In the spring of 1971 the Romanian Militia put about 6,000 people into the search for one man. For more than a year women in Bucharest had been killed or wounded after dark, and four of them had died. Officers, Militia school staff and students, patriotic guards and military reservists were called out, more than 100 cars patrolled at night, and hundreds of people were followed or questioned. The man they wanted had been sitting in lecture halls the whole time.
Students come into a murder case with something most defendants lack: a file. Admission papers, grade averages, scholarship forms, a doctor’s note, a research proposal. In these six cases the paperwork of student life did real work, sometimes for investigators, sometimes for psychiatrists, sometimes for a university that had to explain itself afterward. Each of these people was enrolled somewhere when the case closed around them. What followed differed enormously, from a firing squad in Romania to a judge in Mexico City who released a man for lack of proof.
Ion Rîmaru was born on October 12, 1946, in Corabia, in Olt County (two reports say Caracal). His surname is also written Râmaru; most accounts, and the legal historian Hunor Kádár’s study of the case, use Rîmaru. School went badly. Kádár writes that he repeated a year of secondary school, and Adevărul reported in 2019 that he finished with a low average. In 1965 he was convicted of robbery; Adevărul says the sentence was five months.
In 1966 he was admitted to the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine in Bucharest with an average of 5.33, a bare pass, a figure Adevărul and Kádár both give. He repeated his second year, and when he was arrested in 1971 he was repeating his third. Teachers described him to investigators and reporters as shy, with a poor vocabulary; classmates called him withdrawn. Kádár records a harsher portrait drawn by the police: aggressive, impulsive, sadistic. His roommates in the student dormitory kept away from him. He had more than 20 self-inflicted cuts on his arms and legs, he kept his room locked with two padlocks, and his file at the student hospital carried a diagnosis of "unstable psychopathy."
Four women died. Elena Oprea, a waitress, was the first, in 1970; the date is given as April 8 to 9 by Adevărul and Kádár in one place, May 8 to 9 by BZI and Kádár in another, and Adevărul in 2025 says the series began in March. Fănica Ilie, 31, a restaurant worker, died on the night of March 4 to 5, 1971. Gheorghița Popa, 35, who worked in a restaurant, died on April 8 to 9. Mihaela Ursu, 39, a university assistant, died on May 4 to 5. Other women were wounded between June 1970 and May 1971 and survived.
The Militia had little to work with. Kádár writes that investigators went through registers of psychiatric patients and clinic records, checked men released from prison in 1970 and 1971 after violent or sexual convictions, and questioned restaurant customers, without result. Survivors helped build a composite portrait, the first of its kind made in Romania according to both Adevărul and Kádár. Forensic specialists also concluded that the offender had a distinctive irregularity in his teeth, and photographs of a cast showing it went to several hundred officers. After the death of Mihaela Ursu the search grew to the scale described above, with more than 2,500 people arrested by Kádár’s count.
What ended it was a piece of student paperwork. A medical certificate from the student hospital in Bucharest, linked to the last killing, was traced to Rîmaru. Adevărul reported that 83 students had received such a certificate that month, and his was among them. He was arrested in Bucharest on May 27, 1971, and the Militia announced the arrest in a communiqué dated June 4.
At a public trial from September 1 to 3, 1971, the Bucharest Municipal Tribunal convicted him of four murders, three as especially serious murder and one as qualified murder, along with six counts of attempted murder, rape, attempted rape, robbery and theft. He was sentenced to death. The sentence was upheld on appeal, and he was shot at Jilava Penitentiary, near Bucharest, on October 23, 1971. Romanian reports give his age as 25.
Sara Maria Aldrete was 24 and a student at Texas Southmost College in Brownsville when Mexican police named her, in April 1989, as a member of the group responsible for at least 13 deaths near Matamoros. She was born in Matamoros on September 6, 1964, finished high school in Brownsville and held resident alien status in the United States so that she could attend the two-year college, where she majored in physical education. Mexican outlets add that she studied social anthropology and that her interest in religion began with a class project.
