Thirteen days. That is how long it took Albuquerque police, the FBI and a tip line to go from the first of three killings in the summer of 2022 to a man in custody. The man was Muhammad Syed, an Afghan refugee who prayed at the same mosque as the dead. A surveillance recording of a car, photographs released to the public and tips from inside a frightened community did what weeks of canvassing had not.
Other cases of the 2020s ran on a different clock. In Winnipeg an arrest came two days after the first death came to light. In Colorado a search for stolen vehicles led, nine days later, to a man located in another state, and the dead were identified over the following months. In Kenya a suspect was held within days of a ransom call and was dead, never charged, three months later. In Argentina a nurse was convicted three years after the arrest, by a margin of six votes to four. In Brazil, in September 2026, police arrested a man who has not been tried, and the account of what he did rests on police statements.
The twelve cases below come from the United States, Canada, Mexico, El Salvador, Ecuador, Argentina, Kenya, Indonesia and Brazil. They are not a survey. They are twelve files, each with a different answer to the questions that matter in a serial case: how the deaths came to light, how quickly a name followed, what a camera, a telephone or a fingerprint contributed, and where the proceedings stand today. Where a person has been convicted, the conviction is stated as the court entered it. Where one has not, the account is the police account and nothing more.
Aftab Hussein, 41, was killed in Albuquerque on the night of July 26, 2022. Muhammad Afzaal Hussain, 27, a city planning director and former student leader at the University of New Mexico, was killed on August 1. Naeem Hussain, 25, was killed on August 5, after attending funeral services for the men who had died before him. All three had come to the United States from South Asia and belonged to the city’s small Muslim community.
For about two weeks that community lived in fear. Dawn reported on August 7 that police and the FBI had told the Islamic Center of New Mexico, before Naeem Hussain died, that they believed the earlier killings were connected. President Biden condemned the killings and said such violence had no place in America. Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham sent additional state police and said, "This is not who we are." The FBI formed a task force of more than 100 investigators, analysts and specialists, and rewards offered by various groups reached a combined $30,000, according to the Albuquerque Journal’s report on the arrest.
The break came from a camera and from the community itself. Police released photographs of a dark gray or silver four-door Volkswagen with tinted windows, and the Associated Press reported that surveillance video had shown a gray sedan leaving the August 5 killing. Tips, many of them from within the Muslim community, and more video identified the car, which was registered to Syed. State police, Albuquerque police and the FBI took him into custody near Santa Rosa, New Mexico, on the night of Monday, August 8, 2022, by the Associated Press’s account; later Albuquerque Journal reports give August 9. He was 51 and had lived in Albuquerque for about five years.
He denied any part in the killings. Prosecutors told the court and the press they had no motive to offer. In March 2024 a jury in Albuquerque convicted him of the first-degree murder of Aftab Hussein, the verdict coming on March 18. On the eve of a second trial, in late August 2024, he reached a plea agreement, and on September 3 he pleaded no contest to two counts of second-degree murder in the deaths of Muhammad Afzaal Hussain and Naeem Hussain. Judge Britt Baca sentenced him on November 8, 2024, to life in prison with at least 30 years to serve before parole eligibility, plus two concurrent 15-year terms. On May 7, 2026, the New Mexico Supreme Court unanimously affirmed the first-degree murder conviction. Police had also named Syed as the main suspect in a killing in Albuquerque in November 2021, but no charge was filed.
Jeremy Skibicki was arrested on May 18, 2022, two days after the case came to light in Winnipeg, and charged that day with the first-degree murder of Rebecca Contois, 24, of O-Chi-Chak-Ko-Sipi First Nation. On December 1, 2022, the Winnipeg Police Service served a warrant on him at Milner Ridge Correctional Centre, where he was being held, adding three more counts of first-degree murder: for Morgan Harris, 39, and Marcedes Myran, 26, both of Long Plain First Nation, and for a woman police could not then identify, believed to be Indigenous and in her mid-20s. Announcing the charges, Police Chief Danny Smyth said, "It is always unsettling when there is any kind of a serial killing," and noted the national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. Prosecutors did not lay hate crime charges, police confirmed, though Grand Chief Jerry Daniels of the Southern Chiefs' Organization urged them to.
