A trial jury is the one body in a murder case that cannot be hurried, and the record keeps its time only erratically. Some courts and newspapers count days. Some count hours. A few say nothing at all. Nine serial-murder trials follow, ranked by the length of the deliberations as they were reported, and only these nine; nothing here speaks for every such trial anywhere. Where days are reported, the order goes by days; where hours are reported too, both appear; where only hours are reported, the case is placed by them. Guilt-phase and penalty-phase deliberations are kept apart, because they answer different questions.
Wesley Shermantine was tried in Santa Clara County because of heavy publicity around Stockton, in San Joaquin County, where the case began. The trial opened in 2000, and the evidence took about three months, according to the San Mateo Daily Journal. The prosecutor, Testa, told the jury what it would not have: "There are no fingerprints, no eyewitnesses, no smoking gun." No one had seen any of the killings, he said. The case rested instead on tire tracks, on blood that DNA testing tied to two of the victims, Wheeler and Vanderheiden, and on witnesses who described Shermantine’s own words. Testa told the jurors that Shermantine had said to several people that "he had hunted the ultimate kill: humans."
The charges were four counts of first-degree murder: Paul Cavanaugh and Howard King III, in 1984; Chevelle Wheeler, 16, in 1985; and Cyndi Vanderheiden, 25, in 1998. After eight days of deliberation the jury convicted him of all four on February 14, 2001. He sat quietly as the verdicts were read. Relatives of the victims wept, and so did two jurors. His lawyers declined to comment. "This is the verdict, frankly, we expected," Testa said. "But to me, it’s 15 years too late." Outside court he added: "No way would he stop." Vanderheiden’s father said: "I’m glad, from now on, he won’t hurt anybody."
The penalty phase went to a jury of five men and seven women, and it was the second clock. It deliberated for more than four days before returning a verdict of death in March 2001. Testa had said only the day before that he feared a deadlock. Chevelle Wheeler’s mother said of the sentence: "He was a pig from the beginning to even offer it but he got what he deserved." The Department of Corrections received Shermantine from Santa Clara County as a condemned prisoner on May 18, 2001.
Eight days is the longest guilt-phase figure in this group, and it came without a split verdict: all four counts went one way. The sentence was never carried out. Shermantine’s automatic appeal to the California Supreme Court was still open in May 2025, according to the court’s minutes of May 22, 2025, which report no decision. He died at California State Prison, Sacramento, on September 17, 2026, at 60, with no decision reported; the Department of Corrections left the cause of death to the Sacramento County Coroner.
The jury in the first Pennell trial was sequestered at a hotel, and its deliberations ran seven days, "an unofficial record," The Review of the University of Delaware reported in its issue of November 28, 1989.
Pennell, an electrician from Glasgow, Delaware, was tried on three counts of first-degree murder: Shirley Ellis, Catherine DiMauro and Michelle Gordon. On a Thursday, The Review reported, the jury told Judge Gebelein that it had reached a verdict on one count and was deadlocked on the other two. The judge gave the jurors a few minutes to consider whether more time would help. They came back with unanimous verdicts on two of the three counts. WHYY later reported that the verdict arrived on Thanksgiving Day 1989.
The jury convicted Pennell of the first-degree murders of Ellis and DiMauro. It could not agree on the Gordon count, and the judge declared a mistrial on that count. DiMauro’s mother told reporters afterward that she had been determined that God would show the world that this man really had murdered her daughter.
The penalty phase began the next day, with the jury choosing between death and life imprisonment without parole, The Review reported. The jurors could not agree on death, and Pennell received two life sentences. WHYY dates the life sentences to 1990; the date on which they were formally imposed was not reported.
The seven days drew no comment from the Delaware Supreme Court in its two opinions. The court’s treatment of the first trial dealt with three other matters. The prosecutor, Kathleen Jennings, had told Pennell by name in her closing argument that he had murdered the three women; Judge Gebelein struck the remark and told the jury to disregard it, the State later conceded on appeal that the comment was improper, and the court saw no prejudice that required a mistrial, writing, "The case against Pennell was not close." The court also held that testimony about a fifth woman, Margaret Lynn Finner, was admissible only to explain why police had begun their operation. Pennell was never charged with her death, and the court said the evidence did not link him to it. The jury never learned her name or that she had been killed.
