January 1, 1995. Frederick West took his own life in his remand cell at Winson Green prison in Birmingham on New Year’s Day. He was fifty-three, a Gloucester builder awaiting trial on twelve counts of murder, among them the deaths of his first wife, Catherine (Rena) Costello, his stepdaughter Charmaine, who was eight, and his daughter Heather, sixteen, who had not been seen since 1987. He had been arrested in February 1994. The next morning John Boddington of the Prison Officers' Association went on LBC and IRN radio to discuss the decision to end regular checks on the prisoner, and on January 3 Detective Superintendent John Bennett told a news conference that the costly inquiry would go on. West’s death ended the proceedings against him, and no jury ever heard the case. His wife, Rosemary, faced the charges alone, and later in 1995 a jury at Winchester Crown Court convicted her of ten of the murders.
January 2, 1981. Sergeant Robert Ring and Constable Robert Hydes of South Yorkshire Police arrested Peter William Sutcliffe in the Broomhill district of Sheffield after a routine check showed that the number plates on his car were false. He was a thirty-four-year-old truck driver from Heaton, Bradford, born in Bingley in 1946. Two days later, at Dewsbury police station, he confessed to the killings of women that had frightened the North of England since 1975. At the Central Criminal Court in London he pleaded guilty to seven attempted murders, and on May 22, 1981, a jury convicted him of thirteen murders; Mr. Justice Boreham passed twenty concurrent life sentences and recommended a minimum of thirty years. He was moved to Broadmoor Hospital in 1984, received a whole life order in July 2010 and was returned to prison at HMP Frankland in 2016. He died at the University Hospital of North Durham on November 13, 2020.
January 3, 2008. Chief Judge Donald Hudson of the 16th Judicial Circuit in Illinois sentenced Edward L. Tenney of Aurora to life in prison without parole for the murder of Virginia Johannessen, who died in Aurora Township on January 2, 1993. A Kane County jury had convicted him at a retrial the previous September, after the Illinois Supreme Court reversed his first conviction and death sentence in 2002. Another man had earlier been convicted of the same killing; that conviction was vacated in 1995, after Tenney’s cousin, Donald Lippert, was arrested by an FBI task force and confessed. Tenney was already serving natural life for the 1993 murder of his neighbor Mary Jill Oberweis, fifty-six. In March 2010 a DuPage County jury convicted him of the murder of Jerry D. Weber, twenty-four, and sentenced him to death. Governor Pat Quinn commuted that sentence, with fourteen others, to life without parole on March 9, 2011, the day Illinois abolished capital punishment.
January 4, 2008. Meredith Hope Emerson, twenty-four, a University of Georgia graduate, died in Dawson County, Georgia, on the date later set out in the indictment against Gary Michael Hilton. Hilton, sixty-one, was a drifter and survivalist who lived in his van and camped in the national forests of Georgia, North Carolina and Florida. He was detained in the first days of January and charged with kidnapping her. On January 31 he was indicted and pleaded guilty to her murder, and he was sentenced to life with parole possible after thirty years. In February 2011 a Leon County, Florida, jury convicted him of the first-degree murder of Cheryl Hodges Dunlap, forty-six, and Judge James C. Hankinson sentenced him to death that April. In federal court in Asheville he pleaded guilty in 2012 to the murders of John and Irene Bryant on national forest land and received four life terms in 2013. The Eleventh Circuit affirmed the denial of his federal habeas petition on April 1, 2026.
January 5, 1990. Arthur John Shawcross, forty-four, was charged in Rochester, New York, with eight murders and pleaded not guilty in Rochester City Court. State police had taken him into custody the day before. He had been on parole since April 30, 1987, when he left Green Haven Correctional Facility after serving a sentence for first-degree manslaughter in the 1972 death of Karen Ann Hill, eight, in Watertown; he had also admitted the death that year of a ten-year-old Watertown boy, Jack O. Blake, which never came to court. A Monroe County grand jury indicted him on January 23, 1990, for the murders of ten women killed since March 1988. On December 13, 1990, a jury rejected his insanity defense and convicted him of ten counts of second-degree murder, and in March 1991 he pleaded guilty in Wayne County to the murder of Elizabeth Gibson, twenty-nine. He died on November 10, 2008, after he was taken from Sullivan Correctional Facility to Albany Medical Center.
January 6, 1987. Kimberly Ann Ruggles, a cab driver in Fayetteville, North Carolina, was killed on the night of January 6, and her death came to light on Fort Bragg the next day. That month Ronald Adrin Gray, twenty-one, an Army cook with the 82nd Airborne Division, was arrested and linked to a series of crimes in and around the post. In November 1987 he pleaded guilty in Cumberland County Superior Court to the second-degree murders of Linda Jean Coats and Tammy Wilson and to other felonies, and received three consecutive and five concurrent life terms. A general court-martial at Fort Bragg then convicted him of the premeditated murders of Ruggles and of Private Laura Lee Vickery-Clay, with other offenses, and on April 12, 1988, sentenced him to death. President George W. Bush approved the sentence on July 28, 2008; an execution set for December 10 that year was stayed on November 26. As of June 2026 he was held on military death row at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, with no execution date.
January 7, 2008. Additional Sessions Judge I. S. Bajwa in Jalandhar, Punjab, sentenced Darbara Singh to death for the murders, with other charges, of two young cousins, Khursheed, about five, and Ronku, about six, who had gone missing in the city in October 2004. Singh, a former serviceman from a village near Beas, had been freed from the Ludhiana Central Jail on a mercy petition in December 2003. After his arrest on October 29, 2004, he told police he had killed seventeen children, fifteen girls and two boys. Within two days of the sentence he was moved to the Patiala Central Jail. On April 25, 2008, another judge in Jalandhar sentenced him to life for the murder, with other charges, of eight-year-old Diksha. The Punjab and Haryana High Court declined to confirm the death sentence and acquitted him in the cousins' case on July 30, 2009, criticizing the methods of the inquiry, but in February 2013 it upheld the life sentence for Diksha’s murder.
January 8, 2010. The death of Ardiansyah, a nine-year-old boy who lived on the streets of Jakarta, came to light in East Jakarta. The next day police arrested Baekuni, a man known as Babe, at the house he rented in Pulogadung, after the boy’s parents pointed officers toward him, and he confessed to killing fourteen boys over many years. Born in Magelang, Central Java, he was about forty-nine. Indonesia’s National Commission for Child Protection put the number of children killed at fifteen or more. On October 6, 2010, the East Jakarta District Court convicted him of premeditated murder, with other charges, and sentenced him to life in prison. The Jakarta High Court raised the sentence to death on December 13, 2010, and the Supreme Court rejected his cassation appeal on April 21, 2011, a decision that was not made public until May 2013. As of September 2022 he was held at Cipinang prison in Jakarta, awaiting execution.
January 9, 1991. Aileen Carol Wuornos was arrested at a biker bar in the Daytona Beach area of Florida on an outstanding warrant for carrying a concealed firearm. Investigators from several counties had been comparing the deaths of men along the state’s highways since the previous September. A week later, in a videotaped statement at the Volusia County Branch Jail, she confessed, and she was charged with the murder of Richard Mallory. A jury in DeLand convicted her of his first-degree murder and armed robbery on January 27, 1992. She went on to plead no contest or guilty in the deaths of Charles Humphreys, Troy Burress, David Spears, Charles Carskaddon and Walter Antonio, and she received six death sentences in all. In 2001 she told a judge she had killed the men to rob them. After the Florida Supreme Court allowed her to drop her remaining appeals, Governor Jeb Bush signed her death warrant, and she was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison on October 9, 2002.
January 10, 2018. The second trial of Mikhail Popkov, a former police officer from Angarsk in Siberia’s Irkutsk Region, opened behind closed doors at the Irkutsk Regional Court. He was already serving a life sentence: on January 14, 2015, the same court had convicted him of twenty-two murders of women, along with attempted murder, more than two years after his arrest near Vladivostok in June 2012. After that verdict he began confessing to scores of other killings, and the new case charged him with about sixty more. On December 10, 2018, he was convicted of fifty-six murders, fifty-five of women and one of a fellow police officer, given a second life term and stripped of his rank of junior lieutenant. Further verdicts followed in 2021, 2023 and 2025, each folded into the life sentence, and in March 2026 the Irkutsk Regional Court rejected his appeal against the last of them. In April 2026 he was reported moved to a special-regime colony in Mordovia.
January 11, 1996. Police in Vienna arrested Elfriede Blauensteiner early in the morning. She was a sixty-four-year-old widow with long-running money troubles, one of six children raised in the city’s Favoriten district. In the days that followed she confessed to five murders, one of them as an accomplice, and within about a month she withdrew the confessions before the investigating judge. In 1997 the regional court at Krems convicted her of murdering Alois Pichler, who had died in Lower Austria in November 1995, and sentenced her to life imprisonment; her memoirs appeared the same year. A Vienna court convicted her in 2001 of the murders of her neighbor Franziska Köberl and her companion Friedrich Döcker, and the Supreme Court upheld those verdicts on December 17, 2001. Other deaths she had first admitted were not charged. She died of the effects of a brain tumor on November 16, 2003, after six years in the women’s prison at Schwarzau.
January 12, 1948. In Tokyo, the deaths of infants in the care of the Kotobuki maternity home in Shinjuku Ward came to light. Its director was Miyuki Ishikawa, a licensed midwife born in 1897 and trained at the Tokyo Imperial University hospital. She, her husband and the undertaker were arrested on January 15, and on January 26 the couple and an assistant midwife were indicted for murder. Prosecutors told the court that eighty-four infants had died at the home between April 1946 and January 1948; police and press estimates of the total ran higher. On October 11, 1948, the Tokyo District Court convicted the couple in five deaths that it held were caused by omission and sentenced Ishikawa to eight years; the Tokyo High Court cut the term to four years in 1952. The case was debated in the House of Representatives that February and fed into the national regulation of maternity homes. She died in May 1987, aged ninety.
January 13, 1928. Earle Leonard Nelson was hanged at the Vaughan Street Jail in Winnipeg, Manitoba, by the hangman Arthur Ellis. Born in San Francisco, he had crossed into Canada in June 1927 and was arrested near Wakopa, Manitoba, on June 15 by the Manitoba Provincial Police; he got away from the town lockup at Killarney the same day and was taken again the next morning. A Winnipeg jury rejected his insanity defense in November 1927 and convicted him of the murder of Emily Patterson, twenty-seven. He was never tried for the death of a Winnipeg girl, Lola Cowan, that same month, or for the twenty or more deaths of women, and of one infant, that American police and newspapers attributed to him in 1926 and 1927, in cities from San Francisco and Portland to Philadelphia, Buffalo, Detroit and Chicago. Newspapers of the day called him the Gorilla Man.
January 14, 1982. Three days after his trial opened in British Columbia, the public learned that the province had agreed to pay $100,000 into a trust for the wife and infant son of Clifford Robert Olson in return for his cooperation with the investigation into the deaths of children and young people around Vancouver. The arrangement had been made in August 1981, soon after his arrest on Vancouver Island on August 12. Olson, forty-two, faced ten counts of first-degree murder when the trial began on January 11, and within three days he pleaded guilty to eleven; Justice H.C. McKay imposed eleven concurrent life terms and recommended that he never be released. Families of seven of the victims sued over the trust in 1984 and lost in the B.C. Court of Appeal in 1986. A jury rejected his faint-hope application in 1997, the parole board refused him in 2006 and again in 2010, and he died of cancer in federal custody in Quebec on September 30, 2011.
January 15, 2007. Officers of a joint task force arrested Altemio C. Sanchez after a traffic stop in Buffalo, New York. He was a factory worker from Cheektowaga, born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, married and the father of two, and investigators had matched his DNA to the man the region had called the Bike Path Rapist for years. Police had interviewed him in 1990 and let him go. On May 16, 2007, he pleaded guilty to three counts of second-degree murder for the deaths of Linda Yalem, twenty-two, in Amherst in 1990, Majane Mazur, thirty-two, in Buffalo in 1992, and Joan Diver, forty-five, in 2006, and Justice Christopher Burns sentenced him to the maximum, seventy-five years to life. Prosecutors tied him to at least eight sexual assaults that were never charged, including two 1984 cases for which another man had been wrongly convicted; that man’s convictions were vacated on April 2, 2007. Sanchez died in state custody on September 22, 2023, a death the Commission of Correction classed as suicide.
January 16, 2020. In the 399th State District Court in San Antonio, Genene Jones, sixty-nine, a former licensed vocational nurse, pleaded guilty to murdering eleven-month-old Joshua Sawyer, who died in the pediatric intensive care unit of the Bexar County hospital on December 12, 1981. Judge Frank J. Castro sentenced her to life, with twenty years to serve before she could first seek parole, and four other murder charges brought in 2017 were dismissed under the agreement. Jones had been in prison since 1984, when a jury in Georgetown convicted her of the murder of fifteen-month-old Chelsea McClellan, a patient at a Kerrville clinic, and set her punishment at ninety-nine years; that October a judge added a concurrent sixty years for injury to a child, a four-week-old boy who survived. A 1977 mandatory release law had set her release for March 1, 2018, and the new prosecutions began as that date drew near. An appeal was dismissed in August 2021.
January 17, 2000. Police in St. Petersburg arrested Maxim Vladimirovich Petrov, an emergency ambulance medic born in 1965, as he tried to enter the home of an elderly resident where officers were waiting. He had been robbing elderly people in their homes since 1997, and from 1999 some of the pensioners he visited died. He spent nearly five years in the Kresty remand prison while his case went to trial before Judge Valentina Kudryashova of the St. Petersburg City Court, which convicted him of multiple murder, attempted murder and robbery and sentenced him to life on November 21, 2003. The Supreme Court of Russia upheld the sentence on June 24, 2004, and he was sent to the penal colony at Solikamsk known as the White Swan. In 2012 the European Court of Human Rights awarded him 15,000 euros over his conditions of detention and police statements made before his trial. Russian outlets in 2025 counted eleven murders, and that March he was reported to be seeking parole, which the regional prison service said was not expected soon.
January 18, 2018. Texas executed Anthony Allen Shore by lethal injection at Huntsville, the first execution in the United States that year; he was pronounced dead at 6:28 p.m. Shore, fifty-five, a native of Pennington County, South Dakota, had worked in Houston as a tow truck driver and telephone company repairman. He was condemned for the 1992 capital murder of Maria del Carmen Estrada, twenty-one, after his DNA, entered in the state database following a 1998 plea in an unrelated case, connected him to her death in 2003. He then confessed to her killing and to three others: Laurie Tremblay in 1986, Diana Rebollar, nine, in 1994, and Dana Sanchez, sixteen, in 1995. Those deaths were never separately charged but were proved to the jury at the punishment phase of his 2004 trial. His conviction was affirmed in 2007 and his federal appeals ended in 2017. An execution set for October 18, 2017, had been withdrawn hours before it was due.
January 19, 1952. Carlos Eduardo Robledo Puch was born into a middle-class family in the northern suburbs of Greater Buenos Aires. Reports drawing on the prison service mark his birthday on January 19, while La Nación has given January 22. Between March 1971 and February 1972, robberies in Olivos, Vicente López, Boulogne, Martínez and Carupá cost eleven people their lives, among them Virginia Rodríguez, sixteen, and Ana María Dinardo, twenty-three. He was arrested on February 3, 1972, and the press named him the Angel of Death. On November 27, 1980, the San Isidro appeals court convicted him of ten aggravated homicides and one simple homicide, with an attempted homicide, seventeen robberies and other crimes, and imposed reclusión perpetua with indefinite detention. He has denied the killings. Requests for release were refused repeatedly, and in November 2024, more than fifty-two years after his arrest, a court granted him an open regime subject to his consent; he declined it, saying he had grown used to prison.
January 20, 1988. Arlington County detective Joe Horgas arrested Timothy Wilson Spencer at a Richmond halfway house on a burglary indictment. Spencer, born in 1962, had grown up in Arlington and had been released to the halfway house in September 1987, shortly before a series of killings of women in Richmond, Chesterfield County and Arlington. In March 1988 a private laboratory reported a DNA match, and Virginia juries went on to convict him of the capital murders of Susan Tucker, forty-four, Debbie Dudley Davis, thirty-five, Dr. Susan Hellams, thirty-two, and Diane Cho, fifteen, returning four death sentences. Investigators also attributed to him the 1984 death of Carolyn Hamm in Arlington, a case in which another man had entered an Alford plea and received thirty-five years; the governor pardoned that man on January 4, 1989. Spencer was executed in the electric chair at Greensville Correctional Center on April 27, 1994. The case became a landmark in the use of DNA evidence in American courts.
January 21, 2016. Derrick Todd Lee, forty-seven, died shortly before 9 a.m. at a hospital where he had been taken from the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola for emergency care five days earlier. He had been on death row since October 2004, and the West Feliciana Parish coroner’s office later gave the cause as heart disease. Lee, of St. Francisville, was arrested in Atlanta on May 27, 2003. In 2004 two juries convicted him, first of the second-degree murder of Geralyn Barr DeSoto, twenty-one, for which he received life at hard labor, then of the first-degree murder of Charlotte Murray Pace, twenty-two, for which he was formally sentenced to death on December 10, 2004. The Louisiana Supreme Court affirmed the Pace judgment in 2008. DNA linked him to the deaths of Gina Wilson Green, Pam Kinamore, Trineisha Dené Colomb and Carrie Lynn Yoder, which were put to the Pace jury as evidence of other crimes but never tried.
January 22, 2007. The first trial of Robert William Pickton, a pig farmer from Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, opened in New Westminster. Arrested in February 2002, he stood charged with twenty-six counts of first-degree murder involving women from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, and Justice James Williams had severed six of them for the first trial. On December 9, 2007, the jury convicted him of second-degree murder in the deaths of Sereena Abotsway, Mona Wilson, Andrea Joesbury, Brenda Ann Wolfe, Georgina Faith Papin and Marnie Frey, and two days later he received life with no parole eligibility for twenty-five years. After the Supreme Court of Canada dismissed his appeal on July 30, 2010, the Crown stayed the remaining twenty charges. A provincial inquiry led by Wally Oppal reported in 2012 on the failures of the police investigation. Pickton died in hospital on May 31, 2024, aged seventy-four, after another inmate assaulted him in prison in Quebec.
January 23, 1978. Teresa Wallin, twenty-two, was killed in Sacramento, California, the second of six people Richard Trenton Chase was convicted of killing between December 29, 1977, and January 27, 1978. Chase, twenty-seven, was unemployed and lived alone in an apartment; he had spent years in and out of psychiatric care and had been diagnosed with severe schizophrenia in 1975. He was taken into custody outside the apartment after the deaths of Evelyn Miroth, thirty-eight, her six-year-old son Jason, Daniel Meredith, fifty-one, and an infant, David Ferreira. Tried in Santa Clara County after a change of venue, he was convicted on May 8, 1979, of six counts of first-degree murder, the first having been Ambrose Griffin, fifty-one; the jury held him legally sane and fixed the penalty at death. He died in his cell at San Quentin on December 26, 1980, at thirty, and was never executed. In 2014 a Sacramento haunted house dropped a theme based on the killings after the Wallin family objected.
January 24, 1989. Theodore Robert Bundy was executed in the electric chair at Florida State Prison in Starke and pronounced dead at 7:16 a.m., aged forty-two. A crowd gathered outside to cheer, United Press International reported. A jury in Miami had convicted him in July 1979 of the murders of Margaret Bowman and Lisa Levy, killed in Tallahassee in January 1978, and another in Orlando in February 1980 of the murder of Kimberly Leach of Lake City; he was sentenced to death in both cases, and the Florida Supreme Court affirmed the judgments in 1984 and 1985. A stay in November 1986 came hours before an earlier execution date. In the days before his death he confessed to investigators from Utah, Washington and the FBI to about thirty killings in several states. A Colorado murder charge over the death of Caryn Campbell was never tried. Bundy had been arrested in Pensacola on February 15, 1978, after escaping twice from custody in Colorado.
January 25, 2006. Police in Mexico City arrested Juana Barraza Samperio, forty-eight, in the Venustiano Carranza borough minutes after the death of Ana María de los Reyes Alfaro, when a neighbor alerted a patrol and officers caught her after a short chase. Since 2003 the capital had been hunting a killer of elderly women whom the press called the Mataviejitas,. Barraza, born in Epazoyucan, Hidalgo, had wrestled professionally as the Lady of Silence. The next day the city’s attorney general tied her to ten homicides and one attempt. On March 31, 2008, she was convicted of sixteen homicides and twelve aggravated robberies against elderly people and sentenced to 759 years and seventeen days, though Mexico City law then capped the time served at fifty years. In a 2024 television interview she said she was innocent and had confessed under threats. In September 2026 she was seen in a wheelchair at the Tepepan women’s prison.
January 26, 1974. Katie Smith, seventeen, of Detroit, was killed in the Bahamas, the third American to die in a series of killings that Michiah Shobek, a handyman from Milwaukee, later confessed. Paul Howell, fifty, a lawyer from Massillon, Ohio, had been killed in Nassau on December 5, 1973, and Irwin Bornstein, forty-four, a New York accountant, earlier in January 1974. Shobek was tried and convicted of Bornstein’s murder; United Press International reported that he was also charged with the other two deaths, which never came to trial. He was sentenced to death in September 1975, and about a year before his execution a scheduled hanging was put off, hours ahead, to allow more time for appeals. After the conviction was affirmed and the Committee for the Prerogative of Mercy refused clemency, a final telephone appeal to the White House failed. He was hanged at Fox Hill Prison, east of Nassau, on October 19, 1976, aged twenty-two.
January 27, 2016. The Delhi High Court upheld the convictions of Chandrakant Jha in three murder cases and commuted his two death sentences to imprisonment for the rest of his natural life without remission. Jha, from a village in Madhepura district, Bihar, had moved to Delhi in 1990. Arrested in Alipur, north Delhi, on May 20, 2007, he was tried before Additional Sessions Judge Kamini Lau at the Rohini Courts, who convicted him on January 24, 2013, of murdering Anil Mandal, known as Amit, a man named Upender and a third man whose identity the courts held was not proved, and of destroying evidence. She sentenced him to death in two cases and to life for the rest of his life in the third. Justices Sanjiv Khanna and R.K. Gauba delivered three judgments, one for each case. Delhi Police attributed further deaths to him that did not end in convictions. Paroled for ninety days in October 2023, he failed to surrender and was rearrested at Old Delhi Railway Station on January 17, 2025.
January 28, 1829. William Burke was hanged in the Lawnmarket in Edinburgh. An Irish laborer, militia soldier and cobbler born about 1793 near Strabane, County Tyrone, he had lived in the city’s West Port since late 1826. On December 25, 1828, after a trial in the High Court of Justiciary that opened on Christmas Eve, a jury convicted him of murdering Margery Campbell or Docherty, an elderly Irishwoman, in his house on October 31; on the charge against the woman who lived with him, it returned a verdict of not proven. In confessions made in January 1829 he admitted sixteen killings between February and November 1828, most of them with William Hare, for the sale of the bodies to the anatomist Robert Knox. Hare was never tried. He was released on February 5, 1829, after the High Court ended a private prosecution brought by the mother and sister of one victim, James Wilson. Public anger over the case helped bring about the Anatomy Act of 1832, which regulated the supply of bodies to schools of anatomy.
January 29, 2002. Stephen Wayne Anderson, forty-eight, was executed by lethal injection at San Quentin State Prison. Three days earlier Governor Gray Davis had denied clemency, although members of the victim’s family had said they did not seek his death. Anderson had walked away from the Utah State Prison in November 1979, and on May 26, 1980, San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputies arrested him inside the Bloomington, California, home of Elizabeth Lyman, eighty-one, who had been killed there that night. A jury convicted him of first-degree murder with a burglary special circumstance and sentenced him to death in 1981. The California Supreme Court set aside the special circumstance and the penalty in 1985, a second jury restored both in 1986, and the court affirmed in 1990. He also confessed to two killings in Utah that were never charged, of a fellow inmate in 1977 and of Timothy Glashien in 1980; Utah police announced in 2015 that the Glashien case was solved.
January 30, 1905. Police in New York arrested Johann Otto Hoch at a Manhattan boardinghouse where he was living as Henry Bartels, and he was returned to Chicago. Hoch, the best known of the many names he used, had married Marie Walcker in Chicago in December 1904. She died on January 12, 1905, and four days later he married her sister, took $750 from her and disappeared. A German prosecutor had identified him in 1898 as Jacob Schmidt, a merchant born near Bingen. His trial for Marie Walcker’s murder opened on April 19, 1905, and a month later the jury convicted him. He was hanged at the Cook County jail on February 23, 1906. He was suspected, but never tried, in the 1895 death of Caroline Hoch, his wife in Wheeling, West Virginia, and in the deaths of other women he had married under a string of names; the suspicions of a Wheeling pastor helped bring about his capture.
January 31, 2000. A jury at Preston Crown Court convicted Harold Frederick Shipman, a family doctor in Hyde, Greater Manchester, of murdering fifteen women patients between March 1995 and June 1998 and of forging the will of one of them, Kathleen Grundy, eighty-one. Mr Justice Forbes passed fifteen life sentences and said that life must mean life. The next day the health secretary, Alan Milburn, announced an inquiry, and in July 2002 the Shipman Inquiry under Dame Janet Smith concluded that he had killed at least 215 patients between 1975 and 1998; its final report in January 2005 put the toll at about 250. Shipman, who had practiced alone in Hyde since 1992, was arrested on September 7, 1998, after a suspected forgery of Kathleen Grundy’s will was reported to police. He was never tried for the other deaths. He took his own life in his cell at HMP Wakefield on January 13, 2004, the day before his fifty-eighth birthday.
February 1, 2011. The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office charged Chester Dewayne Turner, already under sentence of death, with four more murders. The new complaint named Elandra Bunn, killed in June 1987; Debra Williams and Mary Edwards, both killed late in 1992; and Cynthia Annette Johnson, killed in February 1997, all in Los Angeles. Turner, a former pizza delivery driver, had been identified through DNA in 2003, and in April 2007 a jury convicted him of the first-degree murders of ten women in South Los Angeles and the downtown Skid Row district between 1987 and 1998. Two of the four new cases were deaths for which another man had been convicted in 1995; the same DNA review that pointed to Turner had cleared him. A second jury convicted Turner of all four murders in June 2014, and on August 1, 2014, he received four more death sentences. In November 2020 the California Supreme Court affirmed the first judgment, reversing a single count.
February 2, 2005. The Appellate Court of the Supreme People’s Court in Ho Chi Minh City rejected the appeal of Lê Thanh Vân and upheld her death sentence on all three charges: murder, robbery and illegal possession of poison. The Bình Dương Provincial People’s Court had convicted her on September 1, 2004, of killing 13 people in southern Vietnam between January 1998 and August 2001. The dead included an elderly woman whose family employed her, a landlord, the mother of the man she lived with, her own brother-in-law and an old friend, and she took their money, motorbikes, land and businesses. Vân had a long record of fraud and passed herself off as a dentist trained in Germany. Police held her in July 2000 but released her on bail in January 2001, and four more people died before she was arrested again in October 2001. The appeal court cut her co-defendant’s term from 21 years to 17. Clemency was refused that October, and she was executed by firing squad at Thủ Dầu Một on the morning of October 26, 2005.
February 3, 1903. Amelia Sach and Annie Walters were hanged together at Holloway Prison in London, the first women executed there and the last two women hanged side by side in Britain. Sach, about 30, ran a lying-in home in East Finchley where unmarried women could give birth in private and, for a fee, leave their babies to be placed for adoption. Walters, a midwife in her fifties who lodged in Islington, collected the infants. In November 1902 Walters was arrested over the death of a boy born four days earlier at the Finchley home. Both women were tried for his murder, Sach as an accessory, and both were convicted. They were suspected of killing many more children, but no other death was charged or tried, and no number was ever established. Holloway had held only women since 1902, and theirs was the first of five hangings carried out inside its walls. By one minute past nine that morning, the writer Laura Thompson records, both sentences had been carried out.
February 4, 1986. Marybeth Tinning went with two police officers in Schenectady, New York, to be questioned about the death of her daughter Tami Lynne, four months old, who had died on December 20, 1985. Tami Lynne was the ninth of Tinning’s children to die young. The eight before her had died between January 1972 and March 1981, and their deaths had been recorded as natural or unexplained. Questioned by William Barnes of the State Police, she gave oral, written and stenographic statements admitting that she had killed Tami Lynne and two of her sons, Timothy and Nathan. She was arrested just after midnight and charged with second-degree murder. At trial she said the statement had been obtained improperly. On July 17, 1987, a jury acquitted her of intentional murder but convicted her of depraved indifference murder, and she was sentenced to 20 years to life. No other death was ever charged. After six refusals she was granted parole in July 2018 and walked out of Taconic Correctional Facility on August 21, 2018.
February 5, 1993. In Pasco County, Florida, Circuit Judge Wayne L. Cobb sentenced Aileen Wuornos to death for the murder of Charles Carskaddon. It was her sixth death sentence; the day before, Judge Royce Agner had imposed the fifth in Dixie County for the murder and robbery of Walter Antonio. Wuornos, a Michigan-born drifter who worked as a roadside prostitute in Florida, had pleaded guilty in the Carskaddon case in June 1992, telling the court she was pleading guilty in self-defense. In January 1993 she waived a jury, mitigating evidence and her own presence at the penalty hearing, saying she wanted only to go back to death row and be left alone. A Volusia County jury had already convicted her in January 1992 of murdering Richard Mallory, and she had pleaded no contest to the murders of Charles Humphreys, Troy Burress and David Spears. The Florida Supreme Court affirmed the Pasco sentence in 1995. She later gave up her appeals and was executed at Florida State Prison on October 9, 2002.
February 6, 1980. The murder trial of John Wayne Gacy opened in Chicago before Judge Louis Garippo. Coverage in Cook County had been so heavy that the jury was chosen in Winnebago County, around Rockford, and brought to the city for the trial. Gacy, arrested at Des Plaines in December 1978, faced 33 counts of murder for the deaths of young men and boys between 1972 and 1978. William Kunkle, Robert Egan and Terry Sullivan prosecuted; the defense, led by Sam Amirante, did not seriously contest the killings and argued that he was insane. The state called about sixty witnesses over thirteen days, among them parents and siblings who told the jurors who their sons and brothers had been. In March 1980, after less than two hours, the jury convicted him on every murder count and rejected the insanity defense. It returned death sentences on the twelve killings committed after Illinois restored capital punishment, and the other twenty-one brought natural life. He was executed at Stateville Correctional Center on May 10, 1994.
February 7, 2011. King County Prosecuting Attorney Dan Satterberg charged Gary Ridgway with aggravated first-degree murder in the death of Rebecca Marrero, 20, known to her family as Becky. Ridgway, who painted trucks at the Kenworth plant for three decades, had pleaded guilty in November 2003 to 48 counts of aggravated first-degree murder in the Green River case, most of the killings committed in King County, Washington, between 1982 and 1984. That plea agreement had spared him the death penalty, and its terms barred a death sentence now. "The Marreros have the right to face the man who killed Becky," Satterberg said. On February 18, his 62nd birthday, Ridgway pleaded guilty at the Regional Justice Center in Kent before Judge Mary E. Roberts, who imposed a 49th consecutive life term. Becky’s sister told the court she did not agree with the deal that had saved his life, and when he began to apologize, relatives told him no one wanted to hear it. "I can find no compassion," the judge said.
February 8, 1984. Rożina Zammit, 54, was killed in the early afternoon in Safi, a small village in the south of Malta, and 200 Maltese liri were taken from her. The case went unsolved for two decades. Salvatore Mangion of Zejtun, known as Silvio, was serving a prison term for the 1998 murder of Francesco Cassar and the attempted murder of Cassar’s sister when he talked to a fellow inmate about two older killings. The inmate went to the police, and in 2005 Mangion was arrested and questioned. In 2010 a jury convicted him by eight votes to one of murdering Zammit, with burglary, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment. In 2012 a unanimous jury convicted him of the 1986 murder of Maria Stella Magrin, and he received a second life term, so that the prosecutions ran in the reverse order of the killings. During his last trial he was described as a certified schizophrenic patient at Mount Carmel Hospital. A prosecutor suggested at the 2012 sentencing that he might be responsible for a fourth killing; no charge followed.
February 9, 2015. The Hohhot Intermediate People’s Court in Inner Mongolia announced its judgment against Zhao Zhihong, convicting him of intentional homicide, with other charges, and of robbery and theft, and sentencing him to death. The case was bound up with that of Hugjiltu, an 18-year-old executed in 1996 for the killing of a woman surnamed Yang in Hohhot. Zhao, taken into custody in October 2005, had said he was responsible, and in December 2014 the Inner Mongolia Higher People’s Court declared Hugjiltu not guilty. At a closed hearing in November 2006 prosecutors had left the 1996 killing out of the charges, and Zhao himself raised the omission. His appeal was rejected in April 2015. Reviewing the case, the Supreme People’s Court confirmed 17 crimes between 1996 and 2005 in which six people were killed, but held that Zhao’s guilt in the 1996 killing had not been proved. In 2016 Inner Mongolia announced that 27 officials had been held responsible for the wrongful execution. Zhao was executed at Hohhot on July 30, 2019.
February 10, 1978. Sister Godfrieda, born Cécile Bombeke in Wichelen in 1933, was arrested in Wetteren, Belgium, at first on forgery charges linked to prescriptions. The nun, 44, was head nurse of the geriatric ward of a public home in the town, and Time reported that she was first accused of stealing more than $30,000 from elderly patients. Held in jail in Ghent, she confessed to killing three residents in her care, Leon Matthys, 81, Irma De Backer, 79, and Maria Vanderginst, 87, and was charged with three murders. She later denied that she had meant to kill anyone. The investigating judge’s file listed 17 people whose deaths she may have caused, and a doctor who helped expose the case put the possible toll at 30; none of those cases was charged. Reporters came from across Europe, while much of the Flemish press, close to the Catholic Church, gave the case little space. In 1980 experts ruled her insane, and she was interned in Melle instead of being tried. Released in 1990, she died in 2019, aged 86.
February 11, 2009. The Dnipropetrovsk Regional Court of Appeal, sitting as the trial court, sentenced Viktor Sayenko and Igor Suprunyuck to life imprisonment for a series of random killings in and around the Ukrainian city in June and July 2007. The judge had begun reading the verdict the day before; the case file ran to 39 volumes. The two men, both 19 when they were arrested on July 23, 2007, had been childhood friends in the Krasny Kamen neighborhood, and by the time of the verdict both denied the crimes. Reports of the judgment differ on Sayenko’s own count. Podrobnosti said the court held that the two killed 18 people together and that Suprunyuck killed three more alone, and a 2026 review citing the verdict gives Sayenko 18 murders. Both were also convicted of robbery and cruelty to animals, and the court described their motive as an aggressive drive to assert themselves. A third defendant, Oleksandr Hanzha, convicted only of robbery, received nine years. The Supreme Court of Ukraine upheld the life sentences on November 24, 2009.
February 12, 2015. In the Fourth District Court in Provo, Utah, Megan Huntsman pleaded guilty to six counts of murder, each a first-degree felony, saying "guilty" six times in a quiet voice. Between 1996 and 2006, while she lived in Pleasant Grove with her husband and three daughters, she had concealed seven pregnancies and given birth alone at home. She admitted killing six of the newborns, and prosecutors accepted her account that the seventh was stillborn. The deaths came to light in Pleasant Grove in April 2014, and she was arrested in West Valley City on April 13. Because the law in force from 1996 to 2006 did not allow it, she could not be charged with aggravated or capital murder. Under the plea agreement prosecutors recommended that the six terms of five years to life run concurrently, but on April 20, 2015, Judge Darold McDade ordered three of them to run consecutively. The Utah Board of Pardons and Parole set her first hearing for April 2064, when she will be 89.
February 13, 1973. Fred Perez, a retired fisherman in his seventies, was killed in Santa Cruz, California, and that afternoon Herbert Mullin, 25, of Felton, was taken into custody. The arrest tied together cases that had seemed unrelated. Between October 13, 1972, and that afternoon Mullin, who had a history of mental illness, had killed 13 people around Santa Cruz and Los Gatos, among them a homeless man, a Catholic priest, a former classmate and his wife, a mother and her two sons, and four young men camping in a state park. He later said voices had told him the deaths would save California from earthquakes. A Santa Cruz jury rejected his insanity defense in 1973 and convicted him of ten murders, two of them in the first degree, and he pleaded guilty to an eleventh in Santa Clara County. He admitted two more that were never charged. Denied parole repeatedly, he died at the California Health Care Facility in Stockton on August 18, 2022, at 75.
February 14, 2004. Yang Xinhai was executed in China after a series of night attacks on farming families in Henan, Anhui, Shandong and Hebei provinces in which, Reuters reported, 67 people died. State television reported the execution. Born in 1968 in Zhengyang County, Henan, Yang was a drifter and former inmate who for about three years moved through the countryside on foot and by bicycle. Each county investigated its own cases until the Ministry of Public Security linked them in August 2003. In November 2003 he was detained in Cangzhou, Hebei, during a police inspection of entertainment venues, and his confession that month was reported by the South China Morning Post as covering 22 cases, with 65 people killed and five seriously injured. He was convicted and sentenced to death, and the sentence was carried out within about three months of his arrest. AFP gave his age at his death as 35 and Reuters as 38, and Reuters called him one of China’s worst serial killers.
February 15, 1978. Early in the morning in Pensacola, Florida, Officer David Lee ran the plate of a Volkswagen and learned that it was stolen. The driver fought him and was taken into custody after a chase. He gave his name as Kenneth Misner and kept up the pretense for almost two days before telling Detective Norman Chapman, "My name is Theodore Robert Bundy." He was wanted in Colorado for escape and murder. In July 1979 Bundy was convicted of the Chi Omega murders of Margaret Bowman, 21, and Lisa Levy, 20, in Tallahassee, and in February 1980 an Orlando jury convicted him of the murder of Kimberly Leach, 12, of Lake City, with kidnapping. Both cases brought death sentences, and the Florida Supreme Court affirmed them. Before he was executed at Florida State Prison on January 24, 1989, he confessed to about 30 killings in seven states. DNA has continued to tie him to cases since his death: in April 2026 the Utah County Sheriff’s Office announced that he had killed Laura Ann Aime, 17, in 1974.