The fourth woman was known at trial only as Mashkode Bizhiki’ikwe, Buffalo Woman, a spiritual name given to her by Indigenous grandmothers and community members. Thelma Morrisseau, an Elder who took part in the naming, said she "needs to be honoured and respected." A shelter worker had earlier recognized a distinctive jacket that police had released and pointed investigators to a photograph of Ashlee Shingoose, IndigiNews later reported, but DNA on the coat did not match her and investigators set the lead aside. She was identified as Ashlee Shingoose, 30, of St. Theresa Point Anisininew Nation, on March 26, 2025, after Skibicki gave investigators new information, according to a Winnipeg Police Service release.
Skibicki had confessed to all four killings in a long videotaped police interview. "I killed four people," he told detectives, in a passage later quoted in court. At trial before Chief Justice Glenn Joyal of the Manitoba Court of King’s Bench, sitting without a jury, his lawyers did not dispute that he had caused the deaths. They argued he was not criminally responsible because of a mental disorder. Joyal rejected the defense, held that the killings were planned and deliberate, and said Skibicki had acted on racist views. On July 11, 2024, he was convicted of four counts of first-degree murder. On August 28, 2024, he received four life sentences, served concurrently, with no eligibility for parole for 25 years. A special post-sentence hearing for the Shingoose family was held on August 15, 2025. As of April 30, 2026, the province’s news bulletins described him as serving his sentence.
Keith Gibson walked out of a Delaware prison on December 20, 2020, after about 13 years for a 2008 killing in Delaware. The original first-degree murder charge had been reduced, and in 2010 he was sentenced to 20 years for manslaughter and a weapons count, WHYY reported. A probation report cited in WHYY’s reporting listed 64 prior criminal charges, nine felony and 15 misdemeanor convictions and 14 earlier probation violations. He called himself "the Beast," a nickname that surfaced in both of his trials and in the telephone evidence that tied him to one killing.
Between January 28 and June 5, 2021, six people were killed in Philadelphia and northern Delaware. Two were men working in a Germantown store in Philadelphia, Roy Caban and Eric Flores. One was his own mother, Christine Gibson, 54. One was Christine Lugo, a coffee shop manager in Philadelphia, 40 or 41 in different reports. In Delaware, Leslie Ruiz-Basilio, 28, was killed in May, and Ronald Wright, 42, in June.
The records carried the Delaware case. A bicycle recovered near the Delaware store carried a serial number that matched a January 2021 receipt in Gibson’s name from a Philadelphia bicycle shop; two more receipts, from May 13 and 14, covered a service visit and a lock, and keys that fit the lock were on him when he was arrested. A cellphone taken in the robbery was activated the next day under another person’s name, and it held a contact labeled "The Beast" with Gibson’s number, the Delaware Supreme Court’s order recounts. He was arrested in Wilmington on June 8, 2021, after a tracking device concealed in cash taken in a robbery led police to him, CBS Philadelphia reported.
The case drew attention for a decision made in between. On February 9, 2021, the day after his mother’s death, Philadelphia detectives told Gibson’s Delaware probation officer he was a suspect, and the officer filed a report asking that he be returned to prison for the six and a half years left on his sentence. On April 27, 2021, Superior Court Judge Vivian Medinilla sentenced him to 31 days counted from his March 26 return, followed by 18 months of probation. He had already served the time and was released that day, WHYY reported. The killing in Delaware came less than three weeks later.
