In January 1984, when Judge Ronald M. George finally sent Angelo Buono Jr. to prison, United Press International filed a story that called the case the longest criminal trial in United States history. The jury had been chosen in the winter of 1981 and 1982. Its members had spent two years of their lives in a courtroom in downtown Los Angeles.
Length in a murder trial is rarely an accident. It is the sum of a few hard facts: how many deaths the prosecution has chosen to charge, how much of its case rests on a single witness, how long it takes to find twelve people who have not already made up their minds, and how much time the law allows between arrest and the first word to a jury. Nine of the longest serial murder prosecutions of the past half century, in four countries, and one much shorter trial in a fifth, show how those facts combine. No court or record office keeps a common ledger, so they cannot be ranked, and even the people who measured them used different clocks. Some counted days in session. Some counted months on the calendar. Some counted the years between handcuffs and verdict, which is a different kind of length altogether.
Buono and his younger cousin, Kenneth Bianchi, were charged over the deaths of ten women and girls in Los Angeles County between October 1977 and February 1978. Buono was arrested in Glendale on October 19, 1979, within about half an hour of Bianchi’s guilty plea in Washington, according to HistoryLink, and was charged with 24 felonies, ten of them murder. Three days later Bianchi pleaded guilty in Los Angeles to five of the murders and agreed to testify against him.
That bargain set the length of everything that followed. The preliminary hearing and pretrial proceedings took about two years. Bianchi, as a witness, was erratic. He gave contradictory statements, recanted his testimony against Buono and then took back the recantations, HistoryLink reported. In 1981, a couple of months before trial, the Los Angeles district attorney’s office moved to dismiss every murder count, having concluded that Bianchi would not survive cross-examination. Judge George, newly assigned to the case, refused. The district attorney declared a conflict and stepped aside, and the state attorney general, George Deukmejian, sent two deputies, Roger W. Boren and Michael Nash, to try it. A 1985 UPI review of Darcy O’Brien’s book on the case put the episode in a sentence: the district attorney sought to drop all charges, and the judge refused.
The trial opened on November 16, 1981. Jury selection alone took about three months. Judge George later wrote that the case had been expected to take about a year; it took two. In Boren’s account the state spent about four months on its own case before Bianchi took the stand, and Bianchi then spent about six months as a witness, beginning in June 1982. In all the prosecution called about 250 witnesses and offered more than 1,000 exhibits, according to The Appellate Strategist, a legal history blog written by the attorney Kirk Jenkins.
The jury began deliberating on October 20, 1983, and was sequestered for the first time. Its first verdict, at the end of October, was guilty of the murder of Lauren Wagner. More followed over several days; the last, on the count for Cindy Hudspeth, was delayed about a week while jurors studied photographs of her car. The jury convicted Buono of nine murders. It did not convict him in the death of Yolanda Washington, the count on which, Boren explained, jurors had heard only Bianchi’s account. On November 18 the jury chose life without parole over death. On January 9, 1984, Judge George imposed nine concurrent life terms and ruled that Bianchi had not testified truthfully and completely, as his bargain required. Buono died at Calipatria State Prison on September 21, 2002.
Two former participants later wrote the trial’s history themselves. In 2000 the Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review published a foreword by George, by then chief justice of California, and a long account by Boren, by then a justice of the Court of Appeal.
Richard Ramirez was taken into custody in East Los Angeles on August 31, 1985, and arraigned on 68 felony counts, including 14 murders. He was not sentenced until November 7, 1989. Almost none of that time was idle.
The preliminary hearing took place in the spring of 1986. On July 21, 1986, the defense moved to take the trial out of Los Angeles, and the hearing on that motion alone lasted about two months, during which the judge watched hours of videotaped news coverage. A defense survey of 300 eligible jurors, conducted in late November 1986, reported that 94.3 percent had heard of the case and 51.7 percent believed he was responsible. On January 9, 1987, the court denied the motion. It called the coverage "saturation" but held that a county the size of Los Angeles could still supply a fair jury, the California Supreme Court later recounted. The defense also asked for eight separate trials and lost. The defense then challenged the jury pool itself for underrepresenting Hispanic residents; the court denied that motion on May 31, 1988, after the jury commissioner revised the master list.
