A man under surveillance is a man still at liberty, and the officers watching him know it. Each of these nine cases contains a stretch, anywhere from a few hours to about two months, in which detectives held a name and chose to follow the man instead of arresting him. The reasons differed. A laboratory had not reported. A sample had not been collected. A single sighting would not hold up as a charge. The costs differed too, and two of the cases show the worst side of waiting: one man was detained, cleared on a blood test, and sent back out for six more years, and another was tried for one death out of a series that police and the press put at more than thirty.
Ivan Milat was arrested on May 22, 1994, in Eagle Vale, in Sydney’s southwest, after police had kept him under surveillance for about two months, according to the Australian Associated Press and the Associated Press. Seven young travelers had been hitchhiking out of Sydney between December 1989 and April 1992: Deborah Everist and James Gibson, both 19, from Victoria; Simone Schmidl, Anja Habschied and Gabor Neugebauer from Germany; and Joanne Walters and Caroline Clarke from Britain. Their deaths came to light in the Belanglo State Forest, south of Sydney, between September 1992 and November 1993.
The case that brought police to Milat’s name began with a survivor rather than a victim. In January 1990 a British backpacker, Paul Onions, reported an offense to police the same day it happened. Four years later, AAP reported, he was shown 13 photographs and picked out Milat. The first charge laid after the arrest was the armed robbery of Onions. The seven murder charges followed at the end of May 1994.
What the two months of watching produced has not been made public. The sequence is plain enough: a witness who had waited four years, a man followed for about two months, an arrest on one count and then, within days, murder charges. Milat was committed for trial on December 12, 1994. On July 27, 1996, Justice David Hunt sentenced him to life imprisonment on each of the murder counts, which the press reported as seven consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole. His appeal was dismissed on February 26, 1998. He never confessed. He died of cancer at the Long Bay Correctional Complex in Sydney on October 27, 2019, aged 74.
The watching in Andrei Chikatilo’s case went wrong in an instructive way. He was a married father of two, a former teacher of Russian literature who worked as a supply agent for factories in the Rostov region of southern Russia, and the killings of children and young women attributed to him had been going on since 1978. In September 1984 police watching the Rostov bus station saw a man approaching girls. They followed him to the central market and detained him. The Moscow Times reporter Peter Conradi wrote that investigators examined him over the March killing of Dima Ptashnikov, 10, in Novoshakhtinsk.
Nothing tied him directly to any death, and a blood-typing result appeared to clear him. He was prosecuted instead for stealing a car battery from a former employer. He was expelled from the Communist Party and sentenced to a year of corrective labor, and he was out after about three months, according to Britannica; Conradi put his release in early 1985. The killings did not stop. He was arrested in Novocherkassk in November 1990, by which time the number of dead attributed to him had passed fifty.
He was charged with 53 murders. On October 15, 1992, the Rostov Regional Court convicted him of 52 and sentenced him to death. He was executed at the prison in Novocherkassk on February 14, 1994, UPI reported. The 1984 episode is the part of the case that bears on waiting. Police had watched a man, stopped him, and let a laboratory result overrule them, and the next six years are what that cost.
Jack Owen Spillman III pleaded guilty in April 1996 to the murders of a mother and her daughter, Rita Huffman, 48, and Mandy Huffman, 15, in East Wenatchee, Washington, on the night of April 12, 1995. The case was solved in a week, and most of that week was spent watching him.
The Associated Press reported that police had encountered Spillman about two hours after the killings. They did not hold him. According to the Spokesman-Review, they began watching him around the clock on the day after, and they kept at it for days while the sheriff, LaRoche, told the public that there were no suspects and no leads. The laboratory results came back on a Wednesday, April 19, and police arrested Spillman the same day in a rented apartment in the Wenatchee area. The sheriff called the arrest "a big relief to the public" and still would not say what had first drawn police to Spillman. He said at the time that the killings appeared random and that the Huffmans had not known the person who killed them.
Watching a man for six days costs something if he is dangerous, and what the officers would have done had he moved has never been reported. They do say what the delay bought. When Spillman was brought in, police had laboratory results to put in front of him, and he was charged with two counts of aggravated first-degree murder. A year later, facing a possible death sentence at a trial set for August 1996, he pleaded guilty. In the same hearing he admitted the killing of Penny Davis, 9, whose death in Okanogan County in September 1994 had gone uncharged until that day. Superior Court Judge Carol Wardell sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of parole for Rita Huffman’s death, 70 years for Mandy Huffman’s and 45 and a half years for Penny Davis’s. Other charges in King County and Spokane County were pending, and their outcome has not been reported. He was serving his sentences as of May 1, 1996.
