In March 1998 the scientist who ran the molecular biology laboratory at the university hospital in Nantes sat down with the genetic profiles his laboratory held, about 3,500 of them, and began to compare them one by one with a profile that Paris detectives had carried for years. France had no national DNA file. Each laboratory kept its own records, and the records did not travel. When the Nantes expert reached the file of a man named Guy Georges, the profile matched the one taken in four killings in eastern Paris. By then seven young women were dead.
Investigators have a phrase for what kept that name hidden: linkage blindness. It describes the failure that sets in when one offender’s crimes are spread across agencies that do not share what they know, or across squads in a single department that work their cases apart. The offender crosses a city line, a river or an ocean. The files stay where they were opened. A detective in one town holds a fragment that would mean everything to a detective forty miles away, and neither of them knows the other exists.
The cases that follow span three decades and two continents. In some, the link was made by a machine, a database or a laboratory, once someone thought to ask. In others it came from a single person who refused to treat a death as an isolated event: a retired detective, a Texas Ranger, a newspaper reporter, a teenager who got away. In one, the link was made within days and still produced no name. Together they show how much of the work of catching a serial offender is the slow, unglamorous labor of getting one office to read another office’s mail.
Guy Georges was born Guy Rampillon on October 15, 1962, in Vitry-le-François, and grew up in the French child welfare system. By his early twenties he had served prison terms for a series of offenses against young women, according to Newsweek, the longest of them a ten-year sentence. Near its end he was granted day release, failed to return one January evening, and went to Paris.
The 2002 report of the National Assembly’s finance committee dates the first of the killings for which he was later convicted to January 1991. Newsweek names the women in order: Pascale Escarfail, 19; Catherine Rocher, 27; Elsa Benady, 22; Agnès Nijkamp, 32; Hélène Frinking, 27; Magali Sirotti, 19; and Estelle Magd, 25. The killings ran from 1991 to 1997.
For most of that decade no one treated them as one series. The parliamentary report, written by the deputy Marc Le Fur, states it plainly: the murders in eastern Paris and a second group of murders were handled by two different investigative teams, and no link was made between them. Frédérique Pons, who defended Georges at his trial, told Europe 1 in 2015 that for years investigators had regarded the crimes as possibly separate cases.
There was a profile. Detectives had a DNA sample from the killings, labeled SK1, and nowhere to send it. In 1995, Pons said, Georges came into contact with the police in connection with the inquiry and was cleared at first. That August, the parliamentary report records, he was convicted of a sexual assault, and again no link was made between him and the eastern Paris murders. A man with his record passed through the system, received a sentence and walked on, while a profile that would have named him sat in a different file.
What ended the search was persistence applied to a fragmented system. After two more killings in the autumn of 1997, police released a composite sketch, and the parliamentary report says the arrest followed a survivor’s recognition of a photograph. The identification itself came from Nantes, where the laboratory chief worked through his 3,500 files until he reached Georges. Jean-Paul Milland, who oversaw the forensic police in those years, described the arrangement to Europe 1 in 2020: comparisons were made case by case, and each laboratory kept its own records. A shared file did not yet exist.
Georges was arrested in Paris on March 27, 1998, Newsweek reported. Less than three months later, on June 17, 1998, Parliament passed Law no. 98-468, which created the Fichier national automatisé des empreintes génétiques, France’s national DNA database. In a written question that November, the deputy Michel Hunault asked the interior minister why no national file was yet in operation, citing the arrest of "the murderer of eastern Paris" through a genetic comparison. The decree that put the file to work was published on May 18, 2000. By 2020 it held the profiles of 3.3 million people.
Le Fur’s report drew the conclusion without softening it. A centralized file, he wrote, would have allowed Guy Georges to be identified more quickly and would have saved the lives of his last two victims.
At his trial in March 2001 Georges first pleaded not guilty, then confessed in open court to seven murders and four other offenses committed between 1991 and 1998. On April 5, 2001, the assize court convicted him of the murders, with rape, and sentenced him to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 22 years. Newsweek reported in September 2021 that he was held at the maison centrale of Ensisheim.
The Mississippi River runs between St. Louis and the towns of the Illinois side, and between 2000 and the spring of 2002 it ran between the deaths of about a dozen women as well. Alysa Greenwade’s death came to light in Washington Park, Illinois. Teresa Wilson’s came to light in West Alton, Missouri, in May 2001, and Betty James’s in St. Louis later that month. More followed on the Illinois side, in East St. Louis, Mascoutah, Highland and Columbia. Most of the women were Black, and most came from north St. Louis.