Jury selection began on July 21, 1988. Of the 12 jurors finally seated, one had never heard of the case, and the rest said they knew it only in general terms and had formed no opinion. The trial that followed was long enough that the court appointed a third defense lawyer, Roy Clark, partway through the prosecution’s case, on March 6, 1989. The Deseret News called it a 16-month trial.
The jury had been deliberating for 13 days when one of its members, Phyllis Singletary, was killed; her boyfriend took his own life the next day. Judge Michael Tynan replaced her with an alternate and told the panel, "We must get on with the task life has given us." On September 20, 1989, the jury convicted Ramirez on all 43 counts, among them 12 counts of first-degree murder and one of second-degree murder. It returned a death verdict a week later. The automatic appeal took nearly 17 more years. The California Supreme Court affirmed the judgment on August 7, 2006, and Ramirez died on death row on June 7, 2013, with the sentence never carried out.
Randy Kraft was arrested in Orange County on May 14, 1983. The case against him grew to 19 counts, 16 of them first-degree murder, covering young men who died across Southern California between 1972 and 1983. His lawyers asked the court to try the murders separately. A psychology professor testified for the defense that joining many counts makes a conviction more likely, because jurors begin to judge character rather than evidence. The trial court refused, and the California Supreme Court later upheld that ruling, finding that most of the evidence would have been admissible on every count anyway.
The trial began about five years after the arrest, Vice reported in 2014. Judge Donald A. McCartin presided. Orange Coast magazine reported in 2013 that the defense spent close to 5.5 million dollars on investigators and experts, that the record ran to some 38,000 pages, and that the jurors spent most of 11 months on the case. The jury convicted Kraft of all 16 murders in May 1989 and returned a death verdict on August 11, the Long Beach Post reported. Judge McCartin pronounced sentence on November 29, 1989.
The appeal was built on the same scale. Kraft waited more than two years for an appellate lawyer to be appointed, according to Orange Coast. That lawyer, Richard Power, filed an opening brief of about 700 pages. "This was a huge case," he told Vice. The California Supreme Court affirmed the judgment on August 10, 2000, in an opinion that began its conclusion, "We affirm the judgment in its entirety." Federal habeas proceedings began in 2001 and were still unresolved when Orange Coast wrote about him in 2013. The juror who had been foreman told the magazine that Kraft "has lived longer in prison than the whole lives of most of the kids that he killed." He was still under sentence of death on the Habeas Corpus Resource Center’s list updated June 1, 2026, in a state where Governor Gavin Newsom halted executions in March 2019.
The deaths that came to light in Snowtown, South Australia, in May 1999 produced one indictment, two defendants and a trial that the ABC described as the longest criminal trial in the state’s history. John Justin Bunting faced 12 counts of murder. Robert Joe Wagner had already pleaded guilty to three murders and went to trial on further counts. A third man, James Vlassakis, had pleaded guilty to four murders in June 2001 and undertaken to give evidence against them; he became the key prosecution witness.
Justice Brian Martin knew from the start what he was facing. Because the trial was expected to run so long, he swore in 15 jurors instead of the usual 12, Agence France-Presse reported, and he warned them about the evidence they would hear. Three dropped out along the way. The twelve who remained returned the verdicts.
The trial opened in the Supreme Court of South Australia in Adelaide on October 16, 2002. 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 ABC reported. The trial cost about 15 million Australian dollars, and the state government set aside 21 million to cover it and the separate prosecution of a fourth man, Mark Haydon.
The jury deliberated for nearly seven days, more than 40 hours in all. On September 8, 2003, it convicted Bunting of 11 murders and Wagner of seven, which with his pleas brought his total to ten. It could not agree on the twelfth count, the death of Suzanne Allen, and that charge was formally dropped in 2007. Both men were sentenced to life. On October 29, 2003, Justice Martin declined to fix a non-parole period for either of them.
The length itself became the appeal. The grounds that the Court of Criminal Appeal considered, the ABC reported, centered on the length and complexity of the trial. Bunting argued his own case. On May 24, 2005, the court, headed by Chief Justice John Doyle, dismissed both appeals. In 2019 Justice Greg Parker refused Wagner’s application for a non-parole period. Reports as recent as October 8, 2026, describe both men as serving life without parole.
