Every date below is drawn from the Serial Killer Archives, the verified roster of 1,090 cases on this site. Each entry records one event dated to that day: an arrest, an execution, a killing, a sentence, a birth. Where a case is disputed, the archive entry for that person sets out what was proved and what was only claimed.
Every day of the year now carries an entry. June 4 was the last blank, filled from the magazine archive rather than the roster.
January 1, 1995. Fred West hanged himself in his cell at Winson Green prison in Birmingham, using a rope plaited from strips of bedsheet tied to the ventilation grille, on a morning when the holiday staff was thin. He was fifty-three. Charged with twelve murders on December 13, 1994, he had given the police 145 interviews in which he confessed, retracted and confessed again. Nine bodies came out of 25 Cromwell Street in Gloucester. No court ever tried him, and what is known of the twelve dead rests on the excavations, the pathology and his wife Rose's trial.
January 2, 1981. Peter Sutcliffe was arrested in Sheffield after two officers on a routine check found a woman in the passenger seat of his Rover and plates stolen from a scrapyard car. Detectives had interviewed him nine times in five years and let him go every time. The next morning one of the officers went back to the spot and found the ball-pein hammer and knife he had dropped. The Old Bailey convicted him on May 22, 1981, of thirteen murders and seven attempted murders. He died in a Durham hospital in November 2020.
January 3, 1961. Thomas Rung was born in Berlin. In October 1983 he strangled his landlady, Melanie Scharnow, seventy-seven, in her apartment in Neukölln, and the next month killed a twenty-two-year-old student, Susanne Matthes. Other men were charged with both deaths; one, Michael Mager, spent six years in juvenile detention before Rung, arrested in 1995, told the police what he had done. Seven killings are attributed to him, most of them women drowned in their own baths. A Berlin court gave him two life sentences in 1996.
January 4, 2008. Gary Michael Hilton, sixty-one, was arrested in Georgia three days after Meredith Emerson, twenty-four, set out on Blood Mountain with her black Labrador, Ella. Hikers remembered an older man with a dog following her, and he was identified that week. Her body was later recovered on his information. Hilton was convicted of four murders in three states: Emerson in Georgia, Cheryl Dunlap in Florida, which sentenced him to death in 2011, and John and Irene Bryant, eighty and eighty-four, in North Carolina.
January 5, 1990. Arthur Shawcross sat down with Rochester police two days after a helicopter crew spotted June Cicero's body on the ice of Salmon Creek and a man standing on the bridge above. Over eleven days he admitted strangling eleven women. He had killed two children in Watertown in 1972, Jack Blake and Karen Ann Hill, and was paroled in 1987 after serving time for manslaughter. A jury convicted him of ten murders on December 13, 1990, and he was sentenced to 250 years to life. He died in prison in 2008.
January 6, 1987. Kimberly Ann Ruggles, twenty-three, a Fayetteville cab driver, was sent to pick up a passenger called Ron and never came back. Military police found her body near Fort Bragg the next morning, gagged with a belt matching karate pants found on Ronald Adrin Gray, a twenty-one-year-old Army cook. His fingerprints were on her cab. Gray pleaded guilty in state court and was sentenced to death by court-martial in April 1988 for two other murders. President Bush approved the execution in 2008; it was stayed that November.
January 7, 2008. Darbara Singh, a former soldier released early from a Ludhiana jail in December 2003, was by then abducting the children of migrant laborers from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh around Jalandhar. He confessed to killing seventeen, fifteen girls and two boys, most of them under ten. He was given life for two murders, including that of eight-year-old Diksha, in April 2008. A death sentence in two other cases was quashed in July 2009, and he died in the Patiala Central Jail in June 2018.
January 8, 2010. The mutilated body of Ardiansyah, a nine-year-old street child, was found in a cardboard box by a roadside in East Jakarta, and his head the next day. His family's complaint and the trail of the box led police on January 9 to a rented home in Pulo Gadung and a street vendor known as Babe. Baekuni confessed to strangling fourteen street boys over seventeen years. He was given life in October 2010, and the Jakarta High Court raised it to death, a sentence the Supreme Court upheld in 2011.
January 9, 1991. Aileen Wuornos was arrested at a biker bar in Volusia County, Florida, after seven men who picked her up on the state's highways had been shot dead. Convicted of Richard Mallory's murder on January 27, 1992, she testified that he had raped her and that she shot him to get away. The jury never learned that Mallory had served ten years in Maryland after a sex-crime conviction. She received six death sentences, one for each murder charged, and was executed at Florida State Prison on October 9, 2002.
January 10, 1884. Hugo Schenk was arrested in Vienna after the family of his last victim pressed the police and a pawn ticket was traced. He posed as a railway engineer, courted housemaids with promises of marriage, and took them away with their savings. Josefine Timal, thirty-four, went off with him on what she believed was her honeymoon and was thrown into the flooded Hranice Abyss in Moravia. Convicted of four murders with his accomplice, Karl Schlossarek, he was hanged in Vienna on April 22, 1884.
January 11, 1866. Joseph Philippe attacked a woman in the rue d'Erfurt in Paris. She bit him and screamed, a neighbor tripped him as he ran, and he was held down on the pavement. On his arm was a tattoo reading Né sous une mauvaise étoile, born under an evil star, which witnesses to a string of murders had described. He was a former soldier of thirty-four. Seven to ten killings of women and a child were attributed to him. Tried on four, he was guillotined outside La Roquette prison on July 24, 1866.
January 12, 1948. Two officers from the Waseda police station in Tokyo found the bodies of five infants in wooden boxes carried by an undertaker, who said he was paid five hundred yen a body. Autopsies found pneumonia, malnutrition and freezing, and empty stomachs. The trail led to the Kotobuki maternity home in Shinjuku, where the midwife Miyuki Ishikawa took in unwanted newborns for a fee and let them die. Estimates run from 85 to 169 deaths. Convicted of five, she served four years and died in 1987.
January 13, 1958. Peter Manuel was arrested in Glasgow, and after police charged his father over a stolen item found at the family house he made a full written confession, saying he wanted his parents left alone. In September 1956 he had shot Marion Watt, her daughter Vivienne and her sister in their beds, and William Watt spent sixty-seven days in Barlinnie for the murders before the case against him collapsed. Manuel was convicted of seven murders on May 29, 1958, and hanged at Barlinnie that July.
January 14, 1982. Three days after Clifford Olson pleaded guilty to eleven murders, the press reported that $100,000 had been placed in trust for his wife, Joan, and their infant son in return for his help finding the bodies of the children he had killed around Vancouver. The British Columbia attorney general had accepted Olson's own proposal. The victims' families learned of the payment from the news. Olson was given eleven concurrent life terms, was refused parole three times, and died in custody on September 30, 2011.
January 15, 2007. The Bike Path Task Force arrested Altemio Sanchez in Buffalo two days after detectives collected the silverware, glass and napkin he used at dinner in Amherst. The DNA matched the man who raped and strangled Linda Yalem on a bike path in 1990, and police said it matched eight crime scenes. An innocent man had served twenty-two years for rapes Sanchez committed. He pleaded guilty to the murders of Yalem, Majane Mazur and Joan Diver, was sentenced to 75 years to life, and died in prison in 2023.
January 16, 1952. Genzo Kurita was arrested in Chiba prefecture after the killing of a woman of twenty-four and her aunt at Kemigawa, and confessed. In October 1951 he had offered to help a woman and her four children at a railway station, led them to the sea cliffs at Osenkorogashi, and thrown four of them over; the oldest daughter hid and survived. Seven killings were proved in court. He became the first man in Japan sentenced to death twice, by two courts, and was hanged at Miyagi Prison in October 1959.
January 17, 2000. Maxim Petrov, an ambulance medic, was arrested in St. Petersburg after the family of a surviving patient traced his visit. He arrived in the mornings, after relatives had left for work, introduced himself as the doctor from the local clinic, and gave elderly patients an injection that put them out. Then he searched the apartment and took their money, icons and jewelry. For two years nobody died, and many victims were too ashamed to report it. Eleven later did die. He was sentenced to life in November 2003.
January 18, 2018. Anthony Allen Shore was executed by lethal injection at Huntsville, the first execution in the United States that year. In 2003 a skin particle recovered from under the fingernail of Maria del Carmen Estrada, killed in Houston in 1992, matched a DNA sample he had given on probation. After seven hours in an interview room he offered Sergeant John Swaim the cases and a couple of bonuses. He confessed to strangling Laurie Tremblay, Diana Rebollar, nine, and Dana Sanchez, sixteen, and was condemned for Estrada.
January 19, 1952. Carlos Eduardo Robledo Puch was born in Buenos Aires into an ordinary middle-class family. Between March 1971 and February 1972 he and a childhood friend, Jorge Antonio Ibáñez, robbed clubs, shops and houses in the northern suburbs, and he shot eleven people, among them the owner and night watchman of a club at Olivos as they slept. Arrested at twenty, he was called the Angel of Death by the press. He was sentenced in 1980 and, after more than fifty years, is Argentina's longest-held prisoner.
January 20, 2007. Andrzej Nowocień, a paramedic with the Łódź ambulance service, was sentenced to life for four murders and for aiding a fifth. Patients were killed with Pavulon, a muscle relaxant that paralyzes breathing and leaves little a routine examination would find, so that their deaths could be sold to funeral homes. One of them, Danuta Barasińska, had been sent for tests because her blood pressure was slightly high and died in the ambulance. The sentence was upheld on appeal in 2008 and by the Supreme Court in 2009.
January 21, 1958. Charles Starkweather, nineteen, went to the Lincoln house of his fourteen-year-old girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, and shot her mother and stepfather and killed her two-year-old half-sister, Betty Jean. The couple stayed in the house for days behind a note on the door saying everyone had the flu. Over the next eight days he killed eleven people across Nebraska and Wyoming. Caught near Douglas, Wyoming, after a stolen Buick stalled, he was tried only for Robert Jensen's murder and executed in June 1959.
January 22, 1983. Richard Biegenwald was arrested in New Jersey after a friend of his wife told police he had shown her a young woman's body hidden in the garage of his Asbury Park home. Children had just found Anna Olesiewicz, eighteen, behind a Burger King in Ocean Township with four bullets in her head. Biegenwald had killed a Bayonne grocer, Stephen Sladowski, in 1958 and was paroled in 1975. Convicted of six murders, he was sentenced to death, later reduced to life, and died in March 2008.
January 23, 1978. Richard Chase walked into the unlocked Sacramento house of David and Teresa Wallin and shot Teresa, twenty-two and three months pregnant. Five months earlier Nevada police had found him naked and covered in blood near Pyramid Lake, with a bucket holding a liver in his truck; he told them the blood had seeped from his own body. Within a month he shot six people, among them a six-year-old boy and a baby. Convicted of six murders in May 1979, he died of a drug overdose at San Quentin in December 1980.
January 24, 2009. Kang Ho-sun was arrested in Ansan after a cash machine camera recorded his face as he used the bank card of a nineteen-year-old university student he had picked up at a Gunpo bus stop and strangled. The picture ended a series the Gyeonggi police had not known was a series. He had killed eight women since 2006, and in 2005 his fourth wife and her mother had died in a fire at his house, for which he was also convicted. He was sentenced to death in April 2009. South Korea has executed no one since 1997.
January 25, 2006. A lodger saw a heavyset woman run from the Mexico City home of Ana María de los Reyes Alfaro, eighty-two, who had just been strangled with a stethoscope. The woman carried a stethoscope, pension forms and a social worker's card. She was Juana Barraza, forty-eight, a professional wrestler known as the Lady of Silence, in a city that had been told the killer of its old women was a man. Convicted of sixteen murders and robberies in March 2008, she was sentenced to 759 years. Police estimated forty or more deaths.
January 26, 1974. Katie Smith, a seventeen-year-old tourist from Detroit, was the last of three Americans stabbed to death in the Bahamas by Michiah Shobek, a nineteen-year-old from Milwaukee who called his victims angels of Lucifer. Eight days earlier Irwin Bornstein, an accountant from Oceanside, New York, and a father of three, had accepted a ride from the Nassau airport and was found the next day on Yamacraw Beach. Paul Howell, a lawyer from Ohio, was the third. Shobek was hanged at Fox Hill Prison in October 1976.
January 27, 2005. Roger Andermatt was convicted by the Obwalden cantonal court and sentenced to life. By 2001 staff at the Eichhof home in Lucerne had noticed deaths bunching on his shifts, and when detectives followed his career back through homes in Sarnen and Küssnacht they found eighteen more. He smothered or drugged elderly residents in his care, many with dementia, and called it mercy. The final judgment covers twenty-two killings; he confessed to twenty-seven. Parole has been refused every year since 2016.
January 28, 1944. Clarence Hill, a thirty-three-year-old Black Army private from Hamilton Township, New Jersey, signed confessions in the stockade at Fort Dix, by some accounts on this date, to the shotgun attacks the papers blamed on the Mad Killer of Duck Island. Six people had died in three attacks on couples in lovers' lanes around Trenton between 1938 and 1940. Hill said the statements were beaten out of him. Convicted of the 1938 murder of Mary Myatovich, he was given life, paroled in 1964, and died in 1973.
January 29, 2002. Stephen Wayne Anderson was executed by lethal injection at San Quentin after clemency was refused. In May 1980, an escapee from Utah State Prison, he cut the telephone line of a house in Bloomington, California, believing it empty, and shot Elizabeth Lyman, eighty-one, a retired piano teacher, in her bed. Deputies found him in her kitchen eating noodles and eggs he had cooked for himself. He admitted other killings that were never charged, and spent his twenty years on death row writing poetry.
January 30, 1905. Johann Otto Hoch was arrested in New York carrying a fountain pen filled with arsenic. In December 1904 a Chicago widow, Marie Walcker, had married him and given him her life savings; she died on January 12, and three days later he married her sister. The police exhumed Marie and found arsenic. Hoch, born John Schmidt in Hesse, married at least fifty-five women under a string of names. Police were sure of fifteen killings. Convicted only of Marie's murder, he was hanged in Chicago in February 1906.
January 31, 2002. Hua Ruizhuo was executed in Beijing, reportedly on this date, after a closed trial in the city's No. 2 Intermediate People's Court. A cement-mixer driver from Heilongjiang with a wife and a young son, he was thought well of by colleagues. He was convicted of murdering fourteen women, most of them young migrants from other provinces working as prostitutes and nightclub hostesses, and of hiding their bodies in wells and cesspits. Chinese accounts begin his story with a love affair in 1994 with a young woman he later found was working as a prostitute.
February 1, 1984. An Illinois judge suppressed the evidence from Larry Eyler's arrest on Interstate 65 the previous September, when a trooper found the Terre Haute house painter in his pickup with a young hitchhiker and a sergeant searched the truck before telling him he was under arrest. The boots that matched prints beside Ralph Calise's body were lost to the case, and Eyler went free. In August he killed Danny Bridges, fifteen, in Chicago, and was convicted and sentenced to death for it in 1986. He died at Pontiac prison in 1994.
February 2, 1905. Elisabeth Wiese was beheaded in the courtyard of the Hamburg remand prison. In April 1903 a servant named Klotsche went to take back her baby son, Wilhelm, whom she had handed for a single payment to a woman in St. Pauli who promised to find him a good home. The boy could not be found. Inquiries showed that four infants who passed through Wiese's hands at Wilhelminenstrasse 23 had vanished. A Hamburg jury convicted her of five murders, four foster babies and her own newborn grandchild, and condemned her five times.
February 3, 1988. Gennady Mikhasevich was shot in Minsk, by some accounts on this date, though the record of his case gives September 25, 1987. In 1985 the militia in the Vitebsk region were checking the owner of every red Zaporozhets in the oblast, and Mikhasevich, a volunteer police auxiliary, joined the search for himself. He killed twelve women that year. He was convicted of strangling thirty-six women picked up on the region's roads at night over fourteen years, while at least fourteen innocent men were convicted of his crimes.
February 4, 1986. Marybeth Tinning was taken to the Schenectady police station for questioning, weeks after she brought her four-month-old daughter, Tami Lynne, to the hospital and said she had found her not breathing. Tami Lynne was the ninth of her children to die between 1972 and 1985, and this time the pathologist found suffocation. Doctors had spoken of a genetic curse. Convicted in July 1987 of Tami Lynne's murder, she was given twenty years to life, admitted two more deaths, and was paroled at her seventh hearing in 2018.
February 5, 1986. A patient on the intensive care unit of St. Petrus Hospital in Wuppertal-Barmen died in one of the deaths later charged against the nurse Michaela Roeder. Seventeen deaths went before the Wuppertal assize court, among them a woman of seventy-seven, a man of ninety-four and a woman of eighty-six. Prosecutors asked for life for murder from base motives. On September 11, 1989, Judge Rolf Watty told the court that the defendant was not a murderer, and a woman in the public seats shouted at him to dig up the dead and let them speak.
February 6, 1984. Michaela Roeder was on duty at St. Petrus Hospital in Wuppertal on a date tied to one of the patient deaths that later went before the court. An intensive care nurse in her twenties, she injected gravely ill patients with a drug that lowered their blood pressure until they died. The court found her responsible in eight of seventeen deaths, convicting her of manslaughter in five cases, killing on request, negligent homicide and attempted manslaughter, called them pity killings, and in 1989 sentenced her to eleven years.
February 7, 2006. Kayoko Nakai was arrested in Kobe, almost six years after Molotov cocktails were thrown into two branches of the Rin Rin House, a telephone dating chain she blamed for the decline of the two clubs she ran in Chuo Ward. Four male customers sitting in private booths died of burns, and others were injured. Nakai had not thrown the bombs. She denied ordering the attack, but the Kobe District Court convicted her of murder and arson in November 2007 and gave her life, though prosecutors had asked for her to be hanged.
February 8, 1984. Rozina Zammit, fifty-four, was stabbed thirty-seven times at her own door on Triq Hlantun in Safi, Malta. Silvio Mangion said later that he had followed her home and knocked, that she began shouting when she opened it, and that he stabbed her and ran with two hundred Maltese liri. He went on to kill Maria Stella Magrin, sixty-eight, at Cospicua in 1986 and his neighbor Francesco Cassar, seventy-five, in 1998. The two older killings came out only when he talked about them to other prisoners. He holds two life sentences.
February 9, 2015. A court in Hohhot sentenced Zhao Zhihong to death. In 1996 a young woman named Yang was raped and strangled in the women's lavatory of the city's No. 1 Wool Textile Mill, and the eighteen-year-old worker who reported finding her, Huugjilt, was convicted and executed within about sixty-two days. His parents petitioned for eighteen years. Zhao confessed to the 1996 killing in 2005, and Huugjilt was exonerated in 2014. China's Supreme People's Court confirmed most of Zhao's crimes, and he was executed in July 2019.
February 10, 1929. Priscilla Joyce Ford was born in Berkeley, California, and worked for a time as a teacher. Just before three o'clock on Thanksgiving afternoon, November 27, 1980, she drove a Lincoln Continental onto a crowded sidewalk on North Virginia Street in downtown Reno. A police officer on the beat radioed that there were bodies everywhere, and the lieutenant who ran to the corner of Second and Virginia first thought a bomb had gone off. Six people died. Ford was sentenced to death in 1982 and died in prison of emphysema in 2005.
February 11, 2009. Viktor Sayenko was convicted in Dnipropetrovsk of eighteen murders and sentenced to life. In June and July 2007 he and Igor Suprunyuk, both nineteen, went out at night, in Sayenko's words, for a walk, and beat strangers to death with hammers. The first was Yekaterina Ilchenko, thirty-three, walking home from tea at a friend's; within the hour they killed Roman Tatarevich on a bench across the street from the prosecutor's office. Twenty-one people died in three weeks. Ukraine's Supreme Court upheld the sentence that November.
February 12, 2015. Megan Huntsman pleaded guilty in Utah to six counts of murder. Her estranged husband, Darren West, home after eight years in prison, had called 911 from the garage of their former house in Pleasant Grove the previous April to report a dead baby in a bag. Seven newborns were found, born in secret between 1996 and 2006; she said one had been stillborn. On April 20, 2015, she was sentenced to five years to life on each count, three to run consecutively. Her first parole hearing is set for 2064, when she will be eighty-nine.
February 13, 1973. Herbert Mullin was driving a load of firewood through Santa Cruz when he saw Fred Perez, a seventy-two-year-old retired prizefighter, working in his garden. He made a U-turn, laid a rifle across the hood of his station wagon and shot Perez through the heart while a neighbor wrote down his license number. A patrolman stopped him minutes later. Mullin killed thirteen people in four months, believing the deaths would prevent an earthquake. Convicted of ten murders and later an eleventh, he died in prison in August 2022.
February 14, 2004. Yang Xinhai was executed by shooting in Henan, thirteen days after the Luohe Intermediate People's Court sentenced him to death; he did not appeal. In November 2003 police in Cangzhou, Hebei, made a routine check of the city's entertainment venues and stopped a man who struck them as suspicious. He tried to stab them, and by morning they knew he was wanted for murder in four provinces. Yang entered farmhouses at night and killed the families inside. He was convicted of sixty-seven murders and twenty-three rapes.
February 15, 1968. Lee Roy Martin was arrested in Gaffney, South Carolina, after a stranger had been telephoning the Gaffney Ledger to confess to murders and to say that Roger Dedmond, in prison for strangling his wife, was innocent. Annie Lucille Dedmond, thirty-two, had been left alone by the road after an argument in May 1967 and taken a ride from a man who raped and strangled her. Martin admitted her killing and those of three girls and young women, and received four life sentences. Another inmate stabbed him to death in 1972.
February 16, 1972. Hiroko Nagata, vice-chair of Japan's United Red Army, was arrested, four days after the last death in a purge she and the chairman, Tsuneo Mori, ran at the group's mountain bases in Gunma Prefecture. They called it sokatsu, enforced self-criticism meant to produce true revolutionaries. Members were beaten, tied to posts in the winter cold and left to die, or stabbed. Twelve died between late December and February 12, and two more had been killed in August 1971. She was sentenced to death and died of brain cancer on death row in 2011.
February 17, 1993. Paul Bernardo was arrested in Ontario. In November 1990, after callers said a composite sketch of the Scarborough Rapist looked like him, he had given detectives blood, hair and saliva, and the samples sat untested at the provincial forensic laboratory for about twenty-six months. In that time Tammy Homolka, Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French died. He was convicted of the murders of Mahaffy and French in 1995, given life and declared a dangerous offender. His wife, Karla Homolka, had made a plea deal.
