The oldest Interpol notice among these cases dates from May 1976. The man it named was arrested in a Kathmandu casino in September 2003, days after The Himalayan Times printed a front-page story on where he was staying. That order of events sets the terms for the hunts that follow. Interpol turns up in these cases the way a telephone does in an old detective story, always in the room and seldom described. Colombia asked for a notice in 2002. Investigators in Bucharest sent an inquiry to Wiesbaden about a few fibers. French special units arrested a fugitive in Menton "with Interpol," in the words of one Italian paper. The requests are on record. What a notice obliged any police force to do is not.
Several of these manhunts were settled by something else: a newspaper reporter, a security camera, a ballistics examiner, a sister’s negotiation with a Texas Ranger. Three of the nine men died without standing trial. One was last confirmed alive in 1999, and Colombia asked Interpol to look for him in 2002.
Charles Sobhraj, a French citizen born in Saigon, was linked by Thai police to the deaths of young Western travelers in Thailand in 1975. The man who built the case was not a policeman. Herman Knippenberg was a junior diplomat at the Netherlands embassy in Bangkok, and according to the journalist John McBeth, Thai police showed little interest while Knippenberg carried out most of a roughly five-month inquiry himself. A front-page story in the Bangkok Post in May 1976 and an Interpol notice followed.
By then Sobhraj was in India. On July 5, 1976, a group of French tourists collapsed in a New Delhi hotel after being drugged, and Sobhraj was arrested. The size of the group varies by account: more than 20 tourists (Agence France-Presse), a party of 22 (McBeth), more than 30 engineering students (Press Trust of India). No one in it died. AFP reported that a Thai police officer, Sompol Suthimai, whose work through Interpol helped bring about the arrest, later pushed for Sobhraj’s extradition to Thailand.
Nine years went by. In late 1985 India agreed to a Thai request to extradite him over the deaths of Teresa Knowlton and a Turkish tourist. In March 1986 he escaped from Tihar jail in New Delhi. He was free for about three weeks. On April 6, 1986, a Mumbai police team led by Inspector Madhukar Zende arrested him in Porvorim, near Panaji in Goa. He was returned to Tihar and, McBeth writes, given another 10 years for the escape.
By the time India let him go, Thailand could no longer try him. McBeth writes that the Thai arrest warrant had expired before his release in 1997; AFP says the alleged crimes in Thailand had passed the statute of limitations. Accounts put the lapse in 1995 or 1996. In 2022 Sompol, then 90, told AFP that he did not object to Sobhraj’s release because Sobhraj "has already paid for his actions." Sobhraj had left India for Paris, where he arrived on April 8, 1997.
In 2003 Sobhraj, then 59, traveled to Nepal, where murder cases from December 1975 had never been closed. McBeth writes that no one knows why he went back, and that Knippenberg suspected he wanted attention. The South China Morning Post reported that Sobhraj believed the 1975 warrants had lapsed. A reporter at The Himalayan Times, Joseph Nathan, traced him to a hotel in Kathmandu’s tourist district, and the paper published a front-page story on September 17, 2003. Police arrested him at a casino within days. The Himalayan Times dated the arrest September 19; the United Nations Human Rights Committee’s record says September 13.
Nepali courts did what Thai and Indian courts had not. A Kathmandu court convicted him in 2004 of the murder of Connie Jo Bronzich, an American; a second Nepali court convicted him in 2014 of the murder of Laurent Carrière, a Canadian. Those are the only murder convictions against him. On December 21, 2022, Nepal’s Supreme Court ordered his release, applying the remission rule for prisoners over 65, and on December 23 he was deported to France. In an interview published in August 2023 he said, "I have never killed anybody in my life." The 2003 arrest has never been credited to the notice.
Pedro Alonso López was seized at a market in Ambato, Ecuador, in early 1980. He confessed to killing more than a hundred girls in Ecuador and to killings in Colombia and Peru; police and the press have given totals of 200 to 350 at various times. Semana reported that police in all three countries had been investigating the cases of missing girls between 1973 and 1980, and AFP wrote in 1994 that Ecuadorian investigators had at one stage had no leads and had considered theories such as organ trafficking. Ecuador sentenced him to 16 years, the legal maximum, and released him in 1994 after reductions for good conduct.
