Nobody keeps a ledger of what it costs to catch a serial offender, and the figures that exist were produced for other purposes: a county administrator defending a budget, a newspaper asking how much a trial had run, a government study weighing whether a search could be done at all. They are not comparable, they are given in different currencies and different years, and they count different things. What they do show is the scale at which public institutions have been willing, or forced, to spend when a case grows past the ordinary. In some cases the bill is the story. In others the bill is a measure of how long a case went unsolved, or how much was spent on the wrong theory.
Each figure that follows is given as its author gave it, with the name of the person or publication and the year. None has been converted into another currency or added to another.
Charles Chitat Ng was convicted in Orange County Superior Court on February 24, 1999, of 11 counts of first-degree murder committed in 1984 and 1985. The jury did not reach a verdict on a twelfth count. It had taken 14 years to get him into a courtroom for the verdict. He was arrested in Calgary, Alberta, on July 6, 1985, after California’s most wanted fugitive was stopped over a shoplifting complaint. Canada had abolished capital punishment, California would not promise to forgo it, and the question of whether he could be returned went to the Supreme Court of Canada, which ruled on September 26, 1991, and then to the United Nations Human Rights Committee, which adopted its views in 1993. He came back to California in 1991. Jury selection did not begin until September 1998, and the California Supreme Court later wrote that Ng had used the pretrial period to delay.
The delay is where the money went. Debra J. Saunders, writing in The Weekly Standard in September 1998, called it the most expensive prosecution in California history, with costs approaching 10 million dollars. She quoted the Calaveras County administrator, Brent Harrington, who put the county’s bill at 9.3 million dollars at the latest count. After the verdicts, Attorney General Bill Lockyer said the case had taken nearly 14 years of legal proceedings and more than 11 million dollars in public expenses. A reference work, Great American Trials, gave a lower final figure of 6.6 million dollars. More recent reporting has gone the other way: The Union Democrat has put the cost of the trial at about 14 million dollars, and the Lancaster Guardian and the Calgary Journal at about 20 million.
Those five numbers cannot all be right, and they probably do not measure the same thing. One may count the county’s costs, another the state’s, another the extradition fight. The reasonable reading is that nobody could say precisely, and that every account agrees the sum was far beyond what a county of Calaveras’s size could carry. Ng was sentenced to death on June 30, 1999, and the sentence was affirmed by the California Supreme Court on July 28, 2022.
The killings that came to be called the Snowtown murders took place between August 1992 and May 1999 in Adelaide’s northern suburbs, at Murray Bridge and at the small town of Snowtown, about 140 kilometers north of the city. John Justin Bunting was convicted on September 8, 2003, of 11 murders. Robert Joe Wagner, who stood trial beside him, was convicted of 10. James Vlassakis, who was 18 when he took part in the first of the killings, had pleaded guilty to four in 2001 and became the principal witness for the prosecution. Mark Haydon, whose wife was among the dead, was not convicted of murder but of seven counts of assisting the offenders.
The trial of Bunting and Wagner opened in the Supreme Court of South Australia on October 16, 2002, before Justice Brian Martin, with Wendy Abraham prosecuting. When Justice Martin began summing up on August 7, 2003, ABC News reported that the court had sat for 150 days, heard 227 witnesses and produced about 11,500 pages of transcript. The trial had cost about 15 million dollars, and the state government had set aside 21 million dollars to cover it and Haydon’s separate prosecution. It had run for 11 months, the longest criminal trial in the state’s history. Fifteen jurors were sworn at the start; three dropped out along the way and twelve returned the verdicts.
The sentencing hearing in October 2003 put another kind of weight on the courtroom. Twenty-nine victim impact statements were put to Justice Martin, the largest number presented in a single case in South Australia. On October 29 he sentenced both men to life imprisonment and declined to fix a non-parole period for either. The Court of Criminal Appeal dismissed Bunting’s appeal, which he argued himself, on May 24, 2005.
The costs did not stop with the verdicts. A court order barred publication of Vlassakis’s image for about 25 years to protect him as a witness; it was lifted in May 2026, and in October 2026 the news agencies reported that he had been released on parole. Haydon’s release in 2024 came under a supervision order. The case, in other words, kept the South Australian justice system occupied for more than two decades.
