Abdullah Shah was executed in a prison outside Kabul on April 20, 2004. The government said nothing. It was Amnesty International that told the world, a week later, and officials then confirmed it to the Associated Press and Reuters. The execution was the first the Afghan state had carried out since the Taliban fell at the end of 2001, and it would be the last for more than three years.
Cases like his make an odd set. A serial case that ends in an execution usually does so in a country that executes people routinely, and the offender is one name in a long list. Here the position of the execution varies. In Western Australia, The Bahamas and Afghanistan the counts and dates show how seldom the state used the penalty. In Romania, Russia and Kazakhstan the record shows a country that executed many people, and the case matters because of where it sits at the end of the period. In Guatemala and Poland the execution sits in a longer history. Each section says which it is.
The eight cases run in the order of their executions, from 1946 to 2004.
On July 18, 1946, hundreds of people gathered outside the wall of the Cementerio General in Guatemala City to watch the execution of José María Miculax Bux. He was 21, a day laborer from Patzicía, in Chimaltenango. Less than three months earlier he had been arrested and accused of killing boys and adolescents in and around the capital, in Mixco and near Antigua Guatemala, since the start of the year. Two reports give July 17; Prensa Libre, Soy502 and La Voz de Guate give July 18.
To try him, the Congress of Guatemala passed Decree 235, which shortened the procedure for crimes that cause public alarm. The Diario La Voz describes it that way and quotes its preamble on crimes that caused "justified alarm in society." In popular use the law is known by his name, the Ley Miculax. The case came during the government of President Juan José Arévalo, which followed the revolution of 1944, and Guatemalan outlets describe it as the first serial killing case in the country’s records. The República news site reported in 2023 that delays in the case led to the new law, and NVI Noticias of Oaxaca reported that the crimes caused public outrage and that Arévalo pressed for a fast trial and penalty. The parents of the victims wrote to the president asking that both men be executed in public, saying that only with their lives could they pay, República reported. Relato.gt reported a similar petition from residents of Antigua Guatemala.
The numbers are not firm. Most Guatemalan and regional reports give 15 killings. Prensa Libre said in 2023 that he killed more than 14 children, and its 2016 archive feature said he was accused of killing 15 and of other offenses against ten more. The victims' ages are given as 11 to 15 by the Diario La Voz and as 10 to 18 by República. Most striking is República’s statement that the death sentence itself rested on two of the 15 killings proven against him. The judge and the court have not been named in published accounts, and no appeal has been reported.
His cousin, Mariano Macú Miculax, was tried with him and sentenced to 30 years in prison as an accomplice. According to República there was evidence that he shared his cousin’s intentions but not that he had acted directly in the killings. The Diario La Voz reported that Miculax complained that his cousin had been left alive.
On June 18, 1946, he was sentenced to death. The execution came a month later. Emisoras Unidas and República reported that his last wishes were to wear a suit and hat, to be given two octavos of aguardiente, a cane liquor, and to receive spiritual assistance. Soy502 reported that he drank one octavo in a single swallow and asked for another. Before the end he said that he had killed only four of the children and that his cousin had killed the rest. Soy502 quoted him as saying, "Yo solo maté a cuatro, a los otros se los tronó mi primo" ("I only killed four; my cousin did the others in"). República wrote that there was no way to verify the claim. Prensa Libre’s 2016 archive feature described the execution as one of the most controversial in Guatemala’s history and as something closer to a public ceremony, and reported that he called out "¡en tus manos encomiendo mi espíritu!" ("into your hands I commend my spirit") and smiled and raised his arms to the crowd.
The execution belongs to a long history. Prensa Libre’s 2017 retrospective traced the death penalty in Guatemala from 1840. It recorded that an execution on September 13, 1996 was broadcast live on television, that a different procedure replaced the older one and the first execution by the new procedure was carried out in February 1998, and that the last executions in Guatemala took place on June 29, 2000. Miculax therefore stands fifty-four years before the last executions in the country, and at the start of its recorded serial cases, not at the end of its use of the penalty. In that sense Guatemala is the weakest fit of the eight: the last executions came 54 years later. What stands out in 1946 is the speed and the special law.
Eric Edgar Cooke was executed at Fremantle Prison on October 26, 1964. He was 33, a married father of seven from the Perth suburb of Rivervale, and the last person executed in Western Australia. A jury had convicted him of a single wilful murder: that of John Sturkey, 18, in Nedlands on January 27, 1963. By the time he died he had confessed to far more. He told police he had killed eight people and tried to kill 14 others between 1959 and 1963 and had committed more than 250 break-ins, ABC News reported in 2017. The Australian Dictionary of Biography records that the state attributed two other murders to him. The rest of his confessions were never tested by a court.
