By the end of the summer of 1977, about 300 New York police officers were assigned to one offender, and young women across the city were cutting their hair short, pinning it up or dyeing it, and staying indoors after dark. Queens District Attorney John Santucci said later that they did it out of fear. Discotheques in Queens and the Bronx lost business, and the owner of one Queens club called a Friday night that summer the worst he had seen. The man everyone was afraid of was arrested in Yonkers on August 10, 1977. He had a name, a court date and, nine months later, a guilty plea.
Most of the cases from those years did not end so cleanly, and the decade is remembered less for any single name than for the way the inquiries ran: forces whose command did not always cross a jurisdiction line, a press that printed the letters of unknown gunmen, and a public fear that left its mark on hair salons and dance floors.
Whether serial killings peaked in those decades and then fell is a question, not a finding. The court records, official reviews and newspaper reporting on the nine cases here describe particular investigations, trials and sentences. They describe, in a few places, changes that officials announced afterward. None of them counts how many people serial offenders killed in the 1970s and 1980s, and none measures a fall in that number. Nine cases are not a statistic. Set in their decade, they show how each inquiry was run, and what officials said they would change afterward.
Between February 1972 and December 1973, girls and young women from Santa Rosa and from towns farther north died in rural Sonoma County, California. The youngest were 12 and 13. Several of them had been hitchhiking, in a county where, as the North Bay Bohemian wrote in 2004, young people had once thumbed rides without fear. The cases came to be known as the Santa Rosa hitchhiker murders.
They are unsolved. No one has been charged with any of the deaths, and the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office has kept the files open. Press lists of the case name seven girls and young women, one woman whose case is still open and one woman who has not been identified. Maureen Sterling, 12, and Yvonne Weber, 13, were students at Slater Junior High, and their deaths came to light on December 28, 1972. Kim Wendy Allen, 19, studied at Santa Rosa Junior College and worked at a natural food store in Marin County; her death came to light on March 5, 1972. Lori Kursa was 13, and hers came to light on December 14, 1972. Carolyn Davis, 15 in most lists and 14 in one, died in July 1973, and her death came to light about July 31; Theresa Walsh, 23, the mother of a two-year-old, died that December; her death came to light on December 28, 1973, and she was identified in January 1974. The state Department of Justice still lists the case of Jeanette Kamahele, who was 20, as open, and she has not been formally tied to the deaths.
The sheriff, Don Striepeke, brought in a University of California criminologist, Peter D. Barnett, in the hope that academic help could move the inquiry forward; what Barnett’s work produced has not been reported. At a press conference in 1975, the Bohemian reported, Striepeke and Sergeant Butch Carstedt named the Zodiac, the unidentified Bay Area killer of those years, as the likeliest suspect in a string of killings of young women across six western states, and they described the pattern on a map as a sideways letter Z. By 2004, the Bohemian said, the consensus inside the sheriff’s department was that the Zodiac had not been involved. The writer Robert Graysmith counted the hitchhiker cases among the Zodiac’s in a book that named Arthur Leigh Allen, who died without being charged with any killing; DNA from a stamp on a Zodiac letter had not matched him, and a co-author of another Zodiac book told the paper he did not consider Allen a suspect.
Ted Bundy’s name came up too. Robert Keppel, who had led the Seattle-area inquiry into Bundy, told the Bohemian that Bundy was a viable suspect for some of the Santa Rosa deaths. It was "definitely possible," he said, though he could not place Bundy in Northern California at the right times and could not rule it out either. A tip that Bundy had worked for an electronics company in Forestville in 1972 went nowhere; Keppel said there was no evidence for it. Bundy was not charged with any death in Sonoma County.
The only movement in fifty years has come from a different case. A detective in the sheriff’s Violent Crimes unit reopened the file on Michelle Marie Veal, a Sonoma County woman who died in 1996, and sent evidence to a private laboratory in 2021. In January 2022 the state Department of Justice reported a match in the national DNA database to Jack Alexander Bokin, who had died on December 4, 2021, in a state prison medical facility at Vacaville while serving 231 years for kidnapping, attempted murder and other crimes in San Francisco. The sheriff’s office said its cold-case detectives would look at him.
