Every few years the same question comes back, usually after a name reappears in the news: how does a person linked to several deaths end up free? The cases that prompt it are few, and they rarely turn on what the public assumes, a lenient judge or a careless parole board. Look at them one at a time and the release almost always traces back to a decision made long before, by a legislature that set a ceiling on punishment, a prosecutor who needed a witness, or a court that found the accused too ill to be tried. Six cases show how differently that can happen.
In March 1980 a ten-year-old girl who had been reported missing days before was found dead in the Ecuadorian province of Tungurahua. Witnesses had seen her talking with a Colombian drifter, Pedro Alonso López. A police major, Telmo Tamayo, questioned him in what Semana, the Colombian news magazine, later called a routine interview. In a statement given on Monday, March 10, 1980, López admitted killing the girl and went on to claim about 200 more killings of girls in Ecuador. The police did not believe him until he led them to about fifty places around Tungurahua where bodies were recovered. La FM, the Colombian radio network, placed his arrest at a market in Ambato, where he was trying to lead a girl away.
The freelance writer Ron Laytner, in a 1992 report printed by the Deseret News, wrote that López took police to 53 graves and pleaded guilty in 1980 to 110 counts of murder. Other reports describe the conviction more narrowly. Vanguardia, the Bucaramanga daily, wrote in 2023 that he was sentenced in 1981 to 16 years for a single crime, because Ecuadorian law did not allow sentences to be added together. Every account agrees on the length. Sixteen years was the most an Ecuadorian court could impose for murder, however many victims there were. Laytner quoted the prisons minister, Pablo Faguero, conceding that it sounded strange but was the law, and the governor of the Ambato jail, Victor Lascano, calling López unreformed and without remorse.
Good-conduct reductions shortened the term. In 1994 he was released and deported to Colombia, Vanguardia reported, where a court in El Espinal, Tolima, had a case against him for the killing of eleven children in the late 1970s, with other charges. La FM reported that an evaluation there found him to have mental disorders that made him inimputable, not criminally responsible, and he was placed in a psychiatric annex. That finding is not a conviction. After about four years he was declared sound and, in 1998, released on bail on condition that he report regularly to the authorities. He did not. His last confirmed official record, La FM said, was the renewal of his identity card in 1999.
Semana reported in 2002 that Interpol had held a red notice on him since 1998, that an El Espinal court had issued a warrant over the killing of an 11-year-old girl in late 1995, and that a psychiatric report attached to the warrant described paranoid schizophrenia and a great capacity to deceive. La FM reported a further Interpol request in October 2002. In 2005, La FM reported, his identity number was cancelled after a fingerprint identification made on a dead body. Vanguardia set out the competing versions in March 2023: that a body reached Colombia’s forensic institute in 2005, that he was living in Tolima or destitute in Bogotá, or that relatives of victims had taken revenge. None has been confirmed.
Karla Homolka is often said to have served only twelve years. She served all twelve. The decision that set the term was made in May 1993, before the evidence that would later define her was in the hands of the police.
Leslie Mahaffy, 14, of Burlington, Ontario, was abducted in June 1991, and Kristen French, 15, of St. Catharines, in April 1992. Both were held and killed by Paul Bernardo, whom Homolka married in June 1991, with her taking part. In early 1993, a federal Department of Justice paper later explained, the authorities had no admissible evidence tying Bernardo to the deaths, and without Homolka’s cooperation a murder prosecution was unlikely. Her lawyer first sought immunity, which was refused. The resolution agreement finalized on May 14, 1993, gave her two concurrent 12-year terms for manslaughter in return for her testimony against Bernardo. It also covered her part in the death of her younger sister, Tammy, 15, in December 1990. She was never charged in Tammy’s death.
On July 6, 1993, she pleaded guilty to two counts of manslaughter before Justice Francis Kovacs in St. Catharines, who banned publication of most of the evidence until Bernardo was tried. Six videotapes from the couple’s house, removed by Bernardo’s lawyer and kept from the police until September 1994, then showed her as a participant rather than a coerced witness. The Justice Department paper put it plainly: had prosecutors held the tapes on May 14, 1993, there would have been no agreement. By then she had been sentenced under it. The arrangement became known as the deal with the devil.
Bernardo was convicted on September 1, 1995, of the first-degree murders of both girls, with other charges, and was later declared a dangerous offender. A review by Patrick Galligan for Ontario’s attorney general, dated March 15, 1996, found that the Crown had had no alternative, that Homolka had kept her side of the bargain, and that she could not now be tried for murder: section 610(2) of the Criminal Code bars a murder indictment for a homicide already resolved as manslaughter.
She never sought parole. In March 2001 the National Parole Board ordered her held past her statutory release date, a ruling upheld at each later review, so she left prison only when the full sentence ran out, in July 2005, with no parole conditions to follow her. A Quebec court imposed restrictions under the Criminal Code’s peace-bond provision; on December 1, 2005, United Press International reported that a Quebec Superior Court judge had lifted all of them. In 2010 Parliament passed the Limiting Pardons for Serious Crimes Act, which CBC News described as a bill to stop offenders such as Homolka from applying for a pardon.
