A series of killings has a calendar, and the calendar is rarely even. Some run as a fever, with several deaths in a month. Others leave a hole of years in the middle, and the hole is what investigators, reporters and families spend decades arguing about. Was the killer in prison? Frightened? Content? Dead? Or simply not yet connected to the deaths on either side of the silence?
The nine cases that follow are ranked by one measure: the interval between two killings in the same series, taken from the dates in the court record and the published accounts. The measure is blunt. Many of those dates are the day a death came to light, not the day it happened, and in several cases the accounts disagree by a month or a year. Where anyone has offered a reason for a pause, it is a theory, not a fact.
The widest interval in the record belongs to a factory worker from Cheektowaga, a suburb east of Buffalo, New York. Altemio Sanchez pleaded guilty on May 16, 2007, to three counts of second-degree murder: Linda Yalem, a 22-year-old University at Buffalo sophomore whose death came to light in Amherst on September 30, 1990; Majane Mazur, 32, of Buffalo, killed in 1992; and Joan Diver, 45, of Clarence, whose death came to light in Newstead on October 1, 2006. Justice Christopher Burns sentenced him on August 14, 2007, to 75 years to life, the maximum.
Between Mazur and Diver lie about fourteen years. A 2009 account published by Union College, about a state police analyst who worked the case, describes the Buffalo series as resurfacing in 2006 after a gap of 12 years, a figure that counts from a later starting point than the 1992 killing. What that later starting point was has not been reported, and no explanation from Sanchez for the silence is on record.
What they do record is how ordinary the silence looked from outside. In November 1990, after a co-worker reported having seen him, police interviewed Sanchez and took his fingerprints, but did not ask for a DNA sample, and he was not pursued, The Spectrum, the student newspaper at Buffalo, reported in 2020. Union College’s account says old police files recorded his workplace, his working hours and physical descriptions of him. The university began an annual 5K race in Linda Yalem’s memory, with entry fees funding personal safety programs. After his arrest the university’s vice president for student affairs, Dennis Black, said a records check showed that Sanchez had run in the 1996 race.
The pause also overlapped with an injustice. Anthony Capozzi, a Buffalo man with schizophrenia, was arrested on September 13, 1985, and convicted in 1987 of two assaults from 1984 in Delaware Park. He spent about 22 years in custody. When a joint task force matched Sanchez’s DNA, taken from tableware at a restaurant, to the series, the same testing cleared Capozzi, and a court vacated his convictions in April 2007. Prosecutors said DNA tied Sanchez to at least eight sexual assaults in the Buffalo area, none of them chargeable because New York’s five-year limit had run. His lawyer later said, according to WBFO, that he had admitted a dozen or more.
Sanchez was arrested in Buffalo on January 15, 2007, aged 48. He died on September 22, 2023, aged 65, at Millard Fillmore Suburban Hospital after becoming unresponsive in a cell at Wende Correctional Facility. The Commission of Correction’s final report gave the manner of death as suicide.
Lonnie Franklin Jr. holds the second place by a margin no one has settled. After the death of 18-year-old Alicia Alexander, which came to light in South Los Angeles on September 11, 1988, and the shooting of a 30-year-old woman who survived in November of that year, no killing was publicly linked to the same weapon for more than 13 years. The next convicted death, that of Princess Berthomieux, 15, came to light in Inglewood on March 9, 2002. Accounts of the span give it as 13 or 14 years.
The span gave the series its name. LA Weekly’s crime reporter Christine Pelisek and her editor, Jill Stewart, called the unknown man the "Grim Sleeper" in August 2008 for the apparent gap, the Columbia Journalism Review reported in 2010. The police had resisted going public, fearing they would scare him off.
By then investigators had come to doubt that he had slept at all. Prosecutors argued at the penalty phase of his 2016 trial that a death in December 2000, that of 43-year-old Georgia Mae Thomas, fell inside the supposed quiet, though he was never charged with it. They said the same of the death of Inez Warren in August 1988 and of an earlier one, Sharon Dismuke in January 1984, none of them charged. The defense disputed all three. The jury convicted him only of the ten killings and one attempted murder.
There was also a theory, offered by Police Chief Charlie Beck in 2010, that the near miss of November 1988 had affected Franklin’s behavior, since police had searched a house three doors from Franklin’s in 1988 after the woman who survived named it. Beck said investigators would need a confession to be certain, and none came.
