Anthony Sowell was on a sex offender registry in Cleveland from 2005. Harvey Carignan had once been sentenced to hang. Guy Georges had been to prison for assaults on women in the 1980s. Darren Vann had pleaded to a sexual assault in Texas and served his full term. Each of them later stood trial for, or pleaded guilty to, killings that came after a conviction for violence. The record was there. In several of these cases it was thin, incomplete, or filed in a system that could not see across a county line or a border. In others it was complete, and the sentence that came with it had simply ended.
Seven men, seven earlier files: what the first conviction was, what it brought, how the man left custody, and what followed.
In 1989 a 21-year-old woman was assaulted by Sowell, then living in East Cleveland. The Supreme Court of Ohio records that he was convicted of attempted rape in 1990 and served 15 years. The distinction mattered in 2009: the Associated Press withdrew early reports that called him a convicted rapist, noting that the conviction was for attempted rape.
He was released in 2005 and returned to Cleveland. He had to register as a sex offender. According to the Associated Press in 2009, officers visited to confirm his address, but because he was on neither parole nor probation they could not go inside without a warrant. For a time he looked like a man making a fresh start. He finished a program for former prisoners, and a counselor called him "job ready." Heart trouble in February 2007 ended his factory work by July.
Between 2007 and 2009, prosecutors said, eleven women were killed. Cleveland police reached the house on October 29, 2009, with warrants on a rape complaint made by a woman in September. Sowell was arrested on October 31. A Cuyahoga County jury convicted him on July 22, 2011, of the aggravated murder of all eleven women, and of kidnapping, rape and attempted murder involving three women who survived. Judge Dick Ambrose imposed eleven death sentences in August 2011. The Supreme Court of Ohio affirmed in December 2016, and the United States Supreme Court declined review in October 2017.
The case left a second record, about what the city knew. In December 2008, before the arrests, a woman had reported an assault and Sowell was taken into custody and released without charges. Families of six of the dead sued the city, and in September 2018 Cleveland agreed to pay $1 million, Ideastream reported. Sowell died in custody on February 8, 2021, at 61, of a terminal illness, with his appeals still pending. He was never executed.
Cole’s earlier conviction is known from one sentence in a Nevada sentencing order. The three-judge panel that sentenced him recorded that he had pleaded guilty in Missouri to assault with intent to kill. Neither the year nor the sentence was reported. The panel counted it among the earlier violent crimes that made him eligible for death.
By then the record had grown. Cole was convicted by Texas juries of three murders in Dallas, and he pleaded guilty in Nevada to the murder of Kathlyn J. Blum and to the first degree murder of Marie Cushman, a 1979 case in Las Vegas. At his sentencing he acted as his own lawyer, told the judges he had killed at least 13 people, said he had no remorse, and asked for death. United Press International reported that he described the 13 as victims besides Cushman, most of them women. Those statements were never tested in court; five killings produced convictions.
The panel voted unanimously for death and entered judgment on October 12, 1984. Cole filed no appeal. The Nevada Supreme Court held the waiver valid, reviewed the sentence as the law required, and affirmed on October 22, 1985. He was executed by lethal injection at Nevada State Prison on December 6, 1985, the first execution by injection in Nevada. The Missouri conviction is the least documented of the seven, and probably the most telling about what a court needed from the earlier record: it supplied a legal category, and nothing more.
Vann left the Marine Corps in 1993 with an other-than-honorable discharge. The Corps said his service had been "incongruent with the Marine Corps' expectations and standards." His criminal record had two parts, in two states, and the two did not meet.
The first was in Gary, Indiana, in April 2004: a standoff with police that began with a confrontation involving his then-girlfriend. A patrol officer talked to him until a SWAT team was in place, and no one was hurt. The charges were reduced in a plea bargain. CBS Chicago reported a conviction for misdemeanor residential entry and 90 days in jail; the Associated Press reported a year in prison.
The second was in Austin, Texas. In December 2007 a 25-year-old woman told police that Vann had sexually assaulted her. He was convicted in September 2009 and sentenced to five years. The Travis County district attorney, Rosemary Lehmberg, said in 2014 that he had first been charged with a first-degree felony carrying up to 99 years, and that she had offered a plea to a reduced charge because there was no DNA evidence and the woman’s statements had been inconsistent. Her spokesman said the 2004 Indiana case had not appeared in the criminal history prosecutors reviewed in 2009, and that if they had known of it "it could have potentially affected the prosecutor’s decision."
Texas officials rated him a low risk before release. A Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesman said Vann would have been rated low in any event, because he had served his whole sentence and left without supervision. Texas’s sex offender registry listed his risk level as "low."
In October 2014 Hammond police arrested him in Gary in the death of a 19-year-old woman. He confessed, and within days the deaths of six more women came to light in Gary. Gary’s police chief said Vann had been "not on our radar at all." Asked by detectives why he started, Vann gave a one-word answer, according to the Associated Press: "anger." He said he "shouldn’t have went to prison the first time." On May 4, 2018, he pleaded guilty to seven murders under an agreement that removed the death penalty. Judge Samuel Cappas sentenced him on May 25, 2018, to seven concurrent terms of life without parole.