Her classmates had no idea. Texas Monthly reported in 1989 that she was an honor student, a cheerleader for the college soccer team and a nominee for "Who’s Who." An anthropology instructor told the magazine she was an A student, always present, always friendly, and that he never saw her wear any amulet or sign of the occult. She still lived with her parents in Matamoros and crossed the international bridge to class. Friends, instructors and relatives told reporters they had known nothing of another life. The Deseret News carried the story under the headline "Perfect student sought in cult slayings."
The group was led by Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo, a Cuban American who practiced Palo Mayombe and was paid by a family of drug smugglers to protect their business. Police said its members believed human sacrifice would shield them. Among the dead was Mark Kilroy, 21, a pre-medical student at the University of Texas at Austin from Santa Fe, Texas, who had come to the border on spring break. His death and the others came to light in April 1989, and by April 13 investigators had counted 13 dead near Matamoros. Five men in custody told the Associated Press they had acted on Constanzo’s orders and named Aldrete, whom they called "the witch." Police first feared she might be a victim herself, then believed she had fled into the United States. She was arrested in Mexico City on May 6, 1989. Another follower arrested, Omar Orea, was a communications student.
Aldrete told El Financiero she met Constanzo in 1987, when she was 22. "He hooked me, and there I stayed," she said. About a year later he became her godfather in his religion and gave her the name La Madrina. She says she took part in the group’s religious rites but never went to the place where the killings happened and never killed anyone, and that police tortured her into her statements; no court finding on the torture complaint has been reported. Prosecutors described her in court as the group’s godmother.
Mexican authorities indicted Aldrete, Orea and a third defendant in June 1989 over 15 deaths, with weapons, drug and criminal association charges. All three pleaded not guilty. El Financiero and SDP Noticias report that she was convicted in 1990 of criminal association and homicide, 13 counts according to El Financiero, together with drug offenses and the burial and desecration of corpses. On May 4, 1994 the Associated Press reported a sentence of 62 years for the killing of Kilroy and 12 others, while four men in the same case each received 67 years. An appeals tribunal reduced her term to 50 years in October 1995. As of August 2026 she was held at the Centro Femenil de Reinsercion Social Tepepan in Mexico City; a request for a non-custodial measure after 31 years had been refused, and her latest early release bid had stalled over an unpaid reparation payment.
Kilroy’s parents answered his death with restraint. "I don’t feel any anger at all, to be honest with you," his father told reporters, and his mother asked people to pray for the men who killed her son. A charity in his name pays for treatment programs and scholarships, and his father wrote a book about the case.
Gregorio Cárdenas Hernández was 27 and a chemistry student at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, on a scholarship from Pemex, the state oil company, when the capital learned in September 1942 that four young women had died in Tacuba and that he had confessed. Before the university he had worked as a stenographer for the national railways and been active in the oil workers' union around the 1938 nationalization. He was never convicted, and no court ever made a finding against him. He was charged with homicide, with other charges; he confessed in 1942; he later denied it.
The inquiry began with a missing-person report on September 3 from the father of Graciela Arias Ávalos, 21, a student at the national preparatory school whom Cárdenas had been courting. Her classmates and her father pointed to him: a chemistry student and Pemex employee who knew her. Detectives went to look for him and met his mother, who said her son had gone mad and that she had placed him in a private psychiatric clinic the night before. The police suspected an alibi. At the clinic, according to La Crónica de Hoy, he told them he was "the invisible man," with pills that made people invisible; the detectives concluded he was pretending. The historian Andrés Ríos Molina writes that the psychiatrist Gregorio Oneto Barenque examined him there, gave him sodium pentothal and obtained a full confession.
The other three women were reported in the press as María de los Ángeles González, 16; Raquel Martínez León, 14; and Rosa Reyes Quiroz, 16. Semanario Zeta reports that the identification of the 14-year-old was mistaken and the girl’s identity remained unknown. On September 8, 1942, Excélsior’s front page announced that a student had killed four young women.
