The phrase "foster parent" promises a screen: a social worker’s visit, a license, a file. Eight cases, spread across a century and five countries, show how little the promise sometimes weighed. In several of them the person who took a child in was a killer. In others the paperwork around the arrangement, or the lack of it, let a killer collect children, money or both. What the authorities checked, and when they stopped checking, is the thread that runs through them.
Edward Wayne Edwards pleaded guilty to five killings in three separate cases spread over nearly two decades. The first two victims, Billy Lavaco, 21, and Judy Straub, 18, died in Norton, Ohio, in August 1977. The next, Tim Hack and Kelly Drew, both 19, died in Jefferson County, Wisconsin, in August 1980, and their deaths came to light that October. The fifth was a young man he called his foster son, in 1996.
None of those cases was solved at the time. Edwards was arrested in July 2009, at 76, after his daughter told a Wisconsin detective that she suspected him and DNA from Kelly Drew’s clothing matched a sample he gave that month. Within a year he had pleaded guilty in Wisconsin and Ohio to the two double killings: two consecutive life terms in Summit County on June 11, 2010, and two life sentences in Jefferson County, imposed by Judge William F. Hue on June 21, 2010. Then, already serving life terms, he told the Associated Press about the death of his foster son and said he wanted to be executed.
His earlier life had been public in a way few such cases are. Born in Akron in 1933, he spent his early years in a Catholic orphanage. In the 1950s and early 1960s he was a car thief, robber and escapee. In 1961, after robbing a bank in Akron, he reached the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list; a Jefferson County detective later gave the date as November 10, 1961. FBI agents captured him in Atlanta on January 20, 1962. After prison he wrote an autobiography and gave talks urging young people to stay out of trouble. The lead Wisconsin investigator later called him a con man his whole life.
The foster son was born Daniel Gloeckner and was known as Dannie Boy. He had been a foster child without a stable placement, the Daily Jefferson County Union reported, and at 24 he legally took the family name, becoming Dannie Boy Edwards. He lived with Edwards and his wife in Burton, in Geauga County, east of Cleveland. Edwards told the Associated Press in 2010 that he had considered the young man an adopted son. Accounts give the month of the 1996 killing as May or June. Geauga County sheriff’s Sergeant Brian Johnston investigated from 1996 on. Investigators questioned Edwards at the time, but no charges were filed. Edwards collected insurance on the young man’s life, the Geauga County prosecutor later confirmed; most reports give the amount as 250,000 dollars, while one Associated Press report gave about 183,000.
A Geauga County three-judge panel sentenced him to death on March 8, 2011, for aggravated murder, with counts of aggravated robbery and kidnapping. Execution was set for August 31, 2011. He died of natural causes at the Corrections Medical Center in Columbus on April 7, 2011. Of all eight cases, his is the one where the foster relationship was simplest and the motive plainest: a young man with nobody else, a man who had taken his name, and a policy on his life.
Belle Gunness was never charged with anything. Born Brynhild Paulsdatter Storset in Selbu, Norway, in 1859, she emigrated to Chicago in 1881 and later settled on a farm outside La Porte, Indiana. In the early hours of April 28, 1908, the farmhouse burned. Four people died in the ruins, three children and an adult woman. A week later, digging on the property led investigators to identify men who had answered her notices for a husband, and her foster daughter. Within weeks the La Porte County sheriff, coroner and prosecutor were treating the widow as the person responsible.
By then she was presumed dead. The coroner ruled that the adult woman was Belle Gunness, relying on a dental plate and rings; doctors disagreed at the time. Her former hired man, Ray Lamphere, was tried in November 1908 for murdering her and her children by arson, and the jury convicted him of arson only. He received an indeterminate term of two to 21 years, a 5,000 dollar fine and five years' loss of the vote, and he died in the Indiana State Prison at Michigan City in 1909. In 2007 a University of Indianapolis team ran DNA tests to settle whether the dead woman was Gunness. The results were reported as inconclusive, and whether she died that night, or set the fire and left, remains open.
