John Thomas Straffen, a young man living in Bath, confessed to killing two girls in the city: Brenda Goddard, who was six, and Cicely Bathstone, who was nine. He was charged with their murders. He never stood trial for either. In 1951 he was ruled unfit to plead, a decision the Farnham Herald later attributed to his mental age, and the prosecution stopped where it stood. He was committed to Broadmoor, the high-security hospital in Berkshire.
A year later he was out. In 1952, while he was at large from Broadmoor, a five-year-old girl was killed. This time, the Farnham Herald reported, doctors judged him fit for trial. He denied the killing, a jury convicted him of murder, and he was sentenced to hang. The Court of Criminal Appeal dismissed his appeal in R v Straffen, a judgment the legal digest Swarb dates to August 20, 1952, and the Home Secretary commuted the sentence to life imprisonment, citing his mental state, Reuters reported. Straffen died in the health care center at HM Prison Frankland, County Durham, on November 19, 2007. He was 77 and had spent 55 years in custody, longer than any other prisoner in Britain.
Set the two rulings side by side. In 1951 the man was beyond the reach of a trial. In 1952 the same man stood in the dock. No recovery between the two rulings was reported; the Home Secretary spared him on the ground of his mind, and in 2001 his solicitors asked for the case to be reopened, arguing, according to Reuters, that with a mental age of about nine and a half he should never have been put on trial at all. What separated the two decisions was a third death.
A ruling that a defendant is unfit to plead, or incompetent to stand trial in the American phrase, answers one narrow question. It asks whether the accused can understand the charge and take part in the proceedings now. It does not ask what happened. When a jury in Stockton, California, sat in the autumn of 2026 to decide whether Wesley Brownlee was competent, it was not deciding whether he had committed any crime, only whether he was fit to be tried for one.
Because it is a question about the present, the answer can change, and sometimes quickly. In November 2006 the deaths of four children came to light in Elkhart, Indiana: Jennifer Lopez, 8, Gonzalo Lopez, 6, Daniel Valdez, 4, and Jessica Valdez, 2. Their mother, Angelica Alvarez, was charged with four counts of murder, and United Press International reported that she could face the death penalty. She received treatment at the state mental health hospital in Logansport, according to the Goshen News, and before she entered any plea Elkhart Circuit Judge Terry Shewmaker ruled her competent to stand trial, the Associated Press reported.
On September 4, 2007, she pleaded guilty to all four counts. In return the prosecutor, Curtis Hill Jr., agreed not to seek a death sentence. At her sentencing that month her lawyer, Juan Garcia, told the court that she had expressed remorse and asked that her severe mental illness be taken as seriously as a physical one. Hill answered that she had planned the killings and knew what she was doing, and said he would have preferred to seek death. The father of the two eldest children told the court he had forgiven her. Speaking through an interpreter, Alvarez said she accepted responsibility. Judge Shewmaker sentenced her to life without parole on each count. Her capacity had been put to the court and judged sufficient within a year of the deaths, and the case ended in a conviction.
In other countries the barrier comes from a neighboring doctrine. A court decides not that the accused cannot be tried now, but that he or she cannot be held criminally responsible at all. The effect on the record is much the same: the deaths are never weighed against a verdict of guilty.
Bartolomeo Gagliano, a man of Sicilian origin from Savona on the Ligurian coast, gave himself up to police a few hours after a woman’s death near Savona in January 1981, the news site Affaritaliani reported. The court judged him totally insane, Libero wrote, and he was committed to a judicial psychiatric hospital, then called a criminal asylum. In 1989, while he was at large from the hospital at Montelupo Fiorentino, two people were shot dead in the Genoa area, and Il Post reported that he was charged with those killings. Again the outcome was a declaration that he was incapable of understanding and willing his acts. Il Giornale summed up the result in December 2013: three killings behind him, and no sentence served for any of them.
He spent the following years moving between prisons and psychiatric hospitals. By 2006 he was back in Marassi prison in Genoa on lesser charges, and in December 2013 he failed to return from a good-conduct leave. The prison’s director told reporters that the file showed only a robber, according to ANSA; the justice minister, Annamaria Cancellieri, told parliament that the officials who granted the leave had his full history. He was arrested at Menton, across the French border, on December 20, 2013. On January 14, 2015, judges in Genoa sentenced him to six years and ten months for absconding from the leave, the kidnapping of a delivery driver and armed car theft, ANSA reported. On January 22, 2015, ANSA reported that he had died by suicide in his prison cell. Several outlets, ANSA’s English service among them, had described him as convicted of three murders. The legal outcomes were findings of insanity, not convictions.
