Authority is a form of cover. A man who commands an air base, who signs death certificates, who sits as mayor or wears a marshal’s baton has a standing that most people find it uncomfortable to question, and the investigators who eventually did question these men did so against the weight of that standing. The eight cases span six centuries and several professions: soldier, physician, civic figure, public officer. In each, the position was real. What it did varies. For some it delayed suspicion for years. For several the medical license was the instrument itself. For one it ended in a fraud arrest over lies on job applications.
Gilles de Rais was one of the richest lords in western France and a Marshal of France at about 25. He fought in the army that relieved Orléans with Joan of Arc in 1429 and stood among the lords at the coronation of Charles VII at Reims that summer. In October 1440 he stood trial at Nantes before two courts at once. A church court under Bishop Malestroit, with a Dominican friar as vice-inquisitor, heard charges of heresy and the invocation of demons. The secular court of the duke of Brittany heard the charge of murdering children.
The record is unusually full. It includes a 49-article indictment read on October 13, 1440, the depositions of parents who had lost children, and the confessions of Gilles and of his servants. Article 27 charged that he had killed "one hundred and forty, or more, children, boys and girls." The historian Laurent Guitton, working from the depositions in 2024, counted 36 missing boys from 32 families. The gap between the two figures is the first thing a reader of the case has to hold in mind.
Whatever shelter his rank gave him ended in September 1440. The bishop issued a citation on September 13, and on September 15 Gilles surrendered his sword to Jean Labbé, a captain in the duke’s service, at his castle of Machecoul and was taken to Nantes. He first refused to recognize the church court, saying he would rather be hanged than answer such judges, and was excommunicated. Two days later he reversed course and accepted its authority. After the testimony closed on October 20, the prosecutor reminded the court of its power to apply torture. Gilles confessed on October 21 and repeated the confession in open court on October 22, saying he could not give the number of children and calling it many. He asked that his confession be published in the common language so that people who did not read Latin could understand it.
On October 25 the church court issued its sentences, and the secular court sentenced him to be hanged and burned. He was executed at Nantes on October 26, 1440, with two of his servants. The question of his guilt has not been closed. Most historians who have studied the record accept it. A minority of writers has argued since the 1920s that he was the victim of a political plot, and in 1992 an unofficial panel in Paris declared him not guilty. Guitton, for his part, reads the servants' confessions with caution, noting that their detail is so alike that the judges may have imposed a questionnaire, and thinks they were probably obtained under torture.
William Palmer was a surgeon in the Staffordshire town of Rugeley who gave up most of his practice for horse racing and betting and fell deep into debt. His standing was local and ordinary: a native son, trained in medicine, a doctor with a surgery in the town where he had been born in 1824. That standing did not stop what followed in November 1855, when his racing associate John Parsons Cook, 28, won a large sum, fell ill, was tended by Palmer for several days, and died on November 21. The Crown charged that Palmer had killed him with strychnine.
None was detected. Alfred Swaine Taylor, the most respected toxicologist in England and an unofficial adviser to the Crown, analyzed Cook’s organs at Guy’s Hospital and did not find strychnine. He concluded all the same that it had killed Cook, and became the prosecution’s chief witness. James Voelkel, writing for the Science History Institute, observes that Taylor reasoned from symptoms: the convulsions could come only from tetanus or strychnine, tetanus could be ruled out, and so the cause was poison. The conviction, Voelkel writes, rested on that reasoning rather than on chemical proof.
The case drew two further inquests, on the bodies of Palmer’s wife and his brother, both heavily insured. Juries returned verdicts of wilful murder against him on January 12 and January 23, 1856. Those were findings by coroner’s juries, not convictions, and neither death was tried. Feeling in Staffordshire ran so high that Parliament passed the Central Criminal Court Act 1856, known as Palmer’s Act, which received royal assent on April 11 and allowed his trial to be moved to London. The trial began at the Old Bailey on May 14 before Lord Chief Justice Campbell, Baron Alderson and Mr. Justice Cresswell, with Attorney General Cockburn for the Crown. Katherine Watson counts 17 medical and scientific witnesses for the Crown and 15 for the defense. On May 27 the jury convicted him of the wilful murder of Cook. Charles Dickens, in an essay published on the day of the execution, argued that the composure the papers had admired in the dock was not innocence but the usual bearing of a very wicked man. Palmer was hanged at Stafford on June 14, 1856.
