Courts do not take holidays off, and neither does a police department. In American and Canadian courtrooms, October 31 turns up again and again, not because anyone chose it but because it is one day in a calendar crowded with arrests, indictments, verdicts and rulings. A holiday that belongs to horror films gives it a second life in the memory: the date that a jury reaches a first verdict, or that a prosecutor announces a charge, reads differently when the evening brings trick-or-treaters. What follows traces October 31 through nine cases. It leads with what happened in public, in court and in the offices of prosecutors. Where a death is itself dated October 31, only the date is given.
The holiday and the genre grew up together. John Carpenter’s Halloween, produced by Debra Hill and released in October 1978, was made for about $320,000 and filmed over 20 days in the spring of that year; Film Independent, a nonprofit arts organization, says it is one of the first and best-known slasher films and that many credit it with inventing the subgenre. Wes Craven’s Scream, from a script by Kevin Williamson, was released on December 20, 1996, and opened to a modest $6 million before word of mouth carried it to $173 million worldwide, according to the film site JoBlo. Neither film is a documentary, and neither is the subject here. They matter because they set a template in which October 31 is a night for horror, and the real cases that fall on that date are read against it. Only once do the films touch a court record in what follows, in a sentence from a confession.
The Cleveland arrest of Anthony Sowell took place on Saturday, October 31, 2009. CBS News reported on November 2 that police had first sought to arrest him earlier in the week on new charges. At the time of the arrest nothing had been charged in the deaths that would define the case. Over the days that followed, deaths of women came to light in Cleveland, and in December 2009 a grand jury returned an 85-count indictment.
A Cuyahoga County jury convicted Sowell on Friday, July 22, 2011, after deliberating just over 15 hours. The Supreme Court of Ohio’s later opinion records that the jury convicted him on 81 of the 85 counts, including 11 counts of aggravated murder, one for each of the 11 women named in the indictment; the trial court acquitted him on three counts tied to one victim, and the jury returned a not guilty verdict on one count of aggravated robbery. Sentencing began August 1, 2011. Following the jury’s recommendation, the trial court sentenced him to death on each of the 11 aggravated murder counts.
On December 8, 2016, the Supreme Court of Ohio affirmed the convictions and death sentences by a vote of 5 to 2. Justice Terrence O’Donnell wrote for the majority; Justice William O’Neill dissented, and Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor joined part of the dissent. The central issue was the trial court’s closing of a suppression hearing without fully documenting its reasons. The majority held that this did not require a new hearing or a new trial. The Supreme Court of the United States declined to hear the case on October 2, 2017. Sowell died on February 8, 2021, aged 61, at Franklin Medical Center, the state prison medical facility in Columbus; a prison spokesperson said the cause was a terminal illness unrelated to COVID-19. He had been on death row and was still pursuing appeals.
Exactly fifteen years after Sowell’s arrest, Judge James R. Dabney of the Los Angeles County Superior Court resentenced Angelina Rodriguez on October 31, 2024. The sentence was life in prison without the possibility of parole, replacing a death sentence imposed on January 12, 2004.
The original case concerned the death of her husband, Jose Francisco Rodriguez, 41, who died in Montebello on September 9, 2000. In October 2003 a jury convicted her of his first-degree murder and returned true findings on two special circumstances: murder by administering poison and murder for financial gain. She was also convicted of attempting to dissuade a witness. The jury could not reach a verdict on a count of soliciting the witness’s murder, and a mistrial was declared on that count. At the penalty phase, prosecutors presented evidence about the 1993 death of her infant daughter and argued that she had murdered the child; the death was never charged, she was never convicted of it, and she denies it. The jury returned a death verdict on November 12, 2003.
The Supreme Court of California affirmed the judgment in 2014, unanimously. A decade later the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office conceded that she had a legitimate claim of ineffective assistance of counsel at the penalty phase and declined to seek the death penalty again. The convictions were not set aside.
The first verdict in the case of Angelo Buono Jr. arrived on Monday, October 31, 1983. The case concerned ten women and girls who died in the Los Angeles area between October 1977 and February 1978. A trial that had taken about two years, then the longest criminal trial in United States history by the account of United Press International, had gone to the jury, and the jury returned its verdicts in a series over several days. The first was a conviction on one count of murder, with nine murder counts and 11 non-murder felony counts still pending. By the time it was over, the jury had convicted Buono of nine of the ten murder counts.
The path to that verdict had almost ended in 1981. After his cousin Kenneth Bianchi, who had a plea agreement requiring him to testify, performed badly in pretrial testimony, the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office moved to dismiss all ten murder counts against Buono. Judge Ronald M. George, who presided, denied the motion, finding enough corroborating evidence to support a conviction; the district attorney’s office then withdrew, and Attorney General George Deukmejian took over the prosecution. Bianchi had pleaded guilty and received a life term in exchange for his testimony.
Prosecutors asked for the death penalty. The jury that had convicted Buono recommended life without parole after an hour of deliberation. Judge George then imposed nine concurrent terms of life without the possibility of parole. Buono, who was 50 at the sentencing and had run an auto upholstery shop in Glendale, died in a California prison in 2002.