The deadlock on death came back into the case in 1991. A grand jury indicted Pennell on two counts of first-degree murder, for Michelle Gordon and Kathleen Meyer. Representing himself, he pleaded nolo contendere, and the court entered guilty findings on October 30, 1991. He waived a jury for sentencing, so no deliberation took place: the Superior Court judge heard the penalty hearing on October 31, 1991, and sentenced him to death for each murder. The Delaware Supreme Court, affirming on February 18, 1992, noted that the earlier jury had deadlocked on death for Ellis and DiMauro, and held that the Gordon and Meyer murders would support a death sentence even without those convictions. Pennell was executed on March 14, 1992, the first execution in Delaware since 1946, according to United Press International.
The Snowtown trial of John Bunting and Robert Wagner opened in the Supreme Court of South Australia on October 16, 2002, before Justice Brian Martin, with Wendy Abraham prosecuting. By the time Justice Martin began his summing up on August 7, 2003, the court had sat for 150 days, 227 witnesses had given evidence and about 11,500 pages of transcript had been typed. The trial had run for 11 months, the longest criminal trial in the state’s history, ABC News reported.
One restriction shaped the long months. The court kept the faces of the accused from the South Australian public for more than four years. Justice Martin lifted the order on June 24, 2003, as the trial entered its eighth month, telling the jury that the court had always been open to the public.
The jury retired after the summing up and deliberated for nearly seven days, more than 40 hours in all, ABC News reported. On September 8, 2003, it convicted Bunting of 11 counts of murder and Wagner of seven, to add to the three murders to which Wagner had already pleaded guilty. It could not reach a verdict on the 12th count, the murder of Suzanne Allen, for either man.
Both men refused to stand when the judge directed them to hear their sentences. Life imprisonment is the mandatory sentence for murder, and each man was sentenced to life on each count that day. Justice Martin told the jury, as he discharged it, that he agreed with the verdicts "entirely," and he excused the jurors from any future jury service.
The sentencing question came later. On October 29, 2003, Justice Martin ruled that neither man should have a non-parole period. He described their crimes as marked by "brutality, depravity and cowardice" and said the two had been "in the business of killing for pleasure" and were "incapable of true rehabilitation." He added that he had kept his description of the crimes plain, because strong words could be used to glorify the men in prison. "If I had the power to make an order that you are never to be released, I would unhesitatingly make that order," he said. The Court of Criminal Appeal dismissed Bunting’s appeal on May 24, 2005; he had represented himself.
The Jennings jury is ranked here on the figure the California Supreme Court recorded, which is partial. The jury began deliberating in June 1986. On June 10 the foreman raised a question about a possible deadlock on one count, and the trial judge answered it without first calling in the lawyers. He told the jurors that a deadlock on one count would not affect the other 23. The jury then deliberated for almost five more days. How long it had deliberated before the question has not been reported.
The panel had a great deal to decide. The charges against Jennings, tried before Judge Mario G. Olmos in Fresno County Superior Court, ran to 24 counts, and the defense had chosen, as a matter of strategy, to withdraw a motion that would have split them into separate trials. The supreme court later called that choice a reasoned tactical decision. The defense had also asked to move the trial out of Fresno County. A defense expert surveyed residents and reported that 72 percent remembered the case; of 423 people called for jury selection, 269 had seen or heard some coverage. The judge denied the motion without prejudice and the defense did not renew it.
The verdicts show how far the jury went in separating one count from another. It convicted Jennings of the first-degree murders of Linda Johnson, Olga Cannon and Jacqueline Frazier and the second-degree murder of Karen Robinson, with other felonies against those four women and three further victims. It acquitted him of the charges concerning one other woman and could not agree on the charges concerning two more. The same jury sustained eight special-circumstance allegations and, at the penalty phase, returned a verdict of death. No length is reported for the penalty deliberation.
On the one point where the deliberations reached the appeal, the court held that the defense had waived any objection to the judge’s unshared answer to the foreman and that the answer stated the law correctly. On April 11, 1991, in People v. Jennings (53 Cal.3d 334), the court vacated two of the multiple-murder special-circumstance findings and otherwise affirmed the guilt and penalty judgments in their entirety. Jennings was awaiting trial on a 1981 Sacramento County murder charge when he died in custody on February 11, 2014, at 73.
