There is no classic gold-rush serial killer among these cases. What follows is a set of cases from places where money arrived faster than the law: a homestead frontier in Kansas, cattle trails and a disordered Texas after the Civil War, an Oklahoma oil field that made one Native nation the richest people per head in the world, a pipeline boom in Anchorage, a Perth still reshaping itself after the 1890s gold rush, a mining region in the Brazilian north, a copper-mining town in Sonora and the factory city of Shenzhen. Only two of them touch gold at all. Rendell’s Perth was the aftermath of a gold rush, and the Brazilian bicycle mechanic Francisco das Chagas had worked as a gold prospector in Altamira. The settings are otherwise oil (the Osage country and the Alaska pipeline), copper (Nacozari), cattle (Texas), land (Kansas) and manufacturing (Shenzhen). Two of the men named, Hardin and Hale, were not serial killers in the usual sense: one was a frontier gunfighter of the cattle trails, the other organized killings for money. They are included because they show how the same conditions work: newcomers nobody can vouch for, victims nobody reports, officials stretched thin or bought, and a legal system that arrives afterward.
John Wesley Hardin was a gambler and cattle drover whose name was attached to more killings than any other man in Texas in the decade after the Civil War. What a court proved is much narrower. A Comanche County jury in September 1877 convicted him of second-degree murder for the killing of Charles Webb, a Brown County deputy sheriff, on May 26, 1874, Hardin’s twenty-first birthday. The Texas Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction in 1878, and he entered the penitentiary at Huntsville that October as convict 7109 under a 25-year sentence. In 1892 he pleaded guilty to manslaughter for the 1873 killing of J. B. Morgan at Cuero. Those are the only two deaths for which he was convicted.
Everything else rests on attribution. Some killings were reported in newspapers when they occurred, some are recorded in peace officer memorials, and many are known only because Hardin described them in The Life of John Wesley Hardin, a manuscript written in prison and published in 1896, the year after his death. Historians accept at least 20 killings. The totals range from about 20 to 27 (a newspaper count of 1877) and 32 (documented by the biographer Leon Metz), up to the 40 or 42 of Hardin’s own boast. The autobiography presents almost every killing as self-defense or as resistance to an occupying government, and it cannot be taken at its word.
The setting shaped every part of his record. Hardin was born at Bonham on May 26, 1853, the second of eight children of a Methodist circuit-riding preacher who also taught school and later practiced law. Texas was under federal military authority from 1867, and after 1870 Governor Edmund J. Davis governed with a new statewide force, the Texas State Police. The Handbook of Texas records that a committee of the 1868 to 1869 constitutional convention counted 939 murders in the state between 1865 and 1868, of which 373 were killings of Black Texans by white men. The State Police, created in July 1870 and never larger than about 200 men, included Black, Hispanic and white officers, and many white Texans resented it for that reason. The legislature abolished it in April 1873. The Handbook says that older histories called the force corrupt and partisan, that recent research finds the charge largely unsupported, and that some officers, Captain Jack Helm among them, did commit serious misconduct.
Several of the men Hardin is said to have killed were freedmen, Union soldiers or State Police officers. In the fall of 1868, aged 15, he killed a Black man in Polk County; the Handbook calls it the result of "a chance meeting and an argument," and the Wittliff Collections identify the man as a former slave. Hardin’s autobiography gives the name Mage and says Mage had confronted him with a stick; no independent account of the encounter has survived, so the claim that Mage was the aggressor is Hardin’s alone. What is not in dispute is that a boy killed a man and was never brought to trial. Hardin wrote that his father told him to hide because a white youth could not expect a fair trial for killing a Black man. He also claimed three Union soldiers in 1868 and two more in 1869. Metz writes that Hardin "claimed to have killed three Union soldiers," and no army record or contemporary report of those deaths has been found.
