Most of the men below were not musicians in any sense a booking agent would recognize. One sang in church choirs, another played the organ for services, a third tape-recorded himself singing country songs in a motel. A man known in his Illinois suburb as a children’s-party clown was a contractor by trade. A teenage chorister grew up to be a fraudster. One was reported only as a man who played music part time. The performing in these cases was amateur, aspirational or, in one case, reported by a single newspaper. Only Charles Manson spent years trying to make music his living, and he failed.
That is the interesting part. In case after case the performing was something neighbors, friends or investigators mentioned in the first lines of a description: the clown at the parade, the quiet man at the organ, the songwriter with the guitar. It was a way of being known. What follows sorts the men by how far the stage actually went in their lives, and says plainly in each case whether the performing was real, hoped-for or claimed.
### John Wayne Gacy and the clown called Pogo
John Wayne Gacy was a contractor in the Chicago suburbs who performed at children’s parties and charity events as a clown he called Pogo. It was local, and no account describes it as paid work; it ran alongside his business, PDM Contractors, and his work as a Democratic precinct captain. But it was public, and it started long before Illinois. In Waterloo, Iowa, where his first father-in-law set him up managing several fast-food restaurants, Gacy joined the Jaycees and dressed up for local parades. David Dutton, then a Black Hawk County prosecutor, met him first as a witness after one of the restaurants was robbed. Dutton later recalled seeing him dressed as a clown in a parade and thinking he was "just a nice person to have around." He learned, he said, "that wasn’t the case."
By then Gacy had a criminal record that made the costume look like a disguise. In 1968 he was convicted in Black Hawk County, Iowa, and sentenced to ten years; he was paroled on June 18, 1970, after about eighteen months. Back in Illinois he bought a ranch house in Norwood Park Township, married again in June 1972, started the contracting firm and hired teenagers and young men to work for it. He threw large summer parties for the neighborhood, became a precinct captain and kept up the clown act. In 1978 he met Rosalynn Carter at a private reception connected with Chicago’s Polish Constitution Day parade. A photograph of the First Lady shaking his hand was published after his arrest; The Press of Christchurch, New Zealand, reporting a Chicago story in January 1979, noted that he was wearing a lapel pin suggesting Secret Service clearance, and Mrs. Carter’s press secretary called the meeting an unusual coincidence.
The legal record is plain. Gacy was arrested in Des Plaines, Illinois, on December 21, 1978. In March 1980 a jury convicted him on all counts, thirty-three counts of murder, with other charges. The jury returned death sentences on twelve counts and natural life on the other twenty-one. He was executed at Stateville Correctional Center on May 10, 1994, at the age of 52. The Supreme Court of Illinois affirmed the convictions and sentences in 1984.
How much of a performer was he? Within the limits of the record, not much: a suburban entertainer at children’s events who dressed up for parades. But the clown is the reason the case is remembered by its nickname, and the contrast it drew, a man dressed to make children laugh, is the one fact in the file that a single glance explains. The cases below are quieter, and in most of them the performing is a footnote that investigators and relatives could not leave out.
### Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo and the career that did not start
Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo was 26 when he died in a Mexico City apartment on May 6, 1989, killed by one of his own followers as police surrounded the building. He was never arrested, charged or tried. Mexican and Texas police, and men arrested at a ranch near Matamoros, named him as the leader of a group of marijuana smugglers who believed ritual killing gave them protection. The deaths of 15 people were linked to the group, and the investigation began with the killing of a University of Texas student, Mark Kilroy, 21, in March 1989. Followers told police that Constanzo killed Kilroy himself, according to the Associated Press; no court ever heard it.
His relationship to the stage was aspirational and brief. Born in Miami on November 1, 1962, to a Cuban immigrant mother, he went to Mexico City as a young man, by most accounts hoping to work as a model or actor. Infobae put his age at the time at 20, Prensa Libre at 22. Vanguardia wrote that friends in Miami had arranged modeling work for him there, that he went back to Miami for a time and that he returned to Mexico in mid-1984. Nothing on record suggests the modeling or acting led anywhere.
