The service record is one of the first documents detectives ask for, and one of the least revealing. It lists postings, ranks, medals and the reason a man left, but it does not say what he would do afterward. Among the men whose cases follow, the uniform came in every condition: a Canadian officer who flew VIPs, an Army sergeant with an expert’s marksmanship badge, a Navy cook with a schizophrenia diagnosis, an Air Force airman still on active duty when he was arrested, a Marine who stole weapons from his own air station and fled. Some of these men were praised by their commanders. Others were sent home early. No service record explains the killings, and no court that heard these cases found that military service caused them. What the records do show is how far a career in uniform could carry a man who was, or would become, a killer.
John Reginald Christie served in the British Army in the First World War and was hurt in a gas attack. The London Review of Books, reviewing two recent books on the case in 2024, says the gas left him temporarily blinded; the Incorporated Council of Law Reporting, in its own review, says he was severely injured. When war came again in 1939 he joined the Metropolitan Police War Reserve and served as War Reserve Constable X 112, though he already had five criminal convictions. In July 1953 the Home Secretary told the House of Commons that he regretted the record had not come to light "in the conditions of rapid expansion of the Metropolitan Police War Reserve."
Christie was convicted at the Central Criminal Court on June 25, 1953, of murdering his wife, Ethel, and was hanged at Pentonville Prison on July 15, 1953. He confessed to killing other women, among them Ruth Fuerst and Muriel Eady during the war years and three women in early 1953, but none of those deaths was tried. His conviction reopened the case of Timothy Evans, hanged in 1950 for the death of his infant daughter; a judicial inquiry in 1966 found it more probable than not that Evans had not killed her, and he received a posthumous free pardon.
Marcel Petiot was called up in the First World War and reached the front as an infantryman in November 1916, the Argentine newspaper Infobae reported in 2025. About six months later he was gassed and wounded. Encyclopaedia Britannica records that in 1917 he was tried for stealing army blankets and found not guilty by reason of insanity, then sent back to the front, where he broke down. Infobae says that army psychiatrists recorded mental imbalance, depression and obsessions, and that in September 1920 the army discharged him with a disability pension. He then qualified as a doctor on an accelerated program for former soldiers.
During the German occupation he offered people who wanted to flee France passage to South America through what he presented as an escape network. The French Ministry of Justice, in its own account of the case, states that the network was a false cover: he killed the people who came to him and took their belongings. At trial in 1946 he claimed 63 killings and said every one of them was a German, a collaborator or a traitor, killed for the resistance. The Seine Assize Court rejected that defense. On April 4, 1946, he was convicted of 24 of the 27 murders charged and sentenced to death, and he was guillotined at La Santé prison in Paris on May 25, 1946.
Andrei Chikatilo, born in 1936 in a village in the Sumy region of Soviet Ukraine, trained as a communications technician after he failed to win a place at Moscow State University’s law faculty. Accounts of his compulsory military service differ. The Russian outlet Life.ru reported in 2018 that he served with KGB border troops in Central Asia and then in Berlin; other Russian accounts place him with Interior Ministry troops. He later joined the Communist Party, worked as a teacher and then as a factory supply agent, and lived in Shakhty and Novocherkassk in the Rostov region.
On October 15, 1992, the Rostov Regional Court convicted him of 52 murders, among them many children, with other charges, and sentenced him to death. The Supreme Court of Russia removed nine of the murder episodes in 1993 for insufficient evidence and upheld the death sentence on the 43 that remained. Among the episodes removed was the 1978 killing of a nine-year-old girl, Yelena Zakotnova, which he had confessed to and for which another man, Aleksandr Kravchenko, had been executed years earlier. President Boris Yeltsin refused clemency, and Chikatilo was shot at Novocherkassk prison on February 14, 1994.
Gary Heidnik joined the Army in the 1960s. He had hoped for a particular kind of training, the former Philadelphia prosecutor Charles Gallagher told Philadelphia Magazine in 2007, but the Army trained him as a medic and sent him to Germany, an assignment he disliked. Another man the magazine interviewed described a "legitimate, real nervous breakdown" there. Heidnik left with a medical discharge and, Gallagher said, "wound up with 100 percent disability." Psychiatrists who testified in federal court in 1997 described him as a paranoid schizophrenic; one of them said he had been schizophrenic since 1963.
