When a woman dies suddenly, police begin with the people who were closest to her. The rule is old and it is usually sound, and in several of the best-known serial cases it cost an innocent person weeks, months or years. A widower sat in a Glasgow prison cell accused of killing his own wife, daughter and sister-in-law while the man who had done it walked the same prison corridors. A sheriff in Virginia lived under a cloud for the rest of his life. A younger brother in Hong Kong was held while detectives tried to understand what he must have known. Fathers, boyfriends and husbands in Brazil, California, Georgia and Texas were arrested, questioned, tried, and in a few cases convicted, before the facts turned elsewhere or never turned at all.
Seven cases follow. In five of them a conviction of the real offender eventually settled the question. In the other two, the Atlanta and Austin killings of 1884 to 1912, nobody was ever convicted of the series, and the husbands and acquaintances who were tried for single deaths remain, in the words of the law, men whom no court could connect to the crime.
Nancy Dunning was 56, a real estate agent known in Alexandria as the "Queen of Del Ray," a neighborhood she had worked to improve. Her husband had been the city’s sheriff since 1985. On December 5, 2003, she was due at lunch with her husband and son and did not arrive. Her death came to light that day. According to the Court of Appeals of Virginia, the front door was closed but unlocked, nothing was missing or disturbed, and there was no forced entry. Investigators recovered a small-caliber bullet.
The case stayed open for more than ten years, and for much of that time suspicion rested on the sheriff. Nothing in the record shows a charge, but the shadow was public. After the 2015 verdict, Commonwealth’s Attorney Bryan Porter said he was glad to lift the suspicion that had hung over the former sheriff, and the couple’s daughter said the verdict cleared her father. By then he could not hear it. He had left office after two decades, moved to South Carolina after his wife’s death and died there in July 2012, at 62, according to Patch.
What cleared him was a man he had no known connection to. Charles Severance, a former Alexandria resident who had twice run for mayor, in 1996 and 2000, lost custody of his son in an Alexandria court in 2000. In more than 2,000 pages of his own writing he railed against what he called the city’s "enforcement class." On November 11, 2013, Ronald Kirby, the region’s senior transportation planner, was killed in Alexandria. On February 6, 2014, Ruthanne Lodato, 59, a music teacher whose father and brother had both been Alexandria judges, was killed, and a caregiver who worked in her household was wounded and survived. Two killings in three months alarmed the city. On March 6, 2014, Police Chief Earl Cook said bullet fragments from all three cases were similar enough to investigate them as possibly linked. The tests showed similar rifling from a small-caliber weapon but did not establish whether the same gun had been used.
Severance was arrested on March 13, 2014, in Wheeling, West Virginia, on a Loudoun County warrant for possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. Alexandria police said publicly they were "nowhere close" to calling him a suspect. He was charged with the three killings on September 8, 2014. The case against him had no murder weapon, no DNA and no fingerprint evidence. Tried in Fairfax County after a change of venue, he was convicted on November 2, 2015, on all ten counts, on the strength of the surviving caregiver, a rare type of ammunition, neighbors who placed him near the last killing, and his own words. Judge Randy Bellows sentenced him on January 21, 2016, to three consecutive life terms plus 48 years. The Court of Appeals of Virginia affirmed in 2017 and the Supreme Court of Virginia in 2018.
One detail of the trial shows how long the first suspicion lasted. In September 2015, Patch reported, the judge ruled that Severance’s lawyers could try to show that the former sheriff, dead for three years, was responsible for his wife’s death. The jury convicted Severance on every count, and the sheriff’s daughter spoke for the family afterward: "We miss her more than I can say."
Peter Manuel was born in Manhattan in March 1927 to Scottish parents who took the family back to Scotland in 1932. He had a record from boyhood. In 1946 a detective constable named William Muncie arrested him after a housebreaking in Lanarkshire, and Muncie would meet him again twelve years later as a chief inspector. Manuel served eight years in Peterhead Prison and was released in the summer of 1953, aged 26.
