Two kinds of people kill and then deal with the press. Some want the public to know their names, and they take an unnamed killing and make it theirs. Others give reporters nothing at all: no interview, no statement from the dock, no word for the families. Both choices shape what the public can learn, and the second leaves its own mark on the record. Six cases fall on either side of that line.
Between July 29, 1976, and July 31, 1977, thirteen people were shot in eight separate shootings in the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn. Six of them died: Donna Lauria, 18; Christine Freund, 26; Virginia Voskerichian, who was 19 or 20; Valentina Suriani, 18 or 19; Alexander Esau, 20; and Stacy Moskowitz, 20. Most of the people hit were young women, and in the spring of 1977 the city learned that the gunman had a name for himself.
The name was "Son of Sam." It first reached the police in a letter addressed to Captain Joseph Borrelli of the New York Police Department after the Suriani and Esau shootings, in which the writer denied hating women and called himself Son of Sam. Time reported in 1977 that the letter spoke of a father figure named Sam who directed him. The name leaked to the press and stuck.
On May 30, 1977, a second letter went to Jimmy Breslin, a columnist at the New York Daily News. It was postmarked in New Jersey. The writer said he read Breslin’s column every day and called it "quite informative." Time said the letter described its author as a spirit roaming the night and joked that detectives would need new shoes. The Daily News published it on June 6, with excerpts, and Breslin used the column to urge the writer to give himself up, either to the police or to him. He said later that the police had wanted the letter printed in the hope of drawing out clues, and that he had consulted detectives and a psychiatrist before answering in print. The New York Times executive editor, A. M. Rosenthal, said he had serious doubts about newspapers appealing directly to a killer. By midsummer the writer had an audience.
By August 1977 the case dominated New York. Time reported that 75 detectives and 225 uniformed officers were working it full time, that about 700 more had volunteered off duty, and that the task force’s center in Queens sometimes logged more than 100 calls an hour. The police received at least 5,000 names to check. The special task force, code-named Operation Omega, had grown from about 70 investigators to 300 after the last shooting. Young women across the city cut or dyed their hair and stayed in at night. The Queens District Attorney, John Santucci, later said so, and the WCBS radio reporter Irene Cornell remembered hairdressers struggling to keep up with women changing their looks. The owner of one Queens discotheque said a Friday night in the summer of 1977 was the worst he had seen.
The man behind it was David Berkowitz, a 24-year-old postal worker who lived alone in an apartment in Yonkers. He was arrested in Yonkers on August 10, 1977. On May 8, 1978, against his lawyers' advice, he pleaded guilty to all six murders, and on June 12 he was sentenced to the maximum of 25 years to life for each. Reported totals vary, at 315 years in Associated Press copy of 1978 and 365 years in later sources.
He was born on June 1, 1953, in Brooklyn, and given up for adoption; the Pace Law Review says he was born Richard David Falco, and that his adoptive parents, Nathan and Pearl Berkowitz of the Bronx, reversed his first and middle names. In 2017 he told CBS News that he learned he was adopted when he was about four or five. He described a mostly ordinary childhood and a struggle with depression. He was 14, or 13 by the Pace Law Review’s account, when his adoptive mother died of cancer.
The famous name did not leave him. In prison he took a different one, "Son of Hope," and published a book of prison journals under it in 2006. UPI reported in 2004 that he had his own blog. In 2006 the New York Sun reported that he had sued to recover photographs, a typewriter and letters, and had moved to strip a lawyer of profits from a book. The "Son of Sam" law, passed in New York to keep convicted criminals from profiting from accounts of their crimes, was struck down in its original form by the Supreme Court in 1991, according to the First Amendment Encyclopedia. He has been eligible for parole since 2002 and has been refused at every hearing; Associated Press and CBS News reported his 12th denial in May 2024, when he was 70. Whatever the writer to Breslin intended, the name the newspapers took up in 1977 outlasted every other detail of the case.
Between November 2010 and April 2011, a run of night assaults on people on the paths of Akademgorodok, the academic district of Irkutsk in eastern Siberia, left six dead and about ten more injured. The dead included a 12-year-old boy and a 69-year-old researcher at one of the district’s institutes. Residents formed patrols. For months police looked for an outsider.
They were looking for two young men from the district. Artyom Anoufriev, whose name is also written Anufriev, was 18 and a first-year medical student. Nikita Lytkin, a few months younger, had dropped out of two colleges. They had been at School No. 19 together and lived in neighboring buildings. They were caught in April 2011 when Lytkin’s uncle came across a recording on a camera he had lent his nephew and took it to the local police post; both men were arrested in Akademgorodok on the night of April 5 to 6.