Between Thanksgiving 1986 and March 1987, Heidnik kidnapped six women and held them captive in Philadelphia. Two of them, Sandra Lindsay and Deborah Dudley, died. The case ended when one of the captives escaped and reached a telephone, and police freed the others. In 1988 a jury convicted him of two counts of first-degree murder and returned two death sentences. He asked the courts to let him drop his appeals; his daughter’s effort to stop the execution as his next friend reached the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in April 1997. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court found him competent to be executed in August 1998, and he was put to death on July 6, 1999.
Charles Whitman was not a serial killer; his crime was a single day of killing. He enlisted in the Marine Corps on July 6, 1959, and spent about a year and a half at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, according to the Handbook of Texas. He passed a test for officer training, went to a preparatory school in Bainbridge, Maryland, and in September 1961 entered the University of Texas at Austin to study engineering. Low grades sent him back to duty as an enlisted man on February 12, 1963. A former Marine officer who served with him at Camp Lejeune, writing anonymously in American Heritage in 1993, remembered him as a corporal and rifle squad leader who qualified every year as a sharpshooter. In November 1963 a special court-martial found him guilty of possessing a pistol and ammunition and of lending money for profit; he was reduced to private. He was discharged on December 4, 1964.
Early on August 1, 1966, Whitman killed his mother and his wife. That day he opened fire from the observation deck of the University of Texas Tower. Pamela Colloff, writing in Texas Monthly in 2006, put the toll at 43 people shot and 15 dead, his wife and mother among them; the Handbook of Texas gives somewhat different figures. Austin police officers Ramiro Martinez and Houston McCoy reached the deck and killed him. An autopsy found a small brain tumor, but the commission Governor John Connally appointed could not determine why he did it.
Dean Corll served in the Army in the mid-1960s, completed radio repair school at Fort Hood, Texas, and in 1965 received a hardship discharge because his mother needed him at home, Skip Hollandsworth reported in Texas Monthly in 2011. He went back to Houston, where his mother ran a candy business in the Heights, and later worked as an electrician for Houston Lighting and Power.
Corll was never charged with any crime. On August 8, 1973, he was shot dead by Elmer Wayne Henley Jr., a teenager who had helped him, and Henley then told police about boys and young men who had disappeared from the Heights since 1970. Twenty-seven bodies were recovered that August, and police attributed at least 28 deaths to Corll on the strength of his accomplices' statements. Henley was convicted of six murders and David Owen Brooks of one. Brooks died in custody in 2020; Henley was denied parole again in November 2025, KPRC reported.
Arthur Shawcross had served in the Army and in Vietnam, and at his 1990 trial his lawyers made that service part of their insanity defense. They argued, as CNY Central summarized it after his death, that brain damage, abuse in childhood and his experiences as a soldier in Vietnam had left him legally insane. Under hypnosis, on tapes shown to the jury, he described atrocities in wartime; those were his own claims, and no report confirmed any killing by him in Vietnam.
The jury was not persuaded. In 1972, in Watertown, Shawcross had pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter in the death of eight-year-old Karen Ann Hill and was sentenced to up to 25 years; he also admitted the death of a ten-year-old boy, Jack Blake, for which he was never convicted. Paroled in April 1987 after almost 15 years, he moved to Rochester. In December 1990 a Monroe County jury convicted him of ten counts of second-degree murder for the deaths of women killed between March 1988 and January 1990; its foreman said the jurors decided he "wasn’t insane." Three months later he pleaded guilty to the murder of Elizabeth Gibson, 29, in Wayne County. He died in custody on November 10, 2008, after being taken from Sullivan Correctional Facility to a hospital in Albany.
William Bonin was a Vietnam War veteran and a truck driver living in Downey, in Los Angeles County, in 1979 and 1980. His branch of service is recorded inconsistently. At his Orange County trial the defense told the jury that he had earned a medal for gallantry by saving a fellow soldier at the risk of his own life, and that "he returned from Vietnam a changed man." The same defense evidence, as the California Supreme Court summarized it, traced the beginning of his violence against other men to his time in Vietnam. A psychologist who had worked as a parole counselor testified in Los Angeles about his decorated service.
A Los Angeles County jury convicted Bonin in January 1982 of the first-degree murders of ten boys and young men, and an Orange County jury convicted him in 1983 of four more. He was sentenced to death in both counties. On February 23, 1996, he was executed at San Quentin State Prison, the first person put to death in California by lethal injection, the Associated Press reported.
