The hardest cases to solve are often the ones in which the victims are the easiest to overlook. A shoeshine boy in a provincial Colombian town, a girl selling newspapers at an Ecuadorian market, a child sleeping on the roof of an Egyptian train, an infant handed over for a fee to a stranger in Copenhagen: each was the kind of child whose absence could pass for a week, a month, or for good. The killers who chose them understood that. So, in the end, did the investigators who caught them, usually after years of separate files in separate jurisdictions had been laid side by side.
These seventeen cases span more than a century and four continents. Some ended in convictions that still stand. One ended in a pardon and a court’s finding that the convictions should never have been entered. Several produced laws that changed how a country watched over its children.
Luis Alfredo Garavito Cubillos was born on January 25, 1957, in Génova, in the coffee department of Quindío, Semana reported in 1999. For most of the 1990s he drifted from town to town, and boys from poor families disappeared behind him: street vendors, shoeshine boys and lottery sellers, most between about eight and sixteen.
For years the deaths were treated as unrelated. Remains turned up in one department while the missing-person reports sat in another. In August 1997 the Fiscalía’s investigative arm, the CTI, set up a special group, and by late 1999 it had recovered 118 sets of remains, Semana reported. Its director said he had ruled out early the popular theory of a satanic sect. Reuters reported that the remains of 25 children had been found in a single mass grave in Pereira.
The break came by chance. On April 22, 1999, on the outskirts of Villavicencio, a man was caught attacking a boy and arrested. He gave his name as Bonifacio Morera Lizcano and was held under it, Semana reported. Only when investigators from across the country compared their files did the prisoner prove to be Garavito. By the time he was questioned, the head of the Fiscalía told Reuters, prosecutors had DNA from hair, a shoe, eyeglasses, travel and hotel receipts, and nylon rope that matched rope used on victims. In October 1999 he confessed to killing 140 children.
The first sentence, in December 1999, was 52 years, La Nación of Costa Rica reported. In August 2003, EFE reported, he admitted 28 more killings, 23 of them of minors, and the sentences against him had reached 1,853 years for 138 of the 172 crimes he had admitted by then. Colombian law held the time any prisoner could serve to 40 years, El Colombiano explained in 2023, and that was the limit that applied to him.
The arithmetic kept his case in the news. When the Senate moved in 2020 to allow life imprisonment for the gravest crimes against children, lawyers told Semana that a harsher penalty could not be imposed after the fact on a man already sentenced. In 2021 a sentence enforcement court in Valledupar ruled on his eligibility for conditional release and refused it, and on November 1, 2021, the national prison institute, INPEC, issued a bulletin stating flatly that he would not be released. He died in custody in Valledupar on October 12, 2023, at 66, INPEC confirmed.
Pedro Alonso López came from Tolima, in central Colombia. In March 1980 he was questioned by police in Ambato, in the Ecuadorian highlands, over the death of a ten-year-old girl who sold newspapers, Semana reported in 2002. The statement he gave on March 10, 1980, became a confession to killing some 200 girls in Ecuador. Police did not believe him until he led them to about fifty places around the province of Tungurahua and the bodies were dug up. Ron Laytner, reporting for the Deseret News in 1992, put the number of bodies recovered at 53.
Ecuador convicted him of the murder of girls, with other charges. Its law at the time did not allow sentences to be added together, and in 1981, Vanguardia of Bucaramanga reported, he received 16 years for one crime. In 1992 Laytner quoted a prisons minister who said the release that was coming sounded strange, but that it was the law. When his sentence ran out he was handed over to Colombia, where a court in his home region wanted him.
Colombia did not convict him. He was declared inimputable, not criminally responsible, and committed to the psychiatric annex of the Modelo prison in Bogotá, Vanguardia reported. A psychiatric opinion attached to his Interpol notice, Semana wrote in 2002, described paranoid schizophrenia and a great capacity to deceive. He was later released on condition that he report to the court periodically, and he did not. Colombia asked Interpol to find him in 2002. La FM reported in 2018 that no one could say whether he was alive, and in March 2023 Vanguardia set out the competing rumors: that he had died in 2005, that he was living in Tolima, that he was destitute in Bogotá. None had been confirmed.
