In the spring of 2000 a woman in Michigan opened a handwritten letter from her daughter. The envelope was postmarked in Kansas City on March 6. That was wrong, and she knew it. Suzette Trouten, 27, had gone to Kansas the month before for a job that paid $60,000 a year, caring for an elderly man and traveling overseas with his employer, and by the date on that postmark she was supposed to be out of the country. The employer, John E. Robinson Sr., told the mother that Suzette had changed her mind about the job and left with another man. Typed letters followed, postmarked in San Jose and in Veracruz, then an email on March 24 saying that Suzette had set off on her trip. The mother and an aunt did not believe any of it.
Nothing in the letter was true, and the way it reached her was the point. Robinson had spent years learning that a person who has dropped out of a life can be kept alive on paper, in a mailbox, in an inbox, long enough for the people who love her to stop pressing. The internet did not teach him the trick. It gave him a wider pool to fish in and a cheaper way to keep up the fiction. The same pattern runs through the cases below, which span more than two decades and four continents. A stranger offers companionship, work, marriage, a shared death or a notoriety no one else can supply. A screen name stands in for a face. And when investigators finally reach the person behind it, the trail they follow is almost always digital: an email, a rental contract, a blog, a laptop, a post under a real name.
None of these offenders was the first to use a newspaper personal ad or a poste restante box, and nothing here shows the internet made anyone a killer. What changes is the route in and the record left behind. In several of these cases that record decided the outcome. In one it sat unread on a seized laptop for ten months while a man went on to kill again.
Robinson was 56 when he was arrested in Olathe, Kansas, on June 2, 2000. To his neighbors he was a family man who enjoyed his grandchildren. To courts in two states he was a man with a long history of embezzlement and theft, and a fraud record that went back to 1969. His arrest on theft and other charges was followed on June 13, 2000, by capital murder charges.
His method of reaching women changed with the decade. In the spring of 1994 Sheila Faith, 45, a widow who had moved with her teenage daughter Debbie to Pueblo, Colorado, after her husband’s death, met a man called "John" through a personal ad and set out with her daughter to visit him. The two lived on about $1,200 a month in Social Security benefits. Within weeks, according to the Kansas Supreme Court, the mailing address for those checks had been changed to a private mailbox in Olathe that Robinson had rented in their names, and from July 1994 the checks were deposited into his accounts. Faith’s sisters received typed letters whose signatures they doubted; one was postmarked in Canada. In August 1994 a disability form purportedly signed by Sheila arrived with a medical report that appeared to carry the signature of a prison physician, who later said he had never treated Debbie. The Associated Press reported that the two were probably killed that summer.
By the end of the decade the same approach had moved online. Izabela Lewicka, born in Poland and raised in Indiana, began studying fine arts at Purdue University in the fall of 1996. A friend from a student group told the Kansas jury that Lewicka had met "John" online and had agreed to illustrate a manuscript for him. She told her parents she had an internship in Kansas with a small publisher and would be back for her sophomore year. She moved to Kansas on June 8, 1997, and did not return. Robinson leased a mailbox in her name and set up apartments for her, telling landlords she was a graphics employee and, at one point, his adopted daughter. In August 1999 her parents drove to the Overland Park address they had been given and came upon a private mailbox company. Her father emailed her, and the reply that jurors later saw said she was happy and well, had a wonderful job and a man who loved her, and wanted to be left alone. A $500 check drawn on her account was made out on September 1, 1999. In April 2000 her parents received emails from her account describing travels in China. She was 21.
Trouten’s contact with Robinson came through websites, where, prosecutors said, he used a screen name. She told her mother about the $60,000 offer and about the "Papa John" she would be caring for. She moved in February 2000 and by early March her family was reading letters that the state said he had written for her.
The jury of six men and six women that heard the case in Olathe in the fall of 2002 saw the contents of a storage unit he rented: driver’s licenses and Social Security cards belonging to the women, a written contract, and cards already signed and addressed that the state said he meant to mail to their families. The defense never conceded guilt and suggested in closing that others might have been involved. On October 29, 2002, the jury convicted Robinson on all six counts it had been given, including the aggravated kidnapping and capital murder of Trouten and the capital murder of Lewicka. A Kansas judge sentenced him to death in January 2003.
