Most killers spend their careers avoiding the police. These six spent part of theirs inside it. Two wore the uniform of Florida departments, one patrolled the night streets of a Siberian city, one was a small-town California officer, one was a police forensic technician in the Soviet Union, and one was a farm mechanic who led a squad of volunteer police auxiliaries while the hunt for the Vitebsk strangler went on around him. What the badge gave each of them differed. In several cases it gave the investigators trouble that had nothing to do with evidence: men who knew how a search was run, and, in Belarus and Ukraine, police forces so eager for a result that innocent people went to prison in their place.
Gerard John Schaefer had been a police officer in Wilton Manors, a suburb of Fort Lauderdale, before he became a deputy with the Martin County Sheriff’s Office. In July 1972, while on duty as a Martin County deputy, he detained two teenage hitchhikers. Both girls escaped from him and reached help, and he admitted to the sheriff, Robert Crowder, that he had "overdone" his job in trying to teach them a lesson, according to a 2022 account by Cox Media Group. He was charged with aggravated assault and false imprisonment and was fired. Sentenced on December 22, 1972, to six months for the assault, he was allowed to begin his jail term after the holidays, and he had been free on $15,000 bail in the months before.
It was during those months, on September 27, 1972, that Susan Place, 17, and Georgia Jessup, 16, disappeared from Fort Lauderdale. They were found dead on April 1, 1973. Schaefer was tried in 1973, prosecuted jointly by Bob Stone, the state attorney of the Nineteenth Judicial Circuit, where the bodies were found, and Phil Shailer, the Seventeenth Circuit state attorney, whom Governor Reubin Askew appointed because much of the evidence had been seized in Broward County. Shailer later called it "a good circumstantial evidence case," and said investigators believed Schaefer had committed nine murders but that only two offered a reasonable prospect of conviction, as The Florida Bar News reported in 2009. A jury found him guilty of the first-degree murders of both girls, and he received two life sentences; Florida could not then impose death because of a ruling of the United States Supreme Court. He maintained his innocence.
Police had also seized items at his mother’s home that, in the words of a federal appeals court, linked him to other possible murders, but he was never convicted of any other killing. Authorities said in 2022 that he had been implicated in as many as 30 deaths. When Schaefer later sued the author and publisher of an encyclopedia of serial murder for calling him a killer linked to at least 20 deaths, the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit upheld a judgment against him in 1995, noting that the two murder convictions were not disputed and that his own 1992 book said he had been publicly accused of murdering 34 women.
In 1995 he was stabbed to death in his cell at Florida State Prison by another inmate, identified in later reporting as Vincent Faustino Rivera. Shailer told the Bar News he "did not shed a tear." The case stirred again in June 2022, when the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office identified remains found in Palm Beach County in June 1974 as those of Susan Gale Poole, 15, who had gone missing from Broward County just before Christmas 1972. The Texas laboratory Othram had used genetic genealogy to make the identification, confirmed with DNA from her mother. Detective Bill Springer called Schaefer "the best suspect due to the location." Schaefer was never charged in her death, which remains officially unsolved.
Manuel Pardo Jr., born on September 24, 1956, was a Navy veteran and former Boy Scout who joined the Florida Highway Patrol in the 1970s and graduated at the top of his academy class. The patrol fired him in 1979 for falsifying traffic tickets. The Sweetwater Police Department hired him anyway. In 1981 he was one of four Sweetwater officers charged with brutality, cases that were dismissed. About four years later he lost that job too, after flying to the Bahamas to testify at a colleague’s drug-smuggling trial and telling the court, falsely, that the two of them were international undercover agents, CBS Miami reported.
Over about 92 days in early 1986 he killed six men and three women in the Miami area in a run of robberies. The Supreme Court of Florida grouped the nine murders into five episodes between January and April: two people on January 22, in what the court called a drug "rip-off"; on January 28, Michael Millot, who was alleged to be a police informant and was found dead in Miramar on February 28; a further killing on February 27; two women on April 22 who had angered Pardo and his accomplice; and, on April 23, an alleged drug dealer and his female companion. The nine named in the state’s case records are Mario Amador, Roberto Alfonso, Michael Millot, Luis Robledo, Ulpiano Ledo, Sara Musa, Fara Quintero, Ramon Alvero and Daisy Ricard.
He was linked to the killings after using stolen credit cards of the victims. In his apartment detectives found a calendar book with entries on the date of each killing, newspaper clippings about them taped inside, and running numbers matching the victims. Daisy Ricard’s watch carried his fingerprints, and a bullet removed from his foot in New York City matched bullets recovered from two of the victims, according to the Florida Commission on Capital Cases. His codefendant, Rolando Garcia, was arrested on May 23, 1986, and was later convicted of four of the murders.
