Every one of them left custody through a door the system itself opened. A parole panel voted, a sentence ran its course, a day pass was signed, a court clerk typed one word in place of another. What came after was a new killing, or a new accusation, and in several cases a long argument about the decision that had come before.
In 1966, at the age of 15, Dwain Lee Little was convicted of killing a teenager in Springfield, Oregon. He served eight years at the Oregon State Penitentiary and was paroled to his family’s home in Ruch, a small community in the Applegate Valley of southern Oregon, KOBI-TV in Medford has reported.
Over the Labor Day weekend of 1974, Richard Cowden, 27, his wife, Belinda, 22, their son, David, 5, and their daughter, Melissa, five months old, drove from their home in White City to camp along Carberry Creek in the Applegate. They were last seen at the general store in Copper, about a mile from their campsite. When searchers reached the camp, the family’s truck was there, with the keys, wallets and their other belongings. The family was gone.
Police waited about a day before they began to search, a delay the officers later regretted, the lead detective, Richard Davis, told KOBI. The Oregon State Police, the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office and Central Point police searched for months without result. About seven months later, in the spring of 1975, two campers from Washington found human remains roughly seven miles from the campsite, and the remains of all four Cowdens were recovered there. David had been shot with a .22 rifle. Weather had destroyed most of the evidence; the investigators' best lead was a single rifle bullet.
Davis, who took over the case after the remains were found, came to focus on Little. By his account, Little had hauled steel to Crescent City, California, the day before the family vanished and was seen at a restaurant near Ruch around noon on the day they disappeared. An elderly couple reported a car like Little’s carrying a man, a woman and a second man. Police tied Little to a .22 caliber Marlin rifle; the gun was never found, but investigators recovered a spring that would have fit it. Little was arrested as a felon in possession of a concealable firearm. Offered the dismissal of that charge in exchange for a polygraph examination, he refused, and the interview ended there.
In 1980 a 23-year-old woman whose car had broken down on Oregon 99 West in the Portland area accepted a ride from a stranger and was attacked. She survived. Davis identifies the man as Little. KOBI has reported that Little is serving a life sentence at the Oregon State Penitentiary. No one has been charged in the deaths of the Cowden family, and the Oregon State Police say there are no new leads or suspects. Davis, who retired in 1992, has not let the case go. "I am ashamed. I am sorry," he told KOBI. "The Cowden family did not get justice."
William Bonin was a Vietnam War veteran from Downey, in southeast Los Angeles County, who spent most of the 1970s in prison for attacks on young men. He was paroled in 1978 and found work as a truck driver in Montebello, the OC Weekly reported in 2011.
Within about a year the killings began. Between 1979 and 1980, boys and young men between 12 and 19 years old were picked up in Bonin’s van, most of them hitchhikers, and were killed, most of them by strangulation. Their bodies were left beside the freeways of Southern California. Bonin often had younger companions with him in the van. Two of them, James Munro and Gregory Miley, later testified against him in exchange for lighter sentences; a third, Vernon Butts, hanged himself in jail before trial. Miley, who was 18 at the time, received 25 years to life.
Bonin was under police surveillance by the time of his arrest, and some of his companions informed on him. In January 1982 a Los Angeles County jury convicted him of ten murders and chose death, and in 1983 an Orange County jury convicted him of four more and again chose death, Amnesty International recorded in 1996. Among the fourteen were Charles Miranda, 14, picked up in West Hollywood on February 3, 1980, and James McCabe, 12, who was walking to Disneyland later that morning. Bonin told a television reporter that he had killed 21 people. No court has made a finding on that figure.
At hearings on his federal appeals in 1992, a neurologist testified that Bonin had brain damage that might have left him unable to control his impulses; other doctors disagreed. His lawyers argued that his trial counsel had been compromised by talk of selling the rights to his story. The appeals failed. On February 23, 1996, after fourteen years on death row, Bonin was put to death at San Quentin, the first prisoner executed by lethal injection in California and the third person executed in the state in 30 years, the Associated Press reported. He was 49. In his last words he said that the death penalty sent the wrong message to the young.
