In June 2003 a court in Contra Costa County, California, sentenced a man named Curtis Kimball to 15 years to life for murder. The name was borrowed. The man who stood in the dock had been Robert Evans in New Hampshire, Gordon Jenson at an RV park in Santa Cruz County, and Larry Vanner to the woman he was convicted of killing. Nobody who sentenced him knew who he was.
That gap between the name on the paperwork and the person behind it runs through the cases that follow. A false name is a practical instrument before it is anything else. It defeats a records check, delays a fingerprint comparison, keeps one county from talking to the next. In some of these cases the name hid a record; in others it hid a past that investigators spent years or decades reconstructing. What follows is the story, case by case, of how nine men lived under names that were not their own, and how, in each instance, the real person was finally put on paper.
Born in Colorado on December 23, 1943, according to the Attorney General’s timeline, he grew up in Phoenix and worked as an electrician. Over four decades he was Robert "Bob" Evans, Curtis Mayo Kimball, Gordon Jenson, Gerry Mockerman and Lawrence "Larry" Vanner. The timeline lists arrests in Phoenix in 1973 and 1975; in Manchester, New Hampshire, three times in 1980 as Robert T. Evans; in Cypress, California, in 1985 as Curtis Kimball; and in California in 1989 on a child abandonment charge. In Manchester, around 1978 or 1979, he worked as head electrician at a mill complex under the name Bob Evans. His three arrests there in 1980 were for a bad check written the previous December, for theft of electrical services and for diverting electric current.
The first break had nothing to do with New Hampshire. In May 1985, as Curtis Mayo Kimball, he was arrested in Cypress for drunk driving with a small girl in the car, was charged with driving under the influence and endangering a child, and failed to appear in court. By January 1986 he was working as a handyman at an RV park in Scotts Valley, Santa Cruz County, as Gordon Jenson. An older couple at the park helped look after the girl and grew concerned. In June 1986 he left the park without her, having told people her mother was dead. The girl entered the child protective system in San Bernardino County and was adopted, and she grew up believing that the man she had known as Gordon Jenson was her father. In September 1986 fingerprints established that Gordon Jenson and Curtis Mayo Kimball were one man.
In 2013 her case went to Detective Peter Headley of the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Office. At the end of 2014 she asked him to look again, since DNA databases had grown. In 2015 the genetic genealogist Barbara Rae-Venter began working with her through a volunteer adoption research group. "All we had was her DNA," Rae-Venter told ABC News. Starting from more than 200 genetic cousins she built family trees that pointed to a man in New Hampshire, who agreed to a test and proved to be the woman’s maternal grandfather. Headley telephoned and asked whether she wanted to know her name. She did. She had been born in 1981, and her mother was Denise Beaudin, a Manchester woman who had left family in November 1981 with a man the family knew as Bob Evans. In July 2016 the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Office contacted New Hampshire authorities, and Beaudin’s relatives then made a formal report to police. The Attorney General’s office said in 2017 that the family had not contacted police at the time, and that the report came more than 35 years later. Beaudin herself has not been located. The state’s cold case unit lists her case as suspicious with a suspect identified, and the Attorney General has said it believes the man it knew as Evans was responsible for her death. Her daughter is alive; the Attorney General’s office has said she wished to remain anonymous.
The work had a second consequence. In 2017 the New Hampshire Attorney General’s office named Evans as the suspect in the deaths of a woman and three girls whose deaths, in Allenstown, had gone unsolved since 1985 and 2000. DNA showed that one of the girls was his own daughter. Later in 2017, investigators established that Evans was Terry Peder Rasmussen. The Concord Monitor reported in August 2017 that the man the state had been calling Bob Evans was Rasmussen. Investigators attribute the four deaths to him, and he was never charged with them. Three of the four victims were identified in June 2019, as CBS Boston and the Associated Press reported, and the last in September 2025, when the Attorney General and the State Police announced that all four had names. Marlyse Honeychurch and her two daughters, with Rasmussen’s daughter Rea, are the four. The man called a chameleon by the state’s homicide chief at the first announcement in January 2017 had, by the investigators' account, targeted women he lived with or dated, and their children.
