In 1993, in Charlotte, North Carolina, a young woman named Shawna Hawk died, and her mother, Dee Sumpter, her godmother, Judy Williams, and Williams’s son David Howard did something that the city’s police had not yet managed. They organized. Nobody at the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department had yet understood that Hawk’s death belonged to a series; detectives did not see the pattern until March 1994. The three formed a support group for families who had lost someone to murder, and the group outlasted the case that had called it into being.
That is the pattern in the cases below: relatives of the dead who built something, or demanded something, in public. The cases are different in almost every other way. One campaign was a support network, one a push for a public inquiry, one a petition to the highest court in Russia for the death penalty, one a project for young people cut off from their families, one a rescue operation for missing children. What each asked for, and what each got, follows, case by case, with the legal record kept apart from the claims people made about it.
Henry Louis Wallace, a fast-food restaurant manager from Barnwell, South Carolina, was convicted by a Mecklenburg County jury on January 7, 1997, of nine counts of first-degree murder. The nine women died between June 15, 1992, and March 12, 1994, and nearly all of them knew him: co-workers, friends, friends of friends. He was sentenced to death on January 29, 1997. He had also confessed to two further killings that were never tried.
Charlotte at the time was recording homicides at a pace it had never seen. The Charlotte Post reported 129 in 1993, the highest number in the city’s history. WSOC-TV counted 322 murders from 1991 to 1994. Against that background, nine deaths spread over almost two years went unlinked until the second week of March 1994.
Shawna Hawk worked at the restaurant where Wallace was her manager. Her death came to light in Charlotte on February 19, 1993. Within the year her mother and godmother had started the support group, which became Mothers of Murdered Offspring, a nonprofit that, the Post reported, later ran programs on gun violence, relationship violence and substance abuse. The group gave families who had lost someone to murder a place to meet, at a time when the city’s murder count made such families common.
Sumpter spoke publicly about her daughter’s death in the years that followed, including in 2018 and 2019. Williams died in October 2020, and the Post’s obituary described her as a co-founder of the organization. What it asked for was modest, and what it achieved is simply that it existed: a group begun in 1993 whose co-founder was still being described as such when she died in 2020. Whether it changed how Charlotte’s police treated such cases is not on the record.
On January 31, 2000, a jury at Preston Crown Court convicted Harold Shipman, a family doctor in Hyde, Greater Manchester, of the murders of 15 of his patients and of forging the will of the last of them, Kathleen Grundy. The judge passed 15 life sentences. A public inquiry chaired by Dame Janet Smith later attributed to him at least 215 deaths in its First Report of July 2002 and, in January 2005, about 250 between 1971 and 1998, 218 of them positively identified. Those are the findings of an inquiry, not convictions. He never admitted any killing and died in prison on January 13, 2004.
The case began with a relative. Angela Woodruff, Kathleen Grundy’s daughter, was a solicitor who handled her mother’s legal affairs, and the will she was shown made no sense to her. Its grammar was poor and its tone curt, nothing like her mother. "My mother thought he was wonderful," she said later. In July 1998 she took her suspicions to a senior officer of Warwickshire Police, who passed them to Greater Manchester Police. Believing that the doctor might have forged a will, and so might have killed her mother, was "a huge gap to cross," she said after the trial. Without her, she said, the police would never have known, and the deaths would have been taken as natural.
Her report was followed by an official response. On February 1, 2000, the Health Secretary, Alan Milburn, told the House of Commons that he was setting up an independent inquiry, whose main purpose would be to recommend how patients could be better protected. The Inquiry’s Second Report, published in July 2003, concluded that the police investigation of March 1998 had failed at every level, and Dame Janet wrote that if the police and the coroner had moved with reasonable speed, the lives of Shipman’s last three victims would probably have been saved. Greater Manchester Police apologized to the Grundy family. The Inquiry produced six reports in all, and the government’s 2007 overview described its action programme in response.
What Woodruff asked for was to be believed, and in the end she was.
On March 20, 2008, the St. Petersburg City Court sentenced Dmitry Voronenko to life imprisonment for the murders, with other charges, of four girls and young women in the city between late 2006 and May 2007. They were aged 11, 12, 18 and 20. Voronenko, a Ukrainian citizen born in the Kirghiz SSR, was 36 and on conditional early release from an earlier sentence when he was arrested in May 2007; the court counted that against him.