In 1871 he went to Gonzales County, where cousins persuaded him to drive cattle up the Chisholm Trail to the railhead at Abilene, Kansas, then the great cow town of the plains. The Handbook says flatly that "he killed seven people en route and three in Abilene." Both it and the Wittliff guide follow Hardin’s own book, and a Kansas newspaper of the time reported fewer herders killed than he claimed. The one Abilene death documented at the time was that of Charles Couger. The Abilene Chronicle of August 10, 1871 named the suspected shooter as "Wesley Clements, alias 'Arkansas,'" and said he had escaped; Hardin was sharing the adjoining room with his cousin. Hardin does not admit the killing in his autobiography.
By 1873 he had joined one side of the longest feud in Texas history. The Handbook entry on the Sutton-Taylor feud describes it as growing out of the disorder after the war, with the Taylor family and their kin on one side and, on the other, a party that formed around the State Police and took its name from a DeWitt County deputy sheriff, William E. Sutton. Hardin was related to the Taylors by marriage. In July 1873 the former State Police captain and DeWitt County sheriff Jack Helm was killed, and Hardin said in his book that he took part in the killing. Two Texas State Police members, Private Jim Smalley (January 1871, which Hardin also describes in his own account) and Special Police Officer Green Paramore (October 1871, named by Hardin himself), are attributed to him. No court heard those cases.
Law caught up with him slowly and by Texas Rangers. He was arrested at Pensacola, Florida, on August 23, 1877, by Texas Ranger Lieutenant John B. Armstrong, a detective and local officers; he had been living in Florida and Alabama as J. H. Swain. After his Webb conviction and the 1892 plea, he was discharged on February 17, 1894. Governor James S. Hogg granted a full pardon in both cases on March 16, 1894. Hardin became a lawyer in El Paso, where he was killed by Constable John Selman on August 19, 1895. Six witnesses at his trial had repeated what he said to the deputy before the fatal encounter: "I am John Wesley Hardin, that d__d desperado, as people call me." The frontier, in other words, produced the killer, the legend and the pardon in a single generation.
The same expansion produced the Benders. Southeast Kansas was newly open to settlement in 1870. The Homestead Act of 1862 let settlers claim 160 acres, and the Osage lands of the region were being made available to them, as the Library of Congress and Humanities Kansas both describe. A family of four, known locally as John Bender, his wife, John Jr. and Kate, arrived at about the end of 1870 and took up a claim in Osage Township, Labette County, about six miles northeast of Cherryvale. The Kansas Historical Society says the two men came first, built a one-room timber cabin over a stone cellar, and sent for the women. HistoryNet puts the opening of their small store and inn in 1871. Travelers could buy a meal and stay the night.
Nobody has settled who these four people were. The Kansas papers of 1873 described two men and two women. The family was called German, and the Library of Congress observes that their nationality was reported inconsistently. The Kansas Historical Society calls the older woman Kate, like her daughter; Smithsonian Magazine, in 2020, noted that some researchers have questioned whether they were a family at all. HistoryNet says some sources describe the younger pair as married, others say John Jr. was the older woman’s son by an earlier marriage, and some say none of them was related. Kate was the member the neighbors remembered. The Kansas Historical Society says she was the only one of the four with social skills, that she claimed second sight and spiritualism, and that she handed out circulars around the county advertising her powers.
The deaths came to light in May 1873, when the family had already gone. The Kansas Historical Society’s count, repeated in its encyclopedia entries, is eleven victims; newspapers of the time gave figures from eight to fourteen, and later accounts speak of about a dozen, one of them, by several accounts, a child. Dr. William H. York of Independence is the best known of the victims. Because the district had horse thieves and vigilance committees, suspicion fell first on others, and HistoryNet describes neighbors turning on one another. That is what the Bender case shows about the frontier: a stream of travelers moved through thinly settled country, nobody could count them, and when some failed to arrive, the first suspicion fell elsewhere.