Two women remain unaccounted for. Pepper Reed, born in 1952 and from Texas, was Rea’s mother; the DNA Doe Project said she came from Houston, where Rasmussen was reportedly living in the 1970s. The Attorney General’s office said in September 2025 that the inquiries into Reed and Beaudin remained open. Rea was born in 1976 in Orange County, California.
The last false name in the file was Larry Vanner. Eunsoon Jun met him in late 1999. By 2001 he had moved in with her. A backyard wedding ceremony that year had no legal standing and produced no marriage certificate. Detective Roxane Gruenheid of the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office took the case, and fingerprints established that Vanner was Curtis Mayo Kimball, who had absconded from parole in 1990 after his child abandonment sentence. Investigators learned the names Gerry Mockerman and Gordon Jenson. He was arrested in November 2002 on a charge of murdering Jun and on a parole violation.
The case is also remembered as one of the first in which genetic genealogy was used both to identify unknown victims and to identify the man investigators believe was responsible for their deaths.
Tobin was born in Johnstone, Renfrewshire, on August 27, 1946, according to the fatal accident inquiry into his death. His use of other names was long-standing. In August 1993 he was living in Leigh Park, Havant, in Hampshire, when two 14-year-old girls became the subject of offenses that led to his arrest. The Scotsman reported at the time of his sentencing that he left for Brighton, joined a religious community under a false name and moved with it to Stockton, Warwickshire, where he went undetected for a time, and that he was arrested after returning to Brighton on September 13, 1993. The Scotsman’s 2022 account says instead that he was caught hiding under a false name at a Christian drop-in center in Coventry. On May 18, 1994, at Winchester Crown Court, Tobin, then 47, pleaded guilty to offenses against both girls, and Mr. Justice Waterhouse sentenced him to 14 years in all. The judge said the girls had been seriously affected and that their prospects in life might have been "gravely and permanently impaired." Both girls survived.
In 2006 he was working in Glasgow as a church handyman. By the time police were looking for him, he was no longer in Scotland. He had gone to London, where he was admitted to a hospital under the name James Kelly, with a complaint that Clyde 1 News later described as fictitious. A member of the hospital staff recognized him from media coverage. He was returned to Scotland and on October 9, 2006 appeared at Glasgow Sheriff Court charged with Angelika Kluk’s murder. He lodged a special defense to the rape charge, did not give evidence, and the jury convicted him on May 4, 2007.
After his arrest Strathclyde Police set up Operation Anagram, formed in November 2006, to build a timeline of where he had lived and worked and to share it with other forces. Detective Superintendent David Swindle, who led it, said in December 2009 that Tobin had used many aliases, had been linked to about 38 SIM cards and had traveled widely across Britain in the year before the Kluk case. A later account in a Scottish Legal News review described Lord Emslie’s remark that "the accused conceded nothing" at trial.
The Hamilton trial in Dundee lasted 21 days. In December 2008 the jury took 2 hours and 28 minutes to reach a unanimous verdict, the Falkirk Herald reported. Lord Emslie sentenced him to life, said Tobin had shown himself "unfit to live in a decent society," and described a "calculating and entirely self interested" concealment. The judge said that, had the law allowed it, he would have added 30 years to the existing 21-year term; instead the minimum term was raised to 30 years. A year later, in December 2009, a jury in Chelmsford convicted him of the murder of Dinah McNicol, and a life term, reported as a whole life order, followed.
On the day after the McNicol verdict, Strathclyde Police released photographs of pendants, brooches, necklace clasps and military badges from Tobin’s belongings that they believed he had kept from victims. Swindle called the release a "highly significant step" and said officers would urgently review dozens of unsolved cases. "There could be undetected murders, but we don’t have anything to link him to any at the moment," he said in December 2009, adding that the true number of victims might never be known. The forensic psychologist Vince Egan of the University of Leicester told The Scotsman that Tobin picked vulnerable women and often escaped notice because no one was looking for them. He described him as violent toward people he could overpower and submissive to those in authority.
Several reviews reached into other years. In 2022 an inquest into the 1980 death of Jessie Earl recorded that she was murdered by an unknown third party; DNA did not match Tobin, as the Edinburgh Evening News and the Press Association reported. Police have said there was no evidence linking him to the Bible John cases of 1968 and 1969. No further charge was ever brought.
