In May 1971, investigators in Bucharest were holding a damaged piece of paper. It was a medical certificate from the neurology office of the student hospital, the writing on it blurred, and they had connected it with the last of four killings. A stamp and part of a serial number told them it had been issued in March. They went through more than 30,000 medical files and counted 83 students who had received a certificate from that office in the month. Fifteen of the 83 had not handed theirs in to excuse an absence. One of the fifteen was Ion Rîmaru, a veterinary student, and within days he was under arrest.
That is a very old kind of police work, and it is the kind the ten cases that follow involved. They were investigated, and in most instances tried, before DNA profiling was part of the work: between the late 1960s and about 1990. The proof in them came from blood groups, fingerprints, fibers, handwriting, fuel receipts and delivery schedules, telephone records, witnesses, co-defendants and confessions. Most of those methods worked. Several did not. A blood group recorded wrongly kept a man at liberty for six years in Rostov, a forged forensic report and beaten confessions put fourteen innocent people into the Vitebsk cases, and a faulty blood test clouded the evidence in Irkutsk. Where DNA did arrive, it arrived afterward: in an appeal in Georgia, in a database in California, in laboratories in Tuscany.
Rîmaru was born on October 12, 1946, in Corabia, in Olt County, according to most reports; two give Caracal. He lived in a student dormitory in the capital. At school he did poorly, the legal historian Hunor Kádár writes; in 1965 he was convicted of robbery. Between 1970 and 1971 four women were killed at night in Bucharest, and the Militia mobilized thousands of officers, cadets, patriotic guards and reservists. A state press that said little left room for rumor. Women were warned not to go out alone, and, according to later press accounts, some blonde women dyed their hair because word had spread that the killer chose blondes. Kádár points out that the pattern did not hold exactly.
The four dead were Elena Oprea (1970), Fănica Ilie, 31 (March 4 to 5, 1971), Gheorghița Popa, 35 (April 8 to 9, 1971), and Mihaela Ursu, 39 (May 4 to 5, 1971). The date of the first is reported three ways: the night of April 8 to 9, 1970, in an Adevărul list and in Kádár’s list of the offenses he confessed to; the night of May 8 to 9 in BZI and in another section of Kádár’s study; and March 1970 in a later Adevărul account. Her age was not reported. Other women were wounded between June 1970 and May 1971 and survived. The Militia did not at first connect all the cases; Kádár writes that Oprea’s killing and an attempted murder in November 1970 were linked to the same offender only later.
The investigators built the case from small physical comparisons. Kádár writes that dental experts compared evidence from Ilie’s killing with that from Popa’s, and later with a third, and concluded that one man was responsible. After Popa’s death a cloth apparently used to bind a cut on the attacker’s own hand was recovered, and its blood group, A2, matched traces from the case, BZI and Kádár both report. A taxi driver came forward to say that at about 2 a.m. that night he had carried a passenger who left blood on the seat, and that the blood matched Popa’s group. Women who had survived gave descriptions from which a composite portrait was drawn, which Adevărul and Kádár both call the first made in Romania: a man of medium height, between 1.72 and 1.75 meters, with a round head, dark hair, a prominent chin and a high forehead. Forensic specialists also concluded that the attacker had a distinctive irregularity in his teeth, and Kádár writes that anthropologists made a cast of it and sent photographs of the cast to several hundred officers.
Then came the certificate, damaged so that the ink had run. Adevărul and Kádár report that the neurologist’s stamp could be read, and part of the serial number, which might have been 42, 47, 62 or 67. Adevărul adds that the name had been made illegible. Kádár says investigators went through more than 30,000 medical files and identified 83 students who had received certificates that month, only 15 of whom had not handed theirs in. Adevărul puts Rîmaru 21st on the list of 83; Kádár gives a different number. The comparisons that followed matched his teeth to the evidence, his blood group was A2, and hair samples matched, Kádár writes. He was arrested in Bucharest on May 27, 1971.
The public learned of it only later. A Militia communiqué dated June 4, 1971, announced that the criminal had been identified and arrested, Evenimentul Zilei reported in 2026, and the newspaper counted nine days between arrest and announcement and criticized the delay, given how frightened the city had been. According to the communiqué he had admitted four murders, six attempted murders and a robbery, all against women. At a public trial from September 1 to 3, 1971, the Bucharest Municipal Tribunal sentenced him to death for four murders, six attempted murders, rape, attempted rape, robbery and theft. The sentence was upheld on appeal, and he was executed at Jilava Penitentiary, near Bucharest, on October 23, 1971. Romanian reports say he was 25.
The case did not end there. A year later his father, Florea Rîmaru, died after a fall from a train, and a forensic specialist examining the body said that his fingerprints matched prints left at a killing in Bucharest in 1944, one of a series of unsolved killings of women. The son had been tried and convicted. The father was never charged with anything. His surname is written both Rîmaru and Râmaru in Romanian reporting; Kádár’s study and most accounts use Rîmaru.