On September 17, 1956, three women died in Burnside, Rutherglen: Marion Watt, her 16-year-old daughter Vivienne, and Marion’s sister, Margaret Brown. Police searched the Uddingston house of Manuel’s parents and learned nothing. Manuel refused to speak to them, and his father complained that the family was being persecuted.
Suspicion fell instead on the husband and father, a former War Reserve policeman who had been away on a fishing trip at Lochgilphead, in Argyll, at the time. Detectives ran tests to see whether he could have driven back to the Glasgow area overnight and returned before morning. Most were inconclusive, but a ferry master and another motorist picked him out at an identity parade. He was charged with all three murders and held in Barlinnie Prison.
Manuel was in Barlinnie at the same time. He approached the widower and claimed to know who the real killer was. The widower’s solicitor, Lawrence Dowdall, became convinced that Manuel himself was responsible, but Manuel would not take the idea to the police. After 67 days in custody the case against the husband collapsed and he was released. He had lost his wife, his daughter and his sister-in-law, and he had been jailed on the allegation that he caused it.
Manuel went on. The Glasgow Police Museum records that Isabelle Cooke, 17, of Mount Vernon, was reported missing on December 29, 1957, and that Peter Smart, 45, his wife Doris and their son Michael were killed in Uddingston at the turn of the year. Chief Inspector Muncie was working on the Cooke inquiry when the Chief Constable of Lanarkshire told him of the Uddingston deaths. Muncie remembered the young housebreaker he had arrested in 1946. Detectives learned that Manuel had been driving the Smart family’s car, and banknotes from the Smart household turned up in local pubs. He was arrested on January 14, 1958, and charged with the Smart murders.
The next day he asked to see Inspector Robert McNeill. He offered to confess on condition that his father, who had been arrested for receiving stolen goods, was freed. His statements covered Anne Kneilands, 17, who died in East Kilbride in January 1956, the Burnside deaths, the Smart family and Isabelle Cooke: eight killings in all. He was also the prime suspect in the death of a taxi driver near Newcastle upon Tyne in December 1957, a case never tried.
The trial opened at the High Court in Glasgow on May 12, 1958, and lasted 14 days. Manuel dismissed his lawyers and conducted his own defense, and at points in the police interviews had explained his detailed knowledge of the crimes by claiming he had spoken to the "real" murderer, according to GBH. The jury took two hours and 21 minutes and convicted him of seven murders. He was sentenced to death on May 26, 1958, and hanged at Barlinnie at 8 a.m. on July 11, 1958. The Burnside widower had, by then, been free for nearly two years.
Lam Kor-wan was 27, a taxi driver on the night shift. Between February and July 1982, four women who took his cab did not reach their destinations: Chan Fung-lan, a nightclub hostess and mother of two, Chan Wan-kit, 31, Leung Sau-wan, 29, and Leung Wai-sum, 17, a student who had just finished Form 5. Police spent six months questioning hundreds of people and then taxi drivers in Tsim Sha Tsui. The case broke on August 17, 1982, when staff at a photo shop reported what a customer had left to be printed. Officers watched the shop’s Tsim Sha Tsui and Mong Kok branches, and arrested Lam when he came to collect the prints.
His family lived in To Kwa Wan, in Kowloon: his father, his siblings and the household of a brother-in-law. Lam shared a small bedroom with his younger brother, and the two, by an informal agreement, never touched each other’s belongings. The arrangement mattered after the arrest. Sing Tao Headline, in a 2023 series drawn from its archives and from retired officers, reported that police first suspected the younger brother, who slept in the bunk above Lam’s and, the paper said, had no idea of his brother’s crimes. He was detained and then released for lack of evidence, according to Sing Tao and Leung Ping, a retired officer who worked on the case. A forensic pathologist, Dr. Ma, told HK01 that there was no evidence the brother took part and that Lam accepted responsibility for the crimes.