Tobin died at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh on October 8, 2022, aged 76, of bronchopneumonia following a broken hip, with vascular disease and prostate cancer, as the fatal accident inquiry recorded. The inquiry noted a diagnosis of vascular dementia in December 2020. Prostate cancer had been suspected in 2016 but was never confirmed because he refused further tests, Express and Star reported in 2024.
He was convicted of two of the killings, both in New York, on guilty pleas: the 1971 death of his fiancee Natalie Brown on Long Island and the 1974 death of Judith Becker in Westchester County. After the first, he was committed to a state hospital, and he left the hospital system in 1974. The killings he described in San Francisco and Mexico City, Barbara Taylor and Laura Gomez, were never tried. UPI reported that a Nassau County grand jury re-indicted him on two murder counts in the Brown case about two months after his surrender. In August 1995 in White Plains he received 8 to 25 years for Brown and 25 years to life, the maximum, for Becker, to run consecutively. He died at Attica on October 1, 1997, aged 48, of cardiac causes.
Caputo went west. Infobae reported that he traveled by bus to San Francisco, changed his appearance and began calling himself Ricardo Donoguier, a supposed Uruguayan. Both Infobae and Letra P put the number of false identities he used over the following two decades at about 17, among them Ricardo Martinez Diaz and Roberto Dominguez. In San Francisco, Letra P wrote, he made a living drawing pencil portraits.
The court record that survives is narrow: two pleas, two sentences, one prison.
His identity problem was a record, not a name. Swango, born James Michael Swango in Tacoma, Washington, in 1954 according to Columbus Monthly, grew up in Quincy, Illinois. In 1985 he was convicted in Adams County, Illinois, of six counts of aggravated battery against ambulance co-workers and received five years; he was released on August 21, 1987. UPI reported the sentence on August 24, 1985. The conviction followed him, and he spent most of the decade after his release working to keep it from anyone who might hire him. The 2000 federal indictment names two aliases, "David Jackson Adams" and "Jackson Kirk."
When federal authorities finally moved, they did so on a fraud charge. On October 27, 1994, a warrant was issued for his arrest on a charge of fraud over his application to the medical program at Stony Brook, the Daily Press reported, not on a murder charge. He had by then left hospital work in the United States; the Daily Press described a stay in Florida, a move to Atlanta, a job as a chemist near Atlanta obtained under a false name, and a refusal to speak to the FBI in July 1994, after which he quit and left. He was arrested on June 27, 1997, at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago on the fraud warrant, on his way to a hospital job in Saudi Arabia. In March 1998 he pleaded guilty to a federal false-statement charge and received 42 months. On July 11, 2000, with that sentence close to its end, prosecutors charged him with the three Northport murders; the Associated Press reported the indictment that day. He pleaded guilty on September 6, 2000, and a nine-count indictment, signed by United States Attorney Loretta E. Lynch, covers the fraud, the three murders, an assault count and false statements.
Between those dates he had been working abroad. At Mnene Mission Hospital in Zimbabwe he was known as "Dr. Mike." Nurses noticed that patients with simple illnesses kept dying on his ward and that he preferred to do his rounds alone, the Mail & Guardian reported in 1998. One nurse, Sister Hove, said staff were glad at first to have a doctor but came to call him "an angel of death." Zimbabwe charged him over five deaths at Mnene; the Daily Egyptian, the paper of his medical school, reported the charges in January 1998. He was never tried there.
Estimates of the total number of his victims are not findings. An FBI agent was reported to have said he may have killed as many as 60, a figure that the British Medical Journal carried in September 2000; American Medical News reported in 2012 that the FBI had put the number as high as 50. In the same 2012 article, Swango’s case appears among those cited in debates over criminal background checks for physicians, though no single law was tied to it; by then 27 states required fingerprinting for licensure, up from seven in 2001, and the Association of American Medical Colleges had recommended background checks for all medical school applicants since 2006. As of October 19, 2026, the Federal Bureau of Prisons locator shows him at ADX Florence, Colorado, release date "LIFE."
He had a second name. On October 4, 1957, during the months he was separated from his wife Juanita, Archerd married a divorced woman as James Lynn Arden. They married again in La Habra on May 21, 1959, this time under his own name. Her former husband, Frank L. Stewart, died in Las Vegas on March 17, 1960. About a week earlier Archerd had told his wife’s son-in-law that Stewart could not live much longer and that the two of them had arranged an accident that would bring in insurance money, and he asked for a loan. To his girlfriend at the time he laid out a plan in which Stewart would appear to have a fall at the Las Vegas airport. He registered the two of them at a hotel as "Mr. and Mrs. Don Nightengale."