What ended the silence on paper was DNA. In 2004 cold-case work matched saliva from one 1987 victim to the 2002 and 2003 deaths, and in 2007 laboratory results connected one man’s profile to the cases of 2002, 2003 and 2007 and to the 1980s killings. A familial search of the state’s data bank, run in 2010, pointed to a relative, and Franklin was arrested on July 7, 2010, aged 57. A Los Angeles County jury convicted him on May 5, 2016, a jury recommended death on June 6, and Judge Kathleen Kennedy sentenced him on August 10, 2016. He died at San Quentin State Prison on March 28, 2020, with his automatic appeal pending.
Alexander Pichushkin, a Moscow store worker, is serving life for 48 murders. The court record puts his first killing on July 27, 1992, in Bitsa Park, the large forest park in the southwest of the city beside the Zyuzino district where he grew up. The victim, Mikhail Odiychuk, was a former schoolmate. The case was proven at trial in 2007 without a body, on Pichushkin’s own identification of a photograph, a 1992 notice in Moskovsky Komsomolets about the search for the young man, and a certificate from the vocational school showing the two had studied together. Police questioned Odiychuk’s acquaintances in 1992, and the Associated Press reported that no charges followed.
The next killing in the record came on May 17, 2001, when the 360.ru news site says the main series began with a man of 52. That is a pause of close to nine years. By the end of 2001, according to the same account of prosecutors' evidence, he had killed 11 people, six of them in one month. After a pause of nearly nine years came a pace of killing that no earlier year had matched.
No reason for the nine years is on record. 360.ru reported that he told investigators he had begun after following the trial of Andrei Chikatilo, the Rostov killer convicted in 1992 of 52 murders, and that he later compared the first killing to first love. Radio Svoboda reported in June 2006, days after his arrest, that police believed he had planned 64 killings, one for every square on a chessboard.
A jury at the Moscow City Court convicted him on October 24, 2007, of 48 murders and three attempted murders. He was sentenced to life on October 29, and the Supreme Court of Russia upheld the sentence on February 14, 2008. Investigators who checked 11 further killings he described reported in February 2008 that he was not linked to them. In April 2025 the penal service said he was ready to confess to 11 more unsolved killings in a district of Moscow, and no new charge had been reported by October 2026. In August 2026 he took a refused request for transfer from the Arctic colony to the Supreme Court, as Vesti reported.
Dennis Rader, a municipal code officer and church council president in Park City, Kansas, killed 10 people in and around Wichita between January 1974 and January 1991. His quietest stretch came in the middle. Nancy Fox, 25, was killed on December 8, 1977. Marine Hedge, 53, a neighbor in Park City, was killed in April 1985. Between them lie seven years and four months, the longest silence in a series that otherwise ran in clusters: four members of one family in January 1974, a young woman in April of that year, a woman in March 1977, then Fox nine months later.
The silence was not complete. Rader’s letters kept coming for a while: a poem about the 1977 death reached The Wichita Eagle on January 31, 1978, and a letter claiming seven lives reached a television station on February 10, asking how many people he had to kill before he got his name in the paper. In 1984 the Wichita police set up a secret unit that spent about three years on the case, and in 1988 a widow received a letter signed BTK, which did not claim the killing in her family and which experts disagreed about.
After Hedge came Vicki Wegerle, 28, in September 1986, and Dolores Davis, 62, in January 1991. Rader told police he had become "lazy" in his last years, because his last two killings were so close to his own residence in Park City. "This is not really good serial killer business," he said. The remark explains the choices he made at the end, not the silence in the middle. No one has recorded why so long an interval separates Fox from Hedge.
The longer silence, after 1991, is of a different kind. The Eagle did not mention BTK at all in 1993, 1995 or 1996. Then, on March 19, 2004, a letter reached the paper with a photocopy of Vicki Wegerle’s driver’s license and photographs, and in the months that followed he sent police and television stations package after package. A floppy disk he mailed in February 2005 was traced to his church. He was arrested on February 25, 2005, pleaded guilty on June 27, and was sentenced on August 18 to 10 consecutive life terms. Kansas had no death penalty for crimes committed from 1972 to 1994.