Between August 1968 and September 1985, eight couples were killed in the countryside around Florence. Sixteen people died. Every one of the eight double killings was tied to the same weapon, which has never been recovered, and the Italian press called the unknown killer Il Mostro di Firenze. The case has produced some of the longest investigations and trials in modern Italian history, and it is unsolved. Only three people have been finally convicted of any of the killings. Stefano Mele, the husband of one of the 1968 victims, Barbara Locci, was convicted of that double killing alone. Mario Vanni and Giancarlo Lotti, two men from San Casciano in Val di Pesa, were convicted in 2000 of taking part in the last four double killings. A farmer identified in the sources by his initials, P.P., was convicted at first instance in 1994 of seven of the double killings, acquitted on appeal, and died before a retrial; under Italian law he died unconvicted. No court has named the killer.
The first suspect in 1968 was Mele, a Sardinian laborer living in Tuscany. He first denied involvement, Il Post reports, then implicated two of his wife’s Sardinian lovers, then cleared them, and finally confessed; according to Fanpage he later accused another man as well before returning to his young son’s account. The Florence Assize Court convicted him on March 25, 1970. After a remand from the Court of Cassation, the appeal court in Perugia ruled on April 12, 1973, making the conviction final; a parliamentary report says the Florence judgment firmly excluded accomplices. Il Post and Fanpage give the sentence as 14 years, with two more for slander against the two brothers he had accused. The weapon used in 1968 was linked to the later killings only in 1982, when a former officer from Signa remembered the old case. Doubt about whether Mele fired it has never gone away, the Unione Sarda wrote in 2019, and La Nazione asked in 2023 who could have supplied him with the weapon.
Of the later killings, one is worth setting apart. On September 9, 1983, two German students, Horst Wilhelm Meyer and Jens-Uwe Rüsch, both 24, were killed in their Volkswagen camper van at Giogoli, on the edge of Florence. Il Post and LaPresse report that one of them had long hair and a slight build and was probably taken by the killer for a woman.
By 1991 the inquiry had a computer and a profile. In the spring of that year the Florence police unit set up for the cases, the SAM, cross-referenced data and concluded that P.P., then in prison on an unrelated conviction, matched the profile it had drawn of the killer, La Nazione reported. P.P. had been born in 1925 near Vicchio and, as a young man, had killed a rival for the affections of his fiancée and served 13 years in prison. The points investigators assembled against him, which La Nazione itself called indications and not proof, were that he wrote "Repubblica" with one B, as it was spelled on an envelope sent to a magistrate; that he kept many newspapers about the crimes, with photographs he had marked in pencil; that he had links to the places of all eight double killings; and that the killings had stopped when he went to prison. The trial before the Florence Assize Court was televised. On November 1, 1994, it convicted him of seven of the eight double killings, 14 of the 16 deaths, and sentenced him to life. A witness at that trial, a retired postman named Mario Vanni, said that he and the accused had only gone together for merende, picnics or snacks, and the phrase compagni di merende, "snack companions," stuck to the group of friends.
The conviction did not hold. The appeal court acquitted P.P. in February 1996. On December 12, 1996, the Court of Cassation annulled the acquittal because the appeal court had declined to hear four witnesses that prosecutors had kept under the code names Alfa, Beta, Gamma and Delta, Panorama reported, a defect of form and not of substance, and it ordered a new hearing. That hearing never took place. On February 22, 1998, P.P. died at his house in Mercatale; the authorities said natural causes, though Il Post wrote that the circumstances were unclear. He has sometimes been described as acquitted after his death, which is not what happened: the proceedings simply ended with it.
The second inquiry produced Vanni and Lotti. Lotti, known by the nicknames "Garibaldi" and "Katanga," first appears in SAM records on July 19, 1990. He confessed that he had taken part in the last killings and became a pentito, a cooperating witness, naming P.P. and Vanni. Another man testified against them, saying he had seen two of the killings, and was not convicted of any. The judgment against Vanni and Lotti states that someone "ordered" the killings, La Nazione wrote in 2017. Both convictions became final in 2000: Vanni received life, Lotti 26 years. Lotti died in 2002. Vanni’s sentence was suspended for health reasons in 2004, and he died in 2009. A man identified as F.C. was acquitted in 2008 of commissioning the killings.
DNA has come into the case late, and it has produced questions more than answers. Fanpage reported in 2017 that DNA had been identified on two exhibits, La Nazione reported in 2024 an unknown DNA profile, and AFP wrote the same year that DNA "spurs new questions." The Unione Sarda reported in 2019 that a DNA profile from letters sent to prosecutors in 1985 did not belong to F.N., a Perugia physician who had died in Lake Trasimeno in October 1985 and whose death investigators in Perugia and Florence had at one time examined; the Perugia prosecutor asked in 2017 to archive the inquiry into it, and he was never charged with anything. In 2025 a request to reopen Vanni’s conviction was declared inadmissible by the Genoa Court of Appeal; his family’s lawyers said they would appeal to the Court of Cassation, and no ruling on that appeal has been reported.
Gennady Mikhasevich killed women in the Vitebsk region of Soviet Belarus for fourteen years. In May 1987 a Soviet court convicted him of the murders of 36 women, with other charges, and sentenced him to death, according to the human rights center Viasna. He confessed to 43. He was a state-farm mechanic, a married father of two, a Communist Party member who served as a party secretary, and a volunteer in the druzhina, the civilian auxiliary that helped the Soviet police; in that role, Lenta.ru reported, he took part in checks connected with the search for the man responsible.
