On January 24, 2023, the San Francisco Police Department raised the reward in the Doodler case from $200,000 to $250,000. The offer is for information leading to the identification, arrest and conviction of the unidentified man the department holds responsible for six deaths between January 1974 and the early summer of 1975. It was the second increase. The department had announced $100,000 in February 2019 and doubled that sum in January 2022. Each announcement came with something new for the public to look at: an age-progressed sketch, the recording of a 1974 telephone call, a sixth name added to the list of victims. None has produced a charge. In June 2026 the head of the department’s cold case unit said in an interview that the $250,000 was still on offer, and that no one had been charged with any of the killings.
The Doodler sits in the middle of the range. What follows are the largest sums stated for these serial cases, who put them up, what became of them, and what in the end led to an arrest in the cases that were solved. It is a ranking of the largest offers in these cases and not a ranking of rewards in general. Every figure is given in the currency and year stated, with no conversion into present-day money.
By the largest single sum stated for each case, the order is this. At the top are two rewards of $1 million each, offered in New South Wales in 2019 for information about two Newcastle-area cases that police reopened that year. Second is the Doodler’s $250,000, set in January 2023. Third is the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department’s poster in the Freeway Phantom murders, which offers up to $150,000. Fourth is the $100,000 that Victoria Police offered in December 2000 in the case of Kathleen Downes, a 95-year-old Melbourne woman. Fifth, on the figures available, are the rewards totaling $70,000 that had been offered by August 31, 1985, in the hunt for the Los Angeles intruder the press called the Night Stalker. One more figure stands outside the ranking because it is a running total, not an offer: the reward foundation of Francis and Carole Carrington, whose name is tied to the Yosemite killings, had posted $3.5 million in rewards in more than 540 cases in 47 states by the time the Carringtons said they could no longer pay for it.
A later section turns to three cases in which the arrest came by another route, because what led to an arrest bears on what the money in the other cases was trying to buy.
The largest sums in the ranking were offered in cases that police reopened in 2019. In April 2019, detectives from Lake Macquarie in New South Wales set up Strike Force Arapaima to re-examine the cases of Robyn Hickie and Amanda Robinson. Two rewards of $1 million each were offered for information about the suspected murders. The New Daily later reported the offers under the headline "Robyn Hickie and Amanda Robinson: $1 million rewards."
The Milat case supplies the legal record on the Australian side of the ranking. Ivan Milat, a worker from Sydney’s southwest, was convicted in 1996 of murdering seven young travelers in New South Wales between December 1989 and April 1992. They were Deborah Everist, James Gibson, Simone Schmidl, Anja Habschied, Gabor Neugebauer, Joanne Walters and Caroline Clarke. The jury, which delivered its verdict on July 27, 1996, also convicted him of detaining a British backpacker for advantage, an offense that news reports described as kidnapping. Milat was never charged in connection with the Hickie and Robinson cases, and he never confessed to any killing.
Police kept Milat under surveillance for about two months before they moved against him, according to AP and AAP. His later efforts to overturn the verdict turned in part on the identification evidence. The New South Wales Court of Criminal Appeal dismissed his appeal on February 26, 1998. On June 24, 2002, he filed an application for special leave to appeal to the High Court of Australia, about four and a quarter years after the deadline under the court’s rules, so it needed an extension of time. He argued that the trial had miscarried over the identification evidence; that the Crown had put a case inconsistent with the evidence of its own witnesses without cross-examining them as hostile or suggesting they were mistaken; and that the trial judge had put alternative cases to the jury, one of them not relied on by the Crown, which might have led the jury to use the detaining count to convict on the murder counts. The Crown answered that the evidence in question was not essential, that there was no legal error, and that the murder convictions did not depend on the detaining count.
In December 2003 Milat asked the High Court to order that he be brought before the court to argue his application in person, or else that he appear by video link from Goulburn Correctional Centre. On February 24, 2004, Justice Michael McHugh dismissed the request, holding that the court had no power or ground to order his attendance and that written submissions were adequate. He observed that "an application, brought so long out of time, faces a formidable hurdle in obtaining the grant of special leave to appeal." The application itself failed in May 2004, AAP reported.
