The men who led the escape from Virginia’s death row in May 1984 were brothers. So were the two men who, in December 2000, carried out the killings in a Wichita field that the Supreme Court of the United States would call the Wichita Massacre. In Toledo, a pair of brothers confessed in a single day to nine killings, most of which had gone unsolved for years. In India a condemned man’s younger brother was tried for the same six killings years after the older one had been hanged, and in Mexico three sisters were sentenced together in 1964 in a case that still divides historians over how many women died.
The cases differ in almost every way: some were robbery partnerships, one grew out of a liquor and brothel trade, one ended in a jungle manhunt with no trial at all. What they share is the problem they set for courts. Siblings rarely do the same things, and the law weighs each one separately. Brothers who stood side by side on the same night have left court with a death sentence and a life term, or with a murder conviction and a plea to kidnapping.
Linwood, James and Anthony Briley grew up in North Richmond, Virginia. Linwood and James were the two oldest; Anthony was the youngest. Their parents were respected in the neighborhood, the Richmond reporter Mark Holmberg wrote for WTVR in 2014. The first death connected to Linwood came in 1971, when he was 16: by Holmberg’s account he shot an elderly neighbor from inside the family house and told police he had been shooting at a bird.
By 1979 the three brothers and a 16-year-old neighbor, Duncan Eric Meekins, were robbing people across Richmond. Prosecutors told the courts the group was implicated in 11 killings that year. One of them, Robert Rice, told Virginia Lawyers Weekly in 2009 that the true number was at least 11 and probably more. Far fewer ended in convictions.
On the evening of September 14, 1979, John Harvey Gallaher, a disc jockey who also played bass in a small band, stepped out of a South Richmond restaurant during an intermission and did not come back. According to Meekins, who testified for the Commonwealth, Linwood took his wallet and keys, the two forced him into his own Lincoln Continental, and Linwood shot him when they stopped. The group then stripped the car for parts. Gallaher’s body was found two days later.
On October 19, 1979, the four men robbed the Richmond home of Harvey W. Wilkerson, 26, who lived with Judy Diane Barton, 23, and her five-year-old son, Harvey Wayne Barton. All three were killed. Meekins admitted shooting Wilkerson. Police officers were watching the four men that night without knowing that a crime was under way; their records of the men’s clothing and movements later corroborated Meekins’s account, the Supreme Court of Virginia said. The bodies were found on October 21, and Linwood and Meekins were arrested the next evening. Meekins confessed in detail and became the Commonwealth’s chief witness against all three brothers. In return the state agreed not to seek his death and he was sentenced to life.
The sentences divided the brothers. A Richmond jury convicted Linwood of capital murder for Gallaher’s death, and he was sentenced to death; in a separate case he was convicted of three counts of first-degree murder, with rape and robbery, from the October 19 killings. James was convicted of the capital murders of Judy Barton and her son, with other charges, and of Wilkerson’s first-degree murder, and was also sentenced to death. UPI reported in 1984 that Linwood had been convicted in six killings and James in seven. Anthony was never sentenced to death. Virginia Parole Board records show four convictions for first-degree murder in Richmond, with judgments in April and June 1980, and robbery and abduction counts besides; one prosecutor later described him as present at many of the killings without killing anyone himself.
The appeals ran through every level. The Supreme Court of Virginia affirmed Linwood’s death sentence on November 26, 1980, holding that the robbery of Gallaher had continued, as a matter of law, from the moment he was seized until his death, so that the killing was part of the same criminal enterprise; it decided James’s appeal the same day. In federal court Linwood argued that the true terms of Meekins’s plea agreement had been hidden from the jury. The Fourth Circuit called the claim "manifestly frivolous" in August 1984, noting that the defense had chosen to limit its own questions, and that a defendant who made that choice "cannot complain now."
On May 31, 1984, Linwood and James led four other condemned men in an escape from the death row unit of the Mecklenburg Correctional Center in Boydton. Six got out, in what UPI called the largest death row escape in the nation’s history. The guards credited another condemned man, Wilbert Lee Evans, with calming the uprising and protecting a nurse from one of the escaping inmates, Justice Thurgood Marshall later recorded. The Brileys were the last to be caught, in Philadelphia, on June 19.
