A killer’s dealings with the press usually come late: the jail-cell interview, the courtroom sketch, the book contract. The people discussed here met journalists while they were still free, and in most of these cases the meeting changed what the public knew. One man wrote the news reports on the deaths of which police later accused him. One telephoned a night reporter in Johannesburg and said the police had arrested the wrong man. One mailed a confession to a newspaper in Lahore and then gave himself up at its office instead of a police station. One answered a newspaper’s accusation from hiding, in a long letter demanding space to reply. The last, a woman, sat on national television a week before her arrest, and nobody noticed her. Each of these cases ended differently in law.
For more than twenty years Vlado Taneski was the Kicevo correspondent for newspapers in Skopje, the capital of what was then the Republic of Macedonia. Kicevo is a small town on a mountain plateau in the west of the country, a few kilometers from the Albanian border. Between 2005 and 2008 Taneski wrote about the deaths of older women from his own town. His name is spelled Tanevski in some reports from 2008.
On June 20, 2008, police arrested him in Kicevo. They said that his articles contained details of the deaths that had never been released, and that his DNA matched evidence connected with two of the women. He was charged with two murders, those of Zivana Temelkoska, 65, and Mitra Simjanoska, whose age is given as 61, 64 and 70 in different reports. Police also said he was under investigation over the death of Ljubica Licoska, 55 or 56, and over the case of Gorica Pavleska, who was reported missing in May 2003 and whose age is given as between 73 and 79. No charge was brought in either case.
He was never convicted of anything. Three days after the arrest, on June 23, 2008, he died in custody at the prison in Tetovo. Police and the Justice Ministry described the death as a suicide. A handwritten note, according to reports, denied the killings. His wife, a lawyer from whom he had been separated for four years, told Agence France-Presse that he was not an aggressive man, and she and the Virginia Quarterly Review both reported that he maintained his innocence; police said he neither confessed nor denied. No court ever tested the evidence the police described.
Taneski was born in 1952 in the Kicevo area. He worked in a local factory, led the Communist youth organization in the town, and returned in 1980 as an editor at Radio Kicevo. In 1985 he joined Nova Makedonija, the Skopje daily, as a staff reporter. The paper let him go in 2003 when it changed hands, and afterward he wrote freelance for Utrinski Vesnik, for Vreme and again for Nova Makedonija. The Virginia Quarterly Review reported that he had three times won the national award for best reporting. He still worked on a typewriter and telephoned his copy to the capital. Kiro Kiproski, a Nova Makedonija reporter, called him an introvert; Ljupcho Popovski, editor in chief of Utrinski Vesnik, called him a good, quiet journalist. A colleague, Sasa Dukoski, told the magazine that Taneski had sometimes passed other reporters' work off as his own and had once made threatening telephone calls to him, years earlier.
His reporting on the deaths ran in two papers. On February 6, 2008, Utrinski Vesnik carried his report on Licoska’s death under a headline that called the new crime the main story in Kicevo. On May 19, Nova Makedonija published his article on the fear gripping the town, which tied the deaths of Temelkoska and Licoska to a single killer and said the killer’s motives were unclear. According to the Virginia Quarterly Review, he visited Licoska’s sister several times while reporting, asking whether she had news or suspected anyone, and she later told the private television station A1 that he had also asked her for details and for a photograph of the dead woman. Temelkoska’s son told A1 that Taneski had come to speak to the family and asked for details; Taneski had told his editors the interview would be easy because the family lived a few doors away.
Those are the ordinary habits of a local reporter, and they are also the facts the public later read in a different light. Police pointed to the printed details and the DNA match. The case against him also touched an earlier conviction: two other men had been sentenced to life imprisonment for the Simjanoska killing. According to EFE, both men, by then in prison, had always denied any part in the deaths of the women. The Virginia Quarterly Review reported that biological evidence in her case did not match either of them. Taneski had covered their trial for Nova Makedonija.