Milat kept trying. In December 2006 he lost a bid for an inquiry into his convictions, according to AAP. In September 2008, in what the Illawarra Mercury reported was his third official request for an inquiry, he relied on a television program in which Clive Small said there was no police evidence of an accomplice, and argued that the trial judge’s ruling that the Crown did not have to prove whether he acted alone was partly wrong. Justice McClellan refused the application and rejected his claim that he had been denied procedural fairness. "The material provided by the applicant does not raise a doubt or question about his guilt," he said. In a six-page letter from his cell at Goulburn, published in 2010, Milat called himself the victim of a "miscarriage of justice." AAP reported at the time that he had exhausted all avenues of appeal. He died on October 27, 2019, aged 74.
The San Francisco reward can be followed stage by stage, because the department announced each one in a numbered bulletin. On February 6, 2019, it held a news conference at police headquarters. It announced a $100,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the suspect, released an age-progressed version of the 1975 sketch, and played the 1974 call reporting the death of Gerald Cavanaugh, 49. Investigators said they believed the same man was responsible for the assaults and the five killings then attributed to him.
The recording drew its own attention. In it the caller tells a dispatcher that he believes he has seen a dead person, that he did not want to get too close, and that he felt it was his duty to report it. Asked for his name, he says he does not think it is necessary. Police said in 2019 that they were still trying to identify him, and Commander Greg McEachern said the caller could have been a witness or the suspect, according to the Bay Area Reporter.
McEachern said at the news conference that the case had gripped San Francisco in the 1970s, and that the department wanted justice for the victims. He said the cold case team looked at cases it believed were solvable and at cases in which victims had never had justice, that DNA samples from some of the cases had been submitted and results were awaited, and that a person of interest interviewed at the time of the killings remained one. He would not say whether that man resembled the sketches.
The second stage came on January 27, 2022, the anniversary of the first death in the series. The department said a new investigation suggested that Warren Andrews, who had been assaulted in April 1975 and died several weeks later, may have been the sixth victim. It doubled the reward to $200,000 and reissued the suspect sketch. It said it believed others may have survived assaults by the same man, or may have information about him, and asked them to come forward.
The third stage came on January 24, 2023. The department released a new age-progressed sketch and raised the reward from $200,000 to $250,000, again for information leading to the suspect’s identification, arrest and conviction, and repeated that Andrews was believed to be the sixth victim. For the first time it asked the public to help identify a woman who had called police twice in 1975 with a name and a license plate, and asked the two other people who had given the same name to come forward again. The cold case investigators named on the bulletin were Tom Newland, Dominic Celaya, Daniel Dedet and Daniel Cunningham.
The six men the department attributes to the series are Gerald Cavanaugh, 49; Joseph "Jae" Stevens, 27; Klaus Christmann, 31; Warren Andrews, 52; Frederick Capin, 32; and Harald Gullberg, 66. All six deaths took place in San Francisco. No one has been arrested.
In June 2026, with the $250,000 reward still on offer as part of a cold case review, Cunningham, who leads the unit, told The San Francisco Standard that he believed the suspect was alive, in his 70s and living in the East Bay. "Once this person was made aware that they were a suspect in these murders, the murders stopped," he said. As of June 2026, no one had been charged. The department asks anyone with information to call its 24-hour tip line, and says tipsters may remain anonymous. The offer has been raised twice, and each raise came with new public material. As of June 2026 it had not produced a defendant.
Between April 1971 and September 1972, six girls and young women were taken from neighborhoods in Washington, D.C., and killed. The Metropolitan Police Department’s published appeal names them: Carol Spinks, 13; Darlenia Johnson, 16; Brenda Crockett, 10; Nenomoshia Yates, 12; Brenda Woodard, 18; and Diane Williams, 17. The department describes them as young African American girls, and says their deaths came to light in the District and in Prince George’s County, Maryland. The appeal names the department’s Major Case/Cold Case Unit and the Prince George’s County Police Homicide Unit and asks anyone with information to come forward.
The reward is set out on a separate poster, headed "Up to $150,000 Reward: 'Freeway Phantom' Murders," whose footer carries the date April 18, 2006. As of October 2026 the department’s poster still offers up to $150,000. It is the only sum in the ranking stated as a ceiling rather than a fixed figure. The poster asks callers to contact the department or to send an email to its unsolved murder address.
No one has ever been arrested or charged in the six deaths, according to Boundary Stones, the WETA history publication that traced the case in 2025. The two police agencies named on the appeal do not describe the case in the same way. In an undated WUSA9 report on a book about the case, Prince George’s County police said they were still actively investigating, while a D.C. police spokeswoman said the District’s cases had been purged years earlier and were no longer active investigations. The District’s appeal and its reward poster remain online all the same.
