On September 9, 1910, Clarence Hiller was killed in the Morgan Park neighborhood of Chicago. The man convicted of the crime, Thomas Jennings, had only lately been released from the state prison at Joliet, and the case against him rested in part on something new to an American courtroom: the ridges of his fingers. When the Illinois Supreme Court upheld the verdict in 1911, in People v. Jennings, Chief Justice Orrin Carter wrote that fingerprint identification had a scientific basis and that courts were justified in admitting it, noting that Great Britain already did so. The state’s own court historian, John A. Lupton, has called it the first case of its kind in the United States. Jennings was hanged on February 16, 1912.
Jennings killed one man, and the ruling settled a question of evidence. The harder questions came later, as fingerprints moved from a single killing to series of killings spread across years, cities and borders. A print only names someone if there is a card to compare it with, a person to compare it, and a system that brings the two together. In the cases that follow, those three things arrived decades apart, or not at all, or in the wrong order. One print waited until its owner was dead. Another was compared by hand, one finger at a time, until the examiner’s eyesight suffered. Others sat in computer systems that held exactly the record investigators needed and returned it to no one.
In the summer and autumn of 1944 five women were killed in Bucharest in a series that the city’s press, according to the Hungarian legal historian Hunor Kádár, attributed to "the killer in the storm," because the killings came on nights of heavy rain and wind. Kádár and the Iași daily BZI name them as Elena Udrea, 19, killed on the night of June 29 to 30; Maria Ionescu, 36, in July; Elena Locusteanu, 17, in October; and Rozalia Coroiu, 20, and Maria Vizitiu in November. Some Romanian reports count four deaths rather than five.
The young police officer who handled the first case was Constantin Țurai. He recorded fingerprints and a palm print, and then the war, the change of regime and the turnover of investigators left the case open, Kádár writes. Țurai did not let it go. He had noted that the pattern of the prints was of a type carried by about one person in 3,000, and by 1970 he was running the biocriminalistics laboratory of the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Bucharest.
By then the city had a new series. Between 1970 and May 1971 a series of killings in Bucharest took the lives of four women: Elena Oprea, a waitress, in the spring of 1970; Fănica Ilie, 31, in March 1971; Gheorghița Popa, 35, in April; and Mihaela Ursu, 39, a university assistant, in May. On May 27, 1971, the Militia arrested Ion Rîmaru, a veterinary student. After a public trial on September 1 to 3, 1971, the Bucharest Municipal Tribunal convicted him of four murders, six attempted murders and rape, robbery and theft counts and sentenced him to death, Evenimentul Zilei reported, quoting the Agerpres account of the verdict. He was executed by firing squad at Jilava Penitentiary on October 23, 1971. In his statements, as BZI quotes them, he blamed his father, Florea Rîmaru, for urging him on; the father denied it and was never convicted of anything connected with his son’s case.
Florea Rîmaru died in October 1972, a year after the execution. At the Institute of Forensic Medicine his fingerprints and palm prints were taken, and Țurai, according to both BZI and Kádár, recognized the pattern of the left thumb as the one he had recorded in 1944. A formal comparison confirmed the match. Țurai later wrote about the case in a book, "Enigmele unor amprente" ("The Mysteries of Some Fingerprints"), which BZI quotes. Kádár gives the date of the father’s death as October 23, 1972, the anniversary of his son’s execution; BZI gives October 20.
The identification closed nothing in court. Florea Rîmaru had left Bucharest after 1944, settled in Corabia and raised a family, BZI reports. He was never charged with the 1944 killings, and they stand attributed to him only by Țurai’s comparison and by the writers who have followed it. The case is a lesson in the oldest limit of the method. A print kept from 1944 to 1972 named its owner only when a single examiner, still carrying the pattern in his memory, happened to see the right hand.
Two years after the Bucharest killings, a fingerprint drove the best-known Chicago murder case of its generation. In June 1945 Josephine Ross, a 43-year-old widow, was killed on the North Side. In December 1945 Frances Brown was killed, and the press began calling the unknown offender the Lipstick Killer. On January 7, 1946, six-year-old Suzanne Degnan was kidnapped and murdered.
