Michelle Urbin was 16 and her sister Melissa was 14. Their parents spent eight months searching for them, and by the first anniversary of the girls' deaths they had done something unusual for people in their position: they had lobbied the Michigan legislature for a parole reform bill, and the governor signed it hours before a memorial gathering. Six cases put the question that episode raises. When a family says it wants the law changed, what, exactly, did the law say afterward, and who says the family caused it?
The answers are uneven. In one case a statute carries the survivors' fingerprints in the sponsor’s own words. In another a mass march was followed by a stack of reforms, and no single law has been named. In a third one law passed within months of the confessions and its text does not mention the man whose crimes prompted it. The legal record for each person is stated first, and the claims about influence are stated as claims.
Leslie Allen Williams, a Detroit parolee, was arrested in Springfield Township, Oakland County, in May 1992. Within days, police said, he had confessed to four killings: Kami Villaneuva, 18, of South Lyon; Cynthia Jones, 15, of Milford; and the sisters Michelle Urbin, 16, and Melissa Urbin, 14, of Tyrone Township. He was charged in Oakland County in May 1992 with first-degree murder, kidnapping and other charges in the deaths of Villaneuva and Jones, and he was sentenced to life in prison for each of the four murders. UPI reported that when he was arraigned a crowd outside the courthouse shouted "Kill him, kill him!"
Williams had been on parole since 1990. He had served seven years of a seven-to-30-year sentence in a 1983 kidnapping case, UPI reported, and his record went back 22 years. That the four deaths came after the state had released him made the case a political event. "When you can’t keep violent criminals locked up, there’s something seriously wrong," said John Truscott, the press secretary to Governor John Engler, in May 1992.
Ted Roelofs of Bridge Michigan wrote in 2014 that before 1992 the Michigan Parole Board was made up of professional civil servants and could grant parole to prisoners serving life sentences after ten years. After Williams confessed, Engler replaced it with ten political appointees. The changes that followed, as Roelofs described them, went well beyond who sat on the board. Parole eligibility for prisoners serving life rose from 10 years to 15, and the interval between reviews grew from two years to five. A 1997 Department of Corrections study showed that the share of parole decisions that were approvals fell from 66 percent in 1988 to 1991 to 56 percent under the new board, and that the number of prisoners held past their minimum sentences nearly doubled, from 5,992 in 1991 to 11,855 in 1997. In 1999 the board’s chairman, Stephen Marschke, said that "a life sentence means just that: life in prison."
The Urbin family’s part is recorded by Maria Stuart, who covered Livingston County for three decades and sat near the girls' mother during Williams’s court hearings. She wrote in 2020 that the parents lobbied for a parole reform bill that Engler signed into law hours before the memorial gathering on the first anniversary of their daughters' deaths. The law, she wrote, made it harder for offenders like Williams to be paroled before serving their full sentences. "It was something we had to do for them," the girls' mother said.
Which provisions of the bill Stuart means is not stated, and Roelofs ties the changes he describes to the governor’s overhaul of the board, not to that bill. What the record supports is narrower than the usual telling: the parents lobbied for a bill, the governor signed it, and a much stricter parole regime followed from the political reaction to the case as a whole.
Donald Gene Miller was a Michigan State graduate and church youth minister when, in August 1978, he was caught in Eaton County in a case involving a girl of 14 and her brother of 13, both of whom survived. He was convicted in May 1979 and sentenced to 30 to 50 years. In July 1979, under a plea agreement with the Ingham County prosecutor, he admitted causing the deaths of four women between January 1977 and August 1978: Martha Sue Young, 19; Marita Choquette, 27; Wendy Bush, 21; and Kristine Stuart, 30. He pleaded guilty on July 13, 1979, to two counts of manslaughter, for Young and Stuart, having been indicted for second-degree murder in both, and received 10 to 15 years, to run concurrently. The deaths of Choquette and Bush were admitted and never charged. In 1998 he was convicted of possessing a weapon in prison and given 20 to 40 years more.
The plea has been disputed ever since, and Miller’s parole has been refused repeatedly. Between 1989 and 1997 he had seven parole hearings, the Associated Press reported, and each time parole was refused. In 1997 a Michigan State psychiatry professor, Frank Ochberg, led the founding of a Committee for Community Awareness and Protection to keep him in prison. It included Martha Sue Young’s mother and the stepmother of the two children. The committee pressed for a law allowing civil commitment of dangerous offenders at the end of their sentences. It failed.