The work he took up was spiritual. Infobae reported that he read tarot cards and worked as a healer and clairvoyant. In a 2023 report drawing on an investigation by the Milenio journalist Laura Sanchez Ley, who reviewed more than 8,000 pages of the case file, Infobae wrote that by the early 1980s Constanzo had become known as a card reader in the Zona Rosa district of Mexico City, and that his clients reportedly included politicians hoping to win elections and performers hoping for leading roles. That is where the stage reappears in his story: not as an act he performed but as a market. The man who had wanted work in front of an audience was selling certainty to people who needed one.
In Mexico City he gathered his first close followers. Vanguardia and Infobae name Martin Quintana and Omar Orea Ochoa; Infobae and Prensa Libre add Jorge Montes. After the Matamoros investigation became public, the group went into hiding in early April 1989. Constanzo died on May 6, 1989, killed by his follower Alvaro de Leon Valdez on his own order, according to de Leon and others arrested at the building. Sara Maria Aldrete Villarreal has since said he "could not be left alive," and a 2023 report says the circumstances are still disputed. In May 1994 Mexican courts sentenced Aldrete to 62 years and four other followers, Elio Hernandez Rivera, Serafin Hernandez Garcia, David Serna Valdez and Sergio Martinez Salinas, to 67 years each, in the case reported as the slaying of Kilroy and twelve others. The accounts agree on the early ambition and differ on almost everything after it. No account describes him as a working performer; they describe a young man who went to the city hoping to be one.
### Charles Manson, the one who tried
Charles Manson’s record began long before music. His first conviction, for the burglary of a grocery store, came at twelve, according to the chronology compiled by Douglas Linder for the University of Missouri-Kansas City’s Famous Trials project. Juvenile detention, escapes and federal reformatories followed, then a marriage in 1955, a second in the early 1960s, and a federal sentence on a Mann Act charge that he served mostly at McNeil Island penitentiary in Washington state. It was there, according to the Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives, that an aging member of Ma Barker’s gang, Alvin "Creepy" Karpis, taught him to play guitar. He became fixed on the Beatles and spent his spare hours writing songs. When the term was done he asked to be allowed to stay in prison, the only life he knew. The request was refused.
He was released from Terminal Island on March 21, 1967, at thirty-two, and with permission went to the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. The Scribner entry describes a man who learned that playing a gentle musician could get him food, a bed and companionship. That sentence is the best short statement of what music was for him: a method of being fed. In the evenings, the record says, Manson talked and the group listened, or he played guitar and sang.
What he wanted from the outside world was a recording contract. In 1968 the Beach Boys' drummer Dennis Wilson fell in with the group, and for months Manson and his followers lived at Wilson’s house. By one account, the Beach Boys recorded one of Manson’s songs, "Cease to Exist," rewritten and retitled "Never Learn Not to Love," on their album 20/20, which angered him. Through Wilson he met the producer Terry Melcher, the son of Doris Day. Melcher passed on him. On March 23, 1969, according to the Famous Trials chronology, Manson went to the rented house where Melcher had lived, looking for him, and was curtly told to leave. Susan Atkins later told the grand jury that a follower chose that house on the night of the murders because it had been Melcher’s and he knew the layout.
Music also supplied the prosecution’s theory of motive. The Beatles, Manson said, were speaking to him, and in particular their song "Helter Skelter" became his name for a coming race war. Witnesses told the jury what he had said about it. The California Court of Appeal later held that the resemblance between the prophecy and the crime was strong circumstantial evidence. The explanation has been argued over ever since. A narrower account holds that the killings were staged to cast doubt on the case against another follower already in jail, and a third is money. The Scribner entry adds a fourth: resentment of the celebrity world that had refused his music. The explanations are not mutually exclusive, and the record supports parts of each.
The convictions are specific, and they are not what the legend says. Manson was convicted in January 1971, in the Tate-LaBianca trial, of seven counts of first-degree murder and one of conspiracy, and in November 1971, in the Hinman-Shea trial, of two counts of first-degree murder and conspiracy: nine murders in all, committed by members of the group at his direction. Others struck every proven fatal blow. He was sentenced to death in 1971; the sentence was vacated after People v. Anderson (1972) and formally modified to life on February 2, 1977. He was denied parole twelve times and died in a hospital in Kern County, California, on November 19, 2017, aged 83.
Manson is the only man here who genuinely pursued music as a career, and the only one for whom the music went somewhere: a song recorded by a famous band, a producer’s rejection, a cultural reading of a Beatles album. It is also the case in which the performing is least separable from the crime. He did not play at parties on the side. For some years, it was the only thing he wanted to do.