The poster and the appeal also disagree with the older record about one date. The current appeal gives April 25, 1971, as the day Carol Spinks was taken; an earlier police poster dated April 2006 gives April 21. Most accounts give the victims' ages as 10 to 18, but a March 2023 Black Enterprise announcement of a podcast about the case gave 12 to 18, which leaves out Brenda Crockett, who was 10.
Boundary Stones describes Brenda Woodard as the presumed last victim rather than a certain one; the department counts her among the six on the reward poster. Her sister later joined the Metropolitan Police and rose to the rank of lieutenant. Interviewed by WUSA9 in 2008, she said she wanted the person responsible to admit what had been done.
The tips that came in pointed in every direction. Priests, police officers and doctors were all named at one time or another. "Every male that you could think of ended up being a suspect at one time," said Jenkins, one of the investigators who rebuilt the case files.
Headlee, who spent two years on the case for her podcast, said in 2023 that the victims were doing ordinary things, going to the store or coming back from class, and that their families were not careless. The most urgent need, she told Black Enterprise, was to find some measure of justice, or at least closure, for the families. Trainum, who rebuilt the files after Jenkins, said he hoped someone would finally come forward and confess; Hester said the same thing in different words: someone knows something.
Victoria Police dated its reward notice in the Kathleen Downes case December 1, 2000. The offer was $100,000 for information leading to an arrest and conviction. Mrs. Downes was 95, of Brunswick, Melbourne, and she died on December 31, 1997. The notice was still on the force’s website in 2026, with an update date of January 27, 2026.
The man eventually charged in the Downes case was already in prison. Peter Dupas had been convicted of three Melbourne murders: Margaret Maher, 40, in October 1997; Mersina Halvagis, 25, on November 1, 1997; and Nicole Patterson in April 1999. He had been a suspect in the Downes death since 2001, AAP reported, and police questioned him about it in 2013. In February 2018, while he was serving his life sentences, he was charged with her murder. The prosecution was discontinued in October 2019 when the main witness became too ill to give evidence, which is not an acquittal. A coroner, Ian Gray, had already determined in 2015 that Mrs. Downes died as a result of the actions of Dupas; the finding was published in July 2020. Dupas was never tried for her death.
The convictions came in the order the cases were solved, not the order of the deaths. A jury convicted Dupas of the Patterson murder in August 2000 and of the Maher murder in August 2004. Each time he was sentenced to life imprisonment with no minimum term, and his applications for leave to appeal against those two convictions were refused. The Halvagis case took longest. A jury convicted him in 2007. In September 2007, just before the 14-day limit ran out, his lawyers lodged an application for leave to appeal, arguing that the verdict was "unsafe and unsatisfactory." Mersina Halvagis’s father told ABC News the family had hoped the ordeal was over. "Just when we thought we go on with our lives and, let Mersina rest in peace," he said, the appeal made things difficult for his family. "Obviously we are not happy but we will just let the law take its course."
In September 2009 the Court of Appeal of Victoria quashed the Halvagis conviction by a majority of two to one and ordered a new trial. Justice Weinberg dissented. The father of Mersina Halvagis told Neos Kosmos: "The system is putting us on trial and nobody else. The only thing I know is that for the last 12 years we’ve been in a morass and who knows what’s going to happen now." Dupas took the question of a permanent stay to the High Court of Australia, arguing that publicity had made a fair trial impossible. All seven justices heard the case, and on April 15, 2010, the court dismissed his appeal in Dupas v The Queen [2010] HCA 20. A second jury convicted him in November 2010. In early 2011 Mersina’s father wrote an open letter to the Premier, Ted Baillieu, which began: "As one father to another I ask you to help us." A five-judge bench of the Court of Appeal rejected Dupas’s second appeal unanimously in December 2012, and by February 2013 it was reported that he would not seek a third.
In the month that final appeal was rejected, Neos Kosmos published a report under the headline "Dupas reward up for grabs." The Downes notice dates from December 2000, the last Halvagis appeal was rejected in December 2012, and the Downes prosecution ended in October 2019. Between the reward notice and the last court event in the Downes case lay nearly two decades.
By August 31, 1985, when Los Angeles police released the name of the man they were seeking, a task force of 50 detectives believed the Night Stalker responsible for 16 killings and about two dozen other crimes of violence, UPI reported. Rewards totaling $70,000 had been offered.