In Bolzano, the capital of South Tyrol in northern Italy, Marcella Casagrande, a student of 15 or 16, was killed on January 3, 1985. Anna Maria Cipolletti, 41, a former teacher, was killed the same year. Then nothing, until Renate Rauch, 24, on the night of January 7, 1992, according to L’Unità's report of the verdict. The interval is just under seven years from Cipolletti, with one complication: L’Unità's report of August 1992, written days after the arrest, said she was killed a year after Marcella Casagrande, which would shorten the span by a year. The 1994 report gave 1985.
The only explanation on record comes from the same paper. L’Unità reported at the time of the verdict that Bergamo’s father had taken away his large collection of knives after the 1985 killing, and that the next death came only in 1992. The paper did not say how the father came to do so or what he knew, and no court tested the point.
Two more followed in 1992: Renate Troger, 19, from Bressanone, in March, and Marika Zorzi, 19, from Laives, on the night of August 5 to 6. Bergamo was arrested in Bolzano on August 6, 1992, which was his 26th birthday, ANSA noted. He admitted the Zorzi killing at once, L’Unità reported on August 7, and in the end three of the five. He denied the deaths of Cipolletti and Troger.
On March 8, 1994, the Bolzano Court of Assizes ruled him sane and convicted him of all five murders, then sentenced him, aged 28, to life. He was convicted of the two he had denied because the method matched the three he admitted, L’Unità reported. In a 2014 interview with the Trento daily L’Adige, a police officer who took part in the arrest said it had brought relief to a city that had lived for years in fear. Bergamo died in custody on October 17, 2017, aged 51, ANSA reported; Il Fatto Quotidiano named the prison as Bollate and the date as October 16.
Andrey Yezhov was a 53-year-old plumber in Kashira, in Moscow Oblast, when investigators detained him in June 2020. He was never tried, and every date that follows is an attribution reported in the Russian press, not a finding. Within days, the reports said, he had admitted killings of women in the Kashira and Stupino districts going back to 2010.
The reports place the series in bursts. Moskovsky Komsomolets dated the first killing to February 2010, of a 79-year-old woman in Kashira, with no witnesses and no camera footage. Then came April 2013, which the reports describe differently: Moskovsky Komsomolets wrote of a 95-year-old woman killed and a second woman of about 60 targeted in the Stupino district, while Izvestia and Life.ru described an elderly woman who survived the encounter and died in hospital two to three weeks later. An autumn 2015 killing of a woman between 35 and 40 followed, in the Moscow Oblast reports. Then, Izvestia told its readers, investigators knew of no crimes from 2015 until 2019.
That is a gap of about four years, and the only reason on record is the investigators' own, relayed by Moskovsky Komsomolets: fear of being caught, followed by a feeling that he would not be punished. Yezhov offered a different account of the rhythm, quoted by Life.ru and the 360 channel. He said the urge came over him periodically, "once every six months, once a year", and that he chose women at random.
Two more elderly women were killed in Kashira in the autumn of 2019, in cases he admitted on June 26, 2020. Rambler News gave their ages as 69 and 79, Izvestia gave the dates as September and October 2019, and Moskovsky Komsomolets gave a 70-year-old killed in November and a 75-year-old in December. The last case, an 88-year-old woman, dated to the night of June 8, 2020. Camera footage near her address, in which a man discarded her papers, brought police to him; Life.ru reported he was identified on June 10. A court remanded him in custody on June 13.
He died on the morning of July 6, 2020, in a single cell at pretrial detention center No. 11 in Noginsk. Preliminary findings pointed to mechanical asphyxia, and the version reported later that month was suicide. Moskovsky Komsomolets also reported that investigators had been about to check all the men of the Kashira district. No court heard any of the evidence, and the shorter gaps between the 2019 and 2020 cases, like the longer ones before, rest on press accounts that conflict.
Rex Heuermann, a Manhattan architect who lived in Massapequa Park on Long Island’s South Shore, stood in a Riverhead courtroom on April 8, 2026, and pleaded guilty to murdering seven women and admitted an eighth killing for which he was never charged. The dates attached to the women are the least settled of any of the nine. Most come from the day a death came to light, and several of the women were not identified for decades.