Paul John Knowles was never tried for anything. He was born in Orlando in 1946 and was 28 in the summer of 1974, when he left a Jacksonville jail on July 26. Over the next four months police in Florida, Georgia and several other states linked him to deaths. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation, in a 2011 release, put the number at no fewer than 18. A 13WMAZ investigation said police tied him to crimes in Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Nevada, Texas, Virginia and Connecticut, and another of its reports said investigators had confirmed that he killed at least 14 women and four men in five states. First Coast News described a four-month spree across seven states. On tapes recorded for his lawyer, he claimed 35.
Among the dead were a Florida Highway Patrol trooper, Charles Eugene Campbell, 35, who had served nine years and left a wife and a son, and James Meyer, described as a Delaware businessman. The patrol’s memorial gives Campbell’s date of death as November 16, 1974, and the GBI says both men died in Pulaski County, Georgia; the Atlanta Journal-Constitution put the date at November 17. Andy Hill, whose father was the Pulaski County sheriff in 1974, told 13WMAZ that his father "always described it as the worst thing he’d ever been a part of or had to be a part of."
Knowles was arrested in Henry County, Georgia, on November 17, 1974. What charges were filed against him, and whether any reached a hearing, has not been reported. On December 18, 1974, a GBI agent, Ronnie Angel, killed him while he was being driven by Douglas County Sheriff Earl Lee to recover a gun. The officers said he had picked his handcuff lock and seized the sheriff’s weapon; his lawyer said he did not believe Knowles had tried to escape. No inquiry or finding on his death was reported. Because he died before any trial, no court heard the evidence against him, and the count has stayed uncertain for half a century. A retired Georgia investigator, Jimmy Josey, told WGXA that he could find no clear motive for any of it.
The press called him the "Casanova Killer." Sandy Fawkes, a British journalist born in 1929 and raised in foster care, wrote Killing Time, published in Britain in 1977 and in the United States in 1979 and reissued in 2004 as Natural Born Killer: In Love and On the Road With a Serial Killer. In its first edition, Sarah Weinman wrote, Fawkes called Knowles as much a victim as the 18 people whose deaths police attributed to him. Fawkes died in 2005.
The case also shows how thin the paper trail could be for a child in 1974. Ima Jean Sanders was 13 and had come from Texas to live with her mother in Warner Robins, Georgia. In December 2011, after 35 years in which her case sat in a GBI laboratory file labeled "unidentified victim No. 5," the bureau announced that she had been identified as one of Knowles’s victims. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that no report on her could later be located and that she had never been entered in the federal database of missing persons.
Two sisters from Jacksonville, Annette Anderson, 11, and Mylette Anderson, 6, are still unaccounted for. Knowles later wrote a letter claiming responsibility for them. Sergeant Dan Janson of the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office told First Coast News in 2019, "I can’t say that he is responsible for this," adding that he believed the confession was false and that Knowles was known for inflating his count for shock value. News4Jax reported that prosecutors had concluded Knowles was responsible and that one of his brothers did not believe it. The sheriff’s office has never closed the case, and Knowles is the only person ever linked to it. The girls' father kept the same telephone number for the rest of his life. On the 45th anniversary the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the sheriff’s office again appealed for tips, and a former director of the center, Jay Howell, told Action News Jax that the center had not existed until 1984 and that a 1981 study showed only one in nine missing children had been entered in the national system at all.
David Berkowitz attacked 13 people in eight attacks in the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn between July 29, 1976, and July 31, 1977. Six died: Donna Lauria, 18; Christine Freund, 26; Virginia Voskerichian, 19 or 20 depending on the source; Valentina Suriani, 18 or 19; Alexander Esau, 20; and Stacy Moskowitz, 20 in most accounts. Seven were wounded. In 2024 the New York police confirmed that Wendy Savino, attacked on April 9, 1976, who survived, had been the first victim of the same man, an attack for which he was never charged. He also told detectives, after his arrest, of an assault on Christmas Eve 1975 in the Bronx; no charge was reported.