### Danny Rolling, the tape recorder and the country song
Danny Rolling was born on May 26, 1954, in Shreveport, Louisiana. His father was a Shreveport police officer, later described as a retired lieutenant. The Independent Florida Alligator reported in 2015 that Rolling grew up with an abusive father and ran away at 17. ABC News reported in 2021 that he spent a couple of years in the U.S. Air Force and also wanted to be a country singer. The aspiration is a line in a biography, but it is a line the case itself backs up. The Associated Press reported that he served eight years in prisons in Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi before 1990, and ABC News said most of the 1980s were spent in prison for armed robberies. His relationship with his father was volatile. In May 1990 Rolling was accused of wounding his father after an argument; his father survived, and Rolling was never prosecuted for it, News4JAX reported in 2006. He left Shreveport afterward.
By the summer of 1990 Rolling was on the move in Florida. He recorded himself on cassette tapes, talking and singing. One song, which he called "The Mystery Rider," was played at his 1994 sentencing hearing; he had recorded the first part at a motel in Sarasota before he went to Gainesville, United Press International reported. At the end of the tape he spoke to his father in Shreveport, saying he had wanted to make him proud and was sorry he had let him down. It is a more complete musical record than any other man in this group left. It is also the clearest case of a performance made for no audience at all.
The hunt turned on one of the tapes. The break came in November 1990, when Cindy Juracich, a woman from Shreveport who knew Rolling from her church, called Crime Stoppers. "I think there’s one guy y’all need to investigate," she said, and gave his name. Detective Legran Hewitt and other investigators then listened to the tape recording and heard a man talking and singing; on it, Rolling said his name. "If we had played the tape before, we would’ve had this guy three months ago," Don Maines of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement said, according to ABC News. On one recording, made just before the first killings, he told his tape recorder that he was going to sign off for a while because he had something to do, Smithsonian magazine reported.
In late August 1990, as students returned to the University of Florida for the fall semester, five young people were killed in Gainesville over about four days: four University of Florida students and one student at Santa Fe Community College. The killings closed classes for a week, emptied parts of the town and drew investigators from across the state. Rolling was identified while he was in the Marion County jail awaiting trial on a supermarket robbery; the AP dates this to December 1990, and the Gainesville Police Department lists January 1991. He was indicted on November 15, 1991.
On February 15, 1994, the day his trial was set to begin, Rolling pleaded guilty to all eleven counts, including five of first-degree murder. The jury heard the songs from the tapes. On March 24, 1994, the jury recommended death on each of the five murder counts by a vote of 12 to 0, and on April 20, 1994, Circuit Judge Stan R. Morris imposed five death sentences. The Supreme Court of Florida affirmed in 1997. Before his execution on October 25, 2006, at Florida State Prison, Rolling handed his former pastor a written note confessing to three killings in Shreveport in November 1989, of a father, his daughter and his grandson. He was never tried for them. CBS News and the Associated Press reported that he sang before he died.
### Brandon Tholmer and the favorite song
The record on Brandon Tholmer’s music is a single phrase and a single song. By the early 1980s he was living in Los Angeles and working as a shipping clerk for a shoe manufacturer. United Press International later described him as an aspiring rock musician. His former live-in girlfriend testified at his trial that he was a rock fan and that his favorite song was "Killer on the Loose" by Thin Lizzy. UPI reported her testimony when the verdict came in.
That is the whole of the record on his music, in a case otherwise full of numbers. Between January 1981 and the autumn of 1983, Los Angeles police investigated a long series of killings of older women in Hollywood and nearby communities. At his arrest in November 1983, police counted 32 unsolved cases; by the time he was charged the count had reached 34 in UPI’s reporting, and police called him the prime suspect in all of them. He had an earlier record. UPI reported a 1975 conviction, after which he was held at Patton State Hospital and released in June 1979 to outpatient therapy.