No court ever heard a case against the Benders. Governor Thomas A. Osborn offered a $2,000 reward in May 1873; it was never paid. The family left by train from Thayer in April or early May 1873, and their fate is unknown. Claims that vigilantes killed them, and identifications of people in Michigan, Nebraska, Colorado and elsewhere, were never proved. In late 1889 two women arrested at Niles, Michigan, as Ma and Kate Bender were held in the Labette County jail at Oswego and then released; they were never tried. The deaths are attributed to the family rather than legally proven against any of them.
Perth in 1909 was a city remade by gold. The Western Australian rush of the 1890s had swollen the population, and in her 2015 article in the journal TEXT the historian Anna Haebich writes that, after it, settlers, Labor politicians, medical reformers and women’s groups alike held up the chaste wife and devoted mother as the ideal. Anxiety about the care of children was high. Haebich cites a 1907 children’s law and the opening of Perth’s first children’s hospital in 1909. A woman living unmarried with another woman’s children and nursing them through fatal illnesses stood against that ideal.
Martha Rendell was executed at Fremantle Prison in October 1909, about three weeks after a jury in Perth convicted her of the wilful murder of Arthur Morris, 15, the son of the man she lived with in East Perth, Thomas Nicholls Morris. Police also held her responsible for the deaths of two of his younger children, Annie and Olive, who had died earlier in the same household; those two deaths were never charged. Thomas Morris was tried with her and acquitted. Two of the three deaths had been certified at the time as illness of the throat, and the family doctor, in Haebich’s account, praised Rendell’s devotion and raised no suspicion. The WA Police Historical Society says several doctors treated the children and only one doubted the cause of death. The execution date is given as October 6 by the Society and by Traces Magazine and as October 9 by Haebich. She was the last woman executed in Western Australia.
The case grew out of a family’s own report: a surviving brother left the household in April 1909 and told police his stepmother had killed his brother and sisters. A coroner’s inquiry followed; its records are among the few official papers that survive, so most of what is known of the trial comes from Perth’s newspapers. Truth published a photograph of her veiled face with a witch-like face scratched onto it, and ran headlines such as "ASTOUNDING ALLEGATIONS OF DEVILISH DEEDS." The West Australian took a more sober line and printed near-verbatim reports. Haebich describes the papers as competing with one another but united about Rendell’s guilt. The Conversation, in an essay by the author of a book on stepmothers charged with murder, says there were no precedents for such a case, no forensic or medical proof and no eyewitnesses; the police historical society’s account of a neighbor’s evidence is at odds with that last point. The police could find no clear motive; the Society says the only explanation they offered was her infatuation with Morris and her anger at the children’s disobedience.
Haebich, who studied the surviving records, describes the case as one of gaps and silences and places the trial within a moral panic about women, marriage and child care. The WA Police Historical Society presents it as the murder of all three children by Rendell. She denied all three deaths to the end. At the centenary of her execution in 2009 a vigil was held on the anniversary, and a lecture Haebich gave at Fremantle Prison had to be repeated because so many people wanted to attend. A gold rush had created the Perth that tried her, and the verdict rested on what that city feared as much as on anything proved.
William King Hale was a cattleman from Texas who became one of the most powerful men in Osage County, Oklahoma, in the years when oil made the Osage people some of the richest in the world per capita. By the 1920s, according to a 1953 internal FBI history, he controlled about 45,000 acres of Osage grazing land by lease and owned 5,000 acres outright, controlled a bank at Fairfax and kept a ranch house near Gray Horse. He cultivated people through favors and gifts, acted as a deputy sheriff and signed some of his letters "Rev. W. K. Hale," according to the law professor Douglas O. Linder. Federal investigators later concluded that he had arranged the killing of members of one Osage family, the family of his nephew’s wife, Mollie Burkhart, so that their oil wealth would pass toward his own household.
The money lay underground. Under the Osage Allotment Act of 1906, the minerals beneath the reservation stayed in tribal ownership, held in trust by the United States, and royalties were divided equally among the 2,229 Osage on the tribal roll. Each share was called a headright. A headright cannot be bought or sold, but it could be inherited, and, as the Oklahoma Historical Society’s encyclopedia states, the heir did not have to be Osage. Linder reports that the net annual payment per headright rose from $221 in 1915 to $12,400 in 1923, and the encyclopedia records that the tribe earned more than $30 million in revenue in 1923 alone. The Osage Nation states plainly that the headrights were the motive for the killings.