In October 2003, in Cass County, Missouri, Robinson pleaded guilty to the first-degree murders of Beverly Bonner, Sheila Faith, Debbie Faith, Paula Godfrey and Catherine Clampitt, and received life without parole on each count, a plea that took the death penalty off the table in that state. On November 6, 2015, the Kansas Supreme Court affirmed one capital murder conviction, that of Trouten, together with the death sentence, and reversed two others, the capital murder conviction for Lewicka and the first-degree murder conviction for Lisa Stasi, because the counts duplicated the single charge of a common scheme. The reversal was a matter of how the case had been charged. It was not a finding that either woman had come to no harm. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the case in October 2016.
Governor Kelly denied clemency on June 18, 2026. On September 15, 2026, the Kansas Supreme Court heard his post-conviction appeal. His lawyer, Madeline Cohen, argued that his trial attorneys had not understood how Kansas jurors weigh a death sentence after a guilty verdict and had not challenged the single aggravating factor, the common scheme. She acknowledged that he was unlikely to be acquitted of murder and argued that he might have avoided a death sentence. The state answered that the defense team had been experienced and that Robinson had not shown a reasonable probability of a different result. The court announced no decision that day. As of mid-September 2026 he was held at the El Dorado Correctional Facility.
Between February and June 2005, three young people in the Osaka area who had written on an online forum about suicide agreed to meet a man who said he wanted to die alongside them. Each had been treated for depression. The man, Hiroshi Maeue, a temp agency worker from Sakai in Osaka Prefecture, did not intend to die. The Osaka District Court later held that he planned each meeting in advance, bought what he needed and reserved a rental car before he met the person who had answered him.
The court’s judgment traced how he arrived at this. He had been receiving psychiatric treatment since 1995 and had been diagnosed with a dissociative disorder. He worked at a post office from April 1993 until February 1995, when an incident with a colleague led to his dismissal; it did not result in a prosecution. After that he moved between jobs, driving a taxi among them, and from December 1999 until February 2005 he had a steady girlfriend whom he planned to marry. The judgment records that he then looked for another way to act on his urges and turned to the internet, where people who wanted to die were posting. In December 2004, after reading a post by someone describing a failed attempt, he wrote proposing that they die together. That false offer became his method.
The first victim was Michiko Nagamoto, 25. According to United Press International, citing Japanese press accounts, the two exchanged more than 20 emails over several months before they met, and police sources said he never meant to take his own life. He killed her in Kawachinagano on February 19, 2005. The court noted that he afterward followed news reports of the case.
The second was a 14-year-old boy from Kobe, an only son whose parents, the court said, loved him deeply. In his third year of junior high school the boy had developed depression and was seeing a psychiatrist. Between May 14 and May 20, 2005, Maeue wrote to him from internet cafes in Sakai, concealing his purpose; contact began only about three days before they met. He was killed on May 21, 2005, in Izumi. Maeue was convicted of the boy’s murder together with other charges.
The third was a 21-year-old university student, the eldest of four brothers, who lived on his own and paid his way with a scholarship and part-time work. After being held back a year he had developed depression and social anxiety and had begun treatment in January 2005. He and Maeue had been in contact for about five days when he was killed on June 10, 2005, in Kawachinagano.
The investigation turned on the same medium. Police traced Maeue through the death of Nagamoto: United Press International reported in August 2005 that emails and a rental car contract led investigators to him. He was arrested on August 5, 2005. According to the court, he admitted that killing within hours of questioning and then prepared a written confession to the deaths of the boy and the student, which police had not yet connected to him. The court treated that account as a voluntary surrender, known in Japanese law as jishu, for those two counts.
At trial, the defense argued that his mental condition should lessen his responsibility. A forensic psychiatrist who examined him, reviewed his records and ran tests that included brain imaging detected no psychosis, epilepsy or schizophrenia, and diagnosed antisocial personality disorder and two further disorders, none of which, the psychiatrist concluded, took from him the ability to tell right from wrong or to control his conduct. The court agreed. It pointed to his planning, his efforts to hide evidence and his ordinary daily life between the killings, and held that he kept "sufficient capacity to understand and control his conduct." It called the killings "cold and extraordinarily cruel," noted that each victim had been in a fragile state of mind when writing to the forum and might have recovered, and recorded that every family had asked for the death penalty. On March 28, 2007, it sentenced him to death. He withdrew his appeal, and he was executed at the Osaka Detention Center on July 28, 2009, the same day as two other prisoners, according to Agence France-Presse.