The district attorney filed a single murder count first, for the death of Mary Pauquette, explaining that the office had filed only the case it could prove. A spokesman said investigators were still working to connect Tholmer to other deaths. After a closed preliminary hearing he was ordered to stand trial on five murder counts. The trial lasted about six months. In July 1986 the jury convicted him of four counts of first-degree murder, those of Rose Lederman, 80; Woolloomooloo Woodcock, 66; Mary Pauquette, 72; and Dorothy Fain, 72, killed in the East Hollywood and Silverlake area of Los Angeles between August 1981 and August 1983. The jurors held the special-circumstance allegations true, including multiple murder. They deadlocked on a fifth murder count, the death of Loraine Wells, and on an attempted burglary. The penalty jury rejected the death penalty, and Judge Clarence Stromwall sentenced him to four consecutive terms of life in prison without the possibility of parole. Police had once suspected him in up to 34 deaths; they later cleared him in 22 and said they believed he committed seven more, which the prosecutor said lacked the evidence for charges.
As a performer, Tholmer is the thinnest case here, and it is the most useful for reading the others against. A phrase in a wire report (aspiring) and a song at a trial are what survive. Nothing in the reports says he played in a band, sang, or wrote a song. The word aspiring is carrying a great deal of weight.
### Anthony Shore and the part-time musician
Anthony Allen Shore’s musical life is a single clause in an Associated Press story. In Houston, the AP reported, he worked as a tow truck driver and as a repairman for the telephone company, and he played music part time. The prison system’s records list his former occupations as wrecker driver, general construction worker, lineman and laborer; they say nothing about music. The claim rests on the AP alone. No band, instrument or performance is named in any account.
Shore was identified in 2003, when a DNA profile taken from him after a 1998 plea in an unrelated case matched a particle recovered in the 1992 killing of Maria del Carmen Estrada, a 21-year-old woman, in Houston. Once arrested, he confessed to her killing and to the killings of three girls, Laurie Tremblay, Diana Rebollar and Dana Sanchez, between 1986 and 1995. He also admitted an assault on a 14-year-old girl in 1993, who survived. Harris County prosecutors charged him with a single count of capital murder, the Estrada case, because the DNA evidence in it was strong, ABC13 reported. The other three killings were proved to the jury at the punishment phase and through his own recorded confession, but he was never tried for them. He claimed more killings in October 2017, and the Texas Rangers later determined those claims untrue.
At his 2004 trial his own lawyers told the jury that he wanted to be sentenced to death. They said they were passing on that wish "against our advice, against our better judgment, against our 40 years of experience," the Fifth Circuit recorded. The trial judge asked Shore whether the statement was accurate. He answered that it was "very accurate." The jury returned a death sentence; ABC13 gives the date as October 21, 2004, and the prison system records his arrival on death row on November 15, 2004. An execution set for October 18, 2017, was withdrawn hours before it was due, after a claim of further killings. He was executed at Huntsville on January 18, 2018, the first execution in the United States that year. In his final statement he apologized to the families of his victims. "No amount of words or apology could ever undo what I’ve done," he said.
### Charles Albright, the gentleman who sang in churches
Charles Albright was adopted in 1933, when he was about three weeks old, by a Dallas grocer and his wife. He grew up in Oak Cliff, then a middle-class neighborhood south of downtown Dallas. Skip Hollandsworth, who wrote the longest account of his life for Texas Monthly in 1993, described the boy’s adoptive mother as strict, frugal and overprotective. She taught him manners and respect for women and pushed his schooling hard. He practiced the piano every day and skipped two grades in elementary school.
The musical side of his adult life is documented in the testimony of friends. Friends called him a Renaissance man who spoke French and Spanish, sang in churches and played piano and organ. At St. Bernard’s Catholic Church in East Dallas, where friends called him "Good Old Charlie," he was active. He was also a self-taught painter who had won a prize at the state fair. A lawyer who worked the case, Lollar, remembered Albright by 2020 as a man who sang in churches, played piano and organ, and painted. None of it was professional. No account says he was paid for any of it. His working life was a sequence of jobs: aircraft design work, patent illustration, carpentry, hair styling after he earned a beautician’s license and, briefly, bullfighting. He taught high school science in Crandall in 1969 on forged academic records, and when the forgery came to light he admitted it, pleaded guilty to a fraud charge and received a year of probation.
The record that matters here is the contrast. To a companion he lived with in his parents' old house, and to many others, he was a "perfect gentleman." A softball teammate said he would back down rather than fight, and others said he often gave gifts and money to people who needed them. At his trial, neighbors and friends testified that he was a good neighbor who handed out presents and did electrical work for free, the Oak Cliff Advocate reported.