Moses Sithole was convicted in the Pretoria High Court in December 1997 of 38 murders, with other charges. The dead were 37 women and a two-year-old boy, and the press had by then named the series for the initials of three places around Pretoria and Johannesburg where the deaths came to light. Judge David Curlewis sentenced him to 2,410 years in prison and ruled that he could not be considered for parole for 930. He told the press that he had killed 76 people. That figure is his own claim. The court convicted him of 38 killings.
Before he was caught, the case was a puzzle that the police could not close. A man had been arrested in December 1994 for the deaths of 15 women in and around Cleveland, in Johannesburg; he died before he could be tried. More deaths followed near Atteridgeville and then, in the week before September 22, 1995, near Boksburg, where, the Mail & Guardian reported, ten more deaths came to light. The paper wrote that investigators seemed to agree that all three series were sexually motivated, that the police were officially silent, and that rumors suggested either one killer or a copycat. In the paper’s own account, the young, mostly rural women who were dying were widely regarded as near the bottom of South African society, and a new police service that wanted to show it served every citizen was finding the cases hard.
The police had brought in a psychologist, Micki Pistorius, who had set up the South African Police Service’s investigative psychology unit and trained more than a hundred detectives in serial-murder investigation during her years in the post, according to the Mail & Guardian. Her profile predicted that the killer would contact the media. In 1995 a man telephoned The Star in Johannesburg under a false name and said he was the killer.
The calls were taken by Tamsen de Beer, a junior reporter on the night shift with little experience of hard news, her later account relayed by the documentary’s director, Jasyn Howes, to Eyewitness News in 2025. Her night editor, Alameen Brendan Templeton, worried for her safety, The Post reported. According to the Sunday Tribune’s description of the 2025 documentary, the caller was frustrated with the police and said they had arrested the wrong man. De Beer built a rapport with him, he gave her details of the killings, and she encouraged him to give himself up; he seemed open to the idea. She said later that she regretted becoming emotionally involved in the story rather than simply reporting it. Eyewitness News reported that he also telephoned the families of some of the dead to taunt them.
At Sithole’s trial in 1996 the court heard that the caller had spoken to two reporters at The Star and had given clues to three murders, and that police had confirmed what he said. A voice expert, Dr Leendert Jansen, testified that there was "no doubt whatsoever" the caller was Sithole. His counsel, Eben Jordaan, said he would ask the Legal Aid Board to pay for an expert from abroad to examine the tapes. Police announced on October 19, 1995, that they had arrested Sithole, then 31, in Benoni the day before, and described him as the most wanted man in the country. He was held in hospital under guard. He was linked, police said, to the murders of at least 37 women and one child over the previous 18 months.
Sithole had been released from Pretoria Central Prison on parole in November 1993. By 1995 he was holding meetings for an organization that said it campaigned against the abuse of women and children, according to his wife’s testimony; SA People gives its name as Youth Against Human Abuse. He challenged his transfer to a private prison in Mangaung and lost in court on November 8, 2012. In November 2025 SA People reported him held in the C-Max section of Kgosi Mampuru II prison in Pretoria.
In the last days of November 1999 a letter reached the police in Lahore, Pakistan. Its writer, Javed Iqbal, said he had killed 100 boys. Time magazine quoted it a few weeks later: "I have killed 100 children, all boys." According to TRT World, the first letter came from Iqbal’s own address, and a police deputy superintendent went there with constables; Iqbal threatened to kill himself and the officers left. The officer later told his superiors that Iqbal could not be the killer of a hundred children. Dawn reported that Iqbal also sent parcels to the authorities and to a newspaper, with evidence, a confession and details of the killings.
