Most of the men in these cases had been looked for, in one way or another, for months or years. Task forces had been formed, profiles drawn, tip lines staffed and lists of suspects run through computers. What put several of them in handcuffs was something far smaller: a car weaving in its lane at one in the morning, a pickup with no rear license plate, a van that turned without signaling, a rental car doing three miles an hour over the limit in East Texas. The officers who made those stops were not working homicide cases. They were doing the most ordinary job in American policing.
The traffic stop is also a moment the law watches closely, and these cases show why. Defense lawyers challenged several of them. Courts were asked whether the officer had a lawful reason to pull the car over, whether questions put to a man in custody required a Miranda warning first, whether an inventory of an impounded vehicle was a search, and whether a detention that began with a parking violation had become an arrest without probable cause. Most of those challenges failed. In New York an appeals court agreed that questions asked before a Miranda warning had gone too far, and in Illinois a ruling on a search set a man free.
On August 16, 1975, Sergeant Bob Hayward of the Utah Highway Patrol stopped a tan Volkswagen in Granger, a suburb of Salt Lake City, after its driver tried to evade him. Hayward recalled the arrest for the Associated Press twenty-five years later.
The driver was Theodore Robert Bundy, a law student at the University of Utah. He was arrested for evading an officer and soon released. The arrest report did not stay in a drawer. Hayward’s brother, Pete Hayward, was the Salt Lake County sheriff, and the report reached the detectives Jerry Thompson and Ben Forbes, who were working the disappearances of young women in Utah. They put Bundy under surveillance, and a call to King County, Washington, established that his name was already on a list of suspects there. On October 2, 1975, Carol DaRonch, who had survived an abduction attempt in Murray the previous November, picked him out of a lineup. A judge in Salt Lake City convicted him of aggravated kidnapping on March 1, 1976, after a five-day trial without a jury, and sentenced him to one to fifteen years.
That conviction was the only one any state other than Florida would obtain against him. By January 1978 he was in Tallahassee, and on January 15 Margaret Bowman, 21, and Lisa Levy, 20, were killed. In February, Kimberly Leach, a 12-year-old seventh grader in Lake City, was killed.
The second stop came that same month. On February 15, 1978, Officer David Lee of the Pensacola police ran the plate of a Volkswagen, learned that the car was stolen and arrested the driver. At the station the man said his name was Kenneth Misner. He kept up the pretense for nearly two days before telling Detective Norman Chapman, "My name is Theodore Robert Bundy." Chapman told WEAR-TV in 2018 that he had no idea at the time who his prisoner was.
A Miami jury convicted Bundy in July 1979 of the first-degree murders of Margaret Bowman and Lisa Levy, and an Orlando jury convicted him in February 1980 of kidnapping and murdering Kimberly Leach. He was sentenced to death in both cases. The Florida Supreme Court affirmed the Bowman and Levy convictions in 1984 and the Leach conviction in 1985, and the federal appeals court in Atlanta rejected his habeas petition in 1988. He was executed in the electric chair at Florida State Prison in Starke on January 24, 1989, at the age of 42.
Shortly after one in the morning on May 14, 1983, California Highway Patrol Sergeant Michael Howard and Officer Michael Sterling stopped a car weaving in its lane in southern Orange County on suspicion of drunk driving. The driver, Randy Steven Kraft, was a 38-year-old computer programmer from Long Beach, and he was arrested for driving under the influence.
The death of Terry Lee Gambrel, a 25-year-old Marine stationed at the El Toro air station, came to light in San Juan Capistrano on May 14, 1983. Search warrants followed within days. For more than a decade, the deaths of young men in Southern California, many of them Marines or hitchhikers, had gone unsolved. Kraft was charged in Orange County Superior Court.
The Orange County case grew to 19 counts: 16 of first-degree murder and three other counts, with special circumstances that made him eligible for death. The trial in Santa Ana began about five years after the stop, ran for most of 11 months and produced a record of some 38,000 pages, according to Orange Coast magazine. In May 1989 the jury convicted him of all 16 murders and of two of the other counts, and acquitted him of the third. The victims named in the verdicts included Edward Daniel Moore, Ronald Gene Wiebe, Keith Daven Crotwell, Mark Howard Hall, Scott Michael Hughes, Roland Gerald Young, Richard Allen Keith, Keith Arthur Klingbeil, Michael Joseph Inderbieten, Donald Harold Crisel, Robert Wyatt Loggins Jr., Eric Herbert Church, Geoffrey Alan Nelson, Rodger James DeVaul Jr. and Terry Lee Gambrel, along with a young man who had still not been identified when the case reached the state Supreme Court. Judge Donald A. McCartin sentenced Kraft to death on November 29, 1989.
