A crime becomes a song when it has been absorbed by a place. The people of a port town, a Breton parish or an Italian harbor city repeat the names, fix a tune to the details and sell the sheet for a few coins, and what the court decided becomes one more thing the verse can leave out. A playwright arrives later with a different appetite. An opera, later still, with a commission and a budget.
The eight cases below produced works of that kind: an American opera, a Broadway comedy, a Washington State musical, an Italian pop song, a Danish stage play, a Georgia play and short film, a Breton ballad and the printed broadside songs of Second Empire France. Each is set against what a court or an archive can establish.
Aileen Wuornos was convicted of murdering six men in Florida between late 1989 and late 1990, and she admitted killing a seventh. The men were middle-aged, mostly strangers to one another, and came from towns across the state and beyond it. Richard Mallory, 51, was the first, in November or December 1989. David Spears, 43, Charles Carskaddon, 40, Troy Burress, 50, Charles Richard Humphreys, 56, and Walter Antonio, 62, followed through November 1990. The seventh, Peter Siems, 65, is the death for which she was never charged.
She was arrested in the Daytona Beach area on January 9, 1991, on an unrelated warrant, and indicted in five counties. A Volusia County jury convicted her of the murder of Mallory on January 27, 1992. In March 1992 she entered no contest pleas to the murders of Humphreys, Burress and Spears in Marion and Citrus counties. She pleaded guilty to the murder of Carskaddon in Pasco County on June 22, 1992, and later to that of Antonio in Dixie County. Six death sentences followed: from Judge Uriel Blount on January 31, 1992, from Judge Thomas D. Sawaya on May 15, 1992, from Judge Royce Agner on February 4, 1993 and from Judge Wayne L. Cobb on February 5, 1993. The Florida Supreme Court affirmed each in turn, in decisions dating from 1994 to 1996.
A set of recorded telephone calls became part of the case. According to the Florida Supreme Court, officers contacted Tyria Moore, a companion of Wuornos, in Pennsylvania, and she agreed to return to Florida and help them obtain a confession. Investigators paid for her travel and lodging and helped her write a letter to Wuornos in jail. Over three days the two spoke in about ten recorded calls, with an officer beside Moore passing her written notes. Wuornos’s appeal lawyers later said Moore lied to her and pressed her to take the blame; the state said Wuornos used the calls to urge Moore to stop cooperating. Moore was never charged.
For years Wuornos described the killings as self-defense. Then she told a court that she had killed the men to rob them, and a Florida circuit court ruled her competent to drop her remaining appeals on July 20, 2001. The Florida Supreme Court approved on April 1, 2002. Governor Jeb Bush signed a death warrant on September 5, 2002, and she was pronounced dead at 9:47 a.m. on October 9, 2002, at Florida State Prison, aged 46.
The works made from her life are numerous. Nick Broomfield’s second documentary, Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer, was reviewed by Variety in May 2003. In February 2004, Charlize Theron won the Academy Award for best actress for playing Wuornos in a 2003 feature film. And in 2001, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, the composer Carla Lucero’s opera Wuornos opened. A finding aid at the Online Archive of California preserves papers connected with the production. The six men whom the court named, Mallory, Humphreys, Burress, Spears, Carskaddon and Antonio, have no such archive.
Amy Archer-Gilligan ran a residence for elderly lodgers in Windsor, Connecticut, in the years before the First World War. Residents paid by the week, or paid a single sum in return for care for the rest of their lives. Between 1907 and 1916, sixty of them died there, forty-eight in the last five years of that span. A newspaper correspondent, a dead man’s sister and the editors of a Hartford newspaper pressed the authorities to look closer, and she was arrested in Windsor on May 8, 1916.