A Delaware jury convicted Gibson in November 2023 of two counts of first-degree murder in the Delaware killings, with attempted murder, robbery and other counts. On March 8, 2024, Judge Ferris Wharton sentenced him as a habitual offender to seven life terms plus 296 years, according to the Delaware Department of Justice; the Delaware Supreme Court affirmed on May 28, 2025. In June 2026 a Philadelphia jury convicted him of four counts of first-degree murder in the Philadelphia killings, and the District Attorney’s Office said that a judge, Giovanni Campbell, imposed four consecutive life terms plus 76 years. He has said he will appeal.
The Alamosa case began as a search for stolen property. On November 10, 2020, the Conejos County Sheriff’s Office and the Colorado Bureau of Investigation served a search warrant near Los Sauces, a rural community about 20 miles southeast of Alamosa. They were looking for Adre Baroz, a man wanted in connection with stolen vehicles and equipment, not for anyone reported missing, Sheriff Garth Crowther told KKTV. The deaths came to light in Conejos County in the days that followed. On November 18, Alamosa Police Chief Ken Anderson named Baroz as the suspect and warned the public not to approach him. "When I say he is a danger to the community, I really mean he is a danger to the community," Anderson said. The bureau opened a tip line. On November 19, agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, working with Alamosa police, located Baroz in Gallup, New Mexico.
Baroz, then 26, was known around Alamosa as "Psycho," and CBS Colorado later described him as a small-town gang leader helped by his brother and three loyal gang members. He had a long record. He was in prison from March 2016 until November 2018 and then on parole, according to the Colorado Department of Corrections, and on September 25, 2020, he was a passenger in a car Alamosa police stopped, which led to separate drug and weapons charges that were pending when the murder inquiry began.
The identifications came slowly. The bureau announced on December 5, 2020, that one of the dead was Myron Martinez of Del Norte; by then the task force had received more than 60 tips. On December 29 it announced that another was Shayla Hammel. A third was not formally identified in any official release through April 2021, though court papers unsealed in December 2020 accused Baroz of killing Selena Esquibel, 19, of Alamosa. In January 2021 two more men were arrested, among them his brother Julius Baroz, and a third in March. On April 26, 2021, Baroz was charged with a fifth murder, that of Korina Arroyo of Monte Vista, who according to CBS Colorado had been due to testify against him in a drug case. The fifth victim named in the case was Xavier Zeven Garcia of Saguache County. Four men were charged alongside him in all, and all four later pleaded guilty. Prosecutors said the Alamosa Police Department, the bureau, the ATF and forensic specialists compiled more than 50,000 documents.
In February 2024, after withdrawing an earlier plea of not guilty by reason of insanity, Baroz pleaded guilty to all 13 counts: five of first-degree murder, five of tampering with a deceased human body, and one each of first-degree assault, second-degree assault and second-degree kidnapping. District Judge Michael Gonzales sentenced him in Alamosa on May 3, 2024, to five consecutive life sentences. On May 10, 2024, he received the maximum 12 years in Pueblo County for assaults on two detention deputies and another inmate, to run on top of the life terms.
The Ohio case began with a tip about a theft, not a death. According to the attorney general’s office, the Central Ohio Human Trafficking Task Force received information in 2023 that a woman in northeast Columbus was drugging men to steal their belongings. The Franklin County Prosecutor’s Office later said the tips first led to an inquiry into a human trafficking ring. That inquiry became a joint investigation by special agents of the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation and homicide detectives of the Columbus Division of Police.
Investigators eventually linked Rebecca Auborn to five overdoses between December 13, 2022, and June 17, 2023. A 61-year-old Columbus man survived the first. Four men died: Joseph Crumpler, 30, of North Linden, on January 15, 2023; Robert Snoke, 54, of Pataskala, on April 1; Wayne Akin, 64, of Columbus, in April (the prosecutor’s office gave April 17; the attorney general’s 2023 timeline, which named no one, listed April 13); and Guy Renda, 42, of Belpre, on June 17. Auborn was charged on September 11, 2023, with murder and other offenses in Crumpler’s death. According to the Columbus Division of Police, she admitted supplying him and stealing from him, 10TV reported. On October 25, 2023, a Franklin County grand jury returned a 28-count indictment covering all five men, and Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost called the deaths serial killings. Investigators said there might be more victims and asked for information about overdose deaths in northeast Columbus between December 2022 and August 2023. No further charges were reported through February 2026.