Thomas Neill Cream was born in Glasgow in 1850, grew up in a prosperous English-speaking family in Quebec, and graduated in medicine from McGill University in 1876. McGill News, in a 2021 profile, recalled neighbors and teachers who remembered a hard worker who taught Sunday school and sang in a church choir. He practiced in London, Ontario, and then in Chicago.
In 1879 a young woman who had been his patient died in London, Ontario; the coroner’s jury ruled that she "died from chloroform, administered by some person unknown," and Cream, who left for Chicago, was never charged. In 1881 an Illinois jury convicted him of the murder of Daniel Stott, a stationmaster for a railway. He was sentenced to life at Joliet, and in 1891, after about ten years, his term was reduced and he was released on parole.
He sailed for England and took a room in Lambeth, south London, calling himself Dr. Thomas Neill. Over seven months young women in the district died of strychnine poisoning. Ellen Donworth died in October 1891; her inquest returned a verdict of strychnine and morphia poisoning without evidence of how it was given, and Scotland Yard’s Assistant Commissioner, Robert Anderson, accepted it as suicide, though noting the obvious question that strychnine was sold only to physicians. A coroner received a letter signed "A. O’Brien, Detective" offering to name the killer for 300,000 pounds and filed it as a prank. Over the following months a series of letters reached prominent people in London, threatening to accuse them of poisoning young women. Most took them to Scotland Yard, and the police largely set them aside. The Canadian writer Dean Jobb does not believe Cream meant to collect; he thinks the letters were a way of claiming credit.
Four deaths were charged in 1892, along with one attempted murder and the letters. Tried at the Old Bailey in October 1892 before Mr. Justice Hawkins, Cream faced the case of one death, that of Matilda Clover, which had earlier been recorded as natural. The Attorney General, Sir Charles Russell, led for the Crown, and the central scientific witness was Dr. Thomas Stevenson. An unsigned commentary in the Journal of Mental Science in January 1893 conceded that "no direct evidence of administration, indeed, was forthcoming," and called the evidence of identity weak, but concluded the circumstantial evidence justified the verdict. The jury needed about ten minutes. Cream was hanged at Newgate Prison on November 15, 1892. Jobb puts his toll at no fewer than ten people. That total is his estimate, and two deaths, Stott’s and Clover’s, ended in conviction.
Marcel Petiot qualified as a physician in 1921 after a First World War service that left army doctors recording mental imbalance and depression. His reputation was made in the Yonne, where he set up practice at Villeneuve-sur-Yonne. Britannica reports that he was elected mayor in 1926, was suspended in 1930 after a fraud conviction and removed in 1931, then won a seat as a local councilor and lost it after a conviction for stealing electricity. Several deaths from those years were later linked to him, none proved, and he was never charged over any of them. In Paris he presented himself as a doctor devoted to the poor.
In 1942 to 1944, under the German occupation, he offered people trying to leave France a passage to South America. The French Ministry of Justice, in an account of the case published in 2020, states the courts' finding plainly: he drew in people who wanted to flee, using a false resistance network as cover, killed them and took their belongings. No one who went to him reached South America. Most of the dead, the Ministry writes, were Jews or petty criminals trying to drop out of sight.
Twenty-seven deaths were charged against him, and he was arrested in Paris on October 31, 1944, after seven months in hiding. The trial before the Seine Assize Court began on March 18, 1946. He was defended by René Floriot, who did not plead insanity but challenged the weaknesses of the investigation and argued that the dead were enemies of France. Petiot presented himself as a hero of the resistance, claimed in court that he had killed 63 people, every one a German, collaborator or traitor, and denounced judges he accused of having stayed loyal to Vichy. Salon, reviewing David King’s book on the case, reports that the hearings were crowded and disorderly, with the writer Colette among those who came to watch. On April 4, 1946, the jury convicted him of 24 of the 27 murders, with theft, and he was sentenced to death. He never admitted the murders. He was guillotined at La Santé prison in Paris on May 25, 1946.
Harold Shipman was a family doctor in Hyde, a town on the eastern edge of Greater Manchester. By 1998 he had about 3,000 patients and, CBS News reported, a large waiting list of people who wanted to join his practice. He was known locally as Fred. His record was not spotless. In 1976 he was convicted of offenses involving the misuse of pethidine and fined; he was reported to the General Medical Council, which took no further action, and in 1977 he joined a group practice in Hyde, having told his new partners that he had put the problem behind him.