She was charged in five deaths and tried in June 1917 for the murder of Franklin Andrews, 60, a lodger who died in May 1914. The jury convicted her of first-degree murder, with arsenic as the charged and accepted cause, and she was sentenced to hang. The Connecticut Supreme Court of Errors set the verdict aside on April 30, 1918, in State v. Gilligan. At a retrial in June 1919 she was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. Prosecutors had offered evidence at the first trial that three other people had also died of arsenic, among them her second husband, Michael Gilligan, who died in February 1914. Those deaths were never tried to a final judgment. A prosecutor said she probably caused as many as two dozen deaths, a figure no court tested.
She spent her first years at the state prison in Wethersfield. In 1924 she was declared insane and moved to the Connecticut hospital for the insane at Middletown, where she died in 1962. In 2015 the Connecticut Supreme Court held her hospital records exempt from public disclosure, ending a freedom-of-information dispute that had run since at least 2011.
The case is best known today through a comedy. The playwright Joseph Kesselring followed it and turned it into Arsenic and Old Lace, which had a long Broadway run and became a Frank Capra film. The Windsor Historical Society, introducing a 2017 program on the trial, described the real woman as a petite, churchgoing widow with a teenage daughter, and a program speaker examined the court case, its unusual procedural history and the forensic evidence. The lodgers who died in Windsor were not characters. Forty-eight of them died in five years, and most of those deaths were never examined in court.
William "Billy" Gohl was a union official on the Washington coast who became better known for a crime story than for his union work. From 1903 to 1910 he was the agent of the Aberdeen branch of the Sailors' Union of the Pacific, at a time when Grays Harbor was the world’s most productive lumber port and the most heavily unionized area of the state. In early 1910 he was arrested and charged with murder. In May 1910 a jury in Chehalis County convicted him of first-degree murder in the death of a sailor, Charles Hadberg, and he was sentenced to life in prison. He died in 1927.
That is the whole of the legal record: one conviction, one victim. What grew around it was legend. Later writers attributed to Gohl dozens of deaths of workers around Grays Harbor, and the estimates cited by the historian Aaron Goings run from 40 to 200. Most of the deaths laid to him were those of itinerant sailors and laborers, according to Goings. In his 2020 book The Port of Missing Men, Goings argues that the story was built by employers and newspapers to destroy a union leader, and that the waterfront’s real danger was the work itself. He presented the argument in lectures and interviews, among them a talk at Tampere University in 2019.
Interest has continued locally. In 2021 a Grays Harbor composer, Alex Eddy, was writing a musical about Gohl, titled Billy, which takes Goings’s side. It is the one work among these written, in effect, as a rebuttal of the legend, an effort to give a stage to the man the record convicts of a single killing rather than to the figure the later writers invented.
Cesare Serviatti was convicted in July 1933 of killing three women he had met through newspaper marriage advertisements. The killings took place over four years, in La Spezia in 1928, in Rome in 1930 and in La Spezia again in November 1932. Each of the women brought him her savings, and il Giornale reports that the motive was money. The victims were Pasqua Bartolini, a widow who moved to La Spezia in 1928, Beatrice Margarucci, a woman from Rome, and Paolina Gorietti, who was about 40 and left Rome for La Spezia in November 1932.
He was arrested in Rome in December 1932. The Corte d’Assise of La Spezia tried him summarily from June 14, 1933. On July 8, 1933 it convicted him of the three murders and of theft and robbery in the Gorietti case, and sentenced him to death for the murder of Paolina Gorietti and to life imprisonment for the other two. La Voce del Patriota said all stages of the case were settled quickly. A request for clemency went to King Victor Emmanuel III, who refused it, and Serviatti was shot by firing squad at Sarzana on October 13, 1933.
After his arrest he spoke of more killings, reported as five in all or as at least four others besides those tried. None was charged.
The case has stayed alive in La Spezia. In 2010 the local band Funkafe recorded a song about it, sung in the La Spezia dialect and built around events at the town’s central station, as Città della Spezia reported. A pop song in dialect about a crime of 1932 is an unusual memorial, and the headline over the local report called Serviatti a serial killer in music. The three women named in the judgment have the verdict and the local histories; in the song the central figure is the man.
