Gilberto Antonio Chamba Jaramillo, according to the Lleida daily Segre, needed three days to clear his criminal record in Ecuador. On October 23, 2000, he held a passport and a certificate stating that he had none. In 1993 he had confessed to killing eight young women and girls.
Every case here turns on a border. In each, a man whose killings were being counted, charged or suspected in one country crossed into another, and the paper that followed him did not always cross with him. The reasons for the crossing differ: an early release, a court ruling that he could not be punished, a deportation, a work assignment, a ticket bought to escape a warrant, an ordinary emigration decades earlier. What the new country knew of him ranged from everything to nothing. In several of these cases the deaths in the first country were confessed or attributed and never tried, and the law of that country ended with a sentence, a ruling or a death, never with a verdict.
Between 1988 and 1993, by his own confession, Chamba killed eight women and girls in and around Machala, in Ecuador’s El Oro province. El Telégrafo, writing in 2014, said all of them were students, aged 14 to 22, and that two were girls of 14 and 16. Infobae’s 2021 account gives the same range. Chamba was a former army corporal and taxi driver. He was arrested in Machala in 1993 and sentenced that year to 16 years of reclusión mayor. Ecuadorian reports named him "el Monstruo de Machala," and Spanish papers kept the name.
He did not serve the 16 years. In 2000, Infobae reported, Ecuador’s Congress passed a law on the remission of sentences, promoted by Claudio Mueckay, then acting as the national ombudsman, which cut most sentences in half. Crimes against the public administration were excluded; his were not. A further year came off in recognition of the Great Jubilee of 2000. Infobae’s 2024 account says he left prison in March 2000 after about seven years. El Telégrafo attributes the release to the "2 por 1" rule, which it dates to 1998. Segre describes the time served as about half the sentence, and an EFE report printed in November 2024 gives it as eight years. The sources agree on the shape of it and not on the arithmetic.
Under Ecuadorian law his criminal record was then cleared, Infobae reported. Segre has said that he cleared it within three days and that on October 23, 2000, he obtained a passport and a certificate showing no criminal record. He later told the judges in Lleida that the documents had been issued in the normal way, without bribes.
Two of his sisters lived in Spain. They met him at Madrid’s Barajas airport when he arrived on November 9, 2000, El Telégrafo reported, and El Universo gave the same date. Infobae’s 2024 account, citing the Madrid newspaper El Mundo, says instead that he reached Amsterdam by air on November 23, 2000. He settled in Lleida, in Catalonia, where the sisters lived. Infobae reported that he worked at first as a bricklayer’s assistant and a cleaner and then rented a flat of his own; El Telégrafo says he held various jobs, lived an outwardly ordinary life with his family and had several partners. Spanish officials granted him legal residence in 2001, and his Ecuadorian record was not in the file. How a man with his history left Ecuador with a clean certificate, and how Spain came to give him residence without it, became the two questions the Spanish and Ecuadorian press asked at length.
On November 23, 2004, in Lleida, María Isabel Bascuñana Royo, a 21-year-old law student at the University of Lleida, was killed. The Mossos d’Esquadra arrested Chamba on December 1, 2004. On November 6, 2006, the Audiencia Provincial de Lleida convicted him of her murder, with another charge, and of the attempted murder of a second woman in 2003, with a further charge, and sentenced him to 45 years, 25 of them to be served in effect according to Segre. The court also ordered his employer to pay 190,000 euros and 10,000 euros to each of the victim’s siblings, El Universo reported. After his release he is barred for ten years from living in Lleida or within 100 kilometers of it, and the court sent its judgment to the government’s Lleida office so that an expulsion file could be opened under article 57 of Spain’s immigration law, Segre reported.
Both Chamba and the employer appealed. On November 5, 2007, EFE reported in a story printed by Público, the Tribunal Supremo rejected his appeal and confirmed every part of the conviction and the 45-year sentence. It accepted the employer’s appeal and removed its civil liability: under the Spanish criminal code an employer answers for an employee’s crime only when it is committed in the course of the job and connected to it, and the court held that the connection here was too slight. Ecuador had sentenced him for eight killings and Spain for one murder and one attempt. Neither country’s court tried the other’s cases. In November 2024, EFE reported, he was held at the Quatre Camins prison at La Roca del Vallès, expecting release on November 29, 2029, when the Policía Nacional would open its expulsion file.
