In January 1950, John Reginald Halliday Christie stood in the witness box at the Old Bailey as the chief prosecution witness against his upstairs neighbor in North Kensington, a laborer named Timothy Evans. Evans was convicted of murdering his 13-month-old daughter and was executed that March. Three years later, in March 1953, Christie was himself arrested in London. He confessed to killing six women, his wife among them, and to the death of Evans’s wife, Beryl, in 1949. A jury at the Central Criminal Court heard one charge only, the murder of Ethel Christie, and on June 25, 1953, it convicted him. He was executed at Pentonville on July 15. In October 1966, Timothy Evans received a free pardon.
That sequence, a man executed on the word of a witness who later admitted to killing the man’s wife, is the 1950s in miniature. In Britain, the United States, West Germany, Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Australia, the same decade produced cases in which one person was tied to many deaths, and in most of them the courts proved fewer deaths than the police and the press counted. The rest stayed in confessions, charge sheets, newspapers and, in one case, a pardon. What follows takes twelve of those files and asks how police, courts and the press handled each.
Christie was born in Halifax, Yorkshire, in 1899. He spent the interwar years in and out of trouble, mainly for theft, and by 1939 he had five convictions, the figure the Home Office accepted in a written answer to Parliament in July 1953. When war came he joined the Metropolitan Police War Reserve as Constable X 112, and no one discovered his record. Asked in the Commons how a man with five convictions had been taken on, the Home Secretary said he regretted that "in the conditions of rapid expansion of the Metropolitan Police War Reserve" the record had not come to light. Another member observed that Christie "did slip in."
The Evans trial rested on confessions. Evans was illiterate, a point Major Geoffrey Bing told the Commons was the one fact admitted on all sides, and he gave four differing accounts in all, according to the London Review of Books. His first statement to the police accused Christie, Bing said. His confession came after he was shown clothing belonging to his wife and daughter. Christie made three statements to the police in December 1949, of 991, 821 and 375 words; the Home Secretary gave those figures to the Commons in December 1953 and added that no record was kept of the time spent taking statements from potential witnesses. Workmen had been repairing the house that November, and their accounts suggested Evans could not have done what he confessed to on the dates he gave. The High Court recorded in 2004 that those statements were never disclosed to the defense or put before the jury.
The correction came slowly. In July 1953 the Commons debated the report of an inquiry into the Evans case. In 1965 the question came back, and on October 18, 1966, the Commons recorded a free pardon. A High Court judge had judged it more probable than not that Evans had not killed his daughter. A pardon is not a quashed conviction, and the Evans conviction itself has never been quashed, a point the lawyer Gerry Rubin examined in the Criminal Law Review in 2007. The pardon came sixteen years after the verdict.
In the American cases of the decade, the choice of which death to prosecute fell to the county, and the other deaths were handled as evidence rather than as charges.
Anjette Lyles ran a restaurant in Macon, Georgia, where, WMAZ reported, the town’s lawyers, judges and businessmen were regulars; WGXA called it a gathering place for local power brokers. In the fall of 1958 a Bibb County jury convicted her of murdering her nine-year-old daughter, Marcia Elaine Lyles, who died on April 5, 1958. The jury did not recommend mercy, and she was sentenced to death. The Supreme Court of Georgia upheld the verdict on July 8, 1959.
Marcia’s death was the only one she was tried for, but not the only one the jury heard about. Her first husband had died in 1952, her second husband in 1955 and her first husband’s mother in 1957. WMAZ reported that Lyles was charged in those deaths too, though no trial on them is reported. The trial court admitted testimony that all three had died of the same cause as the child and that she had collected money after each death, and the Supreme Court restated the rule on which that turned: proof of a distinct, separate offense is not admissible unless there is some logical connection between the two. The state said the connection was plan, scheme and motive. It also put into evidence documents the Supreme Court described as forgeries made by the accused, among them a letter to the Veterans Administration, an instrument dated September 2, 1957, and a will. A sanity board later ruled her insane, and she was sent to Central State Hospital at Milledgeville, where she died in 1977. The death sentence was never carried out.
