Texas counted Coral Eugene Watts’s days in thirds. For every day he served on a 60-year sentence he earned three days of credit, and when a journalist for 60 Minutes ran the arithmetic, it came to release after about 24 years. Reports on his Texas years describe a model prisoner who worked as a machinist in the wood shop at the Ellis Unit. The credit, the shop job and the clean conduct were all real. What they were worth depended on a calendar, and the calendar was about to deliver a man who had confessed to thirteen killings.
Prison programs sound like a simple bargain: a man sentenced for killing takes the classes, does the work, goes to chapel, and the system takes note. The cases below show how uneven that bargain was. In some jurisdictions the courts counted study and conduct in writing, as with a Finnish court that listed a life prisoner’s law degree and open-prison record among the reasons to let him out. In others the credit was arithmetic, a few years knocked off a sentence. In a few, years of sobriety, a doctorate and a ministry inside the walls produced parole panel after parole panel recommending release, and a governor each time saying no. And in some the programs were real, the person was sincere or seemed to be, and the sentence simply stayed where it was.
Ten cases follow, from Finland, the United States, Italy, Colombia, Greece, Japan and Germany.
Antti Olavi Taskinen was convicted in Finland of two killings eight years apart. In February 1997 a 30-year-old man, described as his friend, died in Tampere, and the courts convicted Taskinen of manslaughter. In November 2005 his registered partner, a 54-year-old former business executive, died in Heinola, and he was convicted of murder. The Kouvola Court of Appeal ruled in March 2007 that the motive in the Heinola case was money: Taskinen wanted to inherit from his partner. A third charge, aggravated negligent homicide over the death of a 20-year-old student in Tampere in 1996, failed on appeal; the court dismissed it in 2007. He received a life sentence.
In prison he changed his name to Anton von Schrowe. He studied law at the University of Turku and graduated as a Master of Laws in 2020, Yle reported. He studied and worked inside, and he spent a long stretch in an open institution. His disciplinary record held a single penalty, imposed in August 2020 for a narcotics use offense; Yle said he committed no other offenses in prison.
Under the rules the Finnish Prison and Probation Service describes, a life prisoner can seek conditional release after at least 12 years, or 10 if he was under 21 at the time of the offense, and the decision belongs to the Helsinki Court of Appeal. Von Schrowe applied in 2021. The court wrote that his crimes had called for a sentence clearly longer than the average. A violence risk assessment was prepared and kept confidential; the public part of the decision said that a forensic psychiatric evaluation had rated his risk of a new violent offense as moderate. The court nonetheless saw no evident danger that he would commit a violent offense after release.
Then it listed what counted in his favor: his work in prison, his determined study and work, a long and well-run period in an open prison, and authorized leaves that had mostly gone well. It set his release for after 17.5 years of the sentence, a period that included six months of supervised probationary freedom. He left prison on July 31, 2023. The probation period for a conditionally released life prisoner in Finland is always three years.
The degree did not make him a lawyer in the full sense. A Master of Laws in Finland can hold many posts and can act as counsel in the administrative courts, Yle reported, but he did not have permission to act as counsel in the general courts. In September 2025 he became the legal counsel of the rapper Milan Jaff, a convicted gang leader whom Finland had ordered deported to Iraq. Asked by Yle about his past, von Schrowe declined to comment on it. He wrote that many clients wanted him in particular because he knew what it meant to be the target of the authorities' power. Yle reported on December 13, 2025, citing Iltalehti and the Helsinki police, that Jaff had been flown back to Iraq on a joint Nordic return flight. As of September 2025, von Schrowe was serving the three-year probation with no new convictions.
Of all the cases here, Taskinen’s is the one where study turned into a court’s written reasons. The law degree sat on a list with the open-prison years and the leaves.
Anthony Kirkland’s prison education did not decide his release, and the reason why is one of the odder turns in the Ohio parole story.
He was charged with murder in the 1987 death of Leola Douglas, 27, in Cincinnati. Under a plea agreement he pleaded guilty to reduced charges, voluntary manslaughter and aggravated arson. In prison he earned a GED and an associate degree. His conduct record was poor. FOX19 reported in March 2009, from parole records, that he was placed in solitary confinement for "disciplinary control" 21 times between 1998 and 2003, four of them in the nine months before his release, for breaking rules or fighting. The Supreme Court of Ohio recorded in 2014 that he threatened prison officials and staff while he was held.
