A man who kills for money has to spend it, and spending leaves a record. The ATM keeps a log and, often, a picture. The pawnbroker writes down the ring and the name of the person who sold it. The telephone company keeps the numbers, the times and the rough position of the handset against the nearest cell tower. None of these records was built for detectives. Each of them has, at one time or another, put a name in front of a grand jury.
Eight cases from four decades and two continents show the range. In some the paper trail did the whole job, from the first lead to the arrest. In others it arrived late, after a car registration or an accomplice’s confession had already given police a suspect, and its work was to turn suspicion into a case a jury would accept. In one it named the man within days and then could not catch him for eight months. Together they show what the ordinary records of daily life can do in a homicide investigation, and where they stop.
Samantha Koenig was 18 and lived in Anchorage, Alaska, with her father and her boyfriend. She went missing in early February 2012. Her picture went up on billboards across the city, volunteers handed out tens of thousands of fliers, and the community raised a reward.
The man responsible wanted that money. According to the account Anchorage police released in December 2012, he had obtained the debit card for the bank account she shared with her boyfriend, along with its personal identification number. On February 24 he used her own phone to send her boyfriend a text pointing him to a ransom note. The note demanded $30,000, to be placed in the account.
Investigators chose to let the account become a trap. Her father deposited reward money donated by the people of Anchorage into the account linked to the card. The plan, as police later described it, was to catch the person by tracking any withdrawals. The FBI’s timeline lists them: Anchorage on March 1, 2012; Willcox, Arizona, on March 7; Lordsburg, New Mexico, and Shepherd, Texas, on March 8; Humble, Texas, on March 10. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Anchorage later summarized the route as withdrawals in Alaska, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.
Each withdrawal tightened the net. Investigators determined that the person using the card was driving a white Ford Focus, and the FBI and the Texas Rangers followed the withdrawals as they happened. On March 13, 2012, a corporal of the Texas Highway Patrol stopped a white Ford Focus matching that description in Lufkin, in East Texas, more than three thousand miles from Anchorage. The driver was Israel Keyes, a 34-year-old Anchorage contractor and Army veteran. He was arrested for access device fraud, the federal offense of using a stolen card.
Keyes was returned to Alaska. Samantha Koenig’s death came to light near Palmer, north of Anchorage, on April 2, 2012. On April 18, 2012, a federal grand jury in Anchorage indicted him on three counts: kidnapping resulting in death, receiving and possessing ransom money, and access device fraud. He pleaded not guilty.
Over the months that followed he talked at length to federal prosecutors, FBI agents and Anchorage detectives. He confessed to Samantha Koenig’s death, and to the deaths in June 2011 of Bill and Lorraine Currier, a couple from Essex, Vermont, whom he had never met. He described other killings in other states and refused to name the victims. On December 2, 2012, three months before his trial was to begin, he died by suicide in his cell at the Anchorage Correctional Complex. He was never convicted of anything. The FBI later said that, relying mainly on his own statements, it believed he was responsible for 11 homicides between 2001 and 2012. The case against him began with an ATM card and a father’s deposit.
Gary Michael Hilton was 61 in the winter of 2007, a drifter who lived out of a van and camped in the national forests of the southern Appalachians and north Florida. Between October 2007 and January 2008 he killed four people he met in or near those forests. The courts that dealt with him in three jurisdictions agreed on what he wanted from each of them: their bank cards, and the numbers that made the cards work.
The first were John D. Bryant, 80, and his wife, Irene W. Bryant, 84, retirees from Hendersonville, North Carolina. Irene Bryant had been a veterinarian, one of the few women practicing large-animal medicine in Montana in her day. The couple went missing in October 2007. In the days that followed, investigators said, someone used the Bryants' ATM card in Ducktown, Tennessee, about fifty miles from the area of the later Georgia investigation. Irene Bryant’s death came to light in Transylvania County, North Carolina, in November 2007; her husband’s, in Macon County, in February 2008.
The second was Cheryl Hodges Dunlap, 46, of Crawfordville, Florida, a nurse at Florida State University who taught Sunday school. On December 2, 3 and 4, 2007, someone used her bank card at an ATM in Tallahassee, taking $700 in three withdrawals, the Florida Supreme Court later recorded; two further attempts were declined because they exceeded the daily limit. Bank video captured a figure with the face covered. Her death came to light in Leon County that month.