Each of those places had its own police. The city of St. Louis, St. Louis County, the small Missouri towns and a string of Illinois municipalities all opened their own files, and the Illinois State Police had jurisdiction over others. Traci Angel, a St. Louis reporter and editor writing in The Commonspace in July 2002, noted that the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Belleville News-Democrat published their first stories analyzing the deaths as a series only in October 2001, after two came to light on consecutive days. Law enforcement asked the FBI for help that month. St. Louis police joined a multi-agency task force some weeks later, Angel wrote, after a period in which the agencies blamed one another and newspaper editorials criticized all of them.
Even once the agencies were working together, the evidence pointed at no one. Laboratory work tied two of the deaths to a single unknown man, but his profile was in no database.
The link came from the man himself. In the spring of 2002, after the Post-Dispatch reporter Bill Smith published a story about Teresa Wilson, Smith received a typed letter from someone claiming responsibility for the deaths. It asked him to write about Alysa Greenwade, and it enclosed a computer-printed map as proof that the writer was genuine.
An Illinois State Police investigator who specialized in computer crime worked out that the map had been printed from Expedia.com, then part of Microsoft. Federal subpoenas to Expedia and Microsoft traced the map to a single internet address, and the address led to Maury Travis, a 36-year-old hotel waiter in Ferguson, Missouri.
Travis was arrested in Ferguson on June 7, 2002, and held on a federal criminal complaint charging him with kidnapping that caused the deaths of Alysa Greenwade and Betty James. On the night of June 10, 2002, three days after his arrest, he died by suicide in the St. Louis County jail in Clayton. He was never indicted or tried, and no court ever weighed the evidence against him. Police told ABC News they had identified 12 women whose deaths they attributed to him; the letter had claimed 17.
St. Louis police also sent his DNA to Atlanta, where he had lived in the mid-1990s and where detectives were studying deaths of women from 1994, AccessWDUN reported in June 2002, relaying the Post-Dispatch. No result was ever reported.
The work of connecting the Illinois cases outlived him by more than two decades. Three of the women had no names for 23 years. In March 2025 Columbia police announced that genetic genealogy had identified one of them as Carol Jean Hemphill, who had been reported missing in St. Louis in July 2001. The chief, Jason Donjon, said his department was contacting the other agencies that had handled cases tied to Travis to compare evidence. "This case is not done," he said. In July 2025 the Illinois State Police and Southern Illinois University Edwardsville announced that the other two women had been identified as Kelly Johnson and Crystal Lay, and that all three were believed to have been victims of Travis.
Jack Unterweger was serving a life sentence for the 1974 murder of Margret Schäfer, 18, in West Germany, when he became one of Austria’s best-known writers. His autobiographical novel, Fegefeuer, was made into a film. Writers and public figures campaigned for his release, and on May 23, 1990, he walked out of prison on parole as a symbol of rehabilitation. He moved to Vienna, toured Austria and neighboring countries giving readings, and took freelance assignments as a reporter.
Within months women began to die in the places he visited. The Graz indictment, as summarized by the Austria Presse Agentur, listed eleven killings between September 1990 and July 1991: one in Prague, one near Bregenz, two in the Graz area, four around Vienna and three in Los Angeles. Each fell to a different police authority. Prague detectives answered to the Czechoslovak state; the Austrian cases were split among provinces; the California deaths were in the hands of the Los Angeles Police Department, which had given Unterweger a ride-along during the summer trip he spent researching a story, the historian Kristina E. Poznan writes. The three Los Angeles victims were Shannon Exley, Irene Rodriguez and Peggy Jean Booth, who died between June 19 and July 3, 1991.
Investigators later said the same signature recurred in every case, from Prague to California. For it to mean anything, someone had to see all of the cases at once.
That someone was August Schenner, a retired detective in Salzburg who had dealt with Unterweger in the 1970s. According to Poznan and the Austrian magazine profil, Schenner was the first to connect the new deaths with the man he remembered. Police in Vienna and Graz followed his lead, but early surveillance produced nothing.
Ernst Geiger, who led the work for the Vienna homicide unit, told ORF in 2024 that Austria’s forensic resources at the time were not adequate, and that help with DNA and other analysis came from Switzerland and the United States. The case was built from the movements of a man who kept a public calendar: readings, interviews and assignments that put him in Prague, Graz and the Bregenz area on the dates of the killings. Trace evidence recovered from a car he had once owned, scrapped long before and broken down for parts in Linz, surfaced only about two months before trial.
The Graz Regional Court issued an arrest warrant on February 13, 1992. Unterweger fled to the United States and was arrested in Miami on February 27, 1992. Los Angeles police wanted to try him for the California deaths, Poznan writes, but their DNA work was slow, and he was extradited to Austria at the end of May 1992. The three Los Angeles cases went into the Graz indictment. An Austrian court would sit in judgment on deaths in California.
