In the late summer of 2005 the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit gathered investigators, prosecutors and researchers in San Antonio, Texas, to set down what was actually known about serial murder. The report that came out of the meeting defined the crime simply, as the unlawful killing of two or more victims by the same offender in separate events, and it devoted a section to the myths that had grown up around it. One of those myths was that serial killers are all white men. "Contrary to popular belief, serial killers span all racial groups," the report said. It listed white, African-American, Hispanic and Asian offenders and observed that their racial makeup broadly mirrored that of the American population.
The cases gathered under that heading bear the point out from several directions. A Black railroad laborer hanged in Washington State in 1949. A trash company supervisor in Kansas City, a Navy veteran on Chicago’s South Side, a former Marine in Cleveland and a young freelance photographer in Atlanta. A career thief in Seoul, a farmer in central China, a former futon salesman in southern Japan, a Hong Kong taxi driver and a drifter who crossed four Chinese provinces on foot and by bicycle. Their victims were as varied as the men themselves: elderly couples and schoolchildren, young mothers and students, strangers and members of the offender’s own household. Some of these men were convicted of many killings and some of very few. Several were tied by police or by their own words to far more deaths than any court ever examined, and the distance between those numbers is part of each story.
At about 2:30 on the morning of October 30, 1947, two Tacoma patrol officers answering a report of screams saw a barefoot man run from the back of a house on the city’s south side. They chased him over several fences and cornered him in an alley. He pulled a jackknife and wounded both of them before he was subdued. Inside the house officers found Bertha Kludt, about 52, and her daughter, Beverly June Kludt, 17. Both had been killed with an ax.
The prisoner was Jake Bird, 45, a transient laborer who had spent much of his adult life working on railroad section gangs. HistoryLink, the online encyclopedia of Washington history, gives his birth year as 1901 and his birthplace as Louisiana, and records a long criminal record of burglaries and assaults. Bird dictated and signed a confession that morning. He said he had come to burgle the house.
The prosecutor charged a single count of first-degree murder, for Bertha Kludt’s death; it was then customary to file one charge when more than one person had been killed, and Beverly June’s death was never charged separately. The physical evidence was overwhelming: the victims' blood on his clothing, his fingerprints on the ax handle. A police witness admitted at trial that officers had beaten Bird after his arrest, but the judge ruled that the beating had nothing to do with the confession, and it was read to the jury. On November 26, 1947, a jury of nine men and three women deliberated for 35 minutes, found Bird guilty and recommended death.
At his sentencing, HistoryLink reports, Bird told the courtroom that everyone connected with the case would die before he did. Within a year the trial judge, the undersheriff who drove him to prison, the court reporter, the detective who took his confession and his own defense lawyer were dead, all of heart attacks according to the Tacoma press of the time. The run of deaths became known locally as the Jake Bird Hex.
On death row at Walla Walla, Bird began to talk about other killings. He claimed at least 44 over two decades, mostly of women, in about a dozen states, and Governor Monrad Wallgren granted him a 60-day reprieve so that police could hear him out. HistoryLink’s historian Daryl McClary writes that 11 of the claims were substantiated, without naming the cases, and that police in several states used Bird’s statements to close files. No other state ever charged him. He was hanged at the Washington State Penitentiary at 12:20 a.m. on July 15, 1949, before about 125 witnesses, and buried in the prison cemetery under his convict number. HistoryLink counts him as the 63rd prisoner, and the seventh African American, executed in Washington since 1904.
Through the second half of the 1990s women were found dead, one after another, in Englewood and New City on the South Side of Chicago. When cold-case officers sent the evidence from a dozen unsolved killings and three rapes to the Illinois State Police laboratory, Newsweek reported in September 1999, the DNA results showed not one attacker but four. The police labeled them Patterns A through D. Pattern A was tied to more killings than any of the others, and its profile matched none of the 261 registered sex offenders in the area.
Pattern A was Andre Crawford, a Navy veteran who lived much of the time on the streets of the same neighborhoods. Acting on a tip, police picked him up in late January 2000 on an unrelated matter. He gave a DNA sample that matched the profile and then a series of video-recorded confessions. On January 30, 2000, he was charged with ten counts of first-degree murder, 11 counts of aggravated criminal sexual assault and one of attempted murder. "Nothing takes the place of good old-fashioned police work," Superintendent Terry Hillard said at the news conference.