They had not hidden. According to prosecutors, both posted under their real names, and Anoufriev moderated a page on the Russian social network VKontakte whose name translates as "We are gods, we decide who lives and who dies." The first survivor known to investigators, an 18-year-old woman, wrote about what had happened to her on the internet, and Rossiyskaya Gazeta reported that the two men contacted her to ask how she had felt. When Captain Yevgeny Karchevsky, the Investigative Committee’s senior investigator on the case, spoke to the Irkutsk Reporter in October 2011, he said that they were "just normal kids" who wanted attention and to be valued as they were. Lytkin had told him, he said, that he would not have done it alone because it would not have been interesting. The suspects told investigators early on that they had killed to "clean up the city."
Anoufriev spoke to the press from custody. In a television interview in 2011, Vesti reported, he said he was a murderer but not a maniac. In an interview with the Investigative Committee’s press service he said he expected a life sentence. Lytkin wrote from the detention center to an Irkutsk newspaper in November 2012, saying that his childhood had been happy until the sixth grade, when he met Anoufriev and moved to a class where he had no friends.
Psychiatric examinations judged both men sane. On April 2, 2013, the Irkutsk Regional Court convicted both of murder, with other charges. Anoufriev was sentenced to life imprisonment, upheld by the Supreme Court of Russia in October 2013. Lytkin, a minor for most of the crimes, received 24 years, cut on appeal to 20, and died in custody on November 30, 2021, in a hospital in Angarsk. Novaya Gazeta Europe reported Anoufriev in the Vologda region in 2023.
Between April 1987 and April 1988, sixteen elderly women who lived alone died in and around Santander, the capital of Cantabria on Spain’s northern coast. The first was Victoria Rodríguez, 61; the last, in April 1988, was Julia Paz Fernández, 71, who lived in Muriedas, a few kilometers away. The victims' ages ran from the sixties into the nineties. Most of the deaths were first recorded as natural. At the trial, four forensic doctors who had certified deaths testified that they had written them up that way, Servimedia reported on November 26, 1991; the body of the sixth victim, they said, was the first to suggest violence.
By late 1987 reporters at the Santander newspaper El Diario Montañés had begun looking into the run of deaths, according to Infobae. Cuatro named Paco Pérez Caballero as the journalist leading the reporting, and said that officials were reluctant to raise an alarm for fear of panic. The Cantabrian authorities at first denied that a serial killer was at work. Police told the 1991 trial that their investigation began in August 1987, about five months after the first death. The firmest lead came after the last. The Guardia Civil learned the name of a bricklayer with a criminal record who had been out on provisional release since November 1986, and the head of the Santander police ordered him watched for about four weeks. José Antonio Rodríguez Vega was arrested in Santander on May 19, 1988.
He already had a record. In October 1978, at 20, he had been arrested in Santander in a series of sexual assaults; the press called him the rapist on the motorbike. In 1979 he was sentenced to a combined 27 years in prison, and he left prison on conditional release after serving part of it. In December 1991 the Audiencia Provincial de Santander convicted him of 16 murders, with nine counts of abusos deshonestos (indecent assault), six thefts and two minor thefts. All sixteen women died of asphyxia, the courts held, and the trial court recorded a sadistic sexual deviation directed at elderly women. He was sentenced to a total reported as 440 years, with no more than 30 to be served under the Spanish Penal Code of the time, and ordered to pay 8 million pesetas to each victim’s family. The Tribunal Supremo upheld the judgment, Servimedia reported on April 30, 1993.
The court rejected a plea of mental illness. It described a psychopath and not a psychotic, fully responsible, a man of normal to high intelligence who knew the rules of society without feeling them, and it said, among other things, that he was not suitable for treatment and that he wanted notoriety. The judgment’s finding is a judge’s reading of a man, not his own statement. His own words came from prison. He wrote to Lucía Guirado, a journalist at El Mundo, and kept up a correspondence and conversations with her for two months, VICE España reported. In those letters he called the killings revenge against his mother and wrote that he should have killed her instead, both VICE España and Infobae reported.
The press had named him El Mataviejas, "the old-lady killer," and Servimedia in 1991 called him "el asesino de ancianas." In 2026 the writer Silvia Cosio argued in Público that the coverage had reduced the dead women to a single label, "viejas," while the man who killed them became the story. In October 2002 he was transferred to the Topas prison near Salamanca. Two days later, on October 24, fellow inmates killed him there.