In 1921 a jury in Copenhagen convicted Dagmar Overbye of killing infants who had been handed to her by their mothers. She was a working woman of about thirty with a record of thefts, who answered and placed newspaper advertisements offering to take in babies for adoption. The mothers, most of them unmarried and poor, paid her a single sum and left believing their children would be placed with families. In the case the court heard, the children died the same day or soon after.
The count of the dead depends on the source. Dansk Kvindebiografisk Leksikon and Den Store Danske give nine counts, eight foster children and one of her own. Other Danish accounts give eight infants in her care between 1916 and 1920. She confessed in the city court to as many as 16. Later writers suspected 20 to 25 or more, a figure never tested in court. She was sentenced to death in 1921; the verdict was not appealed. About a month later she was pardoned on a recommendation from the Council of State, on condition that she never be released and never receive any relaxation of the prison rules. She died in Vestre Fængsel in Copenhagen on May 6, 1929. Her case led directly to a 1923 Danish law on the supervision of foster children.
Her story has been told three ways. The novelist Karen Søndergaard Jensen wrote a book about it, Englemagersken (The Angel Maker), and in a 2007 report in Avisen.dk was quoted on how Overbye manipulated the mothers. The same report said Overbye killed more than 20 children; that figure comes from the novelist’s account and was never tested in court. The dramatist Lotte Arnsbjerg wrote a play about the case after reading a newspaper article about it, staged at Teatret ved Sorte Hest in Copenhagen. She told Avisen.dk that she saw in the story lessons about how trauma is passed on to children, and about handling anger.
The third is Magnus von Horn’s film The Girl with the Needle (Pigen med nålen), shot in black and white. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2024 and opened in Danish cinemas in January 2025, according to Den Store Danske, and TV 2 Kosmopol reported its nomination for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film. Trine Dyrholm plays Dagmar, and Vic Carmen Sonne plays Karoline, a young factory worker in Copenhagen after the First World War. Nordisk Film & TV Fond reported in May 2024 that the idea came from von Horn’s co-writer, Line Langebek, and that von Horn did not want a conventional biopic. He chose to tell the story through someone who meets the offender rather than through the offender. In another interview he said the real woman was a serial killer but not in the sense that she took babies in order to kill them, and that the film’s Karoline was invented to give the audience a main character. The film’s Karoline shares a first name with a real mother, Karoline Aagesen, whose report to the police led to the arrest. The events, characters and dialogue belong to the screenplay.
What the stage and the screen chose to hold on to is telling. Arnsbjerg’s play read the case as a story about inheritance of harm. Von Horn said she found the society around her more interesting than a biopic of an offender. Neither work could restore the infants, who appear in the record chiefly as a count.
Anjette Lyles was a Macon restaurant owner whose trial in the fall of 1958 drew reporters from across Georgia and beyond. A Bibb County jury convicted her of murdering her daughter, Marcia Elaine Lyles, who was nine. The jury did not recommend mercy, and she was sentenced to die in the electric chair. The Supreme Court of Georgia upheld the verdict on July 8, 1959, in Lyles v. State.
She was also charged in the deaths of her first husband, Ben F. Lyles Jr., in 1952, her second husband, Joe Neal Gabbert, in 1955, and her first husband’s mother in 1957. No trial on those charges is reported. Testimony that arsenic had been given to all three was admitted at her trial to show plan, scheme and motive. After a sanity board declared her insane she was sent to Central State Hospital in Milledgeville. The death sentence was never carried out. She died there in 1977 at age 52, on December 4, according to CrimeReads.