The case is remembered less for the number of deaths than for what happened while he was free. Before his arrest, investigators convicted fourteen other people of killings in the series, and one of them was executed. Zerkalo, the Belarusian news site, writes that the confessions of those people were beaten out of them. When Mikhasevich confessed, the convictions fell apart. The former regional police chief Mechislav Grib, who led the investigation in 1985 and later became Belarus’s head of state, said in remarks published by Viasna that the case convinced him the death penalty is wrong. He said the executed man had died "for nothing."
The wrongful convictions are the best-documented part of the case, and the three sources that describe them, Zerkalo, Viasna and Lenta.ru, differ in places. The first man to be convicted, O. G., was punished for the murder of Lyudmila Andaralova, 19, in 1971; Zerkalo gives his sentence as 15 years on a confession obtained by force, Viasna as ten years on a confession given under threats. Three young men, V. P., V. K. and N. Ya., were convicted over a woman’s death in 1972. Lenta.ru describes a group of three friends who had been walking a dog and who were forced into confessions and sentenced to terms of 2 to 15 years. V. P. received 12 years and, by Viasna’s account, was freed about two weeks after Mikhasevich’s arrest; Zerkalo says he served the full term. V. K. received 15 years and served 12, harming himself several times in prison in protest. N. Ya. served two and a half years or three, and his father believed him guilty until he was rehabilitated in 1986. V. G. was sentenced to 15 years for a woman’s murder, Viasna reported, although the biological evidence did not link him to the crime; he went blind in prison and was released after six years, by which time he had lost his family. O. A. was acquitted at first, but the Supreme Court overturned the acquittal and he was sentenced to 15 years; Zerkalo says his false confession followed a forged forensic report and threats. He served less than two years and tried to take his own life in his cell. "Frankly speaking, I would have never returned to normal life had I served 15 years," he said in 2011, as quoted by Viasna.
N. T. was sentenced to death in 1979 and executed in 1980, according to Viasna. A woman who knew him, L. K., had testified against him and was sentenced to 10 years as his accomplice; Lenta.ru says she was pressured into giving evidence. She was rehabilitated in 1986, as was he, after the real killer was caught, Zerkalo reported. Zerkalo also describes the case of Lyusya Ovlasenko, who died in Polotsk on July 7, 1982: her partner was convicted of killing her and sentenced to 10 years, and he was released after three, when the real killer was caught. Viasna lists six more people sentenced and later rehabilitated on the strength of Mikhasevich’s confessions, and Lenta.ru adds a driver who confessed after two weeks and ten interrogations, once investigators had planted a victim’s photograph in his possession; he tried to kill himself and needed sedatives for the rest of his life. The numbers vary with the source. Zerkalo and Lenta.ru say 14 people were convicted. Grib said 13 were unlawfully sentenced to long prison terms and one was executed. Viasna says Mikhasevich confessed to 13 murders for which 14 innocent people had been convicted. All of the living people wrongly convicted were released and rehabilitated, Zerkalo reported. Lenta.ru adds that they were given money and apartments in one district of Vitebsk, and that not all of them could return to normal life.
The investigation that finally reached him leaned on three things: a witness, a letter and handwriting. A witness told investigators that one of the women had got into a red Zaporozhets, a small Soviet car, and police set out to check every car of that kind in the region. Mikhasevich owned one. According to Lenta.ru, he worked on the checks as a druzhina volunteer and examined about 7,000 owners of similar cars himself. A juvenile affairs inspector questioned him, and the inspector’s report was sent to Grib’s headquarters, Zerkalo reported; Grib recalled that after that interview Mikhasevich understood everything and was badly frightened. Later a letter signed by an invented group, the "Patriots of Vitebsk," reached police, and a note with the words "Death for betrayal. A struggle against the cops and the communists" turned up after a later killing. Experts concluded that the note and the letter were written by the same person. Saliva on the envelope showed blood group I.
The investigators decided to compare the handwriting of the men of the region with the letter. Lenta.ru says the check covered almost all the men of Vitebsk and about 560,000 handwriting samples; Grib, as reported by Zerkalo, put the figure at 600,000. Along the way, Lenta.ru reported, the checks solved 220 other crimes, 27 of them murders. Grib asked for more samples from the office of the state farm and from the technical school in Gorodok where Mikhasevich had studied, according to Zerkalo. Lenta.ru gives two versions of how his own handwriting reached the experts in December 1985: either he wrote an explanation during the check of his red Zaporozhets, or a traffic inspector in Polotsk, looking for a similar car involved in an accident, stopped him and asked him to write one. The experts concluded that this explanation and the Patriots of Vitebsk letters were in the same hand. Grib’s account places the arrest on a Sunday in November 1985, just after the graphologists confirmed the match; Lenta.ru says December. Grib said Mikhasevich offered no resistance and then confessed. Psychiatrists judged him sane, and KGB officers guarded him through the investigation and the trial. The sources disagree on the end: Lenta.ru says he was executed in autumn 1987, Viasna on January 19, 1988; neither names a place. Lenta.ru gives 36 as the total, noting that other sources say 38.