Jeremy Skibicki was convicted on July 11, 2024, of four counts of first-degree murder: Ashlee Shingoose, 30, Morgan Harris, 39, Marcedes Myran, 26, and Rebecca Contois, 24, First Nations women killed in Winnipeg between about mid-March and mid-May 2022. Chief Justice Glenn Joyal of the Manitoba Court of King’s Bench, sitting without a jury, rejected the defense that Skibicki was not criminally responsible because of mental disorder. On August 28, 2024, Skibicki was sentenced to four concurrent life terms with no eligibility for parole for 25 years.
What made the case a matter of public expenditure came after the arrest. Winnipeg police believed that Harris and Myran were in a private landfill. On December 2, 2022, the police chief, Danny Smyth, said no search was planned because too much time had passed. The decision set off protests, calls for his resignation and an apology from him on December 14. A committee that included Indigenous leaders was formed to study whether a search could be done.
That study, released on May 12, 2023, concluded that a search was feasible but could take up to three years and cost up to 184 million dollars. In July 2023 the provincial government of Premier Heather Stefanson said a search was too risky for workers and could not guarantee a result. The question became an issue in the provincial election that autumn, and the Progressive Conservatives ran advertisements on the last day of the campaign saying that for health and safety reasons the answer on the landfill dig had to be no. The New Democrats under Wab Kinew, who had promised a search, won in October 2023.
A second study, released on January 26, 2024, put the figure at about 90 million dollars for a search of about a year, and warned of health risks from asbestos. On March 22, 2024, the federal and Manitoba governments each committed 20 million dollars. The search began in December 2024 and ran until July 2025. In March 2025, two sets of what the search recovered were identified as Harris and Myran. The fourth woman, known throughout the trial only as Mashkode Bizhiki’ikwe, or Buffalo Woman, a name given to her by Indigenous community members, was identified as Ashlee Shingoose in March 2025 after Skibicki gave investigators new information. A second search began in Winnipeg on December 1, 2025, and the province closed the private site on April 30, 2026, while crews continued at the second.
The Canadian figures are estimates, one of them a ceiling and the other a plan, and no final bill has been reported. What the case shows is a cost debated in public before any money was spent, in a province where the argument over 184 million dollars and then 90 million dollars was fought out at a polling station.
Robert William Pickton, a pig farmer from Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, was convicted on December 9, 2007, of six counts of second-degree murder. The women were from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside: Sereena Abotsway, Mona Wilson, Andrea Joesbury, Brenda Ann Wolfe, Georgina Faith Papin and Marnie Frey. Justice James Williams sentenced him to life with no parole eligibility for 25 years. Twenty more counts of first-degree murder were stayed on August 4, 2010, after the Supreme Court of Canada upheld the convictions, because prosecutors said further convictions could not add to his sentence.
Police began searching the property on February 5, 2002, for illegal firearms; he was charged with two counts of first-degree murder on February 22. The search of the property then widened into what The Canadian Encyclopedia described as the largest investigation of its kind in Canadian history. The full search began on June 6, 2002, and ended in November 2003, after about 21 months. Investigators took 200,000 DNA samples and seized 600,000 exhibits. Maclean’s reported in 2007 that the investigation had cost 70 million dollars through the end of 2003, with a further 46 million dollars budgeted. The Canadian Encyclopedia gives the figure as nearly 70 million.
The sums were spent after an earlier failure to spend, and the public inquiry led by Wally Oppal concluded in 2012 that the police investigations before 2002 had been a blatant failure. The DNA of 33 women was linked to the property in all. Pickton died on May 31, 2024, after another inmate assaulted him in a Quebec prison; the inmate pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in September 2025.
At least 11 women in and around New Bedford, Massachusetts, became part of the case in the spring and summer of 1988. Nine of them were confirmed dead between July 1988 and April 1989; the other two have never been found. One man, identified here only by the initials K.P., was indicted in 1990 for one of the deaths, and the charge was dropped in the summer of 1991. No one has been convicted, and no one has been charged in any of the other deaths.