Daniel Camargo Barbosa was born in Cundinamarca in 1930, according to the Ecuadorian magazine Vistazo. He had already been convicted in Colombia, and was serving a long sentence in the island prison of Gorgona, when on November 23, 1984, he got off the island, Vistazo reported. Colombia declared him dead. An Agence France-Presse report carried by Radio Nacional de Colombia in 2021 said he had been given up for lost at sea.
He reached Ecuador. In Guayaquil, women and girls began to disappear. The forensic physician Carlos Barcos, who directed the forensic institute of the University of Guayaquil, concluded in 1985 from the first remains that a single person was responsible, El Universo reported in 2009. To put names to the dead, Barcos superimposed photographs of missing young women on skulls to see whether they matched. More than 67 of the victims later attributed to Camargo were identified that way or by other means, and 46 bodies were claimed by their families, El Universo reported.
Camargo was arrested in Quito in 1986 carrying the clothing of his most recent victim, Vistazo reported. Semana, in 2015, described an earlier stop in which a patrol let him go despite a bag of women’s clothing and newspaper clippings about dead women. He confessed to killing 71 women and girls in Ecuador. The court gave him 16 years, the maximum Ecuadorian law then allowed.
He did not serve it out. In November 1994 he was killed by a fellow prisoner in Quito; a 2026 study by Manuel Alvarado Mendoza dates the killing to November 13, 1994, at the Centro de Rehabilitación de Varones No. 2. He was buried in a common grave at the El Batán cemetery, Vistazo reported.
Andrei Chikatilo was a former teacher of Russian language and literature who became a supply agent for factories in the Rostov region of southern Russia. Between 1978 and 1990 children and young women disappeared along the railway lines and forest strips around Rostov-on-Don, and for twelve years the investigation failed to stop him.
Its first failure was the gravest. For the killing of a girl in Shakhty in December 1978, a crime Chikatilo later confessed to, a local man, A.K., was tried, convicted and shot. He was 29, Radio Svoboda noted, and in 2002 Novaya Gazeta argued that the state had never properly acknowledged that an innocent man had been executed in Chikatilo’s place. In September 1984 police detained Chikatilo near the Rostov bus station and examined him over one of the killings, Peter Conradi wrote in The Moscow Times, but there was no direct evidence against him, and by early 1985 he was free. NEWS.ru, reviewing the case in 2023, catalogued the errors and false leads that cost the investigation years.
He was arrested in Novocherkassk on November 20, 1990. Over the following days he began to confess, and the count of killings he described rose past fifty.
His trial opened before Judge Leonid Akubzhanov in the Rostov Regional Court on April 14, 1992. He was charged with 53 murders, with other charges. He sat in a metal cage, and at the start he pleaded guilty to most of the counts but denied three, United Press International reported. The trial ran for almost six months. Conradi described doctors and nurses waiting in the courtroom in case relatives of the victims collapsed.
On October 15, 1992, the court sentenced him to death, having found him guilty of 52 murders, The Moscow Times and the St. Petersburg Times reported; Reuters reported that he had called himself a "mad beast" in court. His lawyer appealed to the Supreme Court of Russia, UPI reported, and Amnesty International, which opposes capital punishment in every case, urged the authorities to commute the sentence. The Supreme Court upheld it. President Boris Yeltsin rejected his plea for clemency, and on February 14, 1994, Chikatilo was shot in the prison at Novocherkassk, UPI reported.
Ramadan Abdel Rehim Mansour, known as al-Tourbini, from the Arabic word for an express train, led a gang that preyed on the street children who lived around Egypt’s railway stations.