For months, according to The Chicago Maroon, the police took the fingerprints of everyone they arrested and compared them with the prints from the Degnan case. The comparison that mattered came after June 26, 1946, when police arrested William Heirens, a 17-year-old University of Chicago student with a long record of burglaries, in Rogers Park. Sergeant Thomas Laffey of the Chicago police reported that a print of Heirens’s matched one in the Degnan case, and the FBI confirmed it, the University of Chicago researcher Sophia Posnock writes. By June 30 police had tied him to the Ross and Brown deaths as well; the Maroon reported nine points of similarity between his print and one from the Brown case, a figure officials called adequate for identification.
What came next turned the case from a matter of ridges into a matter of law. In its 1954 opinion in People v. Heirens, the Illinois Supreme Court described two days of intermittent questioning, an injection of sodium pentothal given without his or his parents' consent at the direction of the State’s Attorney, and a lie-detector test, also without consent, and called the conduct "flagrant violations of his rights." On July 16, 1946, the Chicago Tribune published an account presented as his confession before he had confessed to anything, Posnock writes. His own lawyers then negotiated a plea, and on September 4, 1946, in the Criminal Court of Cook County, he pleaded guilty to the three murders and to 26 indictments for burglary, robbery and assault. He received three consecutive life sentences. The Supreme Court held in 1954 that the police misconduct had "no substantial connection" with the pleas, entered more than a month later, and the convictions stood.
He recanted almost at once, and the fingerprint became the center of the fight. In the 1990s his lawyer, Jed Stone, argued that the print from the Brown case had the full edges of a rolled impression, something he said did not occur in ordinary handling, and that it had been planted, ABC7 Chicago reported; CBS Chicago reported that Stone called the fingerprint evidence fraudulent. Prosecutors answered with the same print. At an April 1988 parole hearing, United Press International reported, the Cook County State’s Attorney, Richard Daley, dismissed the innocence claims and pointed to the fingerprints, the handwriting samples, the stolen property and his confession. The Prisoner Review Board turned him down for the last time on August 2, 2007, by a vote of 14 to 0, WBEZ reported. He died in custody on March 5, 2012, at 83, having served more than 65 years. No court set aside his convictions.
Carlton Gary’s prints were on file long before anyone in Georgia knew to look for them. On April 14, 1970, Nellie Farmer, 85, a retired teacher, died in Albany, New York. A fingerprint in the case matched Gary’s, and he told police he had robbed her and that another man had killed her, according to the Muscogee County Superior Court’s 2017 order in his case and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. That man, J.L.M., was tried and acquitted. Gary was convicted only of robbery and was never charged with her death.
Seven years later, between September 1977 and April 1978, a series of attacks on older women living alone in and around the Wynnton neighborhood of Columbus, Georgia, left seven of them dead. For six years, the federal courts later recorded, the Columbus police had no workable suspect. The break came in 1984, when a trace of property stolen in a Columbus burglary in October 1977 pointed through Gary’s relatives to Gary himself. A Columbus police sergeant then compared Gary’s fingerprints with prints from the 1977 cases and reported a match, the 2017 order records. On May 3, 1984, he was arrested in Albany, Georgia.
The prosecution was built around the prints. Doug Pullen, one of the prosecutors, told the Journal-Constitution that the state charged Gary only in the cases where his fingerprints had been identified and where he had admitted being present. On May 4, 1984, a Muscogee County grand jury indicted him for the deaths of Florence Scheible, 89, Martha Thurmond, 69, and Kathleen Woodruff, 74, all killed in the autumn and winter of 1977. On August 26, 1986, a jury convicted him of three counts each of malice murder, rape and burglary, and he was sentenced to death. Four other Columbus deaths were put before the jury as similar transactions; he was never charged with them.
He denied the killings for more than 30 years, and in the long post-conviction fight the fingerprints were challenged with everything else. A former FBI fingerprint supervisor stated in an affidavit that the identifications were borderline at best; the state replied that the affidavit contained factual errors, the 2017 order records. Judge Frank J. Jordan Jr. held that the fingerprint challenge had been known at trial and was no ground for a new one, and he denied Gary’s extraordinary motion for a new trial on September 1, 2017. Georgia executed Gary by lethal injection on March 15, 2018, the state Attorney General’s office announced. The New York print of 1970 had named him for one crime and not another; the Columbus prints of 1977 waited on a stolen object to bring a suspect forward before they could speak at all.
Lyndon Fitzgerald Pace’s case shows the same dependence from the other side. Between August 1988 and March 1989 four women were killed in Atlanta: Lula Bell McAfee, Mattie Mae McLendon, Johnnie Mae Martin and Annie Kate Britt. Three were in their late seventies or eighties; the fourth was 42. Laboratory work had told the police that one man was responsible, the Supreme Court of Georgia later noted, but not who he was.