Voskerichian was a sophomore at Barnard College, the daughter of a watchmaker, from a family of Armenian descent who had lived in Bulgaria and reached the United States in 1968 after waiting more than ten years for permission to leave. Her brother told the Queens Chronicle that she spoke five languages and might have become a translator. After her death, ballistics tests showed that the same weapon had been used in all five attacks to that point, the Associated Press reported. By then three young people were dead and four were wounded.
The police response was the largest the city had mounted. The department formed a task force code-named Operation Omega under Deputy Inspector Timothy Dowd, with Joseph Borrelli as his second in command; it grew from about 70 investigators to 300 after the last attack. Time reported in August 1977 that 75 detectives and 225 uniformed officers were assigned full time, that about 700 more had volunteered off duty, and that the task force center in Queens sometimes logged more than 100 calls an hour. Police received at least 5,000 names to check; women named husbands, former boyfriends and co-workers. Officers recorded license plates in the lovers' lanes after midnight and put mannequins in parked cars; live decoys were judged too dangerous. A profile drawn up in May described a paranoid loner, possibly with religious delusions. Witness sketches did not resemble one another and sent people after the wrong men.
The killer wrote letters, and the press made them famous. A letter addressed to Captain Borrelli turned up after the April 17, 1977, killings of Suriani and Esau, in which the writer called himself the "Son of Sam"; the name leaked and stuck. He also wrote to the Daily News columnist Jimmy Breslin. The pattern the newspapers drew was tidier than the cases. Time counted six attacks in parked cars, most of them in quiet residential areas and not in lovers' lanes, and noted that some of the women did not have long dark hair. It made no difference to the fear.
Berkowitz was traced, in the end, through a parking ticket written near the last attack, in Brooklyn, and through Yonkers police files on threatening letters sent to his neighbors, and he was arrested in Yonkers at about 10:30 p.m. on August 10, 1977. On May 8, 1978, against his lawyers' advice, he pleaded guilty to six counts of second-degree murder, with attempted murder, assault and weapons counts for the seven who were wounded. On June 12, 1978, he was sentenced to the maximum of 25 years to life on each murder count. He became eligible for parole in 2002 and has been refused at every appearance, most recently at his twelfth, in May 2024. Carl Denaro, who survived and had to give up a place in the Air Force, told the Associated Press forty years afterward, "I’m the luckiest man alive, I really am."
Peter Sutcliffe, a truck driver from Bradford, killed 13 women and tried to kill at least seven more in West Yorkshire and Manchester between July 1975 and November 1980. West Yorkshire Police interviewed him nine times during those five years. The names of the dead are Wilma McCann, 28; Emily Jackson, 42; Irene Richardson, 28; Patricia Atkinson, 32; Jayne MacDonald, 16; Jean Jordan, 20; Yvonne Pearson, 21; Helen Rytka, 18; Vera Millward, 40; Josephine Whitaker, 19; Barbara Leach, 20; Marguerite Walls, 47; and Jacqueline Hill, 20.
The inquiry was the largest the country had seen, and it was overwhelmed by its own paperwork. Police interviewed about 11,000 people in the months after the first assaults, ITV reported, without an arrest. A tape and a series of letters mailed from Sunderland, attributed to a man who claimed to be the killer, drew the hunt toward the northeast of England. Voice experts and some detectives warned that the material was a hoax. Twelve days after Barbara Leach died, in September 1979, the hoaxer himself telephoned police to say that the letters and tape were not genuine; the call was lost among many others. The women who had survived said their assailant sounded like a local man, and Sutcliffe was from Bradford. He said later of the Sunderland hunt, "While ever that was going on, I felt safe."