By mid-November 2006, WGRZ later reported, the joint task force hunting the man the Buffalo press called the Bike Path Rapist regarded Altemio Sanchez as its primary suspect. The sheriff said three separate investigative units had each pointed to him, and he was placed under surveillance. Sanchez was a factory worker from Cheektowaga, a suburb east of Buffalo, married for 26 years and the father of two.
Surveillance could not settle whether he was the man. For that the task force needed his DNA, and needed to get it without alerting him. On January 13, 2007, detectives followed him to a restaurant and, after he left, collected the drinking glasses, tableware and napkin he had used. The laboratory compared the DNA on them with the profile from the Bike Path Rapist cases. District Attorney Frank Clark said the match was 100 percent. Sanchez was arrested in Buffalo two days later, on January 15, 2007.
The match connected him to at least eight sexual assaults in the Buffalo area, according to prosecutors, and to three killings: Linda Yalem, 22, a University at Buffalo student, in 1990; Majane Mazur, 32, in 1992; and Joan Diver, 45, a nurse, in 2006. It also undid a conviction. Anthony Capozzi had been convicted in 1987 of two assaults in Delaware Park in Buffalo in 1984; his convictions were vacated in April 2007, after DNA tied the same assaults to Sanchez. On May 16, 2007, Sanchez pleaded guilty to three counts of murder in the second degree. Justice Christopher Burns sentenced him on August 14, 2007, to 75 years to life, the maximum. Through his lawyer Sanchez admitted to a number of other rapes, a figure the lawyer put at 12 to 15 in one report and 13 to 20 in another; none was charged. He died on September 22, 2023, aged 65, at Millard Fillmore Suburban Hospital after he became unresponsive in his cell at Wende Correctional Facility. The State Commission of Correction ruled the manner of death a suicide.
Arthur Shawcross was watched for roughly a day. It was long enough to matter. On Wednesday, January 3, 1990, a New York State Police surveillance helicopter crew working north of Rochester sighted a woman’s body in the Northampton Park area, about ten miles west of the city. She was June Cicero. Minutes later, troopers saw a car leaving the area, and the helicopter followed it to Shawcross’s address. "The big break came with the State Police helicopter," Major Salvatore Valvo, commander of Troop E in Canandaigua, said afterward.
On Thursday, January 4, he was questioned, and he gave police information about Felicia Stephens, UPI reported. Her body was located that morning by a deer hunter in the same area, while police kept watch on him. He was taken into custody that day and arraigned on January 5.
The watching left a courtroom question behind. Shawcross’s lawyers argued that statements he made to police should not be heard. The Appellate Division, Fourth Department, ruled in April 1993 that he had gone with the police voluntarily and had not been in custody when he was questioned, and that the record showed no threats or promises that induced his statements. He was 44, worked nights at a food service company, and had been paroled in 1987 after serving about 15 years for the 1972 manslaughter of Karen Ann Hill, 8, in Watertown. He was indicted in Monroe County on January 23, 1990 for the murder of ten women. A jury convicted him of murder in the second degree on all ten counts on December 13, 1990, and in March 1991 he pleaded guilty to the murder of Elizabeth Gibson in Wayne County. He died in prison on November 10, 2008, of a pulmonary embolism.
Brandon Tholmer had been released from Patton State Hospital in June 1979, after being declared a mentally disordered sex offender following a 1975 rape and robbery conviction, and sent to outpatient therapy. By November 1983 detectives in Los Angeles were watching him in connection with the killings of elderly women who lived alone in East Hollywood and Silverlake. Police once suspected him in up to 34 deaths of elderly women in the city; they later cleared him in 22.
The surveillance lasted a week. At about 4 a.m. on Monday, November 7, 1983, officers following him watched him approach a house in Los Angeles where an 85-year-old woman who was paralyzed lived with a full-time nurse. Chief Daryl Gates explained why police moved when they did: "We thought that was far enough." The arrest followed that morning on a charge of attempted burglary. He did not resist.
Gates’s sentence carries the whole problem of this kind of watching. The officers had followed a man they suspected of killing women who lived alone, and the act they saw him attempt was at the house of a paralyzed woman who was not alone. Waiting for more would have meant waiting for a door to open.
The murder case took three years. After a closed preliminary hearing in March 1984 Tholmer was ordered to stand trial on five murder counts. A jury, after a trial that ran six months, convicted him in July 1986 of four counts of first-degree murder with special circumstances: Rose Lederman, 80, in August 1981; Woolloomooloo Woodcock, 66, in August 1982; Mary Pauquette, 72, in September 1982; and Dorothy Fain, 72, in August 1983. The jury deadlocked on the murder of Loraine Wells and on the attempted burglary, and a mistrial was declared on those counts. The penalty jury rejected the death penalty, and in November 1986 Judge Clarence Stromwall imposed four consecutive terms of life without parole. "I have not observed more vicious crimes," the judge said, after what he described as 40 years in the criminal justice system. Police said they believed Tholmer had committed seven more killings; the prosecutor said the evidence for charges was lacking.