Two of those confessions concerned killings for which other men were already in prison. One, identified here as J.B., then 19, had been convicted of the manslaughter of his girlfriend, Rosemary Anderson, 17. The other, D.B., a deaf young man, had been sentenced to death, later commuted, for the murder of Jillian Brewer, 22, who died in Cottesloe in December 1959. Shortly before he was executed, Cooke reportedly swore on a Bible that he had killed both women. Nothing changed for the two men in his lifetime. The Western Australian Court of Criminal Appeal quashed J.B.'s conviction on February 25, 2002, and D.B.'s on April 1, 2005, after a journalist, Estelle Blackburn, spent years reassembling the record of Cooke’s crimes.
He was born on February 25, 1931, at Victoria Park, Perth, with a cleft lip and palate, and at school he was bullied for the disfigurement it left. His father drank and was violent, and the boy was abused, according to the dictionary and to the National Film and Sound Archive’s summary of Channel Seven coverage, which adds that the father also assaulted Cooke’s mother. He went to five schools and from the age of 14 worked a succession of semi-skilled jobs. He suffered repeated head injuries and at one point was admitted to an asylum; when and where have not been recorded. He joined the Permanent Military Forces on May 27, 1952, and was discharged on August 28 of that year once earlier convictions for theft, breaking and entering and arson came to light. On October 14, 1953, he married a 19-year-old waitress.
He was arrested on September 1, 1963, and charged with the murder of Shirley McLeod, 18, at Dalkeith in August 1963, though he was tried only for Sturkey’s. The Supreme Court of Western Australia tried him from November 25, 1963. A single conviction was enough for a death sentence, and ABC News noted that he was never tried for any of the others. He pleaded not guilty, and his counsel sought a verdict of not guilty on the ground of insanity, setting out the abusive father, the bullying, the head injuries and the time in an asylum. The defense case that he had schizophrenia was rejected by Dr. A. S. Ellis, the state’s director of mental health services, and no other psychiatric specialist was allowed to examine him, the dictionary records. The jury took about an hour and a half to convict him of wilful murder, ABC News reported. He was sentenced to death on November 27, 1963, according to the dictionary; the National Film and Sound Archive gives November 28 as the date of conviction. No appeal by Cooke against his own conviction was reported.
His confessions did go before the courts in 1964, but as evidence in other men’s cases. The dictionary says they led to unsuccessful appeals and that the court placed little weight on his testimony; it records that Chief Justice Sir Albert Wolff called him a "villainous unscrupulous liar." For D.B., the 1964 Court of Criminal Appeal declined to order a new trial, according to the Attorney General’s 2011 statement, and he went on to lose a series of appeals, including one to the Privy Council in London in 1965, Estelle Blackburn wrote. J.B.'s appeals in 1964 were also rejected. Both were still in prison when Cooke died.
On the morning of the execution, his wife kept the children out of school, and their son Tony remembered a gloomy day of visitors and quiet kindness from neighbors. About 15 minutes before the execution Cooke reportedly swore on a Bible that he had killed Rosemary Anderson and Jillian Brewer, ABC News reported. The Law Society of Western Australia’s exhibition on wrongful convictions says the Reverend Jenkins recorded the statement and that a copy is held in D.B.'s court file. The execution took place at 8 a.m., Blackburn wrote. Only one woman kept vigil outside the prison, the dictionary says, and there was little public opposition to the sentence.
The Western Australian case comes with a very exact statistic. According to Fremantle Prison, it was the only place of legal execution in the state from 1888 to 1984, and 44 people were executed there, 43 men and one woman. Cooke was the last. The state parliament abolished capital punishment in 1984. The execution did not help the two men in prison. Blackburn wrote that when it went ahead, both understood there would be no reprieve for them, and the Central Western Daily reported that police opened no inquiry after his last confession, so both stayed in prison.
Their release took four decades. J.B. was released on parole in December 1967 after serving five and a half years of a ten-year sentence, according to the Attorney General’s 2003 statement, and the state awarded him $460,000 in April 2003. D.B., who had been charged with Brewer’s murder when he was 18 or 19, was convicted of wilful murder in 1961 and sentenced to death, commuted to life imprisonment; the Central Western Daily described him in 2021 as having been coerced into a confession. After his conviction was quashed in 2005, the government paid him an ex gratia sum of more than $400,000, a radio report said in June 2011. The fresh evidence in J.B.'s case, according to the Law Society’s exhibition, came from pedestrian crash tests run in Perth in February 2000 by an American reconstruction specialist, William "Rusty" Haight.
Cooke’s children grew up with his name. Tony Cooke told the ABC program Australian Story in 1998 that he was bullied over his father as a boy until he finally stood up to the bullies. He spent decades working for the Trades and Labor Council in Perth and became an outspoken opponent of the death penalty. In 2014 he told ABC Perth that his father was a deeply damaged man whose acts were monstrous, but that such people are made, not born. He died of cancer on April 24, 2018, aged 62.
In the spring of 1971 the Romanian Militia mobilized thousands of officers, cadets, patriotic guards and reservists to catch one man. For more than a year women walking alone at night in Bucharest had been targeted, and four had been killed. Rumor filled the gap left by a state press that said little. Women were warned not to go out alone after dark, and, according to later press accounts, some blonde women dyed their hair because word had spread that the offender chose blondes.