Amy Archer-Gilligan ran a lodging house for the elderly in Windsor, Connecticut, from 1907. Residents paid by the week, or paid a single sum in return for care for the rest of their lives. Between 1907 and 1916, sixty of them died; forty-eight of those deaths fell in the years from 1911 to 1916, according to the Windsor Historical Society. A newspaper correspondent, a dead man’s sister and the editors of the Hartford Courant pressed the authorities to look closer. The sister had gone through her brother’s papers after the death of Michael Gilligan, the proprietor’s second husband, and took her concerns to the state’s attorney and to the Courant. In May 1916 Archer-Gilligan was arrested.
She was charged with five murders by arsenic. In June 1917 she was tried, for about four weeks, for the death of one lodger, Franklin Andrews, 60, who had died in May 1914. To show that his death was no accident, prosecutors were allowed to put in evidence that three other people connected with the house had also died of arsenic: Michael Gilligan, who died in February 1914, and two residents the court record calls Smith and Gowdy. A jury convicted her of first-degree murder and she was sentenced to hang.
She did not testify. She never testified at either of her trials and never gave an interview, the researcher Ron Robillard told Connecticut Public Radio, which made her own account of events hard to recover. In April 1918 the Connecticut Supreme Court of Errors held, in State v. Gilligan, that the trial judge had wrongly let the jury hear the evidence of the other deaths, and sent the case back. At the retrial in 1919 she was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to life. She served at the state prison in Wethersfield, was declared insane, and in 1924 was moved to the state hospital in Middletown, where she died in 1962. The deaths other than Andrews’s were never tried to a final judgment. A prosecutor estimated that she had killed up to two dozen people, Connecticut Public Radio reported, and Connecticut History says arsenic turned up in more than two dozen former residents; neither figure is a court finding.
Her silence outlived her. Robillard, an East Hartford newspaper editor writing a book about the case, asked the state for her hospital records. He was told at different times, the Connecticut Mirror reported in 2011, that the records had been destroyed, that they were locked in a vault, and that they were missing and presumed destroyed. The Freedom of Information Commission examined the withheld papers in private and ruled that her psychiatric records were confidential but her physical and dental examinations should be released. The state’s Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services appealed, arguing that every one of her medical records was protected, and the Connecticut Supreme Court agreed on September 22, 2015, in an opinion by Justice Eveleigh, holding that her medical and dental records counted as psychiatric records exempt from disclosure. The commission had argued that she had been dead since 1962 and left no surviving relative. The court’s ruling kept the records closed regardless. The case is best known through a comedy: the playwright Joseph Kesselring followed it in writing Arsenic and Old Lace.
Nocona General Hospital was one of the smallest in Texas, in a North Texas town of about 3,200 people, a single hallway of 18 rooms that rarely held more than 15 patients. In the winter of 2000 and 2001, patients there began to stop breathing in the night. Hospital officials later said deaths in December and January ran at about twice the usual level, and later lawsuits said that 22 of the 23 deaths since November had happened on the night shift, with a licensed vocational nurse, Vickie Dawn Jackson, 34, on duty for most or all of them. No one at the hospital treated the deaths as suspicious at the time. The chief executive later testified that he had not believed anything abnormal was happening, given the patients' ages and the higher death rate in winter. Some nurses, Skip Hollandsworth wrote in Texas Monthly, joked that the night shift was the "killing crew." In January the hospital ran a nearly full-page advertisement in the Nocona News praising its nurses, with Jackson’s photograph at the top.
The Texas Monthly writer interviewed her in jail and in prison, and spoke with her relatives and with the families of the patients. He reported that when he went to Nocona in the spring of 2001 to try to speak with her, she declined, and that she also turned down network television crews. In the interviews he later obtained, she denied that anything in her life had made her angry enough to kill. "I would never kill anyone, Mr. Hollandsworth," she told him.
She was arrested in Bowie on July 16, 2002, immediately after a grand jury in Montague County indicted her; two capital murder counts, each alleging two deaths, were followed by three more in January 2004, each alleging two deaths. The case was moved to San Angelo. In October 2006, as her trial was about to begin there, she pleaded no contest to capital murder, in what news reports described as the deaths of ten patients; which ten has not been made public. On October 5 Judge Roger Towery sentenced her to life, which was automatic because prosecutors did not seek the death penalty, and she waived her right to appeal. A no contest plea is not an admission of guilt, and she never made one. Investigators suggested as many as 24 deaths in all, according to the Bowie News in 2015, and civil plaintiffs alleged as many as 22; neither figure was tested in a criminal court. Separately she had pleaded guilty in Cooke County in 2002 to stealing $5,000 from an employer, a retail store, and had been given a year in state jail.
