A film about a real crime owes the dead nothing in the way of accuracy and the living very little. It owes its audience a story that holds together for ninety minutes, and real cases rarely oblige. Courts record what a jury accepted. Newspapers record what was said in the first week. A screenwriter keeps whatever carries the picture and discards the rest, and the record of the case is left to explain itself later, if anyone goes looking.
The nine cases below were all turned into films, some within a few years of the verdicts and one more than eighty years later. In a few, the filmmakers openly altered the facts. In others the departure was subtler: a place moved, a sequence compressed, a name kept for the dead and a person invented to hold the audience’s hand. What follows sets each film beside what courts, archives and contemporary reporting establish.
Robert Hansen ran a bakery in Anchorage, flew a small airplane and hunted big game. In February 1984 he pleaded guilty to four counts of first-degree murder, and in a taped confession he told prosecutors and Alaska State Troopers that he had killed 17 women over about a decade. Superior Court Judge Ralph Moody sentenced him on February 27, 1984 to life plus 461 years without parole. United Press International reported the sentence the next day.
The record contains one detail that no screenwriter would have dared invent. In 1978 the Alaska Supreme Court reduced a five-year sentence he had received for theft, describing him as a hard worker and a respectable member of his community. Six years later he stood before Judge Moody for the murders.
Two books followed within a decade of the plea, one by Walter Gilmour and Leland E. Hale in 1991 and Fair Game, by Bernard Du Clos, published by St. Martin’s in 1993. Publishers Weekly said the second examined how police and judges had failed to stop Hansen, including by not making sure he received the treatment the courts had relied on.
The 2013 film The Frozen Ground dramatized the investigation, with John Cusack as Hansen, Nicolas Cage as a state trooper and Vanessa Hudgens as a young woman who survived him. A corrections spokeswoman told reporters in 2014 that, as far as she knew, Hansen never saw it. He died on August 21, 2014, at Alaska Regional Hospital in Anchorage, aged 75.
The case did not end with the film. Hansen confessed to more killings than he was charged with, and some of those women went unnamed for decades. In October 2021 the Alaska Bureau of Investigation announced that a DNA match through genetic genealogy had identified one of them, Robin Pelkey, 37 years after her death came to light. A feature film ends on a verdict. The identification of the dead takes longer.
Robert Joe Wagner is one of the two men at the center of the Snowtown murders in South Australia, which came to light on May 20, 1999, in a small farming town north of Adelaide. Between 1992 and 1999, 11 people were murdered in and around Adelaide by John Justin Bunting, Wagner and James Vlassakis, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Most of the dead were people the killers knew: friends, neighbors, relatives and former partners.
Wagner was charged on May 20, 1999, the day the case broke. He pleaded guilty to three murders before trial. On September 8, 2003 a jury convicted him and Bunting of the others he faced, seven in Wagner’s case, and Justice Brian Martin sentenced both to life imprisonment with no non-parole period. A further charge, over the death of Suzanne Allen, was dropped on May 7, 2007. Wagner and Bunting had said she died of a heart attack.
The law has returned to him since. In 2019 Wagner applied to have a non-parole period fixed. Justice Greg Parker dismissed the application on May 9, 2019. He was reported in the autumn of 2026 to still be serving life, in the same weeks that Vlassakis was released on parole after an attempt to block it failed.
The 2011 feature film Snowtown dramatized the case. The point is worth stating plainly: a film that presents itself as drama is not claiming to be the court record, and the record here is detailed enough to stand without it. Ten murder convictions against Wagner, three on his own pleas, are an adjudicated fact. How any actor chose to portray him is not.
Gordon Stewart Northcott was 21 when, in September 1928, his teenage nephew told Los Angeles investigators what had happened on a small chicken ranch in Riverside County, California. Northcott left for Canada, was arrested in British Columbia on September 19, 1928, and was returned to California for trial at Riverside. In February 1929 a jury convicted him on three counts of first-degree murder: a youth of about 18 whose name was never learned, and two brothers from Pomona, Nelson Winslow, 10, and Lewis Winslow, 12. He was hanged at San Quentin on October 2, 1930. A prison archive in New York preserves the record of the execution.
The nine-year-old Walter Collins of Los Angeles, who had gone missing in March 1928, was tied to the same ranch by investigators. Northcott was never tried over his death.