Leonard Lake and Charles Ng both came out of the Marine Corps, though their service did not overlap. Lake, born in San Francisco in 1945, was a former Marine and a survivalist; little more of his service is known. Ng, born in Hong Kong, came to the United States as a young man and joined the Marines after a hit-and-run accident, William Weir writes in Gale’s Great American Trials. Stationed at the Marine Corps Air Station at Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii, he took part in the theft of weapons from the base armory in 1981, escaped from military confinement and was later caught. The Associated Press recorded in 2022 that he served his sentence at Leavenworth for the weapons theft. Weir says the two men met through a survivalist magazine.
Lake was arrested in South San Francisco in June 1985 after Ng walked out of a lumber store with a vise. In custody Lake swallowed cyanide, and he died four days later without being tried. Ng fled to Canada and was extradited to California after six years. On February 24, 1999, an Orange County jury convicted him of 11 counts of first-degree murder and deadlocked on a twelfth. He was sentenced to death on June 30, 1999, and the California Supreme Court affirmed the judgment on July 28, 2022. The deaths of the other people linked to the property Lake used in Wilseyville, in Calaveras County, were attributed by investigators to the two men and never tried.
Randy Kraft graduated from Claremont Men’s College in 1968 with a degree in economics and then served in the United States Air Force at Edwards Air Force Base, the Bay Area Reporter wrote in 2016. He was discharged in 1969 after he told superiors that he was gay; the Long Beach Post wrote in 2013 that the discharge was recorded as being for medical problems. He moved into computer programming in the 1970s.
The men Kraft killed were young, white and often far from home. The California Supreme Court described the 16 victims of the counts on which he was convicted as males between 18 and 25, many of them hitchhiking or walking, and several of them Marines from Camp Pendleton, El Toro or Tustin. He was caught in May 1983, when highway patrol officers stopped his car for drunk driving; his passenger, Terry Lee Gambrel, 25, a Marine stationed at El Toro, was dead. An Orange County jury convicted him in 1989 of 16 counts of first-degree murder, and he was sentenced to death. The state Supreme Court affirmed the judgment on August 10, 2000. He has denied every killing.
Joseph James DeAngelo Jr. served in the Navy during the Vietnam War, and the Associated Press reported after his arrest that he had been a repairman aboard the cruiser USS Canberra in the late 1960s. After his discharge he studied police science and became a police officer, first in Exeter, in Tulare County, in 1973. The Exeter newspaper greeted him that year with a short article headlined "Navy veteran serves Exeter as Policeman," The Sun-Gazette recalled in 2018. He later served on the Auburn police force, which fired him in 1979.
DeAngelo was arrested in April 2018 after investigators used genetic genealogy to identify him as the man behind a series of killings, home invasions and burglaries across California between 1975 and 1986. On June 29, 2020, he pleaded guilty to 13 counts of first-degree murder and 13 counts of kidnapping to commit robbery, and on August 21, 2020, he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Douglas Clark was an Air Force veteran from a well-to-do family, 31 years old in 1980, according to Hadley Meares’s 2020 account of the case in Los Angeles Magazine. In his own statements to police, quoted by the California Supreme Court, he said that he had spent part of his schooling in Switzerland. Little else about his early life entered the trial record.
In 1983 a Los Angeles County jury convicted Clark of the first-degree murders of six women, among them Gina Marano, Cynthia Chandler, Karen Jones, Exxie Wilson, Marnette Comer and a young woman who has never been identified, and he was sentenced to death. The California Supreme Court reversed two lesser convictions in 1992 but affirmed the murders and the death judgment. He died of natural causes on October 11, 2023, still under sentence of death, City News Service reported.
Dennis Nilsen joined the British Army in 1961, when he was about 15 or 16, and served for about 11 years as a cook. The Press and Journal, the newspaper of his native north-east Scotland, says he began with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders in Inverness; The Scotsman lists service with the Army Catering Corps in South Yemen, Cyprus, Germany and the Shetland Islands, and the Evening Express adds postings at Fort George and at Ballater. He left the Army in October 1972, joined the Metropolitan Police that December, and resigned after about eight months to work in a London jobcentre.
Nilsen was arrested in February 1983 at his flat in Muswell Hill, north London, after a discovery at the house led investigators to him, and he told them there had been 15 or 16 deaths since 1978. At the Central Criminal Court on November 4, 1983, he was convicted of six murders and two attempted murders and sentenced to life imprisonment. He died in custody on May 12, 2018, aged 72.