In 2015 she sought a new trial through a habeas application. Judge Towery heard evidence on July 9, 2015, and the parties filed proposed findings in August; no ruling has been reported.
Marianne Nölle was a carer in Cologne who looked after elderly people in their care, with earlier convictions for theft and fraud. In 1993 the Cologne regional court sentenced her to life imprisonment for murder. The court held it proven that she had killed six people in her care between 1984 and 1992, and prosecutors said she had done it out of greed. Police believed the true number was far higher, by one count reported in 1993 17 completed killings and 18 attempts, but only six cases came to judgment. She denied the killings throughout the investigation, said nothing at her trial, and died in prison in 2022 at the age of 84.
The case began with a complaint of theft. An 88-year-old woman had died after a sudden coma, and her daughters learned that the folder in which she kept her savings was empty, the Nürnberger Nachrichten reported. German newspapers reporting on the trial shortened the defendant’s name to Marianne N., as the German press usually does; the tabloids called her the "Todesengel von Köln," the angel of death of Cologne. The six people whose murders the court held proven have not been publicly named, and little has been reported about them as individuals. In January 2025, when a Berlin palliative care doctor was under investigation on suspicion of killing patients, the Berliner Kurier set out earlier German cases of medical staff convicted of killing the people in their care and printed her full surname beside those of Niels Högel, convicted in 2019 of 85 murders, and Stephan Letter, sentenced to life for killing at least 29 patients. Her case arose in the patients' own residences, where she worked alone.
The two groups did not differ much in what the public came to know, and they differ a good deal in what it knew well. Berkowitz wrote his own name into the coverage and has spent decades answering it. Anoufriev and Lytkin posted, contacted a survivor and gave interviews, and the court still convicted on the evidence. Rodríguez Vega’s court read notoriety into him and he supplied his reasons to a journalist later. Archer-Gilligan, Jackson and Nölle said little or nothing, and the facts about each of them come from court records, trial testimony and the writers who tried to reach them. A defendant’s silence is a right, and it also makes the file thin.
• 1907: Amy Archer-Gilligan opens her lodging house in Windsor, Connecticut.
• 1916, May 8: Archer-Gilligan arrested in Windsor.
• 1917, June: Archer-Gilligan tried for the death of Franklin Andrews; convicted of first-degree murder.
• 1918, April 30: Connecticut Supreme Court of Errors orders a new trial.
• 1919: Archer-Gilligan convicted of second-degree murder; sentenced to life.
• 1953, June 1: David Berkowitz born in Brooklyn.
• 1976, July 29, to 1977, July 31: eight shootings in New York City; six people die.
• 1977, April 17: letter naming "Son of Sam" reaches police after the Suriani and Esau shootings.
• 1977, May 30: letter mailed to columnist Jimmy Breslin; published June 6.
• 1977, August 10: Berkowitz arrested in Yonkers.
• 1978, May 8: Berkowitz pleads guilty to six murders; sentenced June 12.
• 1987, April, to 1988, April: sixteen deaths in Santander and Muriedas.
• 1988, May 19: José Antonio Rodríguez Vega arrested in Santander.
• 1991, December 5: Rodríguez Vega convicted of 16 murders; Tribunal Supremo upholds the judgment in 1993.
• 1993: Marianne Nölle sentenced to life in Cologne.
• 2000, December, to 2001, February: deaths at Nocona General Hospital in Texas.
• 2002, July 16: Vickie Dawn Jackson arrested in Bowie, Texas.
• 2002, October 24: Rodríguez Vega killed by fellow inmates at Topas prison.
• 2006, October 3 to 5: Jackson pleads no contest to capital murder; sentenced to life.
• 2010, November, to 2011, April: killings in Akademgorodok, Irkutsk; the two men are arrested April 5 to 6, 2011.
• 2013, April 2: Anoufriev and Lytkin convicted by the Irkutsk Regional Court.
• 2015, September 22: Connecticut Supreme Court rules Archer-Gilligan’s hospital records exempt from disclosure.
• 2021, November 30: Lytkin dies in custody.
• 2022: Nölle dies in prison.
• 2024, May: Berkowitz refused parole for the twelfth time.