The Hennepin County jury that tried Billy Glaze for the murders of three women in 1986 and 1987 deliberated for 35 and a half hours over four days, the Star Tribune reported, and returned verdicts of guilty on charges of first-degree and second-degree murder. Patch, reporting in 2016, gave the date of the verdict as February 10, 1989, and said he received three consecutive life sentences. The victims were Kathleen Bullman, 19, Angeline Whitebird Sweet, 26, and Angela Green, 21. Before he was sentenced, Glaze told the judge that the witnesses were liars and that he was not the man who had killed the women, the Star Tribune reported.
This is the case in the group where the length of the deliberation has to be read beside a doubt that was never resolved. In 2014 Glaze’s lawyers, from the Innocence Project of Minnesota, the national Innocence Project in New York and the Minneapolis firm Dorsey & Whitney, asked for a new trial. They said DNA testing of dozens of items had traced nothing to him, and that a profile from two of the three cases matched another man with a sexual-assault conviction, MPR News reported. Hennepin County prosecutors answered that the DNA proved nothing about who killed the women and that the case against Glaze remained overwhelming.
No court decided the question. Glaze died of lung cancer in a Delaware prison on December 22, 2015, aged 72, with the petition pending. A district judge dismissed it as moot in November 2016, and on March 21, 2018, the Minnesota Supreme Court dismissed the appeal. The convictions stand. A jury had spent more than 35 hours on the evidence put before it; the DNA testing was reported in 2014, and no court weighed it.
In Norway the jury that tried Arnfinn Nesset, the former manager of a nursing and care facility in Orkdal, consisted of six women and four men. It deliberated for three days. On a Friday in March 1983, United Press International reported from Trondheim on March 11, it convicted him in the deaths of 22 patients and of taking about $1,800 from patients. Adresseavisen reported that he was convicted of 22 murders and one attempted murder, and acquitted of two further murders. The deaths ran from May 1977 to November 1980, and the victims ranged in age from 67 to 95, UPI reported. They were not named in the news reports of the verdict.
He was sentenced to 21 years in prison, the maximum under Norwegian law, and 10 years of preventive detention. The deliberation followed a long hearing. "After 128 witnesses," the Adresseavisen writer Finn Åldstedt wrote in 2002, "Arnfinn Nesset was as incomprehensible as the killings he was convicted of." The newspaper wrote that the trial did not establish a motive.
The verdict stands, and the doubts about it belong to others, in their own words. In June 2024 the lawyers' magazine Advokatbladet reported that Nesset, at 87, wanted the case taken up again. His first lawyer, Morten Gunnes, told the magazine that the police never called him in and that he was never present at any interrogation. The prosecutor at the trial, Jakhelln, told Advokatbladet that there was no basis for reopening and that the verdict should stand. In autumn 2025 the journalist Simen Sætre published a book arguing that several of Nesset’s confessions were probably false. Nesset died in a care facility in December 2025, aged 89, before any court looked at the case again. In August 2026 the Norwegian Association of Jurists announced that it would give Sætre its rule-of-law prize; NTB reported that it was uncertain whether the case would return to court.
Stephen Port’s trial began at the Central Criminal Court in October 2016 before Mr. Justice Openshaw. Port denied 29 offenses against 12 men, among them four murders. The judge said in his sentencing remarks that the evidence took four full weeks, and that the jury deliberated for about 28 hours. The reports give hours here and no count of days, so Port is placed by the hours alone.
On November 23, 2016, the jury convicted him of the murders of Anthony Walgate, Gabriel Kovari, Daniel Whitworth and Jack Taylor. It also convicted him of 22 offenses in all against 11 men, and cleared him of three counts of rape, ITV News and PinkNews reported. Mr. Justice Openshaw sentenced him on November 25, 2016, to a whole life order for each murder.
A second jury later heard the same four deaths from a different angle, and its work is not a trial. Inquests opened at Barking Town Hall on October 5, 2021, before Her Honour Judge Sarah Munro QC and a jury. After the coroner ruled as a matter of law that the jury could not express views on whether homophobia or prejudice had played a part, she directed it to return conclusions of unlawful killing for all four men. On December 10, 2021, the jury did so and returned narrative conclusions for three of them, finding that failings in the police investigations probably contributed to the deaths of Kovari, Whitworth and Taylor. "We believe there were fundamental failures in these investigations, which were at a basic level," the jurors wrote. The Independent Office for Police Conduct told eight current and former officers on November 16, 2023, that they were under investigation for possible gross misconduct.