She pleaded not guilty on October 30, 2023, and the case moved slowly. On December 19, 2025, she pleaded guilty to four counts of murder and one count of felonious assault, with 23 counts dismissed. "This closes a tough case," Yost said. Judge Karen Phipps sentenced her on February 19, 2026, to four consecutive terms of 15 years to life. She will not be eligible for parole for 60 years. At sentencing she apologized to the families and said she took full responsibility, WSYX reported.
In September 2015 Rosario Alfonso R., a fisherman from the Las Arenitas camp near Eldorado on the Sinaloa coast, was the only survivor of a fishing trip that went wrong in the Gulf of California. The Mexican Navy pulled him from the water after 13 days. Five years later the state prosecutor’s office charged him with the femicides of four young women in Culiacán, and the Sinaloa weekly Ríodoce described him in 2020 as the first person in the state to be prosecuted under the femicide statute for more than one killing.
He was arrested in January 2020, days after the death of Olga Ana Karen, 19, of Hermosillo, Sonora, in Culiacán. Ríodoce reported that investigators identified him through their inquiries and witness statements. On January 31, 2020, Luz Noticias reported that the prosecutor’s office had announced the arrest and that a judge had bound him over for trial on one charge of femicide. State Attorney General Juan José Ríos Estavillo said the office had solid information linking the same man to femicides in Culiacán in December 2018, February 2019 and December 2019.
The link rested on DNA and on phones. Ríodoce reported, from the prosecutor’s account, that genetic tests in Olga Ana Karen’s case detected a male profile and that the same profile turned up in the cases of the other women; a cheek swab taken after the arrest matched. The prosecutor’s office also put witness testimony, expert reports and reports on the geolocation of mobile phones before the judges. For more than seven months the only charge was the femicide of Olga Ana Karen; at hearings in the first week of September 2020 prosecutors added the other three, and a judge ordered mandatory pretrial detention.
After an oral trial, on October 21, 2022, the trial judge convicted him of three femicides: of Olga Ana Karen, for which he received 36 years, and of Cecilia Guadalupe B. in 2018 and Lucía Mariana M. in 2019, 18 years each. The terms were reported as 70 years in all, with reparations of 1,274,967 pesos to the three families. The court acquitted him of the fourth count, the 2019 femicide of Melissa Angélica E., 24, of La Cruz de Elota, finding the state had not proved his responsibility. No one else has been reported charged in her death.
On the night of May 7, 2021, neighbors in Chalchuapa, a town in western El Salvador, heard a young woman calling for help and telephoned the police. The woman was Jacquelinne Palomo Lima, 26. She and her mother, Mirna Cruz Lima, 57, both died in Chalchuapa that night, and the man who lived at the address, Hugo Ernesto Osorio Chávez, a former officer of the National Civil Police, was arrested. Agence France-Presse reported the detention date as May 8; its later account and the reports from the trial place the arrest on the night of May 7. On May 12 he was charged with two counts of femicide, the offense in Salvadoran law for the killing of a woman for reasons of gender, and two counts of homicide were added later, Reuters reported.
Osorio was 51, according to both Agence France-Presse and Reuters. He had joined the police in 1997 and left the force in 2005. The national police chief, Mauricio Arriaza, told Reuters that Osorio had been removed from the ranks about 15 years before the 2021 killings after a criminal conviction, and that he had served a five-year sentence. Justice Minister Gustavo Villatoro called him a psychopath in public. Investigators told Agence France-Presse that he had reached victims through social media by offering jobs or help to migrate, and Reuters reported that he was alleged to have targeted mostly women and girls with such promises.
