Very few killers have ever committed their crimes because of an epidemic. The cases that follow show something narrower and, for investigators, more troubling: what a mass outbreak of illness does to the way a death is read. In nineteenth-century France, England and America, cholera, typhoid and gastric fever were everywhere, and a poisoned household looked like an unlucky one. In 2020 the machinery of justice itself was disrupted. Trials were postponed or moved into ballrooms, families were shut out of courtrooms, executions were put on hold by agreement, parole routines stopped, and in at least two cases a convicted killer died of the virus in custody. In each of those instances the disease was context, never motive. Nothing in these cases suggests that any of these people killed because an epidemic was under way. What the epidemic changed was who noticed, how long it took, and how the law proceeded afterward.
Hélène Jégado was a cook and domestic servant from the Breton countryside who was executed at Rennes on February 26, 1852. The assize court of Ille-et-Vilaine had convicted her on December 14, 1851, on all 18 counts before it: the murders of three women by poison, four attempted murders and 11 thefts. The Archives départementales d’Ille-et-Vilaine give the court’s own estimate as 37 people poisoned, 23 of them fatally. Most of those deaths were never tried. They dated from 1833 to 1841 in presbyteries and households across Morbihan, and by 1851 they lay beyond the ten-year limit French law set for prosecution.
The archives describe how one such household unraveled without anyone saying a word. Within about four months seven people died after the same illness: the priest’s father, his mother and his niece; a day laborer; the priest himself; a second day laborer; and Jégado’s own sister, Anna, who had come to the priest’s funeral. Nobody suspected the cook. Cholera had struck shortly before, and its signs could resemble poisoning, so the deaths were put down to disease. After the fifth death the doctor examined the body and recorded inflammation severe enough to explain it, with nothing at the time that pointed to a poison. Many doctors, the curators note, harbored private doubts about such deaths and kept them to themselves. Jégado was known as pious and devoted to the sick, and she nursed every one of the dying. The archives say she repeated that pattern in each house that followed. Between 1833 and 1841, none of the deaths in the houses where she worked was suspected to be poisoning.
It took a different kind of household to break the pattern. In the autumn of 1850 she was hired as cook by Théophile Bidard, a lawyer and professor of law at the University of Rennes. Rose Tessier, the chambermaid whose orders she resented, fell ill and died. A shopkeeper heard Jégado say during the illness that the doctor did not understand the case and that Tessier would never recover. Another maid who ate soup served to her in a separate bowl fell ill each time and recovered only after leaving. Rosalie Sarrazin, hired next and put in charge of the household accounts, fell ill within three weeks and died on July 1, 1851.
By then two doctors who had attended the household, Dr. Beaudouin and Dr. Pinault, had grown suspicious, and so had Bidard. They had asked Jégado to keep samples from the sickroom and she had not. They then asked Bidard to lock samples away without her knowledge. The investigating judge, Hippolyte Vannier, had her arrested in Rennes the same day, and chemical analysis supplied what the symptoms had not.
The trial began on December 6, 1851, four days after Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte seized power in Paris. Her court-appointed lawyer, Magloire Dorange, asked for a postponement because witnesses were missing, among them the deputy Baudin, who had been killed in Paris defending the constitution against the coup. The court refused. Local newspapers raised their prices while the case ran, the archives note, though national coverage was overshadowed by events in the capital. The Cour de cassation rejected her appeal on January 16, 1852, and Louis-Napoléon refused a pardon on February 22. Philippe Bohuon of the archives' heritage staff told Unidivers in 2019 that hard living, high mortality and cholera had allowed her crimes to pass unnoticed for years.
Lydia Sherman was convicted at New Haven, Connecticut, in 1872 of the second-degree murder of her third husband, Horatio N. Sherman, a widower from Derby who had died in 1871. A local doctor, uneasy about the way Sherman died, ordered an examination, and George Frederick Barker, professor of toxicology at the Yale Medical School, detected poison. He then detected it in the cases of Sherman’s two children, who had died in the months before their father, and of her second husband, Dennis Hurlburt. On January 11, 1873, Judge Sanford sentenced her to life imprisonment at Wethersfield State Prison.