Robert William Pickton was charged on February 22, 2002, with two counts of first-degree murder. By October 2002 there were 15 counts, and by May 2005 there were 27, according to the British Columbia attorney general’s guide to the case. The preliminary hearing alone ran from January to July 2003 in Port Coquitlam. One count, concerning a woman who had never been identified, was ruled a nullity in March 2006, leaving 26.
Then Justice James Williams of the B.C. Supreme Court did something that shaped the length of the case more than any other ruling. On August 9, 2006, he divided the indictment. Trying all 26 counts together, he held, would place an unreasonable burden on a jury, given the expected length of the trial, the volume and nature of the evidence and the complexity of the law, the CBC reported. Six counts would go first. The relatives of the other 20 women asked the obvious question, and one shelter worker put it aloud: "What about the other 20?"
Even six counts required months. Jury selection, expected to draw on about 3,500 people, was completed on December 12, 2006. The trial opened in New Westminster on January 22, 2007. The Crown rested on August 13 and the defense on October 16. In all, 98 Crown witnesses and 30 defense witnesses testified, according to the attorney general’s guide. The jury, seven men and five women, deliberated over several days, and paused while the judge answered a question it had sent him and amended part of his instructions. On December 9, 2007, it acquitted Pickton of first-degree murder and convicted him of second-degree murder on all six counts. Justice Williams imposed life with no parole eligibility for 25 years, the maximum.
The appeal reached the Supreme Court of Canada, which dismissed it on July 30, 2010. Five days later, on August 4, 2010, the Crown stayed the 20 remaining murder charges, CTV reported. The second trial that the families had waited for was never held. Pickton died in custody on May 31, 2024, Correctional Service Canada announced.
Iouri Mikhel and Jurijus Kadamovas were tried together in the federal court in Los Angeles over the abduction and killing of five people between October 2001 and January 2002. The charges were brought under the Hostage Taking Act. The case was capital from the outset, and the trial began in July 2006 before Judge Dickran M. Tevrizian, more than four years after the defendants were in custody.
The jury was anonymous. It was drawn from a pool of 270, each side had 28 peremptory challenges, and the judge ruled that disclosing jurors' names could put their safety at risk, the Ninth Circuit later recorded. The government called scores of witnesses over more than thirty trial days. Mikhel twice asked in writing for new lawyers and was refused. At the close of the guilt phase he testified on direct examination for three days and then refused to be cross-examined, and the judge struck the testimony. The appeals court later called it a "Hail Mary" attempt to clear himself and Kadamovas.
The jury began deliberating on January 16, 2007, and convicted both men on every count the next day. It recommended death on February 13, and Judge Tevrizian imposed the sentence on March 12, 2007. Novaya Gazeta reported that the whole trial had lasted seven months and a day.
The appeal took more than a decade. The Ninth Circuit heard argument on January 10, 2018, and affirmed on May 9, 2018. The United States Supreme Court denied review on October 7, 2019. On December 23, 2024, President Joe Biden commuted the death sentence to life without parole, The Union Democrat reported. The Federal Bureau of Prisons listed Mikhel at the United States Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, on October 27, 2026.
Lonnie Franklin Jr. was arrested in Los Angeles on July 7, 2010, and charged with ten murders and one attempted murder. His trial did not begin until February 16, 2016. KCRW headlined its report that day: 30 years later, the case was finally going to trial.
The wait was the story. A grand jury indicted him in 2011, and on August 1 of that year prosecutors announced that they would seek death. His lawyer at the time said she was still reviewing tens of thousands of pages of evidence. The trial was postponed again and again. Witnesses retired or died, experts reexamined evidence, and at least two mothers of victims died before they could see a jury sworn, according to reporting at the opening of the trial.
Once it started, the trial itself moved quickly by the standard of this list. Sixty-one witnesses testified over about three months. The jury of seven women and five men began deliberating on May 4, 2016, and convicted Franklin on all counts on May 5, after about a day and a half. "It took all this time, but we got him," a victim’s father said. Judge Kathleen Kennedy sentenced Franklin to death on August 10, 2016, and told the families that "closure is not what this trial is about." He died at San Quentin on March 28, 2020, CBS San Francisco reported, with his automatic appeal still pending.