The arrest opened a much larger inquiry. By May 20, 2021, a magistrates' court in Chalchuapa had ordered provisional detention for 11 people linked to Osorio. Forensic work at the property ran until July 14, when Villatoro announced its end without giving a total. Officials offered different counts: a prosecutor estimated about 30, and Israel Ticas, a forensic criminologist working for the prosecution, suggested at least 40, a figure the Attorney General, Rodolfo Delgado, called unproven. Reuters reported that Ticas was sanctioned. Twelve of the dead had been identified by October 7, 2021, when the Institute of Legal Medicine delivered them to eight families.
Osorio’s two convictions cover the deaths of the mother and daughter. On June 10, 2022, a specialized court in Santa Ana convicted him of two femicides and sentenced him to 70 years, 35 for each woman. On November 11, 2022, he received a further 18 years in a separate case concerning a girl, with other charges. He followed both hearings by video from the maximum-security prison in Zacatecoluca. The deaths of the others were tried against nine other defendants, with Osorio as the prosecution’s cooperating witness under a partial arrangement, a criterio de oportunidad, that covered nine cases. A judge acquitted all nine in May 2023; an appeals chamber annulled that verdict in August; at a retrial that ended on October 6, 2023, six were convicted and three acquitted. The house, which prosecutors said belonged to a third party, passed to the state in May 2023. No charges against Osorio himself for those deaths have been reported, and the outcome of the two homicide counts filed against him in 2021 has not been made public.
Lissa María Caiza, a young mother from Pifo, a rural parish on the northeastern edge of Quito, was convicted three times in Pichincha province in three years. On August 3, 2021, a court convicted her of the murder of her two children, aged nine and five, on the night of October 27, 2020, and sentenced her to 34 years and eight months, with $20,000 in reparation to the children’s father; an appeal court ratified the sentence in March 2022. In April 2022 a second court convicted her of the murder of Jaime Geovanny Yanchaguano, 28, whose death prosecutors put between October 18 and 24, 2020, and added 22 years. In July 2023 a third court convicted her of the murder of Marco Escanta, 48, a co-worker, in June 2020, and added another 22 years.
The cases were joined by a fingerprint and by a telephone. Escanta’s death in June 2020 was not at first treated as a homicide. A fingerprint lifted in the case went no further until that November, when police compared it with prints taken in the October investigation and established that they matched Caiza’s. General Fausto Olivo, head of the national violent-deaths directorate, told reporters on November 6, 2020, that investigators had identified "a relationship with an earlier homicide." In the Yanchaguano case, his family received messages saying he had been kidnapped and demanding $8,000, then $4,000, and later claiming he owed Caiza money; prosecutors said the messages came from her, and the family came to believe they were meant to hide what had already happened. In the children’s case the court heard chat messages between Caiza and the children’s father, presented through an audio and video expert report.
Within two weeks of her arrest, police in Quito called her a possible serial killer. Carlos Perugachi, head of criminalistics for the Metropolitan District of Quito, said technical and scientific work had established her possible involvement in what he classed as serial murders and attempted murders. Officers also accused her of harming relatives at a family gathering on September 2, 2020, and others. None of those allegations had reached a verdict by 2026. A forensic psychologist quoted by the newspaper Extra cautioned that only a proper evaluation could show whether she fit the profile, and a psychological assessment cited by Extra in 2021 disputed the serial-killer label. In May 2026 she remained in prison in Cotopaxi while a filing against the reparation order awaited a decision.