The third was Meredith Hope Emerson, 24, a University of Georgia graduate and a gifted student of French who had won national and departmental honors for her work. She went missing in north Georgia at the start of January 2008, and within days Hilton was in custody. His arrest warrant, the Associated Press reported, said he had tried to use her credit card. Her death came to light in Dawson County, Georgia, on January 7, 2008.
The cards did not catch Hilton by themselves; witnesses, a former employer and a forestry officer’s routine check all played a part. What the cards did was link three investigations in three states to one man and one motive. On January 31, 2008, Hilton pleaded guilty in Dawson County Superior Court to Meredith Emerson’s murder and was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole after 30 years. The district attorney said Hilton had planned to abduct her to take money from her accounts. In February 2011 a Leon County jury convicted him of the first-degree murder of Cheryl Dunlap, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that the theft count on which he was also convicted concerned her ATM card. Judge James C. Hankinson sentenced him to death on April 21, 2011, and listed among the aggravating circumstances that the murder had been committed for money. On March 27, 2012, in federal court in Asheville, Hilton pleaded guilty to the murder, robbery and kidnapping of John and Irene Bryant, and in April 2013 he received four life terms, consecutive to his state sentences.
The Florida Supreme Court affirmed the death sentence in 2013 and again rejected his challenges in 2021. On April 1, 2026, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit affirmed the denial of his federal habeas petition. On August 4, 2026, his lawyers asked the U.S. Supreme Court for more time to seek review, describing him as a prisoner under sentence of death in Florida.
The ATM can identify a man without stopping him. Gary Ray Bowles proved it in 1994.
His first victim was John Hardy Roberts, a 59-year-old insurance salesman in Daytona Beach, Florida, with whom Bowles was living. Roberts was killed in mid-March 1994. Bowles took his money and his cards. Daytona Beach police had little trouble working out who was responsible, the Associated Press reported: among the evidence was an ATM camera that recorded Bowles trying to withdraw money from Roberts' account. "What proved more difficult was capturing him," the AP wrote.
Bowles moved up the East Coast and back again. By the count he later gave investigators, he killed five more men in Maryland, Georgia and Florida before the year was out, most of them older men. The FBI added him to its list of Ten Most Wanted Fugitives as number 438. He was arrested in Jacksonville Beach on November 22, 1994, by the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office while being questioned about the death of Walter Hinton, a 42-year-old florist who had let him stay in his mobile home; he admitted who he was, and his fingerprints confirmed it.
The legal outcome rested on Florida’s three cases. Bowles pleaded guilty in May 1996 to the first-degree murder of Walter Hinton and was sentenced to death; the Florida Supreme Court reversed that sentence in 1998, and a new jury recommended death again in 1999. He was convicted of the first-degree murder of Albert Morris in Nassau County in 1996 and of John Hardy Roberts in Volusia County in 1997, and received life terms in both. The three killings outside Florida that he confessed to were never charged. He was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison on August 22, 2019. Eight months and five more deaths separated the moment a bank camera named him from the day he was caught.
Between October 2001 and January 2002, five people were taken in the Los Angeles area and held for ransom: Meyer Muscatel, 58, a real-estate developer; Rita Pekler, 39, a financial adviser; Alexander Umansky, 35, who owned an automobile shop; Nick Kharabadze, 29, a sound editor in the film industry; and his friend and business partner George Safiev, 37, a wealthy businessman. Ransom totaling more than $1 million was paid. None of the five came home. Their deaths came to light in Tuolumne County, California, the first in October 2001 and the other four in March 2002.
The men behind it were Iouri Mikhel and Jurijus Kadamovas, emigrants from the former Soviet Union who were connected through a Los Angeles business, with a handful of accomplices. What the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit later described is a scheme that kept drawing on its victims' finances after their deaths. Mikhel used the victims' ATM cards and was recorded by surveillance cameras as he did so. Kadamovas gave cards to an associate who traveled to Germany to withdraw more money. Mikhel used one of Safiev’s credit cards to order about $9,000 in electronic equipment. He also faxed a ransom note Safiev had signed to Safiev’s partner in London, demanding another $4 million; the partner tape-recorded the calls.