February 16, 2017. The Supreme Court of Canada dismissed, without reasons, Cody Alan Legebokoff’s application for leave to appeal, and his four convictions for first-degree murder became final. A jury in Prince George, British Columbia, had convicted him in September 2014 of the murders of Jill Stacey Stuchenko, 35, Natasha Lynn Montgomery, 23, Cynthia Frances Maas, 35, and Loren Donn Leslie, 15. Legebokoff, from Fort St. James, was 20 when an RCMP constable stopped his pickup north of Vanderhoof in November 2010, and he was charged in the three other deaths in October 2011. Justice Glen Parrett sentenced him to life with no parole eligibility for 25 years. On appeal his new lawyer, Eric Gottardi, did not challenge the evidence, which he called overwhelming, and argued instead that the judge’s private criticism of trial counsel, disclosed only after sentencing, made the trial look unfair. The British Columbia Court of Appeal rejected that argument in September 2016. Early in 2019 he was moved from Kent Institution to medium security at Warkworth Institution in Ontario.
February 17, 1993. Paul Bernardo was arrested in Ontario for the Scarborough rapes and for the murders of Leslie Mahaffy, 14, and Kristen French, 15. Earlier that month the Centre of Forensic Sciences had matched his DNA to the Scarborough attacks; the sample he gave police in 1990 had waited more than two years to be tested. The case broke from inside his marriage. In January 1993 he beat his wife, Karla Homolka, she filed charges against him, and her parents took her out of the couple’s rented house in Port Dalhousie. On September 1, 1995, a Toronto jury convicted Bernardo of the first-degree murders of both girls, with other charges. He was sentenced to life with no parole eligibility for 25 years and in November 1995 was declared a dangerous offender. Justice Archie Campbell’s review of the investigation later set out the failures that let him remain free so long. The Parole Board of Canada refused him parole in 2018, 2021 and November 2024.
February 18, 1949. Olive Durand-Deacon, a 69-year-old widow, was killed at Crawley, Sussex, by John George Haigh, a convicted fraudster who lived at the same South Kensington hotel. Haigh took her valuables, sold her jewelry and had her fur coat cleaned. In a statement to police on February 28 he admitted her death and five others, William Donald McSwan, his parents Donald and Amy McSwan, and Archibald and Rosalie Henderson, and claimed three more that were never confirmed. He was charged only with Mrs. Durand-Deacon’s murder. At Lewes Assizes in July 1949 his counsel asked for the special verdict of guilty but insane, and after a two-day trial before Mr. Justice Humphreys a jury of 11 men and one woman took about a quarter of an hour to reject it. Sentenced to death, he did not appeal, and Albert Pierrepoint hanged him at Wandsworth Prison on August 10, 1949. Haigh had been born in Stamford, Lincolnshire, in 1909 and raised near Wakefield by parents who belonged to the Plymouth Brethren.
February 19, 2026. In the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas in Columbus, Ohio, Judge Karen Phipps sentenced Rebecca Auborn to four consecutive terms of 15 years to life, with a concurrent term for felonious assault, so that she cannot be considered for parole for 60 years. Auborn, a Columbus woman then 35 or 36, had pleaded guilty on December 19, 2025, to four counts of murder for the overdose deaths of four men on the city’s northeast side between January and June 2023, and to felonious assault for a 61-year-old man who survived in December 2022. Prosecutors said the men were robbed of their belongings. Twenty-three further counts, including involuntary manslaughter and drug trafficking, were dismissed under the plea. When he announced the 28-count indictment in October 2023, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost described the deaths as serial killings, and after the sentencing he credited the Bureau of Criminal Investigation and the Columbus police. The hearing took place a day earlier than first scheduled, and the case was prosecuted by Renee Amlin and David Zeyen.
February 20, 2026. Bangkok’s Criminal Court convicted Sararat Rangsiwuthaporn of the premeditated murder of Police Lieutenant Colonel Nipa Saenchan, known as Inspector Pu, who died in Nakhon Pathom on April 1, 2023. The court imposed death and reduced it to life imprisonment because her testimony had been of use. Prosecutors said she planned the killing to conceal her own fraud against the victim, and the court rejected her claim that she had been in Hua Hin that day. It was her second conviction. Sararat, the former wife of a police lieutenant colonel, was arrested in Bangkok on April 25, 2023, after a friend died on a merit-making trip in Ratchaburi, and police went on to link her to fifteen cases since 2015, fourteen of them fatal. By September 22, 2026, the court had convicted her of five murders, three of them carrying death sentences, and acquitted her in three cases; the remaining cases were still pending. She maintains her innocence, and her lawyers have said she will appeal every conviction.
February 21, 2008. After two days of deliberation, a jury of nine men and three women at Ipswich Crown Court convicted Steve Wright of murdering five women in Ipswich, Suffolk: Tania Nicol, Gemma Adams, Anneli Alderton, Annette Nicholls and Paula Clennell. All five had worked in the town’s small red-light district, and all had disappeared between the end of October and the second week of December 2006. Wright, a 49-year-old forklift driver who lived in that district with his partner, had admitted picking the women up but denied killing anyone. The next day Mr Justice Gross imposed a whole life order, telling him that drugs and prostitution had put the women at risk, "but neither drugs nor prostitution killed them. You did." Wright lost his Court of Appeal bid in 2009 and admitted nothing for 18 years. On February 2, 2026, the day his Old Bailey trial was due to open, he pleaded guilty to the 1999 kidnap and murder of Victoria Hall, 17, and on February 6 he was given life with a minimum term of 40 years.
February 22, 2002. Robert William Pickton, 52, a pig farmer from Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, was arrested and charged with the first-degree murders of Sereena Abotsway and Mona Wilson. RCMP officers had gone to the family farm on February 5 with a warrant to look for illegal firearms, and the next day a joint task force sealed off the property. At a two-minute hearing in Port Coquitlam the charges were read to him; he said nothing, and his lawyer, Peter Ritchie, said he was shocked by them. Women had been disappearing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside for years. The murder counts against him rose to 27, and in December 2007 a jury convicted him of the second-degree murders of six women: Abotsway, Wilson, Andrea Joesbury, Brenda Ann Wolfe, Georgina Faith Papin and Marnie Frey. He received life with no parole eligibility for 25 years, and in 2010 the 20 counts still outstanding were stayed. A 2012 commission of inquiry concluded that police failures had let him evade arrest for years. He died in May 2024 after an attack by another inmate.
February 23, 1996. William Bonin was pronounced dead at San Quentin at 12:13 a.m., four minutes after the warden ordered the execution to begin. He was 49, and he was the first prisoner California put to death by lethal injection, in the room that had served as the gas chamber. Bonin, a truck driver and Vietnam veteran from Downey who had served two earlier prison terms and was paroled in 1978, had been convicted by a Los Angeles County jury in January 1982 of the first-degree murders of ten boys and young men, and by an Orange County jury in 1983 of four more. Both juries chose death. Three young men who had been with him on different nights were also convicted and imprisoned. On February 22 the Ninth Circuit affirmed the denial of his final petitions, calling the new claims an abuse of the writ, and refused a stay; Governor Pete Wilson did not grant clemency. He was only the third person executed in California in 30 years, the Associated Press reported.
February 24, 1979. Anatoly Biryukov was executed by shooting, according to Lenta.ru, which wrote that he had only just marked his 40th birthday in the detention facility. Born in Chekhov, in the Moscow Region, on February 18, 1939, the son of Lieutenant General Nikolai Biryukov, a Hero of the Soviet Union, he worked as a fitter at a Moscow construction enterprise. Over about five weeks in September and October 1977, five infants were abducted and killed, three in Moscow and two in Chekhov. An attempted abduction in Chekhov on October 21, 1977, failed, and the child was unhurt; within days Biryukov had been identified and arrested. He confessed to the five killings. Forensic psychiatrists at the Serbsky Institute held him legally sane, and he was sentenced to death. His petitions for clemency, carried as high as the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, were rejected. Life.ru also places the execution in February 1979, while a 2025 account in News.ru gives February 1978.
February 25, 2005. Officers arrested Dennis Rader in Park City, Kansas. More than 200 officers from five agencies took part in the operation, and nine search warrants were served at once on his home, his office and his church. Rader, 59, a Park City code enforcement officer, church council president and Cub Scout leader, had signed letters BTK during a series of killings in and around Wichita between 1974 and 1991. He had begun writing to the press and the police again in March 2004, and a floppy disk he mailed to KSAS-TV that February was traced to his church. "BTK is arrested," Wichita police chief Norman Williams announced the next day. On June 27, 2005, Rader pleaded guilty to ten counts of first-degree murder, and on August 18 Judge Gregory Waller imposed ten consecutive life terms. In August 2025 he was reported still held at El Dorado Correctional Facility.
February 26, 2015. The Landgericht Oldenburg in Lower Saxony convicted Niels Högel, a 38-year-old former intensive care nurse, of two murders, two attempted murders and dangerous bodily harm against patients at the hospital in Delmenhorst, and sentenced him to life imprisonment with a finding of particular gravity of guilt. The court could rule only on the five cases charged, and for three of the patients it could not say whether his acts or their illness had caused their deaths. Högel had been stopped at Delmenhorst in June 2005, when a colleague raised the alarm, and he had been in custody without a break since May 2009. The 2015 trial set off a far wider inquiry. In 2018 he was charged with 100 more murders at hospitals in Oldenburg and Delmenhorst between 2000 and 2005, and on June 6, 2019, the same court convicted him of 85 of them and acquitted him of 15 for lack of evidence. The verdict became final in September 2020, and in March 2026 the court fixed his minimum term at 28 years.
February 27, 1912. Enriqueta Martí was arrested in the Raval district of Barcelona after police recovered a five-year-old girl who had been missing since February 10 and was living in her keeping; the child was returned to her family in good health, Muy Interesante reports. A younger girl in the home, whom Martí presented as her daughter, was most likely her niece. Martí, a poor healer and beggar born in Sant Feliu de Llobregat in 1868 or 1871, told police she had taken the older girl in because she was hungry. Within days the city’s newspapers had made her the "vampira del Raval," accused of killing children to sell remedies to rich clients. She was held in the Reina Amalia women’s prison for trial over the abduction and died there on May 12, 1913, without being tried; her death certificate gives the cause as uterine cancer. The writer Jordi Corominas and the historian Elsa Plaza, going back to the newspapers and court files of 1912, concluded that no murder was ever shown.
February 28, 2014. At the Old Bailey, Mr Justice Spencer, sitting as a judge of Cambridge Crown Court, imposed a whole life order on Joanna Dennehy, 31, for the murders of Lukasz Slaboszewski, 31, John Chapman, 56, and Kevin Lee, 48, in the Peterborough area over ten days in March 2013. She had pleaded guilty the previous November to every charge, among them the attempted murders of two men in Hereford on April 2, 2013, both of whom survived. The judge called her "a cruel, calculating, selfish and manipulative serial killer" and held that each murder involved a substantial degree of premeditation. Three men who had helped her were sentenced with her. Her sentencing had been held back while the courts considered whether whole life orders could survive a ruling of the European Court of Human Rights. She was only the third woman in Britain to receive a whole life term, after Myra Hindley and Rose West. A witness at her accomplices' trial said she had claimed eight killings; no other death has been laid at her door.
February 29, 1960. Ricardo Leyva Muñoz Ramirez was born in El Paso, Texas, the youngest of five children of Julian and Mercedes Ramirez. His father, United Press International reported in 1985, was a resident alien who worked at the nearby railyards. As Richard Ramirez, a drifter and burglar, he broke into homes across Los Angeles County at night in 1984 and 1985, and on August 31, 1985, the morning after police released his name and photograph, residents of Hubbard Street in East Los Angeles caught and held him. On September 20, 1989, a Los Angeles jury convicted him on all 43 counts against him, among them 13 murders, and on November 7 Judge Michael Tynan sentenced him to death. The California Supreme Court affirmed the sentence in 2006. In 2009 San Francisco police attributed the 1984 killing of Mei Leung, 9, to him through DNA, but he was never charged in it. He died on June 7, 2013, at 53, at Marin General Hospital, of complications of B-cell lymphoma, while still under sentence of death.
March 1, 2005. Dennis Rader appeared by video from the Sedgwick County jail in Wichita, Kansas, seated behind a small desk with his hands folded, while District Judge Gregory Waller read ten counts of first-degree murder against him. He answered the judge with a yes or a no. Bail stood at 10 million dollars, and the court appointed the state public defender’s office to represent him. Four days earlier officers had stopped his car near his home in Park City, closing an investigation that had run, with long silences, since 1974. Rader, a city code enforcement officer and the president of his church council, had signed his letters to the police and the press with the initials BTK. The charges covered ten people killed between January 1974 and January 1991, beginning with four members of the Otero family in east Wichita. Kansas had no death penalty in force for crimes of those years. He pleaded guilty in June, and on August 18, 2005, Judge Waller imposed ten consecutive life terms.
March 2, 2006. About sixty relatives of the dead filled a courtroom in Somerville, New Jersey, as Superior Court Judge Paul W. Armstrong sentenced Charles Cullen to eleven consecutive life terms for twenty-two murders and three attempted murders. Cullen, 46, a critical care nurse, wore a bulletproof vest. Offered the chance to speak, he said he had nothing to say. He had worked in hospitals in New Jersey and Pennsylvania from 1987 until 2003, moving from job to job as employers let him resign or dismissed him without warning the next hospital. His guilty pleas, begun in April 2004 in exchange for prosecutors in seven counties giving up the death penalty, came to cover twenty-nine murders and six attempted murders of patients aged 21 to 91, among them Judge John W. Yengo Sr., 72, and the Very Rev. Florian J. Gall, 68. On March 10, courts in Lehigh and Northampton counties, Pennsylvania, added their own life sentences. Cullen told detectives he had killed thirty to forty people. The deaths beyond the twenty-nine were never charged.
March 3, 1974. Norman Stribbling, the first husband of Josephine Gray, died in Montgomery County, Maryland, the first of three deaths that federal prosecutors would one day set before a jury. In 1975 she married William Robert Gray, who went by Robert; he died in November 1990. Her cousin and partner, Clarence Goode, died in Baltimore in June 1996. Life insurance paid out on the men, and in August 2002 a federal jury in Maryland convicted her of five counts of mail fraud and three of wire fraud, built on the charge that she intentionally caused the deaths of Robert Gray and Clarence Goode and hid her role from the insurers. Evidence about Stribbling’s death went to the jury only on motive and intent. She was never tried for it and has never been convicted of any homicide. The judge, finding both charged killings premeditated, imposed forty years. The Fourth Circuit vacated the sentence in 2005, the same term was imposed again in 2006, and on December 12, 2024, President Joe Biden commuted it to expire on April 11, 2025.
March 4, 1992. Police in Bratislava arrested Ondrej Rigo that evening, hours after the last killing in a series that had crossed three countries, at the hotel where he worked as a cloakroom attendant. Rigo, born in Modra in 1955, had eleven earlier convictions. He was later sentenced for nine murders committed from June 1990: eight women and the teenage son of one of them, in Munich, Amsterdam and Bratislava. Most of the women lived alone, many of them older; the eldest was 88. One woman he attacked survived. On December 7, 1994, he was sentenced to life imprisonment, and Slovak reporting describes him as the first person in the country convicted on DNA evidence. He never confessed. He served his term at Ilava and later at Leopoldov, applied for conditional release in May 2018 and withdrew the request on June 5 of that year. He died on June 14, 2022, aged 66, in the hospital for accused and convicted persons in Trenčín.
March 5, 2012. William Heirens died in custody at the University of Illinois at Chicago Medical Center, aged 83, after more than sixty-five years behind bars, by the reports of his death the longest-serving prisoner in Illinois history. He had been moved from Dixon Correctional Center the week before because of illness. In 1946 he was a 17-year-old University of Chicago student with a long record of burglaries when he was charged with three killings on Chicago’s North Side: Josephine Ross, 43, in June 1945; Frances Brown in December 1945; and Suzanne Degnan, 6, in January 1946. On September 4, 1946, to avoid a possible death sentence, he pleaded guilty to all three murders in the Criminal Court of Cook County and received three consecutive life terms. He recanted soon afterward and insisted on his innocence for the rest of his life. The Illinois Supreme Court upheld the denial of post-conviction relief in 1954, parole boards turned him down again and again, and a clemency petition failed in 2002. No court ever set the convictions aside.
March 6, 1828. On the evening of her forty-third birthday, Gesche Margarethe Gottfried was arrested in Bremen. For years she had been admired in the city for nursing sick relatives and friends, and people called her the Angel of Bremen. She confessed to fifteen killings between 1813 and 1827. The dead included her first husband, the saddler Johann Miltenberg; her second, the wine merchant Michael Christoph Gottfried; her mother and father; her twin brother; her two daughters and her son; and friends, a neighbor and a music teacher. Reports put the number of people she harmed who lived at nineteen or more. Convicted of the fifteen murders, she was sentenced to death by the sword and held for almost three years in the Ostertorwache prison. On April 21, 1831, she was beheaded on the Domshof before a crowd estimated at 35,000, the last public execution in Bremen. A stone set into the square, known as the Spuckstein, or spitting stone, marks the place.
March 7, 1987. John Powell, 44, died at Drake Memorial Hospital in Cincinnati, where he had lain in a coma for eight months after a motorcycle accident. Hilda Leitz, 82, another Drake patient, died the same day. The autopsy at the Hamilton County Coroner’s Office brought the case to light, and on April 6 Cincinnati police charged a nurse’s aide on the ward, Donald Harvey, with his murder. Nurses who had their own suspicions about other deaths took them to a Cincinnati television anchor, whose reporting prompted a grand jury inquiry. Facing a possible death sentence, Harvey confessed in exchange for life terms. In August 1987 he pleaded guilty in Hamilton County to twenty-four murders, most of them Drake patients, Powell and Leitz among them. With later pleas in Ohio, and eight murders and a manslaughter in Kentucky, where he had worked at Marymount Hospital in London in 1970 and 1971, the reported total reached thirty-seven. He was attacked in his cell at the Toledo Correctional Institution on March 28, 2017, and died two days later, aged 64.
March 8, 1994. Two days after Larry Eyler died of complications from AIDS on Illinois’s death row at Pontiac Correctional Center, his lawyer, Kathleen Zellner, called reporters to a hotel in Naperville and announced that he had admitted killing twenty-one people in Indiana and Illinois in the early 1980s. She said he had described the killings to her over the previous three years, that attorney-client privilege had kept her silent while he lived, and that he had given her permission to speak once he was dead. Someone had helped him in four of the deaths, she said, and she would give that name to the authorities. Eyler, a 41-year-old house painter from Indiana, had been convicted of only two killings: the 1984 murder, with other charges, of Danny Bridges, 15, in Chicago, which sent him to death row in 1986, and the murder of Steven Agan, 23, of Terre Haute, to which he pleaded guilty in 1990 and received sixty years. To the last he denied killing Bridges. The other deaths were never tried.
March 9, 2004. In a courtroom in Manassas, Virginia, with about fifty relatives of victims watching, Circuit Judge LeRoy F. Millette Jr. imposed the two death sentences a jury had recommended for John Allen Muhammad. The judge could have reduced them to life without parole. He called the evidence overwhelming, and Muhammad said he would appeal. The jury, sitting in Virginia Beach after the trial was moved there at his request, had convicted him in November 2003 of the capital murder of Dean Harold Meyers, 53, on two theories: a killing committed in an act of terrorism, and the killing of more than one person within three years. Meyers was one of the people killed in the Washington area in the fall of 2002 strangers who, according to the courts, had been chosen at random. The Supreme Court of Virginia affirmed the sentences in April 2005, federal courts denied relief, and Virginia set his execution for November 10, 2009.
March 10, 2008. Richard Biegenwald died at St. Francis Medical Center in Trenton, New Jersey, aged 67, still in state custody. His first murder conviction dated from 1959: in 1958, during a robbery in Bayonne, he killed Stephen Sladowski, a store owner who was also an assistant city prosecutor. He served about seventeen years and was paroled in 1975. Arrested in Asbury Park in January 1983, he was convicted by a Monmouth County jury that December of the murder of Anna Olesiewicz, 18, and by a jury in Mount Holly in February 1984 of the murder of William J. Ward, 34. He was also indicted for the killings of three young people from the Jersey Shore and Camden: Maria Ciallella, 17, Deborah Osborne, 18, and Betsy Bacon, 17. Juries twice sentenced him to death in the Olesiewicz case, and twice, in 1987 and 1991, the Supreme Court of New Jersey set the sentence aside, in rulings that shaped how the state’s 1982 death penalty law was applied. New Jersey never executed him.
March 11, 2025. Two days before David Leonard Wood was due to be executed, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals stayed the execution. It was the second date halted at the last moment; the first, set for August 20, 2009, was stopped the day before. Wood was convicted in 1992 of capital murder under the Texas provision for killing more than one person in the same scheme or course of conduct. The state describes the conviction as covering six girls and young women from the El Paso area who disappeared between May and August 1987: Ivy Susana Williams, Desiree Wheatley, Karen Baker, Angelica Frausto, Rosa Maria Casio and Dawn Marie Smith. Their deaths came to light outside El Paso in 1987 and 1988. Wood, then a paroled offender, has always denied the killings and calls the two jailhouse informants who testified against him liars. In July 2025 the court sent the case back to the trial level to develop eight claims, and on September 4, 2026, a visiting judge granted his request for new DNA testing.
March 12, 1994. At about five in the afternoon, police in Charlotte, North Carolina, arrested Henry Louis Wallace on an outstanding larceny warrant. Early the next morning he began to confess. Wallace, a fast-food restaurant manager from Barnwell, South Carolina, had killed young Black women in Charlotte since June 1992, and nearly all of them knew him: co-workers, friends, and friends or neighbors of people close to him. In January 1997 a Mecklenburg County jury convicted him of nine counts of first-degree murder, for the deaths of Caroline Love, Shawna Hawk, Audrey Ann Spain, Valencia M. Jumper, Michelle Stinson, Vanessa Little Mack, Betty Jean Baucom, Brandi June Henderson and Deborah Slaughter, along with rape, robbery and other counts. On January 29, 1997, he received nine death sentences. He also confessed to two killings that were never tried, those of Tashanda Bethea in South Carolina in 1990 and Sharon Nance in 1992. The Supreme Court of North Carolina affirmed the convictions and the sentences on May 5, 2000.
March 13, 2012. A Texas Highway Patrol corporal and a Texas Ranger stopped a rented white Ford Focus in Lufkin, Texas, and arrested the driver, Israel Keyes, a 34-year-old contractor from Anchorage, Alaska, for access device fraud. He was carrying the phone and the debit card of Samantha Koenig, an 18-year-old Anchorage barista who had been kidnapped six weeks earlier. A federal grand jury in Anchorage indicted him in April for kidnapping resulting in death. Over the months that followed he confessed to federal prosecutors, FBI agents and Anchorage detectives that he had killed Koenig and, in June 2011, Bill and Lorraine Currier of Essex, Vermont, a couple he had never met. The FBI later attributed eleven homicides to him between 2001 and 2012, in fewer than ten states, resting mostly on his own statements; most of those victims have not been identified. Keyes died by suicide at the Anchorage Correctional Complex on December 2, 2012, months before his trial was due to open. He was never convicted of any killing.
March 14, 1992. At 9:49 in the morning, Steven Brian Pennell was pronounced dead after a lethal injection at the Delaware Correctional Center near Smyrna, the first person executed in Delaware since 1946. An electrician from Glasgow, Delaware, married with two children, he had been convicted by a jury in November 1989 of the first-degree murders of Shirley Ellis, 23, and Catherine DiMauro, 31, women who worked along the Route 40 corridor in New Castle County, south of Wilmington. When the penalty jury deadlocked, he received two life terms. In October 1991, representing himself, he pleaded no contest to the murders of Michelle Gordon, 22, and Kathleen Meyer, 26, said he was innocent, and asked to be put to death. The Superior Court judge imposed two death sentences on October 31, 1991, and on February 18, 1992, the Delaware Supreme Court, in its mandatory review, affirmed them. The family of another woman, Margaret Lynn Finner, believed he had killed her, but he was never charged.
March 15, 2018. Georgia executed Carlton Michael Gary by lethal injection at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson. He was pronounced dead at 10:33 that night, aged 67. The State Board of Pardons and Paroles had denied clemency the day before. In August 1986 a Muscogee County jury convicted him of the malice murder, with rape and burglary, of three older women who lived alone in Columbus: Florence Scheible, 89, Martha Thurmond, 69, and Kathleen Woodruff, 74, all killed in 1977. Prosecutors attributed four more deaths of Columbus women in 1977 and 1978 to him; those cases went before the jury as similar transactions but were never charged. Gary was arrested in Albany, Georgia, in May 1984 and denied the killings from then to the end. For three decades his lawyers argued that the science of the case pointed away from him, and the state answered that DNA testing ordered in 2009 matched him to one of the women. Every court that heard the case left the convictions in place.
March 16, 2005. Mohammed Bijeh was flogged and then hanged from a crane in public at Pakdasht, southeast of Tehran, at about ten in the morning. A provincial criminal court in Tehran had convicted him the previous autumn of murder, kidnapping and other offenses, and the Supreme Court upheld the verdict. Agence France-Presse, citing the newspaper Kayhan, reported sixteen death sentences, together with a hundred lashes and a prison term for kidnapping. Most of the dead were boys aged eight to fifteen from the Pakdasht area, among them Kayvan Khosravi, 10, and Ahmad Azimi, 9; the presiding judge also counted adults among the victims. The charge sheet read aloud at the execution listed twenty-one killings, while relatives of the children said twenty-six had died, a figure never tested in court. Bijeh had been arrested in September 2004 with a co-defendant, Ali Baghi. Nineteen police officers were charged with negligence over the handling of the case.
March 17, 1999. In the early hours of the morning, Andrew Kokoraleis, 35, was executed by lethal injection at Tamms Correctional Center, the last person put to death by the State of Illinois. Governor George Ryan had denied clemency the day before. Kokoraleis was arrested in November 1982 at his family’s home in Villa Park, along with Edward Spreitzer and his own brother Thomas, in the investigation the Chicago press called the Ripper Crew case. A Cook County jury convicted him in March 1985 of the murder of Rose Beck Davis, 30, and he received natural life. In 1987 a DuPage County jury convicted him of the murder and aggravated kidnapping of Lorraine Borowski, 21, of Elmhurst, and sentenced him to death. After his arrest he confessed to other killings, and the federal appeals court later wrote that he had admitted as many as eighteen, but at trial he denied every one and said his statements had been beaten out of him. Illinois cleared its death row and abolished capital punishment in 2011.
March 18, 1932. Harry Powers was hanged at the West Virginia Penitentiary in Moundsville. A grocer from Clarksburg, he had courted widows by letter through a matchmaking organization, writing under the name Cornelius O. Pierson and promising marriage. He was arrested in August 1931 after Asta Eicher, a widow from Park Ridge, Illinois, and her children, Greta, 14, Harry, 12, and Anabel, 9, disappeared. Their deaths, and that of Dorothy Lemke, a widow from Massachusetts, came to light at Quiet Dell, near Clarksburg, that summer. Powers was charged with the Quiet Dell killings and was reported to have confessed to the deaths of two women and three children, but he was tried only for Dorothy Lemke’s death. The trial was held in a Clarksburg opera house, and on December 12, 1931, he was convicted of her murder and sentenced to hang. The case later gave the West Virginia writer Davis Grubb the starting point for his novel The Night of the Hunter.
March 19, 1996. The Court of Appeal in London refused Rosemary West leave to appeal against her convictions for ten murders, and gave its full reasons in open court on April 2. A jury at Winchester Crown Court had convicted her on November 22, 1995. Her lawyers argued that press coverage before the trial, centered on her private life, had made a fair hearing impossible, and that newspapers had paid or promised payments to important prosecution witnesses, making their evidence unreliable. As the European Commission of Human Rights later summarized the judgment, the court held that the effect of such coverage was essentially short-lived and that a trial itself focuses a jury on the evidence. Her husband, Fred West, a Gloucester builder, had been charged with twelve murders but died in custody at Winson Green prison on January 1, 1995, before any trial. The ten young women and girls whose murders she was convicted of included Lynda Gough, Carol Ann Cooper and Lucy Partington, her stepdaughter Charmaine, 8, and her own eldest daughter with Fred West, Heather, 16.
March 20, 2008. The St. Petersburg City Court sentenced Dmitry Voronenko to life imprisonment for the murders, with other charges, of two schoolgirls aged 11 and 12 and two young women aged 18 and 20, killed in St. Petersburg between late 2006 and May 2007. A fifth episode in the indictment concerned a 17-year-old who survived. The prosecution had asked for death, and the court said the moratorium on capital punishment ruled it out; parents of the victims made plain that they were unhappy with the outcome. Voronenko, a Ukrainian citizen, had been on conditional early release from an earlier sentence when he was arrested in St. Petersburg in May 2007. The Supreme Court of Russia upheld the verdict, and he was sent to a special colony for prisoners serving life in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug. In 2024, after confessing from prison to the killing of a schoolgirl in St. Petersburg in September 2006, he was charged with her murder, with other charges, and brought back to the city in April to face it.
March 21, 2002. Amanda Dowler, 13, known to her family and friends as Milly, was kidnapped and murdered in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey. For nine years no one was charged. In June 2011, at the Central Criminal Court in London, a jury convicted Levi Bellfield of her kidnapping and murder. He was already serving a whole life order, imposed in February 2008, for the murders of Marsha McDonnell, 19, and Amélie Delagrange, 22, and the attempted murder of a third young woman, who survived. On June 24, 2011, Mr Justice Wilkie gave him a second whole life order, reported as the first time anyone had received two. Bellfield refused to attend court for either sentencing. The cause of Milly’s death could not be determined. In February 2012 the Court of Appeal refused him permission to appeal against the conviction. A jury at the 2011 trial was discharged without a verdict on a charge of attempting to kidnap an 11-year-old girl on March 20, 2002, and the count was not retried. Other killings he has claimed or been linked to remain unproven.
March 22, 2013. The Penza Regional Court convicted Alexander Bychkov of the murder of nine men, under the counts of murder of two or more people and murder to conceal another crime, and of a burglary, and sentenced him to life in a special regime colony. Bychkov, born in the small town of Belinsky in western Penza Oblast in 1988, had been detained there in January 2012 over a burglary at a household goods shop, and within days the case had become a murder investigation. He told investigators about men he had killed and handed over a diary in which he had recorded the killings. His victims were men in and around Belinsky, among them Yevgeny Zhidkov, 60, Sergei Lisyanin, 37, and Sergei Sukharev, 34; prosecutors described most of them as men who drank heavily and had no settled way of life. A local man with a mental disability had earlier been sent for compulsory treatment over some of the deaths and was later released. The Supreme Court of the Russian Federation left the verdict unchanged in June 2013.
March 23, 1998. Gerald Eugene Stano was executed in the electric chair at Florida State Prison in Starke and pronounced dead at 7:15 a.m. He died for the murder of Cathy Lee Scharf, 17, of Port Orange, killed in 1973, for which a Brevard County jury convicted him at a retrial in 1983. Courts in Volusia, Brevard and Seminole counties, and a circuit court sitting in Bradford County, convicted him of first-degree murder in the deaths of ten young women and teenage girls in all, most often on his own guilty pleas, and he carried three death sentences. He confessed to many more killings than he was ever charged with, and the reliability of those statements, and of the detective who took most of them, has long been disputed. A warrant had set his execution for April 1997, but his case was joined to the litigation over Florida’s electric chair that followed a malfunction during the execution of Pedro Medina in March 1997. When the Florida Supreme Court upheld electrocution, the warrant was reset for March 23, 1998.
March 24, 1873. Mary Ann Cotton was hanged by William Calcraft at Durham County Gaol for the murder of her stepson, Charles Edward Cotton, who had died at West Auckland, County Durham, the previous summer. Earlier that month a jury at the Durham Assizes had convicted her after fifty minutes, in the only trial she ever faced; a doctor’s findings after the boy’s death had brought the case to light. She had also been charged with the deaths of her lover and lodger, Joseph Nattrass, her stepson Frederick Cotton junior and her son Robert Robson Cotton, all at West Auckland in 1872, but those charges never came to trial. Further deaths around her, of three husbands, her mother, a sister-in-law and children and stepchildren from her marriages, were suspected and never charged, and later accounts attribute as many as twenty-one deaths to her. The conduct of the prosecution was raised in the House of Commons on March 4, 1873. W. T. Stead’s Northern Echo, of Darlington, reported her last days and her execution. She was buried inside the gaol.
March 25, 1996. A jury was empanelled in the Supreme Court of New South Wales in Sydney for the trial of Ivan Milat before Justice David Hunt, the Chief Judge at Common Law, and the evidence began the next day. Mark Tedeschi QC prosecuted; Terry Martin led the defense. Milat was charged with the murders of seven young travelers who had been hitchhiking out of Sydney: Deborah Everist and James Gibson, both 19, from Victoria; Simone Schmidl, Anja Habschied and Gabor Neugebauer, from Germany; and Joanne Walters, 22, and Caroline Clarke, 21, from Britain. A further count concerned a British backpacker who survived. The jury convicted him on every count in July, and on July 27, 1996, Justice Hunt sentenced him to life imprisonment on each murder, with no possibility of parole. His appeal was dismissed in February 1998. Milat died of cancer in the hospital at Long Bay Correctional Complex on October 27, 2019, aged 74.
March 26, 2001. A federal jury in Springfield, Massachusetts, declined to return a death sentence against Kristen Gilbert, a former nurse at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Northampton, and she was sentenced to life in prison without parole. Twelve days earlier the same jury had convicted her of three counts of first-degree murder and one of second-degree murder in the deaths of patients on Ward C, the hospital’s acute care ward, along with two counts reported as attempted murder; it acquitted her on a further count. The men who died were veterans: Stanley J. Jagodowski, 66, a Korean War veteran and truck driver from Holyoke; Henry Hudon, 35, who had served in the Air Force; Kenneth Cutting, 41, an Army veteran from Leominster; and Edward Skwira, who served in the Army in the Second World War. The sentence was reported as four consecutive life terms without parole, plus twenty years. Other deaths on the ward were suspected but never charged.
March 27, 2008. In Jackson County Circuit Court in Kansas City, Missouri, Judge John R. O’Malley read a fifteen-page order convicting Terry A. Blair of six counts of first-degree murder after a trial without a jury. The victims were women killed in Kansas City in 2004: Sheliah McKinzie, 38; Anna Ewing, 42; Patricia Wilson Butler, 45; Carmen Hunt, 40; Claudette Juniel, 31; and Darci I. Williams, 25. The judge relied heavily on recorded 911 calls, writing that the caller was the person who had murdered at least five of the six women, and he acknowledged conflicting expert testimony and what he called small pieces of circumstantial evidence. On April 24, 2008, Blair received six consecutive terms of life without parole. He had been convicted long before of the 1982 murder of Angela Monroe, his former girlfriend and the mother of two of his children. Two further murder counts were dismissed before trial. The Missouri Court of Appeals affirmed the convictions in 2009, and Blair died in custody on May 11, 2024, while held at Potosi Correctional Center.
March 28, 2007. The Osaka District Court, with Judge Kazuo Mizushima presiding, sentenced Hiroshi Maeue to death for the murders of three young people in 2005. Each had posted on an internet suicide site while in a depressive state. The dead were Michiko Nagamoto, 25, killed in February; a 14-year-old junior high school boy from Kobe, killed in May, a murder, with other charges; and a 21-year-old university student, killed in June. The court also convicted him of kidnapping the boy and of intimidating the boy’s father in ransom calls, along with related offenses. Police had arrested him on August 5, 2005, in Nagamoto’s death. Within hours he confessed, and he then wrote out confessions to the other two killings, which police had not yet connected to him. Maeue withdrew his appeal to the High Court, so the sentence became final without review. He was hanged at the Osaka Detention Center on July 28, 2009, one of three men executed in Japan that day.
March 29, 2013. On Good Friday in Peterborough, Joanna Dennehy killed John Chapman, 56, a former Royal Navy man who shared a house of bedsits with her, and later the same day Kevin Lee, 48, a lettings agent and property developer who was her landlord and employer. About ten days earlier she had killed Lukasz Slaboszewski, 31, a Polish man living in the city. On April 2, with police across England looking for her, a friend drove her about 140 miles west to Hereford, where she attacked two men who were out walking their dogs. Both survived. In November 2013, at her arraignment before Mr Justice Sweeney, she pleaded guilty to all three murders and to two attempted murders. Sentencing her at the Central Criminal Court on February 28, 2014, Mr Justice Spencer imposed a whole life order for each murder, and three men who had helped her afterward were sentenced alongside her. The judge was sure the killing of John Chapman had been planned, and he listed Chapman’s vulnerability among the factors that made it more serious.
March 30, 1998. Judias Buenoano, known in Florida as Judy, was executed in the electric chair at Florida State Prison and pronounced dead at 7:13 a.m. Her death sentence was for the murder of her husband, Air Force Sergeant James E. Goodyear, who died in an Orlando naval hospital in September 1971, when no one suspected foul play. The case was built thirteen years later, after an attempt on the life of her fiance, John Gentry, near Pensacola sent investigators back to the men around her. Each had been insured with her as beneficiary, the courts said. Juries convicted her of the first-degree murder of her elder son, Michael Goodyear, 19, in Santa Rosa County in 1984, of the attempted murder of Gentry in Escambia County the same year, and in 1985 of her husband’s murder in Orange County, where she was sentenced to death. Four days before the execution the Florida Supreme Court refused her last motion and a stay, holding that there was no reasonable probability the new material would lead to an acquittal on retrial.
March 31, 1953. A police officer on his beat noticed a man near the Thames at Putney and asked him to come to the station. It was John Reginald Halliday Christie, and he was arrested near Putney Bridge and charged with the murder of his wife, Ethel, 54, who had died the previous December. He confessed to killing six other women: Ruth Fuerst, an Austrian refugee; Muriel Eady, a co-worker; his neighbor Beryl Evans; and Kathleen Maloney, Rita Nelson and Hectorina Maclennan, women in their twenties, in early 1953. He was tried only for his wife’s death, convicted at the Old Bailey on June 25, 1953, after his plea of insanity failed, and hanged at Pentonville on July 15. Beryl Evans’s husband, Timothy Evans, had been hanged in 1950 for the death of the couple’s baby daughter, Geraldine. A judicial inquiry concluded in 1966 that it was more probable than not that Evans had not killed her, and on October 18, 1966, he received a posthumous free pardon.