The man the Militia arrested on May 27, 1971, was Ion Rîmaru, a student at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine who lived in a student dormitory. He was born on October 12, 1946, most reports say in Corabia, Olt County; Romanian reports say he was 25 when he died. At a public trial from September 1 to 3, 1971, the Bucharest Municipal Tribunal convicted him of four murders, six attempted murders, rape, attempted rape, robbery and theft, and sentenced him to death. The sentence was upheld on appeal; Evenimentul Zilei reports that it became final when his last appeal was rejected, and the legal historian Hunor Kádár writes that the Supreme Court rejected it. The dates of the appeal rulings were not reported. He was executed at Jilava Penitentiary, near Bucharest, on October 23, 1971. The newspapers carried only a short notice the next day saying that the sentence had been carried out, Evenimentul Zilei reports.
The four women he was convicted of killing were Elena Oprea in 1970, Fănica Ilie, 31, in March 1971, Gheorghița Popa, 35, in April 1971, and Mihaela Ursu, 39, on the night of May 4 to 5, 1971. The date of the first death is reported three ways. A list of the offenses published by Adevărul in 2019 and Kádár’s summary of his confessions put it on the night of April 8 to 9, 1970; BZI and another section of Kádár’s study give May 8 to 9; a 2025 Adevărul account says the series began in March 1970. Oprea’s age was not reported. Other women were targeted between June 1970 and May 1971 and survived, according to the Adevărul list and Kádár, among them several in the first week of May 1971.
The investigators built what Adevărul and Kádár both call the first composite portrait of its kind made in Romania, from the accounts of women who had survived. It showed a man of medium height, about 1.72 to 1.75 meters, with a round head, dark hair, a prominent chin and a high forehead. Forensic specialists also concluded that the offender had a distinctive irregularity in his teeth, and Kádár writes that anthropologists made a cast of it and sent photographs to several hundred officers to compare with suspects. After Mihaela Ursu’s death the Militia widened the search to a scale it had not attempted before. Kádár writes that about 6,000 people took part, including officers, staff and students of the Militia school, patriotic guards and reservists; more than 100 cars patrolled at night; hundreds of people were followed or questioned; and more than 2,500 people were arrested. Adevărul gives the figure as more than 2,500 in one place and more than 2,000 in another.
A medical certificate traced to him led to his arrest. For the first day he said nothing, Kádár writes. He then claimed to be mentally ill. After several days of questioning he confessed, giving detailed accounts of the killings and the other offenses. Observator reported in 2019 that after his capture he admitted 23 serious criminal acts; Adevărul says he confessed at the start of questioning.
During the investigation he began to blame his father. In his statements, as BZI quotes them, he said, "Nu vreau să spun că tata e vinovat întru totul, dar are şi el o mare vină" ("I don’t want to say my father is entirely to blame, but he also bears a great deal of guilt"). He said his father had taught him to go out in the rain, "so the Militia wouldn’t come with dogs," had told him to hand over any money he took, and had told him that nothing would happen to him if he were caught, because he was sick. "And I couldn’t resist these urgings," he said. Evenimentul Zilei (2016), Adevărul (2025) and Kádár agree that at the end he shouted that his father was to blame. His last words are reported as "Vreau să trăiesc!" ("I want to live!"). Kádár gives a longer version: "I want to live! Call my father, let him see what is happening to me! He alone is guilty!"
The case did not end with the execution. A year later, Kádár and BZI report, his father died, and a forensic specialist said his fingerprints matched prints from a 1944 killing in Bucharest, one of a series that had never been solved. The father was never charged with anything, and the claim rests on the accounts of the specialist, Constantin Țurai, quoted in his own book and in the press. The son’s case stands on its own.
The Romanian execution belongs to the second category. Under Nicolae Ceaușescu more than 100 people were sentenced to death and executed between 1965 and 1989, Newsweek Romania reported in 2023, and Romania abolished the death penalty on January 7, 1990. Rîmaru was not an exception among those condemned. The state tried him in public, and the press, otherwise silent, carried the short notice of the execution.
Michiah Shobek was a handyman from Milwaukee who was executed in Nassau, the capital of The Bahamas, on the morning of October 19, 1976. He was 22. A Bahamian court had convicted him of the murder of Irwin Bornstein, a 44-year-old visitor from New York, in January 1974. He had also confessed to killing two other Americans in Nassau over the same winter: Paul Howell, 50, of Massillon, Ohio, on December 5, 1973, according to the historian William Steel Lofquist, and Katie Smith, 17, of Detroit, on January 26, 1974. He was never tried for either of those deaths. UPI reported that he was charged with both; Lofquist writes that he was tried and convicted only for Bornstein’s murder, and in law the other two remain confessed killings, not convictions.
He said that his victims were "angels of Lucifer" and that God had told him to kill them. The Associated Press reported in October 1976 that the confession had come 29 months before his execution. His lawyers argued that he was insane, and UPI reported that the appeal court rejected the psychiatric evidence offered on his behalf as unconvincing. After two and a half years of appeals, embassy talks and a mother’s plea to the White House, he became one of the few Americans ever executed in The Bahamas.
