Eight men in this archive killed alongside a brother. They fall into four cases, and the useful thing about reading them together is not what the brothers had in common. It is how differently the law treated men who did the same thing.
Anthony and Nathaniel Cook worked Toledo and northwestern Ohio, mostly attacking couples parked in cars. Anthony was nine years older. Both drove long-haul trucks. The killings began in December 1973 with Vicki Small, taken near a hospital, and at least eight more followed in a seventeen-month stretch from May 1980. Anthony was pulled over on the interstate in October 1981 and gave himself up without incident, and the attacks on couples stopped.
He went to prison for one murder, that of a property developer named Peter Sawicki, and the rest of the series stayed unsolved for seventeen years. What reopened it was a misdemeanour arrest in 1998 and the DNA testing that followed. By then the state wanted the confessions more than it wanted Nathaniel. Under a plea agreement in 2000, both brothers gave full videotaped accounts under immunity and sat polygraph examinations, so that the Lucas County prosecutor could close a shelf of unsolved homicides.
The price was written into the deal. Nathaniel would serve twenty years and then be released. In August 2018 Judge Linda Jennings suspended the remainder of his sentence and said plainly that she was bound to follow the law, because the agreement signed by her predecessor promised judicial release once the twenty years were served. Members of the victims' families were in court. Anthony admitted nine killings and remains in prison; in 2024 he refused to meet the parole board.
One brother is serving life for three murders. The other admitted taking part in three of them, was never convicted of a murder at all, and walked out. That is not an inconsistency in the record. It is what the state agreed to in exchange for knowing what had happened.
Shen Changyin and Shen Changping left Huojia county in rural Henan around 2000, after the elder stabbed a man there and a failed investment in auto parts. From June 2003 they moved across China. Lanzhou, Taiyuan, Hefei, Baotou, Shijiazhuang, killing eleven women who worked in beauty salons and spas. The pattern was robbery first: the women were bound and made to give up their bank card numbers before they were killed.
What is hardest to read is not the killing but the recruitment. In November 2003 they robbed a woman named Li Chunling exactly as they had robbed the others, and did not kill her, because she offered to bring them more. She delivered women to them over the following months. Later, in Taiyuan, they took Zhao Meiying and forced her to procure others, and made her stab one of the women she had brought. Zhao went to the police in mid-2004. Police raided a Shijiazhuang apartment that August and found the brothers, a dismembered body, tools and a pile of stolen bank cards.
Both were sentenced to death on the same day and executed on the same day, 27 April 2006. Changyin was thirty. Changping was twenty-three. Li Chunling was also sentenced to death, and three other women, aged between sixteen and twenty-six when it happened, received between three and twenty years for procuring victims.
The Brileys are the case where the sentences diverge most. Linwood Briley, James Briley and their brother Anthony robbed and killed across Richmond, Virginia between March and October 1979, with a younger accomplice named Duncan Meekins. Figures for the series differ widely: contemporary reporting settled on eleven, most later accounts say at least twelve, and one tally reaches twenty-one.
Linwood had killed before. In 1971, at sixteen, he shot an elderly neighbour from a window of the family house. A detective traced the bullet's path back with a sheet of plywood and found the gun inside. He first said he had been shooting at squirrels, then admitted he had meant it, and said of the dead woman that he had heard she had heart problems and would have died soon anyway. His lawyer persuaded the court it was an accident. He got a year in reform school.
It ended in October 1979 at Harvey Wilkerson's house, a short walk from the Briley home, where Wilkerson, his partner Judy Barton, who was twenty-three and pregnant, and her five-year-old son were bound and killed. Meekins was a minor and gave evidence against the brothers.
Linwood was convicted of capital murder and six counts of first-degree murder and electrocuted in October 1984, killed by two fifty-five-second bursts of current with eight witnesses present and no reporters. James was convicted of two capital murders and executed six months later, aged twenty-eight. Anthony was convicted of four counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to life. He had turned himself in after the Wilkerson killings. In 1984 Linwood and James escaped from death row at Mecklenburg with four other men and were recaptured within three weeks; Anthony was held elsewhere and had no part in it. He is still at Lawrenceville Correctional Center.
One series. Three brothers. A death sentence, two death sentences, and a life term.
The Spahalski case is the odd one, because the brothers never killed together. Robert Spahalski and Stephen Spahalski were identical twins, born in 1955, and gifted athletes as boys. Stephen killed first, beating a shop owner named Ronald Ripley to death with a hammer in 1971 at sixteen. Robert was a suspect in that killing until his brother confessed. Stephen was convicted of manslaughter rather than murder.
Robert killed four people in Rochester between 1990 and 2005 and was never caught for any of them. He stayed at one scene and spoke to investigating officers, describing himself as a friend of the dead woman. He gave a dead man's name to police at a traffic stop and was acquitted even of the impersonation charge. What ended it was Robert walking into the Rochester Police Department in November 2005, aged fifty-one, and saying what he had done. He kept talking in custody and cleared three killings that had been unresolved for years. He was sentenced to a hundred years.
Two brothers, both convicted killers, who served time in the same prison for crimes committed thirty-four years apart.
Read the four together and the pattern is not in the men. Every one of these cases produced brothers who did comparable things and received sentences that were not comparable at all: Nathaniel Cook released under an agreement, Anthony Cook still inside; Anthony Briley alive at Lawrenceville while both his brothers went to the electric chair; Stephen Spahalski convicted of manslaughter for a killing his brother was suspected of first.
Only the Shens got the same sentence on the same day, and they were tried by a system that had already decided the answer.
What separates them is almost never the conduct. It is what each man could offer the state, when he offered it, and who got there first.