Every one of these cases has a kitchen table in it. Somewhere behind the court files and the body counts there was a husband or a wife who shared a mortgage, raised children, sat through church services and family dinners, and, in some of the cases, learned the truth from the police. Some had been married for decades. Some were divorced long before an arrest; one filed for divorce while detectives were still trying to get a search warrant. A few later testified. One stood by his wife for thirty-one years in prison. One married a man she would later testify against, and went to prison herself.
Courts seldom had reason to ask what these husbands and wives knew. In only one of these marriages did a wife go to prison for the killings: Karla Homolka, who was convicted of manslaughter. The others were left with the years they had spent at that table.
Robert Lee Yates Jr. married in 1976. His wife was from Walla Walla, Washington, and the couple had four daughters and a son. He was an Army helicopter pilot who retired in 1996 as a chief warrant officer, and he moved the family to Spokane, where he later flew for the Washington Army National Guard and worked at the Kaiser Aluminum plant.
In the fall of 1996 he told his wife he would drive their oldest daughter to work at night. He came home after dawn in coveralls, with blood in his black van, and explained that a dog had run into the vehicle and that he had taken the dog and its owner to a veterinarian. He cleaned the van and removed a foam cushion from its bed. His wife repeated the story to detectives after his arrest, and it surfaced in search warrants unsealed in May 2000. The Spokesman-Review, reporting the warrants, observed dryly that police were not so sure.
He was arrested in April 2000, on his way to work. The loss of his income left the family in difficulty, and that October the couple filed a joint petition for bankruptcy, listing the house on the South Hill as their largest asset. In October 2000 Yates pleaded guilty in Spokane County to 13 murders and one attempted murder in exchange for the prosecutor’s agreement not to seek death. A condition of the deal was that he draw a map leading investigators to the remains of one of the women, Melody Murfin, who had been missing for more than two years; deputies followed it and recovered her remains in Spokane, the Washington Supreme Court later recorded.
Spokane sentenced him to 408 years. Pierce County, which refused to be bound by the Spokane agreement, tried him in 2002 for the murders of two women found near Tacoma, and a jury sentenced him to death. The Supreme Court upheld that sentence in 2007, noting among the evidence that he and his wife had been in financial trouble at the time. In October 2018 the court struck down Washington’s death penalty as it was then administered, and every death sentence in the state, Yates’s included, was converted to life imprisonment.
Herbert Baumeister married in November 1971, and the couple had three children. He spent years at the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles before he was fired in 1985, and in 1988 he started a thrift store in Indianapolis; a second store followed. By the early 1990s the family lived at Fox Hollow Farm, an 18-acre estate in Westfield, north of the city. To the people around him he was, as the Indianapolis station WRTV later put it, a successful businessman with a wife, three children and a horse farm in the suburbs.
In 1993 and 1994 men began disappearing from Indianapolis. Most had last been seen at or near gay bars in the city. According to the Encyclopedia of Indianapolis, the disappearances fell in periods when Baumeister’s family was away. In 1995 an Indianapolis detective traced a lead to him; in November she confronted him at one of his stores, and his lawyer refused consent for a search of the property. In December 1995, on the advice of her own lawyer, his wife also declined.
His wife filed for divorce in January 1996, months after police first asked her about a possible link between her husband and the missing men, WRTV reported. Some time earlier, in late 1994, one of the children had found a human skull in the woods behind the house; Baumeister said it was a medical specimen that had belonged to his late father, an anesthesiologist. On June 24, 1996, his wife’s divorce lawyer told the detective about the skull. Investigators went to the farm that day with his wife’s consent, found bones, and had a search warrant signed by 10 p.m. By then his wife had obtained a protective order against him, the Associated Press reported.
Baumeister had already left the state. On July 3, 1996, his body was found in Pinery Provincial Park in Ontario; he had shot himself. He was never charged. The Hamilton County sheriff later called him the only suspect in the deaths, and in 1998 investigators said they also suspected him in nine earlier strangulation deaths of men and boys in Indiana and Ohio, none of which was charged. Identification of the men whose remains were recovered from the farm resumed in 2022; by May 2026 ten had been named, and work continued.
