In the fall of 1981 the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office asked a judge to throw out every murder count against Angelo Buono Jr. Its own deputies had concluded that the principal witness against him could not be believed. The witness was Buono’s cousin, Kenneth Bianchi, who had already pleaded guilty to seven murders and promised to testify. The judge, Ronald M. George, refused the motion. The state attorney general took the case over, and in the fall of 1983 a jury convicted Buono of nine murders.
A cousin who turns on a cousin is an unusual courtroom problem, and it is not the only way a family tie bends a murder case. In some cases the tie provided access: a woman invited into a husband’s family, a visitor welcome in every relative’s kitchen, a household that grew by adoption and marriage until nobody in it had anywhere else to go. In others the tie decided what a court would believe. Defendants in these cases blamed relatives, relatives blamed defendants, and in one case the person who might have explained everything died in a police cell before a judge heard a word. Twins make only a single appearance, and he is a victim.
Two of the women in these cases were never convicted of the deaths that made them famous; the courts decided less than the headlines did.
Angelo Buono Jr. was born in Rochester, New York, in 1934. According to a 2016 account in The Occidental, the student newspaper of Occidental College, his parents divorced when he was eight and the family moved to Los Angeles; he left school before finishing junior high. By the 1970s he ran an auto upholstery shop in Glendale, just north of downtown. HistoryLink, the online encyclopedia of Washington State history, says he had a history of sexual violence before the murders.
Kenneth Bianchi was also from Rochester, born in 1951 and adopted as an infant. HistoryLink calls Buono his adoptive cousin. In 1976, by HistoryLink’s dating (The Occidental says 1975), Bianchi moved to Los Angeles and lived with Buono, who was then 42. He wanted to be a police officer, and both the Los Angeles and Glendale departments turned him down.
Between October 17, 1977, and February 17, 1978, at least ten women and girls between 12 and 28 were killed in the Los Angeles area. The press called the unknown culprit the hillside killer, and later in the plural, once it was clear that two men were involved. A task force of more than 160 officers logged thousands of tips and made no arrest for almost two years.
The break came from Washington State. On January 11, 1979, two Western Washington University students, Karen Mandic and Diane Wilder, were killed in Bellingham. Bianchi, who had left California for Bellingham in 1978 and worked as a security guard, was arrested there on January 12 and charged on January 26 with two counts of first-degree murder. Los Angeles detectives were soon looking at him for the older series. On April 23, 1979, Police Chief Daryl Gates said the task force had evidence to charge him with ten of the Los Angeles murders; the district attorney, John Van de Kamp, filed five on May 9.
Bianchi’s first defense was another man living inside him. In March 1979 he changed his plea to not guilty by reason of insanity, and his lawyer said three psychiatrists had diagnosed severe multiple personality disorder. Under hypnosis a personality calling itself Steve claimed the killings and implicated Buono. A panel of six experts examined him. The prosecution’s expert, Martin Orne, a University of Pennsylvania psychiatrist and authority on hypnosis, remarked to Bianchi that it was "pretty rare for there to be two" personalities. A third, "Billy," soon appeared. Orne concluded the hint had created him. In another test Orne suggested that Bianchi’s lawyer was in the room when he was not; Bianchi rose, shook hands with the imagined lawyer and asked if the examiner could see him too. Orne and his co-authors wrote in 1984 that they had never seen a deeply hypnotized subject behave that way, and read it as an effort to convince the examiner.
The Ninth Circuit later summed up what happened next in a sentence: Bianchi pleaded guilty to avoid the death penalty. On October 19, 1979, after all six experts agreed he was competent, he withdrew the insanity plea and pleaded guilty in Washington to both murders; Judge Jack Kurtz sentenced him to two consecutive life terms. Three days later, in Los Angeles, he pleaded guilty before Judge William B. Keen to five counts of murder, one of conspiracy to commit murder and another count, and received concurrent terms. His side of the bargain was to testify against Buono. Glendale police arrested Buono at his upholstery shop within about half an hour of the Washington plea, and he was charged with 24 felonies, ten of them murder.