Huang Yong was a farmer in Pingyu County, in the Zhumadian area of Henan Province in central China. Between September 2001 and November 2003, according to the findings reported after his trial, 18 young people fell victim to him. Seventeen died. One survived, seriously hurt. People’s Daily Online, reporting on the day of the verdict, described the dead as high school students, and a later review in the same paper said most of the victims were students. They were teenagers and young men whom he met, according to the case summary, at internet cafes, game arcades and video halls in the county, the new public spaces of the early 2000s where a stranger with a few hours of conversation could be taken for a friend.
The killings went undetected until November 2003, when the young man who survived reported to police. People’s Daily Online gave November 21, 2003, as the date of Huang’s arrest. A police record from Pingyu, drawn up that month and quoted by the Beijing Youth Daily the following spring, has him telling the survivor that he was a killer and had already killed more than 20 people. The court did not charge more than 17.
Huang was tried at first instance on December 9, 2003. He was 29. The court convicted him of intentional homicide, sentenced him to death and deprived him of his political rights for life. He did not appeal. The reported findings on motive were that violent films had shaped him since childhood and that he wanted to become a professional killer; the court called the crimes extremely vicious and cruel, with a very bad effect on society. After the Henan Higher People’s Court reviewed the sentence, he was executed on December 26, 2003.
The case did not close with the execution. In March and April 2004, relatives of victims asked whether the real toll was higher than the 17 announced. County police were reported in November 2003 to have given a figure of 23 dead, 18 of them students. DNA tests carried out by the Ministry of Public Security tied further evidence recovered in Pingyu to two young people already on the list, Han Peng and Zhai Pengchao, rather than to anyone new. Police acknowledged failings in the original investigation, and the head of the police technical unit responsible was removed from his post, the Beijing Youth Daily reported on April 23, 2004. Only those two of the dead have been named publicly. The others stayed anonymous.
Kanae Kijima was sentenced to death on April 13, 2012, by a lay judge panel at the Saitama District Court, north of Tokyo. The court convicted her of murdering three men she had met through internet marriage-hunting and dating sites in 2009, and of seven lesser counts of fraud and theft: Takao Terada, 53, in Tokyo in January; Kenzo Ando, 80, in Chiba Prefecture in May; and Yoshiyuki Oide, 41, in Saitama Prefecture in August. Prosecutors said she had taken money from the men on the promise of marriage and killed them so they could not ask for it back. At first the deaths were not treated as murders.
There was no confession, no witness to the deaths and no direct physical link between Kijima and the act of killing. She has denied the murders from the start. The case rested on circumstantial evidence: her purchases, the money that moved from the men to her, and the fact that she had been with each man shortly before he died. The trial lasted 100 days, the longest in Japan’s lay judge system up to then. The Tokyo High Court upheld the sentence on March 12, 2014, and the Supreme Court’s Second Petty Bench rejected her last appeal on April 14, 2017, holding that she had killed all three men. She filed an objection, and the sentence became final in May 2017. Her defense team maintained that she was innocent and that the men had probably taken their own lives, Agence France-Presse reported, citing NHK.
Kijima was born in 1974 in Hokkaido and grew up in Betsukai, a dairy town in the island’s far east. She went to Tokyo at about 18. According to an account drawn from the Bessatsu Takarajima book on death row prisoners, she later worked at a dating club and entered paid arrangements with wealthy men, and at 28 she was arrested for fraud involving internet auctions, an early sign of a pattern of deceiving people online. In 2008 and 2009, the same account says, she used a marriage-hunting website to approach more than 20 single men with offers of marriage and to take their money. The journalist Taeko Ishii, who reconstructed her life in a long Weekly Bunshun series in 2024 and 2025, wrote that she posted blog entries boasting of a lavish life paid for by money she obtained from men. The indictments, Ishii noted, contained more fraud counts than murder counts, with theft at the core of the case.