The women whose murders he would be convicted of are named in the Illinois Appellate Court’s 2013 opinion: Patricia Dunn, Rhonda King, Angela Shatteen, Tommie Dennis, Shaguanta Langley, Sonji Brandon, Nicole Townsend, Evandre Harris, Cheryl Cross, Sheryl Johnson and Constance Bailey. The first, prosecutors said, was killed in September 1993; Sheryl Johnson was found in April 1999. Most had been strangled. A 12th woman was attacked on Thanksgiving night in 1997 and survived by lying still until her attacker left. She later picked Crawford out of a lineup and testified against him.
One of his confessions exposed a wrongful conviction. Rhonda King, 18, found dead in December 1994, had been counted as a victim of another Englewood man, who had confessed to her killing and been sentenced to death for it with five other murders. After Crawford told a prosecutor he remembered killing King, the state moved in February 2000 to vacate the other man’s conviction and death sentence for her murder. Reviewing the history in 2013, Justice DeLort of the Appellate Court called that series of events "extraordinarily troubling."
Crawford spent ten years in the Cook County Jail awaiting trial, the longest-held inmate in its history, according to ABC7 Chicago. About 90 witnesses testified before Judge Evelyn Clay in late 2009. On December 10, 2009, the jury found him guilty of the murders and sexual assaults of 11 women and the attempted murder and sexual assault of the 12th. It found him eligible for death but did not impose it; one juror said ten had voted for death and two held out. He was sentenced to natural life. The Appellate Court affirmed in December 2013, and on March 26, 2014, the Illinois Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal, leaving him serving life.
On the evening of October 29, 2009, Cleveland police went to a three-story house on the city’s east side with warrants to arrest the man who lived there and to search his home. A woman had reported in September that he raped her there. He was not in. On the third floor officers found the bodies of two women. Over the following days investigators, working with the county coroner, a cadaver dog and finally a backhoe, recovered the remains of eleven women from the house and the yard behind it.
The tenant was Anthony Sowell, 50, a former Marine who had served 15 years in prison for attempted rape and had been registered as a sex offender at that address since his release in 2005. All eleven women were Black, as was he. Most were mothers. The coroner’s office identified them by early December: Crystal Dozier, Tishana Culver, Leshanda Long, Michelle Mason, Tonia Carmichael, Kim Yvette Smith, Nancy Cobbs, Amelda Hunter, Telacia Fortson, Janice Webb and Diane Turner. They had disappeared between 2007 and 2009, several of them from the streets around the house. Seven died of ligature strangulation, the coroner found, and one most likely of strangulation by hand.
A member of the public recognized Sowell from television news on October 31 and called the police, who arrested him in the street. Questioned on video for more than 11 hours, he admitted nothing and said he did not know the bodies were on his property.
The case became an indictment of the city as much as of the man. In December 2008 a woman had fled his house and flagged down a police car; he was arrested and released without charges, and, according to a detective’s report obtained by CBS News, the allegations were marked "unfounded." Families said the police had dismissed their missing relatives. "They release 'em, it’s like trout fishing where you catch and release," Tim McGinty, then a Cuyahoga County judge, told CBS News of the city’s practice with rape suspects. A mayoral commission made 26 recommendations in March 2010, among them a missing persons unit. In 2018 Cleveland agreed to pay 1 million dollars to the families of six women who disappeared after the December 2008 release, Ideastream reported.
A Cuyahoga County jury convicted Sowell on July 22, 2011, of the aggravated murder of all eleven women, on 81 counts in all, among them the rape, kidnapping and attempted murder of women who survived. Judge Dick Ambrose imposed eleven death sentences that August. "We will continue to be here when you are long gone," Tonia Carmichael’s daughter told him in court. The Supreme Court of Ohio affirmed in December 2016. Sowell was never executed. He died of a terminal illness at the prison medical center in Columbus on February 8, 2021, at 61. The house was demolished in December 2011, and in November 2021 the Garden of 11 Angels, a memorial bearing the women’s names, opened on the land nearby.
Lorenzo Gilyard supervised garbage crews for a Kansas City trash company. His employer’s spokesman described him after his arrest as reliable, friendly and hardworking, and neighbors remembered a man who helped clear the street after an ice storm. He was also a man with a long record, the Associated Press reported, in and out of jail in the 1970s and 1980s on charges that included molestation, burglary and assault.