Stewart was admitted to a Las Vegas hospital at 12:30 a.m. on March 17, 1960. Archerd told staff that Stewart had slipped on debris in the airport’s men’s room. Sheriff Pitchess wrote that Stewart and Archerd, who used the Arden alias, had flown to Las Vegas together. Stewart died at 10:30 that night. The medical examiner who first assigned another cause revised it after he learned Stewart’s history and heard the girlfriend’s account. At the airport Stewart had bought two flight insurance policies, one for $62,500 naming his former wife and one for $18,750 naming Archerd’s mother. Neither was paid; Pitchess noted that the policies paid only on death or the loss of a limb.
About six months later Archerd asked the same girlfriend to help stage an accident of his own. Posing with her as "Mr. and Mrs. Pierce," and using a car that had been advertised for sale, he damaged the car’s aerial and windshield wiper, wiped off fingerprints and left it in a parking lot. On October 10, 1960, police located him about six blocks from the place of the supposed collision and took him to a hospital. He received $900 in workmen’s compensation plus medical costs. Pitchess wrote that he also filed a $50,000 lawsuit over the supposed hit-and-run and that the suits were dismissed with prejudice. The staged accident was admitted at trial along with three uncharged deaths: William Edward Jones, who died on October 12, 1947; Juanita Archerd, who died on March 13, 1958; and Stewart.
The last marriage ran on the same two names. On April 18, 1965, Archerd married Mary Brinker Post, then 59, as James Lynn Arden; they married again on November 12, 1965. She had good income, with checking and savings accounts, and received a raise after the wedding. Her husband was out of work, and his only income was $165 from a hearing-aid company. He never wrote a check on her accounts or withdrew money himself, yet between May 1965 and October 1966 they were drained of $21,620.12. On October 20, 1966, she filed for bankruptcy. By late October the couple had separated, though she wrote to him almost every day, begging him to come back. She died on November 3, 1966. Archerd’s earlier wife Zella Winders Archerd had died on July 25, 1956, and his nephew Burney Kirk Archerd, 15, on September 2, 1961.
Judge Adolph Alexander of the Los Angeles Superior Court, sitting without a jury, convicted Archerd of three counts of first-degree murder on March 15, 1968, and sentenced him to death on each. He ruled that the three uncharged deaths had been proved beyond a reasonable doubt as part of a common plan. On December 10, 1970, in People v. Archerd, the California Supreme Court unanimously affirmed. It held that the uncharged deaths were relevant to identity, intent, malice, premeditation, motive, knowledge of the means used and the method, and admissible despite their prejudicial effect. On the long gap between the deaths and the indictment, it held that the speedy-trial guarantee applies only once a charge is pending, that there is no time limit for prosecuting murder, and that, given the slow progress of medical science, the delay was neither unreasonable nor deliberately caused to harass him.
He was 42, born on January 25, 1957, in the coffee town of Génova, Quindío, a drifter who drank heavily and moved between towns and cities. From 1992 to 1999 he traveled through at least eleven Colombian departments and into Ecuador. Semana reported in 1999 that he had been treated in two psychiatric hospitals, was an alcoholic who attended Alcoholics Anonymous and liked the rural ballads known as música de carrilera. He visited a Pentecostal church, sometimes passed himself off as a priest, and presented himself as a representative of a foundation called "Nuevo Amanecer." Investigators learned that he used several names and nicknames, among them "Loco," "Tribilín" and "Conflicto." He told prosecutors in 1999 that he had a partner and a 16-year-old son in Villavicencio. His partner told investigators that when he drank he talked about his hatred for his family.
There had been warnings. Semana reported that he was detained in 1994 in Corinto, Cauca, in a case involving a child; the charge was dropped. In August 1995 he broke his left leg in Bogotá, and the metal plates and screws left in it gave him a limp that witnesses in Tunja would later remember.
