Before a court tries a person for murder it must be satisfied that the person can be tried. The question is not whether he did it, and not whether he was ill when he did it. It is whether he understands what is happening in the courtroom well enough to take part. When the answer is no, the case stops. The defendant goes to a hospital, the evidence waits, and the families of the dead wait with it. In some cases the wait was a few months. In others it ran for ten years, or until the defendant died, and in one case an innocent man served a sentence while the person later linked to the crime sat in a psychiatric ward.
The law differs from place to place, and so do the endings. In England, unfitness to plead sends a defendant to a high-security hospital, and a verdict of guilt never arrives. In Wisconsin in 1968 the test, as a hospital superintendent’s report put it, was whether a man was mentally able to confer with counsel and take part in his own defense. In one California case a jury was asked to decide it. In Brazil a judge may declare a defendant inimputavel, not criminally responsible, and the court then imposes a treatment order with no fixed end. In Missouri the delay came from a different cause: the beds that a court could order for restoration were full.
Saturday, November 16, 1957, was the first day of deer season in Waushara County, Wisconsin. Bernice Worden, who ran the hardware store in Plainfield, was killed that day, and a 51-year-old bachelor who did odd jobs around town was taken into custody. His name was Edward Gein. On November 21 he was arraigned on one count of first-degree murder and pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. District Attorney Earl Kileen had said he would charge only one killing and was willing to accept the plea. "I will move immediately for a sanity hearing when he is arraigned," he told reporters, and he did.
On November 23 Gein entered Central State Hospital at Waupun for observation. In January 1958 two psychiatrists testified that he was not competent, and Judge Herbert A. Bunde committed him there. "It is unlikely he will ever be at liberty again," the judge said, according to accounts of the hearing. The ruling meant that the question of what Gein had done, and what his mind had been at the time, was set aside. He was a patient, and the charge sat in the file.
It sat there for ten years. On January 16, 1968, the Waushara County district attorney announced that the superintendent of Central State had reported significant changes in Gein’s mental condition. Doctors judged him mentally able to confer with counsel and take part in his defense, and Circuit Judge Robert H. Gollmar ruled that he could be tried. His trial, on the single count of murdering Mrs. Worden, was held in November 1968 without a jury and lasted about a week. Gollmar convicted him of first-degree murder. In a separate hearing, as Wisconsin law then required, he ruled that Gein had been insane when he did it, and sent him back to the hospital.
Gein had been tried for one killing. The death of Mary Hogan, in 1954, was never taken to court. "Due to prohibitive costs," the judge later explained, "Gein was tried for only one murder." Gein asked in June 1974 for a sanity hearing to release him after 17 years, and the request was denied. In 1978 he was moved to the Mendota Mental Health Institute in Madison, where he died on July 26, 1984, at 77.
The Gein sequence, an early finding of incompetence, a long hospital stay, a restored competence, a trial limited to one count, a verdict that is both guilty and insane, is the pattern that most of the cases below follow in outline. What differs is the length of the wait and what, if anything, is lost during it.
John Thomas Straffen spent 55 years in custody, longer than any other prisoner in Britain at the time of his death in 2007. He was born in 1930 at Bordon in Hampshire. As a young man in Bath he confessed to killing two girls, Brenda Goddard and Cicely Bathstone, but in 1951 he was declared unfit to plead and sent to Broadmoor. The next year he escaped. While he was at large a five-year-old girl was killed, and this time he stood trial. He was convicted of her murder and sentenced to death, and then reprieved. He never left prison again.
A finding of unfitness to plead is not a verdict on whether a person committed the act charged. It is a decision that he cannot understand the proceedings well enough to take part in a trial. Straffen was not convicted of killing Brenda Goddard or Cicely Bathstone, though the Court of Criminal Appeal in 1952 recorded that he had been arrested for the murders of young girls and committed to Broadmoor, and the Australian Law Reform Commission later wrote that it had been established that he killed both. No jury ever tried him for either death.