April 1, 2008. Clara Strange and Thelma Metcalf, two kidney patients receiving treatment at the DaVita dialysis clinic in Lufkin, Texas, died after going into cardiac arrest. Their deaths opened a month in which patient after patient collapsed at the clinic, and the run ended on April 28, when two patients told state inspectors what they had just watched the clinic’s licensed vocational nurse, Kimberly Clark Saenz of Pollok, do to two others. The clinic closed that day. Saenz was indicted on a single count of capital murder naming five patients, Strange, Metcalf, Garlin Kelley, Cora Bryant and Opal Few, together with five counts of aggravated assault. On March 30, 2012, an Angelina County jury convicted her of capital murder and three of the assaults and acquitted her of two. The jurors chose life without parole over death on April 2, 2012. The Fourth Court of Appeals affirmed in 2014, the Court of Criminal Appeals sent the case back over the jury charge, and the conviction was affirmed again in August 2015.
April 2, 2013. Joanna Dennehy was arrested in Hereford, England, within hours of an afternoon in which two men out walking their dogs in the city were attacked. Both men lived. In the fortnight before, she had killed three men in and around Peterborough: Lukasz Slaboszewski, 31, a Polish man living in the city; John Chapman, 56, a former Royal Navy man who rented a room in the same house of bedsits; and Kevin Lee, 48, a lettings agent and property developer who was both her landlord and her employer. At the Old Bailey on November 18, 2013, she pleaded guilty to all three murders, to two counts of attempted murder and to three counts of preventing the lawful burial of a body. On February 28, 2014, Mr Justice Spencer imposed a whole life order and jailed the three men who had helped her. In August 2023 she was listed among the handful of women in Britain serving such an order.
April 3, 2014. Tommy Lynn Sells was executed by lethal injection at Huntsville, Texas, and pronounced dead at 6:27 p.m., after the Supreme Court of the United States declined to halt the execution over the state’s refusal to name the supplier of its new pentobarbital. He was 49 and made no last statement. A Val Verde County jury had convicted him in September 2000 of the capital murder of Kaylene Harris, 13, killed near Del Rio on December 31, 1999; he pleaded guilty to the attempted murder of her 11-year-old friend, who survived and described him to police. In 2003 he pleaded guilty to the capital murder of Mary Bea Perez, 9, of San Antonio and received a life term. Sells, born in Oakland in 1964, had drifted across the country for years and claimed as many as 70 killings. Reports at the time of his execution linked him to more than a dozen.
April 4, 1946. After a trial that had opened on March 18, the Seine Assize Court in Paris convicted Dr. Marcel Petiot of the premeditated murder of 24 people, with theft, out of the 27 deaths charged, and sentenced him to death. A physician and former mayor of Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, he had offered people desperate to leave occupied France a passage to South America. Most of those who paid him were Jews; others were petty criminals trying to disappear. Petiot had vanished from Paris in March 1944 and was arrested on October 31, 1944, as he left a Métro station, after seven months in hiding. In court he insisted he had killed 63 people, all of them Germans, collaborators and traitors, an account the jury rejected. He was guillotined at La Santé prison on May 25, 1946.
April 5, 2001. The Paris assize court sentenced Guy Georges to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 22 years for the murders, with rape, of seven young women killed in the city between 1991 and 1997: Pascale Escarfail, 19, a student; Catherine Rocher, 27; Elsa Benady, 22; Agnès Nijkamp, 32; Hélène Frinking, 27; Magali Sirotti, 19; and Estelle Magd, 25. Born Guy Rampillon in Vitry-le-François in 1962 and raised in the child welfare system, he had served prison terms for attacks on young women before the first of the killings. Two separate investigations pursued the Paris deaths without meeting, and he was identified through a DNA comparison and arrested in March 1998. At his trial in March 2001 he confessed to all seven murders and four other attacks. The case was cited by the National Assembly in 2002 as the reason France needed its national DNA file, created by a law of June 17, 1998. In September 2021 he was reported held at Ensisheim.
April 6, 1987. Cincinnati police charged Donald Harvey, a nurse’s aide at Drake Memorial Hospital, with the murder of John Powell, 44, a patient whose death the Hamilton County coroner’s office had questioned at autopsy a month earlier. Within weeks Harvey told his lawyer that Powell was far from the only one. On August 18, 1987, he pleaded guilty in Hamilton County to 24 counts of aggravated murder, four of attempted aggravated murder and one of felonious assault; most of the dead were long-term patients at Drake. In November he pleaded guilty in Laurel County, Kentucky, to eight murders and a manslaughter at Marymount Hospital in London, where he had worked as an orderly in 1970 and 1971. Further Ohio counts followed in 1988, bringing the reported total to 37. His own claims ran as high as 87. On March 28, 2017, he was beaten in his cell at Toledo Correctional Institution, and he died two days later at 64. A fellow inmate pleaded guilty to his aggravated murder in 2019.
April 7, 1989. At midday Waltraud Wagner, a nurse’s aide on Pavilion V of the Lainz hospital in Vienna, made her first confession at the Vienna police security office, and her colleague Irene Leidolf made hers the same day. Doctors on the ward had been looking into a possible misuse of drugs for a year. The patients were elderly, most of them frail, on the First Medical Department. Wagner at one point marked 39 names in a ward death book as patients she had killed, a confession she later withdrew. The trial of four aides opened in the Vienna Provincial Court in February 1991. After 17 days a jury convicted Wagner of 15 murders, 17 attempted murders and two counts of bodily harm, and she was sentenced to life. Leidolf was convicted of five murders and two attempts; Stefanija Mayer and Maria Gruber received lesser verdicts. The Austrian Justice Ministry announced in July 2008 that Wagner and Leidolf would be freed early for good behavior, and both left prison on parole on August 7, 2008.
April 8, 2011. In Atlantic County, New Jersey, Dellmus Colvin pleaded guilty to killing Donna Lee White, 27, of Somers Point, in 1987, and was sentenced to 30 more years. Colvin, a former long-haul truck driver from Toledo, Ohio, was already serving life. In 2006 he had pleaded guilty in Toledo to the deaths of Jackie Simpson, 33, Melissa Weber, 37, Valerie Jones, 38, Jacquelynn Thomas, 42, and Lily Summers, 43, reported as four killings and help in a fifth, in exchange for prosecutors setting aside the death penalty. DNA taken in 2004 over a separate complaint had tied him to two of the Ohio deaths. The New Jersey case was reopened in 2009, and he was indicted by June 2010. In a 2020 prison interview he claimed as many as 52 killings in several states. None of those claims has produced a charge. He was held at Lebanon Correctional Institution in September 2020.
April 9, 1997. The Athens Security Police arrested Dimitris Vakrinos, a taxi driver and former shipyard welder from the Arcadian village of Pyrri, at a taverna in Nikaia, ending an inquiry that had run for 14 months. According to press reports, he then confessed to five killings committed between 1987 and 1995, seven attempted killings and five armed robberies of supermarkets. The dead he named were Panagiotis Gaglias, 43, killed in 1987; Anastasia Simitzi, who died near Mandra in 1993; Theodoros Andreadis, 35, a fellow taxi driver killed near the Isthmus of Corinth in January 1994; and the brothers Kostas and Antonis Spyropoulos, killed in Menidi in December 1995. Reports describe the motives he gave as small slights and grudges. Two police officers were among the people hurt in the attacks he admitted. Vakrinos took his own life in Korydallos prison on May 12, 1997, about a month after his arrest. He was never tried, and no court ruled on any of the killings.
April 10, 1991. Australia’s Minister for Immigration ordered the deportation of Archibald Beattie McCafferty, known as Archie, a Scottish-born prisoner who had arrived in Australia with his family as a child. On April 26, 1974, the Supreme Court of New South Wales had sentenced him to life imprisonment for murder; the gang he led killed three people in 1973, ABC News reported, and The Scotsman described his convictions as the murders of three people. In 1981 he was convicted of the manslaughter of a fellow prisoner, and 14 years were added to his sentence. A minimum term was fixed on October 15, 1991, counted from August 30, 1973, which made him eligible for parole consideration from August 1993. He challenged the deportation in the Federal Court of Australia, which ruled on his case in December 1995. After about 25 years in custody he was returned to Scotland in 1998, where he lived in Edinburgh under the name James Lok.
April 11, 1947. Louise Peete was executed in the gas chamber at San Quentin State Prison, a day after the Supreme Court of the United States refused to hear her case or stay the sentence. She was 66. In 1920 she had leased the Los Angeles house of Jacob C. Denton, a mining man, and a jury convicted her of his first-degree murder on February 5, 1921. She served 18 years of a life sentence and was released in 1939. In November 1943 Margaret R. Logan hired her to help care for her elderly husband, Arthur, and took her into their Pacific Palisades home. Margaret Logan died on May 29, 1944. For months afterward Peete signed her employer’s name on her own monthly parole reports, and it was those forgeries that drew the District Attorney’s office to the house. She was arrested there on December 20, 1944, convicted of first-degree murder without a recommendation of mercy in 1945, and sentenced to death. The Supreme Court of California affirmed on June 7, 1946.
April 12, 2023. Louis Bernard Gaskin was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison and pronounced dead at 6:15 p.m. He was 56, and the day before, the Supreme Court of the United States had refused to stop the execution. On June 15, 1990, a Flagler County jury had convicted him of the first-degree murders of Robert Sturmfels, 56, and his wife, Georgette, 55, a retired couple from New Jersey killed at their winter home in Palm Coast on December 20, 1989, and of the attempted murder of a man at a second house in the neighborhood that night, who survived. He was arrested on December 30, 1989, after a relative of his girlfriend went to the authorities, and he confessed. The jury recommended death by 8 to 4 for each murder, and Circuit Judge Kim Hammond imposed two death sentences on June 19, 1990. Under a plea agreement he also received life terms for a 1989 murder and armed robbery in Volusia County. Governor Ron DeSantis signed the death warrant on March 13, 2023.
April 13, 1993. Sergei Ryakhovsky was arrested in the Odintsovo district west of Moscow, after police posted in the area recognized him from a composite sketch drawn from a survivor’s description. Born in Balashikha in 1962, he had served four years in the 1980s for malicious hooliganism after a run of attacks on elderly women in Moscow. From June 1988 he killed men and women from their teens to their seventies across Moscow and the Moscow region, among them pensioners, a postman, a veteran of the Second World War and two boys of 16 and 14. He confessed after his arrest and later retracted. Psychiatrists declared him sane, and on July 11, 1995, he was convicted of 18 murders and two attempted murders and sentenced to death; one further murder charge was not proven. The death sentence was never carried out and was replaced with life imprisonment. He died of pulmonary tuberculosis on November 12, 2007, in a special-regime colony for life prisoners in Mordovia.
April 14, 1993. The Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court, Fourth Department, unanimously affirmed the murder convictions of Arthur J. Shawcross. A Monroe County jury had convicted him on December 13, 1990, of ten counts of second-degree murder, rejecting his insanity defense, and in March 1991 he pleaded guilty in Wayne County to the murder of Elizabeth Gibson, 29. Most of the Rochester-area women he killed between 1988 and 1990 were women he met on the city’s streets. Shawcross had already served a prison term for the 1972 death of Karen Ann Hill, 8, in Watertown, after pleading guilty to manslaughter, and he was paroled from Green Haven on April 30, 1987, less than a year before the Rochester killings began. He was arrested on January 4, 1990. The Court of Appeals denied leave to appeal on August 19, 1993. He died on November 10, 2008, at 63, after being taken from Sullivan Correctional Facility to Albany Medical Center; the state Commission of Correction later concluded his medical care had been grossly negligent.
April 15, 1925. At six in the morning Fritz Haarmann was beheaded by guillotine in the prison yard of the Landgericht in Hanover. On December 19, 1924, the Schwurgericht Hannover had convicted him of 24 murders out of the 27 charged and sentenced him to death 24 times; he was acquitted of three, and he accepted the verdict. His victims were boys and young men aged 10 to 22. Haarmann, a petty criminal, had worked for years as a police informer. The first was Friedel Rothe, 17, who disappeared in September 1918; the last was Erich de Vries, 17, in June 1924. Haarmann was arrested at the station on June 22, 1924. His companion Hans Grans was sentenced to death with him, then retried in 1926 and given 12 years for aiding two murders. Haarmann’s head was kept by the forensic institute in Göttingen until it was cremated in 2014. Hanover marked the centenary of the execution in April 2025.
April 16, 1996. Anatoly Onoprienko was arrested in Yavoriv, in the Lviv region of western Ukraine, at the apartment of his partner. The date is the one his trial lawyer gave; the Suspilne archive and Espreso give April 14. In two series of killings, nine people in 1989 and 43 between October 1995 and March 1996, he had killed motorists on the highways and wiped out rural households in the Zhytomyr, Lviv, Kyiv and Zaporizhzhia regions, often whole families with young children, along with neighbors and passersby who saw him. Before his capture an innocent man, Yu. M., died under torture in security service custody in Horodok; a Lviv court later ordered compensation for his parents. The Zhytomyr Regional Court convicted Onoprienko of 52 murders in a verdict dated March 31, 1999, and read the next day, sentencing him to death by shooting. After the Constitutional Court struck down the death penalty that December, his sentence became life imprisonment. He died in Zhytomyr prison No. 8 on August 27, 2013, aged 54.
April 17, 2007. Karen Abramyan, 46, an Armenian businessman, was attacked in southwest Moscow and died in hospital. That month police detained Artur Ryno, an icon-painting student from Yekaterinburg, and Pavel Skachevsky on suspicion of his killing. Ryno, born in 1989, told investigators in his first statements that he had killed 37 people, a confession he later withdrew. With Skachevsky he had organized a group of teenagers who attacked men they took to be non-Slavic, chiefly migrants from Central Asia and the Caucasus, between August 2006 and October 2007. On December 2, 2008, a Moscow City Court jury convicted seven members of the group, and on December 15 Judge Pyotr Shtunder sentenced Ryno and Skachevsky to ten years each for 20 murders and 12 attempted murders committed on grounds of racial and national hatred. Further verdicts in 2010 and 2011 left the term at ten years. Two Russian outlets reported in July 2026 that Ryno had been released in 2017.
April 18, 1991. A Cook County judge sentenced Dorothy Williams to death after a jury convicted her of the first-degree murder and robbery of Mary Harris, 97, killed in her Chicago apartment on July 25, 1989, and robbed of her stereo. Williams, then 35, had been robbing elderly residents of Chicago apartment buildings, among them housing for senior citizens, since at least 1986. She was arrested on September 6, 1989, after a resident of Mary Harris’s building pointed her out to a plainclothes officer, Betty Woods, and the next day she gave a court-reported statement admitting the killing. In statements to police she also admitted the deaths of two elderly men, Lonnie Laws in December 1987 and Caesar Zuell in December 1988; she was charged with both, and the outcome of those charges was not reported. The Illinois Supreme Court affirmed her death sentence in 1994. In 2002 it reversed the dismissal of her post-conviction petition and ordered a hearing on the merits.
April 19, 1966. The trial of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley opened at Chester Assizes before Mr. Justice Fenton Atkinson. The two sat in the dock behind screens of bulletproof glass, and both pleaded not guilty. On May 6, 1966, the jury convicted Brady of the murders of John Kilbride, 12, Lesley Ann Downey, 10, and Edward Evans, 17, children and a teenager from the Manchester area. He received three concurrent life sentences. In 1987 he confessed to the killings of Pauline Reade, 16, and Keith Bennett, 12, for which he was never charged or tried. Brady was moved from prison to Ashworth High Secure Hospital in 1985 after a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, and a tribunal refused his bid to return to prison in 2013. He died at Ashworth on May 15, 2017, aged 79, of natural causes.
April 20, 2004. Abdullah Shah was executed by shooting at a prison outside Kabul, after President Hamid Karzai signed his death warrant. The government made the execution public a week later, and it was reported as Afghanistan’s return to state executions after the fall of the Taliban. A commander during the civil war of the 1990s, Shah served under Faryadi Sarwar Zardad, whose forces held checkpoints on the Kabul to Jalalabad road, and he was known as "Zardad’s Dog." A closed special court convicted him in September 2002, and he was sentenced to death at the end of his appeal that October. Officials said his victims included travelers on the highway and members of his own family, among them one of his wives and an infant daughter; the number of counts was not reported. Amnesty International said he had no lawyer, could not question witnesses and was tried behind closed doors. Zardad himself was convicted in London in July 2005 of conspiracy to torture and to take hostages.
April 21, 1831. Gesche Margarethe Gottfried was beheaded with the sword on the Domshof in Bremen before a crowd estimated at 35,000, the last public execution in the city’s history. Born Gesche Margarethe Timm on March 6, 1785, the daughter of a master tailor, she was called the Angel of Bremen before her arrest. She was arrested on the evening of her birthday in 1828 and convicted of 15 murders by poison. Those she killed included her first husband, the saddler Johann Miltenberg; her second husband, the wine merchant Michael Christoph Gottfried; her mother and father; her two daughters and her son; her twin brother; several friends; and, last, the farrier Friedrich Kleine of Hanover in 1827. Many more people survived poisonings she confessed to. She spent almost three years in the Ostertorwache prison before the sentence was carried out. A stone in the Domshof pavement still marks the place, and passersby spit on it.
April 22, 1931. The Schwurgericht in Düsseldorf convicted Peter Kürten of murder in nine cases and attempted murder in seven, and sentenced him to death for each of the nine murders. The trial had opened on April 13. Kürten, born in Mülheim am Rhein in 1883, the third of 13 children, had spent much of his adult life in prison. The first murder tried was the 1913 killing of Christine Klein, a girl of nine, in Mülheim; the others were committed in Düsseldorf in 1929. He was arrested in 1930, after he had confessed to his wife and after a woman who survived one of his attacks helped investigators identify him. The Prussian State Ministry rejected his plea for clemency on June 30, 1931, and he was guillotined in the yard of the Klingelpütz prison in Cologne at about 6 a.m. on July 2. In 2023 the investigating judge’s case file surfaced and was handed to the state archive of North Rhine-Westphalia.
April 23, 2019. Governor Ron DeSantis signed a death warrant for Robert Joe Long, known as Bobby Joe Long, setting his execution for the following month. Born in Kenova, West Virginia, in 1953 and raised mainly around Miami, Long was arrested in a Tampa movie theater parking lot on November 16, 1984. On September 23, 1985, he pleaded guilty in Hillsborough County to eight counts of first-degree murder for the deaths of women aged 18 to 28 in the Tampa Bay area in 1984, among them Ngeun Thi "Lana" Long, Michelle Denise Simms, Elizabeth Loudenback, Vicky Elliott and Kim Swann. He received life sentences on every count but one; for the Simms murder he was sentenced to death, a sentence vacated in 1988, imposed again in 1989 and affirmed in 1992. A separate Pasco County murder case ended in an ordered acquittal in 1997 after three convictions were reversed. Long was executed at Florida State Prison on May 23, 2019, and pronounced dead at 6:55 p.m. He was 65.
April 24, 2018. Joseph James DeAngelo Jr., a 72-year-old former police officer, was arrested at his home in Citrus Heights, outside Sacramento, after investigators traced him through genetic genealogy. He had served on the police forces of Exeter and Auburn, California, in the 1970s and later worked for 27 years at a supermarket distribution center. On June 29, 2020, he pleaded guilty to 13 counts of first-degree murder, for killings committed from 1975 to 1986 in Visalia, Sacramento County, Goleta, Ventura, Dana Point and Irvine, and to 13 counts of kidnapping to commit robbery. The dead included Claude Snelling, Brian and Katie Maggiore, Lyman and Charlene Smith, Keith and Patrice Harrington, Cheri Domingo and Greg Sanchez, and Janelle Cruz. He also admitted 161 uncharged crimes, among them dozens of rapes beyond the statute of limitations. On August 21, 2020, Judge Michael Bowman sentenced him to 11 consecutive terms of life without parole and further consecutive terms. In February 2021 he was held in the protective housing unit at California State Prison, Corcoran.
April 25, 2001. David Thabo Simelane was arrested in Nhlangano, in the south of Swaziland, now Eswatini, after the husband of a missing woman recognized him. Earlier that month the deaths of dozens of people, most of them women from poor rural homes and several of them young children, had come to light near Malkerns, outside Manzini. Simelane, then described as 43, had a criminal record going back to 1977, with 18 previous convictions by the prosecution’s count. He was charged with 34 murders and spent ten years in custody before the High Court in Mbabane convicted him on 28 counts of murder on March 23, 2011. In April 2011 Judge Jacobus Annandale sentenced him to death by hanging, and his lawyer said he would appeal. As of June 2015 the sentence had not been carried out; King Mswati III had permitted no hanging since his coronation in 1986.
April 26, 1946. José María Miculax Bux, a 21-year-old day laborer whose family came from Patzicía, in Chimaltenango, was arrested in Guatemala after an elderly woman described a man she had seen; some reports give April 27. His cousin, Mariano Macú Miculax, was arrested in Antigua Guatemala the next day. Since early in the year boys and adolescents had been killed in and around Guatemala City, Mixco and Antigua; among those named in reports are Enrique Sactic Cuyuch, 14, Oscar Emilio López, 12, and César Augusto Bolfovich, 13. Miculax confessed before a justice of the peace, and Congress passed Decree 235, a shortened procedure known as the Ley Miculax. On June 18, 1946, he was sentenced to death; República reports the sentence covered two of 15 killings proven against him. His cousin received 30 years. On July 18, 1946, he was executed by firing squad before a crowd outside the wall of the Cementerio General, claiming in his last words that he had killed only four and that his cousin was to blame for the rest.
April 27, 1979. The Argentine Federal Police arrested Yiya Murano at her home in the Monserrat district of Buenos Aires. Within six weeks that summer three women who had given her money to invest had died: her neighbor Nilda Gamba on February 11, her friend Lelia "Chicha" Formisano de Ayala later that month, and her second cousin Carmen "Mema" del Giorgio de Venturini on March 24. Each death had at first been certified as natural. The last woman’s daughter noticed that the promissory notes Murano had signed were missing and went to the police. In June 1982 Judge Ángel Mercado acquitted Murano for lack of proof and she walked free, but in 1985 Sala III of the national criminal appeals court reversed the acquittal and sentenced her to life imprisonment for three aggravated homicides by poisoning and for fraud. President Carlos Menem later commuted the sentence, and with credit for her pretrial custody she was released, in November 1995 by most accounts. She died in a care home in Belgrano in 2014.
April 28, 1908. The farmhouse of Belle Gunness outside La Porte, Indiana, burned, and her three children, Myrtle, Lucy and Philip, died in the fire. Her former hired man, Ray Lamphere, was arrested the same day. In the weeks that followed, the deaths of men who had answered her matrimonial notices and come to the farm with their savings came to light there, among them Andrew Helgelien of South Dakota and Ole B. Budsberg of Iola, Wisconsin, along with her foster daughter, Jennie Olson. The La Porte County coroner, sheriff and prosecutor attributed the deaths to Gunness, who was born Brynhild Paulsdatter Storset in Selbu, Norway, in 1859. She was never charged; the coroner ruled that she had died in the fire, and doctors disputed that ruling at the time. Lamphere was convicted only of arson in November 1908 and died in the state prison in 1909. Indiana Public Media reported on April 28, 2026, that DNA work begun in 2007 had been inconclusive.
April 29, 2004. WAFB in Baton Rouge reported that Sean Vincent Gillis, 41 and unemployed, had been arrested in a raid on his home in south Baton Rouge and had confessed to killing women in the city, linking him to the death of Donna Bennett Johnston, 43, that February. By the next day he had been charged in the deaths of Ann Bryan, 81, a retirement community resident killed in 1994, and Hardee Schmidt, 52, a morning jogger killed in 1999, and had admitted the killing of Lillian Gorham Robinson. In all he confessed to eight killings. On August 20, 2007, he pleaded guilty in West Baton Rouge Parish to the second-degree murder of Joyce Williams, 36, and was sentenced to life without parole. In July 2008 an East Baton Rouge Parish jury convicted him of the first-degree murder of Johnston; the jurors deadlocked on the death penalty a week later, and he was sentenced to life. The case unfolded alongside the separate prosecution of Derrick Todd Lee, and the two investigations reshaped how Baton Rouge police worked.
April 30, 1973. Edmund Emil Kemper III was arraigned in Santa Cruz, California, on eight counts of murder, a week after he telephoned Santa Cruz police from a phone booth in Pueblo, Colorado, to confess. Over Easter weekend he had killed his mother, Clarnell Strandberg, 52, who worked at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and her friend Sally Hallett. The other six counts covered young women and girls killed in Santa Cruz County and the Bay Area in 1972 and 1973: Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa, both Fresno State students; Aiko Koo, 15; Cindy Schall; Rosalind Thorpe; and Alice Liu. At 15, in 1964, Kemper had killed his paternal grandparents in Madera County; that case went to juvenile court, and he was later released from Atascadero State Hospital to his mother’s care. On November 8, 1973, a jury convicted him on all eight counts of first-degree murder. He has been denied parole repeatedly, most recently on July 9, 2024, with his next hearing set for 2031.
May 1, 1987. Michel Peiry, a trained salesman from Romont in the canton of Fribourg, was arrested in the middle of his military service, among comrades who knew him as a quiet and unfailingly polite man. Blick places the arrest at an army training site in Schangnau, in the canton of Bern. A teenage hitchhiker who had survived an attack the previous month gave investigators the information that brought them to him. The killings later attributed to him ran from 1981 to April 1987, and his victims were young hitchhikers, most of them between 14 and 18. In October 1989 the Entremont district court in Valais sentenced him to life imprisonment for four murders and two attempted murders, with other charges that included abduction and coercion. Press reports have since linked him to at least eleven killings in five countries. He has asked for conditional release twelve times since 2002 and been refused every time. In August 2026 the Federal Supreme Court upheld the latest refusal, and he remained in prison almost forty years after his arrest.
May 2, 1997. Ahmad Suradji, a village dukun, a traditional healer and practitioner of magic, was arrested in Sei Semayang, in the Deli Serdang regency outside Medan, North Sumatra. For years women and girls had come to him for help with money, health and love. In April 1997 a young client failed to return home, and her family’s alarm set the inquiry moving. The deaths of 42 women and girls, spanning 1986 to 1997, then came to light in his village. On April 27, 1998, the Lubuk Pakam District Court sentenced him to death, trying the killings as one continuing offense of murder under Article 338 of the Indonesian Criminal Code; his wife, Tumini, was convicted as an accomplice. The Medan High Court and the Supreme Court upheld the sentence that year, and President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono refused clemency in December 2007. A police mobile brigade firing squad executed Suradji on a plantation in Deli Serdang at 9:58 p.m. on July 10, 2008. His neighbors would not allow his burial in his own village.
May 3, 1984. Carlton Michael Gary was taken into custody in Albany, Georgia, on a burglary charge. Six years earlier a run of attacks on older women who lived alone, most of them in the Wynnton neighborhood of Columbus, had held that city in fear, and the case had gone cold. It reopened when a .22 Ruger pistol, stolen from a Wynnton home in October 1977, surfaced in Michigan in 1984 and was traced through relatives to Gary. He was indicted in Muscogee County the next day. On August 26, 1986, a Columbus jury convicted him of the malice murder, with rape and burglary, of Florence Scheible, 89, Martha Thurmond, 69, and Kathleen Woodruff, 74, all killed in the autumn and winter of 1977, and he was sentenced to death. He denied the killings for more than thirty years, through long disputes over serology, DNA testing and evidence the defense said had been withheld. Georgia executed him by lethal injection at the state prison in Jackson at 10:33 p.m. on March 15, 2018.
May 4, 1998. A federal judge in Sacramento sentenced Theodore John Kaczynski to four consecutive life terms plus thirty years and ordered $15,026,000 in restitution. A Harvard-trained mathematician who left an assistant professorship at Berkeley in 1969, Kaczynski had lived since 1971 in a cabin near Lincoln, Montana. Between 1978 and 1995 he carried out sixteen attacks that the FBI investigated as the UNABOM case, killing Hugh Scrutton in Sacramento in 1985, Thomas J. Mosser in North Caldwell, New Jersey, in 1994 and Gilbert B. Murray in Sacramento in 1995, and injuring more than twenty other people. His brother and sister-in-law recognized his ideas in the manifesto the newspapers had been pressed to print. On January 22, 1998, after jury selection had begun, he pleaded guilty to every count rather than let his lawyers argue that he was mentally ill, and the government withdrew its notices of intent to seek death. He went that month to the federal Supermax at Florence, Colorado, and died in federal custody at Butner, North Carolina, on June 10, 2023, aged 81.
May 5, 2016. A Los Angeles County Superior Court jury convicted Lonnie David Franklin Jr. of ten counts of first-degree murder, with the special circumstance of multiple murder, and one count of attempted murder. A former Army cook, city sanitation worker and attendant at a police garage, he had lived for decades on West 81st Street in South Los Angeles. The dead were nine young women and a 15-year-old girl, killed between 1985 and 2007: Debra Jackson, Henrietta Wright, Barbara Ware, Bernita Sparks, Mary Lowe, Lachrica Jefferson, Alicia "Monique" Alexander, Princess Berthomieux, Valerie McCorvey and Janecia Peters. A woman who survived an attack in November 1988 testified against him. The long gap in the series gave the press its name for the killer, the Grim Sleeper. In July 2010 California’s familial DNA search program pointed investigators to a relative and then to Franklin. Sentenced to death on August 10, 2016, he died at San Quentin on March 28, 2020, while his automatic appeal was still pending.
May 6, 1966. At Chester Assizes, before Mr Justice Fenton Atkinson, a jury convicted Myra Hindley of the murders of Lesley Ann Downey, 10, and Edward Evans, 17, and of harbouring Ian Brady knowing that he had murdered John Kilbride, 12. Brady was convicted of all three murders. The Attorney General, Sir Frederick Elwyn Jones, had led the prosecution in person. Parliament had abolished the death penalty for murder while the pair were on remand, and Hindley received two life sentences, with seven years concurrent for harbouring. In 1987 she admitted her part in the deaths of two more children from the Manchester area, Pauline Reade, 16, and Keith Bennett, 12; neither death was ever brought to trial. Successive Home Secretaries settled on a whole life tariff, and she was still serving it when she died in custody in November 2002, aged 60, after thirty-six years in prison.
May 7, 1972. Edmund Emil Kemper III, a man of six feet nine inches, picked up two Fresno State students, Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa, both 18, who were hitchhiking in Berkeley, and killed them. At 15, in 1964, he had killed his paternal grandparents in Madera County; the case went through juvenile court, and after years at Atascadero State Hospital he was released to his mother’s care. By the following February he had killed four more young women and girls who were hitchhiking in Santa Cruz County and the Bay Area, among them Aiko Koo, a 15-year-old high school student. In April 1973 he killed his mother, Clarnell Strandberg, who worked at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and her friend Sally Hallett, at the house in Aptos. He then drove to Pueblo, Colorado, and telephoned Santa Cruz police to confess; it took three calls before an officer believed him. A Santa Cruz jury convicted him of eight counts of first-degree murder on November 8, 1973. The parole board refused him again in July 2024.
May 8, 1978. David Richard Berkowitz, a 24-year-old postal worker from Yonkers, pleaded guilty to six counts of second-degree murder against the advice of his lawyers, before Justices Joseph R. Corso, William Kapelman and Nicholas Tsoucalas of Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens. Between July 1976 and July 1977 he had killed six people and wounded seven in eight attacks across the three boroughs. The dead were Donna Lauria, Christine Freund, Virginia Voskerichian, Valentina Suriani, Alexander Esau and Stacy Moskowitz. In letters to the police and to the columnist Jimmy Breslin he called himself "Son of Sam," and for a year young women in parts of New York changed how they lived. A parking ticket written near the last attack, in Brooklyn, sent detectives to his building, and he was arrested outside it on August 10, 1977. On June 12, 1978, he received the maximum of twenty-five years to life on each murder. First eligible for parole in 2002, he has been refused at every appearance; in May 2024 the board turned him down for the twelfth time.
May 9, 1994. A Nassau County jury convicted Joel David Rifkin of the second-degree murder of Tiffany Bresciani, 22, and of first-degree reckless endangerment, rejecting his insanity defense. An unemployed man from East Meadow, Long Island, who lived with his adoptive family, he had been stopped by state troopers in June 1993 after a chase that began over a missing license plate on his pickup. He then confessed to killing seventeen women between 1989 and 1993, most of them sex workers he had met in New York City. Guilty pleas in Suffolk County, Brooklyn and Queens followed in 1995 and 1996, and news reports put his total at nine murder convictions, with consecutive sentences of 203 years to life. The Appellate Division affirmed all four county judgments on December 3, 2001. One woman he described, Heidi Balch, was identified in 2013; two others are still known to investigators only by number. He was reported to be serving his sentence in June 2026.
May 10, 1994. John Wayne Gacy was pronounced dead at 12:58 a.m. at Stateville Correctional Center in Crest Hill, Illinois, after a lethal injection, at the age of 52. A jury had convicted him in March 1980 of thirty-three murders committed near Chicago between 1972 and 1978, and he was sentenced to death on twelve counts and to natural life on the other twenty-one. The Supreme Court of Illinois affirmed in 1984, and the Seventh Circuit rejected his federal appeal in April 1993. His victims were young men and boys, the youngest 14. Among them were Timothy McCoy, 15, John Butkovich, 17, Gregory Godzik, 17, John Szyc, 19, and Robert Piest, 15, whose death in December 1978 brought about Gacy’s arrest on December 21 of that year. Five of the dead have still not been named. The Cook County Sheriff’s Office identified three more through DNA between 2011 and 2021, the latest announced in October 2021.
May 11, 1953. Police in Sydney arrested Caroline Grills and charged her with attempting to murder two women of her family, her sister-in-law and the sister-in-law’s daughter. Born Caroline Mickelson, probably in 1888, at Balmain, she was known to her relatives as Aunty Carrie. Her arrest came during a wave of poisonings in Sydney in the early 1950s, and police went on to charge her with four murders and a further attempted murder, alleging that the deaths had begun in 1947 with her stepmother’s. None of those charges went to trial. The Crown proceeded on one count, and on October 15, 1953, a jury in the Central Criminal Court convicted her of the attempted murder of her sister-in-law by poisoning. She was sentenced to death. The Court of Criminal Appeal dismissed her appeal in April 1954, and the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. She spent about six and a half years in the State Reformatory for Women and died of peritonitis at Prince Henry Hospital, Sydney, on October 6, 1960.
May 12, 2018. Dennis Andrew Nilsen died in custody at York District Hospital, aged 72, after surgery for a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm; an inquest in October 2019 recorded a conclusion of natural causes. Born in Fraserburgh, Aberdeenshire, in 1945, he had been an Army cook and later a civil servant who interviewed job seekers in London. Between 1978 and 1983 he killed young men he met in pubs and on the streets, at two addresses in north London, and when police came for him in 1983 he confessed at once to fifteen or sixteen killings. On November 4, 1983, an Old Bailey jury convicted him of the murders of Kenneth Ockenden, Martyn Duffey, William Sutherland, Malcolm Barlow, John Howlett and Stephen Sinclair, and of two attempted murders. His recommended minimum of twenty-five years was later raised to a whole life tariff. In 2005 police identified Stephen Holmes, 14, as his first victim; Nilsen was never charged with that death. He spent his last years at HMP Full Sutton, in East Yorkshire.
May 13, 2005. At 2:25 a.m., Michael Bruce Ross was pronounced dead after a lethal injection at Osborn Correctional Institution in Somers, Connecticut, the only person executed in New England since 1960. A 1981 Cornell graduate in agricultural economics, he had sold insurance in eastern Connecticut. In June 1984 he admitted killing eight girls and young women in Connecticut and New York over three years. A jury convicted him in 1987 of six counts of capital felony in the deaths of Robyn Stavinsky, 19, April Brunais, 14, Leslie Shelley, 14, and Wendy Baribeault, 17, and guilty pleas covered the murders of Tammy Williams, 17, and Debra Smith Taylor, 23. The Connecticut Supreme Court reversed his death sentences in 1994, a new jury restored them in 2000, and the court affirmed in June 2004. Ross then gave up his appeals. A judge ruled him competent to make that choice in April 2005, the state Supreme Court affirmed on May 9, and on May 12 federal courts turned away a last suit brought by his father.
May 14, 1971. Police in Gunma Prefecture arrested Kiyoshi Okubo, 36, in Maebashi; Gendai Business gives the date of the arrest as May 14, and another account places his capture on the evening before. He had been paroled that March after a prison term at Fuchu. Between March 31 and May 10 he had killed eight girls and young women aged 16 to 21: Miyako Tsuda, Mieko Oikawa, Chieko Ida, Seiko Kawabata, Akemi Sato, Kazuyo Kawaho, Reiko Takemura and Naoko Takanohashi. They were high school students, a waitress, a temporary prefectural employee, a telecommunications worker, an office worker and a young wife, and most of them had met him at least once before. His trial opened at the Maebashi District Court on October 25, 1971, and he admitted every charge. On February 22, 1973, the court convicted him of eight murders, with other charges, and sentenced him to death. He did not appeal. He was hanged at the Tokyo Detention House on January 22, 1976, at the age of 41.
May 15, 2025. Glen Edward Rogers was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison near Starke and pronounced dead at 6:16 p.m., aged 62. A man from Hamilton, Ohio, who had worked at times as a cab driver, he was convicted of murdering two women he had met in bars in the autumn of 1995: Sandra Gallagher, 33, in Van Nuys, Los Angeles, in September, and Tina Marie Cribbs, 34, in Tampa in November. Kentucky police captured him on November 13, 1995, after a high-speed chase in Cribbs’s car. A Tampa jury convicted him in May 1997 and recommended death by a vote of 12 to 0; Judge Diana M. Allen imposed the sentence that July, and the Florida Supreme Court affirmed in 2001. California sentenced him to death for the Gallagher murder in 1999. He was suspected in the deaths of two more women, in Louisiana and Mississippi, and of a Hamilton man of 71, but was never tried for any of them. Governor Ron DeSantis had signed his death warrant on April 15, 2025.
May 16, 2008. David Randitsheni, who lived in Mandela village near Modimolle, in Limpopo, was arrested at Lwamondo, outside Thohoyandou. Since 2004 children had been abducted and killed in the Phagameng area, and police had taken DNA samples from hundreds of local men in an effort to end it. At his first appearance in the Modimolle magistrates' court on May 19 he faced seventeen counts, seven of them murder. In August 2009, after a two-day trial, the Modimolle Circuit High Court convicted him on all 46 counts, among them ten of murder and eighteen of kidnapping, with other charges. Police counted nineteen victims, ten of whom died. On August 19 Judge Roger Claassen sentenced him to multiple life terms with no parole for 35 years; the government news agency gave the total as 16 life terms and 220 years, while Sowetan and IOL reported 26. On August 31, 2009, Sowetan reported that he had died in his cell at Thohoyandou Prison, and police registered an inquest.