Clint Eastwood’s 2008 film Changeling, with Angelina Jolie as Walter’s mother, Christine Collins, and a screenplay by J. Michael Straczynski, who spent a year in newspaper files and city and court records, takes as its subject something other than the ranch. It is the story of what the Los Angeles Police Department did to a mother. A boy was returned to her who she said was not her son. Captain J. J. Jones, who was handling the case, called her in and, when she would not accept the boy, had her sent to the psychopathic ward of the county hospital. The Legislature later barred police from taking that step without a warrant. The boy eventually admitted he was not Walter; he was a runaway who wanted to meet a film cowboy.
On those points the film has a firm base. Collins sued Jones. The Otago Daily Times reported that Jones never paid, that a city council committee recommended removing him and the police chief, and that the Legislature passed a bill barring police from placing a person in a psychiatric facility without a warrant. Christine Collins went on hoping her son was alive.
Where a film moves into the ranch, the record has to be read more carefully. Much of what is told about the killings rests on the testimony of the nephew, whom Northcott had brought illegally from Canada, and on the jury’s acceptance of it. Northcott called the charges a frame-up. His own Vancouver lawyer said afterward that when he last saw his client he thought him, in his word, a nut. After the case drew national attention, residents of Wineville changed the name of the community to Mira Loma, and the historian Steve Lech told ABC7 Los Angeles that the case had largely faded from local memory, perhaps by intention. Changeling is a fictionalized account, and its makers never said otherwise.
Raymond Martinez Fernandez spent the last years of the 1940s writing letters to women he found through mail-order lonely hearts clubs. Some of them he courted, two of them he married, and from several he took money. From late 1947 he did this with Martha Beck, a nurse from Florida who had answered one of his own letters and who traveled with him as his sister.
In January 1949 a widow from Albany, New York, Janet Fay, died in Valley Stream, Long Island. In late February 1949 Michigan police arrested the pair near Grand Rapids while inquiring into the death of another widow. Statements made there led New York detectives to Fay’s death, and New York, which had the death penalty when Michigan did not, took both. A jury in the Bronx convicted them of first-degree murder in the summer of 1949 after a trial of about ten weeks. Both were executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing on March 8, 1951.
The trial was a spectacle of mutual blame. Fernandez’s position was that Beck alone had acted while he was out of the room, and that his own part came afterward. Beck’s account was that her mind went blank after an argument. According to the reference work Great American Trials, both defendants testified at length about their private life together, apparently in an effort to show insanity, and Beck told the court of four suicide attempts. When she was called, she crossed the courtroom and kissed Fernandez before guards pulled her away. Fernandez withdrew his insanity plea during the trial at his own request; Beck’s stayed in, and two prosecution psychiatrists testified that she knew the nature of her act and knew it was wrong.
The 1970 film The Honeymoon Killers was written and directed by Leonard Kastle and produced by Warren Steibel, and opened in New York on February 4, 1970. According to the American Film Institute, it had been developed under the titles The Lonely Hearts Killers and Dear Martha, and starred Shirley Stoler as Beck and Tony Lo Bianco as Fernandez, with Mary Jane Higby as Fay. Turner Classic Movies' essay on the film says Kastle wanted an anti-Bonnie and Clyde that showed crime as ugly and its perpetrators as pathetic. The film invents and compresses some events, and it is not a source for the facts of the case.
The gaps cut the other way too. Much that is told about Fernandez elsewhere, including stories of a head injury, a prison term and other wives who died, has never been confirmed. He told New York authorities he had killed 17 women, a claim they could not confirm, according to a 2024 local history column in The Recorder. A notebook he carried listed the names of about 20 missing women, Great American Trials says. Neither figure was ever tested in court, and neither belongs in the account of what a jury decided.
Gesche Margarethe Gottfried was beheaded on the Domshof, the square beside Bremen Cathedral, on April 21, 1831. A Bremen court had sentenced her to death for 15 murders by poison, and a crowd estimated at 35,000 came to watch, according to the Bremen edition of the Berlin daily taz. It was the last public execution in the city. She had been born Gesche Margarethe Timm in Bremen on March 6, 1785, the daughter of a master tailor, and before her arrest the city called her the Angel of Bremen.
She was arrested on the evening of March 6, 1828, her birthday, and held almost three years at the Ostertorwache prison. Her victims, in the reporting, were people close to her: relatives, friends, acquaintances. The period of the crimes is given as 1813 to 1827 by most German reporting and 1813 to 1828 by the City of Bremen tourism portal. Even the count of the people who survived her poisonings varies, 19 in the taz in 2010 and at least 20 in a 2022 account citing the researcher Peer Meter.