The inquiry also rested on a theory about the killer’s motive that led senior officers to sort his victims into those they called innocent and the rest. Officers described Jayne MacDonald, 16, as the first "innocent" victim, which Wilma McCann’s son, Richard, said implied that his mother and the other women had not been innocent. "My mum was completely innocent and deserved to live," he said in 2020. MacDonald’s own family were angered by the division of the dead into good and bad women, the Yorkshire Post reported. Marcella Claxton, wounded in Leeds in May 1976, gave police a description and a photofit that later proved accurate, but the police at the time did not count her as part of the series; she was pregnant and lost the baby, and told the press after Sutcliffe’s death that she still lived with her injuries. Sutcliffe later pleaded guilty to the attempted murder of her. After his death in 2020, the chief constable of West Yorkshire Police apologized for the language and terminology officers had used about the victims.
George Oldfield, the assistant chief constable in charge of the inquiry, suffered a heart attack and was moved off the case. In November 1980 Detective Chief Superintendent James Hobson took over and reduced the weight given to the letters and the tape. Sutcliffe was arrested in Sheffield on January 2, 1981, by two South Yorkshire officers on a routine check of his car’s number plates, and he confessed at Dewsbury police station two days later. When he was first charged, crowds outside the Yorkshire courthouse chanted against him, United Press International reported, and the trial was moved to the Old Bailey. He pleaded guilty on April 29, 1981, to seven counts of attempted murder, and a jury rejected his claim of diminished responsibility and convicted him of 13 murders on May 22, 1981. Mr. Justice Boreham passed 20 concurrent life sentences with a recommended minimum of 30 years. A diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia took him to Broadmoor Hospital in 1984; the High Court imposed a whole life order in July 2010. The High Court listed in 2010 an eighth attempted murder that he had admitted, on a 14-year-old girl in August 1975, for which he was never charged.
This is the case in which the changes were spelled out most plainly. In a statement repeated in the House of Lords on January 19, 1982, the government announced better training for senior investigators and incident room staff, clearer command for crimes that crossed force boundaries, the use of advisory teams of experienced detectives and forensic scientists, and greater use of computers in major inquiries; a Home Office circular on the subject had been issued earlier that month, and a separate review by Colin Sampson also examined the inquiry. A review by Sir Lawrence Byford for the Home Office stayed confidential for almost 25 years. Released on June 1, 2006, with parts blacked out, it said that Sutcliffe "was probably responsible for many attacks on unaccompanied women, which he has not yet admitted," and described an "unexplained lull" in his recorded activity between 1969 and 1975. In 2017 he was reported to have been questioned in prison about 17 unsolved cases; he denied them and no charge followed. He had been moved to HMP Frankland in County Durham in August 2016, and he died at the University Hospital of North Durham on November 13, 2020, of COVID-19 pneumonia, with diabetes and heart disease contributing.
William Bonin, a truck driver from Downey and a paroled offender, was convicted of murdering fourteen boys and young men between August 1979 and June 1980. They were between 12 and 19. Most were hitchhikers or boys alone in public in Los Angeles and Orange counties, and their deaths were spread across two counties, so he was tried in each. In Los Angeles a jury convicted him in January 1982 of the first-degree murders of Marcus Grabs, Donald Hyden, David Murillo, Charles Miranda, James Macabe, Ronald Gatlin, Harry Todd Turner, Steven Wood, Darin Lee Kendrick and Steven Wells, and of robbery; it acquitted him on two further murder counts, and two others were dismissed before trial. In 1983 an Orange County jury convicted him of the first-degree murders of Dennis Frank Fox, Russell Rugh, Glenn Barker and Lawrence Sharp. Both juries returned death.
Marcus Grabs, 17, was a German tourist. James Macabe, 12, was the youngest; the district attorney’s office and the corrections department spell his surname McCabe. Fox was 17, Rugh 15, Barker 14, Wood 16, Kendrick 19 and Wells 18.