His name appears in more than one form. The Associated Press and Lofquist print it as Michiah Shobek; The Tribune of Nassau has used Michaiah. The name of the man he was convicted of killing also varies: the Associated Press gives Irwin Bornstein, UPI and Lofquist give Bernstein, and The Tribune printed Borstein. Little about Shobek’s early life was reported. The Associated Press described him in 1976 as a Milwaukee handyman, and The Tribune, looking back in 2013, said he had moved to Nassau from Milwaukee. His mother still lived in Milwaukee, where she worked as a cleaner. When he first went to The Bahamas, what work he did there and his date of birth have not been reported.
The dates of the case are unsettled. UPI places the conviction in 1974, while Lofquist dates the death sentence to September 26, 1975; The Tribune’s 2013 account gives a sentencing date of October 18, 1976, the day before the execution, which does not match either. A statement prepared in the White House press office, now held in the papers of President Gerald Ford’s press secretary Ron Nessen at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, records that the American Embassy in Nassau had helped him obtain a prominent Bahamian attorney, who pursued his right of appeal, and that the guilty verdict was affirmed.
The execution was postponed once. UPI, reporting before the final date, said that a year earlier his lawyers and the American Embassy had persuaded the Bahamian government to allow more time for appeals, saving him by a matter of hours. Lofquist writes that the execution was delayed after his mother raised claims about her son’s mental health. In the month before the execution the Bahamian Minister of Home Affairs, Donald Rolle, announced that the appeals had run their course, UPI reported. The Committee for the Prerogative of Mercy rejected a plea to spare his life, and the execution was set for October 19.
His mother’s appeal reached the United States government. The Ford Library statement records that the embassy had passed to the Bahamian government an appeal that Shobek’s mother had made to the United States government. The Associated Press reported that President Ford had relayed her appeal but was unable to become further involved in Bahamian affairs. On the night before the execution Thomas Cannon, a Legal Aid Society lawyer acting for the family, spent 45 minutes at about midnight on the telephone with the President’s chief of staff, pleading for intervention. The attempt failed. Lofquist sums up the outcome in one line: American authorities refused to intervene.
Shobek spent his last 48 hours in a cell next to the execution room at Fox Hill Prison, about five miles east of Nassau. On October 19 he was woken at 6:30 a.m. and given a breakfast of orange juice, bread, sausage, grits and coffee, the Associated Press reported. He was executed shortly after dawn. The prison physician, Victoriano Fermo, pronounced him dead, and as Bahamian law required, a notice of the execution was posted outside the main entrance. Security was tight; reporters were not allowed near the prison and about two dozen uniformed police manned a barricade. A demonstration planned by a religious group did not take place, and the Associated Press suggested heavy rain may have kept people away.
Lofquist, a sociologist at the State University of New York at Geneseo, reconstructed the country’s history of executions from the Nassau newspapers, the Department of Archives, Fox Hill Prison records and the British National Archives. He counts 86 documented executions in all. In the 1970s he lists Charles Glinton, executed on April 13, 1971; Philip Humes and Wendell Burrows, executed together on October 15, 1974; Errol Dean, on February 3, 1976, under heavy police security; and Shobek. Among Americans he identifies Alvin Table Jr. and Billy Sees, executed on May 9, 1961, and Shobek. He records the last execution in the country as that of David Mitchell, a Haitian, on January 6, 2000. On his list, five executions fall between 1971 and 1976, and the last in the country came in 2000. The Bahamian case is the one in which another government, the United States, tried hardest to stop an execution.
Joachim Knychała was a coal miner from Bytom, in the industrial heart of Upper Silesia, who assaulted women and girls in four neighboring towns between 1974 and 1982. On April 19, 1984, the provincial court in Katowice, the Sąd Wojewódzki w Katowicach, sentenced him to death for five murders and seven attempted murders, according to a 2019 study of the case by the forensic scholar Ewa Gruza. The Supreme Court upheld the verdict in October 1984, the Council of State did not grant clemency, and he was executed at the Montelupich prison in Kraków on May 21, 1985. Super Express wrote in 2021 that he was executed on October 28, 1985; Gruza and National Geographic Polska agree on May 21.
For most of those years he lived an ordinary life. He was married, had two children, held a steady job at a mine and was an activist in the Union of Socialist Youth, the ZMS. He was born on September 8, 1952, in Bytom, finished primary school there and in 1970 qualified as a miner-carpenter, Gruza wrote. He went to work underground in Piekary Śląskie, first at the "Julian" coal mine and later at "Andaluzja." As a teenager he was convicted in a case brought against him and two co-workers and sentenced to three years in prison. He denied the charge, said he had been framed and considered the sentence unjust. Both Gruza and Super Express traced his lasting resentment of women to that period, as he himself later described it. At Andaluzja he was well liked, Super Express wrote.
