Police work runs on people who talk. A man who sells what he knows about his neighbors to a detective gets a favor, some cash, occasionally a look in the other direction, and the detective gets a name he could not have had any other way. The arrangement is old and usually dull. The cases that follow are ones where the man on the other end was killing people while it lasted, and where the question that followed was what the officers who used him had known, had asked and had let pass.
The seven cases run from Germany in 1918 to Michigan in 2020, and they are not alike. In some, an inquiry, a court or an official said the authorities had failed. In others, nobody has said anything of the kind, and all that exists is a sheriff’s remark or a sentence in a court opinion. Where the record stops, so does the story.
Fritz Haarmann was convicted at Hanover on December 19, 1924 of 24 murders. His victims were boys and young men between 10 and 22 years old, one killed in September 1918 and the rest between February 1923 and June 1924. He had been charged with 27 and was acquitted of three as not proven. He was sentenced to death 24 times, accepted the verdict, and was beheaded in the prison yard of the Hanover regional court on April 15, 1925.
He was also, by every account of the case, a police informer. The Lower Saxony State Archive describes him as a small-time crook whom the Hanover criminal police pressured into passing on what he heard in the city’s underworld, beginning in 1918. The archive’s own summary goes further than most such summaries do: it says this relationship was the reason earlier suspicions against him were not pursued and why missing-person reports were handled only after long delays.
The philosopher Theodor Lessing, who attended the trial and wrote the first full account of the case, described how the arrangement worked on the ground. Haarmann carried an official police pass, and boys who met him took him for a plainclothes detective. In at least one case, Lessing wrote, he introduced himself to a missing boy’s family as a criminal investigator. Lessing’s argument was that Haarmann’s police connections both opened doors for him and shielded him for years. Hanover after the war was full of runaways and unattached young people, and almost 600 people, most of them boys and young men between 14 and 18, were reported missing in the city in 1923 alone.
The record holds two moments, both from Lessing, where the failure can be seen. In 1918 the parents of Friedel Rothe, 17, went to the police after friends of their son told them he had gone off with a man who claimed to be a detective. In October of that year an officer went to Haarmann’s address at night. Haarmann was later sentenced to nine months for an offense against another boy. The officer did not search the premises, and when asked about it afterward he said he had no orders to do so. Rothe was the first of the 24 for whom Haarmann was convicted.
In 1923 the parents of Roland Huch, 15, a pharmacist’s son who wanted to go to sea, took their report to the station police. The officer on duty told them he could not set the whole apparatus in motion over a runaway boy, and Lessing says the report was never passed on.
Haarmann’s arrest on June 22, 1924, the state archive says, came largely by chance, out of a dispute with a 15-year-old boy. Lessing, who covered the trial and criticized the role of the police, was removed from the courtroom and later hounded out of his teaching post. How many people he killed beyond the 24 was never settled; he gave his own estimate, as Lessing recorded it, as "thirty, forty; I don’t know."
Clifford Olson was released from prison on mandatory supervision in September 1980, after a life that had been spent mostly in custody. Between November 17, 1980 and July 30, 1981 he killed 11 children and young people in and around Vancouver. The youngest was Simon Partington, nine. The oldest was Sigrun Arnd, a visitor from West Germany, whom police identified as 18. Three were boys and eight were girls.
The police response was slow, and the reasons were partly institutional. The Canadian Press reported that police did not at first treat the first child’s case as suspicious, and that until Simon Partington went missing on July 2, 1981, the missing young people had been classed as runaways. The killings took place in several police jurisdictions, some policed by the RCMP and some by municipal forces.
The informant thread in this case is brief and strange. On July 30, 1981, the day of the last killing, the Canadian Press reported that RCMP investigators had met Olson and offered him money to act as an informant on unsolved murders. They were, in effect, asking the man who had committed some of them. The Canadian Press, reviewing the case in 2011, noted that calls for an independent inquiry into how the investigation had been run went unanswered.
Olson was arrested on Vancouver Island on August 12, 1981. He was charged with the murder of Judy Kozma that month, and had nine counts against him by early September. What followed is the part of the case Canadians remember. On January 11, 1982, his trial opened on 10 counts, and he pleaded guilty to 11 counts of first-degree murder. Days later it became public that police and the British Columbia attorney general had agreed to put $100,000 into a trust for his wife and infant son, in return for his cooperation. Reports differ on how the money was divided. A United Press Canada report of January 1982 described $10,000 for each of seven victims and $30,000 for information about stolen goods. All the accounts agree on the total and on the trust.