The record the men left was also online. Oide, an office worker from Chiyoda Ward in central Tokyo, built plastic model tanks and kept a website about them, along with a personal blog. He met Kijima through a matching site and believed they would marry. Ishii reported that she asked him to help with her education costs and that he gave her 4.7 million yen; Agence France-Presse reported a transfer of 5 million yen shortly before his death. On August 5, 2009, about 20 hours before his death was discovered, he wrote on the blog that he had met his partner’s family and was setting off on a three-day trip with her before the wedding. He had bought sweets for her in Akihabara, he wrote. After her re-arrest on February 1, 2010, on suspicion of murdering Oide, J-CAST News reported that physical evidence was scarce and that his own posts about the planned marriage, together with medical findings, had led investigators to conclude that he had been killed. His blog stayed online and drew more than 1,800 comments, most of them messages of mourning.
Other men connected with her also died, and no one was charged over those deaths. A 70-year-old man in Matsudo, Chiba Prefecture, who had given her more than 70 million yen, died in 2007, according to the Takarajima account. Prosecutors were reported by Agence France-Presse in 2012 to suspect her in as many as five more deaths. They remain suspicions and are not part of her convictions.
Much of the Japanese coverage dwelt on her appearance and her weight, and the press called the case the "Konkatsu Killer" case, after the word for marriage hunting. The analyst Philip Brasor argued in 2012 that heavy pretrial coverage had made the public likely to assume her guilt and had in effect shifted the burden of proof to the defense. An NHK special that April assembled six mock lay judges, who concluded that the evidence was weak but that the motive was easy to believe. One of the real lay judges told reporters it had been "difficult to make a clear judgment" but that there was "no option but to convict." From the Tokyo Detention House Kijima has written a blog, magazine essays and a novel. Shukan Josei reported in November 2024 that she was still held there.
Zhou Youping, born in 1972 in Xiangxiang, Hunan Province, earned his living as a singer, moving from one song hall to the next in Changsha, the provincial capital. Between October 11 and November 26, 2009, Changsha police recorded the deaths of six men on separate dates in different parts of the city. The men were in their twenties to forties, and most came from northern China. Investigators came to see the six deaths as one series, and to see one man as the person all six had in common.
From September 2009, according to reports published in 2014, Zhou posted repeatedly on a website, looking for men from northern China. The posts drew many replies. The Xiaoxiang Morning Post reported that most of the people in the case had met through the same online chat room, which had a large following and had been running for a long time. What tied the deaths together, the paper said, was the manner in which each man died and the fact that each had been in contact with the same person. Police traced the six to Zhou, and the website and its chat room turned out to be the thread running through the men who had answered him.
The arrest itself came on another matter. On November 28, 2009, two days after the last two deaths, Zhou was detained in Changsha on suspicion of robbery. In custody he confessed to the deaths and gave investigators a detailed account of each meeting. The paper reported that the results of the investigation shocked the police. Not every man who answered his posts died: the paper counted two or three who survived, and PinkNews, citing Shanghai Daily, reported in April 2010 that two intended victims had been spared. That report, on April 22, 2010, was the first in the foreign press to say that a bar singer in Hunan had been arrested over the deaths of six men he met through websites.
The Changsha Intermediate People’s Court heard the case on October 28, 2010, and on March 29, 2011, sentenced Zhou to death with lifelong deprivation of political rights, finding him responsible for all six deaths. On appeal the Hunan Higher People’s Court upheld the conviction on two of the six deaths and held that the evidence was insufficient for the other four. Which two has not been reported. The court of first instance had held that Zhou knew the risk of death in what the men had agreed to do and did not save them. The Supreme People’s Court approved the death sentence, and he was executed in Changsha on August 29, 2014, as the Chinese press reported on September 16 of that year.
Chinese outlets covered the case in 2010 and again in 2014, and the headlines leaned on its sexual aspect. Commentators quoted by the Xiaoxiang Morning Post used it to warn of the dangers of meeting strangers through the internet. Two media researchers said that a crime of this kind in an inland city should prompt a public warning and pointed to the chat room through which most of the men had met. A member of the Hunan Mental Health Association described the conduct as a psychological disorder with no rational basis.
Between November 2010 and April 2011, a series of night assaults on people walking in Akademgorodok, the scientific district of Irkutsk in eastern Siberia, left six people dead and about ten more injured. The dead included a 12-year-old boy, Danil Semyonov, a 69-year-old researcher from one of the district’s institutes, Olga Pirog, and four other people. Residents formed patrols. Police searched for an outsider.