Michael Gargiulo’s case runs the clock longer still. He was arrested in Santa Monica on June 6, 2008, on suspicion of attempted murder, and was later charged in Los Angeles County with the murders of Ashley Ellerin in 2001 and Maria Bruno in 2005. A judge ordered him to stand trial in 2010, the Santa Monica Daily Press reported. Opening statements were not given until May 2, 2019.
The trial lasted about three months and heard 79 witnesses, according to CBS News. The court also allowed prosecutors to put before the jury extensive evidence of an uncharged 1993 killing in Illinois, the death of Tricia Pacaccio, to show a pattern. The jury began deliberating on August 12, 2019, and convicted Gargiulo of both murders and the attempted murder on August 15. A sanity phase followed, then a penalty phase that opened on October 7. On October 18, 2019, the jury returned a verdict of death.
Then the calendar slipped again. Procedural issues and the COVID-19 pandemic delayed sentencing for nearly two years, the Associated Press reported. Judge Larry P. Fidler imposed the death sentence on July 16, 2021, thirteen years after the arrest. Gargiulo’s California appeal had produced no reported decision by October 2026. He was extradited to Illinois in September 2024, where he is charged with first-degree murder in the Pacaccio case and has not been tried; CBS Chicago reported on September 30, 2026, that no trial date had been set and that his next court date was November 11, 2026.
Tsutomu Miyazaki was arrested in Hachioji on July 23, 1989, and confessed the following month to the murders of four girls aged 4 to 7. He did not dispute the killings at trial. The question the Tokyo District Court took years to answer was his state of mind.
The court ordered repeated psychiatric examinations. Amnesty International Japan recorded that he was diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder or schizophrenia; the Fuji TV news team that later broadcast his interrogation recordings described two lengthy evaluations and said the court finally accepted a finding of personality disorder. On April 14, 1997, almost eight years after his arrest, the court held that he had understood the seriousness and consequences of his acts, that he bore criminal responsibility, and sentenced him to death for the murders, with other charges.
The Tokyo High Court upheld the sentence on June 28, 2001, according to Amnesty International Japan. During that appeal the Tokyo Detention House told the court in writing that he had been given psychiatric medication continuously since 1996, a 2008 written question in the House of Representatives recorded. The Supreme Court dismissed his final appeal in January 2006, and when it rejected a request to correct its judgment the following month, the sentence became final, the Fuji TV team wrote. He was hanged at the Tokyo Detention House on June 17, 2008, nearly 19 years after his arrest, Japan Today reported.
Set beside these cases, the trial of Rosemary West reads like a different legal system, which in part it was. She was arrested in Gloucester on February 25, 1994. Her husband, Fred West, died in custody on January 1, 1995, before he could be tried. The case went to Winchester Crown Court in the autumn of 1995, before Mr Justice Mantell, with Brian Leveson QC leading the prosecution.
On November 22, 1995, the jury convicted her of ten murders, including those of her daughter Heather, 16, and her stepdaughter Charmaine, 8, and she received ten life sentences.
The verdict did not end the argument. West’s lawyers argued that several prosecution witnesses had been paid or promised money by newspapers, and that publicity made a fair trial impossible. The Court of Appeal refused leave on March 19, 1996, and gave its reasons on April 2. To accept the publicity argument, the court said, would mean that "if allegations of murder are sufficiently horrendous as inevitably to shock the nation," the accused could not be tried, and "That would be absurd," as openDemocracy later quoted it. Her solicitor, Leo Goatley, told the Law Society Gazette that he had worried the jury might be influenced by the money on offer. She was moved to HMP New Hall in West Yorkshire in June 2019, the Yorkshire Evening Post reported.
Ten counts, one defendant and a single English jury took a matter of weeks at Winchester. Ten counts, one defendant and a Los Angeles jury took two years in Buono’s case and three months in Franklin’s, after six years of waiting. The number of victims does not set the length of a trial. The structure of the prosecution does.