Linwood Briley was electrocuted at the Virginia State Penitentiary in Richmond on October 12, 1984, still saying he was innocent. In his last hours he took telephone calls from James, on death row elsewhere, and from Anthony, serving his life term. James followed him to the electric chair on April 18, 1985. Anthony is the brother who remained. The Virginia Parole Board refused him parole in March 2024 and again, on a geriatric application, in December 2024, when he was 66.
Meekins, whose testimony convicted all three, was given a new name and moved to another state’s prison system. His plea had been expected, under the parole practice of the time, to bring release after about 15 years, but he was refused parole in 2008. The next year two of the prosecutors who had tried the brothers, Robert Rice and Warren Von Schuch, said they would speak for him at his next hearing. "He kept his part of the bargain," Rice told Virginia Lawyers Weekly; the Commonwealth, in his view, had not kept its own.
"In December 2000, brothers Reginald and Jonathan Carr set out on a crime spree culminating in the Wichita Massacre." So begins Justice Antonin Scalia’s opinion for the Supreme Court of the United States in Kansas v. Carr, decided in January 2016.
The court set out the sequence. On December 7, Reginald and another man carjacked Andrew Schreiber and forced him to withdraw cash from automated teller machines; he was released alive. On December 11, the brothers followed Linda Ann Walenta to her home in Wichita, and when she tried to escape, one of them shot her. She died a month later. On December 14, they broke into a home in Wichita where three young men and two young women were spending the evening. The victims were sexually assaulted and robbed, then driven to a snow-covered field and shot. Jason Befort, 26, Brad Heyka, 27, Aaron Sander, 29, and Heather Muller, 25, died. The fifth, a young woman, survived, ran to a nearby house for help and later testified against the brothers.
The verdicts for the two brothers were not identical. Reginald was convicted of kidnapping, aggravated robbery and other counts for the Schreiber carjacking, and of felony murder for Walenta’s death. Jonathan was acquitted of the Schreiber charges but convicted of felony murder in the Walenta shooting. For the December 14 crimes each was convicted of four counts of capital murder and many other counts, among them rape and robbery. In 2002 a Sedgwick County jury sentenced both to death. Each brother blamed the other.
The appeals took more than two decades. In July 2014 the Kansas Supreme Court upheld one capital murder conviction for each brother and many of their other convictions, but vacated the death sentences. It held that the jury had not been told that mitigating circumstances need not be proved beyond a reasonable doubt, and that trying the brothers' penalty phase together had denied each an individual sentencing. After that ruling, the district attorney’s office counted 32 convictions still standing against Reginald and 25 against Jonathan.
The Supreme Court reversed by a vote of 8 to 1 on January 20, 2016, holding that the Constitution required neither the instruction nor separate sentencing hearings. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the lone dissenter, wrote that the cases should never have come before the Court. On remand, the Kansas Supreme Court upheld both death sentences on January 21, 2022, though Chief Justice Marla Luckert wrote that the trial had been "riddled by error." The brothers returned to the court once more, and on June 26, 2026, it rejected each man’s arguments again and upheld his death sentence. Both were then held at the El Dorado Correctional Facility. Kansas has carried out no execution since the hangings of 1965.
For sixteen years Anthony Cook was in prison for one killing while police in Toledo, Ohio, suspected him and his younger brother, Nathaniel, of many more. Both brothers would later work as long-haul truck drivers. Anthony had served prison time for armed robbery in the 1970s, and Frank Stiles, the Toledo detective who led the investigation, told WTOL that his history was one of brutality, especially toward white people. Most of those he later confessed to killing were young and white.
The killing that put him away came on September 18, 1981. Anthony Cook and an accomplice confronted a young couple in a van in Toledo. The young man fought free and the young woman ran and called her father, Peter Sawicki, a real estate developer, who arrived and struggled with Cook. Cook recovered the gun and shot both men. Sawicki died; the young man survived. An informant led police to Cook several weeks later, and officers stopped his pickup on the interstate. In March 1982 a jury convicted him of Sawicki’s murder. Because Ohio’s current death penalty law did not take effect until October 19, 1981, a month after the killing, he received a term that left him eligible for parole.