In September 1992 two burglaries at the homes of older women in the Vine City neighborhood were investigated, and the prints taken in both matched prints of Pace’s that the police already held, according to the state’s brief to the Supreme Court of the United States and the Georgia court’s 1999 opinion. He was arrested on October 2, 1992, at 28, on a charge arising from the second burglary. After his arrest he agreed to give blood and hair samples, and laboratory tests matched him to the evidence from all four killings. The fingerprints did not prove the murders. They produced the name that made the decisive tests possible.
A Fulton County jury convicted Pace on March 5, 1996, of four counts of malice murder, four of felony murder, four of rape and two of aggravated sodomy, and recommended death for each murder. The Supreme Court of Georgia affirmed on December 3, 1999. Two of its justices would have set aside the death sentences over the prosecutor’s closing argument at sentencing, but the federal courts left them in place, and on May 13, 2024, the Supreme Court of the United States declined to hear his case. The Georgia Department of Corrections listed him among the people under a death sentence in its custody as of June 30, 2026.
Not every laboratory had a database to consult. In September 2020 the Kazakh news site Liter.kz interviewed Igor Semenov, by then head of the operational and forensic department of the North Kazakhstan police, about a run of killings and attacks on women in and around Petropavlovsk in the late 1990s. One of the men convicted in those years was Oleg Muraenko (Murayenko in English transliteration), who was sentenced to death for killing six women. A Petropavlovsk news agency, pkzsk.info, described the victims as six young women. Their names and the dates of the killings have not been reported.
There were no living witnesses, investigators told Liter.kz. The case turned on part of a single fingerprint recovered in one of the investigations. Semenov, then a senior forensic examiner, described what the comparison involved once a suspect had been identified: going through all ten fingers on the man’s fingerprint card, one at a time, with a magnifying glass, looking for the small patch of ridges that matched the fragment. The work took five or six days. By the end, he said, his eye was swimming, and he believed the work had damaged the sight in his right eye, which he said still saw poorly.
Semenov described a laboratory that photographed on Soviet-made Zenit cameras with black-and-white film, measured with calipers and a ruler, and had no automated fingerprint system at all. The regional police later acquired the Papillon fingerprint database, which by 2020 held about 350,000 prints for North Kazakhstan, Liter.kz reported. Muraenko’s identification came before any of it. Liter.kz reported that he was executed in 2002, shortly before Kazakhstan’s moratorium on executions; pkzsk.info said it was widely believed he was the last man executed in the country, and put the last executions in 2001. Both accounts rest on press reporting alone.
By the late 1990s the United States had automated fingerprint systems, and the case of Angel Maturino Resendiz showed both what they could do and how badly they could fail. In December 1998 Dr. Claudia Benton, a 39-year-old physician training in medical genetics at Baylor College of Medicine, was killed in West University Place, inside Houston. Houston police ran prints from the investigation through the Texas fingerprint system, and on December 26, 1998, it reported a match to "Carlos Cluthier Rodriguez," the name a man had given when he was arrested in Carson County, Texas, in 1993, according to a 2000 review by the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General. A California database matched the same man to a 1995 arrest in San Bernardino County, and on January 5, 1999, the FBI reported his long criminal record. That day a Harris County judge issued a warrant for him on a burglary charge that named him as a suspect in her murder.
The prints had given the police a man. A different set of prints kept letting him go. During 1998 the Border Patrol caught him seven times crossing from Mexico, and each time agents checked his fingerprints only against the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s own system, IDENT, which held records of earlier border arrests and a list of lookouts but was not connected to the FBI’s criminal records, the Inspector General reported. Each time he was returned to Mexico the same day. After the warrant was issued, Houston detectives and a Texas Ranger tried to have him flagged at the border; their requests went to the wrong agency or stalled. "In fact, no one in the INS had entered a lookout for Resendez in any INS database," the report said.
On the night of June 1, 1999, while he was wanted for murder, agents caught him again near Santa Teresa, New Mexico. He gave a name he had never used. The officer who enrolled him in IDENT had about six months on the job and no IDENT training. The system offered three possible matches, with photographs, covering five of his 1998 arrests, and the officer rejected each one. There was no lookout in the system, and he was sent back to Mexico. Had a lookout been entered, the Inspector General concluded, "it is likely that he would have been detained by the Border Patrol on that date."