The false name held for months. In June 1999, El País of Cali reported, a multidisciplinary group of the Fiscalía, the DAS, the SIJIN and a Medicina Legal psychiatrist was formed. From July 14 to 17, 1999, investigators from different regions met in Pereira and compared their files. The exchange, El Tiempo wrote, showed that the man arrested in Villavicencio in April was the one they were looking for. On Tuesday, July 20, the CTI’s criminalistics unit fully identified the prisoner as Luis Alfredo Garavito Cubillos, and evidence gathering followed across the country.
Colombian courts convicted him in case after case. The number of convictions has been given as 138 of the 172 crimes he had then admitted (EFE, 2003), 139 of 140 admitted cases (a Fiscalía report cited by Semana in 2018) and 143 (El Colombiano, 2023). A first sentence of 52 years was reported in December 1999, by La Nación of Costa Rica. The sentences were reported as adding up to 1,853 years and nine days, but the time he could serve was held to 40 years, the legal maximum. He was also convicted by the Juzgado 6 Penal del Circuito de Pereira on July 6, 2007, over the deaths of four boys in Ecuador in July 1998, as the Colombian Supreme Court recorded.
The numbers of his admissions moved. After the 140 of October 1999, EFE reported in August 2003 that he had admitted 28 more people, 23 of them minors. Colombian investigators cited by Semana in 2011 spoke of 168 minors, 81 identified and 86 not. Semana and El País of Cali in 2023 gave at least 172 children as the figure most often attributed to the Fiscalía; El Tiempo, worded as an allegation, gave between 142 and 194; El Colombiano reported about 182 confessed during his Tunja case. In March 2016, La FM reported that the Fiscalía had concluded he had lied about some crimes and had not disclosed others.
He served his sentence in the maximum-security prison in Valledupar, Cesar, known as La Tramacúa. El País of Cali and El Tiempo date his arrival to September 2002; another El Tiempo report gives December 9, 2002. He was held in a closed-off cell at the end of a row and did not go out into the sun, for his own safety. He made bracelets, earrings and necklaces, and that work, with study, earned him reductions of sentence. A Medicina Legal psychiatric report, described by El Tiempo in 2021, diagnosed antisocial personality disorder and an alcohol use disorder in remission. On May 21, 2021, the Juzgado Primero de Ejecución de Penas of Valledupar refused conditional release, and INPEC announced in November 2021 that he would not go free. The forensic psychiatrist Heydy Luz Chica Urzola, interviewed by Infobae after his death, described him as a predator who sought power and control. A 2020 essay in the journal Salud UIS compared him with another Colombian offender and described him as a traveling serial offender whose movement from place to place made him harder to identify.
He died in custody on October 12, 2023, aged 66, at the Clínica Nueva Santo Tomás del Caribe in Valledupar, according to INPEC as reported by Semana and El Colombiano. Medicina Legal concluded natural causes, El Tiempo reported on December 13, 2023, and he was cremated in Valledupar on December 21, Radio Nacional de Colombia reported.
Her death came to light in Nezahualcóyotl on June 22, 2020. She was 29 or 30, his partner of about ten years and the mother of his son. Her father, who said Santos Loera had telephoned the family to confess, spent more than a year pressing prosecutors and searching for him. Agents of the State of Mexico prosecutor’s office arrested him on October 23, 2021, in Tlalnepantla de Baz, on a warrant in the Ríos Cabrera case. He was reported dead in custody the next day, before a first hearing set for October 24; the death was reported as a suicide. He was never tried, and no judge ruled on the accusation against him.
The name on his prison record was different again. According to El Heraldo de México, he used the false name Érick Hernández Camacho while he was held in 2011. Zócalo, relaying Milenio’s interview with Elideth’s father in October 2021, said he entered the Reclusorio Oriente that year under the name Erick Hernández Camacho, a name taken from a friend of Elideth. The August 2020 SDP Noticias report went further and said his real identity appeared to be Erick. The father, by contrast, said that when he saw the arrested man in October 2021, the man confirmed that he was Omar and not Erik. Whether Omar Santos Loera, Omar Sánchez Loera or Erick Hernández Camacho was his legal name has never been publicly settled. Most outlets used Santos Loera; some used Sánchez Loera.