The case surfaced in late 2006. Daily News Egypt reported that two young members of the gang had been caught in a police trap, had confessed to killing boys together with their accomplices, and were guiding officers to the places where bodies had been left. A child’s body found in Shubra al-Khaimah, on the edge of Cairo, in November 2006 led to the arrest of seven suspects, Mansour among them, Egypt Independent later reported. Families of children missing for years came to the prosecutor’s office with photographs, hoping for an answer. Mansour told investigators he could not remember how many crimes he had committed or where. He also claimed, in a statement prosecutors took seriously enough to have experts review, that he had caused a 1998 train crash at Kafr al-Dawwar; a railway official told Daily News Egypt the account was not plausible. Under interrogation, Egypt Telegraph reported in 2024, he blamed a female jinn that he said had possessed him.
On May 23, 2007, the criminal court in Tanta convicted Mansour and his deputy, Farag Samir Mahmoud, of the murder of 20 street children, with other charges, and of illegal possession of weapons, and sentenced both to death, the Associated Press reported in a dispatch printed by IOL. The two men had admitted the 20 killings; police had recovered the remains of eight. As Egyptian law requires, the sentences went to the Grand Mufti for his advisory opinion. Five other defendants received prison terms of three to 40 years, Egypt Independent reported.
Mansour and Mahmoud were hanged on the morning of December 16, 2010. Mansour’s brother told Egypt Independent that their mother fainted when she was told.
On the evening of January 12, 1948, police in Shinjuku learned of the deaths of five infants, Bunshun Online recounted in 2026. An undertaker said the infants came from the Kotobuki maternity home, run by a licensed midwife, Miyuki Ishikawa, and her husband, Takeshi, and that he had handled more than thirty of the home’s dead before.
The Ishikawas took in, for a fee, infants whose mothers could not keep them, and drew rations of milk and sugar for each child; Bunshun Online reported that they sold the rations on the black market. On January 15, 1948, the Waseda police arrested the couple. They were indicted for murder on January 26. Prosecutors told the court that 84 infants had died at the home between April 1946 and January 1948, Arata Koike reported in his 2021 history of the case for Bunshun Online; estimates of the total dead range from 85 to 169.
On October 11, 1948, the Tokyo District Court found the evidence insufficient on 22 of the 27 deaths the prosecution called clear. On the other five, it found that the couple had jointly caused the infants' deaths from malnutrition by omission. It sentenced Miyuki Ishikawa to eight years and her husband to four, and acquitted the assistant midwife, who had repeatedly asked for more milk for the children. On April 28, 1952, the Tokyo High Court halved the terms, and the Supreme Court upheld that judgment.
The case reached the Diet within weeks. It is regularly cited among the events behind the Eugenic Protection Law of 1948, which first permitted abortion in Japan on stated grounds; a 2023 report of both houses on that law opens its account of the background with the Kotobuki home. In June 1948 the government presented the Medical Care Bill, which brought midwife-run maternity homes under national regulation for the first time; the parliamentary vice-minister of health told the House of Representatives that recent cases had shown the need. The historian Hitomi Yoshida has argued that the case ended the old role of midwives as guardians of infants awaiting adoption.
Robert Black, a Scottish-born van driver, delivered posters across Britain for a London firm. Four girls were killed: Jennifer Cardy, 9, in Northern Ireland in August 1981; Susan Maxwell, 11, in 1982; Caroline Hogg, 5, in 1983; and Sarah Harper, 10, in 1986. The joint inquiry into the Maxwell and Hogg cases, led by Hector Clark, gathered 189,000 witness statements over the years, The Scotsman reported.
The end came in the Borders village of Stow on July 14, 1990. A resident alerted the police, who stopped Black’s van and rescued a six-year-old girl. Black pleaded guilty to abducting her, with other charges.
There was no confession to the murders. Officers from five forces built a circumstantial case from about half a million fuel receipts, expense records and delivery schedules from his employer, which placed him near the places where the girls disappeared, The Scotsman reported. In May 1994, at Newcastle upon Tyne Crown Court, he was convicted of the kidnapping and murder of Susan Maxwell, Caroline Hogg and Sarah Harper, with other charges, and given life sentences with a minimum term of 35 years.