The trial itself was a press event. Celestine Sibley of The Atlanta Constitution, whose colleagues called her the paper’s "murder queen," covered it from the courtroom balcony with 27 other reporters, according to Eldredge ATL, and Judge Bill Adams, whose father was a special prosecutor in the case, told WGXA that reporters came from local, state, national and international outlets.
Nannie Doss was 49 when she was arrested in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in November 1954. She confessed to killing her fifth husband, Samuel Doss, who had died that October, and within days she signed statements about three earlier husbands, one in Alabama, one in North Carolina and one in Kansas. The Associated Press described her as a jovial widow who smoked as she talked to investigators and who broke off the questioning to appear before television cameras. The press called her "Grandma Doss"; the nickname "Giggling Granny" came later.
The legal result was the narrowest possible one. Murder charges were filed in Alabama, North Carolina and Kansas, and in December 1954 a first-degree murder warrant was signed in Calhoun County, Alabama. She was tried in none of those places. In Oklahoma she was charged only with the death of Samuel Doss; after a stay at a state mental hospital and a jury finding that she was legally sane, she pleaded guilty in May 1955, and on June 2, 1955, Judge Elmer Adams sentenced her to life imprisonment. The county attorney had asked for death. She died in custody in 1965. Officials spoke of up to ten relatives besides her husbands, and the Encyclopedia of Alabama says officials have speculated the total may have been as high as 12, but no charge was reported for those further deaths, and she denied harming her mother, her sisters and a grandson. The wire reports of 1954 disagreed with one another on names and years: one husband appeared as Harley Lanning in the first Associated Press story and as Arlie Lanning in later ones, and the sisters' death years moved by a year or two from report to report. The case was built in the press before it was built in court.
Ed Gein’s case went the other way: the question was not how many counts but whether he could be tried at all. He was arrested at Plainfield, Wisconsin, on November 16, 1957. He admitted two killings, those of Mary Hogan, 54, in December 1954, and of Bernice Worden, 58, at Plainfield in 1957, but he was charged with one count of first-degree murder only, that of Bernice Worden, in Waushara County. He was never charged in Mary Hogan’s death. In January 1958 he was ruled unfit for trial and committed to Central State Hospital at Waupun. A newspaper headline in January 1968, in the Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, reported that the "alleged Plainfield slayer" had been judged competent and able to be tried. At a bench trial in November 1968 he was convicted of first-degree murder and judged insane at the time of the crime, and he was recommitted. He was moved to the Mendota Mental Health Institute in Madison and died there on July 26, 1984, aged 77. United Press International headed its 1982 retelling "The tale of 'Psycho' killer Ed Gein."
Harvey Glatman’s case ended in a courtroom without a trial. Arrested in Orange County, California, on October 27, 1958, after a woman he had approached survived, he confessed on recorded statements to killing three women: Judy Dull in 1957, Shirley Bridgeford in March 1958 and Ruth Mercado in July 1958. He was indicted in San Diego County for the last two. He pleaded guilty to both and waived a jury on the degree of the crimes and the penalty. A psychiatrist appointed by the court reported that he was sane and able to cooperate with his lawyer, and before the confessions were admitted, the prosecution showed that no reward or immunity had been promised and no force used. Judge John A. Hewicker ruled both murders first degree and fixed the penalty at death in December 1958. Judy Dull’s death was heard as evidence at the hearing on degree and penalty, and the Supreme Court of California held that the evidence was properly before the judge; he was never tried for it. The state Supreme Court affirmed the judgment on June 5, 1959, calling the evidence overwhelming on both counts, and he was executed at San Quentin on September 18, 1959, according to the Washington Examiner; the historian Harold Schechter gives September 19. In 2009, after a new identification in a 1954 Colorado case, a lead investigator with the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office put forward Glatman as a suspect in that death too. He was never charged, and he never confessed to it.
John Straffen’s file shows how a single finding could change what later juries were told. In 1951, Reuters reported in 2007, he was ruled unfit to stand trial over the deaths of two girls in Bath, and he was committed to Broadmoor. Straffen was not tried or convicted for either death. In 1952 he escaped from Broadmoor, and while he was out a five-year-old girl was killed. Reuters stated that he killed her after escaping from the hospital.
