Public office, in these cases, comes in several shapes. Of the eight men whose cases follow, two were elected to something that a reasonable reader would call public office: a physician chosen as mayor of a small French town, and a Soviet club leader who sat as a deputy on a city council. One more, a union agent, was elected by the seamen of his port and twice elected head of a labor council, which is real office but not public office. One stood for mayor twice and lost both times. Another was elected president of his church council while drawing a salary as a municipal compliance officer, a post he was hired to rather than elected to. Another held a party secretaryship and a delegate’s seat at a party conference. The last two carried party cards and little more.
Those distinctions matter, and each case below is placed accordingly. Holding a seat, running for one, holding a post inside a party, and merely belonging to a party are four different relationships to power, and the cases do not all show the same thing. What they have in common is narrower and more interesting than a list of officeholders would suggest. In each, some form of public standing, whether a ballot result, a title or a membership card, surrounded the man while the deaths went on, and in several of them it shaped how long the deaths went unexplained.
### Marcel Petiot, mayor
Marcel Petiot is remembered as the Paris doctor of the occupation years, convicted in 1946 of the premeditated murder of 24 people. Before Paris he was a country politician. He set up his first practice in Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, a small town in the Yonne, and he was popular there. Britannica says he was elected mayor in 1926.
His time in office was marked by accusations. Infobae writes that he was accused of fraud and of misusing town funds, and that rumors of other misconduct circulated around his practice. Britannica records that he was suspended as mayor in 1930 after a fraud conviction and removed in 1931. He then won a seat as a local councilor, and lost it after being convicted of stealing electricity. For a man who would later pose as a figure of the resistance, the record of his public career is a record of small institutional failures, each one followed by another bid for a place in local life.
Several deaths and one fire from those years were later linked to him in published accounts, and none was ever proved. Hérodote reports that in 1926 a fire destroyed the house of a patient’s daughter, with whom he was said to be having an affair. Britannica records that a patient of his was murdered around 1930 and that another patient who had accused him of that killing also died in unexplained circumstances. Hérodote adds that in 1933 a witness in a murder case in which he himself was implicated died suddenly after a visit to his consulting room. He was never charged over any of these deaths. They remain allegations that followed a man who held office.
The case that made him famous belongs to the occupation. The Ministry of Justice of France describes people trying to leave occupied France through what he presented as an escape route to South America, most of them Jews, along with petty criminals seeking to get away. They paid him, and he kept their money and belongings. When the case came to light in Paris in March 1944, he told the first patrolmen that the house was a resistance outpost and that the dead were "Germans and traitors," according to Salon’s review of the American historian David King’s 2011 book. The officers let him leave. At trial he claimed 63 killings, all, he said, of Germans, collaborators and traitors, the Ministry of Justice notes; the court did not accept it.
He was arrested on October 31, 1944, as he came out of a Métro station in Paris, after some seven months in hiding. The Seine Assize Court tried him from March 18, 1946, and on April 4 sentenced him to death for 24 of the 27 murders charged. He was executed on May 25, 1946, at La Santé prison.
His years as mayor or councilor are not known to have figured in the prosecution’s case. What matters about him is the shape of his life: a man who had once been trusted with a town’s money and then stripped of the trust was, in the dark years, trusted by frightened people again, as a doctor with a way out.
### Anatoly Slivko, city deputy
Anatoly Slivko spent about twenty years as one of the most admired men in Nevinnomyssk, an industrial town in Stavropol Krai in southern Russia. He worked at the town’s chemical plant, led a children’s tourist club called Chergid that took boys on hikes through the region, and was rewarded by the Soviet state for it. Novaya Gazeta Europe reports that in 1977, despite having no teaching qualifications, he was named an Honored Teacher of the RSFSR for his work with children outside school, that he was elected a deputy of the Nevinnomyssk city council, and that the children’s newspaper Pionerskaya Pravda and national radio covered his work. He was a member of the Communist Party, according to NEWS.ru. Lenta.ru reports that the Honored Teacher title came with the support of the town’s party secretary.
Here the word office fits, though how he came to be elected has never been described. What is clear is how the position worked for him afterward. Novaya Gazeta Europe says the case was not easy to bring: Slivko was a city deputy and a decorated educator. The evidence of the boys was enough for the city prosecutor to sign a warrant to search the club and Slivko’s apartment.