Gesches Gift, a feature film loosely based on the case, had its world premiere at the Montreal film festival in August 1997 and was first shown on German television by ZDF on January 25, 1998, according to filmportal.de, the German film database. Effigie: Das Gift und die Stadt, directed by Udo Flohr from a screenplay by Flohr and Meter, premiered at the Bremen film festival on September 21, 2019 and reached German cinemas on January 20, 2022, with Suzan Anbeh as Gottfried. The story is told through a court stenographer, Cato Böhmer, one of the few invented figures; the taz noted that the victims, witnesses, judges and senators, as well as Mayor Johann Smidt, are real people.
The film’s interest in motive is the interesting part. The judges of 1831 cited inheritance and debt, among other reasons. Meter, after reading the full court files, argues that no plausible motive exists and that she was severely ill. The taz describes her insanity defense as the first of its kind raised in any trial, though that claim rests on its 2010 report of Meter’s research. Reporting also disagrees on where she died: the taz in 2023 and the city portal say the Domshof, where a paving stone called the Spuckstein marks the spot and visitors spit on it; a 2022 taz film review and the Kunsthalle Bremen catalog refer to the Marktplatz next to it.
The case has also inspired a ballad by Adelbert von Chamisso, a musical, an opera and radio plays, the taz reported. In 2003 the artists Korpys/Löffler made a drawing of the stone for their installation Etagentraum, now in the collection of the Kunsthalle Bremen. Two centuries on, the city is still arguing over how to remember her.
In the summer of 1968, poor people on the northern and western edges of Bombay were being killed at night. On the morning of August 27, 1968, a police sub-inspector named Alex Fialho stopped a man in the crowded Bhendi Bazaar area of south Bombay and took him to the Dongri police station. The man was known in police records as Sindhi Dalwai and to the press as Raman Raghav. He had a record of theft and no fixed address. In November 1968 he confessed before a magistrate, and police later said he had admitted at least 41 killings between 1966 and 1968. That figure was never tested in court.
About ten cases were registered against him over deaths in Bombay’s western suburbs in July and August 1968, and charge sheets were filed in all of them. He was tried in one: the murder of two men at Malad on the night of August 25 to 26, 1968, where the court determined the motive was theft. On August 13, 1969 he was sentenced to death. He declined to appeal. The High Court postponed confirmation on July 3, 1970, after a special medical board judged him 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 Bombay 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. By then one judge noted eight more trials still awaited him.
He was treated at the Central Institute of Mental Health and Research in Pune and died in custody there. Scroll.in gave the date as April 7, 1988; a Press Trust of India report in 2020 and The Week in 2016 say 1995. The date has never been settled.
Two films are involved. In 1991 the director Sriram Raghavan made Raman Raghav, A City, A Killer, a 70-minute reconstruction for a series of police case films produced with the Maharashtra police. It was based on the confession and on a retired officer’s memoir and was shot in 10 to 12 days at the places where the killings happened, Scroll.in reported in 2015. The series was never distributed. Years later, a doctor told Raghavan to see the man as someone who was sick and not only as a criminal.
Anurag Kashyap saw Raghavan’s film and later made Raman Raghav 2.0, starring Nawazuddin Siddiqui, 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. Anyone looking in it for the 1968 case will find a title and little else. The real man was judged by a medical board to be of unsound mind and spent the last decades of his life in custody; the film’s man is a creation of the screenwriters, and the court record does not mention him.
Carlos Eduardo Robledo Puch was 20 when police in Buenos Aires province arrested him on February 3, 1972. Eight years later, on November 27, 1980, a three-judge court of the San Isidro appeals chamber convicted him of 11 homicides, 10 of them aggravated, together with an attempted homicide, 17 robberies, abductions and other offenses, all committed in the northern suburbs of Greater Buenos Aires between March 1971 and February 1972. The court imposed life imprisonment with an added sentence of indefinite detention. Apart from a few days in July 1973, when he escaped from a prison in La Plata and was recaptured about 68 hours later, he has not been free since.
The Buenos Aires provincial prison service has described him as the person held longest in custody in Argentina, and newspapers there routinely call him the worst multiple killer in the country’s criminal history. Courts have refused his requests for release repeatedly: in 2008, in several rulings between 2013 and 2016, and again in 2023. On November 14, 2024 a judge granted him an open regime, subject to his consent. La Nación and Perfil reported that he declined, saying he was used to prison. As of January 19, 2026, MDZ placed him in Unidad 26 at Lisandro Olmos.
The journalist Rodolfo Palacios published a book on the case, Ángel Negro, in 2008, according to Los Andes. Luis Ortega’s feature film El Ángel, starring Lorenzo Ferro in his first film role, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 11, 2018, according to La Gaceta and Diario de Cuyo.