A nickname followed him in the press. Infopolitano reported in June 2020 that he was known as "El Cojo," because of a leg wound that left him limping and using a cane, and that after escaping he took on a new identity to evade the federal attorney general’s office, the PGR. Infopolitano also reported that he faked his death to cover the escape. El Heraldo de México and El Mañana put the escape in 2011, months after he was jailed; Infopolitano wrote in June 2020 that it had happened about five years earlier. His age was given as 29 in June 2020 by SDP Noticias, SinEmbargo and Infopolitano. His date and place of birth have not been made public. Relatives of Elideth described him to reporters as violent and out of work. La Jornada reported that he walked with a cane and a limp, and the family’s appeals for information described facial scars and a tattoo on his back. Reports differed on which leg was injured.
The family complained of how the case was handled. SDP Noticias reported in August 2020, two months after her death, that the prosecutor’s office said it had no evidence to detain the person responsible, that it had not returned the apartment, so the family was still paying its rent, and that the family had received no victim support. El Heraldo de México reported that the family had no access to the file, and that the father protested outside the National Palace in Mexico City with a banner bearing Santos Loera’s photograph.
When the warrant came, it named Érick Hernández Camacho, the name on his prison record, rather than Omar Santos Loera, El Heraldo de México reported. The paper said it took nearly two months to issue; the father later told Milenio, as carried by Zócalo, that it took about three months because the authorities said there were not enough grounds. According to El Heraldo, the authorities said the man under that name was wanted across Mexico and in the United States, but for his earlier crimes rather than for Elideth’s death. The family feared that he could later argue he was not the man named in the warrant, and the father asked that he be sought under both names.
The father told Milenio that his daughter’s partner was in the Centro Penitenciario y de Reinserción Social of Nezahualcóyotl, known as Bordo de Xochiaca, when he died. La Chispa Petrolera reported that the State of Mexico prosecutor’s office began an investigation file for suicide, and that no one came forward to identify the body, so Elideth’s father did it himself. Officials at first refused him access, the paper said, until a judge ordered that he be let into the morgue. He identified the body by a tattoo, according to both La Chispa Petrolera and Zócalo. El Mañana reported that the case file on Elideth’s death was closed, and La Chispa Petrolera said the father attended the hearing that closed it. No official statement on his death has been made public.
The French press of the time spelled his first name Eugène. German and English sources use Eugen. In France he lived under false names, chiefly Karrer, and on the day of his arrest he first gave the police the name Sauerbrei, then admitted the identity Karrer, according to Détective. Born in Frankfurt am Main in February 1908 and raised in Sachsenhausen, he had been sent to Canada by his father in 1928, Détective said, fell in with bootleggers, was convicted there and expelled. Back in Germany he led a series of burglaries in Frankfurt and served five and a half years, the magazine wrote, in prisons at Frankfurt and Saarbrücken. A radio script from early 1938, preserved in the papers of the broadcaster Lowell Thomas, also placed criminal records in Germany and in Canada. In prison he met the three men who would matter most in France: two Frenchmen, Roger Million and Jean Blanc, and a younger German, Fritz Frommer. Détective reported that he left Frankfurt on June 15, 1937, and that Million and Blanc came to collect him.
In Paris he stayed at a hotel as Eugène Karrer on a passport that, Détective reported, reached him through Million. Blanc put up the money for a house, and a villa at La Celle-Saint-Cloud was rented in June 1937. According to a 2024 account of the trial by the journalist Hélène Molinari in Actu-Juridique, the plan was to use the crowds drawn by the Paris International Exposition of 1937 to kidnap wealthy foreigners and demand ransoms. At the trial a gendarme described a room fitted out to hold captives, Détective reported.
The victims were Jean de Koven, 24, an American from Brooklyn; Joseph Couffy, a father of three from Levallois; Janine Keller of Strasbourg; Roger Le Blond, 23; Fritz Frommer; and Raymond Lesobre. On July 30 de Koven’s aunt received a letter demanding 500 dollars, to be left at a café in Paris. The money was never sent. Her traveler’s checks were forged and cashed. The Lowell Thomas script said her family went to the Sûreté and got little help at first, because officers assumed a romance. At the trial a police inspector, Challier, described what the family went through during the months of not knowing, and Weidmann was seen to be shaken by it. A money order for 1,300 francs in Keller’s name was cashed and her passport used after her death. Accounts differ on the date of her death: the Détective special issue of December 1937 grouped it with the autumn deaths, a March 1939 report said early October, and a profile of December 1937 called her the fourth victim in order of time.