The case came to light because an assistant city prosecutor, Tamara Langueva, took over a file in the summer of 1985 and noticed what earlier investigators had not: that nearly all the boys at the center of such files in Nevinnomyssk over the previous years had belonged to the same club. Slivko was arrested in Nevinnomyssk on December 28, 1985, his 47th birthday. Lenta.ru says he protested that he was a city council deputy and a master of sport, threatened the officers with his political connections and told them they would regret it. It is the clearest statement in any of these cases of what a man believed office was for.
Boys who survived his sessions, NEWS.ru reports, remembered little or were afraid to tell adults, and those who did speak were often not believed. Rumors spread through the town that he had been killing for about twenty-one years, Novaya Gazeta Europe reports.
The consequences reached the officials around him. The town party secretary who had supported him and pressed for his Honored Teacher title died by suicide after the verdict, according to Novaya Gazeta Europe and Lenta.ru. Novaya Gazeta Europe says the town’s police chief was dismissed for failing to act on the deaths of children. Angry residents set fire to the club, the same source reports, and Lenta.ru says its building now houses a municipal center for children’s and youth tourism.
The trial began in June 1986 and was closed to the public. Slivko was judged sane by a forensic psychiatric examination. A Soviet court convicted him in 1986 of seven murders committed between 1964 and 1985, and sentenced him to death. He was executed on September 16, 1989, at Novocherkassk prison, according to NEWS.ru, Life.ru and BFM.ru. Other deaths of boys in the area were never tried against him, and Novaya Gazeta Europe reports a researcher’s view that the real toll is unknown.
### Charles Severance, twice a candidate for mayor of Alexandria
Charles Severance never held office. He belongs here because his candidacies, and his grievance against the officials of one Virginia city, run through the case as the prosecution presented it.
Prosecutors said the three people he was convicted of killing had nothing in common except Alexandria and the man who killed them. Nancy Dunning, 56, a real estate agent, was the wife of the city’s sheriff, and she died on December 5, 2003. Ronald Kirby was director of transportation planning for the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, and he died on November 11, 2013. Ruthanne Lodato, 59, a music teacher and the daughter and sister of Alexandria judges, died on February 6, 2014; a caregiver who worked in her household was wounded and survived.
The court record gives only a short account of Severance’s early years. According to the Court of Appeals of Virginia, he graduated in 1986 with a degree in mechanical engineering and afterward worked only sporadically. His family noticed erratic behavior beginning in 1988, the court said, and he received no significant mental health treatment. He distrusted the mental health system, and when he ran for mayor of Alexandria in 1996 his platform condemned mental health institutions. He ran again in 2000 and lost both races.
In 2014 the Associated Press spoke with two former mayors about those campaigns. Bill Euille remembered Severance’s unusual clothes. Kerry Donley called him an "odd opponent, to say the least," and said police had assigned an undercover officer to shadow Severance during both campaigns. A 2015 ruling by the Fairfax County Circuit Court described him as well known in local political circles in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when he lived in Alexandria. He was a candidate in the full sense, with a platform, rivals and a public presence, and he lost.
The event prosecutors placed at the center of the case came in the same year as his second campaign. Severance began a relationship with a woman in 1998, and their son was born in April 1999, according to the Court of Appeals. After problems in March 2000 the mother moved out with the boy. Following contentious hearings in the Alexandria Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court, she received sole legal and physical custody, and Severance received no visitation. The appeals court noted that the custody orders were signed by deputies "for Sheriff Dunning." The Associated Press reported in 2014 that the mother had obtained a protective order and that the judge called the matter "a most unusual one presenting real issues of safety." Severance sought custody again in 2009 without success. The Fairfax County Circuit Court wrote in 2015 that he never saw the child again.
Afterward, according to the Court of Appeals, he sent the boy’s mother threatening letters. For years he grew upset and irrational about the custody decision and denounced the police and what he called the "enforcement class." The circuit court summarized the prosecution’s proffer this way: he showed intense and long-lasting anger over the custody ruling, aimed at the city, its courts and its elected officials. His girlfriend testified that he often talked about killing judges, police officers and their families. The Supreme Court of Virginia later described the killings as part of a plan of retribution.