The newspapers differ among themselves even on small facts. His birthday is given as January 22, 1952 by La Nación and Letra P, and as January 19 by La Gaceta, Diario de Cuyo and MDZ. His arrest is dated February 3 by most, February 4 in one La Nación account. The count of victims is firm, because a court fixed it; the count of what he did beyond it is not. He told a forensic doctor of two further deaths that were never proven, and a first accomplice who died in a car crash in 1971 was never charged with anything. A film can present the worst version of a story as fact. A conviction, by contrast, can only count what it counts.
In September 1942 Mexico City learned that four young women had died in Tacuba, in the north of the capital, and that a 27-year-old chemistry student had confessed to their deaths. The student was Gregorio Cárdenas Hernández, known for the rest of his life as Goyo Cárdenas. He was on a scholarship from Pemex, the national oil company, and the press described him as a thin, shy young man. Within two weeks the main daily papers had turned him into the most talked-about criminal in the country. The historian Juan de Dios Vázquez, writing in a UNAM journal in 2011, called him the first Mexican serial killer, an assessment that no court ever confirmed: Cárdenas was charged with homicide and clandestine burial, held at Lecumberri and at the La Castañeda asylum, and never sentenced.
The press gave him many names. La Crónica lists the Mexican Bluebeard, the jackal and the troglodyte among them, and La Razón adds the Totonac Bluebeard, a reference to his Veracruz origins. Vázquez writes that some front pages set him beside criminals of the Porfirio Díaz era, others cast him as a mad scientist with a private laboratory, and others as a local Jack the Ripper. One 1942 headline asked how he turned from a human being into a wild beast. The printmaking collective Taller de Gráfica Popular produced a set of satirical skeleton prints about him for the Day of the Dead that year.
His defense lawyer, Eduardo D. Casasús, presented the deaths as the product of temporary insanity. The leading psychiatrists of the day took sides. La Razón reports that Leopoldo Salazar Viniegra, director of La Castañeda, concluded that Cárdenas had trained himself to deceive the experts, and that the criminologist Alfonso Quiroz Cuarón later concluded that he had known what he did. The Spanish psychiatrist Gonzalo Lafora published his own analysis in 1942, and La Razón describes the dispute between the Mexican and Spanish doctors as heated and at times xenophobic. Vázquez argues that Cárdenas read the press coverage of his own case and drew on it to build a public persona; he claimed, Vázquez writes, that he could turn into a bat and had invented a potion that made people invisible.
The case reopened an old argument about capital punishment, abolished in 1931. The weekly magazine Tiempo asked its readers whether it should be restored in the Federal District, and La Crónica reports the result as 5,325 in favor and 4,838 against.
Cárdenas escaped from La Castañeda on December 26, 1947 and was recaptured in Oaxaca. He returned to Lecumberri and stayed there until 1976. A judge ordered his release in September 1976 for lack of proof, according to Vázquez, though some newspapers describe a pardon by President Luis Echeverría. On September 23, 1976 he sat in the honor box of the Chamber of Deputies as the interior secretary, Mario Moya Palencia, held him up as a man who had remade himself, an episode Excélsior revisited in 2025. He died in a Los Angeles hospital on August 2, 1999.
Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1989 film Santa sangre was loosely based on his story, Vázquez writes. La Razón describes plays, films, documentaries, corridos and burlesque acts drawn from the case. Alfonso Quiroz Cuarón’s 1952 study of Cárdenas remains the best-known expert account. What a film cannot supply is the thing the legal record lacks: a verdict. A man who was never sentenced became source material for a feature, and in Congress an example of reform. The record supports neither use.
In the spring of 1946 eight people became victims of an unknown gunman in and around Texarkana, the twin city that sits on the line between Bowie County, Texas, and Miller County, Arkansas. Five of them died. The Texarkana Gazette called the unknown gunman the Phantom, and the case came to be known as the Texarkana Moonlight Murders. Nobody was ever charged. The Texas Department of Public Safety once described it as the number one unsolved murder case in Texas history, according to Texas Monthly and The Texas Observer.
The first incident came on the night of February 22, 1946, according to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, which also gives the date as February 23 in one of its daily history items. The last, on May 3, 1946, was in Arkansas, and investigators disagreed over whether it was the same man’s work. Investigators named one main suspect, Youell Lee Swinney, a car thief arrested in July 1946 at the Texarkana bus station. He was questioned about the Texarkana cases and never charged in any of them; his wife could not be made to testify against him. In 1947 he received a life sentence in Bowie County for felony theft under the Texas habitual-offender statute, and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ordered his release on September 25, 1973. He later served a federal term for counterfeiting and died in the 1990s, the year differing by source.