Within days four more people were dead. Josephine Konvicka, 73, died in Fayette County, Texas, and Noemi Dominguez, 26, a Houston schoolteacher, in Houston, deaths that came to light on June 4 and June 5, 1999. About ten days later George Morber, 80, and his daughter, Carolyn Frederick, were killed in Gorham, Illinois. Resendiz was charged in those cases and in others in Texas, Kentucky and Georgia, but none of them was ever tried. He surrendered at El Paso on July 13, 1999. A Harris County jury convicted him on May 18, 2000, of the capital murder of Claudia Benton, rejecting his insanity defense, and he was sentenced to death; the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed in 2003. Texas executed him on June 27, 2006.
The Inspector General’s report, released on March 20, 2000, made 25 recommendations, the first of them to integrate IDENT with the FBI’s fingerprint system as soon as possible. It noted that the FBI’s new national fingerprint and crime-information systems had gone live in July 1999 with no link to IDENT, and that connecting them might take five years. "We agree and believe that IDENT and its use should be improved rather than abandoned," the report concluded.
Integration did not cure everything. Jeremy Bryan Jones, an Oklahoma man wanted there on a sexual assault charge, moved to Georgia and lived under the name John Paul Chapman, which belonged to a man then imprisoned in Missouri. He was arrested three times in Douglas and Carroll counties in 2003 and 2004 on minor offenses, and each time local police sent his fingerprints to the FBI under the Chapman name, CBS News and the Associated Press reported in May 2005. The FBI’s system did not connect them to Jones or to the Oklahoma warrant, and each time he was released.
On September 17, 2004, two days after Hurricane Ivan cut power across the Mobile area, Lisa Marie Nichols, a grocery store worker who had raised two children, was killed in Turnerville, Alabama. Jones was arrested in Mobile County four days later, still using the Chapman name, and only then did investigators learn who he was. In May 2005 the FBI admitted the failure. "Law enforcement lost an opportunity to prevent further criminal activity by this individual," the bureau said, and Thomas E. Bush III, assistant director of its Criminal Justice Information Services Division, added: "The FBI regrets this incident." A Georgia Bureau of Investigation official, Terry Gibbons, said such errors were very infrequent with the automated systems then in use.
A Mobile County jury convicted Jones on October 26, 2005, of four counts of capital murder of Lisa Marie Nichols, and on December 1, 2005, Circuit Judge Charles Graddick sentenced him to death. The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed in 2007. He was charged with murder in Georgia, in the death of a 16-year-old neighbor, Amanda Greenwell, and in New Orleans, in the death of Katherine Collins, but neither case came to trial. In July 2020, WPMI reported that he remained on Alabama’s death row.
In Mexico City the fingerprints did their most important work before anyone was arrested. For more than two years the city’s press wrote of "el Mataviejitas," the killer of old women, and police told the public the killer was probably a man dressed as a woman. On November 17, 2005, the deputy attorney general for central investigations, Renato Sales Heredia, told reporters that a single offender could account for 24 of the 32 homicides of elderly women recorded since 2003, and that nine of the killings and one attempt carried the same fingerprints, La Jornada reported. He also explained the bottleneck. The prints had been sent to the national public security system, but they could not be checked quickly against the national voter registry, because no digital system existed for it, and comparing by hand was slow.
The prints also cleared people. In late October 2005 police detained dozens of transgender sex workers and took their fingerprints; none matched, the Carleton University researcher Susana Vargas Cervantes has written, and she has described the raids as resting on homophobic and transphobic assumptions. Earlier arrests in deaths of elderly women had produced convictions of others, among them a man, M.T., charged in 2004 with three killings.
On January 25, 2006, Ana María de los Reyes Alfaro, a widow in her eighties, was killed in the Venustiano Carranza borough, and Juana Barraza, a 48-year-old former professional wrestler, was arrested in Mexico City the same day. The next day the attorney general, Bernardo Bátiz, said her fingerprints matched those from ten homicides and one attempted homicide; Proceso reported that an initial comparison showed similarity in six cases. In April 2006 Bátiz told La Jornada that a fingerprint comparison showed that María Guadalupe González, killed on October 9, 2003, had been killed by Barraza and not by M.T., whose case file would be corrected; M.T. remained convicted in two other deaths.