In December 1987, while investigating the death of a woman named Sheila Ingold, Kansas City police took a sample of his blood. No charge followed, and the sample sat in storage for more than 15 years. A federal grant in 2003 paid for DNA analysis of evidence from the city’s old unsolved killings of women, and the crime lab linked a series of them to one unknown man. On April 12, 2004, the lab matched that profile to Gilyard’s 1987 sample. He was arrested within days and charged with ten counts of first-degree murder and two of capital murder. A 13th count followed in 2006. The charges covered deaths from 1977 to 1993; all of the women and girls had been strangled. "This is another example as to what DNA evidence can do for us in law enforcement," Jackson County Prosecutor Mike Sanders said.
The women in the counts that went to trial were Catherine Barry, 34; Naomi Kelly, 23; Ann Barnes, 36; Kellie Ford, 20; Angela Mayhew, 19; Sheila Ingold, 36; and Carmeline Hibbs, 30. Naomi Kelly had been attending business college and raising two children. "The one thing I hate the most is that Naomi never got to raise her children," her sister said at the sentencing.
In January 2007 prosecutors agreed not to seek the death penalty if Gilyard waived a jury and nearly all of his appeal rights. On the first day of trial, March 5, 2007, they dismissed six counts and went forward on the seven they considered strongest, all from 1986 and 1987. Gilyard denied killing anyone. On March 16, 2007, Judge John O’Malley, sitting alone, found him guilty of the first-degree murders of Barry, Kelly, Barnes, Ford, Ingold and Hibbs; in each case his DNA had been found on the body. He acquitted him in Angela Mayhew’s death, the one tried count without DNA evidence. "These crimes have gone unsolved and unpunished for two decades," the judge wrote. In April 2007 he imposed six consecutive life terms without parole. "He’s forfeited any right to live here among the rest of us," O’Malley said. The six dismissed counts, covering the deaths of Stacie Swofford, Gwendolyn Kizine, Margaret Miller, Debbie Blevins, Helga Kruger and Connie Luther, were never tried. Gilyard was in the Missouri prison system as of December 2007.
Between July 1979 and May 1981 a long series of Black children, teenagers and young men in Atlanta disappeared and were found dead. The official list of the missing and murdered grew to 29 or 30 names, depending on the count. Parents led by Camille Bell, whose son Yusuf, 9, had been found dead in 1979, formed the Committee to Stop Children’s Murders and pressed the city to treat the deaths as connected. By the spring of 1981 a task force of local, state and federal officers was watching the bridges over the Chattahoochee River, where bodies had begun to surface.
At about 3 a.m. on May 22, 1981, a surveillance team at one of those bridges heard a loud splash. A white station wagon crossed the bridge, turned and crossed back, and officers stopped it. The driver was Wayne Williams, 23, a freelance photographer and the only child of two Atlanta schoolteachers. With no body and no probable cause, they let him go. Two days later the body of Nathaniel Cater, 27, was pulled from the river downstream. Williams was arrested on June 21, 1981, and indicted for the murders of Cater and of Jimmy Ray Payne, 21, whose body had been found in the same river in April.
The trial before Judge Clarence Cooper opened in late December 1981 and ran about nine weeks. The heart of the state’s case was fiber and hair evidence: experts from the FBI, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police linked fibers and dog hairs on the two men to Williams’s bedroom carpet, a bedspread, the station wagon and the family’s German shepherd. The judge also allowed evidence about ten other deaths on the task force list, to show a pattern. On February 27, 1982, a jury of nine women and three men, eight of them Black, found Williams guilty of both murders. He received two consecutive life sentences. "It was the fibers, that was all I saw," his lawyer, Alvin Binder, said.
Days later the task force closed 22 more of the child and young adult cases and attributed them to Williams. He was never charged with any of them, never tried for them, and has always denied all of the killings, including the two of which he was convicted. The Supreme Court of Georgia affirmed his convictions in 1983, and his state and federal habeas challenges failed. Families have never agreed about him: some believe he killed their children, and others believe he did not. In 2019 Atlanta reopened the child cases and sent evidence for modern DNA testing; as of December 2022 no results had been released, and families were asking for them. The state parole board denied him parole in November 2019 and set his next consideration for November 2027, the Associated Press reported. In June 2023 the city lit an eternal flame at City Hall in the victims' memory.