Children moved through her household, and some died. R. Marc Kantrowitz writes that two children in her household, Caroline and Axel, showed symptoms that later accounts read as signs of foul play, and both were insured. After the La Porte discoveries in May 1908, Chicago officials searched their records and reported that a daughter, Carolina Sorenson, had died on August 24, 1896, and an infant on April 10, 1896. Whether these were her own children is disputed. Ted Hartzell, writing in American History in 2008, said birth records and her sister’s statements suggest she had no children of her own, though at times she cared for as many as twelve. Andrea Simmons, the forensic researcher who reopened the case a century later, said in 2008: "We don’t believe Belle Gunness ever gave birth to her own kids."
Her first husband, Mads Sorenson, died on July 30, 1900, the only day on which two of his life insurance policies were both in force. The family doctor attributed the death to heart failure and no autopsy was done. She collected 8,500 dollars, according to both Hartzell and Kantrowitz, and in 1901 bought the La Porte farm. She moved there with the two surviving Sorenson girls, Myrtle and Lucy, and a foster daughter, Jennie Olson.
In 1902 she married Peter Gunness, a Norwegian widower who had boarded with her in Chicago. He brought two young daughters from his first marriage. The younger, an infant, died in Belle’s care, within a week of the wedding by Hartzell’s account, or some months after it by the account of Peter’s brother, Gus Gunness, interviewed in Minneapolis in May 1908. Either way there was no official investigation. About eight months after the wedding Peter Gunness was dead. Belle called it an accident. Hartzell writes that she was cleared at the coroner’s inquest and collected 3,500 dollars in insurance. Gus stayed several days and recalled that she asked him more than once to stay on and run the farm. He declined. "I did not like her looks," he said. He also said she was fond of children and treated his niece Swanhild, the surviving daughter, and her own children well. Peter’s brother later took five-year-old Swanhild to Wisconsin.
Jennie Olson, raised by Belle from infancy, was a teenager in September 1906. Belle told neighbors that Jennie had gone away to college, and later that she was on her honeymoon. A Lutheran school in Fergus Falls, Minnesota, where Belle said Jennie had enrolled, told reporters in 1908 that she had never been there. Relatives gave depositions to the coroner. The foster daughter, in other words, was the one member of the household whose absence was explained by a series of stories, each replaced by the next.
Estimates of the total number of deaths attributed to Gunness range from 10 to 14 among most researchers, to at least 21 according to La Porte County historian Bruce Johnson and about 25 according to Simmons. Figures above 40 come from 1908 rumor. No court ever ruled on the cause of any of these deaths.
Marybeth Tinning was convicted in July 1987 of murdering her daughter Tami Lynne, four months old, who died on December 20, 1985, in Schenectady, New York. A jury convicted her of murder in the second degree under the theory of depraved indifference to human life, and acquitted her of intentional murder. She was sentenced on October 1, 1987, to 20 years to life.
Tami Lynne was the ninth of Tinning’s children to die young. The eight before her had died between January 1972 and March 1981, and their deaths were recorded at the time as natural or unexplained: respiratory failure, cardiorespiratory arrest, brain edema, sudden infant death syndrome, acute pulmonary edema, cardiopulmonary arrest. The eighth of those children, Michael, was not born to the Tinnings. The district attorney said in 1986 that he had been placed with them through a private agency and that the adoption might never have been finalized; the Associated Press said in 2018 that the couple had been in the process of adopting him and that his death on March 2, 1981, had been attributed to bronchial pneumonia. UPI gave his age as two and two-thirds years, and the AP as three.
In a handwritten statement to investigators in February 1986, Tinning admitted causing the deaths of Tami Lynne and of two of her sons, Timothy in 1973 and Nathan in 1975, and wrote that she "did not do anything to" Jennifer, Joseph, Barbara, Michael and Mary Frances. She was never charged in any death but Tami Lynne’s. At trial she said the statement had been obtained improperly. The Appellate Division held that the statements were properly admitted and affirmed the conviction in December 1988; the Court of Appeals denied leave to appeal in April 1989.