The Cardy case took longer. At Armagh Crown Court in October 2011 a jury convicted him of Jennifer’s murder, with other charges, after the prosecution was allowed to put his other crimes before the jury. Mr Justice Weatherup set a minimum term of 25 years. "It was a wicked deed," the judge said in his sentencing remarks. The Court of Appeal in Northern Ireland dismissed his appeal on June 27, 2013, and Devon and Cornwall Police said that ruling transformed their reinvestigation of the 1978 disappearance of Genette Tate, 13. When Black died in Maghaberry prison on January 12, 2016, at 68, the force said that in all probability he would have been charged in her case, the Press Association reported. He was never charged. An inquest jury found in 2018 that he died of a heart attack. No relative claimed his body, and his ashes were scattered at sea.
In the spring of 1991 Beverley Allitt, a 22-year-old enrolled nurse, worked on Ward 4, the children’s ward of Grantham and Kesteven General Hospital in Lincolnshire. Over a period of about two months, children on the ward collapsed one after another. Four of them died: Liam Taylor, Timothy Hardwick, Becky Phillips and Claire Peck.
A laboratory result in April showed that one baby had been given insulin that his body had not produced. The police were not told until April 30, 1991. Detective Superintendent Stuart Clifton, who led the inquiry, told VICE in 2019 that many parents at first believed the hospital had saved their children and did not want the police involved. The evidence that pointed to Allitt was circumstantial and cumulative: the insulin result, her report that the key to the drug refrigerator had gone missing, pages torn from the ward’s nursing log, and her presence at every one of the incidents. She was arrested in November 1991, VICE reported.
At Nottingham Crown Court a jury convicted her of four murders, three attempted murders and six counts of causing grievous bodily harm with intent. On May 28, 1993, Mr Justice Latham gave her 13 life sentences. "You are cunning and manipulative and you have shown no remorse for the trail of destruction you have left behind you," he told her, United Press International reported.
The government’s inquiry, chaired by Sir Cecil Clothier, reported on February 11, 1994. The Health Secretary, Virginia Bottomley, told the House of Commons that its central conclusion was that "a determined and secret criminal may defeat the best regulated organisation." Its recommendations covered the health screening of nurses, the use of pediatric pathology after unexplained deaths, and the reporting of serious incidents.
Allitt’s minimum term of 30 years, fixed in 2007, expired in November 2021, the Grantham Journal reported; she was still detained at Rampton Secure Hospital when she sought a move to a prison in 2023. The case returned to public view when the Thirlwall Inquiry examined the Lucy Letby case: the inquiry’s counsel said Allitt’s case had formed part of Letby’s own nurse training, the Press Association reported, and a former Department of Health official, Tom Luce, told the inquiry that the Clothier recommendations "were not acted on."
Abraão José Bueno was a nursing technician at the Instituto de Puericultura of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, a pediatric hospital, in 2005. He was convicted of four homicides and four attempted homicides against children aged up to 12 who were patients there, and was sentenced to terms adding up to 108 years, Bahia Notícias reported in June 2010, citing Agência Estado.
His lawyers took the case to Brazil’s highest courts while he was held in the maximum-security prison at Volta Redonda. On June 14, 2010, Justice Cármen Lúcia of the Supremo Tribunal Federal refused his request for an injunction, after the Superior Tribunal de Justiça had already ruled against him on a habeas corpus petition.
Between 1989 and 1992, boys were killed in Altamira, a river town in the Brazilian Amazon. The children were between about 8 and 14, the Diário do Pará reported. The case was eventually tried before a jury in Belém, the state capital; Sousa, by his own lawyers' account, had remained free for more than eight years before it came to trial.