On March 31, 2008, a Mexico City criminal court convicted Barraza of 16 homicides and 12 aggravated robberies against elderly people and sentenced her to 759 years in prison, Notimex reported. She said she had admitted four killings and denied the rest, while prosecutors said her fingerprints matched those in 12 other cases, according to a wire summary in the Deseret News. On September 14, 2026, a city legislator released a video of her, aged and in a wheelchair, at the Tepepan women’s prison, El Financiero and Expansión Política reported. She remained in custody.
Vladimir Mirgorod was caught by a clerical step. Between 2002 and 2004 a series of women were killed in the north of Moscow and the Moscow region, and by the summer of 2003 rumors of a single killer were circulating, Moskovsky Komsomolets reported, while prosecutors at a press conference said the deaths were the work of different people. Then the killings stopped. From January 2005 to July 2010 Mirgorod was in prison for robbery, with other charges, the Investigative Committee said, as Pravo.ru reported.
When he was released in the summer of 2010, he registered with his local police station as a former prisoner convicted of a serious crime. His fingerprints were taken and entered into the "Delta" fingerprint database, which matched them to prints from murders in 2003, Moskovsky Komsomolets reported; the Investigative Committee said the prints matched evidence from four murders. He was arrested in October 2010. DNA testing then linked him to all 16 crimes in the case.
On January 30, 2012, the Moscow City Court convicted him of 16 murders, of 15 women and a teenage boy, between April 2002 and May 2004, with other charges, and sentenced him to life in a special-regime colony; the Supreme Court of Russia upheld the verdict on June 21, 2012. The fingerprint match opened a door that DNA kept widening. After investigators returned to old cases with modern genetic testing in 2024, a Moscow district court in June 2025 convicted him of the murders of 15 more women and a man and of an attempted murder, and imposed a second life term. The Moscow City Court upheld it on December 9, 2025, Profile.ru reported.
The oldest open warrant in this group was closed by prints taken after death. Sharon Kinne was acquitted in June 1961 of the murder of Patricia Jones, 23, in Jackson County, Missouri. A jury convicted her in January 1962 of murdering her husband, James Kinne, but the Missouri Supreme Court reversed the verdict in 1963, and the retrials ended in a mistrial and a hung jury. Free on bond, she went to Mexico City, where Francisco Paredes Ordoñez, a man from Chicago, was killed on September 18, 1964; a Mexican court convicted her of his killing in October 1965. In December 1969 she fled a Mexican women’s prison and disappeared.
She lived for about five decades in Taber, Alberta, as a realtor and volunteer named Diedra "Dee" Glabus, and died there of natural causes on January 21, 2022, at 81. In December 2023 an anonymous tip prompted the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office and the Kansas City, Missouri, police to look at her. Proving the identity took some ingenuity. Canadian police could not take fingerprints from a funeral home without a warrant, and there was no Canadian offense to justify one, the Taber police chief, Graham Abela, told the Taber Times. But the funeral home had recorded her prints through a service that keeps prints of the deceased, and the company holding them was in Missouri. Jackson County obtained them with an administrative subpoena and compared them with the prints taken at her 1960 arrest. They confirmed her identity on May 31, 2024, the Kansas City police said. On January 29, 2025, all pending charges against her were dismissed, and the agencies announced the case closed the next day.
The systems that failed Resendiz’s victims and Jones’s have since been rebuilt. In testimony to a House oversight subcommittee on June 19, 2013, Steven M. Martinez, executive assistant director of the FBI’s Science and Technology Branch, said the bureau had processed more than 456 million fingerprint submissions since automation through its national system. He described the Next Generation Identification program: a first stage launched on February 25, 2011, to improve matching accuracy, and a third stage completed in May 2013 that gave contributors what he described as three times increased accuracy for latent prints, opened a National Palm Print Repository, and ran new submissions against the bureau’s file of unsolved latent prints, producing potential matches.
That last feature is the Mirgorod case turned into national routine: every new card checked against every old unknown. It is also an answer, of a kind, to Florea Rîmaru’s thumb, which waited on one man’s memory from 1944 to 1972.
The cases show something less tidy than progress. In nearly every one, the print was not the hard part. Țurai had the 1944 pattern; Columbus had Gary’s prints from 1977; Texas had held the name "Carlos Cluthier Rodriguez" since 1993; the FBI had Jones’s prints three times. What was missing was a connection: a card on file, a suspect to compare, a system willing to talk to another system, an officer who trusted the screen. And where a match was made, it settled identity, not guilt. Heirens’s print was called a plant by his own lawyer, and Gary’s were challenged as borderline for three decades. Both men went to their deaths with the convictions intact.
