A charge sheet counts offenses, not people. One death can produce several counts, as Andre Crawford’s did, and the number of counts can rise or fall between a first appearance in court and a verdict. The eight cases below are arranged by the size of the charge sheet as reported, and the published figures are uneven: some give a total, some give only the parts, and one never gives a total at all. Two cautions apply to the title. A "single indictment" is an exact description only for some of these cases. Dale Hausner faced five indictments joined for one trial, Bruce Lee faced eleven, and Andre Crawford faced twelve separate cases tried before one jury. In each section the count total, its breakdown and what became of the counts are kept apart from the number of people who died.
On Sunday, January 30, 2000, Chicago police charged Andre Crawford, 37, with ten counts of first degree murder, 11 counts of aggravated criminal sexual assault and one count of attempted murder, covering deaths between September 1993 and June 1999, according to CBS News and United Press International. At a news conference attended by dozens of police officers and FBI agents, Superintendent Terry Hillard credited the detectives. "Nothing takes the place of good old-fashioned police work," he said. Police told reporters that Crawford had also admitted three other killings that they had not linked to the series, and that another man arrested earlier had been charged with three of the killings in the area.
The charge sheet then grew. By the time the case reached a jury, the State had filed more than 200 counts across 12 separate cases, covering 11 women who died and one who survived, and had dropped 139 of those counts before trial. The Illinois Appellate Court’s caption for the appeal lists twelve consecutive Cook County case numbers, 00 CR 5454 through 00 CR 5465. The twelve cases were joined for trial before a single jury in the Circuit Court of Cook County, Judge Evelyn B. Clay presiding. The number of counts that actually went to the jury is not on the public record, so the figure left after the 139 withdrawals is unknown.
The case took a decade to reach trial. When it opened in late 2009 Crawford had spent ten years in the Cook County Jail, and ABC7 reported that he was the longest-held inmate in the jail’s history. The women were Patricia Dunn, Rhonda King, Angela Shatteen, Tommie Dennis, Shaguanta Langley, Sonji Brandon, Nicole Townsend, Evandre Harris, Cheryl Cross, Sheryl Johnson and Constance Bailey. The woman who survived an assault on November 27, 1997, testified. Prosecutors went through each killing in closing arguments on December 9, 2009. "The defendant turned Englewood into his city," one prosecutor said.
The count that drew the most scrutiny was Rhonda King’s. Another man, Hubert Geralds Jr., had been convicted by a Cook County jury on November 14, 1997, of murdering six women in Englewood, and Judge Michael P. Toomin sentenced him to death on January 9, 1998. According to the National Registry of Exonerations, King, 18, was the first of the six, and Geralds had told a prosecutor on June 19, 1995, that she was one of the women he had killed; the registry notes that he had an intellectual disability. After Crawford confessed to King’s murder, prosecutors moved on February 10, 2000, to vacate Geralds’s conviction and death sentence for it. The registry records that they then vacated his five other murder convictions as well, and that he pleaded guilty to those five killings and was sentenced to life in prison without parole. The Illinois Appellate Court would later call the sequence "extraordinarily troubling."
The jury deliberated a little more than ten hours and returned its verdict shortly before 6 p.m. on Thursday, December 10, 2009. ABC7 reported that the judge read the word "guilty" 24 times, for the murders and sexual assaults of 11 women and the attempted murder and sexual assault of the 12th. The figure matches a verdict for each of the two offenses per woman and for each of the two offenses against the survivor: 11 plus 11 plus 1 plus 1. The appellate court’s account is wider. It says the jury convicted him on all counts, including three counts of first degree murder for each of the 11 women, two counts of attempted murder for the survivor, and numerous sexual assault counts. Three murder counts for each of eleven women is 33 counts for 11 deaths. The verdicts read in court and the counts on the indictments are therefore different numbers measuring different things.