His crimes cannot be separated from those of Zdzisław Marchwicki, whom the press called the "Wampir z Zagłębia." The provincial court in Katowice sentenced Marchwicki to death on July 28, 1975, for 14 murders of women and attempts on six more, and he was executed at the Katowice remand prison on April 26, 1977, Gruza wrote. Knychała followed that trial. Super Express reported in 2022 that he watched the Marchwicki proceedings, and Rzeczpospolita wrote in 2013 that he attended them regularly and later told his own trial that Marchwicki had fired his imagination. National Geographic Polska wrote that in his confession he named the Zagłębie crimes as his inspiration. The Polish press called him "Wampir z Bytomia," the Vampire of Bytom, a name borrowed from the earlier case.
The four towns were Bytom, Piekary Śląskie, Chorzów and Siemianowice Śląskie. The dead, as named in press reports, were Stefania M. in 1975, Mirosława Sarnowska in 1976, Teresa Ryms in 1976, a girl reported as Halinka or Halina S. in 1979 and his 17-year-old sister-in-law in 1982. Two of the earlier deaths were not linked to any series at the time: Stefania M.'s partner was charged with her death, and Super Express wrote that the court treated it as a crime of passion. National Geographic Polska reported that Sarnowska had been the main witness in the Zagłębie case against Marchwicki, who was then awaiting execution, and that her death led the militia to consider for the first time that someone was imitating him.
In September 1979 the militia detained Knychała for the first time as a murder suspect, Gruza wrote. A woman who had survived one of the assaults recognized him, and he bore a strong resemblance to the composite portrait. He was released anyway. The attendance lists at the Andaluzja mine showed him at work on the dates of the crimes, and investigators accepted that as an alibi, according to both Gruza and National Geographic Polska. It was not true. As a youth-union activist he often worked overtime, and his foreman recorded him as present for full shifts on days he was not there, Gruza wrote; the militia learned this only in 1982. Super Express described the practice as an illegal arrangement at the mine under which employees appeared on the lists for overtime they had not worked.
He was arrested in May 1982 after his 17-year-old sister-in-law died. He denied everything at first, Gruza wrote. A polygraph examination indicated that he had killed her and that he had killed before, National Geographic Polska reported, and after the test he confessed to the earlier crimes, Super Express wrote. Under pressure in questioning and during visits to the places concerned, he gave detailed testimony about the killings of the 1970s, according to Gruza. He admitted five murders and seven other assaults, National Geographic Polska reported, spoke about his childhood and his hatred of women, and said the Zagłębie crimes had inspired him. Archival footage of his questioning was later used in a television documentary, Rzeczpospolita wrote; in it he says "Nienawidziłem kobiet," I hated women, and that he wanted to live, but not after everything he had done.
Some press lists give six murders rather than five; Rzeczpospolita dates the murders to 1975 to 1982, while the East European Film Bulletin review gives 1975 to 1985, which does not match the court record or his execution in May 1985.
What sets the Polish case apart is its place in time. Gruza describes his execution as one of the last carried out in Poland. The Polish Press Agency recorded in 2013 that the last execution in the country took place at the same Kraków prison in April 1988; a few months later the government declared a moratorium on executions, and the 1997 criminal code abolished the death penalty. Knychała was executed about three years before the last execution in the country.
Sergei Golovkin killed 11 boys in the countryside west and north of Moscow between April 1986 and September 1992. The youngest was 10 and the oldest 16. He was a graduate of the Timiryazev Agricultural Academy in Moscow and a livestock specialist at Moscow Horse Plant No. 1, a stud farm for Orlov trotters in the Odintsovo district, where colleagues knew him as withdrawn and awkward. In 1989 he received a silver medal of the USSR Exhibition of Achievements of the National Economy, known as VDNKh, for his work.
For six years investigators chased a figure called "Fisher," a name that came from a story told by a teenager and that turned out to be invented. Moskvich Mag reported that in two years they checked 5,799 psychiatric patients, 1,628 people with criminal records and 443 others from police registers, about 50,000 people in all, and that more than 2,000 other crimes were solved in the process. Life.ru listed the groups checked: men recently released from prison, residents of Zvenigorod and the surrounding villages, morgue and anatomy workers, people who worked with animals, and people who rented garages and sheds. Staff at the horse farm were among those checked, without result. Because Golovkin was registered as a Moscow resident and not as a local, he did not appear in the district’s lists, Moskvich Mag wrote. In the first years the killings were not treated as one series. Moskvich Mag’s 2026 account says the crimes were alike but were not linked for a long time, and that officials were reluctant to accept that a serial killer was at work near the government dachas around Nikolina Gora. Investigators also wondered whether Andrei Chikatilo, then still at large in the Rostov region, could be responsible; Chikatilo was sentenced to death by the Rostov Regional Court four days before Golovkin’s arrest.