Pardo was tried alone in Dade County on all nine counts, represented by a lawyer. Against his counsel’s advice he took the stand, admitted that he had intentionally killed all nine people, and told the jury he should not be held culpable because the victims were drug dealers who "have no right to live." He asked the jurors to let him die rather than send him to prison, describing himself as a soldier who had completed his mission. The jury convicted him on every count and recommended death by votes of eight to four up to ten to two, and on April 20, 1988, Judge Phillip W. Knight sentenced him to death on each murder count. The Supreme Court of Florida affirmed all eighteen judgments of guilt in 1990. Years of state and federal appeals followed, many of them arguing that he was mentally ill, as his trial lawyer had argued in 1988.
Governor Rick Scott signed his death warrant in October 2012. On December 11, 2012, Pardo was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison in Starke and pronounced dead at 7:47 p.m. In a written statement released that day he accepted responsibility for killing the six men and denied harming "those 3 women or any female." The brother of Sara Musa said the execution was long overdue.
The Vitebsk region of Soviet Belarus lived for fourteen years with a killer of women whom the press would later call the Vitebsk strangler. Gennady Mikhasevich, born on April 7, 1947, in the village of Ist, was not a policeman. He was a mechanic on state farms, trained at the agricultural technical school in Gorodok, and he joined the Communist Party, rising to secretary of a party committee and delegate to a regional party conference, according to a 2019 Lenta.ru investigation by Anna Komissarova. He was also a druzhinnik, a member of the voluntary people’s squads that helped Soviet police keep order, and in time he commanded a unit of them. When investigators began checking the owners of red Zaporozhets cars, the make Mikhasevich drove, he took part in the checks in that role, stopping drivers of Zaporozhets cars and learning, Lenta.ru reported, of police plans that included a failed operation using undercover women.
He was 23, by Zerkalo’s account, at the time of his first killing in 1971, and by the time he was caught he had killed at least 36 women. The break came from his own pen. He sent a letter to the newspaper Vitebsky Rabochiy in the name of an invented group, the "Patriots of Vitebsk," and because it spoke against the Soviet state the KGB took it up. Graphologists then compared enormous numbers of handwriting samples, about 560,000 by Lenta.ru’s count and 600,000 by the account of Mechislav Grib, who took charge of the investigation in January 1985. When the experts found matching features in Mikhasevich’s hand, Grib had more samples gathered from the state-farm office and the Gorodok school, and the experts said there could be no doubt. He was arrested in November 1985, by Grib’s account as reported by Zerkalo, or December 1985 by Lenta.ru’s, at the home of relatives in the village of Goryani. Viasna, the Belarusian human rights center, reports that he confessed to 43 murders, including 22 that the authorities had not connected to the series.
On May 19, 1987, the judicial board for criminal cases of the Supreme Court of the USSR, presided over by Judge Fedor Savkin, found him guilty of murdering 36 women in the Vitebsk region between 1971 and 1985, with other charges, and sentenced him to death. He did not appeal. Viasna gives the date of his execution by shooting as January 19, 1988; Zerkalo and Lenta.ru place it in 1987.
The cost of the long hunt fell on people who had done nothing. Before Mikhasevich’s arrest, courts in Belarus convicted 14 people of killings in the series, according to Viasna and Zerkalo, many on confessions that Zerkalo says were beaten out of them. One, a 30-year-old man from Polotsk, was sentenced to death in 1979 for a murder he did not commit and was shot; he was rehabilitated after the real killer was found. Another, sentenced to 15 years, went blind in prison and was freed after six. Lenta.ru reported that the wrongly convicted were rehabilitated and received compensation and apartments. Some 200 police employees were held responsible in one form or another, most with reprimands or expulsion from the party. A transport prosecutor received a four-year prison term and others received suspended sentences, while the senior investigator, a Second World War veteran, escaped punishment, by amnesty in Zerkalo’s account.
Mikhail Popkov served in the police in Angarsk, an industrial city near Irkutsk in eastern Siberia. In the mid-1990s he was an assistant duty officer in the city’s central police department; he later received an officer’s rank and left the force in 1998 as a junior lieutenant, Meduza reported. Investigators said he found his victims at night on the streets of Angarsk, Irkutsk and Usolye-Sibirskoye, sometimes using a police service car.
A joint team of the Interior Ministry and the Prosecutor General’s Office took over the case in 2002. DNA recovered from victims gave investigators a genetic profile, but until 2008 such tests could be run only in Moscow, at high cost, a handful a year. The team built a list of more than 30,000 people who matched at least one known trait, among them a blood type and ownership of a Niva car, and from the end of 2010 began working through it in alphabetical order. In March 2012 they reached the letter P. Popkov came in, confirmed that he owned a Niva and had the right blood type, gave a sample and went home. He quit his job and traveled, and after the sample matched he was detained on a train two stops short of Vladivostok and flown back to the Irkutsk region, by Meduza’s account.