The jury of nine men and three women at Ipswich Crown Court deliberated for two days and on Thursday, February 21, 2008, convicted Steve Wright of all five murders: Tania Nicol, Gemma Adams, Anneli Alderton, Annette Nicholls and Paula Clennell. The next day Mr. Justice Gross passed a life sentence with a whole life order, citing premeditation and planning. "It is right you should spend your whole life in prison," he told Wright.
It is the shortest deliberation in the ranking, and the verdict was unanimous on every count. Wright’s second trial never needed a jury at all. On February 2, 2026, the day his trial at the Old Bailey was due to open, he pleaded guilty to the kidnap and murder of Victoria Hall, 17, in 1999, and to an attempted kidnap. Mr. Justice Bennathan sentenced him on February 6, 2026, to life with a minimum term of 40 years.
No length has been reported for the deliberations in the federal trial of Kristen Gilbert, a nurse at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Northampton, so she stands outside the ranking. Opening statements were given on November 20, 2000, ABC News reported. On March 14, 2001, the federal jury in Springfield convicted her of murder in the deaths of four patients, three counts of first-degree murder and one of second-degree, and of two counts reported as attempted murder, and acquitted her on one further attempt count. The government sought the death penalty. On March 26, 2001, the penalty jury did not return a death sentence, and she was sentenced to life in prison without parole, ABC News and CBS News reported. She is held at the Federal Medical Center, Carswell, in Fort Worth, Texas, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons as of October 21, 2026.
Three of the juries ranked here ended with a count they could not resolve: Pennell’s on the Gordon murder, Bunting’s on Suzanne Allen, Jennings’s on the charges concerning two women. In each of those trials the number of counts and the number of defendants or victims was large. Shermantine’s jury, which sat longest, faced four counts and returned four verdicts.
Length did not predict the sentence. The longest guilt deliberation here led to a death verdict that was never carried out. The second-longest jury, in Delaware, could not agree on death, and Pennell received two life sentences; the death sentences came in 1991 from a judge, on different counts. A jury that sat two days convicted on five counts of murder, and the whole life order that followed was passed by a judge. Two of the long deliberations, Glaze’s and Nesset’s, now sit under attributed doubts that no court has tested, and in both the convictions stand.
• March 11, 1983: Nesset’s jury in Trondheim returns its verdict after three days.
• June 1986: the Jennings jury begins deliberating in Fresno County; on June 10 the foreman raises a possible deadlock on one count.
• February 10, 1989: Glaze is convicted in Minneapolis after 35 and a half hours of deliberation.
• November 1989: the Pennell jury, sequestered for seven days, returns verdicts on two of three counts on Thanksgiving Day.
• April 11, 1991: the California Supreme Court affirms the Jennings judgments with two special-circumstance findings vacated.
• October 30 and 31, 1991: Pennell’s pleas and guilty findings are entered; the Superior Court judge sentences him to death.
• February 18, 1992: the Delaware Supreme Court affirms; March 14, 1992: Pennell is executed.
• November 20, 2000: opening statements in the Gilbert trial.
• February 14, 2001: the Shermantine jury returns four verdicts after eight days; March 2001: his penalty jury, after more than four days, returns a verdict of death.
• March 14 and 26, 2001: Gilbert is convicted; the penalty jury does not return a death sentence.
• October 16, 2002: the Bunting and Wagner trial opens in Adelaide.
• June 24, 2003: the order on the accused’s images is lifted; August 7, 2003: the summing up begins.
• September 8, 2003: Bunting is convicted of 11 murders after nearly seven days; October 29, 2003: no non-parole period is fixed.
• May 24, 2005: Bunting’s appeal is dismissed.
• February 21 and 22, 2008: Wright is convicted after two days and given a whole life order.
• February 11, 2014: Jennings dies in custody.
• December 22, 2015: Glaze dies in prison; November 2016: his petition is dismissed as moot; March 21, 2018: the Minnesota Supreme Court dismisses the appeal.
• November 23 and 25, 2016: Port is convicted after about 28 hours of deliberation and sentenced.
• December 10, 2021: the inquest jury returns its conclusions on the four deaths.
• December 2025: Nesset dies; February 2 and 6, 2026: Wright pleads guilty and is sentenced; September 17, 2026: Shermantine dies.