John Wayne Gacy married twice, and both marriages ended before the period in which most of his victims died. In September 1964 he married a coworker from a shoe company in Springfield, Illinois. Her father owned Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants in Waterloo, Iowa, and brought the couple there to run several of them. Gacy joined the Jaycees, dressed as a clown in local parades and became a familiar civic face. David Dutton, then a Black Hawk County prosecutor, first met him as the main witness in a robbery at one of the restaurants and later remembered thinking him "just a nice person to have around."
In 1968 Gacy was convicted in Black Hawk County and sentenced to ten years. His first wife divorced him while he was in prison, and he did not see her or their two children again. He was paroled after about eighteen months, in June 1970, and went home to Chicago.
On June 1, 1972, he married again. His second wife knew about the Iowa conviction. They lived in his ranch house in Norwood Park Township, northwest of the city, and at his trial she testified about the years they spent there. She had complained of a terrible smell in the house, and he told her it came from dead rodents under the floor. The marriage ended in divorce in March 1976.
The killings accelerated after the divorce. In December 1978 police searching for a missing 15-year-old, Robert Piest, began the investigation that ended with Gacy’s arrest that month. In March 1980 a Cook County jury convicted Gacy of 33 counts of murder, with other charges, and he was sentenced to death on twelve of them. The Illinois Supreme Court affirmed the convictions in 1984. He was executed by lethal injection at Stateville Correctional Center on May 10, 1994.
Dennis Rader married in 1971 and stayed married for thirty-four years. For most of that time he was the father of two, an alarm installer and later the compliance officer for the small city of Park City, Kansas, a Cub Scout leader and the president of his church council. Neighbors who told reporters about him after his arrest described two different men: one who helped elderly residents with their yard work, and one who looked for reasons to write citations.
Between 1974 and 1991 he killed ten people in and around Wichita, signing letters to the press and police with the initials BTK. He went silent for more than a decade, then began writing again in 2004, and a computer disk he mailed in February 2005 led detectives to his church and to him. DNA from his daughter, taken under court order from a medical sample, provided a familial match to crime scene evidence. He was arrested on February 25, 2005.
Soon after the arrest his wife was granted an emergency divorce, which gave her the family home and his retirement savings. The family refused interviews for years. Their daughter, Kerri Rawson, who was newly married and living in Michigan when officers came to her door, later broke that silence. In 2019 she published a memoir, A Serial Killer’s Daughter, and said she had written to her father and received letters back but had never visited him. "He imploded my family; my family has never been the same," she told the public radio station KMUW.
Rader pleaded guilty to ten counts of first-degree murder on June 27, 2005. Kansas had no death penalty in force for crimes committed between 1972 and 1994, and on August 18, 2005, he received ten consecutive life terms. In his statement to the court he went through his victims one by one, naming things he believed he had in common with them; of Julie Otero he said she had been a loving mother, like his wife. Twenty years later, in August 2025, he was held at the El Dorado Correctional Facility in Butler County, Kansas.
Gary Ridgway, who painted truck cabs at the Kenworth plant in the Seattle area for more than thirty years, married three times. His third wife met him in 1985, when she was 40 and single, while dancing at a tavern on Highway 99. Two days later, without her knowledge, Green River Task Force detectives interviewed him about his ties to women working along the highway. They married in 1988 and in 1997 bought a house in Auburn.
She described the marriage afterward as nearly perfect. He was, she told ABC News, loving, gentle and considerate, and he made her feel like a newlywed every day. On November 30, 2001, two detectives found her cleaning the garage and told her that her husband had been arrested. "I was in such denial," she said. She did not believe he was the Green River Killer until he confessed.
In 2003 Ridgway pleaded guilty under a deal that spared him the death penalty in exchange for helping to locate victims' remains, and he received life sentences without the possibility of parole, MyNorthwest reported.