This time he stood trial. The prosecution put before the jury what he had said at Broadmoor and evidence about the deaths in Bath. The Court of Criminal Appeal, sitting as Slade, Devlin and Gorman JJ, dismissed his appeal in a judgment reported as R v Straffen [1952] 2 QB 911, which Swarb’s legal digest dates August 20, 1952. It held that the Judges' Rules governed statements to the police, not statements made elsewhere, and it allowed the Bath evidence because Straffen had admitted the earlier deaths while denying the later one. The Australian Law Reform Commission used the case as the opening example of its report on tendency and coincidence evidence, writing that the earlier deaths showed a tendency to kill in a particular manner and that, with his presence nearby, the similarities pointed to him. The lawyer Stefano Filletti described the earlier killings as bearing "the accused’s signature." According to Swarb, the Court of Appeal cited the case in 2003 and the House of Lords in 2005.
Straffen was sentenced to death, and the Home Secretary commuted the sentence to life imprisonment, citing his mental state, Reuters reported. He died on November 19, 2007, aged 77, after 55 years in custody, longer than any other prisoner in Britain at the time. His escape also changed the area around the hospital: the warning sirens installed around Broadmoor were still sounding in weekly tests in 2014, according to a report to Wokingham Borough Council.
In Sydney, the police case was larger than the prosecution. Caroline Grills, known to her extended family as "Aunty Carrie," was arrested on May 11, 1953, and charged with attempting to murder her sister-in-law and the sister-in-law’s daughter, both of Redfern, who recovered. The investigation widened after her arrest: she was charged with four murders and one more attempted murder. All the people named in those charges were in-laws, except one, a friend of her mother. Police speculated that the deaths had begun in 1947 with her stepmother’s, a theory Stephen Garton of the Australian Dictionary of Biography describes as speculation. The Crown went ahead only with the original charge of attempting to murder her sister-in-law.
Sydney was, in the Dictionary of Biography’s word, in a panic. From March 1952 until Grills’s arrest there were 46 reported cases of illness traced to a household product then easy to buy, ten of them fatal. In October 1953 Grills said she was innocent and told the court she had "helped to live, not kill." Her manner in the dock, which included laughter at times, strengthened the view of her as a malevolent killer, in Garton’s assessment. On October 15, 1953, she was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to death. The Court of Criminal Appeal dismissed her appeal in April 1954, and the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. She spent about six and a half years at the State Reformatory for Women and died on October 6, 1960. The four murder charges were never tried, and the label that followed her was a count that no court had made. The Conversation’s review of a 2021 book on the period still speaks of "her four victims."
In West Germany the court’s response to Heinrich Pommerenke was the longest sentence it could give. Born in 1937 near Rostock in Mecklenburg, he moved to the Federal Republic in 1953. In October 1960 the regional court at Freiburg convicted him of four murders and twelve attempted murders, with other charges including bodily harm and robbery, 27 serious crimes in all according to der Freitag. The victims in 1959 were four women and girls in Baden, aged 18, 21 and 16 where the press gave ages. The court gave him six terms of life imprisonment plus 15 years; a University of Tübingen radio feature expressed that as 165 years, the strictest sentence a West German court had handed down. He was arrested in Hornberg in the Black Forest on June 19, 1959. German newspapers had called him "das Ungeheuer vom Schwarzwald," roughly "the beast of the Black Forest."
The chief prosecutor’s closing image became the line most often quoted from the case: nine gates would close behind Pommerenke, gates he would never pass through again, and he would go into "Dante’s Ninth Hell," as dpa reported it. At the trial, according to the taz, Pommerenke told the court: "Vor Ihnen sitzt kein Mensch, sondern der Teufel," that no man but the devil sat before them; dpa attributed the words to his confession. A claim made at the trial tied one killing to a showing of the film The Ten Commandments, and the journalist Thomas Staisch tested it for his book and, der Freitag reported, established that no cinema was showing the film on the day in question. Der Freitag noted that most people serving life for murder in Germany were released after about 15 years. Pommerenke was not. His sentence was considered served by 2001; in 2004 experts judged release inappropriate; the taz called the arrangement of therapy and prognosis a vicious circle, since the justice ministry said therapy could not begin without a positive social prognosis and a psychiatrist said a prognosis could only follow therapy. He died in the prison hospital at Hohenasperg in December 2008 after 49 years in custody, which dpa and the taz both described as the longest term of any prisoner in Germany.