The convictions came in stages. On January 14, 2015, the Irkutsk Regional Court sentenced him to life imprisonment in a special-regime colony for 22 murders and attempted murder. On December 10, 2018, the same court convicted him of 56 more murders, 55 of women killed between 1994 and 2010 and one of a fellow police officer killed in 1999, and imposed a second life term; the Associated Press, in a report carried by Global News, called him Russia’s most prolific serial killer in at least a century. The Supreme Court of Russia upheld that verdict in April 2019, rejecting a defense argument that the statute of limitations should apply to the killings of 1994 to 2003. On June 4, 2021, the Angarsk City Court convicted him of killing two women in 1995 and stripped him of his rank of junior police lieutenant, Interfax reported. A further verdict followed in November 2023, and in 2025 the Angarsk City Court convicted him of a murder in May 2011 and then of the killing of two women in August 2008. After the last verdict took legal effect, the Irkutsk regional prosecutor’s office announced a final combined sentence of life imprisonment and said Popkov had been moved from Irkutsk to a special-regime colony in Mordovia, Altapress reported on April 6, 2026, citing TASS. Investigators now hold him responsible for 91 murders and three attempted murders.
Joseph James DeAngelo Jr. was a Navy veteran who joined the police department in Exeter, a small town in California’s San Joaquin Valley, in 1973. He moved to the Auburn police in the Sierra foothills in 1976. In 1979 Auburn fired him after he was caught stealing a can of dog repellent and a hammer from a drugstore; he was convicted of the theft and fined $100, the Associated Press reported in 2018. By then, prosecutors would later establish, he had been committing crimes for years.
The first killing to which he pleaded guilty came while he still wore the Exeter uniform. In the early hours of September 11, 1975, Claude Snelling, a journalism professor at the College of the Sequoias, was shot and killed in Visalia. Tim Ward, the Tulare County district attorney, filed the murder charge in August 2018. The other twelve murder victims were Brian and Katie Maggiore, killed in 1978; Robert Offerman and Debra Alexandria Manning, in 1979; Lyman and Charlene Smith, Keith and Patrice Harrington, all in 1980; Manuela Witthuhn and Cheri Domingo and Greg Sanchez, in 1981; and Janelle Cruz, in 1986.
The cases sat unsolved for decades. In 2018 investigators uploaded a crime-scene DNA profile from a 1980 double murder in Ventura County to GEDmatch, a public genealogy database used mostly by people looking for lost relatives, and spent four months building out a family tree, Courthouse News Service reported. They took DNA from an item DeAngelo had discarded, and when the first sample showed close similarities they went back for more and obtained a match. He was arrested at his home in Citrus Heights, outside Sacramento, on April 24, 2018, at the age of 72. "We knew we were looking for a needle in a haystack, but we also knew that needle was there," said Anne Marie Schubert, the Sacramento County district attorney.
Six district attorneys, from Contra Costa, Orange, Sacramento, Santa Barbara, Tulare and Ventura counties, brought the cases together in Sacramento. On June 29, 2020, in a ballroom at Sacramento State University chosen to allow social distancing during the pandemic, DeAngelo pleaded guilty before Judge Michael Bowman of the Sacramento Superior Court to 13 counts of first-degree murder and 13 counts of kidnapping to commit robbery. Under the agreement he also admitted crimes that could no longer be charged, among them attempted murder, kidnapping, robbery and burglary; prosecutors counted 87 victims at 53 crime scenes in all. The plea spared him a death sentence. On August 21, 2020, he was sentenced to eleven consecutive terms of life without the possibility of parole for the murders, followed by a further life term for the kidnappings and eight years for weapon enhancements. In January 2021 the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation moved him from the reception center at North Kern State Prison to the Protective Housing Unit at California State Prison, Corcoran, ABC30 in Fresno reported.
Serhiy Tkach, known in the Ukrainian press as the Polohy maniac, had trained at a police school and worked as an investigator before he was dismissed for falsifying an expert assessment, according to the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group. Radio Svoboda described him as a former police criminalist, a forensic specialist. He moved to Ukraine in the late 1970s, and over roughly 25 years, by his own account, he killed girls and young women in Crimea and in the Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk regions. He was arrested in August 2005 in Polohy, in the Zaporizhzhia region.