Relatives of two of the victims carried photographs into the chamber. The brother of Darin Kendrick, one of the dead, said Bonin "got the easy way out." Governor Pete Wilson said: "Justice has finally been done."
In 1973 Daniel Joe Hittle was convicted in Minnesota on two counts of second-degree murder. He was paroled in 1984. By 1989 he was living in Texas, where, Dallas police said, he had no criminal record.
Late on Wednesday, November 15, 1989, Officer Gerald Ray Walker of the Garland Police Department stopped Hittle’s vehicle for a traffic violation. Walker was shot and was pronounced dead at about midnight at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas. He was 48, married, with one son, and had served 17 years on the force, earning four departmental commendations and seven from citizens. He was the first Garland officer to die in the line of duty. Officers chased Hittle’s vehicle until it crashed, and the driver opened fire on them in a gunfight on a suburban street. A shotgun was recovered from the vehicle.
The shooting in Garland was the end of the night, not the start of it. At Hittle’s apartment in east Dallas, police found that Mary Alice Goss, 39, Richard Joseph Cook Jr., 36, and Raymond Scott Gregg, 19, had been shot dead. Goss’s 4-year-old daughter had been shot and was in critical condition, the Associated Press reported two days later. Garland police charged Hittle with capital murder and three counts of attempted capital murder, and Dallas police said they would file charges in the apartment shootings.
Hittle was indicted in November 1989 for the capital murder of Officer Walker. A jury convicted him and sentenced him to death. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed on April 7, 1993, and the United States Supreme Court declined review. In August 2000 the Fifth Circuit refused him a certificate of appealability, noting in its order that he had killed four other people in the course of the same spree. Texas executed him on December 6, 2000. His last statement, as the Texas Department of Criminal Justice records it, was a single short phrase of religious invocation.
Kenneth Allen McDuff grew up in Rosebud, a small town in Falls County, Central Texas, the favored son of a cement finisher. In 1964 he went to prison for a string of burglaries. Because he was 18, the sentences, which added up to 52 years, ran concurrently. He became a trusty within three months and was paroled in December 1965, the Texas Monthly writer Gary Cartwright reported.
Eight months later, on the night of August 6, 1966, McDuff and an 18-year-old companion, Roy Dale Green, came upon three teenagers talking in a car near a baseball field in Everman, south of Fort Worth: Robert Brand, 17, his friend Mark Dunnam, and Edna Louise Sullivan, 16. McDuff shot the two boys and killed Edna Sullivan. Green told friends the next day what had happened and became the state’s main witness. McDuff was convicted of murder in Fort Worth, and the jury sentenced him to death. Accounts of how many of the three killings went to verdict differ.
He spent about six years on death row. In 1972 the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Furman v. Georgia ended the death sentences then in force, and McDuff’s was commuted to life. He became eligible for parole in 1976, and for thirteen years the board turned him down. In 1981 he offered a board member $10,000 for his vote; the member reported it, and McDuff was convicted of bribery. In 1988 the board voted to release him, then reversed itself after protest letters, Cartwright wrote, from the trial judge and the prosecutor.
What changed in 1989 was the prison system around him. Under court-ordered population limits, Governor Bill Clements had directed the parole board in 1987 to release 750 prisoners a week, and when too few met the standards, the standards were lowered. More than 36,000 people were paroled in 1989 from a system built for about 60,000. Old files went to "special review" panels that gave them little scrutiny. A lawyer told Texas Monthly the board’s decisions were "as random as throwing darts." In September 1989 such a panel took up McDuff’s file, and a board member, Chris Mealy, cast the deciding vote. "I wish that I could take it back," Mealy later told Cartwright. McDuff walked out on October 11, 1989, after 23 years.
Three days later the body of Sarafia Parker, 29, was found in a field in Temple, where McDuff was reporting to his parole officer. He was never charged in her death. In 1990 he was sent back to prison on a misdemeanor threat charge; the charge was dropped, his parole was reinstated, and he was released again on December 6, 1990. "The most frustrating part," the Falls County sheriff, Larry Pamplin, told Cartwright, "is that we knew he was going to kill someone."