Between December 1990 and March 1991, three women were killed in the Oak Cliff section of south Dallas: Mary Lou Pratt, Susan Beth Peterson and Shirley Williams. Dallas police and sheriff’s detectives linked the deaths. On March 22, 1991, police arrested Albright. In December 1991 a Dallas County jury convicted him of the murder of Shirley Williams and he was sentenced to life. The case rested largely on hair comparison; Texas Monthly called it the first murder conviction in the history of the Dallas County district attorney’s office to rest on hair evidence alone. He was never tried for the other two deaths investigators attributed to him. Albright never testified and never confessed, and in prison he blamed the crime lab. He died in state custody in 2020, at 87.
Lollar, by 2020 a capital murder public defender, said he had always felt uneasy about the case, and allowed that Albright might have been the man who killed the women. The police officer who made the arrest, asked at a public talk in 2023 whether police had caught the right man, answered that all he knew was that the killing stopped. The musician in the file is real, and the question the file leaves open is how far a court’s single conviction can carry.
### John George Haigh, chorister and assistant organist
John George Haigh was executed at Wandsworth Prison on August 10, 1949, for the murder of Olive Durand-Deacon, a 69-year-old widow who lived at the same South Kensington hotel as he did. A jury at Lewes Assizes in Sussex had convicted him on July 19 after a two-day trial, rejecting a defense that he was insane. That killing is the only one for which he was ever charged, tried or convicted.
His music was a child’s. He was a capable pupil. He won a scholarship to Queen Elizabeth Grammar School in Wakefield, the Yorkshire Evening Post reported, and became a chorister at Wakefield Cathedral; Lincolnshire Life adds that he served at the altar there and was made assistant organist while still at school. Fellow choristers remembered him, the Evening Post reported, as "a brainy lad, but a bit of a loner." After his death someone sent the Wakefield Express a photograph of him as a smiling choirboy. He was the only child of John Robert and Emily Haigh, members of the Plymouth Brethren, and was born in Stamford, Lincolnshire, in 1909.
That is the full extent of it. Nothing on record places him at an organ after boyhood. By adulthood he had set himself up as a solicitor without any legal qualification, was arrested, and spent the next few years in and out of prison, Lincolnshire Life records; the Yorkshire Evening Post describes several more sentences for fraud. The choirboy is the image the paper chose, and it was chosen precisely for the contrast.
The case is known for what he told police. In a statement taken on February 28, 1949, he admitted killing Mrs. Durand-Deacon and five other people he knew, and he claimed three more killings that were never confirmed. The five admitted deaths of William, Donald and Amy McSwan and Archibald and Rosalie Henderson are attributed to him in the Metropolitan Police file on the case, which The National Archives now holds, but none of them came before a court. Haigh had taken the McSwans' property and money. Posing as William McSwan, he obtained a power of attorney and sold their properties; the Alloa and Hillfoots Advertiser puts his gain at more than 5,000 pounds. By 1947 he was living at the Onslow Court Hotel in Kensington and, by Gordon Lowe’s account, had his suits made on Savile Row, drove an Alvis, and presented himself as a civil engineer and inventor. The performer in his adult life was a confidence man, not a musician.
The defense asked for the special verdict of guilty but insane; the jury rejected it in about a quarter of an hour. He was sentenced to death by Mr. Justice Humphreys. No appeal was reported, and he was executed on August 10, 1949. Haigh sits at the edge of this group. A cathedral chorister and a boy assistant organist is a performer by one definition. The record makes it plain that the performing ended in adolescence and that the adult life had no stage.
### Karl Denke, the organist who may not have been
Karl Denke never stood trial. He died in a police cell in the Silesian town of Münsterberg, now Ziębice in southwestern Poland, on the evening of December 21, 1924, a few hours after his arrest, and the case against him was never put to a court. What investigators attributed to him was the deaths of at least 20 people, most of them destitute men passing through the town in search of work. Later estimates by historians and journalists run to 30 or 40; none of these figures was ever tested in court. What exists is an attribution, not a verdict.
His music is the least certain of the nine. The Czech broadcaster CNN Prima News, in a 2024 account based on the Czech and German press of the time, describes him as a butcher’s helper who also played the organ in church. The historian Lucyna Biały of the University of Wrocław, who wrote the first scholarly account of the case in 2001, describes him only as a peddler with a permit to sell door to door. One account has the organ; the more careful one does not. The organ is a claim, and only that.