Golovkin was identified only in the autumn of 1992, after a boy from a group of local friends told investigators that a man from the horse farm had been driving them around in his car. Pravo.ru reported that the investigator Bakin later called the events of September 15, 1992 "the moment of truth." From the beginning of October 1992 Golovkin was kept under covert surveillance, Moskvich Mag reported, and investigators still lacked direct evidence against him. He was arrested on October 19, 1992, near Zhavoronki in the Odintsovo district, and charged on October 30. He was taken to the Odintsovo police station and questioned. He denied everything. Accounts differ over what happened next. Moskvich Mag’s 2026 article says Nikolai Chekmazov, head of the criminal investigation directorate of the Moscow Oblast police, took responsibility for holding him; 360 wrote that he was to be released and that a duty officer, Yevgeny Dorokhov, disobeyed the order and put him in a single cell for the night. That night he attempted suicide and was revived, according to Moskvich Mag, Life.ru and the investigator Karchevsky. In the morning he asked to be questioned.
He then confessed to 11 killings between 1986 and 1992. Moskvich Mag wrote that he talked readily and at times mocked the investigators, and Life.ru reported that he described the killings as moments when he lost control of himself. Investigators believed he might be connected to more cases, Moskvich Mag and Pravo.ru reported; only the 11 killings could be proven. The case file ran to 95 volumes, 360 reported. The trial opened on August 22, 1994, according to Pravo.ru, and lasted until October 19, 1994. The first hearings were open to the public; the court then closed them after relatives of the boys tried to reach the defendant in the courtroom, Moskvich Mag reported. His lawyer, M. A. Pashkov, asked for leniency, pointing to the good work record, the medal and his cooperation with the investigation. At one of the final sessions Golovkin himself asked the court for the death penalty, Moskvich Mag reported. On October 19, 1994 he was sentenced to death, with other charges, for the murder of 11 boys.
In Russia at the time, a death sentence could not be carried out until the president had rejected the prisoner’s plea for clemency, Pravo.ru noted. Boris Yeltsin refused Golovkin’s. Business Online, in 2021, dated the refusal to late November 1995, and Moskvich Mag wrote that Golovkin received the refusal signed by Yeltsin on November 26. Pravo.ru gave a different account: Yeltsin had put off the petitions of condemned prisoners, then in April 1996, as Russia prepared to sign the European protocol abolishing the death penalty, ordered them reviewed quickly; of several hundred petitions, 60 were rejected, Golovkin’s among them. A story spread that Yeltsin refused clemency because Golovkin’s garage stood about 500 meters from the president’s dacha. Moskvich Mag’s 2023 account rejected it, noting that Yeltsin also refused clemency to other condemned men with no link to the area, and argued that the real reasons were the local anger at Golovkin and a decision to clear death row before executions stopped. Two other condemned men who waited alongside Golovkin had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment, Moskvich Mag reported in 2026.
Golovkin was executed at Butyrka prison in Moscow. Vedomosti, Moskvich Mag’s 2026 article and Life.ru give the date as August 2, 1996, and Novaya Gazeta Europe places the execution on the night of August 1 to 2. Pravo.ru and 360 give August 1996 without a day. Official records of executions in those years remain closed, Moskvich Mag noted in 2023, citing Eva Merkacheva, who named August 2 or September 2 as the two most likely dates.
His execution came in the middle of Russia’s move away from the death penalty. On May 16, 1996, Yeltsin signed a decree on the gradual reduction of the use of the death penalty, as Russia prepared to join the Council of Europe, Vedomosti reported. On April 16, 1997, Russia signed Protocol No. 6 to the European Convention on Human Rights, which abolishes the death penalty in peacetime; the State Duma did not ratify it. Russian reports date the moratorium on executions from April 16, 1997. Courts could still pass death sentences for a time. On February 2, 1999, the Constitutional Court ruled that no one could be sentenced to death until jury trials were available in every region, and on November 19, 2009, shortly before jury trials reached Chechnya, the last region without them, it ruled that the death penalty could not be imposed even then, Vedomosti and Novaya Gazeta Europe reported. Vedomosti reported that courts passed 159 death sentences in 1992, 157 in 1993, 160 in 1994 and 141 in 1995.
Novaya Gazeta Europe, Vedomosti, Life.ru and Moskvich Mag describe Golovkin as the last person executed in Russia. Other reporting is less certain. Pravo.ru wrote that he was the last man executed at Butyrka but that the last execution in Russia took place on September 2, 1996, and that the name of the man executed that day was not public. The 360 channel and a former death-row prisoner interviewed by Merkacheva for Snob in 2021 also put it in September 1996. Business Online called him one of the last people executed, and Moskvich Mag’s Baykov called the claim that he was the very last probably a legend, without ruling it out. For Russia the entry here is therefore a qualified one: Golovkin stands at the very end of a long run of executions, the last or one of the last, and not a rare exception.
Oleg Muraenko was sentenced to death in North Kazakhstan for killing six women, and the case against him turned on a partial fingerprint. The Kazakh news site Liter.kz, which interviewed regional police and a forensic psychiatrist in September 2020, reported that he was executed in 2002, shortly before Kazakhstan stopped carrying out death sentences. In English his name is usually spelled Murayenko. The execution is reported, not officially confirmed: neither Liter.kz nor the Petropavlovsk news agency pkzsk.info cites an official record, and the year is the point on which they differ.