February 18, 1949. John George Haigh took Olive Durand-Deacon, a sixty-nine-year-old widow from his South Kensington hotel, to his storeroom in Crawley to discuss a business idea about artificial fingernails, shot her and put her body in a forty-gallon drum of sulfuric acid. He believed English law required a body to prove murder, and when detectives came he asked how anyone could prove it without one. Pathologists found gallstones and part of a denture. Convicted after seventeen minutes, he was hanged at Wandsworth that August.
February 19, 2001. Tímea Faludi, a twenty-four-year-old nurse on the first internal medicine ward of the Nyírő Gyula Hospital in Budapest, was arrested after the director general reported a run of suspicious deaths. Detectives had first watched the ward with a hidden camera and seen nothing. She admitted giving incurably ill patients morphine, or potassium mixed with Seduxen, on her own initiative, and spoke on television of far more. The press called her the Black Angel. She was convicted of one murder, given eleven years on appeal, and released in 2009.
February 20, 1989. Bartolomeo Gagliano was arrested in Italy after a week in which a man with a 7.65 pistol shot Nahir Fernandez Rodriguez, thirty-two, on the road between Milan and Genoa, and on Valentine's night shot Francesco Panizzi, known as Vanessa, in a car in Genoa. The client in the car survived, and the next day another woman was wounded. The press called him the Valentine's monster. He had killed Paolina Fedi in 1981 and escaped from the asylum he was sent to. Found insane each time, he hanged himself in Sanremo prison in 2015.
February 21, 2002. Patrice Alègre was sentenced in Toulouse to life, with a twenty-two-year minimum, for five murders, six rapes and an attempted murder. The first was Valérie Tariote, twenty-two, a waitress at a cafe near the Matabiau station, found in her flat in 1989 bound and gagged; the police called it suicide. Alègre worked beside her at the station buffet. Four more women died before his arrest in September 1997. False allegations made about the case afterward became a bigger scandal than the murders. He withdrew a parole application in 2021.
February 22, 2002. Robert Pickton was charged with the first-degree murders of Sereena Abotsway and Mona Wilson, seventeen days after a search for illegal firearms opened his pig farm in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia. In 1997 a woman had run from the farmhouse with a handcuff on one wrist and stab wounds; the evidence seized then sat untested for years and later held the DNA of three missing women. The DNA of thirty-three women was found on the farm. Convicted of six murders in 2007, he was killed by another inmate in 2024.
February 23, 1996. William Bonin was executed at San Quentin, the first person in California put to death by lethal injection rather than in the gas chamber. In June 1980 police officers who had followed the thirty-three-year-old truck driver for nine days forced the door of his van in a San Fernando Valley parking lot and found him assaulting a seventeen-year-old runaway. He was convicted of ten murders of boys and young men in Los Angeles County and four in Orange County. Twenty-one are attributed to him. His appeals had run fourteen years.
February 24, 1979. Anatoly Biryukov was executed by shooting. On September 16, 1977, a Moscow mother stepped away from her pram outside a children's milk kitchen in Shchukino and turned back to find it gone, with her three-month-old daughter inside. The man carried the baby into a nearby apartment building and stabbed her there. Biryukov was sentenced to death for killing five infants, none older than six months, taken from prams in Moscow and Chekhov that autumn. A composite sketch was recognized, and he was arrested in October 1977.
February 25, 2005. Dennis Rader was arrested near his house in Park City, Kansas. After thirteen years of silence, the BTK killer had resumed writing to the police in 2004 and asked whether a floppy disk could be traced. Through a newspaper advertisement the task force told him it could not. The deleted data on the disk he sent named Christ Lutheran Church and a user called Dennis, and DNA from his daughter's medical file confirmed the family match. He pleaded guilty to ten murders, including four members of the Otero family, and got ten life terms.
February 26, 1984. Rosario Gonzalez, twenty, an aspiring model and a bride-to-be from Homestead, was handing out aspirin samples at the Miami Grand Prix when she left the track around midday with a white man in his thirties. Three days earlier Christopher Wilder, a wealthy builder from Boynton Beach, had raced a Porsche at the same event and won four hundred dollars. He offered young women modeling work. Over seven weeks he killed eight or nine across the country, and he died in a struggle with two New Hampshire troopers in April 1984. She was never found.
February 27, 1912. Enriqueta Martí was arrested in Barcelona and five-year-old Teresita Guitart Congost was carried out of her first-floor flat on Carrer de Ponent in the Raval. Teresita had been missing since February 10. Ten days earlier a neighbor, Claudia Elías, had seen a girl with cropped hair at Martí's window and asked whether the child was hers; Martí shut the window without a word. The city called her a child-eating vampire. Ten or more deaths were attributed to her, none established, and she died in prison in 1913, untried.
February 28, 2006. Gong Runbo was arrested in Jiamusi, Heilongjiang. He had served eight years for raping a girl and after his release lured children from internet cafes to a room he rented in a back alley. In March 2005 a police dog followed nine-year-old Wang Shengli's scent to the gate of his courtyard, but the landlady cursed the detectives and they left without searching; her body was inside. Six children died in a year. He was sentenced to death in July 2006 and shot on December 31, 2006, less than ten months after his arrest.
February 29, 1960. Ricardo Leyva Muñoz Ramírez was born in El Paso, the youngest of five children of Julian and Mercedes Ramírez. As Richard Ramírez he broke into homes across Southern California in 1984 and 1985, and Los Angeles slept with its windows shut. A crowd in East Los Angeles caught him on foot in August 1985. Convicted of thirteen murders in 1989, he was sentenced to death. In 2009 DNA linked him to the 1984 murder of Mei Leung, nine, in a San Francisco hotel basement. He died on death row in June 2013 of lymphoma.
March 1, 1998. Zhang Lisong was arrested in Hubei province. Almost everything known about him comes from a few sentences in the Legal Daily, the state legal newspaper, relayed abroad by wire services that September. It described him as a peasant of thirty and called him the Monster Murderer. For about a year from March 1997 he moved across central China committing murder, rape and robbery; nine people were killed and six raped. None of them has been named. He was sentenced at a public rally and shot, less than seven months after his arrest.
March 2, 1996. A railroad officer arrested Robert Joseph Silveria Jr. in the rail yards at Roseville, California. His backpack held the Social Security card, birth certificate and food stamps of William Pettit Jr., thirty-nine, found beaten to death in a boxcar in Oregon three months before, and the papers of another dead man. Silveria had ridden freight trains for years, and he confessed at length, drawing maps for investigators from several states. He was convicted of four murders in Oregon, Kansas and Florida. Estimates of nine to thirty rest on his own word.
March 3, 1974. Norman Stribbling, the first husband of Josephine Gray, died in Maryland, the first of three men whose deaths brought her life insurance money over twenty-two years. Her second husband, William Robert Gray, died in 1990, and her cousin and boyfriend Clarence Goode, twenty-eight, was found shot in his car in Baltimore in 1996, three months after taking out a $100,000 policy in her name. She was never convicted of murder, but a federal jury found in 2002 that she caused two of the deaths, and she was given forty years for fraud.
March 4, 1992. Ondrej Rigo was arrested in Bratislava. Between 1990 and 1992 he killed eight women and a teenage boy in Munich, Amsterdam and Bratislava, attacking most of them in their homes as they slept. Among the dead were Terézia R., eighty-eight, and Anna P., forty, and her son Juraj. The only woman who survived his attacks, named in the Slovak press as Jana B., gave the evidence that helped bring him to trial, and he became the first murderer in Slovakia convicted on DNA. Sentenced to life in 1994, he died in a prison hospital in 2022.
March 5, 1996. A Berlin court sentenced Thomas Rung to life, finding particular gravity of guilt. Arrested in February 1995, he had confessed to drowning or strangling six women over twelve years, beginning with his landlady, Melanie Scharnow, seventy-seven, in Neukölln in 1983, and to killing his stepbrother, Eckhard Trutti. Two other men had been charged for his first two killings, and one of them, Michael Mager, served six years in juvenile detention before Rung's confession cleared him. Further terms followed in 2001 and 2004.
March 6, 1969. Antone Charles Costa, a Provincetown handyman, was arrested. In January two friends from Providence, Patricia Walsh and Mary Anne Wysocki, both about twenty-three, had checked into the Cape Cod guest house where he lodged, and the landlady found a note pinned to their door asking for a ride to Truro. The women were found dismembered and buried near his marijuana plot in the Truro woods, with two other young women, Susan Perry and Sydney Monzon. Convicted of two murders, he was given life in May 1970 and found hanged in his cell at Walpole in 1974.
March 7, 1987. John Powell, forty-four, died at Daniel Drake Memorial Hospital in Cincinnati, where he had lain since a motorcycle crash the summer before. His family asked for an autopsy, and when the Hamilton County pathologist, Dr. Lee Lehman, opened the body he caught the smell of burnt almonds. Powell had been fed cyanide through his gastric tube. Police looked at who had been on the ward and found the nurse's aide Donald Harvey, who pleaded guilty in Ohio and Kentucky to thirty-seven killings. He was beaten to death in prison in 2017.
March 8, 1994. Two days after Larry Eyler died of AIDS on Illinois's death row, his lawyer, Kathleen Zellner, held a news conference in Naperville and released the list of twenty-one killings he had confessed to her, seven of the dead unnamed. He had been convicted of only two, Danny Bridges, fifteen, in Chicago and Steven Agan, twenty-three, in Indiana. Zellner said she still believed he had not killed Bridges, the murder that sent him to death row, and the confession blamed an accomplice in four deaths. The man he named was later acquitted.
March 9, 2006. Scott Wilson Williams, forty-two, a North Carolina road-crew worker from Monroe with no criminal record, was arrested two months after Sharon Tucker Stone, forty-six, disappeared. A man collecting cans had found her dismembered remains in the woods of Chesterfield County, South Carolina, and investigators turned up his name among her acquaintances. He was tied to the killings of Sharon House Pressley in 1997 and Christina Parker in 2004, and to two women who survived. He made Alford pleas in 2008, received three life terms and died in 2022.
March 10, 2001. Vincent Johnson pleaded guilty in Brooklyn and was sentenced to life without parole. Between the summers of 1999 and 2000, women who worked the streets of Williamsburg and Bedford-Stuyvesant were found strangled with whatever lay to hand: shoelaces, a sweatpants drawstring, electrical wire. He left them on rooftops, in a vacant lot and in apartments. The dead included Laura Nusser, Patricia Sullivan, Rhonda Tucker, Joanne Feliciano and Vivian Caraballo. He pleaded guilty to avoid a possible death sentence and is held at Wende.
March 11, 2025. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals stayed the execution of David Leonard Wood two days before it was due, the second time in sixteen years the court had stopped it within days of the date. In 1987 water utility workers found six young women and girls in shallow graves in the desert northeast of El Paso, among them Rosa Maria Casio, twenty-four, and Karen Baker, twenty. Wood was sentenced to death in 1993 and has always denied the killings. In September 2026 a judge granted new DNA testing in the case.
March 12, 1994. Henry Louis Wallace was arrested in Charlotte on a larceny warrant, and the next day confessed at length on videotape to killing eleven women. In June 1992 he had gone with his girlfriend and the sister of Caroline Love, twenty, to report Love missing, after strangling her in the apartment she shared with his girlfriend. Most of the women he killed knew him, and several worked at fast-food restaurants he had managed. He was convicted of nine murders in January 1997, sentenced to death nine times, and remains on death row in Raleigh.
March 13, 2012. Israel Keyes was arrested in Lufkin, Texas, in a rented car, after using Samantha Koenig's debit card at cash machines across the Southwest. On February 1 a security camera at a coffee stand on Tudor Road in Anchorage had recorded a man climbing through the service window, binding Koenig, eighteen, with zip ties and taking her away. Keyes told investigators he had killed her and a Vermont couple, Bill and Lorraine Currier, and had buried murder kits around the country years in advance. He killed himself in jail that December.
March 14, 1986. Michaela Roeder, an intensive care nurse at St. Petrus Hospital in Wuppertal-Barmen, was arrested on suspicion of killing patients. She had injected gravely ill people on her unit with a drug that lowered their blood pressure until they died. Prosecutors charged seventeen deaths and asked for life, for murder from base motives. In September 1989 the Wuppertal assize court found her responsible in eight, convicting her of manslaughter in five cases, killing on request, negligent homicide and attempted manslaughter, and gave her eleven years.
March 15, 2018. Georgia executed Carlton Gary at 10:33 at night, three and a half hours after the time set, while the Supreme Court decided whether to stop it. He declined a final prayer and said nothing. Seven women, most of them elderly and living in the Wynnton district of Columbus, had been strangled in their homes between September 1977 and April 1978, and two more survived. Gary was convicted in 1986 of murdering Florence Scheible, eighty-nine, Martha Thurmond, sixty-nine, and Kathleen Woodruff, seventy-four. He spent thirty-one years insisting he was innocent.
March 16, 2005. Mohammed Bijeh was flogged and then hanged from a crane in Pakdasht, a poor district of migrant laborers and Afghan refugees southeast of Tehran, before a crowd of about five thousand. A brickworks laborer from Quchan, he confessed to luring boys aged eight to fifteen from poor families into the desert between March and September 2004, raping and killing them. The Iranian press called him the vampire of the Tehran desert. He admitted sixteen deaths; the charge sheet listed twenty-one. An accomplice, Ali Baghi, was also convicted.
March 17, 1999. Andrew Kokoraleis was executed by lethal injection, the last person the state of Illinois put to death. He was one of three men convicted of murders attributed to the group the Chicago press called the Ripper Crew. Its alleged leader, Robin Gecht, has never been convicted of murder. In October 1982 Gecht picked up Beverly Washington in his van; she was found beside a railroad track, mutilated and left for dead, and lived to describe him. He is serving 120 years for that attack, with a projected parole date in 2042.
March 19, 1990. Detectives watching John Wayne Glover, fifty-seven, a salesman for the Four'n Twenty pie company, saw him welcomed into the Mosman home of Joan Sinclair, sixty, a divorcee who played bridge with him. When he did not come out, they went in and found her dead and Glover unconscious in the bath, having tried to kill himself. Over the previous year he had beaten and strangled five elderly women on Sydney's North Shore. He was given six life sentences in 1991, his file marked never to be released, and hanged himself at Lithgow prison in 2005.
March 20, 2000. Michael Wayne McGray pleaded guilty to the 1998 murder of Joan Hicks, forty-eight, in Moncton, the first of six concurrent life sentences for murders reaching back to 1985. Hicks's daughter Nina, eleven, was killed with her. McGray claimed up to sixteen killings and told prison officials that if he were given a cellmate he would kill him. Moved to the medium-security Mountain Institution in British Columbia, he was paired with Jeremy Phillips, thirty-three, who was found dead in their cell in November 2010. McGray was convicted of that murder too.
March 20, 2008. The St. Petersburg City Court sentenced Dmitry Voronenko to life without parole for the murders of girls of eleven and twelve and young women of eighteen and twenty. The judge said from the bench that he deserved death and that only the moratorium on capital punishment stood in the way. The prosecution and the girls' parents had asked for it, and Voronenko said he would accept it. In 2023, already serving his sentence, he confessed to two earlier killings, a woman of twenty-eight and a girl of twelve, and was convicted of both in 2025.
March 21, 2002. Amanda Dowler, thirteen, known as Milly, bought chips with friends at the café by the railway station in Walton-on-Thames, set off to walk home and never arrived. Six months later mushroom pickers found her remains in Yateley Heath Woods in Hampshire, about twenty-five miles away. It took nine years, a second police force and a second Old Bailey jury to name her killer. Levi Bellfield, already serving a whole-life order for murdering Marsha McDonnell and Amélie Delagrange, was convicted in June 2011 and given a second.
March 22, 1979. Rudy Bladel was arrested in Indiana. On New Year's Eve 1978 he had carried a suitcase to the Amtrak depot in Jackson, Michigan, assembled a shotgun on the platform and shot three railroad men in the crew locker room: Robert Blake, forty-two, William Gulak, fifty, and Charles Burton, thirty-two. A railroad worker who lost his job when his line moved, he was suspected in the shooting of seven railroad men from 1963. His confession was thrown out by the Supreme Court in Michigan v. Jackson in 1986, and he was convicted again at retrial.
March 23, 1998. Gerald Stano was executed in the electric chair at Florida State Prison, aged forty-six. He was arrested in 1980 after Donna Hensley, a sex worker stabbed about thirty times in a Daytona Beach motel, survived and picked him out of a photograph. Detective Sergeant Paul Crow then questioned him about Mary Carol Maher, twenty, a former swimming champion, and Stano began to confess. He admitted forty-one killings and was convicted of nine, largely on his own statements. He said near the end that he had made some of them up.
March 24, 1873. Mary Ann Cotton was hanged at Durham County Gaol, nineteen days after her trial for the murder of her stepson, Charles Edward Cotton, seven, opened at the Durham Assizes. The hangman left her three minutes on the rope. In July 1872 a parish official in West Auckland had asked her to nurse a smallpox patient, and she said the boy was in the way and would not trouble her long. He died within days, and arsenic was found. Three husbands, a lover, her mother and most of her children had died around her, most of them insured.
March 25, 2016. Yasutoshi Kamata was hanged at the Osaka Detention House, aged seventy-five, seventeen years after his sentence, an interval ordinary in Japan. In September 1985 the Osaka police chief received a letter naming the sushi restaurant where the writer had eaten with a young woman before killing her, signed with the name used by the extortionists in the Glico Morinaga case. Kamata strangled four women and a nine-year-old girl and taunted the police by letter for years, until a petty theft arrest in 1994 matched his fingerprints.
March 26, 1998. Guy Georges was arrested in Paris after a DNA match, at a time when France had no national DNA database. Between 1991 and 1997 he raped and murdered seven young women in the east of the city, among them Pascale Escarfail, nineteen, and Hélène Frinking, twenty-seven, and several more survived. He denied everything until near the end of his trial in 2001, when he stood and admitted all seven, telling the families he would never leave prison. He was sentenced to life with a twenty-two-year minimum, which ended in 2020.
March 27, 2007. Shelly Andre Brooks was sentenced in Detroit to life without parole. Between 2001 and 2006 seven Black women aged thirty to fifty-three, drug users who sometimes sold sex on the city's east side, were raped and beaten to death with rocks, bricks and wood and left in abandoned buildings, vacant lots and an alley. Some were found only years later. Brooks was charged with all seven in August 2006 and convicted at two trials of murdering Pamela Greer and Rhonda Myles. The other cases were not pursued. One victim was identified by DNA in 2025.
March 28, 1980. Robert Joseph Zani was arrested, and his wife's account to investigators connected him to a killing in Austin thirteen years earlier. On the morning of July 23, 1967, George Vizard, a student activist and president of the local Students for a Democratic Society, was shot twice at the Town and Country Store where he worked and left in the cold-room locker, while a stranger served customers. Zani was convicted in 1981 of Vizard's murder and given ninety-nine years. He was also tried over his mother's death. He died in 2011.
March 29, 2013. Joanna Dennehy stabbed Kevin Lee, forty-eight, a Peterborough property developer and her lover, and dressed his body in a black sequined dress before it was dumped in a ditch near Newborough. In the previous ten days she had killed Lukasz Slaboszewski, thirty-one, whom she lured by text message, and John Chapman, fifty-six, a navy veteran who lived in one of Lee's houses. Days later she stabbed two men walking dogs in Hereford; both survived. She pleaded guilty to all three murders and was given a whole-life order in February 2014.
March 30, 1998. Judy Buenoano was executed in the electric chair at Florida State Prison, the first woman executed in Florida since 1848. In 1983 she told John Gentry, the Pensacola businessman she lived with, that she was pregnant and sent him out for champagne. Dynamite wired to his ignition blew the car apart; he survived. She was not pregnant. Investigators went back to her husband James Goodyear's death in 1971 and found arsenic, and to her paralyzed son Michael, nineteen, drowned in 1980. She was condemned for her husband's murder.
March 31, 2009. John Floyd Thomas Jr., seventy-two, a retired state insurance claims adjuster in Los Angeles, was arrested after the DNA swab he gave as a registered sex offender matched semen from two women killed in the 1970s. Investigators began to say publicly that the soft-spoken grandfather might be the Westside Rapist, who had broken into the homes of elderly women for years. In April 2011 he pleaded guilty to seven first-degree murders, among them Ethel Sokoloff, sixty-eight, and Adrian Askew, eighty-five, and received seven life terms.
April 1, 2009. Kimberly Saenz, a licensed vocational nurse, was arrested in Lufkin, Texas, a year after a run of deaths at the DaVita dialysis clinic where she worked. On the morning of April 28, 2008, two patients watched her pour bleach into a container and then, they said, draw it into syringes and inject it into the lines of other patients. Five people died that spring, among them Clara Strange, Thelma Metcalf and Opal Few, and three more were injured. She was convicted of capital murder in March 2012 and sentenced to life without parole.
April 2, 2013. Joanna Dennehy drove to Hereford and stabbed two strangers who were out walking their dogs, Robin Bereza, sixty-four, and John Rogers, fifty-seven. Both survived, and she was arrested that day. In the previous two weeks she had stabbed three men to death in and around Peterborough: Lukasz Slaboszewski, thirty-one, whom she lured by text message; John Chapman, fifty-six, a navy veteran; and her lover, Kevin Lee, forty-eight. She pleaded guilty to all three murders in November 2013 and in February 2014 became one of very few women in Britain given a whole-life order.
April 3, 2014. Tommy Lynn Sells was executed by lethal injection at Huntsville, aged forty-nine, after a last legal fight over the secret source of the pentobarbital. In the early hours of December 31, 1999, he let himself into the mobile home of Terry and Crystal Harris west of Del Rio, a family he knew from church, and stabbed thirteen-year-old Kaylene Harris to death; her friend Krystal Surles, ten, survived with her throat cut and helped police find him. Sells rode freight trains for years. Investigators confirmed twenty-two killings.
April 4, 1896. Amelia Dyer was arrested in Reading. Five days earlier a bargeman had hooked a brown paper parcel out of the Thames holding the body of a baby girl, Helena Fry. Under a microscope a detective made out a label from Bristol Temple Meads station with a name and address that led to Dyer. For some thirty years desperate mothers had paid her to take unwanted babies. Seven infants were recovered from the river that spring. Convicted at the Old Bailey of murdering Doris Marmon, four months old, she was hanged at Newgate on June 10, 1896.