A second system made Osage people vulnerable. Courts and the federal government placed many Osage under guardianship, deciding they were not "competent" to manage their own money, often on the basis of how much Osage ancestry they had. A guardian, usually a prominent white man, controlled the ward’s spending. The National Archives, which holds the Register of Guardians kept from 1919 to 1924, reports the finding by the author David Grann that guardians often used the arrangement to swindle the people they were supposed to protect.
The members of Mollie Burkhart’s family died in a sequence that investigators later read as a pattern: Anna Brown in May 1921, her mother Lizzie Q. Kyle in July 1921, and in March 1923 the Smith household in Fairfax, where Mollie’s sister Rita Smith, Rita’s husband Bill Smith and their housekeeper Nettie Brookshire died. The FBI history says whoever in the family died first and last decided which way the headrights flowed; with each death, more of the family’s wealth moved toward the last surviving sister, Mollie, and through her toward Hale’s nephew. Bill Smith did not believe Lizzie Kyle’s death was natural, but nothing was proved. Hale held a $25,000 life insurance policy on Henry Roan, an Osage man who was killed in early 1923.
In January 1929 a federal jury at Pawhuska convicted Hale of the murder of Henry Roan as the man who aided, abetted, counseled and procured the killer, John Ramsey. It was his third federal trial. The first, at Guthrie in the summer of 1926, ended in a hung jury; the second, at Oklahoma City in October 1926, produced a life sentence that the Eighth Circuit reversed on March 27, 1928; the Tenth Circuit dismissed the appeal from the third on February 7, 1930. State murder charges filed in 1926, while federal jurisdiction was in doubt, were never tried. He served at Leavenworth, was paroled in 1947 over Osage objections and died in Arizona in 1962.
Men convicted of other Osage killings named him as the man who ordered them. Kelsie Morrison, convicted in the death of Anna Brown, said in a statement taken at Guthrie on May 18, 1926, that Hale had paid him. Hale’s nephew Ernest Burkhart pleaded guilty to the murder of Bill Smith and said he carried Hale’s message. Hale was never tried for those killings and never admitted any of them. The investigation was the first major homicide inquiry of the Bureau of Investigation, later renamed the FBI. In the newspapers of the 1920s, and in Osage memory since, the years of killing in Osage County are known as the "Reign of Terror," and the number of people who died has never been settled. The Osage Nation Museum cut Hale’s figure out of a 1924 panoramic photograph; its director told Grann that "the Devil was standing right there."
Robert Hansen ran a bakery in an Anchorage strip mall, flew a small airplane and hunted big game. In February 1984 he pleaded guilty to four counts of first-degree murder, and in a taped confession he told prosecutors and Alaska State Troopers that he had killed 17 women over about a decade; police said in April 1984, according to United Press International, that he had by then admitted 20. Judge Ralph Moody sentenced him on February 27, 1984 to life plus 461 years without parole. Hansen died in custody at an Anchorage hospital on August 21, 2014, aged 75, of apparently natural causes.
The killings he confessed to took place in an Anchorage reshaped by the building of the 800-mile trans-Alaska pipeline in the 1970s. The Associated Press wrote that the boom brought thousands of newcomers to the city, many of whom left as suddenly as they arrived, so that absences drew little notice. A prosecutor explained at the time, according to KTUU, that Hansen chose women he believed nobody would miss. The prosecutor Frank Rothschild said in 2014 that in Hansen’s mind "there were good girls and bad girls," and that he did not regard his victims as human. Twelve of the women were eventually located and eleven identified, the most recent in 2021, when genetic genealogy gave a name, Robin Pelkey, to a 19-year-old who had been known for 37 years as "Horseshoe Harriet." The twelfth, a woman located near Eklutna in 1980 and believed by troopers to be his first victim, was still unidentified when the troopers discussed the case in 2021. Almost everything known about her came from Hansen.