May 17, 2017. The Moselle assize court in Metz convicted Francis Heaulme of the murders of Cyril Beining and Alexandre Beckrich, both 8, who were killed in Montigny-lès-Metz on September 28, 1986, and sentenced him to life imprisonment. Another man, a teenager at the time of the killings, had first been wrongly convicted of them and was acquitted in 2002. Heaulme, a drifter from Meurthe-et-Moselle who crossed France on foot, by hitchhiking and by train from 1984, had been in custody since his arrest in Alsace in January 1992, after a gendarme in Brittany connected him to a string of unsolved killings. At the Metz trial he insisted, "Montigny, that was not me," and he has denied the killings ever since. The Yvelines assize court at Versailles upheld the verdict in December 2018, and the Cour de cassation made it final in June 2020. His final convictions now total eleven murders committed between 1984 and 1992. In June 2026 an investigating judge sent him for trial over a 1989 killing at Bédarrides, in the Vaucluse.
May 18, 2000. After about ten hours of deliberation, a Harris County jury convicted Angel Maturino Resendiz of the capital murder of Dr. Claudia Benton, a 39-year-old physician killed in her home in West University Place, inside Houston, in December 1998. The jury rejected his plea of not guilty by reason of insanity and voted for death days later. A Mexican drifter who crossed the border again and again and rode freight trains around the United States under dozens of names, he had been placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list as Rafael Resendez-Ramirez. In June 1999 the Border Patrol caught him and sent him back to Mexico without knowing he was wanted, an error the Justice Department’s Inspector General later examined. On July 13, 1999, he walked onto a bridge at El Paso and surrendered to a Texas Ranger. The Associated Press reported that he was charged in nine more deaths in four states; none was tried. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed his conviction in 2003, and Texas executed him at Huntsville on June 27, 2006.
May 19, 1988. Police in Santander arrested José Antonio Rodríguez Vega, a 30-year-old bricklayer, after about four weeks of surveillance, and he confessed. Born in the city on December 3, 1957, he had already been sentenced in 1979 to 27 years for rape and other offenses. Between April 1987 and April 1988, elderly women who lived alone in and around Santander had died one after another, and many of the deaths had first been recorded as natural. On December 5, 1991, the Audiencia Provincial de Santander convicted him of sixteen murders, with nine counts of indecent assault and several thefts, and imposed sentences that the agency Servimedia totaled at 440 years, of which Spanish law allowed no more than thirty to be served. The court also ordered him to pay 8 million pesetas to each victim’s family. The Tribunal Supremo upheld the judgment in 1993. On October 24, 2002, two days after his transfer to Topas prison, near Salamanca, he was killed by fellow inmates. The Spanish press had named him El Mataviejas.
May 20, 1999. The killings at the center of the Snowtown case came to light in the farming town of Snowtown, north of Adelaide in South Australia, and the next day police arrested John Justin Bunting, Robert Joe Wagner and Mark Ray Haydon. Bunting, who had worked in an abattoir and lived in Adelaide’s northern suburbs, was the ringleader of a small group that killed relatives, friends and neighbors he branded paedophiles or simply disliked, and then collected their welfare payments. The last of the dead, David Johnson, had been killed in Snowtown on May 9. On September 8, 2003, a jury in the Supreme Court of South Australia convicted Bunting of eleven murders committed between August 1992 and May 1999; it could not agree on a twelfth, the death of Suzanne Allen, and no retrial was sought. Wagner was convicted of ten murders, James Spyridon Vlassakis pleaded guilty to four, and Haydon was convicted of assisting offenders. Justice Brian Martin declined to fix a non-parole period, and the Court of Criminal Appeal dismissed Bunting’s appeal on May 24, 2005.
May 21, 1997. The Central Jakarta District Court sentenced Siswanto, a homeless scavenger known as Robot Gedek, to death for murder, with other charges, in the deaths of street boys in Jakarta. detikX dates the sentence to May 21; two detikNews reports in 2010 gave May 20. Arrested at the railway station in Tegal, Central Java, on July 27, 1996, he had confessed to killing twelve boys in Jakarta and Central Java. The cases of eight boys were tried, six in Central Jakarta and two in East Jakarta. On hearing the sentence, detikX reported, he said, "I am afraid of dying." His appeals to the Jakarta High Court and the Supreme Court failed. He was held at Cipinang prison and, from 1999, at Batu prison on Nusakambangan island, and he died of a heart attack at the Cilacap regional hospital on March 26, 2007, before any execution. In 2010 his former lawyer said the key witness at his trial had been Baekuni, a man then under arrest over the deaths of fourteen boys; police rejected any link between the cases.
May 22, 1994. Police arrested Ivan Robert Marko Milat, a road worker, at his home in Eagle Vale, in Sydney’s southwest, after about two months of surveillance. He was charged first over a 1990 attack on a British backpacker who survived and later identified him. At the end of May he was charged with the murders of seven young hitchhikers whose deaths had come to light in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales in 1992 and 1993: Deborah Everist and James Gibson, of Victoria; Simone Schmidl, Anja Habschied and Gabor Neugebauer, of Germany; and Joanne Walters and Caroline Clarke, of Britain. On July 27, 1996, Justice David Hunt sentenced him to life imprisonment on each of the seven murder counts. His appeal was dismissed in February 1998, and an application to the High Court failed in 2004. Milat never confessed. He died of oesophageal and stomach cancer in the hospital at Long Bay Correctional Complex on October 27, 2019, aged 74. Police, a coroner and a parliamentary inquiry have examined other cases, and no charge has been laid.
May 23, 2019. Robert Joe Long, known as Bobby Joe Long, was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison and pronounced dead at 6:55 p.m., aged 65, after the Supreme Court of the United States refused a stay that day. Born in Kenova, West Virginia, in 1953 and raised mostly around Miami, he was a former Army enlistee and radiology technician. In 1984 he killed at least eight women around Tampa Bay. He was arrested outside a Tampa movie theater on November 16, 1984, after a 17-year-old girl he had abducted and released earlier that month gave detectives what they needed to identify him. On September 23, 1985, he pleaded guilty in Hillsborough County to eight counts of first-degree murder, for Ngeun Thi "Lana" Long, Michelle Denise Simms, Elizabeth Loudenback, Vicky Elliott, Chanel Williams, Karen Dinsfriend, Kimberly Hopps and Kim Swann. His death sentence was for the murder of Michelle Simms. In Pasco County, three convictions over the death of Virginia Johnson were each reversed, and in 1997 an acquittal was ordered.
May 24, 1973. Pedro Rodrigues Filho, born on a farm at Santa Rita do Sapucaí in southern Minas Gerais in 1954, was arrested in Greater São Paulo; Estado de Minas gives his age as 18. While he was being transported after the arrest, he killed a fellow prisoner. Across the decades that followed, the courts of São Paulo state convicted him of dozens of homicides, most of them killings of other inmates, and the Brazilian press called him Pedrinho Matador. Published counts of his convictions range from 18 to 71, and he claimed more than a hundred killings. His sentences were reported as totaling 128 years in some accounts and close to 400 in others. Granted provisional release in 2007, he was arrested again on September 15, 2011, at a farm in Camboriú, Santa Catarina, and given eight more years for riot and false imprisonment committed in prison. Released from the Colônia Penal de Mongaguá in 2018, he became a crime commentator on YouTube. He was shot dead in Ponte Grande, in Mogi das Cruzes, on March 5, 2023.
May 25, 1968. The death of Martin Brown, 4, came to light in Scotswood, in the west end of Newcastle upon Tyne, and at first it was treated as an accident. On July 31, 1968, Brian Howe, 3, of the same neighborhood, also died. Two girls stood trial. On December 17, 1968, a jury at Newcastle Assizes acquitted Mary Bell, then 11, of murder and convicted her of the manslaughter of both boys on the ground of diminished responsibility; her co-defendant, a girl of 13, was acquitted of both charges. Bell was ordered detained for life under section 53(1) of the Children and Young Persons Act 1933 and was held from early 1969 at Red Bank approved school in Lancashire, and later in women’s prisons. Released on licence in 1980, at 23, she has lived since under a new identity and is still on licence for life. Payments for her cooperation with a book about her life were raised in the House of Commons in 1998. On May 21, 2003, the High Court granted her and her daughter lifelong anonymity.
May 26, 1978. Eric Christgen, 4, was abducted and killed in St. Joseph, Missouri. Another man, who had falsely confessed, was convicted of the killing and spent four years in prison before Charles Ray Hatcher, a drifter who had spent years in California mental institutions, admitted it. Hatcher was arrested in 1982 in the death of Michelle Steele, 11, also of St. Joseph, and told federal officers that he had killed sixteen people. In October 1983 he pleaded guilty to Eric’s murder and received life with no parole for fifty years, and the wrongly convicted man was freed; the National Registry of Exonerations lists his case. On September 22, 1984, a Buchanan County jury convicted Hatcher of the capital murder of Michelle Steele. He had asked the jury for death and received life. In December 1984, UPI reported, he took his own life in a segregation cell at the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City. Authorities suspected him in as many as fifteen other killings over thirteen years; he was never tried for any of them.
May 27, 2003. In the evening, at a tire shop in Atlanta, an East Baton Rouge homicide detective working with the FBI, the U.S. Marshals and Atlanta police arrested Derrick Todd Lee, 34, of St. Francisville, Louisiana, a day after a Baton Rouge warrant named him in the death of Carrie Lynn Yoder. A court-ordered cheek swab, taken on May 5 by investigators working two old cases in Zachary, had linked him through DNA to the killings of five women around Baton Rouge and Lafayette. He did not resist and waived extradition. In 2004 he was convicted of the second-degree murder of Geralyn Barr DeSoto, 21, in West Baton Rouge Parish, and of the first-degree murder of Charlotte Murray Pace, 22, a new graduate of the business school at LSU, in East Baton Rouge Parish, where a jury chose death. He was never tried in the deaths of Gina Wilson Green, Pam Kinamore, Trineisha Dené Colomb, Carrie Lynn Yoder or Randi Mebruer. He died of heart disease on January 21, 2016, after he was taken from Angola for emergency care.
May 28, 1984. About 9 p.m., Mauricio Rodriguez Silva walked into the sheriff’s substation in Templeton, San Luis Obispo County, California, and said that he had killed three people. Paroled from Soledad three weeks earlier, after a guilty plea to voluntary manslaughter in the January 1978 death of Troy Crovella, he had killed Walter Sanders, a 16-year-old runaway, a young hitchhiker named Monique Hilton and, that same day in Hollywood, his 17-year-old half sister, Martha Kitzler. Born in October 1959 to a mother from Nicaragua and a father from Mexico, he had grown up in Los Angeles, Mexico City and the county’s juvenile placements. A Los Angeles County jury convicted him of the second-degree murder of Sanders and the first-degree murders of Hilton and Kitzler, with the multiple-murder special circumstance. One penalty jury deadlocked; a second returned death, and judgment was entered on August 11, 1986. On April 30, 2001, the California Supreme Court upheld the convictions but reversed the death sentence, because the prosecutor’s reasons for striking a Hispanic prospective juror had no support in the record.
May 29, 2023. On Memorial Day, the U.S. Marshals Service Lone Star Fugitive Task Force arrested Raul Meza Jr., 62, in north Austin, days after he had telephoned Austin police and confessed to a killing. Meza had pleaded guilty in 1982 to the murder of Kendra Page, 8, in Austin, and received thirty years. His release in 1993 on good-conduct credit under mandatory supervision, after about eleven years, set off protests across Texas, and he was sent back to prison in 1994 for a curfew violation. The new charges concerned Gloria Lofton, 65, killed in Austin in May 2019, and Jesse Fraga, 80, a retired probation officer in Pflugerville with whom Meza had been living. Austin police went on to review eight to ten cold cases dating back to 1996, and no further charge was reported. On September 30, 2024, before Judge Julie Kocurek in Travis County, he pleaded guilty to the capital murder of Gloria Lofton and the murder of Jesse Fraga, waived his right to appeal, and received life without parole and a life sentence.
May 30, 2006. After just over four hours of deliberation, a Montgomery County, Maryland, jury convicted John Allen Muhammad of six counts of first-degree murder in the October 2002 killings of James D. Martin, James L. "Sonny" Buchanan, Premkumar Walekar, Sarah Ramos, Lori Ann Lewis-Rivera and Conrad Johnson. An Army veteran born John Allen Williams in 1960 and raised in Baton Rouge, Muhammad had been arrested with Lee Boyd Malvo, then 17, on October 24, 2002, ending three weeks of attacks around Washington that killed ten people. Virginia had already tried him: on November 17, 2003, a jury there convicted him of the capital murder of Dean Harold Meyers, 53, and he was sentenced to death in March 2004. The Supreme Court of Virginia affirmed in April 2005. On June 1, 2006, Judge James L. Ryan imposed six consecutive Maryland terms of life without parole. Virginia executed Muhammad by lethal injection at Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt on November 10, 2009, and he denied any part in the killings to the end.
May 31, 1963. At La Yerbabuena, a hamlet in the municipality of Villagrán, Tamaulipas, two people, Celina Saldaña and Héctor Arias, were killed at a gathering of a cult that two brothers, Santos and Cayetano Hernández, had built around the settlement, and Cayetano Hernández was shot dead the same day. Accounts published in 2021, relaying reporting from 1963, say that Magdalena Solís, a girl reported to be 16 whom the brothers had brought from Monterrey to act as the cult’s priestess, urged the crowd on with her brother Eleazar and Santos Hernández. A 14-year-old boy, Sebastián Guerrero, carried word of the killings to the police at Villagrán. The next day a police raid on the settlement ended in a gunfight that left at least seven dead by one count and fourteen by another. Solís and her brother were taken at a nearby farm soon afterward. Later accounts say each was sentenced to fifty years in prison, Infobae says for the deaths of the boy and the police investigator Luis Martínez; the court, date and counts were not reported.
June 1, 1936. Arnold Karl Sodeman was hanged at Pentridge Gaol in the Melbourne suburb of Coburg and buried within its walls. A laborer born at Hawthorn in 1899, he had been working in South Gippsland when police arrested him in December 1935 over the death of June Rushmer, a six-year-old girl from Leongatha. After about twelve hours of questioning he confessed to her killing and to three earlier ones that had gone unsolved for years: Mena Griffiths, 12, at Ormond in November 1930; Hazel Wilson, 16, at Ormond in January 1931; and Ethel Belshaw, 12, at Inverloch on New Year’s Day 1935. He was tried only for June Rushmer. A Melbourne jury rejected his insanity defense in February 1936, Justice Charles Gavan Duffy passed sentence of death, and his appeals failed all the way to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London.
June 2, 2000. John Edward Robinson Sr. was arrested at his home in Olathe, Johnson County, Kansas, at first on unrelated charges; capital murder charges followed on June 13. Born in Illinois in 1943, he had a record of theft and fraud reaching back to 1969, and in the days after his arrest the deaths of five women came to light in Linn County, Kansas, and in Raymore, Missouri. In October 2002 an Olathe jury convicted him of the capital murder of Suzette Trouten, 27, of Newport, Michigan, and he was sentenced to death the following January. In October 2003, in Cass County, Missouri, he pleaded guilty to the murders of Paula Godfrey, Catherine Clampitt, Beverly Bonner, Sheila Faith and Debbie Faith and received life without parole on each count. The Kansas Supreme Court upheld one capital conviction and the death sentence in November 2015. Governor Kelly denied clemency on June 18, 2026, and in September 2026 a post-conviction appeal was pending. Kansas has carried out no execution since 1965.
June 3, 1985. Brian Dugan was arrested by officers from Geneva, Kane and DeKalb counties working with the FBI, at first over attacks on women that spring; on June 25 he was charged with the murder of Melissa Ackerman, a seven-year-old from Somonauk. That November he pleaded guilty in Kane County to her murder and to that of Donna Schnorr, a 27-year-old Geneva nurse killed in July 1984, and received two life sentences. Through his lawyers he also offered to admit the February 1983 killing of ten-year-old Jeanine Nicarico, provided his life was spared. Prosecutors refused, and two other men spent years on death row for her murder before they were cleared. Dugan was indicted for it in 2005, pleaded guilty in July 2009 and was sentenced to death that November. When Illinois abolished capital punishment on March 9, 2011, Governor Pat Quinn commuted the sentence to life.
June 4, 2012. The Sverdlovsk Regional Court in Yekaterinburg convicted Irina Gaidamachuk of seventeen murders of elderly women and a series of robberies, and sentenced her to twenty years in a general regime colony and two years of restricted freedom. Russian law does not permit a life term for a woman, and the next day Senator Valery Ryazansky called the sentence out of proportion to the crimes. Born in Karpinsk in 1972, the mother of two lived in Krasnoufimsk without a passport or an official job. Between 2002 and 2010 she gained entry to the homes of pensioners by presenting herself as a social worker and killed them for small sums of money. She was detained in Krasnoufimsk in 2010, after investigators traced her through the circle of acquaintances of the last woman to die, a pensioner she had once worked for, and she confessed. The indictment also covered a 2003 robbery in which an elderly woman was hurt and survived.
June 5, 1959. The Supreme Court of California affirmed the death sentence of Harvey Murray Glatman, a television repairman who had moved from Denver to Los Angeles in 1957. A motorcycle officer had arrested him on an Orange County side road in October 1958, in a struggle with a woman who survived, and Glatman then confessed to the killings of three young women he had met through modeling work and a lonely hearts club. He pleaded guilty in San Diego County to the first-degree murders of Shirley Bridgeford, killed in March 1958, and Ruth Mercado, killed that July. The death of Judy Dull in 1957, which he described in his confessions, came before the court as evidence of other crimes but was never charged. Judge John A. Hewicker had fixed the penalty at death in December 1958. Glatman was executed in the gas chamber at San Quentin State Prison on September 18, 1959.
June 6, 2019. The Landgericht Oldenburg convicted Niels Högel, a former intensive care nurse, of eighty-five murders of patients at hospitals in Oldenburg and Delmenhorst between 2000 and 2005, and acquitted him of fifteen more for lack of evidence. He was sentenced to life with a finding of particular gravity of guilt and barred for life from nursing, elder care and rescue work. Högel, 42 at the verdict, was already serving life for killings at Delmenhorst, the result of a 2015 trial. The motive described at his trial was the recognition he received when a resuscitation succeeded. The Bundesgerichtshof rejected his appeal in September 2020, making the verdict final, and in March 2026 the Oldenburg court ruled that he must serve at least twenty-eight years. A separate prosecution of his former superiors, who had held suspicions about him, ended in acquittals in October 2022.
June 7, 2002. FBI agents and St. Louis detectives took Maury Troy Travis, a 36-year-old hotel waiter, into custody at his mother’s house in Ferguson, Missouri. Weeks earlier a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter, Bill Smith, had received an anonymous letter with a computer-printed map, and investigators traced the map through Expedia and Microsoft records to a single internet address connected to that house. A federal complaint charged Travis with kidnapping resulting in the deaths of Alysa Greenwade, 34, and Betty James, 46, and investigators linked him to about a dozen deaths of women on both sides of the Mississippi from 2000 to 2002, most of them women from north St. Louis. He never faced trial. On June 10, 2002, he died in the St. Louis County jail in Clayton, and his death was treated as a suicide. In 2025 investigators in Illinois gave names back to three of the women: Kelly Johnson, Crystal Lay and Carol Jean Hemphill.
June 8, 2007. A Jacksonville jury convicted Paul Durousseau, a former soldier who had driven a city cab, of the first-degree murder of Tyresa Mack, 24, a mother of three who died on July 26, 1999. Arrested for a probation violation in February 2003, Durousseau had been charged that June with the murders of five young women in the city over seven weeks: Nichole Williams, Nikia Kilpatrick, Shawanda McCallister, Jovanna Jefferson and Surita Cohen. Those cases never went to trial, and the charges were later dropped. The Mack jury recommended death by ten votes to two, Circuit Judge Jack Schemer imposed it in December 2007, and the Florida Supreme Court affirmed in 2010. After Hurst v. Florida the sentence was vacated in January 2017. A second penalty jury also divided ten to two, and on December 10, 2021, he was resentenced to life in prison.
June 9, 1998. The military court of the Siberian Military District sentenced Vadim Yershov, an army deserter born in Kirov oblast in 1973, to death by shooting for nineteen murders, with attempted murders and other charges, committed in and around Krasnoyarsk between 1992 and 1995. His arrest had come by chance, on October 29, 1995, after an attempted robbery in Krasnoyarsk, and prosecutors then connected him to a string of unsolved attacks. The trial prosecutor later said that Yershov’s statements had cleared two other men, one of them already convicted of a killing in Divnogorsk. The Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of Russia rejected his appeal on January 28, 1999, and the death sentence was later replaced with life imprisonment under the national moratorium on executions. Moskovsky Komsomolets reported in October 2026 that he was held in the Black Dolphin colony in the Orenburg region.
June 10, 1996. Hugjiltu, an eighteen-year-old ethnic Mongolian factory worker, was executed in Inner Mongolia for a killing he had reported to the authorities himself. On April 9 a woman surnamed Yang had been killed in Hohhot, the regional capital. Agence France-Presse later wrote that he was questioned for forty-eight hours before he confessed, and on May 17 the Hohhot Intermediate People’s Court sentenced him to death for intentional homicide; the regional high court rejected his appeal on June 5. In October 2005 Zhao Zhihong, arrested for a long series of robberies and killings, confessed to the same crime, yet nine years passed before the case was reopened. In December 2014 the Inner Mongolia Higher People’s Court declared Hugjiltu not guilty, and his parents were awarded 2.05 million yuan. In 2016 twenty-seven officials were disciplined over the case. Zhao was executed in 2019, although the Supreme People’s Court held his own guilt in the 1996 killing unproven.
June 11, 1980. Los Angeles police who had kept William George Bonin under surveillance since June 2 arrested him in his van in Hollywood; a teenage boy who was with him survived. Bonin, a truck driver from Downey and a Vietnam veteran on parole for earlier offenses, had come under suspicion when a 17-year-old acquaintance held on an auto theft charge told detectives that Bonin had talked about killing young boys. Prosecutors in Los Angeles and Orange counties tied him to the deaths of boys and young men picked up across Southern California in 1979 and 1980, sometimes with younger accomplices in the van. In January 1982 a Los Angeles County jury convicted him of ten murders, and in 1983 an Orange County jury convicted him of four more; each trial ended in a death sentence. After fourteen years on death row he was executed at San Quentin on February 23, 1996.
June 12, 1978. David Richard Berkowitz, the 24-year-old postal worker who had signed his letters to police and to the columnist Jimmy Breslin "Son of Sam," was sentenced to the maximum of twenty-five years to life for each of six murders, terms the Associated Press tallied at 315 years. Between July 1976 and July 1977 he attacked thirteen people in eight separate incidents in the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn. Six died: Donna Lauria, Christine Freund, Virginia Voskerichian, Valentina Suriani, Alexander Esau and Stacy Moskowitz. Arrested outside his apartment building in Yonkers on August 10, 1977, after detectives traced a parking ticket written near the last attack, he pleaded guilty in May 1978 against the advice of his lawyers. The day after sentencing he arrived at Clinton Correctional Facility. The New York parole board denied him release for the twelfth time in May 2024.
June 13, 2003. Gary Leon Ridgway signed a plea agreement with King County prosecutors in Washington and, the same day, sat down for the first of his interviews with detectives. Under its terms he had to account truthfully for his killings and plead guilty to every murder he had committed in the county, including any that came to light later, in exchange for life without release; a refusal to plead to a later case could expose him to the death penalty for it. A truck painter who had worked for three decades at the Kenworth plant, Ridgway had been arrested as he left work in Renton on November 30, 2001, after a DNA match. On November 5, 2003, he pleaded guilty to forty-eight counts of aggravated first-degree murder of women and girls killed between 1982 and 1998, and on December 18 he received forty-eight consecutive life terms. A forty-ninth, for the death of Rebecca Marrero, followed in February 2011.
June 14, 1856. William Palmer, a surgeon from Rugeley in Staffordshire, was hanged at Stafford before a crowd estimated at about thirty thousand. Born in 1824, he had drifted from medicine into horse racing and heavy debt, and in November 1855 his racing associate John Parsons Cook, 28, died at Rugeley. A coroner’s jury returned a verdict of wilful murder against Palmer that December, and another inquest jury returned the same verdict in the death of his wife, Anne, who had died in September 1854; that case was never tried. Concern that local feeling would prevent a fair trial in Staffordshire led Parliament to pass a measure, known afterward as Palmer’s Act, that allowed the case to be heard in London. At the Central Criminal Court a jury convicted him of Cook’s murder on May 27, 1856. On the morning of the execution Charles Dickens’s weekly, Household Words, carried his essay on Palmer’s composure in the dock.
June 15, 1927. Officers of the Manitoba Provincial Police arrested Earle Leonard Nelson near Wakopa, in southern Manitoba. He got away from the town lockup in Killarney the same day and was retaken near Killarney the next morning. A drifter from San Francisco who also used the name Virgil Wilson, Nelson had been linked by police and newspapers to the deaths of twenty or more women, most of them landladies, in cities across the United States in 1926 and 1927. Days before the arrest, two people had died in Winnipeg: Lola Cowan, a girl reported as thirteen or fourteen, and Emily Patterson, 27. A Winnipeg jury rejected his insanity defense and convicted him of Patterson’s murder in November 1927, and he was hanged at the Vaughan Street Jail on January 13, 1928, by the hangman who worked as Arthur Ellis. The death of Lola Cowan was attributed to him but never tried.
June 16, 2026. An investigating judge in Nanterre sent Francis Heaulme to trial before an assize court for the murder of Jean-Joseph Clément, 60, killed at Bédarrides in the Vaucluse on August 8, 1989. Heaulme, then 67, is accused in that case and has not yet been tried for it. He already stood finally convicted of eleven murders committed between 1984 and 1992, as he crossed France on foot, by hitchhiking and by train. A gendarme in Brittany connected him to a string of unsolved deaths, and he was arrested at Bischwiller, in Alsace, on January 7, 1992. The last of his convictions concerned Cyril Beining and Alexandre Beckrich, both eight, killed at Montigny-lès-Metz in September 1986, a case in which another man had earlier been wrongly convicted and was acquitted in 2002. Heaulme denies the Montigny killings; the verdict against him became final in June 2020. In June 2026 he was held at the Ensisheim prison.
June 17, 1939. Eugen Weidmann was guillotined in public outside the prison at Versailles. A German born in Frankfurt in 1908, with earlier convictions in Germany and Canada, he had killed six people around Paris in 1937, most of them for small sums, while living in a rented villa at La Celle-Saint-Cloud: Jean de Koven, Joseph Couffy, Janine Keller, Roger Le Blond, Fritz Frommer and Raymond Lesobre. Inspectors of the Sûreté arrested him there on December 8, 1937, and he admitted all six killings. A Versailles assize jury convicted him on March 31, 1939. On June 16 President Albert Lebrun refused him clemency while commuting to life the death sentence of his accomplice, Million. A week after the execution, on June 24, 1939, a decree required that executions take place inside prisons, and Weidmann’s became the last public execution in France.
June 18, 2008. Chief Judge William Collette of the Ingham County Circuit Court sentenced Matthew Emmanuel Macon to life without parole. In May a jury had convicted him of the first-degree murders of Sandra Eichorn, 64, and Karen Delgado-Yates, 41, both killed in Lansing, Michigan, in August 2007, along with torture, home invasion and assault with intent to murder in an attack on a third woman, who survived. Macon, a registered sex offender, had been paroled from state prison on June 26, 2007, and police linked him to five deaths of Lansing women that summer. He also confessed to the 2005 death of Carolyn Kronenberg, a Lansing Community College professor, for which a student had been wrongly convicted; that man was released in October 2007. In March 2010 the county prosecutor closed five killings of women without charges, saying he believed Macon had committed them.
June 19, 1959. Heinrich Pommerenke was arrested in Hornberg, a small town in the Black Forest. Accounts of how police traced him differ; one has him leaving a bag with a local tailor, who alerted the authorities. A laborer born in 1937 at Bentwisch, near Rostock, he had moved from the East to West Germany as a teenager in 1953. That spring he had killed four women and girls in southwestern Germany, among them a sixteen-year-old killed near Baden-Baden on June 9. In October 1960 the Landgericht Freiburg convicted him of four murders and twelve attempted murders, with other charges including bodily harm and robbery, and gave him six life terms plus fifteen years. The German Press Agency reported that he had confessed to sixty-five crimes in all. His sentence was deemed served in 2001, but experts judged release inappropriate. He died in December 2008, aged 71, in the prison hospital at Hohenasperg, after forty-nine years behind bars, then the longest prison term served by anyone in Germany.
June 20, 2008. Police arrested Vlado Taneski at his home in Kičevo, in western Macedonia. A veteran local correspondent for Skopje newspapers, Taneski had reported on the deaths of older women from the same part of town who worked or had worked as cleaners, and police said his articles carried details that had not been made public and that DNA tied him to two of the cases. He was charged with the murders of Zivana Temelkoska, 65, and Mitra Simjanoska, and was also under investigation over the death of Ljubica Licoska and the disappearance of Gorica Pavleska, missing since 2003. A court in Gostivar ordered him held for thirty days, and he was moved to the prison in Tetovo. Early on June 23 he died there in custody; the autopsy gave drowning as the cause, and officials described the death as suicide. He left a handwritten note denying the killings. No court ever ruled on the charges.
June 21, 1981. Wayne Bertram Williams, a 23-year-old freelance cameraman and would-be music promoter, was arrested at his Atlanta home at about five in the afternoon and charged with the murder of Nathaniel Cater, 27. For two years the deaths and disappearances of Black children and young men in the city had drawn a federal investigation, and earlier that month the FBI had questioned Williams for twelve hours. In February 1982 a Fulton County jury convicted him of murdering Cater and Jimmy Ray Payne, 21, and Judge Clarence Cooper imposed two consecutive life sentences. The Supreme Court of Georgia affirmed the convictions in December 1983. Investigators attributed twenty-two other deaths on the city’s list to him, but he was never charged with any of them. Williams, the only child of two Atlanta schoolteachers, was denied parole in December 2019, the same year Atlanta police began re-testing evidence from the cases.
June 22, 1924. Friedrich Haarmann, called Fritz, was arrested at Hanover’s main railway station, at first on a complaint about a teenage boy, and from the next day he was held in the court prison. A petty criminal who also worked as an informer for the police, Haarmann was charged with twenty-seven murders of boys and young men. On December 19, 1924, the Schwurgericht Hannover convicted him of twenty-four, one committed in 1918 and the rest between February 1923 and June 1924; the victims were aged ten to twenty-two. The court acquitted him in the deaths of Hermann Wolf, Adolf Hennies and Hermann Bock, which were not proved. Sentenced to death twenty-four times, he accepted the verdict and was guillotined at six in the morning on April 15, 1925, in the prison yard of the Landgericht Hannover. In December 2024, a century on, the Niedersächsisches Landesarchiv in Hanover presented the transcripts of the case.
June 23, 2012. Mikhail Popkov, a former police officer from the Siberian city of Angarsk, was detained near Vladivostok after a DNA sample he had given in Angarsk that March was matched during a screening of tens of thousands of local men. Popkov had served in the Central District police department until 1998, when he left the force as a junior lieutenant, and investigators said he had killed women from 1992 until 2011. The Irkutsk Regional Court sentenced him to life on January 14, 2015, for twenty-two murders and attempted murders. A second life term followed on December 10, 2018, for fifty-six more, among them a fellow police officer killed in 1999, and the Supreme Court of Russia upheld it in April 2019. Further verdicts in 2021, 2023 and 2025 were merged into a single life term, and in April 2026 the Irkutsk regional prosecutor’s office put the total at ninety-one murders and three attempted murders.
June 24, 1960. FBI agents arrested Melvin Davis Rees Jr. in the Memphis area on a federal warrant for unlawful flight to avoid prosecution for a murder in Maryland. Seventeen months earlier, in January 1959, Carroll Jackson, his wife Mildred, and their daughters Susan, five, and Janet, an infant, had disappeared in Louisa County, Virginia. A federal jury in Maryland convicted Rees in 1961 of kidnapping Mildred and Susan Jackson, and he received two life sentences. A Virginia jury then convicted him of the first-degree murder of Carroll Jackson and sentenced him to death, a judgment the Supreme Court of Virginia affirmed in 1962; Janet’s death was not prosecuted. In 1967 a federal judge ruled him mentally incompetent, and his petition to the U.S. Supreme Court was held without action for almost three decades. He died in prison of natural causes in 1995, and the Court dismissed the petition that October.
June 25, 1953. A jury at the Central Criminal Court in London convicted John Reginald Halliday Christie of the murder of his wife, Ethel, 54, rejecting his plea of insanity, and he was sentenced to death. Born in Halifax, Yorkshire, in 1899, Christie had served as a police reservist during the war. After the deaths of six women came to light in North Kensington in March 1953, he was arrested on March 31 near Putney Bridge. He confessed to killing all six, among them Ruth Fuerst and Muriel Eady, and to killing Beryl Evans, the wife of his upstairs neighbor, in 1949, but he was tried only for Ethel’s death. Three years earlier he had been the chief prosecution witness against Beryl’s husband, who was hanged in March 1950 for the murder of the couple’s baby daughter. Christie was hanged at Pentonville on July 15, 1953. Beryl’s husband received a posthumous free pardon on October 18, 1966.
June 26, 1989. Vasiliy Kulik, an Irkutsk physician, was executed by shooting in the city’s pretrial detention center, as most accounts date it; one 2026 report says that some give late December 1989 instead. Born in Irkutsk on January 17, 1956, into an academic family, Kulik trained at the Irkutsk Medical Institute and worked as a district therapist and then as an emergency ambulance doctor. He was caught on his thirtieth birthday in 1986, when workers from a student canteen and two passersby intervened and held him for the police. In 1988 the Irkutsk Regional Court convicted him of a series of murders, with other charges; reports put the murders at thirteen, seven elderly women and six children, killed in 1984 and 1985 in Irkutsk, with one child killed in Kirovograd in Soviet Ukraine. Psychiatrists at the Serbsky Institute had judged him sane, and the court sentenced him to death that August.
June 27, 2006. Angel Maturino Resendiz was executed by lethal injection at Huntsville, Texas, at 8:05 in the evening, after the Fifth Circuit and the U.S. Supreme Court denied stays; the day before, the state’s Board of Pardons and Paroles had voted seven to none against clemency. Earlier that month Judge William Harmon ruled him competent to be executed. A Mexican drifter who used dozens of names and rode freight trains across the United States, he was linked to at least fifteen killings near rail lines from 1986 to 1999. Four of them came after June 1, 1999, when the Border Patrol caught him near Santa Teresa, New Mexico, and returned him to Mexico, a lapse the Justice Department’s inspector general later examined. On July 13, 1999, he surrendered to Texas Ranger Sergeant Drew Carter on a bridge at El Paso. A Harris County jury convicted him in May 2000 of the capital murder of Dr. Claudia Benton, 39, killed in West University Place in December 1998.
June 28, 1994. At about nine in the evening a jury in Graz returned guilty verdicts against Jack Unterweger on nine of eleven murder charges, covering women killed in Austria, Prague and Los Angeles, and he was sentenced to life with committal to an institution for mentally abnormal offenders. Born Johann Unterweger in Judenburg, Styria, in 1950, he had already served years of a life term for the 1974 murder of Margret Schäfer, 18, in Herborn, West Germany, and in prison he became a celebrated writer. Paroled in May 1990 as a model of rehabilitation, he was arrested in Miami in February 1992 on an Austrian warrant and extradited that May. Within hours of the verdict, before dawn on June 29, he took his own life in his cell in Graz. Because he died before any appeal could be heard, the verdicts of June 28 never became final.
June 29, 2005. A team that included officers of Thailand’s Crime Suppression Division arrested Somkid Phumphuang in Chaiyaphum province. Born in Thung Song district, Nakhon Si Thammarat, he was convicted of killing five women in Mukdahan, Lampang, Trang, Udon Thani and Buri Ram provinces between January and June 2005, with theft or robbery counts, in five separate cases; among them was Patcharee Amatanirand, killed in Trang on June 11. Each case ended in life imprisonment, two death sentences having been reduced, and the last appeal ruling was read in July 2013. Sentence reductions for good conduct freed him from Nong Khai Provincial Prison in May 2019. In December he was arrested again, at Pak Chong station, after two passengers on a Bangkok-bound train recognized him from police photographs. In 2021 the Khon Kaen Provincial Court convicted him of the premeditated murder of Ratsami Mulichan, 51, a woman he had met on Facebook, and sentenced him to death.
June 30, 1999. In Santa Ana, the Orange County Superior Court sentenced Charles Chitat Ng to death. Four months earlier a jury had convicted the Hong Kong-born former Marine of eleven counts of first-degree murder for killings in 1984 and 1985 around Wilseyville, in Calaveras County, committed with Leonard Lake. The victims were Harvey, Deborah and Sean Dubs, Clifford Peranteau, Jeffrey Gerald, Michael Carroll, Kathleen Allen, Lonnie Bond Sr., Brenda O’Connor, Lonnie Bond Jr. and Robin Scott Stapley; two of the families lost infant sons. Lake took his own life after his arrest in June 1985, and Ng fled to Canada, where he was arrested in Calgary that July. His extradition was contested before the Supreme Court of Canada and the United Nations Human Rights Committee before he was returned. The California Supreme Court affirmed the judgment on July 28, 2022, and in June 2026 the Lancashire Post reported that he had been moved from San Quentin to the California Medical Facility at Vacaville.
July 1, 1851. Hélène Jégado, a cook from the Breton countryside, was arrested in Rennes at the home of her employer, the lawyer and law professor Théophile Bidard, on the very day his servant Rosalie Sarrazin died. Two doctors who had attended the household had grown uneasy, and chemists soon reported arsenic. For some eighteen years Jégado had moved through presbyteries and private houses in Morbihan and then Rennes, and the court later estimated that 37 people in her care had been poisoned, 23 of them fatally. Most of those deaths lay beyond the ten-year limit French law then set for prosecution. In December 1851 the assize court of Ille-et-Vilaine convicted her on all 18 counts: the murders of Pérotte Macé, Rose Tessier and Rosalie Sarrazin, four attempted murders and 11 thefts. The Cour de cassation rejected her appeal, a pardon was refused, and she was guillotined in Rennes on February 26, 1852.