Parole came slowly. She was denied in 2007, 2009, 2011, 2013, 2015 and 2017. At her sixth hearing, in January 2017, she said Tami Lynne "was a lovely child and there was no reason for me to do what I did at that time," and attributed the other deaths to "various medical conditions." At her seventh hearing, by video conference on July 10, 2018, she told the commissioners, "I killed my daughter, my baby daughter, on that day," and, speaking of her adopted son, "I didn’t harm (Michael) with my own hand or any of the other children." Parole was announced on July 16, 2018, when she was 75, and she was released from Taconic Correctional Facility on August 21, 2018. A Daily Gazette report later recorded her discharge from parole supervision. Assemblyman Jim Tedisco called the decision "a total disgrace and an affront to the victims and the safety of the public." Her husband said he was "very glad that it will soon be all over with."
What she was proven to have done, and what she admitted but was never tried for, are separate things, and the record keeps them so. The adopted boy belongs to neither list. His death was never charged, never tried, and was attributed at the time to illness; she has denied harming him.
John E. Robinson Sr. was 56 when he was arrested in Olathe, Kansas, on June 2, 2000. To neighbors he was a family man who liked spending time with his grandchildren. To courts in two states he was a man with a long record of embezzlement and theft. He is now under a Kansas death sentence for the capital murder of Suzette Trouten, 27, of Newport, Michigan, and serving life without parole in Missouri for five killings to which he pleaded guilty in Cass County in October 2003.
His adoption case is the strangest of the eight, because it involved a baby who lived. Lisa Stasi began dating her future husband at 18; they married in August 1984, and their daughter was born the following month, according to the Kansas Supreme Court. By the fall she had separated from her husband and was moving between places with the baby.
Robinson at the same time was looking for a baby for his brother and his brother’s wife, who wanted to adopt privately. In late 1984 he told a Kansas City social worker about a program he said he ran for young mothers and their babies. His brother sent him a 2,500 dollar cashier’s check that fall, made out to Equi II, and on January 10, 1985, a 3,000 dollar check made out to an attorney, the court recorded. In early January 1985 Robinson arranged a hotel room in Overland Park for Stasi and her daughter, which he later admitted. On January 9 she left with a man calling himself "John Osborne," whom a relative by marriage later identified as Robinson. That afternoon Stasi called her mother-in-law in distress and said that "they" wanted her to sign four blank sheets of paper. A few days later a typed letter signed "Lisa" reached the family, saying she had left to start a new life with her baby. She was 19.
Robinson’s wife testified that her husband brought a baby into their house during a January snowstorm. The child went to Robinson’s brother and his wife, who adopted her and renamed her. The adoption papers were later shown to be forged. After Robinson’s arrest in 2000 the adoptive parents raised questions about the child’s origins, and a comparison of footprints matched her to Lisa Stasi’s daughter, the Kansas Supreme Court recorded.
The adoptive couple, in short, were not parties to the crime in any finding of a court; they were the people to whom the product of a fraud had been delivered. The papers that made the arrangement look lawful were forged.
Another woman, Catherine Clampitt, 27, had a different file. Robinson leased a mailbox in her name and set up two apartments for her, telling landlords she was a graphics employee and at one point his adopted daughter. In August 1999 her parents drove to an Overland Park address they had for her and found a private mailbox company. Emails shown to jurors assured her father that she was happy and well and asked to be left alone. Robinson pleaded guilty to her murder in Missouri in 2003.
