Every series ends, and almost none ends with an announcement. Investigators, reporters and relatives are left with a date: the last death that anyone is willing to attribute, followed by silence. What that silence meant is rarely recorded by the one person who could say. The explanations that exist are, in nearly every case, somebody’s theory, offered by a police chief, a newspaper, a profiler or a family, and they have to be read that way.
Eight series follow. Six of them stopped for reasons nobody established, and the two that were solved are barely better explained. Each is given with the date of its last death in the record, then every explanation anyone attributed to the ending, then what nobody knows.
Between the fall of 1910 and the spring of 1912, a run of young Black women were killed in Atlanta, most of them in domestic work. In June 1911 the Atlanta Journal pointed out that one had been killed on each of five Saturdays in a row, Creative Loafing recounted, and the city’s white dailies, the Constitution, the Journal and the Georgian, began to suggest that one man was responsible. They borrowed a name for him from London. By the middle of July, with deaths coming close to once a week, Black churches were raising reward money, the governor had offered a reward of his own, and councilmen wanted the police department reorganized.
Then the pace changed. For some weeks after mid-July the killings seemed to stop, though police kept arresting men on witnesses' word. Deaths came again: Mary Ann Duncan on August 31, Eva Florence in October, Minnie Wise on November 10 and Mary Putnam on November 21, 1911. The criminologists Vance McLaughlin and Robert L. Bing III, who in 2013 went back to the newspapers and death certificates, kept eight cases as a possible series, removing shootings, cases with a different method and cases with a convicted or probable suspect. Mary Putnam is the last of their eight. The deaths of Ida Ferguson on January 12, 1912, and Pearl Williams a week later were set aside because suspects were identified, and the newspaper lists they worked from run to May 1912.
The explanations on record cut in different directions. The newspapers and Fulton County coroner Paul Donehoo held that one man was responsible. A city judge, Judge Broyles, said at a commitment hearing in November 1911 that he had never believed so, and a leading Black minister and a 1912 grand jury said the same. The police chief spoke of a "murder-maniac." On November 28, 1911, at the courthouse during one trial, Sheriff Plennie Minor offered the theory that jealous Black women, not men, were responsible; police and detectives laughed at it, McLaughlin and Bing found.
The prosecutions suggest a third reading, in which some of the deaths were never part of anything. A jury acquitted H.H. of the death of Sadie Holley after he was indicted on August 9, 1911. A man identified as H.B. was acquitted in October 1912 of the death of Eva Florence. Three men were convicted of single killings and given life: the husband of Lucinda McNeal, Lucky Elliott for Ida Ferguson, and the husband of Alacy Owens. Each of those deaths had at one time or another been placed on a newspaper’s list of the series.
Capital B News Atlanta, which retraced the case in 2025, counted 24 women and began earlier than the papers did, with deaths in 1909; Atlanta News First suggested in 2023 that the stalking may have begun "perhaps as early as April 1909." What is not known is whether there was ever one series, how many women belong to it, and whether anything ended it at all. No one was convicted of the series, and other accounts count 20, 21 or 24 deaths.
In the spring of 1946 someone targeted eight people in and around Texarkana, the twin city on the line between Bowie County, Texas, and Miller County, Arkansas. Five died. The first incident was on February 22, 1946, and the last on May 3, 1946, the death of Virgil Starks, 36, a Miller County farmer. The Texarkana Gazette named the unseen assailant the Phantom Killer, and the case became the Texarkana Moonlight Murders. Investigators disagreed over whether the May 3 case was the same person’s work. The Texas Department of Public Safety once called the case the number one unsolved murder in Texas history, Texas Monthly and The Texas Observer reported.
The Encyclopedia of Arkansas says the killings ended as abruptly as they had begun. Several explanations were put forward over the years. The Rangers came to Texarkana after the second couple was killed, and Captain M. T. Gonzaullas, speaking in 1977, said there were no further killings of that kind after they arrived. Townspeople, in the meantime, bought guns and locked doors they had never locked, and some left, Texas Monthly reported.