Pedro Alonso López, a Colombian born in Tolima in 1948 according to El Tiempo (Semana gave 1949), confessed to the killings of more than a hundred girls in Ecuador and to further killings in Colombia and Peru. Police and the press put the totals at various times between 200 and 350. The count of Ecuadorian victims in press reports varies as well: 53 in Ron Laytner’s 1992 interview, more than 60 in an AFP report of March 1994, about 60 in AFP’s November 1994 report and 57 in El Tiempo’s 2018 account. In Ecuador the press called him "el Monstruo de los Andes"; in Colombia, "la bestia del Tolima."
The order of his movements is not settled. Semana said he reached Ecuador in 1973, passing as a humble vendor, and that between 1973 and 1980 the police of Ecuador, Colombia and Peru were all investigating cases involving girls aged 8 to 13. AFP’s 1994 report said Ecuadorian investigators had no leads and had considered theories such as organ trafficking or the sale of children outside the country; El Tiempo said the authorities were slow to connect the cases to one man because gangs engaged in trafficking and sexual exploitation were active at the time. El Tiempo’s 2018 account has him moving through the Andes toward Peru, where, in the Ayacucho region, he was held by members of a community until the authorities intervened and was then expelled toward Ecuador. The forensic expert Luis Jiménez described him to the paper as a nomad whose constant movement across borders made him hard to catch. What is said about Peru rests on his own statements and on later press accounts. No Peruvian court record has been reported, no victim there has been named, and no Peruvian charge or trial has come to light.
He was arrested in Ambato, Ecuador, in early 1980; Semana dates his decisive statement to police to Monday, March 10, 1980. An Ecuadorian court convicted him of murder, with other charges, and sentenced him to 16 years, which was the maximum term Ecuadorian law then allowed. The number of counts is not established: reports give one, "several minors," 57 crimes or 110 counts. The director of the old Quito prison, Joel León, told AFP in March 1994 that once López had served his sentence, and once it was checked that no other proceedings were open against him in Ecuador, he would be deported to Colombia. AFP noted that Ecuadorians doubted he would stop, and that he was still in his forties.
By early September 1994 he was in Colombian hands. El Tiempo reported that on September 5 he was brought from Pasto to El Espinal under escort by the DAS, the Colombian security agency. A court in El Espinal had a warrant for him, and later El Tiempo reports describe the handover as an extradition it had requested. Colombia’s own file was in poor shape: it had been destroyed by fire around 1991, and the mother of one of the children he was accused of killing renewed her complaint in September 1994. He was accused of the deaths of eleven children in El Espinal. In Colombia he was not convicted. He was declared inimputable and held in the psychiatric annex of La Modelo prison in Bogotá. In February 1998, according to El Tiempo’s 2012 report, he was declared "sano" (sound) and released on bail of 80,000 pesos, with an obligation to report to the court. He did not report.
In June 1998 the Ecuadorian border provinces went into alarm. El Tiempo reported on June 17 that word had spread that he was in Carchi or Imbabura, in northern Ecuador, and the police commander for Carchi, José Rivas, said he had been seen near El Juncal, though the sighting was never confirmed. There was no warrant for him in Ecuador. He had served his sentence there, the paper noted, and had been deported because he had no document allowing him to stay. He had claimed to be a naturalized Ecuadorian since 1973 but could not prove it, and the police said the claim was false. The police stepped up vehicle checks and sent a telegram with an updated photograph to all twelve police posts in the area, and the main precaution in the border towns was to watch students as they left school.
His last confirmed record is dated September 22, 1999, when he renewed his identity card in Bogotá. In May 2002 Semana reported that the Colombian authorities feared he was in the country and had his photograph circulating in the border regions with Ecuador and Peru; it also said Interpol had held a red notice on him since 1998 and that Peruvian authorities had blamed him for new cases involving children after his release, none of which has been described in detail or charged. El Tiempo reported that Colombia asked Interpol for an arrest notice in October 2002, on suspicion that he was behind the killing of a girl in El Espinal. In 2005, El Tiempo reported, his identity number was cancelled and removed from the electoral roll after a positive fingerprint identification made on a dead body, yet the Registraduría still certified the number as valid. Vanguardia reported in 2023 that a body had reportedly reached the Instituto Nacional de Medicina Legal in 2005, without saying whose body it was or whether the identification was ever confirmed. The same paper set out the competing versions of his fate: that he died in 2005, that he lived in Tolima, that he lived in destitution in Bogotá, that relatives of victims took revenge. Reports that he had fled to Ecuador were never confirmed. As of March 2023 there was no confirmed evidence that he was alive or dead.