The couple divorced in 2002. In the years after his confession, his former wife told the Kent Reporter in 2021, she struggled with depression and anxiety, spent months without a home while she tried to sell the house, and cut off all contact with him; she said she would never speak to him or read his letters again. A friend who wrote a book about her life said she believed "100 percent" that she had never known what he was doing. In December 2025 Ridgway was reported to be gravely ill at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla.
Peter Tobin, born in Johnstone, Renfrewshire, in 1946, married three times. He married his first wife in 1969, in Brighton, and they were divorced in 1971; he married again in 1973. In 1990 he moved to Bathgate, West Lothian, with his third wife, and she left him that same year. All three former wives said he had attacked them repeatedly, The Scotsman reported, and STV News reported that each described the same pattern: a charming, well-dressed man at first, who turned violent.
On February 10, 1991, Vicky Hamilton, 15, disappeared from a bus stop in Bathgate, where Tobin was living. That August, Dinah McNicol, 18, was last seen after leaving a music festival in Hampshire. Neither girl was traced until 2007. In 1994 Tobin was jailed for 14 years for offenses against two 14-year-old girls in Hampshire.
He was released in 2004. In September 2006 Angelika Kluk, a 23-year-old Polish student working at a church in Glasgow, was killed. In May 2007 a jury at the High Court in Edinburgh convicted him of her rape and murder. The inquiry into his past that followed, Operation Anagram, led detectives to Margate, in Kent, where in November 2007 they found the remains of both missing girls. In December 2008 he was convicted of Vicky Hamilton’s murder at the High Court in Dundee, and in December 2009 a jury at Chelmsford Crown Court convicted him of murdering Dinah McNicol.
Tobin died in custody at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh on October 8, 2022, at 76. A fatal accident inquiry found that he died of bronchopneumonia after breaking his hip in a fall in his cell.
Col. Russell Williams took command of 8 Wing Trenton, the air force base in eastern Ontario, in July 2009. He had served 23 years without seeing combat and had been given steadily greater responsibility. He was married, and the couple had no children. They kept a home in Ottawa, where they had lived for years in the suburb of Orleans before moving to Westboro, and a cottage in Tweed, Ontario.
He was arrested in February 2010. On October 18, 2010, he pleaded guilty to all 88 counts against him: the first-degree murders of Cpl. Marie-France Comeau, 38, and Jessica Lloyd, 27, of Belleville; the sexual assault and forcible confinement of two women in Tweed, both of whom survived; and 82 counts of breaking and entering or attempting to, in Ottawa, Belleville and Tweed, going back to 2007. On October 21 Justice Robert F. Scott sentenced him to two concurrent life terms with no eligibility for parole for 25 years. The military revoked his commission and burned his uniforms.
His wife’s own exposure came through the civil courts. In June 2010 one of the Tweed survivors sued Williams and his wife for 2.45 million dollars, and Jessica Lloyd’s mother and brother sued for 4 million dollars. Both suits challenged a property arrangement made about six weeks after the arrest, under which she paid him 62,000 dollars and took on the mortgage of their Ottawa townhouse. His wife denied any wrongdoing, said the arrangement was for her own financial security, and described herself as one more of his victims; in an affidavit that June she said the charges had devastated her. About four years after the sentencing Williams settled both suits on confidential terms, and the claims against his wife were dismissed without costs. She began divorce proceedings after the guilty pleas.
Harvey Carignan’s life was spent largely in prisons, and his marriages fit into the gaps between sentences. Born in Fargo, North Dakota, in 1927 and raised partly in a state reform school, he joined the Army and was stationed near Anchorage in 1949 when Laura Showalter, 57, was killed there. A federal jury in the Territory of Alaska convicted him of first-degree murder and he was sentenced to death, but the conviction was thrown out over the handling of his confession, and the Supreme Court of the United States upheld that result in November 1951. In law he was never convicted of her death. He remained in federal custody on a separate assault conviction and was paroled from Alcatraz in 1960.