In Kansas, the jury on October 29, 2002, convicted Robinson on all six counts it received: aggravated kidnapping and capital murder of Trouten, capital murder of Izabela Lewicka, felony theft, first-degree premeditated murder of Lisa Stasi, and aggravated interference with Stasi’s parental custody. The capital charges rested on a Kansas provision making it capital murder to kill more than one person as part of a common scheme or course of conduct; prosecutors argued that the killings of Trouten and Lewicka each belonged to a scheme that also took in the Missouri deaths. On November 6, 2015, the Kansas Supreme Court reversed the separate capital murder conviction for Lewicka and the first-degree murder conviction for Stasi as multiplicitous, not as a finding of innocence, and affirmed one capital conviction and the death sentence. The U.S. Supreme Court declined review in October 2016. Kansas Governor Kelly denied clemency on June 18, 2026, and a new post-conviction appeal was pending before the Kansas Supreme Court as of September 15, 2026. Kansas has carried out no execution since 1965.
Hilda Nilsson was sentenced to death in Helsingborg, in southern Sweden, on June 13, 1917, for killing eight small children she had taken in as foster children. The city’s own encyclopedia, Helsingborgs stadslexikon, describes her as the last person in Sweden convicted as an änglamakerska, the Swedish term usually rendered "angel maker." The sentence was never carried out. While her appeal was pending she was held in the women’s prison at the citadel in Landskrona, and there she took her own life. Nyheter24 dates her death August 10, 1917, and reports that her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment that same day; the city encyclopedia and the court-history site do not mention a commutation, and the court-history site says she died before the appeal was decided.
Born in 1876 in Tirup, in Skåne, she worked at Dunker’s rubber factory in Helsingborg, known locally as "Galoschan," then took a cookery course and worked in restaurants, according to the city archive’s account. In 1902 she married Gustaf Nilsson, a fireman. He later suffered an eye injury and had to take lower paid work, Nyheter24 reports. The couple ran into money trouble and eventually went bankrupt. SVT, the Swedish public broadcaster, described her in 2017 as a woman with debts who took in children born outside marriage in return for payment.
Her case belongs to the history of a paid foster trade. Children born outside marriage carried a heavy stigma in Sweden in the early 1900s, and their mothers were looked down on, the archive says. A market grew up to meet the demand. A mother could pay a single lump sum, known as "allt i ett," meant to cover the child until the age of 15; wealthier families paid more. Many foster children were neglected or mistreated, and when a child died, the foster home kept the money. Nyheter24 adds that a 1911 law had banned the spread of information about contraception and that abortion was already strictly prohibited. Mothers, often from middle class or wealthier families, found foster mothers through newspaper advertisements, and Nilsson’s well kept apartment made her look like a trustworthy choice.
Nilsson took in foster children in her forties, short of money. Her husband was against the idea but went along with it. Over a few years, 13 children passed through her care; some were placed elsewhere or adopted out, and eight were killed. She told no one, and the money paid for them was soon spent. Nyheter24 dates the first killing to 1915 and reports that seven more followed. The children’s names have not been reported. Nyheter24 describes the judgment as seven murders and one manslaughter; the city sources say eight killings. Both counts are on record and they do not agree.
The case came apart because of one mother. She had paid extra so that she could keep in contact with her son, Nyheter24 reports, and Nilsson had collected the boy from a foster agency while posing as an aunt of his under a false name. Nilsson then produced a forged letter claiming that this "aunt" had moved to Gällivare, in the far north of Sweden. When the mother came to Nilsson’s door she was told the boy had died of whooping cough. She wrote to the parish priest in Gällivare and learned that the parish had no record of any such child. She went to the police, and their inquiry led to Nilsson’s arrest in Helsingborg. By late December 1916 the case was public. The court-history site quotes a Helsingborgs Dagblad report of December 29, 1916, and describes Nilsson as calm and composed during the trial.
Helsingborg’s city archive put her case on public display in 2017, and in 2019 a project listing notable women in the city’s history drew criticism on social media when it included her. The disagreement is local and it is still going.
In 1921 a jury in Copenhagen convicted Dagmar Overbye of killing infants who had been handed to her by their mothers. She was a working woman of about thirty with a record of thefts, who answered and placed newspaper advertisements offering to "adopt" babies. The mothers, most of them unmarried and poor, paid her a single sum and left believing their children would go to a family. The court heard that the children died the same day or soon after.