The offenders were two local schoolmates and neighbors, Artyom Anoufriev, born in 1992, and Nikita Lytkin, born in 1993, and they had spent a good part of their adolescence on the internet. According to the historian Alexander Kostrov of Irkutsk State University, who testified for the prosecution, they first tried to join the city’s skinheads, then moved to a neo-Nazi current and then to the "misanthropes," whose followers profess hatred of all humanity and treat killing as central to their ideas. Investigators said the two regarded themselves as followers of an ideology they had taken from social networks. They studied the lives of Andrei Chikatilo and Alexander Pichushkin, and they followed closely the 2010 trial in Irkutsk of Konstantin Shumkov, leader of a gang that had killed five homeless people.
They posted under their real names. Prosecutors said Anoufriev moderated a VKontakte group whose name translates as "We are gods, we decide who lives and who dies," and another page was named after Pichushkin. Rossiyskaya Gazeta reported that online groups linked to the pair had dozens of members across Russia, and that a social media campaign in their support appeared after their arrest. A court report dated the formation of their own group to October 2010, when, the prosecution said, they began planning killings.
The first offense known to investigators came on November 14, 2010. Anastasia Markovskaya, 18, was hurt and survived. Police declined to open a criminal case because nothing had been taken. She later wrote about the experience on the internet and, according to Rossiyskaya Gazeta, the two contacted her to ask how she had felt.
Captain Yevgeny Karchevsky, the senior investigator on the case, told the Irkutsky Reporter in October 2011 that the pair were "just normal kids" who wanted attention and to be valued as they were. Lytkin, he said, had told him he would not have done it alone because it would not have been interesting. By then investigators attributed 16 offenses between November 2010 and April 2011 to the two, six of them fatal, along with robberies of a woman’s bag and two mobile phones. More than 40 forensic examinations had been carried out and more than 60 witnesses questioned.
It was a family, not a detective, who ended it. In early April 2011 a composite sketch was shown to staff at the institute where Lytkin’s grandmother worked. She recognized a likeness and sent her son, Lytkin’s uncle, to her grandson’s apartment. The uncle had lent Lytkin a digital video camera, and when he took it back he came across a recording on it that he recognized as evidence of a killing. Reports describe the recording as on the camera’s memory card, on a flash drive or on a computer. Rossiyskaya Gazeta reported that the family held a council and decided to hand him over. On the evening of Tuesday, April 5, the uncle took the recording to the local police post, where the district officer, Maksim Khomyak, watched the clip and raised the alarm. The two were arrested that night and the next in Akademgorodok.
On April 2, 2013, the Irkutsk Regional Court convicted both men of six murders, nine attempted murders, three robberies, desecration of a body and creating an extremist community; ideological hatred was charged as the motive. Anoufriev admitted only part of the charges and denied the rest. He received life imprisonment in a special-regime colony, upheld by the Supreme Court of Russia in October 2013. Lytkin, who was a minor for most of the period, received 24 years, cut on appeal to 20, after the Supreme Court released him from punishment on the extremist-community count because the limitation period had run. RIA Novosti reported the reduction on October 9, 2013. He died on November 30, 2021, in a hospital in Angarsk, Meduza and Mediazona reported. Anoufriev has been held at the Vologodsky Pyatak colony on Ognenny Island; Novaya Gazeta Europe described him there in September 2023.
The investigators' main difficulty, Karchevsky said in a later interview, was proving the ideological motive and the extremist community, which had no precedent in the region. The defendants and their families pointed variously to hatred of people without housing, nationalism, Satanism, the internet and television. Lenta.ru concluded that the real motive appeared to be a wish to kill.
Miranda Barbour was 18 when police in Sunbury, Pennsylvania, charged her in December 2013 with killing Troy LaFerrara, a 42-year-old engineer from Port Trevorton who had answered an online advertisement she placed offering companionship for money. LaFerrara died on November 11, 2013. Her husband of three weeks, Elytte Barbour, was charged with her. Police arrested her on December 3 and him on December 6, after tracing the last call on the victim’s phone to her number. According to the police account, Elytte told investigators the couple had killed LaFerrara because they wanted to kill someone together. Prosecutors sought the death penalty.
After the arrests Elytte Barbour told The Daily Item of Sunbury that his wife regularly hired herself out as a "companion" to men she met through websites, earning between $50 and $850 for dinner or a walk around a mall. The ads, he said, including those on Craigslist, stated that sex was not part of the arrangement. She told police the same thing in outline. The pretrial record showed how far the ad’s footprint reached: her lawyer won approval to hire a computer expert and told WNEP that LaFerrara had used at least eight email addresses.