On February 4, 1999, the Ohio Parole Board turned him down, citing the violent crime he had pleaded guilty to and his poor adjustment in prison, and set his next review ten years out. That is not how it played out. Ohio prisoners had sued the Adult Parole Authority and won a ruling that guidelines must be applied according to the offense a prisoner was convicted of, not the crime he was believed to have committed. For Kirkland that meant the guidelines for voluntary manslaughter, which the board’s chair told FOX19 in 2009 called for "a lesser range" of time than those for murder. He got a new hearing in 2003 and was released that year, after 16 years. Of about 2,500 cases the board reheard after the ruling, FOX19 reported, about 1,400 prisoners went free.
So the associate degree and the GED sat in the file next to 21 stints in solitary. Neither was the lever. A lawsuit about guidelines was.
Between 2006 and 2009 four people died in Cincinnati for whom Kirkland was later convicted: two women, Mary Jo Newton and Kimya Rolison, and two girls, Casonya Crawford, 14, and Esme Kenney, 13. He was arrested in March 2009. A Hamilton County jury convicted him on March 12, 2010 of aggravated murder, with other charges, in the girls' deaths, and he had pleaded guilty to the two women’s murders. Judge Charles Kubicki sentenced him to death on March 31, 2010 for the girls' murders and to 70 years to life for the women’s. After the sentence was vacated in 2016, Judge Patrick Dinkelacker reimposed death on August 28, 2018, and the Supreme Court of Ohio affirmed on August 18, 2020.
His release became a public argument in Cincinnati. A former prosecutor told FOX19 that under the law in force when he committed the 1987 crime, he could have been held for the whole 25 years. Leola Douglas’s brother told WCPO that Kirkland "should never have gotten out of jail." What matters here is narrow: a degree earned behind the walls and a record of solitary confinement came out of the same years, and a court ruling about guidelines outweighed both.
Bruce Davis spent more than fifty years in California prisons for his part in the 1969 murders of Gary Hinman and Donald "Shorty" Shea, killings tied to Charles Manson’s group. Alta Journal reported that a jury convicted him of first-degree murder on March 14, 1972, after 12 days of deliberation. Sentencing accounts vary, from two life sentences (UPI) to seven years to life (Alta Journal). He was never charged in the Tate or LaBianca killings.
By his own account, the change came in 1974 at Folsom State Prison. He told Alta Journal that he became sober that year and converted to Christianity, describing a vision of the prison yard: "When that light came on, it showed all my dirt." He became eligible for parole in 1977 and was refused at his first hearing in 1978 and at the hearings that followed through 2008. He had no disciplinary write-ups after 1980, according to Alta Journal.
At the California Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo he became part of the prison’s Christian community and ministered to other prisoners. He earned a master’s degree and a doctorate in the philosophy of religion. Alta Journal said the doctorate came from Bethany Theological Seminary and that his dissertation was a ten-chapter course for Christians, which he went on teaching. He completed drafting and welding programs, took courses through several colleges, and worked as a printing plant operator, clerk, orderly, porter, teacher’s aide and instructor. He married a woman he met through the prison ministry, and the couple had a daughter; news reports in 2012 and 2013 said they had divorced.
This is the record that parole panels read. A panel ruled him suitable in January 2010. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger reversed the grant, in a decision signed June 22, 2010. He wrote that Davis had made "some credible gains" in prison but had repeatedly tried to minimize his part in the crimes, and he questioned whether Davis still followed others too readily: "I believe his release would pose an unreasonable risk of danger to society at this time." Davis’s lawyer, Michael Beckman, called the decision "a political calculation rather than an individual consideration." No ruling on a legal challenge has been reported.
The panels kept returning. On October 4, 2012, a panel recommended parole, citing good conduct, the absence of recent discipline and the education and self-help programs he had completed, UPI reported. If freed, he was to live in transitional housing run by religious groups in Los Angeles County. Governor Jerry Brown reversed that grant in March 2013. A panel recommended release again in March 2014, and a reversal followed in August 2014; a Superior Court judge upheld that reversal in April 2015. The August 2015 grant was the fourth. More grants and reversals followed: Brown blocked parole again in June 2017, and Governor Gavin Newsom did so in November 2019 and in June 2021. By published counts, panels ruled him suitable seven times between 2010 and 2021, and a governor reversed all seven.