Bonin told a television reporter in 1980 and 1981 that he had killed about 21 people, the Associated Press recalled in 1996. Police had put him under surveillance on June 2, 1980, after a 17-year-old acquaintance held on an auto theft charge told detectives that Bonin had talked about killing young boys, and he was arrested on June 11, 1980. Three young men who had been with him on different nights were convicted and sent to prison, two of them after testifying against him in exchange for lighter sentences, and a fourth died by suicide in jail before any trial. The prosecution tied him to the cases through the van he drove, with fiber, hair and blood comparisons. At the Los Angeles trial, jailhouse informers and other witnesses testified to further admissions. At the Los Angeles penalty phase his mother testified, according to the Ninth Circuit’s later review, about an abusive, alcoholic father and a good record whenever he was in a structured setting. In 1992, at hearings on his federal petitions, a neurologist testified that Bonin had frontal lobe damage that might have left him unable to control his impulses, Amnesty International reported in 1996; doctors called by the state saw no organic impairment and described planning. The California Supreme Court affirmed the Orange County judgment on August 29, 1988, and the Los Angeles judgment on January 9, 1989. Bonin was executed at San Quentin at 12:13 a.m. on February 23, 1996, according to the Department of Corrections.
Clifford Olson killed 11 children and young people around Vancouver between November 1980 and July 1981: Christine Weller, 12; Colleen Daignault, 13; Daryn Johnsrude, 16; Sandra Wolfsteiner, 16; Ada Court, 13; Simon Partington, 9; Judy Kozma, 14; Raymond King Jr., 15; Sigrun Arnd, 18, a visitor from West Germany; Terri Lyn Carson, 15; and Louise Chartrand, 17. Three were boys and eight were girls. Olson was 41 and had been released from prison on mandatory supervision on September 7, 1980. The Canadian Press reported that he had spent most of his life in custody, starting with a nine-month sentence for burglary in 1957, and that he escaped at least six times.
Nearly five months passed between the first of the 11 deaths, Christine Weller’s, and the next. When the killings resumed in the spring of 1981 they came quickly. Until the early days of July 1981, the Canadian Press reported, police had classified the missing young people as runaways, and Simon Partington’s case was the first they acknowledged as foul play. On July 7 Olson was charged in an unrelated case and was not linked to the others; the charge did not keep him in custody. The 11 killings fell within several police jurisdictions around Greater Vancouver, some policed by the RCMP and some by municipal forces. The Canadian Press noted in a 2011 review that RCMP investigators had met Olson and offered him money to act as an informant on unsolved murders only hours before one of the killings, and that calls for an independent inquiry were ignored.
Surveillance officers saw Olson pick up two young hitchhikers on Vancouver Island on August 12, 1981, and he was arrested. At the time United Press International reported that the charges were impaired driving and breaking and entering. He was charged with Judy Kozma’s murder, the Canadian Press said, on August 18. RCMP officer Fred Maile, the North Shore News reported, showed Olson posters of missing children during questioning, and Olson pointed to eight of the faces. When his trial began on January 11, 1982, he faced 10 counts; he pleaded guilty to 11 counts of first-degree murder and received 11 concurrent life sentences with no parole eligibility for 25 years. Justice H.C. McKay recommended that he never be released.
Days later the public learned that police and the British Columbia attorney general had agreed to put $100,000 in trust for his wife and infant son in return for his information on the victims. The payment, and the questions about how the missing-person reports had been handled, made the case one of the most argued over in Canadian legal history. A lawsuit by the victims' families over the trust failed. Olson used court applications, letters and parole hearings to stay in the news for the next thirty years: a jury in Surrey rejected his faint-hope application in August 1997, and the parole board refused him on July 18, 2006, and again on November 30, 2010. The victims' families went to every hearing. He died of cancer on September 30, 2011, in the health care centre of a federal prison in Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines, Quebec, aged 71.
Police said years later that the frustration of the Olson inquiry led to a new computer system for tracking violent offenders, the Canadian Press reported in 2011, and CBC News also listed a police tracking system for violent crimes among the changes that came out of the case.