Richard Ramirez was arrested on August 31, 1985, in East Los Angeles, the morning after police released his name and photograph. Residents who recognized him from the newspaper photograph caught and held him.
On September 20, 1989, a Los Angeles County jury convicted Ramirez on all 43 counts, among them 12 counts of first degree murder, one of second degree murder, five of attempted murder and 14 of first degree burglary, with the special circumstances returned as true. On November 7, 1989, Judge Michael Tynan sentenced him to death, plus 59 years and four months for the other felonies. Because the sentence was death, the appeal went directly to the California Supreme Court. On August 7, 2006, the court unanimously affirmed the convictions and the sentence in an opinion by Justice Carlos Moreno, and in 2007 the United States Supreme Court declined, without comment, to review the case. Ramirez died on June 7, 2013, aged 53, on death row. The convictions stand.
Not every large sum in a reward story is a single offer. Scott Webb, executive director of the reward foundation of Francis and Carole Carrington, told ABC30 in Fresno that it had posted $3.5 million in rewards in more than 540 cases in 47 states, including the Laci Peterson case in Modesto and the Sandra Cantu case in Tracy, before the Carringtons, then in their 70s, announced they could no longer fund it. The foundation’s name joins the Carringtons' with that of Carole Sund, one of the victims of Cary Stayner.
Stayner, a maintenance worker in El Portal at the western edge of Yosemite National Park, was convicted of four killings in 1999: Carole Sund, 42, her daughter Juli, 15, and Silvina Pelosso, 16, a family friend from Argentina, in February, and Joie Armstrong, 26, a Yosemite Institute instructor, in July. In September 2000 he pleaded guilty in federal court in Fresno to the murder of Armstrong and was sentenced to life without parole. In August 2002 a Santa Clara County jury convicted him of three counts of first-degree murder and one of kidnapping, with the special circumstances returned as true. The jury deliberated for about five hours, and Stayner showed no emotion at the verdict. Carole Carrington said, "It’s a vindication of our feeling that this definitely is a death penalty case and that it was a horrendous crime." Francis Carrington said: "My personal feeling is, he knew exactly what he was doing when he did it." In December 2002 Judge Thomas C. Hastings sentenced Stayner to death, plus a consecutive 45-year term.
The state appeal took more than two decades. On April 30, 2026, the California Supreme Court, in an opinion by Chief Justice Patricia Guerrero joined by Justices Corrigan, Liu, Kruger and Groban and by Justice Adams of the Court of Appeal, sitting by assignment, affirmed the judgment in its entirety. The court assumed error on some points and concluded that it caused no prejudice. It held that Stayner’s statement "I prefer not to talk now," read in context, left open talking later, and that even if it was an effective invocation of the right to silence, he made no incriminating statements in the car afterward. It upheld his written waiver in Sacramento and ruled the confession voluntary. It also held that there was probable cause for his arrest, listing among the grounds his missed work and the cheap sale of his belongings, which gave "reasonable ground for believing that defendant was involved in the murder of Armstrong." A habeas petition filed in March 2026 had not been reported decided by October 2026. As of May 28, 2026, he was held at Pelican Bay State Prison.
Joie Armstrong’s family and friends created the Armstrong Scholars program at NatureBridge, which began in 2000. Each summer a group of young women aged 15 to 18 spends about ten days backpacking in the Yosemite backcountry with two women educators. Two of her friends started an organization called Balanced Rock in 1999, named for the promise she and one of them had made to each other.
Three further cases belong in the comparison for the way their arrests came about.
Derrick Todd Lee was arrested on May 27, 2003, in Atlanta, a day after Baton Rouge police named him as the prime suspect in the deaths of at least five women. The Louisiana Supreme Court set out how he was identified in its opinion of January 16, 2008, in State v. Lee. The court held that taking a cheek swab was a search under the Fourth Amendment, that the subpoena used to obtain it lacked the probable cause and sworn support a warrant requires, and that Lee’s apparent consent was not voluntary. It nonetheless held the DNA evidence admissible under the inevitable discovery doctrine: once a sketch was released on May 23, 2003, tips naming Lee came in independently, and the task force’s standard procedure would have led to a swab. The court affirmed his conviction and death sentence in the Pace case. He had also been convicted of second degree murder in the DeSoto case, in 2004. Lee died on January 21, 2016; the coroner gave heart disease as the cause.