The Farnham Herald, the local paper for Bordon, reported in 2007 that he was first judged unfit to plead because of his mental age. When his solicitors asked for the case to be reopened in 2001 they argued that he had a mental age of about nine and a half. A 1962 review in the British Medical Journal called him a certified mental defective. The Home Secretary who spared his life in 1952 cited his mental state.
The review, written ten years after the trial by an unnamed reviewer of G. W. Keeton’s Guilty But Insane: Four Trials for Murder, noted that Straffen had been declared unfit to plead in 1951 and asked why the same question was not raised again when he stood trial the following year. The reviewer judged that to hang Straffen would have been a serious miscarriage of justice and that only the Home Secretary’s recommendation of a reprieve had prevented it. The reviewer also criticized the defense for giving up, without a fight, the argument that mental deficiency counted as a disease of the mind. The result, in the reviewer’s view, was that the law was left more tightly bound to the McNaughton rules on insanity than before. The review ended by arguing that it was the security arrangements at Broadmoor, not Straffen, that should have been on trial.
The prosecution at the 1952 trial sought to put the earlier deaths in Bath before the jury. On identification, the Australian Law Reform Commission listed the three strands that were admitted: evidence that Straffen had been near the place, that he had escaped from a nearby institution, and that he had been detained for killing two young girls "in precisely the same circumstances" as the killing being tried. The commission’s summary calls the institution a prison; Broadmoor was a hospital. As the Swarb digest of R v Straffen summarizes the ruling, he had admitted the earlier killings while denying the later one, and that made the evidence about them relevant. The ruling became a leading English authority on similar-fact evidence.
Around Broadmoor, the escape left a physical mark. A report to Wokingham Borough Council’s Overview and Scrutiny Management Committee in July 2014 recorded that warning sirens went in after the 1952 escape, with more added in the 1960s. By 2014 there were 13 siren sites within a seven-mile radius of the hospital, linked by copper lines that BT no longer supported, and an independent review had judged the system no longer fit for purpose. The sirens were still tested every week.
The legal status of the three deaths is easily blurred. The 2007 Farnham Herald report said Straffen had been convicted of murdering three girls. That is not correct: his only conviction was for the 1952 killing. For the two girls in Bath, unfitness meant that the question of guilt was never put to anyone. The same finding that protected him from a trial in 1951 also left the families of those two girls without a verdict. He died in the health care center of HM Prison Frankland, County Durham, on November 19, 2007.
Eddie Lee Mosley was never convicted of killing anyone. He was charged with murder in 1987, declared incompetent to stand trial and committed to a state psychiatric hospital, where he stayed until his death in 2020. Yet his name sits at the center of two of Florida’s best-known wrongful convictions. DNA testing in 2000 and 2001 linked him to killings of Black women and girls in northwest Fort Lauderdale for which two other men had been sent to prison. One of them, Jerry Frank Townsend, served about 22 years before he was freed. The other, Frank Lee Smith, died of cancer on death row eleven months before the test that cleared him.
Police and the lawyers who sued on Townsend’s behalf came to attribute 17 murders and other assaults to Mosley between 1973 and 1987, according to Florida Bulldog. None of those killings was ever tried against him. A court-appointed psychiatrist, quoted in a 2009 Bulldog profile, called him "a shark." The same profile reported that he had been arrested ten times and had been released again and again after being declared incompetent to stand trial and treated in hospitals.
According to the FRONTLINE documentary "Requiem for Frank Lee Smith" (PBS, 2002), Mosley was charged in two cases in 1973, with other charges. He was declared incompetent and sent to the state hospital for the criminally insane at Chattahoochee. Doug Evans, a Fort Lauderdale detective who headed a squad investigating assaults on women, told FRONTLINE that the squad had close to 300 cases and that Mosley was identified in 41 of them. "He never confessed, not one time, to any case," Evans said.
