Richard McCann was five years old when his mother, Wilma McCann, died in Leeds in October 1975. In 2020, in the days after Peter Sutcliffe’s death, he told reporters what the police of his childhood had called her: a "good time girl," a "woman of loose morals." His mother, he said, was completely innocent and deserved to live. The rumors her family always denied had been printed as fact.
A famous killer is assembled in public. Someone supplies the name, someone the profile, someone the countdown of dates, and the people he killed are used, at best, as numbers on it. The six cases run from Whitechapel in 1888 to a sheriff’s office in Illinois in 2021, and the pattern repeats across them. The public story was about the man, or the hunt for him, or an argument about what kind of woman he preferred. In each case, later work by a historian, a police force, a student newsroom or a sheriff’s office has been an attempt to put the people back.
Five women were murdered in Whitechapel in the autumn of 1888: Mary Ann "Polly" Nichols, 43; Annie Chapman, 47; Elizabeth Stride, 44; Catherine Eddowes, 46; and Mary Jane Kelly, about 25. No one was ever charged. The police inquiry took in eleven deaths between April 1888 and February 1891, and how many belong to one killer is still disputed. For more than a century the five women were described, in the police files and in almost everything written since, as prostitutes.
The historian Hallie Rubenhold’s 2019 book The Five does not support that. As Smithsonian magazine summarized her findings, there is no evidence tying three of the five women to prostitution at all. What they shared was not their work. Most of them had been knocked out of ordinary life by ordinary things: a marriage that failed, a child who died, a husband’s allowance that stopped when he did. "It is only by bringing these women back to life," Rubenhold wrote, "that we can silence the Ripper and what he represents."
The man has never been identified, and claims about him continue. A claim in 2019 that DNA from a shawl pointed to a suspect, Aaron Kosminski, rested on limited mitochondrial testing of an item with no proven link to the crimes, and Live Science reported scientists' doubts within days. In January 2025 a relative of Catherine Eddowes demanded a new inquest into her death, citing DNA evidence. No decision on that application had been reported as of August 2026.
Peter Sutcliffe killed 13 women and injured at least seven others between July 1975 and November 1980. He was a married truck driver from Bradford, and in the five years of the crimes West Yorkshire Police interviewed him nine times. The inquiry was the largest the country had seen. It was also overwhelmed by its own paperwork, distracted by a hoax tape and letters sent from Sunderland, and built around a theory that the killer hated prostitutes, which led senior officers to sort his victims into those they called innocent and the rest. He was arrested in Sheffield on January 2, 1981. At the Old Bailey in May 1981 he said he was not guilty of murder because God had told him to kill; the jury rejected that and convicted him of 13 murders, after he had pleaded guilty to seven attempted murders. He was sentenced to 20 concurrent life terms, was told in 2010 that he would never be released, and died of COVID-19 on November 13, 2020.
The thirteen were Wilma McCann, 28; Emily Jackson, 42; Irene Richardson, 28; Patricia "Tina" Atkinson, 32; Jayne MacDonald, 16; Jean Jordan, 20; Yvonne Pearson, 21; Helen Rytka, 18; Vera Millward, 40; Josephine Whitaker, 19; Barbara Leach, 20; Marguerite Walls, 47; and Jacqueline Hill, 20.
Wilma McCann was the mother of four and lived in Chapeltown, Leeds. Police interviewed about 11,000 people in the months after her death, ITV reported, without an arrest. Her son Richard spent much of his adult life speaking about her. The words were the police’s, and the Yorkshire Post reported that her family had always denied the rumors about her, which the press treated as fact.
Emily Jackson, 42, came from Churwell, near Morley, and was a mother. One of her sons, Derek, had died in an accident at 14 in 1969. Her eldest son, Neil, was 17 when she was killed in January 1976, and he later wrote a book about what her death did to his family.
Marcella Claxton was seriously injured in Leeds in May 1976 and survived. She gave the police a description and a photofit that later proved accurate. She was left out of the series, the Press Association reported, because she did not fit what officers believed about the women the man was choosing. She was pregnant at the time and lost the baby. The case of her injuries was one of the seven attempted murders to which he pleaded guilty.
Irene Richardson, 28, was the mother of two. Born in Glasgow, she worked as a cleaner and in early 1977 was living in a bed and breakfast in Leeds. Tina Atkinson, 32, was divorced, the mother of three, and lived in Manningham, Bradford; she was the first woman Sutcliffe killed in Bradford, in April 1977.