A court decision in 2015 moved his parole timeline forward, and in 2016 the families and officials organized. A high school friend of Kristine Stuart circulated a petition to the Michigan Department of Corrections. Attorney General Bill Schuette wrote to the board that the details of Miller’s crimes were reason enough to keep him in prison. The board denied parole in 2016. In 2021 Ingham County Prosecutor Carol Siemon and Attorney General Dana Nessel wrote again, and the board’s refusal that June was counted as his ninth. The brother who survived had attended each hearing. He told WCMU and WKAR that the decision was "a great relief," and he told WILX that, since Miller could apply again within a year, he "might get the summer" before having to start over.
That one-year cycle was the target. A 2018 Michigan law had cut the longest wait between parole reviews for prisoners denied parole from five years to one year for those with a high or average probability of release, and to two years for those with a low probability. Supporters of changing it called that an unintended result. House Bills 4562 and 4563, sponsored by Representatives Sarah Lightner and Angela Witwer, both from the Eaton County area, allowed a majority of the 10-member parole board to wait up to five years between reviews in certain circumstances, including when more frequent reviews would cause added harm to victims or their surviving families. Governor Gretchen Whitmer signed the bills on March 11, 2022, and they took effect at once. House Bill 4562 became Public Act 28 of 2022.
Here the credit is explicit. The Associated Press reported that the legislation was spurred by Miller’s surviving victims. At the signing, the brother said, "Every year, I fear for the safety of my future, the future of my children and the future of our community." The Delta Township representative who knew the family growing up said the old schedule "simply wasn’t humane to victims and survivors." In May 2022 the board denied Miller parole for the tenth time, and under the new law his next eligibility date was set at August 29, 2027, five years on. The change applies to certain prisoners, not only to him, and it gives the board a discretion, not a duty.
Marc Dutroux was arrested at Marcinelle, on the southern edge of Charleroi, on August 13, 1996. Two girls aged 12 and 14 were rescued alive. Within weeks, the deaths of four others abducted in 1995 came to light: Julie Lejeune and Mélissa Russo, both 8, and An Marchal, 17, and Eefje Lambrecks, 19. On June 17, 2004, a jury at Arlon returned guilty verdicts on the murders of An Marchal, Eefje Lambrecks and his former accomplice Bernard Weinstein, of abduction and unlawful detention of minors, and of leading a criminal association, and held him responsible for the deaths of Julie and Mélissa. On June 22 he was sentenced to life imprisonment, with a further ten years at the disposal of the government.
He had been convicted before. In 1986 he and Michelle Martin were arrested for abducting and confining girls under 16; he was sentenced in 1989, and AFP reported in 2023 that he was granted conditional release on April 4, 1992, after about three years. The case that followed his arrest in 1996 was less about what he had done than about what the state had known. A gendarmerie surveillance operation had been watching him since August 1995. Julie and Mélissa had been reported missing on June 24, 1995, and the posters bearing their faces were in windows across Belgium for months. A search of one of his properties in December 1995 did not locate them; a gendarme, the Belga timeline says, heard children’s voices and wrongly concluded they came from outside.
The girls' parents pressed for results at great personal cost, The Brussels Times wrote in 2021. Mélissa’s mother, Carine Russo, complained repeatedly that the justice system was slow to act on the case.
On October 14, 1996, the Court of Cassation removed the judge leading the investigation, Connerotte, for legitimate suspicion of bias, after challenges by defense lawyers. The decision angered the public and the families, Belga reported, and a court reporter told VRT NWS it had felt as if a revolution were about to break out. On Sunday, October 20, 1996, about 300,000 people walked through Brussels in the White March, demanding justice for the victims and deep reform of the judicial system. Belga News Agency has put the crowd at between 275,000 and 350,000 and called it the largest demonstration in Belgium since the Second World War. The prime minister, Jean-Luc Dehaene, pledged judicial reform and sanctions for those responsible, and announced a center for missing children. It became Child Focus.
Then came the inquiry. A parliamentary commission examined how police and prosecutors had handled the case; its hearings were aired live, and a supplementary report was published by the Chamber of Representatives on February 16, 1998. The reforms attributed to the case are a merger of the country’s police forces and a series of judicial reforms. They have been described only in general terms, and no single statute has been named. What can be said exactly is smaller and firmer: a march of roughly 300,000 followed a court decision that angered the public and the families, the prime minister made specific promises within a week, one of them produced an institution that still exists, and the Chamber’s inquiry gave a public account of the failures.
Francisco das Chagas Rodrigues de Brito, a bicycle mechanic on the island of São Luís, in the Brazilian state of Maranhão, confessed to killing 42 boys, 30 in Maranhão and 12 in Pará; Maranhão police attributed to him the deaths of 30 children in their state between 1989 and 2003. Juries in Maranhão have convicted him in trial after trial. On August 24, 2009, he was convicted of homicide, with other charges, in the deaths of Hermógenes Santos, 11, and Raimundo Luís Cordeiro, 10. On March 22, 2010, a jury convicted him on a majority vote in the death of Ivanildo Póvoas Ferreira, 10, a seventh conviction, with sentences then totaling 237 years. By May 2018 the Maranhão prosecutors reported a total of 580 years and 10 months. The killings in Pará were never tried against him.
