Somebody getting away is the most common way a series in this archive ends. That is the subject of a piece already on this site, ELEVEN CASES BROKEN BY SOMEONE WHO SURVIVED, and the point there was that the survivor supplied the first accurate description anybody had. These twelve are a harder set. In these, the escape did not supply new information. It forced action on information the authorities were already holding, or it started an investigation that had never begun.
Anthony Sowell is the plainest of them, and he needs two escapes to tell properly. In December 2008 a woman got out of his house on Imperial Avenue and reported a rape. No charge followed. In September 2009 another woman jumped from a second-floor window, and that report produced the warrant. Nine months separate the escape that was ignored from the escape that worked. He was a registered sex offender living at that address throughout, the smell had been reported for two years and blamed on the sausage factory next door, which spent money on new equipment because of it, and families who reported the women missing were told, in several documented cases, that grown women who used drugs were entitled to disappear. Eleven women were recovered from the house, the stairwell, the yard and the crawl space.
Robert Pickton was charged with attempted murder in 1997 after a woman escaped his farm handcuffed and stabbed. The charge was stayed. He killed for another four years. This archive records six convictions, twenty-six charges, thirty-three women identified by DNA on that property and forty-nine claimed by him to a cellmate who was an undercover officer.
Herb Baumeister is carried here at eight to sixteen. A man who escaped him gave police a description and a partial number plate in 1994. Nothing happened for two years.
Robert Wayne Danielson had stopped reporting to his parole officer within a year of release. Two people he left for dead survived and picked him out of mug shots, which is to say that his photograph was already in the books being shown to them. The FBI traced him to a job with a traveling carnival. Six homicides are suspected and one manslaughter conviction stands from 1970.
Daniel Lee Corwin was recognized from a sketch by a corrections officer. Wendy Gant, twenty-one, was raped, stabbed, tied to a tree and left with her throat cut. She survived and worked with a forensic artist in writing, because she could not speak. The man who recognized the drawing worked in the system that already had him.
James Samuel Walraven belongs here for the opposite reason, and it is the case that should give anyone pause. Two women survived him. On 16 March 1981 a man in a tan uniform with black gloves rang Constance Harrold's doorbell carrying a flower box and said he had a delivery. She shut the door on him and ran out the back; the box was caught in the door with no flowers in it, and police found a coil of rope on her porch. She first identified a man who jogged in the area, who was arrested and released when she decided she had picked the wrong man. She later identified Walraven. He was convicted of three murders and sentenced to death, and the Supreme Court of Georgia reversed: the trial court had refused to hear his challenge to the grand jury that indicted him, and it had admitted a jailhouse informant's account of a custodial statement the prosecution had never disclosed to the defense. He was resentenced to life. A survivor's identification is the most valuable thing these investigations get, and this is the entry in the roster that most carefully sets out what the evidence in such a case can actually amount to.
In the second group there was no investigation to force. A sixteen-year-old girl stabbed Beoria Simmons in Iroquois Park, escaped, and identified him. He was arrested the same day, after two years of investigation that had produced nothing. The fourth kidnapping count on his indictment is hers.
Huang Yong was convicted and executed five weeks after his arrest, with seventeen deaths attributed to him and no published judgment. One boy escaped in November 2003. That is the only reason the case was ever opened.
A captive Alexander Komin sent up from the underground bunker he had built, to work, walked to the police. Four deaths are recorded.
A ten-year-old girl reached her grandparents and that ended Futoshi Matsunaga, who has six murder convictions and one manslaughter, seven dead in total. The Japanese police recovered no human remains and found no physical evidence in the case.
Hubert Pilcik was stopped when a living victim was found in his house: starved, held two months in a restraint device he had built, made to write cheerful letters home. Five deaths were proved. He died in custody before a verdict.
Michel Fourniret was caught in 2003 because a thirteen-year-old got out of his van and took down the registration. He has eight convictions, seven murders and one killing he had ordered, with several suspected cases never resolved before his death.
The uncomfortable part is not that these people escaped. It is what their escapes reveal about the state of the case at the moment they happened, and in two of them that judgment is not the archive's, it is on the public record. A Cleveland city commission examined afterwards how eleven women could vanish from one neighborhood without a serious investigation, and found that every element needed to find Sowell was already in the hands of the authorities: a registered sex offender at a known address, two years of complaints about the smell coming from it, eleven missing-person reports, and a rape allegation from a woman who had got out of the house alive. The Missing Women Commission of Inquiry under Wally Oppal reported on Pickton in 2012 and found blatant failures by police, rooted in bias against poor, Indigenous and addicted women; its findings remain the reference point for the wider Canadian inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women. Both inquiries were asked how this had been allowed to happen and both answered with something about who the victims were. Baumeister's escapee handed over a description and a partial plate in 1994, and nothing happened for two years.
The second group is worse in a different way. Simmons had been investigated for two years without result. Huang Yong had not been investigated at all. In those cases nothing was coming. The series would have continued until the person running it stopped, and what ended it was one person's decision, taken in the worst circumstances imaginable, to run.
There is a version of this that reads as reassurance, and it is worth naming because it is wrong. It is tempting to treat a survivor as the system working: the case broke, the man went to prison. But an escape is not a safeguard. It is an accident, and in most of these it is an accident that happened after the investigation had already been given what it needed.
Editor's note: this article was written from this archive's own roster and covers twelve entries, all tagged as cases broken by a victim who escaped. The convicted figures are given as the roster records them and are kept apart from attributions and claims: Pickton's six convictions are not his forty-nine, and Huang Yong's seventeen attributed deaths rest on no published judgment, which is stated in his entry and repeated here. Hubert Pilcik was never tried to verdict. Daniel Corwin has three convictions. The companion piece ELEVEN CASES BROKEN BY SOMEONE WHO SURVIVED covers a different set and a different argument; only Herb Baumeister appears in both, and for a fact that piece does not use.