Bianchi turned out to be the witness nobody wanted. According to Roger W. Boren, one of the two deputy attorneys general who later prosecuted the case, he recanted responsibility for the murders despite his recorded confessions and guilty pleas. HistoryLink adds that he contradicted himself, recanted his testimony against Buono, and then took back the recantations. A couple of months before the scheduled trial, the district attorney’s office moved to dismiss, convinced that Bianchi would not survive cross-examination. Judge George held that there was enough corroboration to support a conviction and denied the motion. Van de Kamp then declared a conflict of interest, since his deputies had told the court Bianchi was not credible, and Attorney General George Deukmejian assigned Boren and Michael Nash.
The trial opened on November 16, 1981. Jury selection took about three months; the jury of seven women and five men sat through nearly two years. Gerald Chaleff led the defense, with Katherine Mader, and argued that Bianchi had acted alone or with someone else and had pulled in his cousin to win a plea bargain. The proceeding, by the accounts of the judge, the prosecutors and the wire services, was the longest criminal trial in United States history to that date, with about 400 witnesses and roughly 1,800 exhibits. In late October and November 1983 the jury returned verdicts: Buono guilty of nine of the ten murder counts, and not convicted on the tenth. On November 18 it chose life over death, and Judge George imposed life without parole on January 9, 1984.
Buono died of heart disease at Calipatria State Prison on September 21, 2002, aged 67. Bianchi changed his name to Anthony D’Amato in 2023 and still denies the Los Angeles murders, claiming his confessions came out of hypnosis. California refused him parole in 2010 and again in July 2025; on July 14, 2025, the Washington board declined release and added 120 months to his minimum term. As checked on October 22, 2026, he was in custody at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla.
Lin Yu-ju was 27 when her mother died in Tainan in November 2008. Her mother-in-law, Cheng Hui-sheng, died in Puli, Nantou County, in late May 2009, and her husband, Liu Yu-hang, in July 2009. Taiwanese courts convicted her of all three murders. Each of them had been insured shortly before, and the money, prosecutors said, was meant for gambling debts that Taiwanese reports put at more than NT$20 million, run up mostly on an illegal Mark Six lottery.
She was born in Tainan in 1981, her father died when she was young, and after vocational school she worked as a hostess at a nightclub there. SETN reported that she already bet more than she earned. A customer, Liu, was a former national badminton player from a family that ran a stinky tofu wholesale business in Puli. His family opposed the match. The Taipei Times reported that after a third pregnancy she decided to keep the child, the couple married, and she moved into the Liu household and worked in the business.
The marriage did not end the gambling. SETN reported that her husband’s family paid off her debts more than once, never enough, and that she also borrowed from informal lenders. A 2022 Taipei Times feature described a wider picture in which Lin, her husband and others in his family all bet heavily on the same underground lottery. Lin said Liu beat her; her defense argued that he had grown up around violence himself. Doctor’s statements about her injuries were kept out of the trial because no police report existed, and Wu Chia-chen of the Taiwan Alliance to End the Death Penalty told the paper that a wife living in her husband’s family is often reluctant to file one. Medical reports, the paper said, diagnosed bipolar disorder and a mild intellectual disability.
The first death came on November 10, 2008, when she visited her mother in Tainan. The courts held that Lin killed her mother during a quarrel over the debts. Late in September she had taken out life insurance on her mother and mother-in-law, and the insurer paid about NT$5 million on December 25, 2008, according to the Taipei Times. Her mother-in-law, who had been ill for some time, died in Puli in late May 2009; the courts held that Lin poisoned her. TVBS reported a claim on that policy of about NT$10.7 million. Earlier in 2008 a stinky tofu shop that had stopped trading with the Liu family after a dispute had been set on fire, and Lin was convicted of arson in a judgment that also covered forgery and insurance fraud, with a sentence of four years and six months.
The case came apart on the paperwork. An insurance company employee noticed that relatives of one woman were dying one after another and told the police, SETN reported. Agence France-Presse said the three deaths, within nine months, made her the sole beneficiary of every policy. Investigators from the Criminal Investigation Bureau took the case, and she was arrested in 2009. She confessed under questioning. At her trial in the Nantou District Court, which opened in early 2010, she withdrew the confessions to the deaths of her mother and mother-in-law, saying police had threatened to draw in her older sister and that her husband had been responsible for his mother’s death.