The campaign came first. The deaths on the island ran for about ten years, and at first they looked unrelated. The Centro de Defesa Padre Marcos Passerini, a children’s rights group in São Luís, began to catalogue them and saw shared features, the state prosecutors wrote in 2018. With a second group, Justiça Global, it took the cases to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States. A 2025 paper gives the petitions as cases 12.426 and 12.427, covering three boys killed in Paço do Lumiar. Band reported in 2024 that the complaint was made in 2001.
Meanwhile, other men were in prison. The same paper says that third parties, and not the actual perpetrator, were arrested and convicted for some of the crimes, and Band reports that prosecutors later asked for the acquittal of two men accused in some of the cases. Francisco das Chagas was identified in late 2003 and arrested in 2004, and a police inspector, Wilton Carlos Rego, described to a public hearing of Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies in 2004 how he had used GPS to map the places linked to the deaths.
The petition ended in a friendly settlement under which the state accepted responsibility. The law came on December 15, 2005: the state of Maranhão passed a law recognizing 28 boys as victims for the purposes of the settlement with the families, according to a 2021 study in the Revista de Direitos Humanos e Efetividade, which was built on the accounts of the boys' mothers. An MPMA release of 2018 also gives the number as 28. In name, the law recognized the boys as victims. What it required the state to pay or provide has not been reported, and the settlement was still the subject of a public hearing held by the Maranhão prosecutors in June 2025, twenty years after the law and more than two decades after the complaint. The campaign did produce a state law, but what the law is reported to do is acknowledge 28 names.
Charles Cullen worked as a registered nurse for 16 years, in nine hospitals and a nursing home in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Between 2004 and 2006 he pleaded guilty to murdering 29 patients and attempting to murder six more: in New Jersey, 22 murders and 3 attempted murders; in Pennsylvania, 7 murders and 3 attempted murders. He told investigators that he had killed 30 to 40 patients in all. The plea terms ruled out the death penalty, and in March 2006 he was given 11 consecutive life terms in New Jersey and, in Pennsylvania, a life sentence for the Northampton County murder and six in Lehigh County. Families of victims spoke at the sentencing. The son of one of them said the family would never feel safe in a hospital again.
The case exposed how he had kept working. Several employers suspected him, fired him or let him resign, and none of their suspicions followed him to the next job. New Jersey passed two laws within about a year, and they are not the same.
The first is the Patient Safety Act, P.L.2004, c.9, approved on April 27, 2004, two days before Cullen’s first guilty plea. It requires health care facilities to report serious preventable adverse events to the state and to tell patients or their families about them. The text of the law does not mention Cullen, and nothing on the record ties it to him. Its date makes it easy to assume that it was his law. It is not.
The second grew directly out of the case: the Health Care Professional Responsibility and Reporting Enhancement Act, P.L.2005, c.83, approved on May 3, 2005. It requires hospitals and other health care entities to report to the state Division of Consumer Affairs, within seven days, when they discharge a licensed professional, cut or suspend privileges, or accept a resignation during a review, among other actions. It requires them to keep complaint and disciplinary records for seven years and to tell other employers truthfully, when asked, whether they made such a report. It protects good-faith reports and references from lawsuits, obliges professionals to report colleagues who pose an imminent danger, and requires criminal background checks for licensing. Its sponsor, State Senator Joseph F. Vitale, said Cullen had abused the trust placed in health care workers. "The culture of secrecy and the 'Hear no evil, See no evil' attitude will, we believe, end today," he said.
The families' route ran through the civil courts instead. In Pennsylvania, eight families whose relatives had died at St. Luke’s Hospital while Cullen worked there sued him in Lehigh County. He did not defend the suit, and a judge ruled him responsible for the eight deaths. In March 2010 a jury awarded the families $95 million, ABC7 reported. None of those eight deaths was among his criminal convictions. The 2005 law owes its existence to a legislator who named the case; the damages owe theirs to families who sued. Neither has been described as a campaign.
Clifford Olson killed 11 children and young people around Vancouver between November 1980 and July 1981. He pleaded guilty in January 1982 to 11 counts of first-degree murder and received 11 concurrent life sentences, with no parole eligibility for 25 years; Justice H.C. McKay recommended that he never be released. The youngest victim was Simon Partington, 9. Daryn Johnsrude was 16, Ada Court 13, and Raymond King Jr. 15. Because there was no trial, much of the evidence and of the police investigation was never made public, the Canadian Press noted.