Much of his case is thinly documented. The women have not been publicly named, and the dates of the killings, how they died and the court that sentenced him have not been published. Nor has it been reported how he came to be a suspect, when he was detained, or what else was against him. What has been reported is how he was identified: by hand, with a magnifying glass, in a laboratory that had no computer database of fingerprints, by examiners who spent five or six days comparing a partial print with his fingerprint card.
The wider record shows why Kazakhstan sits in the second category. Amnesty International reported in 2002 that no official comprehensive statistics on the use of the death penalty had been published since 1998. It cited a Kazakh television report from 2000 that estimated between 40 and 60 executions a year, and said that at least 30 people were reportedly executed in 2001. In a follow-up in November 2003, Amnesty wrote that prisoners under sentence of death in Kazakhstan did not know when their executions would take place, and that executions of men on death row had been carried out in secret. According to Zakon.kz, a death sentence could be carried out only once at least a year had passed after it came into force. Tengrinews and Zakon.kz reported in 2016 that 536 death sentences had been carried out in Kazakhstan before the moratorium.
Liter.kz described Muraenko as perhaps the last person in the North Kazakhstan region, or even in the whole of Kazakhstan, to be sentenced to death and executed, and the pkzsk.info agency said in November 2020 that it was widely believed that the last person executed in the country was Muraenko and that the last death sentences had been carried out in 2001. Tengrinews and Zakon.kz put the last executions in 2003, before the moratorium decree, and Zakon.kz said 12 people were executed that year. If those national figures are correct, Muraenko was not the last person executed in Kazakhstan, though he may still have been the last in North Kazakhstan.
In December 2003, President Nursultan Nazarbayev declared an indefinite moratorium on carrying out death sentences, Tengrinews reported. Life imprisonment replaced the death penalty in practice from January 1, 2004, according to Zakon.kz. Courts could still pass death sentences after 2003 but they were not carried out; Radio Svoboda reported that the last such sentence was handed down in 2016, and that on December 23, 2021, the Senate passed a law removing the death penalty from the Criminal Code, with all remaining death sentences to be replaced by life imprisonment. His patronymic, his date and place of birth, and the dates of the killings, his arrest and his trial have not been published.
Abdullah Shah was a militia commander in Afghanistan’s civil war of the 1990s, described by officials in 2002 as a commander of the Hezb-i-Islami faction. He was known as "Zardad’s Dog," after his former commander, Faryadi Sarwar Zardad, whose own trial in London in 2005 became a landmark in international law, Tate wrote in a 2005 press release. In 2002, in what Tate later described as the first capital trial in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban, a special court in Kabul convicted him of multiple murders. The U.S. State Department’s human rights report for that year described the offense as mass murder and said the conviction included the killing of 50 Hazaras during a bus hijacking. Afghan officials said the killings included travelers and members of his own family, among them one of his wives and his infant daughter, an Associated Press report of April 2004 said.
The numbers differ from source to source. A Reuters report that week said he had been convicted of murdering dozens of people, including four of his wives, and that his own confessions had incriminated him. Voice of America quoted officials in 2002 as saying he killed at least nine people. Tate’s press release said he is said to have killed three of his wives and five of his children. The number of counts was not reported.
He was first tried in September 2002. The State Department’s report says that a closed court convicted him that month of mass murder. Amnesty International later described the tribunal as a special court that sat in closed session and denied him basic defense rights: he had no lawyer, and he was not able to cross-examine the witnesses against him. Before his appeal was heard, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Fazl Shinwari, said publicly that Shah should receive the death sentence; the State Department recorded the statement in the section on the denial of fair public trial. The appeal, or retrial, was heard in Kabul in October 2002, and Voice of America reported on October 16 that a Kabul court had sentenced Shah to death. The State Department wrote that the sentence came at the end of his appeal and that he had no legal representation during it.
The hearing was watched by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, who was then on a mission to Afghanistan. Amnesty International later recorded that the Special Rapporteur observed the trial and afterward expressed concern that the international safeguards for capital punishment "cannot be observed at this stage" in Afghanistan. The hearing was also filmed. The British artists Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell, commissioned by the Imperial War Museum in London to respond to the war in Afghanistan, were given permission to attend the Supreme Court in Kabul and film a trial, and the trial they filmed was Shah’s. Tate described the footage as showing a crowded, shabby courtroom with armed guards, the proceedings in Afghan languages and only basic explanation.
In Amnesty’s words in 2006, the court did not investigate his claims that he had been tortured, even though, Amnesty said, his injuries were visible, and the trial was not open to the public. Amnesty also said that senior figures, including his former commander, pressed the judiciary for his execution, and that this commander was never called to give evidence. The State Department’s 2002 and 2004 reports said that Afghan court procedures did not meet international fair trial standards, that defendants generally had no right to an attorney and no means of confronting or questioning witnesses, and that there was no working public defender system.