David Berkowitz joined the Army in 1971, at 18. Time magazine reported in 1977 that he failed his first rifle test but later qualified as a sharpshooter, and that his only recorded blemish was a temporary demotion over a late truck convoy. He spent a year in South Korea with the 2nd Infantry Division, patrolling near the demilitarized zone without seeing combat, according to an interview published in the Pace Law Review in 2011. While in uniform he left Judaism for a fundamentalist Baptist church. He was honorably discharged in 1974.
Between July 1976 and July 1977, in the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn, Berkowitz shot 13 people in eight attacks, killing six, and signed letters to the police and the press "Son of Sam." He was arrested in Yonkers on August 10, 1977. On May 8, 1978, he pleaded guilty to six counts of second-degree murder, and in June 1978 he received the maximum sentence of 25 years to life for each killing, a total the Associated Press put at 315 years. In May 2024 the New York parole board refused him release for the twelfth time.
Gary Ridgway served a two-year stint in the United States Navy after he graduated from high school in 1969, Encyclopaedia Britannica records. He came home to the Seattle area and spent more than three decades painting trucks at the Kenworth plant.
Detectives questioned him several times in the 1980s, but he was arrested only in November 2001, after DNA from a saliva sample taken in 1987 was matched to evidence from three of the women found in 1982. On November 5, 2003, under an agreement that spared him the death penalty in return for leading investigators to remains, he pleaded guilty to 48 counts of aggravated first-degree murder for women and girls killed in King County between 1982 and 1998, HistoryLink reported. In February 2011 King County prosecutors charged him with a 49th killing, that of Rebecca Marrero, again without seeking death, KOMO News reported. In 2013 he claimed to have killed about 80 women. In December 2025 KIRO Newsradio reported that he was gravely ill at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla.
Before he trained as a physician, Michael Swango had what The Daily Egyptian, the student newspaper of Southern Illinois University, where he studied medicine, called "a brief stint in the Marines." The rest of his career was spent getting into hospitals. He was imprisoned in Illinois in 1985 for poisoning ambulance co-workers, then concealed that conviction to win medical posts in South Dakota, New York and Zimbabwe.
On September 6, 2000, in federal court on Long Island, Swango pleaded guilty to murdering three patients at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Northport, New York, in 1993, and was sentenced to three consecutive life terms without parole, the Associated Press reported. All three were veterans in a federal hospital. A month later, in Columbus, he pleaded guilty to the 1984 murder of Cynthia Ann McGee, a 19-year-old patient at Ohio State University Hospitals. The Federal Bureau of Prisons lists him at the maximum-security penitentiary in Florence, Colorado, with a release date of "LIFE."
Robert Lee Yates Jr. had 18 years of active duty in the Army, including posts at Fort Drum, New York, and Fort Rucker, Alabama, the Spokesman-Review reported in April 2000. He left the service in April 1996, two years short of retirement, and moved his family to Spokane. In 1997 he joined the Washington Army National Guard and flew helicopters for it, and when a woman he picked up in Spokane in 1998 asked about his work, he told her he was "a helicopter pilot for the National Guard," the paper reported.
In October 2000 Yates pleaded guilty in Spokane County to 13 murders, among them a college couple shot near Walla Walla in 1975, a woman killed in Skagit County in 1988 and ten women killed in the Spokane area between 1996 and 1998, and to the attempted murder of a woman who survived. He was sentenced to 408 years. In 2002 a Pierce County jury convicted him of two more aggravated first-degree murders and sentenced him to death; the Washington Supreme Court affirmed that sentence in 2007. When the same court struck down the state’s death penalty in State v. Gregory in October 2018, his sentence was converted to life imprisonment.
John Allen Muhammad served in the Louisiana Army National Guard from 1978 to 1985, CBS News reported in 2002, and he faced disciplinary charges twice; in one case he struck a noncommissioned officer and was fined 100 dollars. In November 1985 he enlisted in the regular Army. He was posted at Fort Lewis, Washington, moved to Germany in 1990, to Fort Ord, California, in 1992, and back to Fort Lewis in 1993. In the 1991 Gulf War he served as a combat engineer. Army records showed that he earned the expert rating with the M-16 rifle, the highest of three grades, but that he had no sniper training. He was discharged at Fort Lewis in 1994 and served in the Oregon National Guard until 1995. His highest rank was sergeant.