The other cases stayed open until 1997, when the Lucas County prosecutor, Julia Bates, asked Stiles to test the evidence kept from an attack of May 1980. That night Tom Gordon and his girlfriend had been taken from his car in Toledo; Gordon was shot dead and the young woman was left for dead but survived. DNA from the evidence in her case matched both brothers. Nathaniel was arrested in 1998.
The DNA tied the Cooks to one crime. Bates and her assistant, Dean Mandros, offered a bargain, and the victims' families agreed to it: if both brothers confessed fully and passed polygraph tests, Nathaniel would be released after 20 years. "Those family members at the time all said to us, please, please, please find out what happened," Bates told 13abc in 2018. Neither the death penalty nor life without parole was available for crimes of that period.
On April 3, 2000, the brothers gave videotaped confessions that accounted for nine killings between 1973 and 1981. Nathaniel admitted three of them, all with his brother: Tom Gordon; Connie Sue Thompson, 18, whose body was found in Lucas County about eight months after the Gordon attack; and Dawn Backes, 12, a seventh grader abducted in February 1981 as she walked home. He said Dawn was the last killing he took part in. Anthony admitted those three and five others: Vicki Small, killed in December 1973; Scott Moulton and Denise Siotkowski; and Stacey Balonek, 21, and her boyfriend, Daryl Cole, all in 1981. He had already been convicted of the ninth, Sawicki’s. WTOL, which examined close to three hours of his interviews, reported that he described changing weapons so that police would see no pattern. "Tony Cook enjoys killing," Stiles said.
Anthony Cook is serving life for the killings of both Peter Sawicki and Tom Gordon. Nathaniel pleaded guilty to attempted murder and kidnapping in the attack on Gordon’s girlfriend; he has never been convicted of murder. The other killings, confessed but never tried, were cleared under the agreement, and prosecutors agreed not to pursue charges.
In 2018, when Nathaniel’s twenty years were up, his lawyer asked for the release the agreement promised. Bates said her office would neither support nor oppose it. "If my word isn’t my word then nobody is ever going to trust the prosecutor in the future ever again," she told 13abc. Dawn Backes’s mother told the Associated Press that the brothers had used her daughter as a plea bargaining chip. Nathaniel was released later that year. The families did not let go. They have stayed in touch for more than forty years, WTOL reported, and have gathered to oppose his release; before one hearing, nine candles and nine flowers were set around the victims' photographs at a Toledo church. "Nine murders. About as simple as that," Scott Moulton’s sister told the station. "And my firm belief is that it will start again if he’s released." Anthony was refused parole in February 2015. A hearing set for December 5, 2024, was postponed to March 2025 after he declined to meet the board; he was then 75 and still in prison.
The series in central Ohio began, by the account the Granville historian Kevin Bennett published in 2014, with two women shot dead outside a bar in Newark in December 1977. More killings followed, and investigators linked the .22-caliber shell casings left at the scenes to one another.
Jenkin Jones was 77, a widower who lived south of the village of Granville and made no secret of his distrust of banks. Not long before his death he had paid for a purchase with a large amount of cash at a Columbus shop where Gary Lewingdon worked. Late on Saturday, April 8, 1978, Jones was shot dead at his home. The killers left with about $300; police found more than $6,000 in the house the next day. A detective, puzzled by killings that seemed to yield so little, offered Bennett’s article its title: maybe, he said, they just liked to kill.
The case broke in December 1978. Joseph Annick, by Bennett’s count the tenth victim, had been killed, and Gary Lewingdon tried to use Annick’s credit card in a store whose staff recognized it as stolen. Under questioning he confessed to Annick’s murder and implicated himself and his brother, Thaddeus, in nine other killings, among them that of Jenkin Jones.
Gary was tried in Licking County Common Pleas Court in February 1979. The trial lasted two days, and the jury returned a guilty verdict quickly. Ohio’s death penalty was then suspended, and he was sentenced to life. Thaddeus asked for a change of venue, was tried in Cincinnati, and was convicted and given several life sentences. Gary later became psychotic and was sent to the Lima State Hospital for the criminally insane, where in March 1982 he was caught trying to escape. Thaddeus died of lung cancer in prison in April 1989.