The case drew national attention twice. The first time was in December 2013, when wire services carried the police account of a newly married couple planning a killing. The second came on February 16, 2014, when Miranda Barbour, held in the county prison, told a reporter for The Daily Item that she had killed at least 22 other people over six years, in Alaska, Texas, North Carolina and California, beginning when she was 13. She said she had stopped counting at 22; asked for an actual number, she said it was under 100. "I don’t care if people believe me," she said, according to the Associated Press account. A sister told the AP she was lying. Police, the FBI and agencies in several states looked into what she said. The district attorney said there was no verification of any of it, and the Alaska State Troopers said they knew of nothing beyond her own comments to the press that linked her to a homicide in their state.
In August 2014 both Barbours pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in LaFerrara’s death, with other charges, under an agreement that took the death penalty off the table. On September 18, 2014, Northumberland County Judge Charles Saylor sentenced each of them to life in prison without parole. She stands convicted of one killing. Her other claims remain claims. In November 2015 Elytte Barbour withdrew a petition to take back his guilty plea.
Stephen Port, a chef who lived in Barking, in east London, killed four young men between June 2014 and September 2015. Anthony Walgate, 23, was a fashion student from Hull. Gabriel Kovari, 22, came from Slovakia. Daniel Whitworth, 21, was a chef from Gravesend, Kent, and Jack Taylor, 25, a forklift driver from Dagenham. Port met each of them through dating websites or apps. In the weeks after his arrest the police linked 18 accounts on 12 apps and websites to him, PinkNews reported. The inquests that followed heard that shortly before he first contacted Walgate, Port had searched online for videos about drugging and for drugs themselves.
For more than a year the Metropolitan Police treated the deaths as separate and non-suspicious. Outside the force, people had begun to see a pattern. PinkNews said it first heard of claims linking the deaths in December 2014 and contacted Scotland Yard early in 2015, and was told the deaths were being treated as separate incidents with nothing suspicious linking them. Peter Tatchell, the human rights campaigner, said he raised concerns about a possible serial killer after the first three deaths. A friend of Kovari’s went to charities, the press and Tatchell because, he told the inquests, "I didn’t trust the police to link it properly."
The first death was the one the 2021 inquests examined most closely. Port had arranged to meet Walgate through a website. He first told officers he did not know Walgate. When that failed he said the young man had taken drugs himself and that he had panicked, because, as the Barking and Dagenham Post reported from the trial, "he’s in my bed, they are going to think I did this to him." He was arrested for perverting the course of justice on June 27, 2014, and released on bail. In March 2015 he was jailed for eight months for lying to police about the death.
The record that mattered was on his computer. Port’s laptop was seized but not sent for forensic analysis for about 10 months. When the material came back in June 2015, the officer who reviewed it reported only selfies, videos and dating messages as relating to Port’s "lifestyle," and did not find the searches. "It was there on his laptop and we should have got it," Detective Sergeant Martin O’Donnell, the senior detective on the case, told the inquests. He called his failure to log an earlier allegation "a terrible mistake." That allegation dated from December 2012, when Port was arrested on suspicion of raping a young man; the case was dropped when the man withdrew his statement. Officers had run a check on Walgate on the Police National Database, but not on Port, and the check would have shown the 2012 allegation and a British Transport Police record from June 2014 of Port at Barking station with another young man who was under the influence of drugs. The Crown Prosecution Service was not told that Port was a suspected sex offender when it ruled out a homicide charge. Requests from borough officers for the Met’s specialist murder teams to take over were turned down. Detective Constable David Parish, who had handled the laptop, said he had spent seven and a half years wishing he had acted differently.
Whitworth and Taylor met Port in September 2014 and September 2015. Whitworth had made contact through a dating website. Taylor met him through an app, and a CCTV still showing Taylor walking beside a tall man at Barking station on September 13, 2015, was later recognized as Port. The duty inspector who attended the following day declared the death "unexplained but non-suspicious." Two detectives who had worked on the earlier deaths attended, but neither told him the cases shared features. He said at the inquests that he did not learn where the earlier deaths had come to light until he saw a graphic at Port’s trial: "I was absolutely flabbergasted."