In Austria the case of Max Gufler was a political event before it was a trial. A salesman from St. Pölten, 48 in 1958 according to the magazine MFG, he was questioned by the police on October 31, 1958, at the request of the Carinthian gendarmerie, and arrested on November 2 on a warrant from the Klagenfurt regional court. The inquiry had begun with a letter to a missing woman’s former husband that said she had died in a car accident; the police could find no record of any such accident. On November 6 the St. Pöltner Zeitung asked on its front page whether Max Gufler was a mass murderer. One of the officers, Johann Haiden, told MFG it was the first murder case in Austrian criminal history to cross the boundaries of the federal states.
Within weeks the custody had become a parliamentary question. On November 18, 1958, the Vienna daily Neues Österreich reported that Gufler had been allowed to read about his own case. On November 20 the deputies Hetzenauer, Kranzlmayr, Glaser and Hofeneder put a question to the Justice Minister: his cellmate, held for a minor offense, had permission to read newspapers, and Gufler had read a long report on the investigation that told him which murders could not yet be proved and which interrogation methods were planned. After that, the deputies wrote, he partly withdrew his confessions to four murders and blamed two unknown men. The failures, they said, had set the inquiry back by weeks or perhaps months. The Justice Ministry’s answer to a related question followed on November 21.
His trial in Vienna began in April 1961 and drew large crowds. The jury convicted him of four murders and two attempted murders, out of seven murders charged, and sentenced him to life imprisonment, with a dark cell on each anniversary of the killings. He denied the killings to the end. The Austrian press called him Blaubart, Bluebeard, and in St. Pölten he is still remembered by that name. He died of stomach cancer in Stein prison in 1966.
In Poland the courts of the decade tried two men whose records ran back before the war’s end, and in both cases the sentence was carried out.
Władysław Mazurkiewicz was a gambler and man about town in Kraków, born there in 1911, whom the city called "Piękny Władzio," handsome Władzio, and whom the press, once the case broke, called "elegancki morderca," the elegant murderer. He dressed with care, drove his own car, played bridge well and, after the war, worked as a driving instructor and as an expert on traffic accidents for the courts. In 1943, 1945, 1946 and 1955, a court ruled, he robbed and killed six people, and he tried to kill two others, both of whom lived.
The case broke in the autumn of 1955. A Warsaw trader whom Mazurkiewicz had harmed survived, and when he went to a hospital with headaches, doctors identified the cause and told the militia, which opened an investigation on October 3, 1955. A wanted notice was issued on October 12, and Mazurkiewicz was detained on November 1. He denied everything at first. RMF FM, drawing on the writer Cezary Łazarewicz, reports that he confessed in March and April 1956, after his wife and half-sister were arrested and threatened with charges of complicity and investigators threatened his sick father. Histmag reports that investigators first drew up just over 30 charges, most of which were dropped for lack of evidence; the indictment that went to court had eight, six of murder and two of attempted murder. Most of the confessed crimes had no supporting evidence beyond his own statements, according to RMF FM, so the confession became the backbone of the indictment.
An earlier inquiry had gone nowhere. After the death of a man named Tomaszewski in 1945, villagers wrote down the registration of a car, and it belonged to Mazurkiewicz. Tygodnik Powszechny reports that he escaped through contacts among Kraków militia officers and prosecutors and gave a lavish reception for those who had helped. Magazyn TVN24 reports that the prosecutor on the case was a friend of Mazurkiewicz and of his lawyer. The trial ran from August 6 to 30, 1956, in the Voivodeship Court in Kraków and filled the city’s largest courtroom, with crowds outside. He was sentenced to death on August 30, 1956, and executed at Montelupich prison in Kraków in January 1957 (January 29, according to most accounts; Focus gives January 27). Rumor put his victims at about thirty, and stories that he had worked for the Gestapo and later for the communist security police followed him afterward, a claim for which historians at the Institute of National Remembrance have reported finding nothing in the files. A feature film about the case, titled Śpij kochanie, was filmed in Kraków in 2016 and 2017.