Jayne MacDonald was 16. She had recently left Allerton High School and worked as a shop assistant at a Grandways supermarket, and she was a fan of the Bay City Rollers. She died on June 26, 1977. Her father, Wilfred, died two years later at 60. Her death brought the case to the national press, and it fixed in public a distinction the police were already drawing. Officers described Jayne as the first "innocent" victim, which Richard McCann later said implied that his mother and the other women had not been innocent. "My mum was completely innocent and deserved to live," he said in 2020. Jayne’s own family were angered by the division of the dead into good and bad women, the Yorkshire Post reported.
Jean Jordan, 20, was born in Scotland and lived in Manchester’s Moss Side with her partner and their two children. Her death on October 1, 1977 was Sutcliffe’s first outside West Yorkshire. A new five-pound note in her bag traced back to a batch of wage packets paid out by six companies, one of them T. and W.H. Clark, Sutcliffe’s employer. Detectives interviewed him, his wife and his mother said he had been at a family party, and the alibi was accepted. In January 1978 the police dropped their inquiries into the people who might have received the note. In December 1977 a woman who survived in Leeds gave a description that was later judged a "remarkable likeness" of Sutcliffe; police dismissed her as unreliable, the Yorkshire Post reported in 2019.
The press borrowed the 1888 name for the man, and the inquiry spent months on a hoax tape and letters from Sunderland, the work of a hoaxer later known as Wearside Jack. The correction was slow. In March 2019 the Yorkshire Post ran a piece on restoring the victims' reputations after decades of victim-blaming. In October 2020 the Yorkshire Evening Post reported that a Leeds survivor had told her story in a new book. On the day Sutcliffe died, November 13, 2020, the chief constable of West Yorkshire Police apologized to the families for the language, tone and terminology the original investigators had used about the women.
Between July 1976 and July 1977 a gunman shot 13 people in eight shootings in the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn. Six died: Donna Lauria, 18; Christine Freund, 26; Virginia Voskerichian, 19 or 20; Valentina Suriani, 18 or 19; Alexander Esau, 20; and Stacy Moskowitz, 20. The name that stuck came from a letter addressed to Captain Joseph Borrelli of the NYPD that turned up after the April 1977 shooting of Suriani and Esau, in which the writer called himself "Son of Sam"; Time reported in 1977 that the letter spoke of a father figure called Sam who directed him. The name leaked to the press. On May 30, 1977, the gunman mailed a handwritten letter to Jimmy Breslin, a columnist at the New York Daily News, which the paper published on June 6. By that summer about 300 officers were on the case, and young women across the city were cutting or dyeing their hair and staying in at night.
The gunman was David Berkowitz, a 24-year-old postal worker who lived alone in Yonkers. He was arrested there on August 10, 1977. In May 1978, against his lawyers' advice, he pleaded guilty to six counts of second-degree murder and received the maximum of 25 years to life for each. He has been eligible for parole since 2002 and has been refused at every appearance, the twelfth in May 2024. In May 2026 he did not attend his hearing, and no decision was reported.
Virginia Voskerichian was a sophomore at Barnard College and worked at a duty-free shop at Kennedy Airport. Her family, of Armenian descent, had lived in Bulgaria and came to the United States in 1968 after waiting more than ten years for permission to leave. Her brother told the Queens Chronicle about 35 years later that she spoke five languages and might have become a translator, and that she loved music, reading, art and fashion. Her father was a watchmaker. He said he drove past the place where she died every day on his way to work because he did not want to forget, and that he still blamed himself for not meeting her at the subway.
Carl Denaro was 20 when he was seriously wounded in Queens in October 1976, with Rosemary Keenan, 18, beside him. Keenan was not hurt. Denaro spent weeks in the hospital and had to give up a place in the U.S. Air Force. Forty years later he told the Associated Press, "I’m the luckiest man alive, I really am," and said he did not let the shooting define him.
One victim waited nearly half a century to be counted. Wendy Savino was shot on April 9, 1976, and survived. In 2024 the NYPD confirmed that she had been the first victim of the gunman later called Son of Sam, Time reported in 2025. The shooting was never the subject of a charge.