The State asked for death. The jury ruled Crawford eligible for the death penalty but did not impose it; one juror said afterward that ten jurors had voted for death and two had held out. The court sentenced him to natural life for the murders and to 30-year terms for the sexual assault convictions and the attempted murder. The Illinois Appellate Court affirmed on December 16, 2013, rejecting arguments that included a challenge to the King evidence, on the ground that independent evidence corroborated his account and that the conflicts were for the jury; a claim that his lawyers had failed to explain the limits of five-marker DNA matches in six of the cases, which the court answered by noting a corroborated video confession in each of the six; and a claim that his right to confront witnesses was violated when a substitute medical examiner described findings in Nicole Townsend’s case. The Supreme Court of Illinois denied leave to appeal on March 26, 2014. He was serving life as of that month.
A study the City of Chicago published in 2005, which used his case to argue for taking DNA samples at felony arrests, listed three earlier felony arrests, in March 1993, May 1995 and January 1998. No DNA sample was taken on any of those occasions, the study said.
In the last days of November 1999 a letter reached the police in Lahore, Pakistan. Its writer, Javed Iqbal, said he had killed 100 boys. Time magazine quoted it a few weeks later: "I have killed 100 children, all boys." A first information report, number 316 of 1999, was recorded at the Ravi Road police station on December 2, 1999. Iqbal surrendered at the Lahore office of the Urdu daily Jang on December 30, 1999. Reports of the investigation describe physical evidence in only a small number of the deaths, while the number in his letter, and later on the charge sheet, was 100. Time reported that by late December 1999 families had identified 72 of the boys named in his records.
Iqbal was tried with three co-accused. The trial opened before Additional Sessions Judge Allah Bakhsh Ranjha in Lahore on February 8, 2000, and Iqbal and his co-accused were formally charged on February 17 and pleaded not guilty, Dawn reported. The prosecution, led by the special prosecutor Burhan Moazzam, called more than 100 witnesses; the Federal Shariat Court later counted 105 prosecution witnesses in the trial record. Iqbal’s position shifted. Dawn reported that at times he claimed the children were alive and at other times said he had killed them to avenge the injustice done to him; TRT World reported that he retracted his confession and claimed the whole affair had been staged to draw attention to runaway children.
On March 16, 2000, Judge Ranjha convicted him. The Federal Shariat Court’s judgment sets out the findings: Iqbal was convicted on 100 counts of murder under section 302-A of the Pakistan Penal Code, as qisas, and on 100 counts under section 201, which concern evidence of the offense, with seven years' rigorous imprisonment on each of the second set, 700 years in all. A co-accused named Sajid was convicted on 98 counts of murder and 98 counts under section 201. Two others, both boys when they were arrested, were convicted of lesser offenses and given prison terms. The judge sentenced Iqbal to death and added a direction on how the sentence was to be carried out. The government said it would challenge that direction, and Pakistan’s Council of Islamic Ideology said it violated Islam. The Federal Shariat Court later held it "against the teachings of Islam," a violation of the Pakistan Prison Rules and "perverse."
Iqbal never had a ruling on appeal. On October 9, 2001, he and Sajid were dead in adjacent cells in Block 7 of Kot Lakhpat jail, where both were held as condemned prisoners; jail officials gave an account of suicide, and Britannica records the death as officially ruled a suicide. Dawn reported that police investigators doubted that two men could easily have done this at the same time, and Gulf News reported that sources it spoke to doubted the official account. The appeals that the two juvenile co-accused had brought were decided by the Federal Shariat Court in April 2007. The court acquitted both. It held that one boy’s confession had been recorded 13 days after his arrest without explanation and that the state’s own lawyer conceded it had no value as evidence, and that the other boy’s confessions were neither voluntary nor free from coercion; it called the questionnaire put to the accused under section 342 "a mockery in the eyes of law." As to Iqbal and Sajid, the court recorded that their appeals had "become infructuous" because both had died in jail. It did not decide whether the evidence proved their guilt.
The count total is therefore precise and the proof behind it is not. A trial court convicted on 200 counts, 100 for each of two offenses, and no appeal court ever tested a single one of them against Iqbal.
