A second family is a logistical achievement before it is anything else. Someone has to carry two sets of names, two sets of dates, two sets of stories about where a husband goes on a Tuesday. The killers here managed it for years. In several of the cases the structure came apart through an ordinary person with a single piece of information: a father who read a newspaper, a pastor who kept a photograph, a sister who recognized a face in a shop, a telephone booth.
The cases run from Victorian Durham to Delhi in the 2020s. Their shapes differ. Some of these killers kept a lawful family and a concealed one; some had only a succession of bigamous marriages; one had a church. What they share is the discipline of the separation.
Mohan Kumar was a former government school teacher from Kanyana, in Bantwal taluk, Dakshina Kannada district of Karnataka, who, according to police and a long run of court findings, courted young women under false names and promised to marry them. He was 46 when Dakshina Kannada police arrested him on October 21, 2009, at Deralakatte near Mangaluru, after a special team traced a missing 22-year-old woman’s telephone. The women who died in the cases that reached court died in towns far from their own, and their deaths were recorded at the time as suicides or unexplained. Nobody connected them until 2009.
His own domestic arrangements were as divided as the lives he built for the women. He married three times. According to Open, he divorced his first wife in the early 1990s and then kept two households in different towns, with a second wife and their two daughters in one, and a third wife and their two sons in the other; neither woman knew about the other. In 2017 he told the Karnataka High Court that he had divorced his first wife, that his third wife had filed for divorce, and that he still had to support his second wife. At his arrest he was living with the third wife at Deralakatte, the Deccan Herald reported. The High Court record lists fake rubber stamps and identity cards in various names among the items recovered from the house of his second wife.
The separation worked for the same reason the false names worked. He introduced himself to the women as Sudhakar, Sudhakar Acharya, Sudhakar Kulal, Sudhakar Gowda, Shashidhar, Shashidhar Poojary, Ananda, Rajesh K and Sundar Rai, among others, and presented himself variously as an insurance employee, a forest department official and an officer of public bodies, according to reports of individual trials and Open. Police recovered fake rubber stamps, letterheads, visiting cards and identity cards in several names. The pattern, as trial courts accepted it in case after case, was consistent: unmarried women, often from poor families, who had passed the age at which their families expected them to marry or whose families could not pay a dowry, and an offer of marriage without one. Open reported that he watched their routines before approaching them. Once a woman agreed, he persuaded her to leave quietly, often wearing her gold jewelry and carrying cash, and took her to a town several hours away.
The Deccan Herald’s first report on his arrest gave the explanation police heard from him for how he turned to crime: an abdominal growth that needed surgery costing about 50,000 rupees, a resignation, the sale of land, and then money trouble. The explanation is his own, relayed by police.
Police said within a day of the arrest that he had been linked to 18 young women, five of them from Kasaragod in Kerala. A week later the Deccan Herald reported that he had admitted to Mysuru police that he had killed nine women in that city alone. Those figures, and later police and press figures of 30 or more victims, are attributions and not court findings. In the case of a 25-year-old cook from Kasaragod who died in Bengaluru in July 2009, her sister recognized him from photographs and filed a complaint, after which the state Criminal Investigation Department took over the case, PTI reported.
Prosecutors brought about 20 separate cases, and sessions courts in Mangaluru tried them one at a time over the next decade, often with Kumar acting as his own lawyer and appearing by video link from prison. Death sentences came in December 2013 in three cases and in October and November 2019 in two more, by press accounts. The press has called the result 20 convictions, with a conviction in the twentieth and last murder case reported in June 2020, but the court record is more mixed. In October and November 2017 the Karnataka High Court confirmed one death sentence, that for the killing of a 30-year-old woman from Sullia taluk in Mysuru in February 2008; upheld a murder conviction but commuted the death sentence to life without remission for a 22-year-old woman from Bantwal taluk who died in Hassan in June 2009; and set aside the murder conviction in the case of a 32-year-old woman from Belthangady taluk who died in Mysuru in September 2005, keeping only a robbery conviction, because the evidence did not prove he was with her when she died. A trial court acquitted him in the case of a woman who died at Kollur in November 2006, and on August 17, 2026 the High Court upheld that acquittal. Two surviving women testified about his methods and his false names. No Supreme Court ruling and no High Court ruling on the 2019 death sentences had been reported as of October 2026. He was held at Hindalga Central Prison in Belagavi, according to 2019 reports, and was in custody on August 17, 2026.