April 5, 1985. A date tied to the deaths later investigated around Dorothy Matajke, a paroled forger who hired herself out in Little Rock as a live-in companion to elderly people. Opal Kinsey, about seventy, was later exhumed. In 1986 Marian Doyle, seventy-four, died after two weeks in Matajke's care, and police noticed her bank account had been looted. Investigators found arsenic. Matajke was convicted in June 1987 of murdering Paul Kinsey, about seventy-one, and given life, and two months later received sixty more years by plea for Doyle.
April 6, 1987. Donald Harvey, a nurse's aide at Daniel Drake Memorial Hospital in Cincinnati, was charged with murdering John Powell, forty-four, a brain-injured patient whose autopsy smelled of burnt almonds. Powell had been given cyanide through his feeding tube. Harvey first admitted that one death, then dozens. He had killed patients for seventeen years in Kentucky and Ohio, beginning in 1970, and also a neighbor and his lover's father. He pleaded guilty to thirty-seven killings and claimed as many as eighty-seven. He was beaten to death in prison in 2017.
April 7, 1984. Robert Wayne Danielson Jr. was arrested. The previous December, road workers in Mendocino County, California, had dug up the bodies of Benjamin Shaffer, sixty-nine, and his wife, Edith, sixty-two, who vanished in July 1982. Their credit cards had been used by Danielson, and his companion, Lenora Hart Johnson, confessed. Paroled in 1981 after killing a young man in 1970, he had robbed and shot retired campers in Arizona, Oregon and California. Sentenced to death in California in 1986, he was found hanged in his San Quentin cell in 1995.
April 8, 1955. Leslie Irvin was arrested in Indiana after six people were killed in four robberies and burglaries around Evansville, among them Mary Holland, thirty-three, and three members of the Duncan family. Of the 430 people called for jury service that fall, 268 were excused because they had already decided he was guilty, and eight of the twelve seated said the same. In 1961 the Supreme Court set aside his death sentence in Irvin v. Dowd, the first time it reversed a state conviction chiefly because of press coverage. He was retried and given life.
April 9, 1997. Athens police arrested a taxi driver at a taverna in Nikaia over a stolen car and a pair of shootings, and within days Dimitris Vakrinos confessed to five killings, seven attempted murders and five armed robberies going back a decade. He said he killed over grudges; the dead included his roommate, Panagiotis Gaglias, fifty-three, a fellow taxi driver and two brothers. The Greek press, with no domestic precedent, called him the country's first serial killer. On May 12, 1997, he hanged himself with shoelaces in the Korydallos prison showers.
April 10, 1998. Alfred Gaynor was arrested in Springfield, Massachusetts. Over three years he had raped and strangled women in the city's poorer neighborhoods, most of them women he knew. Yvette Torres, thirty-three, let him into her home in November 1997 as an old friend; her eleven-year-old son found her body, and Gaynor tried to sell her VCR for drug money. Convicted of four murders in 2000, he received four life terms. In 2010 he pleaded guilty to four more, among them Torres, and he confessed to the killing of Amy Smith, which was never charged.
April 11, 1947. Louise Peete was executed in the gas chamber at San Quentin, aged sixty-six. She had served nineteen years of a life sentence for shooting the Los Angeles mining engineer Jacob Denton and burying him under his own house in 1920. Paroled in 1939, she went to work as companion and housekeeper to Margaret Logan in Pacific Palisades. In December 1944 detectives dug in Logan's garden and found her shot and beaten in a shallow grave, while Peete had been cashing her checks and telling callers she was ill. She was the second woman executed in California.
April 12, 2023. Louis Bernard Gaskin was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison, aged fifty-six, the hundredth execution in Florida since 1976. On the night of December 20, 1989, dressed in black and carrying a .22 rifle, he circled the Palm Coast winter home of Robert and Georgette Sturmfels, a couple from New Jersey, and shot them through a window as they sat watching television. That night he also shot at Joseph and Mary Rector, who survived. He was later convicted of a 1986 murder as well, and spent thirty-three years under sentence of death.
April 13, 1993. Sergei Ryakhovsky was arrested in Balashikha, on the eastern edge of Moscow. Well over six feet tall and heavily built, he was called the Hippopotamus by the press for his size and the Balashikha Ripper for what he did. Over five years he killed people in the woods, parks and cemeteries east of the city, among them elderly women, teenagers and men he approached as a homosexual, aged fourteen to seventy-eight. Eighteen murders were proved at trial. Sentenced to death in 1995 and spared by the moratorium, he died of tuberculosis in a Mordovian colony in 2007.
April 15, 1925. Fritz Haarmann was beheaded in the yard of the Hanover prison at six in the morning. In May and June 1924 children found human skulls on the banks of the Leine, and when the police dragged the river they recovered more than five hundred bones from at least twenty-two people. The city had been losing boys and young men for years, most of them last seen at the central railway station, where Haarmann, a police informer, picked them up. He was convicted of twenty-four of twenty-seven murders charged. The rumor that he sold their flesh as meat outlived him.
April 16, 1996. Anatoly Onoprienko was arrested at a relative's apartment in Yavoriv, in western Ukraine, after his cousin's wife found a bag of women's clothing and a gun. On Christmas Eve 1995 he had broken into the Zaichenko family's home in the village of Garmarnia with a sawn-off shotgun, killed the parents and their two small sons, and set the house on fire. Over the next three months he wiped out whole families in their homes and killed witnesses who saw him. Convicted of fifty-two murders in 1999, he was sentenced to death, later commuted, and died in prison in 2013.
April 17, 2007. Artur Ryno, an icon-painting student of seventeen, was arrested in Moscow. With Pavel Skachevsky he led a gang of teenage neo-Nazis who stabbed people in the street because they did not look Slavic, most of them migrant workers from Central Asia and the Caucasus, among them the Armenian businessman Karen Abramian. Ryno confessed to thirty-seven killings. In December 2008 seven of the gang stood in a glass cage in the Moscow City Court; nineteen murders were proved against him. A juvenile at the time, he received the maximum of ten years and was released in 2017.
April 18, 1991. A Cook County judge sentenced Dorothy Williams to death for the murder and robbery of Mary Harris, ninety-seven, strangled in her apartment in Chicago Housing Authority senior housing. Williams preyed on the elderly residents of the South Side buildings for heroin money. Lonnie Laws, seventy-nine, was strangled with his own belt, and Caesar Zuell, sixty-four, was stabbed. She was caught in September 1989 by Betty Woods, a plainclothes officer from the senior citizens' unit who waited outside one of the buildings. Her sentence was commuted to life in 2003.
April 19, 2004. Lorenzo Gilyard, a trash-truck supervisor in Kansas City, was arrested after DNA linked him to the strangling of women going back to 1977. Every one of the six he was convicted of killing was found without her shoes, the prosecutor, Jim Kanatzar, told the court; all were strangled, left in secluded places and found within the same eighteen months. Thirteen murders were indicted, and six were dropped in a deal that took the death penalty off the table. Judge John O'Malley convicted him of six in 2007, among them Catherine Barry and Naomi Kelly, and acquitted him of a seventh.
April 20, 2004. Abdullah Shah was shot at Pul-e-Charkhi prison outside Kabul, the first execution in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban. A former mujahideen fighter, he had commanded a small armed band in the Paghman district west of Kabul during the civil war of the 1990s, and most accounts place him as an enforcer for the warlord Faryadi Sarwar Zardad. In October 2002 a special court sentenced him to death for twenty murders after a closed trial in which he had no lawyer. Human rights groups protested the trial.
April 21, 1973. In the early hours Edmund Kemper killed his mother, Clarnell Strandberg, with a hammer as she slept in their house in Aptos, California, then telephoned her friend Sally Hallett, fifty-nine, invited her over, and killed her too. Days later he called the Santa Cruz police from a phone booth in Colorado and confessed. At fifteen he had shot his grandparents dead, and in 1969 he was released from Atascadero State Hospital after learning what its tests looked for. He had since killed six young women. Convicted of eight murders, he remains in prison.
April 22, 1999. Peter Dupas was arrested at a hotel in Thomastown, Melbourne, three days after the murder of Nicole Patterson, twenty-eight, a counselor who had made an appointment with a new client in her diary. He had spent nearly thirty years in and out of prison for knife attacks and rapes. He was convicted of murdering Patterson in 2000, Margaret Maher, forty, in 2004, and Mersina Halvagis, twenty-five, stabbed at her grandmother's grave in 1997, at a retrial in 2010. Three life terms carry no parole. A charge over a nursing-home killing was dropped in 2019.
April 23, 1997. Andrew Urdiales, a former Marine working as a security guard, was arrested in Illinois. Shown photographs of three drowned women he said he did not recognize them. Told that all three were shot with bullets from his gun, he sat for about a minute, took off his badge, began pulling the laces from his shoes and said he guessed he was not going to work today. He confessed to the three Illinois killings and then, unasked, to five in California while he was stationed there. Sentenced to death three times, he hanged himself at San Quentin in 2018.
April 24, 2006. Jeong Nam-kyu was arrested in Seoul. Two days earlier he had broken into a house in Singil-dong to beat a sleeping man to death, and the man and his father held him until the police came; booked as a burglar, he got out of the patrol car in handcuffs and ran, and was caught again. He was then linked to thirty-three attacks since 2004 in which thirteen people died and twenty were seriously hurt, mostly women in their homes at night. Sentenced to death on September 21, 2006, he hanged himself in his cell in November 2009.
April 25, 2001. David Thabo Simelane was arrested on a public road near the graves in the Malkerns forest, in the farming country between Mbabane and Manzini. Herders looking for a stray cow had found remains that spring, and the digging uncovered forty-five bodies, forty-one women and four small children, among them a baby of nine months. Several of the women were pregnant. Simelane had promised them work and walked them into the bush. In 2011 he was convicted of twenty-eight murders and sentenced to hang. Eswatini has hanged no one since 1983.
April 26, 1946. José María Miculax Bux, twenty-one, was arrested in Guatemala City. Between January and April fifteen boys and adolescents aged ten to eighteen had been found dead around the city, among them Enrique Sactic Cuyuch, fourteen, and Guillermo Rolando Castillo, ten; five were never identified. He was tried under a decree written to speed up his own case, known as the Ley Miculax, and sentenced to death in June. On July 18, 1946, before a crowd outside the wall of the Cementerio General, he drank two small bottles of liquor, took a priest's blessing and was shot.
April 27, 1979. Yiya Murano was arrested in Buenos Aires. When her cousin Carmen Zulema del Giorgio de Venturini, known as Mema, died suddenly in March, her daughters asked for an autopsy, which found cyanide, and the building's porter said he had seen Murano leave the apartment carrying a small jar. Two other women who had died weeks earlier, her neighbor Nilda Gamba and her friend Lelia Formisano de Ayala, were exhumed and had cyanide in them too. All three had lent her money. Acquitted in 1982, she was convicted on appeal in 1985 and given life.
April 28, 1908. Belle Gunness's farmhouse outside La Porte, Indiana, burned with her three children and a headless woman inside. In May Asle Helgelien, a South Dakota farmer who would not believe the letters coming back in his brother Andrew's name, stood in the burned farmyard and told the sheriff where to dig. The digging found the remains of men who had answered her Norwegian-language marriage notices and arrived with their savings. Eleven were identified in whole or part. The headless woman was buried under her name; DNA work in 2007 was inconclusive.
April 29, 2004. Sean Vincent Gillis was arrested in Baton Rouge after a tire track at the scene of Donna Bennett Johnston's killing led detectives to his car. For ten years he had killed women in the city at the same time as Derrick Todd Lee, and the two series confused both investigations. He admitted eight killings, among them Ann Bryan, eighty-one, in 1994. In 2008 a jury convicted him of first-degree murder for Johnston, a mother of forty-three, but did not agree on death. He pleaded guilty to two others and is serving life without parole.
April 30, 1980. Andrea Matteucci, eighteen, killed Domenico Raso, a shopkeeper in Aosta, of whom he said afterward that he had no reason to exist. He killed three women working as prostitutes between 1992 and 1995, the last Albana Dakovi, twenty, beaten with a wrench in May 1995; with her body hidden in his van he drove to the police station to sign the register under a court order. Another woman, Lucy Omon, survived an attack in 1994. A pimp's letter to the police caught him. The Aosta court gave him twenty-eight years in 1996.
May 1, 1987. Michel Peiry, a twenty-eight-year-old from Romont in the canton of Fribourg, was arrested on the evidence of two people who had survived his attacks. For six years he had picked up adolescents and young men hitchhiking, most of them fourteen to eighteen, and tortured and killed them in Switzerland and abroad. In custody he began to describe what he had done, confessing to five killings and later retracting some of it; Swiss reporting puts the total near ten. Sentenced to life in Valais in 1989, he has been refused parole twelve times, most recently in August 2026.
May 2, 1997. Ahmad Suradji, a cattle breeder and healer known as Datuk, was arrested outside Medan in North Sumatra. On April 24, Sri Kemala Dewi, twenty-one, had hired a fifteen-year-old rickshaw driver to take her to him and asked him to keep the trip to himself; three days later her body was found buried in a sugar cane field. Women came to Suradji for charms to become richer or more beautiful, and he buried them to the waist in the field before strangling them. He confessed to forty-two killings and was executed by firing squad in July 2008.
May 3, 1984. Carlton Gary was arrested after a gun taken in one of the burglaries was traced to him. Between September 1977 and April 1978 seven women, most of them elderly and living alone in the Wynnton district of Columbus, Georgia, had been strangled in their homes with stockings, and two more survived. The city called the killer the Stocking Strangler. Gary was convicted in 1986 of murdering Florence Scheible, eighty-nine, Martha Thurmond, sixty-nine, and Kathleen Woodruff, seventy-four, and sentenced to death. He denied all of it and was executed in 2018.
May 4, 1999. Edson Izidoro Guimarães, a nursing assistant at the Salgado Filho municipal hospital in Rio de Janeiro, was arrested after a porter watched him fill a syringe with potassium chloride and inject it into a patient in a coma, who died almost at once. The hospital's own figures had shown deaths clustering on his shifts for months, among patients in comas or in the last stages of AIDS. He confessed to five killings, and up to 131 deaths on his shifts were examined. Four murders were proved, and his sentence was twice cut on appeal to under thirty-two years.
May 5, 2016. A Los Angeles jury convicted Lonnie Franklin Jr., a former city garbage collector and police garage attendant, of ten murders and one attempted murder. In November 1988 Enietra Washington, thirty, accepted a ride from a man in an orange Pinto, who shot her in the chest and photographed her as she lost consciousness; she survived. The killings ran from 1985 to 2007 with a long gap, and the press called him the Grim Sleeper. California's first familial DNA search pointed at his son in 2010. Sentenced to death that August, he died in his cell in 2020.
May 6, 1966. At Chester Assizes a jury convicted Myra Hindley of murdering Lesley Ann Downey, ten, and Edward Evans, seventeen, and of harboring Ian Brady after the murder of John Kilbride, twelve. A woman of twenty-one with bleached hair and a van, she persuaded children to get into the car when a young man alone could not have. The jury heard a sixteen-minute tape on which her voice tells Lesley Ann to shut up. In 1987 she and Brady confessed to killing Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett, who has never been found. She died in custody in 2002.
May 7, 1972. Edmund Kemper picked up two Fresno State students hitchhiking near Berkeley, Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa, both eighteen, and killed them. In 1969 he had been released from Atascadero State Hospital, where he was held for shooting his grandparents dead at fifteen, after learning what its psychological tests were looking for. Over the next year he killed four more young women, among them Aiko Koo, fifteen, and then his mother and her friend, before calling the police himself. He was convicted of eight murders in 1973 and remains in prison.
May 8, 1978. David Berkowitz pleaded guilty in Brooklyn to the six Son of Sam murders. From July 1976 to July 1977 he shot young couples and women in parked cars and on stoops in Queens, the Bronx and Brooklyn with a .44 revolver, and for a year many of New York's dark-haired women cut their hair or stayed home. He was caught through a parking ticket written near the last shooting, in Bath Beach, where Stacy Moskowitz, twenty, died. He was sentenced to twenty-five years to life on each murder and has been refused parole twelve times.
May 9, 1956. Elmer Wayne Henley Jr. was born in Houston to a violent, alcoholic father and left school at fifteen to help support his mother and brothers. That year David Brooks introduced him to Dean Corll, who offered two hundred dollars for every boy he brought. He brought many, most from his own street and circle in the Houston Heights. On August 8, 1973, he shot Corll six times and called the police himself. Twenty-nine known victims of the Houston Mass Murders were found. Henley was convicted of six and has been refused parole at every hearing since 1980.
May 10, 1994. John Wayne Gacy was executed by lethal injection at Stateville Correctional Center shortly after midnight, fourteen years after he was condemned for thirty-three murders. A building contractor in the Chicago suburbs who performed at children's parties as Pogo the Clown, he had buried twenty-six young men and boys in the crawl space under his house, three more elsewhere on the property, and left four in rivers. The first was Timothy McCoy and the last Robert Piest, fifteen. Five remain unidentified; three have been named by DNA since 2011.
May 11, 1998. Jacqueline Williams was sentenced to death in Illinois. On the night of November 16, 1995, Debra Evans, twenty-eight and nine months pregnant, was shot and stabbed in her apartment in Addison, and her baby, Elijah, was cut from her womb and carried out alive. Her daughter Samantha, ten, was killed in the apartment, and her son Joshua, seven, was taken and killed later. A two-year-old son was left alive. Williams, who wanted the baby, was convicted with two men. Her sentence was commuted to life in 2003 with every death sentence in the state.
May 12, 1995. Andrea Matteucci picked up Albana Dakovi, a twenty-year-old Albanian woman, took her to Arnad in the Aosta valley and killed her with blows from a wrench and stab wounds. With her body hidden in his van he drove to the police station at Saint-Pierre to sign the register, as a court order required. He had killed Daniela Zago and Clara Omoregbee before her, and a shopkeeper, Domenico Raso, in 1980, and he burned the women's bodies. A pimp's letter to the police led to him. The Aosta court sentenced him in 1996 to twenty-eight years.
May 13, 1978. Velma Barfield was arrested in North Carolina three months after Rowland Stuart Taylor, the man she was living with, died while she was, as she put it, nursing him back to health. He had begun to suspect that she was forging checks on his account, and she had been mixing arsenic-based rat poison into his beer and tea. Exhumations followed, and she confessed to poisoning her mother and two elderly people in her care. Arsenic was also found in her second husband. In November 1984 she became the first woman executed in the United States since 1962.
May 14, 1971. Kiyoshi Okubo was arrested in Gunma prefecture, four days after his last killing, and led police to the graves. That spring a man in a beret and a Russian peasant blouse, driving a white Mazda rotary coupe, had been stopping young women on the street, saying he was an art teacher and asking them to model for a painting. Many got into the car. Between March 31 and May 10 he killed eight of them, aged sixteen to twenty-one, and buried them in fields and cleared building land. He did not appeal his death sentence and was hanged in January 1976.
May 15, 2025. Glen Edward Rogers was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison, aged sixty-two. On November 5, 1995, a long-haired, bearded stranger danced to the jukebox at the Showtown bar in Gibsonton, Florida, and bought drinks for a table of women. One of them, Tina Marie Cribbs, thirty-four, a waitress and mother of two, was found stabbed in a motel bathtub days later. Rogers was sentenced to death for her murder, and in California for that of Sandra Gallagher, thirty-three. He was suspected in three more killings, including that of a man of seventy-one.
May 16, 2008. David Randitsheni was arrested around Modimolle in Limpopo province, South Africa, after police tested the DNA of more than 550 men and an analyst found the match. Between 2004 and 2008 he abducted and raped children there and killed ten. Nineteen people were victims in the case; one was an adult woman, and every other was a girl. They are not named because they were children. He was convicted on forty-six counts and sentenced in August 2009 to life with no parole for thirty-five years. Twelve days later he was found hanged in his cell at Thohoyandou.
May 17, 1764. Darya Saltykova, a wealthy widow with estates around Moscow, was taken into custody after two of her serfs got a petition through to Catherine II. Between 1757 and 1762 she beat and tortured dozens of her own serfs to death, most of them young women and girls. A six-year investigation by the Collegium of Justice counted 138 suspicious deaths. In 1768 she was convicted of thirty-eight murders and chained for an hour on a Moscow platform under a sign reading This woman has tortured and murdered. She died imprisoned in a convent in 1801.
May 18, 2007. Eleazar Paula Mendez pleaded guilty in Sevier County Circuit Court in Arkansas to three counts of capital murder and was sentenced to life without parole. On January 28, 2006, police in De Queen went to her house after a frantic call from her husband, Arturo Morales, in New York. She collapsed as officers arrived. Inside, lying side by side on a bed, were their children, Elvis, eight, and the five-year-old twins, Samuel and Samantha. She had suffocated them weeks after her husband asked for a divorce, and had tried to kill herself.
May 19, 1988. José Antonio Rodríguez Vega was arrested in Santander. Police and two journalists had begun to ask whether the deaths of elderly women living alone in the city were natural, and detectives found a builder who had done small jobs in several of their apartments and left his card; he had fitted the final victim's new security door. He talked his way in by offering repairs, then raped and suffocated women aged sixty-one to ninety-three. Convicted of sixteen murders in 1991, he was stabbed to death by two inmates at Topas prison in 2002.
May 20, 1999. Police forced open the vault of a disused bank on the main street of Snowtown, a farming town of a few hundred people about ninety miles north of Adelaide. Inside were six plastic barrels of hydrochloric acid holding the dismembered remains of eight people. None of the dead came from Snowtown; they were men and women from Adelaide's northern suburbs, and nearly all knew John Bunting, who led a small group that killed people it judged weak or deviant and drew on their welfare payments. Bunting was convicted of eleven murders in 2003 and will never be released.
May 21, 1997. Siswanto, a homeless man known as Robot Gedek, was sentenced to death in Central Jakarta for killing twelve street boys aged nine to fifteen. Police paid little attention until the fourth body, when the forensic reports began to show the same injuries each time. Only eight bodies were recovered, and only one boy has been named, Kasikin, whose discovery gave police the case. Siswanto's appeals failed, and he died of a heart attack on Nusakambangan in 2007. After 2010, doubts about his guilt were raised in the Indonesian press.