Dale Hausner was a janitor at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport who photographed boxing matches in his spare time. The Arizona Supreme Court summed up the jury’s findings: six people died and 18 others survived assaults, most of them pedestrians or bicyclists, between June 2005 and July 30, 2006. The state filed 88 charges against him in five indictments and consolidated them for a single trial. They included eight counts of first degree murder, 26 counts of drive-by offenses, ten counts of animal cruelty, two of conspiracy to commit first degree murder and two of arson, along with attempted murder, aggravated assault and firearms counts. The trial court refused to split them up.
Police arrested Hausner and his roommate, Samuel Dieteman, at their apartment in Mesa on August 3, 2006, according to the Arizona Supreme Court’s account; some news reports say early on August 4. The Associated Press reported that each man was booked on two counts of first degree murder and 13 counts of attempted first degree murder at that stage. From that booking to the 88 counts at trial is the distance covered by five indictments.
In March 2009 a Maricopa County jury convicted Hausner on 80 of the counts, acquitted him on seven, and one was dismissed, Associated Press reports said. The verdicts included first degree murder of six people: Nathaniel Shoffner, Jose Ortis, Marco Carillo, Claudia Gutierrez-Cruz, Robin Blasnek and David Estrada. They also included 18 counts of attempted first degree murder, two of conspiracy, two of arson of an occupied structure, and nine of animal cruelty. The two murder counts on which the jury acquitted were the deaths of Tony Mendez and Reginald Remillard in May 2005, the earliest killings police had attributed to the series. Remillard’s sister told reporters that the family was glad he would never be free again, though she noted the not-guilty verdict in her brother’s case. The jury also acquitted Hausner of a July 2005 animal cruelty count.
The sentences came at the end of March 2009: six death sentences, with consecutive life terms on the two conspiracy counts and further prison terms. Hausner waived mitigation and asked for death. The Arizona Supreme Court affirmed on July 11, 2012, with one exception. A conviction for cruelty to a horse named Apache was reversed because the evidence did not prove that he committed it. Eighty convictions less that one leaves 79, by simple arithmetic. On the question of the joint trial, the court held that Hausner had not shown he was unfairly prejudiced: a forensic psychiatrist had testified that the crimes formed a thrill-seeking scheme, and two detectives had testified to the similarities among the assaults.
After the ruling Hausner asked the court to stop his appeals and issue a death warrant, KJZZ and Phoenix New Times reported in 2012. On June 19, 2013, he was unresponsive in his cell at the state prison complex in Florence and was pronounced dead about an hour later. The Pinal County Medical Examiner’s Office ruled the death a suicide, the Star Tribune reported in July 2013.
Anthony Sowell was the subject of an 85-count indictment in 2009. The Supreme Court of Ohio records that he had been convicted of attempted rape in 1990 and served 15 years in prison. He was released in 2005. On the evening of October 29, 2009, Cleveland police went to his address in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood with warrants to arrest him, after a woman had reported that he had raped her there in September. He was arrested on October 31, 2009. Within days investigators had tied eleven women to the address.
According to the Supreme Court of Ohio, the indictment had two counts of aggravated murder with death specifications for each of the 11 women, one on prior calculation and design and one on felony murder predicated on kidnapping, which makes 22 counts for 11 women. It added kidnapping and tampering-with-evidence counts, and kidnapping, attempted murder, rape, felonious assault and aggravated robbery counts concerning three women who survived assaults in December 2008, September 2009 and October 2009. Ideastream reported on December 2, 2009, that a grand jury had indicted him for eleven murders. The women were Tonia Carmichael, Nancy Cobbs, Tishana Culver, Crystal Dozier, Telacia Fortson, Amelda Hunter, Leshanda Long, Michelle Mason, Kim Yvette Smith, Diane Turner and Janice Webb. Two further cases, one for rape and kidnapping and one for kidnapping and attempted murder, were dismissed at the prosecution’s request in September 2011, after the main trial.
A Cuyahoga County jury convicted him on 81 of the 85 counts on July 22, 2011, including the aggravated murder of all eleven women and of the offenses against the three survivors. The judge acquitted him of the felony murder and kidnapping counts concerning Leshanda Long, and the jury acquitted him of one count of aggravated robbery. Those account for three of the four counts that did not end in conviction; the fourth has not been reported. Judge Dick Ambrose sentenced him in August 2011 to death eleven times. The Supreme Court of Ohio affirmed the convictions and sentences on December 8, 2016, five to two on the main issue. The U.S. Supreme Court declined review in October 2017, and the Eighth District Court of Appeals affirmed the denial of postconviction relief on May 14, 2020. Sowell died in custody on February 8, 2021, aged 61, of a terminal illness, at the prison medical facility in Columbus, never executed.