FRONTLINE reported that about five years after the 1973 incompetency finding, new killings began. Captain McKinley Smith recalled Evans telling him, "Mack, he’s out." In the summer of 1979 several women and girls died in northwest Fort Lauderdale, according to the Innocence Project’s case page for Townsend: Ernestine German on July 9, Sonja Marion, 13, on July 27, Terry Jean Cummings on August 7 and Cathy Moore on August 24. About three weeks before September 5, 1979, Evans named Mosley as the prime suspect in the killings within Fort Lauderdale’s jurisdiction, Florida Bulldog reported. His case rested on eyewitness accounts from women who had survived and on a distinctive shoeprint. Broward Sheriff’s Office detectives did not follow his lead. Detective Anthony Fantigrassi later testified that he had checked Mosley during the 1979 investigations and discarded him as a suspect.
In July 1980 a Broward jury convicted Townsend of first-degree murder in the 1973 deaths of Naomi Gamble, 15, and Barbara Ann Brown, 21, and acquitted him in the death of Thelma Jean Bell, 20. He received two consecutive life sentences. In October 1982 he pleaded no contest to the murders of Cathy Moore and Terry Jean Cummings, and prosecutors dropped the charges in the deaths of Ernestine German and Sonja Marion. The Marion case had been dropped after an alibi showed Townsend clocked in at work that morning. In December 1982 he pleaded guilty in Miami-Dade County to two more murders and a further offense. At Townsend’s trial Evans testified for the defense, and the 2009 Bulldog profile reported that the prosecutor and judge cut his testimony short. Fantigrassi told the court that Evans had an "irrational vengeance" against Mosley.
Detective Kevin Allen, who later took up the case, described a pattern to FRONTLINE: from 1973 through 1987, he said, there were no unsolved killings of that kind of Black women in northwest Fort Lauderdale while Mosley was locked up, and "immediately upon his release, within 30 days, we find a black female."
Broward-Palm Beach New Times traced the court record of those years in a piece titled "A Devilish Deal." After two women reported assaults in the spring of 1980, a jury convicted Mosley in 1981 in one of the cases and he was sentenced to 15 years. An appeal court overturned the conviction because his private lawyer had wrongly abandoned an insanity defense, and the case went back for retrial. In 1983 prosecutors agreed to reduce the pending charges, which could have carried life in prison, in exchange for a guilty plea and a five-year sentence. With credit for jail time and gain time, Mosley was released on November 16, 1983. Geraldine Barfield died on December 19, 1983, and Emma Cook on December 24. About six months after his release Mosley was charged again in another case, and a jury acquitted him on October 25, 1984.
Then came 1987. Florida Bulldog reported that he was declared incompetent to stand trial for the December 1983 killing of Emma Cook and confined to a state mental hospital for the criminally insane. Broward-Palm Beach New Times reported that he was charged with two of the killings that followed his 1983 release, and the 2009 profile said he was indicted on two counts of first-degree murder and ruled incompetent. The National Registry of Exonerations dates his involuntary commitment to 1988. He was never brought to trial.
The cost of that finding was borne elsewhere. Mosley was a cousin of the mother of eight-year-old Shandra Whitehead, according to the National Registry of Exonerations, the Innocence Project and FRONTLINE, and that tie later mattered in the case against Smith, who was convicted of her murder and sentenced to death. Prosecutors argued in the Smith case that Mosley did not assault children. DNA testing later linked him to the deaths of Sonja Marion, 13, Naomi Gamble, 15, and Shandra Whitehead, 8.
Accounts disagree on several points that matter. The Innocence Project of Florida’s page on Smith calls Mosley a convicted murderer, but he was never convicted of murder, and the 1981 conviction was overturned. The figure of 17 comes from police belief and the Townsend lawsuit; other sources give seven DNA-linked killings (National Registry of Exonerations) or at least 19 (Florida Bulldog, 2009). None was proved in court. Mosley died in 2020, aged 73, at a hospital in North Florida, according to Florida Bulldog.