The case broke when one of the accomplices learned he was under investigation, confessed and cooperated with the FBI. From there the records did the rest. The FBI wiretapped the defendants' telephones and recorded them discussing ransom money. Cellphone records placed their phones traveling north on the days the victims died. On March 22, 2002, the Associated Press reported, six men were in federal custody, charged with hostage taking or receiving ransom money; the U.S. attorney’s office said the five victims had been abducted, blackmailed and killed over six months.
The trial before Judge Dickran Tevrizian in federal court in Los Angeles began in July 2006 and ran for months before an anonymous jury. On January 17, 2007, the jury convicted both men of conspiracy to take hostages resulting in death, three counts of hostage taking resulting in death, conspiracy to launder monetary instruments and conspiracy to escape from custody. It recommended death, and in March 2007 the judge imposed it. The Ninth Circuit affirmed in May 2018, calling the evidence of guilt "detailed, comprehensive, and in a word, overwhelming," and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case in October 2019. On December 23, 2024, President Joe Biden commuted the death sentences of 37 federal prisoners, Mikhel and Kadamovas among them, to life without parole. In October 2026 the Federal Bureau of Prisons listed Mikhel at the United States Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana.
For more than a decade the Gilgo Beach investigation on Long Island had the victims' names and very little else. The deaths of four women came to light near Gilgo Beach in December 2010, and the inquiry stalled for years. In early 2022 a new multiagency task force took it up, with Suffolk County police, the New York State Police, the sheriff’s office, the FBI and the district attorney’s office.
The first break was not a phone record. On March 14, 2022, according to the prosecution’s bail application, a State Police investigator reviewing vehicle registration records learned that a Massapequa Park architect named Rex Heuermann had owned a first-generation Chevrolet Avalanche at the time of the killings, the model a witness had described in 2010. Heuermann also fit the witness’s description of the man. Investigators then began to pull his records, and a grand jury eventually authorized more than 300 subpoenas, warrants and other legal process.
The telephones made the case. According to the bail application, burner phones, prepaid handsets with no name attached, had been in contact with several of the women. The historical cell-site records for Heuermann’s own phone no longer existed, so investigators turned to his billing records, which gave general locations. According to the bail application, they identified no occasion on which Heuermann’s phone was somewhere different from the burner phones or the victims' phones when those phones were in use. His records put him in Midtown Manhattan, where he worked, on the days the burners were active, and the burners and the victims' phones moved between Midtown and Massapequa Park. In one case, the filing said, the phone of Melissa Barthelemy, 24, was used in the summer of 2009 to make taunting calls to her family; prosecutors placed the phone in Midtown during those calls, and one near Heuermann’s office.
Suffolk County police arrested Heuermann in Midtown on July 13, 2023. He was arraigned the next day on first- and second-degree murder charges in the deaths of Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman and Amber Lynn Costello, and further charges followed in the cases of Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Jessica Taylor, Sandra Costilla and Valerie Mack. A hair, analyzed with a form of DNA testing that a judge allowed in September 2025, became a second pillar of the prosecution.
On April 8, 2026, in Suffolk County Court in Riverhead, Heuermann pleaded guilty to three counts of first-degree murder and four counts of second-degree murder, and admitted killing an eighth woman, Karen Vergata, with whose death he was never charged. On June 17, 2026, he was sentenced to three consecutive terms of life without parole and four consecutive terms of 25 years to life. He waived his right to appeal. District Attorney Ray Tierney told News 12 Long Island after the sentencing that Heuermann would not have admitted guilt without the weight of the evidence, which he said included phone and financial records as well as the DNA. In August 2026 the state prison system confirmed that Heuermann was held at Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora.
Steven Dean Gordon and Franc Cano were registered sex offenders in Orange County, California, and both wore GPS ankle monitors, Cano under state parole and Gordon under federal supervision. Between October 2013 and March 2014, four women vanished from Santa Ana and west Anaheim: Kianna Jackson, 20; Josephine Monique Vargas, 34; Martha Anaya, 28; and Jarrae Nykkole Estepp, 21. The death of Jarrae Estepp came to light in Anaheim on March 14, 2014.