The Associated Press reported in March 2014 that Severance had reluctantly acknowledged a diagnosis of schizophrenia, which he blamed on his doctors' errors, and that he had stopped taking a prescribed medication because he believed it was part of a plot against him. A judge later ruled him competent to stand trial, the Alexandria Times reported.
Police contacted his girlfriend after the Lodato case. According to the Court of Appeals, on March 7, 2014, Severance went to the Russian Embassy in Washington seeking asylum, telling Secret Service agents that Alexandria had persecuted him for a dozen years, partly in revenge for his mayoral campaigns. He was arrested in Wheeling, West Virginia, on March 13, 2014, on a Loudoun County warrant charging possession of a firearm by a felon; he was 53. On September 8, 2014, he was charged with the three killings.
The trial was moved to Fairfax County. In 2015 the judge ruled that the defense would be allowed to try to prove that the former sheriff was responsible for his wife’s death, according to reports; nothing in the verdict suggests the jury accepted it. On November 2, 2015, the jury convicted him on all ten counts: two counts of capital murder, one of first-degree murder, malicious wounding, firearm offenses and possession of a firearm by a felon. The prosecution had relied on the surviving caregiver, neighbors and his own writing of more than 2,000 pages. On January 21, 2016, Judge Randy I. Bellows sentenced him to three consecutive life terms plus 48 years and $400,000 in fines. The Court of Appeals of Virginia affirmed on May 23, 2017, and the Supreme Court of Virginia on July 19, 2018. His is the only case here where office is a shape of resentment rather than a source of cover. A man who had asked the voters of a city for their trust, and been refused, came to see its institutions as one enemy.
### Billy Gohl, agent and labor council president
Billy Gohl is the least settled case here, and the one where office matters most to the argument. From 1903 to 1910 he was the agent of the Aberdeen branch of the Sailors' Union of the Pacific, at a time when Grays Harbor was the world’s most productive lumber port and the most heavily unionized area of Washington. He was born in 1873. According to the historian Aaron Goings, he was elected to the post by the union’s seamen, and fellow unionists twice elected him president of the local labor council. He was also the founding president of the Grays Harbor Waterfront Federation. A HistoryLink essay by Goings records that Hoquiam’s shingle weavers, together with Gohl of the Aberdeen sailors' union, formed the Grays Harbor City Front Federation, which its organizers saw as a first step toward one union for all waterfront workers.
These were elective offices, and they carried real authority, but they were not public offices. The distinction is worth stating because the public office in this story belonged to his opponents. Goings says that by 1909 a group of employers, politicians and newspaper editors had formed a citizens' committee to deal with Gohl, and a 2021 report on Goings’s research says the committee was formed by Aberdeen’s mayor, E. B. Benn, together with wealthy local business owners. The committee raised thousands of dollars to pay the Thiel Detective Agency, a private detective firm. Through 1909 and 1910 Thiel agents and local employers worked to have Gohl arrested and convicted of murder. Goings’s research began, he has said, with a single headline in the Aberdeen Daily World of August 10, 1911: "Business Men Helped Convict Gohl." The newspaper reported a debate in the Aberdeen City Council over whether public money should pay the Thiel agents.
The job itself was practical. Gohl watched conditions on ships, collected dues and called strikes. He kept members off what the union called "death ships," arranged death benefits and funerals, represented sailors in court, translated for immigrant members and helped find them housing. He pressed ship captains to keep to union contracts and safety laws. Goings writes that he won real gains for his members, and that this made him an enemy of the harbor’s business owners. A reviewer summarizing the book quotes Goings’s view that Gohl was "the only one capable of shutting down the highly profitable Grays Harbor lumber trade." Goings also says that in 1906 Gohl led unionists in armed clashes with employers and strikebreakers, and was charged and convicted of a serious crime as a result.
In early 1910 he was arrested on a murder charge. In May 1910 a jury in Chehalis County convicted him of first-degree murder in the death of a sailor, Charles Hadberg, and he was sentenced to life in prison. He died in 1927. That single conviction is the legal record. Goings, who grew up in Aberdeen and spent about twenty years on the case, argues that in 1910 there was little hard evidence that Gohl had killed Hadberg, and that even the identity of the body was in doubt.