Carlton Michael Gary was convicted on August 26, 1986, of three killings in Columbus, Georgia: Florence Scheible, 89, killed on October 21, 1977; Martha Thurmond, 69, whose death came to light on October 25, 1977; and Kathleen Woodruff, 74, on December 28, 1977. A Muscogee County jury convicted him of three counts each of malice murder, rape and burglary, and he was sentenced to death on August 27, 1986. Prosecutors told the jury that one man had attacked nine older women in Columbus between September 1977 and April 1978, seven of whom died, and that the man was Gary. He was never charged with the other four deaths, those of Mary "Fern" Jackson, Jean Dimenstein, Mildred Borom and Janet Cofer, which the prosecution laid before the jury as proof of a common plan and identity.
He denied the killings from his arrest in 1984 until his death. For three decades his lawyers argued that the science in the case pointed away from him: blood-group tests on samples, DNA tests that excluded him as the source of a stain from the state’s key surviving witness, a shoeprint too small for his feet, and a dental impression kept from the defense. The state answered that his fingerprints were found at four of the scenes, that he had led police around the houses, and that DNA testing ordered in 2009 matched him to one of the women killed. The fingerprint evidence, as a 2017 Muscogee County order lists it, was a finger and palm print at the Woodruff house, a thumbprint at the Scheible house, a fingerprint at the Thurmond house and a palm print at the Jackson house. The federal courts described the blood and hair evidence as inconclusive: it neither identified nor excluded him. He told 11Alive in March 2018 that the statement police relied on was unsigned, and his lawyers told the Associated Press it had the marks of a false confession.
The case had gone cold for six years before a weapon broke it. A weapon was taken in a burglary of a Wynnton house on October 8, 1977, and in April 1984 police recovered it in Michigan. Its ownership was traced through a cousin of Gary’s and the cousin’s mother to her brother, Gary’s uncle, in Phenix City, Alabama, who said his nephew had given it to him. A Columbus police sergeant compared Gary’s fingerprints with prints lifted at the Woodruff house and reported a match. Gary was taken into custody on May 3, 1984, in Albany, Georgia, on a burglary charge, and indicted the next day.
His record elsewhere had not been linked: a woman killed in Albany, New York, in 1970, Nellie Farmer, 85, had left a fingerprint matching his at the scene. He told police he had robbed her and another man had killed her; that man, J.L.M., was tried and acquitted, and Gary was convicted only of robbery. In 1975 a woman was attacked in Syracuse, and the Journal-Constitution reported in 2018 that DNA had linked him to the case, which remained unsolved. He was never charged with it. He also had records in Connecticut, Florida and Alabama that nobody had connected to one another, the paper reported.
The trial turned on resources as much as on science. Before trial Gary’s lawyers asked again and again for money to hire experts and an investigator, and the court refused, according to the Eleventh Circuit’s 2009 opinion; the state called a hypnotist, a serologist, a forensic dentist, a fingerprint examiner and a hair and fiber specialist. Amnesty International called it an "inequality of arms." The lead prosecutor on the case, Doug Pullen, told the Journal-Constitution that prosecutors charged him only where his fingerprints had been matched and he had admitted being present. "The question wasn’t did he do it or did he not do it," Pullen said. It was whether the state could prove it. On December 16, 2009, the Georgia Supreme Court halted the execution to allow DNA testing, and the courts that heard the case afterward left the convictions in place. His extraordinary motion for a new trial was denied on September 1, 2017. Georgia executed him on March 15, 2018. He was 67.
Gerald Armond Gallego was convicted of four murders in two states and sentenced to death in both. A jury in Contra Costa County, California, convicted him in 1983 of kidnapping and murdering Craig Miller, 22, and Mary Beth Sowers, 21, two Sacramento State students. A jury in Lovelock, Nevada, convicted him in 1984 of kidnapping and murdering Stacey Redican and Karen Chipman Twiggs, both 17. Six more deaths were laid to him by investigators and the press, among them two girls aged 13 and 14, largely on the account of Charlene Williams, the young woman who lived with him and called herself his wife. Those six were never tried against him.
Williams was the center of both prosecutions. After a first statement that was an alibi, and a story the California Supreme Court described as fabricated, she changed lawyers, withdrew the story and confessed to her new lawyer, implicating Gallego. The plea agreement was made with prosecutors in California, Nevada and Oregon together, according to the Ninth Circuit. She agreed to tell what she knew about ten killings and to testify against him in both states; she pleaded guilty to two murders and received a sentence of 16 years and 8 months, with transactional immunity for the other eight. The courts describe her pleas differently: the California Supreme Court wrote first degree, the Nevada Supreme Court and the Ninth Circuit second degree. At the Nevada trial the judge refused Gallego’s request for psychological testing of her, and the Ninth Circuit noted that she had faced a withering cross-examination that brought her to tears at least once and that the jury knew of her bargain.