The courts did not accept it. She received two life terms for her mother and mother-in-law, final by June 2012, and a death sentence for her husband that was final on June 13, 2013, making her the first woman on Taiwan’s death row in 23 years. Her lawyers have argued since that she has an intellectual disability. On September 20, 2024, the Constitutional Court ruled in Judgment 113-Hsien-Pan-8 that people with mental disorders or intellectual disabilities may not be executed, and she was one of three prisoners to whom it applied. As of September 2026 she was held at Taichung Women’s Prison, the only woman among 34 people on Taiwan’s death row.
To her extended family Caroline Grills was "Aunty Carrie." Stephen Garton, who wrote her entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, describes a short, matronly woman in thick-rimmed glasses who did what a favorite aunt was expected to do. She was a frequent visitor in the households of her husband’s relatives and of family friends.
She was born Caroline Mickelson, probably in 1888, at Balmain in Sydney, and married a laborer named Grills on April 22, 1908. They had five sons and a daughter; two of the sons died. Her father died in 1948, and she inherited his house at Gladesville.
In 1953 Sydney was living with thallium, the poison then sold as rat bait. On May 11 Grills was arrested and charged with trying to kill her sister-in-law and the sister-in-law’s daughter, both of Redfern. According to Garton, both recovered when Grills stopped visiting. The police inquiry then widened. She was charged with four murders and one more attempted murder, and every person named was an in-law except one, a friend of her mother. Police speculated that it had begun in 1947 with the death of her stepmother. Garton writes that detectives believed they had a strong circumstantial case on the murders, but the Crown proceeded only on the attempted murder of her sister-in-law.
The trial in the Central Criminal Court in Sydney in October 1953 turned partly on her manner. Grills said she was innocent, claimed that police had pressured her relatives into giving evidence, and told the court she had "helped to live, not kill." She laughed at times in the dock, and in Garton’s judgment the outbursts strengthened the public picture of a malevolent poisoner. On October 15, 1953, she was convicted of the attempted murder of her sister-in-law and sentenced to death. The Court of Criminal Appeal dismissed her appeal in April 1954, and the sentence was commuted to life.
She spent about six and a half years in the State Reformatory for Women. The family’s "Aunty Carrie" had become, in the press, "Aunt Thally." She died of peritonitis at Prince Henry Hospital in Sydney on October 6, 1960. The record supports one narrow finding. No court decided whether she caused any of the four deaths she was charged with, and no motive was ever proved.
Anjette Lyles ran a downtown restaurant in Macon, Georgia, and was known in the 1950s for warmth toward her customers and a flashy Cadillac, according to a 2025 CrimeReads essay. In the fall of 1958 a Bibb County jury convicted her of murdering her nine-year-old daughter, Marcia Elaine Lyles, who died on April 5, 1958. The jury did not recommend mercy.
The family ties are what made the trial enormous. By the time Marcia died, her father, Ben F. Lyles Jr., had died in early 1952; her mother’s second husband, Joe Neal Gabbert, in December 1955; and her paternal grandmother, Mrs. Ben F. Lyles Sr., in September 1957. Lyles was charged in those deaths too, WMAZ reported. She was tried only for Marcia’s. The central fight in court was whether the jury could hear about the other three, and the trial judge let it. The state argued a logical connection: each of the four deaths had the same cause, arsenic trioxide poisoning, and in each case the defendant had collected money. The Supreme Court of Georgia later wrote that she "collected a substantial amount of money from the death of each victim."
Documents did part of the work. The state introduced a letter to the Veterans Administration dated June 21, 1955, that purported to be signed by Gabbert, an instrument dated September 2, 1957, in the name of her mother-in-law directing that a payment be delivered to the defendant, and a photostatic copy of a will said to be the mother-in-law’s. The Supreme Court described evidence that the documents "were not only forgeries but forged by the accused." Witnesses also testified that she had said more than once shortly before Marcia’s death that "she would kill her if it were the last thing she ever did." Bill Adams, later a Bibb County Superior Court judge, whose father served as a special prosecutor, summed up the state’s theory to WMAZ: "Anjette was doing this for the money, for life insurance money."