On appeal his lawyers went straight at the stop and the searches. The California Supreme Court, affirming the judgment in full on August 10, 2000, held that the sergeant’s initial seizures were justified by officer safety and by the rule of inevitable discovery, that the magistrate had good reason to issue the warrant for the car, and that the warrant’s breadth was "commensurate with the scope of the investigation." Kraft has denied every killing. Governor Gavin Newsom halted executions in California on March 13, 2019, and a list of people under sentence of death kept by the state’s Habeas Corpus Resource Center, updated June 1, 2026, still carried his name.
On June 28, 1993, Troopers Deborah Spaargaren and Sean Ruane of the New York State Police tried to stop a pickup on Long Island because it had no rear license plate. The driver did not stop, and he was arrested in Nassau County. He was Joel David Rifkin, an unemployed landscaper from East Meadow. The death of Tiffany Bresciani, 22, came to light in Mineola that day, and Rifkin was charged in Nassau County with murder in the second degree and reckless endangerment in the first degree, the second charge arising from his driving.
About five hours after his arrest, at a station house, he admitted to officers that he had killed Tiffany Bresciani and 16 other women between 1989 and 1993, most of them in New York City. Over the following months a State Police task force identified 15 of the women he had described. The case became the largest serial murder investigation in New York since Arthur Shawcross was sentenced in 1991 for killing 11 women in the Rochester area, United Press International noted.
Rifkin’s lawyers moved to suppress his statements, and the County Court denied the motion. At the trial in Mineola his defense was insanity. On May 9, 1994, after two hours and ten minutes of deliberation, a Nassau County jury convicted him of second-degree murder and first-degree reckless endangerment and rejected the insanity defense. "The jury obviously were not fooled by Mr. Rifkin and his defense," said the prosecutor, Fred Klein. Rifkin took no other case to trial. He pleaded guilty in Suffolk County in August 1995 to the murders of Leah Evens and Lauren Marquez and received two consecutive terms of 25 years to life. In Brooklyn in December 1995 he pleaded guilty to three counts of second-degree murder covering Lorraine Orvieto, Mary Ann Holloman and a woman who has not been identified. A guilty plea in Queens followed in January 1996.
The stop itself was not the problem on appeal. What he said before his Miranda warning was. On December 3, 2001, the Appellate Division, Second Department, held that questions put to Rifkin once he was in custody, before he was read his rights, were interrogation, not preliminary questions to clarify what was happening, and that his statements at the place of arrest should have been suppressed. The court affirmed the conviction anyway, "in light of the otherwise overwhelming evidence of the defendant’s guilt," and held that the station-house confession, given after a valid waiver and a definite break in the questioning, had been properly admitted. The same panel affirmed the Kings, Queens and Suffolk judgments. News accounts have given his combined sentences as 203 years to life. Newsweek reported in June 2024 that he was 65 and held at Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora.
Between June 1989 and December 1991, twelve women were killed in and around Lake Elsinore, Riverside, Highgrove and Corona in western Riverside County. Among them were Kimberly Lyttle, Tina Leal, Darla Ferguson, Carol Miller, Cheryl Coker, Susan Sternfeld, Kathleen Milne, Sherry Latham, Kelly Hammond, Catherine McDonald, Delliah Zamora and Eleanor Casares. A task force had been assembled, and a police bulletin asked patrol officers to record field information on any vehicle matching the description of a two-tone van.
On January 9, 1992, Officer Frank Orta, a Riverside police motorcycle officer who knew of the bulletin, saw such a van in Riverside and stopped it after the driver turned without signaling. The driver, William Lester Suff, was a stock clerk at the Riverside County supply warehouse. The van’s registration had lapsed, so it was impounded and inventoried. Suff told an officer that he was on parole from Texas, and he was arrested for a parole violation. He had a past the task force had not known about: in 1974 a Texas jury had convicted him of murder in the death of his two-month-old daughter, and he had served about ten years of a seventy-year sentence before he was paroled to California in 1984.
