Engleman was born in 1927 and practised dentistry in St Louis, Missouri, from a surgery in a working-class district. He was, by every account, an ordinary and even well-liked dentist, and he ran a second business alongside it.
The method was consistent. He would identify a woman willing to take part, arrange for her to marry a man who could be insured, and then kill the husband and split the payout. The deaths were staged as accidents, mining explosions, hunting mishaps and shootings during robberies. He killed at least seven people between 1954 and 1980, including a man blown up at a quarry and a newly married man shot on a country road. The St Louis press called him the Killing Dentist.
Those named in the record are James Bullock, twenty-seven; Eric Frey; Peter J. Halm, twenty-six; Arthur Gusewelle, sixty-one, and Vernita Gusewelle, fifty-five; their son Ronald Gusewelle, thirty-three; and Sophie Marie Barrera.
The scheme worked for twenty-six years because each death looked like something else and because the beneficiaries had no criminal record. It came apart when one of the women involved talked to federal investigators in the early 1980s, in a case built substantially on wired conversations.
He was convicted, sentenced to life imprisonment, and died in prison on March 3, 1999.
The figure of seven or more reflects further deaths connected to him and not charged. His entry belongs beside the insurance cases in this archive, and it is the most systematic of them: not a person who took a policy out on a relative, but a professional man who assembled marriages in order to collect on them.