By those dates, Sandra Costilla, 28, came to light in North Sea, in the Town of Southampton, on November 20, 1993, and for three decades was not connected with the cases near Gilgo Beach. Karen Vergata, 34, came to light on Fire Island in April 1996, though the record places her death earlier that year; she was not identified until 2022. Valerie Mack, 24, came to light in Manorville on November 19, 2000, and was identified in 2020. Jessica Taylor, 20, came to light in Manorville on July 26, 2003. Then comes the longest interval in the series: nearly four years to July 2007, when the prosecution’s bail application dates the case of Maureen Brainard-Barnes, 25. Melissa Barthelemy, 24, follows in July 2009, Megan Waterman, 22, in June 2010 and Amber Lynn Costello, 27, in September 2010.
Read end to end, the intervals shorten as the series goes on: about two years and three months from Costilla to Vergata, four years to Mack, two years and eight months to Taylor, four more to Brainard-Barnes, two to Barthelemy, eleven months to Waterman, three to Costello. Four of the deaths came to light together in December 2010, and for more than a decade nobody was charged. No one has explained why the 1990s and early 2000s were slower than 2009 and 2010. Prosecutors did say that his family was away at the times of several of the killings, and both they and the family’s lawyer said that no member of the family knew of or took part in the crimes.
A task force formed in 2022 reached Heuermann within weeks, through a pickup truck a witness had described in 2010. He was arrested in Midtown Manhattan on the evening of July 13, 2023, and charged in stages: first with the deaths of three women, then more in January and June 2024, with the Mack indictment announced in December 2024. A hair recovered in 1993 and tested in February 2024 put Costilla in the case, and pushed its known span back to 1993, as the Trinidad Express reported. On June 17, 2026, Judge Timothy Mazzei sentenced him to three consecutive terms of life without parole and four consecutive terms of 25 years to life. He waived his right to appeal and was assigned to Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, the state confirmed in August 2026.
Kang Ho-sun, a masseur and livestock farmer from Ansan in South Korea, was sentenced to death on April 22, 2009, for ten murders. Two of the women were his fourth wife and her mother, who died in a fire in Ansan on October 30, 2005, which the court held he set and which he denied setting. The other eight were women he did not know, killed between September 2006 and December 2008 in Jeongseon County and in cities in southwestern Gyeonggi Province.
His calendar has two silences. The first, from the fire in October 2005 to the first of the eight, a 23-year-old woman surnamed Yoon, in Jeongseon in September 2006, lasted about eleven months. Kang gave his own account to police, quoted by the Korea JoongAng Daily: "I wandered around the nation for a year, and then I began feeling the urge to kill whenever I saw a woman." Prosecutors said he had spent time that year in Gangwon Province doing beekeeping work.
The second silence is the one that matters most. Five women died in Gyeonggi between December 13, 2006, and January 7, 2007, among them a 52-year-old, a 37-year-old and a 20-year-old university student. Then came what the Korea JoongAng Daily called a gap of 22 months. In November 2008 a 48-year-old woman went missing. On December 19, 2008, a 21-year-old university student went missing in Gunpo. Her case led to his arrest.
No reason for the 22 months has been reported, and Kang’s own statement covers only the earlier pause. Police said that from 2006 he kept cattle and pigs on a farm in Suwon he ran with his brother, and that he had collected insurance money since 1999; neither fact was offered as an explanation. Police arrested him in late January 2009. The Ansan Branch of the Suwon District Court sentenced him, the Seoul High Court upheld the sentence on July 23, 2009, and no appeal reached the Supreme Court in time. In October 2026 he was still on death row at the Seoul Detention Center. South Korea has not carried out an execution since December 30, 1997.
The shortest gap in this set belongs to the youngest man in it. Kyriakos Papachronis was 22 and a reserve officer with a commando unit at Drama in northern Greece when he was arrested on December 13, 1982. The Greek press called him the Dragon of Drama. A military court in Thessaloniki convicted him in June 1983 of two homicides, with other charges including attempted homicides and bombings.
The homicides lie eleven months apart. Athens Voice and a 2024 Proto Thema profile place the first on September 9, 1981, in Xanthi, the town where he was born, naming the victim as Georgia Theocharidou and giving her age as 46 in one account and 56 in the other; a list of offenses printed by Parapolitika puts it in Drama on September 5. The second victim, Anastasia Alexandridou, a student of 20 or 22, was killed in Thessaloniki on the evening of August 15, 1982.