The earlier deaths came to light only through her own words. In a confession of January 1873 she admitted poisoning her first husband, Edward Struck, in New York in 1864, and several of the Struck children, along with the two Sherman children. She denied causing Hurlburt’s death. Howard Fischer, writing in Hektoen International, reports that death certificates for the Struck children gave typhoid fever as the cause. A newspaper summary of her confession, printed when she died, says the doctors who attended the children put their deaths down to ordinary illnesses, and that afterward she supported herself by nursing. Connecticut History puts the total of those linked to her at as high as ten, and the 1873 book on her case counted three husbands and eight children. None of the New York deaths was ever tried, and neither Hurlburt’s death nor those of the Sherman children was separately prosecuted. Her conviction is for one death.
She escaped from Wethersfield in 1877, reached Providence, Rhode Island, and was returned to prison after about a week. She died there on May 16, 1878, after several weeks of illness. The report of her death gave her age as fifty-four and no cause.
Mary Ann Cotton was executed at Durham County Gaol on March 24, 1873, for the murder of her seven-year-old stepson, Charles Edward Cotton, who died at West Auckland, County Durham, in the summer of 1872. A doctor who had examined the boy reported poison, and a jury at the Durham Assizes convicted her after 50 minutes. It was the only death for which she was tried.
Thomas Riley, the assistant overseer at West Auckland, set the case in motion. In that summer he asked her to nurse a patient with smallpox. She said she could not, because she had her stepson to look after, asked whether the boy could be taken into the workhouse without her, and, according to Durham University Library, made a remark suggesting she would not be troubled with Charles for long. The boy died about a week later, and Riley went to the police. Smallpox had also supplied her with work. Earlier she had nursed an excise officer who had the disease, and Durham University Library records that within weeks of that arrangement her stepson Frederick Cotton junior, her son Robert Robson Cotton and her lodger Joseph Nattrass were all dead. She was charged with those three deaths too but never tried for them, and the library’s summary records poison in each.
The mislabeling began years before. Joanne Pearman, reviewing the criminologist David Wilson’s book on the case in the University of Kent journal feminists@law, observes that Wilson calls the poison used the poison of choice of the period and that its symptoms could be mistaken for gastric fever, cholera or typhoid. That matters because the earlier deaths linked to Cotton, those of husbands, children and stepchildren, her mother and her sister-in-law, were certified at the time as natural, several as gastric fever. A week after she took a post as housekeeper to a widowed shipyard foreman in Sunderland, his ten-month-old son died; the cause was recorded as gastric fever, though the child had suffered convulsions. Two more of his children died within a couple of years, and so did her own mother. These deaths were never charged and no finding of poisoning has been reported in any of them. Beamish, the museum, says as many as 21 people close to her died, Durham University Library gives the same figure, and Pearman writes that the true number is unknown. She married her third husband bigamously in September 1870 and insured him and his two surviving sons a week later, according to the library. Wilson, as summarized by Pearman, sees her motives as a blend of insurance money and the removal of anyone in her way.
Nineteenth-century cholera gave poisoners camouflage. The COVID-19 pandemic arrived in the care facilities of western Pennsylvania and north Texas with a different set of questions.
Heather Pressdee was a registered nurse in western Pennsylvania. On May 2, 2024, she pleaded guilty before Judge Joseph Kubit in the Butler County Court of Common Pleas to three counts of first-degree murder and 19 of attempted murder, covering 22 patients in all. Prosecutors said 17 of the patients who had been in her care died; murder counts were filed only where physical evidence supported the cause of death, and attempted murder counts where a patient survived or the cause of death was undetermined. The Pennsylvania Attorney General’s office said she gave patients doses of medication they did not need, usually on overnight shifts, at five nursing and rehabilitation facilities in four counties around Pittsburgh. Some of her patients were diabetic and some were not. They ranged in age from 43 to 104. She received three consecutive life sentences without parole plus a consecutive 380 to 760 years, and was serving them as of June 6, 2024. Which three deaths the murder pleas cover has not been made public.
The earliest patient named in the coverage of the plea hearing is Ruth Erikson, 89, who died on December 17, 2020, at the Concordia at Rebecca Residence, after having COVID-19, TribLive reported. Her son spoke at the sentencing and said he could not forgive Pressdee. Norman Paul Hendrickson, 88, a former steelworker, came to a facility in Lower Burrell after a short hospital stay with COVID-19. According to his family’s lawsuit he was not diabetic and had no prescription for the medication, but Pressdee gave him a dose during an overnight shift in February 2022; he went into acute respiratory failure, never recovered and died in December 2022. Lawyers for the families said she confessed to giving excessive doses to him and to a second patient, Jack Allen Rogers.