The Lesobre case led to Weidmann, and the accounts of how differ. The Lowell Thomas script said a visiting card was traced to a friend of one of the victims, and from there to Weidmann’s false identity. The Détective special issue said Commissaire Primborgne of the Sûreté led the investigation and traced the name Karrer to La Voulzie. Another Détective report said a rental agency linked the tenant of the villa to a neighboring family. Once in custody, Weidmann was taken to Versailles. He confessed to the Lesobre case, speaking in German, and then, before the examining magistrate, M. Berry, to those of de Koven, Couffy, Le Blond and Frommer, and finally to that of Janine Keller, which had not yet been connected to him. Détective printed a facsimile of a handwritten statement that began "J’ai tué Joan de Koven" ("I killed Joan de Koven"). Police recovered a metal box of the victims' belongings. Détective calculated at the end of 1937 that six people had been killed for about 25,000 francs in all; Actu-Juridique called the sums involved derisory.
The trial began at Versailles in March 1939. Witnesses included the two inspectors who made the arrest, the gendarme Joyaux, who reported remarks Million made during transfers, Million’s own father, whose testimony largely harmed his son, and two forensic doctors. Restaurant owners told the court they had heard of the de Koven kidnapping from Million and a young woman, C. T. Balmary’s closing speech against Weidmann lasted more than three hours and asked for death. For the defense, Raoult argued against the death penalty itself; Planty disputed the proof in the Frommer case; Renée Jardin presented Weidmann as repentant; and Moro-Giafferri asked the jury not to kill him, arguing that Weidmann was abnormal rather than insane. The jury refused extenuating circumstances, Détective reported in April 1939. Million, charged with complicity in two killings and the murder of Le Blond, was condemned too; President Albert Lebrun refused clemency for Weidmann and commuted Million’s sentence to life on June 16. Blanc faced a charge of harboring criminals; C. T. was acquitted of receiving stolen goods. A decree of June 24, 1939 ended public executions in France, as Euronews and the historian Arnaud-Dominique Houte noted.
Little is known of his early life, and much of what is known comes from his own words. When he gave evidence on oath in the sessions court in August 1969, he gave his name as Sindhi Dalwai, said he was about 40, and gave an address in Tirunelveli district, in what is now Tamil Nadu, according to the Bombay High Court’s 1987 judgment. Scroll.in, writing in 2015, described him as a Tamil who came to Bombay in 1950 and worked for a few years as a mill hand. He went by many names; the courts used "Sindhi Dalwai alias Raman Raghav" and "Sindhi alias Raman," and the press settled on Raman Raghav. His confession, as summarized by a High Court judge in 1987, described a life of petty crime that began in childhood: a Borstal school, repeated theft convictions and about five years in prison in all.
He was tried only for the deaths of Lalchand Jagannath Yadav and Dular Jaggi Yadav at Chinchavli, Malad, on the night of August 25 to 26, 1968, where the court held that the motive was theft of money kept at the stables. The watchman and his son picked him out at an identification parade conducted by a magistrate on August 29, 1968. About ten cases in all were registered against him over killings in Bombay’s western suburbs in July and August 1968, and charge sheets were filed in all of them; in 1987 one judge noted that eight more trials awaited him.
The sentence was delivered on August 13, 1969: death, referred to the Bombay High Court for confirmation, which he declined to contest. Confirmation was postponed on July 3, 1970, after a special medical board concluded he was of unsound mind and unable to make his defense. The Supreme Court of India dismissed the State’s appeal on February 19, 1975. On August 4, 1987, the High Court confirmed the conviction, set aside the death sentence and imposed life imprisonment, citing the delay of nearly 19 years and his long illness. He was held at Yeravda Central Prison in Pune and treated at the Central Institute of Mental Health and Research there. The date of his death in custody at Sassoon Hospital, Pune, is reported inconsistently: 1995 in a 2020 PTI report and in The Week in 2016, April 7, 1988 in Scroll.in. Alex Fialho, the sub-inspector who arrested him, died in November 2020, as National Herald and The Hitavada reported.