On September 24, 2003, a retired university professor, 73, and his wife, 68, were killed in their two-story house in Sinsa-dong, in Seoul’s Gangnam district. Over the next eight weeks three more households were attacked in the same way, in Seodaemun-gu, in Gangnam again and in Jongno-gu: three generations of one family, the wife of a wealthy man, and an 87-year-old homeowner with the woman who kept house for him. Eight people died. Cash and valuables were left behind, Yonhap reported, and police treated the cases as separate crimes.
Then the pattern changed. From March 2004 young women began to disappear in western Seoul. Police would later trace them to a rented room in Mapo-gu and to the man who lived there, Yoo Young-chul, born in 1970, a thief who had spent about 11 years of his adult life in prison and had been released in 2003.
Detectives did not catch him first. The operators of the businesses whose women kept vanishing noticed that each had gone to the same customer. In the early hours of July 15, 2004, they arranged a meeting in Sinchon, seized him and held him until officers arrived, the newspaper Pressian reported. He escaped from a police station the same day and was recaptured at Yeongdeungpo Station the next morning. On July 18 Seoul’s police chief announced that Yoo had confessed to at least 19 killings, and investigators began recovering the women’s remains. In custody his own count rose to 26 and then past 30; police considered most of the additions untrue.
On December 13, 2004, the Seoul Central District Court convicted him of 20 murders, most of the victims elderly people and women, and sentenced him to death. It acquitted him of a 21st, the February 2004 stabbing of a young woman in Imun-dong, finding that his confession did not match the physical evidence; he had retracted it in court, saying a police officer promised to pay for his son’s education. Yoo did not appeal, and the death sentence became final. The Supreme Court upheld the Imun-dong acquittal on June 9, 2005.
South Korea has carried out no execution since December 30, 1997. In September 2023 the Ministry of Justice moved Yoo to the Seoul Detention Center in Uiwang, the facility with the country’s working execution chamber, and the transfer set off speculation that executions might resume. None followed. As of October 6, 2026, Yonhap reported, he was one of 52 people on South Korea’s death row. The Korea Herald has called him the first offender in the country to be publicly described as a psychopath, and the 2008 film The Chaser drew on his case.
Pingyu County lies in the southeast of Henan province, under the city of Zhumadian. Between September 2001 and November 2003 teenagers and young men from the county, most of them students, began to vanish. The man responsible was Huang Yong, a local farmer reported to be 29 at the time of his trial.
The disappearances went unconnected until November 2003, when one more youth escaped from Huang, seriously injured, and went to the police. Huang was arrested on November 21, People’s Daily Online reported. A police record from the scene, quoted the next spring by the Beijing Youth Daily, has him telling the youth who escaped that he had already killed more than 20 people.
On December 9, 2003, a court sitting in Pingyu convicted Huang of intentional homicide in the deaths of 17 young people, with one more seriously injured, and sentenced him to death with lifelong deprivation of political rights. The court found, as People’s Daily Online summarized its judgment, that he had been shaped by violent films since childhood and wanted to become a professional killer, and it called the crimes extremely vicious and cruel. He did not appeal. After the Henan Higher People’s Court completed its review of the death sentence, he was shot on December 26, 2003. In his last days, China News Service reported, he spoke with journalists and said he wished to see his parents.
The official toll did not settle the matter. In November 2003 relatives of victims told reporters that county police had given them a figure of 23 dead, 18 of them students. When further evidence was recovered in Pingyu in the spring of 2004, Ministry of Public Security DNA tests linked it to two young people already on the list, Han Peng and Zhai Pengchao. Police acknowledged failings in the original investigation, and the head of the police technical unit responsible was removed from his post, the Beijing Youth Daily reported in April 2004. No killing beyond the 17 was ever charged.
The case that Japanese reporters came to call the Kitakyushu serial confinement murders surfaced on March 6, 2002, when a 17-year-old girl walked into a police station with her grandfather. She had lived since she was a young child with a couple in rented apartments in Kokurakita Ward, in the city of Kitakyushu. The next day Fukuoka prefectural police arrested a man and a woman, both about 40, who refused to give their names. They were Futoshi Matsunaga, a former door-to-door futon salesman from Yanagawa who had gone into hiding with his partner after his business collapsed in 1992, and Junko Ogata, a former kindergarten teacher who had been with him since the early 1980s.