The cases hit a system that had wide-open gaps, and the lawsuits say so. They accuse Guardian Healthcare and the Lower Burrell facility of failing to vet Pressdee properly and, when other nurses raised concerns, of disciplining those nurses while keeping her on as assistant director of nursing. The families' attorney, Peirce, told KDKA-TV in November 2023 that staff had complained patients were dying at an alarming rate, that five patients died at that facility, and that the company let her keep working after a brief suspension. Guardian Healthcare said it was devastated and disheartened and that privacy law and the pending litigation limited what it could say. In June 2024 state lawmakers began looking at a registry of people with abuse findings against older adults. WPXI noted that the bill would probably not have stopped Pressdee, because the allegations against her were not fully investigated for years, and a state representative said he was very concerned about the delay between a hospital doctor’s warning and the state’s referral.
Pressdee’s case sits in a pandemic only by timing: the charges cover December 2020 to May 2023, and the first patient named had been ill with the virus. Nothing in the public record says the pandemic caused her to act. What the record does show, through the lawsuits, is that staff concerns went unheeded for a long time, and that state officials were slow to act on a hospital doctor’s warning.
Billy Chemirmir’s case runs on the same logic, and it ended in a courtroom shaped by the virus. Chemirmir, a Kenyan-born former caregiver, was indicted on 22 counts of capital murder, 13 in Dallas County and nine in Collin County, along with two counts of attempted murder, over the deaths of older women in the Dallas area between 2016 and 2018. Several of those deaths were first recorded as natural. Mary Brooks, 87, died in January 2018 in Richardson, Texas; her death was recorded as natural, and her daughter later discovered that a safe and most of her jewelry were missing. Families of the women went to the Texas Legislature after the arrests. A bill known as Marilyn’s Law, filed by State Representative Jared Patterson, requires officials to notify next of kin when a cause of death on a death certificate is amended. Governor Greg Abbott signed it on May 15, 2021, and it took effect that September.
His first trial, for the death of Lu Thi Harris, began on November 15, 2021, at the Frank Crowley Courts Building in Dallas. Because of COVID-19 precautions, the victims' families were kept out of the courtroom. The jurors deadlocked 11 to one, and Judge Raquel Jones declared a mistrial on November 19. District Attorney John Creuzot said his office would try the case again: "Our commitment was to get two convictions and that does not change." At the retrial, which began on April 25, 2022, a jury convicted Chemirmir of capital murder on April 28 after about 45 minutes, and Judge Jones imposed life without parole. A second jury convicted him of the murder of Mary Brooks on October 7, 2022. He maintained his innocence.
On September 19, 2023, Chemirmir was killed in his cell at the Coffield Unit in Tennessee Colony, Texas. He was 50. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice said his cellmate, who was serving a murder sentence from Dallas County, was the assailant. About two weeks earlier the department had placed all of its prisons on a statewide lockdown because of a rise in killings inside them. The 20 remaining counts were never tried.
Joseph James DeAngelo, a former police officer in Exeter and Auburn, California, was arrested in Citrus Heights on April 24, 2018, at 72, after investigators built family trees from the DNA of distant relatives and matched him to evidence from crimes that ran from 1975 to 1986 and had been known under several names, including the Golden State Killer. Prosecutors counted 87 victims in 11 counties, charged and uncharged together. The case was enormous. The prosecution said the discovery ran to more than 1.3 million pages and that a trial could take up to 10 years. California had a moratorium on executions, the coronavirus pandemic had disrupted the courts, and the defendant, the survivors and many witnesses were old. After consulting victims and families, six district attorneys accepted a plea: life in prison without parole in return for guilty pleas to every count and admissions of uncharged crimes.
The hearing took place on June 29, 2020, before Sacramento Superior Court Judge Michael Bowman, in a ballroom at California State University, Sacramento, chosen so that victims, families and reporters could sit far enough apart. DeAngelo, 74, wore an orange jumpsuit and a plastic face shield. He pleaded guilty to 13 counts of first-degree murder and 13 counts of kidnapping to commit robbery, and admitted 161 further crimes against 61 other victims in seven counties, many of them beyond the statute of limitations. Prosecutors from several counties described each case in turn. At sentencing on August 21, 2020, Judge Bowman imposed 11 consecutive terms of life without parole for the murders, a further consecutive life term for the kidnappings and eight years for weapon enhancements, after days of statements from survivors and relatives.
