A murder case is treated as finished when somebody is convicted. In twelve cases in this archive the man was convicted, in several instances sentenced to death or hanged, and the archive still cannot say who some of his victims were. The bodies were recovered. The killer was named. The dead were not.
This is a different failure from a missing body, and a different one from a case never solved. It is what is left over after the courts have done everything they are able to do.
## Recorded by number, or by description
Dennis Nilsen was convicted at the Old Bailey in November 1983 of six murders and two attempted murders, and is thought to have killed twelve to fifteen men in London. He kept the bodies in his flats for months. Several of his victims have never been identified, and the archive records the reason plainly: their absence was never reported by anyone.
William Bradford was convicted of two murders in Los Angeles County in 1987 and died on death row at San Quentin in 2008. Fifty-four photographs of women were recovered from his possessions. What happened to the women in them is unknown, and most were never identified.
Lonnie Franklin, the Grim Sleeper, was identified in 2010 through California's first familial DNA search and convicted in 2016 of ten murders. Around a thousand photographs and videos of women were recovered from his house. Many of the subjects have never been identified, and police released images publicly in an attempt to find out who they were.
Rodney Alcala was a photographer. A number of the people in the photographs he kept have never been identified, and several police forces regard the true number of his victims as far higher than the seven he was convicted of.
## Bodies that were found and stayed anonymous
Larry Eyler was convicted of two murders and has twenty-one or more deaths attributed to him along the highways of Indiana and Illinois. Several of the bodies recovered from those roadsides have never been identified, and there have been renewed attempts since to match them to families through DNA.
William Mansfield is recorded in the archive as having five victims, two of them still unidentified. Four bodies were dug out of his family's junkyard at Weeki Wachee Acres in Florida over three weeks in 1981, within forty feet of the house. Two of those four have never been named. He is serving concurrent life terms in California and Florida.
Stewart Wilken received seven terms of life imprisonment in Port Elizabeth in February 1998. Two of the dead, a boy of fourteen and another young child, were never identified.
Douglas Clark was convicted on six counts of first degree murder in January 1983 and remains under sentence of death in California. A sixth woman has never been identified.
Dayton Leroy Rogers was convicted of one murder in 1988 and of six of the Molalla forest murders in 1989. An eighth body was found and never identified.
Gordon Northcott was hanged in California on October 2, 1930. A headless Mexican teenager was found near La Puente in February 1928 and has never been identified.
## Where the anonymity was administrative
Lazarus Mazingane was sentenced in Johannesburg on December 2, 2002 to seventeen life sentences and seven hundred years for sixteen murders around Nasrec. Several of the women were never identified.
Mohan Kumar was convicted in all twenty of his murder cases in Karnataka. One of the dead was a woman found in a public lavatory in a town where nobody knew her. She was registered as an unnatural death, kept as an unidentified body, and disposed of as one.
## What the twelve have in common
The reason is rarely forensic. In most of these cases the body was in a condition to be identified and the failure was that there was nothing to compare it against: no report, no dental record anybody had thought to keep, no relative who came forward. Nilsen's case states it outright, and Mohan Kumar's shows the same thing happening inside a filing system rather than a laboratory.
It follows that the same people who were easiest to kill without anyone noticing are the ones who are hardest to name afterwards. The convictions in this list are secure. Twelve men were caught, tried and sentenced, and it made no difference at all to the question of who they had killed.