He was no stranger to the courts, and what they did with him before 1983 belongs to the story of a boomtown’s thin patience. His first felony conviction came in Iowa: the Alaska Supreme Court recorded a 1961 conviction for willfully and maliciously setting fire to a motor vehicle, for which he served 23 months in a reformatory. He moved to Anchorage in 1967. By the mid-1970s, the Alaska Supreme Court wrote, he had been steadily employed as a baker and a warehouseman, with good references from his employers. He owned a house and three vehicles and was the main support of his wife and two young children. In 1972 he was convicted of assault with a dangerous weapon and sentenced to five years with a recommendation for psychiatric treatment; he served about six months, moved to a halfway house and a work-release program, and was paroled about a year later. A court-ordered psychiatric report of February 28, 1972, by Dr. J. Ray Langdon, concluded that Hansen suffered from a dissociative mental illness, suggested that his criminal conduct stemmed from it, and warned that disorders of that type were difficult to treat successfully. Eight months later a second psychiatrist reported progress enough to justify parole.
On November 3, 1976, a security guard at an Anchorage department store watched him leave with a chainsaw under cover of an old sales receipt. The saw was returned in full, and the court described its value as relatively low. Hansen pleaded guilty to larceny in a building. In a written statement he said he had wanted to please his father, who was 69 and had had one heart attack. In 1978 the Alaska Supreme Court reduced the sentence, in an opinion that dwelt on his steady work and references. Within five years of that opinion he was arrested, and within six he was confessing to 17 killings.
He was arrested in Anchorage in October 1983 by Alaska State Troopers. His wife and children lived across town from the bakery and, the Associated Press reported, knew nothing of the life he led away from them; a 1984 AP report quoted Rothschild as saying that even Hansen’s wife of 20 years had had no idea. The district attorney, Victor Krumm, told reporters Hansen had grown up in Pocahontas, Iowa, with "a severe inferiority complex with girls." The nickname the press gave him was "the Butcher Baker." Troopers have called the unidentified 1980 woman "Eklutna Annie."
Francisco das Chagas Rodrigues de Brito, whom the press and the courts call Chagas, was a bicycle mechanic on the island of São Luís, in the northern Brazilian state of Maranhão. In the 1990s he lived in Altamira, a town on the Xingu River in Pará, where he worked as a gold prospector as well as a mechanic; a Brazilian Supreme Court news item from December 2004 also describes him as a former resident of Altamira. This is the closest any of these cases comes to a gold camp, though nothing ties the killings to gold. What the record does show is poor families and a police response that, the families argued, left the deaths of their sons uninvestigated.
He was 41 when his first trial began in October 2006, according to the legal news site ConJur. By then he had confessed to killing boys over more than a decade: 42 deaths in most accounts, 30 in Maranhão and 12 in Pará, though a 2025 academic paper gives 41, 13 of them in Altamira. ConJur reported that he first denied the charges, then confessed, and later gave versions that his lawyer, Erivelton Lago, dismissed as inventions. Maranhão police attributed 30 deaths of children in their state to him, and in November 2004 the police chief then heading the inquiry, João Carlos Amorim Diniz, presented a geographic analysis of the deaths to the human rights committee of the Chamber of Deputies.
The victims were boys from poor families, roughly 4 to 15 years old, from poor districts of São Luís, São José de Ribamar and Paço do Lumiar. A 2021 study built on the accounts of the boys' mothers describes families living in informal settlements. The state of Maranhão, in a law passed on December 15, 2005, recognized 28 boys as victims for the purposes of a settlement with the families, according to the study; the state prosecutors' release of 2018 also gives 28. Before the arrest, the families and the groups that worked with them had taken Brazil to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, arguing that the police had failed to investigate the deaths of poor children. That petition ended in a friendly settlement; the CONPEDI paper of 2025 cites the settlement report as number 43 of 2006. Brazil acknowledged international responsibility at a public ceremony in São Luís, the state promised to reopen the investigations, pay the families a monthly pension of 500 reais for 15 years and include them in income and housing programs. The 2021 study says the pension was later made lifelong and raised to one minimum wage but that promised schools and prevention programs were never fully delivered.
