On May 23, 2019, a woman who had been abducted at 17 in Tampa, Florida, in 1984 sat in the front row as the man who took her was executed. Afterward she told the Associated Press that she had forgiven him, because otherwise she would have been living in a prison of her own. "The peace that came over me is a remarkable feeling," she said. It is one of the more unusual things a survivor of a serial offender can say in public, and she was not typical. Other survivors here did something that looks the opposite and is, on closer reading, closely related: they showed up every time the state reopened the question of release. A man who was a boy of 13 in 1978 has attended the parole hearings of the man who assaulted him and his sister, in Michigan, for years. A woman who escaped a captor in Perth, Western Australia, in 1986 started a petition thirty years later that helped change a law. A woman held captive in South Carolina in 2016 went to civil court and won a judgment of more than $6 million.
What these cases share is not a temperament. It is the long afterwards. Courts settled guilt in each of them within a few years of arrest, mostly through guilty pleas. What came next went on for decades and was conducted largely in public: sentencing statements, parole boards, legislatures, civil courts, television interviews and, in one case, a book. The survivors below are named only where the public record names them.
Anthony Cook is serving two life sentences in Ohio for two killings in Toledo: the murder of Peter Sawicki in September 1981, for which a jury convicted him in March 1982, and the aggravated murder of Tom Gordon in May 1980, to which he pleaded guilty under a 2000 plea agreement. In April 2000 he and his younger brother, Nathaniel Cook, gave videotaped confessions that accounted for nine killings between 1973 and 1981. Prosecutors agreed not to pursue charges for the killings that had never been tried. Because Sawicki died on September 18, 1981, a month before Ohio’s current death penalty law took effect on October 19, 1981, Cook was sentenced to a term that left him eligible for parole. That date explains why a case from the early 1980s still produces public statements in the 2020s.
The survivors came into the case at three points.
The first was the young woman who was with Tom Gordon in May 1980. WTOL reported that both brothers later admitted abducting her and trying to kill her. She lived, and she told police that her assailants were two men. For years police suspected the brothers but lacked the evidence to charge them. Then, in 1997, Julia Bates, the Lucas County prosecutor, wondered whether DNA might work on old evidence and asked whether the material collected after the 1980 case still existed. It did. The profile it produced matched both brothers, and Nathaniel Cook was arrested in 1998. His convictions for attempted murder and kidnapping rest on what happened to her. The evidence from her case, collected in 1980, is what opened the rest of the file twenty years later.
The second was a young man who was wounded in the September 1981 confrontation that killed Sawicki, a Toledo-area real estate developer who had come to the aid of his daughter during a robbery. The young man survived with lasting physical and emotional injuries, and he and the other young person involved testified at Cook’s 1982 trial. Reports on the case say he has since said publicly that he has forgiven the brothers. He wrote to Anthony Cook, who did not answer.
The third was a young woman who was assaulted in Toledo in January 1981 and survived; her companion was not hurt. WTOL reported that she has told the board that if Cook were released he would do it all over again, because prison life was all he knew. She has described herself as a survivor, not a victim, and has said that she never got her day in court. Under the 2000 agreement prosecutors agreed not to pursue charges for the other killings the brothers confessed to, so apart from the Sawicki trial and the Gordon plea none of them reached a courtroom.
Families have used the same forum. A vigil for the nine victims was held before an earlier hearing, and the brother of Scott Moulton, one of those killed in 1981, told WTOL that the killings still shape the way he protects his own family. At Nathaniel Cook’s first court appearance in 2018 he said, "I guess I’m the voice of my brother." Of Anthony Cook he told WTOL ahead of the December 2024 hearing, "I hope he rots in hell." The mother of Dawn Backes, who was 12, said in 2018 that the brothers had used her daughter as a bargaining chip in the plea. She told WTOL that she kept a landline telephone for decades, waiting for a call that the brothers had died.
