In Belmont, California, in November 1981, the family of a missing 15-year-old printed flyers, and a young man who knew them well helped put them up. John Davies had been reported missing on November 8. Jon Scott Dunkle, then 21, came by on the Wednesday or Thursday after the report, the California Supreme Court later recorded, and then did not come back. Police at first treated John as a runaway. His parents searched for years. By the time Dunkle told FBI agents what the family did not know, he was in a state prison on an unrelated burglary conviction, and it was 1989 before a jury heard the case.
The seven cases here run across four continents and share one narrow fact: a person later convicted of causing the deaths took part, openly and in good standing, in the community’s response to the loss. Some handed out flyers or joined search parties. Some went to wakes and funerals. One, an accomplice, belongs at the edge of the group and gets an explanation of her own. What follows sets down what courts and newspapers say these people did, and how, afterward, it was noticed. Most people who join a search are what they appear to be, and nothing in these records suggests otherwise.
John Davies was the son of a family Dunkle knew well. In mid-1982 a Belmont detective began contacting Dunkle about the case, and by September 1984 the police were treating the disappearance as a possible kidnapping and had called in the FBI. That autumn, on October 2, 1984, Lance Turner, 12, of Belmont was killed. ABC7 in San Francisco reported that police suspected Dunkle for years, and that they placed an undercover officer at his workplace. The confessions came only when a cellmate went to investigators in September 1986. On October 3, 1986, Dunkle confessed to FBI agents at the state prison in San Luis Obispo. He also confessed to the July 1985 killing of Sean Dannehl, 12, in Sacramento.
His trial in San Mateo County began in October 1989. The jury convicted him of the first degree murder of John Davies and of Lance Turner, found a multiple-murder special circumstance true, and returned a verdict of death. The Dannehl killing was put before the jury at the penalty stage as aggravating evidence. Much of the case turned on his mind. Doctors disagreed sharply, from chronic schizophrenia to malingering, and a jury found him competent in 1989. When the California Supreme Court affirmed the judgment on August 4, 2005, it held that the trial court had erred in June 1988 by not opening new competency proceedings, but that the error did no harm because competency was tried again in 1989.
An undated report by Dan Noyes of the ABC7 I-Team describes Dunkle on death row at San Quentin, photographed at 52, with the sentence on hold because a federal judge had found him incompetent to assist in his own appeal. Dunkle sent the station a letter. The same reporting examined the disappearance of Kevin Collins, 10, in San Francisco. Dunkle has not been charged in that case and has denied involvement.
Between May 2005 and May 2006 three young women went missing from Cabecinha de Rei, a village in the municipality of Santa Comba Dão in central Portugal. Isabel Cristina Isidoro, reported as 17 although some reports gave 18, went missing on May 24, 2005. Mariana Lourenço, 18, followed. Joana Oliveira, reported as 17, went missing on May 8, 2006. Isabel Cristina’s parents did not report her missing, Lusa wrote, because they believed she had gone to France to work. Joana’s family put up posters and alerted the authorities.
Living near all three families was António Luís Costa, a retired corporal of the Guarda Nacional Republicana, the rural police force. Lusa reported that he had known the young women since they were children and was in almost daily contact with their families. He was married with two sons, took part in the local Benfica supporters' club and in pilgrimages to Fátima, and was well regarded, Correio da Manhã wrote. Correio da Manhã later reported that he took part in the searches for the missing young women, and TVI repeated it in 2021. When the news of his arrest broke, a 74-year-old neighbor told Lusa he was a very good person and that it sounded like a horror film. She added that when the Polícia Judiciária questioned her, she had suggested that an international kidnapping ring had taken the young women, a theory many in the village believed.
Three disappearances in about a year, of young women of similar age from one small area, led investigators to ask whether they were dealing with a serial killer. The Polícia Judiciária arrested Costa in June 2006, and he was brought before the Figueira da Foz court on June 23 and remanded in custody. He confessed to the police. At trial a year later he withdrew the confession, said he had been coerced and blamed an uncle of one of the victims. On July 31, 2007 the court convicted him of the three homicides, two of them qualified, along with concealment of a corpse, desecration of a corpse and other counts, ten in all, and sentenced him to 25 years, the maximum under Portuguese law. The court did not find Isabel Cristina’s homicide to be qualified, and it acquitted him on one of three concealment counts. The Coimbra Court of Appeal rejected his appeal in February 2008 and the Supreme Court of Justice confirmed the judgment in June 2008.