Forensic evidence supported her on the two killings that were never charged: Kippi Vaught and Rhonda Scheffler, taken in Sacramento in September 1978. Ballistic evidence pointed to a single weapon, fibers on Scheffler’s clothing matched the carpet of Gallego’s van, and forensic evidence matched his blood type. Both of his trials admitted those two deaths as evidence of uncharged crimes: in California to show intent and motive and to rebut a claim of diminished capacity, in Nevada to show a common scheme or plan. The same California jury, at the penalty phase, heard of two further killings, of Linda Aguilar and Virginia Mochel, in which no charge was brought. DNA reached two of the other cases much later. In 2000, nearly 21 years after 1979, the Lassen County Sheriff’s Office announced that DNA tests had confirmed the identities of the two Sparks, Nevada, girls Williams had implicated him in; the district attorney had not decided whether to file charges, and the Associated Press reported at Gallego’s death that he was never tried for those deaths.
The California jury returned a death verdict after about two and a half hours at the penalty phase, where a clinical neuropsychologist testified that the right frontal lobe of Gallego’s brain was damaged, and the prosecution presented an escape plot supported by a handwriting expert who testified that Gallego wrote a torn note. A Mississippi lawyer testified that he had represented Gallego’s father in a murder case, and that the father had been executed in 1955; the Mississippi Department of Archives and History records that a convicted murderer named Gerald Gallego became in March 1955 the first person executed under the state’s new procedure. In Nevada the trial was held at Lovelock after jury selection that began on May 14, 1984; Gallego later listed about 23 examples of what he called negative coverage, including a restaurant menu offering "Guilty Porker" pork chops, but the Nevada Supreme Court and the federal courts judged the coverage largely balanced. The convictions and sentence were affirmed in December 1985; the Ninth Circuit set aside the Nevada death sentence on September 4, 1997, because of a misleading clemency instruction; a new jury imposed it again in September 1999, and the Nevada Supreme Court affirmed on May 17, 2001. Gallego died of colon cancer on July 18, 2002, the day after his 56th birthday, at the prison system’s regional medical center in Carson City, while his federal appeals were still open.
The Douglas Clark case turned on a telephone call. On August 11, 1980, a vocational nurse named Carol Bundy telephoned Los Angeles police, confessed that she had killed her former lover, Jack Murray, and named the man she lived with, Douglas Daniel Clark, as the person behind the Sunset Strip killings, in which young women had been killed in Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley that summer. Until that call, the California Supreme Court said, police had not focused on Clark at all. Los Angeles Magazine reported that Clark was arrested at his job at a Burbank plant, where he was a licensed steam engineer, on a separate charge; the court’s account is that he was first taken into custody over the Murray killing and then questioned about the others.
The jury that convicted him heard a case built from small matches. Ballistic evidence tied every killing to a single weapon. A garage Clark had told police he gave up in May 1980 was shown by other evidence to have been in his use through June; stains in it tested positive for blood, and a bootprint matched his black boots. A large ski painting kept there had blood spots matching the blood-type characteristics of Gina Marano, shared by only about one person in 200, an expert testified. Blood in a station wagon he regularly used matched the characteristics of Karen Jones, shared by about one person in 125. Telephone records and the voice identifications of two women tied him to calls. In his apartment, in a filing cabinet, police recovered a newspaper article about the discovery of Exxie Wilson. Bundy testified for the state, and said she had helped him after Wilson’s killing.
Of all the evidence, the blood types now seem the most dated, and the fractions the experts attached to them, one in 200 and one in 125, are the sort of figures a DNA profile would later replace with a number many times larger. The jury convicted Clark of six counts of first-degree murder, for Gina Marano, 15, Cynthia Chandler, 16, Karen Jones, Exxie Wilson, Marnette Comer and an unidentified young woman known as Jane Doe 18, with multiple-murder special circumstances and firearm use true on each count, and of a further count in Wilson’s case. It also convicted him of attempted murder and mayhem over a woman who survived an attack on April 27, 1980, and the California Supreme Court reversed both of those convictions on July 30, 1992, while affirming the murders and the death judgment. On March 16, 1983, the Los Angeles County court imposed six consecutive death sentences. Clark insisted for the rest of his life that Bundy and Murray had committed the killings together. He was not charged with Murray’s death; Bundy pleaded guilty to it. The Ninth Circuit rejected his last appeal on October 10, 2023, and he died of natural causes at an outside medical facility on October 11, 2023, aged 75.
Robert Black was a delivery driver who carried posters for a London firm to towns across Britain and to Northern Ireland. He was convicted of kidnapping and murdering four girls between 1981 and 1986: Jennifer Cardy, 9, in Northern Ireland; Susan Maxwell, 11, on the Scottish border; Caroline Hogg, 5, in Edinburgh; and Sarah Harper, 10, in Leeds. There was no confession and, in Jennifer Cardy’s case, as the detective who reopened it, Raymond Murray, said, no DNA or fingerprint evidence. The cases against Black were circumstantial. They rested on his employer’s records and his own fuel receipts, which placed him on the road near each girl at the time, and on the pattern of his other offenses.
A neighbor ended his run. Black was arrested in Stow, in the Scottish Borders, on July 14, 1990, after a retired sub-postmaster named David Herkes alerted police, and he pleaded guilty to abducting a six-year-old girl there. Tom Wood, later a deputy chief constable of Lothian and Borders Police, said he linked the arrest to the Hogg case at once: "that’s got to be him." Only then did the police see the shape of his past. His teenage convictions, in the old Argyll and Bute police area, had been lost when police and courts were reorganized in the 1960s and 1970s, the former chief superintendent Andrew Watt said in 2011, and when officers checked everyone in Scotland convicted of such offenses Black appeared to have no record at all. "It was a different era," Watt said.