Stanisław Modzelewski’s file runs from the 1950s into the next decade. A driver born in 1929 near Łomża, he served in the army at Gałkówek, near Łódź, and six women and girls died in the villages around it between July 1952 and August 1956, ranging from a teenager to a woman of 67. The Polish press called him the "wampir z Gałkówka," the vampire of Gałkówek. Ewa Gruza of the University of Warsaw notes in a study of the men the press has labelled "vampires" that the nickname was attached by journalists to a series of killers named after the places where they struck. Survivors described a man in uniform, and because several of the assaults happened close to the railway, the authorities concluded that the killer was an employee of the state railways, PKP. The search for a railway worker led nowhere, and in 1957 the prosecutor’s office in Łódź closed the investigation.
It reopened ten years later. On September 14, 1967, Maria Gałecka, 87, died in Warsaw; her daughter told the militia that her mother had quarreled with a neighbor who had threatened to kill her. That neighbor was Modzelewski. He was arrested on September 24, 1967, denied everything at first, then admitted her death, and finally confessed to eight killings. On February 5, 1969, the Voivodeship Court in Łódź sentenced him to death for seven murders and for attempted murders. The Supreme Court refused further psychiatric and sexology experts on July 4, 1969, and upheld the sentence on July 7; the Council of State did not grant clemency; he was executed in Warsaw in November 1969. The accounts disagree on how many women survived assaults, six in two reports and four in the charge as Gruza sets it out and in Super Express, and on small points of dates and spelling. Super Express listed him in 2014 among the serial killers of postwar Poland, and in 2023 and 2024 Super Express and Radio ESKA in Łódź marked the anniversary of his sentence with retellings.
Hubert Pilčík is the one subject of the twelve who never reached a courtroom. A locksmith at the Škoda works near Pilsen, a herbalist and a keen walker, he was known in the village of Senec as "Strýček," Uncle. After the communist takeover of February 1948, Seznam Zprávy reports, leaving the country without permission became a serious crime, and about 25,000 people left in the three years that followed. Pilčík offered to guide people over the border into West Germany for a price. Investigators concluded that those who paid him did not reach the West, and they held him responsible for five murders.
Two deaths came to light in 1951 in the Pilsen region: that of a retired army officer, Emanuel Balley, in the spring, and that of his daughter, Renata Balleyová, in July. A twelve-year-old girl who was to have traveled with them survived. Letters in her hand had kept arriving for her relatives, saying she was safe in the West; the Police Museum says Pilčík made her write them so that the family and others would go on trusting him. Detectives arrested him in early September 1951. The quantity of property seized convinced them that the five deaths they could prove were only part of the story, and investigators' estimates, reported in 2026, ran to 30 or 40 victims. Radio Prague International reported that only two of the deaths were ever confirmed, and Seznam Zprávy reports that the investigation file has not survived.
He did not come to trial. On the night of September 9, 1951, days after his arrest, he died in his cell, and the death was officially recorded as a death by suicide. Seznam Zprávy reports that he was supposed to be under close guard, that documents from the period show he was beaten repeatedly during interrogation, and that the official account has been questioned. His wife was sentenced to five years in prison and ten years' loss of civil rights; other members of the group received prison terms. In the early 1990s, during the rehabilitation proceedings that re-examined communist-era political convictions, unauthorized departure from the country under the 1948 law was treated as a political offense, and the whole group was rehabilitated, an outcome Seznam Zprávy points out came even though its members had committed ordinary crimes. The case inspired an episode of the Czechoslovak television series Thirty Cases of Major Zeman, and a 2026 feature in Seznam Zprávy carries a headline calling him "the real Beast."
Lay the twelve files side by side. Nine of the twelve were convicted of murder: Christie, Straffen, Doss by plea, Lyles, Glatman by plea, Pommerenke, Gufler, Modzelewski and Mazurkiewicz. Grills was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to death for it. Gein was judged insane at the time of the crime. Pilčík died before trial. Christie, Glatman, Mazurkiewicz and Modzelewski were executed. Straffen and Grills were sentenced to death and reprieved; Lyles was sentenced to death and the sentence was never carried out; Doss, whom the county attorney wanted sentenced to death, received life, as did Pommerenke and Gufler. Lyles and Gein ended in state hospitals. The record here is the sentences themselves, and a pardon in 1966.