At the Hospital Materno Neonatal Ramón Carrillo, the provincial maternity hospital in the city of Córdoba, 13 newborns who had been born in good health suddenly fell gravely ill between March and June 2022. Five died, on March 18, April 23, May 23 and, two in one night, June 6. Eight survived after emergency treatment, some with serious, lasting disability, the trial court later held. Inside the hospital, staff noticed the pattern before anyone outside did: after the first two deaths they asked for a change in the lot of vitamin K given to newborns and met with a prosecutor, but no formal complaint was filed, the Buenos Aires Herald reported from the trial evidence. After June 6 there were no more cases. Prosecutors and the trial court both treated that as significant, because it coincided with the removal from the ward of dozens of doctors and nurses, Brenda Agüero among them.
The provincial Ministry of Health did not take the deaths to a prosecutor. The criminal case began in July 2022 with a complaint from an engineer whose wife was a doctor on duty at the hospital. The couple had noticed that the share of deaths and of sick newborns had risen. The complaint went to the district prosecutor’s office headed by Raúl Garzón. The investigation became public on August 11, 2022, and about twenty families came forward. Agüero, a 27-year-old nurse assigned to the mothers, not the babies, was arrested in Río Ceballos on the afternoon of Friday, August 19, 2022, on Garzón’s order. The provincial health minister resigned on August 25. In the months after, Garzón charged the former minister and other officials with failing in their duties and widened the case against Agüero to the earlier deaths and eight attempted homicides.
The trial opened on January 6, 2025, before the Seventh Criminal and Correctional Chamber of Córdoba, with three professional judges and eight citizen jurors. Eleven people were in the dock: Agüero, accused as the direct perpetrator, and ten hospital managers and health officials accused of concealment and related offenses. Her lawyers argued that no one had seen her harm a child and that there was no direct, indirect or circumstantial evidence against her. She denied everything. On June 18, 2025, the court convicted her of five counts of aggravated homicide, the offense called homicide aggravated by insidious means, and eight attempts, and sentenced her to life imprisonment. The vote was six to four, and four members of the court dissented on her guilt, the presiding judge, Patricia Soria, among them; Soria wrote the minority’s reasoning. Her appeals were admitted on September 4, 2025, and sent to the Superior Tribunal of Justice of Córdoba. She turned 30 in prison on June 2, 2025, at the Bouwer complex outside Córdoba.
Masten Milimu Wanjala, 20, was never charged with murder, never entered a plea and was never convicted of anything. What is known about the children’s deaths comes from police statements, court filings for his detention and what reporters were told by investigators and by families. None of it was tested before a judge.
The case began in Nairobi. On June 30, 2021, police received a report about Charles Opindo Bala, 13, a pupil at Sagaret Primary School. On July 8 a second report came in for Junior Mutuku Musyoki, 12, a pupil at the same school, according to an affidavit described by The Star. The families then received telephone calls demanding money, Kenyans.co.ke reported. Police traced the calls to Kitengela, a town in Kajiado County just south of Nairobi, and arrested Wanjala there, the affidavit said. A mobile phone and a SIM card that police said had been used to make the demands were taken from him.
The Directorate of Criminal Investigations announced the arrest on July 14, 2021, describing him as a serial killer behind the deaths of "at least ten innocent children," according to the Associated Press. The next day he was brought before Chief Magistrate Heston Nyagah at the Makadara law courts. He was not charged; instead police applied for permission to hold him while they investigated, telling the court he had confessed to the killing of 10 more children across Machakos, Mlolongo, Kitengela, Nairobi and Kakamega. The magistrate allowed 30 days. The count was never settled: police and the press put the number he admitted at 10, 12 and 13, and the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions said he was to be charged with the murders of three children while investigations into others went on. The Associated Press reported that police said he often presented himself to children as a football coach.
On the night of October 12 to 13, 2021, hours before he was due in court to take a plea, he left Jogoo Road police station in Nairobi. Two days later, on October 15, villagers in Mukhweya, in Bungoma County in western Kenya, recognized him, and schoolchildren on their way to class were among the first to know him, the local chief said. A crowd killed him before officers arrived. Three police officers who had been on duty that night were charged with aiding a prisoner to escape and with neglect of duty. Nothing the police alleged about him was ever put to a court.