July 2, 1986. Gerald Stano was due to die in Florida’s electric chair. Governor Bob Graham had signed the warrant in May in the case of Cathy Lee Scharf, a 17-year-old from Port Orange, and less than a day before the scheduled hour Stano’s new lawyers filed a motion claiming that the confessions behind his earlier guilty pleas had been coerced. The execution was stayed. A short-order cook from the Daytona Beach area, Stano had been arrested in April 1980 and had confessed, over the next two years, to dozens of killings of young women; reports put his own total at 41. By plea and at trial in four Florida counties he was convicted of the murders of ten women, one of whom was never identified, and received three death sentences. The litigation over his confessions ran for twelve more years. He was executed at Florida State Prison on March 23, 1998, for the murder of Cathy Lee Scharf.
July 3, 2003. Alfredo Galán Sotillo, a former Spanish army corporal who had served in Bosnia and later worked as a security guard at Madrid’s Barajas airport, walked into the police station in his hometown of Puertollano, in Ciudad Real province, and confessed. Between January 24 and March 18 of that year six people chosen at random had been killed in Madrid, Alcalá de Henares and Arganda del Rey, and three others had survived. The dead included Juan Francisco Ledesma, a building doorman; Juan Carlos Martín, an airport cleaner; Mikel Jiménez Sánchez, 18, and Juana Dolores Uclés, killed in a bar in Alcalá; and a married couple of Romanian origin. Galán retracted in September and blamed two other men. In March 2005 the Audiencia Provincial de Madrid convicted him of six murders and three attempted murders and sentenced him to 142 years and three months, with an effective maximum of 25. Spanish television reported in March 2026 that he remained in prison, with release expected around 2028.
July 4, 1969. Shortly before midnight at Blue Rock Springs Park in Vallejo, California, Darlene Ferrin, 22, was killed; the young man with her survived. Within the hour a caller telephoned Vallejo police, claimed the attack and claimed the deaths of two teenagers, David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen, near Benicia the previous December. Weeks later letters and ciphers began reaching Bay Area newspapers from a writer who called himself the Zodiac. Police attribute five killings to him between December 1968 and October 1969, the last a San Francisco cab driver, Paul Stine; the letter writer later claimed 37. One of his ciphers resisted every attempt for 51 years until amateur codebreakers announced its solution in December 2020; it contained no name. No one has ever been charged, and the case is still open in Vallejo, Napa, Solano County and San Francisco.
July 5, 1976. Charles Sobhraj, a French citizen born in Saigon, was arrested in New Delhi in connection with the drugging of a party of French tourists at a hotel. By then police in Thailand and Nepal had linked him to the deaths of young Western travelers in 1975. He spent most of the next two decades in Indian custody, escaped from Tihar jail in March 1986, was recaptured in Goa that April, and was released and flown to Paris in 1997. In September 2003 he reappeared in Kathmandu and was arrested. A Nepali court convicted him in 2004 of the 1975 murder of Connie Jo Bronzich, an American, and in 2014 of the murder of Laurent Carrière, a Canadian. On December 21, 2022, the Supreme Court of Nepal ordered him freed on age grounds, and two days later he was deported to France. He has denied all of the killings.
July 6, 1985. Charles Chitat Ng, a Hong Kong-born former U.S. Marine, was arrested in Calgary, Alberta, after a confrontation with store security guards over shoplifting. A month earlier his associate Leonard Lake had been arrested in South San Francisco and had died by his own hand, and the investigation had turned to the killings of men, women and families in Calaveras County and San Francisco in 1984 and 1985. Ng fought extradition for six years; the Supreme Court of Canada ruled against him 4 to 3 on September 26, 1991, and he was flown to California the same day. Tried in Orange County, he was convicted on February 24, 1999, of 11 counts of first-degree murder, among the victims two families with infant sons, and was sentenced to death that June. On July 28, 2022, the California Supreme Court affirmed the judgment in its entirety.
July 7, 2010. Lonnie David Franklin Jr., 57, a former Los Angeles sanitation worker and police garage attendant, was arrested in South Los Angeles. California’s familial DNA search, the first of its kind to lead to a suspect in the state, had pointed investigators to a relative in the offender data bank, and DNA from food Franklin left at a restaurant matched the evidence. The killings of women in South Los Angeles had begun in 1985, paused, and resumed in 2002, a pattern that earned the unknown attacker the name the Grim Sleeper. In May 2016 a jury convicted Franklin of ten counts of first-degree murder, among them the murder of Princess Berthomieux, 15, with other charges, and of the attempted murder of a woman who survived in 1988. He was sentenced to death in August 2016 and died at San Quentin on March 28, 2020, with his automatic appeal still pending.
July 8, 1933. The Corte d’Assise of La Spezia convicted Cesare Serviatti, a former hospital nurse and butcher from Rome, of three murders committed to take the savings of the women he killed. The court sentenced him to death for the murder of Paolina Gorietti, killed in La Spezia in November 1932, and to life imprisonment for the murders of Beatrice Margarucci, killed in Rome in 1930, and of Pasqua Bartolini, a widow killed in La Spezia in 1928. Serviatti had been arrested at his home in Rome in December 1932, reportedly at the dinner table with his wife. After his arrest he spoke of further killings, reported variously as five in all or at least four more, but none was ever charged. The case moved quickly through every stage. King Victor Emmanuel III refused clemency, and on October 13, 1933, Serviatti was executed by firing squad at the Chiara Vecchia range at Sarzana.
July 9, 2024. A three-member panel of California’s Board of Parole Hearings denied parole to Edmund Kemper, then held at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville, after he declined to attend, and set his next hearing for 2031. Kemper had first killed at 15, in 1964, when he killed his paternal grandparents in Madera County; that case went through juvenile court, and he was later released to his mother’s care. Between May 1972 and April 1973 he killed six young women and girls who were hitchhiking in the Santa Cruz and Bay Area region, then his mother, Clarnell Strandberg, and her friend Sally Hallett in Aptos. He telephoned Santa Cruz police from Pueblo, Colorado, to confess. On November 8, 1973, a Santa Cruz jury convicted him of eight counts of first-degree murder. He has been refused parole, or has waived his hearings, since 1979.
July 10, 2008. Ahmad Suradji, a village dukun, or traditional healer, from Sei Semayang in Deli Serdang regency, North Sumatra, was executed by a police firing squad at a plantation in Deli Serdang at 9:58 p.m. He had been arrested in May 1997 after the family of a young woman who had consulted him raised the alarm. On April 27, 1998, the Lubuk Pakam District Court sentenced him to death for the killings of 42 women and girls between 1986 and 1997, tried as a single continuing offense of murder, and his wife Tumini was convicted as an accomplice. The Medan High Court and the Supreme Court upheld the sentence that year. President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono rejected clemency in December 2007. After the execution, neighbors in his hamlet refused to allow his burial there, and he was laid to rest in the public cemetery of a neighboring village.
July 11, 2000. Days before he was due to walk out of federal prison on a fraud sentence, Dr. Michael Swango was charged in the Eastern District of New York with murdering three patients at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Northport, Long Island, in 1993. United States Attorney Loretta E. Lynch called him exactly the kind of doctor a patient would want to avoid, the Associated Press reported. Trained at Southern Illinois University, Swango had been imprisoned in 1985 in Quincy, Illinois, for aggravated battery against ambulance co-workers, then concealed that record to obtain medical posts in South Dakota, New York and Zimbabwe. On September 6, 2000, he pleaded guilty to the murders of George Siano, Aldo Serini and Thomas Sammarco and received three consecutive life terms without parole. On October 18 he pleaded guilty in Ohio to the 1984 murder of Cynthia Ann McGee, 19, a patient at Ohio State University Hospitals. He is serving life.
July 12, 1995. In Miami, a grand jury of the Eleventh Judicial Circuit indicted Rory Enrique Conde, a 30-year-old Miami man, on six counts of first-degree murder. Between September 1994 and January 1995 six people who sold sex along the Tamiami Trail had been killed, and the case had defeated Metro-Dade detectives for months. It broke in June 1995 through a separate kidnapping investigation, and Conde was arrested on June 24 at his grandmother’s home; by the Florida Supreme Court’s account he confessed to all six deaths. In October 1999 a jury convicted him of the first-degree murder of Rhonda Dunn, killed on January 13, 1995, and he was sentenced to death in March 2000. The Florida Supreme Court affirmed in September 2003. On April 3, 2001, he received life sentences on the other five counts, which covered Lazaro Comesana, Elisa Martinez, Charity Nava, Wanda Crawford and Necole Schneider. Later challenges to the death sentence failed in the state courts.
July 13, 1999. Angel Maturino Reséndiz walked out of Ciudad Juárez onto a bridge at El Paso and surrendered to Texas Ranger Sgt. Drew Carter, under an arrangement his sister had made through an intermediary. He was then on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list under the name Rafael Resendez-Ramirez, one of dozens he used. A drifter who crossed the border repeatedly and rode freight trains across the United States, he was linked to at least 15 killings near rail lines between 1986 and 1999. A Justice Department review later concluded that the Border Patrol had caught him and returned him to Mexico in June 1999 without knowing he was wanted for murder. In May 2000 a Harris County jury convicted him of the capital murder of Dr. Claudia Benton, 39, at her home in West University Place in December 1998, rejecting his insanity defense. He was executed at Huntsville on June 27, 2006.
July 14, 2009. The Court of Appeal in London, headed by the Lord Chief Justice, quashed the seven murder convictions of Kenneth Erskine and substituted verdicts of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility. A jury had convicted Erskine on January 29, 1988, of murdering seven elderly people in 1986, four of them in their own homes and three in a residential home, and of the attempted murder of an eighth. He had received life sentences with a recommended minimum of 40 years and in August 1988 was moved to Broadmoor Hospital. The appeal court held that psychiatric evidence available at the time of the trial showed his responsibility to have been substantially impaired by schizophrenia, and that the case was one of the exceptional ones in which fresh evidence should be received. The attempted murder conviction stood, and the court said a restricted hospital order without limit of time would replace the life terms.
July 15, 2008. Very Idham Henyansyah, a former Quran teacher and dance instructor from Jatiwates village in Jombang, East Java, known to everyone as Ryan, was arrested at a house in Pesona Khayangan, a residential area of Depok, south of Jakarta. Days earlier the death of Heri Santoso, 40, a Jakarta man killed in a Depok apartment on July 11, had come to light in South Jakarta, and detectives quickly put a name to the suspect. Under questioning Ryan said he had also killed a man in his home village. Police went on to attribute ten deaths in Jombang to him between about 2006 and 2008, among them Nanik Hidayati and her daughter Sylvia, 3; he admitted them, but they were not tried in the reported proceedings. On April 6, 2009, the Depok District Court sentenced him to death for the premeditated murder of Heri Santoso. By 2015 his legal remedies were exhausted, and in August 2021 he was held, unexecuted, at Gunung Sindur prison in Bogor.
July 16, 2002. A Montague County grand jury in North Texas indicted Vickie Dawn Jackson, a 36-year-old licensed vocational nurse, on two counts of capital murder, each alleging the deaths of two patients, and she was arrested the same day at the grocery store deli in Bowie where she then worked. She was held on two million dollars' bond. Jackson had worked night shifts at Nocona General Hospital, a small rural hospital, during the winter of 2000 and 2001, when deaths there doubled. Three more capital counts followed in January 2004. In October 2006, as her trial was about to open in San Angelo, she pleaded no contest to capital murder in what news reports described as the deaths of ten patients. Because prosecutors had not sought death, the sentence of life was automatic, and Judge Roger Towery imposed it on October 5, 2006. She never admitted guilt, and in 2015 she sought a new trial through a habeas application.
July 17, 2020. Dustin Honken, a methamphetamine maker from northern Iowa, was executed by the federal government at the prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, and pronounced dead at 4:36 p.m. He was the first person executed in an Iowa case since 1963. In 1993 Honken and his girlfriend, Angela Jane Johnson, had killed two of his former dealers who had become witnesses against him, Greg Nicholson and Terry DeGeus, along with Nicholson’s girlfriend, Lori Duncan, and her two young daughters, Kandi and Amber, in two separate attacks. Johnson was charged in 2000 and convicted by a federal jury in 2005 of five counts of aiding and abetting murder in furtherance of a continuing criminal enterprise and sentenced to death. A judge vacated her death sentence in 2012 for ineffective assistance of counsel, and in 2014 she was resentenced to life in prison.
July 18, 2002. Gerald Gallego, a Sacramento bartender, died of colon cancer at the Nevada prison system’s Regional Medical Center in Carson City, one day after his 56th birthday, after some 18 years on Nevada’s death row. Between 1978 and 1980 Gallego and Charlene Williams had abducted young people in California and Nevada, and Williams later testified against him in both states under a plea agreement. A California jury convicted him in 1983 of the murders of Craig Miller, 22, and Mary Beth Sowers, 21, and a Nevada jury convicted him in 1984 of the murders of Stacey Redican and Karen Chipman Twiggs, both 17, with other charges. Each state sentenced him to death. A federal court set aside the Nevada sentence in 1997; a new jury restored it in 1999, and the Nevada Supreme Court affirmed in 2001. He was never executed, and the other deaths investigators laid to him were never tried.
July 19, 2013. In Boston, the Suffolk County district attorney, the Massachusetts attorney general and the Boston police commissioner announced that DNA had linked Albert DeSalvo to the 1964 murder of Mary Sullivan, one of the eleven killings of women in the Boston area that investigators had grouped as the work of the Boston Strangler. The odds that another man was the source, they said, were one in 220 billion. DeSalvo, a Malden laborer and Army veteran, had confessed in 1965 to all eleven deaths and two more, then recanted. He was never charged with any of them. Instead, in January 1967, he was convicted of armed robbery and assaults on four women who survived, and he was sentenced to life. He was killed in Walpole State Prison in November 1973, and no one was ever convicted of his death. The Sullivan case is the only one of the series tied to him by physical evidence.
July 20, 1984. Alton Coleman and Debra Denise Brown were arrested in a park in Evanston, Illinois, after a former high school classmate recognized Coleman and alerted police. Coleman, of Waukegan, had been placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list earlier that month. Since late May the pair had traveled through the Midwest, a period in which prosecutors charged Coleman with eight deaths. He was convicted of four murders: Marlene Walters, 44, and Tonnie Storey, 15, in Ohio; Tamika Turks, 7, in Indiana; and Vernita Wheat, 9, in Illinois, each with other charges. All three states sentenced him to death. Two charged deaths in Toledo, of Virginia Temple and her daughter Rachelle, 9, were never tried. On April 26, 2002, Coleman was executed at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville for the murder of Marlene Walters.
July 21, 1949. At nine in the morning Marie Besnard, the widow of a rope merchant in Loudun, in the Vienne, was arrested at her home and taken to Poitiers, where she was charged with poisoning her second husband, Léon Besnard, who had died on October 25, 1947. Gossip in the small town had preceded the arrest, and a Marseille toxicologist had reported arsenic. The inquiry widened until she stood accused in the deaths of eleven more relatives and friends who had died between 1927 and 1949. Twelve years of scientific argument lay ahead. Her first trial, at Poitiers in 1952, was halted for new expert reports; a second, at Bordeaux in 1954, ended the same way, and she was released that April. The defense argued that the arsenic had come from the soil of the cemetery. In December 1961 a Bordeaux jury acquitted her on every count. She died in Loudun in 1980, never convicted in any of the deaths.
July 22, 1991. Late that night Milwaukee police arrested Jeffrey Dahmer, 31, after a man who had been held in his apartment went to them. Within days Dahmer had admitted to detectives the killings of 17 young men and boys since 1978, the first in Ohio and the rest in Milwaukee. The case raised hard questions in Milwaukee about how police had handled earlier contacts with him, for officers had questioned him on several occasions without uncovering what he was doing. On February 15, 1992, a Milwaukee jury rejected his insanity defense and held him sane on all 15 Wisconsin counts of murder. He received 15 consecutive life terms, and a 16th life term followed in Ohio in May 1992 for the killing in 1978.
July 23, 2007. Police in Dnipropetrovsk, in eastern Ukraine, arrested three 19-year-old former classmates, Igor Suprunyuk, Viktor Sayenko and Oleksandr Hanzha, in the Krasny Kamen district where they had grown up. Detectives had traced telephones taken from victims to a second-hand shop. In the space of about a month that summer, people of all ages had been killed in and around the city, apparently at random, and the arrests ended a period of fear across the region. On February 11, 2009, the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast Court of Appeal convicted Suprunyuk of 21 murders, 18 of them committed jointly with Sayenko and three that the court attributed to him alone, with robbery and cruelty to animals. Both men were sentenced to life imprisonment with confiscation of property. Hanzha was convicted only of robbery and received nine years; he was released in 2019.
July 24, 2021. Rodney Alcala, a UCLA-trained photographer, died of natural causes at 1:43 a.m. at a hospital in Kings County, California, at the age of 77, while under sentence of death. He had been tried three times in Orange County for the 1979 murder of Robin Samsoe, 12, of Huntington Beach; two convictions were reversed on appeal before a jury, on February 25, 2010, convicted him of her murder, with other charges, and of the murders of four Los Angeles County women: Jill Barcomb, 18, Georgia Wixted, 27, Charlotte Lamb, 32, and Jill Parenteau, 21. He was sentenced to death on March 30, 2010. In December 2012 he pleaded guilty in Manhattan to the murders of Cornelia Crilley and Ellen Hover, both 23, in the 1970s, and received 25 years to life. A 2016 Wyoming murder charge in the death of Christine Ruth Thornton, 28, was dismissed after he died.
July 25, 1999. Cary Stayner, the handyman at the Cedar Lodge motel in El Portal, outside Yosemite National Park, was charged in federal court with the murder of Joie Armstrong, 26, an instructor in the park. FBI agents had picked him up the previous day at a resort in Wilton, in Sacramento County, and by their account he confessed not only to her killing but to the deaths in February 1999 of Carole Sund, 42, her daughter Juli, 15, and their friend Silvina Pelosso, 16, a case in which investigators had spent months pursuing other men. Stayner pleaded guilty to the federal charges in September 2000 and received life without parole. In 2002 a Santa Clara County jury convicted him of the three Sund and Pelosso murders and of kidnapping Juli Sund, and he was sentenced to death. The California Supreme Court upheld that judgment on April 30, 2026.
July 26, 1946. William George Heirens, a 17-year-old University of Chicago student with a long record of burglaries, signed a written confession in Chicago and authorized his lawyers to arrange a plea. He had been arrested on June 26 while prowling an apartment building in Rogers Park, and investigators had linked him to the murder of Suzanne Degnan, 6, in January 1946 and to the deaths of Josephine Ross, 43, and Frances Brown in 1945. To avoid a possible death sentence he pleaded guilty to all three murders on September 4, 1946, and received three consecutive life terms. He recanted soon afterward and insisted on his innocence for the rest of his life. A federal magistrate ordered him released in 1983, but the Seventh Circuit reversed the order in 1984, and parole boards refused him again and again. He died in custody on March 5, 2012, at 83, after more than 65 years in Illinois prisons.
July 27, 1967. After a month-long hearing at which more than 130 witnesses testified, a Los Angeles County grand jury indicted William Dale Archerd, 55, on three counts of murder, and he was arrested at once, according to Sheriff Peter J. Pitchess. The counts covered his wife Zella Winders Archerd, who died on July 25, 1956; his nephew Burney Kirk Archerd, 15, who died on September 2, 1961; and his wife Mary Brinker Post Arden, a writer, who died on November 3, 1966. Each death had first passed as natural. Archerd had worked from 1939 to 1941 as an attendant on the insulin shock ward at Camarillo State Hospital. On March 15, 1968, Judge Adolph Alexander, sitting without a jury, convicted him of three counts of first-degree murder and sentenced him to death on each. In December 1970 the California Supreme Court affirmed, describing the case as the only known reported prosecution for murder by insulin poisoning in the United States.
July 28, 1975. The Voivodeship Court in Katowice, in southern Poland, convicted Zdzisław Marchwicki, a laborer from Dąbrowa Górnicza, of the murders of 14 women and the attempted murders of six more in Zagłębie and Upper Silesia between 1964 and 1970, and sentenced him to death. The Citizens' Militia had attributed 21 attacks, 14 of them fatal, to a single offender, and the press called the unknown attacker the Vampire of Zagłębie. Marchwicki had been arrested in January 1972 and denied his guilt. His brother Jan and half-brother Henryk were convicted of the murder of Jadwiga Kucianka; Jan was sentenced to death and Henryk to 25 years. The Council of State refused clemency, and Marchwicki was hanged in Katowice on April 26, 1977. Writers and filmmakers have since argued that the case was built under political pressure.
July 29, 2002. Investigators in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, announced that DNA had linked the deaths of three women, Gina Wilson Green, Charlotte Murray Pace and Pam Kinamore, to a single man, and the city learned that it was facing a serial offender. The name came in May 2003, when a court-ordered cheek swab taken from Derrick Todd Lee, a laborer from St. Francisville with a long record of stalking and burglary, matched the evidence from five killings around Baton Rouge and Lafayette. Lee was arrested at a tire shop in Atlanta on May 27, 2003. In 2004 he was convicted of the second-degree murder of Geralyn Barr DeSoto, 21, and the first-degree murder of Charlotte Murray Pace, 22, and was sentenced to death for the second. The other deaths linked to him by DNA were never tried. He died of heart disease on January 21, 2016, after being taken from Angola to a hospital.
July 30, 2006. Detroit police arrested Shelly Andre Brooks, 37, after a woman who had survived an attack gave them a tip; he was already in custody on another charge when detectives began to question him about the deaths of other women. A month later the Wayne County prosecutor, Kym Worthy, charged him with killing seven women in Detroit over five years and called him a quintessential serial killer, United Press International reported. Brooks went to trial twice in 2007, and juries convicted him of first-degree murder in two of the deaths. Michigan law made the sentence life without parole on each count, and the Michigan Court of Appeals affirmed in June 2008. The other charged cases were not pursued in court. In January 2025 Detroit police announced that DNA testing had identified one of the women whose 2006 death had been linked to him.
July 31, 2007. A court in Figueira da Foz, Portugal, convicted António Luís Costa, a retired corporal of the Guarda Nacional Republicana known locally as Cabo Costa, of the homicides of three young women from around Santa Comba Dão whom he had known since they were children: Isabel Cristina Isidoro, 17, Mariana Lourenço, 18, and Joana Oliveira, 19. The court ruled two of the homicides qualified, and he was convicted of other charges as well. The young women had disappeared one after another between May 2005 and May 2006. Costa had confessed to the Polícia Judiciária, then retracted in court, said he had been coerced and blamed a relative of one of the victims. The court imposed 25 years, the legal maximum in Portugal. Appeals failed in 2008. In August 2026 the newspaper Diário de Viseu reported that he would be released in April 2027.
August 1, 1991. Two joggers recognized Wolfgang Schmidt in a forest near Schmerzke, south of Potsdam, held him and handed him to the police, and that night he confessed. He was 25, a former officer in the readiness units of East Germany’s People’s Police, later a crane operator and farm laborer. Between October 1989 and April 1991, the months in which the Wall came down and Germany was reunited, five women and a three-month-old boy were killed in the villages and woods south and west of Potsdam. The German press shortened the victims' surnames: Edeltraud N., Christa N., Inge F., Tamara P. and her son Stanislaw, and Talita B., who was 66. Two 12-year-old girls survived an attack. At the end of November 1992 the Potsdam district court convicted Schmidt of six murders and two attempted murders, held that his responsibility was diminished, and ordered 15 years in prison and placement in a psychiatric hospital. In February 2026 Volksstimme reported that Schmidt, who now uses the name Beate, was still held in a specialist clinic.
August 2, 1996. Sergei Golovkin was shot at Butyrka prison in Moscow, on the date most reports give, months before Russia stopped carrying out executions. A graduate of the Timiryazev Agricultural Academy, he was a livestock specialist at Moscow Horse Plant No. 1 in the Odintsovo district and had won a silver medal at the national economic exhibition in 1989. For six years detectives had pursued a killer of boys called Fisher, a figure that turned out to be a legend begun by a teenager. Eleven boys aged 10 to 16 were killed in Moscow Oblast between April 1986 and September 1992, among them Andrei Pavlov, Sergei Strochkin, 10, Nikita Bogdanov, 13, and, on September 15, 1992, Yuri Sidyakin, Vadim Sharikov and Denis Efremov. Golovkin was detained near Zhavoronki on October 19, 1992, and confessed the next morning. Two years later to the day he was sentenced to death for the murder of 11 boys, with other charges, and President Boris Yeltsin refused clemency. Russia’s moratorium on executions dates from April 1997.
August 3, 2006. Dale Hausner was arrested in Mesa, Arizona, together with his roommate, Samuel Dieteman. Hausner, 33, was a janitor at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport who photographed boxing on the side. For more than a year people walking or cycling on Phoenix-area streets late at night had been attacked at random, along with dogs and a horse. The break came when Dieteman boasted to a drinking companion, Ron Horton, who called a tip line. The six people Hausner was convicted of murdering were Nathaniel Shoffner, Jose Ortis, Marco Carillo, Claudia Gutierrez-Cruz, 20, Robin Blasnek, 22, and David Estrada. A Maricopa County jury convicted him on 80 counts in March 2009, acquitted him of two killings from May 2005, and, after he waived mitigation and asked for death, returned six death sentences. Dieteman received life. The Arizona Supreme Court affirmed in July 2012, and on June 19, 2013, Hausner died in the state prison at Florence of a drug overdose ruled a suicide.
August 4, 1998. After 22 days on the run, Francisco de Assis Pereira was recognized by a local fisherman in Itaqui, Rio Grande do Sul, near the Argentine border, and arrested. He was 30, a motorcycle courier in São Paulo, and the press already called him the Maníaco do Parque, the Park Maniac, after the deaths of several young women came to light in the city’s south zone. By most accounts he confessed to 11 killings. Juries in four trials in 2001 and 2002 convicted him of the murders of seven women, with other charges. Among the women named as his victims were Isadora Fraenkel, 19, Raquel Mota Rodrigues, 23, Rosa Alves Neta, 21, and Michelle dos Santos Martins, 18. His combined sentences have been reported as more than 280 years, but the 30-year maximum that applies to his crimes puts the end of his term in August 2028. In 2026 São Paulo prosecutors opened a procedure on possible compulsory psychiatric internment; no decision had been reported by October 19.
August 5, 2005. Osaka Prefectural Police arrested Hiroshi Maeue, 36, a temp agency worker from Sakai, in the death of Michiko Nagamoto, 25, and in a written statement he confessed to two more killings that police had not yet connected to him. All three of the dead had posted on an internet site for people contemplating suicide, and each was in a depressive state. Nagamoto died in February 2005, a 14-year-old junior high school boy from Kobe in May, and a 21-year-old university student in June. On March 28, 2007, the Osaka District Court, with Kazuo Mizushima presiding, convicted Maeue of the three murders, with other charges that included kidnapping the boy and intimidating his father in ransom calls, and sentenced him to death. He withdrew his appeal to the High Court, and the sentence became final. He was hanged at the Osaka Detention Center on July 28, 2009, one of three men executed in Japan that day on the order of Justice Minister Eisuke Mori.
August 6, 1946. William Heirens, a 17-year-old student at the University of Chicago, gave Cook County authorities full statements about three killings under an agreement that spared him a possible death sentence in return for consecutive prison terms. Born in Evanston in 1928, he had a long record of burglaries and had been arrested on June 26 while prowling an apartment building. The deaths were those of Josephine Ross, 43, in June 1945, Frances Brown in December 1945, and Suzanne Degnan, who was six, in January 1946. On September 4 he pleaded guilty to all three murders and to 26 indictments for burglary, robbery and assault, and received three consecutive life sentences. He recanted soon afterward and insisted on his innocence for the rest of his life. The Illinois Supreme Court rejected his post-conviction challenge in 1954, the Seventh Circuit overturned a 1983 order for his release, and the parole board turned him down again in August 2007. He died in custody on March 5, 2012, aged 83, after more than 65 years in Illinois prisons.
August 7, 1987. Early in the morning police arrested Dayton Leroy Rogers at the small engine repair shop he ran in Woodburn, Oregon, a few hours after Jennifer Lisa Smith was killed in Clackamas County. He was still in custody later that month when the deaths of more women came to light in the Molalla Forest. A jury convicted him of Smith’s aggravated murder in 1988, and in May 1989 he was convicted of 13 counts of aggravated murder in six consolidated cases, for Lisa Marie Mock, 23, Maureen Ann Hodges, 26, Christine Lotus Adams, 35, Cynthia DeVore, 20, Nondace Cervantes, 26, and Riatha Gyles, 16. In November 2013 the sheriff’s office identified a seventh woman from the forest as Tawnia Jarie Johnston, 18, and attributed her death to him; no charge was reported. Four death sentences in the forest cases were imposed and vacated, the last on November 12, 2021, when the Oregon Supreme Court held that a 2019 law had put his crimes beyond the death penalty. In July 2023 Rogers, 70, faced a fifth resentencing.
August 8, 1973. In Pasadena, Texas, 17-year-old Elmer Wayne Henley Jr. shot Dean Corll dead and then telephoned the police himself. Corll, 33, an electrician whose mother had run a candy business in the Houston Heights, was known to neighborhood children as the candy man. Over about three years at least 28 boys and young men, most from the Heights, had vanished, and police had written off many as runaways; among them were Jimmy Glass and Danny Yates, both 14, the brothers Donald and Jerry Waldrop, David Hilligiest, Mark Scott and Billy Lawrence, 15. Authorities ruled the shooting self-defense, and Corll, named by police as the leader, was never charged. Henley admitted bringing boys to Corll for money and was convicted of six murders in San Antonio in 1974 and, after that verdict was reversed, again in Corpus Christi in 1979. A second accomplice, David Owen Brooks, was convicted of one murder. On November 7, 2025, the Texas parole board denied Henley parole and set his next review about ten years away.
August 9, 2007. A Melbourne jury convicted Peter Norris Dupas of the murder of Mersina Halvagis, 25, who was killed in the city’s north on November 1, 1997, and he was sentenced to life with no minimum term. It was his third murder conviction. Dupas, whose record of violent attacks on women went back to the 1970s, was already serving life for the murders of Nicole Patterson, a psychotherapist killed in Northcote in April 1999, and Margaret Maher, 40, killed in October 1997. The Halvagis case was circumstantial, resting on witness identification and on a confession he was said to have made to another prisoner. The Court of Appeal of Victoria quashed the verdict in September 2009, the High Court of Australia refused him a permanent stay in April 2010, and a second jury convicted him that November; a five-judge appeal bench rejected his challenge in December 2012. A fourth murder charge, over the 1997 death of Kathleen Downes, 95, was discontinued in October 2019 when the key witness became too ill to testify.
August 10, 1949. Albert Pierrepoint hanged John George Haigh at Wandsworth Prison in London. Haigh was 40, a convicted fraudster born in Stamford, Lincolnshire, and raised by Plymouth Brethren parents at Outwood, near Wakefield. He was hanged for one killing, the murder of Olive Durand-Deacon, 69, a widow who lived at the same South Kensington hotel, at his workshop in Crawley, Sussex, on February 18, 1949. In a statement to police on February 28 he admitted five more killings of people he knew and whose money he took, William McSwan and his parents, Donald and Amy, and Dr. Archibald Henderson and his wife, Rosalie, and he claimed three more that were never confirmed. None of those deaths was charged. His defense asked for the special verdict of guilty but insane, and on July 19, 1949, a jury of 11 men and one woman at Lewes Assizes rejected it after a two-day trial before Mr. Justice Humphreys. The day before his execution he sat for a life mask so that Madame Tussauds could make a wax figure of him.
August 11, 2010. Elias Abuelazam was arrested at the boarding gate of a Delta flight to Tel Aviv at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, after Atlanta police paged him at the request of the Michigan State Police. An Israeli citizen from Ramla, 33, he had been working at a market near Flint, Michigan. Since late May 14 men had been attacked in the Flint area, most of them Black men out alone late at night, and five had died: David Motley, 31, Emmanuel A. Muhammad, 59, Darwin Marshall, 43, Frank Kellybrew, 60, and Arnold R. Minor, 49. Six days before the arrest, police in Arlington, Virginia, had held him on an old assault warrant, and a magistrate let him go. A Genesee County jury rejected his insanity defense and on May 22, 2012, convicted him of the first-degree premeditated murder of Arnold Minor; he was sentenced to life without parole. His other Michigan cases were suspended, and in 2017, under a grant of immunity, he confessed to the 2009 killing of Jammie Lane in Leesburg, Virginia.
August 12, 1981. Police officers who had been watching Clifford Robert Olson on Vancouver Island saw him pick up two hitchhikers and arrested him. Olson, 41, born in Vancouver and raised in Richmond, B.C., had spent all but about four years since 1957 in custody, and he had been released on mandatory supervision in September 1980. Between November 1980 and July 1981 eleven children and young people were killed around Vancouver: Christine Weller, 12, Colleen Daignault, 13, Daryn Johnsrude, 16, Sandra Wolfsteiner, 16, Ada Court, 13, Simon Partington, 9, Judy Kozma, 14, Raymond King Jr., 15, Sigrun Arnd, 18, Terri Lyn Carson, 15, and Louise Chartrand, 17. In January 1982 he pleaded guilty to 11 counts of first-degree murder and received 11 concurrent life sentences. Days later Canadians learned that $100,000 had been placed in trust for his wife and son in return for his help to the police, a deal that set off national anger and a failed lawsuit by the families. He died of cancer in federal custody in Quebec on September 30, 2011, aged 71.
August 13, 1996. Marc Dutroux was arrested at Marcinelle, near Charleroi, with Michelle Martin and Michel Lelièvre, after the abduction of a 14-year-old girl. Dutroux, a scrap dealer born in Brussels in 1956, had been sentenced in 1989 to 13 and a half years for abducting girls, with other offenses, and was granted conditional release in April 1992. On August 15, two girls aged 12 and 14 who had been held captive were freed alive. In June 2004 an assize jury at Arlon convicted Dutroux of the murders of An Marchal, 17, Eefje Lambrecks, 19, and his former associate Bernard Weinstein, and held him responsible for the deaths of Julie Lejeune and Mélissa Russo, both eight, with other charges. He was sentenced to life. The failures of the police and the courts in the case brought some 300,000 people onto the streets of Brussels for the White March in October 1996 and led to a parliamentary inquiry that reshaped Belgian policing. Thirty years after his arrest, in August 2026, he was still held at Nivelles prison.
August 14, 2007. Justice Christopher Burns sentenced Altemio Sanchez to 75 years to life, the maximum, in Buffalo, New York, and he entered the state prison system the same day. Sanchez, a married factory worker and father of two from Cheektowaga, had been arrested in January 2007 after a task force matched his DNA to attacks on women around Buffalo going back more than 25 years. On May 16 he had pleaded guilty to three counts of second-degree murder, for Linda Yalem, 22, a University at Buffalo sophomore and runner, in 1990; Majane Mazur, 32, in 1992; and Joan Diver, 45, a nurse and mother of four from Clarence, in 2006. The same DNA cleared Anthony Capozzi, who had spent more than 20 years in prison for two 1984 attacks in Buffalo’s Delaware Park. Capozzi’s convictions were vacated in April 2007, and the state later paid him $4.25 million. Sanchez died on September 22, 2023, aged 65, while held at Wende Correctional Facility; the state Commission of Correction ruled the death a suicide.
August 15, 2019. A Los Angeles County jury convicted Michael Gargiulo of the first-degree murders of Ashley Ellerin, 22, a fashion student, in February 2001, and Maria Bruno, 32, a mother of four in El Monte, in December 2005, with multiple-murder and lying-in-wait special circumstances. It also convicted him of the attempted murder of a woman in Santa Monica in April 2008, who survived, and of attempting to escape from jail. Gargiulo had grown up in Glenview, Illinois, and worked around Los Angeles as a nightclub bouncer and an air conditioning repairman. Prosecutors called him the Boy Next Door Killer, because the women lived near him. On July 16, 2021, Judge Larry P. Fidler sentenced him to death; his automatic appeal is pending, and he denies the killings. Extradited to Illinois in September 2024, he is charged with the 1993 murder of Tricia Pacaccio, 18, a Glenview neighbor. As of September 30, 2026, no trial date had been set in that case.
August 16, 1987. Harrison Graham, known in his North Philadelphia neighborhood as Marty, was arrested in Philadelphia. A former dishwasher, he was charged in the deaths of seven women that came to light in North Philadelphia that month. In a statement to police he admitted his part in the deaths but called them accidents, an account the trial judge rejected. After a seven-week trial without a jury, Judge Robert A. Latrone convicted him of seven counts of first-degree murder, with other charges, and on May 3, 1988, imposed a life sentence followed by six death sentences, all consecutive, so that he could be executed only if the life term were ever cut short. In July 1995 the Pennsylvania Supreme Court affirmed the death sentences but struck down that order. A Pennsylvania court threw out the death sentence in 2003, and in 2017 he was reported serving life at SCI Coal Township.
August 17, 1982. Hong Kong police arrested Lam Kor-wan, a night-shift taxi driver, at a photo shop in Tsim Sha Tsui when he came to collect prints that the staff had reported to them a week earlier. Lam, 27, the eldest of seven children, lived with his family in To Kwa Wan, Kowloon. Between February and July 1982 four women who had taken his taxi late at night or before dawn had been killed: Chan Fung-lan, a nightclub hostess and mother of two; Chan Wan-kit, 31, a cashier; Leung Sau-wan, 29; and Leung Wai-sum, 17, a student who had just finished Form 5. A High Court jury convicted him of all four murders, and on April 8, 1983, he was sentenced to death. In August 1984 the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, in the years when every death sentence in Hong Kong was commuted. Reports in 2018 that he had been granted parole were denied, and in October 2023 he was reported still serving his sentence at Shek Pik Prison on Lantau Island.