Where a case turned on one accomplice, as in Los Angeles in 1981 and in Adelaide in 2002, the trial stretched to fit him, because every word he gave had to be tested and then corroborated. Where the prosecution charged the full count in one indictment, as in Kraft’s case and Ramirez’s, the courts refused to sever it and the record ran to tens of thousands of pages. Where a judge did sever it, as Justice Williams did in British Columbia, the trial grew shorter and the remaining charges were never heard at all. Where the law required a jury that had not already decided, as in Ramirez’s case, the hunt for twelve people took longer than many whole trials.
The longest stretches, though, were often not in front of a jury. Miyazaki waited nearly eight years for a first verdict. Gargiulo waited eleven years for an opening statement and thirteen for a sentence. Franklin waited six. Ramirez’s appeal took longer than his crimes, his capture and his trial combined. For the families who sat through those years, the trial was a single event with a date on it. For the courts, it was only the part of the case that had a jury in the room.
• October 19, 1979: Angelo Buono Jr. is arrested in Glendale and charged with 24 felonies, ten of them murder.
• 1981: The Los Angeles district attorney moves to dismiss the murder counts against Buono; Judge Ronald M. George refuses, and the attorney general takes over.
• November 16, 1981: Buono’s trial opens; jury selection takes about three months.
• May 14, 1983: Randy Kraft is arrested in Orange County.
• October 20, 1983: The Buono jury begins deliberating.
• January 9, 1984: Buono is sentenced to nine concurrent terms of life without parole; UPI calls the case the longest criminal trial in United States history.
• August 31, 1985: Richard Ramirez is taken into custody in East Los Angeles.
• January 9, 1987: The motion to move Ramirez’s trial out of Los Angeles is denied.
• July 21, 1988: Jury selection begins in the Ramirez case.
• May 1989: Kraft is convicted of 16 murders.
• July 23, 1989: Tsutomu Miyazaki is arrested in Hachioji.
• September 20, 1989: Ramirez is convicted on all 43 counts.
• November 7, 1989: Ramirez is sentenced to death.
• November 29, 1989: Kraft is sentenced to death.
• February 25, 1994: Rosemary West is arrested in Gloucester.
• November 22, 1995: West is convicted of ten murders at Winchester.
• April 14, 1997: The Tokyo District Court sentences Miyazaki to death.
• August 10, 2000: The California Supreme Court affirms Kraft’s judgment.
• February 22, 2002: Robert Pickton is charged with two counts of first-degree murder.
• October 16, 2002: The trial of John Bunting and Robert Wagner opens in Adelaide.
• August 7, 2003: Justice Brian Martin begins his summing up after 150 sitting days.
• September 8, 2003: Bunting is convicted of 11 murders and Wagner of seven.
• May 24, 2005: The South Australian Court of Criminal Appeal dismisses the Snowtown appeals.
• July 2006: The federal trial of Iouri Mikhel and Jurijus Kadamovas opens in Los Angeles.
• August 7, 2006: The California Supreme Court affirms Ramirez’s convictions and death sentence.
• August 9, 2006: Justice James Williams severs six counts for Pickton’s first trial.
• January 17, 2007: Mikhel and Kadamovas are convicted on all counts.
• January 22, 2007: Pickton’s trial opens in New Westminster.
• December 9, 2007: Pickton is convicted of six counts of second-degree murder.
• June 6, 2008: Michael Gargiulo is arrested in Santa Monica.
• June 17, 2008: Miyazaki is executed.
• July 7, 2010: Lonnie Franklin Jr. is arrested in Los Angeles.
• August 4, 2010: The 20 remaining murder charges against Pickton are stayed.
• February 16, 2016: Franklin’s trial opens.
• May 5, 2016: Franklin is convicted of ten murders and one attempted murder.
• May 9, 2018: The Ninth Circuit affirms Mikhel’s convictions.
• May 2, 2019: Gargiulo’s trial opens.
• August 15, 2019: Gargiulo is convicted of two murders and one attempted murder.
• July 16, 2021: Gargiulo is sentenced to death.
• December 23, 2024: Mikhel’s death sentence is commuted to life without parole.
• November 11, 2026: Gargiulo’s next scheduled court date in Illinois.