May 22, 1994. Ivan Milat was arrested at his home in Eagle Vale, outside Sydney, by police who had matched him to the description given by Paul Onions, a British backpacker. In January 1990 Onions accepted a lift on the Hume Highway from a man who called himself Bill; near the Belanglo State Forest the man pulled a gun, and Onions ran into traffic and got away. Between 1989 and 1992 seven young backpackers, five of them from Britain and Germany, were killed and left in the forest. Milat was convicted of all seven in 1996 and died in prison in 2019.
May 23, 2019. Bobby Joe Long was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison, aged sixty-five. In the early hours of November 3, 1984, Lisa McVey, seventeen, was riding home from work at a Tampa doughnut shop when he knocked her off her bicycle and held her in his apartment for twenty-six hours. She took in everything she could about him and his car, and when he let her go her description led to his arrest. In 1985 he pleaded guilty to eight murders of women around Tampa Bay. His death sentence was for the murder of Michelle Simms.
May 24, 1973. Pedro Rodrigues Filho was arrested in São Paulo state and spent forty-two of the next forty-five years in custody. The Brazilian press called him Pedrinho Matador, Little Pedro the Killer, and on his arm he carried a tattoo reading mato por prazer, I kill for pleasure. He killed his first man at fourteen, then drug dealers and gang rivals around Mogi das Cruzes, and then dozens of fellow prisoners, many of them men accused of rape. Freed in 2018, he became a YouTube personality. He was shot dead in Mogi das Cruzes in March 2023.
May 25, 1968. Three children found Martin Brown, four, dead in an upstairs bedroom of a derelict house on St. Margaret's Road in Scotswood, Newcastle upon Tyne, the day before Mary Bell's eleventh birthday. There was no mark on him. While a workman tried to revive him, two girls appeared in the room. Bell had strangled him. On July 31 she and her friend Norma Bell, no relation, were with Brian Howe, three, when he was strangled on waste ground nearby. Mary Bell was convicted of manslaughter for both in December 1968, released in 1980, and granted lifelong anonymity.
May 26, 1978. Charles Ray Hatcher abducted four-year-old Eric Christgen from the riverfront in St. Joseph, Missouri, and killed him. Another man, Melvin Reynolds, was convicted of the murder and spent four years in prison. In July 1982, the day after eleven-year-old Michelle Steele was found beaten and strangled on a bank of the Missouri River, Hatcher walked into the St. Joseph State Hospital and asked to be admitted. He confessed to sixteen killings since 1969, cleared Reynolds, and was convicted of Christgen's and Steele's murders. He hanged himself in his cell in December 1984.
May 27, 1963. Léopold Dion, forty-three, a paroled rapist, was arrested near Quebec City and led police to the bodies of four boys. The day before he had persuaded thirteen-year-old Pierre Marquis to come and be photographed, taken him to a dune in the country and strangled him when the boy fought back. A little more than a month earlier he had buried another boy in the same dune. The others were Guy Luckenuck, twelve, Alain Carrier, eight, and Michel Morel, ten. Sentenced to hang for Pierre's murder, he had the sentence commuted and was stabbed to death in prison in 1972.
May 28, 1984. Mauricio Rodríguez Silva walked into the sheriff's station in Templeton, on California's Central Coast, and told the two deputies on duty that he was wanted for murder. Three weeks earlier he had left Soledad State Prison after serving five years for killing Troy Covella, eighteen, in 1978. Since his release he had shot two runaways, Walter Sanders and Monique Hilton, both sixteen, and killed his half-sister, Martha Kitzler, seventeen. A loaded sawed-off shotgun was in his truck. He was convicted of three murders in 1985 and sentenced to death in 1986.
May 29, 1970. Antone Charles Costa, a Provincetown handyman, was sentenced to life for the murders of Patricia Walsh and Mary Anne Wysocki, two friends from Providence who had checked into the Cape Cod guest house where he lodged in January 1969 and agreed to give him a ride to Truro. Their dismembered bodies were found buried near his marijuana plot in the Truro woods, with those of Susan Perry, seventeen, and Sydney Monzon, eighteen. Kurt Vonnegut wrote about the case for Life magazine. Costa was found hanged in his cell at Walpole in May 1974.
May 30, 1990. Halley Amaya went home in the middle of the afternoon to his first-floor apartment on Summerfield Place in Port Chester, New York, because his wife, Maria Isabella Amaya, thirty-six, had missed an appointment with her psychiatrist. He came out and asked a neighbor to call the doctor, saying his wife had killed the little ones and tried to kill herself. Their four children were dead: Halley William, eleven, Jessica, eight, Christopher, six, and Edward, three. She admitted the killings, and the court accepted her plea of not responsible by reason of mental disease.
May 31, 1963. Magdalena Solís was arrested at Yerbabuena in Nuevo León. Two brothers running a cult in the village had hired her, a sex worker from Monterrey, to play a living goddess, and she presided over rites in which villagers were beaten and their blood drunk. Days earlier Sebastián Guerrero, fourteen, saw the rites from behind a rock in the hills and ran to the police station at Villagrán. The investigator sent back with him, Luis Martínez, was killed, and so was the boy. Eight bodies were recovered. Solís and her brother were each given fifty years.
June 1, 2006. The court at Frankfurt an der Oder convicted Sabine Hilschenz of eight counts of manslaughter. In the summer of 2005 the remains of nine newborns had been found in the garden of her parents' house in Brieskow-Finkenheerd, near the Polish border, wrapped in plastic and buried in flowerpots, buckets and an old fish tank that had stood for years on the balcony of her apartment. She had hidden nine pregnancies between 1988 and 1998; the first death fell outside the statute of limitations. The court accepted diminished responsibility and gave her fifteen years.
June 2, 2000. John Edward Robinson was arrested at his farm in Kansas. An Eagle Scout from Cicero, Illinois, who had once sung for Queen Elizabeth II, he found women through job offers, a fake charity and, later, internet chat rooms, took their money and identities and killed at least eight. In 1984 Paula Godfrey, nineteen, of Overland Park, accepted a job with training from him and was never seen again. Two women were found in barrels on his farm and three more in a storage unit in Missouri. He was sentenced to death in Kansas in 2003; clemency was denied in June 2026.
June 3, 1861. Martin Dumollard was arrested after Marie Pichon led gendarmes back over the route. On May 28, on the Guillotière bridge in Lyon, a man with a misshapen lip had offered her a place as a maid at Dagneux at 250 francs a year; she took the train with him to Montluel and walked into the woods, where he tried to strangle her with a cord and she broke away. For six years he had lured servant girls out of Lyon with promises of work. Three murders and an attempt were proved at Bourg-en-Bresse, and he was guillotined at Montluel in March 1862. His wife got twenty years.
June 4, 1998. Douglas Gretzler was executed by lethal injection in Arizona, by some accounts on this date and by others the day before, having been on death row since November 1976. In the autumn of 1973 he and Willie Steelman crossed Arizona and California and confessed to killing seventeen people in about a week. In the town of Victor, California, they killed nine people in a single house, among them children. Gretzler was condemned in Arizona for the murders of a young couple. Steelman died on California's death row in 1987.
June 5, 2023. Kathleen Folbigg was pardoned and released from prison in New South Wales after twenty years. Her four children had died in the Hunter region between 1989 and 1999, each found unresponsive at home: Caleb at nineteen days, Patrick at eight months, Sarah at ten months and Laura at nineteen months. A jury convicted her in 2003, relying heavily on her diaries. Geneticists later found a rare mutation in the two girls that pointed to natural causes. All four convictions were quashed in December 2023, and in 2025 she was awarded A$2 million.
June 6, 1956. Werner Boost was caught in the woods outside Düsseldorf with a loaded weapon. In January 1953 two masked men had attacked a lawyer, Bernd Servé, and Adolf Hüllencremer, eighteen, in a parked car; Servé was shot dead, and Hüllencremer survived by playing dead when one of the attackers whispered to him to do so. Two more couples parked in cars were later found dead, among them Hildegard Wassing, twenty, and Peter Falkenberg in February 1956. Boost was convicted of Servé's murder in 1959 and given life. The other charges were held not proved, and he was released in 1990.
June 7, 2002. Maury Travis was arrested in St. Louis. In May a reporter at the Post-Dispatch, Bill Smith, received a letter from a man who demanded more coverage of the victims and enclosed a computer-printed map of West Alton, Missouri, marked with an X where a body could be found. The FBI traced the map to the website it was printed from, which logged the address of everyone who asked for it, and the log led to Travis, a hotel waiter. Investigators attributed twelve to seventeen killings of women to him. Three days later he hanged himself in the county jail.
June 8, 2005. Maurizio Minghella was sentenced to life in Turin for killing women there while on semi-liberty. In 1978 he had strangled five young women in Genoa, among them Maria Catena Alba, fourteen, and he received life in 1981. From 1995 he left prison every day to work as a carpenter in Turin. On the night of February 16, 2001, Tina Motoc, twenty-seven, the mother of a two-year-old, was beaten to death there, and on March 7 police arrested him. Further killings of women in sex work between 1997 and 2001 were charged to him, with terms reported at 131 years.
June 9, 1959. Heinrich Pommerenke killed the last of four women he murdered in southwest Germany that spring, among them Karin Wälde, eighteen, and Dagmar Klimek, twenty-one, whom he pushed from a moving train. Ten days later he collected a suit from a tailor in Hornberg in the Black Forest, said he was going to the barber, and left a heavy bag behind. The tailor found a sawed-off rifle inside and called the police, who arrested him outside Hornberg station. He confessed to sixty-five offenses. In 1960 he was given six life terms plus fifteen years, and he died in prison in 2008.
June 10, 1996. Huugjilt, eighteen, was executed in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, about sixty-one days after the killing for which he was convicted. On April 9 a young woman surnamed Yang had been raped and strangled in the women's lavatory of the No. 1 Wool Textile Mill, and Huugjilt, a worker who reported finding her, was charged with murder during a national anti-crime campaign in which cases were rushed through. His parents, Li Sanren and Shang Aiyun, petitioned for eighteen years. Zhao Zhihong confessed to the killing in 2005, and a court declared Huugjilt innocent in 2014.
June 11, 1980. Los Angeles police officers who had followed William Bonin for nine days watched him cruise Hollywood for three hours, pick up a seventeen-year-old runaway and park his van in a San Fernando Valley lot. When they forced the door they found him assaulting the boy. Bonin, a thirty-three-year-old truck driver, had been paroled twice after raping boys, and since 1979 the bodies of boys and young men had been turning up beside Southern California's freeways. He was charged with eighteen murders, convicted of fourteen, and executed in 1996.
June 12, 2012. Irina Gaidamachuk was sentenced in Yekaterinburg to twenty years, the most a Russian court could give a woman, for whom the law does not allow life. For eight years the police of the Sverdlovsk region had looked for a man. Elderly women, aged sixty-one to about ninety, were killed in their apartments with a hammer or an axe and robbed, and some apartments were set alight. Gaidamachuk, a mother of two, got in by posing as a social worker and spent the money on vodka. She killed seventeen; one more woman escaped her.
June 13, 2025. Stephen Stanko was executed by lethal injection at Broad River Correctional Institution in South Carolina, aged fifty-seven. While serving time for assault and kidnapping he co-wrote a book on prison life with two criminology professors. Released in 2004, he moved in with Laura Ling, forty-three, a librarian. In April 2005 he strangled her and attacked her teenage daughter, who survived, and within hours shot Henry Lee Turner, seventy-four, a friend from the library. He was sentenced to death at two trials, in 2006 and 2009.
June 14, 2001. Olaf Däter, a geriatric nurse in Bremerhaven, killed the fifth of five elderly women in nine days. A few days before the first, the home-care service that employed him had fired him without notice for embezzling. On June 6 he called on Lisbeth N., eighty-seven, smothered her with a towel and took 350 marks, and he did the same to four more of the service's clients, all women over eighty who knew him as their nurse and let him in. A sixth woke during the attack, survived and named him. He was sentenced to life with a finding of particular gravity of guilt.
June 15, 2004. Li Pingping, a Beijing taxi driver, was shot alongside three other condemned men, three months after the Beijing No. 1 Intermediate People's Court tied together two cases eight years apart. In May 1995 his former manager, Song Shutian, was killed with his wife and twelve-year-old daughter and their house set on fire, a crime that went unsolved. Between November 2002 and April 2003 four young women were lured to a small house on the city's western edge and killed and dismembered, with his wife's help. He was arrested in June 2003.
June 16, 1941. Felicitas Sánchez Aguillón, a midwife in Mexico City, died of an overdose of medication before any trial, generally recorded as suicide. In April a shopkeeper at 9 Calle Salamanca in Colonia Roma, tired of a blocked drain, had bricklayers break up the floor and found the sewer plugged with infant remains and blood-soaked gauze. The midwife who rented a room upstairs was charged with abortion, illegal burial and medical offenses, not murder. The press of the time blamed her for forty to fifty deaths of infants, none of whom was ever identified.
June 17, 2000. Geoffrey Griffin was arrested in Chicago, and police called him the Roseland killer and charged him with the murders of eight women on the city's far South Side. On September 22, 2005, from the same bench at the same trial, Judge Fred Suria convicted him of murdering Angela Jones, killed on May 12, 2000, and acquitted him of the murder of Beverly Burns. The evidence against him was largely a videotaped statement. He was sentenced to a hundred years. No court has ruled on the other six deaths, and the women have not been publicly named.
June 18, 2008. Matthew Macon was sentenced in Lansing, Michigan, to two terms of life without parole for murdering two women in 2007, among them Karen Delgado-Yates, forty-one. In January 2005 students had found Carolyn Kronenberg, sixty, a professor at Lansing Community College, dying on the floor of her classroom, and police arrested Claude McCollum, a homeless student with learning disabilities, who was convicted on his own statements. Macon confessed to Kronenberg's murder, and McCollum was freed in 2007 after two years in prison.
June 19, 1995. Zilda Araujo Barbuth, seventy-six, was killed in her home in Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais, by a man who had been out of prison for less than five hours. André Luiz Cassimiro was serving almost twelve years for robbery, and the director regarded him as a model prisoner and let him out for the Corpus Christi holiday. Over the following days he killed four more elderly women who lived alone in the city, among them Malvina Maria de Oliveira, seventy-seven. He confessed and was convicted of five murders. His later status is not publicly recorded.
June 20, 2001. Andrea Yates drowned her five children in the bathtub of their house in Houston, one after another, and then telephoned the police and her husband. Noah was seven, John five, Paul three, Luke two and Mary six months. She had a long history of postpartum psychosis. A jury convicted her of capital murder in 2002, but the conviction was reversed in 2005 because the state's expert had described a television episode that never existed. In 2006 a second jury found her not guilty by reason of insanity, and she has been in a state hospital since.
June 21, 1999. Ángel Maturino Reséndiz surrendered to Texas Ranger Drew Carter on a bridge at El Paso, after weeks of talks through his sister and a spiritual adviser in which Carter promised him decent treatment. He rode freight trains across the country and killed people in houses within sight of the tracks. Claudia Benton, thirty-nine, a geneticist at Baylor College of Medicine, was killed in her house in West University Place, a quarter mile from a Southern Pacific line, in December 1998. At least fifteen killings in six states are attributed to him.
June 22, 2008. Vlado Taneski, the Kičevo correspondent of the Skopje daily Nova Makedonija, was arrested in North Macedonia. In May he had written that the town lived in fear after another butchered body was found, resembling one found the year before, and his articles carried details the police had not released. Three women in their fifties and sixties were killed in Kičevo, among them Mitra Simjanoska, sixty-four. He was charged with two murders. Early the next morning he was found dead in a bathroom at Tetovo prison with his head in a bucket of water.
June 23, 2012. Mikhail Popkov, a former police officer, was arrested in Angarsk, Siberia. For almost two decades women had been found dead in the forests, roadsides and cemeteries outside the city, killed with axes, knives and hammers, many of them raped. The killings began in 1992 and disappeared into the general violence of the time. Popkov offered women rides home at night, often in his police car. He was given life in 2015 and 2018, and further convictions followed until December 2025, bringing his total to at least eighty-five. He also killed a fellow officer.
June 24, 1960. Melvin Rees, a jazz musician from the Washington area, was arrested in Arkansas, where he was selling pianos. In January 1959 Carroll and Mildred Jackson and their daughters, Susan, five, and Janet, eighteen months, had been forced off a road in Virginia; the bodies were found weeks later in Virginia and Maryland. A friend, Glenn Moser, recalled that Rees had argued that killing was simply part of human experience. Rees was also linked to the 1957 murder of Margaret Harold. He received life terms and a Virginia death sentence, and died in custody in 1995.
June 25, 2007. Late at night in Dnipropetrovsk, Yekaterina Ilchenko, thirty-three, was walking home from tea at a friend's apartment when Igor Suprunyuk spun round and hit her in the head with a hammer. Within the hour he and Viktor Sayenko, both nineteen, killed Roman Tatarevich as he slept on a bench across the street from the local prosecutor's office. Over three weeks they killed twenty-one people, filming some of the attacks. Suprunyuk, whom the court held responsible for every death, was convicted of all twenty-one in 2009 and sentenced to life.
June 26, 1989. Vasiliy Kulik was shot in the Irkutsk detention center. On January 17, 1986, his thirtieth birthday, passersby in Irkutsk caught him in the middle of an attack, beat him and took him to the police. An emergency ambulance doctor, he had been let into the apartments of some of his victims because they trusted him. He confessed to killing six children and seven elderly women and to about thirty rapes since 1984. His first trial collapsed when he retracted his confession, and he was sentenced to death at a second in August 1988.
June 27, 2006. Ángel Maturino Reséndiz was executed by lethal injection at Huntsville, six days after a court found him competent. A drifter from Mexico, he rode freight trains and killed people in houses near the tracks. In June 1999, during a nationwide manhunt, the Border Patrol stopped him and, not realizing who he was, sent him back to Mexico; four more people died before he surrendered. He was convicted in 2000 only of the murder of Claudia Benton in Houston. At least fifteen killings in six states are attributed to him. Holly Dunn survived his attack in 1997.
June 28, 1993. Cynthia Gail Savage, five months old, died at home in Illinois, the third of Gail Savage's infant children to die in under three years. Michael was about six weeks old when he died in November 1990, and Amber Lynn three weeks in February 1992; each death had been recorded as sudden infant death. After Cynthia's death Savage told police she had smothered them. A jury acquitted her of murder and convicted her of involuntary manslaughter in April 1994, and she was given twenty years under an arrangement covering all three children.
June 29, 2005. Somkhid Phumphuang was arrested in Thailand after strangling five women in a few months, cafe singers and masseuses he met in different provinces, among them Warunee Pimpabutr, twenty-five. He received life terms, one cut from death on appeal. Paroled in May 2019 as a model prisoner, he killed Ratsami Mulichan, fifty-one, a hotel maid, that December. Two students on a train from Surin to Bangkok recognized the scar on his forehead from a wanted poster, and he was taken at Pak Chong station. He was sentenced to death in 2021.
June 30, 1951. Olga Hepnarová was born in Prague, the daughter of a bank clerk and a dentist. At about half past one on the afternoon of July 10, 1973, she drove a rented Praga flatbed truck down the hill toward Strossmayer Square and onto the curb at the tram stop, into a crowd of twenty-five to thirty people. Eight people aged sixty to seventy-nine died and twelve were injured. She had written letters announcing it as revenge on a society she said had wronged her. Hanged at Pankrác Prison in 1975, aged twenty-three, she was the last woman executed in Czechoslovakia.
July 1, 1851. Hélène Jégado, a cook, was arrested in Rennes after a maid named Rosalie Sarrazin died in the household of Théophile Bidard, a law professor. A year earlier another of his servants, Rose Tessier, had died the same way with the same cook at her bedside, and the two doctors who treated Rosalie saw the likeness and pressed for an autopsy. It found arsenic. Investigators traced about twenty-three earlier deaths in houses across Brittany where Jégado had worked, among them her own sister. She was tried for three and guillotined at Rennes in February 1852.
July 2, 1979. Joseph Fischer was arrested in New York days after walking in to the police to say he had killed his wife, Claudine Eggers, at Wassaic. He was fifty-six, an ex-convict who had served time in Rahway State Prison in New Jersey for beating a man to death in 1953. Once in custody he kept talking, and the number of people he said he had killed in the previous year climbed to thirty, then forty. None of those claims led to a charge. He was convicted only of his wife's murder, sentenced in 1980 to twenty-five years to life, and died in custody in 1991.
July 3, 2003. A drunk young man walked into the police station in Puertollano, in Ciudad Real province, and said he was the Playing Card Killer. For months the Madrid region had hunted a gunman who shot strangers at random and left Spanish playing cards beside some of them, and officers had heard such claims before. Alfredo Galán, a former army corporal, described a detail of the cards that only the killer and the investigators knew. He was convicted in 2005 of six murders, among them Juan Francisco Ledesma, fifty, and three attempts, and sentenced to 142 years.
July 4, 1969. Just before midnight at Blue Rock Springs Park in Vallejo, California, a man pulled up behind a parked car and shot Darlene Ferrin, twenty-two, and Michael Mageau, nineteen. Ferrin died; Mageau survived. Less than an hour later a caller told the Vallejo police he had done it and claimed the killing of two teenagers the previous December. Within weeks the Zodiac began writing to Bay Area newspapers, signing with a crosshair and enclosing ciphers, one of which took fifty-one years to crack. He killed five people that are confirmed and has never been identified.
July 5, 1977. Riverside County authorities announced that Patrick Kearney and David Hill had confessed in the trash bag murders. Four days earlier the two men had walked into the sheriff's office in Riverside, pointed at a wanted poster and said that was them. Within ten days Kearney had signed confessions to twenty-eight killings, and on July 8 officers dug up a skeleton behind the Culver City house where the two men had once lived. Hill was released without charge. Kearney pleaded guilty to twenty-one murders of men and boys and confessed to thirty-five.
July 6, 1985. Charles Ng was arrested in Calgary after shooting a store security guard who stopped him for shoplifting. A month earlier his partner, Leonard Lake, had swallowed cyanide after his own arrest in San Francisco, and police had found a bunker with a cell in it on Lake's property at Wilseyville, in the Sierra foothills, along with the remains of men, women and children. Ng fought extradition until 1991. He was convicted in 1999 of eleven murders, among them the Dubs family and the Bonds, and sentenced to death. The sentence was upheld in 2022.