Roberto Succo was 19 and in his final year at a science high school in Mestre, the mainland part of Venice, when he confessed in April 1981 to killing his father and his mother. His father, Nazario Succo, was a police officer; his mother, Maria Lamon in Il Post’s account (il Giornale prints Maria Succo), kept the household. The sources disagree on the date: the evening of April 9 in Il Post, April 12 in il Giornale and Fanpage.it. The deaths came to light in Mestre on April 11, and carabinieri arrested him two days later at San Pietro al Natisone in Friuli. On October 8, 1981, the investigating office of the Venice tribunal ruled that he could not be punished because of total mental infirmity, and he was committed to the judicial psychiatric hospital at Reggio Emilia for at least ten years.
In 1986, while on leave to attend university classes, he left and did not return. Fanpage.it dates the departure to May 17, 1986, and il Giornale says he went to Paris. The Italian record of him went quiet. The French record began.
Stefano Nazzi writes that in France the press called him "André l’anguille" (André the eel) and "André le fou" (André the madman) and listed him as the country’s most dangerous fugitive. Screen International’s review of the 2001 film, summing up the real case, says he was living in the south of France under a false name, telling people he was an English sales representative or a secret agent, and that the crimes laid at his door included car thefts, kidnapping, burglary and several killings, one of them of a police officer. Il Giornale, in 2023, attributed five deaths in France between April 1987 and January 1988 to him: a gendarmerie brigadier, a young woman, a doctor, a woman at Menthon-Saint-Bernard and a police inspector in Toulon, with a second inspector wounded. The places the Italian press named include Tresserve, Annecy, Sisteron, Menthon-Saint-Bernard and Toulon. None of the French cases was ever tried. The dates are those given by il Giornale in 2023; the killings remain attributions, because no court ever ruled on them.
He was arrested again on February 28, 1988, at Santa Lucia di Piave, near Conegliano in the province of Treviso. Deborah Streifford Reisinger, in an academic study of the case, writes that the capture followed a young woman turning him in. He was held at Treviso, Livorno and Vicenza. France pressed for his extradition, il Giornale reports. On May 17, 1988, Nicola Maria Pace, the investigating judge of the Treviso tribunal, declared him incapable of understanding and willing (incapace di intendere e di volere), and he was due to be moved to a forensic psychiatric institution. He died by suicide in Vicenza prison on the night of May 23, 1988, at the age of 26. He had been arrested twice, seven years apart, and never stood trial: the first time a court ruled him not punishable, the second time he died before one could sit.
Reisinger places the Succo case beside that of Thierry Paulin as one of the sensational crime stories of 1980s France, crimes without a stated motive that the political right used in its campaigns on crime and immigration, to argue that the left had failed to keep people safe. The playwright Koltès wrote a play from it, Roberto Zucco, which Reisinger dates to 1990, and the journalist Pascale Froment wrote a book on the case.
Angel Maturino Resendiz was executed by the State of Texas on June 27, 2006, for one crime: the capital murder of Dr. Claudia Benton, a 39-year-old physician at Baylor College of Medicine, who was killed in West University Place, an enclave inside Houston, in December 1998. A Harris County jury convicted him on May 18, 2000, after rejecting his plea of not guilty by reason of insanity, and the same jury voted for a death sentence days later. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed both in May 2003.
He was linked to many more deaths. By 2006 the Associated Press counted at least 15 killings attributed to him, eight of them in Texas, two each in Illinois and Florida and one each in Kentucky, California and Georgia, from 1986 to June 1999. Many of the cases clustered near railroad lines, and investigators believed he traveled by freight train, which gave the press its name for him, the Railroad Killer. He was charged in several of those deaths in Texas, Illinois, Kentucky and Georgia, and none of those cases came to trial. Others he confessed to after his conviction, among them two deaths in Florida in 1997, for which the AP reported he had immunity there. Prosecutors doubted at least one of his claims.
His name is as unsettled as his birthplace. The Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General gives August 1, 1959, at Izúcar de Matamoros in the state of Puebla, Mexico. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice lists August 1, 1960, and gives his native state as Durango. The FBI and most reporting in 1999 called him Rafael Resendez-Ramirez, one of dozens of names he used; his birth certificate, CBS News reported, reads Angel Leoncio Reyes Recendis. Border Patrol records from 1998 and 1999 show him giving at least seven different birth dates. The prison system recorded the seventh grade as the end of his schooling, with work as a laborer. Amnesty International, which campaigned against the execution, said in 2006 that his childhood in Mexico was marked by mental illness in his family, deprivation and abuse.