Hugh "Pete" Bondurant and his twin, Kenneth "Pat" Bondurant, were from Giles County, Tennessee. In 1986 Pat rented a farmhouse north of the town of Elkton, and testimony at the brothers' trials described a "Manson-like" following of young people who came there to buy drugs, The News Courier of Athens, Alabama, reported.
Gwen Dugger, 24, a single mother from Ardmore, was last seen on May 30, 1986, near that farmhouse. Her body was never found. Ronnie Gaines, a co-worker of Pat’s, was last seen on October 17, 1986, leaving work with him. Terry Lynn Clark, Pete’s former girlfriend, also died in 1986.
The killings went unsolved for four years. In 1990 Pat’s wife gave investigators an account of all three deaths in exchange for immunity from prosecution, and she testified against the twins at their trials. Gaines’s remains were recovered that year. In 1991, in Pulaski, the brothers were convicted in three separate murder cases. Both were convicted of the second-degree murder of Gwen Dugger and sentenced to 25 years, a term The News Courier attributed in part to the absence of her body. Pat was convicted of murdering Ronnie Gaines and of arson for burning his home. Pete was convicted of helping to dispose of Gaines’s body and to burn the house, and separately of murdering Terry Lynn Clark, for which he received 15 years.
The twins' terms ran very differently. Pete Bondurant, 61, was released from the Tennessee Department of Correction the day after Christmas in 2016, after about 26 years. In January 2017 Pat was held at the Northeast Correctional Complex in Mountain City, with a release date of June 2069 and a first parole hearing scheduled for December 2019.
Shankar, also called Gauri Shankar and known to the courts as Auto Shankar, started out driving an auto-rickshaw in Madras, now Chennai, according to the prosecution case the Supreme Court of India set out in 1994. He moved into illicit arrack, a distilled liquor, and then handed that business to his younger brother, Mohan, so that he could run a brothel in Thiruvanmiyur, then on the city’s southern edge. Several associates helped him. One, Eldin, had married Shankar’s younger sister.
The court recorded six killings. The first victim was Lalitha, a woman who had lived with Shankar. She left him for one of his associates, Sudalai, and the two went off together with about 7,300 rupees and Shankar’s camera. She was brought back, and on October 28, 1987, according to the charge, she was strangled in Periyar Nagar; the prosecution said Shankar, Eldin, an associate named Shivaji and Mohan took part. Sudalai was killed about four months later, his body never found. Ravi, Sudalai’s friend, began asking where he had gone and threatened to go to the police; he was strangled in March 1988. Then, on May 29, 1988, three men from the Mandhaveli district, Sampath, Mohan and Govindaraj, clashed with the gang in a street in Thiruvanmiyur. (The victim Mohan was a different man from Shankar’s brother; the court distinguished them.) Shankar and his associates beat all three to death.
The families pressed the police almost at once. On May 31, 1988, a relative of the missing men went to the Thiruvanmiyur station and was sent away; he went next to the Abiramapuram station, where a missing-person case was registered. Witnesses later testified that Shankar had friends among the local police, allegations on which the Supreme Court made no finding. Shankar was arrested on June 27 and released on bail, then arrested again after an accomplice confessed in July. On July 15, 1988, the Crime Branch of the Tamil Nadu police took over the investigation. The accomplice was pardoned and became the chief prosecution witness.
Shankar’s brother and another accused man escaped from custody, and their cases were split from the main trial. Shankar himself got out of the Madras Central Prison with four other prisoners on the night of August 20, 1990, and was recaptured at his father’s home in Orissa on September 1. On May 31, 1991, the Principal Sessions Court at Chengalpattu convicted him of six murders, together with charges of causing evidence to disappear, rioting and taking the property of the dead, and sentenced him, Eldin and Shivaji to death. The Madras High Court confirmed the sentences on July 17, 1992, and the Supreme Court dismissed his appeal in April 1994, calling the killings "coldblooded" and "diabolic in conception."
