A prosecutor who cannot prove a case has to buy one, and in a murder investigation the only person reliably holding what the file is missing is the person who did it. Thirteen entries in this archive were resolved by agreement rather than decided at trial. Read together they show what the state was prepared to give up, what it received, and how the price was set.
In eight of the thirteen the currency was information, and almost always that meant the location of a body.
Gary Ridgway pleaded guilty to forty eight counts in 2003 under an agreement that took execution off the table in exchange for cooperation in locating remains. This archive records forty nine convictions; he gave investigators a figure of between sixty five and eighty. He is the most prolific convicted serial killer in American history, and he is alive because he was the only person who knew where the women had been left.
Richard Paul White shows the exchange at its plainest. He picked women up on the streets of Denver, took them to the house he shared with his girlfriend, and buried two of them in the garden. Police caught him only after he shot a friend, and he then told investigators about five women nobody had connected to him and took them to burial sites in two other counties. A fourth murder charge was dropped in exchange for that woman's remains. One count deleted, one family answered.
James Hicks killed his first wife in Maine in 1977, a woman he left a bar with in 1982, and a woman he lived with in 1996. He was convicted of the first and served six years. The other two were never charged for want of evidence, and the evidence did not exist anywhere except in his memory. Facing fifty five years in Texas for an attack a woman had survived, he offered to lead Maine investigators to all three bodies in exchange for serving that Texas sentence at home. He pleaded guilty to the two killings in 2000.
Anthony Cook was convicted in 1982 of one murder in Toledo, and in 2000 confessed under a plea agreement to nine killings across northwestern Ohio going back to 1973. Detectives attribute eleven to him. Three he committed with his younger brother Nathaniel, and the agreement covered them both. Nathaniel Cook took part in three killings and holds no murder conviction at all; he pleaded guilty to attempted aggravated murder and kidnapping, and a judge released him in 2018 because the terms required it. He is registered for life as a sexual predator. Anthony is still in prison and refused to attend his own parole hearing.
The agreement that went furthest wrong belongs to Coral Eugene Watts. In 1982 Texas gave him immunity from prosecution for any murder he confessed to, and he described thirteen. The immunity then barred Texas from charging him with a single one of them, and the burglary plea he had traded them for nearly set him free in 2006. Michigan convicted him of a murder he had confessed to under the Texas deal, which is the only reason he did not walk. Investigators have credited him with up to eighty deaths.
Two of the eight break the pattern, and both are worth stating precisely because they show what the pricing actually depends on. Terry Blair called 911 himself to say where the bodies were. He gave away the one thing the other men sold, and it bought him nothing; the concession he did receive was for agreeing to be tried by a judge rather than a jury, which took the death penalty off the table. He was convicted of all six killings in 2008 and died in prison in 2024, having been paroled in 2003 after twenty one years for beating and strangling his pregnant former girlfriend, and having killed the six within about a year of release.
Wesley Shermantine sold the same commodity to a different buyer. He and Loren Herzog, childhood friends from Linden, California, killed an unknown number of people across a decade; estimates run from fifteen to seventy, and four are convicted. Herzog was released on a technicality. Shermantine began drawing maps of the graves in 2012 in exchange for a reward offered by a bounty hunter, not by the state, and Herzog killed himself weeks later.
In the remaining five the currency was a co defendant, and the discounts are considerably steeper.
William Hare is the purest case in the archive and the oldest. He killed sixteen people in Edinburgh with William Burke and sold the bodies for dissection. He was given immunity to testify against Burke, walked out of prison in 1829, and was never seen again with any certainty. Burke was hanged. The two men had done the same thing; one of them spoke first.
The other four follow the same shape. Karla Homolka took part in the rapes and murders of two teenage girls with her husband Paul Bernardo, and in the death of her own sister, and was given twelve years in a plea deal struck before videotapes showed the extent of her involvement. She was released in 2005. Charlene Gallego drove the van and made the approach for ten murders committed with her husband Gerald between 1978 and 1980, testified against him under a plea that gave her under seventeen years, and was released in 1997. Roy Norris took part with Lawrence Bittaker in the abduction, torture and killing of five teenage girls in California in 1979, agreed to testify against Bittaker in exchange for avoiding the death penalty, and died in prison in 2020 after forty years. Catherine Wood smothered five elderly patients at a Michigan nursing home with Gwendolyn Graham in 1987, told her ex husband, testified against Graham, served thirty two years and was released in 2020.
What these thirteen have in common is not leniency. It is that the size of the discount was set by how much the killer knew that nobody else did, and knowing where forty bodies are is a consequence of having put them there. The two measures run in opposite directions. Ridgway had the most to sell and escaped execution. Hare had the whole of the inside of that house and escaped entirely. Blair, who handed the information over for nothing, got no credit for it at all. A system that pays for information will always pay the most to whoever has the most, which in a murder case is a description of the person who did the most, and every family answered under one of these agreements was answered on those terms.