In most of these cases, the name was the last thing the investigators had. They had a series of cases, a composite sketch or a pattern, and a public that could not tell whether the person responsible lived down the block or three states away. Then, years or decades later, a name arrived, by one route or another: a letter, a photograph, a database, a family tree. In one of the six cases that follow, the name arrived too late for any court to hear it, and in another it has not arrived at all.
The films and series belong to the same story in a different way. One was made while a defendant waited for trial, one went to air on the eve of a guilty plea, and the others followed a capture or a death. Each was a decision about how to show a killer who, until a given date, had no face.
Dennis Rader killed 10 people in and around Wichita, Kansas, between January 1974 and January 1991. For most of those years he was a husband and father, a security installer and later a municipal compliance officer in Park City, and the president of his church congregation. Police never named him as a suspect before 2005.
He was identified because he started writing again. A letter to the Wichita Eagle-Beacon in October 1974 had claimed the January 1974 killings, and a letter to the television station KAKE on February 10, 1978 claimed the deaths of two more women and a third victim it did not name, which told the city that one person was responsible for a group of deaths. Then the letters stopped for years. A letter in March 2004 to The Wichita Eagle carried proof that he had killed a woman in 1986 whose death had not been linked to the others. Over the following months he sent packages to police and television stations. In May 2004 a word puzzle mailed to a Wichita station contained hidden letters that spelled his name. Then he asked police whether a computer disk could be traced, and police answered through a newspaper advertisement. A disk he sent in early 2005 carried an electronic imprint that traced to the church where he was council president, and DNA evidence completed the case. He was arrested on February 25, 2005 and charged with 10 counts of first-degree murder on March 1.
On June 27, 2005 he pleaded guilty to all 10 counts. On August 18, 2005 District Judge Gregory Waller sentenced him to 10 consecutive life terms, with a minimum of 175 years before parole eligibility. At the hearing Rader apologized, said he hoped the families might one day forgive him, and said he hoped God would someday accept him.
A television film about the Wichita manhunt, listed by IMDb as a 2005 production with Gregg Henry as Rader and Robert Forster as a detective, runs 82 minutes and follows the Wichita detectives after 31 years of searching. It belongs to the year of his capture and plea.
Joseph James DeAngelo was arrested on April 24, 2018 in Citrus Heights, outside Sacramento. He was 72, a retired supermarket warehouse worker, and a former police officer in Exeter and Auburn. The crimes had been known in different parts of California under different names, among them the Original Night Stalker and the Golden State Killer. In 2016 the FBI announced a $50,000 reward and a national campaign to identify a man it linked to 12 homicides and dozens of other crimes between 1976 and 1986, from the Sacramento area through the East Bay to the coast at Goleta, Ventura, Laguna Niguel and Irvine. At that point, the bureau said, he was unidentified.
The name came from a database that had nothing to do with crime. Investigators uploaded a DNA sample from one of the cases to a public genealogy database. It produced a family link, and they spent about four months building family trees until they reached DeAngelo. DNA evidence led police to name him. The district attorney of Ventura County, Greg Totten, called it the first time investigative genetic genealogy had been used to solve a murder.
On June 29, 2020, in a ballroom at Sacramento State University fitted out as a courtroom to allow for distancing during the pandemic, DeAngelo pleaded guilty to 13 counts of first-degree murder and 13 counts of kidnapping to commit robbery. He also admitted 161 uncharged crimes against 61 victims in seven counties, all beyond the statute of limitations. The six district attorneys who had consolidated the case, from Contra Costa, Orange, Sacramento, Santa Barbara, Tulare and Ventura counties, accepted a plea that guaranteed life in prison and spared him the death penalty. Prosecutors told the court that his apparent frailty was an act, citing surveillance of him doing yard work and racing a motorcycle shortly before his 2018 police interview. On August 21, 2020 he was sentenced to 11 consecutive terms of life without the possibility of parole for the murders, a further consecutive life term for the kidnappings and eight years for enhancements. The district attorneys spoke after the sentence. Anne Marie Schubert of Sacramento County called it a long-awaited day of accountability. Diana Becton of Contra Costa County credited Paul Holes, a former cold-case investigator in her county. Joyce Dudley of Santa Barbara County said the case had never been truly cold for the victims. Tim Ward of Tulare County said that the victims and law enforcement had refused to let it be forgotten.
The series I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, an HBO production in six episodes directed by Liz Garbus, premiered on June 28, 2020, the day before the plea. HBO’s announcement credits Garbus with Elizabeth Wolff, Myles Kane and Josh Koury as directors and Michelle McNamara, Patton Oswalt and others as executive producers, and says it is based on Michelle McNamara’s book I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer, that McNamara died while her manuscript was unfinished, and that the series centers survivors and their families. Its first episode aired a night before the court gave the story an ending. The announcement adds that DeAngelo was arrested hours after a reading of McNamara’s book in Chicago in 2018.