The explanation that investigators pursued hardest was a man. Youell Lee Swinney was arrested on a Saturday in July 1946 at the Texarkana bus station on car-theft grounds and questioned about the killings. His wife gave investigators an account of one night, and a polygraph in Austin indicated, the Dallas Observer reported, that she was telling the truth about the night she described, although she could not locate the exact spot again. Prosecutors did not bring a murder charge. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas gives two reasons: her testimony was considered unreliable, and she was not required to testify against her husband. Swinney was convicted of felony theft in Bowie County in 1947 and given a life sentence under the habitual-offender law; the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ordered his release on September 25, 1973. He later served a federal term for counterfeiting. He denied any part in the killings, even in 1992, and died in the 1990s, in a year given variously as 1993, 1994 or 1998.
Two points complicate the Swinney account as an answer to why it stopped. He was arrested two months after the last death, so custody cannot have ended it. And he was never charged. Gonzaullas also said that four or five people confessed and that none knew details that had not been published. The Dallas Observer lists others, among them a railroad section hand who confessed in a letter to the governor and a man in a Shreveport bar who confessed to a reporter and was identified by a deputy as a local drunk. What is not known is who was responsible, whether it was one person, and whether the May 3 case belongs with the others.
Béla Kiss was a tinsmith in Cinkota, a village outside Budapest, when the First World War began. He was called up in July 1914. In May 1916, while the war was still being fought, the deaths of seven women came to light at Cinkota, on property he had left behind. Police concluded that he had corresponded with the women, taken their savings and killed them. He was never arrested or tried, and every account of the deaths is an attribution by the police and press of the time. Hungarian criminology counts him as the country’s first serial killer, the weekly HVG reported in 2007.
When did it stop? The 1916 press tied individual women’s deaths to the years from about 1909 to 1913. Eszter Fekete, known as Eszti, returned to Cinkota on March 4, 1911, and her family heard no more. A Budapest woman believed her sister Juliska had been killed in 1913. Nothing in the record dates a death after the call-up of 1914, and no one has shown that the war itself ended it.
What happened to Kiss is the more contested question, and four versions exist. A military report, as HVG described it, said he was taken prisoner and died of typhus at Valjevo in Serbia on February 5, 1915. A 1933 police summary, printed by Hétfői Napló, added that he had been freed when Austro-Hungarian forces retook the town, and then vanished. A waiter who had served at Valjevo told investigators that Kiss vanished without trace when the town was evacuated. Police did not accept the typhus report as proof; they suspected that he took a new identity during the war, HVG wrote. A woman who ran a food stall told Budapest police that a soldier matching his description had said he had just been released from Serbian captivity and wanted to marry. Letters reached the Vienna authorities claiming he was alive there. Later reports placed him in Győr, the French Foreign Legion, New York and Kansas City, and none was confirmed.
A man who had worked for Kiss was arrested in May 1916 and acquitted in 1918. The Pest district court offered 3,000 crowns on May 20, 1916, for Kiss alive. No trace of him was ever confirmed, and police never closed the file. Whether he died in Serbia, took another name, or was somewhere else altogether is not known.
Seven young women died around Adelaide in the summer of 1976 to 1977, ABC News reported, and the deaths became known as the Truro murders, after the country town northeast of the city. Julie Mykyta was the third. The series ended when a man later blamed for it died. Christopher Robin Worrell was killed in a car crash in South Australia about a week after the seventh death, and the deaths themselves were not uncovered until a couple of years later. In 2025 ABC News wrote that the series ended abruptly when he died in the crash.
That is the only explanation on record, and it is a retrospective one. It rests on the account of James William Miller, Worrell’s companion that summer, who was jailed in 1980 for his part in six of the seven deaths and sentenced to life. Miller said he had only helped, and that Worrell had done the killing. Worrell was dead before police knew of the deaths, so the accusation was never tested, and no court has held that he killed anyone. ABC News has described him as a suspect. The conviction is a finding about Miller alone, and why the seventh death was not part of it has never been explained.
Miller was given a 35-year non-parole period. ABC News gave the end of it as 2015 in one report and 2013 in another, and his age at death as 67 and as 68. He died of cancer at a hospice in North Adelaide on October 22, 2008, after 28 years in prison. Julie Mykyta’s father told ABC News then that for the family it meant nothing more than the fact that Miller was dead. A criminologist, Rick Sarre of the University of South Australia, named Truro in 2017 among the three cases that gave Adelaide its reputation for unusual murders.
