Not every amateur sleuth works online. Several of the people who pushed, profiled or second-guessed the investigations that follow never went near the internet in the way the word "online" suggests. One was a researcher bidding at an auction. One was a high school sociology class, working with a teacher and borrowed expertise. One was a criminologist speaking on a television documentary. What they share is that none held a badge, and each changed, for better or worse, what the public believed about a case.
Others did work online. The relatives of children who died at a Texas hospital organized on Facebook and pressed a district attorney for a new murder charge. Microblog users in China guessed at body counts that a court would never confirm. A woman whose father had been killed in South Korea posted her grief on an online community and began collecting signatures for a petition. The record is mixed. A blog about missing persons helped return a name to a woman who had been missing for more than three decades. A DNA claim about a shawl, published in a forensic journal, was taken apart by the scientists who read it.
Zhang Yongming was a farmer in Nanmen Village, in Jincheng Town, Jinning County, part of Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province in southwest China. In July 2012 the Kunming Intermediate People’s Court sentenced him to death for the intentional homicide of 11 men between 2008 and 2012. It was his second death sentence. In 1979 a court had sentenced him to death with a two-year reprieve for an earlier homicide; People’s Daily Online, reporting the 2012 verdict, said that sentence was reduced several times and that he was released in 1997.
The case became known in China because the families of young people made it known. For years parents in Jincheng had reported sons who never returned, and the reports went nowhere. When a 19-year-old first-year university student, Han Yao, disappeared in April 2012, newspapers and the internet took up the story, the South China Morning Post reported, and in May Zhang was detained. The same newspaper reported on May 25 that two local officials, Da Qiming, described as chief of the county public security bureau, and Zhao Huiyun, had been suspended on May 24 for failing to act on the case.
In Yunnan a crowd forced an institution to look, and then ran far past the evidence. The Kunming paper Chuncheng Evening News had spoken of eight possible victims, all male, aged 12 to 19. Internet users guessed at 20 to 50. Microblog posts claimed that dozens of pairs of shoes had been located and that Zhang had confessed to more than 20 murders; the South China Morning Post said none of it was confirmed, and AsiaNews likewise noted that none of the competing figures had been confirmed. The court that sat on July 28, 2012, about two months after the case was solved, convicted him of 11 killings. Only those 11 were proven. AFP, citing Xinhua, reported his execution in January 2013.
Accounts of his first conviction differ, which says something about the quality of what circulated. The official version, given by People’s Daily Online, is the 1979 death sentence with a reprieve. Neighbors quoted by the South China Morning Post remembered a life term for murder in the late 1970s and a release after about 20 years. AFP wrote that he had served almost 20 years. The victim of that first killing has never been publicly named.
Genene Jones was a licensed vocational nurse in San Antonio whose career in pediatric care ran from 1978 to 1982. In the pediatric intensive care unit at Bexar County Hospital, children on her 3 to 11 p.m. shift suffered so many sudden seizures, bleeding episodes and cardiac arrests that nurses called it the death shift. The hospital held internal reviews, replaced all of the unit’s licensed vocational nurses with registered nurses and let her go with a good recommendation. It did not call the police.
Peter Elkind’s 1983 account in Texas Monthly described a nurse whom colleagues admired for her skill at starting intravenous lines and her technical knowledge, and whom many also judged loud, aggressive and quick to challenge doctors. She volunteered for the sickest patients and was often present when a child went into crisis. ProPublica, drawing on the later investigation, reported in 2017 that 42 children died in the unit between April 1981 and June 1982, that 34 of those deaths came on the 3 to 11 p.m. shift, and that Jones had cared for 20 of the children who died. A study by the federal Centers for Disease Control later reported that a child in the unit was 25.5 times as likely to suffer a medical emergency and 10.7 times as likely to die while she was on duty. Those are statistical associations. They do not show that any particular child was harmed by anyone.
The courts dealt with two cases first. A Kerr County jury convicted Jones in February 1984 of the murder of Chelsea McClellan, 15 months old, at a Kerrville clinic on September 17, 1982, and sentenced her to 99 years. In October 1984 a judge convicted her of injury to a child, a four-week-old boy who survived, and gave her 60 years, to run at the same time. The Court of Appeals in Austin rejected her appeal on August 13, 1986. A Texas law from 1977 set her mandatory release for March 1, 2018, and ProPublica reported in May 2017 that prosecutors were racing to keep her behind bars.
Families took a hand. In 2013 relatives of children who had died at the hospital formed a Facebook group, Victims of Genene Anne Jones, and pressed the Bexar County district attorney for a new murder charge. Andy Kahan, the Houston crime victims' advocate, coordinated a media campaign. "This is my mission now," one relative said that year.