Justice H.C. McKay sentenced him to 11 concurrent life terms with no parole eligibility for 25 years and recommended that he never be released. Because he pleaded guilty, much of the evidence, and of the police investigation that produced it, was never made public. He used the courts and the parole system for three decades. A jury at Surrey rejected his application under the faint-hope clause in August 1997, and parole boards refused him in July 2006 and on November 30, 2010. He died of cancer on September 30, 2011, aged 71, in a federal prison health care center at Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines, Quebec. Police said afterward that the frustrations of the case led to a computer system for tracking violent offenders, and CBC News listed the same among its changes.
Kenyel Brown was never tried for murder. In February 2020 the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office charged him with two counts of first-degree premeditated murder, among other counts, over a shooting in River Rouge, Michigan, in which Kimberly Green, 52, and Dorian Patterson, 48, died and a third person was wounded. Police in River Rouge, Highland Park and Detroit also named him as the suspect in four other deaths between December 2019 and the end of February 2020, and those four were never charged. Brown, 40, died in a hospital on February 28, 2020, four days after he shot himself in Oak Park as officers closed in on him.
On February 26 Detroit Police Chief James Craig told reporters that Brown had been a paid informant. He had worked first for the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and then for a joint task force of Detroit police officers and the Drug Enforcement Administration. According to Craig, Brown had been on federal supervised release, had failed drug screens, had been arrested for drunk driving and had violated the terms of his release seven to nine times. WDIV gave Craig’s figure as eight.
The dates are what caught attention. On October 29, 2019, Brown appeared before U.S. District Judge Bernard Friedman for a probation violation hearing. "You’ve got to stop doing this," the judge told him, according to the Associated Press. A spokesman for the court said Brown was released "at the behest of a federal law enforcement agency," which he did not name. U.S. Attorney Matthew Schneider said in early March that he had seen nothing to show that any agency had asked the court to release Brown or keep him out of custody. Craig said that the same day a Detroit officer assigned to the DEA task force signed Brown up as an informant. "I don’t have an answer as to why," Craig said of the timing.
Craig’s account of what the task force knew was that it knew little. The ATF, he said, had not told the task force of Brown’s violations, and the officer who signed him up did not know his history. "Had we known, this isn’t a person we would want to use," he said, as WXYZ reported. WDIV reported that, by its sources, Detroit police could have checked Brown’s criminal history in court documents. The task force deactivated Brown as an informant on February 3, 2020, after his name came up in the River Rouge shooting. Within a week of Craig’s disclosure he withdrew his officers from the task force, ending a partnership that Michigan Public described as about 20 years old.
The mother of Loren Harrington, the 31-year-old whom police linked first to Brown, asked publicly why Brown had been free and working with police despite his violations. No court has tested any of it. The dispute over what each agency knew was never resolved in a proceeding, because the man at its center was dead.
Scott Lee Kimball was a check forger and escape artist, with four felony convictions behind him, when the FBI asked a federal magistrate to release him on December 18, 2002. He had told agents in Alaska, where he was jailed on a counterfeit-check charge, that a fellow inmate was plotting to have witnesses killed, and he was to help them prove it. The Atavist Magazine reported that agents in Seattle later judged him unreliable after he failed a polygraph examination on a separate claim he had made about the 2001 killing of a federal prosecutor. Moved to a federal prison in Colorado in 2002, he repeated the story to an FBI agent from the Denver office, who activated him as a cooperating witness on September 4, 2002. The plan, according to the Atavist, was for him to pose as a hit man.
He was freed on a $10,000 unsecured bond to work the case. Six days later, on December 24, the U.S. Attorney for Colorado, John Suthers, signed a form moving Kimball’s Alaska case to Colorado, with the understanding that he would receive a plea bargain in return for his work, according to a timeline issued in 2010 by the campaign of the Boulder County district attorney, Stan Garnett, and published by Westword. Pending kidnapping and assault charges in Spokane, Washington, were dropped after he became an informant, though the FBI told the Atavist it had not asked for that. Prosecutors said in December 2003 that he had been paid $20,000. The Atavist puts the total FBI payments at $50,000.
Between January 2003 and September 2004, by the dates in that campaign timeline, four people who knew him went missing: LeAnn Emry, 24, who had been writing to the inmate he was informing on; Jennifer Marcum, 25, the girlfriend of the man Kimball was supposed to be catching; Kaysi McLeod, 19, the daughter of a woman he married; and his uncle, Terry Kimball, 60. Emry was last known to be heading to Denver International Airport on February 16 or 17, 2003, according to Denver7, and her car was left near the airport. There was no sign she had taken a flight.