What none of the courts did was try a case as a series. Even where the confession covered everything, as with Christie, Glatman, Doss, Gufler and Modzelewski, the verdict covered one death or a handful. The remaining deaths lived on as evidence of plan or tendency, as with Lyles and Straffen, or as charges that were filed and left, as with Doss and Grills, or as figures on a police estimate, as with Pilčík and Mazurkiewicz.
The press supplied the missing category in nicknames. Germany had the beast of the Black Forest; Austria had Bluebeard; Poland had the vampire of Gałkówek and the elegant murderer, handsome Władzio; Czechoslovakia had Uncle, and later, on television, a Beast; the United States had Grandma Doss; Australia had Aunty Carrie; Wisconsin, in 1968, had an alleged slayer. Some labels were used while the case was live, and some, such as Giggling Granny and the television Beast, came decades afterward. They report how the public saw the person more than what a court decided.
The media also shaped the cases beyond the headlines. Doss appeared before television cameras during her questioning. Gufler read about his own case in his cell. A film was cited at Pommerenke’s trial as a trigger for a killing, and a journalist later tested the claim. And the long afterlife of the files, the film about Mazurkiewicz, the television episode about Pilčík, the "Psycho" headline above Gein, rested on exactly the material that no court tested. The 1950s counted deaths in confessions and charge sheets and then sentenced for one of them.
• 1943 to 1955: the period of the six murders for which Władysław Mazurkiewicz was convicted in Kraków.
• September 15, 1945: Frank Harrelson dies in Jacksonville, Alabama; a murder warrant over his death is filed against Nannie Doss in December 1954.
• January 1950: Timothy Evans is convicted in London on evidence given by John Christie; he is executed in March 1950.
• 1951: John Straffen is ruled unfit to plead over two deaths in Bath and committed to Broadmoor.
• September 9, 1951: Hubert Pilčík dies in his cell near Pilsen, days after his arrest.
• July 1952: Stanisław Modzelewski’s first recorded killing near Gałkówek; the sixth follows in August 1956.
• 1952: Straffen escapes from Broadmoor, is convicted of murder and sentenced to death; the Court of Criminal Appeal dismisses his appeal on August 20, 1952.
• May 11, 1953: Caroline Grills is arrested in Sydney.
• June 25, 1953: Christie is convicted of the murder of his wife; he is executed on July 15, 1953.
• October 15, 1953: Grills is convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to death.
• November 1954: Nannie Doss is arrested in Tulsa and confesses.
• December 8, 1954: Mary Hogan dies in the Bancroft area of Wisconsin.
• May 1955 and June 2, 1955: Doss pleads guilty in Tulsa County and receives a life sentence.
• August 6 to 30, 1956: Mazurkiewicz is tried in Kraków and sentenced to death; he is executed in January 1957.
• November 16, 1957: Ed Gein is arrested at Plainfield, Wisconsin; in January 1958 he is ruled unfit for trial.
• April 5, 1958: Marcia Elaine Lyles dies in Macon; her mother is arrested in May and convicted in the fall.
• October 27, 1958: Harvey Glatman is arrested in Orange County, California.
• October 31 and November 2, 1958: Max Gufler is questioned and then arrested in St. Pölten.
• December 1958: Glatman is sentenced to death in San Diego County.
• June 19, 1959: Heinrich Pommerenke is arrested in Hornberg.
• July 8, 1959: the Supreme Court of Georgia upholds Lyles’s conviction.
• September 18, 1959: Glatman is executed at San Quentin.
• October 1960: Pommerenke is sentenced at Freiburg; Grills dies in Sydney on October 6, 1960.
• April 1961: Gufler’s trial opens in Vienna.
• October 18, 1966: Timothy Evans receives a free pardon.
• September 24, 1967: Modzelewski is arrested in Poland; he is sentenced to death in Łódź on February 5, 1969, and executed in November 1969.
• November 1968: Gein is tried and judged insane at the time of the crime; he dies on July 26, 1984.
• November 19, 2007: Straffen dies after 55 years in custody.
• December 2008: Pommerenke dies at Hohenasperg after 49 years in custody.