Around the conviction grew a much larger story. On the day of his arrest the Aberdeen Daily World linked him to a "floater fleet" of more than 40 dead men. The writer Murray Morgan put the toll at 124 deaths over ten years. Estimates of his supposed victims have run from 40 to 200, Goings notes, and some true crime writers have called him one of the most prolific murderers in American history. None of those deaths was ever tried against him. Goings argues that employers, labor spies and newspaper editors built the legend, that much of the evidence was manufactured by labor spies, and that newspapers pinned the region’s violent crimes on Gohl and "his gang" while leaving out the employers' own campaign against labor activists. Drawing on the city’s record of deaths and the Chehalis County coroner’s record, among others, he concludes that the toll laid at Gohl’s door "quite possibly" reflected the hazards of the waterfront: drownings were common in the port, often linked to accidents on ships, falls from docks or log rafts, and drinking. In John Larson’s summary in The Daily World, Goings sees "this collective misery, as much as anything," as "the real ghoul of Grays Harbor."
Not everyone in Grays Harbor accepts that reading. Bill Lindstrom, a former city editor of the Aberdeen Daily World, said in 2021 that he admired Goings’s scholarship but took exception to his interpretation, and that the book left out "vital information." His claims, as reported, include that 41 of the dead men shared three traits, being sailors, being single and having no money on them, and that about $10,000 that union sailors had deposited with Gohl was lost around the time of the trial. They are Lindstrom’s claims, not court findings, and none led to any further charge against Gohl. A 2021 report on Goings’s book adds its own caution: the committee’s scheming does not by itself prove that Gohl was innocent, and he "could have been both, political enemy and murderer."
What Gohl’s career shows about office is the reverse of the others here. A man elected by working seamen to speak for them was, on Goings’s account, destroyed by men who held public power and private money. On the other reading, he used a trusted position to prey on the men who trusted him. The record settles only the first step: one conviction, in 1910, in a county whose officials had paid for the investigation.
### Dennis Rader, compliance officer and church council president
Dennis Rader killed 10 people in and around Wichita, Kansas, between January 1974 and January 1991. For most of those years he was a married father of two, an alarm installer and later a municipal code officer, a Cub Scout leader and the president of his church council. Police never named him as a suspect before 2005.
Two of his positions deserve separating. He graduated from Wichita State University in 1979 with a degree in administration of justice and never became a police officer. By the time of his arrest he was the compliance supervisor for the city of Park City, responsible for housing codes and animal control. That was a job, held at the pleasure of a small suburb, with a uniform and a power to write citations. It was not an elected office. At Christ Lutheran Church, where he had been a member for 30 years, he was an usher and the elected president of the congregation council. That was an elected office, in a private body.
To his neighbors he was two people. Some told reporters after his arrest that he helped elderly residents with their yard work. Others described a bureaucratic bully who looked for reasons to write citations. Jim Reno, who was a neighbor for 16 years, called the job "a glorified dog catcher" and said he had clashed with Rader several times over what he considered harassment. One neighbor said his mother had pulled his younger brother out of Rader’s Cub Scout pack because of the way Rader behaved.
He was caught because he started writing again. In March 2004 he mailed The Wichita Eagle proof that he had killed a woman whose death had never been linked to him, and in the months that followed he sent police and television stations package after package, signed with the three-letter name he had given himself years before. In one of them he asked whether a computer disk could be traced. A disk he mailed in February 2005 led investigators to Christ Lutheran Church and carried the name "Dennis," and the congregation’s president was Dennis Rader, the Associated Press reported in March 2005. His church standing gave the police their first real name.
Detectives then needed DNA, and a familial match from his daughter’s sample, tested by the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, tied him to the killings. He was arrested on February 25, 2005, in the Wichita area. The next day at a news conference in the Wichita City Council chamber, before about 300 people, among them relatives of the victims, Police Chief Norman Williams announced the arrest. He was charged on March 1, 2005, with 10 counts of first-degree murder. The death penalty was not available: Kansas had none in force for crimes committed between 1972 and 1994.
