Money leaves paper behind it. A person who has dropped out of a family’s life can be explained away for years, but a Social Security check that keeps being cashed, an alimony payment that keeps going to a mailbox, or a rental car contract signed in a state a man had no reason to visit is a record that someone eventually has to read. In a good many American and European series, the profit was the one part of the offense that did not depend on a witness. Investigators who could not prove how a death had happened, and sometimes could not prove that a death had happened at all, could still show who had been paid.
The cases below are not a single type. Some of the people involved killed for the cash itself, some for insurance, and some, like Israel Keyes, treated money as logistics rather than motive. What they share is that a sheriff’s sergeant, a task force, a Senate committee or a court eventually opened the ledger. The question in each is the same: which record, who read it, and what did it prove.
Dorothea Puente ran a boarding house in downtown Sacramento. Social workers and agencies placed elderly people with her, most of them living on Social Security or Supplemental Security Income, and the monthly government check was the center of the arrangement. In November 1988 a social worker’s inquiry about a tenant brought police to the house. She was 59.
Her paper trail was long before any of that. According to the guide to the case records at the Center for Sacramento History, a forgery arrest in 1978 led to five years of probation whose terms barred her from running a boarding house. In August 1982 she was convicted in Sacramento of administering a controlled substance to another person, grand theft and forgery, and was sentenced to five years in state prison; a McClatchy-Tribune account described it as a case of drugging elderly victims in order to rob them. The prosecution file from that case, with plea transcripts and witness testimony, was kept with the later murder records. By 1989 members of the Senate Special Committee on Aging were telling a hearing on the representative payee program, the system that lets one person receive a beneficiary’s benefits on that person’s behalf, that her record included 30 counts of Social Security fraud.
At her trial in Monterey County the prosecution told the jury that she had taken about 87,000 dollars from her tenants and spent part of it on a facelift, according to the McClatchy-Tribune report. A jury convicted her in August 1993 of first-degree murder in the deaths of Dorothy Miller, 65, and Benjamin Fink, 55, with the multiple-murder special circumstance held true, and of second-degree murder in the death of Leona Carpenter, 78. On six other deaths the jurors deadlocked and the counts were dismissed. The penalty phase also ended without agreement, and she was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. UPI reported on October 13, 1993, that she was to receive a life sentence, and she was sentenced in December of that year.
Puente denied killing anyone. The forgery and theft history was already part of the public record, and the 1993 verdicts drew a line between it and the deaths: the jury convicted on three and could not agree on six. She died in prison on March 27, 2011, at 82.
John E. Robinson Sr. was 56 when he was arrested at Olathe, Kansas, on June 2, 2000. To neighbors he was a family man who spent time with his grandchildren. To courts in two states he was a man with a long record of embezzlement and theft.
The Pitch, a Kansas City weekly, traced part of that record in August 2000. Around 1980, shortly after Borden Foods bought a Kansas City snack food maker, Robinson was hired there as personnel manager. The plant manager came to suspect him of stealing company funds and reported him to Borden’s security staff. In 1981 Robinson pleaded guilty to stealing a 6,000 dollar company check, served 60 days in the Clay County, Missouri, jail and was given five years of probation. The company also sued him over false vouchers and forged checks. A mechanic from the plant told the paper that Robinson had seemed one of the nicest people there and that learning of the theft floored him.
By the 1990s the paper he handled belonged to other people. The Kansas Supreme Court, in its 2015 opinion, and the Associated Press coverage of the Missouri pleas record how checks, mailbox rentals and letters in other people’s names tied the cases together.
Beverly Bonner, 49, of Cameron, Missouri, filed for divorce in November 1993 and told her husband she was helping Robinson find property for a project. Her family last saw her after the final hearing in February 1994. Letters signed in her name then reached her brothers every few months, some postmarked in Australia, France, the Netherlands and Kansas City. She missed a brother’s wedding in September 1995 and her son’s funeral a month later. When the letters stopped in early 1997, the family went to the authorities. Investigators later tested the envelopes, and DNA from eight of the nine matched Robinson.
The money told its own part of the story. Bonner’s former husband had been paying 1,000 dollars a month in alimony for 18 months to a mailbox in Olathe. Robinson, using the name James Turner, deposited the checks into a business account opened in both their names, and his fingerprints were on them.