The newspaper was the Urdu daily Jang. Its editor, Jamil Chishti, told TRT that when the letter and photographs of boys arrived he considered two explanations: that someone was framing Iqbal, or that the confession was real. Jang’s journalists went to Iqbal’s address, but he was gone. The paper published the story on December 3, 1999, with photographs of 57 boys. Parents came to a Lahore police station to look through clothing and pictures, and the families of most of the boys he listed recognized their sons' belongings. By late December Time counted 72 boys identified by relatives; the parents of only 25 of them had ever reported their sons missing. Many poor families, the magazine wrote, distrusted the police and felt they had nowhere to go. The identifications rested on photographs and belongings. Dawn, CBS News and the Associated Press reported that no more than two bodies were ever produced.
Time reported that if the letter was genuine the killings had begun in June 1999, with accomplices whom the letter did not name. Iqbal threatened suicide, and for some weeks nobody knew whether he was alive. In the letter, the Associated Press reported, he said that he had been wrongly arrested and badly beaten in police custody, and described the killings as revenge. Dawn reported in 2001 that his diary portrayed him as a victim of the police, of the jails and of injustice in Pakistani society.
On December 30, 1999, Iqbal walked into the Lahore office of Jang and gave himself up there, saying he feared for his life if he went to the police. He chose the newspaper twice: first as the recipient of his confession, then as the place to be arrested. At trial he denied everything, and he told reporters he had killed no one. On March 16, 2000, a Lahore judge convicted him on 100 counts of murder, with other charges, and passed a sentence that the government said it would challenge and that the Council of Islamic Ideology said violated Islam. It was never carried out. On October 9, 2001, while his appeal was pending, Iqbal and a co-accused man were dead in neighboring cells in Kot Lakhpat jail. Officials called it suicide; doctors at the city mortuary disputed that, Dawn reported. The Federal Shariat Court recorded his appeal as infructuous in April 2007.
In March 1944, during the German occupation of Paris, the case of Dr. Marcel Petiot came to light in the sixteenth arrondissement, and he went into hiding. In September 1944 the newspaper Résistance ran an article headed "Petiot, soldat du Reich" (Petiot, soldier of the Reich), according to Hérodote. Salon, writing about David King’s 2011 book, reported that the paper printed testimony claiming he had smuggled cocaine and worn a German uniform to hunt resistance fighters. A warrant for his arrest had been issued.
Petiot replied. He wrote the paper a long handwritten letter demanding a right of reply, and the letter told the police that he was still in Paris, inside the resistance, Hérodote and Le Quotidien du Médecin both reported. It did not stop the search. Police arrested him in Paris on October 31, 1944, after seven months in hiding.
His trial before the Seine Assize Court opened on March 18, 1946, and the French Ministry of Justice, in a history of the case published in 2020, called it the great media trial of the Second World War, comparable in its effect to the Landru affair after the First. The press called him "Docteur Satan" and "a modern Bluebeard." Crowds camped outside the courtroom, and Colette, Prince Rainier of Monaco and the Duke of Windsor came to watch, according to Salon. The presiding judge was quoted in the press calling him "an unbelievable demon," and no mistrial was declared. His lawyer, René Floriot, complained in his opening remarks that the coverage had already destroyed his client’s presumption of innocence.
The man the papers had accused of working for the Reich now claimed the opposite. Petiot told the court he had killed 63 people, every one of them a German, a collaborator or a traitor. He said he belonged to a resistance group he called "Fly-Tox." He never admitted the murders for which he was tried; Floriot argued that the dead were enemies of France. On April 4, 1946, the jury convicted him of the premeditated murder of 24 people, with theft, out of 27 charged. The French Ministry of Justice describes the victims as people trying to leave occupied France through what he presented as an escape route to South America, most of them Jews, with some petty criminals who wanted to vanish. The case as presented at trial was one of poisoning; King’s research, Salon reported, questioned how the victims died. He was guillotined at La Santé prison in Paris on May 25, 1946. His claim of 63 killings was never proven.