July 7, 2010. Lonnie Franklin Jr., fifty-seven, a former Los Angeles sanitation worker and police garage attendant, was arrested at his house in South Los Angeles. California's first familial DNA search had linked the killings of women in the city since 1985 to his son, and an undercover officer posing as a busboy collected a pizza crust Franklin had eaten. The DNA matched. The press called him the Grim Sleeper because of a long gap in the killings. Convicted in 2016 of ten murders, among them Princess Berthomieux, fifteen, he died on death row in 2020.
July 8, 1942. Charles Schmid Jr. was born in Tucson, Arizona, and adopted by the owners of a nursing home, who gave him money and little supervision. As a young man he gathered a following of teenagers. On May 31, 1964, he told his girlfriend and a friend that he wanted to kill a girl that night, and they drove to the house of Alleen Rowe, a high school student. In August 1965 he killed Gretchen Fritz, seventeen, and her sister Wendy, thirteen. Friends who knew kept quiet for months. Condemned in 1966, he was stabbed to death in prison in 1975.
July 9, 1940. Florence Ransom took the morning train from Bicester and that afternoon, at a cottage in Matfield, Kent, shot dead Dorothy Fisher, forty-six, her lover's estranged wife; Dorothy's daughter, Freda, twenty; and their housekeeper, Charlotte Saunders, forty-eight. The day before, she had asked her brother to show her how to fire his single-shot shotgun, telling him she wanted to shoot rabbits. A jury at the Old Bailey convicted her after forty-seven minutes, and she was sentenced to death. Certified insane, she was reprieved and sent to Broadmoor, where she died in 1966.
July 10, 2008. Ahmad Suradji was executed by firing squad in North Sumatra, ten years after his conviction. A cattle breeder and healer known as Datuk, he had told women who came to him for charms to become richer or more beautiful that they must be buried to the waist in his sugar cane field outside Medan, and he strangled them there. The case broke in 1997 when a rickshaw driver told police he had taken Sri Kemala Dewi, twenty-one, to the healer. Forty-two women and girls aged eleven to thirty were found. One of his wives was also convicted.
July 11, 1996. Kristen Gilbert was arrested. Early that year nurses at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Northampton, Massachusetts, had gone to the administration with a pattern: cardiac emergencies on their ward had climbed sharply, and one nurse was almost always there. Colleagues had nicknamed her the Angel of Death as a joke. Ampules of epinephrine, which can stop a heart, had gone missing. Gilbert, twenty-eight, was convicted in 2001 of murdering four patients, among them Stanley Jagodowski, sixty-six, and Henry Hudon, thirty-five, and given four life terms.
July 12, 1941. Paul Ogorzow, an assistant signalman on the Deutsche Reichsbahn and a member of the SA, was arrested in Berlin after detectives matched the attacks to the railway's shift rosters. Wartime Berlin was blacked out against British bombers, and since 1939 he had attacked women in allotment colonies and then on dark S-Bahn carriages, pushing some from moving trains. The Nazi press said little. He killed eight women and attempted to kill six more. A special court sentenced him to death on July 24, and he was beheaded at Plötzensee the next day.
July 13, 1920. The Berlin assize court sentenced Friedrich Schumann to death for six murders. In August 1919 a forest warden, Wilhelm Nielbock, came upon a man in the Falkenhagen Forest on the western edge of Berlin, who shot him twice in the chest; Nielbock hit him with a shotgun round and, before he died that night, gave a description. Schumann, a former soldier and decorated marksman, had shot couples, walkers and others in the forest for years, and up to twenty-five deaths were suspected. He was beheaded at Plötzensee prison in August 1921.
July 14, 2010. Pedro Pablo Nakada Ludeña was sentenced again in Peru to thirty-five years, after his first verdict was annulled on appeal. Arrested in December 2006 at the auto repair shop where he worked in Huaral, he told police he had been planning to throw a grenade into a crowded discotheque on New Year's Eve. He admitted shooting people across the province for two years, said God had sent him to rid the country of drug users, gay men and sex workers, and asked for a firing squad. He was convicted of seventeen murders and claimed twenty-five.
July 15, 2008. Verry Idham Henyansyah, known as Ryan, was arrested in Depok, south of Jakarta. Three days earlier people near the Ragunan Zoo had found bags holding the dismembered body of Heri Santoso, forty, a sales manager killed in Henyansyah's studio apartment. The investigation led to the garden behind his parents' house in Jombang, East Java, where ten more bodies were dug up, among them Nanik Hidayati, thirty-one, and her daughter Sylvia, three. He was sentenced to death in April 2009. Indonesia had not carried out the sentence as of 2025.
July 16, 2002. Vickie Dawn Jackson, a licensed vocational nurse, was arrested while working in the deli of a grocery store in Bowie, Texas. In the winter of 2000 and 2001 patients had begun dying on her night shifts at Nocona General Hospital, elderly people admitted for problems not expected to kill them who stopped breathing; at one point eight died in eleven days. A syringe of mivacurium, a paralyzing drug used in surgery, was found, and exhumations followed. She pleaded no contest to capital murder in ten deaths in 2006 and is serving life.
July 17, 2020. Dustin Honken was executed by the federal government in Indiana for the 1993 murders of five people in Iowa. His girlfriend, Angela Johnson, had helped him kill Greg Nicholson and Terry DeGeus, two former dealers in his methamphetamine ring who had become informants, and Nicholson's girlfriend, Lori Duncan, thirty-one, and her daughters Kandi, ten, and Amber, six. In 2000, serving time on drug charges, Johnson drew a map of the graves near Mason City for an inmate who was an informant. Her death sentence was replaced with life in 2014.
July 18, 2005. Amir Qayyum was arrested in Lahore. Since June, men who slept in the open on the city's streets, laborers between shifts, beggars and drug addicts, had been found with their skulls crushed by a brick or heavy stone. Fourteen died in about six weeks, and the press called the killer the brick killer. Qayyum was charged with the murders, and in May 2006 an anti-terrorism court sentenced him to death, with verdicts on twelve further killings to follow. No execution has been reported.
July 19, 2005. A Phoenix jury returned death sentences for Cory Morris. On April 12, 2003, his uncle went looking for him at the camper parked in the back yard of the family's house, smelled what he called a rotten odor, and found under a blanket the decomposed body of Julie Castillo. Four other women had been found dead in the alleys around the house since 2002: Barbara Codman, Shanteria Davis, Jade Velasquez and Sharon Noah. Morris had strangled them in the camper. The Arizona Supreme Court affirmed the sentences in 2007.
July 20, 1984. Alton Coleman and Debra Brown were arrested in a park in Evanston, Illinois, after a national manhunt in which the FBI had added Coleman to its Ten Most Wanted list. Over that summer the two rode through six states and killed eight people, among them Vernita Wheat, nine, and Tonnie Storey, fifteen. In Dayton they walked back into the home of a minister and his wife who had taken them in, with guns. Brown was convicted of three murders in Ohio and Indiana and sentenced to death in both states. Both sentences were later commuted.
July 21, 1949. Marie Besnard was charged in Loudun, in the Vienne, with poisoning her husband, Léon. His body had been exhumed in May and his organs sent to Marseille in jars meant for preserving vegetables; the expert found arsenic, though the record says ten jars were sent and he received eleven. Eleven more deaths among her relatives and neighbors were added, including her first husband and her parents. She was tried three times over twelve years while the forensic evidence fell apart, and in December 1961 she was acquitted for lack of proof.
July 22, 1991. Tracy Edwards ran from an apartment on North 25th Street in Milwaukee with a handcuff hanging from one wrist and flagged down a patrol car. In the apartment of Jeffrey Dahmer, thirty-one, the officers found photographs, human remains and a head in the refrigerator. In May, officers had returned a drugged and bleeding fourteen-year-old, Konerak Sinthasomphone, to the same apartment after Dahmer told them the boy was his adult lover. Dahmer had killed seventeen young men and boys since 1978. He was beaten to death in prison in 1994.
July 23, 2007. Igor Suprunyuk and Viktor Sayenko, both nineteen, were arrested in Dnipropetrovsk after trying to sell a mobile telephone taken from one of their victims. Since late June they had killed twenty-one people in and around the city, mostly with hammers, choosing strangers at random: a woman walking home, a man asleep on a bench, a fourteen-year-old boy. They filmed some of the attacks, and the recordings were used at trial. A third young man was convicted of robbery. In February 2009 both were sentenced to life.
July 24, 2021. Rodney Alcala died on death row in California, aged seventy-seven. In September 1978, while on parole as a registered sex offender, he appeared on The Dating Game as a photographer and won; the woman who chose him, Cheryl Bradshaw, refused to go out with him. He was tried three times for the 1979 murder of Robin Samsoe, twelve, of Huntington Beach, and at the third trial in 2010 was also convicted of four more murders of women. He pleaded guilty in New York in 2012 to two others. Investigators suspected many more.
July 25, 1998. Christine Malèvre, a twenty-eight-year-old nurse on the neuro-pneumology ward of the hospital in Mantes-la-Jolie, west of Paris, was arrested. Managers had noticed that too many patients were dying on her shifts. She told investigators she had helped about thirty terminally ill people die, presenting it as mercy, and France argued about euthanasia. The Versailles court convicted her in 2003 of six murders of patients aged seventy-two to eighty-eight and gave her ten years, raised to twelve on appeal. She was released in 2007.
July 26, 1971. Kendall Francois was born in Poughkeepsie, New York. He served briefly in the Army and worked as a hall monitor at the middle school he had attended. From 1996, women who worked on the city's Main Street began to disappear. On September 1, 1998, a woman he had taken home escaped from his car at a Sunoco station and went to the police. In the house he shared with his parents and sister, detectives found the remains of eight women, among them Wendy Meyers, thirty. He pleaded guilty in 2000 and died in prison in 2014.
July 27, 1967. William Dale Archerd was arrested in California. His fourth wife, Zella, collapsed and died in July 1956, two months after their wedding; his teenage nephew, Burney Kirk Archerd, died in Long Beach in 1961; and his seventh wife, the writer Mary Brinker Post, died in 1966 after marrying him under an alias. Each death looked natural. Each had been caused by insulin, which Archerd had learned about as an attendant at a psychiatric hospital. Convicted of three murders in 1968, he was the first American convicted of murder by insulin.
July 28, 1987. Kenneth Erskine was arrested while signing on at a benefit office in London, after a palm print from one of the scenes was matched to him. In 1986 elderly people living alone in south London had been found strangled in their beds. When Nancy Emms, seventy-eight, died in April, her doctor recorded natural causes; her home help noticed her television was gone, and only then did a post-mortem show she had been raped and strangled. Erskine was convicted of seven murders in 1988 and sent to Broadmoor; in 2009 they were reduced to manslaughter.
July 30, 2006. Shelly Andre Brooks was arrested in Detroit. Between 2001 and 2006 seven Black women aged thirty to fifty-three, drug users who sometimes sold sex on the city's east side, had been raped and beaten to death with rocks, bricks and wood and left naked in abandoned buildings, a vacant garage, an alley and a field. Some were found only years later. Brooks was charged with all seven that August and convicted at two trials in 2007 of murdering Pamela Greer and Rhonda Myles. He was sentenced to life without parole, and the other cases were not pursued.
July 31, 2007. António Luís Costa, a retired corporal of Portugal's Republican National Guard, was sentenced to twenty-five years, the longest term a Portuguese court can impose. On the morning of May 24, 2005, he offered a lift to Isabel Cristina Isidoro, seventeen, a neighbor he had known since she was a child, at Cabecinha de Rei; she was never seen alive again. He also killed Mariana Lourenço, eighteen, an accountancy student, and Joana Oliveira, nineteen, Isabel's cousin. His terms totaled sixty-four years. He is due for release in April 2027.
August 1, 1991. Wolfgang Schmidt, a former East German police sergeant dismissed from the force, was arrested near Potsdam. In March a Russian woman, Tamara Petrowskaja, forty-four, had been walking with her three-month-old son, Stanislaw, in the woods at Beelitz-Heilstätten when a very tall attacker tied and gagged her and killed the baby against a tree stump; she was killed too. Since 1989 he had killed five women and the infant around Potsdam and Beelitz, among them Talita Bremer, sixty-six, and attacked three more. He was committed to a psychiatric hospital, where he remains.
August 2, 1996. Sergei Golovkin was shot at Butyrka Prison in Moscow, the last execution in Russia before the moratorium. On October 5, 1992, mushroom pickers in the woods outside the city found the bodies of three boys, Yuri Sidyakin, twelve, Vladislav Sharikov, thirteen, and Denis Efremov, twelve. Three weeks earlier he had lured all three into his garage with a promise of stealing from a warehouse and killed them in the cellar he had dug beneath it. A livestock specialist at a stud farm, he was convicted of murdering eleven boys aged ten to sixteen since 1986.
August 3, 2006. Dale Hausner and Samuel Dieteman were arrested in Mesa, Arizona. Days earlier Robin Blasnek, twenty-two, had been shot dead by a man in a passing car, and Ron Horton, a friend of Dieteman's, went to the police: Dieteman had told him while drinking that he was one of the people the papers called the Serial Shooter. For a year the two men had shot strangers, dogs and horses from a car window around Phoenix, and Hausner kept a scrapbook of the coverage. He was convicted of six murders in 2009, sentenced to death, and killed himself in 2013.
August 4, 1987. Howard Arthur Allen was arrested in Indianapolis three weeks after Ernestine Griffin, seventy-four, partially disabled by childhood polio, was beaten to death in her home. That morning a man had come to her door asking about a car belonging to her neighbor, a dentist, and wrote his name and telephone number on a check stub. In 1974 Allen had beaten Opal Cooper, eighty-five, to death and served about ten years for manslaughter, and after parole he beat Laverne Hale, eighty-seven, who died nine days later. He was sentenced to death for Griffin in 1988.
August 5, 2000. Vincent Johnson, a homeless crack user, was arrested in Brooklyn after DNA from one of the bodies matched a sample taken from him, and he confessed to five killings. Since the summer of 1999 women who worked the streets of Williamsburg and Bedford-Stuyvesant had been found strangled with whatever lay to hand, shoelaces, a sweatpants drawstring or electrical wire, and left on rooftops, in a vacant lot and in apartments. Among them were Laura Nusser and Vivian Caraballo. He pleaded guilty in 2001 and is serving life without parole.
August 6, 1996. Siswanto, a homeless man known as Robot Gedek, was arrested while begging at the railway station in Tegal, Central Java, and confessed. For two years the bodies of street boys aged nine to fifteen had been found around Jakarta, each with a ligature mark at the neck and a cut across the abdomen; police paid little attention until the fourth. Only eight bodies were recovered, and only one boy, Kasikin, has been named. Siswanto was sentenced to death in 1997 for twelve killings and died in prison in 2007. Doubts about his guilt were later raised in Indonesia.
August 7, 1987. Dayton Leroy Rogers was arrested after Jennifer Lisa Smith, twenty-five, was stabbed eleven times in the cab of his truck in a parking lot in Oak Grove, south of Portland, and fell onto the pavement. Diners at the Denny's next to the lot ran to help her, and one who had watched from a window described the truck. Weeks later hunters found the remains of women in the Molalla Forest, where Rogers had taken women he picked up in Portland. He was given life for Smith and sentenced to death in 1989 for six forest murders, a sentence vacated four times since.
August 8, 1973. Elmer Wayne Henley, seventeen, shot Dean Corll six times in Corll's house in Pasadena, Texas, and called the police himself. For three years boys from a handful of streets in Houston Heights had disappeared, and the police had logged them as runaways: David Hilligiest, thirteen, the Waldrop brothers, the Baulch brothers and many more. Henley led officers to a boat shed and to beaches where Corll, with the help of Henley and David Brooks, had buried at least twenty-eight boys and young men. One of them, known as the Swimsuit Boy, has never been identified.
August 9, 2005. Abdelali Amer was arrested in Rabat. For ten months destitute men had been turning up dead along the coast between Rabat and Salé and on the banks of the Bouregreg, the river between the two cities, and for most of that time nobody called it murder; it was assumed they had fallen. On August 1 police found another man with his skull broken near the wholesale market in the Akkari district, by one count the fourteenth. One woman had been raped and killed. Amer was sentenced to death in November 2005 and is reported to have died in prison in 2010.
August 10, 1949. John George Haigh was hanged at Wandsworth by Albert Pierrepoint. He had believed English law required a body before a murder could be proved, and he dissolved six people in drums of sulfuric acid between 1944 and 1949 for their money. When Olive Durand-Deacon, sixty-nine, a widow from his South Kensington hotel, disappeared in February, the pathologist Keith Simpson sifted the sludge in his Crawley yard and found gallstones and her acrylic dentures, which her dentist identified. A jury at Lewes convicted him after seventeen minutes.
August 11, 2010. Elias Abuelazam was arrested at Atlanta's airport, holding a ticket to Israel. Between May and August a very tall man in a green Chevrolet TrailBlazer had driven around late at night, stopped beside men walking alone, asked for directions or help with his car, and stabbed them in the chest or stomach. Eighteen men were attacked in Michigan, Ohio and Virginia, most of them Black, and five died in Flint, among them Arnold Minor, forty-nine, on August 2. Abuelazam was convicted of Minor's murder in 2012 and is serving life without parole.
August 13, 1996. Marc Dutroux was arrested in Belgium after a witness noted part of the license plate of his van near where Laetitia Delhez, fourteen, was taken. Two days later he led police to her and to Sabine Dardenne, twelve, alive in a hidden cell in the basement of his house at Marcinelle. In December 1995 a gendarme searching the house had heard children's voices and decided they came from outside. Julie Lejeune and Mélissa Russo, both eight, An Marchal and Eefje Lambrecks were dead. That October 300,000 people marched in Brussels. He was sentenced to life in 2004.
August 14, 1997. Sipho Thwala was arrested on a DNA match in KwaZulu-Natal. For a year women had disappeared from the townships north of Durban and turned up, if at all, in the sugarcane of Mount Edgecombe near Phoenix, tied with their own underwear, raped and strangled. The fields were burned each season before cutting, and the fires destroyed most of the evidence. Most of the women were twenty to thirty, and he had lured them with offers of hotel work. In 1999 the Durban High Court convicted him of sixteen murders and ten rapes and sentenced him to 506 years.
August 15, 2007. Altemio Sanchez was sentenced in Buffalo to seventy-five years to life, three months after pleading guilty to the murders of Linda Yalem, twenty-two, in 1990, Majane Mazur, thirty-two, in 1992, and Joan Diver, forty-five, in 2006. Known for years as the Bike Path Rapist, he was a married factory worker and a familiar face in his neighborhood. Anthony Capozzi had served more than twenty years for two of his rapes before DNA cleared him that spring. Sanchez was found dead at Wende Correctional Facility in September 2023, ruled a suicide.
August 16, 1998. Francesco Cassar, seventy-five, was stabbed to death in his home in Malta by his neighbor, Silvio Mangion, and Cassar's sister Giuseppa was attacked and survived. Mangion was convicted of the killing and the attempted murder. In prison he told other inmates about two older killings, and they were traced to him: Rozina Zammit, fifty-four, stabbed thirty-seven times at her door in Safi in 1984 for two hundred liri, and Maria Stella Magrin, sixty-eight, at Cospicua in 1986. His three trials ran in the reverse of the order of the killings. He holds two life sentences.
August 17, 1987. Harrison Graham surrendered to police in Philadelphia. That summer neighbors had kept complaining about the smell from the apartment of the tenant they knew as Marty, a man on a disability pension who played basketball with local children and whose two rooms in a mostly vacant building in North Philadelphia had become a place to buy and use drugs. When police broke in they found the bodies of seven women he had strangled there, among them Cynthia Brooks, twenty-seven. He received life and six death sentences, later vacated when he was found incompetent.
August 18, 1974. Marcus Shrader, a Navy corpsman at Camp Lejeune, was arrested in Jacksonville, North Carolina, by some accounts on this date; the account in his case has a Navy military policeman recognizing him a day later from a bank camera photograph pinned to a station bulletin board. Two days before, a man in a green ski mask had taken a young woman hostage and robbed a bank. Since January four young women had been killed in Onslow County, among them two fifteen-year-olds whom his stepdaughter lured into his van. He was convicted of murdering Cheryl Potter Boyd, nineteen.
August 19, 1977. Lemuel Smith was arrested in upstate New York and went on to receive life terms for kidnapping and for the murders of Robert Hedderman, forty-eight, and Margaret Byron, fifty-nine, in Schenectady. On May 15, 1981, at Green Haven Correctional Facility, a correction officer named Donna Payant, thirty-one, took a telephone call and walked off down a corridor; her body was found in a landfill. Smith was convicted of her murder and sentenced to death under a mandatory statute that New York's highest court struck down in his own case in 1984.
August 20, 1919. Friedrich Schumann, a locksmith from Spandau, was arrested in Berlin. Two days earlier a forest warden, Wilhelm Nielbock, fifty-two, had come upon a man in the Falkenhagen Forest on the city's western edge, who shot him twice in the chest with a Parabellum pistol; Nielbock wounded him with a shotgun round and, before he died that night, described him. Schumann, a former soldier and marksman, had shot couples, walkers, hunters and maids in and around the forest for years. Six murders were proved, and up to twenty-five were suspected. He was beheaded in 1921.
August 21, 1921. At about half past nine at night a laborer's wife at Lange Strasse 88, near Berlin's Silesian Station, heard screaming and banging in the flat above, then silence. Her husband came back from the precinct with two officers, and when the lodger would not open the door they forced it and found a woman's body tied to a bed frame among the tools of a butcher's trade. Georg Karl Grossmann had lured destitute women to his room in the hungry years after the war. He confessed to five killings, and remains of at least twenty-three women came out of a nearby canal. He hanged himself during his trial.
August 22, 2019. Gary Ray Bowles was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison. He sold sex to older men along Interstate 95, moved in with some of them, and then beat and strangled them. On the night of November 16, 1994, in Jacksonville Beach, Walter Hinton, forty-two, known as Jay, was asleep when the houseguest he had taken in brought a forty-pound stepping stone down on his head and pushed a towel down his throat. Bowles confessed to six killings in four states, among them John Hardy Roberts, fifty-nine, and Milton Bradley, seventy-two, and was condemned for Hinton.
August 23, 2006. Sipho Dube was sentenced in the Johannesburg High Court to ten life terms plus 114 years, two weeks after he was convicted of murdering six children and a woman. He abducted children around the mine dumps of Johannesburg, and the press called him the mine dump child killer. Reading his verdict, Judge Seun Moshidi called the killing of Tina Bernardes cruel and cold-blooded; in her case and that of Rashunthee Singh, thirty-nine, the stones used to strike them were found beside their bodies. The dead included Nomnikelo Jumba, fourteen, and the brothers Anele and Siyabonga Mbuku.