In 1991, in the Chengalpattu sub-jail, he wrote an account of his life, and he later asked that it be published in the Tamil weekly Nakkheeran, which announced the series in May 1994. The Inspector General of Prisons told the editor it had been written by someone else in his name. The magazine went to the Supreme Court, and its judgment in R. Rajagopal v. State of Tamil Nadu, delivered on October 7, 1994, held that "the right to privacy is implicit in the right to life and liberty," and that the state had no power to stop the press from publishing in advance. A Madras High Court judgment of 2007 records that Shankar was later executed; Amnesty International lists the execution in 1995.
His brother was tried years later. On November 25, 2005, the I Additional Sessions Court in Chennai convicted Mohan of all six murders and sentenced him to life for each, arranged so that he would serve three consecutive life terms. His lawyer argued that Shivaji, whose death sentence had been reduced to life, had been released on remission after about 14 years. On September 25, 2008, the Madras High Court rejected the comparison. Mohan, it held, had acted as his brother’s "right hand" and had taken "a prominent role" in the killings, and the three consecutive terms stood.
The Shen brothers came from Nanwu, a farming village in Huojia county in the central province of Henan. When they were arrested in 2004 the Taipei Times gave their ages as 29 and 21. The Hong Kong paper Sing Tao Headline, looking back at the case in 2025, wrote that both had finished junior high school and that their father and neighbors had thought of them as dutiful sons; it also reported that the elder had served three years in prison for theft. Shanghai Daily reported that Shen Changyin had stabbed a man to death in his home county in September 1999, and the Taipei Times said the brothers left their village in 2000 after the elder brother killed a man. No charge for that killing has been reported.
After the Spring Festival of 2003 the brothers started an auto parts business in Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu province, and lost money. Shanghai Daily reported that they planned their crimes after that failure. Their first victim, killed in Lanzhou in 2003, was a woman named Yao Fang; Sing Tao Headline wrote that the brothers took about 30,700 yuan from her bank account. They moved on through other cities. In Baotou, in Inner Mongolia, in late November 2003, they met Li Chunling, who became their accomplice, and more women were killed there. Four women were later convicted with the brothers. One of them, Zhao Meiying, surrendered to the police, who then arrested Li Chunling, while the brothers remained at large.
They were caught in Shijiazhuang, in Hebei province, in August 2004. The first English report, carried by the Taipei Times on September 3, 2004, said they were accused of killing 12 people, 11 women and one man, in six provinces. Shanghai Daily and Sing Tao Headline later gave the number as 11 women. In September 2005 the Lanzhou Intermediate People’s Court sentenced both brothers to death, and Li Chunling, then 23, with them. The three other women received terms of three to 20 years. Sing Tao Headline reported that Shen Changyin and Shen Changping were executed on April 28, 2006.
The Mailoni brothers were never arrested, charged or tried, and the killings attributed to them were never tested in court. The authorities in Zambia named three brothers, Mika, Fabian and Stephano Mailoni, and said there had first been four, until one withdrew. Police said they had been on the wanted list since 2007 and that the first killings came in 2009. They lived in the Luano Valley, in Mkushi District, and used their knowledge of the forest to stay ahead of the police.
By September 2012, the Times of Zambia reported, they were accused of killing 12 people with spears. Among the dead were Moses Masumba, chief pilot of the Zambia Flying Doctor Service; Christopher Nyama Champe, an adviser to Chief Chembe; and a village headman, Mbalakawe Chipokolo. A 43-year-old man killed in late August 2012 was counted as the twelfth. A reward of 50 million kwacha was posted. Schools in the valley were disrupted because pupils and teachers were afraid, and families abandoned their homes and fields. "We shall not rest until we capture them," the defense minister, Geoffrey Mwamba, said as reinforcements were sent in.
Their mother, a widow in her late seventies, told reporters that her sons had changed after visiting a witch doctor together and that the killings had no reason. Residents of the valley burned her house, and police and the chief moved her away for her safety in 2010. One of her surviving sons, the reports said, had been the brothers' first target; the first killing on record was of a man who had gathered villagers to try to catch them.