In July 2022 a panel denied parole itself. The Associated Press quoted the panel as saying that he lacks empathy. He died on September 11, 2026, at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville, aged 83, still serving his sentence.
The Davis file is the clearest case of programs that counted on paper and did not count where it mattered. Every box that a parole file can hold was ticked: sobriety, a conversion, degrees, trades, decades without discipline. The board accepted it seven times. A governor did not.
Donato Bilancia, a thief and gambler from Genoa, was convicted of killing 17 people in Liguria and southern Piedmont between October 1997 and April 1998. He was arrested in Genoa on May 6, 1998, and confessed within days. Italian news reports in 2020 said he was serving 13 life sentences for 17 murders and 16 years for one attempted murder; AFP reported that a Genoa court convicted him on 13 counts of murder in April 2000. No appeal has been reported.
After his first years at Marassi prison in Genoa he was moved to the Due Palazzi prison in Padua, where he spent the rest of his life. By November 2017, il Settimanale of Novi Ligure reported, he was regarded as a model prisoner. He had earned an accounting diploma and was continuing university studies. At a prison Christmas party, Panorama wrote, he played "Imagine" and "La vie en rose" on the guitar. In one of his rare interviews he said his conscience was tormented by remorse.
In 2017, about twenty years after his arrest, he was granted a permit to leave prison for a few hours under escort to visit his parents' resting place in the cemetery at Nizza Monferrato, in the province of Asti, il Settimanale and Quotidiano Nazionale reported. That few-hour permit is the only concrete benefit on record from his years of good conduct and study. The sentence did not change. He died of Covid-19 in custody in Padua, and his death was reported on December 17, 2020. He was 69.
Watts’s prison years need their context. In 1982, aged 28, he was arrested in Houston, and prosecutors, who by their own account had no evidence tying him to any killing, gave him immunity from prosecution for the deaths he described. In return he pleaded guilty to burglary with intent to commit murder and received 60 years, imposed on September 3, 1982. By most counts he confessed to 13 killings, 12 in Texas and one in Michigan. He was never tried in Texas for any of them. The judge, Doug Shaver, entered a deadly weapon finding that sharply limited the good-time credit he could earn, and ordered the transcript sent to prison officials as a warning to anyone who might let Watts out before he had served all 60 years.
The finding did not last. In October 1987 the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals held in an unrelated case that defendants had a right to notice that a deadly weapon finding might be made, and in 1989 the court deleted Shaver’s finding in Watts’s case. Watts became, in law, a nonviolent offender, eligible for good time retroactively, under a mandatory supervision law that had been passed in 1977 and rescinded in 1987 but still applied to prisoners sentenced in that decade. As a first-time offender he earned three days of credit for every day served.
Little is on record about what Watts did with the time. He lost four years, nine months and 86 days of credit after an escape attempt from the Coffield Unit. Otherwise he was described as a model prisoner and worked as a machinist in the wood shop at the Ellis Unit. The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles considered him in February 1990, when the Ann Arbor News reported he could be released as early as March 1 of that year. Relatives of women he was suspected of killing petitioned the board, and Watts was not released.
By 2002 a date had come into view. Reports gave it as April or May 2006, and the Houston mayor’s crime victims office director, Andy Kahan, warned that Watts would become the first serial killer in the country ever to be legally released. Michigan, which had refused to grant him immunity, went back to its own cases. In 2004 an Oakland County jury convicted him of the 1979 murder of Helen Dutcher; he was sentenced on December 7, 2004 to life without parole. In 2007 he was convicted in Kalamazoo of the 1974 murder of Gloria Steele and received a second life sentence. He died in September 2007 at Foote Hospital in Jackson, Michigan, of prostate cancer, while held at the Ionia Maximum Correctional Facility, a little more than a week after the second sentence.
Watts’s work in the Ellis Unit wood shop was routine. It mattered only as part of the picture of good behavior that kept his credit accruing. The credit, not the work, is what nearly opened the gate.
Luis Alfredo Garavito was arrested in Villavicencio on April 22, 1999, and in October 1999 told prosecutors he had killed 140 children. Colombian courts convicted him of the homicide of children and adolescents, with other charges, in case after case. Reports and the Fiscalía put the number of convictions at 138, 139 or 143, and the sentences at a total of 1,853 years and nine days. Colombian law held the time he could serve to 40 years. He was held at La Tramacúa, the high-security prison in Valledupar.