Ricardo Caputo confessed in March 1994 to killing four women in the 1970s, each of them a woman he had been romantically involved with. He was 44, an Argentine who had lived for about two decades under false names in the United States, Mexico and Latin America, marrying twice and raising children. He had been wanted in New York since 1974, when a young psychologist who had treated him was killed in Yonkers. He surrendered on March 9, 1994, with his lawyer at his side, after recording an interview with ABC News.
The first case came in July 1971. Caputo was charged with murder in Nassau County, New York, in the death of Natalie Brown, 19, but he was declared incompetent to stand trial and committed to a state hospital. UPI named it as Matewan. Infobae wrote that forensic psychiatrists had diagnosed schizophrenia and that he spent about two years there, making drawings as occupational therapy and selling some of them.
The commitment ended in 1974, when he left the hospital system, and Judith Becker, 26, was killed in Yonkers that year. Caputo’s lawyer later referred to an escape. His lawyer, Michael Kennedy, said in a statement paraphrased by UPI that after the 1974 escape Caputo began a three-year spree and committed four killings in the United States and Mexico, Brown’s among them. California and Mexico never brought him to trial for the deaths of Barbara Taylor and Laura Gomez.
When he surrendered, the 1971 charge was still open. By May a court had ruled him competent to stand trial, and on May 11, UPI reported from Mineola that a Long Island grand jury had re-indicted him on two counts of murder in Natalie Brown’s death. He faced 25 years to life. Prosecutors said he had not been charged with any of the other killings and that investigations were continuing. He later pleaded guilty to Brown’s killing and was sentenced to between 8 and 25 years in prison.
He was then prosecuted in Westchester County for Judith Becker’s death. He pleaded guilty to killing her, and on August 16, 1995, a court in White Plains sentenced him to the maximum, 25 years to life, to run consecutively with the Nassau sentence, UPI reported. The Westchester district attorney, Jeanine Pirro, said: "Twenty years after a young woman was brutally, senselessly murdered, her killer has been brought to justice." Infobae reported that in his last words to the judge Caputo said he had turned himself in to prevent more deaths. He died at Attica Correctional Facility on October 1, 1997, aged 48.
In December 2003, police in Hammond, Indiana, linked three young people to David Edward Maust, who lived in the city: Nicholas James, 19, James Raganyi, 16, and Michael Dennis, 13. Their deaths came to light that month. Maust was 49. He had already been convicted of killing two teenage boys, one in Germany while he was a soldier and one in Illinois, and of causing bodily injury to a child in Texas, and he had been free since an Illinois prison released him in 1999. Nearly two years after his arrest he pleaded guilty to all three Hammond murders.
The Illinois case is the one that matters here. By the time Illinois charged him with the 1981 killing of a 15-year-old boy near Elgin, Maust was serving a five-year sentence in Texas for the injury to a child. In Illinois he was held in mental institutions for two years before he was declared fit to stand trial, according to the Associated Press. He was then convicted of murder and sentenced to 35 years in prison. Phil Bettiker, a former Cook County sheriff’s investigator who had worked on the 1981 case, told the Associated Press in December 2003 that he would have liked to see Maust put away for longer. "I think he’s gone this time," he added.
An Associated Press profile at his 2005 sentencing said he had been in and out of mental institutions from an early age. His estranged mother, then 71, told the Associated Press in December 2003 that a prison psychiatrist had once told her his brain might have been damaged by forceps at his birth. She said that after her husband died in 1979, Maust had wanted to come and live with her in Chicago and she had refused because she did not feel safe with him.
His Illinois sentence ended with his release in 1999.
After his arrest in December 2003, Maust appeared in court at Crown Point on December 12 and pleaded not guilty to the murder of James Raganyi. He asked to represent himself. Prosecutors sought the death penalty. In the fall of 2005 he pleaded guilty to murdering Michael Dennis, James Raganyi and Nicholas James, and the state withdrew its request for a death sentence in exchange. In December 2005 he was sentenced to three consecutive terms of life in prison without the possibility of parole. He was discovered hanging in his cell at the Lake County Jail early on the day he was to be moved to a state prison, and he died on January 20, 2006, at a hospital in Crown Point. In a note he admitted to five killings in all. No other killings were charged or confirmed.