The trial opened in Graz on April 20, 1994. The Neue Deutsche Biographie records it as the first trial in Austria in which DNA analysis and criminal profiling supported a circumstantial case. At about 9 p.m. on June 28, 1994, the jury returned guilty verdicts on nine of the eleven murder charges and he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Early the next morning he died by suicide in his cell, at 43. Because he died before the judgment could become final, the 1994 verdict never became a conviction. His only final conviction is still the 1974 murder of Margret Schäfer.
No case shows linkage blindness at greater scale than that of Samuel Little. By 2013, according to the Calcasieu Parish Sheriff’s Office and the Associated Press, his rap sheet ran past 100 pages and recorded about 75 arrests in 24 states over 56 years. Between 1957 and 1975 alone he was arrested 26 times in 11 states. Over those 56 years he served less than ten years in prison. "He’s gotten break after break after break," the Los Angeles prosecutor Beth Silverman said in 2013.
Every one of those arrests opened and closed a local file. In Mississippi in 1982 he was charged with murder in the death of Melinda LaPree, and a grand jury declined to indict him. Mississippi sent him to Florida, where in January 1984 a jury acquitted him of murdering Patricia Ann Mount. He later confessed to killing both women, but the Florida acquittal is final.
Many of the deaths he would one day describe had not been treated as homicides at all.
The women he described were, by the FBI’s account, mostly Black, many of them poor and estranged from their families. Christie Palazzolo, an FBI crime analyst, put it from the other side: "For many years, Samuel Little believed he would not be caught because he thought no one was accounting for his victims."
The first link that held came through a database. In April 2012 Detective Mitzi Roberts of the Los Angeles Police Department’s cold case unit received a match through California’s offender DNA databank that tied the 1989 deaths of Audrey Nelson, 35, and Guadalupe Apodaca, 46, to each other and then to Little. A third match, to the 1987 death of Carol Alford, 41, followed that November.
Finding him exposed another seam. In 2007 Little had skipped a Los Angeles drug diversion program, and a judge issued a bench warrant that could not be used to extradite him from another state. Over the next five years he had about a dozen encounters with police, and officers who saw the warrant let him go. Detectives in Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana, traced him through an ATM purchase, and on September 5, 2012, he was arrested in Louisville, Kentucky, on the Los Angeles narcotics warrant. On September 2, 2014, a Los Angeles jury convicted him of three counts of first-degree murder, and he was sentenced to three consecutive terms of life without parole.
After the 2013 charges, police in at least nine states began reviewing their cold cases, and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement reexamined unsolved killings across 12 jurisdictions. The breakthrough came five years later. In 2018 the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, known as ViCAP, flagged Little in the unsolved 1994 death of Denise Christie Brothers in Odessa, Texas, and referred the case to the Texas Rangers. Ranger James Holland began interviewing him that summer, and over more than 700 hours Little described 93 killings between 1970 and 2005.
ViCAP then did what no single agency could. On October 1, 2018, it notified the Cuyahoga County prosecutor in Cleveland that Little had confessed to killing women there; prosecutors flew to Texas and returned with his account. Detectives from across the country took their files to the jail in Decatur, Texas. The Rangers published the periods when Little had been in custody for six months or more, so that other agencies could rule cases in or out, and warned that his memory for dates could be off by more than ten years and for places by more than 40 miles.
On October 6, 2019, the FBI said it believed all 93 confessions were credible. Little pleaded guilty in Odessa in December 2018 and to four more murders in Cleveland and Cincinnati on August 23, 2019, bringing his convictions to eight. He died in custody on December 30, 2020, at 80. A year later the Rangers and the FBI reported that more than 60 of his confessions had been matched to victims, and released details of 31 that had not.
In Virginia the agencies did work together, and for five years it was not enough. Sofia Silva, 16, died in Spotsylvania County in September 1996. Kristin Lisk, 15, and her sister Kati, 12, died in May 1997. A task force of the Spotsylvania and King George sheriff’s offices, the Virginia State Police and the FBI concluded from trace evidence that one person had killed all three girls. Richard Marc Evonitz, a Navy veteran who worked at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in King George County, came up as an early suspect, The Washington Times reported, but investigators had no grounds to compel a DNA sample. By 1999 he had moved back to his native South Carolina, beyond the reach of a Virginia inquiry that had no reason to follow him.