The Inspector General’s appendix on his criminal and immigration history is the fullest public record of his life before 1998, and it reads as a list of doors that closed behind him and opened again. The earliest entry is August 31, 1976, when he was excluded at San Antonio, meaning he was refused entry. In September 1976 he was arrested for trespassing at a plant in Sterling Heights, Michigan, and allowed to leave for Mexico, and in October 1976 he was returned the same day after trying to cross near McAllen, Texas. In 1977 he was convicted in Corinth, Mississippi, of destroying private property and returned to Mexico. In 1980 he was convicted in Miami of burglary, auto theft and aggravated battery and sentenced to 20 years, to be served concurrently; he was paroled after about six years and deported from Brownsville, Texas, in September 1985.
Through the late 1980s the record is mostly about false papers. He was convicted of falsely claiming to be a U.S. citizen, first in late 1985 and again after a June 1986 arrest at the Laredo port of entry, served about 15 months and was deported in October 1987. A federal inquiry in St. Louis into identity and document fraud ended with his conviction on seven counts in March 1989 and a 30-month sentence, and he was deported a third time in May 1991. In 1992 he pleaded guilty in Las Cruces, New Mexico, to a residential burglary and was paroled in April 1993 to an immigration detainer. In June 1993, in Carson County, Texas, he was arrested for evading arrest in a truck stolen in Missouri and gave the name Carlos Cluthier Rodriguez; the fingerprints taken then would matter five years later. In December 1994 he was arrested in Albuquerque for receiving a stolen vehicle and resisting arrest, was released on bond and failed to return, and the bench warrant stayed open until 1999. In 1995 he served 30 days in San Bernardino County, California, for trespassing and carrying a loaded firearm, and in August 1996 he was ordered off a rail yard in Macon, Georgia, and two days later pleaded guilty to criminal trespass at a rail yard in Science Hill, Kentucky. The Inspector General counted at least three formal deportations and at least four voluntary returns before 1998, and said the records were unclear about others.
During 1998, months before and after the Benton killing, the Border Patrol caught him seven times. The Inspector General’s table gives the dates: January 5, 7 and 8, at Del Rio and Uvalde in Texas; April 17, at Santa Teresa, New Mexico; April 21 and 22, at Uvalde and Del Rio; and November 3, at Santa Teresa. Each time he was returned to Mexico the same day. Each time he denied having a criminal record, and each time the agents checked his fingerprints only against the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s own system, called IDENT, which held records of earlier border arrests and a database of lookouts but was not connected to the FBI’s criminal records. No agent learned of his convictions or of the open Albuquerque warrant, and none of the stops met the local threshold for prosecuting a repeat illegal entrant.
After the warrant in the Benton case was issued, police tried several times in early 1999 to make sure he would be stopped at the border. The Inspector General concluded that every attempt went to the wrong system or stalled. A Houston police analyst asked a Customs Service employee in December 1998 or January 1999 to place an alert in the database used at ports of entry. On January 8, 1999, Detective Ken Macha of West University Place called an INS special agent in Houston, who referred him to Customs and did not mention IDENT. A second INS agent gave Macha the immigration file and called a friend at Customs to check that an alert had been entered, but the friend’s computer crashed and no one followed up. Customs told the Inspector General that no alert was entered in its system until June 22, 1999. On March 10, 1999, Texas Ranger Drew Carter asked another INS agent by telephone to place an internal hold on Resendiz. Carter believed it had been done. The agent said he did not recall the call, and the Inspector General concluded he had apparently done nothing. "In fact, no one in the INS had entered a lookout for Resendez in any INS database," the report said. A Harris County detective assigned to a regional fugitive task force concluded that Resendiz was a transient who had probably fled to Mexico and stopped actively looking for him.
On June 1, 1999, while he was wanted for murder and sought by a growing federal manhunt, the Border Patrol caught him crossing illegally into New Mexico, ran his fingerprints through its own system, set aside the matches that appeared on the screen and sent him back to Mexico the same night. Four more people were killed after that. On July 13, 1999, with his name on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list as fugitive number 457, he walked from Ciudad Juárez onto a bridge at El Paso and surrendered to Sgt. Drew Carter, under an arrangement his sister made through an intermediary. The Inspector General’s review, published on March 20, 2000, set out how the June release happened. His appeals ended in June 2006: a judge ruled him competent to be executed after a three-day hearing, the Fifth Circuit denied a certificate of appealability and a stay on June 27, and the U.S. Supreme Court denied five stay applications the same day. He was pronounced dead at 8:05 p.m. at Huntsville.
Charles Sobhraj was arrested in Kathmandu in September 2003, days after a local newspaper reported that he was living in the city. He was 59, a French citizen who had spent more than 20 years in Indian prisons and had lived openly in Paris since 1997, giving paid interviews. Nepali police charged him with deaths that had come to light in the Kathmandu Valley in December 1975: Connie Jo Bronzich, 29, an American from Santa Cruz, California, and Laurent Carrière, 26, a Canadian. Reports give the arrest date as September 19; the UN Human Rights Committee’s record gives September 13. He said he had never set foot in Nepal before 2003. A Kathmandu court convicted him of the Bronzich murder in 2004, the Patan Appellate Court upheld it in 2005, the Supreme Court of Nepal upheld it on July 30, 2010, and a review was refused in December 2011. A second Nepali court convicted him of the Carrière murder in 2014.