In 1991 McDuff enrolled at Texas State Technical College in Waco. Over the next months several women disappeared in and around the city. On December 29, 1991, Colleen Reed, 28, was seized from a car wash in Austin, and on the night of March 1, 1992, Melissa Ann Northrup, 22, a mother of two who was expecting a third child, was taken from the convenience store in Waco where she worked. Her body was found weeks later in Dallas County. She had been strangled.
A task force of local, state and federal officers went after McDuff, led by two deputy U.S. marshals in Waco, the brothers Parnell and Mike McNamara. On May 1, 1992, the television program America’s Most Wanted broadcast his case. A viewer in Kansas City, Missouri, recognized a man working on a city garbage truck under the name Fowler, and on May 4 McDuff was arrested at the city dump.
He was convicted of the capital murder of Melissa Northrup in a trial moved to Harris County and sentenced to death, and was convicted of capital murder in the Reed case as well. In 1998 an informant led the McNamaras to the graves of Colleen Reed, Brenda Thompson and Regenia Moore. Investigators also attributed the death of Valencia Kay Joshua, found near the college in 1992, to McDuff. He was never tried for those three deaths. Fourteen names were read aloud at a memorial for his known victims in Austin in October 1998. KWTX in Waco reported in 2024 that he was believed to have killed at least six women between October 1989 and March 1992; CBS News’s 48 Hours said in 1998 that authorities suspected him in as many as 14 other deaths.
The Fifth Circuit refused McDuff a stay on the day of his execution. He was put to death at Huntsville on November 17, 1998, at 52. His last words, as the prison system records them, were: "I’m ready to be released. Release me." Parnell McNamara watched. The case reshaped Texas parole. Texas Monthly reported in 1992 a new law requiring prisoners convicted of capital murder to serve at least 35 years before becoming eligible for parole, and later that a former chairman of the parole board had been convicted of perjury in the inquiry that followed. Speaking at a law enforcement conference in Waco in 2017, McNamara, by then the McLennan County sheriff, called the 1989 decision the work of a "runaway parole system." McDuff, he said, "should never have been released."
Johann Unterweger, who called himself Jack, was born on August 16, 1950, in Judenburg, in the Austrian province of Styria. His reputed father was an American soldier he never met. He was raised partly by his grandfather in Carinthia, then by foster parents and in a children’s home, and between 1968 and 1975 he was repeatedly imprisoned for property crimes, violence and sexual offenses, according to the Neue Deutsche Biographie.
On December 11, 1974, he killed Margret Schäfer, an 18-year-old from Germany, in Herborn, in the German state of Hesse. He was arrested in Salzburg, and on May 31, 1976, he was sentenced to life imprisonment. It is the only murder conviction in his record that became final.
At Stein prison, near Krems in Lower Austria, Unterweger finished his schooling and began to write. He founded a small press and a literary magazine, wrote plays and radio stories, and published an autobiographical novel, Fegefeuer (Purgatory), which traced his crimes back to his childhood. The Graz director Willi Hengstler filmed it in 1988; the film was shown in Montreal and won the Vienna Film Prize in 1989. The Austrian state supported his work with a drama scholarship, a book prize and printing grants, the Ministry of Education and Arts told Parliament in 1992. Writers and artists, among them Elfriede Jelinek and Erika Pluhar, campaigned for his release, the news magazine profil reported.
He was paroled on May 23, 1990, a model, as many saw it, of what prison could do. He settled in Vienna, toured with readings, appeared on the national broadcaster ORF and worked as a freelance reporter. Some of his assignments concerned the very killings for which he would later be tried, the Lawrence Journal-World reported in 2007.
Within four months the killings had begun. The indictment later charged him with eleven deaths of women between September 1990 and July 1991: Blanka Bočková in Prague on September 15, 1990; Brunhilde Masser and Elfriede Schrempf near Graz; Heide Hammerer, 31, near Bregenz; Silvia Zagler, Sabine Moitzi, Regina Prem and Karin Eroglu in the Vienna Woods in the spring of 1991; and, in the summer of 1991, Shannon Exley, Irene Rodriguez and Peggy Jean Booth in the Los Angeles area, where Unterweger had gone on assignment. Each woman had been strangled with an item of her own clothing, and investigators said the knot was the same each time.