The town’s mourning came while he was already in custody. On July 6, 2006 Santa Comba Dão stopped for Isabel Cristina’s funeral: shops closed at 6 p.m., about 1,000 people filled the church and its surroundings, and the priest, Father Ricardo Ferreira, urged calm and named all three young women. The next day Mariana and Joana were laid to rest two hours apart before about 4,000 people, many of them young and dressed in white, Jornal de Notícias reported. Costa left prison for the first time on a three-day leave from May 31 to June 3, 2021. In August 2026 the Diário de Viseu, citing the broadcaster SIC, reported that he would be freed in April 2027.
Between 1986 and 1994 about 22 boys died on the Cape Flats, the working-class districts east of central Cape Town, in a series that has never been fully solved. In 1994 the police arrested Norman Afzal Simons, a teacher at a primary school in Mitchells Plain. He was tried in the Cape Supreme Court from early 1995 for the kidnapping and murder of one boy, Elroy van Rooyen, 10, of Strand, who went missing in March 1994. On June 14, 1995 Judge Wally van Deventer sentenced him to 25 years for the murder and 10 for the kidnapping, to run together. Simons appealed. In 1998 the Supreme Court of Appeal dismissed the appeal and raised the sentence to life, as a regional Correctional Services head confirmed in 2023.
The detail that bears on this theme came from a community leader years later. Norman Jantjies, who went on to chair the Mitchells Plain Community Police Forum, told the Cape Argus in 2023 that Simons had taught him isiXhosa and had joined the search parties looking for missing boys. Two or three days before the arrest, Jantjies said, he asked Simons whether he was the killer everyone was hunting, and Simons laughed it off. The Mail & Guardian, reporting the trial in 1995, described a teacher with a reputation as a scholar, who credited his calm in the dock to his "faith in the Lord," and wrote that vigilante gangs hunting the killer had brought Mitchells Plain close to anarchy around the time of the arrest. A sister of Neville Samaai, another boy in the series, told IOL in 2014 that Simons had been Neville’s teacher and that the family would never forgive him.
Simons has never been charged with, tried for or convicted of any other death. DNA from several of the other cases, tested years later, did not match him. Doubts about the one conviction have also been voiced in public. Tredoux, a researcher who studied the case with the Innocence Project in the United States, told the Weekend Argus in 2022 that the eyewitness evidence was "questionable and not reliable," and told the Saturday Star in 2023 that "both the eyewitness identification and the confession(s) have flaws in the Simons case." A former chairman of the community police forum, Michael Jacobs, argued that the man who fitted the profile owned a car while Simons used public transport. Those are views, not findings; the conviction stands. Simons was released on life parole on July 20, 2023, to house arrest with relatives in Parow. Families of other boys said they learned of the parole from television.
On the island of São Luís, in the northern Brazilian state of Maranhão, boys from poor families went missing over about a decade, and at first the cases looked unrelated. A children’s rights group, the Centro de Defesa Padre Marcos Passerini, began to catalogue them and, with Justiça Global, took them to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, arguing that police had failed poor children. Before the arrest, other men had been held over some of the deaths.
Francisco das Chagas Rodrigues de Brito was a bicycle mechanic whom neighbors knew, in Band’s account, as a helpful man people trusted. In February 2003 Daniel Ferreira Ribeiro, 4, went missing. Chagas made missing-person posters to help the search, and in December 2003, when a boy of 15 from São José de Ribamar went missing, he made posters for that search too. After Daniel’s father was briefly suspected, Chagas took part in a police reconstruction of the case and played the part of the father, Band reported. The police chief on the case, Sebastião Uchôa, told Band that Chagas had left what he called subjective traces. He had noticed a poster on a utility pole in the older boy’s neighborhood that looked like the one made for Daniel, and that turned his suspicion toward the mechanic.
In March 2004 a Maranhão court ordered Chagas held in preventive detention, and he has been held at the Pedrinhas complex in São Luís since. He confessed to 42 killings, 30 in Maranhão and 12 in Pará, where he had earlier lived and worked as a gold prospector in Altamira. Maranhão police attributed 30 deaths of children in their state to him. His first trial opened in October 2006, according to the legal news site ConJur. Juries in Maranhão then convicted him of homicide, with other charges, trial after trial: of Hermógenes Santos, 11, and Raimundo Luís Cordeiro, 10, in August 2009; of Ivanildo Póvoas Ferreira, 10, in March 2010; of Daniel in April 2011; of three boys aged 10, 11 and 12 at his eleventh trial in March 2014. The Ministério Público do Maranhão put the combined sentences at 580 years and 10 months in May 2018.