Herman Webster Mudgett, who called himself H. H. Holmes, was convicted of one murder. A Philadelphia jury convicted him in November 1895 of killing Benjamin F. Pitezel, a carpenter who had worked for him for years and had joined him in a scheme to cheat a life insurance company. The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania affirmed the verdict on March 4, 1896, and Holmes was executed at Moyamensing Prison on May 7, 1896.
What the court record makes plain, and what most retellings skip, is how many wives he had. By the time he left New Hampshire he was married. The court record of his trial shows a wife in Gilmanton, and Judge Michael Arnold, ruling on the motion for a new trial in November 1895, held that his earlier marriages, in New Hampshire and in Illinois, made his later marriage to Georgiana Yoke void. At the hearing on that motion the prosecution produced an affidavit from the Gilmanton wife saying that Holmes had resumed relations with her during his travels with Carrie Pitezel and Georgiana Yoke.
Holmes had a second household north of Chicago. He married Myrta Belknap of Wilmette, the daughter of John Belknap, who ran an express business in the village, and they had a daughter, Lucy. In 1892 Holmes built a Queen Anne duplex with turrets flanking a central porch for Myrta, Lucy and her parents, according to records of the Wilmette Historical Museum. He appears in only two Wilmette directories, 1892 and 1894, and was rarely there. After his arrest, reporters tried without success to interview Myrta. She and Lucy stayed in Wilmette for a couple of years after his execution, the house was sold at auction, and both became teachers. Myrta never remarried and died in 1924; Lucy died in Los Angeles in 1956. The house, later an inn and then an apartment building, was demolished in 1997.
At the November 1895 hearing the prosecution produced letters from Holmes acknowledging a marriage and a record that he had filed for divorce in Chicago. In a letter read at the trial, he wrote to an insurance agent that his wife had told him the agent had called on her about Pitezel; the Supreme Court cited it as proof that he had a wife living in Illinois as Mrs. Holmes. In January 1894, in Denver, he married Georgiana Yoke before a clergyman, using the name Howard. She testified at his trial that she lived with him as his wife until about the following November. Before his arrest she had learned that he had married a woman in Gilmanton, whom she understood to be living, and she had heard of a woman in Wilmette, though she did not understand that he was lawfully married to her. Holmes told her he had been informed that the Gilmanton woman was dead, the Supreme Court recorded.
His insurance scheme came apart because a jailed train robber said Holmes had cheated him of a promised 500 dollars, and a Philadelphia detective then traced three missing children, those of Pitezel, to Toronto and Indiana. Holmes was arrested in Boston on November 17, 1894, on a telegram from Fort Worth, Texas, charging horse stealing; the insurance fraud charge followed. He was tried for Pitezel’s death alone. The deaths of Pitezel’s three children were attributed to him by investigators and never tried, and the trial judge excluded that evidence.
The rest of his reputation rests on other kinds of evidence. Several women and a child who had been close to him in Chicago disappeared between 1891 and 1893; he was suspected and never charged. In the spring of 1896, while awaiting execution, he sold a confession to 27 murders; some of the people he named in it were still alive, and on the gallows he denied killing any member of the Pitezel family. Most of what is told about his Chicago building, the "Murder Castle," came from a few weeks of newspaper reports in the summer of 1895. Adam Selzer, a Chicago historian whose 2017 book is built on the primary records, argues that the building "never for one day truly functioned as a hotel," and Smithsonian magazine, summarizing his work in 2021, reported that the third floor was never finished, furnished or opened. Historians who have gone back to the records accept far smaller numbers than the hundreds of victims claimed in later books and broadcasts.