Richard Ramirez was convicted in 1989 of 13 murders in Los Angeles County between June 1984 and August 1985. Through the summer of 1985 the unknown person whom the press called the Night Stalker had people across Southern California locking windows in the heat. By August a task force of 50 detectives attributed 16 murders to him; the jury later returned verdicts on 13.
Investigators identified him from forensic evidence. On the night of August 30, 1985, Los Angeles County Sheriff Sherman Block announced that investigators were satisfied they knew the identity of the person responsible. Police considered withholding the name and decided that releasing it, with a photograph taken eight months earlier at an unrelated arrest, would help more than it would hurt. The suspect was 25 years old. He was arrested in East Los Angeles on August 31.
His trial lasted more than a year. On September 20, 1989 the court accepted guilty verdicts on all 43 counts: 13 murders (12 of the first degree and one of the second), five attempted murders, 14 first-degree burglaries and other offences. On November 7, 1989 he was sentenced to death. The California Supreme Court affirmed the judgment on August 7, 2006. He died on June 7, 2013, aged 53, at Marin General Hospital after being taken from death row at San Quentin.
The best-known screen treatment came 36 years after his arrest. Dread Central announced Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer as a four-part Netflix series directed by Tiller Russell, to be released on January 13, 2021, with the Los Angeles detectives Gil Carrillo and Frank Salerno at its center. It focuses on the fear that gripped Los Angeles in 1985 and was made after the verdict, the appeal and the death. It is a useful contrast: a faceless-killer story told in full hindsight.
Lonnie David Franklin Jr. was arrested in July 2010. He was 57, a former city sanitation worker. California Attorney General Edmund G. Brown Jr. announced on July 8, 2010 that DNA evidence had led investigators to him, and that the state had identified a suspected serial killer who, in his words, had terrorized Los Angeles for more than two decades. The press had called the unknown person the Grim Sleeper, a name taken from an apparent break in the killings from the late 1980s to 2002. Investigators later concluded there had been no real pause.
The case went on for six years before a jury heard it. In the meantime a film was made. Tales of the Grim Sleeper, a documentary by Nick Broomfield, was an official selection of the 2014 Telluride, Toronto and New York film festivals and was scheduled for HBO on April 27, 2015. Shoot Online reported that five years after the arrest, the case was still in pretrial hearings, and Franklin had pleaded not guilty and remained in jail awaiting trial. Broomfield set up an office in a South Los Angeles neighborhood so that residents could visit him. He told the trade magazine he often begins without knowing who the main figures will be. The film was made and shown before any court had ruled on anything.
On May 5, 2016 a Los Angeles County jury found Franklin guilty of 10 counts of first-degree murder, with the special circumstance of multiple murder, and one count of attempted murder. The counts covered the deaths of nine women and a 15-year-old girl. The jury deliberated for one day. Prosecutor Beth Silverman spoke of a sense of relief for the families, and Chief Charlie Beck said they had the outcome they hoped for. The jury recommended death, and on August 10, 2016 Judge Kathleen Kennedy sentenced him to death. He died at San Quentin State Prison on March 28, 2020, aged 67.
On April 5, 2022 the Indiana State Police and the FBI announced that Harry Edward Greenwell, a Kentucky-born man who died in New Albin, Iowa, in January 2013 at the age of 68, was responsible for the deaths of three women and for the assault on a fourth. The three deaths were that of Vicki Heath in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, on February 21, 1987, and those of Margaret Gill in Merrillville and Jeanne Gilbert in Remington, Indiana, on March 3, 1989. A woman in Columbus, Indiana, survived an assault on January 2, 1990 and gave police a description. Greenwell was never charged.
The police work had two stages. Evidence first tied the two 1989 killings together, and DNA evidence later connected them with the Elizabethtown case and the Columbus assault. Genetic genealogy, with the FBI’s help from 2019, then led police to name Greenwell. A sketch drawn from the survivor’s description, police said, resembled photographs of Greenwell.
The legal position is simple. Police attribute the deaths and the Columbus assault to him. No court has tested the evidence, and none will. Superintendent Douglas Carter said investigators keep working regardless of how much time has passed, and FBI Special Agent in Charge Herbert Stapleton said the case had not been neglected and that new technology and partnerships had made the identification possible. Elizabethtown’s deputy chief of operations, David Fegett, said the department’s detectives take each case personally and hoped for long-overdue closure for the families. A daughter of one of the women thanked the agencies for keeping the cases active. Sergeant Glen Fifield told reporters it was a distinct possibility that Greenwell was responsible for other unsolved crimes, and police said they were contacting departments across the Midwest. None has been named. No film or series about the Greenwell case is on record.