By the late spring of 2017 the pressure had a result. Jones was served with a new Bexar County murder warrant in prison on May 25, 2017, and by October 31 she faced five murder counts: Joshua Sawyer, Rosemary Vega, Richard "Ricky" Nelson, Patrick Zavala and Paul Villarreal. Prosecutors had not forgotten the old release date. On January 16, 2020, she pleaded guilty to the murder of Joshua Sawyer, 11 months old, who died in San Antonio on December 12, 1981. Judge Frank J. Castro of the 399th District Court sentenced her to life. The other four counts were dismissed under the plea agreement. An appeal was dismissed on August 25, 2021.
The prosecutors, not the relatives, brought the charges. What the group did was keep a name in front of a district attorney who had a release date to meet.
The Redhead Murders is the name that has stuck to a group of unsolved killings of young women in the American South and Appalachia in the mid-1980s. Between February 1983 and April 1985 six women were located in West Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and Kentucky, and further cases in Mississippi and elsewhere have since been drawn into the count. Most of the women were far from where they lived. Several had red or auburn hair, which gave the cases their name. For decades most of them had no names at all.
The grouping itself came from outside law enforcement. In 2018 Alex Campbell, who teaches sociology and history at Elizabethton High School in East Tennessee, assigned his students the cases as a semester project. About 20 students took part; one report counted 23. Campbell said he wanted to keep them engaged and give them experience of the real world, and the students said they wanted to speak for victims who had no family speaking for them. They called the women their "six sisters." A podcaster from Indiana, Shane Waters, of the program "Out of the Shadows," had researched the same cases for years and worked with the students at times.
On May 15, 2018, the class presented an eight-page profile with 21 characteristics and a timeline, prepared with guidance from professional profilers and law enforcement. They believed the man responsible was a white commercial truck driver who often drove the interstate near Knoxville, who had lived in or around Knoxville or Nashville in the 1980s, and who might still be alive. Representatives of the Kentucky State Police and the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation attended and praised the work. "We know that catching the killer is a long shot," Campbell said, but he urged anyone with knowledge to come forward. A Kentucky trooper, Shane Jacobs, called it "very remarkable and exciting" that young people had taken it on.
How far the cases belong together is disputed, and the number of victims depends on who is counting. The students linked six women. The Greeneville Sun reported in 2023 that some believe the killings run from 1978 to possibly 1992 and reach into Pennsylvania and Mississippi as well. Law enforcement has never confirmed that the killings are related. In 2018 Todd Matthews, then case management director for the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, told WBIR he thought it "a very strong possibility that these cases are connected." Detective Aaron Frederick of the Kentucky State Police told UPI in October 2018 that they were "probably connected," while saying there was still too little evidence to link them officially. The Bureau’s spokeswoman, Leslie Earhart, declined to confirm any connection, and UPI reported that the agencies were not working a joint case, though they had agreed to share relevant new information.
The identification that tests what amateurs add is that of Tina Marie McKenney Farmer, the woman whose death in Campbell County, Tennessee, was long a Jane Doe file. Reporting by WTHR in Indianapolis placed her as married and living in Indianapolis in 1984. Her family looked for her for decades. In November 2017 a woman who said she was her sister posted on a Facebook page for unidentified and unclaimed people: "I Miss My Sister!"
The break came from a website. In August 2018 agents of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation learned of a blog about missing persons that listed Farmer as missing from Indiana, and her description matched the Campbell County woman. A Bureau intelligence analyst, Amy Emberton, located a card of Farmer’s fingerprints from the early 1980s. Compared with the prints taken from the Jane Doe after death, the two matched.
The students had already counted the Campbell County woman among their six when they presented in May 2018. The Bureau said the class had raised awareness but had not contributed to the identification. The podcaster had been in touch with Farmer’s sister for 12 weeks by then. So the ledger reads this way: the volunteers who built public attention did not make the identification, and a missing-persons blog and a relative’s post on a little-known Facebook page did.
In December 2019 a grand jury reviewing the Farmer case concluded that a man who had died in prison in December 2015 would have been indicted for her death. He was never charged, and no one else has been, in her case or in any other in the group.
Further identifications followed through professional work. In October 2018 the Kentucky State Police named a woman long carried as a Jane Doe in Knox County, Kentucky, as Espy Regina Black-Pilgrim, of Spindale, North Carolina. A relative in North Carolina had seen a social media post carrying a rendering of how she might have looked and thought she might be a mother who had gone missing. The detectives took DNA from her children and compared it through the national database, and the match was announced in a press release reported on October 2, 2018. Her daughter wrote her a letter that was read aloud at the students' 2018 news conference: "All my life I hoped to find you alive and well."