In 1972 Schaefer was a Martin County sheriff’s deputy. He was fired after two teenage girls reported him to police, WKMG News 6 reported in 2026, and he was convicted of aggravated assault on the two girls and given a jail sentence. It was an earlier conviction for violence against young women, and it ended his police career. It did not end the matter.
Susan Place, 17, and Georgia Jessup, 16, had left Oakland Park on September 27, 1972, with a man who called himself "Jerry Shepherd." When their deaths came to light in St. Lucie County on April 1, 1973, Schaefer was already in the Martin County jail. A jury in Fort Pierce convicted him of the first-degree murder of both girls in 1973, and he received life sentences. He denied the murders for the rest of his life.
Investigators examined him in connection with the cases of other women and girls, and the numbers printed in the spring of 1973 climbed fast. Time magazine reported on May 28, 1973, that he was under investigation for at least 20 murders, a figure the Seventh Circuit later quoted in reviewing the press record. None of it was ever charged. The court did not treat the tallies as findings, and none of them is one.
From prison he sued authors who had called him a serial killer, and lost. He was killed by another inmate at Florida State Prison in 1995. In June 2022 the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office, after a DNA laboratory identified a girl of 15 who had been missing since December 1972, said Schaefer was its likeliest suspect in her death and added that it had no physical evidence connecting him to it. He was never charged in her case.
Georges was born Guy Rampillon on October 15, 1962, and grew up in the French child welfare system, Newsweek reported. His adult record began in 1979, according to Newsweek, with a series of assaults on young women. He served a year in an Angers prison after incidents in 1980, 18 months for one in June 1982, and ten years for one in February 1984. A 2002 report of the National Assembly refers to a conviction in 1985.
Near the end of the ten-year term he was granted day release. On the evening of January 24, Newsweek reported, he did not return to prison. He went to Paris. The National Assembly report dates the first killing in the Paris series to January 1991, and Newsweek names Pascale Escarfail, 19, as the first of seven young women. Newsweek reports that he was formally released on April 4, 1992.
The killings of the next six years were not treated as one case. The report says the murders in eastern Paris and other murders committed in car parks were assigned to two investigative teams that drew no link between them. A DNA profile from the cases had a label, SK1, and no national file to be compared with. In August 1995, the report records, Georges was convicted of a sexual assault, and no one connected him to the East Paris murders.
The identification came by hand. An expert at the molecular biology laboratory of the university hospital in Nantes checked the 3,500 files in his own laboratory, one by one, until he matched Georges’s genetic profile to the profile from four of the murders. Newsweek gives the date of the arrest as March 27, 1998, in the Montmartre district of Paris. Jean-Paul Milland, then in charge of the forensic police, told Europe 1 in 2020 that comparisons were made case by case and each laboratory kept its own records.
Parliament passed Law no. 98-468 on June 17, 1998, creating the national DNA file, the FNAEG. The decree that put it into operation came on May 18, 2000. In December 2002 a National Assembly report written by the deputy Marc Le Fur said that a central file would have identified Georges more quickly and would have saved the lives of his last two victims. That is the report’s conclusion, not a finding of any court.
At his assize trial in Paris in March and April 2001 he pleaded not guilty at first, according to Newsweek; his lawyer, Frédérique Pons, told Europe 1 that he confessed after being asked whether he was left-handed or right-handed. He admitted seven murders and four other assaults committed between 1991 and 1998. On April 5, 2001, he was sentenced to life imprisonment with a 22-year minimum term. Pons said he became eligible to apply for conditional release in 2020.
Carignan’s first serious case ended without a conviction for the killing. In 1949 he was a 22-year-old soldier stationed near Anchorage, in what was then the Territory of Alaska. He was arrested in September of that year on an assault charge, and he was later tried for the July 31, 1949, death of Laura Showalter, 57. A jury convicted him of first-degree murder and the court sentenced him to death. Forum Communications reported that he would have been the first person hanged in Alaska’s third judicial district.
The Ninth Circuit reversed on December 8, 1950, over the handling of his confession. The Supreme Court of the United States, in United States v. Carignan, decided November 13, 1951, disagreed with that reasoning but upheld the result on another ground: the trial judge had refused to let him testify, outside the jury’s presence, about whether the confession was voluntary. No second murder trial was reported. In law he was never convicted of Showalter’s death.
He remained in federal custody on the assault conviction and was sent to Alcatraz in 1952. He was paroled in 1960. KFGO, a Fargo radio station, reported that about four months later he was arrested in Duluth, Minnesota, on burglary and assault charges and sent to Leavenworth for five and a half years. After a 1964 parole he moved to Seattle, where, KFGO said, he was arrested within a year for burglary and sentenced to 15 years, of which he served four. By the early 1970s, Forum Communications reported, he ran a service station near Seattle, and authorities there regarded him as the prime suspect in the deaths of two young women. He was never charged in either.