He was handed to Colombia in September 1994. A court in El Espinal, in Tolima, had a warrant for him, and prosecutors accused him of killing eleven children there. He was declared inimputable, meaning not criminally responsible because of mental disorder, and held in a psychiatric annex in Bogotá. A finding of inimputability is not a conviction, and he was never convicted in Colombia. In 1998 he was declared sound and released on bail of 80,000 pesos, with an obligation to report to the court. He did not report. On September 22, 1999, he renewed his identity card in Bogotá, the last confirmed record of him.
Within months of the bail order the border provinces of Ecuador were in alarm. On June 17, 1998, El Tiempo reported that word had spread that López had left Colombian custody and was in Carchi or Imbabura. The police commander for Carchi, José Rivas, said López had been seen near El Juncal; the sighting was never confirmed. Police tightened checks on vehicles and passengers and sent an updated photograph to all twelve posts in the area, though no warrant for him existed in Ecuador. Semana reported in May 2002 that Colombian authorities feared he was in the country, that Interpol, the police, the prosecutor’s office and the security agency DAS had him on maximum alert, and that his photograph was being circulated in the border regions with Ecuador and Peru. Semana said Interpol had held a red notice on him since 1998. El Tiempo and La FM reported that Colombia asked Interpol in October 2002 to issue a notice for his arrest, on suspicion in the killing of a girl in El Espinal. The accounts differ on the date. Semana added that the psychiatric opinion attached to the notice described paranoid schizophrenia and a great capacity to deceive.
When Vanguardia reported on the case on March 26, 2023, no one had said where he was or whether he was alive.
Michael Swango, a physician trained at Southern Illinois University, pleaded guilty in federal court on Long Island on September 6, 2000, to murdering three patients at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Northport, New York, in 1993: George Siano, Aldo Serini and Thomas Sammarco. On October 18, 2000, he pleaded guilty in Columbus, Ohio, to the aggravated murder of Cynthia Ann McGee, 19, a patient at Ohio State University Hospitals, in 1984. He had already served prison time in Illinois, after a 1985 verdict on six counts of aggravated battery for poisoning ambulance co-workers, and he spent the years after his release hiding that conviction.
Interpol has no reported part in the pursuit across borders. In November 1995 the television program Unsolved Mysteries featured him as a fugitive wanted for falsifying a federal job application, the Daily Egyptian reported. He was by then working in Africa. The FBI believed he went on to Zambia and Namibia, according to the Mail & Guardian. Zimbabwe issued a warrant, and in January 1998 the Associated Press reported that he had been charged there with killing five patients at Mnene Mission Hospital. Later reports described a warrant covering seven poisonings, five of them fatal.
By then he was in custody in the United States. He was arrested on June 27, 1997, at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago on a federal fraud warrant, on his way to a hospital job in Saudi Arabia. In March 1998 he pleaded guilty to a false statement on his Stony Brook application and received 42 months. Prosecutors charged him with the Northport murders on July 11, 2000, days before he was due to be released. Zimbabwe dropped its charges under the 2000 plea agreement, and no case there was ever tried. Judge Jacob Mishler imposed three consecutive life terms without parole, and the Ohio court life with parole eligibility after 20 years. As of October 19, 2026, he was held at ADX Florence in Colorado, according to the Bureau of Prisons.
Roberto Succo was 19 when, in April 1981, he confessed to killing his mother and father in Mestre, part of the city of Venice. The deaths came to light on April 11. On October 8, 1981, the investigating office of the Venice tribunal ruled him not punishable because of total mental infirmity, and he was committed to the judicial asylum at Reggio Emilia for at least ten years. In 1986, while on leave to attend university classes, he left and did not return.
Over 1987 and 1988 five deaths in France were attributed to him by investigators and the press: a gendarmerie brigadier, a young woman, a doctor, a woman at Menthon-Saint-Bernard and a police inspector in Toulon. He was also linked to an attack in a Toulon bar and the wounding of a second police inspector. He was never tried for any of it. How he was caught depends on who is telling it. Deborah Streifford Reisinger, of Duke University, wrote in 2007 that a young woman turned him in to the authorities. Screen International’s account of the real case says a witness saw his photograph on a police poster and came forward, and that police tracked him to Mestre with Interpol’s help. Il Giornale places the arrest on February 28, 1988, at Santa Lucia di Piave, near Conegliano, in the province of Treviso. That account follows the film’s story in part, and no other version mentions Interpol.