Hector Clark, then assistant chief constable of Northumbria Police, had led the joint inquiry into the Maxwell and Hogg cases since 1983. Incident rooms were set up in Northumberland and at Leith, and the inquiry used early fax machines to send photographs between them. Over the years the inquiry gathered 189,000 witness statements, The Scotsman reported, and Clark was later credited with pioneering the use of new computer systems to manage serious crime cases. After 1990 officers from five forces went through about half a million fuel receipts, expense records and delivery schedules from Black’s employer, and these placed him near the places where the girls had been taken. Gary Copson, a former Metropolitan Police commander, described the fuel receipts as Black’s "souvenir," the record that placed him at the scenes. Detectives spent four years matching the work records to the three murders. "What Hector Clark and his team did, painstakingly, was build a circumstantial case which proved compelling in court," Wood said in 2021. In May 1994, at Newcastle upon Tyne Crown Court, Black was convicted of the kidnapping and murder of Susan Maxwell, Caroline Hogg and Sarah Harper, and of a 1988 offense in Nottingham against a 15-year-old girl who escaped. He received life sentences, reported by the Yorkshire Post as ten in all, with a minimum term of 35 years.
Northern Ireland came last. In June 2002 Detective Superintendent Raymond Murray of the Police Service of Northern Ireland reopened the inquiry into Jennifer Cardy’s murder and led it for nine years. The case depended, he said, on "convincing a jury that this was how it was." Black was brought from Wakefield prison, and the first interview began on May 16, 2005, Jennifer’s birthday. The interviews filled 21 tapes. He was charged on January 22, 2010, and his solicitor said he would contest the charges. At the trial in Armagh the prosecution’s case had two parts. The first was opportunity: a fuel receipt dated August 13, 1981, showed that his fuel card had been used to fill the van he drove on the Northern Ireland run at Coventry, and the company’s wages book showed a bonus of 50 pounds for an Ireland run in the week ending August 14, 1981, though other drivers said such a sum could have been made up from other runs. The second was his past: the jury was told of his earlier crimes as evidence that he was the man who had taken Jennifer, and the prosecution set out thirteen similarities between her case and his others. There were also differences, which the Court of Appeal later set out: Jennifer was taken eight miles from the nearest point of the Newry to Belfast road, she was wearing trousers, and the circumstances differed in other ways. The jury convicted him on October 27, 2011. Mr. Justice Weatherup sentenced him on December 8, 2011, to life with a minimum of 25 years, and the Court of Appeal in Northern Ireland dismissed his appeal on June 27, 2013.
He died at HMP Maghaberry on January 12, 2016, aged 68; an inquest jury recorded cardiac arrest on December 7, 2018. In April 2016 a file of evidence linking him to the 1978 disappearance of a 13-year-old Devon girl, Genette Tate, went to prosecutors, and Devon and Cornwall Police said he would, in all probability, have been charged. He was never convicted of that, or of any other death.
Andrei Chikatilo was a married father of two, a Communist Party member and a former teacher of Russian literature who worked as a supply agent for factories in the Rostov region of southern Russia. Between 1978 and 1990 he killed children, teenagers and young women, most of them near the railway and bus routes linking Shakhty, Novoshakhtinsk, Novocherkassk and Rostov-on-Don. He was charged with 53 murders. The Rostov Regional Court, in a trial that began on April 14, 1992, convicted him of 52 on October 15 of that year and sentenced him to death. In 1993 the Supreme Court of Russia removed nine of those murders from the verdict for lack of proof and upheld the sentence on the rest, so that 43 stand as legally proven. President Boris Yeltsin refused clemency, and he was executed at Novocherkassk prison on February 14, 1994.
The case is remembered as much for the failures of the hunt as for the offender. A man named Aleksandr Kravchenko, 25, was arrested in January 1979 over the killing of a nine-year-old girl, Yelena Zakotnova, in Shakhty in December 1978. He had an alibi, and his wife withdrew it under pressure. Media accounts later reported that he was put in a cell with a violent inmate who beat him, and about three weeks after his arrest he confessed; Amurkhan Yandiev, an investigator who later worked on the Chikatilo case, told TASS in September 2026 that a cellmate had tormented Kravchenko, and that this was why he took the blame. His account changed repeatedly, and he said the confession had been forced out of him. A court first gave him 15 years, the girl’s relatives pressed for a harsher outcome, the case was sent back, and at a retrial he was sentenced to death. His clemency petition ran to 42 pages, the investigator Issa Kostoyev recalled. He was executed on July 5, 1983. Chikatilo confessed to the Zakotnova killing after his arrest in 1990, and the Rostov court included it in his conviction. The Supreme Court of Russia removed it from the verdict in 1993 for insufficient evidence. The killing of Lena Zakotnova therefore stands legally unsolved, and neither man now stands convicted of it. Kravchenko’s conviction was overturned in 1990.