Danish reference works spell her surname Overby; Overbye is the spelling in much English-language writing. Born April 23, 1887, at Assendrup, Jutland, she was tried before Østre Landsret, the Eastern High Court, which sentenced her to death. She did not appeal. About a month later she was pardoned on a recommendation from the Council of State, on condition that she never be released and never receive any relaxation of the prison rules. She died in Vestre Fængsel in Copenhagen on May 6, 1929. The number of children is not settled. Dansk Kvindebiografisk Leksikon and Den Store Danske give the conviction as nine counts, eight foster children and one of her own; TV 2 Kosmopol, Videnskab.dk and the entry on serial killing give eight infants between 1916 and 1920. She confessed in the city court to as many as 16. Later writers have suggested 20 to 25 or more, never tested in court.
The historian Agnete Birger Madsen, author of a book on infanticide in Denmark from 1900 to 1950, told Information that between 16 and 17 women a year were convicted at that time of killing infants or of gross neglect, usually of newborns. Those convicted came from the bottom of the social order, often maids or factory workers with almost no help with money or childcare. Overbye stood apart. "The Dagmar Overby case is a completely different story; she is very atypical," Madsen said. She had not found another woman who placed newspaper advertisements intending to kill the children she received.
The method of contact was the same in every case, according to Dansk Kvindebiografisk Leksikon. Overbye reached desperate mothers through the newspapers, agreed to "adopt" each child for a single payment, and killed the child on the day it was handed over. The Copenhagen Post, drawing on the retired police officer and lecturer Poul Fjeldgård, said the mothers typically paid around 200 kroner, roughly a year’s wages for the many who worked as live-in servants. Avisen.dk, drawing on the writer Karen Søndergaard Jensen, reported that Overbye told the mothers it was best to avoid further contact, and later wrote them letters about how their children were doing when the children were already dead.
The first case the Danish sources describe dates from 1916. She had answered an advertisement from Rasmine Jensen, an unmarried mother who had just had her second child, and agreed to "adopt" the baby for 12 kroner. Asked at her trial why she had done it, she said she did not know. In the four years that followed she killed at least seven more, and probably more, according to the Leksikon.
The last was in August 1920. Karoline Aagesen was 21 and had become pregnant outside marriage. On August 30 she brought her two-month-old daughter to Overbye’s apartment in the Vesterbro district. After about three quarters of an hour she left. Overbye waved goodbye from the window, holding the baby’s hand. The mother went to the police, and they acted; Overbye was arrested in 1920. TV 2 Kosmopol says Aagesen had not paid for the adoption, while the Copenhagen Post says she testified to paying about 200 kroner. Overbye first denied killing the child, then confessed and said it was the last in a long series. Her explanations changed during the investigation and at the trial, Information reported, and her motive never became clear. Videnskab.dk summed up the trial this way: the defense argued that she was the victim of an uncaring society, and the prosecutor still got the death sentence he asked for.
None of these arrangements had any official standing. Denmark had passed a law on the supervision of paid foster children on April 20, 1888, requiring anyone who took in a child under fourteen for payment to have the permission of the municipal council and placing such children under a local supervisor. That law, by its own terms, ran until April 1, 1895. The reference works describe the Act on the Supervision of Foster Children of 1923, a direct result of the case, as the measure that brought all children born outside marriage under public supervision; it stayed in force until 1965. Information reported that the case also led to new rules on population registration, and that Mødrehjælpen, the organization that helped single mothers, was founded in 1924. Madsen traced a shift in the way Danish newspapers wrote about infanticide between the wars, from condemning individual mothers toward treating it as a problem for society.
The case came back into public view with Magnus von Horn’s film The Girl with the Needle, nominated for an Academy Award. In a December 2024 interview with The Moveable Fest, von Horn said the real woman was a serial killer "but not in the sense that she kidnapped babies to kill them"; women gave her their children in the naive hope that she would find them foster families. The film’s events, characters and dialogue belong to the screenplay.