August 24, 1993. Marcelle Cavilier, eighty-seven, was found strangled in her home in Chevilly-Larue, the first of five elderly women killed by Claude Lastennet in the southern suburbs of Paris. In November François Bonin let himself into his mother's house in Thiais, as he did every evening, and found a calm young man in the kitchen, who told him the old woman had been taken ill; Antoinette Bonin, seventy-six, was dead in a back room. Lastennet, a former waiter, broke in to rob the women. Rosalie Czajka, eighty-two, survived. He was given life in 1997 and died in prison in 2023.
August 25, 1928. Bertha Gifford was arrested in Franklin County, Missouri. In the poison register of a druggist in Pacific her name appeared again and again against sales of arsenic and strychnine, and that month the county prosecutor, Frank Jenny, took the ledgers before a grand jury. For nearly twenty years she had nursed sick neighbors in the farm country around Catawissa, and seventeen people died in her care, aged fifteen months to seventy-two years. Charged with three deaths, among them the brothers Elmer and Lloyd Schamel, she was found not guilty by reason of insanity and died in a state hospital in 1951.
August 26, 2011. Justice Geoffrey Nettle sentenced John Leslie Coombes to life without parole in Melbourne, finding a real risk that he would kill again. In August 2009 a severed leg washed up on a beach on Phillip Island, and more remains came ashore weeks later; DNA identified Raechel Betts, twenty-seven, a childcare worker from Epping. Coombes had killed Michael Speirani, twenty, on a fishing trip in 1983, his body never recovered, and Henry Kells, forty-four, in Chelsea in 1984, and was on parole for both when he killed her.
August 27, 1921. Friedrich Schumann was beheaded with an axe at Plötzensee prison in Berlin at six in the morning, the method then used in Prussia. Two years earlier he had shot a forest warden, Wilhelm Nielbock, in the Falkenhagen Forest on the city's western edge, and the dying man's description led to his arrest. A locksmith from Spandau and a former soldier, he had shot couples, walkers, hunters, maids and train drivers in and around the forest. The Berlin assize court proved six murders against him in July 1920. Up to twenty-five deaths were suspected.
August 28, 2008. Mukosi Freddy Mulaudzi was sentenced in the Thohoyandou High Court by Judge Godfrey Hetisani to eleven life terms, with further years for rape and robbery. He had escaped from prison while serving two life terms for murder, and in the years that followed he killed in Venda, most of his victims women and children, among them a heavily pregnant woman and whole families. When police finally cornered him at Mulodi in 2006, he was folded up inside a broken refrigerator. He was convicted on twenty-six counts.
August 29, 2014. China's Supreme People's Court approved the execution of Zhou Youping, a lounge singer in Changsha, who was put to death in the city soon after. From September 2009 he had posted on a gay website looking for men aged twenty-three to forty willing to play asphyxiation games, and offered generous payment. Between October 11 and November 26, 2009, police found six men naked and hanged in hotel and guesthouse rooms around Changsha. He was sentenced to death in 2011 on six counts; the Hunan Higher People's Court upheld two, among them that of Feng Yu, of Gansu.
August 30, 1989. James Marlow, known as the Folsom Wolf, was sentenced to death in San Bernardino County for the murder of Corinna Novis, twenty, of Redlands. On November 7, 1986, she cashed a check at a bank drive-through near the Redlands Mall, and a man and a woman took her; her body was found in a shallow grave in Fontana eight days later. Over five weeks Marlow and his girlfriend, Cynthia Coffman, abducted and strangled young women across California and Arizona, among them Lynel Murray, nineteen, of Huntington Beach. Both were condemned.
August 31, 1987. Billy Glaze, a drifter known on the street as Butcher Knife Billy, was arrested in Minneapolis. In July 1986 Kathleen Bullman, nineteen, had been found under a tree near a railroad warehouse, and in April 1987 Angeline Whitebird Sweet, twenty-six, was found behind the American Indian Center and Angela Green, twenty-one, under a railroad bridge. All three were Native American women. Glaze was convicted of all three murders in 1989 and given three consecutive life terms. DNA testing later excluded him and matched another man. He died in prison in 2015.
September 1, 1988. Vincent Groves was arrested in Denver again. Convicted of second-degree murder in 1982 for strangling Tammy Sue Woodrum, seventeen, he had been freed on mandatory parole in 1987, and within months women were being strangled in the city and its outskirts. On April 1, 1987, a driver saw the body of Rhonda Fisher, thirty, down an embankment in rural Douglas County. He was given life plus twenty years in 1990 for two more murders, among them Juanita Lovato, nineteen, and died in custody in 1996. DNA has since tied him to at least five more, and the authorities attribute twelve.
September 2, 2013. M. Jaishankar escaped from the high-security Parappana Agrahara prison in Bangalore, over both perimeter walls and their electric fencing, using a bamboo pole and a bedsheet and wearing a police uniform. A truck driver from Tamil Nadu, he was accused of raping and murdering at least nineteen women across south India between 2008 and 2011, many of them sex workers he took near highway eateries. One was M. Jayamani, thirty-nine, a police constable kidnapped while on duty in 2009. He had already escaped once, in 2011. The press called him Psycho Shankar.
September 3, 1998. Khoua Her called 911 from her apartment in St. Paul, Minnesota, and said she had killed her children. Responders found her just inside the door in a ceremonial red dress, an extension cord around her neck. Her six children lay strangled in rooms around the apartment: Kouaeai, eleven; Samson, nine; Nali, eight or nine; Tang Lung, seven; Aee, six; and Tang Ke, five. A twenty-four-year-old Hmong refugee, she had tried to hang herself. She pleaded guilty to six counts of second-degree murder and was sentenced to fifty years. Her release is anticipated in 2032.
September 4, 1986. Daniel Lee Siebert was arrested in Nashville. In February, Sherri Weathers, twenty-four, a hearing-impaired student at the Alabama Institute for the Deaf and Blind in Talladega, had been found on her bed under a sheet with her sons, Chad, five, and Joseph, four, all strangled. Siebert, her art teacher and boyfriend, had let himself in with the key she gave him. He also killed a neighbor, Linda Jarman, thirty-three, and told police his count was at least twelve, from Las Vegas to Atlantic City. He was sentenced to death in Alabama and died of cancer at Holman prison in 2008.
September 5, 1930. Carl Panzram was hanged at Leavenworth, and his reported last words told the hangman to hurry up, because he could hang a dozen men while the man was fooling around. In 1928, at the District of Columbia jail, a young guard named Henry Lesser had passed him a dollar after he was beaten, and Panzram, who said no one had ever done such a thing for him, wrote Lesser a long confession. In it he claimed twenty-one murders and more than a thousand rapes. Few were corroborated. He was condemned for killing Robert Warnke, a laundry foreman at Leavenworth, and refused to appeal.
September 6, 2013. M. Jaishankar was recaptured in Karnataka four days after escaping over the walls of Bangalore's Parappana Agrahara prison in a police uniform. A truck driver accused of raping and killing at least nineteen women in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, he had been tied in 2009 to the kidnapping and murder of a police constable, M. Jayamani, thirty-nine, whose body was found a month after she vanished on duty. He was convicted in at least one case, and most of the others were never tried. He killed himself in Bangalore Central Prison in February 2018.
September 7, 2006. Mark Goudeau was arrested in Phoenix after DNA linked him to an attack the previous September, when two sisters walking home from a city park, one of them visibly pregnant, were forced into the bushes at gunpoint; he assaulted the younger while pressing the gun into her sister's belly. He was then identified as the Baseline Killer, who had shot nine people around south Phoenix in 2005 and 2006, among them Georgia Thompson, nineteen, and Tina Washington, thirty-nine. He was sentenced to 438 years for the sisters case and to death nine times. He says he was framed.
September 8, 1996. Samuel Bongani Mfeka was arrested in KwaZulu-Natal on a rape charge, after a woman survived an attack and went to the police. He had waited at the taxi rank at Kranskop, where women passed through on their way to and from work, told them he could find them jobs, and walked them into a plantation, where he strangled them. Asked why, he said he had killed them because he had lied about the work; he was unemployed himself. Six bodies were recovered on his directions. Published accounts give four to eight murders and sentences of four life terms or 112 years.
September 9, 2003. Richard Paul White was arrested in Colorado for the shooting of a friend, Jason Reichardt, twenty-seven, found two days earlier in an upstairs bedroom of his house in Aurora, shot in the head, his pickup gone. Reichardt had befriended White when he was out of work and tried to find him a job. In custody White led investigators to the bodies of two women he had tortured and strangled at his Denver house, Annaletia Gonzales, twenty-seven, and Victoria Turpin, and a fourth was found under his plea. He pleaded guilty to three murders in 2004 and got three life terms.
September 10, 1998. Velaphi Ndlangamandla was arrested in Mpumalanga, South Africa. In about a year he had shot nineteen people dead in their homes and villages around Piet Retief with a .22 target rifle and robbed their houses, and nine more survived his attacks. On September 18, 2000, a circuit court sitting at Piet Retief convicted him on every count, nineteen murders, nine attempted murders, six robberies and five counts of housebreaking among them, and sentenced him to a total of 137 years in prison. He was thirty-four.
September 11, 1969. Police in Camden, New Jersey, arrested Leroy Snyder, a thirty-eight-year-old junkyard laborer on parole. Earlier that month Gertrude Friedman, fifty-eight, who had lived and worked for more than forty years in rooms that served as her apartment and her linoleum shop at 330 Kaighn Avenue, was beaten, raped and had her throat cut. Over a year Snyder beat and stabbed seven people to death in the city, most of them people he knew. In July 1970 he pleaded no defense to all seven homicides and was sentenced to life. He died in New Jersey State Prison in 2001.
September 12, 1974. A maid found Pauline Spanierman, sixty-nine, dead in her apartment beside the Park Plaza Hotel on Manhattan's West Side. A witness had seen a young man carrying a television down the fire escape at dawn, and a tenant of the Park Plaza told detectives his friend Calvin Jackson, twenty-six, a porter at the hotel, had been in the building. Jackson was arrested and confessed to eleven killings; two of the women he named were alive. Over two years he had smothered nine women at the hotel, most of them elderly, among them Kate Lewisohn, sixty-five. He was given multiple life terms.
September 13, 1997. Johalis Castro, nineteen, was killed in East Harlem and her body burned beyond recognition. In January 1991 Paola Illera, thirteen, had rung the bell of her family's building so that her mother would let her in and never reached the door; she was found raped and stabbed on the East River promenade. In 1998 Rasheeda Washington, eighteen, was killed. Arohn Kee, who had grown up in the neighborhood, was tied to all three by DNA and to the rapes of four girls aged thirteen to fifteen. Convicted in December 2000, he was sentenced to three consecutive life terms.
September 14, 2005. Frances Elaine Newton was executed by lethal injection at Huntsville, aged forty, after eighteen years of maintaining her innocence. On April 7, 1987, a Harris County deputy found the bodies of her husband, Adrian, twenty-three, her son Alton, seven, and her daughter Farrah, twenty-one months, in their apartment in north Houston, all shot with a .25 caliber pistol. Prosecutors said she killed them for insurance. Her defense said the gun tests were unreliable and the investigation incomplete, and in 2004 she received a 120-day reprieve. She was the third woman executed in Texas since 1976.
September 15, 1440. Gilles de Rais, a Marshal of France who had fought beside Joan of Arc, was arrested at his castle at Machecoul. That May he had led armed men into a church at Saint-Étienne-de-Mer-Morte in the middle of Mass and seized a cleric over the sale of a castle, an act that gave the Duke of Brittany and the Bishop of Nantes the opening to move against him. At his trials he was accused of murdering scores of children, mostly boys, from the villages around his castles, and he confessed. He was hanged and burned at Nantes in October. Historians still argue over how far the confession can be trusted.
September 16, 2002. Archibald Thompson Hall died at Kingston Prison in Portsmouth, aged seventy-eight, the oldest prisoner in England serving a whole-life term. In January 1978 a snowstorm forced him and an accomplice to stop at a hotel in North Berwick, and the owner, uneasy about the two men and their hired car, called the police, who found the body of Hall's half-brother, Donald, in the trunk. A career thief posing as a butler, Hall had killed his employers, Walter Scott-Elliot, eighty-two, a former Labour MP, and his wife, Dorothy, and two others in one year.
September 17, 1997. Benjamin Atkins died of AIDS at the Duane Waters Hospital in Jackson, Michigan, aged twenty-nine, four years into multiple life sentences. Between 1991 and 1992 he raped and strangled eleven women in Detroit and Highland Park, most of them homeless or struggling with addiction, aged twenty-two to forty-three, and left them in abandoned buildings along Woodward Avenue. Darlene Saunders, thirty-five, survived when someone on the street saw him choking her in a vacant restaurant, and she identified him. He was convicted after a trial in 1994.
September 18, 1959. Harvey Glatman was executed in the gas chamber at San Quentin. A TV repairman in Los Angeles, he offered women modeling work for crime-magazine covers, tied them up for the camera, photographed them, then drove them into the desert and strangled them. He killed Judy Ann Dull, nineteen, Shirley Bridgeford, twenty-four, and Ruth Mercado, twenty-four. In October 1958 a highway patrolman in Orange County came upon Lorraine Vigil, a model, fighting him for his gun at the roadside, and she survived. He pleaded guilty and refused to appeal.
September 19, 1975. Neal Bradley Long walked into the federal office building in Dayton, Ohio, and asked for Dr. Charles Glatt, forty-six, the sociologist appointed to plan the desegregation of the city's schools. When Glatt answered, Long shot him four times with a pistol, and guards arrested him minutes later. Glatt died three hours after. Long, who had shot Black men from his car at night in Dayton for three years, admitted twenty-five to thirty attacks, and in 1977 pleaded guilty to the murders of Edward Tillman, Larry Romine and Robert Hoard. He died in prison in 1998.
September 20, 2005. Raymont Hopewell was arrested in Baltimore and, after questioning, gave a full account. Over six years he had raped and killed five people, most of them elderly neighbors who knew him and let him in: Constance Wills, sixty, Sarah Shannon, eighty-eight, Sadie Mack, seventy-eight, Carlton Crawford, eighty-two, and Lydia Wingfield, seventy-eight. In August 2006 he pleaded guilty to the five murders and four rapes to avoid a death sentence. At his sentencing he said he was sorry for their losses, and two women burst into tears and left the courtroom.
September 21, 1996. Hiroaki Hidaka, a Hiroshima taxi driver deep in debt, was arrested and confessed. Between April and September he had strangled four women and girls aged sixteen to forty-five whom he picked up in the Nagarekawa and Shintenchi nightlife district, the youngest a high school student. The first body could not at first be identified, and a task force of 164 officers asked the prefectural dental association to search its records. He was sentenced to death by the Hiroshima District Court in 2000, did not appeal, and was hanged in December 2006.
September 22, 1930. A man named Peter Kulaxides was arrested in Athens, by the account published at the time, a day before he was to marry for the eighth time. About a month earlier the decomposed body of his last wife had been found in the old wartime trenches of Macedonia, bearing signs of violence, and when it was discovered he disappeared. He was charged with the deaths of his seven previous wives, killed during the 1920s, admitted one and denied five. He was said to be a refugee from Pontus. No record has been found of a verdict, a sentence or his death.
September 23, 1993. Robert Carl Foley was sentenced to death in Laurel County, Kentucky, for the murders of the brothers Rodney and Harry Lynn Vaughn, by some accounts on this date; the court record gives September 22. At a party at his house in August 1991 the guests locked their guns in a kitchen cabinet, but Foley kept a .38 revolver under his belt and shot both brothers in front of the other adults and five children. He had been paroled after a 1976 killing, and in 1989 had shot four people in a cabin. He received four more death sentences in 1994 and remains on death row.
September 24, 1965. Alys Eberhardt, an eighteen-year-old nursing student, was stabbed and beaten to death in her home in Fair Lawn, New Jersey. Richard Cottingham confessed to her killing sixty years later, in December 2025. In May 1980 he was caught at a motel in Hasbrouck Heights when a maid heard screaming from Room 132 and police met him hurrying down the corridor with a briefcase; inside was Leslie Ann O'Dell, eighteen, handcuffed and bleeding. A computer operator for an insurance company, he has been convicted of nine murders and has spent decades confessing to more.
September 25, 1935. Romanian authorities announced that bodies had been found at Iași and that a man named Vasile Tcaciuc was responsible; twenty-one deaths were eventually proved. A career thief known to the Iași police since about 1930, he lured people to his house, among them a child, killed them with an axe he had made for the purpose and took what they carried. Six bodies were found under his former house in the city. He confessed to twenty-six killings and was known as the Butcher of Iași. On October 17, 1935, during a reconstruction of one of the crimes, he tried to run and was shot dead by a policeman.
September 26, 1990. Gregory John Brazel, an armed robber and arsonist, was arrested in Victoria for the murders that year of Sharon Taylor and Roslyn Hayward, two women who worked as prostitutes. He received fixed terms for both. In 2000, from prison, he wrote to confess the shooting of Mildred Hanmer, fifty-one, a nurse who ran a hardware and gift shop in Mordialloc, on Melbourne's bayside, with her husband. She was killed during a robbery on September 20, 1982, and the case had gone unsolved for eighteen years. He pleaded guilty in 2003 and was given life.
September 27, 1974. David Meirhofer, a twenty-five-year-old carpenter and Vietnam veteran, was arrested in Montana. In June 1973 Susan Jaeger, seven, was taken from her family's tent at a campsite near Three Forks while her parents and brothers slept a few feet away. A year to the day later the kidnapper telephoned her mother, Marietta, and she kept him talking. FBI agents, using an early form of behavioral profiling, had already suspected him, and the recording helped confirm it. He confessed to four killings, among them two boys and a young woman he had dated, and hanged himself two days later.
September 28, 1926. Satarō Fukiage was hanged at Ichigaya Prison in Tokyo, aged thirty-seven. In 1906 he had killed an eleven-year-old girl near Kinkaku-ji in Kyoto and was given life; an amnesty reduced the term, and he was released in 1922. Over the next two years he killed six girls aged eleven to sixteen in the Kantō region. Questioned by detectives in Maebashi in 1924, he drank beer and sorted the girls he had attacked into those parted by death and those parted in life. He confessed to thirteen killings, then recanted, and was tried on three.
September 29, 1974. David Meirhofer confessed to four killings in Montana and hanged himself in the Gallatin County jail hours later, before any trial. He had been arrested two days earlier. The dead were Bernard Poelman, thirteen, Michael Raney, twelve, Susan Jaeger, seven, taken from her family's tent in 1973, and Sandra Smallegan, nineteen, who had once dated him. He had earlier passed a polygraph and a truth serum test. FBI agents who used behavioral analysis to narrow the search for Susan's kidnapper later cited the case in the early development of offender profiling.
September 30, 1993. A killing attributed to Edwin Kaprat took place in Hernando County, Florida, where elderly people living alone in Spring Hill were beaten and killed in their homes, among them Sophia Garrity, eighty, and Ruth Goldsmith, seventy. Lorraine Dawe, eighty-seven, lived in a mobile home near Kaprat's sister. After her death an anonymous caller told detectives to look at him, and his fingerprints matched prints on her garage window. He was convicted in January 1995 of murdering Dawe and Lydia Riddell, seventy-nine, and sentenced to death twice. That April another inmate stabbed him to death on death row.
October 1, 1946. John Crutchley was born in Clarksburg, West Virginia, the youngest of three children in a comfortable family, and grew up to work as a systems engineer for a defense contractor in Florida. On November 22, 1985, a motorist in Malabar stopped for a naked young woman crawling along the roadside, handcuffed at the wrists and ankles; several trucks had already passed her. Laura Murphy, nineteen, told him which house she had escaped from, and doctors found much of her blood had been drained. Crutchley was convicted of her kidnapping and rape and suspected in up to thirty deaths. He was never charged with one.
October 2, 2006. Dellmus Colvin, a long-haul truck driver from Toledo, pleaded guilty to six murders in Ohio to avoid a death sentence and received two consecutive life terms without parole. In April 2004 a woman told Toledo police that a man had taken her from a truck stop, beaten and robbed her and tried to rape her, and while he was held on that complaint investigators took his DNA. It matched women strangled over nearly twenty years and left along the interstates, among them Donna Lee White, twenty-seven, and Jacquelynn Thomas, forty-two. In 2011 he pleaded guilty in New Jersey to a 1987 murder.
October 3, 2011. By this date David Joseph Pedersen and his girlfriend, Holly Ann Grigsby, had killed four people in eight days, the last of them Reginald Clark, fifty-three, in Eureka, California. On September 26 they had killed Pedersen's father, David Jones Pedersen, fifty-six, and stepmother, Leslie Mae Pedersen, sixty-nine, in Washington state, and then Cody Faye Myers, nineteen, in Oregon, whose car they took. The two framed the spree in white supremacist terms, killing Myers, they said, because they took his name to be Jewish and Clark because he was Black. Grigsby pleaded guilty to federal racketeering in 2014 and received life.
October 4, 2001. A thirteen-year-old girl from the Liceo Eleuterio Ramírez in Alto Hospicio, in northern Chile, got into a white Nissan whose driver offered her a ride. He told her he was the Psychopath of Hospicio, raped her, threw her into a mine shaft in the desert and pelted her with rocks. She survived, climbed out and named him. For three years the police had said the girls and women missing from the town had run away. Julio Pérez Silva was convicted of fourteen murders, eleven girls aged fourteen to eighteen and three women, and in 2005 his sentence was raised to qualified life.
October 5, 2011. A police officer outside Yuba City, California, spotted a car belonging to Cody Faye Myers, a murdered nineteen-year-old, and stopped it. Inside were David Joseph Pedersen, thirty-one, and his girlfriend, Holly Ann Grigsby, twenty-four. Authorities had tracked them through stolen credit cards and warned police in several states. Over the previous ten days they had killed four people in Washington, Oregon and California, beginning with Pedersen's father and stepmother. Both pleaded guilty to federal racketeering covering the murders. Prosecutors did not seek death, and Grigsby was sentenced to life without release in July 2014.