In May 1986, days after the death of Tina Kimbrew, 21, in Wichita Falls, Texas, Faryion Wardrip called police in Galveston and confessed to her killing. He pleaded guilty to murder and was sentenced to 35 years. Four other deaths of young women between December 1984 and the following October, around Wichita Falls and in Fort Worth, were each being worked by a different agency, and nothing linked them to him. He was released on December 11, 1997.
In early 1999 an investigator for the Wichita County district attorney, John Little, picked up the old files and saw Wardrip’s name close to several of them. Wardrip was living in Olney, working at a door and screen factory, singing in a church choir and recently married. The Dallas Observer reported that Little followed him for days. At the end of that time Little asked whether he could have the coffee cup Wardrip had just thrown away, and took it. DNA from the cup matched evidence from the killings of Terry Sims and Toni Gibbs, two of the cases that had been open since the mid-1980s.
Wardrip was arrested on February 13, 1999, on capital murder warrants. He confessed to the Sims and Gibbs killings, to the killing of Ellen Blau and to a Fort Worth killing no one had connected to him, that of Debra Taylor, 26. He pleaded guilty to the capital murder of Terry Sims, 20, and a jury in Denton sentenced him to death in November 1999. Life sentences for the other three followed, reported as consecutive. The death sentence has been in the federal courts since. A district court set it aside in 2010, the Fifth Circuit vacated that ruling in 2011, relief was granted again in 2018, and the Fifth Circuit reversed in 2020. On May 19, 2026, the district court denied relief on remand and granted a certificate of appealability on two issues. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice death row list updated March 12, 2026 still carries his name.
The police statement reported in Ghana on May 16, 2001, said that Charles Ebo Quansah had been under surveillance for some time and had been arrested in February 2001 at Adenta, in Accra. It did not say how long some time was. The Daily Guide reported the next day that a tip had led police to him. A special investigation team had been formed to hunt the person behind the killings of more than 30 women in Accra and Kumasi, and the police said the Federal Bureau of Investigation had provided "Scientific Investigation Support," with physical evidence sent to the FBI laboratory in the United States.
Later reports do not agree with the statement. Some give the arrest as June or July 2000 and others as February 2000, which would mean that a man said to be under watch in early 2001 had already been in custody for a year. The record does not settle it. Police said Quansah confessed on May 8, 2001, to eight killings of women, a number later reported as nine, between 1993 and 2001 in Kumasi and in the Accra suburbs of Dansoman, Mataheko and Adenta. They also allowed that more than one person might have been responsible for the series. Quansah retracted the statements and has said they were obtained by torture.
The trial that followed was narrow. Quansah was tried for one death: Akua Serwaa, a 24-year-old hairdresser, in Kumasi on January 19, 1996. He had been committed for trial by an Accra Community Tribunal in March 2002. His trial was suspended in May 2002 and began on May 22. On August 7, 2002, a seven-member jury in the High Court in Accra convicted him of her murder, and Justice Agnes Dordzie sentenced him to death by hanging. Notice of appeal was filed on September 6, 2002. He was reported in the condemned cells at Nsawam Medium Security Prison from 2002 to 2010. Ghana amended its law in 2023 to replace the death penalty for ordinary crimes with life imprisonment; whether the change has affected his sentence has not been reported. The figure of 34 women, which police and the press went on using, was never put before a court.
Dennis Rader killed 10 people in and around Wichita, Kansas, between January 1974 and January 1991, and in between wrote to police and the press under the name BTK. He resurfaced in 2004 after years of silence. On February 16, 2005, a package reached KSAS-TV in Wichita with a letter, a piece of jewelry and a floppy disk. Police traced the disk to a church in Park City where Rader was council president, and he was arrested in Park City on February 25, 2005.
CBS News, citing KAKE-TV, reported that Rader was already under surveillance before the arrest. That is a television station’s report, passed on secondhand, not a court finding. If it is accurate, the watching lasted at most nine days, the span between the disk and the arrest. Whatever surveillance there was, the interval was short. A suspect who had been silent for years had left one trace, and it led to him within days.