Miyuki Ishikawa was one of the best-known midwives in postwar Tokyo, a licensed midwife trained at the Tokyo Imperial University hospital and director of the Kotobuki maternity home in Yanagichō, in Ichigaya, Shinjuku Ward. She and her husband, Takeshi, took in infants that mothers could not keep, collecting a fee for each. Some children were handed on to people who wanted them. Many of the rest died. The couple had no children of their own; their household included Takeshi’s son from an earlier marriage and three adopted children, two boys and a girl. To neighbors they looked prosperous and respectable.
Police in Tokyo linked five infant deaths to the home on January 12, 1948, and Ishikawa was arrested by the Waseda police on January 15, aged 52, with her husband and an undertaker. The Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office indicted her on January 26 for murder, with her husband and an assistant midwife. Prosecutors told the court on September 3, 1948, that 84 infants had died at the home between April 1946 and January 1948. Estimates of the total, never tried, run from 85, in the Tokyo Metropolitan Police history as cited by Arata Koike, to 103 in the Asahi Shimbun’s January 1948 reporting, to "more than 100" in a 2023 House of Representatives report and 169 of 199 in an early Asahi report later corrected by the paper.
On October 11, 1948, the Tokyo District Court convicted the couple of five deaths, as deaths caused by omission through malnutrition, and held the evidence insufficient on 22 further deaths of the 27 the prosecution called clear. Ishikawa received eight years' imprisonment; the prosecution had asked for 15. She was released on bail on August 20, 1948. The Tokyo High Court set the first judgment aside on April 28, 1952, and sentenced her to four years. The Supreme Court upheld that ruling and the sentence became final. She died in May 1987, aged 90.
The sources disagree on when the home opened. Bunshun Online’s 2026 account says April 1942; the House of Representatives report of 2023 says the couple began taking in infants in April 1943; the historian Hitomi Yoshida dates the adoption work from 1944. What the home did is less in dispute. It was what the press called a special maternity home: it delivered babies, and it took in children whose mothers could not raise them and passed them to people who wanted a child. The Diet’s 2023 report lists the women who brought their children to the Kotobuki home as unmarried women, war widows, dancers and café waitresses. Bunshun Online adds that during the war the government had encouraged such homes as a way to raise the population.
The Ishikawas found their clients through short classified advertisements. The fee for taking a child was 5,000 to 10,000 yen, according to the Diet report and Bunshun Online; the Asahi gave 5,000 to 6,000. Adoptive parents then paid a second fee, 400 to 500 yen by the Asahi’s account. A woman who had adopted a girl from the home described Ishikawa pricing one child at 300 yen and another, whom she called better looking, at 500. The Diet report says the intake reached 100 in 1947 and that the home took in 211 infants in all.
Neighbors had complained for months. The police box at Yanagichō told reporters after the arrests that since the previous August people living nearby had reported that the babies were never bathed, even in summer, and cried all day. Midwives on the staff, more than ten over the years, asked for more milk and were told to follow instructions; the Asahi reported that all of them left within a month of starting. Women who gave birth there called Ishikawa the oni sanba, the demon midwife. The deaths also brought in goods. Under the rationing system, the home drew milk and sugar for each infant, and for each death the Shinjuku ward office issued tickets for sake for the funeral. According to Bunshun Online’s 2026 account, the couple sold these on the black market and obtained close to 60 false death certificates. A doctor who signed them told the Asahi that by the time the children were brought to him they were beyond help and that he had warned the couple repeatedly with no result. Before the case came to light, that account says, they had made about a million yen, enough to install a telephone, then a rarity, and to buy land in Tokyo and Ibaraki Prefecture.