What the handling agent heard from Kimball over the following months was a series of stories. He first said that the inmate had asked Emry to kill a witness, and that she had bought a gun and flown to New York, according to the Moab Sun News. In April 2003, the Atavist reports, he said she was dead, killed by a drug dealer. Nothing investigators checked supported it. He offered to show her parents a place; they declined, 48 Hours reported. Westword reported in 2010 that he won his release from jail that June by claiming to know something about her disappearance.
Meanwhile his own case was settled. He pleaded guilty to the Alaska fraud charges in sealed proceedings in Denver on March 10, 2003. On December 1, 2003, he was sentenced to time served, three years of supervised probation and a fine, and prosecutors told the court Marcum was probably dead. The sentence ended his informant work, the Atavist says. In the same period he had told Kaysi McLeod’s mother, whom he met at a casino, that he was an FBI agent, and showed her a badge that was not real. She later married him. Police told her that her daughter was an adult who had chosen to leave, 48 Hours reported. By 2006 the families of the missing women were doing much of the work themselves, and the fathers of Marcum and McLeod pressed the FBI to look harder at Kimball, according to Denver7. The same year, a Lafayette police detective working a check-fraud complaint called the FBI and learned that his suspect was one of the Bureau’s own informants.
Kimball was arrested in California in March 2006 on a probation-violation warrant. In October 2009, in Boulder County District Court, he pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder and admitted responsibility for all four deaths. He was sentenced to 70 years. Jennifer Marcum has never been located. In a court affidavit in 2017, Colorado investigators said he had told them in 2011 that he had killed 21 people, and Utah investigators named him in 2018 as a suspect in a Garfield County death in 1998; neither claim has produced a charge.
The case became a political dispute in Colorado because Suthers, the U.S. Attorney who had signed the transfer form, was by 2010 the state’s Attorney General, seeking reelection against Garnett, whose office had prosecuted Kimball. The handling FBI agent was suspended, the Atavist reported in 2021. As of October 22, 2026, the Federal Bureau of Prisons listed Kimball at USP Coleman II in Florida, with a projected release date of January 7, 2082.
Jeremy Bryan Jones was convicted in October 2005 of the capital murder of Lisa Marie Nichols, who lived alone in Turnerville, in north Mobile County, Alabama, and was killed on September 17, 2004, two days after Hurricane Ivan struck the area. A jury returned guilty verdicts on four counts. On December 1, 2005, after a 10 to 2 jury recommendation, Circuit Judge Charles Graddick sentenced him to death. The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed on August 31, 2007.
Jones was an Oklahoma native who had been living in Georgia under the name of another man, John Paul Chapman, and was wanted in Oklahoma on a sex-offense charge and for failing to register. The informant claim comes from a sheriff, not a court. The Ottawa County, Oklahoma, sheriff, Dennis King, said in 2005 that years earlier Jones had worked as an informant for the county’s drug task force. In April 2005 King named Jones a person of interest in the March 5, 1997 killings of Harmon Fenton and Sarah Palmer, a couple from Commerce, Oklahoma, who were killed near Melrose, Kansas. The sheriff said Jones had bought drugs from Fenton while working as a task force informant. No charge was reported, and the sheriff’s account is all the record offers about the arrangement: no inquiry examined it, and nobody has said what the task force knew about the man it was paying.
What the authorities did say publicly was about a different failure. Jones was arrested three times in Georgia in 2003 and 2004 on minor charges and each time was booked under the Chapman name. Local police sent his fingerprints to the FBI, whose automated system did not connect them to Jones or to the Oklahoma warrant. In May 2005 the FBI acknowledged the miss. Thomas E. Bush III, an assistant director in its Criminal Justice Information Services Division, said in a statement that law enforcement had lost a chance to prevent further crimes by this man and that the FBI regretted it.
After the Alabama verdict the case widened. In early November 2005 the authorities said Jones had told investigators he had killed at least 12 more people in four other states; News On 6 in Tulsa reported 13 in five states, seven of them in Oklahoma. Police were skeptical, because he was a known liar, though they said they could place him at each location. Jones himself would not repeat the claims to his mother, his girlfriend or reporters, though he insisted what he had told the police was true. Searches in 2005 based on his statements, at a pond in Alabama and in old mines in Kansas, turned up nothing.