August 18, 1998. Francesco Cassar, known as Frenċ, a man in his seventies, was killed during a robbery in Zejtun, in southern Malta, and his sister, attacked with him, survived. His neighbor, Salvatore Mangion, also called Silvio, was convicted of the murder and of the attempted murder of the sister and received 21 years. In prison he talked to a fellow inmate about two older killings, and the inmate went to the police. Questioned in 2005, Mangion gave details of the deaths of Rożina Zammit, 54, killed during a burglary at Safi on February 8, 1984, and Maria Stella Magrin, 68, killed during a robbery at Cospicua in 1986. In 2010 a jury convicted him of Zammit’s murder by eight votes to one, and Judge Joseph Galea Debono sentenced him to life. In 2012, after psychiatrists declared him fit to stand trial, a jury unanimously convicted him over Magrin’s death, and Judge Lawrence Quintano imposed a second life sentence. The three prosecutions had run in the reverse order of the killings.
August 19, 1987. Daniel Lee Siebert was sentenced to death in Lee County, Alabama, for the capital murder of Sherri Weathers, 24, and her sons, Chad, 5, and Joey, 4. A drifting free-lance artist with an earlier conviction for voluntary manslaughter, he had come to Talladega in January 1986, calling himself Daniel Spence, to build theater sets for the Alabama Institute for the Deaf and Blind, where Weathers, who was deaf, was a student. On the night of February 19, 1986, she, her two boys and her next-door neighbor, Linda Jarman, a deaf teacher at the institute, were killed. After about six months as a fugitive he was arrested at Hurricane Mills, Tennessee, on September 5, 1986. A Talladega County jury convicted him of Jarman’s capital murder during a robbery, and he was sentenced to death for her on April 17, 1987. Both sentences were affirmed. The Eleventh Circuit stayed an execution set for October 25, 2007, while the Supreme Court weighed lethal injection, and Siebert died on death row on April 22, 2008, apparently of pancreatic cancer.
August 20, 2013. A Marin County jury of six men and six women convicted Joseph Naso, 79, of the first-degree murders of four women, with the special circumstance of multiple murder, after about eight hours of deliberation. The women were Roxene Roggasch, 18, killed in 1977; Carmen Colon, 22, in 1978; Pamela Parsons, 38, in 1993; and Tracy Tafoya, 31, in 1994. Prosecutors described them as sex workers, and each had a first and last name beginning with the same letter. Naso, a New York native and self-employed photographer, had lived in San Francisco, Oakland and Yuba City before moving to Reno in the mid-1990s, and he was arrested in April 2011. On November 22, 2013, Judge Andrew Sweet sentenced him to death for three of the murders and to life without parole for the killing of Roxene Roggasch. Naso denies every killing. In September 2025, still pursuing his appeal at 91, he was held at the California Health Care Facility in Stockton.
August 21, 1921. Carl Grossmann, a street peddler with a long criminal record, was arrested in Berlin, and the same night the death of Marie Nitsche, 34, came to light. Born in Neuruppin, Brandenburg, in 1863, Grossmann had served a 15-year sentence imposed at Bayreuth before returning to Berlin, and from 1919 he lived in the district around the station, among women who were poor, out of work, homeless or newly arrived in the city. Police there had been dealing with unexplained deaths of women since 1918. He confessed to three killings, including that of Marie Nitsche, and later writers attributed more to him, among them Frieda Schubert, 33, who died in October 1920. His trial on three counts of murder opened before Schwurgericht I of the Landgericht Berlin on July 1, 1922. Four days later he hanged himself in his cell at the Moabit remand prison, and the case ended without a verdict.
August 22, 2019. Gary Ray Bowles was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison and pronounced dead at 10:58 p.m. Bowles, 57, had left home in his early teens and had sold sex to men since then. He confessed to killing six men in Florida, Maryland and Georgia between March and November 1994, most of them older gay men who had befriended him or given him a place to stay. He was convicted of three: John Hardy Roberts, 59, in Daytona Beach; Albert Morris, 37, in Nassau County; and Walter Hinton, 42, in Jacksonville, the case that carried the death penalty. The others, David Jarman in Maryland and Milton Bradley, 72, and Alverson Carter Jr., 47, in Georgia, were never charged. In November 1994, days after the FBI added him to its Ten Most Wanted list, Jacksonville officers questioning a day laborer they knew as Tim Whitfield heard him give his real name. He pleaded guilty to Hinton’s murder in 1996, and a death sentence reversed in 1998 was imposed again in 1999.
August 23, 2006. In the Johannesburg High Court, Judge Seun Moshidi sentenced Sipho Dube to ten life terms plus 114 years on other counts, all to run concurrently, with parole to be considered only after at least 25 years. Two weeks earlier Dube, a man from the Ladysmith area of KwaZulu-Natal, had been convicted of seven murders, with other charges: Rashunthee Singh, 39, in Ladysmith, and six children in Johannesburg, Lukhanyo Kuwane, 10, Tina Bernardes, 11, Nomnikelo Jumba, 14, Thabo Dlongolo, 14, and the cousins Anele Mbuku, 9, and Siyabonga Mbuku, 12. The killings ran from May 2001 to January 2004. Tina Bernardes’s family traced him and handed him to the police in November 2003. He escaped from custody about two months later, and Superintendent Piet Byleveld located him in Johannesburg Prison, where he was being held under a false name after an attempted car theft. Dube pleaded not guilty to all 41 counts and claimed the police had assaulted him; the judge rejected the claim. Police said in 2004 that his birth had not been registered.
August 24, 1995. Joel Rifkin pleaded guilty in Suffolk County, New York, to four counts of second-degree murder covering the deaths of Leah Evens and Lauren Marquez in 1993. Rifkin, an unemployed man from East Meadow on Long Island, had been caught in June 1993 when state troopers chased his pickup over a missing rear license plate. He confessed to killing 17 women, most of them sex workers he had picked up in New York City, among them Heidi Balch, Julie Blackbird, Mary Ellen DeLuca and Mary Catherine Williams. A Nassau County jury had rejected his insanity defense in May 1994 and convicted him of the murder of Tiffany Bresciani, 22, and he took no other case to trial. On September 18, 1995, Judge John Jones gave him two consecutive terms of 25 years to life for the Suffolk killings. Pleas in Brooklyn in December 1995 and in Queens in January 1996 followed, and news accounts give his total as nine murder convictions and 203 years to life. In 2024 he was reported held at Clinton Correctional Facility.
August 25, 1993. Michael Alan Durocher, 33, was executed in the electric chair at Florida State Prison in Starke and pronounced dead at 7:15 a.m. He had refused further appeals and objected to lawyers acting for him, and on August 12 the Florida Supreme Court ruled that a competent prisoner could refuse such representation; the U.S. Supreme Court turned away a last appeal filed on his behalf the day before the execution. United Press International reported that he was the only one of the 31 people executed in Florida since 1979 to die on his first death warrant. Arrested in Jacksonville in August 1988 for the murder of a former roommate, he confessed while awaiting sentence to the 1986 robbery killing of Thomas J. Underwood III, a store clerk, and later to the 1983 killings of his girlfriend, Grace Reed, her daughter, Candy, and their son, Joshua. He was convicted of five first-degree murders and received life for the first, a death sentence for Underwood’s, and three death sentences in Clay County in 1991.
August 26, 2011. Justice Geoffrey Nettle of the Supreme Court of Victoria sentenced John Leslie Coombes, 56, of the Melbourne suburb of Preston, to life imprisonment with no parole for the murder of Raechel Betts, 27, a childcare worker from the city’s northern suburbs. She was killed on Phillip Island in August 2009, and her death came to light that September. Coombes was charged that November at an out-of-sessions court hearing, and three other people were charged with lesser offenses. He pleaded not guilty at his committal in February 2011 and then pleaded guilty to murder in May, and only then did his history become public: he had served more than 20 years in prison for two earlier murders and was on parole for them when Raechel Betts was killed. He had first been jailed for life in 1985. At the plea hearing in June 2011 prosecutors asked for life without parole, and her mother addressed the court. On December 8, 2011, Justice Bernard Bongiorno, sitting alone in the Court of Appeal, refused him leave to appeal.
August 27, 2013. Anatoly Onoprienko died in Zhytomyr prison No. 8 in Ukraine, aged 54; the preliminary diagnosis was a heart attack, Interfax-Ukraine reported. A former merchant seaman and fireman, born in 1959 in the village of Lasky in the Zhytomyr region, he had been convicted by the Zhytomyr Regional Court in March 1999 of 52 murders committed in two series. Nine people were killed in roadside robberies between June and August 1989, among them a married couple from Bialystok, Poland, and 43 between October 1995 and March 1996 in rural homes and on roads in the Zhytomyr, Lviv, Kyiv and Zaporizhzhia regions, many of them whole families with young children. He was arrested in April 1996 at Yavoriv, near Lviv, after one of the largest manhunts the young country had mounted. Sentenced to death, he was spared when Ukraine’s Constitutional Court ruled capital punishment unconstitutional in December 1999, and his sentence was replaced with life imprisonment. The Supreme Court of Ukraine had upheld the verdict in August 1999.
August 28, 2024. Chief Justice Glenn Joyal of the Manitoba Court of King’s Bench sentenced Jeremy Skibicki of Winnipeg to four concurrent life terms with no chance of parole for 25 years, after hearing from the families of the four women he murdered in 2022. All four were First Nations women who used the city’s homeless shelters: Rebecca Contois, 24, of O-Chi-Chak-Ko-Sipi First Nation; Morgan Harris, 39, and Marcedes Myran, 26, both of Long Plain First Nation; and a woman known at trial as Mashkode Bizhiki’ikwe, Buffalo Woman, who was identified in March 2025 as Ashlee Shingoose, 30, of St. Theresa Point Anisininew Nation. They were killed between about March and May 2022. Skibicki was arrested in May 2022 in Contois’s death and charged with the other three murders that December. Through his lawyers he admitted causing all four deaths but argued that he was not criminally responsible; the judge rejected the claim and convicted him of four counts of first-degree murder on July 11, 2024. A special hearing for the Shingoose family was held on August 15, 2025.
August 29, 2014. Zhou Youping, a singer from Xiangxiang who worked the song halls of Changsha under the stage name Dai Jun, was executed in Changsha after China’s Supreme People’s Court approved his death sentence. Born in June 1972, he had been sentenced to three years in prison for robbery in 2006. Between October 11 and November 26, 2009, six men in their twenties to forties, most of them from northern China, died in Changsha on separate dates; he had met them through posts on a gay website. Detained on November 28, 2009, on suspicion of robbery, he confessed to the deaths. The Changsha Intermediate People’s Court tried him on six counts of intentional homicide in October 2010 and on March 29, 2011, sentenced him to death with lifelong deprivation of political rights. The Hunan Higher People’s Court upheld the judgment on two of the deaths and held the evidence insufficient on the other four; the reports do not say which two. One of the men was named in the reporting as Feng Yu, from Gansu.
August 30, 1988. Howard A. Allen Jr. was sentenced to death in Marion County, Indiana, for the murder of Ernestine Griffin, 74, plus 50 years for robbery. Griffin lived alone in Indianapolis and was partly disabled by childhood polio. She was killed on July 14, 1987, and Allen, a car wash worker, was arrested that evening. He had an earlier conviction for the voluntary manslaughter of Olga Cooper, 85, during a burglary, and a murder charge involving another elderly woman, a Mrs. Hale, was pending at his trial; its outcome was not reported. The Indiana Supreme Court affirmed the death sentence in 1997, and after Atkins v. Virginia barred the execution of people with mental retardation, the Seventh Circuit in 2009 ordered a hearing on the question. A federal court then held that he was mentally retarded under Indiana law, the state dropped its appeal, and on May 28, 2013, he was resentenced to 60 years for murder. In October 2026 the Indiana Department of Correction listed him as deceased.
August 31, 1989. In San Bernardino County, California, judgment of death was entered against James Gregory Marlow, who called himself the Folsom Wolf, for the murder of Corinna Novis of Redlands, with other charges. Marlow and his partner, Cynthia Coffman, abducted Novis in Redlands on November 7, 1986, and five days later abducted Lynell Murray, a college student, in Huntington Beach. Both women were killed. Officers traced the couple through purchases made with Murray’s credit card and arrested them near Big Bear on November 14. Tried jointly with Coffman, who was also condemned in that case, Marlow testified to a third killing, of Gregory Hill in Kentucky in July 1986, which was never tried. In 1992 he pleaded guilty in Orange County to Murray’s murder, with other charges, and on May 8 received a second death sentence. The California Supreme Court affirmed both judgments on August 19, 2004. As of June 1, 2026, he remained under sentence of death, in a state that has carried out no execution since January 2006.
September 1, 1988. Vincent Groves was arrested on a charge of attempted first-degree murder, eighteen months after Colorado released him on mandatory parole. A former high school basketball player from Wheat Ridge, he had served part of a twelve-year sentence for the 1981 second-degree murder of Tammy Sue Woodrum, seventeen. The 1988 charge rested on the account of a woman who survived an attack in Denver in March 1987, and on February 16, 1989, a jury acquitted him. The reprieve was brief. In 1990 he was convicted of the first-degree murder of Juanita Lovato, nineteen, and of the killing of Diann Mancera, twenty-five, in Douglas County, cases that were among the first in Colorado built on DNA evidence. He died in custody at University Hospital in Denver on October 31, 1996, aged forty-two. In 2012 the Denver district attorney’s office attributed four more deaths from 1979 and 1988 to him on DNA evidence, and in December 2025 the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office attributed the 1987 death of Rhonda Fisher, thirty, to him and closed her case.
September 2, 1999. A jury in Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, convicted Daniel Joseph Blank of the first-degree murder of Lillian Philippe, seventy-one, killed in Gonzales in April 1997. Blank, a mechanic from the river parishes who had been losing money at casinos, confessed in November 1997, after about twelve hours of questioning in Onalaska, Texas, to six killings during home burglaries in Ascension, St. James and St. John the Baptist parishes. Most of the dead were older people. Two days after the verdict the jury voted for death, and he was formally sentenced on December 9, 1999. In 2000 he was also convicted of murdering Joan Brock, fifty-five, and he later pleaded guilty in three more deaths. The Louisiana Supreme Court affirmed the Philippe judgment in 2007 and in February 2016 stayed an execution set for that March. No forensic evidence tied him to the scenes, and in 2021 a federal judge ordered new DNA testing and a fingerprint review. His federal petition was still pending in March 2026.
September 3, 2002. Andrew Urdiales was sentenced to death in Cook County, Illinois, for the murders of Laura Uylaki, twenty-five, and Lynn Huber, killed in the Chicago area in 1996. A former Marine who had served in Southern California from 1984 to 1991 and then worked as a security guard in Chicago, he confessed in April 1997 after ballistic tests tied him to three Illinois killings. Governor George Ryan commuted the Cook County sentence to natural life in January 2003. A Livingston County court condemned him again in 2004 for the murder of Cassandra Corum, twenty-one, and that sentence was commuted when Illinois abolished the death penalty in 2011. Orange County, California, then tried him for five more women killed between 1986 and 1995, among them Robbin Brandley, twenty-three, a college student and volunteer usher, and on October 5, 2018, he was sentenced to death a third time. He died at San Quentin in November 2018, weeks after his arrival on California’s death row, convicted in all of eight murders.
September 4, 1946. William Heirens, a seventeen-year-old University of Chicago student, pleaded guilty in the Criminal Court of Cook County to three murders and received three consecutive life sentences. The dead were Josephine Ross, forty-three, killed in her North Side apartment in June 1945; Frances Brown, killed that December; and Suzanne Degnan, six, killed in January 1946. Heirens, who had a long record of burglaries, had been arrested in June 1946 while prowling an apartment building in Rogers Park, and he entered his pleas to avoid a possible death sentence. He recanted soon afterward and for the rest of his life insisted he was innocent. The Illinois Supreme Court rejected his post-conviction challenge in 1954, and the parole board turned him down again and again, in August 2007 by a vote of fourteen to none. He died in custody in March 2012, aged eighty-three, after more than sixty-five years in Illinois prisons, the longest-serving inmate in the state.
September 5, 1930. Carl Panzram was hanged at the United States Penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas. A federal jury at Topeka had convicted him that April of the first-degree murder of Robert G. Warnke, the civilian foreman of the prison laundry, who was killed on June 20, 1929. The Federal Bureau of Prisons, which honors Warnke among its staff who died in the line of duty, records that he came from Cleveland, had served in Cuba with Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders and had worked at Leavenworth for eight years. Panzram, born in East Grand Forks, Minnesota, in 1892, had passed most of his life in reform schools and prisons. Held in the District of Columbia jail in 1928, he confessed to killing three boys in the eastern United States, cases that never came to trial, and wrote a long autobiography for a young guard, Henry Lesser. That manuscript and their letters are now among his papers at San Diego State University. Warnke’s death was the only killing for which Panzram was ever tried.
September 6, 1991. Donald Henry Gaskins, known as Pee Wee, was executed in the electric chair in Columbia, South Carolina, at fifty-eight. A roofer from Florence County, he was convicted in 1976 of the murder of Dennis Bellamy after a series of deaths among people in his own circle came to light near Prospect in December 1975. A second jury convicted him in 1977, and in 1978 he pleaded guilty to eight more murders, among them a young mother and her two-year-old daughter, receiving life terms after his first death sentence was set aside. The sentence carried out in 1991 came from a later crime. In September 1982, already serving those terms, he killed Rudolph Tyner, a prisoner on death row at the Central Correctional Institution, in a plot arranged through intermediaries by the son of a couple Tyner had been condemned for killing. Gaskins was sentenced to death for it in 1983. The Fourth Circuit refused his final appeal on September 5, 1991, the day before he died.
September 7, 2004. Richard Paul White pleaded guilty in Arapahoe County Court in Centennial, Colorado, to the first-degree murder of Jason Reichardt, twenty-seven, of Aurora, shot to death in September 2003. Aurora police and Douglas County deputies had arrested White that month at a campsite in Pike National Forest, and under questioning about the shooting he began to describe killing women. In September 2004 he also pleaded guilty in Denver to the first-degree murders of Victoria Lyn Turpin, thirty-two, and Annaletia Maria Gonzales, twenty-seven, and prosecutors gave up the death penalty in return for his help with other cases. He was sentenced to life without parole. White, who grew up in Mesita, in Costilla County near the New Mexico line, described further killings in southern Colorado. One woman, Torrey Marie Foster, was identified in August 2005, but he was not charged in her death or in the others he described. In April 2005, the Associated Press reported, his father was offering DVD copies of the videotaped confession for sale.
September 8, 2005. Georgia Thompson, nineteen, was shot and killed in Tempe, Arizona, the first of nine deaths in the series Phoenix police called the Baseline Killer case. Over the following ten months a gunman robbed, abducted and assaulted people across Phoenix and Tempe, and eight more people died, among them Tina Washington, thirty-nine, Kristin Gibbons and Chao Chou. On September 6, 2006, police arrested Mark Goudeau, a construction worker on parole in a 1989 assault and robbery case, after a state laboratory’s DNA test linked him to a September 2005 attack on two sisters. He was convicted in the sisters case in 2007 and sentenced to 438 years. On October 31, 2011, a Maricopa County jury convicted him of all nine murders and dozens of other felonies, and on November 30 he received nine death sentences. The Arizona Supreme Court affirmed in June 2016. Goudeau has always said he is innocent, and in 2026 he filed a petition claiming that Phoenix police planted evidence against him.
September 9, 1982. A jury in Van Buren, Arkansas, convicted Marion Albert Pruett of the capital murder of Bobbie Jean Robertson, killed during a robbery in Fort Smith on October 12, 1981, and he was sentenced to death. Pruett had been released in 1979 from a twenty-three-year federal sentence for bank robbery and placed in the Federal Witness Protection Program in New Mexico under an assumed identity, apparently in return for testimony against a fellow prisoner. In 1981 he killed his wife, Pamela Sue Carnuteson, in New Mexico, and then robbed and killed four more people in Mississippi, Arkansas and Colorado, among them Peggy Lowe, a savings and loan officer from Jackson, Mississippi. He was convicted in all four states. Waiting for trial in a Mississippi jail in October 1981, he called himself a "mad dog killer" on television. The Arkansas Supreme Court affirmed his death sentence in 1984; a federal court granted relief in 1997, but the Eighth Circuit reversed in August 1998. Arkansas executed him on April 12, 1999.
September 10, 1997. Judge Frederic L. Link of the San Diego County Superior Court entered a judgment of death against Ramon Jay Rogers, a former Navy sailor who managed an apartment complex in San Diego. On June 30 a jury had convicted him of the first-degree murders of Rose Albano, who lived with him and was pregnant with his child, and Beatrice Toronczak, the mother of his young son, and of the second-degree murder of Ron Stadt, his old Navy friend and roommate, with a multiple-murder special circumstance, before returning a death verdict. The three had vanished from his life in less than three years, Stadt in June 1993, Albano in December 1993 and Toronczak in February 1996, and each time Rogers told a different story about where they had gone. United Press International gave their ages as twenty-nine, thirty-three and thirty-two. On July 6, 2009, the California Supreme Court affirmed the judgment of death, correcting the sentence on the Stadt count to fifteen years to life.
September 11, 2014. A jury in the Supreme Court of British Columbia at Prince George unanimously convicted Cody Alan Legebokoff of four counts of first-degree murder. The dead were Jill Stuchenko, thirty-five, a mother and singer from Prince George, killed in 2009; Natasha Montgomery, twenty-three, a mother of two originally from Quesnel; Cynthia Maas, thirty-five; and Loren Leslie, fifteen, a legally blind teenager from Fraser Lake whom he had met online. Legebokoff, from Fort St. James, was nineteen at the time of the first killing. An RCMP constable stopped his pickup north of Vanderhoof on November 27, 2010, and he was arrested that night; DNA then tied him to the deaths of the three women, and he was charged with their murders in October 2011. A late offer to plead guilty to second-degree murder failed when the Crown would not consent. On September 16, 2014, Justice Glen Parrett imposed life sentences with no parole for twenty-five years. The B.C. Court of Appeal dismissed his appeal in 2016, and the Supreme Court of Canada refused leave in February 2017.
September 12, 1895. A Philadelphia grand jury indicted Herman Webster Mudgett, the physician and lifelong swindler who called himself H. H. Holmes, for the murder of Benjamin F. Pitezel. The two men had worked an insurance fraud together, and Pitezel died in Philadelphia in September 1894. Holmes was arrested in Boston that November, and in the summer of 1895 a Philadelphia detective traced three of Pitezel’s children, who had been traveling with Holmes, to Indianapolis and Toronto, where their deaths came to light. Investigators attributed those deaths to him, but he was tried for their father alone. The trial opened on October 28, 1895, and ended days later in a conviction for first-degree murder. He was hanged at Moyamensing Prison on May 7, 1896. In Chicago’s Englewood district he had built a block of stores and flats, and his name was later tied to several women who vanished in the city, but none of those cases reached a courtroom, and his paid confession to twenty-seven murders was partly invented.
September 13, 2000. In federal court in Fresno, Cary Stayner pleaded guilty to the first-degree murder and kidnapping of Joie Armstrong, twenty-six, an instructor with the Yosemite Institute, killed in Yosemite National Park on July 21, 1999. Stayner, the handyman at the Cedar Lodge motel in El Portal, outside the park, had confessed after his arrest on July 24, 1999, to killing Armstrong and, five months earlier, three guests of the motel: Carole Sund, forty-two, and her daughter Juli, fifteen, both of Eureka, California, and their friend Silvina Pelosso, sixteen, from Argentina. Investigators had spent months pursuing other men in the motel case before his arrest. The federal plea brought a sentence of life without parole. In August 2002 a Santa Clara County jury convicted him of the murders of Carole Sund, Juli Sund and Silvina Pelosso and of Juli’s kidnapping, and he was sentenced to death that December. On April 30, 2026, the California Supreme Court affirmed the judgment. California executions remain under a moratorium.
September 14, 1992. A three-judge panel in Hamilton County, Ohio, unanimously sentenced John Fautenberry to death for the aggravated murder of Joseph Daron Jr., forty-six, a father of two young children who had given him a ride. Fautenberry, a former long-haul truck driver for a company based in Portland, Oregon, had entered no contest pleas that July 23. He confessed to killing five people between November 1990 and March 1991: Donald Nutley, whom he met at a Portland truck stop; Gary Farmer, a fellow driver, in New Jersey; Daron, in the Cincinnati area; Christine Guthrie, a Portland bank teller; and Jefferson Diffee in Juneau, Alaska, where police arrested him in March 1991. Affirming the sentence on July 5, 1995, the Supreme Court of Ohio held that he had killed to pay his way across the country and wrote that Daron lost his life because he stopped to help. Alaska gave him ninety-nine years, and New Jersey a life term for manslaughter. Ohio executed him at Lucasville on July 14, 2009, at forty-five.
September 15, 1440. Gilles de Rais, baron of Rais and Marshal of France, was arrested at his castle of Machecoul by Jean Labbé, a captain in the service of Duke John V of Brittany, after a citation from the bishop of Nantes. Born about 1404, Gilles had fought beside Joan of Arc and received his marshal’s rank in 1429. The arrest followed a long inquiry into children who had disappeared from Nantes, the Loire valley and the pays de Retz, nearly all boys between about seven and fifteen. In October he was tried at Nantes: a church court convicted him of heresy, apostasy and the invocation of demons, and the duke’s secular court condemned him for the murder of children. The church indictment of October 13 spoke of "one hundred and forty, or more" children; the witness depositions concern far fewer, about thirty-two families who came forward over missing sons. He confessed, was reconciled to the church and was hanged at Nantes on October 26, 1440. A minority of writers have argued since the 1920s that he was framed.
September 16, 1989. Anatoly Slivko was executed by shooting at Novocherkassk prison, according to the Russian outlets NEWS.ru and Life.ru. For about two decades Slivko, a chemical plant worker, had run Chergid, a children’s tourist club in Nevinnomyssk, Stavropol Krai, and had been honored as a model educator, named an Honored Teacher of the RSFSR and elected to the city council, while boys from the town went missing. He was arrested at the club on December 28, 1985, his forty-seventh birthday, after an assistant prosecutor, handed the file while a colleague was on leave, connected the disappearances to it. A forensic psychiatric examination declared him sane. In a trial closed to the public in 1986, a court convicted him of the murders of seven boys aged about eleven to fifteen, killed between 1964 and 1985, among them Kolya Dobryshev, Sasha Nesmeyanov and Andrei Pogosyan, and sentenced him to death. He spent more than three years awaiting execution.
September 17, 2026. Wesley Shermantine died on death row at California State Prison, Sacramento, aged sixty, never executed; the Sacramento County Coroner was left to determine the cause. A graduate of Linden High School in San Joaquin County, he and his childhood friend Loren Herzog had been known as one of the Speed Freak Killers, a name taken from their methamphetamine use. The two men were arrested on March 17, 1999, after DNA tests tied Shermantine’s repossessed car to Cyndi Vanderheiden, twenty-five. On February 14, 2001, a Santa Clara County jury convicted him of four first-degree murders: Paul Cavanaugh, thirty-one, and Howard King III, thirty-five, killed near Stockton in November 1984; Chevelle Wheeler, sixteen, in October 1985; and Vanderheiden, in November 1998. He was sentenced to death that spring. In 2012, for money a bounty hunter promised him, he gave investigators information about other deaths, among them those of JoAnn Hobson, sixteen, and Kimberly Billy, nineteen. He was never charged with them.
September 18, 1959. Harvey Glatman was executed in the gas chamber at San Quentin State Prison. A television repairman who had moved from Denver to Los Angeles in 1957, he was arrested in Orange County in October 1958 and confessed to killing three young women he had met in Los Angeles: Judy Dull, nineteen, a model, in 1957; Shirley Bridgeford, in March 1958; and Ruth Mercado, twenty-four, in July 1958. He pleaded guilty in San Diego County to the murders of Bridgeford and Mercado and waived a jury, and in December 1958 Judge John A. Hewicker held both murders to be of the first degree and fixed the penalty at death. The Dull killing was heard in court as evidence of other crimes but was never tried. The California Supreme Court affirmed the judgment on June 5, 1959. The date of the execution is given as September 18 by the Washington Examiner; the historian Harold Schechter, writing in The Yale Review in 2019, gives September 19.
September 19, 1975. Charles A. Glatt, an Ohio State University education professor appointed to draw up the court-ordered desegregation plan for Dayton’s public schools, was killed in Dayton. Police arrested Neal Bradley Long, a man from the city’s East Side, that same afternoon, and he told Detective Dan Baker that he had shot "25 or 30 people." For three summers a gunman the press called the Midnight Slayer had been shooting people in Dayton, many of them Black men on the West Side. The Dayton Daily News has reported that Long killed at least four people: Glatt; Edward Tillman, in September 1973; Larry Romine, twenty-seven, in July 1975; and Robert Hoard, twenty-one, also in 1975. He later told a federal court psychologist that he had fired at about a hundred Black people and might have killed twenty. His arrest filled the front page of the Dayton Daily News the next morning. Long was held in federal custody and died in a federal prison in Minnesota in 1998.
September 20, 1989. A Los Angeles County jury convicted Richard Ramirez on all forty-three counts against him, among them twelve counts of first-degree murder and one of second-degree murder, five of attempted murder and fourteen of first-degree burglary and other charges, with special circumstances including multiple murder. A drifter and burglar from El Paso, Texas, Ramirez committed his crimes across Los Angeles County in 1984 and 1985. Among those he was convicted of killing were Jennie Vincow, seventy-nine, Mabel Bell, eighty-three, and Joyce Nelson, sixty. Detectives had released his photograph on August 30, 1985, and the next morning residents of an East Los Angeles street held him as he tried to get away. On September 27 the same jury returned a death verdict, and on November 7, 1989, Judge Michael Tynan sentenced him to death. The California Supreme Court affirmed in August 2006. He died on death row in June 2013.
September 21, 2002. Angelo Buono Jr. died of heart disease at Calipatria State Prison in California, aged sixty-seven. A Glendale auto upholsterer, he and his younger cousin Kenneth Bianchi were the two men behind the Hillside Strangler killings of ten women and girls, aged twelve to twenty-eight, in the Los Angeles area in 1977 and 1978; among the dead were two schoolgirls, students, a waitress and an aspiring actress. Bianchi pleaded guilty in October 1979 and agreed to testify, and Buono was arrested in Glendale on October 19, 1979. When the prosecution later moved to drop the murder counts, Judge Ronald M. George refused, and the trial that followed ran from November 1981 to November 1983, with about four hundred witnesses, the longest criminal trial in American history to that time. The jury convicted Buono of nine murders, among them those of Judith Miller, Lauren Wagner and Cindy Hudspeth, but not of the death of Yolanda Washington. Judge George sentenced him to life without parole on January 9, 1984.
September 22, 2023. Altemio Sanchez, the man Buffalo knew as the Bike Path Killer, died in state custody at Millard Fillmore Suburban Hospital, aged sixty-five; the New York State Commission of Correction later ruled the death a suicide. A factory worker from Cheektowaga and a father of two, Sanchez was arrested on January 15, 2007, after a joint task force matched his DNA to a series of attacks on women around Buffalo that had gone unsolved for more than twenty-five years. On May 16, 2007, he pleaded guilty to the second-degree murders of Linda Yalem, twenty-two, a University at Buffalo sophomore and runner, in 1990; Majane Mazur, thirty-two, of Buffalo, in 1992; and Joan Diver, forty-five, a nurse and mother of four from Clarence, in 2006. He was sentenced to seventy-five years to life, the maximum. The same DNA cleared Anthony Capozzi, who had spent more than twenty years in prison for two 1984 rapes in Delaware Park; a judge vacated those convictions on April 2, 2007.
September 23, 1993. The Laurel Circuit Court in Kentucky sentenced Robert Carl Foley to death for the murders of the brothers Rodney Vaughn and Harry Lynn Vaughn, shot during a party at Foley’s Laurel County home on August 17, 1991, by the sentencing date the Kentucky Department of Corrections records. Indicted for the Vaughn killings that October, Foley was charged days later with four more deaths in the same county: Kimberly Bowersock, Lillian Contino, Jerry McMillen and Calvin Reynolds, killed together on October 8, 1989, a case that came to light only after the Vaughn shootings. A Madison Circuit Court jury convicted him of those murders, and on April 27, 1994, he received four more death sentences. The Supreme Court of Kentucky affirmed both judgments, in 1996 and 1997, and his state and federal challenges have failed since. He remained on the state’s death row roster, and in October 2026 a petition for review of his case was pending in the United States Supreme Court.
September 24, 1965. Alys Eberhardt, an eighteen-year-old student at the Hackensack Hospital nursing school, was killed in Fair Lawn, New Jersey. By 2025 her death was the only unsolved homicide still open on the Fair Lawn police books. Detectives reopened it in 2021 and spent more than fifty hours talking with Richard Cottingham, a former computer operator for Blue Cross Blue Shield, who had been convicted in the early 1980s of murdering five women in New Jersey and New York City after his arrest at a motel in Hasbrouck Heights in May 1980. In late 2025, as his health declined, Cottingham admitted the Eberhardt killing and gave details that had never been released. On January 6, 2026, the department announced the confession and closed the case without charges, under earlier agreements with prosecutors. Police Chief Joseph Dawicki called her a vibrant young nursing student taken from the community far too soon. Cottingham had pleaded guilty to three older murders in 2021 and 2022 and has confessed to many more.
September 25, 2014. Judge Lomeli of the Los Angeles County Superior Court sentenced Samuel Little, seventy-four, to three consecutive terms of life without parole, the maximum available, for the murders of Carol Alford, Audrey Nelson and Guadalupe Apodaca, killed in Los Angeles in the late 1980s. A drifter and former boxer with a criminal record in about two dozen states, Little had been arrested on September 5, 2012, at a Christian shelter in Louisville, Kentucky, on a Los Angeles narcotics warrant, after DNA linked him to the three killings, and a jury convicted him in 2014. From 2018 he confessed to a Texas Ranger to ninety-three killings between 1970 and 2005. The FBI judged the confessions credible and called him the most prolific serial killer in American history; the women he described were mostly Black, and many were poor or cut off from their families. Investigators verified about sixty. He pleaded guilty to five more murders in Texas and Ohio in 2018 and 2019 and died in custody in California on December 30, 2020, aged eighty.
September 26, 1991. The Supreme Court of Canada ruled, four to three, that Canada could surrender Charles Chitat Ng to California without assurances that he would not face the death penalty, and he was extradited the same day. A Hong Kong-born former United States Marine, Ng had fled north after his associate Leonard Lake was arrested in South San Francisco on June 2, 1985, and he was arrested in Calgary on July 6 after a shoplifting stop. Because Canada had abolished capital punishment, his case became a constitutional test, heard together with that of Joseph Kindler, an American who had escaped to Canada after a death sentence in Pennsylvania, and the United Nations Human Rights Committee later reviewed it. The case was later moved to Orange County. On February 24, 1999, a jury convicted him of eleven counts of first-degree murder for killings in 1984 and 1985 in and around Wilseyville, among the victims two families with infant sons. He was sentenced to death on June 30, 1999, and the California Supreme Court affirmed in July 2022.
September 27, 1984. Governor Jim Hunt of North Carolina denied clemency to Velma Barfield, condemned for the first-degree murder of her fiance, Stewart Taylor, a St. Pauls farmer who died of arsenic poisoning in February 1978 after he learned she had forged checks on his account. Barfield, a grandmother raised in Robeson County who had long depended on prescription drugs, was convicted in December 1978. She also confessed to three other deaths, among them that of her mother, Lillie McMillan Bullard, but was never tried for them. In prison, according to the State Library’s NCpedia and the University of North Carolina Libraries, she became a born-again Christian who ministered to other prisoners. United Press International reported that Hunt called her crimes deliberate and too serious to justify commuting the sentence. The Fourth Circuit refused her last appeal on November 1, and on November 2, 1984, she was executed by lethal injection at Central Prison in Raleigh, the first woman executed in the United States since 1962 and the first in the country put to death by lethal injection.
September 28, 1926. Sataro Fukiage was hanged at Ichigaya Prison in Tokyo, aged thirty-seven. Born in 1889 to a weaver’s family in Kyoto’s Nishijin textile district, he had served more than fifteen years for the 1906 killing of an eleven-year-old girl in Kyoto, committed while he was a minor; an amnesty and a review reduced his life sentence, and he was released on March 18, 1922. Tokyo detectives arrested him at a workers' camp on the northern edge of the city on July 28, 1924, and an indictment that August charged him with killing six girls in the Kanto region and Nagano in 1923 and 1924. The Maebashi District Court convicted him of the murder, with other charges, of three of them, two in Gunma Prefecture and one in Nagano, and sentenced him to death on May 7, 1925. The Tokyo Court of Appeal imposed death again in April 1926, and his final appeal was dismissed that July. In his cell he wrote a long autobiography. The girls' names did not appear in the press accounts.
September 29, 1974. David Meirhofer, a contractor from Manhattan, Montana, hanged himself in jail a few hours after confessing to four killings, so none of them was ever brought to trial. His confession covered the 1967 death of a thirteen-year-old boy, the 1968 death of a twelve-year-old Boy Scout, the February 1974 killing of Sandra Smallegan, nineteen, of Manhattan, and the death of Susie Jaeger, seven, of Michigan, who disappeared during a family camping trip in Montana in June 1973. A year to the day after Susie vanished, a caller who said he had taken her telephoned her mother, Marietta Jaeger, who kept him talking for more than an hour while the FBI recorded the call, and that recording helped bring the case against Meirhofer. Police also suspected him in other unsolved child killings in Montana that were still under investigation when he died. Marietta Jaeger later forgave him, and for decades afterward she spoke out against the death penalty, in Montana and beyond.
September 30, 2011. Clifford Olson died of cancer, aged seventy-one, in the health care centre of the federal prison complex at Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines, Quebec. In January 1982 he had pleaded guilty to the first-degree murders of eleven children and young people, three boys and eight girls, killed around Vancouver between November 1980 and July 1981: Christine Weller, twelve; Colleen Daignault, thirteen; Daryn Johnsrude, sixteen; Sandra Wolfsteiner, sixteen; Ada Court, thirteen; Simon Partington, nine; Judy Kozma, fourteen; Raymond King Jr., fifteen; Sigrun Arnd, eighteen, a visitor from West Germany; Terri Lyn Carson, fifteen; and Louise Chartrand, seventeen. Police and the British Columbia attorney general had agreed to pay $100,000 into a trust for his wife and infant son in exchange for his cooperation, a deal that set off a national argument. Justice H.C. McKay imposed eleven concurrent life sentences and recommended that he never be released. A jury rejected his faint-hope application in 1997, and he was denied parole in 2006 and 2010. As he lay dying, families of the dead told The Canadian Press they felt relief.
