A case that crosses a border changes what can be proved. A court sits in one country, applies that country’s law and hears the evidence that country’s police could gather. Deaths in another country stay on the police side of the ledger unless the same court takes them on, or a second country does the work again, often years later and sometimes after the man is dead. The eight cases below are arranged by the number of countries that appear in each record, whether as the site of a conviction, a charge, a confession or a police attribution. That is a count of countries named in the reporting, not a measure of how many people a man killed, and the totals are disputed in most of these cases. None of this amounts to a world record. In each case the sections keep three things apart: what a court decided, what police linked to the man, and what he said himself and sometimes took back.
On May 1, 1987, Swiss police arrested a 28-year-old soldier in the middle of his military service. His comrades knew Michel Peiry, a trained salesman from Romont in the canton of Fribourg, as a quiet man who was always polite, according to a 2026 account in the Swiss daily Blick. In October 1989 the district court of Entremont, in the canton of Valais, convicted him of four murders and two attempted murders, with other charges that included abduction, unlawful deprivation of liberty, coercion and theft. Blick reported that one of the murders was that of a 14-year-old boy in Valais in 1986. He received a sentence of life imprisonment.
That is the whole of the court record, and it lies in a single country. The press record is wider. In August 2026 Blick wrote that Peiry had been linked to at least eleven killings in Switzerland, France, Italy, Croatia and the United States, five of them proven. The Keystone-ATS agency, reporting in March 2026, counted the admissions differently: he confessed to killing three teenagers in Switzerland and two abroad, and during the investigation he retracted three further killings he had admitted. In the same month of August 2026 the Swiss daily 20 Minuten put the number of teenagers he targeted at about ten and said the exact figure is unclear, because he sometimes confessed and then withdrew his confessions. Keystone-ATS gave the victims' ages as 14 to 18, Blick as 14 to 24.
Country by country, the accounts divide this way. In Switzerland the cases that were tried arose in 1986 and 1987. Ticino, the Italian-speaking canton in the south, was part of the inquiry: Tio.ch reported that a young man from Ticino was among the victims in 1986, and that the Ticino cantonal police joined an investigation led from French-speaking Switzerland. Two Ticino investigators, Giorgio Galusero and Alfredo Pronzini, questioned Peiry at length in Bellinzona after his arrest. In those sessions, the broadcaster RSI reported in 2025, he confessed to several killings, among them that of a young man in Cresciano, in Ticino. Whether that death was one of the four murders in the Valais conviction has not been reported.
In France, Blick reported, two teenagers were linked to him in 1984 and 1985. Between 1986 and 1987, it wrote, he was tied to six assaults in Croatia, Switzerland and Italy, and two of the victims of assaults in Switzerland survived, barely. In the United States, Blick placed him in September 1981 and wrote that his crimes later spread across France, Italy, Croatia and Switzerland. A 1981 case involving a Canadian man in the United States rests on a confession that Peiry made, withdrew and repeated. It was never proven in court. The French, Italian, Croatian and American entries are attributions in press accounts. Only the cases in the Swiss conviction were tried.
The end of the series came in April 1987. The last assault attributed to him, on a 16-year-old who survived, produced the information that led investigators to him, Blick reported. Tio.ch added that a composite picture of the suspect was published in the newspapers and that Peiry’s own brother then went to the police to say it might be him.
Since then Peiry has applied twelve times for conditional release, the first application dating from 2002, and every one has been refused. He has been in custody without a single day of leave since May 1987. A refusal of early release was already in the news in April 2009, when swissinfo reported it. In March 2026 the Federal Supreme Court, the country’s highest court, refused him accompanied outings; the ruling was published on March 11, 2026, under case number 7B_518/2025, and 20 Minuten and Keystone-ATS both reported it. On August 13, 2026, a second federal ruling upheld the refusal of parole. Blick, reporting on his continued detention on August 18, called him the best-known serial killer in Switzerland.
Volker Eckert was born on July 1, 1959, in Plauen, in what was then East Germany, according to a 2019 profile in the Argentine newspaper Diario UNO. By the time of his arrest he lived in Hof, in Bavaria, and drove long distances for a haulage company with its headquarters at Wesseling, near Cologne. Diario UNO reported that in 1987 an East German court had sentenced him to 12 years for attempted murder over two assaults on women, and gave 1994 as the year of his release. That is his only conviction on record.