France pressed for his extradition, il Giornale reports. On May 17, 1988, the Treviso investigating judge, Nicola Maria Pace, declared him incapable of understanding and willing, and he was due to be moved to a forensic psychiatric institution. He died by suicide in Vicenza prison on the night of May 23, 1988, aged 26. He had been arrested twice and had never stood trial.
Bartolomeo Gagliano, of Sicilian origin and from Savona, was judged incapable of understanding and willing for three killings: a woman near Savona in 1981 and two people near Genoa in 1989. He was acquitted on that ground and committed to judicial psychiatric hospitals, and so served no prison sentence for the deaths, according to Il Giornale. In December 2013, at 55, he failed to return to Marassi prison in Genoa from a good-conduct leave and took a delivery driver’s vehicle. Police called him very dangerous. The Genoa prosecutor’s office began an inquiry for kidnapping, robbery, illegal possession of a firearm and escape, Affaritaliani reported, and the search spread across Italy and to the borders. Libero described checkpoints, checks at railway and bus stations, automatic plate readers and a stream of false sightings. One sighting at the emergency room of the hospital in Lavagna, on the evening of December 18, was checked against surveillance video and ruled out.
He had already crossed into France. L’Unità reported that motorway toll records placed his vehicle at the Albisola toll booth late on the Tuesday night and at Ventimiglia, on the border, just after midnight, and that he was seen in Nice and Menton. On December 20, 2013, at 1:50 p.m., he was arrested in Menton by French special units from Nice "with Interpol," without resistance, L’Unità wrote. His lawyer said Gagliano had telephoned him at noon that day to say he wanted to surrender, but that police caught him first, RSI and Libero reported. L’Unità quoted him as saying, "Scusate, un colpo di testa," roughly "Sorry, I lost my head."
In Rome the escape became a political affair. The Genoa prison director said the file showed only a robber, and Il Giornale reported that the director was the first to go. Justice Minister Annamaria Cancellieri told parliament that the prison and the judge had known his full history. In France a court in Nice sentenced Gagliano on December 24, 2013, to ten months for carrying a gun and false identity papers. On April 23, 2014, the appeal court at Aix-en-Provence granted Italy’s extradition request, ANSA reported. On January 14, 2015, judges in Genoa sentenced him to six years and ten months for the escape, the kidnapping and the armed car theft. His death by suicide in prison was announced on January 22, 2015.
Between September 1972 and February 1974, a series of assaults on women and girls in Cluj, Romania, led to one of the largest militia investigations the city had seen. Investigators attributed them, at least three of them fatal, to Romulus Vereș, a former locomotive driver retired on medical grounds. The reported totals differ: eight victims, half of whom died (Adevărul); nine women, six of them killed (Gazeta de Cluj, interviewing the prosecutor). The dead named in the reports include Cornelia Vaida in September 1972, Aurelia Ciule, 16, in December 1972, and Ilona Szilagyi, 84, in February 1974.
The cross-border part of the hunt is one paragraph. Ovidiu Bojan, a lawyer who as a student read the case file during an internship at the county prosecutor’s office, recalled in Evenimentul Istoric in 2021 that investigators had sent an inquiry through Interpol in Bucharest to Interpol in Wiesbaden about unusual fibers in one case, and that the answer allowed only for exclusion, since genetic testing did not yet exist. There were no fingerprints, he said. A warning about the man responsible had been posted in a Cluj square with words cut from rubber letters, so that no handwriting could be traced. The prosecutor Iuliu Andrei said the physical traces gathered were analyzed and judged very similar, and that was as far as the methods of the time could go.
What ended the search was a list. In February 1974, after the last death, investigators checking local psychiatric patients traced Vereș to a block of flats in Cluj; according to the accounts of the case, a detective sent from Bucharest went door to door with the list, posing as a health official. He was taken by psychiatric orderlies to the psychiatric hospital. Psychiatrists diagnosed paraphrenia and concluded that he lacked discernment, and Andrei issued a decision not to begin a criminal prosecution. He did not confess and blamed the Devil. Vereș died in 1993 at the hospital in Ștei, in Bihor County, of a liver disease, according to Actual de Cluj, without ever being tried.