Those two convictions are the only murder convictions that stand against him. In the mid-1970s Thai police linked him to the deaths of several young travelers around Bangkok and Pattaya, which earned him the name the Bikini Killer, and police and reporters have linked him to many more across Asia. He was never tried in Thailand. India agreed in late 1985 to a Thai request for his extradition over two deaths, those of Teresa Knowlton and a Turkish tourist, according to AFP, and the Thai case lapsed while he was in prison in India. His biographers say he admitted at least 12 killings between 1972 and 1976 and later took the admissions back. He has denied all of them since.
Sobhraj was born in Saigon on April 6, 1944, when Vietnam was under French rule. His father was an Indian businessman and his mother Vietnamese; she later married a French soldier, according to AFP. Britannica gives his original name as Gurmukh Sobhraj, and in Nepali court reporting he is Charles Gurumukh Sobhraj. AFP’s account says that from his first years as an adult he lived by crime across borders, moving through Greece, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan before going to India in 1970. He was arrested there over a jewelry robbery in 1971, fled while on bail to Greece, was arrested again and escaped. The press named him the Serpent for his gift for changing identities and slipping out of custody. In a 1979 interview with the Australian writer Richard Neville, quoted by AFP, he said: "As long as I can talk to people, I can manipulate them."
Bangkok was a stop on the overland route that young Westerners then traveled with cash, traveler’s checks and passports. Sobhraj befriended travelers and robbed them, according to the accounts of police and reporters, and used their passports for his own trips; those who became a danger to him were killed, police have alleged. The passports are the thread that carried him from one country to the next. From Bangkok he and Leclerc flew to Kathmandu on the passports of the Dutch couple Henk Bintanja, 29, and Cornelia Hemker, 25, whose deaths in Thailand he was suspected of, the journalist John McBeth writes. In late December 1975 the deaths of Bronzich and Carrière came to light. Friends of the two travelers suspected a gem dealer, described as Vietnamese, whom Bronzich had met, McBeth writes, and Sobhraj and Leclerc then returned to Bangkok on the passports of Bronzich and Carrière. Nepali police opened two murder cases, one at the Kathmandu District Court and one at the Bhaktapur District Court. Then, for nearly three decades, nothing happened.
The man who joined the Thai deaths to the others was Herman Knippenberg, a junior diplomat at the Netherlands embassy in Bangkok, aged 32 by McBeth’s count. In early 1976 he received a letter from the family of Cornelia Hemker, who with Bintanja had written to their families regularly while traveling and had not been heard from for weeks. In March 1976 police raided an apartment in Bangkok, but Sobhraj and Leclerc, McBeth writes, were held for only a few hours and let go without explanation. They left for Malaysia. Thai police showed little interest, and Knippenberg carried out most of a roughly five-month inquiry himself, with help from colleagues. When he was allowed into the empty apartment he came upon the personal belongings of victims, among them Hemker’s coat and handbag. A front-page story in the Bangkok Post in May 1976 and an Interpol notice followed. Knippenberg kept four boxes of photographs, witness statements and other papers, and later sent a 1976 statement by Leclerc to the FBI; McBeth writes that his files provided key evidence in the Bronzich case decades later. He described the case to McBeth as "like having malaria," something that came back every few years throughout his career. The Dutch king knighted him in 2022, Al Jazeera reported.
India took him next. He was arrested in New Delhi on July 5, 1976, after an incident involving a group of French tourists in a hotel, and was convicted of offenses arising from it, reported by AFP as culpable homicide not amounting to murder and other charges, with a sentence reported as 12 years. In May 1982 he received a life sentence for the murder of Alan Jacob, an Israeli tourist; it was overturned on appeal in 1983 for lack of evidence. In March 1986 he escaped from Tihar jail, and on April 6, 1986, a Mumbai police team led by Madhukar Zende recaptured him at Porvorim, in Goa; Asia Times reports a further 10 years for the escape. Held in India from 1976 to 1997, he was released in early 1997 and flown to Paris, where he arrived on April 8.