In the years that followed he married twice, and both marriages failed, according to the Prairie Public program Dakota Datebook; the second, in Washington State, had ended by the time he returned to Minnesota in the early 1970s. In Minneapolis he lived with Eileen Hunley, 29, who left him in the summer of 1974 and was killed that August. Weeks later Katherine Schultz, a student at a Minneapolis job-training school, was killed. Carignan was convicted of both murders, and in other cases of attacks on women and on girls as young as 13. He died in a Minnesota prison in March 2023, at 95.
Andrei Chikatilo, a former teacher of Russian literature who became a supply agent for factories in the Rostov region of southern Russia, had been married for 27 years when he was arrested in Novocherkassk on November 20, 1990. The couple had two children. To the outside world he was a Communist Party member and a family man whose work kept him on trains.
His wife told prosecutors she had never suspected anything, not his frequent nights away from home or anything else. "If I had known what my husband was doing all those years," she said, she would have done something to stop him. "But how was I to know?" The prosecutors believed her, Peter Conradi reported in The Moscow Times. Her neighbors did not. Friends shunned her, strangers sent death threats, and shortly before the trial she left Rostov for Ukraine to begin again. The chief investigator, Issa Kostoyev, recalled her first reaction to the news as disbelief: Andrei, she said, had never harmed a fly.
On October 15, 1992, the Rostov Regional Court convicted Chikatilo of 52 murders of children, teenagers and young women, committed between 1978 and 1990, and sentenced him to death. He was shot at Novocherkassk prison on February 14, 1994, after President Boris Yeltsin refused his appeals for clemency.
Herman Webster Mudgett, who called himself H. H. Holmes, was married long before he became the subject of Chicago legend. He reportedly married Clara Lovering at 17, then enrolled in medical school and later left her and their young son. At the University of Michigan, where he studied medicine from 1882 to 1884, he got into trouble with a widowed hairdresser who wanted to marry him, the Ann Arbor Argus reported at the time; he could not, because he was already married, and the episode nearly cost him his degree.
In Chicago, under his new name, he married again. His second wife, Myrta Belknap, was the daughter of an express-company owner in Wilmette, north of the city, and they had a daughter. In 1892 Holmes built a turreted house in Wilmette for his wife, their daughter and her parents, according to records of the Wilmette Historical Museum, but he was rarely there. In January 1894, in Denver, he married a third time, to Georgiana Yoke, using the name Howard. A Chicago paper later listed bigamy among his offenses.
He was arrested in Boston in November 1894 on a fraud charge, and investigators connected him to the death of his business associate, Benjamin Pitezel, in Philadelphia that September. In 1895 a Philadelphia jury convicted him of Pitezel’s murder in the first degree. He was hanged at Moyamensing Prison on May 7, 1896. The deaths of three of Pitezel’s children were attributed to him by investigators, and he was suspected in the disappearances of several women in Chicago, but none of those cases was tried. He claimed 27 killings in a newspaper confession; the historian Adam Selzer has found support for nine. The figure of 200 victims, repeated for more than a century, traces back, by Selzer’s account, to the tabloids of the 1890s and the pulp fiction that followed. His second wife never remarried and died in 1924.
Karla Homolka was a 17-year-old high-school student in St. Catharines, Ontario, when she met Paul Bernardo, then 23, in October 1987. They became engaged in December 1989. At the time Toronto police were hunting a serial rapist in Scarborough; Bernardo was later charged with those attacks. On December 24, 1990, her younger sister, Tammy, 15, died at the family home. Her death was not treated as a crime at the time.
In February 1991 the couple moved into a rented bungalow in Port Dalhousie, on the lakeshore of St. Catharines. On June 29, 1991, they were married in Niagara-on-the-Lake. That same day, the remains of Leslie Mahaffy, 14, who had been abducted from Burlington two weeks earlier, were found near St. Catharines. Kristen French, 15, was abducted in St. Catharines in April 1992 and killed days later.