In court he looked weak. He used a wheelchair, moved slowly and spoke in a faint voice. Prosecutors argued that this was an act, and in their sentencing memorandum they wrote that jail video showed "an individual who is healthy and physically active." The argument was the prosecution’s, and the pandemic format, with its face shields and distancing, gave it an unusual stage. He was moved to the protective housing unit at California State Prison, Corcoran, on January 26, 2021, according to a report of February 2021. As of February 2021 he was held there.
Lao Rongzhi was detained in Xiamen, in Fujian province, on November 28, 2019. She told police she was Hong Yejiao, an orphan who knew neither parents nor birthplace. A DNA test said otherwise, and the next evening she gave her real name. She was 44, and for 20 years she had been wanted for her part in robberies, kidnappings and killings that left seven people dead in the late 1990s: in Nanchang in July 1996, Wenzhou in October 1997, Changzhou in the summer of 1998 and Hefei in July 1999. One kidnapping victim survived. Her partner, Fa Ziying, had been executed in 1999. When police caught him, according to his lawyer, he refused to tell them anything about her, and that silence gave her time to start a new life under another name.
The pandemic delayed her trial. It took place at the Nanchang Intermediate People’s Court on December 21 and 22, 2020, over more than 15 hours. Prosecutors said she and Fa had planned every crime together with a clear division of labor and that she was a principal offender who should answer for all the deaths. Her two defense lawyers, assigned by legal aid, did not contest the robbery and kidnapping facts but argued that the evidence did not prove she had killed anyone. No biological evidence pointed directly to her, and some original exhibits had been lost over the years; the court explained that the original files had been kept at the Hefei court and copied.
Lao told the court she did not accept the charges. "I was coerced by Fa and couldn’t break up for fear that he would retaliate against my family," she said, according to the South China Morning Post, citing the Procuratorial Daily. She admitted the robbery and kidnapping in Changzhou and Hefei but said she had gone along because she could not escape him, and that she had never in her life killed so much as a chicken or a duck. According to Beijing Youth Daily as reported by CNN, she said Fa had abused her and that she had suffered two miscarriages. She wept and apologized to the victims' families. "You can say I am not outstanding, but you cannot say I am not kind," she said.
On September 9, 2021, she was sentenced to death. The Jiangxi High Court heard her appeal from August 18 to 20, 2022. In court she challenged the court’s jurisdiction, which was rejected, and withdrew most of her earlier statements. The court rejected the appeal on November 30, 2022. The Supreme People’s Court approved the death sentence, and she was executed in Nanchang on December 18, 2023. She had been convicted of intentional homicide in five deaths, robbery in one and kidnapping in one.
For the families the wait was long. The widow of Lu Zhongming, one of the victims in Hefei, did not learn her husband was dead until about a month after he left for what he had told the family would be half a month of work, and she raised their three children alone. After the execution she told Chinese media the news brought great relief.
Lyndon Fitzgerald Pace was convicted on March 5, 1996, of the murders of four women in Atlanta, killed between August 1988 and March 1989. Three were 78, 79 and 86; the fourth was 42. A Fulton County jury convicted him of four counts of malice murder, four of felony murder, four of rape and two of aggravated sodomy, and recommended a death sentence for each murder. The Supreme Court of Georgia affirmed in December 1999, and the Georgia Department of Corrections still listed him under sentence of death as of June 30, 2026.
His appeals ended in changed circumstances. In April 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Georgia agreed with lawyers for death row prisoners not to seek execution warrants until three conditions were met: the Supreme Court of Georgia’s judicial emergency order had expired, the Department of Corrections had restored normal visitation, and a vaccine was readily available to the public. Six months after that, the state would ask for the longest warrant period allowed and space executions at least 30 days apart. The agreement covered only prisoners whose federal rehearing petitions had been denied while the emergency order was in force. That order expired on June 30, 2021. Pace’s petition was denied in 2023, so the agreement did not reach him, nor two other men, Jerry Heidler and Warren King, nor Willie James Pye, who was executed in March 2024.