The brother’s detention was short. The father’s ordeal was longer and quieter. According to Sing Tao, he told the police they had made a mistake and that his quiet son could not have killed anyone, until officers showed him something that changed his mind. In court he refused to accept blame for what his son had become. "Why don’t you say society has a responsibility?" he asked. The South China Morning Post reported that the court heard Lam had been beaten severely by his father as a child. In 1986, Sing Tao wrote, the father had memorial tablets set up for the four women at the Yuen Yuen Institute in Tsuen Wan, where a Taoist priest chanted scriptures for them. HK01, citing a documentary, dated the ceremony to November 1986.
The High Court jury convicted Lam in March 1983 on four counts of murder. He was sentenced to death on April 8, 1983. In August 1984 the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, as every death sentence in Hong Kong was then commuted. Sing Tao reported in 2023 that he remained in prison. Rumors that he killed more than four women have never been confirmed, and he was charged with four.
The case belongs here because of whom the police looked at in the years before Chagas. Band reports that after a four-year-old boy, Daniel Ferreira Ribeiro, went missing in February 2003, the child’s father was briefly suspected, because Daniel had been sleeping at his house. In the police reconstruction of that case, Band reported, Chagas himself played the part of the father. A police chief, Sebastião Uchôa, later told Band that Chagas had left what he called subjective traces. He had made missing-person posters to help search for Daniel, and again for a boy of 15 who failed to return in December 2003. Uchôa said he noticed a poster on a utility pole near the older boy’s family that looked like the one made for Daniel, and that this turned his suspicion toward the mechanic.
The boy’s father was one of several. A 2025 paper presented to the CONPEDI congress says that third parties, not the actual perpetrator, were arrested and convicted for some of the crimes before Chagas was identified. Band reports that prosecutors later asked for the acquittal of two men who had been accused in some of the cases. The Altamira deaths in Pará, which Chagas confessed to and which have never been tried against him, produced a second trail of wrongly accused men: in 2004 the Supremo Tribunal Federal reported habeas corpus petitions from men convicted in the Altamira case, and their defense argued that Chagas was the real culprit. Maranhão investigators also said they did not rely on his confession alone, and his own lawyer called some of his statements fabrications. The extent of the wrong done to the earlier suspects has never been settled, and neither has the number of boys he killed: 42 by his own account, 41 in the 2025 paper, 28 recognized by the state for the settlement with the families.
The families did not wait for a verdict to count their losses. After a complaint to the Organization of American States, the state of Maranhão, in a law passed on December 15, 2005, recognized 28 boys as victims for the purposes of a settlement. A 2021 study of the mothers' accounts says the families received houses with titles still pending, that a pension was later made lifelong and raised to one minimum wage, and that promised schools and prevention programs were never fully delivered. On June 27, 2025, the Maranhão prosecutors' office held a public hearing on six items of the agreement that had not been carried out: only one property title had been handed over, and five state departments sent no one. A mother whose four-year-old son was killed in 2003 told the hearing that the agreement had not been fully met.
The sixth case is smaller and sharper. Six women were killed in San Diego in 1990, and the California Supreme Court’s 2007 opinion in People v. Prince is the fullest public record. Tiffany Schultz, 21, died on January 12, 1990, in Clairemont. Her live-in boyfriend was arrested in the days afterward and released after a few days. He was never charged. A maintenance worker at the complex testified at trial that a different man, not Cleophus Prince Jr., had asked him for a screwdriver that morning. The opinion does not say what drew police to the boyfriend, and does not need to: a young woman had died inside a closed apartment with no sign of forced entry, and he lived there.
Prince, who had moved to the same San Diego neighborhood with his girlfriend in December 1989, was linked to the series by DNA from the Janene Weinhold case, by other physical evidence and by statements he made to others. He was detained and released in San Diego on February 4, 1991, after giving a blood sample, and arrested in Birmingham, Alabama, on March 1, 1991. A San Diego County jury convicted him of six counts of first degree murder, the rape of Weinhold, burglaries and perjury. Judgment of death was entered on November 5, 1993, and affirmed on April 30, 2007. The Habeas Corpus Resource Center listed him under sentence of death on June 1, 2026.