On October 31, 2017, Bexar County District Attorney Nico LaHood announced that a grand jury had indicted Genene Jones for murder in the 1981 death of a child in San Antonio. It was the fifth child-death case brought against her in 2017.
Jones, a licensed vocational nurse in the 1980s, was already in prison. A Kerr County jury had convicted her in February 1984 of the murder of a child in Kerrville in 1982 and sentenced her to 99 years, and in October 1984 she was convicted of injury to a child in San Antonio and received a concurrent sentence of 60 years. The reason a fresh indictment mattered in 2017 was an old statute. Under a 1977 Texas mandatory-release law, she was set for release in March 2018 after serving about a third of her time. LaHood said a 1987 change in the law did not apply to her retroactively, and that he believed she should spend the rest of her life in prison.
The five 2017 charges covered the deaths of four children in 1981 and one in 1982 in San Antonio. Her mandatory release date, March 1, 2018, passed while the charges were pending, and she stayed in custody. In January 2020, with a trial set for February, she pleaded guilty in San Antonio to the 1981 murder of a child and was sentenced to life, with parole eligibility in about 18 years, when she would be about 87. The other four cases were dismissed under the agreement. Prosecutor Catherine Babbitt said afterward that the odds were she would "take her last breath in prison."
On October 31, 2013, Spokane police and the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office announced that their detectives had forwarded recommended charges to the county prosecutor against Donna Perry, then 61, who is also recorded as Douglas Robert Perry. The recommendation was for three counts of first-degree murder in three 1990 cases in Spokane that had gone unsolved for more than two decades. DNA evidence led investigators to name her. Prosecutors filed three counts of premeditated first-degree murder in January 2014, each with the aggravating circumstance that the murder was part of a common scheme or plan involving more than one victim.
Perry pleaded not guilty on April 3, 2014. On June 29, 2017, Superior Court Judge Michael Price read the verdict aloud: guilty on three counts of murder, with the jury finding that the three killings were part of a common scheme or plan. On July 24, 2017, he sentenced her to three consecutive terms of life without the possibility of parole or early release. The Court of Appeals of Washington, Division III, affirmed the convictions on February 4, 2020, ordering only that a $110 criminal filing fee be struck from the judgment.
The calendar entry in New Brunswick belongs to a community, not a court. In May 1989 Allan Legere, serving a life sentence for a 1986 murder, escaped from custody while being taken to a hospital in Moncton. He was recaptured on November 24, 1989, after a manhunt of nearly seven months in the Miramichi region. In the months between, four people from the Miramichi area died, and by the autumn the region was living as though under siege. A chronology kept by the Allan Legere Digital Archive at the University of New Brunswick records that on October 16, 1989, the communities cancelled Halloween and organized children’s parties instead. The Canadian Encyclopedia says trick-or-treating was cancelled in the Miramichi area in the fall of 1989 amid the fear of the manhunt.
The legal outcome came in stages. In January 1987 Legere had been convicted of second-degree murder in the 1986 case and given a life sentence. In August 1990 a jury in Moncton convicted him of escape and kidnapping after about six hours of deliberation, and he received nine years to run concurrently with the life sentence. In November 1991, after a trial near Fredericton, he was convicted of four murders and declared a dangerous offender. Legere died in custody at Edmonton Institution on March 9, 2026, aged 78, according to Correctional Service Canada.
The community’s response has a coda that has outlived the case. After the murders of two sisters in October 1989, residents of the Miramichi put up outdoor lights and left them burning all night; the CBC reporter André Veniot, who covered the case, wrote in 2006 that people still call them "Legere lights" and that they are "still on."
The Texas case that most resembles a Halloween story came to light in Georgetown, Williamson County, on October 31, 1979, when the death of a young woman became known to authorities. She was identified only by the nickname "Orange Socks" for 40 years. In August 2019 the Williamson County Sheriff’s Office announced that she was Debra Jackson of Abilene; the case is unsolved, and the sheriff said at the announcement that "we haven’t solved the case, but we have solved something that’s taken 40 years."
For most of those years the case belonged to Henry Lee Lucas. Lucas, who had been convicted in Michigan in 1960 of the second-degree murder of his mother, was arrested in Texas in June 1983 and began confessing to killings across the country. Amnesty International records that he claimed more than 600 over ten years, and later retracted all of them except the killing of his mother. In 1984 a San Angelo jury convicted him of capital murder in the Orange Socks case, a verdict that Amnesty described as based almost entirely on his confession, and he was sentenced to death.
In 1986 the Texas Attorney General, Jim Mattox, concluded after an investigation that Lucas was perpetrating a "massive hoax" and that reliable evidence, including work records, placed him in Jacksonville, Florida, when the woman was killed; the report said no rational trier of fact could find beyond a reasonable doubt that he had committed that murder. A later Attorney General, Dan Morales, called Lucas’s guilt "not impossible, but highly improbable," while holding that it would be inappropriate for his office to intervene. Lucas was scheduled to be executed on June 30, 1998. In the last week of June 1998 Governor George W. Bush, acting on a recommendation from the Board of Pardons and Paroles, commuted the sentence to life. Bush said jurors "did not and could not have known" that Lucas had a pattern of lying and confessing to crimes he did not commit.