Four people were convicted, among them two doctors, Anísio Ferreira de Sousa and Césio Flávio Caldas Brandão, and a former military police officer, Carlos Alberto Lima. The convictions were for the murder of boys, with other charges, according to the Supremo Tribunal Federal. Brandão received 56 years and Lima 35, the Diário do Pará reported; another defendant, a woman described as a seer, was acquitted.
The appeals turned on a question of procedure: whether a man convicted at trial could be jailed while his appeals were still pending. In December 2004 Justice Marco Aurélio of the Supremo Tribunal Federal ordered the release of Sousa and another defendant, Amailton Madeira Gomes, holding that the gravity of the charges could not justify serving a sentence before the judgment was final. Their petitions argued that the convictions were a miscarriage of justice and that another man had confessed to the crimes; the court’s report noted the claim without endorsing it. In April 2012, with every appeal exhausted, the court ruled that Brandão’s sentence was final and that he would serve it in prison, the Diário do Pará reported.
In Denmark around the First World War, a child born outside marriage meant shame for the mother and poverty for both. Frederik Strand, head of the Police Museum in Copenhagen, told TV 2 Kosmopol that single mothers had no childcare at all. Dagmar Overbye found her trade in that gap. She placed advertisements in the newspapers, agreed with desperate mothers to arrange the adoption of their infants for a single cash payment, and killed the children, Dansk Kvindebiografisk Leksikon records. The Copenhagen Post, drawing on a retired police officer who studied the case, put the usual fee at about 200 kroner, roughly a year’s wages for a live-in servant.
The case broke in 1920, when Karoline Aagesen, a 21-year-old mother who had handed her two-month-old daughter to Overbye at her flat in Vesterbro on August 30, came back and went to the police. Overbye confessed to up to 16 killings.
She was tried before a jury at Østre Landsret, the Eastern High Court, over three days in 1921. Her lawyer argued that she was the tool of a careless society and indifferent mothers. Experts found her not insane. The jury convicted her, on nine counts according to Den Store Danske and on eight according to TV 2 Kosmopol and Videnskab.dk, a difference that turns on whether one of her own children is counted. She was sentenced to death. About a month later she was pardoned, on condition that she never be released and never be granted any easing of prison rules. No woman had been executed in Denmark since 1861. She died in Vestre Fængsel on May 6, 1929.
The case changed Danish law. The Act on the Supervision of Foster Children of 1923, a direct result of the trial according to both Danish reference works, brought all children born outside marriage under public supervision and stayed in force until 1965. Information reported that it also led to new rules on population registration.
Nine of Marybeth Tinning’s children died in Schenectady, New York, between January 1972 and December 1985. For years the deaths were put down to natural or unexplained causes. The last was Tami Lynne, four months old, who died on December 20, 1985.
A tip from the child protective unit of the county Department of Social Services started the inquiry, the Daily Gazette of Schenectady reported. On February 4, 1986, Tinning went with police to be questioned. By the end of the day she had given a statement admitting that she smothered Tami Lynne, and that she had smothered two of her sons, Timothy in 1973 and Nathan in 1975. She was arrested just after midnight on a charge of second-degree murder.
The trial in Schenectady County Court in June and July 1987 turned on her statement and on two competing medical accounts of Tami Lynne’s death. On July 17, 1987, the jury acquitted her of intentional murder and convicted her of second-degree murder under circumstances evincing depraved indifference to human life, the Daily Gazette reported. On October 1, 1987, County Judge Clifford T. Harrigan sentenced her to 20 years to life. She told the court she had "played no part" in her daughter’s death. She was never charged in the deaths of her other children.
She was denied parole six times. At her seventh hearing, in July 2018, she said, "I killed my daughter, my baby daughter, on that day," the Daily Gazette reported from the hearing transcript, and the state announced on July 16, 2018, that parole had been granted, the Associated Press reported. The Daily Gazette later reported that she had been discharged from parole supervision.