In March 2024 the DeSoto County Sheriff’s Office in Mississippi announced that a woman long carried as a Jane Doe was Lorie Ann Mealer Pennell, a native of Missouri. An evidence clerk, Amber Edlin, had taken up the file in 2023, followed tips until DNA ruled one out, and sent evidence to Othram, a Houston company that uses forensic genetic genealogy, with funding from Carla Davis, a Mississippi philanthropist working on the state’s cold case backlog. Othram returned a lead on March 1, 2024. The DeSoto County announcement made no link to the redhead series. In November 2018 a woman from Manchester, New Hampshire, was identified as Elizabeth Lamotte, a homicide victim in Greene County, Tennessee. In May 2025 Governor Bill Lee announced a $10,000 reward in the Campbell County case of Tracy Sue Walker. In July 2026 a documentary series built around the students' investigation, "Murder 101," was released, WVLT reported.
Kosminski is the name that will not go away in the Whitechapel case, and the reason is a shawl. In 2007 an amateur researcher, Russell Edwards, bought at auction a length of fabric said to have come from the 1888 murder of Catherine Eddowes. He commissioned DNA testing by Jari Louhelainen of Liverpool John Moores University, and in 2014 he announced that the man responsible was Aaron Kosminski. In March 2019 Louhelainen and David Miller of the University of Leeds published a paper in the Journal of Forensic Sciences reporting that mitochondrial DNA from stains on the shawl matched a descendant of Eddowes and a descendant of Kosminski’s family.
Nobody was ever charged with the Whitechapel murders. The paper was criticized at once. Mitochondrial DNA passes down the female line and is shared by large numbers of people, so a match cannot identify an individual. "Millions of people can have the same mtDNA profile," the forensic scientist Connie Bormans told Live Science; "it’s used as an exclusion." The authors did not publish the full sequences, citing privacy, and the geneticist Turi King said they had analyzed only a few segments at low resolution, types that many people could share. The Ripper author Paul Begg said there was "no evidence that a shawl was connected with Catherine Eddowes' murder anyway." The fabric had been handled by many people over a century, including descendants. "For all we know, Kosminski was Jack the Ripper," King said, "but this paper unfortunately does not tell us that."
A private purchase had entered the public record as a solution. Separately, in January 2025, a relative of Eddowes demanded a new inquest into her death, CBS News and AFP reported.
Anthony John Hardy pleaded guilty at the Central Criminal Court in London on November 25, 2003, to the murders of three women in Camden Town: Sally White, Elizabeth Valad and Bridgette MacLennan. Mr. Justice Keith sentenced him to life imprisonment on each count and concluded that no minimum term could properly be set. In May 2010, sitting in the High Court, the same judge made a whole life order, so that Hardy would never be released. He died in hospital on November 25, 2020, aged 69, while a prisoner of HMP Frankland in County Durham, of COVID-19 pneumonia with type 2 diabetes and heart failure contributing.
Two episodes from the file bear on the theme. Sally White’s death had first been recorded as natural causes before Hardy pleaded guilty to her murder; the pathologist, Dr. Freddy Patel, was held guilty of incompetence by his regulator in March 2011, suspended for four months and struck off in August 2012, Channel 4 News reported. The second episode came in April 2013, when a Channel 5 documentary had the criminologist David Wilson name Hardy as a prime suspect in two unsolved murder inquiries from 1991 and 1995, those of Sharon Hoare and Christine McGovern, the Camden New Journal reported. Police said in 2013 that the possibility of other killings had been fully investigated and no evidence had come to light. Hardy was never charged with either death.
The file also shows how loosely newspapers handled links between cases. The 2001 death of Paula Fields had been linked to him in some newspapers. In April 2011 an Old Bailey jury convicted another man, John Sweeney, of the murder of Fields and of another woman, the Islington Tribune reported. Richard Osley of the Camden New Journal wrote in January 2023, twenty years after the arrest, that nobody mentioned the failures that had freed Hardy to kill again, and that the case had become "pure clickbait."