The prosecution had asked for death, calling the case one of the rare ones in which it would truly be justified. The court pointed to Russia’s moratorium on executions and imposed the most severe punishment left to it, Interfax reported. The parents of the girls said, unanimously, that they were unhappy with the result. One mother told reporters that the decision was tearing at their souls. They had expected the court to respect the moratorium and substitute life imprisonment, she said, but they still could not accept it.
Another mother told an Interfax correspondent what she had heard of Voronenko’s final statement, which the press had not been admitted to: that he was ready for any punishment, including public execution, that he showed no remorse, and that he claimed not to know why he had committed the crimes. Moskovsky Komsomolets later reported that during the trial he had mocked the grieving mothers.
The parents took their case to the Supreme Court of Russia and asked for the death penalty. The court refused and left the life sentence in force. The mothers of the dead girls went on to campaign for the return of capital punishment, MK reported in 2024. No result has been reported. The moratorium that the St. Petersburg court cited in 2008 is the thing they were pushing against.
Voronenko served his sentence at the special colony for life prisoners in the settlement of Kharp, in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, known as Polar Owl. In April 2024 MK reported that he had written a confession about a year earlier to the 2006 killing of a sixth-grade schoolgirl in St. Petersburg. On March 27, 2024, he was charged with her murder, with other charges, and a St. Petersburg court ordered him held in pretrial detention until June 4, 2024. MK noted that many life prisoners write such confessions in the hope of being moved, and that they are not always checked. The paper added that a new trial might bring the girl’s family a measure of justice. The outcome of the 2024 case has not been reported.
Anthony John Hardy pleaded guilty at the Central Criminal Court on November 25, 2003, to the murders of three women in Camden Town, London: Sally White, Elizabeth Valad and Bridgette MacLennan. Mr Justice Keith sentenced him to life imprisonment on each count, and in May 2010 made a whole life order. Hardy died in hospital on November 25, 2020, aged 69.
What drew public attention was the sequence. Sally White’s death came to light on January 20, 2002, while police were dealing with damage to a neighbor’s door. A pathologist, Dr Freddy Patel, gave the cause of death as heart disease, a coroner recorded natural causes at an inquest that, the Camden New Journal’s Richard Osley wrote, lasted about 15 minutes, and no action was taken over her death. Hardy pleaded guilty on March 12, 2002, to racially aggravated criminal damage and was detained in psychiatric hospital under a hospital order. He was discharged on November 4, 2002. By the end of December, Elizabeth Valad, 29, and Bridgette MacLennan, 34, were dead.
Elizabeth Valad came from Nottingham and had a daughter. Her mother campaigned for a full public inquiry into how the man who killed her had been free to do so. The government’s answer was a health authority review chaired by a lawyer, Robert Robinson, held in private and published in September 2005. It cleared the health and social care agencies, finding that Hardy’s mental state was clinically stable when he was discharged and that his release could not have been foreseen to lead to the killings. "This is an important report because it finds that the man committed the murders, not the mental illness," said the chief executive of the trust that had treated him, as Community Care quoted him. The Camden New Journal summed up the review’s view as "bad, not mad."
The family went to court. An application brought in the name of Elizabeth’s daughter reached the Royal Courts of Justice in 2005. Mr Justice Bennett ruled that the government had met its obligations through the health authority’s independent review, and the family’s case was dismissed. Valad’s mother later called the process a "whitewash."
Because Hardy pleaded guilty there was no trial at which the evidence was heard in public, and no fresh inquests were held into the deaths. The pathologist’s work did come under scrutiny afterward: the General Medical Council took action over Patel’s practice, and in August 2012 a tribunal panel struck him off the medical register over his work in a different case, that of Ian Tomlinson, who died at the G20 protests in London in 2009. Whether the Valad family’s demand for an inquiry would have produced the same findings is a matter only for speculation. What it did produce was a private review and a refusal in court.
The Anchorage case is the odd one out: no one was ever charged. James Dale Ritchie, 40, died on November 12, 2016, in an exchange of gunfire with police, the police said. On April 26, 2017, the Anchorage Police Department announced that homicide detectives had sufficient probable cause to conclude he was responsible for five killings in the city in July and August 2016, in three separate events, and that he had acted alone. The department closed the cases. That conclusion was never tested in court, and police found no link between Ritchie and any of the victims.
Brianna Foisy, 20, and Jason Netter Sr., 41, died on July 3, 2016. Treyveonkindell Thompson, 21, died on July 29. Bryant "Brie" DeHusson, 25, and Kevin Turner, 34, died on August 28.