Fredrick Scott was arrested in Kansas City, Missouri, in August 2017, at 22. By March 2018 he was charged with six deaths in south Kansas City and Grandview. His trial did not begin until September 2026, after years in which he moved in and out of competency to stand trial. On September 22, 2026, a Jackson County jury convicted him of first-degree murder in four of the deaths and acquitted him in two.
The path to the courtroom began with the charges. In August 2017 prosecutors announced two counts each of first-degree murder and armed criminal action, for the deaths of Steven Gibbons and John Palmer. In 2017 he told detectives he had been diagnosed as bipolar, with depression, during an evaluation connected to an earlier probation; his lawyers later said police had not looked at that evaluation, which would have shown schizophrenia. In October 2017 he was charged in Karen Harmeyer’s death, held on a $500,000 bond. On March 2, 2018, a Jackson County grand jury indicted him on three more counts of first-degree murder and three of armed criminal action, for the deaths of David Lenox, Timothy Rice and Michael Darby. That brought the total to six counts of each. He pleaded not guilty. At a 2025 competency hearing, his mother testified that an older son had been diagnosed with schizophrenia in his late teens, that Scott began to behave in similar ways afterward, and that she asked for him to be tested but he refused.
The trial was years away. Scott was held in the Jackson County jail. The jail could not make him take his medication; the Missouri Department of Mental Health could, but its hospital beds had long waiting lists. In January 2025 a department official told KSHB that 418 people were waiting in jails for restoration beds, with an average wait of 14 months, and that restoration itself usually took four to six months. Over the years the case also passed through four public defenders, each change in effect restarting it, and trial dates were set and postponed six times, KCTV5 reported in 2024. Judges changed too.
In June 2021 a judge ruled Scott currently incompetent, based on evaluations by defense doctors and the Department of Mental Health, and he stayed committed to the department. A long-acting injection later controlled his symptoms, but he lost weight and was moved back to pills. At a hearing in July 2024, prosecutor and public defender agreed that he had missed nine doses in about a month. Scott shouted that he had taken his medication, cursed at people in the courtroom, including the judge, and was removed. His lawyer, Patrick Berrigan, said the missed doses reflected illness, not gamesmanship, and suggested that Scott might never be well enough for a trial. In September 2024 he was still on a waiting list for a bed at the state hospital in Fulton, almost two months after a judge ordered him committed; in January 2025 he was 65th on the list.
The families came to the hearings and watched the dates slip. Darby’s daughter said in 2024 that she was furious because Scott seemed to hold all the power. Another daughter said the families were dragged along for the ride. One of Darby’s brothers wondered whether prosecutors could have pushed harder; Jean Peters Baker, by then the former prosecutor, said that seeking the death penalty to force a plea would have been unethical, that no court would accept a plea from an incompetent defendant, and that her office’s frustration had been extreme because it was ready for trial.
By March 2025 the Department of Mental Health had ruled Scott competent. The defense asked for a second evaluation, and its expert judged him incompetent, pointing to his schizophrenia, his uneven medication use and delusions he had described, including claims that famous rappers would bail him out. The department’s evaluator testified that he had told her he lied about his delusions in order to return to or stay in the hospital. Judge Charles McKenzie heard the evidence in June 2025, and in July 2025 Scott was ruled competent. On July 10, 2025, the judge set jury selection for August 31, 2026, and opening statements for September 3, 2026. Prosecutors had wanted an earlier date, saying witnesses were moving and retiring; the defense said it needed time to prepare. Darby’s son said he felt obliged to attend every hearing because his father would have done the same for him.