October 1, 2013. Marshall Lee Gore was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison and pronounced dead at 6:12 p.m., after the Supreme Court of the United States declined to stay the sentence. A Miami man with a record of gun and theft offenses, Gore was convicted of murdering two women he had met within six weeks of each other in early 1988, Susan Roark and Robyn Novick, 30, and of the attempted murder of a third woman, who survived. A Columbia County jury convicted him in the Roark case in March 1990. The Florida Supreme Court threw out his first conviction for Novick’s murder in 1998 because of the prosecutor’s conduct at trial, and a second jury convicted him again in February 1999. As the 2013 execution date approached, his lawyers argued that he was too mentally ill to be put to death. A panel of psychiatrists, and then the courts, concluded that he was feigning. He had spent 23 years on death row.
October 2, 2002. By this date Robert William Pickton, a pig farmer from Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, faced fifteen counts of first-degree murder, according to the provincial Attorney General’s guide to the case. He had been charged that February with the murders of Sereena Abotsway and Mona Wilson, two of the many women missing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, and the counts kept rising until they reached 27 in May 2005. A jury convicted him in December 2007 of the second-degree murders of six women: Abotsway, Wilson, Andrea Joesbury, Brenda Ann Wolfe, Georgina Faith Papin and Marnie Frey. He was sentenced to life with no parole eligibility for 25 years. The Supreme Court of Canada dismissed his appeal in July 2010, and the Crown stayed the twenty remaining murder charges that August. Pickton died in hospital on May 31, 2024, after another inmate attacked him at Port-Cartier Institution in Quebec.
October 3, 2006. Vickie Dawn Jackson, a licensed vocational nurse, pleaded no contest to capital murder in San Angelo, Texas, days before testimony was due to begin. She had worked the night shift at Nocona General Hospital, a small hospital in Montague County in North Texas, through a winter in which deaths there doubled, and grand juries indicted her in 2002 and 2004 on capital counts covering the deaths of ten patients between December 2000 and February 2001. The case had moved to San Angelo on a change of venue. Her plea, which news reports described as covering all ten deaths, took the prosecution by surprise; the prosecutor told the Associated Press he had never been so surprised in a case in his life. Because the state had not sought death, the life sentence that Judge Roger Towery imposed on October 5 was automatic. A plea of no contest is not an admission of guilt, and Jackson waived her appeal without ever admitting the killings.
October 4, 2001. Carabineros arrested Julio Pérez Silva, a 38-year-old unlicensed taxi driver, in the far north of Chile, hours after a girl who had survived an attack by him reached the police and gave an account that identified him. Within days he confessed to killing fourteen girls and women from Alto Hospicio, a fast-growing settlement on the plateau above the port city of Iquique, between 1998 and 2001. For years officials had told the families, most of them poor, that the missing girls had simply run away from home, and Inter Press Service reported that month that the relatives were accusing the police of negligence. In February 2004 a judge in Iquique convicted Pérez Silva of fourteen aggravated homicides and of the attempted homicide of the girl who survived, with other charges. On appeal the sentence was raised to qualified life imprisonment, which the Supreme Court ratified in October 2006 and which requires at least forty years behind bars before any benefit may be sought.
October 5, 2011. Holly Ann Grigsby, 24, of Portland, Oregon, and her boyfriend, David Joseph Pedersen, were arrested in Yuba County, California, ending a manhunt across three states. They were traveling in the car of Cody Myers, a 19-year-old Christian college student from Lafayette, Oregon. Between September 26 and October 3, four people had been killed: Pedersen’s father and stepmother, David Jones Pedersen, 56, and Leslie Mae Pedersen, 69, in Everett, Washington; Myers in Oregon; and Reginald Clark, 53, a disabled Black man, in Eureka, California. Federal prosecutors described the killings as a white supremacist campaign, and said the couple had taken Myers to be Jewish because of his surname. Pedersen pleaded guilty to aggravated murder in Washington and to federal carjacking resulting in death, and Grigsby pleaded guilty to a federal racketeering count whose pattern of racketeering activity included all four murders. Both were sentenced in 2014 to life without release.
October 6, 1909. Martha Rendell was hanged at Fremantle Prison at eight in the morning, on the date given by the Western Australia Police Historical Society and by Traces magazine, which noted that it fell on the first anniversary of the death of the boy she was convicted of killing. The historian Anna Haebich gives October 9. Rendell, who came from a working-class family in Adelaide, lived in Perth as the de facto wife of Thomas Morris. Over roughly fifteen months, from about 1907 to October 1908, three of his children died: his daughters Annie and Olive and his son Arthur, 15. In 1909 a surviving son left the household, police inquiries followed, and the deaths were examined anew. In September 1909 a jury convicted Rendell of the wilful murder of Arthur alone, and Thomas Morris was acquitted. Police held her responsible for the girls' deaths as well, but she was never charged with them. She denied all three to the end, and she was the last woman executed in Western Australia.
October 7, 1965. Ian Brady was arrested in Hattersley, near Hyde, east of Manchester, after David Smith, the brother-in-law of Brady’s girlfriend, Myra Hindley, telephoned Hyde police early that morning to report a killing in the house the night before. The young man who had died was Edward Evans, 17. Brady, a Glasgow-born stock clerk, and Hindley had killed five children and teenagers since July 1963. At Chester Assizes in May 1966 he was convicted of the murders of John Kilbride, 12, Lesley Ann Downey, 10, and Edward Evans, and received three concurrent life sentences. In 1987 he confessed to the killings of Pauline Reade, 16, and Keith Bennett, 12, for which he was never tried. He spent his last 32 years at Ashworth Hospital on Merseyside, after a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, and died there on May 15, 2017, aged 79. Hindley, convicted of two of the murders, died in custody in 2002.
October 8, 2019. Australian Associated Press reported that the case against Peter Dupas for the murder of Kathleen Downes, 95, had been discontinued before it could reach a Melbourne jury. Downes died at a Brunswick nursing home on the last night of 1997, and Dupas, already serving life, was charged with her murder in prison in February 2018. The prosecution’s key witness, Andrew Fraser, a former criminal lawyer, was too unwell to give evidence or to face cross-examination. A discontinuance is not an acquittal, and in findings made public in July 2020 the Victorian coroner, Ian Gray, concluded that her death was the result of the actions of Peter Dupas. Dupas, whose convictions for violence against women went back to the 1970s, had been convicted of murdering Margaret Maher and Mersina Halvagis in 1997 and Nicole Patterson in 1999. In July 2020 he was serving three life sentences with no minimum term.
October 9, 2002. Aileen Wuornos was woken at 5:30 a.m. at Florida State Prison near Starke, declined a last meal and asked only for a cup of coffee. She was pronounced dead at 9:47 a.m., six minutes after the lethal injection began. She was 46. A Michigan-born drifter who worked as a roadside prostitute in Florida, she was convicted of six first-degree murders of middle-aged men who had picked her up between late 1989 and late 1990: Richard Mallory, at trial in Volusia County in January 1992, and Charles Humphreys, Troy Burress, David Spears, Charles Carskaddon and Walter Antonio on pleas. She admitted killing a seventh man, Peter Siems, but was never charged with his death. For years she claimed self-defense; later she told a judge she had killed the men to rob them. A circuit court ruled in 2001 that she was competent to drop her remaining appeals, and Governor Jeb Bush signed her death warrant on September 5, 2002.
October 10, 1996. Gary Ray Bowles was convicted in Nassau County, Florida, of the first-degree murder of Albert Morris, 37, and sentenced to life in prison. A drifter who had sold sex to men since his teens, Bowles confessed to killing six men in Florida, Maryland and Georgia between March and November 1994, often after they had given him a place to stay. He was arrested in Jacksonville Beach on November 22, 1994. Five months before the Nassau verdict he had pleaded guilty in Duval County to the murder of Walter Hinton, 42, and in August 1997 he was convicted in Volusia County of murdering John Hardy Roberts, 59, in Daytona Beach. The three killings outside Florida were never prosecuted. The Florida Supreme Court reversed his death sentence for the Hinton murder in 1998; a new jury recommended death unanimously, the sentence was reimposed in 1999, and Florida executed him on August 22, 2019.
October 11, 2023. Douglas Clark died of natural causes at an outside medical facility, the Associated Press reported, one day after the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the denial of his last federal appeal. He was 75 and had been held on condemned status at San Quentin since 1983. A steam engineer from Burbank, Clark was convicted in Los Angeles County of the first-degree murders of six young women in the summer of 1980, two of them teenage girls: Gina Marano, Cynthia Chandler, Karen Jones, Exxie Wilson, Marnette Comer and a young woman whose name was not known. He was arrested in August 1980 after his girlfriend, Carol Bundy, called police, confessed to a separate killing and named him. Sentenced to death in March 1983 after a trial in which he twice acted as his own lawyer, he saw the California Supreme Court affirm the murder convictions and the death judgment in 1992. He spent four decades on death row without an execution date.
October 12, 1984. Linwood Briley died in the electric chair at the Virginia State Penitentiary in Richmond and was pronounced dead at 11:05 p.m., still insisting he was innocent. The eldest of three Richmond brothers, he had been sentenced to death for the robbery and killing in September 1979 of John Harvey Gallaher, a disc jockey known on the air as Johnny G, and was convicted in the deaths of Harvey Wilkerson, Judy Diane Barton and Harvey Wayne Barton on October 19, 1979. He was arrested with Duncan Eric Meekins three days later. Police and prosecutors linked the group to at least eleven killings that year. On May 31, 1984, Linwood and his brother James led six condemned men out of the Mecklenburg Correctional Center; Linwood was recaptured in Philadelphia nineteen days later. The Fourth Circuit rejected his second federal petition on October 9, three days before the execution.
October 13, 1933. Cesare Serviatti was shot by firing squad at the Chiara Vecchia range at Sarzana, in Liguria, after King Victor Emmanuel III refused clemency. A former hospital nurse and butcher from Rome, Serviatti met women through marriage advertisements and killed three of them between 1928 and 1932 to take their savings: Pasqua Bartolini, a widow, in La Spezia in 1928; Beatrice Margarucci in Rome in 1930; and Paolina Gorietti, about 40, in La Spezia in November 1932. Police arrested him at his home in Rome in December 1932, while he sat at dinner with his wife. Tried summarily before the Corte d’Assise of La Spezia from June 14, 1933, he was sentenced on July 8 to death for the Gorietti murder and to life imprisonment for the other two, with robbery. After his arrest he spoke of further killings, reported as five in all or as at least four besides those tried. None of them was charged.
October 14, 2014. On the night of October 14, officers of a Polícia Civil task force in Goiânia, Brazil, detained Tiago Henrique Gomes da Rocha, a 26-year-old security guard, on a temporary arrest order issued five days earlier. The task force had been formed in August to investigate a run of killings of women and girls in the city, and police said Rocha confessed to 39 homicides. Juries in Goiânia then tried him case by case for qualified homicide, beginning in February 2016. By June 2018 he had been convicted of 28 homicides and acquitted of three, with terms of nineteen and a half to thirty years for each death. Among the victims named in the convictions were Ana Karla Lemes da Silva, 15, Taynara Rodrigues da Cruz, 13, and Mauro Ferreira Nunes, 51. His combined sentences ran to hundreds of years, but the law in force when the crimes were committed limits the time actually served to thirty.
October 15, 1990. A jury in the Maine Superior Court, sitting in Lincoln County after a change of venue, convicted John Joubert of the murder of Ricky Stetson, 11, who was killed in Portland, Maine, in August 1982. Joubert, an Air Force airman from Portland, was already under two death sentences in Nebraska. He had been traced in January 1984 after a preschool teacher in Sarpy County reported him and police checked the license plate of the car he was driving, and that July he pleaded guilty to the first-degree murders of Danny Joe Eberle, 13, and Christopher Walden, 12, both killed in Sarpy County in the fall of 1983. The Maine court sentenced him to life imprisonment, and the Supreme Judicial Court of Maine affirmed in 1992. A federal court set aside the Nebraska death sentences in 1994, the Eighth Circuit reinstated them in 1996, and Joubert was electrocuted in Nebraska on July 17, 1996.
October 16, 2002. The trial of John Justin Bunting and Robert Joe Wagner opened in the Supreme Court of South Australia in Adelaide, before Justice Brian Martin, with Wendy Abraham prosecuting. Bunting, the ringleader of a small group in Adelaide’s northern suburbs, was charged with twelve murders committed between August 1992 and May 1999. Most of the dead were relatives, friends and neighbors whom he branded paedophiles or simply disliked, and the group went on collecting their welfare payments. The deaths came to light at Snowtown, north of Adelaide, in May 1999. Fifteen jurors were sworn and twelve returned the verdicts. On September 8, 2003, the jury convicted Bunting of eleven murders and could not agree on the twelfth, the death of Suzanne Allen, and prosecutors did not seek a retrial. Wagner, who had already pleaded guilty to three murders, was convicted of seven more. Justice Martin declined to set a non-parole period for either man, and the Court of Criminal Appeal dismissed Bunting’s appeal in May 2005.
October 17, 1999. After more than three days of deliberation, a Clay Circuit Court jury in Brazil, Indiana, convicted Orville Lynn Majors of murdering six patients and deadlocked on a seventh count, on which the court declared a mistrial. Majors, a licensed practical nurse from Linton, had worked in the four-bed intensive care unit of a small hospital in Clinton, where deaths rose to about 100 in 1994 against an average of 27 a year. The inquiry began in 1995, and he was arrested on December 29, 1997. At sentencing the judge named the six patients: Mary Ann Alderson, Dorothea Hixon, Luella Hopkins, Freddie Dale Wilson, Derek Maxwell and Cecil Smith. On November 15, 1999, Judge Ernest Yelton imposed six consecutive 60-year terms, 360 years in all, and the Indiana Supreme Court affirmed in 2002. The verdict came on his mother’s 61st birthday, the Greene County Daily World recalled a decade later. Majors died at the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City on September 24, 2017, aged 56, still denying the killings.
October 18, 1995. Moses Sithole was arrested in Benoni, on the East Rand, and police in Pretoria announced the arrest the next day. Sithole, 31, came from Vosloorus and had run an organization that said it campaigned against the abuse of women and children. Through 1994 and 1995 the deaths of women in open country around Pretoria and the East Rand had come to light one after another, and investigators connected them to him. The 1996 indictment charged him with the murders of 37 women and a two-year-old child, 40 rapes and six robberies. In December 1997 the Pretoria High Court convicted him of 38 murders, reported as 37 women and a two-year-old boy, together with the rapes and robberies. Judge David Curlewis imposed 50 years for each murder, twelve for each rape and five for each robbery, all to run consecutively: 2,410 years, with no parole consideration for 930. In November 2012 he lost a court challenge to his transfer between prisons.
October 19, 1994. Two years to the day after his arrest, Sergei Golovkin was sentenced to death for the murders of eleven boys, with other charges, at the end of a trial that had opened on August 22. Born in Moscow in 1959 and a graduate of the Timiryazev Agricultural Academy, Golovkin worked as a livestock specialist at Moscow Horse Plant No. 1 in the Odintsovo district, west of the city. The boys, aged 10 to 16, were killed in Moscow Oblast between 1986 and 1992. He was arrested near Zhavoronki on October 19, 1992, was charged on October 30 and confessed. Investigators were reported to suspect him in more of the roughly forty disappearances of children in the area over those years, though none was proven against him. President Boris Yeltsin refused clemency, and Golovkin was shot at Butyrka prison in Moscow in 1996, on August 2 by most accounts, a few months before Russia began its moratorium on executions. The press called him Fisher; the investigation file was code-named Boa.
October 20, 1999. Christine Johnson, the district attorney of Mariposa County, California, charged Cary Stayner with three counts of murder, with special circumstances that made him eligible for the death penalty, in the deaths of Carole Sund, 42, her daughter Juli, 15, and their friend Silvina Pelosso, 16, in February 1999. Stayner, a Merced native, was the handyman at the Cedar Lodge motel in El Portal, just outside Yosemite National Park. Investigators had spent months pursuing other men before FBI agents arrested him in July 1999, after the killing of Joie Armstrong, 26, a park instructor, and he confessed to all four deaths. In September 2000 he pleaded guilty in federal court in Fresno to Armstrong’s murder and was sentenced to life without parole. A Santa Clara County jury convicted him of the three murders and of Juli Sund’s kidnapping in August 2002, and he was sentenced to death that December. The California Supreme Court upheld the death sentence on April 30, 2026; executions in California remain under a moratorium.
October 21, 2009. Dakshina Kannada police arrested Mohan Kumar at Deralakatte, near Mangaluru, after investigators traced the call records of a missing 22-year-old woman from Bantwal taluk. A government school teacher from Bantwal taluk in Karnataka, Kumar had courted young women under false names, promised to marry them and then left with their jewelry after their deaths. He was tried case by case before sessions courts in Mangaluru from 2013, and the twentieth and last murder case ended in conviction in June 2020. The courts imposed death sentences in several cases and life terms in others. In October 2017 the Karnataka High Court confirmed one death sentence, for the killing of a 30-year-old woman from Sullia taluk, and commuted another, in the Bantwal case, to life without remission; it overturned one murder conviction outright, and he was acquitted in at least one other case. He was in custody in August 2026, when the High Court ruled on a later appeal.
October 22, 1979. Kenneth Bianchi pleaded guilty in Los Angeles County Superior Court before Judge William B. Keen to five counts of murder, one count of conspiracy to commit murder and one sex-offense count, and received five life terms for the murders, a life term for the conspiracy and five years on the remaining count, all concurrent. Three days earlier, in Bellingham, Washington, he had pleaded guilty to the murders of two university students, Karen Mandic and Diane Wilder, and received two consecutive life terms. A security guard, Bianchi was arrested in Bellingham in January 1979 and soon linked by Los Angeles detectives to the killings of ten women and girls in the Los Angeles area between October 1977 and February 1978. Under the plea agreement he testified against his cousin, Angelo Buono, who was convicted of nine of the Los Angeles murders in 1983. The Ninth Circuit rejected his claim that the pleas were coerced, and California denied him parole in August 2010.
October 23, 2004. The Los Angeles Police Department announced that DNA had linked Chester Dewayne Turner, a former pizza delivery driver already in prison, to thirteen killings of women between 1987 and 1998, and called him the most prolific serial killer ever identified in the history of the city. The women died in South Los Angeles and on downtown Skid Row. Turner had been identified in 2003, when DNA taken after a 2002 rape conviction matched unsolved cases, and he was soon charged with ten murders. A jury convicted him of all ten in April 2007, the deaths of Diane Johnson, Annette Ernest, Anita Fishman, Regina Washington, Andrea Tripplett, Deserae Jones, Natalie Price, Mildred Beasley, Paula Vance and Brenda Bries, and he was sentenced to death that July. In June 2014 another jury convicted him of four more murders, those of Elandra Bunn, Debra Williams, Mary Edwards and Cynthia Annette Johnson, and four more death sentences followed. The same DNA review freed a man who had spent more than a decade in prison for killings Turner committed.
October 24, 2002. Maryland State Police, Montgomery County SWAT officers and the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team arrested John Allen Muhammad, a 41-year-old Army veteran, and Lee Boyd Malvo, 17, asleep in a blue 1990 Chevrolet Caprice at an Interstate 70 rest area near Myersville, in Frederick County, Maryland. For three weeks the region around Washington had lived through a sniper series that killed ten people. Muhammad was tried first in Virginia, where a jury convicted him in November 2003 of the capital murder of Dean Harold Meyers, 53, on two theories: a killing in the commission of an act of terrorism, and the killing of more than one person within three years. In May 2006 a Maryland jury convicted him of six more first-degree murders, those of James D. Martin, James L. Buchanan, Premkumar Walekar, Sarah Ramos, Lori Ann Lewis-Rivera and Conrad Johnson, and he received six consecutive life terms without parole. Virginia executed him by lethal injection at Greensville Correctional Center on November 10, 2009. He denied any part in the killings to the end.
October 25, 2006. Danny Rolling was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison near Starke and pronounced dead at 6:13 p.m. A drifter from Shreveport, Louisiana, Rolling killed five college students in Gainesville over four days in August 1990, as the University of Florida’s fall semester began: Sonja Larson, 18; Christina Powell, 17; Christa Hoyt, 18; Tracy Paules, 23; and Manuel Taboada, 23. He pleaded guilty to all five first-degree murders on February 15, 1994, and a jury voted 12 to 0 for death on each count. Circuit Judge Stan R. Morris imposed five death sentences that April, and the Florida Supreme Court affirmed them in 1997. Governor Jeb Bush signed the death warrant in September 2006. Before he died, Rolling gave his former pastor a written confession to the killings of Tom Grissom, 55, his daughter Julie, 24, and his grandson Sean, 8, in Shreveport in November 1989, which the pastor read publicly two days after the execution. Rolling was never tried for those deaths.
October 26, 1964. Eric Edgar Cooke was hanged at Fremantle Prison at eight on a Monday morning, the last person executed in Western Australia. A Perth petty thief and prowler, born at Victoria Park in 1931, Cooke confessed to eight killings and fourteen attempted murders between 1959 and 1963, all of strangers at night. He was tried for one: the wilful murder of John Sturkey, 18, a student, at Nedlands on January 27, 1963. A jury rejected his insanity defense and convicted him after about an hour and a half, and he was sentenced to death in November 1963. Two of his confessions concerned deaths for which other men were already in prison. J.B., convicted of the manslaughter of his girlfriend, Rosemary Anderson, was cleared on appeal in 2002, and D.B., a deaf young man convicted over the death of Jillian Brewer, was cleared in 2005. About a quarter of an hour before he was hanged, Cooke reportedly swore on a Bible that he had killed both women.
October 27, 2019. Ivan Milat died of cancer at 4:07 a.m. in the hospital at Long Bay Correctional Complex in Sydney, aged 74, still denying the murders that had kept him in prison for more than two decades. A road worker from Sydney’s southwest, Milat was convicted in 1996 of murdering seven young hitchhikers: Deborah Everist and James Gibson, both from Victoria; Simone Schmidl, Anja Habschied and Gabor Neugebauer, from Germany; and Joanne Walters and Caroline Clarke, from Britain. Their deaths came to light in the Belanglo State Forest in 1992 and 1993. A British traveler who had survived an encounter with Milat in 1990 identified him in 1994, and Milat was also convicted of detaining that man for advantage. On July 27, 1996, Justice David Hunt sentenced him to life on each murder count, with no possibility of parole. His appeal was dismissed in 1998. New South Wales police, a coroner and a parliamentary inquiry later examined other cases, and he was never charged in any of them.
October 28, 1980. FBI agents arrested Joseph Paul Franklin in Lakeland, Florida, after an employee at a plasma center reported a visitor with tattoos like the ones the bureau had publicized. Agents from the Tampa office had handed out flyers at plasma centers because Franklin was known to sell his blood for cash between robberies, and the search had grown urgent because President Jimmy Carter was due in Tampa on October 31. A former neo-Nazi and Klansman, Franklin drifted across the country from 1977 to 1980 attacking Black men, interracial couples and Jewish worshippers. He was convicted of eight murders in Utah, Wisconsin, Missouri, Tennessee and Ohio, among them those of Ted Fields and David Martin in Salt Lake City in August 1980. Missouri sentenced him to death in 1997 for killing Gerald Gordon outside a synagogue in Richmond Heights in 1977, a crime that went unsolved until he confessed to an FBI agent seventeen years later. He was executed by lethal injection at Bonne Terre, Missouri, on November 20, 2013.
October 29, 2004. Police in Jalandhar, in the Indian state of Punjab, arrested Darbara Singh on the morning of October 29 after a tip that a cyclist resembling a police sketch was in the area. A former serviceman, he had been released early, in December 2003, from a 30-year sentence. Children of migrant laborers had been going missing around Jalandhar, and after his arrest he told police he had killed seventeen of them. The courts tested those admissions one case at a time. In April 2008 a Jalandhar court convicted him of the murder of Diksha, 8, with other charges, and sentenced him to life; the High Court of Punjab and Haryana upheld that conviction in February 2013, and in November 2013 it upheld his conviction for kidnapping and attempting to kill a girl who survived. In July 2009 the same court set aside the death sentence he had received for the deaths of two young children, Khursheed and Ronku, for want of reliable evidence, and he was acquitted in several other cases.
October 30, 1947. At about 2:30 in the morning, two Tacoma patrol officers answering a report of screams arrested Jake Bird, a 45-year-old transient laborer, in an alley a short distance from the house where Bertha Kludt and her daughter, Beverly June Kludt, 17, had just been killed. A jury convicted him of the first-degree murder of Bertha Kludt on November 26, 1947; he admitted Beverly’s death in his confession but was never separately charged with it. Judge Edward D. Hodge sentenced him to death on December 6. On death row Bird claimed at least 44 killings across the country over about twenty years, and in January 1948 Governor Monrad C. Wallgren granted a 60-day reprieve so that investigators could hear him out. HistoryLink reports that only eleven of the claims were substantiated, and none was ever tried. The Washington Supreme Court denied his petition in November 1948, and he was hanged at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla at 12:20 a.m. on July 15, 1949.
October 31, 1989. The district court of Entremont, in the Swiss canton of Valais, sentenced Michel Peiry to life imprisonment for four murders and two attempted murders, with other charges, on the date given by the Zurich daily Blick. Peiry, a salesman from Romont in the canton of Fribourg, had been arrested on May 1, 1987, during military service, after a teenage hitchhiker survived an attack and gave police the information that identified him. Among the murders, Blick reported, was that of a 14-year-old boy in Valais in 1986. By the count of the Keystone-ATS news agency he confessed to killing three teenagers in Switzerland and two abroad, and he admitted three more during the inquiry before retracting them; press reports have linked him to at least eleven killings in Switzerland, France, Italy and elsewhere. He has been held without a single day’s leave since May 1987. All twelve of his applications for conditional release, the first in 2002, have been refused, and the Federal Supreme Court upheld the latest refusal in a ruling published on August 13, 2026.
November 1, 1984. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit refused the last appeal of Velma Barfield, a grandmother from Robeson County, North Carolina, and on the next day, November 2, she was put to death by lethal injection at Central Prison in Raleigh. She became the first woman executed in the United States since 1962 and the first woman anywhere in the country executed by lethal injection. A Bladen County jury, hearing the case on a change of venue, had convicted her in December 1978 of the first-degree murder of her fiance, Stewart Taylor, a St. Pauls farmer who died in February of that year after he learned she had forged checks on his account. Under questioning by sheriff’s officers she also confessed to causing the deaths of her mother, Lillie McMillan Bullard, and of Dolly Taylor Edwards and John Henry Lee, two elderly people whose homes she worked in. She was never tried for those deaths. Governor Jim Hunt had denied clemency in September.
November 2, 1958. Max Gufler, a salesman of washing machines and vacuum cleaners in St. Pölten, Lower Austria, was arrested on a warrant from the regional court in Klagenfurt, two days after the Carinthian gendarmerie asked the St. Pölten police to question him. The inquiry had begun with Maria Robas, a woman missing since September, and a letter signed by a "Dr. Eberharter" of Munich telling her former husband that she had died in a car accident. No such accident had taken place. Gufler had presented himself to women as a courteous suitor and taken their savings. Within weeks his custody had become a matter for questions in the Austrian parliament. His trial opened in Vienna in April 1961. The jury convicted him of four murders, those of Robas, Juliana Nass, Josefine Kammleitner and Emilie Meystrzik, and of two attempted murders, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment, with a dark cell on each anniversary of the killings. Investigators suspected him in as many as eighteen deaths. He died of stomach cancer in Stein prison in 1966.
November 3, 1995. In a Toronto courtroom Justice LeSage declared Paul Bernardo a dangerous offender, a designation that allows detention without a fixed end. Two months earlier a jury had convicted the Scarborough man of the first-degree murders of two schoolgirls, Leslie Mahaffy, 14, of Burlington, and Kristen French, 15, of St. Catharines, with other charges, and he was already serving life with no parole for 25 years. The Crown had applied for the designation in October, and Maclean’s reported that a finding would spare the courts more than thirty outstanding charges, among them the Scarborough sexual assaults that had gone unsolved for years. The columnist Rosie DiManno later recalled the judge telling Bernardo that he had no right ever to be released. The Court of Appeal for Ontario dismissed his appeal in 2000, and the Supreme Court of Canada refused leave that September. The Parole Board of Canada refused him release in 2018, 2021 and November 2024, and in September 2026 a hearing set for that October was put back to January 2027.
November 4, 1983. A jury at the Old Bailey convicted Dennis Nilsen of six murders and two attempted murders, rejecting his plea of diminished responsibility after nine days of evidence. Born in Fraserburgh, on the Aberdeenshire coast, in 1945, he had been an Army cook and, briefly, a Metropolitan Police constable before taking a civil service post at a London jobcentre, interviewing people looking for work. The six men named in the murder counts were Kenneth Ockenden, Martyn Duffey, Billy Sutherland, Malcolm Barlow, John Howlett and Stephen Sinclair, young men he had met in pubs and on the streets of north London, several of them homeless. He had told police of fifteen or sixteen deaths, and in 2005 detectives identified the first as Stephen Holmes, a 14-year-old boy; no charge followed. The judge passed life sentences with a recommended minimum of 25 years, later raised to a whole life tariff. Nilsen spent the rest of his life in high-security prisons and died in York District Hospital in May 2018, aged 72, while still serving his sentence.
November 5, 2009. In San Joaquin County Superior Court, Judge George Abdallah Jr. sentenced Roger Kibbe, a former furniture maker from the Sacramento area, to six consecutive terms of life without parole. Kibbe had pleaded guilty to six counts of first-degree murder to avoid a possible death sentence: Lou Ellen Burleigh, killed in 1977, and Lora Heedick, Barbara Ann Scott, Stephanie Brown, Charmaine Sabrah and Katherine Kelly Quinones, all killed in 1986. He had been in prison since 1991, when an El Dorado County jury convicted him of murdering Darcie Frackenpohl, a 17-year-old runaway from Seattle, in a case investigators tied to a series of killings of young women in Northern California. The older cases were reopened when an investigator for the district attorney resubmitted evidence for testing, and DNA and trace evidence connected them to Kibbe. At the sentencing Barbara Scott’s sister told him she could not fathom how a so-called human being could do such things. In February 2021, at 81, Kibbe died in his cell at Mule Creek State Prison; the death was ruled a homicide.
November 6, 2003. Four people who worked at a motorcycle dealership were killed in Chesnee, South Carolina: the owner, Scott Ponder, 30; his mother, Beverly Guy, 52, the shop’s bookkeeper; the service manager, Brian Lucas, 29; and the mechanic, Chris Sherbert, 26. The case stayed open for thirteen years. In November 2016 Todd Kohlhepp, a successful real estate broker in Spartanburg County and a registered sex offender, was arrested in a kidnapping case and confessed to the Chesnee killings, and on November 6, 2016, the thirteenth anniversary, he was denied bond on four counts of murder. On May 26, 2017, he pleaded guilty to seven murders, those of the four Chesnee victims, Johnny Joe Coxie and his wife, Meagan Leigh McCraw-Coxie, and Charlie Carver, along with kidnapping and criminal sexual conduct. He received seven consecutive life terms plus 60 years under an agreement in which he waived any appeal and any claim to parole. The state corrections department listed him at Kirkland Correctional Institution in October 2026.
November 7, 1989. Judge Michael Tynan sentenced Richard Ramirez to death in the gas chamber in Los Angeles, plus 59 years and four months for his other crimes, after refusing to reduce the jury’s penalty to life. Ramirez, a drifter and burglar from El Paso, had been convicted in September on all 43 counts tried, among them twelve counts of first-degree murder and one of second-degree murder, five attempted murders and fourteen residential burglaries, committed in homes across Los Angeles County between June 1984 and August 1985. Among the dead was Jennie Vincow, 79. He was caught in East Los Angeles in August 1985 by residents who recognized his photograph from the newspapers. Addressing the court, he said he was beyond good and evil. The California Supreme Court affirmed in 2006. In 2009 DNA tied him to the 1984 killing of Mei Leung, 9, in San Francisco, a case never charged. He died of lymphoma complications at Marin General Hospital on June 7, 2013, aged 53, still under sentence of death.
November 8, 1945. Joseph James DeAngelo Jr. was born in Bath, New York. He graduated from Folsom High School in 1964, served in the Navy, and was a police officer in Exeter and then Auburn, California, from 1973 to 1979, before spending 27 years at a supermarket distribution center. Through those decades a series of murders, rapes and burglaries in seven California counties remained unsolved. In 2018 investigators identified him through genetic genealogy, the first publicly known use of the method to solve a murder case. On June 29, 2020, he pleaded guilty to thirteen first-degree murders committed between 1975 and 1986, among them those of Claude Snelling, Brian and Katie Maggiore and Janelle Cruz, and to thirteen counts of kidnapping to commit robbery. He admitted dozens of further crimes that could no longer be charged. On August 21, 2020, Judge Michael Bowman imposed eleven consecutive terms of life without parole for the murders and a further life term for the kidnappings.
November 9, 2003. Sipho Dube was arrested in Johannesburg after relatives of Tina Bernardes, an 11-year-old girl from Jeppestown, traced him and handed him over to the police, the South African Press Association reported. About two months later he escaped from custody. Rearrested in January 2004 after an attempted car theft, he gave a false name, and Superintendent Piet Byleveld established who he was. On August 8, 2006, the Johannesburg High Court convicted him of seven murders committed between May 2001 and January 2004: Rashunthee Singh, 39, in Ladysmith, and six children in Johannesburg, Lukhanyo Kuwane, 10; Tina Bernardes; Nomnikelo Jumba, 14; Thabo Dlongolo, 14; and the cousins Anele Mbuku, 9, and Siyabonga Mbuku, 12. He was also convicted of ten counts of kidnapping and other charges. Tina’s uncle told reporters that the family wanted a guilty verdict and a life sentence. On August 23, 2006, Dube received ten life terms plus 114 years, to run concurrently, with no parole for at least 25 years.
November 10, 2009. John Allen Muhammad was executed by lethal injection at the Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt, Virginia, at the age of 48. The previous day the United States Supreme Court had refused to stop the execution, and the governor of Virginia denied clemency. Over three weeks in October 2002, Muhammad, an Army veteran, and Lee Boyd Malvo, 17, killed ten people at random around Washington, people pumping gas, mowing grass and loading shopping into their cars, before the two were arrested asleep in a modified Chevrolet Caprice on October 24. A jury sitting in Virginia Beach convicted Muhammad in November 2003 of the capital murder of Dean Harold Meyers, 53, under two theories, one of them that the killing was an act of terrorism. A Maryland jury convicted him in 2006 of six more murders, among them those of James D. Martin and James L. "Sonny" Buchanan. He denied any part in the killings to the end. Malvo, who was 17 at the time, was sentenced to life without parole.
November 11, 2009. A DuPage County jury in Illinois returned a death sentence against Brian Dugan for the 1983 murder of Jeanine Nicarico, 10, of Naperville. In 1985 Dugan had pleaded guilty to the murders of Donna Schnorr, 27, a nurse from Geneva, and Melissa Ackerman, 7, of Somonauk, and received two life sentences, and he had offered to admit the Nicarico killing if prosecutors would spare his life. They refused. Two other men, Rolando Cruz and Alejandro Hernandez, spent years on death row for the girl’s murder before they were cleared. Dugan was indicted on DNA evidence in 2005 and pleaded guilty in July 2009 without any agreement to save him from execution. Judge George Bakalis formally imposed the death sentence in December 2009. On March 9, 2011, when Illinois abolished capital punishment, Governor Pat Quinn commuted it to life in prison, and Dugan was serving life as of August 2020.
November 12, 2007. Sergei Ryakhovsky died of advanced pulmonary tuberculosis in a special-regime colony for prisoners serving life in Mordovia. A former electrician from Balashikha, in the Moscow region, he had served four years for malicious hooliganism after a run of attacks on elderly women in the early 1980s, and between 1988 and 1993 he killed people in and around Moscow and the Moscow region. A woman who survived an encounter with him gave police a description, the resulting composite sketch brought about his arrest on April 13, 1993, and he confessed before withdrawing his statements. In July 1995 a court convicted him of eighteen murders and two attempted murders, holding one further murder charge unproven, and sentenced him to death on July 11. The sentence was never carried out and was replaced by life imprisonment. He was held at Butyrka prison in Moscow before his transfer to Mordovia. The Moscow regional broadcaster 360 reported in 2025 that investigators had suspected him in at least three dozen deaths, a figure no court tested.
November 13, 1995. Glen Edward Rogers, a drifter from Hamilton, Ohio, was arrested in Kentucky at the end of a chase that ran at high speed for about fifty miles through four towns, according to the California Supreme Court. He was driving the car of Tina Marie Cribbs, 34, who had died in Tampa a week earlier. In September 1995 Sandra Gallagher, 33, had died in Van Nuys, in Los Angeles. Florida convicted Rogers of the first-degree murder of Cribbs and sentenced him to death in July 1997, and a California jury convicted him of Gallagher’s murder and he was sentenced to death there in 1999. He was suspected in the deaths of two other women that autumn, Andy Lou Sutton in Bossier City, Louisiana, and Linda Price in Jackson, Mississippi, and was tried for neither. After Governor Ron DeSantis signed his death warrant, Florida executed him by lethal injection at Florida State Prison near Starke on May 15, 2025. He was 62.
November 14, 1986. San Bernardino County deputies arrested Cynthia Coffman, 24, and James Gregory Marlow in the Big Bear area after a nationwide alert, United Press International reported. In the previous week two young women had been killed in Southern California: Corinna Novis, 20, an insurance company clerk from Redlands, and Lynell Murray, 19, a college sophomore who worked at a dry cleaner in Huntington Beach. A San Bernardino County jury rejected Coffman’s defense of battered woman syndrome, convicted both defendants of the murder of Novis with special circumstances and other charges, and returned death sentences in August 1989. In a separate Orange County trial both were convicted of Murray’s murder, and Coffman received life without parole. The California Supreme Court affirmed the death judgments in 2004. On September 4, 2025, a federal judge in Los Angeles ordered Coffman’s death sentence vacated unless the state granted a new penalty trial, and that ruling went on appeal to the Ninth Circuit.