Slamet Tohari, known as Mbah Slamet, presented himself in Balun, a village in the Wanayasa district of Banjarnegara Regency in Central Java, as a dukun who could multiply money. People came from Lampung, Palembang, Sukabumi and elsewhere, paid fees of about 20 million to 40 million rupiah each, according to his own account in court, and waited for sums that never came. He drew clients through others. Budi Santoso, whom police described as his right-hand man, advertised him on Facebook as a man who could multiply money, according to the Banjarnegara police chief, AKBP Hendri Yulianto.
His record was on file. In January 2019 police in Pekalongan stopped the circulation of 1,491 counterfeit 100,000-rupiah notes and arrested three men, one listed as Tuhari, 41, of Wanayasa. In April 2023 a Pekalongan police officer confirmed to detikJateng that Tuhari and Mbah Slamet were the same man.
The case came to light because of a precaution. Paryanto, 53, of Cibadak in Sukabumi, had paid the dukun 70 million rupiah on the promise of 5 billion. Before a final meeting in March 2023 he told his son to go to the police if he could not be reached. From March 24 he could not be reached, and on March 27 the son filed a report with the Banjarnegara police. On April 3, 2023, the police count of the dead stood at ten, and by the next day it was twelve. At a press conference on April 4, the police chief said Tohari had admitted killing ten people since 2020. The Central Java police victim identification team named nine of the twelve over April and May; Kuwat Santosa of Yogyakarta, named in May, was the last. Tohari told police in April 2023 he had killed 16 more people in 2011 and 2012, a claim that was never tried.
At the trial he admitted that he could not multiply money at all. His younger wife testified that she had known him since early 2022 and had married him in an unregistered religious ceremony; his first wife said that more than 20 guests had come to the house. On December 22, 2023, prosecutors demanded the death penalty. JawaPos reported on February 4, 2024, that the Banjarnegara District Court, with presiding judge Niken Rochayati, had convicted him of the premeditated murder of 12 people, committed repeatedly, and sentenced him to death. Whether he appealed has not been reported.
The most recent file here is also the least settled. In September 2026 the Paraíba Civil Police named Jorlan Lopes da Silva, 33, known locally as "Mosquito" for his slight build, as the suspect in a series of 16 homicides in about three months, mainly in the Vale do Mamanguape region of northeastern Brazil. He has not been tried, and he is presumed innocent of every one of those deaths unless a court finds otherwise.
The Italian news agency ANSA, in reports carried by IstoÉ, said he had been released in May 2026 after serving five years in prison for other crimes. The Civil Police said the killings under investigation began after he left the prison system at the end of May. Police told Agence France-Presse that he confessed to 11 of the 16 in questioning, and Delegado Douglas Garcia told the Associated Press that the cases were supported by technical evidence and confessions. Lopes da Silva also told investigators he had killed about 80 people in his life, beginning at 13. Police said they had not verified the figure, and no court record of any killing at that age was published. In a video of part of the questioning obtained by Agence France-Presse, he said he had acted alone, denied any tie to organized crime and said his targets were "linked to the criminal world." Police described him differently, as a member of a criminal gang that had killed dozens in the region, and Estadão Conteúdo reported that two other men arrested in Mulungu in the same period were held as members of the same faction. The authorities withheld the names of the dead and the details of their deaths so the prosecution could proceed.
An operation of about 48 hours by the Civil and Military Police, with information from the Federal Highway Police, ended in his arrest in Mulungu on Sunday, September 13, 2026, on a preventive detention warrant issued by the Paraíba courts. Agence France-Presse described the operation as lasting 30 hours; Estadão Conteúdo gave the arrest as September 15, a date the other reports contradict. After a custody hearing on September 14 a judge kept him in detention and he was taken to the public jail in Alagoinha. The Public Defender’s Office represented him. The Associated Press reported that Paraíba police would reopen dozens of cases linked to him. As of the end of September 2026, the case was an investigation, not a trial, and no formal charges had been reported.
