Nine people in this archive kept written records of what they were doing. Not trophies taken from the dead, though several kept those too, but paperwork: names, dates, weights, expenses, tallies, entered by hand and kept in the house. In every case the record became the evidence. In three of them it is the only reason anybody knows a number larger than the convictions.
## The bookkeepers
Karl Denke was a churchgoer and the organist at his chapel in Munsterberg, known in the village as Papa Denke, and he sold meat at market as pork. He was arrested on December 21, 1924 after a lodger he attacked survived and raised the alarm. The search of his house found two tubs of meat in brine, pots of fat, bones, and braces and belts made from human skin. It also found a ledger in which he had recorded the names, dates and weights of more than thirty people since 1921. The figure of thirty is his own arithmetic. There was no other count.
Henry Desire Landru courted women through newspaper advertisements in France between 1915 and 1919 and killed eleven of them. What convicted him was paperwork. A small notebook in his own hand recorded the names of two hundred and eighty-three women he had corresponded with and the expenses of each courtship, and for the eleven it recorded which railway ticket he had bought: one-way rather than return.
Juan Corona was convicted of twenty-five murders of farm workers around Yuba City in California. A ledger of names was recovered along with the bodies, and two receipts bearing his own name were found in the graves themselves.
## The diarists
Alexander Bychkov killed nine men in the small town of Belinsky in Penza Oblast between 2009 and 2012, most of them homeless or drinkers, and wrote the killings down in a diary. He was caught over a shop theft. The diary did more than convict him: an innocent man had already been convicted of one of the murders it described.
Donald Harvey worked as a hospital orderly and later an autopsy assistant across several hospitals in two states, and kept a diary. He was caught in 1987 when a coroner smelled cyanide during a post-mortem. He pleaded guilty to twenty-four murders in Ohio and to further counts in Kentucky, thirty-seven convictions in all, and claimed eighty-seven.
Manuel Pardo was a former Florida Highway Patrol trooper and Sweetwater police officer, dismissed for falsifying tickets and for false testimony. He photographed some of the bodies and kept a diary and a scrapbook of his victims. He was convicted of nine counts of first degree murder in 1988 and told the court he had been exterminating vermin.
Tamara Samsonova kept diaries over many years in Russian, English and German, recording her feelings about the people around her. One death in Saint Petersburg was established against her and eleven or more have been attributed, and Russian investigators said the diaries referred to further deaths. She was found not criminally responsible and was committed rather than tried, so none of it was tested at a trial.
## Two who kept a notebook alongside the objects
Jose Antonio Rodriguez Vega killed sixteen elderly women in Santander between August 1987 and April 1988. Police searching his flat found what amounted to a museum of small things taken from the dead, watches, rings, ornaments and photographs, and among them a notebook.
Dellmus Colvin, a long-haul trucker, has two murder convictions and a third indictment brought in 2010. The figure of seven or more comes from the charges and from his own account. He kept a notebook.
## Where the number comes from the writing
Three of the nine counts in this archive rest on the killer's own record rather than on a court. Denke's thirty and more is the tally in his ledger. Colvin's seven or more is his own account. Samsonova's eleven or more comes from diaries read by investigators in a case that never reached a verdict.
This is worth stating plainly, because a number that originates with the man who wrote it down is a different kind of fact from a number a jury returned. It may be too high, if he was counting things he did not do. It may be too low, if he stopped writing. Denke's ledger begins in 1921 and earlier killings are suspected.
## The mirror image
Bruce McArthur is not one of the nine, because the record that caught him was not his. He killed eight men in Toronto between 2010 and 2017 and was arrested in January 2018 through Andrew Kinsman's diary and a van. Kinsman had written down who he was meeting.
Two Toronto police projects had already failed to identify McArthur, and he had been interviewed as a person of interest in 2013 and released. What finished it was one of his victims having kept a note of an appointment.
The nine wrote their own cases down and it convicted them. The tenth was convicted by the bookkeeping of a man he killed.