The sentence then waited on President Hamid Karzai. The State Department’s report for 2003 noted that there had been no developments in Shah’s case that year. Reuters reported in April 2004 that Karzai had at first asked the Supreme Court to commute the sentence to life imprisonment. His spokesman, Jawed Ludin, told the Associated Press that the president had commuted two earlier death sentences and that he signed Shah’s death warrant reluctantly, because the nature of the crimes had left him no choice.
Abdullah Shah was executed on April 20, 2004, at a prison outside Kabul, according to Afghan officials quoted by the Associated Press. Reuters reported that the execution had been personally approved by Karzai. The government did not announce it. It stayed secret for a week, until Amnesty International disclosed it in a statement that the Associated Press called scathing; officials then confirmed it, and Associated Press and Reuters reports appeared in newspapers on April 28. Democracy Now, reporting the news on April 27, said it was the first state execution in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban more than two years earlier.
Amnesty’s statement went further than the trial. As reported by the Associated Press and Democracy Now, it said Shah had been denied basic standards of fairness and voiced the fear that he may have been executed to silence a key witness to human rights abuses by several commanders who were now in power. Amnesty urged Afghanistan to abolish the death penalty. The State Department’s 2004 report recorded the same concern from human rights groups, who regarded his trial and appeal as seriously flawed and said he was a material witness to abuses by other prominent Afghans, including some members of the government.
For more than three years after Shah’s death Afghanistan carried out no further known executions. On October 7, 2007, the government executed 15 prisoners. Amnesty said that the last execution before them had been Shah’s, and that the 2007 executions ended a moratorium of three years. Al Jazeera, reporting from Kabul on October 8, 2007, likewise described Shah’s execution as the last known one carried out by Karzai’s government. Agence France Presse, in reports printed in The Daily Star of Bangladesh and Arab News, quoted a Supreme Court spokesman, Wakil Omari, as saying that others might have been executed in secret in the meantime, though he had no details. Of the eight cases here, this is the one in which a single execution after years of none is the whole point.
Taken together they give no single answer to what "rare" means. The Western Australian, Bahamian and Afghan records count or date the executions closely enough to show how seldom the penalty was used. The Romanian, Russian and Kazakh records show states that had executed many people, and the cases mark the end of a period. The Guatemalan and Polish records place the execution in a longer history, with the last executions still some years or decades away.
Two threads run through the cases. The first is that the condemned person is rarely alone in his own case: in Western Australia two men sat in prison for killings he confessed to, in Romania a father was named, in Guatemala a cousin lived. The second is that the question of fairness follows the execution. In Afghanistan the trial itself was criticized as unfair by Amnesty International and the State Department, in Western Australia the confessions took four decades to matter, and in Kazakhstan the record is so thin that even the year of the execution is disputed.
• 1946: Guatemala’s Congress passes Decree 235, the Ley Miculax; José María Miculax Bux is sentenced to death on June 18 and executed on July 18.
• May 1952: Eric Edgar Cooke joins the Permanent Military Forces and is discharged in August.
• 1959 to 1963: Cooke’s confessed crimes in Perth.
• January 27, 1963: John Sturkey, 18, dies in Nedlands; Cooke is later convicted of his murder.
• September 1, 1963: Cooke arrested.
• November 25 to 27, 1963: Cooke tried and sentenced to death.
• October 26, 1964: Cooke executed at Fremantle Prison.
• 1970 to 1971: Rîmaru’s four killings in Bucharest; arrested May 27, 1971.
• September 1 to 3, 1971: Rîmaru tried and sentenced to death; executed October 23.
• 1973 to 1974: Michiah Shobek’s confessed killings in Nassau.
• October 19, 1976: Shobek executed at Fox Hill Prison.
• April 19, 1984: Knychała sentenced to death in Katowice; the Supreme Court upholds the verdict in October.
• 1984: Western Australia’s parliament abolishes capital punishment.
• May 21, 1985: Knychała executed in Kraków.
• April 1988: Last execution in Poland, according to the Polish Press Agency.
• January 7, 1990: Romania abolishes the death penalty.
• October 19, 1992: Golovkin arrested.
• October 19, 1994: Golovkin sentenced to death.
• 1996: Golovkin executed at Butyrka prison (August 2 in most reports).
• April 16, 1997: Russia signs Protocol No. 6; Russian reports date the moratorium from this day.
• January 6, 2000: Last execution in The Bahamas, according to Lofquist.
• June 29, 2000: Last executions in Guatemala.
• February 25, 2002: Western Australia’s Court of Criminal Appeal quashes J.B.'s conviction; D.B.'s follows on April 1, 2005.
• 2002: Muraenko reported executed in North Kazakhstan.
• October 2002: Abdullah Shah sentenced to death in Kabul.
• December 2003: Kazakhstan declares a moratorium.
• April 20, 2004: Shah executed; the news reaches the public a week later.
• October 7, 2007: Afghanistan executes 15 prisoners, ending a three-year pause.
• December 23, 2021: Kazakhstan’s Senate passes the law removing the death penalty from the Criminal Code.