What is unknown is who did what, why a seventh death was left out of the conviction, and whether the crash ended the killing or only closed the file. The most that can be said is that the timing is unusually close, and that the account that explains it comes from the surviving man.
Five women died on Oahu between May 1985 and May 1986: Vicki Gail Purdy, 25; Regina Sakamoto, 17; Denise Hughes, 21; Louise Medeiros, 25 (24 in one account); and Linda Pesce, 36. Honolulu police saw no connection among them, but the deaths had enough in common that investigators came to believe one person was responsible. Honolulu Magazine called it Hawaii’s first reported serial killer case in 2022. Accounts disagree about the start: the magazine dates Purdy’s case to May 1984, while KHNL and Hawaii News Now place her death in May 1985.
The last of the five came to light on May 3, 1986. Six days later, on May 9, police arrested a man, H.G., in the death of Linda Pesce. He was released for lack of evidence, never charged, and died in California in 2003.
The theory folded into those dates is the plain one, that the arrest ended it. No one has shown that it did. Police did not let H.G. go from view. "There was active surveillance and active investigations going on that person," McCarthy told Hawaii News Now, and Honolulu Magazine reported that police watched him for years and that a reward of $25,000 was offered, but that investigators were never able to link him directly to the killings. Nothing in the record proves he was responsible for any of the five deaths. The same magazine described what detectives believed at the time, that they were looking for a white man between 30 and 40 who drove a cargo van and had no criminal record, and said police warned women to avoid public transit; no one was ever shown to match that description.
KHNL reported in 2006 that the cases remained open. In July 2025 Hawaii News Now listed them among several high-profile killings of women on Oahu, alongside the 1982 death of Lisa Au and the 1985 case of Diane Suzuki, and reported that those cases were not connected to one another or to the five. Nobody has been charged. What is not known is who was responsible, whether H.G. had anything to do with the deaths, and whether being watched and questioned is the reason they stopped.
Between October 1978 and January 1987, women died in small towns on both sides of the Connecticut River, in the Upper Valley of western New Hampshire and eastern Vermont. The Associated Press wrote in 2006 of at least six young women; the Concord Monitor in 2023 and the Valley News in 2024 gave seven. The New Hampshire attorney general’s office has not officially connected all of the deaths, and its homicide chief told the AP, in a report headlined "Seeking closure 19 years later," that there was no conclusive evidence any of them were linked.
The women in reliable reports are Catherine Millican, 27, in October 1978; Mary Elizabeth Critchley; Bernice Courtemanche, 17; Ellen Ruth Fried, 26; Eva Morse, 27, whose death came to light in Unity on April 25, 1986; Lynda Moore, 36, of Westminster, Vermont, on April 15, 1986; and Barbara Agnew, 39, a nurse, whose case the Vermont State Police date to January 10, 1987. On August 6, 1988, a young woman who was seven months pregnant survived an assault in Swanzey, New Hampshire, and has been described for decades as the only known survivor. If it was the same person’s work, the series did not stop in January 1987; it paused, or moved, for 19 months.
The best-known theory about identity is also a theory about the end. On New Year’s Eve 2005 a Florida man, M.N., 56, a Vietnam War helicopter pilot who had been treated for post-traumatic stress, killed his estranged wife and stepdaughter and then himself. A St. Petersburg private investigator, Lynn-Marie Carty, recognized his name from an earlier search for a missing woman and wrote to New Hampshire State Police in February 2006. The AP listed what drew investigators: he held a black belt in karate, which the AP set beside the survivor’s description of a martial arts grip; relatives remembered a wood-paneled station wagon; his first wife had been a nurse; and he and the woman he lived with had been at a hospital in Hanover, New Hampshire, on Thanksgiving 1986, after which, the AP wrote, a nurse from that hospital went missing about two months later. John Philpin, a profiler on the 1980s investigation, said M.N. could have been responsible, and Detective Steve Rowland said by April 2006 that he counted him among the three strongest suspects. The survivor, after seeing material Carty sent, told the AP, "You just know. I just know it was him."