Dennis Nilsen, a 37-year-old civil servant who interviewed job seekers in London, a former Army cook, was arrested in February 1983. Tenants in his building in Muswell Hill had complained that the drains were blocked, and the engineer who came to clear them made a discovery that brought police to his flat. Nilsen was arrested the next day and told police that the account went back to 1978 and that there had been 15 or 16 deaths. In February 1983 he was charged with the murder of Stephen Sinclair, 20.
He killed young men he met in pubs, many of them homeless or living on the margins, at two addresses between December 30, 1978, and January 26, 1983. The first, Stephen Holmes, was 14; Nilsen was never charged with his death because the boy had not been identified in 1983. The six on whose deaths he was convicted were Kenneth Ockenden, Martyn Duffey, William Sutherland, Malcolm Barlow, John Howlett and Stephen Sinclair. Martyn Duffey was 16, from Merseyside. William Sutherland, 26, known as Billy, was a divorced father from Edinburgh with a three-year-old son who had gone south to look for work in August 1980; his family did not learn what had happened until Nilsen was arrested three years later. Malcolm Barlow was 24, from Sheffield, with a history of time in care. Stephen Sinclair, 20, was from Perth. The Press and Journal’s timeline also records deaths in 1980 and 1981 that Nilsen described to police and that were never charged. At the opening of the trial, United Press International reported, police had identified seven of the men Nilsen said he had killed, and six were named in the murder counts.
Not every man Nilsen approached died. In November 1980, by the Press and Journal’s account, a young Scottish barman got away and went to police. Officers treated the complaint as a quarrel between two men who had both been drinking and took it no further. Nilsen was charged with two attempted murders as well as the six murders, and was convicted of both.
The Old Bailey convicted him on November 4, 1983, of six murders and two attempted murders and sentenced him to life imprisonment with a recommended minimum of 25 years, later raised to a whole life tariff. He was held as a Category A prisoner throughout and died on May 12, 2018, at York District Hospital after surgery for a ruptured aortic aneurysm, aged 72; an inquest on October 23, 2019, concluded natural causes.
Christopher Wilder died before he could be tried. Born in Australia, he was 39 when he died on April 13, 1984, in a struggle with two New Hampshire state troopers at Colebrook, about ten miles from the Canadian border. In the spring of that year the FBI conducted a national manhunt for him, and he stood at number 385 on its Ten Most Wanted list. Young women had been approached across the country by a man who, the FBI said, claimed to be a professional photographer and offered them modeling work. Between February and April 1984, women vanished or died in Florida, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, Nevada and New York, and police and the FBI connected him to the cases.
The legal basis for the manhunt was a journey. A student at Florida State University was abducted in Tallahassee on March 20, 1984, and taken across the state line into Georgia; she survived. Taking a victim across a state line brought the abduction under the federal kidnapping law, and Wilder was charged with violating it, United Press International reported; that was the case on which he was first wanted. Time reported on April 16, 1984, that he had been charged the previous Friday with the murder of Suzanne Logan, 20, and with a kidnapping; which court filed the charges was not reported. No charge was ever brought for the deaths of Terry Ferguson, Terry Walden or Beth Dodge, or in the cases of Rosario Gonzalez, Elizabeth Kenyon, Sheryl Bonaventura and Michelle Korfman, all of which police and the FBI attributed to him. Gonzalez and Kenyon are still unaccounted for. Kenyon, 23, was a former beauty queen and part-time model whom Wilder had befriended, Time reported. When Wilder died, UPI said on April 22, four women connected with the case were still unaccounted for, two of them from south Florida.
Terry Ferguson was born on Cape Cod and went to school at Teaticket before her family moved to Florida. Her mother, Frances Ferguson, drew on the journals she kept after her daughter’s death for a memoir published in 2022 under the title Wake Me Up At 10:00, Love Terry, according to the Cape News.
The tallies differed from the start. After his death UPI described him as suspected of killing, assaulting or kidnapping at least 11 women in eight states. In June 1984 UPI described an "8,000-mile rampage" in which 11 women had been abducted and at least four killed. Time, in April, wrote of about six assaults and killings in Florida, Texas, Colorado and Nevada. Australian newspapers in 2018 said he had abducted at least 12 women and killed nine. None of these figures was tested in a court.