The most closely watched claim involved four people in Welch, Oklahoma, a couple and two 16-year-old girls, killed in 1999. Records raised doubts from the start: on the morning the deaths came to light, Jones was in a holding cell in Ottawa County on public-drunkenness and drug-paraphernalia complaints, News On 6 reported, arrested about an hour before the medical examiner’s estimated time of death for the wife. He was never charged. He was charged in Georgia in December 2004 with the murder of Amanda Greenwell, 16, and in New Orleans with the murder of Katherine Collins, 45, by May 2005, and no trial on either was reported. None of his statements has led to another conviction. The last reported ruling in his case came in December 2011, when the Alabama Supreme Court ruled on a matter in his postconviction petition.
Robert Carl Foley has been under sentence of death in Kentucky since 1993. Juries convicted him of six murders in two cases. The first to be tried involved two brothers, Rodney Vaughn and Harry Lynn Vaughn, killed on August 17, 1991 at a gathering in Laurel County. The second involved four people, Kimberly Bowersock, Lillian Contino, Jerry McMillen and Calvin Reynolds, killed in Laurel County on October 8, 1989. Those four deaths came to light only after the Vaughn killings, and a Laurel County grand jury had indicted him in the Vaughn case on October 18, 1991. On October 26, 1991 he was charged with the four 1989 killings. A Laurel Circuit Court jury sentenced him to death twice in September 1993, and a Madison Circuit Court jury sentenced him to death four times on April 27, 1994.
The informant question in Foley’s case sits in a single passage of a court opinion. Pretrial newspaper coverage, filed as exhibits in his first appeal, reported that he had been an informant for the FBI and would have been jailed for another crime but for deals with the government. Foley relied on those reports in arguing that publicity had tainted his trial. The Supreme Court of Kentucky recorded what the articles said. It did not find the claim true or false, and the opinions that followed do not take it up. Whether Foley worked for the FBI, and what the Bureau gave or knew, is unconfirmed.
The court affirmed the Vaughn judgment in November 1996, as amended in April 1997. The litigation that followed ran for decades. In his long-running motion challenging the 1989 convictions, which began with 22 grounds, Foley added 21 more claims in 2012, and the trial court ruled 13 of those untimely. On February 16, 2017 the Supreme Court of Kentucky affirmed the denial. It rejected his complaints about the impeachment of witnesses, uncalled witnesses and the search at issue, and held that the trial court had erred in admitting two threats he made to his wife, since they were covered by marital privilege, but that the error caused no prejudice given the overwhelming evidence. In June 2015 the court had also rejected a challenge by Foley and another death-row prisoner to the state’s clemency system. As of October 27, 2026, a petition in his case, Foley v. Plappert, was pending in the U.S. Supreme Court.
Władysław Mazurkiewicz was a currency dealer, gambler and man about town in Kraków who, a court held in 1956, had killed six people over twelve years, starting under the German occupation and ending in the Stalinist years, and had tried to kill two other men, both of whom lived. He dressed with care, drove his own car at a time when few people could, and played bridge well. The city called him "Piękny Władzio," handsome Władzio, and once the case broke the press called him the elegant murderer.
Two stories about the police followed him through the case, and neither has been proved. The first is that he was protected by the Gestapo. Interia reports that he befriended a captain of the Kraków Gestapo, who obtained for him a card identifying him as a hairdresser to the secret police, and RMF FM adds that the German authorities issued him a bicycle permit and that he traded in gold, currency and food. Przemysław Słowiński, in a 2017 book on unexplained killings in communist Poland summarized by the Polish Press Agency, wrote that some of his dealings, and the first killings linked to them, appear to have taken place with German tolerance. Magazyn TVN24 judged a Gestapo connection probable but said there was no proof that the Gestapo protected him. The Gestapo claim is therefore only a claim, made by journalists and writers, with no document cited for it.
The second is that after the war he worked for the communist security police. Nothing in the published accounts establishes it either. Histmag quotes Marek Hłasko, who reported on the trial for Po prostu and wrote about it in a memoir, that everyone knew Mazurkiewicz was a murderer but assumed he was carrying out the sentences of his masters in the security police. At the trial on August 8, 1956, the officer who had survived the 1943 attempt said Mazurkiewicz had been rumored to be a security police officer, Tygodnik Powszechny reports. Several accounts, including Histmag’s and Magazyn TVN24’s, say witnesses were afraid to speak, and Histmag adds that few wished to ask questions in a city where people often vanished in the first years after the war.