In November 2006 Catalan police traced a truck recorded by a security camera near Hostalric, in the province of Girona, to its haulage firm and from there to its driver. A judge in Girona signed a European arrest warrant, and the Catalan police, the Mossos d’Esquadra, sent officers to work with the police of Hof. Eckert was arrested at his employer’s headquarters in Wesseling on Friday, November 17, 2006. The Spanish warrant concerned the death of Miglena Petrova, a 20-year-old Bulgarian woman who died at Hostalric on November 2, 2006, according to Diario UNO. The Sofia News Agency reported on November 27 that her relatives said she was in the third month of pregnancy, and quoted her husband in the Bulgarian daily 24 Hours: "We were expecting a baby."
Within days Eckert confessed. NacióDigital, a Catalan news site, reported on November 22, 2006, citing the prosecutor’s office and the broadcaster Catalunya Informació, that he had admitted the killing of Petrova and four other women, two in Spain and two in France, between 1999 and 2006. A special commission of the Hof police was set up to check the confession. The Olive Press, an English-language paper in southern Spain, reported on November 29 that German police said he had later told them of a sixth killing, in the former East Germany in the 1970s. Diario UNO’s profile identifies it as the death of a 14-year-old schoolmate in Plauen in 1974, when he was 15. No one was ever charged with that death before his own account, 32 years later.
Diario UNO set out the five later cases by place and date. A woman from Kenya died near Chermignac, in western France, on June 25, 2001. A 24-year-old woman died at Maçanet de la Selva, in the province of Girona, on October 9, 2001. A Russian woman died at Sant Sadurní d’Osormort, in the Osona district of Catalonia, on March 1, 2005. A 28-year-old woman from Poland died at Reims on October 2, 2006. Petrova died at Hostalric on November 2, 2006. The period of the confessed killings abroad was reported in 2006 as 1999 to 2006, while the dated list in the 2019 profile begins in June 2001; the difference is unexplained.
The arrest set off a review of unsolved deaths across Europe. NacióDigital reported that the Mossos d’Esquadra and the Catalan interior department sent information about Eckert to police forces across the continent and asked them to compare their records with his routes. The Olive Press wrote that German police wanted to question him about at least three deaths of women in Germany. Diario UNO reported that police in the Czech Republic and France pursued other cases with Interpol; that investigators gathered enough to support charges in the deaths of nine women in Germany, France, Spain and Italy; and that by the time German police closed their inquiry in December 2007 they had linked as many as 19 victims to him. The same profile listed deaths attributed to him but never confessed: an 18-year-old man in Plauen in April 1987, a 23-year-old woman at Troyes, France, in August 2002, a 25-year-old woman at Rezzato, Italy, on September 5, 2004, and four other women, three in the Czech Republic and one in France. Diario UNO names no official source for that list. None of these deaths was charged against Eckert, and none was tested in court.
On July 2, 2007, at 48, Eckert died by suicide in his cell in the prison at Bayreuth while awaiting trial. Counting the confessions, five countries appear in his record: Germany, France and Spain by his own admission, and Italy and the Czech Republic by police attribution. No court in any of them has ever returned a verdict on a killing.
Johann Unterweger, who called himself Jack, was born on August 16, 1950, in Judenburg, in the Austrian province of Styria. His only final murder conviction concerns a woman who died in another country. Margret Schäfer was 18 and came from Germany. On December 11, 1974, according to the Austrian magazine profil, Unterweger killed her in Herborn, a town in the German state of Hesse. He was arrested in Salzburg, and on May 31, 1976, he was sentenced to life imprisonment, the date given by the Austria Presse Agentur (APA) and by a 1992 parliamentary question in the Austrian National Council. profil gives the year of sentence as 1975; most accounts give 1976. An Austrian court thus judged a death in West Germany, and that judgment stands.
In Stein prison, near Krems in Lower Austria, he finished his schooling and wrote. His autobiographical novel Fegefeuer (Purgatory) was filmed in 1988 by the Graz director Willi Hengstler, shown at the World Film Festival in Montreal and awarded the Vienna Film Prize in 1989; in the same year he received the Ingeborg Drewitz Prize for prisoners' literature, according to the Neue Deutsche Biographie. Writers campaigned for his release, and he was paroled on May 23, 1990.
APA, citing the indictment, lists eleven killings charged against him, all between September 1990 and July 1991: one in Prague, one in Bregenz, two in the Graz area, four in the Vienna area and three in Los Angeles. The first, that of Blanka Bočková in Prague, is dated September 15, 1990 by the Vorarlberg news site VOL.AT, less than four months after his release.