A month after Pye’s execution, Pace, Heidler and King sued state officials in federal court in Atlanta, arguing that leaving them out violated their rights to equal protection and due process, because the prisoners it covered had a predictable schedule while they faced pandemic-era visiting limits and a backlog in preparing for clemency. The district court dismissed the suit in 2024 for lack of standing. On June 26, 2026, a panel of the Eleventh Circuit reversed, holding that the three men faced a substantial risk that the state would seek their executions soon, and sent the case back. The panel stressed that it was not deciding whether they would win. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported the ruling on June 30, 2026. A virus changed the schedule on which a sentence from 1996 would be carried out; it did nothing to the sentence.
Patrick Mackay was jailed for life in November 1975 after pleading guilty at the Old Bailey to three counts of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility, in the deaths of two elderly women in London and a Roman Catholic priest, Father Anthony Joseph Crean of Shorne, in Kent. Two further counts of murder were ordered to lie on file for lack of evidence, the Press Association reported in 2021, and were never tried. A 1977 review by the psychiatrist David J. Barry of a book on the case says Mackay admitted five homicides in custody and that the book’s authors and the police suspected him of six more; no court has made a finding on any of them.
He spent his first 27 years in Category A conditions. In November 2017 he was moved to an open prison, where he began working with professionals and was gradually allowed out on temporary release. Those releases were limited, and the Parole Board noted that they were suspended when the coronavirus pandemic began. In May 2021 the Board, at his second review, declined to direct his release. The panel considered a dossier of more than 1,700 pages and heard from a probation officer, a prison psychologist, a medical professional and an independent psychologist commissioned by his lawyers, who supported release. The other witnesses said he needed more testing in open conditions first. "The panel was not satisfied that Mr Mackay was suitable for release," the Board said, and it recommended that he stay in open conditions and urged "a very cautious approach."
Donato Bilancia was convicted of killing 17 people in Liguria and southern Piedmont in a little over six months, from October 1997 to April 1998. He was a thief and gambler from Genoa, and his victims had almost nothing in common. For months, prosecutors in different cities treated the killings as separate crimes. He was arrested in Genoa on May 6, 1998, and within days he confessed to all of them, including a death that had been filed as natural. Italian news reports in 2020 said he was serving 13 life sentences for 17 murders and 16 years for an attempted murder; AFP wrote that a Genoa court had convicted him on 13 counts of murder in April 2000. The counts differ between reports, and the figure of 17 victims is the one in the Italian coverage.
He died of Covid-19 at the Due Palazzi prison in Padua, reported on December 17, 2020, at 69. Carlo Piano, who wrote a book about him, told AGI that Bilancia had refused treatment. Panorama, drawing on Piano, wrote that he refused a ventilator and a mask and quoted him as saying, "Someone like me has to die." Piano said Bilancia had known from the start that the affair would end in something like suicide, a view held by Piano and not established by any record. The prosecutor who had taken Bilancia’s confession, Zucca, told the Swiss agency ATS that news of the death in prison unsettled him.
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, in the High Court in May 2010, made a whole life order. White’s death had first been recorded as natural causes after a pathologist’s examination. He died on November 25, 2020, seventeen years to the day after his plea, aged 69.
The Prisons and Probation Ombudsman’s investigation, published in September 2022 by the Acting Ombudsman, Kimberley Bingham, traced the final weeks. During the first wave of the pandemic Hardy was identified as high risk and shielded from April 17, 2020. He stopped shielding in July and began again in late August. On November 17 he collapsed on the way back from collecting his medication at HMP Frankland in County Durham. A test the next day was positive. The Ombudsman concluded he caught the virus inside the prison, since he had not left it during the incubation period. On November 23 he was taken to hospital as an emergency, escorted by a custodial manager and two prison officers, and restrained with a single handcuff and an escort chain, reduced to the chain alone the next day. He died in the early hours of November 25. The hospital certified COVID-19 pneumonia as the cause, with type 2 diabetes and heart failure contributing; the coroner accepted the certificate and no post-mortem examination was held.
The report criticized delayed health assessments, gaps in his clinical observations and the failure to pass details of his medication to the ambulance service. The Ombudsman said she was concerned that he had stayed restrained while gravely ill and that the restraints were removed only after he died. The report also recorded an error over his next of kin: the family liaison officer could not reach the woman listed, and police went to her address; she turned out to be the partner of another prisoner with the same surname. Two of Hardy’s sons contacted the prison on November 27 after reading about his death in a newspaper. The Ombudsman called the mix-up unacceptable.