George Joseph Smith was executed at Maidstone Prison in Kent on August 13, 1915. A jury at the Central Criminal Court in London, the Old Bailey, had convicted him of murdering Bessie Mundy, who died in 1912 while living with him under a false name. He was tried for her death alone. The prosecution was also allowed to put before the jury the deaths of two later wives, Alice Burnham in 1913 and Margaret Elizabeth Lofty in 1914, as similar-fact evidence, to show a pattern; Smith was never tried for them, and they are not convictions.
He was born in 1872, according to Andrew Maunder’s account for the University of Hertfordshire’s Everyday Lives in War project, which describes him as a bigamist and a forger. History Today says he married at least eight times and that every marriage after the first was bigamous. He used a series of aliases, gained women’s trust, took their money and moved on. To account for his long absences, History Today says, he told one wife in 1908 that he was an antiques dealer who had to travel on business. A legal newsletter discussing the case in 2012 counted seven bigamous marriages and said he deserted each bride once he had her money. The Camden New Journal, writing in 2008, described him as a failed property speculator and estate agent who had defrauded seven other wives besides the three who died.
Bessie Mundy had already been one of Smith’s bigamous wives, according to the 2012 legal commentary by Kamraj Nayagam, and she met him again by chance. Nayagam suggested that Smith may have killed her partly to cover his tracks. The Camden New Journal says Smith used the name Williams with her. Alice Burnham married Smith in 1913, according to Maunder, and died the same year at Blackpool on the Lancashire coast; her father had distrusted Smith from the start. Margaret Lofty was 38 and unmarried when she met Smith, the Camden New Journal reported; after a short courtship she married him, and he was using the name John Lloyd. She drew her savings out of the post office and had a will drawn up with a solicitor; on December 18, 1914, Maunder says, she made a will in Smith’s favor. She died that evening at Highgate in north London.
History Today sets out the pattern the prosecution relied on. Each woman had made Smith her beneficiary, either in a will or through a life insurance policy. He moved each one to a town where she knew nobody and told a local doctor she had a health problem. What joined the deaths was a newspaper. The News of the World reported Margaret Lofty’s death on January 3, 1915, according to Maunder. Alice Burnham’s father read the report of the inquest, saw how closely it matched his daughter’s death at Blackpool a year earlier, and went to the police. The Blackpool landlady’s household also contacted the police. Smith was arrested in 1915 by police who were waiting at a solicitor’s office where he had gone over insurance money due on Margaret Lofty’s death.
The trial took place at the Old Bailey in June 1915. Maunder writes that 112 witnesses were called. J. M. S. Pearce, writing in Hektoen International in 2023, says that the pathologist Bernard Spilsbury rejected the defense’s explanations of accident or illness and credits his courtroom demonstration with persuading the jury. Smith was sentenced to death on July 1, 1915, and his appeal was dismissed; it is reported as R v Smith [1914 to 1915] All ER Rep 262 and is still cited in textbooks, Nayagam notes, as an authority on when evidence of other similar events may be shown to a jury.
On January 12, 1905, a woman named Marie Walcker died in Chicago about a month after her wedding. Her husband, a German immigrant who called himself Johann Hoch, was courting her sister within hours and married her a few days later. He borrowed 750 dollars from the new bride and disappeared. Hoch was arrested at a Manhattan boardinghouse on January 30, 1905, where he was living as Henry Bartels, brought back to Chicago, and tried from April 19, 1905. A jury convicted him a month later of his wife’s murder, and he was executed at the Cook County jail on February 23, 1906.
That one conviction is the whole of his legal record for killing. The rest of what is said about him rests on the work of police, reporters and one persistent pastor, who traced a man of many names through marriages, desertions and deaths across the Midwest over about ten years. In 1964 American Heritage put the number of women he married at roughly 43 to 50 and wrote that about a third of them had been killed, conceding that the true figure was unknown. A Chicago Daily News photograph caption from February 1905 described him more cautiously, as accused of bigamy with between 11 and 23 wives and suspected of killing six of them.