The link came in June 2002, from a girl of fifteen. On June 24 she was abducted in Lexington County, South Carolina, by a man police identified as Evonitz. She got away early the next morning and gave investigators the details she had memorized. Among his papers in Columbia, WIS-TV reported, were newspaper clippings about the Spotsylvania sisters. Evonitz fled to Florida and on June 27, 2002, killed himself in Sarasota as police closed in. He was never charged with any killing.
What one state had not been able to prove, the evidence gathered in another settled. The FBI examined about 600 items and ran more than 10,000 tests on hairs and fibers the task force had held since 1996 and 1997. On August 13, 2002, the Spotsylvania County and King George County sheriffs, the Virginia State Police and the FBI announced that Evonitz had killed Sofia Silva and Kristin and Kati Lisk. The sheriff credited the girl from South Carolina with leading investigators to the man they had sought for five years.
The question of where else he had been never closed. In March 2008 the FBI and the Spotsylvania sheriff issued a ViCAP alert asking agencies across the country to compare their unsolved cases against him, noting that his military and sales work had taken him to 22 states. One of those places was Portland, Maine, where his ship was in port for a refit from May 1988 to May 1989. The Portland Press Herald reported in 2022 that Maine State Police and Portland police had told the federal task force in 2002 that they had no matching unsolved cases, and later said they had no record of the task force’s requests. No police agency has publicly linked Evonitz to any crime beyond the three Virginia killings.
Linkage blindness does not need a state line. In San Diego in 1990, six women were killed over eight months, and the city’s own police department saw five of the deaths as one series and missed the sixth. Tiffany Schultz, 21, died on January 12; Janene Weinhold, 21, on February 16; Holly Tarr, 18, a high school senior from Michigan on spring break, on April 3. All three died within a few blocks of one another in Clairemont. In early 1990 the San Diego police consulted Larry Ankrom, an FBI special agent with five years at the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, about the Schultz and Weinhold deaths, and they reported the Tarr killing to him in April.
Elissa Keller, 38, died on May 20 or 21, 1990, a few miles east, soon after Cleophus Prince Jr., a young man from Alabama, had moved into the area. Pamela Clark, 42, and her daughter Amber, 18, died together in University City on September 13. The police told Ankrom about the Clarks that month. They did not tell him about Elissa Keller until February 1991, Ankrom later testified. The one killing the department had not connected was the one that followed the defendant to his new neighborhood.
Prince was detained on February 4, 1991, gave a blood sample and was released. He left for Alabama and was arrested in Birmingham on March 1, 1991. At his trial, Ankrom testified that he was "very firm" that one person had committed all six murders, basing his view on the hours, the neighborhoods and features of the killings themselves. The defense asked to see the FBI’s VICAP database; Ankrom said his opinion rested on his own experience, not on the database, and the court refused discovery. A San Diego County jury convicted Prince of six counts of first degree murder, with other charges, and the judgment of death was entered on November 5, 1993. The California Supreme Court affirmed it in its entirety on April 30, 2007. As of June 1, 2026, he was listed among those under sentence of death in California, where executions have been halted since March 2019.
The last case runs the other way. Between April 8 and May 7, 1992, six people working in small shops were killed in five cities: Robin Fuldauer, 26, in Indianapolis; Patricia Magers, 32, and Patricia Smith, 23, in Wichita; Michael McCown, 40, in Terre Haute; Nancy Kitzmiller, 24, in St. Charles, Missouri; and Sarah Blessing, 37, in Raytown, Missouri. The investigation began separately in each city. But forensic comparison soon tied all six deaths to a single source, and investigators learned within days that the Indianapolis killing matched the one in Wichita, KMOV reported. Here the agencies made the link early. They still had no name.
What followed shows that linking cases is the beginning of the work, not the end. Agencies from several states met to share information in 1994 and 1995. Larry Ankrom of the FBI, consulted early, thought the gunman probably lived or worked in Indiana. When women working alone in small shops in Fort Worth, Arlington and Houston were killed or wounded in 1993 and 1994, some investigators saw the same pattern; Texas authorities were not persuaded, KSDK reported, because the forensic evidence pointed to a different source. The case drifted. When Captain Ray Floyd arrived at the St. Charles police department in 2021, he learned that the case had not been examined for some time, and that the last laboratory submissions had gone out in 2004.
Floyd called the other four departments. In early November 2021 investigators from all five cities met for two days in St. Charles with the FBI, the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and forensic specialists, and went through files that in St. Charles alone filled ten drawers. They opened a shared online tip portal. A sighting in one city, a Wichita investigator observed, means something only when it matches a witness in another. Stored evidence went out for modern DNA testing, which can recover traces that 1992 laboratories could not. Terre Haute’s results, returned in February 2022, were reported as inconclusive.