Louis van Schoor had served in the dog unit of the South African Police before he went into private security in East London, on the Eastern Cape coast. In the late 1980s, during the states of emergency, he answered silent alarms at business premises, and by his own later account he shot many of the people he found there. After each shooting he telephoned the police himself. The wounded were arrested. When someone died, the only legal step was an inquest, and the journalist Chiara Carter, writing for IOL in 2004, observed that the dead were Black and the judicial officers white.
On November 1, 1989, the Deseret News carried a report from South Africa that van Schoor had shot dead Lindile Hilti, 18, at a factory in the city the previous weekend, and that police and the factory’s owner counted Hilti as the 27th Black burglary suspect he had killed since 1986. Van Schoor declined to comment.
He was arrested in 1991 and charged with 19 murders and 21 attempted murders. In 1992 a court convicted him of seven murders and two attempted murders. Carter described the sentence as 91 years that came, in effect, to about 20. Supporters in the town put "I love Louis" stickers, a heart pierced by bullets, on their cars. Andrew Trench, who covered part of the trial as a young reporter, told Eyewitness News in 2024 that van Schoor showed no remorse at all.
He was paroled from Fort Glamorgan prison in East London in October 2004, after 12 years, 4 months and 13 days, IOL reported. A prison official called him a model prisoner. In his interview with Carter he rejected the labels "mass murderer" and "serial killer" and called himself a crime fighter. "I called the police after each encounter," he said. The higher toll attached to him, 39 deaths in IOL’s 2004 report, was an allegation that no court tested; the law on the use of lethal force by security guards was later changed, Carter wrote.
In July 2024 the BBC released The Apartheid Killer, a documentary by Isa-Lee Jacobson and Charlie Northcott, on its News Africa YouTube channel. Within a week van Schoor was dead. He died in hospital in East London, aged 72, Business Report, an IOL title, reported on July 27, 2024.
Arnfinn Nesset, a trained nurse, became manager of a combined nursing and old people’s home in Orkdal, near Trondheim, in 1976. Over the next few years staff talked among themselves about a run of sudden deaths, but no one in authority looked into it. In late autumn 1980 it emerged that he had ordered a muscle relaxant used in surgery in large quantities for the home, and United Press International later credited a local journalist with the discovery that set off the investigation. He was arrested in January 1981.
Questioning ran to nearly a thousand hours, NRK reported. He confessed to killing many residents, 27 by NRK’s count and 30 by UPI’s, and withdrew every confession shortly before his trial. No technical evidence tied him to any death, and the dead were not exhumed. The case went to a jury at Frostating lagmannsrett, the regional court of appeal, sitting in Trondheim, in October 1982, and lasted five months, with 128 witnesses. The prosecution said he had poisoned them. In March 1983 the jury of six women and four men convicted him of murdering 22 residents, aged 67 to 95 according to UPI, and of one attempted murder. He was acquitted of two further murders and found to have taken money from patients.
He received 21 years, the most Norwegian law then allowed, and 10 years of preventive detention. After 12 years with a spotless custody record he was moved to supervised release in 1993, the news agency NTB reported, and Advokatbladet reported that he was released in 2004. He changed his name and lived quietly in another part of the country.
He denied the killings to the end. In 2024, at 87, he told NRK that he was innocent and wanted the case reopened; the trial prosecutor, Olaf Jakhelln, said the verdict should stand. In 2025 the journalist Simen Sætre published a book arguing that several of the confessions were probably false. Nesset died in a nursing home in December 2025, aged 89, before any court looked at the case again.
Nikolai Dzhumagaliev has never been convicted of a killing. Between January 1979 and December 1980 a series of women were killed in and around Uzynagash, a large village west of Alma-Ata in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic. Dzhumagaliev, born there in 1952, had joined the local fire service in 1977. In August 1979 he shot a fellow firefighter dead and was sent to the Serbsky Institute in Moscow, where he was diagnosed with schizophrenia; he was out of psychiatric treatment in less than a year, the Kazakh outlet Informburo reported.
He was arrested on December 19, 1980, after a further killing that December. On December 3, 1981, a court found him insane and ordered compulsory treatment in a closed special psychiatric hospital. Zakon.kz described him as found not subject to criminal punishment; the Moscow channel 360 wrote that the case covered nine killings, seven of which he confessed to. There was no conviction and no tested verdict on the evidence.
The doctors' judgment that he had improved led to a transfer, and on August 29, 1989, during that transfer, he escaped. He was free for about two years before police in the Fergana region of Uzbekistan detained him in 1991 over the theft of a sheep. In 2014 police in Aktobe announced that they attributed to him the 1990 killing of a student in that city, committed while he was at large, and said it brought the number of victims attributed to him to ten. No court has ruled on it.
He has been held since 1991 at Kazakhstan’s specialized psychiatric hospital in Aktas, near Almaty. Doctors there have discussed his discharge; Zakon.kz quoted the clinic in 2014 describing a calm patient whose behavior was orderly. In January 2016 a false report that he had escaped spread across messaging apps, and police traced it to a 21-year-old woman from his home village. As of August 9, 2026, NewTimes.kz reported, he remained at Aktas under compulsory treatment.