For nine years after the 1946 killing of Jerzy de Laveaux, a wealthy neighbor, no killing was charged. The case that ended his run came in September 1955, when a Warsaw trader he had shot survived, and an investigation opened on October 3. Mazurkiewicz was held on November 1, 1955, after a wanted notice of October 12. The court tried him for the killings of Wiktor Zarzecki in 1943, Władysław Brylski and Józef Tomaszewski in 1945, Jerzy de Laveaux in 1946, and Jadwiga de Laveaux and her sister Zofia Suchowa in 1955.
The trial ran from August 6 to 30, 1956, in the largest courtroom in Kraków, with crowds outside. Asked at the start whether he admitted guilt, he said yes, and then on August 27 withdrew his statements and declared himself innocent. The defense argued first that he was a born killer who could not master his instincts, and then that his victims, former landowners, businessmen and dealers in gold and currency, were of little value to a socialist society. The Polish Press Agency, writing in 2017, described that reasoning as the communist justice system’s leniency toward a killer whose victims did not count for much in the eyes of the state. The court was not persuaded. The prosecutor asked for the death penalty eight times, Focus reports, and in closing called for a catharsis that would cleanse the city’s air of what he called "mazurkiewiczszczyzna." Mazurkiewicz was sentenced to death on August 30, 1956 and executed in Kraków on January 29, 1957.
Set side by side, the seven do not describe a pattern so much as a family of different mistakes. In Hanover, the state archive itself says the informer relationship explained why suspicions went nowhere. In Detroit, a police chief said his own task force had not known what a federal agency knew. In Colorado, a federal prosecutor, a magistrate and an FBI agent each took a step that kept a man with a long record out of custody, and the handling agent was suspended afterward, according to the Atavist. In Vancouver, the police paid a convicted murderer for his help and the public was angry about the bargain, not about the informing. In Kentucky and Oklahoma the informant label rests on a newspaper clipping and a sheriff’s remark, and the courts have never ruled on either. In Kraków it rests on rumor.
What the informant relationship gave these men, in the cases where it can be shown, was not immunity written down anywhere. It was a standing: a pass, a handler who had a stake in the man’s usefulness, a file that said he was cooperating. And in every case the same question came up too late to matter to the people who had died, which was who was reading that file.
• 1918: Hanover criminal police begin using Fritz Haarmann as an informer, according to the Lower Saxony State Archive.
• September 1918: first of the killings for which Haarmann was later convicted.
• 1923: almost 600 people reported missing in Hanover, mostly boys and young men aged 14 to 18, according to Lessing.
• June 22, 1924: Haarmann arrested at Hanover. December 19, 1924: convicted of 24 murders. April 15, 1925: executed.
• March 16, 1943: first attempt for which Mazurkiewicz was later convicted. December 1943: Wiktor Zarzecki killed.
• 1945: Władysław Brylski and Józef Tomaszewski killed. May 1946: Jerzy de Laveaux killed.
• 1955: Jadwiga de Laveaux and Zofia Suchowa killed; Mazurkiewicz held November 1, 1955.
• August 30, 1956: Mazurkiewicz sentenced to death. January 29, 1957: executed.
• September 1980: Clifford Olson released on mandatory supervision. November 17, 1980 to July 30, 1981: 11 killings. August 12, 1981: arrested. January 1982: pleads guilty to 11 counts of first-degree murder; the $100,000 trust becomes public.
• October 8, 1989: four people killed in Laurel County, Kentucky.
• August 17, 1991: two brothers killed in Laurel County. October 1991: Robert Foley indicted and charged.
• September 1993 and April 27, 1994: Foley sentenced to death in the two cases.
• December 18, 2002: Scott Kimball released to work for the FBI. 2003 to 2004: four people who knew him go missing. March 2006: arrested in California. October 8, 2009: pleads guilty to two counts of second-degree murder.
• September 17, 2004: Lisa Marie Nichols killed in Mobile County. October 2005: Jeremy Bryan Jones convicted. December 1, 2005: sentenced to death.
• September 30, 2011: Olson dies.
• October 29, 2019: Kenyel Brown released from federal supervision; signed as a Detroit task force informant the same day. February 3, 2020: deactivated. February 24, 2020: shoots himself in Oak Park. February 28, 2020: dies. March 3, 2020: Chief Craig withdraws Detroit officers from the DEA task force.