The Los Angeles cases came from a trip. In the summer of 1991 Unterweger traveled to California on a freelance assignment; the historian Kristina E. Poznan, writing for the Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies, says accounts describe the commission as coming from an Austrian newspaper or magazine. He stayed a little over a month, the Lawrence Journal-World reported in 2007, and Poznan writes that the Los Angeles Police Department gave him a ride-along during the visit. Three women died in the Los Angeles area while he was there. VOL.AT dates the deaths of Shannon Exley to June 19, Irene Rodriguez to June 28, and Peggy Jean Booth, who also used the name Sherri Ann Long, to July 3, 1991, near Malibu. Poznan gives their ages as 35, 33 and 26.
On February 13, 1992, the Graz Regional Court issued a warrant for his arrest. He left Austria, was arrested in Miami on February 27, 1992, and was brought back to Austria at the end of May. His trial in Graz opened on April 20, 1994. On the evening of June 28 the jury returned guilty verdicts for murder in nine of the eleven cases; in two, profil reported, the cause of death could not be established with certainty. Which two cases those were was not reported, so whether any of the Prague or Los Angeles cases was among the nine is unknown. He was sentenced to life imprisonment for the second time and committed to an institution for mentally abnormal offenders. At 3:40 the next morning he was dead in his cell at the Graz court prison; he had died by suicide. Because he died before the judgment could become final, the 1994 verdict never became a final conviction.
Four countries stand in the record: Germany, where the one final conviction began; Austria, whose courts handled both proceedings; the Czech Republic, through the Prague case; and the United States. The part of the record that reached a verdict in Graz is also the part that never became law.
Charles Sobhraj was born in Saigon on April 6, 1944, to an Indian father and a Vietnamese mother, and he is a French citizen. Britannica gives his original name as Gurmukh Sobhraj; Nepali court reporting uses Charles Gurumukh Sobhraj. His record runs through Thailand, Nepal and India, and what each country’s courts decided differs sharply.
Thailand comes first in time. AFP reported that in 1975 he arrived in Bangkok and set himself up as a gem dealer. The Netherlands embassy in the city became involved after the family of Cornelia Hemker, 25, heard nothing from her and her fiancé Henk Bintanja, 29, both Dutch, for six weeks. CNN reported that a junior diplomat, Herman Knippenberg, took up the matter; on March 3, 1976, a Dutch dentist identified the couple from dental records and told him, "It’s them." On March 11, 1976, police raided the apartment of a man calling himself Alain Gautier, one of Sobhraj’s aliases, but he produced a stolen passport bearing his photograph, claimed to be an American and was released. McBeth wrote in Asia Times that an Interpol notice and a front-page story in the Bangkok Post followed in May 1976. The Associated Press, citing a National Geographic documentary, has named two other young travelers in the Thai record, Teresa Knowlton, an American, and Vitali Hakim.
Reuters has reported that Thai police alleged he was responsible for the deaths of six women in Thailand in the 1970s, and the Associated Press has said he faced 14 murder charges there. When India agreed in late 1985 to a Thai extradition request, AFP reported, the request concerned two deaths, those of Knowlton and a Turkish tourist. The Thai case lapsed. No court has ever ruled on any of the Thai deaths.
India dealt with him on other matters. He was arrested in New Delhi on July 5, 1976, after an incident involving a group of French tourists in a Delhi hotel. AFP reported the resulting offenses as culpable homicide not amounting to murder and other charges, with a sentence reported as 12 years. In May 1982 he received a life sentence for the murder of Alan Jacob, an Israeli tourist, which was overturned on appeal in 1983 for lack of evidence. In March 1986 he escaped from Tihar jail; Asia Times reported a further 10 years for the escape. A Mumbai police team led by Madhukar Zende recaptured him on April 6, 1986, at a restaurant in Porvorim, Goa. He was held in India from 1976 to 1997, flown to Paris, and arrived there on April 8, 1997.