Between the fall of 1910 and the spring of 1912, young Black women, most of them cooks, laundresses or housekeepers, died in Atlanta. In June 1911 the city’s white daily papers began to say one man was responsible and borrowed a name from London, "Jack the Ripper." Researchers who returned to the newspapers and the death certificates in 2013 counted 19 deaths that at least one Atlanta paper had linked to the series and kept eight as a possible one. Other accounts give 20, 21 or 24. The person or persons responsible were never identified, and the series is attributed, not proven.
What the record does show is a steady flow of arrests, mostly of husbands and men who had been seen with the dead. Rosa Trice, 35, died on January 22, 1911; her husband was arrested about two hours later and released that Sunday night for lack of evidence, McLaughlin and Bing reported. Lucinda McNeal died on February 3, 1911, and her husband was convicted of her murder and sentenced to life, so researchers set her case aside. Minnie Wise died on November 10, 1911, and her husband was arrested; the papers reported that he had been jealous and had threatened her, and the outcome of the arrest was not reported. Pearl Williams died on January 19, 1912, and police arrested a man seen with her and, that evening, a 17-year-old, with no reported outcome for either. Alacy Owens was killed on February 15, 1912; her husband was tried, the first jury hung and the second convicted him on wholly circumstantial evidence, with a life sentence.
Two men went to trial and were acquitted. After Sadie Holley died in July 1911, police arrested H.H., a 27-year-old laborer, within 24 hours and held him on suspicion. Police then arrested T.H., 35, in a saloon after a witness named him; no later charge against T.H. was reported. On August 9, 1911, a Fulton County grand jury indicted H.H. and a second man, J.D., about whom little was published. H.H. was acquitted. For Eva Florence, whose death is dated October or November 1911, her brother, a waiter, posted a $100 reward; police arrested H.B. on August 10, 1912, and a jury acquitted him in October 1912.
The people who spoke for the dead pushed back against both the Ripper theory and the pace of arrests. Black leaders asked the city to hire Black detectives, and Black church leaders petitioned the city council and the governor for a reward. White supporters included Asa Candler, the founder of Coca-Cola and a future mayor. Governor Hoke Smith offered $250. City Recorder Nash Broyles said there was no such thing as a Black "Jack the Ripper," that each woman had been killed by a different man, and that at least 1,000 Black men in Atlanta were ready to harm their wives. He fined the man before him $25.75. Capital B News Atlanta, in 2025, described such statements as part of a pattern in which officials dismissed the deaths as "Saturday night violence" and blamed alcohol, quarrels and the women themselves. In 1912 a grand jury also said there was no single offender. The result was that husbands were arrested because the theory of a lone stranger had been dismissed, and strangers were arrested because the theory of a lone man could not be dropped.
Between December 31, 1884, and December 1885, eight people were killed in Austin, Texas, and several more were injured. The police and press of the time, and later writers such as Skip Hollandsworth and D. Kim Rossmo, attributed the killings to a single unknown offender, called the Midnight Assassin, though the PBS program History Detectives allowed that more than one person may have been involved. Rossmo writes that about 400 people, mainly Black men, were arrested during 1885 and questioned severely.
Chief Grooms Lee’s department made the first prosecution. W.S., the man to whom Mollie Smith had paid attention and who was himself injured that night, was tried for her killing. The district attorney, James H. Robertson, the younger brother of the mayor, prosecuted him. After a two-day trial in early December 1885, an all-white jury acquitted him. Earlier, according to the Austin Chronicle, Lee had arrested a Black man he believed had been jealous of W.S.; no charge was reported. Hollandsworth describes how officers picked up Black men for going barefoot and relied on bloodhounds, and how detectives beat a man connected to a suspect, A.M., until a white bystander stopped them; A.M. was held in jail for nine days. None was charged with the killings.