Saeed Hanaei was a construction worker in Mashhad, the city in northeastern Iran that holds the shrine of Imam Reza and draws millions of pilgrims. Between 2000 and the summer of 2001, women died in and around the city, one after another, and the Iranian press called the deaths the "spider killings." On July 25, 2001, police arrested Hanaei, then 39, a married father of three. The national police chief, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, said on state television that the suspect had been arrested in connection with 16 killings, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported on July 26. Arrests had also been made in three other cases that police believed were the work of other men. Hanaei told reporters he had acted "for the sake of God and for the protection of my religion," the Deseret News reported.
What made the case known beyond Iran was not only the killings but the argument that followed. Newsweek reported that many hardline supporters of the government publicly praised him, calling the deaths a moral cleanup. The conservative newspaper Jomhuri Islami asked in print who ought to be judged, the man or the women. A resident quoted by the Deseret News said God might bless the killer. The head of the judiciary, Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, said the killer would not have been provoked if the Islamic laws had been enforced. The sociologist Mohammad Badizadeh warned that the killings might give others a reason to commit similar murders. According to Radio Farda’s 2002 account, the defense of Hanaei in the conservative press became so widespread that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei stated explicitly that no one in Iran could commit any crime, and in particular murder, on his own authority.
Hanaei’s defense rested on a rule in Iran’s Islamic penal code under which killing a person whose blood may lawfully be shed counts as involuntary manslaughter rather than murder, as the filmmaker Maziar Bahari explained to IranWire. The trial was held in Mashhad behind closed doors, which is why the press published little of it, Radio Farda reported. The presiding judge, Hojjatoleslam Gholamreza Mansouri, rejected the argument. Hanaei was sentenced to death and hanged in Mashhad in April 2002. He was convicted, according to one 2023 account, of 16 intentional murders; Radio Farda’s Persian report of April 2002 says he took responsibility for 13. In his prison interview for Bahari’s documentary he said he was not repentant and would have wanted to kill 150 people had he not been arrested.
The women got less. The press described them in terms of what it assumed about their work and their lives, and some papers wrote as if that settled the matter. RFE/RL reported in July 2001 that the families of the dead had not come forward to claim them and that the victims' names had not been published. Radio Farda’s review of the case in April 2002 wrote that the first death and at least eight more like it drew little public attention for exactly that reason.
One of the women Hanaei admitted killing was Azam Abdoli, 45, the Deseret News reported in August 2001. Her husband, a peddler, had died in an accident two years earlier, and she was the mother of a teenage daughter, who spoke to the paper about her. The other women are known through the people they left. Bahari told IranWire in 2022 that the two interviews that affected him most for his documentary were with two girls, each the daughter of a murdered woman, each wondering how she would live without her mother. He said he could not stay detached and arranged through a friend for a Mashhad charity to help the girls' family; the link was lost years later when that friend died, and he said he still wished to help them. The documentary also included a victim’s father and a woman who had been married at 10 and who described the conditions women like the victims faced.
The case came back to the screen as fiction. An Iranian feature film followed in 2020, and in 2022 Ali Abbasi’s Holy Spider competed at Cannes.
There is no famous killer in this case, and in the coverage that is the point. Since 2001, dozens of women, most of them Black, have died on Chicago’s South and West Sides in cases that were never solved. In 2019 a small national nonprofit, the Murder Accountability Project, said that 51 of the deaths between 2001 and 2018, which it had grouped by cause of death, had the characteristics of serial murder. Its head, the retired journalist Thomas Hargrove, explained to WBEZ that the project’s program sorts about 769,000 murder records into more than 10,000 groups by the sex of the victim, the method of killing and the place, and looks for groups with unusually low clearance rates, because a serial killer, he said, drags down the solve rate in the group where his victims fall. The Chicago Police Department does not accept the conclusion. Under pressure from families, activists and elected officials, it put the cases before homicide detectives working on an FBI violent crimes task force in April 2019. Police said that DNA from 21 of the cases came from 21 different men, and that nothing linked the cases to one another. Their position since then has been that there is no evidence of a serial killer and that each case is investigated on its own.
For months the public argument was whether a killer existed. A CBS 2 investigation by the reporter Pam Zekman in February 2019, in which the station asked the project to review more than 50 unsolved cases dating to 2001, brought the question to a wide audience. At a public meeting that month a group read aloud the names of 50 women. State Senator Patricia Van Pelt said police had assured her there was no evidence of a serial killer, but that the reporting raised the question again; she said 3,700 pieces of DNA evidence in Illinois had not been analyzed. In March 2019, the Chicago Sun-Times reported, Hargrove gave his findings to Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson, to Alderman Pat Dowell and to Van Pelt. On April 11, 2019, the Sun-Times reported that the department had begun reviewing the unsolved deaths of 51 women since 2001. Chicago had faced the question before: the Sun-Times recalled that Andre Crawford was convicted in 2009 of killing 11 women, seven of them linked by DNA.