Martin Brown, 4, was found dead in Scotswood, in the west end of Newcastle upon Tyne, on May 25, 1968. Brian Howe, 3, was found dead in the same district on July 31. Police came to suspect two girls from the neighborhood, Mary Bell, then 11, and a 13-year-old, N.B., and both were charged with murder. Their trial began at Newcastle Assizes on December 5, 1968, before Mr Justice Cusack.
On December 17, 1968, the jury acquitted N.B. of both charges. It found Mary not guilty of murder and guilty of the manslaughter of both boys on the ground of diminished responsibility, La Nación recounted in 2020. She was sentenced to detention for life. She was released in 1980 with a new identity.
Her name followed her. Her identity was discovered several times, and she and her daughter had to move five times, according to the London media law chambers 5RB. In 1998 the payment she received for helping Gitta Sereny write Cries Unheard brought protests from the boys' families and questions in Parliament; the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, told the Commons on April 29, 1998, that most people would consider it wrong for money to be paid for books about such crimes. On May 21, 2003, Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, President of the Family Division, granted Bell and her daughter anonymity for life in an order binding everyone, not only the newspapers before the court. The reasons she gave were Bell’s age at the time of the killings, the years that had passed, the narrowness of what was to be protected and Bell’s health. The Washington Times reported the court’s acceptance that both faced "considerable risk of press intrusion and harassment, public stigma and ostracism."
The families took little comfort. "It takes us no further forward," Martin’s sister said after the ruling, The Scotsman reported. Their mother, June Richardson, died in April 2013, aged 68, The Sunday Post reported.
For years the Gilgo Beach killings on Long Island were the standard example of a killer still at large. That changed on July 13, 2023, when Suffolk County police arrested Rex Heuermann, an architect from Massapequa Park. On April 8, 2026, he pleaded guilty in Riverhead to murdering seven women, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman, Amber Lynn Costello, Jessica Taylor, Sandra Costilla and Valerie Mack, and admitted killing an eighth, Karen Vergata. On June 17, 2026, he was sentenced to three consecutive terms of life without parole and four of 25 years to life. In August 2026 New York’s prison department confirmed his assignment to Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora.
Set side by side, the six releases share almost nothing except their legality. López left Ecuador because its law capped every murder sentence at 16 years, and left Colombian custody because doctors there declared him recovered. Homolka walked out on the last day of a sentence fixed by a bargain that prosecutors would not have made a few months later. Van Schoor was paroled on a term that covered seven of the deaths attributed to him. Nesset was released under the longest sentence Norway allowed, under convictions resting on confessions he had withdrawn. Dzhumagaliev was never tried at all, and his only freedom came through an escape. Bell was a child at her trial, and English law chose to let the adult she became live under another name. In each case the decisive choice was made years before anyone walked out of prison, by people applying the law as it then stood.
• 1968: Martin Brown, 4, found dead in Scotswood, Newcastle upon Tyne, May 25; Brian Howe, 3, July 31.
• December 17, 1968: Mary Bell, 11, convicted of manslaughter of both boys on the ground of diminished responsibility; her co-defendant acquitted.
• 1976: Arnfinn Nesset becomes manager of the home in Orkdal.
• January 1979 to December 1980: killings of women around Uzynagash, Kazakh SSR.
• 1980: Mary Bell released with a new identity.
• March 10, 1980: Pedro Alonso López gives the statement that opens the Ecuadorian case.
• December 19, 1980: Nikolai Dzhumagaliev arrested.
• January 1981: Nesset arrested.
• 1981: López sentenced in Ecuador to 16 years, by Vanguardia’s account.
• December 3, 1981: Dzhumagaliev found insane and sent for compulsory treatment.
• March 1983: Nesset convicted of 22 murders and one attempted murder.
• 1986 to 1989: the East London shootings attributed to Louis van Schoor.
• August 29, 1989: Dzhumagaliev escapes; recaptured in Uzbekistan in 1991.
• December 1990 to April 1992: deaths of Tammy Homolka, Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French.
• 1992: Van Schoor convicted of seven murders and two attempted murders.
• 1993: Nesset moved to supervised release.
• May 14, 1993: Karla Homolka’s resolution agreement finalized; July 6, sentenced to 12 years for manslaughter.
• 1994: López released in Ecuador and deported to Colombia.
• September 1, 1995: Paul Bernardo convicted of first-degree murder, with other charges.
• 1998: López released on bail in Colombia.
• May 21, 2003: lifelong anonymity order for Mary Bell and her daughter.
• 2004: Nesset released; van Schoor paroled in October.
• July 2005: Homolka completes her sentence; December 2005, court restrictions lifted.
• July 2024: van Schoor dies in East London, aged 72.
• December 2025: Nesset dies, aged 89.
• April 8, 2026: Rex Heuermann pleads guilty to seven murders; June 17, sentenced to life without parole.
• August 9, 2026: Dzhumagaliev reported still held at Aktas.