The Pará deaths were never tried against him. In December 2004 two men convicted in Pará asked the Supreme Federal Tribunal for release pending appeal, arguing that Chagas, a former Altamira resident, was the real culprit. The Pará killings remain attributed to him and not proven against him in court. Investigators told Band that a confession alone was never considered enough; they pointed to the common pattern of the crimes, the forensic findings and the posters. Of the cases here, this is the only one in which the record says the helping itself drew the investigators' attention.
Gilberto Antonio Chamba Jaramillo, a former Ecuadorian army corporal and taxi driver, confessed in 1993 to the killings of eight young women and girls, aged 14 to 22, in and around the coastal city of Machala between 1988 and 1993. Neighbors described him to El Telégrafo as a quiet man with a wife and children. The police set up a special team after the first deaths, El Telégrafo reported, and the killings went on for several more years. Both El Telégrafo and Infobae report that he attended the wakes of some of the victims and offered his condolences to their families as an acquaintance. Infobae adds that he knew some of the women before the deaths.
He was arrested in Machala in 1993 and sentenced to 16 years of reclusión mayor. Released in 2000 under a sentence-remission law, he left for Spain with a certificate showing no criminal record, and the authorities there granted him legal residence in 2001 without his Ecuadorian record in the file. In Lleida, Catalonia, he worked as a parking attendant. On November 23, 2004 María Isabel Bascuñana Royo, a 21-year-old law student at the University of Lleida, was killed. Chamba was first spoken to by the Mossos d’Esquadra, the Catalan police, as a witness. As usual, investigators looked first at the family and the people closest to her. Her friends changed the direction of the inquiry, Infobae and El Telégrafo reported: they said she had been uneasy about the way the attendant treated her, and that several young women who used the facility had received anonymous harassing calls after he asked for their phone numbers. He was arrested on December 1, 2004.
On November 6, 2006 the Audiencia Provincial de Lleida sentenced him to 45 years: 20 for the murder of María Isabel Bascuñana and 12 for a further charge, and 13 for the attempted murder, with a further charge, of a second woman in 2003. Segre reported that 25 years were to be served in effect, with a ten-year ban on living in or within 100 km of Lleida afterward. The Tribunal Supremo confirmed the conviction in 2007, EFE reported. In November 2024 he was in Quatre Camins prison; release was expected on November 29, 2029, when the Policía Nacional would open an expulsion file.
Christine Malèvre was a nurse on the neurology and pulmonology unit of the hospital in Mantes-la-Jolie, west of Paris, a unit where about 80 patients died each year, infirmiers.com reported. Former colleagues described to the Czech daily Novinky a nurse who got on well with her patients but whose attachment went too far. She was drawn into behavior highly unusual in a hospital, they said, and she regularly went to the funerals of patients who had died. The Southeast Missourian reported that what it called "excessive devotion to terminally ill patients" had begun to arouse suspicion within a year of her arrival.
In 1998 she told investigators that she had ended the lives of more than two dozen sick and dying patients, describing them as acts of mercy, United Press International reported. A few months later she changed her account: she had helped four patients die, she said, and only at their request. A judge placed her under formal investigation in July 1998, according to a statement to the National Assembly in February 1999. The Southeast Missourian said eleven deaths were examined and the charges in four were dropped for lack of evidence. Evidence at the first trial suggested that doctors on the unit knew of her suspect practices as early as 1997 and did nothing, infirmiers.com wrote.
The assize court of the Yvelines, sitting at Versailles, tried her for the murder of seven patients. In January 2003 it found her guilty of murder in the deaths of six who died on her ward in 1997 and 1998, found her not guilty of a seventh for insufficient evidence, and sentenced her to ten years' imprisonment and a ban on nursing. Prosecutors called her a serial killer, Novinky reported. The families said she had acted on her own, without any request. A lawyer for one family, Benoit Chabert, told the court she had a "perverted" relationship with her patients and a "morbid fascination" with death. A former nursing teacher saw a gifted student overwhelmed by a situation she could not cope with. Her statement about more than two dozen patients was never tested in court.
The case fed a national argument over euthanasia, sharpened in September 2003 when Vincent Humbert, a young quadriplegic, died after his mother helped him; Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin ruled out changing the law, infirmiers.com wrote. Malèvre’s second trial was set to open in Paris in early October 2003. As of October 1, 2003 she had been in custody since the first verdict and her requests for release had been refused.