Andras Pandy, born in 1927 in Subcarpathia, served as a Protestant minister to Hungarian refugees in Belgium and taught religion in Brussels schools. Between 1986 and 1989, by the chronology the Hungarian news site Origo published, six members of his household vanished: his first wife, Ilona Sőrés; their sons, Dániel and Zoltán; his second wife, Edit Fintor; and her daughters Andrea and Tünde.
In 1992 his eldest daughter went to the police, accused her father of abusing her, and said six relatives had disappeared. Pandy answered that she had joined a sect and was disturbed, and the complaint was filed away, Origo reported. The file was reopened in 1996. In the autumn of 1997 police arrested Pandy and then his daughter, and in November 1997, Reuters reported, she confessed that she had taken part in five of the killings, including her own mother’s. The 48-page indictment rested largely on what she told investigators.
At the two-week jury trial in Brussels in 2002, Pandy denied everything, compared himself to Alfred Dreyfus and insisted his relatives were alive in Hungary. The jury deliberated for seven hours and convicted him of six counts of premeditated murder, with other charges. He was 74 and was sentenced to life, Reuters reported in a dispatch carried by the Slovak daily SME. The presiding judge, Karel Demyttenaere, said father and daughter both had dangerous, antisocial personalities. His daughter was convicted of five of the murders and sentenced to 21 years; Reuters reported that the lighter term reflected the pressure and abuse she described. She was released from prison in Bruges in June 2010, VRT NWS reported. Pandy died in prison in Bruges in December 2013, aged 86, the Belgian broadcaster BRF reported, citing Belga. He never admitted the crimes.
Anthony Kirkland had served 16 years for killing a woman, Leola Douglas, in 1987, a death for which he pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and aggravated arson. Paroled in 2003, he was back in Cincinnati when, between May 2006 and March 2009, two women and two girls were killed: Casonya Crawford, 14, in May 2006; Mary Jo Newton, 45, in 2006; Kimya Rolison in December 2006; and Esme Kenney, 13, on March 7, 2009.
Esme was a seventh grader at the city’s School for the Creative and Performing Arts, a cellist and singer whom classmates described to FOX19 as always kind. When she did not come home from a run that Saturday afternoon, her mother called 911. Officers searching nearby woods found a man sitting alone with her watch and iPod; he gave a false name and then his own, the Supreme Court of Ohio later recounted. In long recorded interviews after his arrest Kirkland confessed to all four killings.
In March 2010 he pleaded guilty in Hamilton County to the murders of Mary Jo Newton and Kimya Rolison. A jury convicted him on March 12, 2010, of the aggravated murder of Casonya Crawford and Esme Kenney, with other charges, and he was sentenced to death. The Supreme Court of Ohio affirmed in 2014, then in May 2016, after the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Hurst v. Florida, vacated the death sentences by a four-to-three vote, citing prejudice from the prosecutor’s argument, and ordered a new sentencing hearing. A second jury recommended death in August 2018, and Judge Patrick Dinkelacker imposed it on August 28, 2018, WCPO reported. On August 18, 2020, the Supreme Court of Ohio affirmed, writing that he had been "resentenced in a fundamentally fair proceeding."
In 1931 a Clarksburg, West Virginia, grocer who called himself Cornelius O. Pierson was corresponding with widows he had found through a matrimonial agency in Detroit, promising marriage, according to e-WV, the West Virginia encyclopedia. One was Asta Eicher, a Danish-born widow from Park Ridge, Illinois. She and her three children, Greta, 14, Harry, 12, and Anabel, 9, left Park Ridge on June 28, 1931, and were not heard from again, Chicago’s Danish Times reported that September.
The investigation into their disappearance led police to Powers. When he was arrested in Clarksburg he was carrying letters to other women, the West Virginia and Regional History Center at West Virginia University records. In August 1931 he was charged with the deaths, and the bodies of Asta Eicher, her children and a second widow, Dorothy Lemke of Massachusetts, were found at his property at Quiet Dell. He was reported to have confessed.