The church took the news badly. The Associated Press reported on February 28, 2005, that his arrest shook the congregation, which had elected him its leader. On June 27, 2005, he pleaded guilty to all 10 counts. On August 18, 2005, District Judge Gregory Waller imposed 10 consecutive life terms, with a minimum of 175 years before parole eligibility; the count involving Dolores Davis carried a "hard 40." He has been held at El Dorado Correctional Facility since the day after sentencing. Among these cases his is the one in which the office, a church presidency, did the least for the man and the most against him. It identified him.
### Gennady Mikhasevich, party secretary and police volunteer
Gennady Mikhasevich killed women in the Vitebsk region of Soviet Belarus for 14 years, from 1971 to 1985. In May 1987 a Soviet court convicted him of the murders of 36 women, with other charges, and sentenced him to death, according to the Belarusian human rights center Viasna. He confessed to 43 killings. He was a mechanic on a state farm, a married father of two, a member of the Communist Party who served as a party secretary, and a volunteer in the druzhina, the civilian auxiliary that helped the Soviet police. In that role, Lenta.ru reported, he took part in checks connected with the search for the man responsible for the killings.
A party secretaryship is a party post, not a public one, and he is not known to have been elected to a government body. He did make his way in local public life. Lenta.ru reports that he was a delegate to a regional party conference, and that as a druzhina volunteer his photograph was displayed on an honor board. By some accounts cited by Lenta.ru, he received a red Zaporozhets car in 1978 after joining the party.
The case is remembered in Belarus less for the number of deaths than for what happened while he was free. Before his arrest, investigators convicted 14 other people of killings in the series, and one of them was executed. Zerkalo, the Belarusian news site, has written that the confessions of those people were beaten out of them. When Mikhasevich confessed, the convictions fell apart. The former regional police chief Mechislav Grib, who led the investigation in 1985, has said that the case convinced him the death penalty is wrong. The executed man, he said, had died for nothing.
Mikhasevich’s standing worked in a particular way: it was written into the profile. In January 1985 Grib, head of the internal affairs department of the Vitebsk regional executive committee, took charge of the investigative group, Zerkalo reported. The prosecutor’s investigator Nikolai Ignatovich drew up a description of the man they were looking for. By Lenta.ru’s account, it said he would be an attractive man with fair, curly hair from the Vitebsk region, probably connected with cars and possibly a volunteer police helper. Parts of it were wrong: Ignatovich expected an unmarried man outside the party. The police appealed to the public on radio and television, and stations were flooded with calls about anything that looked suspicious.
What identified him was paper. Letters had been signed by an invented group calling itself the Patriots of Vitebsk, and graphologists compared hundreds of thousands of handwriting samples, about 560,000 by Lenta.ru’s count and 600,000 by Grib’s, as Zerkalo reported. When the samples had been checked, Grib asked for more, from the state farm office and from the technical school in Gorodok where Mikhasevich had studied. Lenta.ru gives two versions of how his own handwriting reached the experts in December 1985: either he wrote an explanation during a check of his red Zaporozhets, or a traffic inspector in Polotsk stopped him and asked him to write one. The experts concluded that this explanation and the Patriots of Vitebsk letters were in the same hand. The date of the arrest is itself disputed: November 1985 by the account of Grib, December 1985 by Lenta.ru’s.
According to Lenta.ru, Mikhasevich decided after several days of questioning to pretend he was mentally ill, and began to confess. Psychiatrists judged him sane. Viasna reports that he confessed to 43 murders, 22 of which had not been known to the authorities, and that his confessions covered 13 murders for which 14 innocent people had been convicted. Viasna calls the evidence conclusive, and lists the handwriting, his blood group, his knowledge of the places involved and belongings of the victims in his possession.
The consequences fell on officials. Responsibility for the wrongful convictions was shared by about 200 people, Viasna reported, but most received only reprimands or were expelled from the Communist Party. Mikhail Zhavnerovich, a senior investigator who had led several of the earlier cases, was expelled from the party and dismissed from the prosecutor’s office, and a criminal case was opened against him, Zerkalo reported; he was amnestied as a war veteran with a disability and died in 1987. Viasna says he was never prosecuted. Valery Soroko, a transport prosecutor who had investigated the case of one of the wrongly convicted, was the only one to receive a real prison term, four years. Three others received suspended terms of two to two and a half years. The prosecutor Leonid Proshkin commented, as quoted by Viasna: "That’s how a judicial mistake is 'corrected' by yet another lawlessness." Zerkalo reports that the Belarusian interior minister and his deputies, and the prosecutor Adam Mogilnitsky, were removed from their posts in 1983.