Boston 25 News, reporting in July 2018, described the inquiry by the Bristol County District Attorney’s office and the Massachusetts State Police as the most expensive investigation in the state’s history, and investigators told the station it was the largest homicide investigation in Massachusetts since the Boston Strangler. The station gave no dollar figure. The claim stands, therefore, as a description of scale from a news organization and its sources, not as an audited number, and it is the only such claim here that is attached to a case with no conviction at all. Boston 25 also reported that the inquiry faced difficulties from the start: few clues and no eyewitnesses. The case remained open in June 2026, and families were still pressing for answers.
Orville Lynn Majors, a licensed practical nurse, worked in the four-bed intensive care unit of Vermillion County Hospital in Clinton, Indiana, from 1993 to 1995. According to the federal appeals court, about 354 patients a year had been admitted to the unit in the four years before 1994, and an average of 27 of them died each year; in 1994, 100 of the 351 patients admitted died. In early 1995 a registered nurse compared attendance charts with the deaths in two days of work and concluded that Majors had been present for almost twice as many as the next nurse. The hospital’s chief executive suspended him on March 9, 1995, and police were asked to investigate.
The criminal inquiry ran for about 33 months, examined 165 deaths at the hospital from 1993 to 1995, and cost the state more than 2 million dollars, according to the Greene County Daily World. The Seventh Circuit, writing in 1998, put the length at 34 months and the cost at more than a million dollars. Investigators estimated it at 90,000 hours of work. Majors was arrested on December 29, 1997, and charged with murder.
The trial was moved from Vermillion County to Brazil, in Clay County. Jurors were brought in from Miami County and sequestered, and testimony lasted about six weeks. On October 17, 1999, the jury convicted him of six counts of murder and deadlocked on a seventh. On November 15 Judge Ernest Yelton sentenced him to six consecutive 60-year terms, 360 years in all. The Indiana Supreme Court affirmed on August 14, 2002. Majors always denied that he had harmed anyone. He died at the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City on September 24, 2017, at 56, of natural causes according to the Department of Correction.
Two sources, two numbers, a doubling between them. A small county hospital produced a state expenditure that one source says was twice what another says, and both agree that the inquiry took close to three years for six convictions.
The cost of the Nicarico case was not mainly the cost of finding the right man. Jeanine Nicarico, 10, of Naperville, was killed in February 1983. Brian Dugan told prosecutors in the mid-1980s that he had killed her and acted alone, and offered to say so formally only if he was promised that he would not be executed. No promise was made. Two other men, Rolando Cruz and Alejandro Hernandez, were convicted of the murder in 1985 and sentenced to death, and the case against them went through reversals, retrials and appeals for ten years. Cruz was acquitted at his third trial on November 3, 1995, and the charges against Hernandez were dropped on December 8, 1995. In December 1996 a grand jury indicted seven law enforcement officials, who became known as the DuPage Seven; two were freed by a judge for lack of evidence in May 1999 and the rest were acquitted on June 4, 1999.
On September 26, 2000, the DuPage County Board voted 14 to 9 to settle the civil rights suits brought by Cruz, Hernandez and a third man who had also been charged, for 3.5 million dollars. Hernandez later received 170,000 dollars in state compensation and Cruz 120,300, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. Governor George Ryan pardoned Cruz on grounds of innocence on December 19, 2002.
Dugan was indicted for the Nicarico murder on November 29, 2005, on DNA evidence. He pleaded guilty on July 28, 2009, without a deal, and a jury sentenced him to death that November. The state of Illinois paid for his defense from a fund for poor defendants in capital cases, an estimated 750,000 dollars to 1 million dollars, the Daily Herald reported; the fund was one the Nicarico case had helped bring about. In March 2011 Illinois abolished the death penalty and Governor Pat Quinn commuted his sentence to life. Dugan had already pleaded guilty in 1985 to the murders of Donna Schnorr, 27, and Melissa Ackerman, 7.
The figures in this case do not measure an investigation. They measure what a prosecution cost after it settled on the wrong defendants, and that is why they appear here.