Johann Hoch was the name he died under, but not the name he was born with. When a pastor in Wheeling, West Virginia, wrote to Germany in 1898 asking who the man was, a prosecutor in Mainz replied that he was a merchant called Jacob Schmidt, born November 10, 1862, at Herrweiler near Bingen on the Rhine, who had left Germany on January 5, 1895 while a warrant for fraudulent bankruptcy was out against him. That is A. I. Schutzer’s account in American Heritage. A 2020 history of the Wheeling case by Will Wallace for the news site Weelunk gives a different version: that he was born John Schmidt at Horweiler in 1855 and came to the United States in 1883. American Heritage counted about eighteen American names, among them Jacob Schmidt, Albert Huschberg, Count Otto von Kern, Jacob Erdorf, Dr. Hart, Martin Dotz, Jacob Huff and Henry Bartels. He often took the surname of a woman’s previous husband. A Chicago furniture dealer later gave police his records, which ran from June 1891: each new household was furnished under a new name, often that of a dead husband.
Early in February 1895 a man calling himself Jacob Huff opened a saloon in Wheeling and began courting well-off German-speaking widows, some of them members of the congregation of the Rev. Herman C. A. Haass of St. Matthew’s German Lutheran Church. Haass advised caution. One of the widows, Caroline Hoch, married Huff anyway, on April 18, 1895. It was her married name that he would later adopt as his own. She fell ill soon after the wedding; her doctor believed she had a kidney disease, and she died on June 15, 1895. Haass came to suspect Huff, American Heritage reported.
Huff then staged his own death. By the end of June, Weelunk reported, his belongings with a suicide note had been placed on the shore of the Ohio River. Witnesses later said that a man who looked like Huff bought a train ticket to Chicago at Bellaire, Ohio. Weelunk wrote that he had emptied his wife’s bank account, sold her house and collected her life insurance. Inside a watch left behind was his photograph. That picture became the pastor’s most important evidence.
Haass did not let the matter drop. In the years after 1895 he read obituaries, marriage notices and personal advertisements from across the country, looking for a man who married quickly and moved on; Weelunk compared the matrimonial advertisements he studied to a modern dating app. In 1898 Chicago police arrested a man calling himself Martin Dotz on charges of bigamy and fraud. Haass saw that the description fit and wrote to the chief of detectives, Luke Colleran, enclosing the photograph. Inspector George Shippy showed it to the prisoner, who admitted that it was his picture but denied ever having been in Wheeling. In a letter dated November 1, 1898, Colleran identified the prisoner as Jacob Adolph Hoch, serving a year for bigamy under the name Dotz or Doesing, and urged that he be indicted for murder in Wheeling. The case stalled for want of evidence. He was taken to Wheeling on June 30, 1900 and was freed about two weeks later. No charge in Caroline Hoch’s death was ever tried.
Afterward the trail runs through San Francisco, where he obtained a mail-order diploma in hypnotism, and through St. Paul and Milwaukee, where in 1903 he married as Dr. G. L. Hart. Marie Walcker’s death in Chicago ended it: an examination of her body led to his arrest in New York.
In the spring of 1920 a man held in a Los Angeles hospital ward, shackled to the bed after trying to take his own life, became the center of a case The Spokesman-Review called "the most sensational of its kind in the history of the country." The Spokane papers called him "Bluebeard" Huirt. The name on his marriage certificates changed from one bride to the next: Charles Newton Harvey, Harry M. Lewis, Lawrence Gordon, Milton Lewis, Walter Andrew Watson. Police could not settle his real name. He was sentenced as James P. Watson, and that is the name the record keeps.
Over the following weeks he admitted marrying at least 20 women and confessed to killing several of them. In May 1920 he pleaded guilty in Los Angeles to the first-degree murder of one wife, Nina Lee Deloney of Eureka, Montana, under an arrangement that spared him the gallows, and Judge Frank R. Willis sentenced him to life in San Quentin. UCLA Library’s catalog records that he died there in 1939. That one guilty plea is his only conviction. The killings of Elizabeth Prior and Bertha Goodnich of Spokane, Alice Ludvigson of Seattle, and a wife married in Tacoma whom he did not name were confessed and never tried; Agnes Wilson of Edmonton was reported as apparently confessed, never tried. In 1920 the Los Angeles district attorney believed he had killed as many as five more women than he had confessed to.