The marriage ended in violence. On January 6, 1993, Bernardo beat his wife with a flashlight; she was taken to hospital and never went back to the house. Through her lawyer she then sought a deal with prosecutors, presenting herself as a battered wife who had acted out of fear. In May 1993 the Crown agreed to accept guilty pleas to two counts of manslaughter in exchange for her testimony against her husband, and on July 6, 1993, she was sentenced to two concurrent terms of 12 years. The agreement also covered her part in her sister’s death; she was never charged with any offense in it. The couple divorced on February 25, 1994.
The agreement became known in Canada as "a deal with the devil" after videotapes, removed from the house by Bernardo’s lawyer and missed by a 71-day police search, reached the police in September 1994 and showed her as a participant. A review by Patrick Galligan concluded in 1996 that the Crown had had no alternative and could not undo the agreement. On September 1, 1995, a jury convicted Bernardo of the first-degree murders of both girls, with other charges; he was sentenced to life with no parole eligibility for 25 years and later designated a dangerous offender. At his trial each blamed the other for the killings. Homolka served every day of her sentence and was released in July 2005. The Parole Board of Canada denied Bernardo parole for the third time in November 2024.
Marcel Petiot qualified as a physician in 1921 and set up practice in Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, in Burgundy, where he was elected mayor in 1926. In 1927 he married Georgette Lablais, the daughter of a prosperous landowner, the Argentine newspaper Infobae reported in 2025. In 1933, after his reputation had soured, the couple moved to Paris.
During the German occupation, under the name "Docteur Eugène," Petiot let it be known that he could get people wanted by the Gestapo out of France, for a price. In March 1944 neighbors complained of smoke from a townhouse he owned in the sixteenth arrondissement; the fire brigade went in and found human remains, and Petiot disappeared before he could be detained. The trial began before the Seine Assize Court on March 18, 1946. On April 4 the jury found him guilty of the premeditated murder of 24 of the 27 people named in the case, with theft, and he was sentenced to death. He was guillotined at La Santé prison on May 25, 1946.
Kristen Gilbert was a nurse on Ward C of the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Northampton, Massachusetts, married, with two young sons. In the summer of 1995 she befriended James Perrault, an officer on the hospital’s police force who responded to medical emergencies on the ward, and by the fall they were having an affair, the federal appeals court in Boston later recorded.
What happened to her husband in November 1995 was never charged. He was taken ill and treated for low potassium and low blood sugar; about a week later, by his account, she injected him with a liquid she said was saline, and he lost consciousness and recovered. He reported it months later, during a bitter divorce and custody dispute, a point her lawyers stressed. Before her murder trial, Judge Michael A. Ponsor excluded the allegation from the question of her guilt, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit agreed, calling the evidence "undeniably explosive." Her husband testified at the trial, and at the penalty phase the government was allowed to present the alleged attempt as an aggravating factor.
On March 14, 2001, a federal jury in Springfield convicted Gilbert of murdering four patients by injecting them with epinephrine, three in the first degree and one in the second, and of two attempted murders. At the penalty phase her father showed the jurors photographs of her as a child and as a young mother, and both her grandmothers asked the jury to spare her, saying a death sentence would devastate the family and her two sons. The jury did not return a death sentence, and she was sentenced to life in prison without parole. In October 2026 the Federal Bureau of Prisons listed her at the Federal Medical Center, Carswell, in Fort Worth, Texas, with a release date of life.
Marybeth Tinning and her husband lost nine children in Schenectady, New York, between January 1972 and December 1985. Their deaths were recorded at the time as natural or of unknown cause. The ninth, their daughter Tami Lynne, died on December 20, 1985, at four months. In February 1986 Tinning gave police a statement admitting that she had smothered Tami Lynne and two of her sons, Timothy in 1973 and Nathan in 1975, and saying she had done nothing to five of the other children. Police and the district attorney said that her husband was never a suspect in any of the deaths.