A retired Salzburg detective, August Schenner, who had dealt with Unterweger in the 1970s, was the first to see the link, the historian Kristina E. Poznan has written. The Graz Regional Court issued a warrant on February 13, 1992. Unterweger fled with his 18-year-old girlfriend and was arrested in Miami on February 27, 1992, after the editor of an Austrian magazine that had promised him money for an interview told police where he would collect it. He was extradited to Austria at the end of May 1992; he was never tried in the United States.
His trial opened in Graz on April 20, 1994. No eyewitness testified to any of the killings. The prosecution relied on his presence in each city on the dates of the deaths, on the knot, on a red fiber investigators matched to his scarf in the Hammerer case, and on a hair, attributed to Blanka Bočková, recovered from a car he had once owned. The trial was the first in Austria to use DNA analysis and criminal profiling to support a circumstantial case, the Neue Deutsche Biographie records. Unterweger denied everything to the end. "Ich bin unschuldig, danke," he told the court on the last day: "I am innocent, thank you."
At about 9 p.m. on June 28, 1994, the jury found him guilty of murder in nine of the eleven cases; in the other two, the cause of death could not be established with certainty. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. At 3:40 the next morning, a guard checking his cell at the Graz court prison found him hanged. He was 43. Because he died within hours, the verdict never became legally final, and in law the killings of 1990 and 1991 remain unresolved. His lawyer, Georg Zanger, said that if the verdict was a miscarriage of justice it would be "the biggest scandal of the republic," The Moscow Times reported. Ernst Geiger, who led the Vienna homicide unit’s work on the case, said in 2024 that Unterweger had deceived everyone, the court’s own experts included.
In 1981, when he was 13, Timothy Buss killed five-year-old Tara Sue Huffman in Illinois. He was in prison for that killing until about two years before August 1995, the Illinois Supreme Court later recorded.
On the afternoon of August 7, 1995, Christopher Meyer, 10, was seen at the boat launch on the Kankakee River at Aroma Park. His mother had told him to be home by five. Witnesses at the launch described a man with him who looked like Buss and drove a car like his. A motel clerk in Braidwood called police about a guest registered as "Jim Benson," and on August 10, 1995, officers confronted Buss at the Wilmington Dam and arrested him. Christopher’s body was found in Will County on August 15, 1995.
A Will County jury convicted Buss in 1996 of first-degree murder, aggravated kidnaping and aggravated unlawful restraint. Among the aggravating factors it found were that he had been convicted of murdering two or more people and that the victim was under 12. He was sentenced to death, with prison terms of 30 years and five years on the other counts. On April 15, 1999, the Illinois Supreme Court affirmed the convictions and the death sentence.
David Edward Maust had been in and out of mental institutions since childhood, the Associated Press reported. While serving in the United States Army he was convicted of manslaughter in the death of a teenage boy in Germany, United Press International reported. In 1981 he killed a 15-year-old boy near Elgin, Illinois. When Illinois charged him, he was serving a five-year sentence in Texas for stabbing a child. He pleaded guilty to the Illinois murder and was sentenced to 35 years. When he was arrested in Indiana in December 2003, the Associated Press reported that he had been paroled about four years earlier.
By 2003 he was 49 and living in a second-floor apartment in a run-down house in Hammond, Indiana. Nicholas James, 19, disappeared that year. On September 10, 2003, two friends, James Raganyi, 16, and Michael Dennis, 13, were last seen at a home near his; they had visited his apartment. In December 2003 police in Hammond recovered the bodies of all three, and Maust was taken into custody. Nicholas James had died of a head injury; strangulation or suffocation was suspected for the two younger boys. Police Chief John Cory said Maust had confessed to strangling James Raganyi. A former Cook County sheriff’s investigator who had handled the 1981 case, Phil Bettiker, said he would have liked to see Maust put away longer for that killing. "I think he’s gone this time," he said.