A Riverside County grand jury indicted him in July 1992. In 1995 a jury convicted him of the first-degree murders of the twelve women and of the attempted murder of a woman who had survived in January 1989, and returned verdicts of death on all twelve murder counts.
Suff’s appeal made the turn signal a constitutional question. His lawyers argued that the evidence from the stop should have been suppressed. The Supreme Court of California disagreed in an opinion filed April 28, 2014. The Vehicle Code, it held, required Suff to signal his turn even after stopping at a red light, and Officer Orta, riding behind the van, was in a position to be affected by the turn. The officer could therefore stop the van, demand the license and registration, impound it for the lapsed registration and inventory its contents. "We affirm the judgment," the court wrote. In August 2024, when the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department announced that DNA testing had linked Suff to the 1986 killing of Cathy Small, 19, in South Pasadena, and that he had confessed to it, CBS News Los Angeles reported that he was 73 and on death row at San Quentin.
Phillip Carl Jablonski had already served a prison term for killing a woman. In 1978 he pleaded guilty to the second-degree murder of Linda Kimball, the mother of his daughter, and he was later paroled to Indio, California. In April 1991, within a few days, Fathyma Vann, 38, a classmate, was killed near Indio; Carol Spadoni, 46, his wife, and her mother, Eva Petersen, 72, were killed in Burlingame on April 23; and Margie Rogers, 58, of Thompson Springs, Utah, was killed in Grand County, Utah.
On April 28, 1991, a Kansas state trooper stopped Jablonski for a traffic violation, the San Mateo Daily Journal reported, and he was arrested. On May 1, 1991, two detectives from California questioned him for about four hours. Before they began, according to the state Supreme Court, the two officers agreed that if he asked for a lawyer they would keep questioning him anyway, to gather material for impeachment and leads. He asked for a lawyer 11 times. The trial court ruled some of his statements involuntary.
A San Mateo County grand jury indicted him in June 1991 for the murders of Carol Spadoni and Eva Petersen, and in July prosecutors in Grand County filed a capital homicide complaint in the death of Margie Rogers, which the Associated Press described as the third death penalty case pending against him, after San Mateo and Riverside County. The outcome of the Utah and Riverside cases was not reported. On April 25, 1994, a San Mateo County jury convicted him of both first-degree murders; in May it rejected his plea of not guilty by reason of insanity, and in June it returned death verdicts. He was sentenced to death on August 12, 1994.
The California Supreme Court affirmed on January 23, 2006. It held the statement voluntary and any error harmless, but it did not let the interrogation pass. Deliberately ignoring a request for counsel, the court wrote, was "unethical" and "must be strongly disapproved," and "respect for the rule of law is not advanced when the guardians of the law elect to deliberately violate it." Jablonski was never executed. He died on San Quentin’s death row on December 27, 2019, at the age of 73, CBS San Francisco reported.
Samantha Koenig, an 18-year-old barista in Anchorage, Alaska, was kidnapped in February 2012. In the weeks that followed, someone collected a ransom and began withdrawing money from her account at ATMs in Alaska, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. Investigators tied the withdrawals to a white rental car, and the FBI and the Texas Rangers tracked them as they happened.
On March 13, 2012, Texas Highway Patrol Corporal Bryan Henry stopped a white Ford Focus in Lufkin, in East Texas, about 3,200 miles from Anchorage. The Associated Press reported that the driver was going three miles an hour over the speed limit. He was Israel Keyes, a contractor from Anchorage and an Army veteran, and the stop ended with his arrest for access device fraud. Anchorage police at first described him only as a person of interest.
On April 18, 2012, a federal grand jury in Anchorage indicted Keyes for kidnapping resulting in death, receiving and possessing ransom money and access device fraud. The kidnapping count carried a possible death sentence. He pleaded not guilty. Over months of interviews with federal prosecutors, FBI agents and Anchorage detectives he confessed to killing Samantha Koenig and, in June 2011, Bill and Lorraine Currier, a couple from Essex, Vermont, whom he had never met. The FBI later said that he described 11 killings in all across the country, most of them never identified. He was not tried. Keyes died by suicide in the Anchorage Correctional Complex on December 2, 2012, before a federal trial set for March 2013, and the killings attributed to him rest on his own statements and the FBI’s investigation, never on a verdict.