In October 2002 Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, then 17, carried out the shootings that killed ten people around Washington, D.C. A Virginia jury convicted Muhammad in November 2003 of capital murder for the death of Dean Harold Meyers, and a Maryland jury convicted him in May 2006 of six more murders. He was executed by lethal injection at Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt, Virginia, on November 10, 2009, without ever admitting the shootings.
Anthony Sowell entered active duty in the Marine Corps in 1978 and served until 1985, when he was honorably discharged, the Supreme Court of Ohio recorded. An expert who reviewed his service record for the defense called him an "above average" Marine. He was the only member of his 55-man platoon promoted to private first class straight out of boot camp, rose to sergeant, earned two Good Conduct Medals and was chosen for advanced electrician’s school; two minor disciplinary matters were settled by nonjudicial punishment. A defense psychiatrist later told the jury that he had functioned in structured settings such as the Marines and prison.
Sowell was arrested in Cleveland in October 2009 as the deaths of 11 women came to light. He had already served 15 years in prison for attempted rape. On July 22, 2011, a jury convicted him of the aggravated murders of all 11 women and of crimes against three women who survived, and he received 11 death sentences. The Supreme Court of Ohio affirmed the judgment on December 8, 2016. He died in custody of a terminal illness on February 8, 2021, aged 61, CBS News reported.
Jeffrey Dahmer enlisted in the Army in January 1979, after leaving Ohio State University at his father’s urging, and some months after he had killed his first victim, Steven Hicks, in Ohio. Military.com reported in 2022 that he trained as a medical specialist at Fort Sam Houston, Texas, and was stationed in Baumholder, West Germany, as a combat medic. In his first year he was rated "average or slightly above average." Then the drinking took over, and his superiors decided that it had impaired his ability to function as a soldier. He received an honorable discharge in March 1981. A fellow service member later claimed that Dahmer had assaulted him repeatedly over 17 months; the claim was never tested in court.
Dahmer confessed to killing 17 men and boys between 1978 and 1991, most of them in Milwaukee. On February 15, 1992, a Milwaukee jury rejected his insanity defense and found him sane on 15 counts of first-degree intentional homicide, United Press International reported, and he received consecutive life terms. In May 1992 he pleaded guilty in Ohio to the murder of Steven Hicks. On November 28, 1994, a fellow inmate beat him to death at Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, Wisconsin.
Hadden Clark enlisted in the Navy in the summer of 1982 and served as a cook on an aircraft carrier, the writer Susan Sheehan reported in Washingtonian magazine. He later said that crewmates beat him in late 1984. After a period of erratic behavior he was admitted to a naval hospital in Virginia in March 1985, and in June 1985 he received a medical discharge with a 50 percent disability rating for paranoid schizophrenia. Military.com, previewing a 2024 documentary series, quoted the Navy’s description of the illness as "manifested by persecutory and grandiose delusions."
Clark pleaded guilty in June 1993 to the second-degree murder of Laura Houghteling, 23, of Bethesda, and was sentenced to 30 years. In October 1999 a Montgomery County jury convicted him of the second-degree murder of Michele Dorr, a six-year-old girl from Silver Spring who disappeared in 1986, and he received a further 30 years. The Court of Special Appeals of Maryland affirmed that conviction on September 26, 2001. He described killings of other women to police, but no remains were found and no other charges followed.
John Joubert left Portland, Maine, in December 1982 to join the Air Force, "just over three months after the Stetson murder," in the words of the Supreme Judicial Court of Maine. He was stationed at Offutt Air Force Base in Sarpy County, Nebraska, and was still an enlisted airman when two boys were killed there in the fall of 1983: Danny Joe Eberle, 13, of Bellevue, in September, and Christopher Walden, 12, of Papillion, in December.
In January 1984 a preschool teacher reported a man who had been watching her school, and police traced the car he drove to Joubert at Offutt. He pleaded guilty to both Nebraska murders and was sentenced to death. In 1990 a Maine jury convicted him of the 1982 murder of Ricky Stetson, 11, in Portland, and he received a life term there. After the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit reinstated his death sentences in January 1996, he was executed in Nebraska on July 17, 1996. In 2023 Sarpy County planned a crime victims monument that would remember the two boys, the Nebraska Examiner reported.