Days after the pleas the public learned that police and the British Columbia attorney general had agreed to pay $100,000, held in trust for his wife and infant son, for his help with the investigation. On January 14, 1982, the arrangement was reported in what the press called the "cash-for-bodies" deal. Attorney General Williams at first denied knowing of any payment, then acknowledged it and defended it as the best way to close the case. In Ottawa, the Conservative member Walter Baker said: "That a large sum of money be paid on a per unit basis for a confession to a violent criminal act is an odious precedent." The Canadian Encyclopedia describes a bitter national controversy over whether a criminal should benefit from his crimes and whether police should pay for information, with concern that such payments could create professional witnesses; it notes that the Supreme Court of Canada had held in R v Palmer and Palmer in 1979 that paying for evidence was legal, and that the Olson case led to calls for attorneys general to set ethical guidelines.
The families' work after that was attendance. They went to every hearing for 30 years. Olson applied for early parole eligibility under the faint hope clause, Section 745 of the Criminal Code, and a jury in Surrey, British Columbia, rejected the application in August 1997. Parole was denied again in July 2006 and November 2010. Daryn Johnsrude’s mother, Sharon Rosenfeldt, and his stepfather, Gary Rosenfeldt, became the most visible of the families. "Daryn was a real live person, a young boy who deserved to live," his mother said on CTV in 2010. Ada Court’s sister faced Olson at his parole hearings for 30 years. Her brother, who was 16 when she went missing, said nothing publicly for three decades; when he learned in 2011 that Olson was dying, he told CTV British Columbia that his sister had been close to him and that her murder "destroyed our family." Raymond Jr.'s father said that Olson’s death would "close some doors. At least he’ll be out of our face." Olson died of cancer on September 30, 2011.
Of the six cases, this is the one in which no law is reported to have changed on the families' account. Guidelines were called for, and no statute is reported, so the families' attendance was the only instrument the record shows them using.
Read together, the cases separate cleanly by the kind of evidence there is. Michigan in 2022 has a signed bill, a named sponsor, a date and the Associated Press saying survivors spurred it. Michigan in 1992 has parents who lobbied and a governor who signed, and no statute number. Belgium has a march, a commission and a promise, and an agreed-on institution. Maranhão has a law that recognized 28 names. New Jersey has a 2004 act whose text mentions nobody and a 2005 act whose sponsor named Cullen. Canada has outrage and a payment.
The usual story is that grief becomes legislation. In these cases it becomes legislation only where a legislator, a governor or a prime minister took it up and said so in public, and several of the families appear here only by role. Where the law did change, it changed the rules for people other than the ones the families knew: prisoners eligible for parole in Michigan, hospital employers in New Jersey.
• 1977 to 1978: the Lansing-area killings to which Donald Gene Miller later admitted.
• 1979: Miller convicted in Eaton County in May; pleads guilty to two counts of manslaughter in Ingham County on July 13.
• 1980 to 1981: Clifford Olson’s killings, November 1980 to July 1981.
• January 1982: Olson pleads guilty to 11 counts of first-degree murder; on January 14 the $100,000 trust is reported.
• 1986 and 1989: Marc Dutroux arrested with Michelle Martin in February 1986; sentenced in April 1989.
• April 4, 1992: Dutroux granted conditional release.
• May 1992: Leslie Allen Williams arrested; confesses to four killings; Governor Engler replaces the parole board.
• June 24, 1995: Julie Lejeune and Mélissa Russo reported missing.
• August 13, 1996: Dutroux arrested at Marcinelle.
• October 14, 1996: the Court of Cassation removes the judge leading the Dutroux investigation; October 20, the White March.
• 1997: Committee for Community Awareness and Protection founded to keep Miller in prison; Olson’s faint hope application rejected in August.
• February 16, 1998: Belgian Chamber of Representatives publishes its supplementary inquiry report.
• April 27, 2004: New Jersey Patient Safety Act approved; April 29, Cullen’s first guilty plea.
• June 17 and 22, 2004: guilt verdict and life sentence for Dutroux at Arlon.
• May 3, 2005: New Jersey approves the Health Care Professional Responsibility and Reporting Enhancement Act.
• December 15, 2005: Maranhão law recognizes 28 boys as victims.
• March 2006: Cullen sentenced in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
• August 24, 2009: earliest conviction reported in the series of trials of Francisco das Chagas Rodrigues de Brito.
• March 2010: Lehigh County jury awards $95 million in the Cullen civil case.
• September 30, 2011: Olson dies.
• March 11, 2022: Governor Whitmer signs the bills that include Public Act 28 of 2022.
• May 2022: Miller denied parole for the tenth time; next eligibility August 29, 2027.
• June 2025: Maranhão prosecutors hold a public hearing on the friendly settlement.