The trial opened on September 3, 2026, ten years after the first death. The jury returned its verdicts on September 22: guilty of first-degree murder and armed criminal action in the deaths of John Palmer, Mike Darby, Karen Harmeyer and Steven Gibbons, and not guilty on both counts in the deaths of David Lenox and Timothy Rice. It recommended life without parole on each murder count and 15 years on each armed criminal action count. Formal sentencing was set for November 23, 2026.
Constance Fisher was a young mother in central Maine whose six children died in two separate events twelve years apart, and who did not deny her part in them. In March 1954, at the age of 24, she was charged with murder in the deaths of her three children in Waterville, after she tried to end her own life. She was committed to the Augusta State Hospital, and a grand jury declined to indict her after the hospital reported that she was insane. In March 1959 she was released. She and her husband moved to Fairfield and had three more children. On June 30, 1966, those three children died as well, and again she tried to end her own life.
She was never convicted of a crime. In 1967 a Superior Court jury ruled her not guilty by reason of insanity, and she was committed to the state hospital for good. In October 1973 she left the hospital grounds and died in the Kennebec River. She was 44.
The formal end of the 1954 case is described in different ways. The contemporary wire report of July 1966, as printed in the Columbia Missourian, says she was charged with murder, committed to the state hospital, and that a grand jury declined to indict her after the hospital reported that she was insane. A 2001 Bangor Daily News account agrees. The 2026 Kennebec Journal report says a court ruled her not competent to stand trial. A second 2001 Bangor Daily News article says she was ruled not guilty by reason of insanity, which the wire report does not support: no indictment was returned, so there was no trial and no verdict. Whichever description is right, she was never convicted for the 1954 deaths.
The release has been questioned ever since. The Augusta State Hospital was founded in 1840 as the Maine Insane Hospital, took the name Augusta State Hospital in 1913 and became the Augusta Mental Health Institute in 1973, according to the Maine State Archives. She spent about five years there after 1954. Bob Briggs, who wrote a book on the case, ties her release to the national move, then beginning, to discharge patients from large state mental hospitals, and his publisher presents the case as a warning about what happens to acutely ill people when no proper care is available. Louise Bowker, who wrote the introduction, says the couple asked doctors about a vasectomy after her release and that the doctors instead encouraged them to have more children, telling them she had recovered. A hospital spokesman said in 1966 that when she was released in 1959 there had been no apparent sign that her illness might return.
At the 1967 trial Dr. Walter Rohm of the Augusta State Hospital testified that she suffered from oneirophrenia, a dreamlike psychotic state, and that she had felt that she and the children were doomed, the Bangor Daily News recalled in 2001. John Benoit, a former state senator and retired judge who interviewed her, said in 2001 that he did not recall prosecutors arguing strongly against her claim of mental illness. The jury deliberated for about 20 minutes and ruled her not guilty by reason of insanity. She was committed to the Augusta State Hospital permanently, the Kennebec Journal reported in 2026. The verdict was not a conviction. A 2001 Bangor Daily News article said she might be the only person in Maine ever ruled not responsible by reason of mental disease or defect in two separate killing cases; strictly, the 1954 case ended without an indictment, so the 1967 verdict was the only one.
By 1967 Maine’s statutes on the insanity defense had been rewritten. A 1963 law, "An Act Relating to Disposition of Persons Pleading Insanity," took effect on September 21, 1963. It provided that an accused person was not criminally responsible if the unlawful act was the product of mental disease or defect. When a jury acquitted on that ground, the verdict had to say so, and the court was to commit the person to the Commissioner of Mental Health and Corrections for care and treatment. A committed person could be discharged, or released to a relative or friend who posted a bond, only on a petition to the Superior Court and only if release would not endanger the peace and safety of the community; the county attorney had to be notified and could oppose it. Which of those provisions were applied in her case, and under which earlier statute her 1959 release was approved, has not been reported.
Her sister, who spoke publicly in 2026 as the case was retold during a Massachusetts trial, has said the doctors and the state failed her, and that she asked for help both times. The date of the second event is June 30, 1966 in the wire report, the Kennebec Journal, Briggs and the publisher’s description; one 2001 Bangor Daily News article gives June 20.