He was tried for one death only. Because Clarksburg’s new courthouse was unfinished and the crowds were too large, the trial was held in Moore’s Opera House, and on December 12, 1931, he was convicted of the murder of Dorothy Lemke and sentenced to hang. He was never tried for the deaths of the Eicher children or their mother. He was hanged at the West Virginia Penitentiary in Moundsville on March 18, 1932. The case later gave Davis Grubb the germ of his 1953 novel The Night of the Hunter, e-WV records.
No case in this company shows more plainly how a pattern of infant deaths can be misread. Kathleen Folbigg’s four children died between 1989 and 1999: Caleb at 19 days, Patrick at eight months in 1991, Sarah at ten months in 1993, and Laura at 19 months in 1999. Prosecutors argued that she had smothered them, and in 2003 she was convicted of three counts of murder and one of manslaughter and sentenced to 30 years. Her former husband’s suspicions had started the police investigation.
The science moved on. In 2018, evidence emerged that both daughters carried a rare variant of the CALM2 gene that could cause sudden death; experts suggested heart inflammation as a possible cause of Laura’s death and a neurogenetic disorder as a possible cause of Patrick’s, the Associated Press reported. A petition signed by 90 scientists and medical professionals in 2021 led to an inquiry under Thomas Bathurst, a former chief justice of New South Wales, which found a reasonable possibility that three of the children had died of natural causes. On its findings, the Governor pardoned Folbigg on the recommendation of the Attorney General, Michael Daley, and in June 2023 she walked out of the Clarence Correctional Centre at Grafton, the Australian Associated Press reported.
A pardon does not quash a conviction. On December 14, 2023, the New South Wales Court of Criminal Appeal did so, and Chief Justice Andrew Bell said there was "reasonable doubt as to Ms. Folbigg’s guilt." Her lawyer said she would seek substantial compensation.
Cayetano Santos Godino, the son of Calabrian immigrants, was born in Buenos Aires in 1896. In 1912 small children were attacked in the city’s poor districts. Arturo Laurora was killed in January 1912; Reina Bonita Wainikoff died weeks after an attack that March; and on December 3, 1912, a three-year-old boy named Giordano was killed.
Three child witnesses said they had seen the boy with Godino, and early on December 4 the investigating judge, José Antonio de Oro, went with officers of the 34th precinct to arrest him at his family’s home, the historian María Carolina Zapiola recounts. Stains on his clothing were later confirmed as blood. He confessed to four killings, seven attempted killings and seven deliberate fires.
The law of the day allowed a minor over ten to be tried as an adult if he had acted with discernment, and the court turned to experts. The medical and psychiatric experts found him not responsible, and on their reports Judge de Oro acquitted him; the appeals court acquitted him too, and he was committed to a mental hospital, Zapiola writes. A second appeal by the prosecutor led to his being declared criminally responsible. He was sent to the national penitentiary and then to the prison at Ushuaia, at the southern tip of the country, where he died on November 15, 1944. The official cause was internal bleeding from an ulcer; the suspicion that fellow prisoners had beaten him to death was never settled, and Diego Galeano and Javier Sinay, writing in Página/12, called the story of a fatal beating wrong.
Zapiola tested the common claim that the case shaped Argentina’s 1919 law on the state guardianship of minors and found that Godino was never mentioned in the congressional debates on it.
Set side by side, the cases share a few hard lessons. The killers who lasted longest worked where records were weakest: across provincial and national borders, among children who lived on the streets, inside institutions trusted to protect them. They were caught, more often than not, when someone finally assembled evidence that already existed, whether fuel receipts in Britain, travel receipts and rope in Colombia, or a laboratory result in Grantham. And the laws that followed tended to target the gap the killer had used: Denmark’s supervision of foster children, Japan’s regulation of maternity homes, Britain’s recommendations on screening nurses, though the Thirlwall Inquiry heard in 2024 that those had not been acted on. The Folbigg case stands as the warning on the other side of the ledger, that a pattern of deaths is not in itself proof of murder.