Between them, crimes against women who survived were reported in Drama in December 1981 and on January 15, 1982. Athens Voice wrote that no further such crimes were reported until the summer of 1982. After the August killing they came again, on September 21, October 1, October 25 and December 8. No reason for the pause of 1982 has been reported. Papachronis’s own statements, as Proto Thema reported them, were that he hated women and that, had he not been caught, he would have gone on.
He was tried from June 14 to 18, 1983, by military justice because he was a serving officer, and four psychiatrists who had examined him judged him mentally sound. He was sentenced twice to death; the sentences were upheld in July 1984 and later commuted to life. He was released under restrictive conditions on December 8, 2004, after a little more than 21 years in custody. A stroke in January 2020 left him disabled, and Proto Thema reported in March 2024 that he lived quietly with his wife.
Ranked by the longest interval between two killings, the order is Sanchez at about fourteen years, Franklin at 13 or 14, Pichushkin at nearly nine, Rader at seven years and four months, Bergamo at close to seven, Yezhov at about four, Heuermann at nearly four, Kang at 22 months and Papachronis at eleven. Almost none of those figures is as clean as it looks. Each depends on a death the record dates by when it was recognized, or on a death nobody had yet connected to the rest.
That last problem recurs. Franklin’s silence was in part a product of what the police knew: investigators and prosecutors came to argue that it was never a silence. Heuermann’s span grew by three decades the day a hair from 1993 was tested. Yezhov’s four years of quiet are the investigators' own count of what they could attribute to him. Where a source did offer a reason for a pause, it was one a man or a paper supplied after the fact: fear, a father’s decision, an urge that came once a year, a near miss in 1988.
Linda Yalem’s friends and classmates ran a memorial race every September for years. Records later showed that Sanchez ran in the one held in 1996.
• December 8, 1977: Nancy Fox is killed in Wichita (Rader).
• January 1984 to August 1988: three deaths later presented by prosecutors as part of Franklin’s series, never charged.
• January 3, 1985: Marcella Casagrande is killed in Bolzano (Bergamo).
• 1985: Anna Maria Cipolletti is killed in Bolzano (Bergamo; one report dates it a year later).
• April 1985: Marine Hedge is killed in Park City, seven years and four months after Fox (Rader).
• September 13, 1985: Anthony Capozzi is arrested in Buffalo for the Delaware Park assaults of 1984 (Sanchez series).
• September 11, 1988: the death of Alicia Alexander, 18, comes to light in South Los Angeles (Franklin).
• November 1988: a woman, 30, is attacked in South Los Angeles and survives (Franklin).
• September 30, 1990: Linda Yalem’s death comes to light in Amherst, New York (Sanchez).
• January 1991: Dolores Davis is killed near Park City (Rader).
• January 7, 1992: Renate Rauch is killed in Bolzano (Bergamo).
• July 27, 1992: the first killing in the court record against Pichushkin, in Bitsa Park, Moscow.
• August 6, 1992: Bergamo is arrested in Bolzano.
• 1992: Majane Mazur is killed in Buffalo (Sanchez).
• November 20, 1993: Sandra Costilla’s death comes to light in North Sea, New York (Heuermann).
• April 1996: Karen Vergata’s death comes to light on Fire Island (Heuermann).
• May 17, 2001: the main series begins in Bitsa Park (Pichushkin).
• March 9, 2002: Princess Berthomieux’s death comes to light in Inglewood (Franklin).
• September 7, 2006 to January 7, 2007: six women are killed in Jeongseon County and Gyeonggi Province (Kang).
• October 1, 2006: Joan Diver’s death comes to light in Newstead (Sanchez).
• January 15, 2007: Sanchez is arrested in Buffalo.
• November 2008: the next case, a 48-year-old woman in Gyeonggi Province (Kang).
• January 2009: Kang is arrested.
• February 2010: first killing attributed to Yezhov, in Kashira.
• July 7, 2010: Franklin is arrested.
• September 2010: Amber Lynn Costello’s death is dated (Heuermann).
• April 8, 2026: Heuermann pleads guilty in Riverhead.
• June 17, 2026: Heuermann is sentenced.