From then on his student status shaped the case. The question was whether he was a criminal who could be tried or a sick man who should be treated, and the answer was supposed to come from psychiatry. La Crónica counts 25 psychiatric studies in his file; Cárdenas himself told Zeta’s author that between 48 and 50 doctors examined him, with diagnoses from schizophrenia to epilepsy. His lawyer presented the deaths as the product of temporary insanity. The director of the La Castañeda asylum, Leopoldo Salazar Viniegra, concluded that he had trained himself to deceive the experts, and the criminologist Alfonso Quiroz Cuarón later concluded he had been aware of what he did. In his own written statement, quoted by the historian Juan de Dios Vázquez, he said he had turned into "a wild beast"; Vázquez argues he read the coverage of himself and drew on it.
Because he was sent to La Castañeda, where he was admitted on November 8, 1942, no sentence was ever issued, Vázquez writes. He escaped from the asylum on December 26, 1947 (other reports give 1948) and was recaptured in Oaxaca, where he had been living under another name. For nearly three decades he was held in the Lecumberri prison, where, by the accounts of Excélsior and Zeta, he memorized the penal code, helped other inmates with their cases and wrote several books.
In September 1976, after 34 years in custody, Judge Raúl Gutiérrez Márquez ordered his release for "falta de comprobación," lack of proof, according to Vázquez; Zeta and La Crónica describe a pardon from President Luis Echeverría instead. On September 23, 1976 the interior secretary, Mario Moya Palencia, pointed him out in the Chamber of Deputies as proof that a man could be rehabilitated, and the deputies applauded. Cárdenas finished a law degree at UNAM, opened a law office in 1977 and told interviewers in 1992 that he was innocent. He died in Los Angeles on August 2, 1999.
William Heirens was 17 and a student at the University of Chicago when Chicago police arrested him on June 26, 1946, on burglary suspicion. He had entered the university at 16 under a policy of President Robert Maynard Hutchins that let gifted students begin college before finishing high school. A University of Chicago study of the case by Sophia Posnock concluded that he barely passed the entrance examinations and was a below-average student whom classmates remembered as shy, well liked and unremarkable. At his father’s request he lived in Snell Hall with an older war veteran rather than in the dormitory for the youngest students. He was vice president of the Calvert Club, a Catholic student group. He also went on burgling, as he had since he was 13.
The deaths the police wanted to solve were those of Josephine Ross, 43, a widow, in June 1945; Frances Brown, reported as 31 or 32, in December 1945; and Suzanne Degnan, 6, on January 7, 1946. For five and a half months the Degnan case produced no arrest. Within days of his arrest police said a print of his matched one on a ransom note in the Degnan case, and by June 30 they had linked him to the other two deaths. Police searched his rooms at the university and recovered stolen property.
How a confession was obtained from a teenager is the center of his case. The Illinois Supreme Court, in 1954, recounted two days of intermittent questioning, including a full second night, then an injection of sodium pentothal given at the direction of the State’s Attorney without his permission or his parents', and a lie-detector test, also without consent. The court called the search of his room, the prolonged questioning, the drug and the lie detector "flagrant violations of his rights." On July 16, 1946, the Chicago Tribune printed a detailed account of how he had committed the crimes, presented as his confession, before he had confessed to anything.
His four lawyers, chosen by him and his parents, concluded there was no proof he could not tell right from wrong and negotiated a bargain. On July 30 he told the State’s Attorney’s office he did not remember the crimes, and the first deal collapsed; the State then demanded consecutive life sentences or a trial. On August 6 he gave long statements and went through reenactments. On September 4, 1946 he pleaded guilty in the Criminal Court of Cook County to three murder indictments and 26 indictments for burglary, robbery and assault, and received three consecutive life terms. "I confessed to live," he said later. He recanted soon afterward and never changed his account.