The separation was simple: distance. Letters, wives' statements and his own confessions showed that he met women through correspondence, courted them quickly, married them under one of his false names and asked for their money. He was away for weeks at a time, and he kept wives in different cities at once; Canadian investigators in 1920 said he had maintained wives in Edmonton, Seattle and California. Letters he wrote under the name Lawrence Gordon to a Spokane woman, released by the Spokane branch of the Burns Detective Agency, showed how he kept a courtship going from a distance. Writing from California in February 1920, he told her: "Sweetheart, I have $3,000 transferred to me from Canada." He asked her not to tell her friends she was coming to join him so that they could be surprised by an announcement from California, and he kept putting off the "wonderful trip" he had promised. His last letter said: "Sweetheart, I have to make one more inland trip." He was arrested in Los Angeles the next day.
Two of his Spokane wives, comparing notes in Los Angeles in April 1920, noticed that he had never called either of them by her first name. One suggested that he had avoided first names on purpose, since with so many wives he "might have got them mixed and made no end of trouble for himself." When a wife vanished, her family and friends heard from her by typewritten letter. Elizabeth Prior’s landlady received a typed letter describing travel and a planned move to California; Bertha Goodnich’s relatives received one saying she planned to emigrate to Australia, and found it strange that even her signature was typed; Agnes Wilson’s sister received a typewritten letter in the spring of 1919 that seemed to come from Agnes. Watson had written them himself.
It came apart through the newest wife. Her suspicion of his long absences led her to hire private detectives, and she told police on what day he had promised to come home. He was in custody by April 15, 1920, first held on suspicion of attempted bank robbery, then on bigamy and murder. Nina Lee Deloney, according to the transcript of his confession, had discovered letters showing that he had another wife, a Spokane widow, and told him she would have him arrested as soon as she could find an officer. He then killed her. The Spokane widow whose letters Deloney had seen was in Los Angeles helping the police when the confession was released; she believed she had been saved by chance.
After sentencing he said his true surname was Holden. He had claimed to be the tool of "a gang of men near Kansas City" who robbed women through bigamous marriages, and to have been a patient in an Ohio insane asylum. None of these claims was confirmed.
Mary Ann Cotton was executed at Durham County Gaol on March 24, 1873, for the murder of her stepson, Charles Edward Cotton, who died at West Auckland, County Durham, in the summer of 1872. A jury at the Durham Assizes convicted her after 50 minutes. It was the only killing for which she was ever tried.
By the time of her arrest she had been married four times, the fourth time while her third husband was still alive, and had moved from one pit village and shipbuilding town to another across the North East. Husbands, children, stepchildren, her own mother, a sister-in-law and a lover had died around her, many of them insured. After her arrest the police had three more West Auckland deaths examined, and she was charged with those deaths too, but the Crown proceeded on Charles’s case alone. Beamish, the open-air museum of the North East, says she may have had as many as 21 victims; a 2013 review by Joanne Pearman says the total is unknown. Almost all of that rests on suspicion, inquest records and later research, not on a court’s finding. The earlier deaths were certified as natural at the time, several as gastric fever, and no inquest finding against her in any of them has been reported.
The bigamy is the second life in this case. At 20 she married William Mowbray and left home. After his death she worked as a nurse at the Sunderland Infirmary, where she met a patient, George Ward, and married him; Ward died 14 months after the wedding, Durham University Library says. She then kept house for James Robinson, married him, and had two children with him. The marriage was unhappy. She ran up debts and argued with her husband, and at one point she suggested that he take out insurance on his own life. He refused, and she left. Robinson outlived her. In her last weeks she wrote to him three times, the Northern Echo reported, asking him to visit and to organize a petition to save her life. He did not come.
In 1870 Margaret Cotton introduced Mary Ann to her brother Frederick, a widower. Margaret Cotton died soon afterward. In September 1870, while pregnant, Mary Ann married Frederick Cotton. The marriage was bigamous, because she was still legally married to Robinson. A week after the wedding, the library says, she insured Frederick and his two surviving sons. The family moved to West Auckland, and a little over a year after the wedding Frederick Cotton fell ill and died.