Marcelo Costa de Andrade confessed to killing 14 boys in and around Niteroi, the city across Guanabara Bay from Rio de Janeiro, between April and December 1991. The boys were between about 5 and 13 years old, according to Correio Braziliense. He justified the killings in religious terms, believing that children who died went to heaven, and he showed no remorse, Folha do Leste reported.
He never stood trial. Brazilian courts judged him inimputavel, the legal term for a person who cannot be held criminally responsible because of mental illness or impaired mental development. Instead of a prison sentence he received a medida de seguranca, a security measure that commits a person to a forensic psychiatric hospital for treatment and custody. AIB News reported in April 2023 that the finding came in 1992 and that the security measure had no fixed end, with periodic examinations to decide whether he had recovered. Folha do Leste and Enfoco both date his internment from 1993. Correio Braziliense wrote in 2021 that he was judged to have an intellectual disability, was considered not responsible for his crimes and was placed in a psychiatric hospital, where he remained.
In Brazil the question of criminal responsibility is answered by a psychiatric examination, and a finding of inimputabilidade closes the criminal case: there is no verdict, no conviction and no sentence to serve. The measure is reviewed instead. In 2023 his lawyer asked the Rio de Janeiro criminal enforcement court to end it. In 2024, when Brazil’s National Council of Justice moved to close the country’s forensic asylums, he was the only patient left in the Niteroi custodial hospital, Henrique Roxo, and a court had to decide where he could be sent. A 2023 order to move him to the Jurujuba psychiatric hospital in Niteroi was reconsidered on March 5, 2024, and he stayed for the time being at Henrique Roxo; he was still reported there in October 2024.
The distinction matters for how the case is described. Several regional reports of 2024 wrote that he was "convicted" or that he is "serving his sentence." The legal record described in the same reports is different: he was not tried, there was no conviction, and the internment is a measure of treatment and custody, not a criminal sentence. The judge’s name is printed variously in the 2024 reports, and the date the measure began is given as 1992 or 1993.
Phillip Carl Jablonski spent most of the 1970s and 1980s in California prisons, first for a rape and then for killing Linda Kimball, the mother of his daughter. In 1978 he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, assault and attempted rape in the Kimball case, the Associated Press reported in 2019. He was paroled in September 1990. His wife, Carol Spadoni, and her mother, Eva Petersen, had both said before his release that they were afraid of him, and his parole conditions barred him from Burlingame, where the two women lived. On April 23, 1991, both were killed in Burlingame.
The California Supreme Court’s 2006 opinion describes what happened between the arrest and the trial. Proceedings in San Mateo County were suspended on June 3, 1993, so that a jury could decide whether Jablonski was competent to stand trial. Four experts testified. A defense psychiatrist concluded that he had schizophrenia, could not help in his defense, and was not malingering. Two court-appointed experts first thought he might be incompetent and then changed their views: one concluded he was competent and "without a doubt" malingering, and the other said there was not enough data to decide but strongly suspected malingering. The prosecution’s expert judged him competent and malingering. Over a defense objection, the court let the jury hear a tape recorded in Kansas, ruling it highly probative on whether he was feigning. On November 10, 1993, the jury ruled him competent.
In California, then, the question of whether Jablonski’s illness was genuine went to a lay panel, and the panel did not accept that it was serious enough to stop the case.
He had pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, and the sanity phase ran from May 2 to May 10, 1994, after he had been convicted of first-degree murder in April. Dr. Kormos, for the defense, diagnosed chronic schizophrenia and testified that Jablonski could not tell right from wrong at the time of the killings. Dr. Vitali Rozynko, appointed by the court, agreed that he was schizophrenic and psychotic but judged him legally sane. He called the crimes "goal directed," and pointed to what Jablonski did afterward. A second court-appointed expert, Dr. Wilkinson, diagnosed posttraumatic stress disorder and sexual sadism, concluded that he was malingering, and testified that he understood right from wrong. On May 10 the jury ruled him sane. It then returned death verdicts, and the court imposed the sentence of death on each San Mateo count on August 12, 1994.