She was arrested in May 1958 on a special presentment from a Bibb County grand jury that charged her with murdering Marcia. The trial drew reporters from across Georgia and beyond, among them Celestine Sibley of The Atlanta Constitution. Lyles was sentenced to death in the electric chair, and the Supreme Court of Georgia affirmed on July 8, 1959. A sanity board later declared her insane, and she was sent to Central State Hospital at Milledgeville. The sentence was never carried out. She died there in 1977, aged 52. The three earlier deaths were put in front of a jury only as proof of motive and plan.
Miyoko Sumida was never convicted of anything connected with the deaths that made her case famous in Japan, and she never stood trial. She was 64 when she died on December 12, 2012, in a holding cell at the Hyogo Prefectural Police headquarters in Kobe, a month after her re-arrest on charges that included murder. Police treated her death as suicide. By then Hyogo police had confirmed eight deaths around her household in Amagasaki, an industrial city between Osaka and Kobe.
What is known of her conduct comes largely from the trials of seven people who lived with her: a sister-in-law, two sons, a common-law husband, a cousin by marriage, a daughter-in-law and a man who had married into the household. Between November 2014 and February 2016 the Kobe District Court convicted all seven, holding in each trial that they had acted in conspiracy with her. The Kobe Shimbun covered the proceedings day by day.
The household was a pseudo-family. Over the years she brought unrelated young men and women into it by adoption or marriage. Her defense lawyer, who had known her for more than two decades, told the Kobe Shimbun in 2022 how it worked. She would step into a minor family problem and make the family hold meetings about it; when someone said something she disliked she turned violent, and she told relatives that it was wrong for an outsider to do the hitting while family looked on. Families ended up abusing and blaming one another, and at least four broke apart. Her adopted eldest son told the court in May 2015 that she ruled through fear. Her second son was in fact the biological child of her sister-in-law, who testified that Sumida had made her register the boy’s birth in Sumida’s name.
The lawyer’s recollection also covers a missed chance. In 2000 Sumida was indicted with relatives for theft committed as a group. Investigators already knew of suicides and suspicious deaths around her, the lawyer said, but none was charged. The court rejected the prosecution’s argument that she had led the group, accepted the defense that she was an ordinary housewife, and imposed a suspended sentence. More than twenty years on, the lawyer told the paper the argument had turned out to be wrong.
The deaths tried in court ran from 2005 to 2011. A man of 51 died in July 2005 after a fall in Okinawa. The defense argued that he chose to die to help the household and that the defendants were guilty at most of assisting a suicide; the courts disagreed, ruling that the household created a situation in which he could not escape death, for insurance money. A woman of 26 died in December 2008 after about five months of confinement and abuse in an apartment in Amagasaki. Her younger sister, taken into the household at 17, later married Sumida’s son. The Kobe District Court ruled that continuing to confine her after she was badly weakened amounted to murder. Her mother died in June 2009, aged 59, after abuse; a man of 53 died in July 2011.
The case reached the police in November 2011 when a woman who had been confined escaped and went to them. Sumida was arrested that month on suspicion of injuring her and indicted in February 2012 over the death of a 66-year-old woman. On November 7, 2012, she was arrested again with relatives.
The sentences came out of the household’s own ranks. Her cousin by marriage received life, final in March 2018; her daughter-in-law 23 years; her sister-in-law, her adopted eldest son and her common-law husband 21 years each; her second son 17 years; and the husband of the 26-year-old victim 15 years. The presiding judge in the cousin’s case called the death of the 26-year-old a cruel crime.
Futoshi Matsunaga was sentenced to death in 2005 for a series of killings that Japanese reporters treat as one of the worst crimes of the postwar era. Seven people died between February 1996 and June 1998 while living under his control in rented apartments in Kokurakita Ward, Kitakyushu. One was a man of 34, the father of a girl who lived with the couple. The other six were the father, mother, younger sister, brother-in-law, nephew and niece of his common-law wife, Junko Ogata.
