Most serial murder cases in this archive end the same way. A traffic stop, a DNA hit years later, a confession offered up when there was nothing left to trade. Eleven of them ended differently. Somebody got away, walked into a police station, and described the man.
Kanthi is the clearest case. Mohan Kumar met women in coastal Karnataka, married them or promised to, took them on a journey, and at some point handed them a tablet he said was contraception. Twenty women died that way. On 13 April 2009 Kanthi took what he gave her and lived. She became the prosecution's most important witness, and the reason a man who had killed twenty people was convicted of it.
The survivor's account is usually the first accurate description anyone has. Larry Bright was arrested in January 2005 because a woman who escaped him gave police a description and a vehicle; before that, eight women had died around Peoria and the investigation had nothing to work from. Herbert Baumeister had been killing men from Indianapolis bars since the early 1990s, and the community had been telling police so, largely without result. What changed it was one man who escaped and could give a description and a partial number plate.
Thor Christiansen shot four women in Los Angeles County and was caught because a woman he shot in April 1979 survived and identified him. Robert Frederick Carr was arrested in Florida in 1976 after an attack on a woman who survived, and once he was in custody he confessed to three killings and a long series of assaults nobody had connected. Thierry Paulin, who killed elderly women in Paris, was arrested on 1 December 1987 after a woman he attacked survived and named him.
Two of these cases turn on something more than a description.
Sergei Ryakhovsky killed at least eighteen people around Moscow. Six others survived his attacks, and it was a composite portrait drawn with one of them that led police to him, a picture assembled from the memory of somebody who had been attacked and lived, which is a harder thing to produce than it sounds.
Harvey Robinson attacked Denise Sam-Cali in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and she survived. The police did not simply take her statement. They set a watch on her house, on the expectation that he would come back for her. He did. He is on death row, and the case was made because a woman who had already been attacked once stayed in the house while police waited.
The rest are shorter but the shape is the same. Kendall Francois was caught when a woman escaped from his car in September 1998 and went to the police; under questioning he took detectives through all eight killings and told them where the bodies were, in a house he shared with his parents. Joe Metheny was arrested in December 1996 after a woman escaped from his trailer. Julio Pérez Silva's series in Alto Hospicio ended in 2001 when a girl escaped from his vehicle and went to the police, a case in which the authorities had spent months suggesting the missing girls had run away.
Read the eleven together and one thing is obvious. In nearly every case the police already had the deaths. What they did not have was a description, and no amount of investigation was producing one, because the only people who could give it were dead.
There is a second thing, less comfortable. Several of these investigations were going badly before the survivor arrived. Baumeister's community had reported him and been ignored. Pérez Silva's victims had been written off as runaways. Bright had killed eight women in a city that had not connected the cases. The survivor did not just supply a description; she supplied the credibility that the dead had not been granted.
These eleven women and men are usually a line in the middle of a case file, between the last killing and the arrest. They are the reason the arrest happened.