• September 9, 1910: Clarence Hiller is killed in Chicago; Thomas Jennings is later convicted.
• 1911: the Illinois Supreme Court upholds the Jennings conviction and the use of fingerprint evidence (People v. Jennings).
• February 16, 1912: Jennings is hanged.
• June to November 1944: five women are killed in Bucharest; Constantin Țurai records fingerprints and a palm print in the first case.
• June 1945 to January 7, 1946: Josephine Ross, Frances Brown and Suzanne Degnan are killed in Chicago.
• June 26, 1946: William Heirens is arrested; within days police report a fingerprint match.
• September 4, 1946: Heirens pleads guilty to three murders.
• September 23, 1954: the Illinois Supreme Court upholds his pleas.
• April 14, 1970: Nellie Farmer dies in Albany, New York; a print in the case is matched to Carlton Gary, who is convicted only of robbery.
• 1970 to May 1971: four women die in a series of attacks in Bucharest; Ion Rîmaru is arrested on May 27, 1971.
• October 23, 1971: Ion Rîmaru is executed at Jilava.
• October 1972: Florea Rîmaru dies; Țurai matches his left thumb to the 1944 print.
• September 1977 to April 1978: the Columbus, Georgia, series.
• May 3, 1984: Gary is arrested after a fingerprint comparison.
• August 26, 1986: Gary is convicted of three murders in Columbus.
• August 1988 to March 1989: four women are killed in Atlanta.
• October 2, 1992: Lyndon Fitzgerald Pace is arrested after prints from two burglaries match prints on file.
• March 5, 1996: Pace is convicted.
• Late 1990s: Oleg Muraenko is identified in North Kazakhstan by a hand comparison of a partial print.
• 1998: the Border Patrol checks Resendiz’s prints in IDENT seven times and returns him to Mexico each time.
• December 26, 1998: the Texas fingerprint system matches prints from the Claudia Benton investigation to "Carlos Cluthier Rodriguez."
• June 1, 1999: Resendiz is enrolled in IDENT at Santa Teresa, New Mexico, and returned to Mexico.
• July 1999: the FBI’s new national fingerprint and crime-information systems go live.
• July 13, 1999: Resendiz surrenders at El Paso.
• March 20, 2000: the Justice Department’s Inspector General releases its report on the case.
• May 18, 2000: Resendiz is convicted of capital murder.
• 2002: Muraenko is reported executed.
• 2003 and 2004: Jeremy Bryan Jones is fingerprinted three times in Georgia under the name John Paul Chapman and released.
• September 17, 2004: Lisa Marie Nichols is killed in Turnerville, Alabama; Jones is arrested on September 21.
• May 2005: the FBI acknowledges the fingerprint failure in the Jones case.
• October 26, 2005: Jones is convicted of capital murder in Mobile County.
• November 17, 2005: Mexico City prosecutors say nine killings and one attempt carry the same fingerprints.
• January 25, 2006: Juana Barraza is arrested in Mexico City.
• June 27, 2006: Resendiz is executed in Texas.
• March 31, 2008: Barraza is convicted of 16 homicides and 12 aggravated robberies.
• Summer 2010: Vladimir Mirgorod’s prints, taken when he registers after prison, are matched in the Delta database; he is arrested in October.
• February 25, 2011: the first stage of the FBI’s Next Generation Identification goes live.
• January 30, 2012: Mirgorod is convicted of 16 murders.
• March 5, 2012: Heirens dies in custody.
• May 2013: the FBI completes an NGI stage adding a National Palm Print Repository.
• March 15, 2018: Gary is executed in Georgia.
• January 21, 2022: Sharon Kinne dies in Taber, Alberta, as Diedra Glabus.
• May 13, 2024: the Supreme Court of the United States declines to hear Pace’s case.
• May 31, 2024: fingerprints confirm Kinne’s identity.
• January 29 and 30, 2025: charges against Kinne are dismissed and the case is announced closed.
• June 2025: Mirgorod receives a second life sentence, upheld December 9, 2025.
• June 30, 2026: Pace is listed under a death sentence in Georgia.
• September 14, 2026: Barraza appears in a video at the Tepepan women’s prison.