The mothers appear in the record only in outline. Very few came back to ask after their children; an editorial in the days after the arrests counted two or three. In the week the case broke, mothers who had left children at the home went to the police and to the house in Ichigaya, and at least one collected her infant alive. The writer Yuriko Miyamoto, in a piece for Akahata dated January 23, 1948, argued against taking away what she called the right to be born. The chief of the Waseda station, Isamu Ide, had sent detectives out the day after the first report. Five infants in a single day, and more than thirty before them, struck him as more than misfortune.
Between 1975 and 1979, seven young women disappeared in and around Auxerre, in the Yonne department of Burgundy. All had mild intellectual disabilities, and all were wards or former wards of the state, placed by the child welfare services with foster families or in institutions and special schools. Most of them rode to their day institutions on a bus driven by the same man, Émile Louis. One lived with him for a time; another had been placed in his family as a foster child. When they vanished, the institutions recorded them as runaways. Only three of the seven disappearances were formally reported to the police or gendarmerie.
Louis was arrested in Draguignan, in the Var, on December 12, 2000, more than twenty years later, after families of the missing women forced the courts to look again, and he was charged two days later with abduction and unlawful detention. In custody he admitted the killings, then retracted. In 2004 he was convicted of the murders, with other charges, of Christine Marlot, Jacqueline Weiss, Françoise Lemoine, Bernadette Lemoine, Madeleine Dejust, Chantal Gras and Martine Renault, and sentenced to life imprisonment with an 18-year minimum term. The Paris appeal assize court confirmed the verdict in 2006. He died in custody in October 2013, aged 79, days before doctors were to report on his request for release on health grounds.
He worked as a bus and coach driver in the Yonne, for the Compagnie des Rapides de Bourgogne according to a 2008 legal news report, and his routes carried young people from foster families to schools and day institutions. Among the passengers were young people from institutions run by the Yonne branch of the APAJH, an association for disabled adults and young people, including its medical and educational institute at Grattery, which four of the seven women had attended. He had family ties to the world of foster care. His partner in the late 1970s took in children placed by the welfare services, and the 2001 inspection report describes Louis as the foster father of Jacqueline Weiss. On December 14, 1983, the Paris Court of Appeal sentenced him to four years in prison for offenses against children placed in his partner’s care, committed while he held authority over them. Few details of his early life have been reported; AFP wrote in 2013 that some observers had suggested abuse by the adoptive parents who raised him, a view reported and not a finding of any court.
The women had few people watching over them. The inspectors wrote of a passive environment around them, in their families and in the institutions, and noted that the homes had generally been content to record a runaway or a voluntary departure rather than ask the police to search.
Christian Jambert, then a gendarme in the local brigade and later in the Auxerre investigation unit, came to suspect Louis early. In the spring of 1984 he drew up a preliminary report on six of the missing women. The inspectors who read it in 2001 found that it established the disappearances as certain and laid out troubling links between each woman and Louis. The report was not finished. On June 26, 1984, it went to the Auxerre prosecutor’s office, where a deputy prosecutor sent it on to the investigating judge in the Lesage case, a 1981 death for which Louis had been accused and which had ended in a dismissal for insufficient evidence on May 4, 1984, with a handwritten note asking that it be added to the current homicide inquiry. That inquiry had already closed. The inspectors found the referral legally unsound: the only way to use the new material was to open a fresh judicial investigation, and no one did.
The Jambert report then disappeared from view. A court clerk located it in 1996 in a box of archived, closed files. No decision to close it appears anywhere, and no magistrate admitted to having closed it. The inspectors could not establish how the file was lost or who was responsible. They placed the main responsibility on the prosecutor then in office, who had discussed the case with Jambert and asked him to keep working but gave him no written instructions. Jambert worked on privately for about nine years without reporting to his superiors, the report says.