In February 2018 the Associated Press reported that a motion had been filed seeking the release of Nathaniel Cook, whose sentence was counted from 1998. For Anthony Cook, a hearing set for December 5, 2024, was postponed to March 2025 after he declined to meet with the parole board, WTVG and WTOL reported. Bates, the Lucas County prosecutor, later explained why he was eligible at all: "We didn’t have the death penalty back then. It doesn’t mean he’ll get parole."
Between March and November 1984 at least eight women were killed in and around Tampa. The man responsible was Robert Joe Long, known as Bobby Joe, who was caught because of a 17-year-old girl he abducted from her bicycle in the early hours of November 3, 1984. She was released. She remembered details of the car and the places he stopped, and a bank record gave detectives his name within two weeks. He was arrested on November 16, 1984, on a warrant for her abduction.
Her report ended the killings. On September 23, 1985, in Hillsborough County, Long pleaded guilty to eight counts of first-degree murder, with kidnapping and other charges, covering Ngeun Thi "Lana" Long, Michelle Simms, Elizabeth Loudenback, Vicky Elliott, Chanel Williams, Karen Dinsfriend, Kimberly Hopps and Kim Swann. Court records show that she also testified at a trial in the Pasco County case, in which Long faced a separate murder charge. He was convicted three times in that case, every conviction was reversed, and in 1997 the Florida Supreme Court ordered an acquittal. As a teenager, in other words, she had testified in open court, and she watched that case come apart on procedure. The court’s 1992 opinion held that the Hillsborough pleas should not have been used against him at the trial it reviewed, while allowing that the jury could hear how the girl’s report led to his arrest.
Long’s death sentence was for the murder of Michelle Simms: imposed July 25, 1986, vacated June 30, 1988, imposed again July 21, 1989, affirmed October 15, 1992. Certiorari was denied on October 4, 1993. More than a quarter century of appeals followed. A Florida governor signed a death warrant on April 24, 2019, and Long was executed at Florida State Prison on May 23, 2019, at age 65.
She spoke to reporters around the execution, and she was in the front row on the day. ABC Action News carried her comments under the headline "'Bobby Joe Long, Thank you': Survivor at peace after serial killer executed." She told reporters she would have liked to thank him "for choosing me and not another 17-year-old girl." Forgiving him, she said, was how she avoided living in a prison of her own. A 2018 television film had dramatized her abduction. The woman whose memory identified a man in 1984, and who testified against him, was by 2019 telling reporters that the peace she felt was remarkable.
Todd Kohlhepp was a real estate broker in upstate South Carolina with his own firm, a pilot’s license and a reputation as a hard worker. In November 2016, deputies reached a woman held captive on his land near Woodruff, and the investigation that followed led to his arrest in Moore on November 3, 2016. Within days he confessed to killing her companion, Charlie Carver, to killing a married couple, Johnny and Meagan Coxie, the year before, and to the deaths of four people at a motorcycle shop in Chesnee in 2003, a case that had gone unsolved for thirteen years.
The woman held captive survived, and she has since spoken publicly. Within days of the arrest the relatives of his earlier victims were speaking about her, too: CBS News ran a comment from the widow of one of the 2003 victims in November 2016 under the headline "Widow of 2003 victim: Woman held captive by alleged serial killer is 'the real hero'." Her rescue had led to the arrest of the man who had taken the widow’s husband thirteen years earlier.
On May 26, 2017, in Spartanburg County, Kohlhepp pleaded guilty to 14 charges: seven counts of murder, four of possessing a weapon during a violent crime, two of kidnapping and one of first-degree criminal sexual conduct, the last involving the woman held captive. The solicitor’s office announced seven consecutive life terms plus 60 years under a plea agreement in which he waived appeal and agreed never to seek or accept parole. The solicitor, Barnette, quoted by WLOS, said Kohlhepp deserved to die but that South Carolina "doesn’t have a functioning death penalty," and that the families and the survivor wanted closure rather than the uncertainty of a death sentence. He hoped they could "rest easier knowing he will leave prison in a casket."