Foisy had been adopted out of foster care at five, together with her older sister, and grew up with four siblings, mostly in Anchorage. She loved Broadway musicals and singing; her mother said she was "always up a tree, but with a tutu on." At Service High School she was known for standing up for bullied students. Her mother described her as compassionate, kind and sweet.
That Christmas, her mother and a friend, both adoptive mothers, started Bri’s Make-A-Call Project in her honor, KTUU reported. It began by collecting stockings and gift bags for young people at Covenant House, each with a card reading "Love Bri" and her picture. Its aim was to encourage young people who had lost touch with their families to call the relatives who were worried about them. Brianna had known her mother’s phone number by heart, and her occasional calls had been a comfort. The project asked for no change in law, no sentence, no inquiry. It asked for a phone call.
Another family’s story ran along the same cases. Thompson’s father learned from news reports that the man police named had been a boyhood friend, a teenager who had often stayed with the family for days or weeks at a time and whom he had thought of as a stepbrother. He told KTUU in November 2016 that he was surprised by the identification. He remembered Ritchie as funny and spontaneous, "not the type."
In 1989 Irving Flax, a business executive from Fair Lawn, New Jersey, was kidnapped and killed. John Martini, Sr., and his girlfriend at the time demanded ransom from Flax’s wife. She paid it. According to the New Jersey Supreme Court, Martini then killed Flax, and the jury that convicted him of murder and kidnapping in 1990 concluded that he did it to avoid being identified. Martini was 60. He was sentenced to death. The court also noted that he had been twice convicted of murder in Pennsylvania and Arizona; the court did not give the victims, dates or courts in those cases.
For the next 17 years the case moved through state and federal courts. For a time it was not about guilt, which Martini did not dispute, but about whether a condemned man could stop his own appeals. When an execution date was set for November 15, 1995, he said he wanted no more proceedings. The Office of the Public Defender filed for post-conviction relief anyway, over his objection, and the execution was stayed. On June 28, 1996, the New Jersey Supreme Court held that he could not stop the process, pointing to the reliability and integrity of death sentences. The Senate Judiciary Committee answered on February 10, 1997, with a statement on a proposed constitutional amendment that would have relieved the courts of that obligation. The New Jersey Supreme Court affirmed the denial of post-conviction relief on July 27, 1999, and the Third Circuit rejected his federal challenge on October 22, 2003.
Flax’s widow appears in the public record only once, and late. In December 2007, as the legislature moved to end the death penalty, she spoke of her husband as her "innocent, loving, adoring husband," in remarks the Associated Press reported. His age and the nature of his business have not been reported. The Associated Press listed Martini among the eight men on death row whom the abolition bill would spare. Governor Jon Corzine commuted those eight sentences to life without parole.
Here the relatives of a victim stood on the losing side of a vote. No organized campaign by the family has been reported.
David Elliot Penton was a soldier at Fort Hood, Texas, when his two-month-old son died in 1984. He pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was discharged honorably from the Army late in 1985. He did not stay in custody. According to KLTV he left during an appeal of the manslaughter case, and he was at large for about three years until his arrest in Ohio in 1988. An Ohio jury convicted him of killing Nydra Ross, 9, a Columbus girl and the niece of a friend of his, and he was sentenced to life. In 2003 a Collin County grand jury indicted him for capital murder in the deaths of three girls abducted from Dallas-area suburbs between January 1985 and February 1986. In 2005 he pleaded guilty to killing all three, which avoided a possible death sentence. The convictions were for murder, with other charges. He has denied involvement in other cases, and investigators in Texas and other states have looked at him without charging him.
Christi Lynn Meeks lived in Mesquite. D Magazine reported in November 1985 that she had vanished there "last January 19." Her aunt organized a national publicity campaign to find her, one the magazine described as among the most widely publicized searches for a missing child in the country’s history. About three months after the child was reported missing, her death came to light.
The search did not end with her. Her aunt went on to run the Christi Meeks Foundation for Missing Children, which was incorporated to help law enforcement find missing children, to counsel parents and to teach the public how to protect children from kidnappers. By late 1985 the foundation said it had located 12 missing children on its own and helped other agencies find 11 more, and President Reagan had written to praise its grass-roots work. It also became the subject of a family dispute. Christi’s father went to court to stop it from using his daughter’s name, and two Mesquite detectives who had served on its original board resigned because they felt it was a conflict of interest while they were investigating her killing. KLTV gave her age as 5 in the 2003 indictment.