The Maranhão cases were divided among courts according to where each boy died, and Chagas has been convicted in trial after trial. The state prosecutors' releases record sentences of 36 years (August 2009), 26 years (March 2010) and 28 years (April 2011) for individual cases, each for homicide with other charges. Bahia Notícias reported 108 years in March 2014 and 25 further cases still pending; the prosecutors' summary of May 2018 gave a running total of 580 years and 10 months. He has been held at the Pedrinhas prison complex in São Luís since 2004.
The Pará killings are another matter. The Supreme Court’s news service dates the Altamira crimes to 1989 to 1992; the Agência Câmara report of November 2004 counts 14 poor boys aged 8 to 13 taken and killed between 1988 and 1992, 11 of them in Altamira. Four men had already been convicted in Pará before Chagas was identified: two physicians, a businessman and a military police officer. A Pará jury in Belém had sentenced one of them to 57 years. In December 2004 two of them asked the Supreme Federal Court for release pending appeal, and their lawyers argued that Chagas, a former Altamira resident, was the real culprit and that their clients' convictions were the greatest judicial error in Brazil. The committee chairman, Deputy Mário Heringer, announced a further hearing with representatives of Pará to ask why those men were still in prison after Chagas’s confession. The Pará killings were never tried against Chagas. They remain attributed to him, not proven against him in court.
Ma Yong was 43 and came from Hengdong County in Hunan province. Duan Zhiqun was 20, from Pengxi County in Sichuan. Both were among the millions of people who had moved to Shenzhen, the boom city on the border with Hong Kong, and they met there at the end of 2001, according to China Youth Daily. On November 27, 2003, the Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court convicted them both of robbery for a series of killings of young women who had come alone to a job agency in Buji, a town in the city’s Longgang district, looking for work. Ma was convicted of carrying out all twelve killings between May 26 and October 2003; Duan took part in five. Both were sentenced to death with deprivation of political rights for life.
Shenzhen was declared one of China’s first special economic zones in 1980. By 2003, Time reported, almost all of its roughly five million residents had arrived from other parts of the country within the previous ten years. Neighbors seldom knew one another, and fewer cared to. Across China about 120 million rural migrants were living in cities, and only a decade earlier internal travel had required official permission. For a newcomer looking for work, the usual first stop was a labor market: a hall where job seekers paid about a dollar to get in and then moved among the booths of brokers and company recruiters. The young women in this case went to one such agency, and most of them, the Taiwanese Central News Agency reported, had come to apply on their own.
The case drew attention far beyond Shenzhen. Ming Pao in Hong Kong called it the cruelest series of killings in the city’s history, and the Central News Agency reported that it had alarmed the central government in Beijing. While the case was open, the police ordered Shenzhen’s newspapers to stop reporting on it, according to Time. The magazine said the authorities were happy to announce solved cases but tried to keep unsolved ones out of the news. Ma and Duan were arrested by the public security authorities in October 2003. Police seized the victims' SIM cards, clothing, handbags, wallets and shoes, China Youth Daily reported, and both men admitted the killings and robberies. The court held that the purpose was robbery. What was taken amounted, by the court’s finding, to the women’s bags and ten mobile phones.
They were tried together on November 25, 2003, in a hearing that lasted six hours. A working group from the Ministry of Public Security attended and, the agency reported, was examining whether local police had been negligent in handling the missing-person reports; the families said their reports were not taken seriously at first. The outcome of that examination was not reported. Time placed the case alongside others that had come to light in China that autumn, and quoted a police term for killers who moved from region to region: "predatory transients." Violent crime had risen by 73 percent over five years, Time reported, as a police force used to close watch over fixed neighborhoods struggled with a population free to move. Ren Jiantao, head of the School of Government at Zhongshan University in Guangzhou, told the magazine that society now had blind spots that had become "a heaven for killers," and that Shenzhen was only a few years ahead of the rest of the mainland. Whether either man appealed was not reported. As of the end of November 2003, both were under sentence of death; their later status has not been established.