The court of 1954 held that the earlier misconduct "had no substantial connection" to guilty pleas entered more than a month later, on the advice of competent lawyers, and affirmed. His appeals failed in state and federal courts. The Seventh Circuit reversed a federal magistrate’s order for his release in 1984. The parole board denied him for the 28th time in April 1988 and again, 14 to 0, in August 2007. The prison made him, by every account, a model inmate. The University of Chicago would not let him take its courses, so he studied by correspondence, and in 1972 he received a degree from Lewis University, the first Illinois prisoner to earn one in custody. He died on March 5, 2012, at 83, the longest-serving inmate in the state’s history.
The case changed the university. Posnock argues that it tightened admissions screening, added questions about earlier trouble with the law, increased supervision of students and imposed dormitory rules. The early-admission program under which Heirens had entered ended two years after Hutchins left.
Stephen Griffiths was 40 and a part-time postgraduate research student at the University of Bradford when he was arrested on May 24, 2010. He had studied psychology at the University of Leeds and, from 2004, worked on a local history doctorate on homicide in Bradford between 1847 and 1899, using newspaper archives at the city library. The Scotsman’s report on his charging was headed "Student held over murders." Channel 4 News described a single man, a loner, absorbed in his work and in an online persona he called "Ven Pariah." Associated Press material said he had never held a job and lived on grants and disability benefits.
He had a record long before any university did. The Yorkshire Post reported what the sentencing court heard: in 1987, at 17, he was convicted of a violent assault on a store manager, assessed at Waddiloves Hospital in Bradford, diagnosed with a severe personality disorder and sentenced to three years in youth custody. In 1991 a psychiatrist called him a sadistic schizoid psychopath and dangerous. He was assessed at Rampton Hospital and discharged when doctors concluded treatment could not help him. More than 20 years before the killings, the court was told, he had said to a probation officer that he saw himself becoming a murderer.
The women who died were Susan Rushworth, 43, a mother of three and a grandmother; Shelley Armitage, 31; and Suzanne Blamires, 36. Griffiths was arrested in Bradford on May 24, 2010 after the caretaker of his building alerted police. He was charged on May 27 with all three murders, and the charges set out date ranges from June 22, 2009 to May 25, 2010. Rushworth’s family has never been told where she is; her mother asked Griffiths in court to tell them. Blamires’s mother said her daughter had gone to college and was training to be a nurse: "At the end of the day, nobody deserves this. All these girls were human beings and people’s daughters."
On July 16, 2010 Griffiths tried to plead guilty at Sheffield Crown Court, and Mr Justice Openshaw refused to accept the pleas because of concerns about his mental state. Psychiatrists agreed that he was highly dangerous and had an untreatable personality disorder, but not that he was mentally ill, and judged him fit to plead. On December 21, 2010 at Leeds Crown Court he answered "guilty" quietly to each of three counts of murder. The judge imposed life sentences with whole life orders on each and said the crimes were so wicked and monstrous that he should never be released. The judge added that Griffiths had shown no remorse and had never apologized "in even the most perfunctory way."
In his first police interview he said that searching for the women was pointless because they were already dead, and he claimed to have killed "loads" more. The next day he withdrew that claim and maintained he had killed three. Police said at sentencing that they had no evidence linking him to any other killing, though a national review of unsolved cases followed; reports of six victims rested on what he said in interview and were never charged. A national debate followed over how to protect women at risk of violence, and in December 2010 the Association of Chief Police Officers backed a national database of men suspected of assaulting them. In November 2024 the Yorkshire Post, citing an agency report, described him as still serving the whole life order.
The sentences pronounced at Poona on September 28, 1978 fell on four young men from the same college. Dilip Dhyanoba Sutar, Rajendra Jakkal, Shantaram Kanhoji Jagtap and Munawar Harun Shah were commercial art students at the Abhinav Kala Mahavidyalaya, an art college in Pune, and were known there, a 2020 agency report printed in The Free Press Journal said, for drinking and for stealing two-wheelers. In the words of the Supreme Court of India, the Joshi-Abhyankar case arose out of a wide criminal conspiracy in which the accused carried out six incidents, causing ten murders and committing robbery and dacoity, between January 1976 and March 1977.
