The archive already carries an article about nine deaths a doctor called natural, where the certifying physician was mostly right for his period. This is the wider version of the same problem, and it is much larger. Thirty-five entries in the roster describe deaths first written down as something other than murder, and the thirteen below show what the categories were.
Natural causes is only one of the categories. The others are accident, suicide, and fire.
Accident covers the most. Carroll Cole's first killing was in 1946, when he was eight, another boy of the same age drowned while the two were swimming, and it was recorded as an accident. Karla Homolka's sister's death was recorded as an accident. Ho-sun Kang's was recorded as an accident and he collected on the insurance, a sum reported at several hundred million won. Sharon Kinne told police she had heard her two-year-old daughter ask how the gun worked, and the death was treated as an accident.
Max Gufler gave women barbiturates and drowned them in the Danube and in lakes and ponds, and the deaths were recorded as suicides or accidents, which is what a woman found drowned in a lake ordinarily is.
Suicide is the second category, and the clearest case turns on a method being ordinary.
The men in Kanae Kijima's case died beside a charcoal burner, the standard method of suicide by carbon monoxide in Japan at the time, and each death was initially recorded as suicide. She was convicted and sentenced to death in 2012 on circumstantial evidence, maintains her innocence and remains on death row. If the convictions are right, they describe a killer choosing the local form of a self-inflicted death.
Fire is its own version of the same thing. A series of fatal house fires in Hull between 1973 and 1979 was recorded as accidental, because most house fires are. Bruce George Peter Lee pleaded guilty to manslaughter on the ground of diminished responsibility in January 1981 and was ordered detained indefinitely; in 1983 the Court of Appeal quashed eleven of the convictions as resting on an unreliable confession, and the reliability of the rest has been disputed ever since.
The nursing and care cases are the largest single cluster. Gwendolyn Graham's victims were elderly women in a nursing home and each death was recorded as natural. Anna Marie Hahn's were recorded as natural, which, as her entry puts it, for elderly men in the 1930s required no argument. Claudette Kibble's were recorded as natural until the third. Diana Lumbrera's children died one after another, each recorded as natural until the last.
Two entries show what the classification costs directly.
Anthony John Hardy's first death was recorded as natural causes and he was released. He killed twice more. David Dowler's case had two deaths already recorded as natural or unexplained before anyone connected them.
What runs through all of them is not that anyone was negligent. It is that the first classification of a death is made by one person, quickly, without any reason to suspect murder, and it then becomes the record. Nobody re-reads a death certificate that says natural causes. The category holds until something outside it forces a review, another death, a survivor, a confession, an insurance claim that looks wrong.
That is the reason this archive keeps ranges rather than single figures for so many cases. Where deaths were first recorded as accident or natural causes, the ones that were never revisited are still recorded that way.