Marcelo Costa de Andrade confessed to killing 14 boys in and around Niteroi, across Guanabara Bay from Rio de Janeiro, in the early 1990s, according to Folha do Leste. Brazilian courts declared him inimputavel, not criminally responsible because of mental illness, and imposed a medida de seguranca, a security measure of internment in a custodial psychiatric hospital. AIB News dated the ruling to 1992; Folha do Leste and the Niteroi site Enfoco date his internment from 1993. Enfoco put the consequence plainly: because of his illness he was not fit to be tried. The measure has no fixed end. In 2023 his lawyer, Luiz Mantovani, petitioned for his release under the constitutional ban on life sentences, AIB News reported. In 2024, when Brazil’s National Council of Justice ordered the country’s forensic asylums closed, he was the last patient left at the Henrique Roxo hospital in Niteroi, and on March 5, 2024, a judge withdrew an order to move him to another hospital that, the court decided, could not hold him safely, Enfoco and O Sao Goncalo reported. Cidade de Niteroi reported in October 2024 that he was still held at Henrique Roxo. None of the fourteen deaths has been tested at a trial; the count rests on his own statements.
The Belgian case of Cecile Bombeek shows how far an untried count can travel. Born in 1933 in Wichelen, in Flanders, she entered the Apostolic Congregation of St. Joseph in Wetteren and took the name Sister Godfrieda, according to the journalist Tom De Smet, writing in The Brussels Times. By 1967 she was head nurse of a geriatric ward in the town. Time magazine reported in March 1978 that she had been addicted to morphine and that nurses on the ward had kept a secret diary of deaths and of what they saw as the mistreatment of patients. She was arrested on February 10, 1978, at first on suspicion of forgery, De Smet writes. In custody she confessed to causing the deaths of three elderly residents, Leon Matthys, Irma De Backer and Maria Vanderginst, saying, in words both Time and De Smet report, that they had been too difficult at night. She was charged with three murders. She later denied that she had meant to kill anyone.
The estimates grew at once. A doctor on the hospital’s board, Jean-Paul De Corte, told reporters it could just as well be 30 people as three, Time reported. The investigating judge, Leo Tas, listed 17 people whose deaths she may have caused, according to De Smet and the Flemish broadcaster VRT. Then, in 1980, psychiatric experts declared her insane, and she was interned in a psychiatric institution in Melle instead of being tried. She was released in 1990, went back to her convent, and died in 2019, aged 86. No court ruled on the three deaths she confessed to, still less on the seventeen or the thirty. De Smet argues that the insanity ruling also spared a public airing of the failures of the people around her; that is his conclusion, and no court or inquiry has tested it.
In St. Petersburg in July 2015, Tamara Samsonova, 68, was charged under Article 105 of the Russian Criminal Code with the murder of Valentina Ulanova, 79, Interfax reported. Ulanova had taken her in after a social worker described her as lonely and in need of a place to stay, according to Moskovsky Komsomolets. Within days Russian media were linking her to ten, eleven or fourteen deaths. The Investigative Committee in St. Petersburg asked reporters not to rush. "At present, the investigation does not have objective data on Samsonova committing any other murders," its press service said on July 29, according to Interfax. The city police press service separately attributed to her the 2003 killing of a man who rented a room from her, Interfax reported, a case that was never tried.
A forensic psychiatric examination concluded that she had chronic paranoid schizophrenia. According to Vesti.ru, which cited the St. Petersburg city prosecutor’s office, the experts determined that the disorder had developed after the crime and made it impossible to impose or carry out a punishment. In March 2017 a court released her from criminal liability and sent her for compulsory psychiatric treatment. She was neither convicted nor acquitted. The Kazan newspaper Business Online had reported in January 2017 that she was being held at a psychiatric hospital in that city. The determination was about her mind after the event, and it closed the only case that had been brought.
The purest form of the problem needs no ruling at all. Eugene Butler homesteaded land near Niagara, in western Grand Forks County, North Dakota, in 1882. Neighbors remembered him as a miser who grew steadily more suspicious of other people, according to the Fargo weekly High Plains Reader and Prairie Public’s Dakota Datebook. In 1906 he was committed to the state asylum at Jamestown, where the superintendent, W. M. Hotchkiss, said he was haunted by the idea that someone was after him. He died there in 1912.