On January 31, 2000, a jury at Preston Crown Court convicted him of murdering 15 of his patients with diamorphine, and of forging the will of the last of them, Kathleen Grundy. He was 54. Mr. Justice Forbes passed 15 life sentences: "In your case, life must mean life." The trial had begun on October 5, 1999. A police inquiry in March 1998 had turned up nothing against him. He was caught that summer because he forged a will leaving an 81-year-old patient’s estate to himself and her daughter, a solicitor, refused to believe it. He was arrested on September 7, 1998.
The 15 were a sample. A public inquiry chaired by Dame Janet Smith reported in July 2002 that he had killed at least 215 patients, and her final report in January 2005 concluded that he killed "about 250 patients between 1971 and 1998, of whom I have been able positively to identify 218." The Inquiry also concluded that he had probably caused the deaths of 10 to 15 patients at Pontefract, where he was a junior doctor. Those figures are findings of an inquiry, not convictions. Coroners' inquests held between 2000 and 2001 recorded unlawful killing in 25 of 27 deaths and open verdicts in two. A clinical audit commissioned by the Chief Medical Officer concluded that the excess of deaths among his patients was evident from his first years in practice and continued throughout his career; he issued 521 death certificates, 499 of them in Hyde, against a maximum of 210 for any comparable Hyde doctor. Shipman never admitted any killing. He hanged himself in his cell at Wakefield prison on January 13, 2004, the day before his 58th birthday. The Inquiry’s six reports changed how deaths, controlled drugs and doctors are checked in England and Wales.
Michael Swango was born in 1954 and grew up in Quincy, Illinois. He was valedictorian of his high school class in 1972, played the clarinet on a music scholarship, served in the Marine Corps with an honorable discharge in 1976, and graduated summa cum laude from Quincy College in 1979. He began a surgical internship at a Columbus, Ohio, teaching hospital in July 1983. By early January 1984 he had unsatisfactory performance evaluations, and on January 14 he began a month on a neurosurgery floor. That night Cynthia Ann McGee, a 19-year-old gymnast recovering from injuries, died. Prosecutors said in 2000 that he had killed her.
Nurses had raised alarms in 1984 and were not believed. The residency review committee voted not to keep him on after June, and he left on June 30, 1984. Three doctors nevertheless wrote letters supporting his application for a license, and he received his Ohio medical license in September 1984. The Illinois case then forced a second look. On May 3, 1985, a jury convicted him of aggravated battery on six of seven counts, for poisoning ambulance co-workers with arsenic. Judge Dennis Cashman sentenced him on August 23, 1985 to five years, the maximum, saying he believed Swango was a threat to society. His Illinois and Ohio licenses were revoked. He was released on August 21, 1987.
What followed is the part that made the case. Swango hid his conviction on applications for medical posts in South Dakota, New York and Zimbabwe. He was arrested in Chicago on June 27, 1997, on a federal fraud warrant, on his way to a hospital job in Saudi Arabia. He pleaded guilty in March 1998 to a federal false-statement charge. Federal prosecutors charged him with three murders at a veterans hospital in Northport, New York, in 1993 only days before he was due out of prison. On September 6, 2000, he pleaded guilty to murdering George Siano, Aldo Serini and Thomas Sammarco and received three consecutive life terms without parole. On October 18, 2000, he pleaded guilty in Columbus to the aggravated murder of Cynthia Ann McGee and was sentenced to life with parole eligibility after 20 years. He is held at the federal supermax in Florence, Colorado. The estimates of his toll are 35, 50 and 60, offered by an author, the FBI and an FBI agent, and are not findings.
John Wayne Gacy was born in Chicago on March 17, 1942, and became a pillar of a certain kind of community life. In Waterloo, Iowa, he managed restaurants owned by his first wife’s father, joined the Jaycees and dressed up for local parades. A Black Hawk County prosecutor, David Dutton, recalled seeing him as a clown in a parade and thinking he was "just a nice person to have around." In 1968 he was convicted in Iowa and sentenced to ten years; he was paroled on June 18, 1970, after about eighteen months. Dutton said he was never given a satisfactory answer for the early release.
Back near Chicago he started a contracting and remodeling business, PDM Contractors, and hired teenagers and young men to work for it. He threw large summer parties for the neighborhood. He became a Democratic precinct captain. He performed at children’s parties and charity events as a clown called Pogo.