• December 3 and 4, 1912: a three-year-old boy is killed in Buenos Aires; Cayetano Santos Godino is arrested the next morning.
• 1920 to 1921: Dagmar Overbye is arrested in Copenhagen, convicted by a jury at Østre Landsret and sentenced to death; she is pardoned about a month later.
• 1923: Denmark passes the Act on the Supervision of Foster Children.
• 1931: Harry Powers is charged with the deaths at Quiet Dell, West Virginia, in August; on December 12 he is convicted of the murder of Dorothy Lemke.
• March 18, 1932: Powers is hanged at Moundsville.
• November 15, 1944: Godino dies at the prison in Ushuaia.
• January 12 and 15, 1948: police stop an undertaker carrying five infants' bodies from the Kotobuki maternity home in Tokyo; Miyuki and Takeshi Ishikawa are arrested.
• October 11, 1948: the Tokyo District Court convicts the Ishikawas of five infant deaths by omission.
• April 28, 1952: the Tokyo High Court reduces Miyuki Ishikawa’s sentence to four years.
• March 10, 1980: Pedro Alonso López gives the statement in Ambato, Ecuador, that becomes his confession.
• August 1981 to March 1986: Jennifer Cardy, Susan Maxwell, Caroline Hogg and Sarah Harper are killed.
• December 20, 1985: Tami Lynne Tinning dies in Schenectady; her mother is arrested in February 1986.
• 1986: Daniel Camargo Barbosa is arrested in Quito and sentenced to 16 years.
• July 17, 1987: Marybeth Tinning is convicted of depraved indifference murder.
• July 14, 1990: Robert Black is arrested in Stow, Scottish Borders.
• November 20, 1990: Andrei Chikatilo is arrested in Novocherkassk.
• February to April 1991: four children die on Ward 4 at Grantham and Kesteven General Hospital.
• October 15, 1992: Chikatilo is sentenced to death in Rostov-on-Don.
• May 28, 1993: Beverley Allitt receives 13 life sentences at Nottingham.
• February 11, 1994: the Clothier inquiry report on the Allitt case is presented to the House of Commons.
• February 14, 1994: Chikatilo is executed at Novocherkassk.
• May 1994: Black is convicted at Newcastle upon Tyne of three murders.
• November 1994: Camargo is killed in prison in Quito.
• November 1997: Andras Pandy’s daughter confesses in Brussels.
• April 22, 1999: Luis Alfredo Garavito is arrested in Villavicencio under a false name.
• 2002: a Brussels jury convicts Pandy of six murders; he is sentenced to life.
• 2003: Kathleen Folbigg is convicted in New South Wales.
• December 2004: the Supremo Tribunal Federal orders the release of Anísio Ferreira de Sousa pending appeal in the Altamira case.
• 2005: four children die at the Instituto de Puericultura in Rio de Janeiro; Abraão José Bueno is later convicted.
• May 23, 2007: Ramadan Abdel Rehim Mansour and Farag Samir Mahmoud are sentenced to death in Tanta.
• March 7, 2009: Esme Kenney is killed in Cincinnati; Anthony Kirkland is arrested.
• March 12, 2010: a Hamilton County jury convicts Kirkland of aggravated murder.
• December 16, 2010: Mansour and Mahmoud are hanged.
• October 27, 2011: Black is convicted at Armagh of the murder of Jennifer Cardy.
• December 2013: Pandy dies in prison in Bruges.
• January 12, 2016: Black dies at Maghaberry prison.
• July 16, 2018: New York grants Tinning parole.
• August 28, 2018: Kirkland is resentenced to death; the Supreme Court of Ohio affirms on August 18, 2020.
• November 1, 2021: Colombia’s prison institute announces that Garavito will not be released.
• June 2023: Folbigg is pardoned and released; on December 14, 2023, her convictions are quashed.
• October 12, 2023: Garavito dies in custody in Valledupar.