After serving his sentence Louis left the Yonne for the Var. In Fréjus, in 1989, he was convicted again in a case involving the children of neighbors at a campsite, AFP reported. Meanwhile an association of families, founded on May 6, 1992 by parents of disabled people in the APAJH’s care, made the disappearances its central cause after appeals on the radio station RTL in the spring of 1995 and on the television program "Perdu de vue" later that year. On July 3, 1996, six complaints were filed with the families as civil parties. The prosecutor’s office opposed them, mainly on the ground that the time limit for prosecution had expired. On February 13, 1997, the investigating judge refused to open an investigation; on May 7, 1997, the investigation chamber of the Paris Court of Appeal overturned the refusals, holding that the complaints could not be dismissed without at least being checked. A judicial investigation opened in Auxerre on May 30, 1997. The inspectors concluded that the investigation that led to Louis existed only because of the civil parties.
Digging at his burial ground in autumn 2024, in 2025 and again in 2026, to test whether he had more victims, has so far produced no conclusion, AFP reported in June 2026.
Placement systems rest on trust in the person who takes the child, and on the assumption that someone will look in. In Louis’s case, the state had placed the women with foster families and then recorded their absence as a runaway’s choice. In Robinson’s, a social worker was told about a program that did not exist, a check went to an attorney, and the papers that followed were forged. In Edwards’s, a young man with no family took the surname of the man who later collected on his life. In Nilsson’s and Overbye’s cases, the foster trade rested on a single payment and the silence of mothers who could not afford to ask questions. In Tokyo, the fees came twice, once from the mother and once from the adopter. Gunness and Tinning raise the opposite question: whether anyone with the authority to ask ever did.
The record is uneven. Gunness was never charged, Tinning was charged only in her daughter’s death, and Edwards was not charged in his foster son’s case until 2010, after he confessed to the Associated Press. In Auxerre the case reached trial through the persistence of the families, and in Copenhagen through a young mother who went to the police.
• 1887: Dagmar Overbye born, April 23, at Assendrup, Denmark.
• 1888: Danish law on supervision of paid foster children, April 20.
• 1896: Chicago officials later reported two deaths of children in Belle Sorenson’s care, April and August.
• 1900: Mads Sorenson dies July 30; Belle Gunness collects 8,500 dollars (Hartzell, Kantrowitz).
• 1902: Belle marries Peter Gunness; he dies about eight months later.
• 1908: Fire at the Gunness farm, April 28; Ray Lamphere tried November 1908 and convicted of arson only.
• 1917: Hilda Nilsson sentenced to death in Helsingborg, June 13; dies the same year.
• 1921: Dagmar Overbye convicted at Østre Landsret and sentenced to death; pardoned about a month later.
• 1923: Danish Act on the Supervision of Foster Children.
• 1929: Overbye dies in Vestre Fængsel, May 6.
• 1948: Kotobuki case breaks, January 12 to 15; Miyuki Ishikawa sentenced to eight years, October 11.
• 1952: Tokyo High Court reduces Ishikawa’s sentence to four years, April 28.
• 1975 to 1979: Seven young women disappear around Auxerre.
• 1983: Émile Louis sentenced to four years by the Paris Court of Appeal, December 14.
• 1984: Gendarme’s report on six missing women sent to the Auxerre judge, June 26.
• 1985: Lisa Stasi’s daughter passed to Robinson’s brother and his wife, January.
• 1986: Marybeth Tinning arrested in February after Tami Lynne’s death.
• 1987: Tinning convicted July 17; sentenced October 1.
• 1996: Edwards’s foster son killed; six complaints filed in the Auxerre case, July 3.
• 2000: Robinson arrested June 2; Louis arrested December 12.
• 2002: Robinson convicted in Olathe, October 29.
• 2003: Robinson pleads guilty in Missouri, October.
• 2004: Louis convicted and sentenced to life.
• 2009: Edwards arrested in Louisville, July 30.
• 2010: Edwards pleads guilty in Ohio (June 11) and Wisconsin (June 21).
• 2011: Edwards sentenced to death, March 8; dies April 7.
• 2013: Louis dies in custody, October.
• 2015: Kansas Supreme Court rules on Robinson, November 6.
• 2018: Tinning paroled, released August 21.
• 2026: Clemency denied to Robinson, June 18.