Anaheim detectives started with the monitors. A check of registered sex offenders who were wearing GPS devices showed that Franc Cano had been near the places and times investigators were examining. Then came his phone. When detectives examined Cano’s phone records, the Associated Press reported, they saw that he had been texting constantly with another man: Steven Gordon. Gordon became the second suspect. Santa Ana police, who had been working on the disappearance of three local women since the fall of 2013, joined the Anaheim investigation, and cellphone records together with the two men’s GPS data placed the two men with the women. Both men were arrested in Anaheim in April 2014.
The phones and the trackers carried the prosecution. Gordon represented himself at trial, and on December 15, 2016, an Orange County jury convicted him of four counts of first-degree murder with the special circumstances of murder during a kidnapping and multiple murder. Rape counts against him had been dropped before trial. On February 3, 2017, he was sentenced to death. Cano’s case moved more slowly. In December 2022 the district attorney withdrew the death penalty, and on December 15, 2022, Cano pleaded guilty as charged to the special-circumstances murders of all four women and was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. As of December 2022, Gordon’s automatic appeal of his death sentence was still pending.
The case left a hard question behind it. Both men had been tracked the whole time. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said its monitors showed where an offender had been but could not detect a crime in progress, and were not designed to alert anyone when one offender came into contact with another. The data that could not prevent the killings was, in the end, the data that convicted the men.
Before the cellphone, there was the pawnshop. In the first months of 1988, Marshall Lee Gore was a Florida man with a Miami-Dade criminal record and a habit of leaving town in other people’s cars.
Susan Roark met him in Cleveland, Tennessee, in January 1988, and her grandmother soon reported her missing. On January 31, 1988, Gore arrived in Tampa driving her black Mustang, and he persuaded a friend to help him pawn jewelry that was later identified as hers. From Tampa he went on to Miami. In March 1988 he was driving the yellow Corvette of Robyn Novick, 30, a south Dade County woman. On March 17, 1988, FBI agents arrested him in Paducah, Kentucky, on unrelated federal charges.
The pawned jewelry became one of the load-bearing pieces of the Roark prosecution. The case in Columbia County, Florida, was circumstantial: evidence that he had been with her, her car and her jewelry in his hands soon afterward, and the testimony of a woman who survived a separate crime in Dade County that March. On March 14, 1990, the jury convicted Gore of first-degree murder, kidnapping and armed robbery, and on April 3, 1990, Circuit Judge E. Vernon Douglas sentenced him to death. Affirming in 1992, the Florida Supreme Court set out the features the Roark case shared with the later crime and listed among them that the man took the woman’s car and jewelry, pawned the jewelry soon afterward and left the state. Each might be common alone, the court said, but together they formed a "unique modus operandi."
The point came back eighteen years later. When Gore asked for DNA testing of items from the Roark investigation, the Florida Supreme Court in 2010 affirmed the denial. His presence with Roark, his possession of her car, the pawned jewelry and an admission he made to a witness tied him strongly to the crime, the court said, and a negative result would not clear him. In the Novick case, a Dade County jury convicted him of first-degree murder in 1995; that conviction was reversed in 1998, and he was convicted again on February 12, 1999, and sentenced to death. He was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison on October 1, 2013.
Chandrakant Jha came to Delhi from a village in Madhepura district, in Bihar, in 1990, and took work around the city’s wholesale fruit and vegetable markets. The men police later said he befriended were like him: young migrant laborers from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Three of their deaths came to light in west Delhi within seven months: on October 20, 2006, a man later identified as Anil Mandal, from Bhagalpur district in Bihar; on April 25, 2007, Upender, from Maharajganj in Uttar Pradesh, who had worked with Jha in the market; and on May 18, 2007, a man of about 22 whose identity the courts held was never proved.
Telephone evidence ran through all three cases. Calls made from a public phone booth on the day one of the killings came to light were traced in the course of the investigation, and the booth’s operator later identified Jha in court as the man who had made them. In the Upender case, a relative testified that he had spoken with Jha by phone after Upender went missing, and phone records showed the movements of the phone Jha used on April 24 and 25, 2007. At trial the prosecution called the officials who kept the phone company’s call records, along with the phone booth operators, doctors, and DNA and handwriting experts. The defense argued, among much else, that call records could be altered.