He lived in Paris for six years. Then he returned to Kathmandu, where the 1975 cases had been waiting. He spent 19 years in Nepal’s Central Jail. On December 21, 2022, the Supreme Court of Nepal ordered his release on a habeas corpus petition, applying the 75 percent sentence remission for prisoners over 65. He was released on December 23, 2022, after 19 years, three months and seven days, deported to France that evening and barred from Nepal for 10 years. He was 78. In an interview with Al Jazeera in August 2023, in Paris, he said he had never killed anyone and was planning lawsuits.
Jack Unterweger was serving a life sentence for murder when he became one of Austria’s best-known writers. A Salzburg court sentenced him on May 31, 1976, to life for the murder of Margret Schäfer, 18, in Herborn, Hesse, West Germany, in December 1974. In prison he wrote poems, plays, radio stories and an autobiographical novel, Fegefeuer (Purgatory), which was made into a film. Writers and public figures campaigned for his release, and he was paroled on May 23, 1990, as a symbol of successful rehabilitation.
Once free, he lived in Vienna and moved in literary and media circles. He toured Austria and other countries giving readings, some of them in schools, and ORF gave him airtime. Ernst Geiger, who later led the Vienna homicide unit’s work on the case, told ORF in 2024 that the police had struggled to believe how smoothly his new life ran: a patron paid for his flat and his car, the cultural world and the media backed him, and he had many relationships with women. Within months of his parole, the deaths of women began to be reported. Between September 1990 and July 1991 there were eleven cases in all, in Prague, around Graz, near Bregenz, in the Vienna Woods and in Los Angeles. In each place Unterweger had been at the time, giving readings or working as a reporter.
In the summer of 1991 he traveled to Los Angeles on a freelance assignment. The historian Kristina E. Poznan, writing for the Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies, says sources describe the commission as coming from an Austrian newspaper or magazine. He stayed in California for a little over a month, the Lawrence Journal-World reported in 2007, and the Los Angeles Police Department gave him a ride-along. Three women were killed in the Los Angeles area while he was there: Shannon Exley, 35, on June 19, Irene Rodriguez, 33, on June 28, and Peggy Jean Booth, 26, who also used the name Sherri Ann Long, on July 3, 1991, near Malibu, according to dates VOL.AT gives and ages Poznan gives. A signature detail of each killing linked the Los Angeles cases to the Austrian ones, she writes.
On February 13, 1992, the Graz Regional Court issued a warrant for his arrest. He fled with his girlfriend, who was 18, according to VIENNA.AT, and on February 27, 1992, he was arrested in Miami. Poznan writes that he was held by immigration authorities because he had entered the United States on a tourist visa without disclosing his felony conviction. Los Angeles police wanted to try him for the three California deaths, she writes, but the DNA work was slow and he was sent to Austria to face the Austrian charges first. California had the death penalty; Austria did not. He was extradited at the end of May 1992, according to APA, and never tried in the United States. The three Los Angeles deaths were included in the Graz indictment. Profil counts 673 days of freedom between his release and his arrest.
His trial in Graz began on April 20, 1994. On the evening of June 28, the jury returned guilty verdicts on murder in nine of the eleven charged cases and he was sentenced to life imprisonment for the second time. Hours later, at 3:40 a.m. on June 29, he died by suicide in his cell at the Graz court prison. Because he died before the judgment could become legally final, the 1994 verdict never became a final conviction. His only final conviction is for the murder of Margret Schäfer in 1974.
Between late May and early August 2010, 14 men were assaulted in and around Flint, Michigan, and five of them died. The assaults came late at night or in the early morning when the men were alone. Survivors told police that a big man had pulled up beside them, said his car was giving him trouble or asked for directions, and then struck. Most of the men were Black. By the time they stopped, police in Leesburg, Virginia, and Toledo, Ohio, believed the same man had struck there too, and the count across three states had reached 18.
Elias Abuelazam was born in Israel and raised in part in Ramla, a mixed Jewish and Arab town in central Israel, a member of its Christian Arab community. Ynet reported that he moved to the United States as a child after his mother remarried, and that the family later returned to Ramla after several years in the United States. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported in 2011 that he was living legally in the United States on a green card obtained through marriage to an American citizen. He was not a U.S. citizen, a point the county prosecutor stressed after his arrest. He married twice, and both marriages ended in divorce, the second in 2007, the Associated Press reported. He had worked in mental health while he lived in Leesburg, in Loudoun County, Virginia, AP reports said. After the 2007 divorce he moved around more, living at different times in Loudoun County, Michigan, Florida and Israel. Loudoun County records showed a December 2007 arrest on a felony gun possession charge, later dropped, and a 2008 misdemeanor assault charge that was still waiting for a court date in 2010.