The Fukuoka District Court, Kokura Branch, identified the victims by letters, and the writer Kazuteru Ono, who has reported on the case for Bunshun since 2002, states that every name in his work except Matsunaga’s and Ogata’s is a pseudonym. No victim of that series is named.
Matsunaga was born on April 28, 1961, in Kokura and raised in Yanagawa, where his father ran a futon business. He took it over in 1981 and built a door-to-door sales company. Ogata, born in February 1962 into a prominent farming family in Kurume, was a kindergarten teacher when the relationship began around October 1982, while his wife was pregnant. Her parents learned of it in 1984 and hired a private investigator to end it. Instead, according to a 2024 book excerpt, he won them over. A judicial reporter quoted by Ono described long-term violence that left Ogata believing the abuse was her fault, a pattern common among victims of domestic violence; she tried twice to leave and was brought back each time.
The business collapsed, and the couple went into hiding in Kitakyushu in the 1990s. Ono estimates Matsunaga collected more than 100 million yen over the years, and a former senior prosecutor told him that investigators never traced where it went. By Ono’s account most of it paid for a life in hiding, often with several apartments rented at once.
The court’s findings begin with a man of 34, whom the couple confined, starved and denied warmth; he died of multiple organ failure on or about February 26, 1996, and the court classed his death as murder. His daughter stayed with them. In 1996 and 1997 the court held that the couple confined and injured a woman who had come to live with them, and defrauded and robbed her of money.
The Ogata family came next. Over the following two years her father, her mother, her younger sister, the sister’s husband and their two children, ages 5 and 10, died. The court convicted Matsunaga of the murder of the mother, the sister and both children, and of injury resulting in death for the father; it held that the sister’s husband died of peritonitis he was refused treatment for. Four of the seven, the court held, died at the hands of other captives acting on his and Ogata’s orders, often relatives of the dead. Reporters who followed the case say he rarely used his own hands. None of the dead was ever recovered.
The family tie was the mechanism. Relatives who might have reported one another or run were instead drawn into carrying out the sentence. The court treated Ogata differently, as a woman acting under his domination, and her death sentence was reduced to life imprisonment on appeal.
The case surfaced because a girl of 17, who had lived with the couple since she was in fourth grade, escaped, was taken back, and escaped again. On March 6, 2002, she went to the police with her grandfather. Matsunaga was arrested on March 7 in Kitakyushu on the confinement and assault of the girl, using an alias, and rearrested for murder from September 18, 2002. The Kokura Branch sentenced him to death on September 28, 2005. The Fukuoka High Court upheld the sentence on September 26, 2007, and the Supreme Court rejected his appeal on December 12, 2011. He has always denied the killings. As of October 2026 he was reported held at the Fukuoka Detention Center and had not been executed.
Gesche Margarethe Gottfried was beheaded with the sword on the Domshof, the square beside Bremen Cathedral, on April 21, 1831, before a crowd the taz put at 35,000. A Bremen court had sentenced her for 15 murders by poison. It was the city’s last public execution.
She was born Gesche Margarethe Timm in Bremen on March 6, 1785, the daughter of a master tailor, and she had a twin brother. In 1806 she married Johann Miltenberg, a master saddler, and they had five children; WEB.DE reported the marriage as unhappy. By the City of Bremen’s tourism portal the killing began around 1812, and by WEB.DE’s reckoning she poisoned her mother in 1815, then at short intervals her two daughters, her son and her father. In 1816 her twin, back from the Wars of Liberation, died. She married the wine merchant Michael Christoph Gottfried in 1817 and poisoned him as well. Bremen saw only a woman who had nursed her husband, her parents and her children to the end, and it named her the "Engel von Bremen," the Angel of Bremen.
The last death she caused was in Hanover in 1827, a farrier to whom she owed 800 taler. In March 1828 a household she shared a roof with grew suspicious, and she was arrested on the evening of March 6, her birthday. She confessed to 15 killings and to many poisonings that did not kill; the taz put the number of people harmed but surviving at 19, and the writer Peer Meter, who studied the court files, at no fewer than 20.