In the fall of 2005 Maust pleaded guilty to all three murders, and in December 2005 he was sentenced in Crown Point to three consecutive life terms without parole. He was found hanging in his cell at the Lake County Jail early on the day he was to be moved to state prison, and he died at St. Anthony Medical Center in Crown Point on January 20, 2006. He left a seven-page note that referred to five killings and expressed remorse.
Ian McLoughlin was born on May 31, 1958. Between 1970 and 1983 he was sentenced fourteen times, mostly for burglary and theft. On September 19, 1984, he received eight years for the manslaughter of a man. On July 2, 1992, he was convicted of murdering a man who had offered him a place to stay, and he was given a life sentence with a minimum term of 14 years.
By the summer of 2013 he was still serving that life sentence, held at HMP Spring Hill, an open prison near Aylesbury. In prison he had befriended a man, then in his eighties, whom he knew to be wealthy. On July 13, 2013, McLoughlin was let out for the day on temporary release. He went to that man’s home in Little Gaddesden, in Hertfordshire, intending to rob him and ready to use force. He threatened him with a knife and took valuables, bank cards and PIN numbers. The old man got free and shouted for help.
A neighbor, Graham Buck, came to help, though he was warned not to. McLoughlin attacked him outside and killed him with a knife. Graham Buck died before the emergency services arrived. McLoughlin was arrested in London three days later, after he had spent the stolen money.
On October 21, 2013, he pleaded guilty to murder and robbery. At the Central Criminal Court, Mr. Justice Sweeney sentenced him to life with a minimum term of 40 years, believing that a recent ruling of the European Court of Human Rights, Vinter v. United Kingdom, barred him from imposing a whole life order. The Attorney General referred the sentence to the Court of Appeal as unduly lenient. On February 18, 2014, a five-judge court headed by the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, held that the judge had erred in law in reading Vinter as a bar to a whole life order. A murder by an offender previously convicted of murder, the court noted, is a case for which the starting point is normally a whole life order. McLoughlin’s offense was aggravated by the robbery, the knife, a vulnerable victim attacked in his own home, a record that included murder and manslaughter, and the fact that he was serving a life sentence when he did it. The only mitigation was his plea. The court quashed the 40-year term and imposed a whole life order.
Evan Spencer Ebel had convictions in Colorado dating to 2003, and from 2005 he was serving an eight-year prison sentence. In 2006, while being moved from his cell, he slipped his handcuffs, punched a prison officer and threatened the officer’s family. He spent much of his time in solitary confinement and built a long record of disciplinary violations. His father, a suburban Denver lawyer and an old friend of Governor John Hickenlooper, told the Colorado Legislature in 2011 that he believed solitary confinement was damaging his son.
In 2008 Ebel pleaded guilty in rural Fremont County to assaulting the officer. The plea agreement called for up to four more years, to be served after the eight-year term. The judge did not say the word "consecutive." The court clerk recorded the sentence as concurrent, and that was the version sent to the state prison system, the 11th Judicial District said in 2013. Corrections officials had no means of knowing the plea had been meant to keep him in prison longer. On January 28, 2013, having completed his sentence as recorded, he was released on parole, about four years earlier than intended.
Until the middle of March he was, by official accounts, a model parolee. On March 14, 2013, his electronic monitoring bracelet stopped working. On Sunday, March 17, Nathan Leon, 27, a pizza delivery driver and the father of two young children, was shot dead in the Denver area while out on a delivery. On the evening of Tuesday, March 19, Tom Clements, executive director of the Colorado Department of Corrections, answered the door of his home in Monument and was shot dead. Parole officers had gone to Ebel’s home only hours earlier and found that he had cleared out. A warrant for his arrest on parole violations was issued on March 20.
On March 21, in Montague County, Texas, Deputy James Boyd tried to stop a black Cadillac with Colorado plates. The driver opened fire and wounded Boyd, who survived. The car fled through Wise County at more than 100 miles an hour, and its driver kept firing until he crashed in Decatur, got out shooting and was shot by officers. He was Ebel, 28, and he died of his wounds. "He didn’t plan on being taken alive," the Decatur police chief said. Investigators said the gun he used in Texas was the one that killed Clements, and they believed he was also involved in Leon’s death. In the car they found directions to Clements’s home and the names of other Colorado officials.