The investigators who caught him were not rewarded either. Grib recalled, in remarks reported by Zerkalo, that despite promises they were never put forward for awards, and that a minister told him the Council of Ministers and the party’s Central Committee were irritated by the "Vitebsk case." Ignatovich drew a broader lesson. "It is not enough to condemn the phenomenon; the law enforcement system has to be rebuilt," he said, as quoted by Lenta.ru.
Mikhasevich was sentenced to death on May 19, 1987, and did not appeal. Lenta.ru says he was executed in the fall of 1987; Viasna gives January 19, 1988. Grib went on to a political career; Zerkalo described him in 2023 as the only living former leader of Belarus, and Viasna called him a former speaker of parliament. In public discussions organized by Viasna he returned again and again to the Vitebsk case. In 2009, Viasna reported, he was the first to sign a petition against the death penalty in Belarus. The same man who ran the hunt, in other words, ended his career in elected politics, arguing against the sentence that his own investigation had helped to produce.
The last two men mark the outer edge of public standing. Neither held an elected seat. Each belonged to a party, and the party’s role in the story differs sharply.
### Andrei Chikatilo, party member and police volunteer
Andrei Chikatilo was a married father of two, a Communist Party member and a former teacher who worked as a supply agent for factories in the Rostov region of southern Russia. Between 1978 and 1990 he killed children, teenagers and young women, most of them near the railway and bus routes linking Shakhty, Novoshakhtinsk, Novocherkassk and Rostov-on-Don. He was charged with 53 murders, with other charges. The Rostov Regional Court convicted him of 52 in October 1992 and sentenced him to death. In 1993 the Supreme Court of Russia removed nine of those murders from the verdict for lack of proof and upheld the sentence on the rest, so that 43 murders stand as legally proven.
Membership appears in his story three times, and each time it is background. He joined the party in the years after his military service. In 1984 he was prosecuted for stealing a car battery from a former employer, and by Britannica’s account he was expelled from the party and sentenced to a year of corrective labor. He was released after about three months. RIA Novosti and Lenta.ru reported that he carried a card as a volunteer police auxiliary, which puts him alongside Mikhasevich in the same civic institution at the same time. And at his trial, Kommersant reported, he told the court that the crisis of world communism had driven him to kill and that he had wanted to become General Secretary of the Communist Party and President of the USSR. The court did not credit it as a defense; Judge Leonid Akubzhanov said he had "an iron psyche and nerves of steel."
He was arrested on November 20, 1990, in Novocherkassk. The trial opened on April 14, 1992. He was executed at Novocherkassk prison on February 14, 1994, after President Boris Yeltsin refused clemency. Nothing in the record shows that a party post or an elected seat protected him, or that he sought one. The party card was part of the picture of an ordinary Soviet life, and the one time he invoked politics he did so as a performance.
### Paul Ogorzow, Nazi Party and SA member
Paul Ogorzow worked for the Deutsche Reichsbahn, Germany’s state railway, on the S-Bahn line that runs east from Rummelsburg in Berlin. Between October 1940 and July 1941 he killed eight women and seriously injured six more, according to a 2026 account by t-online that draws on the files of the Berlin police history archive. Roger Moorhouse, who wrote that he rediscovered the case in the Berlin archives in 2008, records that Ogorzow admitted eight counts of murder and more than thirty counts of assault. The killings took place in a city kept dark at night by the wartime blackout.
Maulbeerblatt reports that in 1934 the Reichsbahn hired him as a track construction worker, that he was by then already a member of the Nazi Party, and that he had been in the SA, the party’s stormtroopers, since 1931, rising to the rank of Oberscharführer, a junior squad leader’s rank. He married and lived in Karlshorst with his wife and two children. Neighbors, the magazine writes, saw a man who tended a garden and grew vegetables.
His party membership surfaces in two places in the record. First, the regime kept his crimes out of the press while police searched for him, t-online reports. Second, the local Nazi Party organization set up an escort service for women who had to travel alone at night, Maulbeerblatt writes. In the Voigt case, the magazine notes, the man she had asked to walk her to the station was Ogorzow himself. The party’s own protective measure placed a member next to the woman it meant to protect.