The deaths on the night of December 24, 1885, changed the stakes. Susan Hancock, 45, and Eula Phillips, 17, were both killed that night, and word of Eula’s death reached the city by party-line telephone. At least 4,000 frightened people gathered downtown, Hollandsworth wrote. A citizens' committee raised a reward of $3,000, and the governor added $300. Marshal James Lucy, a former Texas Ranger who had replaced Lee, was authorized to hire more officers.
The district attorney then turned to the two husbands. Eula Phillips’s husband, who had been injured the same night, was arrested in early January 1886. Prosecutors argued he had killed his wife himself and staged the work of the offender the whole city feared; relatives and friends testified to his heavy drinking and his abuse of her. His lawyers challenged the physical evidence. The trial became a public sensation, which Hollandsworth compared to the O. J. Simpson trial, and the jury convicted him and sentenced him to seven years. About six months later the Court of Appeals of Texas reversed the conviction for insufficient evidence. He was not retried. He later worked in a chair factory in Georgetown, married again and raised a second family, suffered headaches from his injury and drank heavily, and died in 1929 at 68.
The husband of Susan Hancock was arrested some weeks after the first. The prosecution rested on a letter his wife had written months earlier, in which she said she could no longer live with his drinking. Prosecutors argued he had returned drunk, believed she was about to leave, and killed her. There were no eyewitnesses. At the trial the couple’s teenage daughter testified that her mother had never shown her father the letter, and the theory collapsed. Hollandsworth wrote that the jury hung, while Haile put it more simply: the husband was cleared at his first trial. Either way he was not convicted, was not retried, and later left Austin. The district attorney never tried to tie either husband to the earlier killings, Haile noted, and Hollandsworth treated the idea of two husbands separately imitating the same offender on the same night as implausible.
• 1884-12-31: Mollie Smith dies in Austin, the first death attributed to the Midnight Assassin.
• 1885-12: W.S. is acquitted of Smith’s killing after a two-day trial.
• 1885-12-24: Susan Hancock and Eula Phillips are killed in Austin.
• Early 1886: Phillips’s husband is arrested and later convicted; the conviction is reversed about six months later.
• 1886: The husband of Susan Hancock is tried; no conviction.
• 1911-01-22: Rosa Trice dies in Atlanta; her husband is arrested and released that night.
• 1911-08-09: A Fulton County grand jury indicts H.H. over the death of Sadie Holley; he is later acquitted.
• 1912-10: H.B. is acquitted in the death of Eva Florence.
• 1956-09-17: Three women die in Burnside, Rutherglen.
• 1956: The husband and father is charged and held in Barlinnie for 67 days.
• 1958-01-14: Peter Manuel is arrested and charged with the Smart murders.
• 1958-05-12: Manuel’s trial opens in Glasgow; he is convicted of seven murders.
• 1958-07-11: Manuel is hanged at Barlinnie.
• 1982-02 to 1982-07: Four women die in Hong Kong.
• 1982-08-17: Lam Kor-wan is arrested; his younger brother is detained and released.
• 1983-04-08: Lam is sentenced to death; the sentence is commuted in August 1984.
• 1990-01-12: Tiffany Schultz dies in San Diego; her boyfriend is arrested and released.
• 1991-03-01: Cleophus Prince Jr. is arrested in Birmingham, Alabama.
• 2003-12-05: Nancy Dunning dies in Alexandria, Virginia.
• 2003-02 and 2003-12: Boys die on São Luís island; the father of one is briefly suspected; Chagas is identified in late 2003.
• 2004-03: Chagas is arrested.
• 2005-12-15: Maranhão recognizes 28 boys as victims for the settlement.
• 2014-03-13: Charles Severance is arrested in Wheeling, West Virginia.
• 2015-11-02: Severance is convicted on all counts.
• 2018-07-19: The Supreme Court of Virginia affirms.