It came apart in 1872 when a parish official asked her to nurse a smallpox patient. She said she could not because of her stepson, and suggested she would not be troubled with him long; days later the boy was dead, and the official went to the police. The trial was held at the Durham Assizes in March 1873. Before the execution, the Reverend Mr. Mountford told the Echo that she said she was responsible for the child’s death but not intentionally; when pressed for more she said nothing further.
Henri Désiré Landru was convicted in November 1921 of murdering ten women and the teenage son of one of them. The killings took place between early 1915 and January 1919, while France was at war, at two rented houses west of Paris, at Vernouillet and Gambais. Landru was a 52-year-old married father of four and a fraudster with a long record. He met the women through marriage advertisements, presented himself as a widower of some means, and took their savings and furniture. The assize court of Seine-et-Oise at Versailles sentenced him to death on November 30, 1921, and he was executed at Versailles on February 25, 1922.
In 1893 he had married Marie-Catherine Rémy, and the couple had four children. His family, according to Herodote, believed he dealt in secondhand goods. RTBF reports that he kept his wife and children in reasonable comfort. The historian Bruno Fuligni, speaking on the French public broadcaster France Bleu, said he presented himself as an engineer but was closer to a garage mechanic: "Il se prétendait ingénieur, il était plutôt garagiste." In 1899 he built a prototype motorized bicycle, France Bleu reports, and used it to attract investors, whom he then defrauded.
From the start of the century Landru moved in and out of prison. Herodote records prison terms for fraud in 1904, 1906 and 1909. To avoid heavy penal sentences he lived under false names from then on; the French police later counted more than 90 of them. Criminocorpus puts the number of women he dealt with between 1914 and 1919 at 283. The method, as the Criminocorpus notice and Infosyvelines describe it, ran in stages: contact through the advertisements, courtship as a prosperous widower, a promise of marriage, the transfer of some or all of her savings, a rented house away from family and neighbors. The Criminocorpus notice says he took 35,600 francs from the women in all. France Bleu adds that he had some of them sign powers of attorney.
The separation broke when a sister of one of the missing women recognized him in a Paris shop, a story told slightly differently by RTBF and Criminocorpus. She telephoned Inspector Jules Belin, and inquiries at the store showed that the man had ordered a large set of tableware under the name Lucien Guillet. He was arrested on April 12, 1919 in Paris, first on charges of fraud and breach of trust. Belin seized a small notebook in his hand. Herodote says it listed the names of eleven victims; RTBF describes notebooks that recorded dates and times matching the disappearances, together with ordinary expenses, among them the fares to Gambais: a return ticket for himself and a single ticket for the woman traveling with him.
The case against him rested on the notebook, on the missing women’s belongings in his possession, on the testimony of their families and neighbors, and on physical evidence recovered at the house at Gambais. He never confessed. The historian Richard Tomlinson, summarized by Connexion, says a police record showed 72 other women who had been in contact with Landru and were never traced, and stresses that this does not mean Landru killed them. He also argues that the notebook was not a full record. The investigation lasted about two and a half years, according to Herodote and RTBF.
Gary Lee Schaefer was an auto mechanic in Springfield, Vermont, a Navy veteran and a member of a churchgoing family when he was arrested in April 1983, soon after the death of an 11-year-old Springfield girl. He was convicted of her murder, with other charges, on a plea of no contest and sentenced to 30 years to life.
His family belonged to the Christadelphian Church of Springfield, and the Bennington Banner reported that he and his family were active members. The forensic psychologist Tom Powell, interviewed by WCAX in 2023, described him as a fundamentalist Christian who led a double life and fooled his congregation. "He was able to convince members of his congregation he was a good guy, he was helpful, pious, honest," Powell said. "And, of course, nobody knew his secret." Powell also pointed to a pattern in Schaefer’s past before 1983, including arson and a kidnapping charge.