His record preceded him. He lived on Sydney’s northern beaches in the mid-1960s and married in 1968; his wife left after about a week, citing his violence, and took her concerns to the police. Australian reports in 2018, drawing on police files obtained by the Channel 7 program Sunday Night, said police were slow to act and had not interviewed him when he left for the United States in 1969 at the age of 24; Time gave 1970. In Florida he had a 1980 conviction in Palm Beach County that brought probation, and charges against him were still pending in Sydney, Time reported. He was a builder and real estate owner in Boynton Beach who raced sports cars. The two troopers who confronted him were honored in June 1984, UPI reported.
Between August 1988 and June 1989, four small girls from Saitama Prefecture and Tokyo died: Mari Konno, 4; Masami Yoshizawa, 7; Erika Namba, 4; and Ayako Nomoto, 5. The man responsible wrote to the Asahi Shimbun and to one family under the name of a woman who did not exist. For about ten months the investigation did not reach Tsutomu Miyazaki, a photo technician in his twenties from western Tokyo; Fuji TV reporters who revisited the case in 2017 said one reason was that the car he drove did not match the type witnesses had described, a discrepancy later put down to a witness’s mistake. He also avoided expressways, they reported, because cameras and toll records might expose him. A former investigator told them, "If he had not been caught then, there would probably have been a fifth and a sixth case."
He was caught by a parent, not by the inquiry. In July 1989, in Hachioji, Tokyo, he was arrested on a charge involving a six-year-old girl, and nothing yet tied him to the four. On August 9, 1989, a detective of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department’s First Investigation Division, Yasuhiro Ohmine, questioned him, and Miyazaki confessed to the killing of the girl from Koto Ward; confessions to the other killings followed. Ohmine later called the breakthrough a lucky accident. He was convicted of the abduction and murder of the four girls and of the abduction of the fifth, according to a 2008 report credited to the Associated Press and Kyodo, and sentenced to death after years of conflicting psychiatric evaluations. He was executed on June 17, 2008, at 45.
The case changed a word. Police found thousands of videotapes in his room, and the press called him the "otaku murderer." Photographs of the room, with tapes and magazines stacked to the ceiling, became the image of the case; the weekly magazine reporter Toshiyuki Kobayashi later wrote that a television cameraman had placed an erotic manga on top of a pile before filming, to get a more striking shot, and that the room contained fewer sensational items than the press had expected, Bunshun Online reported. Writers and scholars have since described how the coverage attached the image of a child killer to fans of anime and manga for years. The Spanish scholar Jorge Rodríguez Cruz, in a 2023 study, wrote that press coverage in 1989 dwelt on the supposed inattention of the man’s parents and the death of his grandfather, and not on the bullying he had suffered at school over his hands. In 1992 a group of manga artists founded a society to protect freedom of expression. The psychiatrist Tamaki Saito observed that there had been very few sex crimes among otaku and no child murders by an otaku since Miyazaki, as Rodríguez Cruz reports. In 2017 Fuji TV broadcast recordings of about two weeks of his interrogation; Bunshun Online’s critic wrote that the detectives did not see in him the obsessive the press had described.
Set side by side, the nine inquiries share little but their decade. Berkowitz was caught by a parking ticket. Sutcliffe was caught by two officers on a check that had nothing to do with the hunt for him, after five years and nine interviews. Bonin was watched after a tip. Miyazaki was caught by a parent. Knowles was killed in custody before he could be tried, and Wilder died in a struggle with two troopers; neither was ever heard in court. The Santa Rosa cases have no defendant at all, and their best-documented suspects are men no court ever charged.
The records do describe what officials said they would do afterward. The government told the House of Lords in January 1982 that it would train senior investigators and incident room staff, give clearer command to crimes that crossed force boundaries, set up advisory teams of detectives and forensic scientists, and use computers more in major inquiries. Police said years afterward that the Olson inquiry led to a computer system for tracking violent offenders. A former director of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children said the center did not exist until 1984. These are statements about intentions and institutions. None of the records says what effect they had, and none measures the number of killings in the 1970s or the 1980s or the years after. Whether the numbers fell cannot be answered from them.