In June 1915, three years after his death, the deaths of six people, five adults and a child, came to light near Niagara. The county sheriff investigated. No one was ever identified, the original case file is missing, according to the High Plains Reader, and the deaths are attributed to Butler only in later accounts. He was never charged, and with the man three years dead there could be no charge, no trial and no verdict.
It is tempting to treat such cases as blanks, gaps in a single person’s record. The Fort Lauderdale case of Eddie Lee Mosley shows that a gap of this kind can be filled by someone else.
Mosley was charged with murder in 1987 after a Fort Lauderdale detective, Kevin Allen, obtained a confession from him, according to Florida Bulldog. He was declared incompetent to stand trial for the December 1983 killing of Emma Cook and confined to a state hospital for the criminally insane; the National Registry of Exonerations dates the commitment to 1988. He was never tried. Police and the lawyers who later sued on another man’s behalf came to attribute 17 murders and other attacks on Black women and girls in northwest Fort Lauderdale to him between 1973 and 1987, Florida Bulldog reported. The Registry says DNA linked him to seven Fort Lauderdale killings in those years. None of those figures rests on a verdict.
Two other men had already been convicted. Jerry Frank Townsend, a man with an IQ the Registry gives as 58, was arrested in Miami in September 1979, questioned over several days, and implicated himself in about 20 killings. He was convicted of six murders. Frank Lee Smith was convicted in 1986 of the murder of Shandra Whitehead, an eight-year-old girl who died in Fort Lauderdale in April 1985, and sentenced to death. When a key witness signed an affidavit in 1989 saying the man she had seen was Mosley, the trial court judged her recantation not credible, and a prosecutor told the court, as FRONTLINE recorded, "You can blame a lot things on Eddie Lee Mosley, but this homicide is not one of them."
Smith died of cancer on death row on January 30, 2000. In December 2000 the FBI laboratory reported that he was not the source of the DNA evidence in the Whitehead case and that the genetic material was consistent with Mosley’s, and his conviction was vacated that month, eleven months after his death. In April 2001 the Broward Sheriff announced that DNA tests linked two of the killings for which Townsend had been convicted to Mosley and excluded Townsend. His convictions were set aside, and he was released in June 2001 after about 22 years in prison. The City of Miami paid $2.2 million in 2008 and the Broward Sheriff’s Office $2 million in 2009 to settle his lawsuits, Florida Bulldog reported. Mosley died in state custody in 2020, aged 73, still untried.
Chicago produced an earlier version of the same pattern. Agnes Lehmann’s death came to light in Chicago on July 11, 1970, and on August 17, 1971, Wilbur McDonald was convicted of her murder. On August 13, 1973, a man named Lester Harrison was arrested in another killing, and in police custody he confessed to that death and to three earlier ones, Lehmann’s among them, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. McDonald was released on August 15, 1973, and on August 19, 1974, the governor granted him a full pardon based on innocence. The ruling that a suspect cannot be tried does not make the deaths go away. The pressure to close them goes on, and the wrong man can carry the weight.
The newest case needs no diagnosis at all. Wesley Brownlee was arrested in Stockton, California, on October 15, 2022, after a series of shootings in Stockton and Oakland between April 2021 and September 2022 in which several men died and a woman was wounded. In November 2025 a San Joaquin County grand jury indicted him on six counts of murder and one of attempted murder, with gun and ammunition counts, CBS Sacramento and Stocktonia reported. He has pleaded not guilty. He has not been tried and is presumed innocent.
For long stretches the case stalled on competence. In late 2024 his public defender, Allison Nobert, declared a doubt about his fitness for trial, and the defense said he had stopped communicating with his own lawyers, with prosecutors and with the mental health evaluators sent to examine him. The district attorney, Ron Freitas, announced in January 2026 that his office would seek the death penalty and argued that Brownlee’s silence was his own choice. In March 2026 Judge Xapuri Villapudua rejected the defense’s demurrer to the indictment and ordered the grand jury transcripts unsealed, Stocktonia reported. A jury began hearing evidence on his competence in September 2026. Prosecutors played recordings of his jail calls with his younger brother, in which the two talked about sports, childhood memories and family birthdays, to show that he could communicate. The defense argued that he was unfit. As of September 18, 2026, the jury had not reached a decision. Whatever it decides, it will say nothing about who fired the shots.