The reductions were real, and they were documented. In May 2011 a Colombian senator, Gilma Jiménez, told Semana that his 40-year sentence had been cut to 24 for cooperating with investigators and that study could reduce it further. She cited conflicting figures from the courts and from INPEC, the national prison service, whose director, Gustavo Ricaurte, replied that the Fiscalía still had 25 cases pending against him and dismissed fears of an early release. Semana reported that each time talk of his release surfaced, the Fiscalía brought a new case and a new detention order.
In 2021 the arithmetic came due. On May 14 the management of La Tramacúa sent the documents on his time served and reductions to the sentence enforcement court of Valledupar, as procedure requires for every prisoner who reaches three-fifths of a sentence. In a ten-page decision on May 21, 2021, the court counted 328 months, 9 days and 15 hours served, including five years of reductions, and ruled that he had met the formal three-fifths requirement. But it noted that he had given no information about where he would live or his ties outside, and that he had not repaired the harm to the victims. He had to stay in prison. The decision became public on November 1, 2021, and INPEC issued a bulletin that day headed "Luis Alfredo Garavito NO saldrá en libertad": it had no power to grant penal benefits, and only the sentence enforcement judge could. President Iván Duque said he was deeply indignant. A former director of La Tramacúa told Blu Radio that Garavito did not want to leave prison and was waiting for more cases to be added to his sentence.
El Colombiano reported in 2023 that the release date under his sentence was 2039. He died in custody in Valledupar on October 12, 2023, aged 66, at a clinic in the city; Medicina Legal ruled the cause natural. The credit he accumulated cut his time on paper by years. It never took him out of the building.
For fifteen months, from September 1981 to December 1982, Greek women in Drama, Xanthi and Thessaloniki were targeted by a man the press called the Dragon of Drama. Two died. Kyriakos Papaxronis, born in Xanthi in 1960 and then a reserve officer in an army commando unit at Drama, was arrested on the evening of December 13, 1982. A military court in Thessaloniki tried him from June 14 to 18, 1983. He was convicted of two homicides, attempted homicides and attempted rapes of women who survived, five bombings, and arson at a military airfield, and sentenced twice to death. The sentences were upheld on appeal in July 1984. They were later commuted to life imprisonment; the date and the legal basis have not been made public.
The prison chapter of his life comes from Greek press retrospectives. From the 1990s, Kozani reports said, he became a model prisoner. At the prison of Larissa, Proto Thema wrote, he changed markedly: he read, chanted in the prison church and painted. On Time added that he read psychology and theology, stopped breaking prison rules, and helped set up a second-chance school, an adult education program, inside the prison. The prison chaplain, Father Konstantinos Gerostergios, told On Time that he had repented and never spoke about his past. The school’s director called him a good young man who had helped a great deal to set it up and who urged fellow prisoners to enroll.
What, if anything, these activities did for his sentence has never been made public. He was released under restrictive conditions on December 8, 2004, at 44, after 21 years and six months in custody (On Time says 22 years and six months). The programs are on record, and so is the release; nothing on record connects them.
After release he lived in Larissa and later the Kozani area. In 2011 he became engaged, and he later married. In a 2012 television interview on the channel Star he said, as On Time quoted him, "I made a mistake. I am ashamed to live among you." He asked to be left in peace. A stroke in January 2020 left him disabled, and Proto Thema reported in March 2024 that he was living quietly with his wife.
Kiyoshi Okubo, 36 and newly paroled from a sentence for earlier offenses, killed eight girls and young women in Gunma Prefecture, Japan, between March 31 and May 10, 1971. He admitted all the charges at the Maebashi District Court and was sentenced to death on February 22, 1973. He did not appeal. A prison memoir was published under his name in October 1973.
The religious chapter in Okubo’s case is a story of refusal. The journalist Keiko Horikawa, in a book about the Buddhist priest Fuso Watanabe, a volunteer prison chaplain for more than fifty years, describes Okubo’s time in the Tokyo Detention House. An excerpt of the Chinese edition was published by The News Lens in 2016. Okubo spent about three years in a single cell, exercising, reading and writing notes. Guards repeatedly urged him to accept religious counseling, and he refused, saying he did not believe in religion.