Lucas died in prison in March 2001, aged 64, still serving sentences for nine murders, according to the Associated Press. He had been convicted of other murders in Texas in 1983; the hundreds of confessions beyond his convictions were never tested at trial.
A second Texas case has a Halloween date in its record. Daniel Lee Corwin was convicted of capital murder in Montgomery County and sentenced to death on March 20, 1990, a jury deliberating 35 minutes on the sentence. The charge was killing more than one person under the same scheme or course of conduct, a provision of the Texas capital murder law that was then new; the Associated Press called the trial one of the first tests of it. The Fifth Circuit’s opinion records that one of the three women died on Halloween evening of 1987, in Huntsville. The three deaths took place over nine months in 1987. Corwin had been arrested in Huntsville in October 1988 after a 21-year-old university student survived an assault. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the capital conviction in 1993, a federal district court denied habeas relief on September 18, 1997, and the Fifth Circuit denied a certificate of appealability in August 1998. Corwin was executed on December 7, 1998.
John Eichinger’s Halloween entry is a sentence in a confession. A jury was never needed. On October 18, 2005, Eichinger, a grocery clerk, waived a jury and stipulated to the Commonwealth’s evidence at a bench trial in Montgomery County, and was adjudicated guilty of four counts of first-degree murder, two counts of possessing an instrument of crime and three counts of unsworn falsification to authorities. The murders were of one woman in 1999 and of three people in one family in 2005. On December 12, 2005, the court imposed three consecutive death sentences for the 2005 murders and life imprisonment for the 1999 murder.
The statement is the part that belongs to October 31. Eichinger told detectives that he wore a horror-film mask on Halloween and handed out candy at the door, and he named it as the "Scream mask," a reference to the 1996 film. The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania affirmed the convictions and sentences on February 20, 2007. A federal district court denied habeas relief in 2019, the Third Circuit denied a certificate of appealability on December 1, 2021, and the Supreme Court of the United States denied review on December 5, 2022. The Pennsylvania Department of Corrections announced in January 2023 that a notice of execution had been signed for March 7, 2023; the Third Circuit’s capital-case record lists that warrant as expired, and as of July 2025 Eichinger remained under sentence of death.
Read together, the entries fall into three groups. Some are acts of the state: an arrest in Cleveland, a recommended charge in Spokane, an indictment in San Antonio, a resentencing in Los Angeles, a first verdict in a long trial in the same city. Some are acts of a community: the cancelled Halloween in the Miramichi, the porch lights that outlasted the trial. And some are dates that attach to a death itself, which a case file carries without comment: Georgetown in 1979, Huntsville in 1987.
None of it was planned. The arrest and the two charging decisions that fell on October 31 were set by investigations and grand juries, and the verdict in Los Angeles by the length of a trial that had run two years; the resentencing in 2024 followed a concession by prosecutors that no one could have timed to a holiday. What the calendar adds is a second reading, the one the horror films taught, in which the day carries an expectation that the facts of the case do not need. The Miramichi in 1989 is the one entry where a community met the expectation head on, cancelling the holiday and keeping the lights on.
• 1960: Henry Lee Lucas convicted in Michigan of the second-degree murder of his mother.
• 1978, October: John Carpenter’s Halloween released.
• 1979, October 31: a death comes to light in Georgetown, Texas (later identified as Debra Jackson, 2019).
• 1983, October 31: first verdict in the Angelo Buono Jr. trial (one count of murder); nine of ten counts follow.
• 1984: San Angelo jury convicts Lucas of capital murder; Genene Jones convicted in February (murder) and October (injury to a child).
• 1986: Texas Attorney General’s report calls the Lucas confessions a "massive hoax."
• 1987, October 31: a death in Huntsville, Texas, later part of the Corwin capital murder conviction.
• 1989, October 16: Miramichi communities cancel Halloween; November 24, Allan Legere recaptured.
• 1990, March 20: Corwin sentenced to death for capital murder.
• 1991, November: Legere convicted of four murders.
• 1996, December 20: Scream released.
• 1998, June: Governor George W. Bush commutes Lucas’s death sentence; December 7, Corwin executed.
• 2005, October 18: John Eichinger adjudicated guilty of four counts of first-degree murder.
• 2009, October 31: Anthony Sowell arrested in Cleveland.
• 2011, July 22: Sowell convicted on 81 counts, including 11 counts of aggravated murder.
• 2013, October 31: Spokane police recommend three murder charges against Donna Perry.
• 2017, June 29: Perry convicted of three counts of murder; October 31, Genene Jones indicted in a fifth child-death case.
• 2019, August: Debra Jackson identified.
• 2020, January 16: Jones pleads guilty to murder and is sentenced to life.
• 2024, October 31: Angelina Rodriguez resentenced to life without the possibility of parole.
• 2026, March 9: Allan Legere dies in custody.