On Monday, June 24, 2013, at about three in the afternoon, the three brothers were shot dead by security forces, after a hunt of about five years. They were buried in Kabwe on the Thursday that followed. The district commissioner, Patrick Chishala, said the authorities held them responsible for more than 12 killings, asked the public not to punish the family, and urged people who had fled the valley years earlier to go home. "The chapter of the Mailoni brothers is now permanently closed," he said. Zambia’s Human Rights Commission, asked about the shooting, noted that no prima facie case had been established against the brothers and said the circumstances should be examined.
The sisters Mexico’s press called Las Poquianchis were born in El Salto, Jalisco, and raised in San Francisco del Rincón, Guanajuato, according to the historian Fabiola Bailón Vásquez, who studied the court file for a 2011 volume published by Mexico’s Supreme Court. Of their mother’s twelve children four survived: Carmen, Delfina, María and Luisa. From about 1938, Carmen and Delfina ran cantinas. Over the next two decades the sisters set up houses in Jalisco and Guanajuato, among them San Juan de los Lagos and San Francisco del Rincón, and some fifty women passed through them. Young women from poor rural families reached the houses through go-betweens who promised them work, and once there they were held by debts for food, clothing and lodging that they could not pay off. The sisters settled payments, taxes and fines with municipal officials, Bailón writes, and officials used the houses without paying.
The houses ran openly until Guanajuato began enforcing the ban on organized prostitution in 1962. With the houses closed, the women were kept in hiding, first in a shuttered house and then on a family ranch near San Francisco del Rincón. As money ran out, their food was cut. Some of the women died in that period and others were killed, Bailón writes, and accounts of how they died differ.
The case began with a missing-person complaint by a victim’s relatives. On Monday, January 13, 1964, police freed eleven women from the sisters' property, and Delfina and María were arrested shortly afterward; other accounts date the arrests to January 12 or 14. Luisa surrendered in Guadalajara on February 8, 1964. Before the judge, Delfina and María blamed each other, admitted that several women had died, and called the deaths accidents. Eighteen people were eventually accused: the three sisters, five women who had lived in the houses, four drivers and servants, and four soldiers.
On October 15, 1964, the judge in San Francisco del Rincón sentenced Delfina and María to 40 years in prison and Luisa to 27, for aggravated homicide (homicidio calificado), kidnapping, criminal association, procuring (lenocinio) and other charges. The accomplices received six to 35 years. A Guanajuato appeals chamber upheld the sentences on July 30, 1966. Mexico’s Supreme Court ruled on the sisters' constitutional appeal on November 21, 1974, leaving the sentences of Delfina and María unchanged and ordering a new sentence for Luisa. The sisters served their terms in Irapuato, La Crónica reported. Delfina died in prison in 1968. Luisa died in prison in 1984. María, the only sister to leave prison, was reported by Uno TV to have died in the mid-1990s.
The number of the dead is still disputed. The weekly Alarma! wrote of hundreds of bodies, a claim Bailón calls exaggerated, and Guinness World Records lists Delfina and María as the most prolific murder partnership on record, with at least 90 victims. The court file is far narrower. Bailón found that the legal proceedings set out the deaths of eight women; the literary scholar Alejandro Lámbarry, who has also studied the file, counts six bodies and writes that the victims' names change across three versions of the record. The novelist Jorge Ibargüengoitia read the same file in 1964 and concluded that the newspapers' version was exaggerated. His novel Las muertas, published in 1977, renamed the sisters and moved the story to an invented town. Felipe Cazals’s film Las Poquianchis appeared in 1976, and in September 2025 Netflix released a six-episode series of Las muertas directed by Luis Estrada.
Set side by side, the cases show how rarely the law treated two siblings as one. In Richmond, three brothers from the same house drew two death sentences and a life term. In Wichita, a jury acquitted one brother of a carjacking it found the other had committed. In Toledo, a plea agreement turned on the difference between the brother who stopped and the brother who went on alone, and in Madras a younger brother was convicted in 2005 of the same six killings for which the elder had been sentenced to death in 1991. In Zambia the brothers died together under fire from the security forces, and no court ever heard the case against them.
• About 1938: Carmen and Delfina González begin running cantinas in El Salto, Jalisco.
• 1962: Guanajuato enforces its ban on organized prostitution; the González houses close.
• January 13, 1964: police free eleven women from the González sisters' property; Delfina and María are arrested shortly afterward.