Sean Lannon, a 47-year-old Army veteran, was living in Grants, New Mexico, in early 2021. By his own account, he killed his former wife, Jennifer Lannon, 39, a mother of five, and two of her friends from Grants, Jesten Mata, 40, and Matthew Miller, 21, in January. Their deaths, and that of Randal Apostalon, 60, an Albuquerque man who gave people rides for money, came to light in Albuquerque on March 5, 2021. By then Lannon had flown east, and on March 8 Michael Dabkowski, 66, who had been his mentor in a Big Brothers program in the 1980s, was killed in East Greenwich Township, New Jersey.
Two days later the case ended in a city neither state had in mind. On March 10, 2021, Lannon was arrested in St. Louis. The U.S. Marshals Service announced the arrest, and the Cibola Citizen later reported that a St. Louis police officer running license plates had learned that the car was listed in the National Crime Information Center and made the stop. That afternoon Gloucester County, New Jersey, charged him with murder, robbery, burglary, motor vehicle theft and weapons offenses in Dabkowski’s death. Officials said they did not know why he was in Missouri. Lannon told investigators he had killed 16 people; investigators in New Mexico reported no record of any victim beyond the five.
New Jersey’s case was resolved first. In October 2022 Lannon pleaded guilty in Gloucester County to first-degree murder and was sentenced to 35 years in New Jersey State Prison, with parole eligibility after 30 years. He was then returned to New Mexico, where the four first-degree murder charges were resolved in 2024 by pleas to second-degree murder. Under the plea agreement filed in the Second Judicial District Court in Albuquerque, the Albuquerque Journal reported, he would serve 15 years for each killing, 60 years in all. In May 2024 he was held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Albuquerque.
A traffic stop is only as good as what the officer knows at the moment. In 1978, the year Jeffrey Dahmer killed Steven Hicks, an 18-year-old hitchhiker, in Bath Township, Ohio, police in Ohio stopped Dahmer on suspicion of drunken driving. He talked his way out of trouble, the Deseret News reported in February 1992, as his sanity trial in Milwaukee laid out the chances investigators had missed. He was arrested in Milwaukee in July 1991, after admitting to 17 killings in all. On February 15, 1992, a Milwaukee County jury rejected his claim that he was insane on all fifteen counts of first-degree intentional homicide, and he received fifteen consecutive life terms. On May 1, 1992, in Akron, he pleaded guilty to the aggravated murder of Steven Hicks and received a sixteenth. Another inmate killed him at Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, Wisconsin, on November 28, 1994.
In Spokane in 1997 the stop came close and still fell short. After two women were killed that August, sheriff’s deputies were told to watch for white Corvettes. On September 24, 1997, an officer stopped Robert Lee Yates in Spokane and did not cite him. On November 28, 1997, a state trooper stopped him for speeding. The task force that formed that winter built a database of Corvette stops, and on September 15, 1999, detectives interviewed Yates about the 1997 stop. He was not a suspect then. Yates was arrested on April 18, 2000. In October 2000 he pleaded guilty in Spokane County to 13 counts of murder, covering ten Spokane-area killings of 1996 to 1998 and three earlier killings in Walla Walla and Skagit counties, and to one count of attempted first-degree murder, and was sentenced to 408 years. In 2002 a Pierce County jury convicted him of the aggravated first-degree murders of Melinda Mercer and Connie Ellis, and he was sentenced to death. When the Washington Supreme Court struck down the state’s death penalty in State v. Gregory on October 11, 2018, his sentence became life imprisonment.
Larry Eyler’s case shows what happens when a search does not hold up. In 1983 Indiana State Police officers searched the truck of Eyler, a house painter who lived between Terre Haute and Chicago. A Lake County, Illinois, grand jury indicted him that November on three counts of murder in the death of Ralph Calise, 28, of Chicago. A judge ruled the search illegal, the evidence obtained from it was excluded, and he was released from custody. Steven Egger, writing about a 1990 book on the case in Illinois Issues, wrote that it laid the blame on the judge who excluded the evidence or on the police who conducted the search. The Calise charge was not tried. Danny Bridges, 15, was killed in Chicago in August 1984, and in July 1986 a Cook County jury convicted Eyler of his murder, with kidnapping, aggravated kidnapping, unlawful restraint and concealment of a homicidal death. He was sentenced to death, and the Illinois Supreme Court affirmed on October 25, 1989. In December 1990 he pleaded guilty to the 1982 murder of Steven Agan, 23, of Terre Haute. He died at Pontiac Correctional Center in March 1994, and his lawyer then released his confession to 21 killings, which no court tested.