No total cost for the West Yorkshire inquiry has been published. What it gives instead is scale. By 1980, the Home Secretary later told Parliament, the hunt for the man who killed 13 women between 1975 and 1980 had become the largest criminal investigation ever conducted in Britain. A squad of about 200 officers carried out more than 130,000 interviews and checked 150,000 cars, and the inquiry consumed about 2.5 million police hours. A campaign built around a hoax tape and letters supposedly from the killer, with a telephone line the public could call to hear the voice, billboards and newspaper advertisements, cost about one million pounds. About 40,000 men in the North East were investigated because of the voice. It was a Sunderland hoaxer’s voice, and Sutcliffe was from Bradford.
Detectives interviewed Sutcliffe nine times before his arrest. The incident room kept its information on a card index that the Byford Report later judged overloaded and ineffective. West Yorkshire Police were checking tens of thousands of names while the man they wanted was already in the system. He was arrested on January 2, 1981, in Sheffield, by two officers who noticed false number plates on his car, and confessed two days later. At the Old Bailey he pleaded guilty to seven counts of attempted murder and said he was not guilty of murder by reason of diminished responsibility. The prosecution was ready to accept that plea; the judge insisted that a jury decide, and on May 22, 1981, it convicted him of 13 murders. He received 20 concurrent life sentences, was ordered in 2010 to serve a whole life term, and died of COVID-19 on November 13, 2020. That day the chief constable of West Yorkshire apologized to the families for the language the original investigators had used about the women.
The Soviet search for the man who came to be known as the Rostov Ripper left no cost that can be stated in rubles or any other currency. The measure that survives is the number of people it touched. Peter Conradi reported in The Moscow Times in 1992 that almost half a million people were questioned during the operation, which also solved more than 1,000 unrelated crimes, among them 95 murders and 245 rapes by his count.
Andrei Chikatilo was arrested in November 1990. At trial in Rostov he was convicted on October 15, 1992, of 52 murders, and sentenced to death. He was executed at Novocherkassk prison on February 14, 1994. A search that questioned half a million people did not stop him from killing for years, and the cost of that failure is not a figure anyone has stated.
In these cases the sums that were reported attach to the courtroom, to the search that followed an arrest, or to years of work on a theory that turned out to be wrong, and few to the arrest itself. In California a county of modest size absorbed a prosecution that officials priced at between 6.6 million and 20 million dollars depending on who was asked. In South Australia the state set aside 21 million dollars for two trials. In Manitoba, 184 million dollars was a ceiling and 90 million a plan, and the argument over which to pay was settled by an election. In Indiana the same inquiry carries two prices. In British Columbia the reported figure was 70 million dollars through 2003, spent on a property whose owner had been the subject of tips for years.
The figures also show how thin the record is. Most are single numbers from a single report, some from the officials with a stake in how large they sounded. A reader can take them as a rough ranking of ambition, not a ledger.
• July 6, 1985: Charles Ng arrested in Calgary, Alberta.
• September 26, 1991: Supreme Court of Canada rules on Ng’s extradition; Ng is returned to California that year.
• September 1998: jury selection begins in Ng’s trial; Saunders writes that costs approach 10 million dollars.
• February 24, 1999: Ng convicted of 11 counts of first-degree murder.
• June 30, 1999: Ng sentenced to death.
• February 5, 2002: police begin searching the Pickton property; Pickton charged with murder February 22.
• October 16, 2002: Snowtown trial of Bunting and Wagner opens in Adelaide.
• August 7, 2003: Snowtown summing up begins; trial reported at about 15 million dollars.
• September 8, 2003: Bunting convicted of 11 murders.
• October 29, 2003: Bunting and Wagner sentenced to life with no non-parole period.
• November 2003: work at the Pickton property ends after about 21 months.
• December 9, 2007: Pickton convicted of six counts of second-degree murder.
• November 2009: Dugan sentenced to death for the Nicarico murder.
• March 2011: Illinois abolishes the death penalty; Dugan’s sentence commuted to life.
• December 2, 2022: Winnipeg police say no search of the landfill is planned.
• May 12, 2023: first Manitoba study estimates up to 184 million dollars.
• January 26, 2024: second study estimates about 90 million dollars.
• March 22, 2024: federal and Manitoba governments each commit 20 million dollars.
• July 11, 2024: Skibicki convicted of four counts of first-degree murder.
• December 2024 to July 2025: search at the private landfill.
• December 1, 2025: second search begins at a Winnipeg site.
• April 30, 2026: Manitoba closes the private landfill search site.