October 6, 1909. Martha Rendell was hanged at Fremantle Prison, three years to the day after the death of Olive Morris, one of the children of her partner, Thomas Morris, whose deaths she was accused of causing. In May 1909 his son George, fourteen, walked out of the house in East Perth and refused to go back, and his testimony led to her trial. Annie Morris died in 1907, Olive the same year and Arthur, fourteen, in 1908, after Rendell painted their throats with what the prosecution said was hydrochloric acid. She was convicted only of Arthur's murder. A clemency campaign citing doubts about the evidence failed.
October 7, 1965. Ian Brady was arrested at his home in Hattersley, outside Manchester, after his partner's brother-in-law, David Smith, called the police to say he had watched Brady kill a young man the night before. Officers found the body of Edward Evans, seventeen, in a bedroom, and left-luggage tickets that led to photographs and a tape recording. With Myra Hindley, Brady had killed five children and teenagers since 1963 and buried most of them on Saddleworth Moor. Convicted of three murders in 1966, he died at Ashworth Hospital in 2017 without revealing where Keith Bennett, twelve, was buried.
October 8, 2019. In the Supreme Court of Victoria, prosecutors discontinued the case against Peter Dupas for the murder of Kathleen Downes, ninety-five, stabbed in her bed at a Brunswick nursing home on the last night of 1997. Their key witness, Andrew Fraser, a former lawyer and convicted drug trafficker who had served time with Dupas, was too ill to give evidence and face cross-examination. Justice Peter Almond told the court the decision was not an acquittal. Dupas was already serving three life terms without parole for murdering Nicole Patterson, Margaret Maher and Mersina Halvagis.
October 9, 2002. Aileen Wuornos was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison after Governor Jeb Bush signed the warrant and a panel of psychiatrists found her competent. Between 1989 and 1990 seven men who picked her up on Florida's highways were shot, beginning with Richard Mallory, fifty-one. She said at first that each had tried to rape her, and later said none had. The jury that condemned her for Mallory never learned that he had served ten years in Maryland for a sex crime. She received six death sentences, and in her final years she asked to die. Peter Siems, sixty-five, was never found.
October 10, 1956. Charlene Adell Williams was born in Sacramento, the only child of prosperous parents. Married to Gerald Gallego, she drove the van and made the approach in ten murders between 1978 and 1980, most of them teenage girls taken from shopping centers and fairs in California and Nevada. In November 1980 a fraternity brother of Craig Miller saw Miller and his date, Mary Beth Sowers, sitting in a car with a couple he did not know, and took down the plate. In exchange for her testimony, which sent Gerald Gallego to death row in two states, she pleaded guilty in Nevada and was released in 1997.
October 11, 1965. Myra Hindley was arrested in Hattersley, four days after Ian Brady, as detectives examined the left-luggage tickets and photographs that led them to Saddleworth Moor. A woman of twenty-three with bleached hair and a van, she had persuaded children to get in when a young man alone could not have. The jury at Chester heard a tape on which her voice tells Lesley Ann Downey, ten, to shut up. She was convicted in 1966 of two murders and of harboring Brady after a third. For thirty-six years she insisted she had changed, and she died in custody in 2002.
October 12, 1954. Samuel Doss died in Tulsa a week after being sent home from the hospital, where he had spent weeks recovering from what doctors took for a severe digestive infection. His physician did not believe the death was natural and insisted on an autopsy, which found arsenic. His widow, Nannie Doss, confessed to poisoning four of her five husbands and giggled through the interviews. Investigators also attributed to her the deaths of her mother, a sister, a grandson, a mother-in-law and two of her daughters. She pleaded guilty to Samuel's murder in 1955, received life, and died in prison in 1965.
October 13, 1933. Cesare Serviatti was shot by firing squad at the Chiara Vecchia range at Sarzana, in Liguria. On November 16, 1932, two leather suitcases left on a train at Napoli Centrale went to lost property, where staff opened the larger one and found a woman's torso packed in sawdust. She was Paolina Gorietti, forty, a widow Serviatti had met through a newspaper advertisement and promised to marry. He had done the same to Pasqua Bartolini Tiraboschi in 1928 and Beatrice Margarucci in 1930, killing them for their savings. The court at La Spezia sentenced him to death that July.
October 14, 2014. Tiago Henrique Gomes da Rocha, a twenty-six-year-old security guard, was arrested in Goiânia, Brazil. For three years a man on a motorcycle had shot strangers at random around the city: homeless men asleep on the street, young men, and women and girls at bus stops and in squares. Bruna Gleycielle de Sousa Gonçalves was killed at a bus stop on Avenida T-9 in May 2014, after finishing work at a gym. Rocha confessed to thirty-nine killings. By 2018 separate juries had convicted him of twenty-nine, the youngest victim thirteen, with sentences totaling 684 years.
October 15, 2015. Stephen Port, a chef at a bus depot canteen in east London, was arrested. He met young men through dating apps, gave them overdoses of the drug GHB in his apartment in Barking and left the bodies of three of them within four hundred meters of it. Anthony Walgate, twenty-three, a fashion student, was the first, in June 2014; Gabriel Kovari, Daniel Whitworth and Jack Taylor followed. Police treated each death as unconnected and accidental. Port was given a whole-life order in 2016, and an inquest in 2021 found police failures had probably contributed to three of the deaths.
October 16, 1997. Bai Baoshan was arrested in Beijing after a robbery in Shijiazhuang. Released from prison in 1996, and refused when he tried to have his Beijing household registration restored, he clubbed a sentry at the Gaojing power plant on March 31 that year and took his rifle. Over eighteen months he killed soldiers and police sentries for their weapons, a tobacco trader, merchants in Urumqi and passers-by, fifteen people across three regions. He had also killed two fellow prisoners years before. Sentenced to death by the Urumqi Intermediate People's Court in March 1998, he was executed that April.
October 17, 1989. Faye Copeland, sixty-eight, and her husband, Ray, were charged in northern Missouri after the bodies of five young drifters were found on and near their farm at Mooresville. In August a former hired hand, Jack McCormick, called a Crime Stoppers line and said he had seen human bones on the property and that Ray had tried to kill him. The couple hired drifters to buy cattle with worthless checks, then shot them. In 1990 they became the oldest couple sentenced to death in the United States. Her sentences were overturned in 1999, and she died in 2003 after a medical parole.
October 18, 1995. Moses Sithole was arrested in Benoni after a struggle in which he was shot in the stomach. Women had been turning up dead in the open veld east of Johannesburg and west of Pretoria, beaten, raped and strangled with their own underwear, and that September President Nelson Mandela went to Boksburg to ask the public for help. Sithole, born in Vosloorus, offered women job interviews and walked them into the veld. In 1997 he was convicted of thirty-eight murders, among them a two-year-old boy left to die of exposure, and sentenced to 2,410 years. Eleven of the women were never identified.
October 19, 1992. Sergei Golovkin was arrested near Moscow. Two weeks earlier mushroom pickers had found the bodies of Yuri Sidyakin, twelve, Vladislav Sharikov, thirteen, and Denis Efremov, twelve, in woods outside the city. He had lured them into his garage in September with the promise of a theft from a warehouse and killed them in the cellar he had dug under it. A livestock specialist at a stud farm, he confessed to the murders of eleven boys aged ten to sixteen since 1986, the first Andrey Pavlov. He was sentenced to death two years later to the day, and in 1996 became the last man executed in Russia.
October 20, 1997. András Pándy, a Hungarian-born Protestant pastor living in Brussels, was arrested. The next month his daughter Ágnes told investigators that the missing members of her family were dead: her mother, Edit Fintor, her two brothers, her father's second wife, Ilona Sőrés, and two stepsisters. She said they were shot or struck with a hammer between 1986 and 1990 and their bodies dissolved in drain cleaner. Teeth and bone fragments were found at his houses. In 2002 the Brussels Court of Assizes sentenced him to life and his daughter to twenty-one years. He died in prison in 2013.
October 21, 2009. Mohan Kumar, a former primary school teacher in Karnataka, was arrested. Calling himself by different names, he promised marriage to young women, took them to lodges in Mangaluru, Mysuru and elsewhere, and gave each a cyanide pill he said was a contraceptive. Then he took their gold and left. In April 2006 a woman of twenty-six from a village near Manjeshwar came to Mangaluru to meet the man who had asked to marry her, Sudhakar, an insurance agent; she boarded a bus with him and was found dead. The courts convicted him in all twenty cases.
October 22, 1987. David Leonard Wood was arrested in El Paso. That September water utility workers had found Rosa Maria Casio, twenty-four, in a shallow grave in the desert northeast of the city, and K-9 units then found Karen Baker, twenty, about a hundred yards away. Four more women and girls were found nearby, among them Desiree Wheatley, fifteen, and Dawn Marie Smith, fourteen. Wood, a convicted rapist, was linked through jailhouse informants and fibers. He was sentenced to death in 1993 and has always denied the killings. Executions were stayed in 2009 and 2025, and new DNA testing was granted in 2026.
October 23, 2004. Fu Hegong was arrested in Beijing, two days after staff at the Beixin Kindergarten, a boarding school in Dongcheng District, found two of their own dead at six in the morning. He Yufen, forty-four, the attendant on night duty, had been raped and smothered with a quilt, and a five-year-old boy was dead. Fu, thirty, had broken in to steal. He was also convicted of killing two people in 2002 and stabbing a security guard in 2004. Sentenced to death by the Beijing No. 2 Intermediate People's Court, he did not appeal and was executed on December 20, 2005.
October 24, 2002. John Allen Muhammad, forty-one, and Lee Boyd Malvo, seventeen, were arrested asleep in their Chevrolet Caprice at a highway rest stop in Frederick County, Maryland. For three weeks they had shot people at random around Washington from a hole cut above the trunk's license plate. On October 3 five people were killed in two hours in the Maryland suburbs, among them James Buchanan, thirty-nine, mowing grass at a car dealership, and Premkumar Walekar, fifty-four, a taxi driver. Ten died in all. Muhammad was convicted in Virginia in 2003 and executed in 2009.
October 25, 1902. George Chapman, a Polish-born barber and publican whose real name was Seweryn Kłosowski, was arrested in London. Maud Marsh had died on October 22 in the rooms above the Crown, his public house in Borough High Street, after months of vomiting; she had improved at Guy's Hospital and fallen ill again as soon as she came home. Her doctor refused to sign a death certificate, and antimony was found. The bodies of two earlier women who had posed as his wives, Mary Spink and Bessie Taylor, were exhumed and held antimony too. He was hanged at Wandsworth in April 1903.
October 26, 1964. Eric Edgar Cooke was hanged at Fremantle Prison, the last execution in Western Australia. Minutes before, he took the chaplain's Bible and swore before God that he had killed Rosemary Anderson and Jillian Brewer, two of the eight people he killed in Perth between 1959 and 1963; two other men, Darryl Beamish and John Button, were in prison for those deaths. He had been tried and hanged for the murder of John Sturkey, shot as he slept. Both men's convictions were quashed decades later, Button's in 2002 and Beamish's in 2005.
October 27, 1983. Alaska State Troopers searched the Anchorage home of Robert Hansen, a baker, and found a rifle, jewelry belonging to missing women and an aviation chart marked with small x's. In June a seventeen-year-old, Cindy Paulson, had run for Sixth Avenue in handcuffs, leaving her sneakers in a car so police would know she had been in it, and told them a red-haired man with a stutter had raped her and tried to fly her into the bush. Hansen admitted killing seventeen women, some hunted with a rifle after he flew them out in his Super Cub. He pleaded guilty to four.
October 28, 1999. Luis Alfredo Garavito, held since April under a false name after a failed attack on a boy in Villavicencio, confessed in an eight-hour interrogation to murdering boys across Colombia. In November 1997 investigators near Pereira had uncovered a burial ground holding the remains of thirty-six boys, and a national task force began to connect cases treated for years as isolated: boys who vanished from markets and bus stations, most of them from poor or itinerant families. He was convicted of 138 murders and sentenced to 1,853 years, capped by law at forty. He died in prison in 2023.
October 29, 2004. Darbara Singh was arrested in Punjab. A former member of the armed forces, he had been released early on a mercy petition in December 2003 while serving thirty years for the rape and attempted murder of a migrant laborer's daughter. Within months children of migrant laborers from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh began to disappear around Jalandhar. He confessed to killing seventeen, fifteen girls and two boys, most of them under ten. Two convictions stood, among them the murder of eight-year-old Diksha, and he was given life. He died in the Patiala Central Jail in 2018.
October 30, 1947. At about 2:30 in the morning Jake Bird took an ax from a shed, removed his shoes and crept into the Tacoma home of Bertha Kludt, fifty-two, and her daughter, Beverly June, seventeen. Bertha woke and he killed her; Beverly came downstairs and he killed her too. Neighbors heard screaming, and police caught him running from the house, covered in blood. A transient railroad laborer, he was convicted that November and, to stay alive, talked about dozens of other killings across the country. Investigators confirmed eleven. He was hanged at Walla Walla in July 1949.
October 31, 1989. The court of Entremont, in Valais, sentenced Michel Peiry to life. He was arrested in May 1987, at twenty-eight, on the evidence of two people who had survived his attacks. For six years he had picked up adolescents and young men hitchhiking, most of them fourteen to eighteen, and tortured and killed them in Switzerland and abroad. He confessed to five killings, three in Switzerland and two elsewhere in Europe, and retracted three more; Swiss reporting puts the total near ten. He has been refused parole twelve times, most recently upheld by the Federal Supreme Court in August 2026.
November 1, 1958. Max Gufler, a traveling salesman, was arrested in St. Pölten, Lower Austria, the day after the gendarmerie in Carinthia asked the town's police to question him about a missing woman, Maria Robas, whom he had killed in September. He courted lonely women through marriage advertisements with promises of a wedding, persuaded them to bring their savings, then drugged them and drowned them. Among the earliest was Emilie Meystrzik, a Vienna prostitute, in 1952. A Vienna jury convicted him in 1961 of four murders and two attempts. He was suspected in eighteen. He died at Stein prison in 1966.
November 2, 1984. Velma Barfield was executed by lethal injection at Central Prison in Raleigh, the first woman put to death in the United States since 1962 and the first since capital punishment resumed in 1976. In February 1978 Rowland Stuart Taylor died while she was, as she put it, nursing him back to health; he had begun to suspect she was forging checks on his account, and she had been putting arsenic-based rat poison into his beer and tea. She confessed to poisoning her mother and two elderly people in her care. In prison she became a born-again Christian and counseled other inmates, and evangelists campaigned for clemency.
November 3, 2003. Police in Cangzhou, in Hebei province, making a routine inspection of the city's entertainment venues, stopped a man who struck them as suspicious. He tried to stab the officers with a folding knife. By the next morning his interrogators had established that Yang Xinhai was wanted for murder in four provinces, and that killings treated for years as unconnected in Henan, Anhui, Shandong and Hebei were his. He entered farmhouses at night with an ax or hammer and killed the families inside, children included. He was convicted of sixty-seven murders and twenty-three rapes and was shot in February 2004.
November 4, 1986. Denise Brown, twenty-one, was killed by David and Catherine Birnie in Perth, the last of four young women they took in a month. From their house on Moorhouse Street in Willagee they abducted women off the street or by offering lifts, chained them to a bed, raped them and killed them: Mary Neilson, twenty-two; Susannah Candy, fifteen; Noelene Patterson, thirty-one; and Denise Brown. Six days later Kate Moir, seventeen, escaped through a window and ran into a shop, and led police back to the house. Both pleaded guilty. David Birnie hanged himself in prison in 2005.
November 5, 1990. Michael Andrew Savage, about six weeks old, died at home in Illinois, the first of three infant children of Gail Savage to die in less than three years. His death was recorded as sudden infant death. Her husband came home from work that month to find her sitting in the dark on the floor of their bedroom closet, holding Michael's blue blanket. Her family read it as grief. Amber Lynn, three weeks old, died in 1992 and Cynthia, five months, in 1993. Savage then told police she had smothered them. A jury acquitted her of murder and convicted her of involuntary manslaughter, and she was given twenty years.
November 6, 2003. Four people were shot dead at Superbike Motorsports in Chesnee, South Carolina: the owner, Scott Ponder, thirty; his mother, Beverly Guy, fifty-two; the service manager, Brian Lucas, twenty-nine; and the mechanic, Chris Sherbert, twenty-six. The case went unsolved for thirteen years. In November 2016 investigators tracing a missing couple's phones came to a fenced property near Moore and heard banging inside a metal container, where Kala Brown, thirty, was chained to the wall. Her boyfriend had been shot. Todd Kohlhepp, a real estate agent, confessed to the Superbike killings and pleaded guilty to seven murders.
November 7, 1983. Brandon Tholmer was arrested in Los Angeles while trying the door of an eighty-five-year-old woman's home, after five days under round-the-clock surveillance. A fingerprint had linked him to the killings. In 1975 he had raped and tried to strangle a woman of about eighty, was committed to Patton State Hospital as a mentally disordered sex offender, and was paroled in 1979. From 1981 elderly women living alone within a mile of his apartment were raped and killed, among them Rose Lederman, eighty, and Dorothy Fain, seventy-two. He was convicted of four murders in 1986, and the jury declined to impose death.
November 8, 1945. Joseph James DeAngelo Jr. was born in Bath, New York. He served in the Navy in Vietnam, took a criminal justice degree, and joined police departments in Exeter and Auburn, California, until he was fired for shoplifting in 1979. For decades his crimes sat in three sets of files: a burglar in Visalia, the East Area Rapist who attacked about fifty women around Sacramento, and the Original Night Stalker who killed couples in Southern California. In 2018 investigators matched crime-scene DNA to distant relatives on a genealogy website. He pleaded guilty to thirteen murders in 2020.
November 9, 2003. Sipho Dube was arrested in Johannesburg, and the investigation linked him to further killings into January 2004. For three years he had lured children onto the mine dumps around the city, among them Nomnikelo Jumba, fourteen, and the brothers Anele and Siyabonga Mbuku, and raped and killed them. Two women also died, Rashunthee Singh, thirty-nine, and Tina Bernardes, killed with stones that were found beside their bodies. In 2006 Judge Seun Moshidi of the Johannesburg High Court convicted him of seven murders, three rapes and ten kidnappings and sentenced him to ten life terms plus 114 years.
November 10, 2009. John Allen Muhammad was executed by lethal injection at the Greensville Correctional Center in Virginia, six years after his conviction there for the murder of Dean Meyers, fifty-three, shot at a gas station in Manassas. In October 2002 Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, seventeen, shot people at random around Washington from a hole cut in the trunk of a Chevrolet Caprice. Ten died, among them James Buchanan, mowing grass at a car dealership, and Linda Franklin, an FBI analyst shot in a store parking lot. Malvo, a juvenile at the time, is serving life.
November 11, 1965. Charles Schmid was arrested in Tucson. He had killed Alleen Rowe, a high school student, in May 1964, and the sisters Gretchen and Wendy Fritz, seventeen and thirteen, in August 1965, and boasted about it to the teenagers who followed him around the city's east side. Friends who knew kept quiet for months. Then one of them, Richard Bruns, frightened for his own girlfriend, went to the police and led them to the Fritz sisters' bodies in the desert. Schmid, who stuffed his boots to look taller and wore makeup, was sentenced to death. He was stabbed to death in prison in 1975.
November 12, 2003. Huang Yong was arrested in Pingyu County, Henan, days after Zhang Liang, sixteen, went to the police with a story investigators at first did not believe. Huang had taken him home and tried to kill him, and Zhang had saved himself by promising to bring Huang more boys. Huang lured teenage boys from internet cafes, arcades and video halls with promises of jobs and schooling, tied them to a wooden device he built from a noodle machine and called his hobbyhorse, and strangled them. He was convicted of seventeen murders, claimed at least twenty-five, and was shot on December 26, 2003.
November 13, 1995. Glen Edward Rogers was arrested in Kentucky after a high-speed chase, at the end of a national manhunt, driving the car of Tina Marie Cribbs, thirty-four, a waitress and mother of two. On November 5 a long-haired, bearded stranger had danced to the jukebox at a bar in Gibsonton, Florida, and bought drinks for a table of women. Cribbs was found stabbed in a Tampa motel bathtub days later. Rogers had also killed Sandra Gallagher, thirty-three, in California that September. He was sentenced to death in both states and executed in Florida in May 2025.
November 14, 1997. Daniel Joseph Blank was arrested in Louisiana and gave a lengthy statement. In July, Leonce and Joyce Millet, both sixty-six, had been shot outside their home in Gonzales and survived to give police a description, and the composite sketch led to him. Over a year he had killed six people in the river parishes, most of them elderly, robbing them to feed a gambling habit at the casinos: Victor Rossi, Barbara Bourgeois, Lillian Philippe, seventy-one, Sam and Louella Arcuri, and Joan Brock. He was sentenced to death for Philippe in 1999 and remains on death row at Angola.
November 15, 2002. Myra Hindley died in custody at West Suffolk Hospital, aged sixty, after thirty-six years in prison. She had been convicted in 1966 of murdering Lesley Ann Downey, ten, and Edward Evans, seventeen, and of harboring Ian Brady after the murder of John Kilbride, twelve. In 1987 she admitted taking part in the killings of Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett, whose body has never been found. Successive home secretaries had set her tariff at whole life. Ten days after her death the House of Lords ruled that politicians could no longer set life tariffs, a ruling that might have opened the way to her release.
November 16, 2006. In the early hours a man climbed through the window of a house in Xiangbi, a small town near Yibin in southern Sichuan, took a mobile phone and climbed out onto the dirt road. The owner woke and shouted, and the thief jumped, broke his right leg and was caught. He was Dong Wenyu, and fingerprints soon tied him to five burglaries in Zhejiang province in which six people, five women and one man, had their throats cut after they woke and two more were injured. The Jinhua Intermediate People's Court sentenced him to death in June 2007. He did not appeal.
November 17, 1894. Herman Webster Mudgett, who called himself H. H. Holmes, was arrested in Boston on an unrelated warrant. He had built a building in Chicago's Englewood district with hidden rooms, chutes and a large basement, and he had defrauded insurers for years. Detectives traced him to the deaths of his associate Benjamin Pitezel and three of Pitezel's children, and to women who had worked and lived in the Chicago building. He sold newspapers a confession to twenty-seven murders, some of the victims still alive. Convicted only of Pitezel's murder, he was hanged at Moyamensing Prison in May 1896.