Louis van Schoor, born Sybrand Louis, was a security guard in East London, a port city on South Africa’s Eastern Cape coast. Before that he had served in the South African Police dog unit. In the late 1980s he answered silent alarms at businesses his company guarded, and shot the people he met there. A court convicted him in 1992 of seven murders and two attempted murders. He had been charged with 19 murders and 21 attempted murders.
For some years he had been unusually open about it. In the early days, Chiara Carter of IOL wrote in 2004, he talked to journalists about the rising number of deaths. In November 1989 the Deseret News carried an account, on the word of police and a businessman, that he had shot dead his 27th burglary suspect since 1986. Each time, he telephoned the police himself. Survivors were arrested; when someone died, the only legal step was an inquest. Carter noted that the dead were Black and the judicial officers white, and wrote that this went a long way toward explaining how he escaped scrutiny for so long. Before his conviction, IOL reported, he told a journalist that he had shot 100 people while working as a guard from 1986 to 1989. That number is his own claim, and it was never tested in court. IOL put the figure of people he was alleged to have killed at 39.
The killings reached wider attention through two other journalists, Patrick Goodenough and his colleague Dominic Jones, who worked through inquest files and court records and interviewed survivors. Goodenough had trouble getting the story published; it ran at last on the front page of the Sunday Tribune, and further accounts then reached the Black Sash, the anti-apartheid human rights organization. Andrew Trench, then a young reporter covering part of the court case, told Eyewitness News in July 2024 that van Schoor showed no remorse at the trial and that a support club formed around him. Cars in the town carried stickers reading "I love Louis" with a heart pierced by bullets.
He was sentenced to what reports agree came to 20 years in effect. He was released on parole in October 2004 after 12 years, 4 months and 13 days, IOL reported. Weeks later he gave Carter a long interview. He rejected the words "mass murderer" and "serial killer" and called himself a crime fighter. "I’m not a serial killer. I called the police after each encounter," he said. He denied that race had anything to do with it. He said the book he planned would set the record straight. Carter observed that his release drew almost no reaction from the town’s Black community, whose members, she wrote, had been the ones he shot.
For two years the police of Mexico City hunted a killer of elderly women whom the press called "el Mataviejitas," in the masculine. On November 17, 2005, the deputy attorney general, Renato Sales Heredia, told reporters that a single killer could have committed 24 of the 32 homicides of elderly women recorded since 2003. Investigators had a three-dimensional portrait made, and a clay bust modeled by the sculptor Patricia Payán was circulated. They told the public the killer was most likely a man dressed as a woman. The attorney general, Bátiz, had described the killer’s mind in October 2005 as brilliant, skillful and careful, Expansión later recalled.
The woman they arrested on January 25, 2006, Juana Barraza Samperio, was 48. She was a former professional wrestler who had fought as La Dama del Silencio, the Lady of Silence, and who sold popcorn at wrestling arenas. According to the Cuicuilco study by the anthropologist Susana Vargas Cervantes, a week before her arrest Barraza had appeared on national television at a wrestling event without anyone connecting her to the portraits, and she had reportedly gone to the prosecutor’s offices at least three times before the arrest. That appearance was not an interview; she was on screen as a wrestling figure, and nobody connected her to the case.
She was arrested in the Venustiano Carranza district minutes after the death of Ana María de los Reyes Alfaro, whose age was reported as 80, 81 and 82 in different accounts. The Associated Press reported that Barraza told television cameras she had done it, and that she resembled the portraits and the bust. By the next day the attorney general announced that she was the person the press had been calling the killer of old women, and fingerprints tied her to at least ten earlier deaths. The name changed to "la Mataviejitas." An academic study of 58 articles in two Mexico City newspapers between December 2005 and February 2006 concluded that coverage moved, after her arrest, from a brilliant and sick killer to an angry, poorly educated woman.