Sheila Faith, 45, and her teenage daughter Debbie had moved to Pueblo, Colorado, after Sheila’s husband died in 1993, and lived on about 1,200 dollars a month in Social Security benefits, the Associated Press reported. In the spring of 1994 Sheila met a man named John through a personal ad and set off to visit him. Her sisters later received typed letters whose signatures they doubted. In June 1994 the address for the family’s Social Security checks was changed to a private mailbox in Olathe that Robinson had rented in their names, and from July 1994 the checks went into his business and personal accounts. In August 1994 a benefits form arrived bearing what appeared to be the signature of the former husband of Beverly Bonner, a prison physician; he told the court he had never treated the girl. In 2000 officers seized checks for June of that year from the mailbox.
Izabela Lewicka, 21, a former Purdue University student, had a 500 dollar check drawn from her account on September 1, 1999, made out to a company called Specialty Publications, which left a balance of one dollar. Her car insurance lapsed two days later. Robinson told a publishing broker she had been deported and another acquaintance that she had quit her job and run off with a boyfriend. In April 2000 her father received emails from her account describing travels in China.
Suzette Trouten, 27, of Newport, Michigan, had spoken to her mother almost every day. After a call at about 1 a.m. on March 1, 2000, a handwritten letter dated February 28 arrived in an envelope postmarked in Kansas City on March 6, which her mother thought strange because her daughter was supposed to have left by then. When she telephoned Robinson, he said Suzette had decided against the job and left with a man named Jim Turner, a name the court identified as another of his own aliases. Typed letters followed, postmarked in San Jose and in Veracruz, Mexico, and on March 24 an email from her account said she had left on her trip. Her mother and an aunt did not believe she had written any of it.
An Overland Park report went to Lenexa police on March 25, 2000, and a task force of several agencies formed around Robinson. The Kansas Supreme Court listed what they read: his trash from March 31, a phone bill from April 25 for property in Linn County, pen registers, and from May 22 a court-ordered wiretap on his cell phone.
In October 2003, at Harrisonville, Missouri, he pleaded guilty to the first-degree murders of Beverly Bonner, Sheila Faith, Debbie Faith, Paula Godfrey and Catherine Clampitt, and received life without parole on each count. In Kansas a jury had convicted him on October 29, 2002, of the capital murder of Suzette Trouten, charged as part of a common scheme. The Kansas Supreme Court affirmed that conviction and the death sentence in November 2015, reversing two other convictions as multiplicitous, which is a finding about charging and not about innocence. Governor Laura Kelly denied clemency on June 18, 2026, and as of September 15, 2026, a post-conviction appeal was pending.
Herman Webster Mudgett, who called himself H. H. Holmes, was convicted of one murder. A Philadelphia jury convicted him in November 1895 of killing Benjamin F. Pitezel, a former employee who had joined him in a scheme to cheat a life insurance company. He was executed at Moyamensing Prison on May 7, 1896.
His reputation as a mass killer rests on a different kind of evidence than his record as a swindler, and the swindler’s record is the sturdier one. Adam Selzer, a Chicago historian whose 2017 book is built on primary records, argues that the large building in Englewood never functioned as a hotel for a single day, with no front desk, lobby or staff. In March 1893 the Chicago Tribune ran a long article after Holmes was caught using hidden rooms to conceal furniture he had bought on credit and never paid for, Selzer wrote in Time Out Chicago. When creditors came, the building looked empty; a janitor later showed where a room had been walled up and filled with the goods, Smithsonian reported. Selzer regards the unfinished third floor as a device for swindling suppliers, investors and insurers.
The same habit of mind ended his freedom. The insurance fraud was the case that investigators could actually reach. In Burlington, Vermont, in October 1894, a Pinkerton detective and an insurance investigator followed him, the Rutland Herald recorded in 2015; Holmes, using the name J. A. Judson, had rented a house there for a "Mrs. A. E. Cook" and two children. He was arrested in Boston in November 1894, and the Philadelphia detective Frank Geyer was assigned to trace the missing Pitezel children. Spacing magazine recounted that in Toronto Geyer worked with a local detective, Alf Cuddy, checking hotel registers and showing photographs to house agents. His trail led to Toronto and to Irvington, Indiana, and to the deaths of three of Pitezel’s children. Holmes was never tried for those deaths, and the Philadelphia court refused to let the jury hear about them.