The number that drew most attention was not a count but a release. In December 2008 a woman had reported an assault by Sowell and he was arrested, then released without charges. The Supreme Court of Ohio, summarizing the trial evidence, says the arresting officer mislabeled the offense on the incident report. CBS News obtained the sex crimes detective’s report in 2010: detectives and prosecutors concluded there was "insufficient evidence," and the allegations were marked "unfounded." Tim McGinty, then a Cuyahoga County Common Pleas judge, told CBS that Cleveland followed a practice detectives called "straight release," in which suspects were routinely let go rather than indicted. "They release 'em, it’s like trout fishing where you catch and release," he said. CBS reported that Cleveland recorded 633 rapes in 2008, the most per capita of any major American city, and that no one was charged in more than two-thirds of them. In September 2018 the city agreed to pay $1 million to the families of six of the women, Ideastream reported.
Jimmy Maketta, a laborer from Grabouw who had drifted to Cape Town without steady work, was charged over a run of killings and rapes in the Philippi farmlands on the Cape Flats between April and December 2005, according to Sapa and the Weekend Argus. He was arrested in Constantia, Cape Town, in December 2005, after Captain Jonathon Morris of the police organised crime unit took over the case.
IOL reported on his appearance in the Wynberg magistrate’s court that he faced 50 charges at that stage: 13 of murder, three of attempted murder, 22 of rape, one of robbery with aggravating circumstances, five of housebreaking, four of assault with intent to do grievous bodily harm and two of kidnapping. Eleanor Mocke, the senior state prosecutor, told the court that DNA results that could link him to the charges were expected within days. A team of senior state advocates in the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions was to review dozens of case dockets that week.
The charge sheet that reached the Cape High Court in May 2007 was a different document. Before Maketta pleaded, the state withdrew seven charges, among them indecent assault and attempted murder, Caryn Dolley reported for IOL. He then pleaded guilty to 47 counts: 19 of rape, 16 of murder, six of housebreaking, three of assault, one of kidnapping, one of theft and one of attempted murder. The arithmetic does not close. Fifty charges less seven withdrawn is 43, yet he pleaded to 47; the murder counts rose from 13 to 16 and the rape counts fell from 22 to 19, while attempted murder fell from three to one. The changes have not been publicly explained, and which of the people named in 2006 are among the final 16 has not been reported.
IOL listed incidents in the charges when he first appeared, all in Philippi: Nolusindiso Sono and Mina Javas in May; Richard Cornelius and Hilton Augustead in July; a man who had not been identified, Petrus Marks and Magriet Koela in October; and Jennifer Petersen in November. Dolley’s report on the plea named one more, Griet Koelas, and outside the court a 16-year-old girl wept as she told reporters that Maketta had killed her mother two years before. Whether Koelas and Koela are the same woman is unclear.
On May 3, 2007, Sapa reported, Judge Abie Motala declared Maketta a dangerous criminal on the 19 counts of rape and the 16 counts of murder. He was to be detained for 25 years and then brought back before the High Court, where a judge would decide whether he was fit to be released. In effect, Sapa said, he would never become eligible for parole, and any release would rest with a judge rather than with the prison authorities. The reports differ on the judge (Dolley named Essa Moosa as the judge who took the plea), on his age (41 in the magistrate’s court, 43 and 46 in May 2007) and on the sentence (the Cape Times wrote of a further 25 years after the first 25). Sapa’s sentencing report said he had terrorized Western Cape communities for 11 years; every report of the plea places the crimes he admitted between April and December 2005.