Early in 2010 he was back in Ramla. Ynet reported that he had visited Israel about six months before his arrest and that, according to police information, he had been involved in a violent fight with a friend before he returned to the United States. Israeli police later said he had been a suspect in an assault in Israel that year, but that the case was dropped because the victim would not cooperate. An Israeli police spokesman said he had no criminal record there.
He went back to Michigan. His uncle bought him a ticket to Tel Aviv that cost about 3,000 dollars, and later testified that he had driven his nephew to Detroit Metropolitan Airport because Abuelazam did not want to work. The route ran from Detroit through Louisville, Kentucky, to Atlanta. He did not make the connecting flight in Louisville, and investigators later traveled there to collect two of his bags.
The records of three states met only at the end. On August 5, 2010, police in Arlington, Virginia, arrested him on an old Leesburg simple-assault warrant, ARLnow reported, and a magistrate released him; nobody yet knew he was the man the Flint task force was hunting. Leads then pointed to Abuelazam, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers located his name on the passenger list of a Delta Air Lines flight from Atlanta to Tel Aviv. A Customs and Border Protection officer had information linking him to assaults in Virginia and Michigan, according to the Michigan Court of Appeals. On August 11, 2010, at the request of the Michigan State Police, Atlanta police paged him at the airport and arrested him at the boarding gate. The prosecutor would say only that "technology" had been used to track him outside Michigan.
The same day, a judge in Flint signed a warrant charging him with assault with intent to murder over a July 27 assault. At a brief hearing in Atlanta, before Judge Richard Hicks, he had no lawyer and first said he wanted to fight the charges in Georgia; once the process was explained he waived extradition. "It sounds more logical to go right now than in 90 days," he said. In August a judge ordered him held without bond. Prosecutors had asked for a 10 million dollar bond, pointing to the seriousness of the assaults and the risk that he would flee. "He is not a citizen of the United States," the county prosecutor said.
In May 2012 a Genesee County jury rejected his insanity defense and convicted him of the first-degree premeditated murder of Arnold Minor, 49, the last man to die in the series. The judge allowed four men who had survived other assaults in the series to testify and to identify him. A state crime lab scientist testified that Minor’s blood was on shoes and jeans in Abuelazam’s luggage and in the car he had been driving, and a state trooper testified that the location records of his cellphone matched the areas where the assaults took place. On June 25, 2012, Judge Judith Fullerton sentenced him to life in prison without parole. He had also been charged with the murders of Darwin Marshall, 43, and Frank Kellybrew, 60, and with assaults on six other men, but the Genesee County prosecutor suspended those cases in October 2012. In Ohio, the Lucas County prosecutor said she would review the Toledo case to decide whether to seek his extradition; as of 2012 he had not been charged in Virginia over the 2010 Leesburg assaults. The Michigan Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction on June 10, 2014, and the Michigan Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal, the Associated Press reported on December 1, 2014. In 2017, in return for immunity, he confessed to the March 2009 killing of Jammie Lane, a former neighbor, in Leesburg. Virginia had never charged anyone in that death, and the immunity meant it would not charge him.
Kieran Patrick Kelly was born in Rathdowney, County Laois, in 1929, according to the Leinster Leader, and spent most of his youth in Dublin. When he first went to London is reported differently. The 2015 Irish Post coverage of the retired detective Geoff Platt’s book put his arrival in 1953, at the time of the celebrations for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II; Platt told the paper that Irish friends working as laborers had advised him where to find cheap lodgings in south London. The book extract carried by the Leinster Leader and the Leinster Express’s launch report say he emigrated to England in the 1960s, married there and worked as a builder’s laborer, settling in the south of the city.
By the early 1980s he was living rough in south London. The Irish Post described him in 2015 as an alcoholic who had been arrested for shoplifting and had served time in prison; its 2016 report called him a vagrant with a long history of violence, theft and alcoholism. Platt, who worked on the case, told the paper: "He was an alcoholic. He was looking over his shoulder his whole life." Robert Mulhern, the author of a book on Kelly and of an RTÉ radio documentary, said Kelly moved among men living rough and among alcoholics, and suggested that this was one reason the case did not come to light the way other murder cases did. "Perhaps some lives were viewed as more important than others," he told The Irish Post.
The Irish record of Kelly is therefore a record of a man who left. The English record of him is a trail of charges that did not hold. Mulhern reports that Kelly was acquitted of a murder charge in London in 1977 and that two counts of attempted murder were dropped in 1982. In 1983 he was arrested in Clapham on suspicion of stealing a wedding ring. William Boyd died that year at the police station where Kelly was held. Questioned after Boyd’s death, Kelly confessed to many more killings over about 30 years. At the Old Bailey in 1984 he was convicted of the murder of Hector Fisher and the manslaughter of William Boyd, both men who lived as he did, and was sentenced to life imprisonment. He died in 2001 at HM Prison Frankland, Durham, Mulhern and the Leinster Leader report; the exact date has not been reported.