The case became part of Macon’s history and of Georgia’s. Shannon Ray told WMAZ that it was a part of Macon’s tarnished history that people do not like to talk about very much. A Macon playwright, Denver Pickard, told the station that the root of the case was money. WMAZ and WGXA both reported that the case has been the subject of books, a play and television crime programs. In 1999 Mercer University Press published Jaclyn Weldon White’s book Whisper to the Black Candle: Voodoo, Murder, and the Case of Anjette Lyles, with the columnist Celestine Sibley as a consultant. Eldredge ATL reported on the director Chad Darnell’s short film Murder Queens, which recalls Sibley’s interview with Lyles in prison.
The Lyles case differs from the others in one respect. The central victim was a child, and the local retelling has dwelt on the town’s memory of a family and a restaurant.
Joseph Vacher confessed in October 1897 to eleven killings committed over a little more than three years across the countryside of southeastern and central France. Most of the dead were young shepherds and farm workers, boys and girls, many of them 13 or 14, according to Lyon Capitale. He was a former army sergeant who had been sent to two asylums and was released as cured on April 1, 1894. He was born on November 16, 1869, at Beaufort in the Isère, according to the authority record of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
He was arrested at Champis, in the Ardèche, on August 4, 1897, on an unrelated minor charge, and linked to a killing in the Ain. He was tried for only one, the murder of Victor Portalier, 16, which the investigating magistrate Émile Fourquet had traced. The trial opened at Bourg-en-Bresse on October 26, 1898. Boston University’s account of the historian Douglas Starr’s research describes a crowd outside the courthouse shouting for his death, and a defendant in a white rabbit-fur hat who drew a finger across his throat as the charges were read. The medical expert Alexandre Lacassagne concluded that he was responsible for his acts, and the court sentenced him to death on October 28, 1898. He was guillotined at Bourg-en-Bresse on December 31, 1898, aged 29. Fourquet suspected him of dozens more deaths, above fifty, a figure never proved.
Before he confessed, innocent men had been blamed. Local crowds harassed suspects, and the magistrate who finally caught Vacher later called them victims of popular fury.
The case moved into song almost at once. Criminocorpus holds a printed complainte, a broadside ballad, on Vacher’s execution, sold in 1899 by L. Simonet at Saint-Amand-Montrond and set to the tune of Le juif errant; its compilers note that it misplaced the execution at Bourges. The Kan.bzh study examines a Breton-language ballad on the case, which used the story of one of the men wrongly accused, the farmer Grenier, to defend the Church. Marc Renneville collected such songs in Le chant des crimes, published in 2021. In 1976 the director Bertrand Tavernier made the case into a film, Le Juge et l’Assassin, which Julie Allard, Vincent Lefebve and Julien Pieret examined in 2023 as a study of justice and social control.
The balladeers kept the wrongly accused man and used him. The eleven who died are recorded in the magistrate’s account and in Starr’s 2010 book The Killer of Little Shepherds, and hardly at all in the verse.
Hélène Jégado was a domestic servant and cook from the Breton countryside who was guillotined at Rennes on February 26, 1852. The assize court of Ille-et-Vilaine had convicted her on December 14, 1851 of poisoning three women with arsenic, of four attempted murders, and of 11 thefts from the households where she worked. Investigators traced her through some 18 years of service in presbyteries and private houses, first in Morbihan and then in Rennes. She was arrested in Rennes on July 1, 1851.
The court’s own estimate, as the Archives départementales d’Ille-et-Vilaine record it, was that 37 people had been poisoned, 23 of them fatally. Most of those deaths were never tried. They had occurred more than ten years before her arrest, beyond the limit French law then set for prosecution. The figures drift in the popular record. A French execution ballad printed in 1852, held in the University of Melbourne’s French Execution Ballads database, was titled as the story of a poisoner accused of attempting the lives of 37 people, 25 of whom died. A pamphlet printed at Joinville in 1863 gives 57 people, 25 of whom died. A Breton-language broadsheet poem catalogued on Kan.bzh says she poisoned 37 people over 19 years and that nine survived. A 2019 Unidivers article put the possible total as high as 60.