Nepal is where his murder convictions lie. Connie Jo Bronzich, 29, an American from Santa Cruz, California, and Laurent Carrière, 26, a Canadian, were killed in the Kathmandu Valley in late December 1975, AFP reported in 2007. In September 2003 Sobhraj was arrested in a Kathmandu casino. The Kathmandu District Court convicted him of the Bronzich murder on August 12, 2004; the Patan Appellate Court upheld the conviction on August 4, 2005, and the Supreme Court of Nepal on July 30, 2010; a request for review was refused in December 2011, AFP reported in Gulf Times. A second Nepali court convicted him of the Carrière murder in 2014. In June 2009 he was also convicted in Nepal of entering the country illegally in 1975 and given one year and a fine of 2,000 rupees. His sentences for the two murders were reported as life imprisonment, which Nepali law counts as 20 years, running concurrently.
On December 21, 2022, the Supreme Court of Nepal ordered his release on a habeas corpus petition, applying the 75 percent sentence remission available to prisoners over 65. He walked out on December 23, 2022, after 19 years, three months and seven days, and was deported to France the same evening, barred from Nepal for ten years. In August 2023 he was interviewed in Paris; Al Jazeera reported that he said he was based in London and was planning lawsuits, and WION had reported in December 2022 that he planned to sue Nepal over what he called fabricated cases. He has denied all the killings. As of August 2023 he was at liberty.
The count is three countries in the record and two in which courts convicted him of homicide offenses.
Pedro Alonso López, a Colombian, is the case in which the accounts disagree most about the basic facts. El Tiempo of Bogotá, in reports from 2012 to 2021, gives his birth date as October 8, 1948, in the department of Tolima, but names Venadillo in some reports and Santa Isabel in others; the Colombian magazine Semana gave May 1949. AFP called him Pedro López Monsalve in 1994. A 1998 El Tiempo report called him Pedro Alfonso López. In Ecuador the press called him "el Monstruo de los Andes."
He was arrested in early 1980 in Ambato, in the Ecuadorian highlands, AFP reported. Semana dates his decisive statement to police to Monday, March 10, 1980. An Ecuadorian court convicted him of crimes against girls, and the number of counts is not established: press accounts give one count, "several minors," 57 crimes or 110 counts. He received 16 years, the legal maximum according to the reports; some reports say 15.
The totals attached to his name range widely. AFP reported in March 1994 that he had confessed to killing more than 100 girls in Ecuador and dozens of children in Colombia. In November 1994 AFP put the number at about eighty, with about sixty of the Ecuadorian cases documented. The freelance writer Ron Laytner, writing in 1992, counted 53 documented cases and reported a confession to 240 more in Peru and Colombia, with police saying he could have been charged with 350. Semana said in 2002 that the authorities estimated about 300 victims in three countries. El Tiempo reported in 2018 that investigators documented 57 cases in Ecuador and that he claimed at least 110 children there and about 200 more killings in Colombia and Peru. None of the totals over 100 has been tested in court.
Peru is the thinnest entry. What is said about his time there rests on his own statements and on later press accounts. El Tiempo reported in 2018 that he operated in the Ayacucho region and was expelled toward Ecuador. No Peruvian court record has been reported, no victim in Peru has been named, and no Peruvian charge or trial has come to light.
Colombia is the second court. After the Ecuadorian sentence he was released in 1994, on reductions for good conduct, and handed to the Colombian authorities. In September 1994 prosecutors in El Espinal, Tolima, accused him of the homicide of eleven children, with other charges; the Colombian case papers had been destroyed by fire around 1991, and the complaint was renewed by the mother of one of the children, Flor Alba Sánchez Ospina, who was killed in December 1979. The Colombian evaluation declared him inimputable, meaning not criminally responsible because of mental disorder, and he was held in the psychiatric annex of La Modelo prison in Bogotá. In February 1998, El Tiempo’s 2012 report says, he was declared sound and released on bail of 80,000 pesos, with an obligation to report to the court. He did not report. He renewed his identity card in Bogotá on September 22, 1999, his last confirmed record. Colombia asked Interpol to search for him in October 2002. Vanguardia of Bucaramanga wrote in March 2023 that his whereabouts, and whether he is alive, remain unknown.
Three countries, then, and a conviction in one, a finding of non-responsibility in a second, and a claim in the third. In none of them does a court hold him now.
Ondrej Rigo was born in 1955 in Modra, near Bratislava, according to the Hungarian news site 444 and the Czech press agency ČTK. His childhood was spent largely in institutions: ČTK reported that at 14 he was placed in a corrective institution. Noviny.sk and TV JOJ reported that he had been convicted 11 times before the first killing, and 444 said most of those convictions were for burglary. TV JOJ and noviny.sk reported in 2011 that he left Czechoslovakia illegally in 1989.