The early investigation went wrong in another way. Investigators assumed the killer was mentally ill and searched psychiatric registers. On September 8, 1983, police arrested a 19-year-old on a psychiatric register, Kostoyev told Lenta.ru, and other detainees included a resident of a boarding home for people with intellectual disabilities. They confessed under pressure, their acquaintances began confessing too, and their accounts contradicted one another. Because so many of the detainees had intellectual disabilities, the file became known as the delo durakov, "the case of the fools." The killings went on while they were in custody. Aleksandr Kuyumdzhi, a former state prosecutor in the Chikatilo case, told Novaya Gazeta in 2005 that twelve people were held in pretrial detention on false charges during the hunt. In Kostoyev’s account, after a colleague reported falsified evidence, a criminal case was begun against Rostov police officers on August 19, 1985, and closed on November 25, 1985, for insufficient evidence.
The forensic evidence that cleared Chikatilo in 1984 became the most debated point in the case. In September 1984 he was detained near the Rostov bus station and investigators had concluded from biological traces on victims that the killer belonged to blood group IV (AB in the Western notation). Chikatilo’s blood was recorded as group II (A). On that basis he was ruled out as the main suspect and released, and after being jailed on a theft charge he was freed within months. The killings went on for six more years. After his arrest in 1990 the discrepancy was explained for years as "paradoxical secretion," the idea that his body fluids showed a different group from his blood, and popular books called it "the Chikatilo phenomenon." Investigators and criminologists have since rejected that explanation. Kostoyev told Lenta.ru that the first expert recorded Chikatilo’s group as II and that later testing confirmed group IV, which makes the first record an error. The Investigative Committee of Russia’s 2019 film made the broader point: without DNA testing, the evidence against him remained weak until he talked.
The search, Operation Lesopolosa, "forest strip," grew into one of the largest in Soviet policing. Peter Conradi reported in The Moscow Times that almost half a million people were questioned and that the operation solved more than 1,000 other crimes, among them 95 murders and 245 rapes. Chikatilo himself carried a card as a volunteer police auxiliary, Lenta.ru reported. Kostoyev also consulted Anatoly Slivko, a convicted killer of seven teenagers held in Novocherkassk prison, without result. Chikatilo was arrested in Novocherkassk on November 20, 1990, after an officer at a railway station wrote down his name. He confessed to 55 murders by the investigators' count in December 1990 and to 56 in most later accounts.
Richard Ramirez was convicted in 1989 of 13 murders in Los Angeles County between June 1984 and August 1985. The press called the unknown intruder the Night Stalker, and through the summer of 1985 people across Southern California shut their windows in the heat and bought locks, guns and guard dogs. Detectives linked the cases through shoe prints, bullets and stolen property, and got a name from a fingerprint taken from a stolen car. On August 30, 1985, they released his photograph, and he was arrested in East Los Angeles on August 31, held by residents who recognized him from the newspaper. In the earliest of the 13, the murder of Jennie Vincow, 79, in June 1984, fingerprints lifted from a window screen were identified as his after his arrest; in other cases Avia shoe prints, a palm print and stolen jewelry sold on to buyers who identified him linked him to the series. A blood sample from the house of Mary Cannon, a widow in her eighties, did not match Ramirez’s blood type, a point the defense later raised. A jury convicted him on all 43 counts on September 20, 1989, and Judge Michael Tynan sentenced him to death on November 7, 1989. The California Supreme Court affirmed on August 7, 2006. He died on death row on June 7, 2013.
DNA came to Ramirez’s story long after the trial, and not in a case he was tried for. Mei Leung was nine when she died in San Francisco on April 10, 1984, and for 25 years her case was unsolved. San Francisco Police Inspector Holly Pera reopened it about five years before 2009 and, with Inspector Joseph Toomey, had the department’s crime laboratory test evidence that had been stored since 1984, before DNA profiling was routine. A criminalist produced a profile from an item that the lab’s DNA technical leader, Matthew Gabriel, called extremely difficult to analyze; police did not say what it was. Searched against the national database, which then held samples from about 1.2 million people, the profile returned a match to Ramirez, then on death row. In October 2009 Pera and Toomey went to San Quentin with a warrant for a fresh sample to confirm it. He cooperated. The San Francisco Examiner reported that the confirming test took about 11 months. No charge was ever filed, and Mei Leung’s death is a killing attributed to him by police on the strength of the DNA evidence, not one of his convictions.
The Examiner also reported that Ramirez was charged in the August 17, 1985, killing of Peter Pan, 66, in San Francisco, in which Pan’s wife was wounded and survived; the case went to a grand jury and was never prosecuted. "We did not have DNA tests or any of the scientific tools we have today," said Frank Falzon, a retired San Francisco Police Department homicide inspector who worked it.
Vasiliy Kulik was a physician, a district therapist and then an emergency ambulance doctor from an academic family in Irkutsk, a married man with two sons. He was arrested on January 17, 1986, his thirtieth birthday, after workers at a student canteen raised the alarm, and the day after his arrest he confessed in writing. In the months that followed investigators tied him to the deaths of seven elderly women and six young children in 1984 and 1985; one of the children died in Kirovograd, in Ukraine. The Irkutsk Regional Court convicted him in 1988 of a series of murders, with other charges, and sentenced him to death. He was executed in Irkutsk on June 26, 1989, though IrCity says some accounts give late December.