The California Supreme Court affirmed the judgment on January 23, 2006. It upheld the compelled competency examinations, the use of the Kansas tape at the competency trial, the competency standard and instructions, and the decision to keep a juror who had received a crank call. Its sharpest words were for a May 1 interrogation. The court held that Jablonski’s statement was voluntary, and that any error was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt, but it said that its ruling did not excuse the officers' repeated refusal to honor his request for counsel. Deliberately violating Miranda in that way, the court wrote, was "unethical" and "must be strongly disapproved," and "respect for the rule of law is not advanced when the guardians of the law elect to deliberately violate it."
Jablonski was discovered unresponsive in his cell at San Quentin at 1:10 p.m. on December 27, 2019, and pronounced dead at 1:30 p.m., aged 73. He had also been charged in Utah with a 1991 killing and was accused in a Riverside County death; the outcomes of those cases have not been reported.
The cases resolve into three outcomes. Some defendants regained competence and were tried: Gein after ten years, Maust after two, Caputo by May 1994, Scott after years of waiting for a hospital bed. Some were never tried, and the finding became permanent: Straffen over the two girls in Bath, Mosley, Andrade. And in one, a jury was asked to decide whether the claim of illness was true, and ruled that it was not enough: Jablonski.
A finding of unfitness does not decide guilt. Straffen’s confessions to the two killings in Bath, the eyewitness accounts and shoeprint that a Fort Lauderdale detective gathered against Mosley, and Andrade’s own statements are the kind of material a court would ordinarily test. Without a trial none of it was. In Mosley’s case the absence of a trial coincided with two other men being convicted of killings later linked to him by DNA, one of whom spent about 22 years in prison and the other of whom died on death row.
The delays have a character of their own. In the older cases the wait was the illness: ten years for Gein. In Missouri in 2026 the wait was also the system: a list of hospital beds, four public defenders, six postponed dates. The prosecutor who had been ready for trial said that nothing in the law allowed her to move faster, and the families, in the words of one Darby daughter, were dragged along for the ride.
• 1951: John Straffen is declared unfit to plead over the deaths of two girls in Bath and committed to Broadmoor. In 1952 he escapes and is later convicted of a third killing.
• January 1958: Ed Gein is declared not competent and committed to Central State Hospital, Waupun.
• 1959: Constance Fisher is released from the Augusta State Hospital. On June 30, 1966, the second event occurs.
• 1967: A Maine jury rules Fisher not guilty by reason of insanity.
• January 16, 1968: A Wisconsin judge rules Gein can be tried. In November 1968 he is convicted of first-degree murder and ruled insane.
• 1971: Ricardo Caputo, charged with murder in Nassau County, New York, is declared incompetent and committed.
• 1973: Eddie Lee Mosley is declared incompetent after charges in two cases. Fisher dies in October.
• 1983: Mosley is released after a guilty plea to reduced charges. In 1987 he is charged with murder and declared incompetent.
• 1984: Gein dies at Mendota.
• November 10, 1993: A San Mateo County jury rules Phillip Jablonski competent. A jury rules him sane on May 10, 1994.
• March 9, 1994: Caputo surrenders in New York. In 1995 he is sentenced in the Becker case.
• 1999: Illinois releases David Maust.
• December 2003: Maust is charged in Hammond, Indiana.
• 2006: The California Supreme Court affirms Jablonski’s death sentence.
• 2021: A Missouri judge rules Fredrick Scott incompetent.
• March 2024: A Rio de Janeiro court decides Marcelo Costa de Andrade will stay at Henrique Roxo.
• July 2025: Scott is ruled competent; trial is set for September 2026.
• September 22, 2026: A Jackson County jury convicts Scott in four of six deaths.