On March 31, 2008, a Mexico City criminal court convicted her of 16 homicides and 12 aggravated robberies against elderly people and sentenced her to 759 years and 17 days; Mexico City law then capped time served at 50 years. She called the sentence unjust, according to Notimex. She has since said that she killed one woman, not the others, and that she confessed under threats. Both statements are hers; the court’s findings stand. As of September 14, 2026, she remained in prison, now 68, seen in a video from the Tepepan women’s prison in a wheelchair.
Lee Roy Martin was a 30-year-old textile worker and father of three when he was identified in February 1968 in the Gaffney, South Carolina, area. According to the National Registry of Exonerations, he pleaded guilty to the murder of Annie Lucille Dedmond, who had died in May 1967. Her husband, Roger Zane Dedmond, had already been convicted of manslaughter in December 1967 and sentenced to 18 years. On February 8, 1968, Bill Gibbons, managing editor of a local newspaper, took a call from a man who would not give his name and who said he had killed her. Gibbons called the sheriff. Dedmond was released on February 29, 1968, and the charges against him were dismissed that September 16. The Registry lists his case among exonerations and names a false confession and official misconduct as factors.
The contacts do not add up to one pattern. Sithole’s calls were a performance for a night reporter who believed, for a time, that she could talk him in, and the court later heard them as evidence. Iqbal used a newspaper first as the recipient of his confession and then as the place to be arrested. Petiot used one to argue with an accusation while the police looked for him. Van Schoor’s early frankness with the Eastern Cape press hid nothing and, for years, changed nothing; the single call to a South Carolina editor freed a man from prison. Taneski stands apart from the rest: in the police account, a reporter’s printed details were the break in the case, and he died in custody three days after his arrest without a trial. Barraza, on camera a week before her arrest, was seen by a national audience and recognized by no one.
• 1944, March 10: Paris, the Petiot case comes to light; Petiot goes into hiding.
• 1944, September: the newspaper Résistance prints an article headed "Petiot, soldat du Reich"; Petiot replies by letter.
• 1944, October 31: Petiot arrested in Paris.
• 1946, March 18 to April 4: Petiot tried before the Seine Assize Court; convicted of 24 murders on April 4.
• 1946, May 25: Petiot guillotined at La Santé prison.
• 1967, May: Annie Lucille Dedmond dies in the Gaffney, South Carolina, area.
• 1967, December: Roger Zane Dedmond convicted of manslaughter.
• 1968, February 8: a caller who gave no name tells a Gaffney newspaper editor he killed Annie Lucille Dedmond; February 29, Roger Dedmond released.
• 1986 to 1989: Louis van Schoor, an East London security guard, shoots people at business premises; November 1989, the Deseret News reports his 27th.
• 1992: van Schoor convicted of seven murders and two attempted murders.
• 1994 to 1995: Moses Sithole’s series of killings in Gauteng.
• 1995, October 18: Sithole arrested in Benoni; October 19, police announce the arrest.
• 1996: At Sithole’s trial the court hears the calls to The Star.
• 1997, December: Sithole convicted of 38 murders; sentenced to 2,410 years.
• 1999, late November: Javed Iqbal’s letter reaches Lahore police and the newspaper Jang; December 3, Jang publishes the story; December 30, Iqbal gives himself up at Jang’s office.
• 2000, March 16: Iqbal convicted at trial on 100 counts of murder.
• 2001, October 9: Iqbal dies in Kot Lakhpat jail.
• 2005, November 17: Mexico City officials say one killer may be behind 24 of 32 deaths.
• 2006, January 25: Juana Barraza arrested in Mexico City.
• 2008, February 6: Utrinski Vesnik prints Vlado Taneski’s report on the death of Ljubica Licoska; May 19, Nova Makedonija prints his article on fear in Kicevo; June 20, he is arrested; June 23, he dies in custody at Tetovo.
• 2008, March 31: Barraza convicted of 16 homicides and 12 aggravated robberies.
• 2026, September 14: Barraza reported in custody at the Tepepan women’s prison.