Smithsonian reported that a grand jury indicted him for Pitezel’s murder on September 12, 1895. In April 1896, while he awaited execution, a Philadelphia newspaper printed a confession to 27 murders; several of the people he named were alive, and on the gallows he denied killing the Pitezels. The Chicago stories grew mostly from newspaper reports of the summer of 1895. What the record supports is smaller, and it begins with unpaid bills.
William Dale Archerd was 55, white-haired and soft-spoken, when Los Angeles County sheriff’s detectives arrested him in July 1967. Time magazine described a sometime hearing-aid salesman who had been married seven times. A grand jury had just charged him with murdering two of his wives and his teenage nephew, and investigators linked him to three more deaths reaching back twenty years. The common thread, the prosecution said, was a method that for most of those years no laboratory test could detect.
The money is where the case begins. He married Zella Winders on May 15, 1956, the day after an earlier marriage was annulled. She had just sold her house in Covina and received 10,000 dollars from escrow, which went into a joint checking account. While the sale was pending, he had pressed the real estate office to hurry, saying he needed the money for a large transaction. Ten weeks after the wedding, on July 24, 1956, the couple reported a robbery; Zella died the next day.
The investigating officer did not believe the robbery account but had no proof that anyone had committed a crime, and medical opinion at the time held that the cause of death could not be shown to be criminal. Sheriff Peter Pitchess wrote in the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin that Sergeant Harry Andre led the early inquiry and that the coroner’s toxicologist had no test that could settle the cause. What the sergeant did have was the bank. After her death some checks and stubs were missing, and 8,798.80 dollars had been drawn from the joint account on checks that did not appear on the stubs, among them counter checks for cash endorsed by Archerd. A few days later he offered 1,000 dollars in cash to recover a repossessed new Thunderbird. Her estate was insolvent; he was unemployed and was the beneficiary of her insurance.
The pattern repeated. About two months after Zella’s death he met Juanita Plum, who had divorced her husband in April 1956 and kept the house, about 10,000 dollars in savings and 1,000 in checking. They married in Las Vegas on March 10, 1958. During the marriage about 10,633 dollars went out of her account, and Archerd was unemployed most of the time. The night before she died he telephoned her daughter and asked her to bring 1,000 to 2,000 dollars to Las Vegas, telling her not to tell her father. The daughter told her father anyway, and the two drove to Las Vegas but gave Archerd nothing. Juanita died on March 13, 1958, the day after an ambulance was called for her. Her will left him one dollar. The cause of her death was disputed; the trial experts disagreed.
Frank L. Stewart died in Las Vegas on March 17, 1960, and the pathologist first attributed the death to a cerebral hemorrhage from arteriosclerotic disease. Stewart had bought two flight insurance policies at the airport, one for 62,500 dollars naming his former wife and one for 18,750 dollars naming Archerd’s mother. Neither was paid, since the policies paid only on death or the loss of a limb. Archerd’s girlfriend of the time later testified about what she had seen him do, and once the pathologist heard her account together with Stewart’s history, he concluded that the death had been a homicide.
Burney Kirk Archerd was 15 when his father died at work on January 22, 1960. The boy received a 7,000 dollar workmen’s compensation settlement, and Archerd and his mother became his co-guardians. Archerd also received more than 1,000 dollars of the death benefits paid by the local union. Substantial sums were later withdrawn from the guardianship account. Time put the boy’s inheritance at 5,000 dollars. Burney died on September 2, 1961.
The murder charges came only in 1967, after a UCLA pathologist showed detectives what the victims' brain slides could prove. Judge Adolph Alexander, trying the case without a jury, convicted Archerd on March 15, 1968, of three counts of first-degree murder, for the deaths of Zella, Burney and his third wife Mary Post Arden, and sentenced him to death on each. The California Supreme Court affirmed on December 10, 1970, calling it the only known reported case of its kind in the United States.
Israel Keyes was a 34-year-old contractor in Anchorage, Alaska, when police in Lufkin, Texas, stopped his rented car on March 13, 2012. In the car was the cell phone of Samantha Koenig, an 18-year-old barista who had been kidnapped in Anchorage six weeks earlier, and in his wallet was a debit card that had been used to collect a ransom paid for her return. Keyes was never convicted of any killing. A federal grand jury indicted him on April 18, 2012, for kidnapping resulting in death, receiving and possessing ransom money, and access device fraud, and he died in custody on December 2, 2012, before a trial.