November 18, 1902. Amelia Sach was arrested in London. Days earlier Annie Walters had left her lodgings in Islington carrying what looked like a baby and was arrested an hour later with a dead infant in her arms; her landlord was a police officer. The child had come from Claymore House, the lying-in home Sach ran in East Finchley, where unmarried mothers, mostly domestic servants, paid a fee to have their newborns placed for adoption. Walters killed them with chlorodyne. More than a dozen infants were suspected. Both women were hanged together at Holloway in February 1903.
November 19, 2017. Charles Manson died in a Bakersfield hospital, aged eighty-three, forty-eight years after the killings on Cielo Drive. He had been convicted of nine first-degree murders and killed none of them himself. He was not in the house where Sharon Tate, eight months pregnant, and four others died; the next night he tied up Leno and Rosemary LaBianca and left before his followers killed them. He was convicted as the man who directed it. His death sentence became life when California's death penalty fell in 1972, and he was refused parole twelve times.
November 20, 2013. Joseph Paul Franklin was executed by lethal injection at Bonne Terre, Missouri, for the 1977 murder of Gerald Gordon, forty-two. On October 8 that year he hid in the bushes outside the Shaare Zedek Synagogue in suburban St. Louis and opened fire as the congregation came out. A white supremacist, he moved across the country shooting Black men, interracial couples and Jews, and among the dead were the cousins Darrell Lane, fourteen, and Dante Brown, thirteen, in Cincinnati. He also shot the publisher Larry Flynt and the civil rights leader Vernon Jordan, who survived. Sixteen killings are attributed to him.
November 21, 1985. John Crutchley, a systems engineer for a defense contractor, picked up Laura Murphy, nineteen, hitchhiking near Malabar, Florida, and held her at his house for more than twenty hours, raping her and drawing nearly half her blood. She pushed herself out of a bathroom window, handcuffed at the wrists and ankles, and a motorist found her crawling at the roadside the next evening. Doctors believed another extraction would have killed her. Crutchley pleaded guilty to kidnapping and rape. Suspected in up to thirty deaths, among them Deborah Fitzjohn, he was never charged with one, and died in prison in 2002.
November 22, 1994. Gary Ray Bowles was arrested in Jacksonville, Florida, six days after he killed Walter Hinton, forty-two, in Jacksonville Beach by dropping a forty-pound stepping stone on his head as he slept, and two weeks after the FBI put him on its Ten Most Wanted list. A drifter who sold sex to men along the Interstate 95 corridor, he moved in with some of them and then beat and strangled them. He confessed to six killings in four states in 1994, among them John Roberts, fifty-nine, and Milton Bradley, seventy-two. Florida executed him in August 2019.
November 23, 1979. Roy Norris was arrested in Los Angeles. A month earlier, on Halloween, he and Lawrence Bittaker had abducted Shirley Ledford, sixteen, the last of five teenage girls they took in their van, which they called Murder Mac, along the coast and in the hills that year. The others were Lucinda Schaefer, sixteen, Andrea Hall, eighteen, and Jacqueline Gilliam, fifteen, and Leah Lamp, thirteen, taken together in September. Police were tipped by an acquaintance he had talked to, and he confessed. He testified against Bittaker to save his own life and died in a prison medical facility in 2020.
November 24, 1981. Robert Diaz, a forty-three-year-old cardiac nurse, was arrested in California. Between March 30 and April 22 that year, eleven of the oldest patients at Community Hospital of the Valley, a small hospital in Perris, in Riverside County, had died violent, convulsive deaths on the nights he worked; a twelfth died at a hospital in Banning, where he had moved. Exhumations found lethal levels of lidocaine, a heart drug. The patients were aged fifty-two to eighty-nine. He was sentenced to death in 1984 for all twelve and died of natural causes on death row in 2010, still denying it.
November 25, 1973. Albert DeSalvo was found stabbed to death in the infirmary at Walpole state prison in Massachusetts. He had confessed in 1965 to the thirteen Boston stranglings of women aged nineteen to eighty-five in their own homes between 1962 and 1964, but the confession was judged too unreliable to charge, and he was serving life for the sexual assaults of the Green Man case. His killer was never convicted. In 2013 DNA from a water bottle used by his nephew led to his exhumation, and the match proved that he killed Mary Sullivan, nineteen, the last of the victims.
November 26, 2009. Police in Changsha found the last of six men dead, naked and hanged in hotel and guesthouse rooms around the city. Since October 11 Zhou Youping, a lounge singer, had met men aged twenty-three to forty through a gay website where he advertised for slaves willing to play asphyxiation games for generous payment. He brought them to rented rooms, restrained them and hanged them. He was sentenced to death in 2011 on six counts of murder; the Hunan Higher People's Court upheld two, among them the death of Feng Yu, of Gansu, and found the evidence insufficient on four. He was executed in 2014.
November 27, 1992. Thomas Lee Dillon, a water treatment technician, was arrested in Ohio. Since 1989 five men who were outdoors alone in the countryside, hunting, fishing or jogging, had been shot at random, among them Jamie Paxton, twenty-one, killed while hunting in November 1990. In 1991 The Times Leader in Martins Ferry received a typed letter signed by the murderer of Jamie Paxton, with details never published. A friend of Dillon's, worried about him, contacted the FBI's task force. Dillon pleaded guilty in 1993 to five aggravated murders, avoiding death, and died in prison in 2011.
November 27, 2010. At about 9:45 at night a rookie RCMP constable, Aaron Kehler, watched a pickup pull out of a remote logging road onto Highway 27 in northern British Columbia and speed off. He stopped it and found the driver, Cody Legebokoff, twenty, with blood on his clothes and in the cab, and a wallet belonging to Loren Leslie, fifteen. Her body was found nearby. Legebokoff had already killed three women around Prince George, Jill Stuchenko, thirty-five, Cynthia Maas, thirty-five, and Natasha Montgomery, twenty-three, whose body has never been found. He was convicted of four first-degree murders in 2014.
November 29, 2007. Dong Wenyu was executed in Jinhua, Zhejiang province, a year after he was caught in Sichuan stealing a mobile phone. He had jumped from a window to escape the owner and broken his leg. Fingerprints tied him to five burglaries in Zhejiang in which householders who woke up had their throats cut: six people, five women and one man, died, and two more were injured. None of them has been named in published reports. The Jinhua Intermediate People's Court convicted him in June 2007. He did not appeal, and the Supreme People's Court confirmed the sentence.
November 30, 2001. Gary Ridgway, a truck painter, was arrested as he left the Kenworth plant in Renton, Washington, after DNA from a saliva sample he had given in 1987 matched three early victims. Since 1982 young women and girls from Pacific Highway South, many of them runaways and sex workers, had been found along the Green River and in the woods around Seattle. He had passed a polygraph in 1984 and kept killing. In 2003 he pleaded guilty to forty-eight murders, and to a forty-ninth in 2011, in exchange for helping find remains. The last of the unidentified was named Tammie Liles, sixteen, in 2024.
December 1, 1987. Commissaire Francis Jacob was standing in the street near the police station at the Porte Saint-Denis in Paris, talking to shopkeepers with a composite sketch in his pocket, when a young man who matched it walked past. Thierry Paulin, twenty-four, a former dancer and drag performer from Martinique, was arrested on the spot; a woman he had attacked had survived and described him. For three years elderly women living alone, mostly in the eighteenth arrondissement, had been beaten, strangled or smothered in their apartments and robbed, among them Rachel Cohen, seventy-nine. He confessed to twenty-one and died of AIDS in 1989, before any trial.
December 2, 2002. Lazarus Mazingane, a Soweto taxi driver, was convicted in the Johannesburg High Court on seventy-four counts, among them sixteen murders, and was sentenced the next day to seventeen life terms and 781 years. Between 1993 and 1998 sixteen women were robbed, raped and killed in fields and open ground around Nasrec and the Southgate shopping mall in the south of the city. One of the first was Margaret Mollo, killed in March 1995 by the corner of Nasrec Road and Aerodrome Road. His appeal was dismissed in 2009.
December 3, 2020. David Fuller, sixty-six, a hospital electrician, was arrested in Kent after DNA from a family member pointed to him. In June 1987 Wendy Knell, twenty-five, was found beaten and strangled in her bedsit on Guildford Road in Tunbridge Wells, and in November Caroline Pierce, twenty, was taken outside her home; her body was found in a dyke weeks later. Police searching his house found hard drives showing that he had sexually abused at least 101 dead women and girls in hospital mortuaries where he worked. He pleaded guilty to both murders in 2021 and received a whole-life order.
December 4, 1979. In the early hours fire broke out at the front of a house on Selby Street in Hull where Edith Hastie was asleep with four of her sons. Charles, fifteen, pushed his mother out of an upstairs window but could not reach Paul, twelve, and Peter, eight, and all three boys died. In 1980 Bruce George Peter Lee, born Peter Dinsdale, a nineteen-year-old with learning difficulties, confessed to it and to other fires in Hull since 1973, and in 1981 he pleaded guilty to twenty-six manslaughters. Fourteen of the convictions were later quashed, among them the 1977 Wensley Lodge fire, ruled accidental.
December 5, 2011. Miyoko Sumida was arrested in Amagasaki, the industrial city between Osaka and Kobe, after a woman held captive in an apartment there escaped and went to the police. It was the thread that unraveled years of control over several families: Sumida moved into their homes, turned members against one another until they beat and confined each other, and took their insurance and pension money. Six people died, among them Kazuko Oe, sixty-six, and Mariko Nakashima, twenty-nine, and remains were found buried and encased in concrete. Sumida was found dead in her police cell in December 2012, before trial.
December 6, 2013. Miranda Barbour and her husband, Elytte, were arrested in Pennsylvania. On November 11 Troy LaFerrara, forty-two, of Port Trevorton, had met her in the parking lot of the Susquehanna Valley Mall after answering her ad on Craigslist; her husband was hiding in the back seat of the car, and LaFerrara was stabbed twenty times and strangled. His body was found in Sunbury. Barbour later told a reporter she had killed twenty-two people in several states. None of the claims was ever confirmed. She pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, and both were sentenced to life without parole in 2014.
December 7, 2005. A date given in early accounts for a killing attributed to Gary Michael Hilton, though the four murders for which he was convicted came in 2007 and 2008. Hilton, a drifter who lived out of a van with a dog, targeted people walking alone on national forest land. In October 2007 he killed John and Irene Bryant, eighty and eighty-four, in North Carolina; in December, Cheryl Dunlap, forty-six, in Florida; and on New Year's Day 2008, Meredith Emerson, twenty-four, on Blood Mountain in Georgia. Florida sentenced him to death in 2011. He was also suspected in the disappearance of Rossana Miliani.
December 8, 1937. Eugen Weidmann, a German drifter, was arrested at his rented villa in La Celle-Saint-Cloud outside Paris, after a business card left with a victim's family led police there; he wounded an officer before he was overpowered. That July a young American dancer, Jean de Koven, had written to a friend about a charming German who called himself Siegfried and invited her to his villa. With accomplices he killed six people for money, among them a chauffeur, a nurse and a real estate agent. He was guillotined outside the Saint-Pierre prison at Versailles in June 1939, the last public execution in France.
December 9, 1985. Gennady Mikhasevich was arrested in the Vitebsk region of Soviet Belarus. That year the militia were checking the owner of every red Zaporozhets in the oblast, because the man strangling women on the region's roads was believed to drive one, and Mikhasevich, a volunteer police auxiliary in the people's druzhina, joined the search for himself. A letter he sent the police, signed Patriots of Vitebsk, was matched to his handwriting. Between 1971 and 1985 he killed at least thirty-six women, most picked up on roads at night, and at least fourteen innocent men were convicted for his crimes.
December 10, 2014. Sailson José das Graças was arrested in Nova Iguaçu, in the Baixada Fluminense outside Rio de Janeiro, days after Fátima Miranda, sixty-two, was found dead in her house on Rua Eduardo Pacheco by a worried friend. He told police he had killed forty-three people over nine years, most of them women, beginning in 2005, and described entering their houses at night and strangling them. Police could tie him to five killings, among them Fátima Miranda. He has been convicted of four, with sentences totaling more than seventy years. His partner, Cleusa Balbina de Paula, got thirty years as an accomplice.
December 11, 2012. Manuel Pardo, a former Florida Highway Patrol trooper and Sweetwater police officer, was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison after twenty-six years on death row. Between January and April 1986 he and an accomplice killed nine people in drug robberies around Miami. When his pistol jammed after he shot Daisy Ricard, he beat her with it, and the round went off into his own foot; he was arrested in a New York hospital, and the bullet matched those in his victims. At trial he told the jury he was a soldier cleaning up the state of drug dealers.
December 12, 2003. Charles Cullen, a nurse, was arrested outside a restaurant in Bridgewater, New Jersey, and charged with murdering the Rev. Florian Gall, a Roman Catholic priest who had been recovering from pneumonia at Somerset Medical Center when his heart gave out. The autopsy found digoxin, a heart drug he had never been prescribed. For sixteen years Cullen had moved between nine hospitals in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and several had suspected him and let him resign with a neutral reference. He pleaded guilty to twenty-nine murders of patients between 2004 and 2006.
December 13, 1982. The security police in Drama, in northern Greece, arrested Kyriakos Papachronis, a soldier doing his military service. Five days earlier Vasiliki Lazaridou, thirty, a cleaner and mother of four, had been stabbed in the face and the carotid artery by a man who had followed her for days. She survived, and the evidence of survivors identified him. Over two years he had raped and stabbed women in Drama, Xanthi and Kavala, most of them prostitutes, among the dead Anastasia Alexandridou, and set off homemade bombs. Sentenced twice to death, later commuted, he was released from Larissa prison in 2004.
December 14, 2003. Two days after his arrest, Charles Cullen began telling New Jersey detectives that he had killed patients for sixteen years, and in the interviews that followed he admitted to about forty. A nurse who had worked at nine hospitals in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, he gave patients overdoses of digoxin and insulin, often by injecting them into IV bags. Among the dead were Michael Strenko, twenty-one, and Judge John Yengo Sr., seventy-two. Some estimates run to hundreds. He pleaded guilty to twenty-nine murders in return for avoiding death, and is serving life terms in both states.
December 15, 1996. Joe Metheny, a forklift operator at a pallet company in south Baltimore, was arrested. A week earlier Rita Kemper had been with him in a trailer on the company lot when, prosecutors said, she refused to have sex with him and ran; he chased her down, beat her and dragged her back, telling her he would kill her and bury her. She escaped and went to the police. Metheny then confessed to killing several people, and the remains of two women were found on the lot, Kimberly Spicer and Cathy Magaziner. He claimed he had mixed human flesh into meat sold at a roadside barbecue stand. He died in prison in 2017.
December 16, 2009. Brian Dugan was sentenced to death in DuPage County, Illinois, by some accounts on this date, for the 1983 murder of Jeanine Nicarico. She was ten and home sick from school in Naperville when someone broke in and took her in broad daylight, and she was found raped and beaten two days later. Two other men, Rolando Cruz and Alejandro Hernandez, were sentenced to death for her murder and spent more than a decade in prison before they were cleared. Dugan, already serving life for killing Donna Schnorr, twenty-seven, and Melissa Ackerman, seven, admitted the crime. His sentence was commuted to life in 2011.
December 17, 1986. Richard Kuklinski was arrested at a roadblock in New Jersey after an eighteen-month undercover operation in which an ATF agent, Dominick Polifrone, posing as a criminal named Dominic Provenzano, recorded him talking about cyanide and contract killings. In 1983 the medical examiner had found ice crystals in the body of Louis Masgay, fifty, missing for two years, which earned Kuklinski the name the Iceman. He was convicted of five murders, among them Gary Smith and Daniel Deppner, and later told interviewers he had carried out one to two hundred killings for the Mafia, none corroborated. He died in prison in 2006.
December 18, 1991. Marcelo Costa de Andrade was arrested in Niterói, across the bay from Rio de Janeiro. Two days earlier two brothers from a poor district of São Gonçalo, Altair Medeiros de Abreu, ten, and his younger brother Ivan, sons of a maid, were stopped at the central station by a man who offered them money to help him light candles. He killed Altair and let Ivan go, and Ivan led police to him. That year he had killed fourteen boys aged about six to thirteen in the hills, saying he was sending them to heaven. Declared not criminally responsible, he has been held in forensic asylums since 1993.
December 19, 1982. Steven Agan, twenty-three, was abducted in Terre Haute, Indiana; his body was found later in a field. Larry Eyler, a house painter from Terre Haute who was already on Illinois's death row for murdering Danny Bridges, fifteen, in Chicago in 1984, pleaded guilty to Agan's murder in 1990 and received sixty years. In his plea he named a former friend, Robert David Little, an Indiana State University professor, as his accomplice. Little was tried for the killing and acquitted. Eyler died of AIDS at Pontiac prison in 1994, and his lawyer then released his confession to twenty-one killings.
December 20, 2006. Gong Runbo was shot in Jiamusi, Heilongjiang, by some early reports on this date; the court's record gives December 31. Less than ten months earlier he had been arrested for the murders of six children he lured from internet cafes to a room he rented in a back alley, among them Wang Shengli, nine, whose scent a police dog followed to the gate of his courtyard; the landlady drove the detectives away and the body stayed inside. Gong had served eight years for raping a girl before his release. He was sentenced to death by the Jiamusi Intermediate People's Court that July.
December 21, 1978. John Wayne Gacy was arrested in Des Plaines, Illinois, on a drug charge while police obtained a second search warrant for his house on West Summerdale Avenue. Ten days earlier Robert Piest, fifteen, had disappeared after telling his mother he was going to talk to a contractor about a job at the pharmacy where he worked. Investigators who had been watching Gacy smelled decay in the house, and that night they began digging in the crawl space. Twenty-nine bodies were found on the property and four in rivers. Gacy was convicted of thirty-three murders. Five of the victims have never been identified.
December 22, 1978. In the coal town of Shakhty, Andrei Chikatilo, a teacher, lured nine-year-old Yelena Zakotnova to a run-down hut he had secretly bought, tried to rape her and strangled and stabbed her, then threw her body into the Grushevka River. Another man, Aleksandr Kravchenko, who had a previous conviction, was arrested, confessed under pressure, and was shot by firing squad in 1983. Chikatilo went on killing for twelve years, boys, girls and young women he met at stations and bus stops across southern Russia and beyond. He was convicted of fifty-two murders in 1992 and shot in 1994.
December 24, 2007. At her parents' house in Carnation, Washington, Michele Anderson, twenty-nine, and her boyfriend, Joseph McEnroe, shot dead her father, Wayne, sixty, her mother, Judy, sixty-one, her brother Scott and his wife, Erica, both thirty-two, and Scott and Erica's children, Olivia, five, and Nathan, three. They had come for Christmas Eve. Anderson told police the killings followed a dispute over money. The state abandoned its bid for the death penalty, and in 2016 a King County jury convicted her of six counts of aggravated murder. She did not speak before she was sentenced to six consecutive life terms.
December 25, 1980. Aleksandr Rubel was born in Estonia. In 1997 and 1998, at sixteen and seventeen, he killed seven people in Tallinn, among them a disabled neighbor, a man he decapitated in the street, and Alice Siivas, fifteen. Because he was a minor, the most an Estonian court could give him was eight years, and he was convicted in February 1999 of six or seven murders, reports differ. On June 8, 2006, at twenty-five, he walked out of Tartu Prison a free man, to wide public alarm in Estonia.
December 26, 2003. Huang Yong was shot in Henan province, six weeks after his arrest. A sixteen-year-old, Zhang Liang, had gone home with him in Pingyu County in November, survived an attempt to kill him by promising to bring Huang more boys, and went to the police. Huang had lured teenage boys from internet cafes, arcades and video halls with promises of jobs and schooling, tied them to a wooden device he built from a noodle machine and called his hobbyhorse, and strangled them. He was tried on December 9 by the Zhumadian court sitting in Pingyu, convicted of seventeen murders, and did not appeal.
December 27, 2006. Pedro Pablo Nakada Ludeña shot the last of the people he killed in and around Huaral, in the Lima region of Peru, over two years beginning January 1, 2005, with a nine-millimeter pistol, often fitted with a homemade silencer. He chose people he took to be drug users, gay men and sex workers, and he said God had sent him to clean up Peru. Among the dead were Carlos Merino Aguilar, twenty-six, and Teresa Cotrina Abad. He was arrested the next day at the auto repair shop where he worked, and he told the police he had planned to throw a grenade into a discotheque on New Year's Eve.
December 28, 2006. Police in Huaral, Peru, arrested Pedro Pablo Nakada Ludeña at the auto repair shop where he worked. He told them he had been planning to throw a hand grenade into a crowded discotheque on New Year's Eve, admitted shooting people across the province for two years, and asked to be executed by firing squad. He said he had been sent to cleanse the world of drug users, homosexuals and prostitutes, and he claimed twenty-five killings. He was convicted of seventeen and sentenced to thirty-five years, a verdict annulled and reimposed. He was later found not criminally responsible and moved to a prison psychiatric ward.
December 29, 1996. William Darrell Lindsey, a mechanic from Palatka, Florida, was arrested in North Carolina for a killing near the mountain town where he had gone. St. Johns County detectives drove up and obtained confessions to the murders of women around St. Augustine over a decade, many of them sex workers and drug users, among them Anita Stevens, twenty-seven, and Cheryl Lucas, thirty-one. He was indicted for six and linked to eight, and he claimed twelve to twenty. In April 1999, at a hearing called to decide whether those confessions could be used, he pleaded guilty to four second-degree murders. He died in prison in 2001.
December 30, 1989. Louis Bernard Gaskin was arrested in Florida, ten days after he shot Robert Sturmfels, fifty-six, and his wife, Georgette, fifty-five, through a window of their winter home on a cul-de-sac in Palm Coast. The couple were from New Jersey. Dressed in black and carrying a .22 rifle, he had parked in a wooded area, circled the house several times and fired as Robert sat in his recliner and Georgette tried to get out of the room. The same night he shot at Joseph and Mary Rector, who survived. He was sentenced to death in 1990 and executed in April 2023, Florida's hundredth execution since 1976.
December 31, 2007. K. D. Kempamma, known as Mallika and later as Cyanide Mallika, was arrested in Bangalore. Between 1999 and 2007 she met women at temples who were praying over family troubles, presented herself as devout, offered to help with special rituals and gave them water or prasad laced with cyanide, then took their jewelry. Elizabeth, fifty-two, from Satanur, was praying for a missing granddaughter when Mallika brought her to the Kabalamma temple. Six women died, among them Mamatha Rajan, thirty. Her death sentence for the murder of Nagaveni was reduced to life by the Karnataka High Court in 2012.