Over the following months prosecutors reconstructed what had happened in those apartments. Matsunaga, the courts found, kept the people around him confined, hungry and afraid, drew money from them and their families, and made them harm one another. Between February 1996 and June 1998 seven people died under his control: the girl’s father, a 34-year-old real estate agent, and six members of Ogata’s own family, her father, mother and younger sister, the sister’s husband, and the couple’s two children, a boy of five and a girl of ten. The Fukuoka District Court found that four of them were strangled by other captives acting under threat, on his and Ogata’s orders. No remains were ever found. A former prosecutor on the case told the writer Kazuteru Ono that investigators searched as far as the sewers.
On September 28, 2005, the Kokura branch of the Fukuoka District Court convicted Matsunaga of six murders, one count of injury resulting in death (Ogata’s father), two counts of confinement causing injury, fraud and robbery, and sentenced both defendants to death. Matsunaga denied the killings throughout, telling the court that the family members had killed one another. On appeal in September 2007 the Fukuoka High Court upheld his death sentence and reduced Ogata’s to life imprisonment, finding that she had acted under his domination after years of abuse. The Supreme Court rejected his final appeal on December 12, 2011.
The deaths of a woman of 32 and her two-year-old daughter, who lived with the couple in 1993 and 1994, were handled at the time as a suicide and an accident and were never charged. Matsunaga remained under sentence of death, and no execution of him had been reported, as of August 2026. The girl whose escape ended the case later married and had children, Bunshun Online reported in 2024.
Between February and July 1982, four women who rode in a Hong Kong taxi in the small hours did not reach home. The driver was Lam Kor-wan, 27, the eldest of seven children, who had driven a cab since 1979 and preferred the night shift. He lived with his family in To Kwa Wan, in Kowloon. Both the South China Morning Post and Sing Tao, which revisited the case in a long series in 2023, describe a childhood under a violent father.
The four women were Chan Fung-lan, in her early twenties and the mother of two daughters, killed on February 3; Chan Wan-kit, 31, on May 29; Leung Sau-wan, 29, on June 17; and Leung Wai-sum, 17, who had just finished her secondary school exams and was going home from her graduation dinner on the rainy night of July 2. Her classmates had asked her to go dancing afterward; she said no, Sing Tao reported, because she did not want her mother to worry. All four were strangled.
After Chan Fung-lan was found in Sha Tin in February, police questioned hundreds of people and then turned to the taxi trade, where Sing Tao put the fleet of the period at about 16,000 cars and nearly 30,000 drivers. They did not find their man. The break came from a photo shop. In August 1982 a customer left a roll of film to be printed, and a technician who saw what the pictures showed alerted his managers, who called the police. On August 17 officers waited at the shop in Tsim Sha Tsui and arrested Lam when he came to collect the prints. A search of the family flat followed. Lam’s younger brother, who slept in the bunk above him, was detained and released for lack of evidence.
For weeks Lam said nothing. A homicide detective, Leung Ping, won his trust over breakfasts of dim sum and talk of ghosts, and persuaded him that the women could be identified and buried. In his tenth interview, Leung testified, Lam called himself in English a "Rainy Night Killer," the phrase from which the papers made his nickname, the Rainy Night Butcher. The case was the first in Hong Kong to rely on dental evidence for identification, HK01 reported, and it led to the founding of the territory’s forensic odontology group.
Tried in the High Court in March 1983 before an all-male jury, Lam was convicted of four counts of murder and sentenced to death on April 8, 1983. His father, who testified, asked the court why no one said society bore responsibility. In August 1984 the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, as every death sentence in Hong Kong had been since 1966; the territory abolished capital punishment in 1993. In 1986 his father set up memorial tablets for the four women at a Taoist temple in Tsuen Wan. Reports in 2018 that Lam would be paroled began with a radio host’s social media post and were not borne out. As of October 2023 he was still serving his sentence, and Sing Tao reported that he had never apologized to the families.
Yang Xinhai was born in 1968 in a village in Zhengyang County, in southern Henan, into one of the poorest families there, China Newsweek reported. He was the only one of six children to reach senior high school, and he left it in his final year without telling anyone. He drifted through mining and construction work, was sent twice to reeducation through labor, and in 1996 was convicted of attempted rape and sentenced to five years in prison.
After his release, which Reuters dated to 1999 and Chinese reports to 2000, Yang began moving through the countryside of Henan, and later of Anhui, Shandong and Hebei, on foot and by bicycle, entering poor farmhouses at night and attacking the families inside as they slept. For years no one connected the cases. Each county force assumed its killer was local, China Newsweek reported; villagers were fingerprinted and gave blood samples, and at least two innocent men were held on suspicion before they were cleared. Henan police began linking cases in three counties in November 2002, and in August 2003 the Ministry of Public Security tied the Anhui and Shandong killings to the Henan series.