Police arrested Jha in Alipur, in north Delhi, on May 20, 2007, on an informer’s tip. In January and February 2013 a sessions court at Rohini convicted him of three murders and of causing the disappearance of evidence, and sentenced him to death in two of the cases and to imprisonment for the rest of his life in the third. On January 27, 2016, the Delhi High Court upheld all three convictions. It held the phone records, the recoveries and the handwriting evidence to be consistent with one another, and it commuted both death sentences to imprisonment for the rest of his natural life without remission. Delhi Police attributed four further killings to him between 1998 and 2005; he was never convicted of them.
The telephone had one more part to play. Released on 90 days' parole in 2023, Jha failed to return to Tihar Jail. A Crime Branch team spent about six months hunting him across Delhi, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Analysis of call records turned up a suspicious mobile number, and the officers followed it. On January 17, 2025, they arrested him at Old Delhi Railway Station. He was 57, and was returned to his life term.
Set side by side, the cases sort themselves. For Israel Keyes and, decades earlier, Marshall Lee Gore, the money trail was the case: a ransom account watched in real time, jewelry pawned in Tampa. For Gary Michael Hilton, the bank cards were both the motive and the thread that tied three state lines to one van. For Mikhel and Kadamovas, for Gordon and Cano, and for Rex Heuermann, the records came after a first break, from an accomplice, a tracking database or a vehicle registration, and turned a suspect into a defendant the courts would convict. Chandrakant Jha was convicted with the help of the telephone and, eighteen years after his first arrest, caught again by it.
Gary Ray Bowles is the reminder that a record is only as good as the speed of the people reading it. A bank camera gave Daytona Beach police his face in March 1994. Five more men died before Jacksonville officers, questioning him about another man’s death, heard him give his real name.
• January 31, 1988: Marshall Lee Gore arrives in Tampa in Susan Roark’s car; jewelry later identified as hers is pawned.
• March 17, 1988: FBI agents arrest Gore in Paducah, Kentucky, on unrelated federal charges.
• March 14, 1990: A Columbia County, Florida, jury convicts Gore of the first-degree murder of Susan Roark.
• March 1994: An ATM camera in Daytona Beach records Gary Ray Bowles trying to withdraw money from John Hardy Roberts' account.
• November 22, 1994: Bowles is arrested in Jacksonville Beach.
• October 2001 to January 2002: Five people are taken and killed in the Los Angeles-area hostage scheme of Iouri Mikhel and Jurijus Kadamovas.
• March 22, 2002: Six men are reported in federal custody in the Mikhel case.
• October 20, 2006, to May 18, 2007: Three deaths later charged against Chandrakant Jha come to light in west Delhi.
• January 17, 2007: A federal jury convicts Mikhel and Kadamovas.
• May 20, 2007: Jha is arrested in Alipur, north Delhi.
• October 2007: The Bryants' ATM card is used in Ducktown, Tennessee.
• December 2 to 4, 2007: Cheryl Dunlap’s bank card is used for three withdrawals in Tallahassee.
• January 31, 2008: Gary Michael Hilton pleads guilty to the murder of Meredith Emerson.
• February 15, 2011: A Leon County jury convicts Hilton in the Cheryl Dunlap case.
• March 1 to March 10, 2012: Samantha Koenig’s debit card is used at ATMs in Alaska, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.
• March 13, 2012: Israel Keyes is arrested in Lufkin, Texas.
• April 18, 2012: Keyes is indicted in Anchorage.
• December 2, 2012: Keyes dies in custody before trial.
• October 1, 2013: Gore is executed.
• January 27, 2016: The Delhi High Court upholds Jha’s three convictions.
• December 15, 2016: An Orange County jury convicts Steven Dean Gordon of four murders.
• August 22, 2019: Bowles is executed.
• March 14, 2022: A vehicle registration record points the Gilgo Beach task force to Rex Heuermann.
• December 15, 2022: Franc Cano pleads guilty and is sentenced to life without parole.
• July 13, 2023: Heuermann is arrested in Midtown Manhattan.
• December 23, 2024: President Biden commutes the death sentences of Mikhel and Kadamovas.
• January 17, 2025: Jha is rearrested in Delhi after a call-record lead.
• April 8, 2026: Heuermann pleads guilty to seven murders and admits an eighth.
• June 17, 2026: Heuermann is sentenced to life without parole.