Port was arrested in October 2015 and charged with the murder of all four. At the Old Bailey on November 23, 2016, a jury convicted him of the murders of Walgate, Kovari, Whitworth and Taylor, and of four counts of rape, four counts of assault by penetration and ten counts of administering a substance with intent against other young men who survived, 22 offenses against 11 men in all. He was acquitted of three counts of rape. On November 25, 2016, Mr. Justice Openshaw ordered that he never be released. Leave to appeal against the murder convictions was refused at the first stage, as reported after an application in 2018.
Five years later, in December 2021, fresh inquests concluded that all four men had been unlawfully killed and that failings in the police investigation probably contributed to the deaths of the last three. The Independent Office for Police Conduct reopened its inquiry, and in November 2023 it told eight current and former officers they were under investigation for possible gross misconduct. The Metropolitan Police later settled civil claims brought by the families of three of the victims.
Richard Choque Flores lived in El Alto, the city beside La Paz in Bolivia. He was convicted in 2015 of the kidnapping and murder of Blanca Rubí Limachi, a 20-year-old university student, killed in 2013 after he contacted her online, and sentenced to 30 years without the right to a pardon, the longest term in Bolivian law. On December 24, 2019, a La Paz judge, Rafael Alcón, granted him 18 months of house arrest. The release rested on a medical report describing incurable illnesses. The conditions it listed were gastritis, an ulcer and diabetes, among others, and Bolivia’s justice minister, Iván Lima, later said none of them put his life at risk.
The supervision that was supposed to accompany the release did not happen, according to Lima. Quarterly checks by a social worker were not carried out, and the file was never sent to the enforcement court in El Alto that had jurisdiction over Choque’s address. The president of Bolivia’s Supreme Court of Justice, Ricardo Torres, told Correo del Sur that Choque had stopped signing the prosecution’s control book by late 2020 and stayed free after the 18 months ran out. Torres said Alcón and two other enforcement judges should have revoked the benefit.
While he was out, two teenage girls from El Alto, Lucy, 17, and Iris Maylin, 15, were killed in 2021. Police traced Choque through online patrols, Voz de América reported. Police said he used fake social media profiles to contact women and girls and posed as a police officer to extort them, and they accused him of extorting about 77 women and girls whom he had contacted online; those allegations were not the subject of separate reported verdicts. He was arrested in La Paz in January 2022; the trafficking prosecutor, Sheila Rodríguez, gave the date as January 20, while the Argentine agency Télam gave January 24. Télam reported that he confessed to killing the two girls. In the weeks that followed, investigators also concluded that his cousin, Fidel Lecón Choque, had been killed.
The release became a national scandal within days. President Luis Arce wrote in a social media post, reported on January 28, 2022, that his government repudiated and condemned the decision of the judge who had freed the offender and demanded an exemplary punishment with the full weight of the law. When the case broke, the investigation file itself could not be located; prosecutors had searched the enforcement courts of both El Alto and La Paz without finding it, and Lima said his ministry’s review had identified further illegal acts, including the loss of the file. Alcón was arrested in late January 2022 when he went to the police anti-violence unit in La Paz to give a statement, and an anti-corruption court soon ordered him held in pretrial detention for six months. He told local reporters that Choque "met certain requirements" and that the measure was only for 18 months. Prosecutors said they would summon the doctor who signed the medical assessment, the two guarantors Choque presented and the social worker responsible for checking on him. A former secretary of Alcón’s court and a social worker were arrested on charges that included breach of duty. In January 2023 prosecutors asked for a 10-year sentence for the former judge, and by February 2025 he had left prison for house detention.
Choque himself was convicted of the femicide of Lucy on March 2, 2022, with a 30-year sentence; of the murder of his cousin in 2022, 30 years; and of the femicide of Iris on September 30, 2022, 30 years. On March 16, 2023, he received a fifth sentence, of 15 years, for human trafficking and other charges involving the two girls. Bolivian law has no cumulative sentences, and a prosecutor said in September 2022 that he must stay in prison until September 2052.