Lee Ki-young lived in Paju, a city in Gyeonggi Province just northwest of Seoul. Prosecutors at the Goyang branch of the Uijeongbu District Prosecutors' Office indicted him on January 19, 2023, on nine charges that included robbery-murder, retaliatory murder, abandonment and concealment, computer-use fraud and forgery. The two people he was charged with killing were the woman he lived with, in August 2022, and a taxi driver, in December 2022. Prosecutors demanded death. On May 19, 2023, the Goyang branch of the Uijeongbu District Court sentenced him to life imprisonment and 30 years of electronic monitoring. The Seoul High Court rejected their appeal for death on October 19, 2023, and gave life again. Retrospectives by Money Today on December 29, 2025, and Edaily on January 1, 2026, say the sentence became final and that he is serving it.
Police had published his name and photograph, but he refused to be photographed, and a driver’s license photo was released instead, JoongAng Ilbo reported on January 1, 2023, and the public argued over how little the image resembled him. Dong-A Ilbo reported that of 44 suspects whose identities had been disclosed, only one photo was recent. In January 2024 the Segye Ilbo reported that serious offenders would be photographed within 30 days and could no longer refuse.
The campaign that followed the sentence came from a family member. On May 20, 2023, a woman who identified herself as the taxi driver’s daughter posted on an online community. "Our family is now in grief and in fury," she wrote. She described false messages and a visit to the police station that located no accident. A forced apology, she wrote, "is like another assault on the victim." She said she was gathering a national petition to revive and carry out the death penalty, or for an alternative law, "so that killers like Lee Ki-young can no longer come back into society." YTN and the Seoul Shinmun both reported the post and the petition on May 21.
No one claimed the post proved anything about the case. It showed what an online community does in the hours after a sentence: it turns a verdict into a cause, and it gives a bereaved family a platform that courts do not.
Randall Woodfield went to an Oregon prison in 1981 for one murder. A Marion County jury convicted him on June 26, 1981, of the murder of Shari Hull, 20, and the attempted murder of a second young woman, who survived, together with related counts, and he was sentenced to life plus 90 years, UPI reported in October 1981. A Benton County jury added 35 years that December. He was a former Portland State University receiver who had been a Green Bay Packers draft pick in 1974.
What happened to the number of deaths attributed to him is a lesson in how a count inflates. KATU reported in 2012 that police suspected him in 18 to 24 deaths. Sports Illustrated wrote in 2016 that cold case detectives conservatively counted about a dozen, while some journalists and amateur investigators put the number as high as 44. In May 2012 the Associated Press, in the Bend Bulletin, reported that DNA linked him to three more deaths, and UPI headlined that Oregon had closed the book on three cases. No charges followed. Woodfield was held at the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem as of January 2017, the Portland Tribune reported; he was reported still in prison in February 2018.
The most striking inflated count in American crime did not come from amateurs at all, but from police who wanted cases closed. Henry Lee Lucas was arrested on a weapons charge in Montague County, Texas, on June 11, 1983, and began confessing to murders. Within days the number was in the dozens, within a year in the hundreds, in more than two dozen states. A task force built around him, and police from across the country came to interview him. By 1985 they had closed more than 200 killings on his word. He eventually claimed about 600.
He was convicted of some. A Denton County jury gave him life in November 1983 for the murder of Frieda "Becky" Powell, 15, and he pleaded guilty on September 30, 1983, to the murder of Kate Rich, 80 or 82, receiving 75 years. A San Angelo jury sentenced him to death in 1984 for the murder of a woman who was then known only as "Orange Socks." The Texas Attorney General, Mattox, began an inquiry in April 1985 and said the mass confessions were doubtable. The Attorney General’s 1986 report judged them largely false. The death sentence was commuted to life in June 1998, the only one George W. Bush commuted as governor; Lucas died in custody in March 2001.
DNA has since cut both ways. Laura Marie Purchase, of Houston, was a case for which Lucas was convicted in 1986. In 2008 DNA testing excluded him. Genealogy testing in 2019 led investigators to Thomas Elvin Darnell, 75, of Kansas City, Kansas, whose sample matched in April 2021. He was arrested in May 2021 and charged with capital murder, and died in the Montgomery County jail that July, before any trial. He was never convicted. The woman called "Orange Socks" was named in 2019 as Debra Jackson, 23, of Abilene, after the Williamson County Sheriff’s Office cold case unit, a group made up mostly of retired officers, worked with the DNA Doe Project in California and uploaded profiles to GEDmatch. A forensic artist’s new sketch, released in June 2019, led a woman to contact the office, believing it was her sister. DNA from two relatives matched, and Sheriff Robert Chody announced the identification on August 7, 2019.