In 1976 the Arkansas filmmaker Charles B. Pierce made The Town That Dreaded Sundown, a horror film loosely based on the case. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas records that it was shot in four weeks in June and July 1976, mostly around Texarkana, starred Ben Johnson, Andrew Prine and Dawn Wells, and had its world premiere in Texarkana on December 17, 1976, before general release on December 24. It moved the crimes to the Arkansas side of the city. Its posters claimed that the person responsible still lurked in Texarkana, Arkansas, and city officials threatened to sue over the line. The film cost about $400,000 and earned about $5 million, and it is often counted among the first slasher films. A loose remake and sequel under the same title followed in 2014.
The distortion here was commercial, not cinematic: a poster line implying that a crime of 1946 was still live in 1976. Captain M. T. Gonzaullas of the Texas Rangers was interviewed for the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum in Dallas on January 26, 1977, as the film was being shown. He said it had never been completely solved. He died the following month, aged 85.
Texas Monthly reports that the case also fed the urban legend of the hook-handed man who preys on parked couples, though there is no evidence that the gunman used a hook. The author James Presley told the magazine that a 2001 cable program about urban legends, which repeated false claims about the case, was what moved him to write his book, The Phantom Killer, published in 2014. Since 2003 Pierce’s film has been screened free each October in Texarkana, and a local country club holds an annual Phantom Ball for charity. The FBI released its file in 2020, now the largest public body of records on the case.
Set side by side, the nine films fall into rough families. Some, like The Frozen Ground, Snowtown and Changeling, stayed close to a conviction and told it with the license of drama. Some, like The Honeymoon Killers and Gesches Gift, took the case as a frame for other interests, the loneliness of the 1940s in one and the question of an entire city’s complicity in the other. Raman Raghav 2.0 kept only a name. The Town That Dreaded Sundown kept a place and moved it. Santa sangre and El Ángel drew on men whose legal records were unfinished in different ways, one never sentenced, one in custody for fifty-four years and counting.
In every case the court file, where there is one, says less than the film and says it more slowly. A verdict names a count and a date. It does not explain. Where the records go quiet, in a case like Texarkana’s, the film fills the silence, and the audience carries the filmmaker’s version home as the memory of what happened.
• March 6, 1785: Gesche Margarethe Timm is born in Bremen.
• 1813 to 1827: the deaths attributed to Gesche Gottfried, according to most German reporting.
• March 6, 1828: Gottfried is arrested in Bremen on her birthday.
• April 21, 1831: Gottfried is executed on the Domshof in Bremen.
• September 19, 1928: Gordon Northcott is arrested in British Columbia and later returned to California.
• February 1929: a Riverside jury convicts Northcott on three counts of first-degree murder.
• October 2, 1930: Northcott is hanged at San Quentin.
• September 1942: Gregorio Cárdenas is arrested in Mexico City.
• December 26, 1947: Cárdenas escapes from La Castañeda and is recaptured in Oaxaca.
• February 28, 1949: Michigan police arrest Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck near Grand Rapids.
• Summer 1949: Fernandez and Beck are convicted of first-degree murder in the Bronx.
• March 8, 1951: Fernandez and Beck are executed at Sing Sing.
• February 22 to May 3, 1946: the Texarkana incidents.
• August 27, 1968: Raman Raghav is arrested in Bombay.
• August 13, 1969: Raghav is sentenced to death for the Malad murders.
• February 3, 1972: Carlos Robledo Puch is arrested.
• July 1973: Robledo Puch escapes from a prison in La Plata and is recaptured about 68 hours later.
• September 25, 1973: the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals orders Swinney released.
• September 1976: Cárdenas is released; he is shown in the Chamber of Deputies on September 23.
• December 17, 1976: The Town That Dreaded Sundown opens in Texarkana.
• November 27, 1980: Robledo Puch is convicted of 11 homicides.
• February 27, 1984: Hansen is sentenced to life plus 461 years.
• August 4, 1987: the Bombay High Court replaces Raghav’s death sentence with life imprisonment.
• May 20, 1999: the Snowtown murders come to light in South Australia.
• September 8, 2003: Robert Wagner is convicted by a jury of seven murders, on top of three guilty pleas.
• 2008: Changeling is released.
• 2013: The Frozen Ground is released.
• August 21, 2014: Hansen dies in Anchorage.
• May 11, 2018: El Ángel premieres at Cannes.
• May 9, 2019: Wagner’s application for a non-parole period is dismissed.
• October 22, 2021: Robin Pelkey is identified as one of Hansen’s victims.
• November 14, 2024: Robledo Puch is offered an open regime and declines.