In November 2003 officers inspecting entertainment venues in Cangzhou, in Hebei, noticed a man behaving suspiciously and detained him. He was Yang. The South China Morning Post, citing the Beijing News, reported that he confessed to 22 cases in which 65 people were killed and five seriously injured, 49 of the dead in Henan. He told police the weeks in Cangzhou had been the happiest of his life.
Yang was convicted, sentenced to death and executed on February 14, 2004, Agence France-Presse and Reuters reported; Reuters gave the toll as 67 dead and called him one of China’s worst serial killers. When People’s Daily Online surveyed China’s serial murder cases in 2012, his had the highest death toll of the seven it listed.
The men in these cases were a railroad laborer, a Navy veteran, a former Marine, a trash company supervisor, a freelance photographer, a career thief, a farmer, a futon salesman, a taxi driver and a migrant drifter. They lived in Tacoma and Chicago, Cleveland and Kansas City, Atlanta and Seoul, a county seat in Henan, a port city in Kyushu and a crowded flat in Kowloon. Their victims ranged from an elderly professor and his wife to schoolchildren, from young mothers to farming families in villages with no bus service.
Several of the series ran for years before anyone joined the files together. In Englewood and Kansas City the connection waited on DNA laboratories; in Cleveland, on a rape complaint that police took more than a month to act on, CBS News reported; in rural China, on the Ministry of Public Security. In Hong Kong the case broke when a photo technician looked at a roll of film, and in Seoul when the operators of the businesses whose women kept disappearing set a trap of their own. In Pingyu it took a teenager who got away. None of those breaks depended on what the man responsible looked like.
• October 30, 1947: Bertha Kludt and her daughter Beverly June Kludt killed in Tacoma; Jake Bird arrested nearby.
• November 26, 1947: Bird convicted of first-degree murder; the jury recommends death.
• July 15, 1949: Bird hanged at the Washington State Penitentiary, Walla Walla.
• July 1979 to May 1981: The Atlanta missing and murdered children cases.
• May 22, 1981: Wayne Williams stopped on a Chattahoochee River bridge after officers hear a splash.
• June 21, 1981: Williams arrested and charged with the murder of Nathaniel Cater.
• February 3 to July 2, 1982: Four women killed in Hong Kong.
• February 27, 1982: Williams convicted of murdering Cater and Jimmy Ray Payne; two life terms.
• August 17, 1982: Lam Kor-wan arrested at a Tsim Sha Tsui photo shop.
• April 8, 1983: Lam sentenced to death; commuted to life in August 1984.
• December 1987: Kansas City police take a blood sample from Lorenzo Gilyard.
• September 1993: The first killing in the series later charged against Andre Crawford, according to prosecutors.
• February 1996 to June 1998: Seven people die under Futoshi Matsunaga’s control in Kitakyushu.
• January 2000: Crawford arrested in Chicago and charged after a DNA match.
• September 2001: The first of the Pingyu County killings later charged against Huang Yong.
• March 7, 2002: Matsunaga and Junko Ogata arrested in Kitakyushu.
• September 24, 2003: The first of Yoo Young-chul’s killings, in Seoul.
• November 2003: Huang Yong arrested in Pingyu County; Yang Xinhai detained in Cangzhou.
• December 26, 2003: Huang executed after his conviction for 17 killings.
• February 14, 2004: Yang executed.
• April 2004: Gilyard arrested after a DNA match to his 1987 blood sample.
• July 15 and 16, 2004: Yoo seized in Sinchon, escapes and is recaptured.
• December 13, 2004: Yoo convicted of 20 murders and sentenced to death.
• September 28, 2005: Matsunaga sentenced to death in Kokura.
• March 16, 2007: Gilyard convicted of six murders and acquitted of a seventh.
• October 29, 2009: Police find the first bodies in Anthony Sowell’s house in Cleveland.
• December 10, 2009: Crawford convicted of 11 murders.
• July 22, 2011: Sowell convicted of the aggravated murder of 11 women.
• December 12, 2011: Japan’s Supreme Court rejects Matsunaga’s final appeal.
• February 8, 2021: Sowell dies in custody, never executed.
• November 2027: Williams’s next scheduled parole consideration, as set in 2019.