Okubo was executed on the morning of January 22, 1976, at the age of 41. The accounts of that morning differ. Bunshun Online says that he collapsed and had to be taken to the execution room by force. Horikawa’s account, from Watanabe’s recollection, gives another picture. Watanabe heard shortly before the execution that it would go ahead without a chaplain. He believed no execution should take place without a religious figure present, for the sake of the prison staff as well as the condemned, and he drove to the detention house in his robes. An officer asked Okubo whether a priest could be present at the end. After hesitating, Okubo agreed that Watanabe could chant sutras nearby. Watanabe said that magazine reports of Okubo collapsing and being dragged were untrue: he was calm and his hands were steady as he smoked a last cigarette.
The chaplain’s role did not end there. Okubo’s family could find no cemetery that would take them, Horikawa writes, and Watanabe kept the ashes in the main hall of his temple in Mita, Tokyo. In the spring of 1986 he arranged for them to be placed in a shared memorial for Tokyo Detention House prisoners at Zoshigaya Cemetery.
In this case a religious program changed nothing about the sentence, and Okubo accepted it only at the very last. Its effect was on the last hour, on the prison staff Watanabe was thinking about, and, in the end, on a family with nowhere to take their dead.
Heinrich Pommerenke was convicted in October 1960 of four murders and twelve attempted murders, with other charges, and the regional court in Freiburg sentenced him, then 23, to six terms of life imprisonment plus 15 years. German newspapers had called him "das Ungeheuer vom Schwarzwald," roughly "the beast of the Black Forest." When he died in a prison hospital in December 2008, aged 71, he had spent 49 years in custody, longer than any other prisoner in Germany, the news agency dpa reported.
His decades inside were broken only by a few supervised outings. The first came in 1994, after 34 years, according to the taz. A prison chaplain became his friend and advocate, der Freitag reported. The friendship did not move the courts. By 2001 his sentence was considered served, but he stayed in prison. In 2004 experts judged his release inappropriate; dpa reported that he was classed as "not qualified for release" and that the experts could not rule out that he remained a danger to the public. One reason, the taz wrote, was that he had received too few hours of therapy. The Baden-Wurttemberg justice ministry said therapy could not begin without a positive social prognosis, while a report by the psychiatrist Werner Berner put it the other way round: a positive prognosis could only be given once therapy had begun. The taz called it a vicious circle.
In February 2007 he was moved to the prison in the Hohenasperg fortress near Stuttgart, where he began social therapy. It was broken off soon afterward. He died there about twenty months later.
Here the program that counted, therapy, was the one he could not get started or keep going. The chaplain was a friend; the justice system was a gate.
Jeffrey Joseph Daugherty was 20 in the winter of 1976, when he left Michigan for Florida with his girlfriend and his uncle. Over the next several weeks, according to the courts that later reviewed his case, he and his girlfriend carried out a run of robberies and killings that moved from Florida to Pennsylvania and ended with their arrest in Dillwyn, Virginia, on March 12, 1976. He was convicted of four murders: Elizabeth Shank in Blair County, Pennsylvania (jury verdict, December 8, 1976), and, on guilty pleas in 1980, Betty Campbell, Carmen Abrams and Lavonne Patricia Sailer in Florida. A fifth conviction, for the death of George Karnes, 18, was reversed by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in 1981 and no retrial was reported.
His conversion appears in the court record at the sentencing for the Sailer case, in Brevard County. On November 18, 1980 he pleaded guilty to first-degree murder, robbery and kidnapping, and a jury heard the case only on punishment. Daugherty testified about the crimes, his remorse, his childhood and his religious conversion. A prison chaplain, Father Albert J. Anselmi, told the jury he believed the conversion was sincere. Family members also testified. On November 20, 1980, the advisory jury unanimously recommended death.
On April 27, 1981, the judge imposed the death sentence, with consecutive life terms for the robbery and the kidnapping. He listed two aggravating circumstances, a prior record of violent felonies and a killing for pecuniary gain, and concluded there were no mitigating circumstances. The conversion, the chaplain and the remorse were before the sentencer, and they did not change the outcome.
They came up again in post-conviction proceedings. In 1985 his lawyers argued that his trial counsel should have presented psychiatric or psychological evidence. The trial lawyer explained his choice: he had consulted two psychologists, concluded that psychiatric testimony would not help, and relied on lay witnesses, Daugherty himself and Father Anselmi, to show that he had changed. The Florida Supreme Court affirmed the denial on April 9, 1987, agreeing that Daugherty had not shown the lawyer’s performance was deficient. Its 1988 ruling on a first death warrant held that the decision not to call an expert was a reasonable strategic choice.