Angela Johnson belongs at the edge of this group, and the difference should be plain. She was not a neighbor who joined a community search. In 1993 she helped her boyfriend, the methamphetamine maker Dustin Honken, kill five people in northern Iowa: Greg Nicholson, 34, and Terry DeGeus, 32, dealers who bought from Honken and were potential witnesses against him; Lori Duncan, 31, Nicholson’s girlfriend; and her daughters Kandi, 10, and Amber, 6. She was convicted as an aider and abettor. News reports say she did not fire the shots.
The Eighth Circuit, setting out evidence the jury could rely on, listed among it that she "joined the search for Nicholson." The court’s account is of a search conducted by the couple themselves: through June and July 1993 Honken and Johnson looked for Nicholson. The link to the theme is that the word is the same and the purpose opposite. DeGeus was killed in November 1993.
A federal jury in the Northern District of Iowa convicted her in 2005 on all ten counts, five of aiding and abetting murder in furtherance of a continuing criminal enterprise and five of murder in a drug conspiracy. It voted for death for the deaths of Lori, Kandi and Amber Duncan and of DeGeus, and for life for Nicholson. Judge Bennett formally imposed the sentence in December 2005, saying the law required him to follow the jury and that he was troubled by the lack of certainty in the record about exactly what she had done, Minnesota Lawyer reported. She called her trial a joke and said Honken had manipulated her. On July 30, 2007 the Eighth Circuit affirmed almost everything, but vacated five duplicate conspiracy convictions. In March 2012 a judge vacated her death sentence because her lawyers had been ineffective at the penalty phase; the convictions were left standing. She was reported in July 2020 to be serving a life sentence in a federal prison in Minnesota. Honken was executed by the federal government on July 17, 2020.
Set side by side, the accounts show how little the helping itself proved. In São Luís alone does the record say that a detail of the participation, the posters, steered a detective toward the man. In Belmont the police had suspected Dunkle for years before a cellmate came forward. In Santa Comba Dão the newspapers mentioned his part in the searches after the arrest, and in Cape Town a community leader recalled it nearly three decades later. In Mantes-la-Jolie colleagues described the nurse’s funeral attendance at her trial, and the wakes in Machala were recorded in retrospective accounts published years after the sentence.
Only the Iowa opinion lists a search among the evidence a jury could rely on, and that search was the accomplices' own. The records say nothing about how many volunteers who stood in the same crowds were exactly what they seemed. They name only the ones who were later convicted.
• 1981, November 8: John Davies, 15, is reported missing in Belmont, California; Dunkle helps the family with flyers.
• 1986, October 3: Dunkle confesses to FBI agents at the state prison in San Luis Obispo.
• 1988 to 1993: eight young women and girls killed around Machala, Ecuador; Chamba attends wakes. 1993: arrested and sentenced to 16 years.
• 1989, October: Dunkle’s trial begins in San Mateo County.
• 1993, July and November: the Iowa killings; Johnson joins the search for Nicholson in June and July.
• 1994: Simons arrested in Cape Town; Elroy van Rooyen, 10, has gone missing in March.
• 1995, June 14: Simons sentenced to 25 years and 10 years, concurrent. 1998: raised to life on appeal.
• 1997 to 1998: the deaths on Malèvre’s ward in Mantes-la-Jolie. 1998, July: formal investigation opens.
• 2000: Chamba freed in Ecuador and leaves for Spain.
• 2003, January: Malèvre convicted of six murders at Versailles, ten years. October: appeal trial set for Paris.
• 2003, February: Daniel Ferreira Ribeiro, 4, goes missing near São Luís; Chagas makes posters. December: a boy of 15 goes missing; more posters.
• 2004, March: Chagas ordered held in preventive detention.
• 2004, November 23: María Isabel Bascuñana Royo, 21, is killed in Lleida; Chamba arrested December 1.
• 2005 to 2006: three young women go missing from Cabecinha de Rei, May 2005 to May 2006; Costa arrested June 2006; funerals July 6 and 7.
• 2005, August 4: the California Supreme Court affirms Dunkle’s death judgment.
• 2005, December: Johnson formally sentenced to death in Iowa.
• 2006, November 6: Chamba sentenced to 45 years in Lleida.
• 2007, July 30: the Eighth Circuit affirms Johnson’s convictions, vacating five duplicate counts.
• 2007, July 31: Costa convicted and sentenced to 25 years.
• 2009 to 2014: Chagas convicted in successive jury trials.
• 2012, March: Johnson’s death sentence vacated.
• 2020, July 17: Honken executed.
• 2021, May 31: Costa’s first leave. 2023, July 20: Simons released on life parole.
• 2024, November: Chamba in Quatre Camins; release expected 2029.
• 2026, August 31: report that Costa will be freed in April 2027.