The size of the claim is the open question. Reported counts of his confessions range from upwards of 10 to 16 or 18, covering the years 1953 to 1983, and Platt’s 2015 book put the possible total as high as 31. A detective on the 1980s investigation estimated five or six. None of the claimed killings other than the two was proved in court. RTÉ revived the case in 2016 with Mulhern’s documentary Anatomy of an Irish Serial Killer and again in 2023 with the series The Nobody Zone. Whether the London count began in 1953, the year Platt’s account puts his arrival, or only later remains unsettled.
In six of these eight cases the first country’s record ended before the second country’s began. Ecuador’s file on Chamba was a sentence served and a certificate issued; Colombia’s file on López had burned and its court had pronounced him sound; Italy’s court had ruled Succo not punishable before France knew his name; the INS held seven same-day returns of a man whom no database connected to a warrant. Sobhraj’s Thai and Nepali cases lay open for decades while he sat in Indian prisons, and Knippenberg’s four boxes of paper were later used in the Nepali case, McBeth writes.
Nothing about the crossing itself was concealed in most of them. Before 1998 the Inspector General counted at least three formal deportations and four voluntary returns for Resendiz, and in 1998 seven more apprehensions; Sobhraj returned to Kathmandu, where two murder cases from 1975 had been opened; Abuelazam’s name was on a passenger list. Where a country failed to hold the man, it was usually because the other country’s file had never reached it, or because the lookouts that were requested went to the wrong system. In the cases that were joined, a diplomat, a Customs passenger list or a traveler’s family did the joining. In the others a count stands unproved: Succo’s five deaths in France, the Thai deaths attributed to Sobhraj, Resendiz’s untried charges, Kelly’s claimed thirty years, the Peruvian girls attributed to López. They remain attributions, because no court ever tested them.
• 1953 to 1983: period covered by the killings Kieran Kelly later confessed to in London.
• December 1974: Margret Schäfer killed in Herborn, West Germany; Jack Unterweger sentenced to life on May 31, 1976.
• December 1975: Connie Jo Bronzich and Laurent Carrière, travelers from the United States and Canada, die in the Kathmandu Valley.
• March 1976: Herman Knippenberg’s inquiry in Bangkok on the Dutch couple’s deaths; Charles Sobhraj briefly held and released.
• July 5, 1976: Sobhraj arrested in New Delhi after an incident involving French tourists.
• Early 1980: Pedro Alonso López arrested at Ambato, Ecuador; sentenced to 16 years.
• April 1981: Roberto Succo confesses in Mestre to killing his parents; ruled not punishable for total mental infirmity on October 8, 1981.
• 1986: Succo leaves the Reggio Emilia hospital on study leave and does not return; Sobhraj escapes Tihar jail in March and is recaptured in Goa on April 6.
• April 1987 to January 1988: five deaths in France attributed to Succo.
• February 28, 1988: Succo arrested at Santa Lucia di Piave; dies by suicide in Vicenza prison on May 23.
• 1988 to 1993: Gilberto Antonio Chamba kills eight women and girls near Machala by his confession; sentenced in 1993.
• May 23, 1990: Unterweger paroled; eleven cases between September 1990 and July 1991.
• February 27, 1992: Unterweger arrested in Miami; extradited to Austria at the end of May.
• 1994: López released in Ecuador and handed to Colombia in early September; Unterweger convicted in Graz June 28, dies June 29.
• 1997: Sobhraj released from Indian prison and flown to Paris on April 8.
• 1998: Resendiz caught seven times by the Border Patrol; Benton killed in December. López released on bail in Colombia in February.
• June 1, 1999: Border Patrol sends Resendiz back to Mexico; he surrenders at El Paso on July 13.
• March 2000: Chamba leaves prison in Ecuador; passport and certificate October 23; arrives in Spain in November.
• May 18, 2000: Resendiz convicted of capital murder in Harris County; executed June 27, 2006.
• September 2003: Sobhraj arrested in Kathmandu; convicted 2004 and 2014.
• November 23, 2004: María Isabel Bascuñana Royo killed in Lleida; Chamba sentenced to 45 years on November 6, 2006.
• August 2010: Elias Abuelazam released in Arlington on August 5, arrested in Atlanta on August 11; convicted May 22, 2012.
• December 23, 2022: Sobhraj released from Nepal and deported to France.
• November 2024: Chamba held in Catalonia, release expected November 29, 2029.