In March 2012 a report concerning a child in Nacozari de García, a copper-mining town in the Mexican state of Sonora, led state investigators to Silvia Meraz Moreno, a 44-year-old woman who lived with her extended family on the edge of town. Within weeks Sonora prosecutors announced that Meraz and seven others had been detained over three deaths: a 55-year-old woman in December 2009 and two 10-year-old boys in 2010 and 2012. Prosecutors described Meraz as the leader of the group and tied the killings to the household’s devotion to Santa Muerte, a skeletal folk saint. She is accused, not convicted: no verdict was reported, and the formal charges against her by name were not reported either.
The link is the place, not any proven tie to the mining economy; nothing in the reporting connects the accusations to copper. Nacozari is a mining town on the edge of the Sierra Madre, about 110 kilometers (70 miles) south of Douglas, Arizona. The Associated Press put its population at about 11,500 in 2012. The town’s police chief, José Miguel Espinoza, told the AP that Nacozari had largely escaped the cartel violence then affecting other parts of the border region. "It was a peaceful town," he said. "We’d never seen such violence." The AP, AFP, EFE and Al Jazeera all carried the arrests, and the AP noted that no earlier case of its kind had been confirmed in Mexico.
Joseph Laycock, an assistant professor of religious studies at Texas State University, argued in Religion Dispatches in April 2012 that the reporting merged an isolated crime with a large and varied religious movement. He noted that the family had no apparent ties to drug cartels and that everyone implicated came from the same household. Devotees of Santa Muerte were not Satanists, he wrote, and many considered themselves Catholic; searching the case for a wider pattern, he argued, would not prevent crime and risked the persecution of innocent believers. The outcome of the case against her has not been reported.
The settings differ and the pattern repeats. In Kansas and Texas the law was a rumor; in Oklahoma it was available and compromised; in Anchorage it had already met Hansen twice and let him go; in Perth it arrived with a moral panic; in northern Brazil it convicted the wrong men before it identified the right one; in Shenzhen it learned that a city of strangers had no one watching. Boom conditions did not create these cases. They produced victims who could be missed without anyone noticing and officials who were not ready to look, and courts that, in nearly every instance, reached their verdicts long after the first deaths.
• 1868: Hardin kills a man in Polk County, Texas, at 15; no trial.
• 1870: Southeast Kansas made available for homestead settlement; the Benders arrive at about the end of the year.
• 1871: The Benders open their store and inn; Hardin drives cattle to Abilene.
• May 1873: Deaths linked to the Benders come to light; Governor Osborn offers a $2,000 reward.
• July 1873: Jack Helm killed in DeWitt County; Hardin says in his book that he took part.
• May 26, 1874: Hardin kills Deputy Sheriff Charles Webb.
• August 23, 1877: Hardin arrested at Pensacola; convicted in September.
• 1889: Two women arrested at Niles, Michigan, as Ma and Kate Bender are released.
• About 1907 to 1908: the Morris children die in Perth.
• September to October 1909: Rendell convicted and executed.
• May 1921: Anna Brown dies in Osage County.
• March 1923: three people die in the Smith household in Fairfax.
• January 1929: Hale convicted at Pawhuska.
• October 1983: Hansen arrested in Anchorage.
• February 27, 1984: Hansen sentenced to life plus 461 years.
• 1989 to 2003: the killings of boys in Maranhão attributed to Chagas.
• May to October 2003: Ma Yong’s twelve killings in Shenzhen; sentenced November 27, 2003.
• October 2006: Chagas’s first trial opens.
• December 2009 to March 2012: the three deaths over which Meraz Moreno was detained.
• August 21, 2014: Hansen dies in custody.