Keyes is not a profit killer in the way that Puente or Archerd were. The money in his case was operational. It mattered for what it showed rather than what it bought.
The ransom had come first. According to the indictment and prosecutors' later account, Keyes demanded 30,000 dollars in a typed note left in an Anchorage park. The card linked to Koenig’s account became the trap, because every use of it was a record. The Associated Press, drawing on court records, listed the withdrawals: 500 dollars in Anchorage on February 29, 2012, another 500 the next day, 400 dollars in Willcox, Arizona, 80 dollars in Lordsburg, New Mexico, and 480 dollars each in Humble and Shepherd, Texas. The FBI dates the Shepherd withdrawal to March 8 and the Humble withdrawal to March 10, and the indictment put the total at nearly 2,500 dollars. The person making the withdrawals, face covered, was driving a white Ford Focus, and the FBI and Texas Rangers tracked the withdrawals as they happened, with two Anchorage detectives already in Texas. He was arrested on the access device charge.
After his arrest he talked, and the same discipline appears in what he described. He paid in cash where he could. He said he had robbed banks to cover his travel; he admitted several robberies, and investigators corroborated two, including a Tupper Lake, New York, bank on April 10, 2009. He told investigators he had placed supplies in distant states years in advance so that he would not have to carry them on aircraft or use traceable cards. The FBI recovered two of those caches.
The FBI’s public timeline of his movements was built from rental car contracts, hotel stays, flights and bank transactions. It shows him leaving the country repeatedly, to British Columbia, Belize, Mexico and El Salvador, and crossing the United States from Alaska to Maine and Louisiana. The FBI said that, based mainly on his own statements, it attributes 11 homicides to him between 2001 and 2012. Only three victims have ever been named. The FBI has appealed to the public for help in identifying the others.
Anna Marie Hahn was 31 when a Cincinnati jury convicted her, in November 1937, of murdering Jacob Wagner, a 78-year-old German-American. Time described her as a Bavarian immigrant who had taken about 50,000 dollars from elderly friends over eight years, much of it to bet on horses. The jury of eleven women and one man returned its verdict without a recommendation of mercy, which meant death.
The inquiry that ended in the courtroom began in August 1937 in Colorado Springs, where a hotel reported 305 dollars in missing diamond rings, and the elderly Cincinnati cobbler who had visited with her, George Obendoerfer, died the next day, the Associated Press reported. A different account in a local-history column says a pawn shop worker refused to buy jewelry she offered and described her to police, and that she tried unsuccessfully to withdraw 1,000 dollars from Obendoerfer’s bank account.
Her lawyers took an unusual line at trial. According to Time, they admitted she was guilty of thefts, adultery and forgery, to argue that she had not killed anyone. Wagner’s death was the only one put to a jury, although the Cincinnati prosecutor said at the time that at least eleven deaths were under investigation. The Supreme Court of Ohio’s history of Judge Charles Bell, who sentenced her, says the evidence showed that she had also killed three more men and disabled another. Judge Bell sentenced her in November 1937, and she was electrocuted on December 7, 1938.
The money is the least contested part of her story. The author Diana Britt Franklin told WOSU that Hahn bet on horses and often took every nickel her victims had. Time reported that by the end of the trial she had barely enough left to pay her lawyers, and a local-history column says Wagner left her 17,000 dollars in his will.
In March 1944, during the German occupation of Paris, police went to a townhouse in the sixteenth arrondissement after neighbors complained, and the case that followed became one of the largest in modern French history. The house belonged to a physician, Dr. Marcel Petiot. Two years later, on April 4, 1946, a Paris jury convicted him of the premeditated murder of 24 of the 27 people charged, with theft, and on May 25, 1946, he was guillotined at La Santé prison.
The French Ministry of Justice account of the case sets out what the courts accepted: Petiot drew in people who wanted to flee occupied France, using a false resistance network as cover, killed them and took what they carried. Most were Jewish, along with some petty criminals who wanted to vanish. No one who went to him reached South America. Le Quotidien du Médecin writes that clients were told to come at night with suitcases, money and jewelry to pay for the passage.
The physical evidence was baggage. Investigators gathered 72 suitcases from his property, and the same publication counts 655 kilograms of other objects, though Infobae writes of 655 objects.