Andrew Urdiales joined the Marine Corps at 19 and was stationed in Southern California from April 1984 until his honorable discharge in April 1991, at Camp Pendleton and at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center at Twentynine Palms, according to the Orange County District Attorney’s Office. Four of the five California killings later charged against him took place while he was a Marine; the Hi-Desert Star reported in 2009 that he had confessed to two of them while stationed at Twentynine Palms. After leaving the Marines he returned to Chicago and worked as a security guard.
The case broke in April 1997, when Chicago detectives matched a gun taken from Urdiales by a police officer in Hammond, Indiana, to three killings in Illinois. He was convicted in Cook County in 2002 of the first-degree murders of Laura Uylaki and Lynn Huber, and in Livingston County in 2004 of the murder of Cassandra Corum; both death sentences were later commuted. In 2018 an Orange County jury convicted him of murdering Robbin Brandley, Julie McGhee, Mary Ann Wells, Tammie Erwin and Denise Maney, and he was sentenced to death. He died in custody at San Quentin in November 2018, weeks after arriving on California’s death row.
Ronald Gray enlisted in the Army in 1984, at 18, Time reported, and became a Specialist Four and a cook with the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He was on active duty there when the killings around the post took place, between 1986 and January 1987. His case therefore ran through two systems of justice at once. In North Carolina state court in November 1987 he pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder, for the deaths of Linda Jean Coats and Tammy Wilson, and to other felonies, and received three consecutive and five concurrent life terms. In 1988 a general court-martial at Fort Bragg convicted him of the premeditated murders of Kimberly Ann Ruggles and of Private Laura Lee Vickery-Clay, a soldier, of the attempted premeditated murder of a woman soldier who survived, and of rape and other offenses. On April 12, 1988, the court-martial sentenced him to death, a dishonorable discharge and reduction to private.
The Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces affirmed the findings and sentence in 1999. Under military law a death sentence must be approved by the President, and President George W. Bush approved Gray’s on July 28, 2008, the Army News Service reported; an execution set for December 10, 2008, was stayed by a federal court. In June 2026 Task & Purpose reported that he was still held on military death row at the United States Disciplinary Barracks, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
Timothy McVeigh was not a serial killer; his crime was a single act of mass murder. He enlisted in the Army in May 1988 and went through basic training in Georgia, where he met Terry Nichols, according to the Counter Extremism Project. He served at Fort Riley, Kansas, with the 1st Infantry Division. A chronology prepared by his defense team in 1996, later published by PBS’s FRONTLINE, records that he received orders in November 1990 that his unit was going to Saudi Arabia and that he returned from the Persian Gulf in March 1991. Encyclopaedia Britannica records that he earned a Bronze Star in the Gulf War. He then tried out for the Special Forces at Fort Bragg; Britannica says he left the program after two days, and the defense chronology puts it at four or five. He took an early discharge and left the Army in late 1991.
On the morning of April 19, 1995, the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City killed 168 people and injured more than 500. About an hour later McVeigh was stopped for a license plate violation and arrested for carrying a concealed handgun. A federal jury in Denver convicted him on June 2, 1997, on 11 counts of murder, conspiracy and use of a weapon of mass destruction, and he was sentenced to death. He was executed by lethal injection in Terre Haute, Indiana, on June 11, 2001, the first federal execution since 1963.
Israel Keyes enlisted in the Army in 1998 and served at Fort Lewis, Washington, at Fort Hood, Texas, and in Egypt. The record of his discharge differs. Time and the Southern Poverty Law Center, citing records, said he served until 2000 and was honorably discharged; the Center gave June 2000. The FBI’s later timeline of his life puts his discharge in July 2001.
Keyes was arrested in Texas in March 2012 and indicted in Anchorage in the kidnapping that resulted in the death of Samantha Koenig, 18. He confessed to her death and to the deaths of Bill and Lorraine Currier in Essex, Vermont, in June 2011. He was never tried. On December 2, 2012, he was found dead by suicide in the Anchorage jail, Alaska State Troopers said. The FBI, relying mainly on his own statements, attributes 11 killings to him between 2001 and 2012, most of the victims still unidentified. The Bureau’s timeline places the first of them in 2001, soon after he left the Army.