Afterward he spoke to the Cape Times, still handcuffed and shackled. He said he was sorry, that he hoped the families would forgive him however long that took, and that he had given his heart to Jesus in the holding cells at Bellville South police station after his arrest. The Weekend Argus reported in April 2022 that he had died in prison, and said the name South African reporting gave him, the Jesus Killer, came from victims' accounts that he had it tattooed on his chest.
Anatoly Onoprienko, born in 1959 in Lasky in the Zhytomyr region, was convicted in 1999 of 52 murders. Interfax-Ukraine and ZN.ua reported his death in Zhytomyr prison on August 27, 2013, at 54, and RIA Novosti called him Ukraine’s bloodiest serial killer. The Zhytomyr Regional Court heard the case from November 23, 1998, to March 31, 1999. The court’s count, according to the archive of the public broadcaster Suspilne, was nine killings between June 14 and August 16, 1989, and 43 from October 5, 1995, to March 22, 1996. The charges, Espreso reported, were murder together with robbery, theft, burglary, theft of a firearm, the illegal making of a weapon and other offenses; the total number of counts has not been reported.
The trial coverage in ZN.ua in December 1998 shows how the smaller counts were heard alongside the murders. A burglary in Kyiv on September 2, 1994, was one of the lesser charges. On October 3, 1995, a theft in Malyn was charged; on October 14 the theft of a hunting rifle from a resident of Narodychi, and the making of a sawn-off gun from it, were separate charges. The eighth episode heard at trial was a murder on October 28, 1995. The 1989 episodes included the couple named Melnyk on June 14, 1989, in the Synelnykove district of the Dnipropetrovsk region, and a married couple named Vasiliuk, residents of Bialystok in Poland, in the Korets district of the Rivne region. Serhiy Rogozin, a man Onoprienko had met in Dniprorudne, was a co-defendant for the 1989 episodes. He told Gazeta.ua in 2013 that he had waited in the car and was guilty of covering for Onoprienko rather than taking part. The court took a different view and convicted him on the 1989 episodes.
The size of the total is disputed beyond the court’s count. Suspilne’s archive puts the second series at 43. Onoprienko himself spoke of orders to kill hundreds, and a cleric who heard his confession later gave the figure 56, Glavcom and Espreso reported; the court convicted on 52. During the trial Amnesty International and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported criticism of President Kuchma’s comments about the case.
The hunt for him cost a second life. Lenta.ru reported that thousands of officers took part in the search, and Espreso said the Interior Ministry set up a dedicated task force and that 60 officers were later dismissed for poor work. In March 1996 investigators arrested a young man identified in court records only as Yu. M. in Horodok, near Lviv; he died in custody, and in 2002 a Lviv court awarded compensation to his parents, Radio Svoboda and the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group reported. Onoprienko was arrested in April 1996 in Yavoriv, in the Lviv region.
He was sentenced to death on March 31, 1999. The Supreme Court of Ukraine upheld the sentence in August 1999. Ukraine abolished capital punishment soon after, and Gazeta.ua wrote in 2020 that the death penalty was replaced by life imprisonment. He served the sentence in Zhytomyr.
Between 1973 and 1979 eleven fires in and around Hull, in northern England, killed 26 people. All but one were recorded at the time as accidents. In 1980 a 19-year-old who called himself Bruce Lee confessed to the one that had plainly been set on purpose, a December 1979 fire that killed three brothers, and then, over the following weeks, to ten others. He had been born Peter Dinsdale and used the names Bruce George Peter Lee, Peter Mawson and Peter Tredget, the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) records. The Court of Appeal’s 2022 judgment is titled Tredget v R.
The prosecution rested on his confessions. The CCRC says there was no identification or forensic evidence tying him to any fire. The 2022 judgment notes that the case against him came from interviews and twelve statements under caution, and the CCRC adds that he described 14 non-fatal fires at shops, warehouses and lodging houses for which he was never prosecuted. He was arrested in Hull on June 6, 1980. Whether he was already under arrest when taken from an amusement arcade was disputed on appeal, and the CCRC concluded that there was not enough evidence to show the arrest was unlawful.