His record had always been about money. Britannica says he was elected mayor of Villeneuve-sur-Yonne in 1926 and was suspended in 1930 after a fraud conviction, removed in 1931, and then lost a council seat after being convicted of stealing electricity. After the invasion of 1940, Infobae reports, he sold medical certificates declaring men unfit for service and supplied narcotics to returning soldiers, and was caught and fined.
By September 1944 a warrant was out. The newspaper Résistance ran an article headed "Petiot, soldat du Reich," according to Hérodote, and Petiot wrote back at length, demanding a right of reply and telling the police he was still in Paris and inside the resistance. Inspector Henri Soutif arrested him at a Métro station on October 31, 1944, Slate.fr says. At trial his lawyer René Floriot attacked weaknesses in the investigation. Petiot claimed 63 killings, all, he said, of Germans, collaborators and traitors. The jury convicted him on 24 of the 27 counts.
Judias Buenoano, known in Florida as Judy, was executed in the electric chair on March 30, 1998. She was 54. She had been sentenced to death for the 1971 murder of her husband, Air Force Sergeant James E. Goodyear, a case built thirteen years after the fact, after a car bomb in Pensacola made investigators look back at the men around her.
The first conviction came in Santa Rosa County, for the death of her son Michael, 19, in 1980, and it rested on paper. A jury heard that she worked as a licensed practical nurse from December 1978 to September 1980, earning 3 dollars and 50 cents an hour, and that her bank records showed a run of returned checks from June 1979 to July 1980. After Michael died she received more than 100,000 dollars as beneficiary under policies on his life, the courts held, and on March 31, 1984, the jury convicted her of first-degree murder and of first-degree grand theft for more than 20,000 dollars obtained from Prudential Life Insurance Company by fraud over his death. She was sentenced to life on June 6, 1984.
The state’s theory was that she saw her son as a burden and staged his death to collect the insurance. In Orange County she was sentenced to death on November 26, 1985, for her husband’s murder; the Associated Press reported at her execution that she had been suspected of killing a boyfriend in 1978 but was never charged.
None of these records proved a death by itself. The Sacramento jury convicted Puente of three murders and could not agree on six. Holmes was tried for one. Keyes never faced a jury. In Archerd’s case a joint checking account made a sergeant doubt a robbery story eleven years before a pathologist gave him a way to prove it. In Robinson’s, a mailbox in Olathe and a stack of postmarks gave a task force its reason to ask for a wiretap. Keyes was caught by a bank card. None of those records explained a death. Each told someone where to look.
• 1978: Puente arrested for forgery; probation bars her from running a boarding house.
• 1981: Robinson pleads guilty to stealing a 6,000 dollar company check.
• August 1982: Puente convicted in Sacramento of administering a controlled substance, grand theft and forgery.
• March 1893: the Chicago Tribune reports Holmes’s use of hidden rooms to conceal goods bought on credit.
• October 1894: A Pinkerton detective and an insurance investigator follow Holmes in Burlington, Vermont.
• November 1894: Holmes arrested in Boston.
• November 1895: Holmes convicted of the murder of Benjamin F. Pitezel; executed May 7, 1896.
• July 24 to 25, 1956: Archerd reports a robbery; Zella Archerd dies; 8,798.80 dollars is later shown missing from the joint account.
• March 1958: Juanita Archerd dies in Las Vegas.
• 1967: Archerd indicted on three counts of murder (July); convicted March 15, 1968; affirmed December 10, 1970.
• August 1937: the inquiry into Hahn begins in Colorado Springs; convicted November 1937; electrocuted December 7, 1938.
• June 1994: Social Security checks for Sheila and Debbie Faith redirected to an Olathe mailbox.
• June 2, 2000: Robinson arrested.
• October 29, 2002: a Kansas jury convicts Robinson of capital murder; October 2003, he pleads guilty to five murders in Missouri.
• October 31, 1944: Petiot arrested in Paris; convicted April 4, 1946; guillotined May 25, 1946.
• March 31, 1984: Buenoano convicted in Santa Rosa County; executed March 30, 1998.
• February 29 to March 10, 2012: ATM withdrawals in Alaska, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas; Keyes stopped in Lufkin March 13; indicted April 18; dies December 2, 2012.
• August 1993: Puente convicted in Monterey County; dies March 27, 2011.
• June 18, 2026: Governor Kelly denies clemency to Robinson.