Her second public act was civil. She had sued Kohlhepp for personal injury, and on August 23, 2018, the court entered judgment for her of more than $1.5 million in actual damages and more than $4.7 million in punitive damages, South Carolina Lawyers Weekly reported. In the same month Kohlhepp’s belongings were auctioned, and WSOC reported that hundreds of people bought items at the sale. In October 2018 a private company bought the property for $500,000.
The families used the same courts. Relatives of victims also faced Kohlhepp in court in Spartanburg County in July 2019, and Live 5 News carried the headline "Widow of serial killer Todd Kohlhepp’s victim addresses him in court: 'I forgive you'." In December 2023 the Associated Press reported that Academy Sports was paying $2.5 million to families of his victims over illegal gun sales.
Don Miller grew up in East Lansing, was a youth minister, studied at Michigan State University and played in the marching band. In August 1978 he assaulted two children in Delta Township, a girl of 14 and her brother of 13. Both survived. Bystanders took down the license plate of the car he was driving, and he was arrested later the same day. In May 1979 he was convicted in Eaton County of attempted murder, with other charges, and sentenced to 30 to 50 years. In July 1979 he pleaded guilty to two counts of manslaughter covering Martha Sue Young, 19, his former fiancée, and Kristine Stuart, 30, and admitted the deaths of two other women, Marita Choquette and Wendy Bush, for whom he was never charged under the agreement. The sentence was 10 to 15 years, concurrent. In 1998 he was convicted of possessing a weapon in prison and was given a further 20 to 40 years. The maximum discharge date reported by the Michigan Department of Corrections is March 24, 2031.
WKAR, reporting in 2016, said the children’s survival was important in prosecuting him. The boy, by then a man, has attended Miller’s parole hearings for years to oppose release. Miller was 61 and held at a prison in Jackson in August 2016, facing his first parole consideration since 1997. He declined to be interviewed. Relatives of the dead organized as well. A high school friend of Kristine Stuart circulated a petition to the Michigan Department of Corrections; her sister-in-law told WXYZ that Miller was "a threat to society"; her parents wrote to the board that "Miller alone is personally responsible for her murder and creating an enormous loss within the family." Attorney General Bill Schuette wrote to the board that the details of the crimes were reason enough to keep him in prison. Miller’s original lawyer, Tom Bengtson, retained again by Miller’s family in 2016, argued that his client had "served his time" and was no longer a threat.
The board denied parole in 2016. In April 2021 it interviewed him again, and the decision took about two months, longer than the usual 30 days. In the week of June 10, 2021, the Department of Corrections confirmed that parole had been denied, The State News and WILX reported, and The State News counted it as his ninth denial. The brother who survived in 1978 told WCMU and WKAR that the decision was "a great relief" and that seeing it in writing meant it was "not a rumor." Under the law then in force Miller could ask for another review within a year, which left the survivors only a few months between efforts, and the brother told WILX that he "might get the summer" before having to start over. He also said that the 1979 bargain had let Miller "basically" get away with the four killings.
The survivors pressed the legislature, too. Michigan legislation enacted in 2022 as House Bill 4562 (Public Act 28 of 2022) was reported by the Associated Press in March 2022 under the headline that new laws let the parole board wait five years to review certain inmates. The AP’s explanation was that a 2018 law had cut the longest wait between reviews for prisoners denied parole from five years to one year for those with a high or average probability of release, and to two years for those with a low probability, and that supporters of the new change called that an unintended result. In May 2022 the board denied Miller parole again, and WILX reported that the new law pushed back his next hearing. His next eligibility is August 29, 2027.