Volker Eckert, a long-distance truck driver living in Hof, Bavaria, confessed in November 2006 to six killings spread over 32 years. The first, by his own account, was the killing of a 14-year-old schoolmate in East Germany in 1974, when he was 15. The other five were women he met along his routes in France and Spain between 2001 and 2006. A 1987 conviction in Plauen for attempted murder had sent him to prison for 12 years, according to Diario UNO.
Catalan police reached him through a security camera. It had recorded a truck near the town of Hostalric, where the body of Miglena Petrova, a 20-year-old Bulgarian woman, came to light in November 2006. The Catalan police traced the truck, then the haulage firm that owned it, and then its driver, who worked for a company with its headquarters in Wesseling, near Cologne. The Olive Press, summarizing newspaper reports, said that a satellite tracking system used by the company later helped police trace where Eckert had been.
On Friday, November 17, 2006, he was arrested at Wesseling in a joint operation of German police from Hof and officers sent by the Catalan police, the Mossos d’Esquadra, on a European arrest warrant signed by a judge in Girona. The warrant, not a notice, carried the hunt across the border. Reports at the time spoke of up to eight deaths, and German police wanted to question him about at least three deaths of women in Germany. Diario UNO reported in 2019 that police in the Czech Republic and France had pursued other cases with Interpol, and that police had linked as many as 19 victims to him; none was charged. The period of the five confessed killings in France and Spain was reported in November 2006 as 1999 to 2006, while the dated list in Diario UNO begins in June 2001. Eckert died in his cell in the prison at Bayreuth on July 2, 2007, aged 48, by suicide, while awaiting trial. German police closed their inquiry in December 2007. He was never convicted of a killing.
Bai Baoshan was a former prisoner from Beijing who, between March 1996 and August 1997, carried out armed robberies and killings in Beijing and Hebei and then in Xinjiang, in China’s far west. The Paper, a Chinese news outlet, reported in 2019 that in little more than a year he killed 15 people, among them soldiers, police officers and civilians, and took property worth more than 1.4 million yuan. When he was arrested in 1997, the South China Morning Post reported that he was accused of killing at least 13 people and injuring 15 others, and that he had confessed. Sing Tao Headline gives the arrest as September 5, 1997; Life Week, as printed by China News Service in 2000, gives August 16.
China’s Ministry of Public Security treated the case as its top priority. The Paper reported that the ministry labeled it the country’s number one case of 1996 and ranked it first among China’s ten major cases of 1997, and that Interpol listed it as the third most serious case in the world that year. That last claim rests on The Paper alone, which gave no detail of the listing. The break in the case came from a ballistics examiner who showed that cartridge cases from Beijing and from Xinjiang, more than 3,000 kilometers apart, had been fired by the same rifle. Bai was executed in April 1998, according to the Hong Kong newspaper Sing Tao Headline. The charges and the verdict have not been reported.
Angel Maturino Resendiz was executed by the State of Texas on June 27, 2006, for one crime: the capital murder of Dr. Claudia Benton, a 39-year-old physician, in West University Place, an enclave inside Houston, in December 1998. A Harris County jury convicted him on May 18, 2000, after rejecting his plea of not guilty by reason of insanity, and he was sentenced to death days later. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed on May 21, 2003. Murder charges in Texas, Illinois, Kentucky and Georgia were filed against him but never tried, and the Associated Press linked him to at least 15 killings by 2006.
Interpol has no reported part in his hunt, though it crossed the Rio Grande more than once. He used more than 30 aliases, according to CBS News, and the FBI kept the one the public already knew: when he went onto the Ten Most Wanted list in June 1999 he was listed as Rafael Resendez-Ramirez, fugitive number 457. A review by the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General, published in March 2000, set out why a man wanted for murder kept getting across. During 1998 the Border Patrol caught him seven times, between January and November, and returned him to Mexico the same day each time. Each time agents checked his fingerprints only against the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s own system, called IDENT, which was not connected to the FBI’s criminal records. No agent learned of his convictions or of an open Albuquerque warrant.
After a warrant was issued for the murder, attempts to have him stopped went to the wrong system or stalled. A Houston police analyst asked a Customs Service employee in December 1998 or January 1999 to place a border alert; Customs told the Inspector General that none was entered until June 22, 1999. On March 10, 1999, Texas Ranger Drew Carter asked an INS agent by phone to place a hold on Resendiz and believed it had been done. "In fact, no one in the INS had entered a lookout for Resendez in any INS database," the report said. On June 1, 1999, Border Patrol agents in New Mexico caught him with nine others, and he was returned to Mexico. Four people were killed after that.