The series ran from June 1990 to March 4, 1992. The first killing took place in Munich in June 1990; 444 identified the woman only as Helena S., aged 40. SITA wrote in 2018 that he began in 1990 with the murders of two women in Germany and then committed another murder in the Netherlands, and Blesk named the Dutch city as Amsterdam. Noviny.sk reported that the killings in Bratislava began in October 1990, the first victim there an 88-year-old woman. The youngest victim was a boy, the son of one of the women; the press gives his age as 14 (TV Markíza, noviny.sk and Blesk in 2021), 15 (SITA) or 16 (ČTK and Blesk in 2022). ČTK put the women’s ages from 22 to 88, SITA from 21 to 80. The reports disagree on how the nine divide among the cities. Most describe eight women and the boy across Munich, Amsterdam and Bratislava; noviny.sk, counting the series as a whole, put seven women and the boy after the first Bratislava victim.
The killings went unsolved for almost two years. Blesk reported that German, Dutch and Slovak investigators were searching for the killer during that time. In Bratislava, ČTK wrote in 2026, the police had only one clue they could use, biological traces left by the killer. They turned to a group of Slovak geneticists developing new ways to identify offenders, and with the help of German and Dutch police, Rigo was linked to all of the killings by DNA, according to ČTK’s report of his death. Noviny.sk reported that he was arrested on the evening of March 4, 1992, hours after the last killing.
On December 7, 1994, he was sentenced to life imprisonment. TV Markíza and noviny.sk described the conviction as the first in Slovakia to rest on DNA evidence, and TV JOJ said in 2011 that the tests helped with both his arrest and his life sentence. SITA reported that he was serving life for nine murders, two women in Germany, one in the Netherlands and the rest in Bratislava. Whether the German and Dutch cases were tried separately in those countries has not been reported; the life sentence as reported covers all nine.
He denied everything. "I wasn’t there, I didn’t do it," he said in a prison interview with the Slovak daily Plus JEDEN DEŇ, as Blesk reported in 2022. He served first at Ilava and later at Leopoldov. Under the Slovak Criminal Code a person sentenced to life may apply for conditional release after 25 years; Rigo applied in May 2018, and the application reached the Trnava District Court on May 11, according to TV JOJ. Experts gave him little chance. The clinical psychologist Dušan Kešický said that without outside help a return to ordinary life would be almost impossible, and the criminal law expert Lucia Kurilovská said: "Given all the circumstances, I would say there is probably little chance." SITA reported that he withdrew the application on June 5, 2018. He died on June 14, 2022, aged 66, in the hospital for accused and convicted persons in Trenčín. ČTK called him the second-worst serial killer in postwar Czechoslovakia.
Three countries appear in the record, and one court handled it.
Thomas Neill Cream was born in Glasgow on May 27, 1850, according to the historian Jill Foran, writing in The Beaver, now Canada’s History. His family emigrated to Quebec about four years later. He graduated in medicine from McGill University in Montreal in 1876, studied at St. Thomas’s Hospital in London and qualified in Edinburgh, then returned to Canada in May 1878 and opened a practice in London, Ontario.
Canada holds the oldest and thinnest part of his record. Foran writes that about a year after his arrival a young woman, named in her account as Kate Gardener, died near his office; she had been one of his patients. At the inquest the coroner’s jury concluded that her death was caused by some person unknown. Cream was never charged, though the case damaged his practice, and he left for Chicago. McGill News, following the Canadian writer Dean Jobb, treats her death as a killing by Cream; no court ever made that finding. His wife also died in Canada, and her doctor suspected a medicine Cream had sent her, Foran writes. No inquiry or charge followed.
In the United States he was convicted. In December 1880 a Chicago patient, Ellen Stack, died after taking medicine he had prescribed. In January 1881 he sent threatening letters to the pharmacist who had filled the prescription, and no charge followed. The case that did reach a jury was that of Daniel Stott, a railroad stationmaster. Cream and Stott’s wife were both charged with murder; she was freed after agreeing to testify, and her evidence, Jobb writes, helped to convict him. The Illinois jury convicted him in 1881, and he was sentenced to life in the state penitentiary at Joliet. Foran describes the verdict as second-degree murder; other accounts say only murder. McGill News reports that he used his family’s money and connections to lobby for his freedom, and Foran writes that his life term was reduced to 17 years and that he was granted early parole. He left prison in 1891, after about ten years, returned briefly to Canada and sailed for England.