Over 29 days in the spring of 1992 six people were killed in five Midwestern cities: one in Indianapolis on April 8, two in Wichita on April 11, one in Terre Haute on April 27, one in St. Charles, Missouri, on May 3 and one in Raytown, Missouri, on May 7. Evidence tied all six killings together, and the police departments involved attribute them to one man. No one has been charged.
The only person known to have met the man face to face and lived to describe him was a witness in Wichita. Detective Tim Relph, who worked the case for nearly 30 years, has said this was the one person investigators had talked to who had had face-to-face contact with him. His account is the basis of the composite sketch. In 2021 St. Charles police formed a task force with the other departments and federal agencies, and the department released an age-progressed sketch of a man believed to be between 52 and 70 years old, with a $25,000 reward. As of February 29, 2024 the case was unsolved and a St. Charles detective, Kelly Rhodes, was assigned to it full time. He said his work has meant going back to the beginning of the case, and that the team now believes it can do things it could not when the case began. He said tips arrive almost every week, and that investigators hope DNA testing, which was limited when the crimes occurred, will identify the man. No suspect has been named. No film or series about the case is on record.
Set side by side, the six cases show three different routes. In the first, the person came forward by himself: Rader’s letters and packages, and most of all the disk, put his name within reach of detectives who had never had it. In the second, the public did the work. Ramirez was identified by a fingerprint, but it was the decision to print his face in every newspaper that put a name on the face, and the sheriff said at the time that going public would better aid the search. In the third, a database did it. DeAngelo, Franklin and Greenwell were each named by DNA evidence that led police to them, in DeAngelo’s and Greenwell’s cases through investigative genealogy, in Franklin’s through a state program. The 1992 killings have so far met none of the three: no letters, no photograph, and no database match, although investigators say they hope DNA testing will change that.
Each route took a different length of time. Rader’s took 31 years from the first killing, Ramirez’s a little over a year, DeAngelo’s more than four decades, Franklin’s 25 years, and Greenwell’s 35 years, with the name coming nine years after the person’s death.
The six cases give six answers to the same question. Rader was identified after he resumed writing to police and the press. DeAngelo was named by a family tree built from the DNA of relatives who had never heard of him. Ramirez was named by a fingerprint and recognized because police chose to print his photograph. Franklin was named by DNA evidence through a state program. Greenwell was named when he had been dead for nine years. The man behind the 1992 killings has not been named at all.
The courts attached very different weight to each name. Four men reached sentences, two by guilty pleas and two after trials, and Ramirez and Franklin both died on death row. For Greenwell the name is a police attribution that nobody can contest, and for the 1992 killings there is only a sketch. The films that were made respond to these differences. The 2005 television film followed a capture that had already happened. The HBO series arrived on the day before a plea. The Broomfield documentary was made in the long gap between arrest and trial. The Netflix series was made after a death. The two cases in which the face stayed unseen longest, the 1992 killings and, until April 2022, the Indiana and Kentucky cases, have no film or series on record.
• 1974, January 15: first of the 10 killings later attributed to Rader by his guilty pleas.
• 1976 to 1986: the crimes in California later attributed to DeAngelo.
• 1978, February 10: a letter reaches KAKE-TV in Wichita from the person responsible for a group of deaths.
• 1984, June 28: first of the 13 murders for which Ramirez was convicted.
• 1985, August 30: Los Angeles County sheriff names Ramirez and releases his photograph; August 31: Ramirez is arrested in East Los Angeles.
• 1985 to 2007: killings in South Los Angeles later tied to Franklin.
• 1987, February 21: Vicki Heath is killed in Elizabethtown, Kentucky.
• 1989, March 3: two women are killed in Merrillville and Remington, Indiana.
• 1989, September 20: guilty verdicts on all 43 counts against Ramirez; November 7: sentenced to death.
• 1990, January 2: a woman survives an attack in Columbus, Indiana.
• 1992, April 8 to May 7: six people are killed in five Midwestern cities.
• 2004, March 19: a letter reaches The Wichita Eagle with proof of a 1986 killing.
• 2005, February 25: Rader is arrested; June 27: guilty pleas; August 18: ten consecutive life terms.
• 2010, July 8: California announces DNA evidence has led to Franklin.
• 2013, January: Greenwell dies in Iowa; June 7: Ramirez dies.
• 2014: Tales of the Grim Sleeper shown at film festivals; April 27, 2015 on HBO.
• 2016, May 5: Franklin found guilty; August 10: sentenced to death.
• 2018, April 24: DeAngelo arrested.
• 2020, March 28: Franklin dies at San Quentin; June 28: I’ll Be Gone in the Dark premieres; June 29: DeAngelo’s guilty pleas; August 21: sentenced.
• 2021, January 13: Netflix releases its Night Stalker series.
• 2022, April 5: Greenwell is named by the Indiana State Police and the FBI.
• 2024, February 29: the 1992 killings remain unsolved, with a detective assigned full time.