It ended on a bridge. On July 13, 1999, he walked from Ciudad Juárez onto a bridge at El Paso and surrendered to Carter, under an arrangement his sister had made through an intermediary. The Inspector General’s review had set out the gaps that let him cross.
Where Interpol appears at all in these nine cases, it is a channel. A notice followed a newspaper story in 1976. An inquiry went from Bucharest to Wiesbaden in the 1970s and came back with an answer that could only exclude. A search was requested in October 2002 for a man last confirmed alive in 1999. In two cases, Swango and Resendiz, it has no reported part, and the hunt was carried by the FBI, a television program, border agents and a Texas Ranger.
The arrests were made by someone else, and what made them possible was ordinary. Sobhraj was identified by a reporter and detained by Nepali police. Eckert was traced by a camera and a haulage firm’s records. Bai was tied to two provinces by a ballistics examiner. Gagliano was caught within hours of a telephone call to his lawyer. Succo, depending on the account, was turned in by a young woman or by a witness who recognized a poster. Resendiz walked across a bridge.
The outcomes divided the same way. Three men died before any trial, two of them by suicide. One was acquitted as insane of three earlier killings, escaped, and died in prison after new sentences in France and Italy. One was tried for a single death out of at least 15 that the Associated Press linked to him. In October 2002 Colombia asked Interpol for a notice on Pedro Alonso López, and as of March 2023 no report said where he was.
• September 1972 to February 1974: the series in Cluj later attributed to Romulus Vereș.
• 1973 to 1980: police in Ecuador, Colombia and Peru investigate cases of missing girls, according to Semana.
• May 1976: Bangkok Post story on Charles Sobhraj; an Interpol notice follows.
• July 5, 1976: Sobhraj is arrested in New Delhi.
• Early 1980: Pedro Alonso López is seized at a market in Ambato, Ecuador.
• April 1981: Roberto Succo confesses to killing his parents in Mestre; October 8, 1981, ruled not punishable.
• August 1985: Michael Swango is sentenced in Illinois to five years for poisoning ambulance co-workers.
• Late 1985: India agrees to a Thai request to extradite Sobhraj.
• March 1986: Sobhraj escapes from Tihar jail; recaptured in Goa April 6, 1986.
• 1986: Succo leaves the Reggio Emilia asylum during a study leave.
• February 28, 1988: Succo is arrested at Santa Lucia di Piave; May 17, ruled incapable; May 23, dies in Vicenza prison.
• 1993: Vereș dies in a psychiatric hospital at Ștei.
• September 1994: López is handed to Colombia.
• March 1996 to August 1997: the Beijing, Hebei and Xinjiang cases attributed to Bai Baoshan; he is arrested in 1997 and executed in April 1998.
• April 8, 1997: Sobhraj arrives in Paris after release from India.
• June 27, 1997: Swango is arrested at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago.
• 1998: the Border Patrol catches Angel Maturino Resendiz seven times between January and November; López is released on bail in Colombia; June 17, alarm in northern Ecuador.
• June 1, 1999: Resendiz is caught in New Mexico and returned to Mexico; in June he is placed on the FBI Ten Most Wanted list.
• July 13, 1999: Resendiz surrenders at El Paso.
• September 22, 1999: López renews his identity card in Bogotá.
• May 18, 2000: Resendiz is convicted of capital murder.
• September 6 and October 18, 2000: Swango pleads guilty to three federal murders and one Ohio murder.
• October 2002: Colombia asks Interpol for a notice on López.
• September 2003: Sobhraj is arrested at a Kathmandu casino after a newspaper story.
• June 27, 2006: Resendiz is executed.
• November 17, 2006: Volker Eckert is arrested at Wesseling; July 2, 2007, he dies in Bayreuth.
• December 20, 2013: Bartolomeo Gagliano is arrested in Menton; April 23, 2014, extradition granted; January 14, 2015, sentenced.
• 2014: a Nepali court convicts Sobhraj of the Carrière murder.
• December 23, 2022: Sobhraj is deported to France.
• March 26, 2023: López’s whereabouts are reported unknown.