He stood by her. He helped post her 100,000-dollar bail in March 1986, and at her trial in Schenectady County Court in 1987 he testified that, in a five-minute conversation after her questioning, she had told him, "I killed Tami." The jury asked to have that testimony read back during its deliberations. On July 17, 1987, it acquitted her of intentional murder and convicted her of second-degree murder by depraved indifference. She was sentenced to 20 years to life. She was never charged in any other child’s death.
Her husband visited her twice a month through 31 years in prison, the Daily Gazette of Schenectady reported. Parole was denied six times, beginning in 2007, before it was granted in July 2018; he said he was "very glad that it will soon be all over with." On August 21, 2018, he was waiting when she walked out of Taconic Correctional Facility. Her supervision was later ended early under a 2022 state directive, the Daily Gazette reported in 2023.
• 1880s and 1890s: H. H. Holmes marries three times; the third marriage, to Georgiana Yoke, takes place in Denver in January 1894.
• May 7, 1896: Holmes is hanged in Philadelphia for the murder of Benjamin Pitezel.
• 1927: Marcel Petiot marries; the couple move to Paris in 1933.
• May 25, 1946: Petiot is guillotined in Paris after his conviction for 24 murders.
• November 1951: the Supreme Court of the United States upholds the reversal of Harvey Carignan’s Alaska murder conviction.
• September 1964: John Wayne Gacy marries for the first time; she divorces him while he is in an Iowa prison.
• 1969: Peter Tobin marries for the first time; he marries again in 1973.
• 1971: Dennis Rader marries; Herb Baumeister marries in November.
• January 1972: the first of nine children of Marybeth Tinning and her husband dies in Schenectady.
• June 1, 1972: Gacy marries a second time; the marriage ends in divorce in March 1976.
• 1976: Robert Lee Yates Jr. marries; the couple have five children.
• March 1980: Gacy is convicted of 33 murders, with other charges.
• 1985: Gary Ridgway meets the woman who becomes his third wife; they marry in 1988.
• December 20, 1985: Tami Lynne Tinning dies at four months.
• July 17, 1987: Marybeth Tinning is convicted of depraved-indifference murder; her husband had testified for the prosecution.
• 1990: Tobin’s third wife leaves him in Bathgate.
• November 20, 1990: Andrei Chikatilo is arrested after 27 years of marriage.
• June 29, 1991: Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka marry in Niagara-on-the-Lake.
• October 15, 1992: Chikatilo is convicted of 52 murders; he is shot on February 14, 1994.
• July 6, 1993: Homolka is sentenced to 12 years for manslaughter; the couple divorce on February 25, 1994.
• May 10, 1994: Gacy is executed in Illinois.
• September 1, 1995: Bernardo is convicted of two first-degree murders, with other charges.
• January 1996: Baumeister’s wife files for divorce.
• June 24, 1996: her lawyer tells police about the skull, and the search of Fox Hollow Farm begins.
• July 3, 1996: Baumeister is found dead in Ontario.
• April 2000: Yates is arrested; in October he pleads guilty in Spokane County and the couple file for bankruptcy.
• March 14, 2001: Kristen Gilbert is convicted of murdering four patients.
• November 30, 2001: Ridgway is arrested; he and his wife divorce in 2002, and he pleads guilty to 48 murders on November 5, 2003.
• February 25, 2005: Rader is arrested; his wife is granted an emergency divorce soon after.
• July 2005: Homolka is released at the end of her sentence.
• May 2007: Tobin is convicted of the rape and murder of Angelika Kluk; murder convictions for Vicky Hamilton (2008) and Dinah McNicol (2009) follow.
• October 18, 2010: Russell Williams pleads guilty to all 88 counts.
• October 11, 2018: Yates’s death sentence is converted to life imprisonment.
• August 21, 2018: Tinning walks out of prison on parole; her husband is waiting.
• October 8, 2022: Tobin dies in custody in Edinburgh.
• March 2023: Carignan dies in a Minnesota prison, at 95.
• November 2024: Bernardo is denied parole for the third time.
• May 2026: ten men whose remains were recovered from Fox Hollow Farm have been identified.