After a trial lasting almost a year, delayed by a psychiatric examination that found him sane, the Court of Appeal of the Dnipropetrovsk region, with Judge Serhiy Voloshko presiding, sentenced him to life imprisonment on December 23, 2008. Reports differ on the number of killings the court found. Interfax-Ukraine, reporting on his death, said the court convicted him of 29 murders and eight further attacks on victims who survived, with three episodes sent back for investigation; the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group put the number of cases in which his guilt was established at 37. He confessed to as many as 100 killings. He died in Zhytomyr penal institution No. 8 on November 4, 2018, after complaining of heart trouble and shortness of breath, and was buried by the prison on November 7.
His case, like Mikhasevich’s, left a second set of victims. At least ten men were arrested for crimes he later admitted, and many of them, the Kharkiv group reported, were tortured into confessing. The father of one murdered girl was arrested and took his own life in his cell. A fourteen-year-old eighth-grader was arrested for the killing of his cousin; he was released in 2008. Other men served years in prison: one was jailed for eight years and freed in 2012. On December 12, 2013, a court in Marhanets, in the Dnipropetrovsk region, convicted an investigator of the Polohy district prosecutor’s office and four police officers of torture, forgery of official documents and abuse of power in connection with the false cases. The investigator received five years and two of the officers seven years each; the other two were found guilty but freed because the time limit for prosecution had run out, UNIAN reported.
The six cases share no single pattern. Schaefer was a serving deputy when two hitchhikers he had detained escaped and reported him, and he was free on bail when Susan Place and Georgia Jessup disappeared. Pardo had been fired by two police agencies before he began to kill, and what undid him was a trail of stolen credit cards and a calendar book in which he had marked each death. Popkov, by investigators' account, sometimes used a police car, and he had left the force for fourteen years when an alphabetical list brought detectives to his door. DeAngelo’s first murder came while he was a serving officer in a neighboring town, and the crimes went on long after Auburn fired him over a hammer and a can of dog repellent.
The two Soviet cases carry the heaviest weight. Mikhasevich stood inside the search for the Vitebsk strangler as the commander of a volunteer police squad, while courts sent 14 people to prison for his crimes and put one man to death. In Ukraine, police who needed a culprit for Tkach’s killings beat confessions out of men who had none to give. In both, the killer’s knowledge of how the police worked mattered less than how the police worked: by the time each was caught, the investigation had already convicted someone else.
• April 7, 1947: Gennady Mikhasevich born in the village of Ist, Belarus.
• 1971: Mikhasevich’s first killing in the Vitebsk region.
• July 1972: Gerard John Schaefer, a Martin County deputy, arrested after two teenage hitchhikers escape from him.
• September 27, 1972: Susan Place and Georgia Jessup disappear from Fort Lauderdale.
• April 1, 1973: They are found dead; Schaefer is convicted of both murders later that year and sentenced to life.
• 1973: Joseph James DeAngelo joins the Exeter police in California.
• September 11, 1975: Claude Snelling killed in Visalia, California.
• 1979: Manuel Pardo fired by the Florida Highway Patrol; DeAngelo fired by the Auburn police; a man from Polotsk sentenced to death for a killing in the Vitebsk series.
• January 1985: Mechislav Grib takes charge of the Vitebsk investigation.
• November or December 1985: Mikhasevich arrested.
• January to April 1986: Pardo kills nine people in the Miami area.
• May 19, 1987: Mikhasevich sentenced to death by the Supreme Court of the USSR.
• 1987 or January 19, 1988: Mikhasevich executed.
• April 20, 1988: Pardo sentenced to death on nine counts of first-degree murder.
• 1995: Schaefer stabbed to death at Florida State Prison.
• 1998: Mikhail Popkov leaves the Angarsk police as a junior lieutenant.
• August 2005: Serhiy Tkach arrested in Polohy, Ukraine.
• December 23, 2008: Tkach sentenced to life imprisonment.
• March 2012: Popkov gives a DNA sample; he is detained near Vladivostok later that year.
• December 11, 2012: Pardo executed at Florida State Prison in Starke.
• December 12, 2013: A prosecutor’s investigator and four police officers convicted in Ukraine over false cases tied to Tkach’s crimes.
• January 14, 2015: Popkov sentenced to life for 22 murders.
• April 24, 2018: DeAngelo arrested in Citrus Heights, California.
• November 4, 2018: Tkach dies in prison in Zhytomyr.
• December 10, 2018: Popkov convicted of 56 more murders and given a second life term.
• June 29, 2020: DeAngelo pleads guilty to 13 murders; sentenced to life without parole on August 21, 2020.
• June 2022: Remains found in 1974 identified as Susan Gale Poole; a detective names Schaefer as the best suspect.
• April 6, 2026: Popkov’s final combined life sentence and transfer to Mordovia reported.