The first person to die, the agency report said, was a classmate, named there as Prasad Hedge, whom the four had planned to hold for ransom; the date was January 16, 1976. Nine more people died between October 31, 1976 and March 23, 1977 in a series of break-ins in which valuables were taken. The names and ages of those nine have not been reported. The Supreme Court did not apportion the ten deaths among the four, saying only that each of the three petitioners before it, Sutar, Jagtap and Shah, had taken part in at least seven of them. Another accused, S. C., turned approver and was not convicted. The News Minute wrote that residents of Pune stopped going out after six in the evening.
Appeals ran for more than four years. The Bombay High Court confirmed the death sentences on April 6, 1979; the Supreme Court dismissed the special leave petitions on November 17, 1980 and review petitions on February 11, 1981. Writ petitions followed in 1982 and 1983, arguing delay. The court was told that Shah, in prison, was writing the Quran in Marathi, learning Arabic and studying an alternative school of medicine, and that Jagtap had written a book in Marathi, translated a book on yoga and was studying Buddhism. On April 18, 1983, Justices V. D. Tulzapurkar and Ranganath Misra dismissed all three petitions. Time under sentence of death was a relevant factor but not a decisive one, they held, and part of the delay was the petitioners' own doing. They remarked that the scholarly work suggested the prospect of execution was not weighing on the two men. The case fell within the rarest of the rare, they said, and the sentences were to be carried out without further loss of time.
The four were hanged together at Yerawada Central Jail in Pune in 1983. The Free Press Journal and The News Minute gave October 25; IANS and The Bridge Chronicle gave November 27. Reports in 2020 said no four prisoners had been executed in India on a single day since.
The files have little in common beyond their dates. Rîmaru’s 5.33 average and a hospital certificate. A Pemex scholarship and a place at UNAM. A seat at Chicago granted two years ahead of schedule. A doctorate topic on Bradford murders of the 1800s. An honor-roll name and a cheerleading uniform in Brownsville. A Pune art college where the first death was a classmate’s.
The institutions answered in their own ways. Chicago rewrote its admissions rules. Mexico’s courts never ruled on the charges against the chemistry student, and a roomful of deputies applauded him. In Pune, the judges read the prisoners' scholarship as a sign that the gallows weighed lightly on them, and ordered the sentences carried out. The four were hanged within months.
• 1942: Cárdenas, a chemistry student at UNAM, is charged after four young women die in Tacuba; he is admitted to La Castañeda on November 8.
• June 1945 to January 1946: the three deaths for which Heirens would be convicted; he is a University of Chicago student.
• June 26, 1946: Heirens arrested in Chicago.
• September 4, 1946: Heirens pleads guilty to three murders and 26 other indictments.
• September 23, 1954: Illinois Supreme Court affirms Heirens’s convictions.
• April 1970 to May 1971 (dates vary by report): the four deaths for which Rîmaru would be convicted.
• May 27, 1971: Rîmaru arrested in Bucharest.
• September 1 to 3, 1971: Rîmaru tried and sentenced to death; shot at Jilava on October 23.
• January 1976 to March 1977: the ten deaths in the Pune case, the first a classmate of the accused.
• September 1976: Cárdenas released; presented to the Chamber of Deputies on September 23.
• September 28, 1978: Sutar, Jakkal, Jagtap and Shah sentenced to death at Poona.
• April 18, 1983: Supreme Court of India dismisses the petitions on delay; the four are hanged later in 1983.
• April 1989: deaths near Matamoros come to light, Mark Kilroy among them.
• May 6, 1989: Aldrete arrested in Mexico City.
• May 4, 1994: AP reports a 62-year sentence for Aldrete; reduced to 50 years in October 1995.
• August 2, 1999: Cárdenas dies in Los Angeles.
• May 24, 2010: Griffiths arrested in Bradford.
• December 21, 2010: Griffiths pleads guilty to three murders and receives whole life orders.
• March 5, 2012: Heirens dies in custody at 83.
• August 2026: Aldrete still held in Mexico City.