He was arrested in Des Plaines, Illinois, on December 21, 1978. In March 1980 a jury convicted him of 33 murders, and he was sentenced to death on 12 counts and to natural life on the other 21. The Illinois Supreme Court affirmed the convictions and death sentences in 1984. The dead were young men and boys, most of them from Chicago’s North Side. Five of them have never been identified, and three were named by DNA between 2011 and 2021. He was executed by lethal injection at Stateville Correctional Center on May 10, 1994, and pronounced dead at 12:58 a.m.
Russell Williams joined the Canadian Forces in 1987, received his pilot’s wings in 1990, and flew VIPs: prime ministers and, during a 2005 visit, Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip. He commanded 437 Transport Squadron at Trenton from 2004 for two years, ran a logistics base the government did not officially acknowledge, completed French-language training and became a colonel. On July 15, 2009, he took command of 8 Wing at Canadian Forces Base Trenton, the country’s largest air base. In 23 years of service, the Associated Press reported, he never saw combat.
On January 17, 2010, he was photographed with the Chief of the Defence Staff, Gen. Walter Natynczyk, and the Minister of National Defence, Peter MacKay, during their visit to the base and an inspection of an aircraft bound for Haiti relief. Three weeks later he was in a Belleville courtroom in a prison jumpsuit, charged with two murders. He was arrested in Ottawa on February 7, 2010, and charged the next day. Lt.-Gen. Andre Deschamps relieved him of command "citing the seriousness of the charges." A defense official in Ottawa described the staff as stunned, saying the colonel they knew had seemed a "straight up, hard working air force guy."
On April 29, 2010, police laid 82 further charges covering break-ins in Ottawa, Belleville and Tweed. On October 18, 2010, before Justice Robert F. Scott of the Ontario Superior Court in Belleville, Williams pleaded guilty to all 88 charges, among them the first-degree murders of Cpl. Marie-France Comeau, 38, and Jessica Lloyd, 27, and sexual assault and forcible confinement involving two women who survived. The judge declared him guilty on every count on October 19. He was sentenced on October 21 to two concurrent life terms with no parole eligibility for 25 years; the sentencing judge called him "Canada’s bright shining lie." Williams told the court he was "indescribably ashamed." His commission was revoked on October 22, in a step the Chief of the Defence Staff said might be the first of its kind in Canadian history, and his release from the Forces was complete on December 10, 2010.
Rank and license worked differently from case to case. For Gilles de Rais and for Gacy, status was social: it made them harder to approach. For Palmer, Cream, Petiot and Shipman it was professional, and it worked through paper: death certificates, prescriptions, a coroner who filed a letter as a prank. For Swango it worked through the paper in reverse, because he lied about a conviction on application forms and the institutions let the lie stand. Williams is the case in which the standing was highest. The commanding officer who was photographed in January with the head of the armed forces was charged in February.
How long the delay lasted, and what ended it, differs from case to case: a bishop’s citation, an inquest, a forged will, a letter, a federal fraud warrant, a charge laid within weeks of an official photograph.
• About 1432 to 1440: Disappearances of children in Gilles de Rais’s lands, per the 1440 depositions.
• October 26, 1440: Gilles de Rais is executed at Nantes.
• November 21, 1855: John Parsons Cook dies; Palmer is charged.
• May 27, 1856: Palmer is convicted of the wilful murder of Cook; hanged June 14.
• 1881: Cream is convicted of murder in Illinois; released on parole in 1891.
• October 1892: Cream is convicted at the Old Bailey; hanged November 15.
• 1942 to 1944: Petiot’s crimes in occupied Paris.
• October 31, 1944: Petiot is arrested in Paris.
• April 4, 1946: Petiot is convicted of 24 murders; guillotined May 25.
• 1972 to 1978: Gacy’s crimes in Cook County, Illinois.
• December 21, 1978: Gacy is arrested.
• March 1980: Gacy is convicted of 33 murders; executed May 10, 1994.
• May 3, 1985: Swango is convicted of aggravated battery in Illinois.
• 1995 to 1998: Shipman’s convicted killings end with his arrest on September 7, 1998.
• January 31, 2000: Shipman is convicted of 15 murders and forgery.
• September 6 and October 18, 2000: Swango pleads guilty to four murders.
• January 13, 2004: Shipman dies in prison.
• February 7, 2010: Williams is arrested in Ottawa.
• October 21, 2010: Williams is sentenced to two concurrent life terms.