Three Springfield girls, aged 13, 12 and 11, died between 1979 and 1983. Only one case ended in a conviction. In 1985 prosecutors dropped a first-degree murder charge in the 1979 case after his confession to police there was ruled inadmissible. Under his plea agreement he confessed to the killing of the 12-year-old in August 1981, and was not prosecuted for it. He was also reported as a suspect in a November 1982 kidnapping in which the person taken escaped. From May 1985 he was held at the Kentucky State Penitentiary in Eddyville under the U.S. Interstate Corrections Compact. He had served his minimum term but was not eligible for release because he had not completed required treatment programs. He was found during a routine cell check shortly after midnight on November 26, 2023, having an acute medical event, and died at a hospital aged 72; the Vermont Department of Corrections said the death did not appear suspicious.
His is the thinnest of these cases. There was no second household and no false name in the record; the second life was the distance between what his congregation saw and what the courts later established.
Chandrakant Jha was a vegetable hawker from the village of Ghasi in Madhepura district, Bihar, who lived and worked in north Delhi. Between October 2006 and May 2007 three young men were killed in the city, most of the cases in west Delhi. With them came handwritten letters in Hindi that mocked the Delhi Police and promised more deaths. Jha was arrested on May 20, 2007 in Alipur, north Delhi, on an informer’s tip. In January 2013 a Delhi sessions court convicted him of all three murders and of causing evidence of the crimes to disappear.
He married twice. Both The Tribune and WION reported that he left his first wife within a year and that he had five daughters with his second wife, though WION added that he mostly lived apart from his family. Court records from his tenancy years show something more settled for at least part of that time. A landlord in Haiderpur, a neighborhood in northwest Delhi, testified that Jha rented a room from him in 2006, said he did vegetable work at Azadpur Mandi, and lived there with his wife and five children, one of whom was born in that room. His mother also stayed with the family for a time. In its 2016 judgment the High Court summed up what the record said about him: he earned his living as a vegetable vendor, he was a family man with children, and he had earlier been tried and acquitted in a murder case.
The police account given to the Press Trust of India in 2025 puts his first killing in 1998, a man named Mangal, also called Aurangzeb. Jha was arrested that year and held for about four years, then released in 2002. That killing, and those of Shekhar (June 2003), Umesh (November 2003) and Guddu (November 2005), remain killings attributed to him by police and not proved crimes; police put the total at seven.
The man at the center of the 2006 case was Anil Mandal, also known as Amit, from Bhagalpur district, Bihar. His identity was established in steps: a first DNA test excluded a couple named in early leads as his parents, police then matched fingerprint records, his widow identified him from a police photograph, and a later DNA test matched samples to his daughter. A handwritten letter in Hindi had come with the body, taunting the police and reading as a confession. The call to the police about it was traced to a public phone booth, and the booth operator later identified Jha in court as the man who had made it. A second letter, which the courts linked to the April 2007 case, named two police officers, warned that more killings would follow, and was signed "CC." In the third case, May 2007, police named the dead man as Dilip, but no relative was ever found and both the trial court and the High Court held that his identity had not been established. A letter in green ink confessed to that killing and two earlier ones and claimed the writer killed "7-8" people a year. The High Court treated the letter as the thread that tied the three cases together, but did not accept the boast as proved.
The defense contested almost everything: the recoveries, the identification, the handwriting, the chain of custody of the samples. It pointed out that the Haiderpur landlord had no written rent agreement or receipts. Jha’s wife testified as a defense witness. The trial court announced its judgment on January 24, 2013. Sentences followed on February 4, 5 and 6, 2013: life imprisonment for the rest of his life in the unidentified man’s case and death in the cases of Upender and Anil Mandal, each with seven years for destroying evidence. On January 27, 2016 the Delhi High Court upheld all three convictions and commuted both death sentences to imprisonment for the rest of his natural life without remission.
