In the summer of 1951 two little girls were strangled near Bath. John Straffen was arrested for both, and in the autumn a court found him unfit to plead. That is not an acquittal and it is not a conviction. It is a finding that the defendant cannot follow the proceedings well enough to be tried, and its effect is that the proceedings stop. He was committed to Broadmoor without a trial, and the two deaths were never examined by any court.
Thirteen months later he got over the wall. He was out for about four hours, and in that time he killed a third child. For that one he was tried in the ordinary courts, convicted at Winchester in July 1952 and sentenced to death, then reprieved on the ground of his mental state. He died in prison in November 2007 after fifty-five years, the longest continuous sentence in British legal history.
Read those two paragraphs together and the difficulty is plain. The same man, with the same condition, thirteen months apart, was unfit to be tried for two killings and fit to be tried for the third. Nothing about his mind had been shown to change. What changed was that he had escaped and done it again.
Fifteen entries in this archive record a case that no court ever decided because the accused was found unable to be tried. It is a different mechanism from the one covered in Fifteen Killers Who Were Never Tried, where the trial was prevented from outside by a suicide, a police bullet, an accomplice or a flight. Here the state has its defendant in a cell and still cannot proceed, and the obstacle is the defendant's own mind.
The first thing to understand about an unfitness finding is that it is not about the killings at all. It is about the accused's capacity now, in this courtroom, to understand the charge and instruct a lawyer. It says nothing about what happened, and it is not meant to. It is also, by design, temporary: capacity can return, and when it does the trial can begin.
Angelica Alvarez shows how fast that can happen. She strangled her four children in the basement of the family home at Elkhart, Indiana, in November 2006 and then tried to kill herself; her husband came home in time to stop her. At her initial hearing Judge Terry Shewmaker ordered two competency evaluations, and when they came back with split opinions he ordered a third and declared her incompetent in May 2007. She went to the state hospital at Logansport. Doctors there reported improvement and found her fit. On September 4, 2007 she pleaded guilty to all four counts, and on the twenty-fourth she was sentenced to life without parole. The plea was made in exchange for the state not seeking her death, and as part of it she gave up any right to rely on her mental illness in mitigation. Four months separated the finding that her illness made her untriable from the bargain in which she agreed not to mention it.
Bartolomeo Gagliano ran the other way. He killed a woman at Savona in 1981 and was found incapable of understanding or willing, which in Italian law means no conviction follows, and was committed for ten years to the criminal asylum at Aversa. After a hostage-taking during a period of leave in 1983 he was moved to the hospital at Montelupo Fiorentino. On January 11, 1989 he escaped with another patient and killed twice in the following month. Stopped at a roadblock that February, both men were declared totally insane and committed again. He escaped five times in all, the last of them from the prison at Genoa in December 2013 while on a day-release privilege, and he hanged himself at Sanremo in January 2015. Three killings, three findings that he was not responsible, and no conviction for any of them.
Marcelo Costa de Andrade was found incompetent in Rio de Janeiro in April 1993 and committed to the Heitor Carrilho hospital. He escaped in 1997 and was recaptured, and has been detained since. Fourteen deaths are attributed to him and none has been tried.
What happens to the counting, when nobody is ever required to count? In an ordinary prosecution the charges name particular people on particular dates and each one has to be supported. Remove the trial and that discipline never arrives. Cecile Bombeek was a nun of the Apostolic Congregation of St Joseph, known as Sister Godfrida, who rose to Mother Superior and ran the thirty-eight-bed geriatric ward of the public hospital at Wetteren in Belgium. Colleagues dated a change in her to a 1975 operation to remove a brain tumour, after which she became addicted to morphine and stole from her patients. Nurses on the ward kept a secret diary of unexplained deaths, and that diary, with a young doctor who took the matter public, brought the case out. Arrested in February 1978 over forgery and drug theft, she confessed to killing three patients with insulin overdoses because they had been too difficult at night, and said that she had done it sweetly. Exhumations confirmed insulin poisoning.
Psychiatrists found her unfit to plead and she was committed instead of prosecuted, so no court ever ruled on any of it. Around thirty deaths on her ward were examined. A member of the hospital board said at the time that it could just as well be thirty people as three. None of the thirty was ever established against her, and none of the three was either. She was released in the late 1990s, dementia having been judged to leave her no longer a danger, and she lived out her life in a nursing home in the same town, dying in 2019 at eighty-six and buried without public notice. The condition that made her untriable in 1978 was, in the end, the condition that made her safe to let go.
Maggie Young was found unfit to stand trial in Hawaii in 1966 and committed to the state hospital at Kaneohe, where she killed herself on the hospital grounds that July. Five deaths are attributed to her. There was no trial, no verdict and no judgment. Lester Harrison was found incompetent to stand trial in Illinois in 1951, was acquitted as insane in 1978, and has been confined ever since without a conviction; seven killings are attributed to him. Tamara Samsonova was made subject to compulsory psychiatric treatment in Saint Petersburg rather than tried, with one killing established and eleven or more attributed. Eugene Butler is the purest form of it: declared insane and committed to the asylum at Jamestown in 1906, he died there in 1911, and the six skeletons under his North Dakota farmhouse were not found until after his death. He was never charged with anything.
In every one of those cases the missing trial leaves a gap in one person's record, and the gap is easy to mistake for modesty. The case that shows what the gap actually costs is Eddie Lee Mosley's.
Mosley raped and killed women and girls in Fort Lauderdale over about fifteen years. He was found incompetent to stand trial and committed to a state psychiatric institution in 1988, and he has never been tried for any killing. Between eight and sixteen are attributed to him, and not one of them has been examined in a courtroom.
Two other men were convicted of murders he committed. DNA testing in 2000 and 2001 matched Mosley to killings for which Jerry Frank Townsend and Frank Lee Smith had been convicted. Townsend served twenty-two years. Smith had already died on death row.
That is the answer to the question this collection keeps circling. An untested count is not an empty space. The evidence in those cases did not stop existing when Mosley was found unfit; it went on sitting in police files, and the pressure to resolve the killings went on being applied, and two men who had nothing to do with them were convicted instead. One of them died waiting. The absence of a trial did not mean nobody was judged. It meant the wrong people were.
Wesley Brownlee is the modern version, and it needs no diagnosis at all. He was indicted in 2025 on six counts of first-degree murder over a series of shootings in Stockton and Oakland. The case has not been tried, and for years it did not move, because he will not speak to the prosecution, to his own defence lawyers, or to the mental health experts appointed to assess whether he can be tried. In March 2026 a judge rejected the defence objections and ruled that the trial could proceed. He has been convicted of nothing and is presumed innocent of every count.
His silence is not an illness and nobody has said it is. It simply produces the same result: a machine that cannot start, six deaths that no court has examined, and a number sitting in the record with nothing behind it but a charge sheet.
None of this is an argument against the unfitness rule. Trying somebody who cannot follow the proceedings is not a trial, and a country that does it has given up on the idea. The difficulty is narrower and it belongs to an archive rather than to a court. An unfitness finding answers a question about a defendant's present capacity and answers nothing about the dead, and then the answer it did not give is the one that gets written down and repeated. Straffen's first two victims are counted in every account of his case. No court ever heard a word of evidence about either of them.