Twelve men in this archive were stopped, questioned or held by the investigation that was looking for them, released, and went on killing. None of the releases was a mystery. In almost every case the file records who made the decision and what it rested on, and what it rested on was usually something the police were entitled to rely on.
That is the part worth sitting with. A list like this reads as a list of failures, and some of it is, but the recurring shape is not incompetence. It is a test, a finding or a procedure doing exactly what it was designed to do and producing the wrong answer about the man in the room.
Andrei Chikatilo was in custody on suspicion in 1984. He was released because the semen recovered from the scenes typed as group AB and his blood typed as A, which under the serology of the day excluded him. He killed for six more years and was convicted in 1992 of fifty-two murders.
David Meirhofer had been interviewed and cleared on a polygraph. He killed four people in Montana between 1966 and 1974, confessed to all four after his arrest that September, and hanged himself in his cell within hours.
Peter Sutcliffe was interviewed nine times and released every time. The inquiry was working from a cassette recording sent by a hoaxer, and the voice on it was from Wearside; Sutcliffe was a Bradford man and was excluded on that basis. He was caught on January 2, 1981 by a routine check that showed false number plates, and convicted of thirteen murders.
Bruce McArthur was interviewed as a person of interest in 2013 and released. Two Toronto police projects, Houston in 2012 and Prism in 2017, both failed to identify him. He pleaded guilty in 2019 to eight counts of first degree murder, and the bodies were found in planters at properties where he had worked as a landscaper.
Mahanand Naik was detained after the first murder in Goa in 1994 and let go for want of evidence, with his fellow rickshaw drivers vouching for him. He was not looked at again for well over a decade. Police eventually linked him to sixteen deaths; he was convicted three times and acquitted in seven other cases, and after an appeal in 2013 two convictions stand.
Ali Asghar Borujerdi was arrested once during the investigation in Tehran and released for want of evidence. When officers did return to the caravanserai where he lived and questioned his neighbors, the neighbors said he had introduced the dead boys to them as his own brothers. He was convicted in June 1934 of the rape and murder of thirty-three boys and hanged in public at Sepah Square.
Chandrakant Jha was arrested in 1998 and released. He was arrested again on May 20, 2007 after a note led investigators to him, was convicted in three of the cases and sentenced to death, and had the sentence commuted to life in 2016. The other counts failed because the bodies could not be identified.
These are the ones where the state was most certain it had done the right thing, because a clinician had signed it.
Dorangel Vargas killed and dismembered a man in a park in San Cristobal in 1995, was arrested, was found to be seriously mentally ill, and was released back into the same park with no provision made for his treatment or supervision. He killed at least ten people there. He was found not criminally responsible by reason of insanity and is detained in psychiatric custody.
Morris Solomon Jr had convictions for sexual assault and had been confined in a state hospital under California's mentally disordered sex offender designation, then released. Six women were killed in Sacramento in 1986 and 1987. He was convicted of six murders in 1992 and sentenced to death, a sentence he remains under in a state that has carried out no execution since 2006.
Charles Ray Hatcher was charged with the murder of a twelve-year-old boy in Antioch, California in 1969, found unfit to stand trial, and released in 1977. The committal, the finding of incompetence, the treatment and the release repeated for thirty years. While he was at liberty a young man with learning difficulties and no connection to the case, Melvin Lee Reynolds, was questioned over months by police who had settled on him and confessed to a killing Hatcher later described in detail; Reynolds was released and pardoned.
Motta Navas had already been tried twice for killing men sleeping outdoors in Kerala, acquitted once and convicted once, and released in 2011. During the 2012 series he was recognized, questioned and let go, because he behaved as though he were mentally ill and was briefly admitted to hospital on that basis. He was arrested at Nehru Park at the beginning of November 2012 and is serving life.
William Mansfield was arrested at Santa Cruz on November 23, 1980 and released on fifteen hundred dollars' bail, which should not have been granted. He killed two weeks later. Four bodies were found buried in his family's junkyard in Hernando County, Florida, within forty feet of the house, and he is serving concurrent life terms in California and Florida.
Heriberto Seda is outside the twelve, because by the time the investigation had him in front of it he had stopped killing. He was interviewed by police in 1994 over an unrelated weapons matter and gave a handwriting sample, and he was released. The sample was never compared against the letters the killer had been sending to the police. He was arrested in June 1996 after a siege at his home in Brooklyn and convicted of three murders and a series of attempted murders.
His case is the clearest of the set because nothing was overruled and nothing was misread. The material was collected, filed, and never put next to the other material. The comparison that would have ended it was one that nobody was assigned to make.