Ebel was a member of the 211 Crew, a white supremacist prison gang, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported. Texas documents suggested that investigators believed, for a time, that he had acted on orders from the gang’s leaders. Ebel was never charged in either killing; he died first. The 11th Judicial District’s chief judge, Charles Barton, and its court administrator expressed their regret for the error and their condolences to the Leon and Clements families. Leon’s widow said an apology was not enough. In 2016 El Paso County Sheriff Bill Elder said that years of work had found no evidence of a gang conspiracy and that he planned to close the case. "If there was physical evidence of a conspiracy," he said, "we would be on that like white on rice."
Each release had its own logic. A Texas board working to a quota cleared old files by the hundred; an Austrian prison freed a celebrated author; an English open prison let a lifer out for the day; a Colorado clerk wrote "concurrent" where a plea deal meant "consecutive." Some of the men went on to new convictions and some only to suspicion. The Cowden family still has no verdict, and neither do the families of Nathan Leon and Tom Clements.
• 1966: Dwain Lee Little, 15, convicted of killing a teenager in Springfield, Oregon.
• August 6, 1966: Kenneth McDuff kills three teenagers near Fort Worth; later sentenced to death.
• 1972: Furman v. Georgia; McDuff’s death sentence is commuted to life.
• 1973: Daniel Joe Hittle convicted in Minnesota on two counts of second-degree murder.
• 1974: Over Labor Day weekend the Cowden family disappears near Copper, Oregon.
• December 11, 1974: Jack Unterweger kills Margret Schäfer in Herborn, Germany.
• Spring 1975: The Cowdens' remains are found.
• May 31, 1976: Unterweger sentenced to life in Salzburg.
• 1978: William Bonin paroled in California.
• 1979 to 1980: The killings for which Bonin is later convicted.
• 1981: Timothy Buss, 13, kills Tara Sue Huffman. David Maust kills a 15-year-old boy near Elgin, Illinois.
• January 1982 and 1983: Bonin convicted in Los Angeles and Orange counties and sentenced to death.
• 1984: Hittle paroled. Ian McLoughlin sentenced to eight years for manslaughter.
• October 11, 1989: McDuff paroled.
• November 15, 1989: Officer Gerald Walker killed in Garland; three people shot dead in Hittle’s apartment in Dallas.
• May 23, 1990: Unterweger paroled.
• September 1990 to July 1991: The eleven deaths later charged against Unterweger.
• December 6, 1990: McDuff released a second time.
• December 29, 1991: Colleen Reed abducted in Austin.
• February 27, 1992: Unterweger arrested in Miami.
• March 1, 1992: Melissa Northrup abducted in Waco.
• May 4, 1992: McDuff arrested in Kansas City, Missouri.
• July 2, 1992: McLoughlin convicted of murder.
• June 28 and 29, 1994: Unterweger found guilty in nine cases; he is found dead in his cell hours later.
• August 7, 1995: Christopher Meyer, 10, disappears at Aroma Park, Illinois.
• February 23, 1996: Bonin executed at San Quentin.
• November 17, 1998: McDuff executed at Huntsville.
• April 15, 1999: Illinois Supreme Court affirms Buss’s death sentence.
• December 6, 2000: Hittle executed.
• December 2003: Three bodies recovered in Hammond, Indiana; Maust charged.
• December 2005: Maust sentenced to three consecutive life terms.
• January 20, 2006: Maust dies after hanging himself in jail.
• January 28, 2013: Evan Ebel released early through a records error.
• March 17, 19 and 21, 2013: Nathan Leon and Tom Clements shot dead; Ebel killed in a shootout in Decatur, Texas.
• July 13, 2013: McLoughlin, on temporary release, kills Graham Buck in Little Gaddesden.
• February 18, 2014: Court of Appeal imposes a whole life order on McLoughlin.
• 2016: El Paso County sheriff moves to close the Clements investigation.