The charge sheet is the notable part. He faced eleven indictments, one for each fire, charging in all 11 counts of arson, 26 counts of murder and alternative counts of manslaughter. On January 20, 1981, before Mr. Justice Tudor Evans at Leeds Crown Court, he pleaded guilty to all 11 counts of arson, charged as arson with intent to endanger life or being reckless as to whether life was endangered, and to 26 counts of manslaughter on the ground of diminished responsibility. The Crown did not proceed on the murder counts. The same day he was ordered detained without limit of time at Park Lane Hospital in Liverpool under the Mental Health Act 1959. Psychiatrists instructed by both sides concluded that he had a psychopathic disorder, was fit to plead and had diminished responsibility. The day before the pleas his leading counsel, Harry Ognall QC, told the judge in private that his client kept changing position, "about the fourth change of tack," and that a public inquiry had held the Hessle fire accidental. The Yorkshire Post, in 2021 and 2022, dated the pleas to 1980; the court records give January 20, 1981.
Two appeals reduced the total. In 1983 the Court of Appeal (Ackner LJ, Glidewell J and Leggatt J) quashed the convictions for a January 1977 fire at a residence for elderly men in Hessle: 11 manslaughter counts and one of arson. In 2022 the court (Fulford LJ, Hilliard J and Lord Hughes), on a CCRC referral, held that he could not have set two further fires, one in June 1976 and one in April 1977, and quashed two counts of arson and three of manslaughter. Twenty-six manslaughter counts less 11 less three leaves 12; eleven arson counts less one less two leaves eight. The court upheld the rest as safe because he had pleaded guilty in open court with legal advice. Twelve manslaughter convictions and eight arson convictions stand, and the hospital order was not disturbed. ITV News reported on February 9, 2022, that he was held in a secure hospital.
The court’s account of his background is the fullest on record. He had congenital right-sided spastic hemiplegia and epilepsy; psychologists who examined him for the later appeal put his IQ at about 73 and described severe deprivation and abuse in childhood. The explanations he gave for the fires changed repeatedly, the judgment lists, among them money, a hatred of people and a liking for fire engines, and Dr. Neill, reporting in November 1982, described him as "highly suggestible, unreliable."
Hélène Jégado was a domestic servant and cook from the Breton countryside who was executed at Rennes on February 26, 1852. The Archives départementales d’Ille-et-Vilaine, whose 2019 exhibition on the case draws on the trial file, record the court’s estimate: 37 people had been her targets, and 23 of them had died. Only three of those deaths were ever tried. Crimes more than ten years old were beyond the reach of prosecution, so none of the deaths in Morbihan between 1833 and 1841 could be charged, although the facts were known and, in the curators' words, weighed against her. Among the deaths attributed to her there by name are Joseph Le Drogo, her sister Anna Jégado and Marie Brégé, who was nearly three.
She was not charged either with the deaths of Louis Rabot, a young boy who died in Rennes on December 29, 1849, and Clodomir Ozanne, who was five and died in April 1850, though both were recent enough to be tried. The archives say the court seems not to have wanted to impose further proceedings on the two families, and judged the other charges sufficient.
The indictment that went to trial had 18 counts: one theft of money, ten thefts of household goods, four attempted murders and three murders, those of Pérotte Macé, Rose Tessier and Rosalie Sarrazin. Sarrazin died on July 1, 1851, three weeks after falling ill, in the Rennes household of the lawyer and law professor Théophile Bidard, and Jégado was arrested that day. She admitted nearly all of the thefts. Much of the stolen linen bore its owners' initials. "Je conviens que j’ai, en effet, volé ces deux serviettes," she said in one exchange, conceding that she had indeed stolen two napkins.
The trial ran from December 6 to 14, 1851. Her lawyer, Magloire Dorange, an early republican who campaigned against the death penalty at a time when, the archives note, few did, argued against her wishes that she suffered from monomania. The experts he called supported the prosecution, and the chemist François-Vincent Raspail, who could not attend because he was in prison, wrote that her conduct was not that of a monomaniac, since she had prepared her acts with care. On December 14 the jury returned guilty verdicts on all 18 counts, with no mitigating circumstances, and she was sentenced to death. The Cour de cassation rejected the appeal on January 16, 1852, and Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte refused a pardon on February 22. She was executed very early on the morning of February 26 on the Champ de Mars, now the esplanade Charles de Gaulle. Le Conciliateur reported the next day that the sentence had been carried out within minutes and that the crowd dispersed in silence. A death mask taken afterward is in the collections of the Musée de Bretagne in Rennes.