Chandrakant Jha, a vegetable hawker from rural Bihar who lived and worked in north Delhi, was arrested in May 2007, after three men had died in Delhi between October 2006 and May 2007, their deaths accompanied by handwritten letters mocking the Delhi Police. In February 2013 a sessions court sentenced him to death twice and to life imprisonment for the rest of his life in a third case, each for murder and causing disappearance of evidence. On January 27, 2016, the Delhi High Court upheld every conviction but commuted both death sentences to imprisonment for the rest of his natural life without remission. Delhi Police attribute seven killings to him in all, including four of earlier years; those are not convictions. Paroled in October 2023, he failed to return and was rearrested at Old Delhi Railway Station on January 17, 2025.
The pandemic shaped how the case was retold. In 2022 Netflix released Indian Predator: The Butcher of Delhi, a three-part documentary directed by Ayesha Sood and produced by VICE Media. Sood told Outlook she had not heard of the case before the makers approached her during the Covid lockdown, when migrant workers were leaving Delhi in large numbers. "It was in our backyard and yet we never heard of it," she said. She described the victims, mostly migrants like Jha, as people on the margins whose deaths had gone largely unnoticed. The critic at Film Companion judged the first two episodes one-sided, relying heavily on police accounts and staged reconstructions, but credited the third, set in Bihar, with tracing the case back to the neglect of the village and of the migrants who leave it.
An epidemic works on a murder case in three ways, and none involves causing it. It lends a false explanation to deaths that would otherwise draw questions, as with the fevers in Brittany, Connecticut and County Durham. It disrupts the institutions that deal with the aftermath: a ballroom in Sacramento, a courtroom locked to the families in Dallas, a Chinese trial postponed, a Georgia execution schedule traded in a legal agreement, a parole path closed to a prisoner in Britain. And, inside prisons, it kills the people those institutions were holding. The record rarely connects the dots for us. Where the record is silent on whether the pandemic mattered, it is simply silent.
• 1833 to 1841: deaths in Morbihan households later attributed to Hélène Jégado, none then suspected; cholera had struck shortly before the first of those described in the archives.
• December 14, 1851: Jégado convicted at Rennes; executed February 26, 1852.
• 1864: Lydia Sherman’s first husband dies in New York; later confession.
• 1872: Sherman convicted at New Haven; Charles Edward Cotton dies at West Auckland that summer.
• January 11, 1873: Sherman sentenced to life imprisonment.
• March 1873: Mary Ann Cotton convicted at Durham; executed March 24, 1873.
• May 16, 1878: Sherman dies at Wethersfield State Prison.
• November 1975: Patrick Mackay pleads guilty to three counts of manslaughter.
• March 5, 1996: Lyndon Pace convicted at Atlanta.
• May 6, 1998: Donato Bilancia arrested in Genoa.
• November 25, 2003: Anthony Hardy pleads guilty at the Central Criminal Court.
• 2006 to 2007: the Delhi deaths for which Chandrakant Jha is convicted.
• April 24, 2018: Joseph James DeAngelo arrested in Citrus Heights.
• November 28, 2019: Lao Rongzhi detained in Xiamen.
• April 17, 2020: Hardy begins shielding in HMP Frankland during the first wave of the pandemic.
• June 29, 2020: DeAngelo pleads guilty in a Sacramento ballroom.
• August 21, 2020: DeAngelo sentenced.
• November 25, 2020: Hardy dies of COVID-19 pneumonia; Bilancia’s death from Covid-19 reported December 17, 2020.
• December 21 to 22, 2020: Lao Rongzhi’s trial at Nanchang.
• April 2021: Georgia and death row lawyers reach the execution-warrant agreement.
• May 2021: Parole Board declines to release Mackay.
• November 15 to 19, 2021: first Chemirmir trial ends in a mistrial; families kept out of the courtroom.
• April 28, 2022: Chemirmir convicted at retrial; October 7, 2022, second conviction.
• September 19, 2023: Chemirmir killed in custody.
• December 18, 2023: Lao Rongzhi executed in Nanchang.
• May 2, 2024: Heather Pressdee pleads guilty and is sentenced.
• January 17, 2025: Jha rearrested.
• June 26, 2026: Eleventh Circuit revives the Georgia prisoners' suit.