The case has outlived the accused. Anurag Kashyap’s film Raman Raghav 2.0, starring Nawazuddin Siddiqui, was released on June 24, 2016. It is not a biography. The film is set in 2013 and imagines a fictional killer who calls himself by the old aliases, and a police inspector hunting him, the news agency IANS noted in its review.
• 1908, February: Eugen Weidmann born in Frankfurt am Main (Détective).
• 1937, June 15: Weidmann leaves Frankfurt. July to November: the six deaths in the Paris region.
• 1937, December 8: Weidmann arrested at La Celle-Saint-Cloud.
• 1939, March 31: Weidmann sentenced to death at Versailles. June 17: executed. June 24: decree moves executions inside prisons.
• 1943, December 23: Terry Peder Rasmussen born in Colorado (New Hampshire Attorney General’s timeline).
• 1946, August 27: Peter Britton Tobin born in Johnstone, Renfrewshire (fatal accident inquiry).
• 1947, October 12: William Edward Jones dies; later admitted as an uncharged death in the Archerd case.
• 1956, July 25: Zella Winders Archerd dies.
• 1957, October 4: Archerd marries as James Lynn Arden.
• 1960, March 17: Frank L. Stewart dies in Las Vegas.
• 1961, September 2: Burney Kirk Archerd, 15, dies.
• 1966, November 3: Mary Brinker Post Arden dies.
• 1967, July 27: Archerd arrested the day a grand jury indicts him.
• 1968, March 15: Archerd convicted of three counts of first-degree murder. August 27: Raman Raghav arrested in Bombay.
• 1969, August 13: Raghav sentenced to death.
• 1970, December 10: California Supreme Court affirms Archerd’s convictions.
• 1971: Natalie Brown dies on Long Island; Ricardo Caputo is committed to a state hospital. 1974: Judith Becker dies in Westchester County; Caputo leaves the hospital system and becomes a fugitive.
• 1975, February 19: Supreme Court of India dismisses the State’s appeal in the Raghav case.
• 1980: Rasmussen arrested three times in Manchester, New Hampshire, as Robert T. Evans.
• 1984, January 14: Cynthia Ann McGee, 19, dies at Ohio State University Hospitals.
• 1985, May: Rasmussen arrested in Cypress, California, as Curtis Kimball. August: Swango sentenced in Illinois to five years.
• 1986, June: Rasmussen leaves a girl at a Scotts Valley RV park. September: fingerprints link Gordon Jenson and Curtis Kimball.
• 1987, August 4: Bombay High Court replaces Raghav’s death sentence with life imprisonment. August 21: Swango released from the Illinois sentence.
• 1993: Swango’s three Northport patients die on July 26, September 23 and October 4. September 13: Tobin arrested in Brighton.
• 1994, March 9: Caputo surrenders in New York. May 18: Tobin pleads guilty at Winchester Crown Court.
• 1997, June 27: Swango arrested at O’Hare International Airport. October 1: Caputo dies at Attica.
• 1999, April 22: Garavito arrested as Bonifacio Morera Lizcano. July 20: identified by the CTI. October: confesses to 140 child victims.
• 2000, September 6: Swango pleads guilty to three Northport murders. October 18: pleads guilty in Columbus.
• 2003, June: Rasmussen sentenced to 15 years to life as Curtis Kimball.
• 2006, October 9: Tobin appears at Glasgow Sheriff Court charged with Angelika Kluk’s murder, after his admission to a London hospital as James Kelly.
• 2007, May 4: Tobin convicted of the rape and murder of Angelika Kluk. July 6: Garavito convicted in Pereira over four deaths in Ecuador.
• 2008, December: Tobin convicted of the murder of Vicky Hamilton. 2009, December: convicted of the murder of Dinah McNicol.
• 2010, December: Rasmussen dies in a California prison.
• 2011: Omar Santos Loera sentenced in Mexico City to 122 years under the name Erick Hernández Camacho (as reported); escapes on October 6.
• 2017, August 18: New Hampshire names Rasmussen as the suspect in the Allenstown deaths.
• 2020, June 22: Elideth Ríos Cabrera’s death comes to light in Nezahualcóyotl.
• 2021, October 23: Loera arrested in Tlalnepantla de Baz; reported dead the next day.
• 2022, October 8: Tobin dies at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh.
• 2023, October 12: Garavito dies in Valledupar.
• 2025, September: the last Bear Brook victim is identified.