He was charged on March 1, 2005, with 10 counts of first-degree murder. The district attorney, Nola Foulston, said at once that the death penalty could not apply to crimes committed between 1972 and 1994, the years in which Kansas had none. Rader pleaded guilty on June 27, 2005. On August 18, 2005, District Judge Gregory Waller sentenced him to 10 consecutive life terms, a minimum of 175 years before parole eligibility, with the count for Dolores Davis carrying a "hard 40." He was held at El Dorado Correctional Facility as of August 2025; no report of a death, transfer or new charge has appeared as of October 2026.
Where the reports give a reason for the wait, it is concrete. Spillman’s police waited for a laboratory. Sanchez’s task force and Wardrip’s investigator waited for a discarded object. Tholmer’s detectives waited for an act. Milat’s police, so far as the record shows, waited on a witness who had taken four years to be shown a set of photographs. In Shawcross’s case the waiting was a matter of hours, and its legal worth showed up three years later in an appeal.
Where the reports give no reason, the silence is part of the record. Nobody has said what two months of watching in Sydney gained that the photographs did not. Quansah’s police said he had been watched for "some time." Rader’s surveillance is a television station’s account, passed along by a network. These are the cases in which a reader should hold the claim loosely.
The cost is easier to read. Chikatilo’s detention in 1984 ended in a release, and the next six years are the price. Tholmer’s detectives watched a man walk up to a door. Spillman was left free for six days while the sheriff told the public that there were no suspects. In each of those, the police had a name and a reason to think they were right; what they lacked was a document or a laboratory result that could hold. All nine men were convicted in the end, and for most of them the watching is a footnote to a longer story. For Chikatilo, and for the women in Accra and Kumasi whose deaths were never put to a court, the question of how long police watched, and what they did with the time, is the part of the story that still lacks an answer.
• 1972: Karen Ann Hill, 8, dies in Watertown, New York; Arthur Shawcross later serves about 15 years for her manslaughter.
• August 1981 to August 1983: the four deaths of which Brandon Tholmer is later convicted occur in Los Angeles.
• November 7, 1983: Tholmer is arrested in Los Angeles after about a week of surveillance.
• September 1984: Andrei Chikatilo is detained at the Rostov bus station and central market and released as a murder suspect after a blood-typing result.
• December 1984 to May 1986: the five deaths later attributed to Faryion Wardrip occur in Wichita Falls and Fort Worth, Texas.
• Early 1985: Chikatilo is released after a short sentence for theft.
• November 1986: Tholmer is sentenced to four consecutive terms of life without parole.
• December 1989 to April 1992: seven young travelers who had been hitchhiking out of Sydney are killed; their deaths came to light in Belanglo State Forest between September 1992 and November 1993.
• January 1990: Paul Onions reports an offense to police; four years later he picks Ivan Milat from 13 photographs.
• January 3 to 5, 1990: Shawcross is traced by a State Police helicopter crew, kept under watch, taken into custody January 4 and arraigned January 5.
• November 1990: Chikatilo is arrested in Novocherkassk.
• October 15, 1992: Chikatilo is convicted of 52 murders and sentenced to death.
• February 14, 1994: Chikatilo is executed at Novocherkassk.
• About March 1994 to May 22, 1994: Milat is under surveillance for about two months; he is arrested May 22 and charged with murder at the end of May.
• April 12, 1995: Rita and Mandy Huffman are killed in East Wenatchee; police begin round-the-clock surveillance of Jack Spillman the next day.
• April 19, 1995: Spillman is arrested after laboratory results come back.
• April 1996: Spillman pleads guilty to the Huffman killings and to the killing of Penny Davis, 9.
• July 27, 1996: Milat is sentenced to life on each murder count.
• December 11, 1997: Wardrip is released from prison after the Kimbrew sentence.
• February 13, 1999: Wardrip is arrested on capital murder warrants after DNA from a discarded coffee cup matches earlier cases.
• November 1999: a Denton jury sentences Wardrip to death for the capital murder of Terry Sims.
• February 2001 (police statement of May 16, 2001): Charles Quansah is arrested in Accra after what police call surveillance for some time; later reports give earlier dates.
• August 7, 2002: Quansah is convicted of the murder of Akua Serwaa and sentenced to death.
• February 16 to 25, 2005: Dennis Rader mails a disk to a Wichita television station and is arrested nine days later.
• August 18, 2005: Rader is sentenced to 10 consecutive life terms.
• Mid-November 2006: the Buffalo task force names Altemio Sanchez its primary suspect and places him under surveillance.
• January 13 to 15, 2007: detectives collect items Sanchez used at a restaurant; DNA matches; Sanchez is arrested January 15.
• May 16 and August 14, 2007: Sanchez pleads guilty to three counts of murder in the second degree and is sentenced to 75 years to life.
• May 19, 2026: a federal district court denies Wardrip relief on remand.