A smaller and better-organized kind of amateur work shows in the cases of Keith Hunter Jesperson, a long-haul trucker who wrote anonymous letters, signed with a drawn smiling face, to The Oregonian and to prosecutors in Portland. The newspaper’s coverage gave him the name Happy Face Killer. His first killing, of Taunja Bennett near Portland, sent two innocent people to prison, L.P. and J.S. in the National Registry of Exonerations summaries, until his own confession in 1995 freed them.
In 2006 Jesperson wrote to the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office and admitted killing a woman in California. In July 2007 he pleaded guilty to her murder, at a time when no one knew who she was. She was named only in April 2022, when the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office announced that she was Patricia Skiple. Detectives had worked with the DNA Doe Project, a volunteer group that uses genetic genealogy to identify unnamed people, and the forensic genealogist Cairenn Binder, one of the team leaders, sorted through dozens of DNA matches. The sheriff’s office credited people who had uploaded their DNA to GEDmatch. Binder said she hoped the identification would give Patricia "some of her dignity back."
In Florida the Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office worked with Othram from 2022, and in 2023 the District 1 Medical Examiner’s Office sent samples there, with funding from the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. Chief Medical Examiner Deanna Oleske said the identification took six weeks. On October 3, 2023, the sheriff’s office announced that the woman was Suzanne Kjellenberg, and Jesperson was formally charged with her murder the same day.
The last of the eight to be named was a woman Jesperson had called Claudia. In January 2024 the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office released renderings of her face and asked the public for help. "This woman is the last of all his victims to remain unidentified," District Attorney Mike Hestrin said. On August 27, 2026, the office announced that she was Lydia Jane Wade McWhorter, after a new lead to a relative on her mother’s side produced a DNA match, confirmed that week. Her family, including her sisters, had never known what became of her. The office said her identification closed the final case tied to Jesperson’s convictions.
The amateurs who changed outcomes did it with narrow tools: a blog entry that matched a description, a relative’s post on a Facebook page, DNA that volunteers sorted through for weeks, a group of relatives who kept pressing for a charge until a prosecutor acted. The amateurs who damaged the record did it with confident numbers and unsupported names: 20 to 50 victims in Yunnan against 11 proven, a shawl that could identify nobody, a count of 44 beside a detective’s dozen. The line between them was thin. The same Yunnan newspapers and microblogs that forced two officials out of their posts also carried the shoes and the 50 victims.
• 1888: The Whitechapel murders, in which Catherine Eddowes was killed. No one is ever charged.
• 1977: A Texas release law fixes Genene Jones’s mandatory release date, later set for March 1, 2018.
• 1979: Zhang Yongming sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve; released in 1997.
• June 26, 1981: Randall Woodfield convicted by a Marion County jury.
• February 1984: Genene Jones convicted of murder by a Kerr County jury; sentenced to 99 years.
• April 1985: The Texas Attorney General opens an inquiry into Henry Lee Lucas’s confessions.
• 1995: Keith Jesperson’s confession frees two people convicted of Taunja Bennett’s murder.
• 2007: Russell Edwards buys the shawl at auction; Jesperson pleads guilty to a California murder.
• 2008: DNA testing excludes Lucas in the Laura Marie Purchase case.
• April to May 2012: Zhang Yongming’s case draws national attention; two officials suspended May 24; detention announced in May.
• May 2012: DNA links Woodfield to more deaths, no charges.
• July 28, 2012: Zhang convicted of 11 killings and sentenced to death; executed January 2013.
• 2013: Relatives form the Facebook group Victims of Genene Anne Jones; Channel 5 documentary names Anthony Hardy as a suspect in two earlier deaths.
• 2014: Edwards announces Kosminski as the man behind the Whitechapel murders.
• May 25, 2017: Jones served with a new murder warrant; five murder counts by October 31.
• May 15, 2018: Elizabethton High School students present their profile.
• August 2018: A blog listing Tina Marie McKenney Farmer as missing from Indiana leads Tennessee agents to her identity.
• March 2019: Louhelainen and Miller publish the shawl paper.
• August 7, 2019: Debra Jackson ("Orange Socks") named.
• December 2019: A Tennessee grand jury issues its finding in the Farmer case.
• January 16, 2020: Jones pleads guilty to the murder of Joshua Sawyer; life sentence.
• November 25, 2020: Anthony Hardy dies in hospital.
• May 19 and 20, 2023: Lee Ki-young sentenced to life; the taxi driver’s daughter posts online.
• October 19, 2023: Seoul High Court upholds life.
• March 2024: Lorie Ann Mealer Pennell identified in DeSoto County, Mississippi.
• January 2025: A relative of Eddowes demands a new inquest.
• August 27, 2026: Lydia Jane Wade McWhorter, Jesperson’s last victim to be named, identified.