Police tried decoys, with male officers dressed in women’s clothing riding the trains as bait, t-online reports. Maulbeerblatt says more than 5,000 workers of the Reichsbahn and the Rummelsburg depot were screened; the Maclean’s review of a book by Scott Andrew Selby puts the number of railway workers police went through at about 8,000. None of these measures caught him, t-online writes. The decisive lead came from an undercover officer of the criminal police. Maulbeerblatt describes how investigators went back over the night shift lists of the railwaymen, and a cleaner gave a vague tip about a switchman who had left his signal box during a shift. The switchman was Paul Ogorzow. He was arrested in the summer of 1941; Moorhouse writes that he was captured in July. The exact day has not been reported.
In his final statement, Maulbeerblatt reports, he blamed a Jewish doctor, who he said had treated an infection badly years before, for lasting harm to his state of mind, and he stressed that he was a party member. The magazine treats both claims as an attempt to save himself by appealing to the regime’s own prejudices. It is the one place in these cases where a man tries to spend a party card in court. He was executed at Plötzensee prison in Berlin on the day after he was sentenced, t-online reports; Maulbeerblatt gives the date as July 24, 1941.
Set side by side, the eight men give three different answers to the question of what public standing meant. Petiot and Slivko held elected posts, lost or kept them in very different ways, and in Slivko’s case the post is what he reached for when the police came. Severance and, in another register, Gohl show a politics of grievance: the first a rejected candidate who turned on the officials of a city, the second a union officer whom officials and employers set out to remove. Rader, Mikhasevich, Chikatilo and Ogorzow show standing of a quieter kind, where a church presidency, a party secretaryship or a membership card made the man look like the sort of person who is not asked questions.
None of this amounts to a pattern in the usual sense. Most of the men who held office in these accounts, and most of the men who stood for it, did nothing that would draw a second glance; these are eight cases, and that is the limit of what they can say. What they do show is how often the institutions around a killer, a council, a church, a police auxiliary, a party committee, were slower to doubt him than to protect their own name, and how often the price of that was paid by someone else.
• 1903 to 1910: Billy Gohl serves as agent of the Aberdeen branch of the Sailors' Union of the Pacific.
• May 1910: Gohl convicted of first-degree murder in Chehalis County and sentenced to life.
• 1926: Marcel Petiot elected mayor of Villeneuve-sur-Yonne (Britannica).
• 1930 to 1931: Petiot suspended, then removed, as mayor after a fraud conviction (Britannica).
• October 1940 to July 1941: the period of the killings for which Paul Ogorzow was convicted.
• July 1941: Ogorzow arrested; July 24, 1941: executed (Maulbeerblatt).
• March 1944: Petiot case comes to light in Paris. October 31, 1944: Petiot arrested.
• April 4, 1946: Petiot sentenced to death. May 25, 1946: executed.
• 1964 to 1985: the period of the seven killings for which Anatoly Slivko was convicted.
• 1971 to 1985: the period of the killings for which Gennady Mikhasevich was convicted.
• 1977: Slivko named an Honored Teacher of the RSFSR.
• 1978 to 1990: the period of the killings for which Andrei Chikatilo was convicted.
• 1985: Mikhasevich arrested (November or December; accounts differ).
• December 28, 1985: Slivko arrested in Nevinnomyssk.
• May 19, 1987: Mikhasevich sentenced to death.
• September 16, 1989: Slivko executed.
• November 20, 1990: Chikatilo arrested in Novocherkassk.
• October 15, 1992: Chikatilo convicted of 52 murders; February 14, 1994: executed.
• 1996 and 2000: Charles Severance stands for mayor of Alexandria, Virginia, and loses both times.
• December 5, 2003: the first of the three Alexandria killings.
• February 25, 2005: Dennis Rader arrested; June 27, 2005: pleads guilty to 10 counts; August 18, 2005: sentenced to 10 consecutive life terms.
• November 11, 2013, and February 6, 2014: the second and third Alexandria killings.
• March 13, 2014: Severance arrested in Wheeling, West Virginia; September 8, 2014: charged with the killings.
• November 2, 2015: Severance convicted; January 21, 2016: sentenced to three consecutive life terms plus 48 years.