Rod Sadler, a retired Eaton County sheriff’s sergeant, published a book on the case, Killing Women (WildBlue Press, 2020), after reviewing police interviews and court transcripts and interviewing prosecutors and the victims' relatives. He befriended Miller’s father, who believed his son had been rehabilitated, and through him received letters from Miller. In one letter, Sadler told WKAR, Miller described killing Martha Sue Young and three other women. Sadler said he wrote the book because Miller could be released in 2031: "people have forgotten who Don Miller is, and people have forgotten what Don Miller did." G. Michael Hocking, the Eaton County assistant prosecutor at the time, later called Miller "Michigan’s version of Ted Bundy."
David Birnie and his partner, Catherine Birnie, abducted and murdered four people in Perth in October and November 1986. The killings ended in November when a 17-year-old girl, whom the couple were holding in the suburb of Willagee, escaped and told police. ABC News reported in 2005 that Neville Collard was the first officer to interview her after she got away. Both Birnies pleaded guilty and were sentenced to life in 1987. Justice Wallace said David Birnie should never be released.
David Birnie died by suicide at Casuarina Prison on October 7, 2005, aged 54. The day after, the woman who had escaped from the couple in 1986 spoke through a statement that Collard read on ABC’s Stateline program. She said her family now had closure and could look forward to a life without a convicted killer alive in prison. ABC News reported that she believed he should have received the death penalty and that keeping him in prison had been a waste of public money. Not every survivor would agree with her on the death penalty.
The petition came a decade later. Catherine Birnie came up for parole review every three years. In March 2016 ABC News reported that her parole bid had been quashed, after earlier refusals in 2007 and 2010. The woman who escaped in 1986 started an online petition that year, calling for an end to automatic parole reviews for such prisoners. The state government said in 2018 that it had drawn more than 41,000 signatures. In February 2017 the opposition’s spokesman, John Quigley, said a Labor government would change the law; the Premier, Colin Barnett, replied that no government would release a killer like Catherine Birnie and that removing her from consideration would amount to revising her sentence.
Quigley became Attorney-General and, on October 18, 2018, introduced the Sentence Administration Amendment (Multiple Murderers) Bill 2018. The bill allowed the Attorney-General to direct that a prisoner convicted of serial killings (two or more murders on separate days) or mass murder (three or more on one day) not be considered for parole or a resocialisation program for up to six years at a time. The government said the aim was to spare victims' families and surviving victims the trauma of repeated reviews. The Australian Associated Press reported that the government wanted the law in place before Catherine Birnie’s next review in 2019 and that one of her sons supported it. Critics questioned the scheme. When the bill was introduced, the opposition’s spokesman, Michael Mischin, asked whether it would cover only prisoners the board and the Attorney-General would never release anyway, and Guy Hall, a law professor at Murdoch University, argued that families should be contacted only when parole was seriously in prospect. In 2024 Jamie Walvisch of the University of Western Australia criticized the process for lacking transparency and independence, and said Western Australia was the only jurisdiction to give the power to its Attorney-General.
In November 2024 ABC News reported that Quigley had directed that Catherine Birnie not be considered for parole before December 13, 2030. ABC News reported in February 2026 that she remained in prison.
Joseph James DeAngelo Jr., a former police officer, was arrested in Citrus Heights on April 24, 2018, and pleaded guilty on June 29, 2020, to 13 counts of first-degree murder and 13 counts of kidnapping to commit robbery. He admitted dozens of further crimes that were too old to prosecute. Prosecutors counted 87 victims at 53 locations in 11 counties. On August 21, 2020, a Sacramento judge sentenced him to 11 consecutive terms of life without the possibility of parole, plus a further life term and eight years. In the days before that sentence, survivors and relatives addressed him in a Sacramento courtroom; reports of those statements are dated August 19 to 21, 2020.
The daughter of Claude Snelling spoke for her father, who was killed in Visalia in September 1975 when the man who would become the Golden State Killer tried to take her. "My dad died saving my life that night and he is my hero," she said, according to the Associated Press. She told the court that his death left a hole in her heart: he never walked her down the aisle and never met her children. She also said the man who had stalked her had been a police officer, someone sworn to protect people. His killing was charged in August 2018 as the 13th murder count, and it is the earliest of them.