In England he lived in Lambeth, south London, and called himself Dr. Thomas Neill. Over the next months young women in the district died, and letters reached prominent people in London accusing others of the deaths and demanding money. Most recipients took the letters to Scotland Yard, and the police largely set them aside. Jobb does not believe Cream meant to collect; in his view the letters were a way of claiming credit. "Somewhere in his psyche, he wanted people to know what an efficient and ruthless killer he was," he told McGill News. They became evidence against him. Cream was arrested in London in 1892 and charged with four murders, one attempted murder and sending letters demanding money. He was tried at the Old Bailey for the murder of Matilda Clover, and in October 1892 he was convicted and sentenced to death. He was executed at Newgate Prison on November 15, 1892. Foran quotes the Toronto Globe on the crowd outside: "Probably no criminal was ever executed in London who had a less pitying mob awaiting his execution." Mark Sanderson, reviewing Jobb’s book in Airmail, gives the crowd as about 5,000. A wax likeness of Cream stood in the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussauds until 1968, Sanderson writes. The Journal of Mental Science had discussed "Neill’s case" in its issue of January 1893.
Jobb counts at least ten people killed, nine women and one man, across Canada, the United States and Britain between 1877 and 1892, and calls Stott the sixth. That total is his, not a court’s, and it includes deaths never tried. The courts convicted Cream of two murders, one on each side of the Atlantic.
Michel Fourniret was born on April 4, 1942, in Sedan, in the French Ardennes, and died on May 10, 2021, at the secure unit of the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, aged 79. His record spans two countries, France and Belgium, and it is the shortest in this list. It is here for another reason: the border is the reason the series was not recognized for so long. In September 2026 RTBF published a review of the flaws in the inquiries that ran through those years. The cases were tied together only after a 13-year-old girl got away from him in Ciney, in the Belgian province of Namur, on June 26, 2003. He was held in Belgium at first only for the attempted abduction, at Dinant, and for a year nobody connected him with the dead girls in France.
The breakthrough was his wife. In June 2004, questioned by Belgian police, Monique Olivier began to describe her husband’s past. Over 2004 and 2005 she named killings to investigators; AFP and Public Sénat put the total she disclosed at eleven, while VRT, carrying a Belga report in 2021, put it at nine. Fourniret, confronted with her statements, admitted eight homicides committed in France and Belgium since 1987, and one attempted homicide, among them the killings of Céline Saison and Mananya Thumpong, which had been unexplained until then. The couple were extradited from Belgium to France in December 2005 and January 2006.
On May 28, 2008, the Ardennes assize court at Charleville-Mézières convicted Fourniret, 66, of seven murders, with other charges: those of Isabelle Laville, Fabienne Leroy, Jeanne-Marie Desramault, Elisabeth Brichet, Natacha Danais, Céline Saison and Mananya Thumpong, and of assaults on three girls and young women who got away. It sentenced him to life imprisonment with no possibility of release, the sentence French press calls perpétuité incompressible. Slate.fr noted that this made him one of very few people in France to receive a security period with no end. On November 16, 2018, the Yvelines assize court at Versailles convicted him of the murder of Farida Hammiche, a woman killed in 1988 to take a cache of gold, and gave him a second life sentence. In all, he died convicted of eight murders.
Other cases never reached a verdict against him. He confessed in February 2018 to the death of Marie-Angèle Domèce and of Joanna Parrish. The death of Estelle Mouzin, aged nine, is a case in itself: his name was raised after the arrest, but he denied involvement and was cleared on an alibi, a telephone call made from Sart-Custinne, in Belgium. AFP reported in 2021 that detectives had first suspected him in 2006. The alibi fell in November 2019, when Olivier told investigators that she had made the call herself, at his request. He was placed under formal investigation on November 27, 2019, and on March 7, 2020, the Paris prosecutor announced that he had acknowledged taking part. Lydie Logé, a case from 1993, was the fourth; he was placed under formal investigation on December 22, 2020. He died before any of the four came to trial. In January 2025, RTBF, carrying a Belga report, and Europe 1, with AFP, reported that Monique Olivier had acknowledged her involvement in the Logé case.