Jégado herself never accepted the poisoning charges in court. The Court of Cassation rejected her appeal on January 16, 1852, and Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte refused a pardon on February 22. The confession taken by Abbé Tiercelin on the eve of her execution, if it is genuine, admitted crimes in general terms while denying three of the deaths at Guern, and the archives record historians' doubts about its wording.
The case passed quickly into popular print. Ballads, or complaintes, were sold about her life and death; the departmental archives hold one from 1851, and the Melbourne database records an 1852 ballad sung to the tune of Fualdès. A Breton-language poem, Buhez Helen Jégadeu, attributed to P.-M. Jaferédo, went through the households where she had worked, naming parish after parish. In 1967 the case was the subject of an episode of the programme En votre âme et conscience, which dramatized historic French trials.
The novelist Jean Teulé told her story in the 2013 novel Fleur de tonnerre, adapted for the screen in 2017 by the director Stéphanie Pillonca-Kervern. Olivier Keraval and Luc Monnerais drew on the trial file for a two-volume comic, Arsenic, published in 2017 and 2018; Keraval said that the childhood episodes were invented and that the rest followed the historical record. On October 4, 2019, the Rennes court of appeal staged a reenactment of her trial as part of its Nuits bretonnes du droit, with working judges and court officials in the roles. Twelve jurors were drawn by lot from the audience. In 2024 the historian Justine Jouet published La Jégado, dans les pas d’une empoisonneuse en Bretagne with Coop Breizh, working from the case file assembled by Judge Vannier, some 400 documents that the departmental archives had digitized.
The works divide along an old line. The ballads and songs of the nineteenth century and the Italian song of 2010 treat a crime as news, to be repeated and priced. The plays and operas treat it as occasion, a way into some other subject: money in a Georgia city, the burden passed from parent to child in Copenhagen, the politics of a lumber port. Almost none was written for the dead.
The records, by contrast, count them. Six men in Florida, three women in Rome and La Spezia, forty-eight residents of a Windsor residence, a sailor in Aberdeen, a boy of 16 in the Ain, three women poisoned in Brittany. The numbers rarely match the ones in the songs.
• 1833 to 1841: deaths in Morbihan later attributed to Hélène Jégado, never tried.
• July 1, 1851: Jégado is arrested in Rennes.
• December 14, 1851: Jégado is convicted at the Ille-et-Vilaine assizes.
• February 26, 1852: Jégado is guillotined at Rennes.
• August 4, 1897: Joseph Vacher is arrested at Champis, Ardèche.
• October 28, 1898: Vacher is sentenced to death.
• December 31, 1898: Vacher is guillotined at Bourg-en-Bresse.
• 1907 to 1916: sixty residents die at Amy Archer-Gilligan’s residence in Windsor, Connecticut.
• May 1910: Billy Gohl is convicted of first-degree murder.
• May 8, 1916: Archer-Gilligan is arrested.
• April 30, 1918: the Connecticut Supreme Court of Errors sets aside her first-degree verdict.
• June 1919: Archer-Gilligan is convicted of second-degree murder at retrial.
• 1921: Dagmar Overbye is convicted in Copenhagen and later pardoned.
• May 6, 1929: Overbye dies in Vestre Fængsel.
• July 8, 1933: Cesare Serviatti is sentenced to death at La Spezia.
• October 13, 1933: Serviatti is shot by firing squad at Sarzana.
• 1958: Anjette Lyles is convicted in Macon; on July 8, 1959 the Supreme Court of Georgia affirms.
• January 9, 1991: Aileen Wuornos is arrested in the Daytona Beach area.
• January 27, 1992: a Volusia County jury convicts Wuornos of the murder of Richard Mallory.
• 2001: the opera Wuornos opens in San Francisco.
• October 9, 2002: Wuornos is executed in Florida.
• 2010: Funkafe records its song about Serviatti.
• 2020: Aaron Goings publishes The Port of Missing Men.
• May 2024: The Girl with the Needle premieres at Cannes.