As of February 2024 a St. Charles detective, Kelly Rhodes, was working the case full time, and tips arrived almost every week. A retired KMOV reporter who had followed the task force told WGLT in March 2024 that police had identified a living suspect. No one has been named or charged.
Set side by side, the cases show the link arriving from every direction except the one the system was built to provide. In Paris it came from a scientist willing to read 3,500 files by hand, and it produced a national database within three months. In St. Louis it came from a letter writer’s vanity and a pair of subpoenas to a software company. In Austria a pensioner’s memory supplied it, and in Virginia a fifteen-year-old’s. Samuel Little was linked first by a state DNA databank and then by a federal clearinghouse that existed, in some form, for most of the years he was free, and that worked only when a detective in Odessa had reason to query it.
The San Diego case is the quietest warning. One department, one FBI consultant, one city, and still the killing nearest the defendant’s new address sat apart for nine months. Distance makes linkage blindness easier, but it does not cause it. The cause is a file that no one thinks to send.
The 1992 shop killings stand as the counterexample and the caution. Those agencies compared notes almost at once, met for years and reconvened in 2021 with every tool that Paris had lacked. Thirty-four years on, the files are linked, the drawers are full, and the gunman has no name.
• January 12 to September 13, 1990: six women are killed in San Diego; the police consult FBI agent Larry Ankrom from early 1990.
• May 23, 1990: Jack Unterweger is paroled in Austria.
• September 1990 to July 1991: eleven killings in Prague, Austria and Los Angeles later charged against Unterweger.
• January 1991: the first of the eastern Paris killings later attributed to Guy Georges.
• February 1991: San Diego investigators tell Ankrom about the Elissa Keller killing of May 1990.
• March 1, 1991: Cleophus Prince Jr. is arrested in Birmingham, Alabama.
• February 13 and 27, 1992: a Graz warrant is issued for Unterweger, who is arrested in Miami.
• April 8 to May 7, 1992: six people are killed in shops in Indianapolis, Wichita, Terre Haute, St. Charles and Raytown.
• November 5, 1993: Prince is sentenced to death in San Diego.
• 1994 and 1995: agencies from several states meet to share information on the 1992 shop killings.
• June 28 and 29, 1994: a Graz jury returns guilty verdicts on nine charges against Unterweger; he dies in his cell hours later.
• August 1995: Georges is convicted of a sexual assault in France; no link is made to the Paris killings.
• September 1996 and May 1997: Sofia Silva and Kristin and Kati Lisk die in Spotsylvania County, Virginia.
• March 27, 1998: Georges is arrested in Paris after a manual DNA comparison in Nantes.
• June 17, 1998: France creates its national DNA database.
• May 18, 2000: the decree putting the French database into operation is published.
• April 5, 2001: Georges is sentenced to life with a 22-year minimum term.
• October 2001: St. Louis-area agencies ask the FBI for help; a task force follows.
• June 7, 2002: Maury Travis is arrested in Ferguson, Missouri, on a federal complaint.
• June 10, 2002: Travis dies in the St. Louis County jail.
• June 24 to 27, 2002: a fifteen-year-old is abducted in South Carolina; police identify Richard Marc Evonitz, who flees and dies in Sarasota, Florida.
• August 13, 2002: Virginia authorities and the FBI attribute the Silva and Lisk killings to Evonitz.
• December 18, 2002: a National Assembly report says a central DNA file would have identified Georges sooner.
• April 30, 2007: the California Supreme Court affirms Prince’s convictions and death sentence.
• March 14, 2008: the FBI issues a ViCAP alert on Evonitz.
• April 2012: a California DNA databank match ties Samuel Little to two Los Angeles deaths.
• September 5, 2012: Little is arrested in Louisville, Kentucky.
• September 2, 2014: a Los Angeles jury convicts Little of three counts of first-degree murder.
• 2018: ViCAP flags Little in the 1994 Odessa case; the Texas Rangers begin interviews.
• October 1, 2018: ViCAP notifies Cleveland prosecutors of Little’s Ohio confessions.
• August 23, 2019: Little pleads guilty to four Ohio murders.
• October 6, 2019: the FBI calls all 93 of Little’s confessions credible.
• December 30, 2020: Little dies in custody.
• November 2021: investigators from five cities meet in St. Charles on the 1992 shop killings.
• February 2022: Terre Haute DNA results are reported as inconclusive.
• February 2024: a St. Charles detective is working the shop killings full time.
• March and July 2025: three Illinois women whose deaths were attributed to Travis are identified.
• June 1, 2026: Prince is listed as under sentence of death in California.