The government created a Commission for the Review of Cases of Rape and Femicide on February 1, 2022, with members from the executive, legislative and judicial branches, and gave it 120 days to review sentences dating back to 2013, Télam reported. Within weeks six convicted people released by three judges had been recaptured, and the Consejo de la Magistratura had ordered the intervention of 18 criminal courts. The case revived a debate over the death penalty, which Bolivia abolished in peacetime in 1997 and in all circumstances in 2013, El Litoral reported; a deputy of the governing party said Choque "should not live any longer." Bolivia’s Catholic bishops called in February 2022 for "a suitable and impartial judicial system that restores confidence and hope," Crux reported. On July 12, 2022, according to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, Arce signed a Law for the Protection of Victims of Femicide, which set prison terms of up to 20 years for judges and prosecutors who favor defendants in femicide, infanticide or rape cases and barred house arrest for such defendants.
Set side by side, the nine cases do not describe a single kind of offender. Robinson wanted money and used a mailbox, aliases and a keyboard to collect it. Kijima treated marriage-hunting websites as a market, and was convicted without a confession. Maeue answered young people who had written on a forum about suicide. Huang’s victims were met in internet cafes, the Irkutsk pair built their following in online groups, and Zhou and Port reached their men in chat rooms and on apps. Barbour’s ad promised company. Choque’s profiles promised a police officer’s authority.
The investigations show the same split. In the cases that went well, the digital trace was the way in: Maeue’s emails and the rental contract that tied them to a man in Osaka, the blog that Oide kept and that 1,800 readers filled with mourning, the video that Lytkin’s uncle carried to a police post. In the case that went worst, the trace was available and unread. A laptop in police hands for ten months held searches that were never read, a jury at the inquests concluded that failings in the investigation probably contributed to three deaths, and an officer told the inquests he had spent seven and a half years wishing he had acted differently.
Several of the claims made at the edges of these stories have not survived scrutiny. Barbour’s 22 killings were never verified; the district attorney said so. Huang’s reported total of more than 20 was never charged. Kijima’s other suspicious cases were never brought to court. In every one of them the internet widened the field of people a single offender could reach, but it was ordinary police work, or an ordinary family’s decision, that closed it.
• 1994: Sheila Faith, 45, meets a man called "John" through a personal ad.
• June 8, 1997: Izabela Lewicka, who had met "John" online, moves to Kansas.
• February 2000: Suzette Trouten moves to Kansas for a job offered to her through websites.
• June 2, 2000: John E. Robinson Sr. arrested in Olathe, Kansas; capital murder charges follow on June 13.
• September 2001: Huang Yong’s first known victim in Pingyu County.
• October 29, 2002: a Kansas jury convicts Robinson. October 2003: he pleads guilty to five Missouri murders.
• November 21, 2003: Huang Yong arrested; sentenced to death December 9; executed December 26.
• December 2004: Hiroshi Maeue sends a message to a poster on an online forum about suicide, proposing they die together.
• February 19 to June 10, 2005: three killings in Osaka Prefecture; Maeue arrested August 5, 2005.
• March 28, 2007: Maeue sentenced to death; executed July 28, 2009.
• January to August 2009: three deaths of men connected to Kanae Kijima; she is re-arrested on suspicion of murder on February 1, 2010.
• October 11 to November 26, 2009: six deaths in Changsha; Zhou Youping detained November 28, 2009.
• November 14, 2010: first known assault by Anoufriev and Lytkin in Akademgorodok; arrested the night of April 5 to 6, 2011.
• March 29, 2011: Zhou sentenced to death; executed August 29, 2014.
• April 13, 2012: Kijima sentenced to death.
• April 2, 2013: Anoufriev and Lytkin convicted in Irkutsk.
• November 11, 2013: Troy LaFerrara dies in Sunbury, Pennsylvania; Miranda and Elytte Barbour arrested in December.
• February 16, 2014: Miranda Barbour tells a reporter she killed 22 others. September 18, 2014: both Barbours sentenced to life without parole.
• June 2014 to September 2015: Stephen Port kills four young men in Barking; arrested in October 2015.
• November 23 to 25, 2016: Port convicted and given a whole life order.
• April 14, 2017: Japan’s Supreme Court rejects Kijima’s final appeal.
• December 24, 2019: Richard Choque Flores granted 18 months of house arrest.
• December 2021: Port inquests find four unlawful killings and probable police contribution to three deaths.
• January 2022: Choque arrested again in La Paz; Judge Rafael Alcón arrested within days.
• September 30, 2022 and March 16, 2023: Choque’s fourth and fifth sentences.
• June 18, 2026: Kansas governor denies Robinson clemency. September 15, 2026: Kansas Supreme Court hears his post-conviction appeal.