In October 1988 his lawyers filed a second motion and an emergency application for a stay. The emergency motion described the evidence of his remorse, his religious conversion and the relationship he had kept with his children, and called the chaplain a most unlikely source of false testimony. Judge J. William Woodson of the Brevard County circuit court denied the motion on October 27, 1988. The United States Supreme Court denied the last applications for a stay on November 7, 1988.
Set side by side, the ten cases show the programs at work in at least five different ways.
Finland wrote them into a decision. The Helsinki Court of Appeal named Taskinen’s work, study and open-prison record as reasons to release him, while still rating his risk of violence as moderate. Colombia and Texas turned them into arithmetic: Garavito’s study and cooperation cut years from a 40-year maximum that was already a fraction of 1,853, and Watts’s conduct kept a three-for-one credit running toward a release that Michigan’s prosecutors then had to head off with their own trials. Ohio’s parole board never needed Kirkland’s degrees; a court ruling about guidelines released him. In California, Davis’s sobriety, doctorate and ministry were accepted by seven panels and overruled by governors. In Italy, Bilancia’s diploma and guitar bought a few escorted hours at a cemetery. In Greece, Papaxronis’s prison church and school were described warmly by a chaplain and a school director, and a release came that no report links to them. In Germany a chaplain’s friendship coexisted with a therapy program that never took hold. In Japan the chaplain’s work came down to one morning. In Florida a conversion was sworn to before a jury that recommended death.
None of the sentences turned on sincerity. What the records show is what the programs produced on paper, and what each system did with the paper.
• 1951: Donato Bilancia born in Potenza; raised in Genoa from 1956.
• October 1960: Heinrich Pommerenke sentenced to six life terms plus 15 years at Freiburg.
• 1969: Gary Hinman and Donald Shea killed; Bruce Davis later convicted of both murders.
• March 14, 1972: A jury convicts Davis of first-degree murder.
• February 22, 1973: Kiyoshi Okubo sentenced to death at Maebashi; no appeal.
• 1974: Davis becomes sober and converts at Folsom State Prison, by his own account.
• January 22, 1976: Okubo executed; the chaplain Fuso Watanabe chants sutras nearby.
• March 12, 1976: Jeffrey Daugherty arrested in Dillwyn, Virginia.
• 1977: Davis becomes eligible for parole; first hearing 1978.
• April 27, 1981: Daugherty sentenced to death in Brevard County, Florida.
• 1982: Coral Eugene Watts pleads guilty in Houston under an immunity agreement; sentenced to 60 years (September 3).
• December 1982: Kyriakos Papaxronis arrested in Drama (December 13).
• June 1983: Papaxronis sentenced twice to death in Thessaloniki; upheld July 1984.
• April 9, 1987: Florida Supreme Court affirms the denial of Daugherty’s first post-conviction motion.
• November 7, 1988: US Supreme Court denies Daugherty’s last applications for a stay.
• 1989: Texas Court of Criminal Appeals deletes the deadly weapon finding in Watts’s case.
• 1994: Pommerenke’s first supervised outing, after 34 years.
• 1999: Luis Alfredo Garavito arrested in Villavicencio (April 22); tells prosecutors in October that he killed 140 children.
• 2003: Anthony Kirkland released from prison on parole after a new hearing.
• December 7, 2004: Watts sentenced to life without parole for the Dutcher murder.
• December 8, 2004: Papaxronis released under conditions.
• 2007: Watts convicted of the Steele murder; dies in September. Pommerenke moves to Hohenasperg in February.
• 2008: Pommerenke dies in December.
• January 2010 to January 2021: Davis ruled suitable for parole seven times; each grant reversed by a governor.
• March 31, 2010: Kirkland sentenced to death; reimposed August 28, 2018; affirmed August 18, 2020.
• 2017: Bilancia granted a permit to visit his parents' resting place under escort.
• 2020: Taskinen graduates as Master of Laws; Bilancia dies of Covid-19 (reported December 17).
• May 21, 2021: Colombian court refuses Garavito conditional release.
• July 31, 2023: Taskinen (von Schrowe) released after 17.5 years.
• October 12, 2023: Garavito dies in custody.
• September 11, 2026: Davis dies at the California Medical Facility, Vacaville.