Christie Proctor was 9, according to a WFAA report republished by KHOU, though KLTV gave her age as 10 and placed her abduction in 1987. Her mother followed leads across the country, held on to the hope that Christie was alive, and helped put up more than a million posters across North Texas. She started an organization to help the families of missing and exploited children. In April 1988 her daughter’s death came to light in Plano.
For years afterward her mother struggled with depression and withdrew from family and friends, and February, the month her daughter was abducted, was always the hardest. "I would just completely shut down," she said. Eleven years after Christie’s death, she told WFAA, a church conference brought a turning point. She married a minister and became one herself. "I have been able to move on with my life," she said, and she has devoted herself to carrying a message of hope to others.
Roxann Hope Reyes lived in Garland. KLTV gave her age as 3 and said the 2003 indictment covered her abduction and killing in 1987, in the same case as Christie Proctor’s. Little else about her life or her family was reported.
Set side by side, the campaigns split into those that asked for something from the state and those that gave something to other people. Woodruff’s insistence changed the course of a murder inquiry. The Valad family’s demand for a public inquiry reached a judge and failed. The Russian mothers' demand for the death penalty reached the country’s highest court and failed, and they have pressed on. The Flax widow’s remarks, whatever she wanted from the vote, did not stop the abolition of the death penalty in New Jersey. Against those, the Charlotte founders, the Anchorage mother and the Dallas-area aunt and mother made things that other people could use: a support group, a project that gets stockings to young people, a foundation and a poster campaign for missing children.
The outcomes do not sort neatly. The foundation in Mesquite drew a court dispute between relatives and the resignation of two board members. The support group in Charlotte had a co-founder still named as such in 2020. The Anchorage project began with a card and a picture. The Charlotte, Anchorage and Dallas-area efforts were not aimed at a verdict, and in most of these cases the verdict was already in.
• 1984: David Elliot Penton’s two-month-old son dies; Penton later pleads guilty to manslaughter.
• January 19, 1985: Christi Lynn Meeks, Mesquite, Texas, vanishes, according to D Magazine.
• Late 1985: the Christi Meeks Foundation for Missing Children says it has located 12 missing children; Penton is discharged from the Army.
• 1988: Penton is arrested in Ohio in the killing of Nydra Ross, 9; in April, Christie Proctor’s death comes to light in Plano, Texas.
• 1989: Irving Flax of Fair Lawn, New Jersey, is kidnapped and killed.
• 1990: John Martini, Sr., is convicted in Bergen County and sentenced to death.
• June 15, 1992: first of the nine killings for which Henry Louis Wallace was convicted, in Charlotte.
• 1993: Dee Sumpter, Judy Williams and David Howard form the support group that becomes Mothers of Murdered Offspring.
• March 12, 1994: the last of the nine killings for which Wallace was convicted.
• January 7, 1997: Wallace is convicted of nine counts of first-degree murder; he is sentenced to death on January 29.
• February 10, 1997: the New Jersey Senate Judiciary Committee issues its statement on the Martini ruling.
• January 31, 2000: Harold Shipman is convicted of 15 murders and forgery; on February 1 Alan Milburn announces an independent inquiry.
• January 20, 2002: Sally White’s death comes to light in Camden Town.
• November 4, 2002: Anthony Hardy is discharged from his hospital order; two women die in late December.
• November 25, 2003: Hardy pleads guilty to three murders.
• January 13, 2004: Shipman dies in prison.
• 2005: Penton pleads guilty in Collin County, Texas; the Valad family’s application for a public inquiry is dismissed; the health authority review of Hardy’s care is published in September.
• December 2007: New Jersey abolishes the death penalty; Martini’s sentence is commuted to life without parole.
• March 20, 2008: Dmitry Voronenko is sentenced to life imprisonment in St. Petersburg.
• May 14, 2010: Hardy is given a whole life order.
• July 3, 2016: Brianna Foisy and Jason Netter Sr. die in Anchorage; on November 12 James Ritchie dies; that Christmas Bri’s Make-A-Call Project begins.
• April 26, 2017: Anchorage police attribute five killings to Ritchie and close the cases.
• October 2020: Judy Williams dies.
• November 25, 2020: Hardy dies.
• March 27, 2024: Voronenko is charged with a 2006 murder, with other charges.