Read together, the cases do not describe luck so much as the moment when a long investigation and a short one meet. Hayward’s arrest report in Granger mattered because it reached detectives who were already working the disappearances. Orta stopped Suff’s van because a bulletin had told him what to watch for. The Lufkin stop worked because the FBI and the Texas Rangers were following the money as it moved. Even the Spokane stops that let Yates go became, two years on, a line in a database that brought detectives back to him in 1999.
The courts, for their part, kept the stops and the work that followed them in separate compartments. A stop for a missed turn signal held up all the way to the state Supreme Court in 2014. A search in Indiana collapsed when a judge held that it went beyond what the law allowed. Questions put to a New York suspect in custody before a Miranda warning were ruled improper, and a California court condemned detectives who questioned a man after he asked eleven times for a lawyer, while affirming both convictions. The traffic stop started each case. What happened after the stop decided how long it would stay open.
• August 16, 1975: Sergeant Bob Hayward of the Utah Highway Patrol arrests Ted Bundy in Granger, Utah, for evading an officer.
• March 1, 1976: Bundy is convicted of aggravated kidnapping in Salt Lake City.
• February 15, 1978: Officer David Lee arrests Bundy in Pensacola, Florida, after a plate check shows his car is stolen.
• 1978: Ohio police stop Jeffrey Dahmer on suspicion of drunken driving and let him go.
• July 1979 and February 1980: Bundy is convicted in Miami and Orlando and sentenced to death.
• May 14, 1983: Randy Kraft is stopped for drunk driving in southern Orange County, California.
• November 1983: Larry Eyler is indicted in Lake County, Illinois, in the death of Ralph Calise; the evidence from an Indiana State Police search is later suppressed.
• July 1986: A Cook County jury convicts Eyler of the murder of Danny Bridges.
• January 24, 1989: Bundy is executed at Florida State Prison.
• May 1989: An Orange County jury convicts Kraft of 16 murders; he is sentenced to death on November 29, 1989.
• April 28, 1991: A Kansas state trooper stops Phillip Carl Jablonski, who is arrested.
• January 9, 1992: Officer Frank Orta stops William Lester Suff’s van in Riverside for failing to signal a turn.
• February 15, 1992: A Milwaukee jury rejects Dahmer’s insanity claim on fifteen homicide counts.
• June 28, 1993: New York State troopers try to stop Joel Rifkin’s pickup for a missing rear plate on Long Island; he is arrested in Nassau County.
• March 1994: Eyler dies at Pontiac Correctional Center.
• April 25, 1994: A San Mateo County jury convicts Jablonski of two first-degree murders.
• May 9, 1994: A Nassau County jury convicts Rifkin of second-degree murder.
• 1995: A Riverside County jury convicts Suff of twelve murders and returns death verdicts.
• September 24 and November 28, 1997: Robert Lee Yates is stopped twice in Spokane County and allowed to go.
• April 18, 2000: Yates is arrested; in October 2000 he pleads guilty to 13 murders.
• August 10, 2000: The California Supreme Court affirms Kraft’s judgment.
• December 3, 2001: The Appellate Division rules Rifkin’s pre-Miranda statements should have been suppressed but affirms his convictions.
• January 23, 2006: The California Supreme Court affirms Jablonski’s death sentence.
• March 13, 2012: A Texas Highway Patrol corporal stops Israel Keyes in Lufkin, Texas.
• December 2, 2012: Keyes dies in custody in Anchorage before trial.
• April 28, 2014: The California Supreme Court upholds the stop of Suff’s van and affirms his death sentence.
• October 11, 2018: Washington’s death penalty is struck down; Yates’s sentence becomes life imprisonment.
• December 27, 2019: Jablonski dies on San Quentin’s death row.
• March 10, 2021: Sean Lannon is arrested in St. Louis after a plate check.
• October 2022: Lannon pleads guilty to first-degree murder in New Jersey.
• 2024: Lannon pleads guilty to four counts of second-degree murder in New Mexico.