Taken as a group, the twelve cases show how unevenly the same work gets done. Albuquerque had a camera, a description of a car and a community willing to talk to detectives, and it had a name in under two weeks. Winnipeg had a confession and a four-count conviction that rested on a judge’s rejection of a defense of mental disorder, and the fourth woman went unnamed from the 2022 charge until March 2025. Gibson was tied to a killing by bicycle receipts and a contact labeled "The Beast" in a stolen telephone, and had been released weeks earlier after a ruling about probation. Tohari’s counterfeit arrest of 2019, Osorio’s dismissal from the police and Baroz’s earlier prison term were all on file before anyone died.
The courts have been less uniform than the arrests. A Salvadoran judge acquitted nine people, and an appeals chamber sent the case back. A Mexican court convicted Rosario Alfonso R. of three femicides and acquitted him of a fourth that the same prosecutors had charged on the same evidence. A Córdoba jury court split six votes to four. In Ecuador one woman has been convicted three times and is accused, but not convicted, of more. In Kenya and in Brazil no court has spoken at all: one suspect is dead and the other has been held since September. What can be said of Masten Wanjala and Jorlan Lopes da Silva is what the police have said, and what the police have said is not a finding.
• 2008: a killing in Delaware for which Keith Gibson was later convicted of manslaughter (sentenced to 20 years in 2010).
• September 2015: Rosario Alfonso R. rescued by the Mexican Navy after 13 days at sea.
• December 2018 to January 2020: four femicides charged against Alfonso in Culiacán.
• January 2019: Pekalongan police arrest three men over counterfeit notes, one listed as Tuhari.
• October 27, 2020: Lissa María Caiza’s two children die in Pifo.
• November 10 to 19, 2020: search warrant in Conejos County, Colorado; Adre Baroz located in Gallup, New Mexico, on November 19.
• December 20, 2020: Keith Gibson released from a Delaware prison.
• January 28 to June 5, 2021: six killings attributed to Gibson in Philadelphia and Delaware; arrested June 8.
• May 7, 2021: Jacquelinne Palomo Lima and Mirna Cruz Lima die in Chalchuapa; Hugo Osorio Chávez arrested.
• July 14, 2021: Masten Wanjala’s arrest announced in Nairobi; he leaves custody October 12 to 13 and is killed by a crowd on October 15.
• March to June 2022: five newborns die and eight others fall gravely ill in Córdoba; Brenda Agüero arrested August 19.
• May 16 to 18, 2022: Rebecca Contois’s case comes to light in Winnipeg; Jeremy Skibicki arrested May 18.
• June 10, 2022: Osorio convicted of two femicides; a further 18 years on November 11.
• July 26 to August 8, 2022: three men killed in Albuquerque; Muhammad Syed taken into custody August 8.
• October 21, 2022: Alfonso convicted of three femicides, acquitted of a fourth.
• March to April 2023: Slamet Tohari’s case comes to light in Banjarnegara after a son’s report on March 27.
• October 25, 2023: Rebecca Auborn indicted on 28 counts in Columbus.
• February 4, 2024: Tohari sentenced to death (reported).
• February to May 2024: Baroz pleads guilty; five consecutive life terms on May 3.
• March 18, 2024: Syed convicted of one murder; sentenced November 8.
• July 11 and August 28, 2024: Skibicki convicted and sentenced.
• June 18, 2025: Agüero convicted by a jury court, six votes to four.
• December 19, 2025, and February 19, 2026: Auborn pleads guilty and is sentenced.
• May 7, 2026: New Mexico Supreme Court affirms Syed’s first-degree murder conviction.
• June 10, 2026: Philadelphia District Attorney announces Gibson’s convictions and sentence.
• September 13, 2026: Jorlan Lopes da Silva arrested in Mulungu.