None of this tells against the rule itself. A trial of someone who cannot follow it is no trial, and the courts in each of these countries were right to ask the question before they asked any other. The difficulty lies in what happens to the answer afterward. A ruling on the defendant’s capacity, or on his responsibility, settles nothing about the dead, yet the deaths go on being counted in the defendant’s name, and the count hardens with repetition.
Straffen is the clearest example. He confessed to the deaths of Brenda Goddard and Cicely Bathstone, and the Court of Criminal Appeal in 1952 treated those deaths as admitted. The Australian Law Reform Commission, explaining the case decades later, described them as established. Even the Farnham Herald, reporting his death in 2007, wrote that he had been convicted of murdering three girls. He was convicted of one. For the two girls in Bath, the only legal decision ever made was a ruling about the man who confessed, and no jury heard a word of evidence about either of them.
• 1882: Eugene Butler homesteads land near Niagara, Grand Forks County, North Dakota.
• 1906: Butler is committed to the state asylum at Jamestown; he dies there in 1912.
• June 1915: The deaths of six people come to light near Niagara; no one is charged and none of the dead is identified.
• 1951: John Thomas Straffen is ruled unfit to plead on the charges over the deaths of two girls in Bath and is committed to Broadmoor.
• 1952: While at large from Broadmoor, Straffen is accused of the killing of a five-year-old girl, judged fit for trial and convicted of murder; the Court of Criminal Appeal dismisses his appeal and the death sentence is commuted to life imprisonment.
• July 11, 1970: Agnes Lehmann’s death comes to light in Chicago; Wilbur McDonald is convicted of her murder on August 17, 1971.
• August 13, 1973: Lester Harrison is arrested in Chicago and confesses to four killings, including Lehmann’s; McDonald is released on August 15 and pardoned on August 19, 1974.
• February 10, 1978: Sister Godfrieda (Cecile Bombeek) is arrested in Wetteren, Belgium; she confesses to causing three deaths and is charged with three murders.
• September 1979: Jerry Frank Townsend is arrested in Miami; he is later convicted of six murders.
• 1980: Psychiatric experts declare Bombeek insane; she is interned at Melle and never tried. She is released in 1990 and dies in 2019.
• January 1981: Bartolomeo Gagliano gives himself up after a woman’s death near Savona; he is judged totally insane and committed.
• January 31, 1986: Frank Lee Smith is convicted of the murder of Shandra Whitehead, 8, and later sentenced to death.
• 1987: Eddie Lee Mosley is charged with murder in Fort Lauderdale, ruled incompetent to stand trial and committed (1988 in the National Registry of Exonerations).
• 1989: Two people are shot dead near Genoa; Gagliano is charged and again declared incapable of understanding and willing.
• 1991: Marcelo Costa de Andrade confesses to killing 14 boys around Niteroi, Brazil; he is declared not criminally responsible (1992, per AIB News) and interned (1993).
• January 30, 2000: Frank Lee Smith dies on death row; DNA results clear him in December 2000 and his conviction is vacated.
• June 2001: Townsend is released after about 22 years in prison.
• November 2006: The deaths of four children come to light in Elkhart, Indiana; Angelica Alvarez is charged with four counts of murder.
• September 4, 2007: After treatment at Logansport and a ruling that she is competent, Alvarez pleads guilty; she is sentenced to life without parole that month.
• November 19, 2007: Straffen dies at HM Prison Frankland, aged 77, after 55 years in custody.
• December 2013: Gagliano fails to return from a leave from Marassi prison, Genoa; he is arrested at Menton, France, on December 20.
• January 2015: Gagliano is sentenced in Genoa on January 14; his death by suicide in prison is reported on January 22.
• July 2015: Tamara Samsonova is charged in St. Petersburg with the murder of Valentina Ulanova, 79.
• March 2017: A court releases Samsonova from criminal liability and orders compulsory psychiatric treatment.
• 2020: Mosley dies in state custody, aged 73, never tried.
• October 15, 2022: Wesley Brownlee is arrested in Stockton, California.
• March 5, 2024: A court in Niteroi keeps Andrade at the Henrique Roxo hospital.
• November 2025: A grand jury indicts Brownlee on six counts of murder and one of attempted murder.
• January 26, 2026: The San Joaquin County district attorney announces he will seek the death penalty against Brownlee.
• March 2026: Judge Xapuri Villapudua rejects the defense demurrer and orders the grand jury transcripts unsealed.
• September 2026: A jury hears evidence on Brownlee’s competence to stand trial; no decision as of September 18, 2026.