By 1985 Irkutsk was full of rumors. NEWS.ru describes talk of kidnapping gangs, sects and a patient who had escaped from a psychiatric hospital. The police, in the usual way of the time, looked first at men with records of offenses against children and at people with mental illness. NEWS.ru says more than ten such men were detained, and one was let go after being seen behaving oddly near a playground on the day a child disappeared. A composite sketch drawn with help from a child witness and from surviving children showed a thin man of about 30 in glasses, a dark coat and a hat, carrying a briefcase. It did not lead police to Kulik. IrCity wrote that it did not look like him, though some later accounts said it did.
The evidence in the file pointed in two directions. In his written confession Kulik declared himself mentally healthy and asked for the harshest punishment, including death. The reports differ on the numbers in it: 13 murders and about 30 other attacks (NEWS.ru, 2026, and Life.ru), 14 murders and 16 other attacks (NEWS.ru, 2025), 13 and about 40 (IrCity), or 14 among about 40 crimes over four years (Russia Beyond). He showed investigators details, IrCity wrote, that only the killer could have known. But NEWS.ru reported in 2025 that his blood type did not match biological traces recovered from one victim, and that the examination was later judged to have been badly done. Kulik soon took the confession back; accounts place the retraction within days, before a trial in March 1987, or at the trial. His new version was that a criminal gang led by a man known as Chibis had blackmailed him into taking the blame for killings the gang had committed. Investigators checked the story and turned up nothing to support it. At trial, NEWS.ru reported, he denied all the killings and admitted only the incident for which he was caught, and in the face of the evidence, according to Life.ru, he finally dropped the gang story and gave a full confession. The conviction and most reports give 13 killings, seven elderly women and six children; two accounts of his confession give 14.
Set side by side, the ten cases show how much weight a pre-DNA inquiry put on a handful of small things, and how much depended on whether they were recorded correctly. In Bucharest a smudged certificate and a count of 83 students were enough. In Rostov a blood group recorded as II when it was IV released a man for six years. In Vitebsk 560,000 handwriting samples caught the right man only after fourteen wrong ones had been convicted on confessions that, by Zerkalo’s account, were beaten out of them. In Irkutsk an examination later judged to have been badly done sat in a file beside a signed confession. In Georgia a prosecutor said plainly that the state had charged only where it had fingerprints and an admission. In Los Angeles the experts offered fractions, one in 200 and one in 125, where a laboratory would later offer a profile. In Britain the evidence against a driver was half a million fuel receipts and a theory about similarity.
Where DNA has been applied since, the results have been mixed. It matched Ramirez to a nine-year-old’s death twenty-five years later but too late for any court. It was ordered in Georgia in 2009 and was still being argued over when Gary was executed in 2018. It identified two girls in Lassen County nearly 21 years after 1979 and charged no one. In Tuscany it has produced a profile belonging to no one yet named. The cases that were solved were solved by other means; the ones that were open are open still. In July 2025 the Genoa Court of Appeal declared inadmissible a request to reopen the conviction of Mario Vanni, who died in 2009, and his family’s lawyers said they would appeal to the Court of Cassation.
• August 1968: First of eight double killings near Florence, Italy; the last is in September 1985.
• 1970 to 1971: Ion Rîmaru’s four killings in Bucharest; he is arrested May 27, 1971.
• 1971 to 1985: Gennady Mikhasevich’s killings in the Vitebsk region; handwriting checks lead to his arrest in late 1985.
• 1977 to 1978: The Columbus, Georgia, killings of older women; Carlton Gary is arrested in 1984.
• 1978 to 1980: The killings in California and Nevada laid to Gerald Gallego; he is convicted of four.
• December 1978: Yelena Zakotnova, 9, is killed in Shakhty; Aleksandr Kravchenko is later executed for the killing (July 5, 1983).
• August 11, 1980: Carol Bundy telephones Los Angeles police and names Douglas Clark.
• 1981 to 1986: Robert Black’s four murders of girls; he is convicted of three in 1994 and the fourth in 2011.
• March 16, 1983: Clark receives six consecutive death sentences.
• 1984: Chikatilo is detained and released after a blood-group result appears to clear him; Vasiliy Kulik’s killings begin in Irkutsk.
• August 31, 1985: Richard Ramirez is arrested in East Los Angeles.
• January 17, 1986: Kulik is arrested in Irkutsk.
• May 1987: Mikhasevich is convicted of 36 murders.
• June 26, 1989: Kulik is executed, per most accounts.
• September 20, 1989: Ramirez is convicted on all 43 counts; death sentence November 7.
• July 14, 1990: Black is arrested in Stow.
• November 20, 1990: Chikatilo is arrested in Novocherkassk.
• October 15, 1992: Chikatilo is convicted of 52 murders; executed February 14, 1994.
• May 1994: Black is convicted of three murders at Newcastle upon Tyne.
• 2009: DNA from stored evidence links Ramirez to the 1984 death of Mei Leung; no charge follows.
• October 27, 2011: Black is convicted of the murder of Jennifer Cardy.
• March 15, 2018: Carlton Gary is executed in Georgia.
• October 11, 2023: Douglas Clark dies in custody.
• July 2025: The Genoa Court of Appeal rules inadmissible a request to reopen Mario Vanni’s conviction.