November 15, 2002. Myra Hindley died at West Suffolk Hospital in Bury St Edmunds at 4.58 p.m., aged 60, three days after she was readmitted from Highpoint prison; an inquest gave the cause as bronchial pneumonia. In May 1966, at Chester Assizes, she had been convicted with Ian Brady of the murders of Lesley Ann Downey, 10, and Edward Evans, 17, and of harbouring Brady knowing that he had murdered John Kilbride, 12. She received two life sentences. In 1987 she admitted taking part in the deaths of Pauline Reade, 16, and Keith Bennett, 12, for which she was never tried. Home secretaries had decided that she should never be released, and in March 2000 the House of Lords rejected her challenge to that whole life tariff. Ten days after her death, on November 25, 2002, the House of Lords ruled in a separate case brought by another life prisoner that the home secretary could no longer set the minimum terms of people serving life for murder.
November 16, 2006. Police caught Dong Wenyu (董文语), the subject of an A-level national wanted notice issued by the Ministry of Public Security that July, on the morning of November 16 in Yibin, in Sichuan province, far to the west of his home. He was 28, a drifter from a farming family in Pingyang County in southern Zhejiang, with earlier convictions for injury and theft. Police had linked him to five break-ins between March and May 2006, in Zhejiang, Fujian and Jiangxi provinces, in which six people died and two more were injured. Officers from Zhejiang left for Sichuan that afternoon to bring him back, and on November 17 the Jiangnan branch of the Jinhua Public Security Bureau placed him in criminal detention on suspicion of intentional homicide. After a trial held in closed session in May 2007, the Jinhua Intermediate People’s Court convicted him on June 8, 2007, of intentional homicide, with robbery, theft and other charges, and sentenced him to death, with lifelong deprivation of political rights and the confiscation of all his property.
November 17, 1894. On the afternoon of November 17, Boston police officers and an agent of the Pinkerton detective agency arrested Herman Webster Mudgett, who called himself H. H. Holmes, at a boarding house in the city’s West End, where he had registered under another name. Mudgett was a physician and pharmacist and a lifelong swindler who had built a block of stores and flats in the Englewood district of Chicago. He was wanted in an insurance fraud on the life of his associate Benjamin Pitezel. In Philadelphia in November 1895 a jury convicted him of the first-degree murder of Pitezel, the only killing for which he was tried. Investigators attributed to him the deaths of three of Pitezel’s children, Howard, Alice and Nellie, in Indianapolis and Toronto, and his name was later tied to women who vanished in Chicago. He sold newspapers a confession to dozens of murders, and some of the people he named were still alive. He was hanged at Moyamensing Prison in Philadelphia on May 7, 1896.
November 18, 2013. At the Old Bailey, before Mr Justice Sweeney, Joanna Dennehy pleaded guilty to every count she faced: the murders of Lukasz Slaboszewski, 31, John Chapman, 56, and Kevin Lee, 48, in and around Peterborough over ten days in March 2013; the attempted murders of two men in Hereford on April 2, 2013, both of whom survived; and three counts of preventing the lawful and decent burial of a body. The plea came at arraignment, sparing the families a trial. Three men were prosecuted with her for helping her after the killings: Gary Stretch and Leslie Layton were convicted by a jury in February 2014, and Robert Moore pleaded guilty. On February 28, 2014, Mr Justice Spencer sentenced Dennehy to life with a whole life order for each murder, with concurrent sentences for the other offenses, so that she can never be released. She was held at HMP Bronzefield in Surrey, where in 2016 the High Court ruled on a challenge she brought against her long segregation in the prison.
November 19, 2017. Charles Manson died of natural causes at Kern County Hospital in Bakersfield, California, aged 83, while serving a life sentence, PBS NewsHour reported. He was convicted of nine first-degree murders committed in 1969 by members of the commune around him: seven at the Tate-LaBianca trial in January 1971, among them the killings of the actress Sharon Tate and four others and of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, and two at the Hinman-Shea trial that November. Others carried out every killing, and the courts held him guilty as the man who directed them. He was sentenced to death in 1971; after the California Supreme Court struck down the death penalty in People v. Anderson in 1972, his sentence was formally changed to life in prison in 1977. His body stayed in the Bakersfield morgue until March 2018, when a court settled a dispute over it in favor of a grandson, the Associated Press reported.
November 20, 2013. Missouri executed Joseph Paul Franklin by lethal injection at the state prison in Bonne Terre for the murder of Gerald Gordon outside a synagogue in Richmond Heights, a suburb of St. Louis, on October 8, 1977. Franklin, a former neo-Nazi and Klansman, drifted across the country from 1977 to 1980 killing Black men, interracial couples and Jewish worshippers. He was convicted of eight murders in five jurisdictions, among them Theodore Fields and David Martin in Salt Lake City in 1980 and Alphonce Manning Jr. and Toni Schwenn in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1977. The Gordon killing went unsolved until Franklin confessed it to an FBI agent seventeen years later; a Missouri jury convicted him of capital murder in 1997 and sentenced him to death. He was acquitted in federal court of the 1980 attack on the civil rights leader Vernon Jordan, which he later admitted, and he was indicted in Georgia for the 1978 attack on the publisher Larry Flynt. Both men survived.
November 21, 2003. Huang Yong, a 29-year-old farmer in Pingyu County, in the Zhumadian area of Henan province, was arrested, according to People’s Daily Online. His crimes had come to light only that month, when a young man he had seriously injured survived and went to the police. Between September 2001 and November 2003 Huang had killed seventeen young people, most of them students. Relatives of the victims told reporters in mid-November that county police had given them a figure of 23 dead, and a police record drawn up that month, later quoted by the Beijing Youth Daily, has Huang telling the survivor that he had already killed more than twenty. The charge covered the seventeen. On December 9, 2003, a court sitting in Pingyu convicted him of intentional homicide and sentenced him to death with lifelong deprivation of political rights. He did not appeal. After review by the Henan Higher People’s Court, he was shot on December 26, 2003, five weeks after his arrest. DNA tests in April 2004 linked new evidence to two of the seventeen listed victims.
November 22, 1994. Detectives of the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office questioning a day laborer who called himself Tim Whitfield about the death of his roommate, Walter Hinton, 42, a florist, heard him give his real name: Gary Ray Bowles. Fingerprints confirmed it, and he was arrested in Jacksonville Beach. The FBI had added him to its Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list, as number 438, shortly before. Bowles, 32, a drifter who had sold sex to men since his teens, confessed to killing six men in Florida, Maryland and Georgia between March and November 1994, often after they had given him a place to stay. He was convicted of three of the Florida murders: John Hardy Roberts, 59, in Daytona Beach, and Albert Morris, 37, in Nassau County, for which he received life sentences, and Hinton, to which he pleaded guilty in 1996. The Florida Supreme Court reversed his first death sentence in 1998; a jury unanimously recommended death again in 1999, and the court affirmed in 2001. Florida executed him on August 22, 2019, at 57.
November 23, 2016. A jury at the Old Bailey convicted Stephen Port, a chef from Barking in east London, of the murders of four young men: Anthony Walgate, Gabriel Kovari, Daniel Whitworth and Jack Taylor, who died between June 2014 and September 2015. The jury also convicted him of offenses against other young men who survived, among them rapes and the administering of substances with intent, twenty-two offenses against eleven men in all, and acquitted him of three counts. Two days later Mr Justice Openshaw imposed a whole life order for each murder. The case became an inquiry into the Metropolitan Police. Fresh inquests in 2021 returned conclusions of unlawful killing for all four men and identified basic failings in the investigation, and in November 2023 the Independent Office for Police Conduct announced gross misconduct investigations into eight Met officers. Port’s application for leave to appeal against his murder convictions was refused at the first stage.
November 24, 2020. The Handan Intermediate People’s Court in Hebei sentenced Wang Shujin to death for a second time. Wang, a farmer from Guangping County, had been convicted in 2007 of the intentional homicide of two women and the attempted homicide of a third woman, who survived, with rape, and sentenced to death. The Supreme People’s Court declined to approve that sentence and sent the case back on November 9, 2020, after new evidence tied him to a third killing, that of a woman surnamed Zhang in his village in November 1993. After his arrest in 2005 Wang had also confessed to a 1994 killing near Shijiazhuang for which a young man, Nie Shubin, had already been executed. Nie was cleared in 2016, but the court accepted the prosecution’s view that Wang was not responsible for that death, citing differences over the timing, the victim’s height and the cause of death. The Hebei High People’s Court dismissed his appeal on December 22, and he was executed in Handan on February 2, 2021, Xinhua reported.
November 25, 2003. On the day his trial was due to open at the Central Criminal Court, Anthony Hardy, a former engineer who lived alone in a council flat in Camden, north London, pleaded guilty to the murders of three women, Sally White, Elizabeth Valad and Bridgette MacLennan. Mr Justice Keith passed a life sentence on each count. The first death, in January 2002, had been attributed by a pathologist to natural causes, and no action was taken over it; after a period in a psychiatric hospital Hardy killed Valad and MacLennan in late December 2002. On May 14, 2010, in the High Court, Mr Justice Keith made a whole life order, so that Hardy would never be released. After about fifteen years at Broadmoor Hospital he was moved to HMP Frankland in November 2019, and he died in hospital on November 25, 2020, aged 69, of pneumonia caused by COVID-19, according to the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman. Two unsolved deaths of women in Camden in the 1990s were never charged against him.
November 26, 1985. A judge in Orange County, Florida, sentenced Judy Buenoano to death for the first-degree murder of her husband, Air Force Sergeant James E. Goodyear, who had died on September 16, 1971, a death no one questioned for more than a decade. The jury had recommended death by a vote of ten to two. She already stood convicted in two other Florida counties. In March 1984 a Santa Rosa County jury convicted her of the first-degree murder of her son Michael Goodyear, 19, who died on May 13, 1980, and of grand theft from an insurer, and she received a life sentence. In October 1984 an Escambia County jury convicted her of the attempted first-degree murder of her fiance, who survived. The Florida Supreme Court affirmed her death sentence in 1988, and the federal courts denied habeas relief, with the Eleventh Circuit affirming in 1996. On March 30, 1998, she was executed in the electric chair, the first woman put to death in Florida since 1848. Her final appeals had failed in the days before.
November 27, 2010. Near Vanderhoof, in northern British Columbia, RCMP officers arrested Cody Legebokoff, 20, of Prince George, in the death of Loren Leslie, 15, a legally blind teenager from Fraser Lake. In October 2011, while he was in custody, he was charged with three more murders: Jill Stuchenko, 35, of Prince George, a mother and singer, in 2009; and in 2010 Natasha Montgomery, 23, originally from Quesnel, a mother of two, and Cynthia Maas, 35, a mother from a First Nations family. On September 11, 2014, a jury in the Supreme Court of British Columbia convicted him of all four first-degree murders, and Justice Glen Parrett sentenced him to life with no chance of parole for 25 years. The British Columbia Court of Appeal dismissed his appeal in September 2016, and the Supreme Court of Canada refused leave to appeal on February 16, 2017.
November 28, 1994. Jeffrey Dahmer was killed at the Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, Wisconsin, aged 34, by a fellow inmate, Christopher Scarver, who was already serving a life sentence for murder. That morning Dahmer, Scarver and a third prisoner had been sent to clean a bathroom in the prison gymnasium and were left without direct supervision for about twenty minutes, United Press International reported. Dahmer had admitted killing seventeen men and boys between 1978 and 1991, most of them in Milwaukee. On February 15, 1992, a Milwaukee jury rejected his insanity defense on all fifteen Wisconsin counts. He received fifteen consecutive life terms, and in May 1992 a court in Ohio added a sixteenth for the 1978 killing of Steven Hicks, the first of the seventeen. The Deseret News printed the names of the victims after the Wisconsin verdict. Dahmer had served less than three years of his sentences when he died.
November 29, 1989. Judge Donald A. McCartin of the Orange County Superior Court sentenced Randy Kraft, a computer programmer from Long Beach, to death, and the next day Kraft was received into the state prison system. An Orange County jury had convicted him that year of the first-degree murders of sixteen young men in Southern California between 1972 and 1983, along with one count of sodomy and one of mayhem, and acquitted him of a second sodomy count. At the penalty phase prosecutors presented evidence of eight more deaths in Oregon and Michigan, which were never charged and remain attributed only. The judgment imposed death on eleven of the murder counts and prison terms on the others, all stayed. On August 10, 2000, the California Supreme Court affirmed the convictions and sentence in full in People v. Kraft. No execution has taken place in California since Governor Gavin Newsom ordered a halt to the death penalty on March 13, 2019. Kraft has denied every one of the killings, Orange Coast magazine reported in 2013.
November 30, 2001. At about 3 p.m., detectives arrested Gary Ridgway, a 52-year-old truck painter, as he left work at the Kenworth plant in Renton, Washington, after DNA from a saliva sample he had given in 1987 was matched to evidence in three of the earliest deaths in the Green River case. Since 1982 young women and girls, many of them from Pacific Highway South near Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, had died across south King County. On December 5, 2001, he was charged with the aggravated first-degree murders of Marcia Chapman, Cynthia Hinds, Opal Mills and Carol Christensen. On November 5, 2003, in a Seattle courtroom, he pleaded guilty to 48 counts of aggravated first-degree murder in an agreement that spared him the death penalty, and he was sentenced to life without release. In February 2011 he pleaded guilty to a 49th murder, that of Rebecca Marrero, 20. Four of the 48 counts had been for women then unidentified; the last of them was named as Tammie Liles in January 2024.
December 1, 1969. Los Angeles authorities announced that the August murders of the actress Sharon Tate and four others, and of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca the next night, were solved. The break came from an unexpected quarter: deputies in Inyo County learned that the suspects had been sitting in their jail for weeks, held since an October 12 raid on Barker Ranch that had netted Charles Manson and his followers. Warrants went out at once. Charles Watson was arrested in McKinney, Texas, Patricia Krenwinkel in Mobile, Alabama, and Linda Kasabian surrendered. Manson struck none of the fatal blows, yet juries in 1971 convicted him of nine first-degree murders, seven in the Tate-LaBianca case and two in the deaths of Gary Hinman and Donald Shea. His death sentence became life after the California Supreme Court struck down capital punishment in 1972. Denied parole twelve times, he died in a Kern County hospital on November 19, 2017, at 83.
December 2, 1978. In a Bladen County courtroom in North Carolina, Judge Henry A. McKinnon sentenced Velma Barfield to death for the first-degree murder of her fiance, Stewart Taylor, a farmer from St. Pauls who had died that February. The trial had been moved from neighboring Robeson County. Barfield, a grandmother who had grown up in Robeson County and had long depended on prescription drugs, had given sheriff’s officers four statements that March. In them she admitted causing three other deaths: her mother, Lillie McMillan Bullard, in 1974, and Dolly Taylor Edwards and John Henry Lee, two elderly people in whose homes she worked, in 1977. She was never tried for those deaths. The North Carolina Supreme Court affirmed her conviction in 1979, federal courts refused relief, and Governor Jim Hunt denied clemency in September 1984. On November 2, 1984, she was put to death at Central Prison in Raleigh, the first woman executed in the United States since 1962 and the first ever executed by lethal injection.
December 3, 2020. Kent Police arrested David Fuller, a hospital electrician of 66, at his home in Heathfield, East Sussex. Thirty-three years earlier two young women from Tunbridge Wells, Wendy Knell, 25, and Caroline Pierce, 20, had been killed within five months of each other, in June and November 1987. They had never met. A DNA profile from the 1987 investigation sat unmatched for decades until familial searching traced it to one of Fuller’s relatives. He was charged the next day. In November 2021, partway through his trial at Maidstone Crown Court, he pleaded guilty to both. On December 15, 2021, Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb imposed a whole life order. The search of his home also exposed years of offenses he had committed in the mortuaries of the hospitals where he worked, which led to further guilty pleas and an independent inquiry. He was serving the whole life order as of July 2025.
December 4, 1979. A fire in Hull took three lives. Three brothers, Charles Hastie, 15, Paul, 12, and Peter, 10, died in hospital. The fire had been set deliberately. In 1980 a young man from the city named Bruce George Peter Lee, born Peter Dinsdale, confessed to that fire and to ten other fatal or injurious fires in and around Hull reaching back to 1973. At Leeds Crown Court on January 20, 1981, he pleaded guilty to 26 counts of manslaughter on the ground of diminished responsibility, together with arson counts, and was ordered detained in a secure hospital without limit of time. In 1983 the Court of Appeal quashed the eleven manslaughter convictions for a January 1977 fire at a residential home. On February 8, 2022, after a referral by the Criminal Cases Review Commission, it quashed the convictions for two more fires and upheld the rest. Twelve manslaughter convictions stand, the Hastie brothers among them.
December 5, 2001. King County Prosecuting Attorney Norm Maleng charged Gary Ridgway, a 52-year-old truck painter, with four counts of aggravated first-degree murder in the Green River case. The four women were Opal Mills, Marcia Chapman, Cynthia Hinds and Carol Christensen, all killed early in the series. Ridgway had been arrested on November 30 as he left his shift at the Kenworth truck plant in Renton, after a saliva sample taken from him in 1987 was finally matched by DNA to evidence from three of the 1982 deaths. Detectives had questioned him several times in the 1980s. On November 5, 2003, under an agreement that spared his life in exchange for his help, he pleaded guilty to 48 counts of aggravated first-degree murder. On December 18, 2003, Judge Richard Jones sentenced him to 48 consecutive life terms without release, and a 49th, for Rebecca Marrero, followed in February 2011. He was held at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla as of December 2025.
December 6, 2013. On a Friday night in central Pennsylvania, police arrested Elytte Barbour. His wife of three weeks, Miranda Barbour, 18, had been arrested and charged three days earlier, after investigators traced the last call on the telephone of Troy LaFerrara, 42, to her number. LaFerrara had answered her online companionship ad in November and had been killed near Sunbury. Elytte Barbour gave the police what they described as a full confession, and said the couple had simply wanted to kill someone together. While she waited in the county jail for trial, Miranda Barbour told a local newspaper that she had killed at least 22 other people. The district attorney said there was no verification of any of it, and the Alaska State Troopers said nothing but her own words tied her to any death there. On August 26, 2014, both pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. On September 18, 2014, Northumberland County Judge Charles Saylor sentenced each of them to life in prison without parole.
December 7, 1938. Anna Marie Hahn was put to death in the electric chair at the Ohio Penitentiary in Columbus and pronounced dead at 8:13 p.m. She was the first woman executed in Ohio. Born in Bavaria in 1906, she had settled in Cincinnati, where she befriended elderly German-American men and, according to Time magazine, took about $50,000 from them over eight years, much of it wagered on horse races. In November 1937 a Hamilton County jury of eleven women and one man convicted her of the first-degree murder of Jacob Wagner, 78 and returned no recommendation of mercy, which meant death. She had been indicted for a second death that never came to trial, and in August 1937 the Cincinnati prosecutor told the Associated Press that at least eleven deaths were under investigation. The Supreme Court of Ohio’s own history of the case records evidence that she killed three more men. Jacob Wagner’s death is the only one for which a court convicted her.
December 8, 1937. At about three in the afternoon, three inspectors of the Sûreté walked up to La Voulzie, a rented villa at La Celle-Saint-Cloud, west of Paris, to question its tenant, a German named Eugen Weidmann. He drew a pistol and wounded two of them before he was knocked down and overpowered. The next day, before the examining magistrate, he admitted six killings committed around Paris that year, most of them for small sums: Jean de Koven, Joseph Couffy, Janine Keller, Roger Le Blond, Fritz Frommer and Raymond Lesobre. Born in Frankfurt in 1908, he already had criminal records in Germany and Canada. The trial at the Versailles assize court ended on March 31, 1939, with a death sentence, the jury refusing extenuating circumstances, and his appeal and plea for clemency both failed. On June 17, 1939, the executioner Jules-Henri Desfourneaux guillotined him in public outside the prison at Versailles before a crowd whose conduct was photographed and filmed. A decree of June 24 moved all French executions behind prison walls.
December 9, 2007. On a Sunday in New Westminster, British Columbia, a jury in the B.C. Supreme Court acquitted Robert Pickton, a pig farmer from Port Coquitlam, of first-degree murder and convicted him of second-degree murder on all six counts before it. The six women came from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside: Sereena Abotsway, Mona Wilson, Andrea Joesbury, Brenda Ann Wolfe, Georgina Faith Papin and Marnie Frey. On December 11, Justice James Williams imposed life sentences with no parole eligibility for 25 years, the maximum. The B.C. Court of Appeal dismissed his appeal in 2009, the Supreme Court of Canada did the same on July 30, 2010, and five days later the Crown stayed the twenty remaining first-degree murder charges. The public inquiry led by Wally Oppal concluded in 2012 that police failures had let him evade arrest for years. He died in hospital on May 31, 2024, after an attack by another inmate at Port-Cartier Institution in Quebec.
December 10, 1993. Dorothea Puente, who had run a boarding house in downtown Sacramento for elderly, sick and alcoholic tenants while on parole for drugging and robbing people, was sentenced to two concurrent terms of life without the possibility of parole and a concurrent term of 15 years to life. The deaths of her tenants had come to light in Sacramento in November 1988. In August 1993 a Monterey County jury convicted her of the first-degree murders of Dorothy Miller and Benjamin Fink and the second-degree murder of Leona Carpenter, and deadlocked on six other deaths. The penalty jury could not agree either, a mistrial was declared on October 13, and prosecutors chose not to try the penalty again. Puente denied killing anyone to the end. She died of natural causes at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla on March 27, 2011, at 82.
December 11, 2012. At 7:47 p.m., about sixteen minutes after the injection began, Manuel Pardo was pronounced dead at Florida State Prison in Starke. He was 56. A former Florida Highway Patrol trooper and later a police officer in Sweetwater, outside Miami, he had been convicted by a Dade County jury on April 15, 1988, of nine counts of first-degree murder, committed in five separate episodes between January and April 1986. The dead were Mario Amador, Roberto Alfonso, Michael Millot, Luis Robledo, Ulpiano Ledo, Sara Musa, Fara Quintero, Ramon Alvero and Daisy Ricard. At trial he told the jurors his victims were drug dealers with no right to live and asked to be sentenced to death. Prosecutors answered that he was in the drug trade himself and had killed for money and drugs. The Supreme Court of Florida affirmed the nine death sentences in 1990,. Governor Rick Scott signed the warrant on October 30, 2012, and on the last day the Eleventh Circuit and the United States Supreme Court both refused to intervene.
December 12, 2003. Investigators from the Somerset County Prosecutor’s Office in New Jersey arrested Charles Cullen, a 43-year-old critical care nurse, and charged him with the murder of the Rev. Florian Gall, a Roman Catholic priest who had died as a patient in a Somerville hospital, and with the attempted murder of another patient. The hospital had fired Cullen on October 31 after suspicious overdoses were traced to him. Two days after the arrest he admitted to detectives that he had killed Father Gall and tried to kill the second patient, and in the interviews that followed he put the total at 30 to 40 people. Since 1988 he had moved between hospitals in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. In pleas beginning in April 2004 he admitted 29 murders and six attempted murders in return for an agreement that no county would seek his death. In March 2006 courts in both states imposed a reported eighteen life sentences. Reports in 2022 placed him at New Jersey State Prison in Trenton.
December 13, 1982. In the evening the security police of Drama, in northern Greece, arrested Kyriakos Papachronis (Κυριάκος Παπαχρόνης), a 22-year-old reserve officer serving with an army commando unit in the town. For fifteen months women across the north of the country had been attacked, and two had died: Georgia Theocharidou in September 1981 and Anastasia Alexandridou, a 20-year-old student, in Thessaloniki on August 15, 1982. Women who survived had described a man in military uniform, and officers at his own camp established that he had been out on the night of the last attack and had no alibi. He had been put in charge of one of the search teams, Parapolitika reported. He denied everything, then confessed. A military court in Thessaloniki convicted him of both homicides and of attempted homicides, bombings and arson, and twice sentenced him to death in June 1983. The sentences were later commuted to life. He was released under restrictive conditions on December 8, 2004, at 44, and was reported in March 2024 to be living quietly with his wife.
December 14, 2012. In a Manhattan courtroom Rodney Alcala, 69, withdrew his pleas of not guilty and admitted the murders of two young New York women, Cornelia Crilley, 23, in 1971, and Ellen Hover, 23, in 1977. He said he wanted the New York case settled so that he could return to California and work on the appeal of his death sentence. A Manhattan cold case unit had won his indictment in January 2011. Two years earlier, on February 25, 2010, an Orange County jury had convicted him of five first-degree murders, of Robin Samsoe, 12, and of four Los Angeles County women, Jill Barcomb, Georgia Wixted, Charlotte Lamb and Jill Parenteau. On January 7, 2013, Justice Bonnie Wittner sentenced him to 25 years to life for the New York murders. He died on July 24, 2021, at 77, with his appeal of the 2010 judgment still pending as far as the reports show.
December 15, 1996. At about 1:40 in the morning, Baltimore police and members of an FBI task force arrested Joe Metheny, a 41-year-old forklift worker who lived alone in a trailer on the lot of a pallet company in Southwest Baltimore, as a suspect in the death of Kimberly Spicer of South Baltimore. Her mother had reported her missing on November 11. That afternoon he admitted killing another woman, Catherine Magaziner, whose death he dated to about July 3, 1994. He was convicted of the Spicer murder and sentenced to life without parole, and in 1998 he pleaded guilty to the premeditated murder and robbery of Magaziner. A Baltimore County jury sentenced him to death, but on July 24, 2000, the Court of Appeals of Maryland vacated the sentence, holding that the robbery used to make him eligible for death had been an afterthought to the killing. In July 1996 a jury had acquitted him in the deaths of two homeless men. He died at Western Correctional Institution in Cumberland in August 2017, at 62.
December 16, 2009. At the DuPage County courthouse in Illinois, Judge George Bakalis formally sentenced Brian Dugan to death for the 1983 murder of Jeanine Nicarico, a ten-year-old girl from Naperville,. Dugan went to death row at Pontiac the same day. Already serving two life terms for the murders of Donna Schnorr, a 27-year-old nurse from Geneva, in 1984, and Melissa Ackerman, 7, of Somonauk, in 1985, he had offered in 1985 to admit the Nicarico killing if his life was spared. Prosecutors refused. Two other men were sentenced to death for Jeanine’s murder instead and spent years in prison before they were cleared in 1995. Dugan was indicted on DNA evidence in 2005 and pleaded guilty on July 28, 2009, without any deal. On November 11 a jury returned a death verdict. On March 9, 2011, when Illinois abolished capital punishment, Governor Pat Quinn commuted the sentence to life.
December 17, 2001. In Vienna an appeal panel of the Austrian Supreme Court, the Oberster Gerichtshof, upheld the verdicts that made Elfriede Blauensteiner guilty of two more murders: those of her neighbor, Franziska Köberl, who died in 1992, and her companion, Friedrich Döcker, who died in 1995. Johann Rzeszut, described as the court’s president, spoke of wrongdoing "really too great for an earthly court," the Oberösterreichische Nachrichten reported. Blauensteiner, a widow from the Favoriten district had used newspaper personal ads to find well-off elderly people who needed care, taken them into her home and made herself their heir. The case began with the death of Alois Pichler in Rossatzbach, Lower Austria, in November 1995. She was arrested on January 11, 1996, at 64, confessed to five murders, and withdrew every confession about a month later. A court in Krems sentenced her to life for the Pichler murder in 1997. She died in custody on November 16, 2003.
December 18, 1974. Paul John Knowles, a 28-year-old from Orlando, was shot and killed by Ronnie Angel, an agent of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, while the Douglas County sheriff, Earl Lee, was driving him to a place where he said he had left a gun. The officers said he had tried to escape. His lawyer doubted it. Knowles had walked out of a Jacksonville jail cell on July 26, 1974. Over the following four months police and the GBI attributed at least 18 deaths in several states to him, among them a Florida Highway Patrol trooper, Charles Campbell. He was captured near McDonough, Georgia, in November, and on tapes made for his lawyer he claimed 35 killings. In 2011 the GBI announced that the 1974 death of Ima Jean Sanders, 13, had been solved and attributed to him. Because he died a month after his capture, none of the deaths was ever tried in court.
December 19, 1924. At ten in the morning, after fourteen days of hearings, the jury court at the Landgericht in Hanover read its verdict on Fritz Haarmann, a petty criminal who had also served the city police as an informer. It convicted him of murdering 24 boys and young men between the ages of 10 and 22, one in 1918 and the rest between February 1923 and June 1924, and sentenced him to death 24 times. It acquitted him in three cases, those of Hermann Wolf, Adolf Hennies and Hermann Bock. Haarmann accepted the verdict and did not appeal. His former companion, Hans Grans, tried beside him, was also sentenced to death, though a retrial in 1926 reduced that to twelve years for aiding two murders. The trial exposed a police force that had used him as a source while ignoring parents' reports. The philosopher Theodor Lessing, who reported on it, was barred from the courtroom on the eleventh day. Haarmann was guillotined at six in the morning on April 15, 1925, in the prison yard of the Hanover court.
December 20, 1993. At the Central Criminal Court in London, the Old Bailey, Colin Ireland pleaded guilty to five murders and received life imprisonment with a whole life tariff. Between March 8 and June 12 that year he had killed Peter Walker, Christopher Dunn, Perry Bradley, Andrew Collier and Emmanuel Spiteri. All five were gay men. He met them through a pub in Earl’s Court and killed them in their own homes. Ireland was 37, a former soldier out of work, and he contacted the Samaritans, The Sun newspaper and the police about the killings while they were still going on. He later said he had done it because he wanted to be famous, PinkNews reported. His pleas ended the case without a trial, and all five convictions stood. He died at HMP Wakefield on February 21, 2012, at 57. At the opening of the inquest, pulmonary fibrosis and a hip fracture suffered earlier that month were given as the preliminary causes of death.
December 21, 1978. Police in Des Plaines, Illinois, arrested John Wayne Gacy, ten days after the disappearance of Robert Piest, 15. On the night of December 20 he went to his lawyers and told them he was responsible for some thirty-three deaths, and he was arrested the next day. The investigation established that he had killed young men and boys between 1972 and 1978. In March 1980 a Cook County jury convicted him of 33 murders, and he received death sentences on twelve counts and natural life on the other 21. The Illinois Supreme Court affirmed in 1984,. He was executed by lethal injection at Stateville Correctional Center and pronounced dead at 12:58 a.m. on May 10, 1994, at 52. Five of his victims have never been identified; DNA work restored the names of three others between 2011 and 2021.
December 22, 1978. In the coal-mining town of Shakhty, in the Rostov region of southern Russia, a nine-year-old second-grader named Yelena Zakotnova, known as Lena, was killed. Another man, a 25-year-old local, confessed, retracted and was sentenced to death; he was shot on July 5, 1983, and his conviction was overturned in 1990. By then Andrei Chikatilo, who had been a teacher in Shakhty in 1978, was in custody, and after his arrest in November 1990 he described the killing of a girl in Shakhty in 1978 and confessed to it. The Rostov Regional Court convicted him on October 15, 1992, of 52 murders of boys, girls and young women and sentenced him to death. In 1993 the Supreme Court of Russia struck nine murder episodes from the verdict for insufficient evidence and upheld the sentence on the rest. The Investigative Committee of Russia dates the 43 murders that stand to the years 1982 through 1990. Chikatilo was shot at Novocherkassk prison on February 14, 1994.
December 23, 1998. Kendall Francois made an unscheduled appearance in the Dutchess County Court in Poughkeepsie, New York, and offered to plead guilty to the entire indictment against him. A day earlier, in Matter of Hynes v. Tomei, the New York Court of Appeals had struck down the provisions of the state’s 1995 death penalty law that let a capital defendant plead guilty to first-degree murder and avoid execution, and the district attorney had not yet filed notice that he would seek death. The indictment of October 8, 1998, charged Francois, a former middle school hall monitor, with eight counts of first-degree murder for eight women missing from the Poughkeepsie area between 1996 and 1998,. The district attorney opposed the plea and filed his death notice on December 24. After the Court of Appeals decided Matter of Francois v. Dolan on May 18, 2000, he pleaded guilty, which ruled out a death sentence, and was sentenced that year to life without parole. He died at Wende Correctional Facility in September 2014, at 43.
December 24, 1995. In the early hours of Christmas Eve, at Llandudno police station on the North Wales coast, Peter Moore confessed to two detectives, his solicitor beside him. A cinema owner from Kinmel Bay, he admitted four killings, one of which the police had known nothing about. The dead were Henry Roberts, 56, near Caergeiliog on Anglesey in September; Edward Carthy, 28, of Liverpool, near Ruthin in October; Keith Randles, 49, on Anglesey in November; and Anthony Davies, 40, at Pensarn, near Abergele, in December. He withdrew the confession the next day. On November 29, 1996, a jury convicted him of all four murders, and the trial judge recommended that he never be released. His whole life order later became one of three at the center of Vinter and Others v. the United Kingdom, in which the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights ruled on July 9, 2013, that whole life orders with no prospect of review breached Article 3 of the Convention.
December 25, 1828. At about half past eight on Christmas morning in Edinburgh, after a trial that had run through the night, a jury in the High Court of Justiciary returned after some fifty minutes. It convicted William Burke of the murder of Margery Campbell or Docherty, an elderly Irishwoman who had died in his house in the West Port on October 31, 1828. The charge against his companion, H.M., was returned not proven, the Scottish verdict that freed her. The court sentenced Burke to be hanged and his body publicly dissected. Two other murder charges, for Mary Paterson and for James Wilson, known as Daft Jamie, had been reserved by the Crown and were never pursued. In two confessions made after sentence, Burke admitted sixteen killings with William Hare between February and the end of October 1828. He was hanged in the Lawnmarket on January 28, 1829.
December 26, 2003. On the morning after Christmas, Huang Yong, a 29-year-old farmer from Pingyu County in the Zhumadian area of Henan Province, was taken to the execution ground and shot. On December 9 a court sitting in Pingyu, his home county, had convicted him of the intentional homicide of 17 young people, most of them students, between September 2001 and November 2003, with an 18th left seriously injured. It sentenced him to death and stripped him of his political rights for life. He did not appeal, and the Henan Higher People’s Court reviewed the sentence. The killings came to light in November 2003, when the injured youth escaped and went to the police, and Huang was arrested on November 21. Relatives of victims said the county police had first given them a figure of 23 dead, and a police record quotes Huang claiming more than 20; only 17 were charged. In his last days he spoke with reporters and said that he wanted to see his parents.
December 27, 1944. Ivan Robert Marko Milat was born in Sydney, the fifth of fourteen children of a Croatian father, Steven, and an Australian mother, Margaret. One Australian Associated Press report gives the date as December 28. On July 27, 1996, after a trial in the New South Wales Supreme Court, Justice David Hunt sentenced him to life imprisonment on each of seven counts of murder, for the deaths of Deborah Everist, James Gibson, Simone Schmidl, Anja Habschied, Gabor Neugebauer, Joanne Walters and Caroline Clarke, young travelers killed between 1989 and 1992. He was also convicted of detaining a British traveler for advantage; that man survived and gave evidence against him. Milat never admitted the murders. His appeal was dismissed in 1998. In 2001 the New South Wales coroner named him among six persons of interest in three disappearances in the Newcastle area in the late 1970s; he was never charged with them. He died of cancer in the hospital at Long Bay Correctional Complex on October 27, 2019, at 74.
December 28, 2006. Police in Huaral, about 80 kilometers north of Lima, arrested Pedro Pablo Nakada Ludeña at the mechanics workshop where he worked. Born in the Lima district of El Agustino in 1973, he confessed, according to the Peruvian press, to killing 25 people, and told the police he had been sent to clean the country of those he called "la escoria," the scum. A list published by Trome names 17 people killed between January 1, 2005, and December 27, 2006. On May 9, 2008, a court in Huacho convicted him at first instance of aggravated homicide and aggravated robbery, acquitted him on the charges concerning seven named people, and sentenced him to 35 years. The judgment was annulled on appeal in March 2009, and on March 12, 2010, the Supreme Court sent the case back for a new trial. Later reports say he was declared not criminally responsible because of paranoid schizophrenia; Trome reported in August 2024 that he remained in the psychiatric ward of Lurigancho prison.
December 29, 1997. After an investigation that had run for nearly three years, Orville Lynn Majors, a licensed practical nurse from Linton, Indiana, was arrested and charged with six counts of murder in the deaths of patients in the intensive care unit of a small county hospital in Vermillion County, in western Indiana. By trial the state had charged seven counts. The case was moved to Clay Circuit Court in Brazil and on October 17, 1999, the jury convicted him of six murders and deadlocked on the seventh. The six patients named at sentencing were Mary Ann Alderson, Dorothea Hixon, Luella Hopkins, Freddie Dale Wilson, Derek Maxwell and Cecil Smith. On November 15, 1999, Judge Ernest Yelton imposed six consecutive 60-year terms, 360 years in all. The Indiana Supreme Court affirmed in 2002. Majors always denied killing anyone. He died in custody at the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City on September 24, 2017, at 56.
December 30, 1989. Louis Bernard Gaskin, a 22-year-old from Bunnell, Florida, was arrested after his girlfriend’s cousin went to the authorities. He waived his rights in writing and confessed. Ten days earlier, on the night of December 20, Robert Sturmfels, 56, and his wife, Georgette, 55, a New Jersey couple spending the winter in Palm Coast, had been killed in their home, and a man in a second house in the same neighborhood had been wounded and survived. On June 15, 1990, a Flagler County jury convicted Gaskin of both first-degree murders and of the attempted murder of the neighbor, and on June 19 Circuit Judge Kim Hammond sentenced him to death after an 8 to 4 jury recommendation for each killing. His appeals ran for 33 years. Governor Ron DeSantis signed his death warrant on March 13, 2023, and he was executed at Florida State Prison on April 12, 2023, pronounced dead at 6:15 p.m., the first person from Flagler County ever put to death, FlaglerLive reported.
December 31, 2007. Police in the Kalasipalya area of central Bengaluru arrested K. D. Kempamma, a woman from Kaggalipura, on the city’s outskirts, known as Mallika, after a goldsmith grew suspicious when she tried to sell him jewelry and called them. In January 2008 the police said she had been arrested on charges of murdering six women; the first death they attributed to her dated to October 19, 1999, and the last, of a woman named Nagaveni, to December 18, 2007, at Doddaballapur. Trial courts in Karnataka convicted her of murder in more than one case: she was reported sentenced to death for the murders of Muniyamma and of Nagaveni, the second sentence in March 2012, and to life for the murder of Pillamma. In September 2017 the Karnataka High Court set aside one death sentence and ordered a retrial, whose result was not reported. In February 2017 she was moved from Parappana Agrahara Central Prison in Bengaluru to Hindalga Central Prison in Belagavi.