Olivier was tried with him twice. She was convicted in 2008 of complicity in four of the murders, with other charges, and sentenced to life imprisonment with a security period of 28 years. In 2018 she received 20 years in the Hammiche case. On December 19, 2023, the Nanterre court convicted her, without Fourniret, of complicity in the abduction, confinement and murder of Domèce, Parrish and Mouzin and gave her life imprisonment with a 20-year security period. That verdict concerns her, not him. RTBF wrote on September 25, 2026, that she is the last surviving member of the couple and is serving her sentences in France.
Set side by side, the eight records show how little the count of countries says about the count of convictions. Peiry and Eckert reach five countries on paper, and the first has a verdict in one while the second has a verdict in none. Unterweger, with four, has a final conviction for a killing in a country other than the one whose court convicted him. Sobhraj, López and Cream were each judged in two countries; Rigo was judged in one for killings in three. Fourniret, with only two, took the longest to be recognized as a series. Where a court spoke, it spoke for one jurisdiction; the others hold dossiers, extradition requests, Interpol notices and confessions.
Pedro Alonso López renewed an identity card in Bogotá on September 22, 1999. Colombia asked Interpol to search for him three years later, and as of March 2023 the newspapers still could not say where he was.
• May 27, 1850: Thomas Neill Cream is born in Glasgow.
• 1881: an Illinois jury convicts Cream of the murder of Daniel Stott; he is sentenced to life at Joliet.
• April 6, 1944: Charles Sobhraj is born in Saigon.
• August 16, 1950: Jack Unterweger is born in Judenburg, Austria.
• December 11, 1974: Margret Schäfer, 18, is killed in Herborn, Hesse.
• Late December 1975: Connie Jo Bronzich and Laurent Carrière are killed in the Kathmandu Valley.
• March 3 and 11, 1976: a Dutch dentist identifies the Dutch couple in Bangkok; police raid the apartment of a man using the name Alain Gautier and release him.
• May 31, 1976: Unterweger is sentenced to life imprisonment.
• July 5, 1976: Sobhraj is arrested in New Delhi.
• Early 1980: Pedro Alonso López is arrested in Ambato, Ecuador.
• September 1981: Blick places Peiry in the United States.
• April 6, 1986: a Mumbai police team recaptures Sobhraj in Porvorim, Goa.
• April 1987: the last assault attributed to Michel Peiry.
• May 1, 1987: Peiry is arrested during military service.
• October 1989: the Entremont district court in Valais convicts Peiry; life imprisonment.
• May 23, 1990: Unterweger is paroled.
• June 1990: Ondrej Rigo’s first killing, in Munich.
• September 15, 1990: Blanka Bočková dies in Prague, the first of the eleven charged Unterweger cases.
• June 19 to July 3, 1991: three women die in the Los Angeles area during Unterweger’s visit.
• February 13, 1992: Graz warrant for Unterweger; he is arrested in Miami on February 27 and returned to Austria at the end of May.
• March 4, 1992: Rigo is arrested, hours after the last killing.
• June 28 to 29, 1994: a Graz jury finds Unterweger guilty in nine of eleven cases; he dies by suicide hours later.
• 1994: López is released in Ecuador and handed to Colombia.
• December 7, 1994: Rigo is sentenced to life imprisonment.
• February 1998: López is declared sound and released on bail in Colombia.
• September 22, 1999: López renews his identity card in Bogotá, his last confirmed record.
• June 26, 2003: a 13-year-old girl gets away from Michel Fourniret in Ciney, Belgium.
• September 2003: Sobhraj is arrested in a Kathmandu casino.
• August 12, 2004: the Kathmandu District Court convicts Sobhraj of the Bronzich murder.
• November 17, 2006: Volker Eckert is arrested at Wesseling on a European arrest warrant.
• July 2, 2007: Eckert dies by suicide in Bayreuth prison.
• May 28, 2008: the Ardennes assize court convicts Fourniret of seven murders, with other charges.
• 2014: a second Nepali court convicts Sobhraj of the Carrière murder.
• November 16, 2018: the Yvelines assize court convicts Fourniret of the murder of Farida Hammiche.
• May 10, 2021: Fourniret dies in custody in Paris.
• June 14, 2022: Rigo dies in the prison hospital in Trenčín.
• December 21 to 23, 2022: Nepal’s Supreme Court orders Sobhraj’s release; he is deported to France.
• December 19, 2023: Monique Olivier is convicted of complicity in three further deaths.
• March 11 and August 13, 2026: Switzerland’s Federal Supreme Court refuses Peiry accompanied outings and upholds the refusal of parole.