None of these men rose further in uniform than David Russell Williams. He joined the Canadian Forces in 1987, received his pilot’s wings in 1990, and spent two years as an instructor at 3 Canadian Forces Flying Training School in Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, before flying the CC-144 Challenger with 434 Combat Support Squadron at Shearwater, Nova Scotia, and with 412 Transport Squadron in Ottawa, carrying VIPs, CBC News recorded. He was promoted to major in 1999 and to lieutenant-colonel in 2004, commanded 437 Transport Squadron at Trenton, and from December 2005 to June 2006 commanded Camp Mirage, a logistics base the government did not officially acknowledge. On July 15, 2009, he took command of 8 Wing at Canadian Forces Base Trenton, the country’s largest air base.
He was arrested in February 2010. On October 18, 2010, he pleaded guilty to all 88 charges against him: the first-degree murders of Corporal Marie-France Comeau, 38, a flight attendant with 437 Transport Squadron at his own base, and of Jessica Lloyd, 27, of the Belleville area; two sexual assaults and forcible confinements in Tweed, Ontario; and 82 counts of breaking and entering. On October 21, 2010, Justice Robert Scott sentenced him to two concurrent life terms with no chance of parole for 25 years and called him "Canada’s bright shining lie." The next day the Department of National Defence announced that his commission had been revoked, and his release from the Canadian Forces was completed on December 10, 2010.
Set side by side, the records do not describe a type. Christie and Petiot came home from the First World War damaged by gas. Heidnik and Hadden Clark left the service with psychiatric diagnoses. Dahmer was let go for drinking, Whitman demoted by a court-martial, Ng imprisoned for stealing from his own armory. Sowell and Yates were the kind of men a commander puts up for promotion, and Williams was promoted to the top. Gray and Joubert were serving when they committed the killings that sent them to death row. The service records were made for other purposes. In case after case it was ordinary police work, a witness, a traffic stop, a laboratory or a survivor that brought the crimes to light.
• 1916 to 1920: Marcel Petiot serves at the front, is gassed and wounded, and is discharged with a disability pension.
• First World War: John Reginald Christie serves in the British Army and is injured in a gas attack.
• 1939: Christie joins the Metropolitan Police War Reserve.
• May 25, 1946: Petiot is guillotined in Paris after his conviction for 24 murders.
• July 15, 1953: Christie is hanged at Pentonville Prison.
• July 6, 1959: Charles Whitman enlists in the Marine Corps.
• 1961: Dennis Nilsen joins the British Army as a cook.
• November 1963: Whitman is reduced to private by a special court-martial.
• December 4, 1964: Whitman is discharged.
• 1965: Dean Corll receives a hardship discharge from the Army.
• August 1, 1966: Whitman kills his mother, his wife and others in Austin.
• 1969: Randy Kraft is discharged from the Air Force.
• 1971: David Berkowitz joins the Army; he is honorably discharged in 1974.
• October 1972: Nilsen leaves the Army.
• August 8, 1973: Corll is shot dead by an accomplice.
• 1978 to 1985: Anthony Sowell serves in the Marine Corps.
• January 1979: Jeffrey Dahmer enlists in the Army; he is discharged in March 1981.
• 1982 to 1985: Hadden Clark serves in the Navy; medical discharge in June 1985.
• December 1982: John Joubert leaves Portland, Maine, to join the Air Force.
• April 1984 to April 1991: Andrew Urdiales serves in the Marine Corps.
• November 1985 to 1994: John Allen Muhammad serves in the regular Army.
• April 12, 1988: Ronald Gray is sentenced to death by court-martial at Fort Bragg.
• 1991: Timothy McVeigh serves in the Gulf War and leaves the Army late in the year.
• April 1996: Robert Lee Yates Jr. leaves the Army after 18 years of active duty.
• July 17, 1996: Joubert is executed in Nebraska.
• July 6, 1999: Gary Heidnik is executed in Pennsylvania.
• June 11, 2001: McVeigh is executed in Terre Haute, Indiana.
• November 5, 2003: Gary Ridgway pleads guilty to 48 murders.
• July 28, 2008: President George W. Bush approves Gray’s death sentence.
• July 15, 2009: Russell Williams takes command of 8 Wing Trenton.
• November 10, 2009: Muhammad is executed in Virginia.
• October 21, 2010: Williams is sentenced to two life terms; his commission is revoked the next day.
• December 2, 2012: Israel Keyes dies by suicide in the Anchorage jail before trial.
• June 29, 2020: Joseph James DeAngelo pleads guilty to 13 murders.
• May 2024: Berkowitz is refused parole for the twelfth time.
• June 2026: Gray remains on military death row at Fort Leavenworth.