Before witnesses she confessed and agreed that her confession could be made public, though the archives say researchers doubt the text is authentic in its wording because its literary style is far beyond her education. "La justice n’a pas connu tous mes forfaits," it has her say: the courts had not known all her crimes.
The largest numbers in this list measure the least. Crawford’s more than 200 counts shrank by 139 before the jury saw them, and the 24 verdicts the judge read were a different count from the 33 murder counts in the opinion. Iqbal’s 200 counts are the cleanest total and the least tested. Hausner’s 88 counts across five indictments ended in 80 convictions, one of them later reversed. Sowell’s 85 became 81, and Maketta’s 50 turned into 47 by a route that has not been publicly explained. Lee’s eleven indictments dwindle to twelve manslaughter and eight arson convictions that stand. The smallest sheet, Jégado’s 18 counts, carries three murders in a case where the court itself put the dead at 23.
In most of these cases the figure for the dead is larger and softer than any count a court could stand behind. The Illinois judge who read "guilty" 24 times was reading a ledger of offenses. Eleven women had died.
• 1833 to 1841: deaths in Morbihan later attributed to Hélène Jégado, none tried.
• July 1, 1851: Rosalie Sarrazin dies in Rennes; Jégado is arrested.
• December 14, 1851: the Ille-et-Vilaine assize court returns guilty verdicts on all 18 counts against Jégado.
• February 26, 1852: Jégado is executed at Rennes.
• June 1973 to December 1979: the eleven Hull fires covered by the indictments against Bruce Lee.
• June 6, 1980: Lee is arrested in Hull.
• January 20, 1981: Lee pleads guilty to 26 manslaughter and 11 arson counts at Leeds Crown Court.
• 1983: the Court of Appeal quashes the Hessle convictions.
• April 1996: Anatoly Onoprienko is arrested in Yavoriv.
• November 14, 1997: Hubert Geralds Jr. is convicted of six Englewood murders.
• November 23, 1998 to March 31, 1999: Onoprienko’s trial in Zhytomyr; death sentence on March 31, 1999.
• Late November 1999: Javed Iqbal’s letter reaches Lahore police; the first information report follows on December 2.
• December 30, 1999: Iqbal surrenders at the Jang office in Lahore.
• January 30, 2000: Andre Crawford is charged.
• February 10, 2000: prosecutors move to vacate Geralds’s conviction for Rhonda King’s murder.
• March 16, 2000: Iqbal is convicted on 200 counts.
• October 9, 2001: Iqbal and Sajid are dead in Kot Lakhpat jail.
• December 2005: Jimmy Maketta is arrested in Constantia, Cape Town.
• August 3, 2006: Dale Hausner and Samuel Dieteman are arrested in Mesa.
• May 3, 2007: Maketta is declared a dangerous criminal after pleading guilty to 47 counts.
• March 2009: Hausner is convicted on 80 counts and sentenced to death six times.
• October 29 to 31, 2009: warrants are served on Anthony Sowell’s address; he is arrested.
• December 10, 2009: Crawford is convicted; sentenced to natural life on December 18.
• July 22, 2011: Sowell is convicted on 81 counts; death sentences follow in August.
• July 11, 2012: the Arizona Supreme Court affirms Hausner’s sentences except one animal cruelty count.
• June 19, 2013: Hausner dies in prison; the death is ruled a suicide.
• August 27, 2013: Onoprienko dies in Zhytomyr prison.
• December 16, 2013: the Illinois Appellate Court affirms Crawford’s convictions.
• December 8, 2016: the Supreme Court of Ohio affirms Sowell’s convictions and sentences.
• February 8, 2021: Sowell dies in custody.
• February 8, 2022: the Court of Appeal quashes three more of Lee’s manslaughter convictions and two arson convictions.
• April 2022: the Weekend Argus reports that Maketta has died in prison.