• October 15, 1964: Delfina and María González sentenced to 40 years, Luisa to 27.
• 1968: Delfina González dies in prison.
• 1971: Linwood Briley, 16, shoots an elderly neighbor in North Richmond.
• December 1973: Vicki Small is killed in Toledo; Anthony Cook confessed in 2000.
• December 1977: two women are shot dead outside a bar in Newark, Ohio, the start of the Lewingdon series.
• April 8, 1978: Jenkin Jones is shot dead near Granville, Ohio.
• December 1978: Gary Lewingdon is arrested after using Joseph Annick’s credit card and implicates his brother Thaddeus.
• February 1979: Gary Lewingdon convicted in Licking County and sentenced to life.
• September 14, 1979: John Harvey Gallaher is killed in Richmond.
• October 19, 1979: Harvey Wilkerson, Judy Barton and Harvey Barton are killed in Richmond.
• October 22, 1979: Linwood Briley and Duncan Meekins are arrested.
• 1980: the Briley brothers are convicted; Linwood and James are sentenced to death.
• May 1980: Tom Gordon is killed in Toledo; his girlfriend survives.
• February 1981: Dawn Backes, 12, is abducted and killed in Toledo.
• September 18, 1981: Peter Sawicki is shot dead; Anthony Cook is arrested weeks later.
• March 1982: Anthony Cook convicted of Sawicki’s murder.
• May 31, 1984: Linwood and James Briley lead the escape of six condemned men from the Mecklenburg Correctional Center.
• June 19, 1984: the Briley brothers are recaptured in Philadelphia.
• October 12, 1984: Linwood Briley is executed.
• 1984: Luisa González dies in prison.
• April 18, 1985: James Briley is executed.
• May 30, 1986: Gwen Dugger is last seen near Elkton, Tennessee.
• October 17, 1986: Ronnie Gaines is last seen leaving work with Pat Bondurant.
• October 28, 1987: Lalitha is killed in Madras, the first of six killings for which Auto Shankar was convicted.
• May 29, 1988: Sampath, Mohan and Govindaraj are killed in Thiruvanmiyur.
• April 1989: Thaddeus Lewingdon dies in prison.
• 1990: Pat Bondurant’s wife gives investigators an account of the 1986 killings.
• August 20, 1990: Auto Shankar escapes from the Madras Central Prison; he is recaptured on September 1.
• 1991: the Bondurant twins are convicted in Pulaski, Tennessee.
• May 31, 1991: Auto Shankar is convicted of six murders and sentenced to death.
• October 7, 1994: the Supreme Court of India decides R. Rajagopal v. State of Tamil Nadu.
• 1995: Auto Shankar is executed.
• 1998: DNA links Anthony and Nathaniel Cook to the 1980 attack; Nathaniel is arrested.
• April 3, 2000: the Cook brothers confess on videotape to nine killings.
• December 7 to 14, 2000: the Carr brothers' crimes in Wichita.
• 2002: Reginald and Jonathan Carr are sentenced to death.
• 2003: Yao Fang is killed in Lanzhou, the first of the Shen brothers' victims.
• August 2004: Shen Changyin and Shen Changping are arrested in Shijiazhuang.
• September 2005: the Lanzhou Intermediate People’s Court sentences both Shen brothers to death.
• November 25, 2005: Auto Shankar’s brother Mohan is convicted of the six murders.
• April 28, 2006: the Shen brothers are executed.
• September 25, 2008: the Madras High Court upholds Mohan’s three consecutive life terms.
• June 24, 2013: the Mailoni brothers are shot dead by Zambian security forces.
• July 2014: the Kansas Supreme Court vacates the Carr death sentences.
• January 20, 2016: the Supreme Court of the United States reinstates them.
• December 2016: Pete Bondurant is released.
• 2018: Nathaniel Cook is released under the 2000 plea agreement.
• January 21, 2022: the Kansas Supreme Court upholds the Carr death sentences.
• December 2024: Anthony Briley is refused parole on a geriatric application; Anthony Cook’s parole hearing is postponed to March 2025.
• June 26, 2026: the Kansas Supreme Court again upholds the Carr death sentences.