the number is the least reliable thing on the page. An acquittal, an unfitness finding, a death before trial and a police shooting are four different endings, and none of them is a verdict. The honest version of each of these entries is shorter and duller than the one in circulation, and this roster prefers it.
Editor's note: this article was written from this archive's own roster and covers eight entries, chosen because none of them carries a murder conviction. That is the criterion and it is applied strictly: David Parker Ray's convictions for kidnapping, criminal sexual penetration and conspiracy are real and are stated, and it is the murder figure that has no verdict behind it. John Bodkin Adams and Marie Besnard were both acquitted, and neither entry should be read as an account of murders. Cecile Bombeek was found unfit to stand trial. Gladys Lila Young was acquitted of manslaughter and convicted only of licensing offenses. Elizabeth Bathory, Felicitas Sanchez Aguillon and Kazeem Adeyemo were never tried at all. The companion piece SEVEN COUNTS THAT ARE ONLY A CONFESSION covers the numbers that came from the offender rather than from everyone else.