The case against M.N. is circumstance and an identification. Vermont State Police identified no forensic link to two Vermont deaths, no DNA result tying him to any assault has been reported, and a New Hampshire prosecutor said at the time that there were other persons of interest. Moore’s son said some of the evidence did not line up. A sister of Eva Morse did not think he was responsible; Barbara Agnew’s sister believed he was. He was never charged.
New Hampshire investigators have kept working. On May 21, 2024, they executed court-authorized search warrants at a property in Newport, New Hampshire; the Attorney General’s spokesman called it the result of several years of follow-up investigation. The man who lives there told the Valley News he had no involvement, said he did not know the victims, and said investigators had questioned him years earlier about Ellen Fried’s death. He has never been charged. On October 29, 2025, the Cold Case Unit searched for evidence in the Millican case in New London, and on April 27, 2026, New Hampshire State Police renewed an appeal in the Morse case. The cases remain open in both states. Why the deaths ended in January 1987, if they ended, is not answered by any theory on record.
Police attribute five killings and two non-fatal assaults between December 20, 1968, and October 11, 1969, to a man who called himself the Zodiac in letters and ciphers mailed to Bay Area newspapers. The last attributed death was that of Paul Stine, 29, in San Francisco on October 11, 1969. Police said at the time that he was the fifth and last confirmed victim. No one has ever been arrested or charged.
The puzzle is that the letters did not stop when the killings did. A note on April 20, 1970 asked whether the last cipher had been cracked and then said "My name is," followed by a code of 13 characters. A map and a 32-character cipher followed on June 26. Then the letters slowed. In January 1974 came the first one to the authorities in almost three years, which Lieutenant Charles Ellis of San Francisco police said had been prompted by the film The Exorcist; according to Cox Media Group’s 2018 summary, it ended with a tally, "Me 37, SFPD 0." Letters postmarked January 29, February 14 and May 8, 1974, the last signed "the Red Phantom," were analyzed and considered authentic. Another letter reached the Chronicle in April 1978, the first in more than four years. Police have never accepted the writer’s counts of eight, 13 or 37 killings, and Time reported in 2011 that only seven incidents were confirmed as his work.
The explanations come in four kinds. When the 1978 letter arrived, Inspector Dave Toschi suggested that the writer might have been abroad or in jail, a guess about the gap between letters that explained no gap in the killings. The second is a name. Arthur Leigh Allen of Vallejo was the leading suspect for decades, the only person ever served with a search warrant in the case, according to Time; KQED reported in 2021 that his fingerprints, palm print, handwriting and DNA comparisons did not match, and he died in 1992 at 58, denying it to ABC7 the year before. The third is another name: in October 2021 a private group, the Case Breakers, named Gary Francis Poste, who died in 2018. The FBI called the claim inaccurate and said the case remained open, and no police agency named him. The fourth removes the premise. A 2023 Peacock series put the view of a professor, Thomas Henry Horan, that the Zodiac was a hoax and that several killers, possibly unconnected, committed the crimes, which, if right, means nothing stopped.
San Francisco police declared their case inactive in 2004, having run out of viable leads, UPI reported, and reopened it before March 2007. In December 2020 three amateurs, David Oranchak, Sam Blake and Jarl Van Eycke, solved the 340-character cipher that had resisted solution for 51 years. It contained no name. As of October 2026 there had been no charge or official identification. Why the killings stopped in October 1969, whether the letters of 1974 and 1978 came from the same hand, and who wrote any of them are all unknown.
DeAngelo is the one series in this set that ends in a conviction and a full admission, and it still lacks a recorded reason. He pleaded guilty on June 29, 2020, to 13 counts of first-degree murder and 13 counts of kidnapping to commit robbery, and admitted 161 further crimes against 61 other victims in seven counties. Judge Michael Bowman sentenced him on August 21, 2020, to 11 consecutive terms of life without parole, a further consecutive life term and eight years.
The prosecution’s dates give the shape of the ending. The last uncharged crime he admitted in Northern California was in Walnut Creek on June 25, 1979, and by October 1979 the FBI said the crimes had moved to the Southern California coast. In July 1979 he had been arrested for shoplifting from a drugstore in Citrus Heights, and the Auburn police department, where he was an officer, fired him that year. After the Goleta killings of July 1981 the FBI identified no linked crime for about five years. Then, in May 1986, Janelle Cruz, 18, died in Irvine, the youngest person he killed and the last known victim. After that, nothing.