What they do preserve is how little was joined together. A girl identified after 35 years had never been entered in a national database. A California sheriff described a sideways Z on a map of killings across six western states, and by 2004 his own department no longer believed the man he named was involved. In Britain a hoax tape from Sunderland drew a hunt for a man who did not exist. And a 1981 study showed that only one in nine missing children had been entered in the national system at all.
• February 1972: first of the Santa Rosa hitchhiker cases; the last of the grouped deaths comes to light in December 1973.
• July 26, 1974: Paul John Knowles leaves a Jacksonville jail; police attribute at least 18 deaths to him by November.
• November 16 or 17, 1974: Trooper Charles Eugene Campbell and James Meyer die in Pulaski County, Georgia.
• November 17, 1974: Knowles is arrested in Henry County, Georgia.
• December 18, 1974: a Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent kills Knowles during a drive to recover a gun.
• July 1975: first of the attacks in Peter Sutcliffe’s series in West Yorkshire and Manchester.
• April 9, 1976: Wendy Savino is attacked in New York; in 2024 police name it the first attack by the man later called the Son of Sam.
• July 29, 1976: first of the eight Son of Sam attacks in New York; the last is on July 31, 1977.
• April 17, 1977: a letter to Captain Joseph Borrelli turns up after the killings of Valentina Suriani and Alexander Esau.
• August 10, 1977: David Berkowitz arrested in Yonkers.
• May 8, 1978: Berkowitz pleads guilty to six counts of second-degree murder; sentenced June 12, 1978.
• December 30, 1978: first of the north London killings by Dennis Nilsen; the last is on January 26, 1983.
• August 1979: first of the 14 killings for which William Bonin is later convicted; the last is in June 1980.
• June 11, 1980: Bonin arrested after police surveillance that began June 2.
• September 7, 1980: Clifford Olson released on mandatory supervision.
• November 1980: first of the 11 killings for which Olson pleads guilty; the last is in July 1981.
• January 2, 1981: Sutcliffe arrested in Sheffield; confesses January 4.
• April 29 and May 22, 1981: Sutcliffe pleads guilty to seven attempted murders and is convicted of 13 murders.
• Early July 1981: police first acknowledge foul play in the Vancouver cases (Simon Partington).
• August 12, 1981: Olson arrested on Vancouver Island.
• January 1982: Bonin convicted in Los Angeles of ten murders; Olson pleads guilty to 11 counts of first-degree murder, and the $100,000 trust payment becomes public days later.
• January 19, 1982: the government’s statement on police training, command and computers is repeated in the House of Lords.
• February 1983: Nilsen arrested after tenants' complaint about blocked drains in Muswell Hill.
• November 4, 1983: Nilsen convicted of six murders and two attempted murders; Bonin is convicted of four more murders in Orange County that year.
• March 20, 1984: abduction of a Florida State University student begins the federal case against Christopher Wilder.
• April 13, 1984: Wilder dies in a struggle with two New Hampshire state troopers at Colebrook.
• August 1988: first of the four girls in Saitama and Tokyo killed in the Miyazaki case; the last is in June 1989.
• July 1989: Tsutomu Miyazaki arrested in Hachioji; confesses in August.
• February 23, 1996: Bonin executed at San Quentin.
• June 17, 2008: Miyazaki executed.
• September 30, 2011: Olson dies in custody.
• December 2011: the Georgia Bureau of Investigation identifies Ima Jean Sanders as a Knowles victim after 35 years.
• May 12, 2018: Nilsen dies in custody.
• November 13, 2020: Sutcliffe dies in custody.
• January 2022: Department of Justice DNA match, in a separate 1996 Sonoma County case, to a man who died in 2021.
• May 2024: Berkowitz refused parole for the twelfth time.