The daughter of Lyman Smith, who was killed in 1980 with his wife, Charlene, spoke of DeAngelo’s "legacy of sadism, cruelty, moral and physical depravity." She said the plea deal did not amount to justice, though she wanted to focus on the good that had come since. United Press International reported that she told the court she had herself been treated as a suspect for two days after the killings and had lived with that shame for decades. The Smith case also mattered to the investigation: the Ventura County medical examiner’s office had kept a duplicate of the evidence collected in 1980 in a freezer, and 37 years later the profile from it was the starting point of the genealogy search that identified DeAngelo.
With no trial, the sentencing hearing was the one place where those who had lived through the crimes could speak to him directly. It was held in a university ballroom fitted out as a courtroom.
The record in each case runs well past the verdict. In Toledo it begins with a description given in 1980, becomes DNA evidence in 1998 and is still a parole objection in 2024. In Tampa a memory of a car identified a man in 1984, and a sentence of forgiveness was spoken in 2019. In South Carolina the lasting document is a civil judgment of more than $6 million. In Michigan it is a brother who keeps coming to the hearings, in Perth a petition with more than 41,000 signatures, and in California a set of statements read in a ballroom.
The survivors disagree about nearly everything else: whether forgiveness is possible, whether a death sentence is right, whether a plea bargain amounted to justice. The woman in Tampa forgave. The woman in Perth said her family had closure when the man died and wished he had been executed. The brother in Michigan has not forgiven and does not intend to stop attending.
• 1973 to 1981: the killings later confessed by Anthony and Nathaniel Cook (nine in all).
• September 11, 1975: Claude Snelling killed in Visalia, California.
• 1977 to 1978: the Lansing-area deaths admitted by Donald Miller.
• August 1978: Miller assaults two children in Delta Township and is arrested the same day.
• May 1979: Miller convicted in Eaton County; July 13, 1979, he pleads guilty to two counts of manslaughter in Ingham County.
• May 1980: Tom Gordon killed in Toledo; the young woman with him survives.
• September 18, 1981: Peter Sawicki killed in Toledo; a young man is wounded and survives. Anthony Cook convicted in March 1982.
• November 3, 1984: Long abducts a 17-year-old in Tampa; he is arrested November 16.
• September 23, 1985: Long pleads guilty to eight murders in Hillsborough County.
• October and November 1986: the Birnie killings in Perth end when a 17-year-old escapes and tells police. Both Birnies plead guilty and receive life in 1987.
• 1997 to 1998: DNA from the 1980 Toledo evidence matches both Cook brothers; Nathaniel Cook arrested in 1998. In 1997 the Florida Supreme Court orders an acquittal in the Pasco County case against Long.
• 1998: Miller convicted of possessing a weapon in prison.
• April 2000: the Cook brothers confess on video under a plea agreement; Anthony Cook pleads guilty to the aggravated murder of Tom Gordon.
• October 7, 2005: David Birnie dies by suicide; his survivor’s statement is read on October 8.
• 2016: the Birnie survivor starts a petition; Miller is denied parole; Kohlhepp is arrested on November 3.
• May 26, 2017: Kohlhepp pleads guilty; seven consecutive life terms plus 60 years.
• August 23, 2018: civil judgment of more than $6 million for the Kohlhepp survivor.
• October 18, 2018: Western Australia introduces its multiple-murderers bill.
• May 23, 2019: Long executed.
• June 29, 2020: DeAngelo pleads guilty; August 21, 2020, sentenced.
• June 2021: Miller denied parole (ninth denial, per The State News); denied again in May 2022.
• November 2024: Catherine Birnie barred from parole consideration until December 13, 2030; Anthony Cook’s December 5 hearing postponed to March 2025.