Little is on record about why. He had been married since 1973 and had children, and from the early 1990s he worked at a supermarket distribution center, living in Citrus Heights. Investigators identified him by genetic genealogy, which narrowed the relatives of an unknown man to six men of the right age who had lived near the crimes, and a tissue from his curbside trash matched; he was arrested in the driveway on April 24, 2018, at 72. The FBI had described him in 2016 as an older man, probably between 60 and 75. Left alone in the interview room, prosecutors told the court, he spoke to himself of someone he called Jerry. "I did all that," he said, and "I pushed Jerry out and had a happy life." The prosecution put those words in the factual basis for the plea. No court held that they explain why the crimes ended, and nothing in the court record says what happened in 1986.
Count the cases the way the sources do, and the word "stopped" holds in some and not in others. In Atlanta, Honolulu, the Connecticut River Valley and the Zodiac case, even the list of victims is contested, so the last date depends on whom one includes. In Texarkana the one suspect was arrested two months after the last death. In the Kiss case the last possible date and the war nearly coincide. In Truro the only explanation is the word of the man who survived.
The two solved cases do not close the question either. Miller was convicted in 1980 and Worrell’s guilt was never tested, and DeAngelo pleaded guilty to everything and said nothing, anywhere in the record, about why a man who had committed crimes across California for eleven years went quiet in 1986. The only stop with a date and an event attached is Worrell’s, in a car crash a week after the seventh death, and the only person who connected the two was James Miller.
• 1909 to 1913: years to which the 1916 Hungarian press tied deaths attributed to Béla Kiss.
• October 3, 1910: earliest death on McLaughlin and Bing’s Atlanta list.
• June 1911: Atlanta papers begin to suggest a single culprit.
• August 9, 1911: H.H. is indicted in the death of Sadie Holley; a jury later acquits him.
• November 21, 1911: Mary Putnam dies, the last of McLaughlin and Bing’s eight Atlanta cases.
• January 1912: Ida Ferguson and Pearl Williams die in Atlanta; the newspaper lists run to May 1912.
• October 1912: H.B. is acquitted in the death of Eva Florence.
• July 1914: Kiss is called up.
• February 5, 1915: the date a military report gave for Kiss’s death from typhus at Valjevo.
• May 1916: seven deaths come to light at Cinkota; on May 20 the court offers a reward for Kiss alive.
• February 22, 1946: first incident in Texarkana.
• May 3, 1946: Virgil Starks dies, the last death attributed to the Texarkana series.
• July 1946: Youell Lee Swinney is arrested at the Texarkana bus station on car-theft grounds.
• December 20, 1968: first Zodiac killing attributed by police.
• October 11, 1969: Paul Stine dies in San Francisco, the last Zodiac killing attributed by police.
• September 25, 1973: the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals orders Swinney’s release.
• January 1974: a Zodiac letter, the first in almost three years.
• Summer 1976 to 1977: seven young women die around Adelaide; Worrell dies about a week after the seventh death.
• April 1978: a Zodiac letter reaches the Chronicle, the first in more than four years.
• October 1978: Catherine Millican dies in New London, New Hampshire.
• 1980: James William Miller is convicted for his part in six of the seven Adelaide deaths.
• May 1985 to May 3, 1986: five deaths come to light on Oahu; H.G. is arrested on May 9, 1986.
• May 4, 1986: Janelle Cruz dies in Irvine, the last known victim of DeAngelo.
• January 10, 1987: the date of Barbara Agnew’s case in Vermont.
• August 6, 1988: the Swanzey, New Hampshire, survivor.
• 1992: Arthur Leigh Allen dies in Vallejo.
• 2004: San Francisco police declare the Zodiac case inactive.
• February 2006: a private investigator contacts New Hampshire State Police about M.N.
• October 22, 2008: Miller dies in Adelaide.
• April 24, 2018: DeAngelo is arrested.
• June 29 and August 21, 2020: DeAngelo pleads guilty and is sentenced.
• December 2020: the Zodiac 340-character cipher is solved.
• May 21, 2024: New Hampshire investigators search a property in Newport.