What both agree on is the churchgoing man. To his neighbors he was calm, orderly, pedantic and devout. He carried the cross in funeral processions, according to CNN Prima, and he was known for his kindness to the poor. He gave food, small jobs and a night’s lodging to beggars and men on the road, and many accepted during the hard years of the hyperinflation, Gazeta Wrocławska wrote in 2025. The Wrocław daily wrote that this was how he became "Ojczulek Denke," Father Denke, one of the more respected residents of the town. CNN Prima, drawing on the Czech press of 1925, reports that neighbors described him as very modest, rather limited, very quiet, poorly dressed and often at church. He did not drink or smoke, and he was not known to have had any relationship with a woman, according to Biały and Radio RAM.
The case came to light because one man got away. A traveling journeyman, Vincenz Olivier, reported an assault to police at about one o’clock on December 21, 1924, and Denke was arrested the same day. At about 9:30 that evening Sergeant Palke reported him dead in his cell, according to Biały, who takes the time and the sergeant’s name from the local press; CNN Prima, using the Czech papers, gives about 9 p.m. Denke had answered no questions on the record. He left no statement, no confession and no explanation. Olivier was tried as a beggar and vagrant on January 15, 1925, and sentenced to ten days in jail.
Denke ranks at the far end of the group. The reported organ-playing is attributed to a single source, the churchgoing is documented, and the verdict does not exist. He belongs among performers only because one account wrote the line, and the line shows what a thin standard of evidence does to a biography.
Placed in order of how far the stage went, the nine men form a graded series that does not support the idea of the performer-killer. At one end is Manson, who spent years trying to earn a living from songs and failed. Next are the men who wanted to: Rolling with his country singing, Constanzo with his modeling and acting hopes, Tholmer with the rock musician’s label. Then come the amateurs: Gacy’s clown act at children’s parties, Shore’s part-time music, Albright’s piano and church singing. At the far end are the men whose performing is a youthful footnote (Haigh) or a claim carried by one newspaper (Denke).
No pattern follows from that. Millions of people sing in church choirs, play in weekend bands and dress up for parades, and the record gives no reason to think the habit says anything about these nine. What it does show is how often a performing life gave a family, a neighborhood or an investigator a ready description. A clown is easy to remember. So is a gentleman organist, a choirboy, a young man who came to the city to act. The detail survives because it is vivid, and it gets repeated because it makes a contrast, not because anyone has shown that it explains what happened.
• 1909: John George Haigh born in Stamford, Lincolnshire.
• December 21, 1924: Karl Denke arrested in Münsterberg and dies in police custody the same day.
• 1933: Charles Albright adopted as an infant in Dallas.
• 1944 to 1949: the period of the deaths attributed to Haigh; July 19, 1949, convicted of one murder; August 10, 1949, executed.
• May 26, 1954: Danny Rolling born in Shreveport, Louisiana.
• November 1, 1962: Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo born in Miami.
• March 21, 1967: Charles Manson released from Terminal Island and goes to San Francisco.
• 1968: Gacy convicted in Iowa; Dennis Wilson meets Manson’s group.
• March 23, 1969: Manson goes to the Melcher house looking for the producer; the killings that led to his convictions took place in July and August 1969.
• 1971: Manson convicted in the Tate-LaBianca trial (January) and the Hinman-Shea trial (November).
• 1972 to 1978: the period of the killings for which Gacy was convicted.
• December 21, 1978: Gacy arrested in Des Plaines, Illinois.
• March 1980: Gacy convicted on 33 counts; May 10, 1994, executed.
• 1981 to 1983: the period of the four killings for which Tholmer was convicted; November 1983, arrested.
• July 1986: Tholmer convicted of four murders; November 21, 1986, sentenced to four terms of life without parole.
• 1986 to 1995: the period of the killings Shore confessed to.
• May 6, 1989: Constanzo dies in Mexico City.
• August 24 to 27, 1990: the Gainesville killings.
• 1990 to 1991: the three Oak Cliff killings; March 22, 1991, Albright arrested; December 1991, convicted of one murder.
• February 15, 1994: Rolling pleads guilty; April 20, 1994, sentenced to death; October 25, 2006, executed.
• 2004: Shore sentenced to death; January 18, 2018, executed.
• November 19, 2017: Manson dies.
• 2020: Albright dies in state custody.