Donald Neilson was arrested on December 11, 1975, near Mansfield in Nottinghamshire by two patrol constables, according to the Mansfield Chad and the Express & Star. In July 1976 he was convicted at Oxford of four murders and of the kidnapping of Lesley Whittle, 17. In June 2008 a High Court judge, Mr. Justice Teare, refused his application for a minimum term and imposed a whole life order. He died on December 18, 2011, aged 75.
Robert Pickton was charged with a weapons offense on February 7, 2002, and on February 22, 2002, with two counts of first-degree murder. The charges grew to 26 counts, of which six were tried first. In December 2007 a jury in New Westminster, British Columbia, convicted him of second-degree murder in the deaths of six women from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside: Sereena Abotsway, Mona Wilson, Andrea Joesbury, Brenda Ann Wolfe, Georgina Faith Papin and Marnie Frey. Justice James Williams sentenced him to life with no parole eligibility for 25 years. The Supreme Court of Canada dismissed his appeal on July 30, 2010, in R. v. Pickton, 2010 SCC 32, and on August 4, 2010, the Crown stayed the remaining 20 counts. In August 2010 Vancouver Deputy Chief Doug LePard released a review of his own department’s handling of the case, about 400 pages long and based on more than 20,000 documents. It concluded that police had received information pointing to Pickton in 1998 and 1999 that should have led to a more vigorous investigation. Pickton died on May 31, 2024, aged 74, after being assaulted by another inmate on May 19.
In the Lee case, tips naming him came in after the public release of a sketch. In the Pickton case, a police department’s own review concluded that information pointing to him had reached police years before the arrest. In the Neilson case, the arrest came from two constables on patrol. Set beside the reward figures, the routes are plain: a published photograph in Los Angeles, a survivor’s identification tested through years of appeals in New South Wales, a court-ordered swab and a sketch in Louisiana, and an arrest in Nottinghamshire.
Of the offers in the ranking, two sit beside cases in which no one has been charged: the $250,000 in San Francisco, still on offer in June 2026, and the $150,000 in Washington, still listed in October 2026. The $100,000 in the Downes case sits beside a murder charge brought in 2018 and discontinued in 2019. The two $1 million offers, the largest in the group, were made for the Hickie and Robinson cases, in which Ivan Milat was never charged. The $70,000 of 1985 belongs to a case that ended in conviction, a death sentence and a finished appeal.
• 1971 to 1972: Six girls and young women are taken from neighborhoods in Washington, D.C., and killed.
• January 1974 to mid-1975: Six men are killed in San Francisco in the series police later attribute to the Doodler.
• December 11, 1975: Donald Neilson is arrested near Mansfield, Nottinghamshire.
• August 31, 1985: UPI reports rewards totaling $70,000 as police release the Night Stalker suspect’s name; Richard Ramirez is arrested that morning in East Los Angeles.
• November 7, 1989: Ramirez is sentenced to death.
• July 27, 1996: Ivan Milat is convicted of seven murders.
• February 26, 1998: Milat’s appeal to the New South Wales Court of Criminal Appeal is dismissed; his High Court special leave application fails in 2004.
• 1999: Four killings in the Yosemite area for which Cary Stayner is later convicted.
• September 13, 2000: Stayner pleads guilty in federal court to the murder of Joie Armstrong.
• December 1, 2000: Victoria Police date the $100,000 reward notice in the Kathleen Downes case.
• February 2002: Robert Pickton is charged; he is convicted of six murders in December 2007.
• August 2002: A jury convicts Stayner of three murders and one kidnapping; he is sentenced to death in December.
• May 27, 2003: Derrick Todd Lee is arrested in Atlanta.
• February 2018: Peter Dupas is charged with the murder of Kathleen Downes.
• February 6, 2019: San Francisco police announce a $100,000 reward in the Doodler case.
• April 2019: Strike Force Arapaima is set up; two rewards of $1 million each are offered in the Hickie and Robinson cases.
• October 2019: The Downes prosecution of Dupas is discontinued.
• January 27, 2022: The Doodler reward is doubled to $200,000.
• January 24, 2023: The Doodler reward rises to $250,000.
• April 30, 2026: The California Supreme Court affirms Stayner’s convictions and death sentence.
• June 2026: San Francisco’s cold case unit says the $250,000 is still on offer and no one has been charged.