Her trial was, by the taz’s account, the first anywhere in which the defense argued that the accused was not responsible for her acts. The court refused a request for a psychiatric examination, and WEB.DE wrote that a mental disorder was not ruled out. The judges named inheritance, relief from debt and access to sexual partners as motives. Meter disagreed. He told the taz in 2010 that there was no plausible motive and that the files record her saying she had none, only an urge. She spent almost three years in custody.
Bremen later set a basalt stone marked with a cross into the Domshof where she died. People began to spit on it, and it became known as the Spuckstein, the spitting stone. In 1931 someone turned the cross into a swastika with a chisel. In 2023 a Bremen resident started leaving flowers and candles there, arguing that spitting offends human dignity, and some tour guides now ask visitors not to spit.
Set side by side, the cases do not agree on much. In Los Angeles, a family tie produced a partner and then a witness who would not hold. In Taiwan and Sydney it provided access to people who were insured, trusted or simply near. In Macon, a court was asked to treat three earlier family deaths as proof of a single plan, and did. In Amagasaki, a household became the instrument, and in Kitakyushu relatives were turned against relatives. In Bremen, a twin brother stood among the dead of a woman the city had called an angel.
Courts handled the uncertainty differently, too. Buono and Bianchi were convicted, one by plea and one by verdict, and each blamed the other. Grills and Lyles were convicted on one count apiece, and the larger allegations stayed allegations. Sumida’s name was attached to eight deaths and a courtroom never heard her.
• 1785, March 6: Gesche Margarethe Timm born in Bremen.
• 1813 to 1827: the period of the 15 murders by poison for which Gottfried was later sentenced.
• 1831, April 21: Gottfried beheaded on the Domshof in Bremen.
• 1888 (probably): Caroline Mickelson born at Balmain, Sydney.
• 1934: Angelo Buono Jr. born in Rochester, New York.
• 1951: Kenneth Bianchi born in Rochester, New York.
• 1952 to 1958: deaths of Ben F. Lyles Jr., Joe Neal Gabbert and Mrs. Ben F. Lyles Sr.; April 5, 1958, Marcia Elaine Lyles dies.
• 1953, May 11: Grills arrested in Sydney. October 15: convicted of attempted murder of her sister-in-law and sentenced to death.
• 1954, April: Court of Criminal Appeal dismisses Grills’s appeal; sentence commuted to life.
• 1958, fall: Lyles convicted in Bibb County, Georgia, and sentenced to death. 1959, July 8: Supreme Court of Georgia affirms.
• 1960, October 6: Grills dies at Prince Henry Hospital, Sydney.
• 1977, October 17, to 1978, February 17: Los Angeles hillside killings; Lyles dies at Central State Hospital, Milledgeville (1977).
• 1979, January 11: Karen Mandic and Diane Wilder killed in Bellingham. January 12: Bianchi arrested. October 19: Bianchi pleads guilty in Washington; Buono arrested in Glendale. October 22: Bianchi pleads guilty in Los Angeles.
• 1981, November 16: Buono trial opens.
• 1983, October and November: jury convicts Buono of nine murders; November 18, jury chooses life. 1984, January 9: life without parole imposed.
• 1996, about February 26, to 1998, about June 7: seven deaths in Kitakyushu for which Matsunaga was convicted.
• 2002, March 6 and 7: the 17-year-old girl goes to the police; Matsunaga arrested. September 21: Buono dies in prison.
• 2005, September 28: Matsunaga sentenced to death. 2011, December 12: Supreme Court rejects his appeal.
• 2008, November 10, to 2009, July: three deaths in Lin Yu-ju’s family; she is arrested in 2009.
• 2011, November: Sumida arrested. 2012, February: indicted. November 7: re-arrested. December 12: dies in police custody.
• 2013, June 13: Lin Yu-ju’s death sentence final.
• 2014, November, to 2016, February: Kobe District Court convicts seven members of Sumida’s household. 2018, March: life sentence for her cousin by marriage final.
• 2024, September 20: Taiwan’s Constitutional Court bars execution of people with intellectual disabilities.
• 2025, July: Bianchi refused parole in California; Washington adds 120 months to his minimum term.