A police officer who kills is usually written up as a betrayal of the uniform. In the four cases below the uniform was not incidental to the killing. It was the instrument.
Gerard John Schaefer was a serving Martin County sheriff's deputy in Florida. He stopped young women, and the stop was lawful until it was not. In 1972 two women survived the same method at the same location and he was convicted of false imprisonment; he was on bail for that conviction when Susan Place and Georgia Jessup were killed. He was convicted of both murders in September 1973 and given two concurrent life sentences. Between eight and thirty deaths have been linked to him and never tried. He was stabbed to death by another inmate on December 3, 1995.
Manuel Pardo had already been dismissed twice, from the Florida Highway Patrol for falsifying tickets and from the Sweetwater police for false testimony, when he killed nine people in Miami in three months in 1986 during a run of drug robberies. He kept a scrapbook of them. At trial he conducted his own defence, admitted the whole of it, told the court he had been exterminating vermin, and asked the jury for the death penalty. He was convicted on nine counts of first degree murder in 1988 and executed by lethal injection on December 11, 2012.
Gennady Mikhasevich strangled thirty-six women in Soviet Belarus between 1971 and 1985. He was not a police officer, which makes his case the sharpest of the four: he joined the voluntary druzhina, the civilian auxiliary, and was assigned to the squad investigating his own murders. Fourteen other men were convicted of killings he committed. One of them was executed. Another was blinded in custody by beatings. He was executed by firing squad on February 3, 1988.
Mikhail Popkov was a patrol officer in Angarsk, in Irkutsk Oblast, throughout the eighteen years he was killing. He offered women lifts at night in his patrol car, which is the entire mechanism of the case and needs no further explanation. He was convicted of twenty-two murders in January 2015 and of fifty-six more in December 2018, seventy-eight in total, which makes him the most prolific convicted killer in modern Russian history. He was caught by mass DNA screening of men with access to that type of vehicle, a category that had to include the police before it could work.
What the four have in common is not moral failure, which is common to every case in this archive. It is access. A stop that nobody questions, a lift that nobody refuses, a scrapbook nobody searches for, a seat on the squad hunting you. Mikhasevich's fourteen wrongful convictions are the clearest measure of it: the same position that let him take the women let him watch other men be convicted for it, and in one case be put to death.