In 1974 he was in Minnesota. Arrested in Minneapolis on September 24, 1974, he was convicted of the murders of Eileen Hunley, 29, and Katherine Schultz, 17, both in 1974. In a Carver County case concerning a woman who survived, a jury convicted him of attempted first-degree murder and aggravated sodomy; he had pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. The Minnesota Supreme Court affirmed on August 11, 1978. A Hennepin County jury convicted him on four sex-offense counts, and the court ordered a 30-year term to follow the Carver County sentence. Prairie Public put the Minnesota total at 150 years. Carignan died at the Minnesota Correctional Facility at Oak Park Heights on March 6, 2023, aged 95.
Allen’s record is described in Indiana court opinions in a way that makes the pattern the point. By the time of his 1988 trial he had eight felony convictions, the Indiana Supreme Court wrote, most of them burglaries or robberies, all involving middle-aged or elderly women. The earliest dated to 1967. One was voluntary manslaughter: the 2001 opinion named the victim as Olga Cooper and described her as 85. Its date and sentence have not been reported. The 1997 opinion called him a "seasoned criminal" with an "extensive criminal record" and noted he was already serving an 88-year term on another conviction.
On July 14, 1987, Ernestine Griffin, 74, died in Indianapolis. A jury in Marion Superior Court convicted Allen in 1988 of murder, felony murder and robbery, and on August 30, 1988, the judge, following the jury’s recommendation, sentenced him to death, plus 50 years for robbery. At the time of the trial a murder charge involving another elderly woman was pending against him; how it ended has not been reported.
The rest of his case was about his mind. School tests in 1956 and 1959 gave him IQ scores of 70 and 68, and he was placed in special education. A prison test given after he turned 22 recorded 104. The Indiana courts treated the question as decided against him until the Seventh Circuit, in Allen v. Buss on March 11, 2009, sent the case back. A federal district court then ruled that he was mentally retarded, the legal term then in use, which barred his execution. On May 28, 2013, he was resentenced to 60 years for murder and 50 for robbery. The Indiana Department of Correction lists him as deceased, a record checked on October 26, 2026.
Set side by side, the seven files are not alike. Sowell served a full 15 years for an attempted rape and was registered; Cole’s Missouri plea survives as one phrase in a sentencing order. Vann’s two prior cases sat in two states, and a Texas prosecutor said the Indiana file never reached her. Schaefer’s conviction ended his police career, and the next case came within a year. Georges left a prison on day release and was convicted again in 1995, while two investigative teams held cases that belonged together and the country had no DNA file to join them. Carignan’s death sentence was set aside on a question of procedure, and the conviction that followed came two decades later. Allen’s list of eight felonies was complete and still did not settle the question of what he was.
None of these men escaped a sentence. Several of them served the one they were given. What each case leaves open is whether the sentence was the measure of the earlier offense or only of the file that was available.
• 1949: Carignan is arrested on an assault charge in Anchorage; Laura Showalter, 57, dies July 31, 1949.
• 1950: Carignan is sentenced to death in Alaska; the Ninth Circuit reverses on December 8, 1950.
• 1951: Supreme Court of the United States, November 13, 1951, leaves the reversal in place.
• 1960: Carignan is paroled from Alcatraz.
• 1972: Schaefer, a Martin County deputy, is convicted of aggravated assault on two teenage girls; Susan Place and Georgia Jessup leave Oakland Park on September 27, 1972.
• 1973: Schaefer is convicted of the first-degree murder of both girls.
• 1974: Carignan is arrested in Minneapolis, September 24, 1974.
• 1979: Marie Cushman dies in Las Vegas; Cole later pleads guilty to her murder.
• 1984: Cole is sentenced to death in Nevada, October 12, 1984.
• 1985: Cole is executed December 6, 1985.
• 1987: Ernestine Griffin, 74, dies in Indianapolis on July 14, 1987.
• 1988: Allen is sentenced to death, August 30, 1988.
• 1990: Sowell is convicted of attempted rape; released in 2005.
• 1991: First killing in Georges’s Paris series, according to a National Assembly report.
• 1995: Georges is convicted of a sexual assault in August 1995; Schaefer dies in prison.
• 1998: Georges is arrested March 27, 1998 (Newsweek); the DNA file law passes June 17, 1998.
• 2001: Georges is sentenced April 5, 2001.
• 2007 to 2009: The period of the eleven deaths for which Sowell was convicted.
• 2009: Vann’s Texas conviction, September 2009; Sowell is arrested October 31, 2009.
• 2011: Sowell convicted July 22, 2011.
• 2013: Allen is resentenced May 28, 2013.
• 2014: Vann is arrested October 18, 2014.
• 2018: Vann pleads guilty May 4 and is sentenced May 25, 2018.
• 2021: Sowell dies in custody February 8, 2021.
• 2023: Carignan dies March 6, 2023.