The family appears again in the parole record. In a petition decided on August 16, 2023, his lawyer told the Delhi High Court that he had served more than 15 years and six months, that his eldest daughter was of marriageable age and that there was no other adult man in the family to find her a husband. A police status report recorded that one of his five daughters had died in 2019 and that his wife and four daughters were living as tenants in Alipur. Justice Rajnish Bhatnagar noted his five earlier paroles and seven furloughs without misuse and granted 90 days' parole in October 2023, with conditions including a weekly report to the Hari Nagar police station. Earlier petitions had failed: in February 2022 Justice Chandra Dhari Singh dismissed one for three months' parole, noting that he faced ten other cases and that the rules bar parole for prisoners convicted of more than one murder except in special circumstances. Jha did not surrender at the end of the parole period. He was rearrested on January 17, 2025 at Old Delhi Railway Station by the Delhi Police Crime Branch, after more than a year on the run, and was reported to be serving his life term.
The structures differ more than the outcomes do. Holmes and Mohan Kumar kept actual second households in separate towns, and in each case the second household handed investigators documents: in Holmes’s, an affidavit and a court’s ruling on his marriages; in Kumar’s, a cache of false identity papers at the second wife’s house. Smith, Hoch, Watson and Landru kept a sequence of marriages, each sealed from the next by distance and a new name. In each of those cases the end came from someone outside the household who compared notes: a father, a pastor, a sister, a newest wife. Cotton’s second life was a bigamous marriage, Jha’s a household that his own parole petitions ended up describing, and Schaefer’s a congregation.
The record is uneven. Holmes, Smith, Hoch and Cotton were each convicted of a single death, Watson on a single plea, and the larger numbers attached to them rest on suspicion, confession or later research and not on verdicts. Landru was convicted of eleven. Kumar’s total is a matter on which the press and the court record disagree.
• 1832: Mary Ann Cotton born at Low Moorsley, County Durham.
• 1862: Jacob Schmidt, whom American Heritage identifies as the later Johann Hoch, born November 10 (disputed).
• 1869: Henri Désiré Landru born in Paris, April 12.
• 1870: Mary Ann Cotton marries Frederick Cotton in September while still married to James Robinson.
• 1872: Death of Charles Edward Cotton at West Auckland.
• 1873: Cotton executed at Durham, March 24.
• 1881: Hoch’s first marriage in Vienna, per American Heritage.
• 1892: Holmes builds the Wilmette duplex for Myrta Belknap, their daughter and her parents.
• 1893: Landru marries Marie-Catherine Rémy.
• 1894: Holmes marries Georgiana Yoke in Denver, January; arrested in Boston, November 17.
• 1895: Caroline Hoch dies at Wheeling, June 15, and Hoch flees Wheeling; Holmes convicted, November.
• 1896: Holmes executed, May 7.
• 1898: Wheeling pastor writes to Chicago police and to Germany.
• 1905: Marie Walcker dies, January 12; Hoch arrested in New York, January 30.
• 1906: Hoch executed, February 23.
• 1912: Bessie Mundy dies.
• 1913: Alice Burnham dies at Blackpool.
• 1914: Margaret Lofty dies at Highgate, December 18.
• 1915: Smith arrested; sentenced to death July 1; executed August 13.
• 1915 to 1919: Landru’s wartime marriage-advertisement correspondence; arrested April 12, 1919.
• 1920: Watson in custody by April 15; pleads guilty in May.
• 1921: Landru sentenced to death, November 30.
• 1922: Landru executed, February 25.
• 1979 to 1983: Three Springfield, Vermont, girls die; Schaefer arrested April 1983.
• 1998: First killing attributed by police to Chandrakant Jha.
• 2006 to 2007: Delhi cases; Jha arrested May 20, 2007.
• 2009: Mohan Kumar arrested October 21.
• 2013: Jha convicted and sentenced; Kumar’s first death sentences, December.
• 2016: Delhi High Court commutes Jha’s death sentences, January 27.
• 2017: Karnataka High Court rules on three of Kumar’s cases.
• 2020: Kumar convicted in the twentieth case, June.
• 2023: Jha granted parole; Schaefer dies, November 26.
• 2025: Jha rearrested, January 17.
• 2026: Karnataka High Court upholds a Kumar acquittal, August 17.