On May 30, 2019, activists and clergy asked the newly elected mayor, Lori Lightfoot, to order a stronger investigation. "If there were a serial killer in Chicago, I would be the first one to acknowledge it," Johnson said. On June 6, Chief of Detectives Melissa Staples told a forum convened by Representative Bobby Rush that the cases had been given to a team of ten homicide detectives. "We have no DNA at this time that links these cases together," she said. Many in the audience said they believed the police cared less because most of the victims were Black. Staples rejected that. "Any uncleared murder, unsolved murder, is a concern to us absolutely," she said. Hargrove told the same forum that the women’s median age had risen over the years.
The women, in these months, were largely a number: 50, then 51. The press named only some of them, and little has been written about most of them beyond their names.
Gwendolyn Williams was born on October 6, 1957, in Montgomery, Alabama, and came to Chicago with her mother in 1965, according to a profile by John W. Fountain and Samantha Latson for the Roosevelt University project Unforgotten 51. She was the eldest of six children. Her sisters remembered a protective, loyal big sister with a heart of gold, small and tough, who loved to dance and to cook and who went to church. As a girl she babysat and helped raise her younger siblings, and she once stood up for them at church when other girls threw spitballs. She was 44 when she died, in June 2002. Their mother died in 2018 without seeing the case solved. "You can’t have closure when your wound is still open," one sister said. Another argued that labels attached to women like her made Black women’s lives and deaths seem smaller. In February 2019, CBS 2 reported that Chicago police had matched DNA from her case to a man with a 1980 armed robbery conviction in Detroit, and that he had been arrested in Tampa, Florida, on a first-degree murder warrant. He denied killing her or ever being in Chicago, CBS reported. According to the station, the Cook County state’s attorney’s office decided not to have him brought back to Illinois. He has not been charged, and her sisters have kept pressing for an arrest.
Nancie Carolyn Walker, called Carolyn by those closest to her, was born on August 15, 1947, in Birmingham, Alabama, the eldest of six sisters, and her family moved to Chicago in 1961, according to Unforgotten 51. She captained her high school cheerleading squad, studied at Columbia College and attended Roosevelt University. She wanted to be an entrepreneur so that she would never have to work for anyone else, and she became one: she started a dance studio in Englewood, where she taught yoga and jazzercise, and she owned residential buildings, a beauty salon and a trucking company. She loved to dance, especially to step. She went missing in January 2003, at 55.
Theresa Bunn was 21 and was looking forward to the birth of her first child, and the Sun-Times reported that she was eight months pregnant. Hazel Marion Lewis, 52, was a mother and grandmother. They died within days of each other in November 2007. The student reporters were unable to reach either woman’s family. Diamond Turner was 21 when she died in March 2017. Reo Renee Holyfield was 34 when she died in September 2018; the Cook County medical examiner could not determine a cause of death, though her family and independent investigators believe she belongs with the others. Her cousin became one of the most visible relatives in the campaign for answers. "She was an individual, separate from everybody," he told WBEZ. "And if you ever, ever encountered her, she would put a mark on you." Student reporters wrote of her singing voice and her love of the Fourth of July. Velma Howard died in 2014, according to VICE, which cited a neighbor’s account to the Chicago Tribune that the community felt overlooked.
Only one case has produced a charge. A.H., 52, was charged on January 30, 2020 with first-degree murder in the death of Diamond Turner. Prosecutors said she had been his girlfriend. Her family had done their own investigating, and the ABC7 I-Team reported in November 2017 that they had recorded a meeting with him. The wait for laboratory results turned into a dispute between Chicago police and the Illinois State Police over who had delayed. "Shouldn’t take three years," her aunt said. Police said he did not appear to be linked to the other women. No outcome of the case against him has been reported.
In January 2020 John W. Fountain, a Roosevelt University journalism professor and former chief crime reporter for the Chicago Tribune, set his students to write about the women. Sixteen student journalists worked on the project over two semesters in 2020, Block Club Chicago reported, tracking down families, some of whom were eager to talk and some of whom refused. The result, Unforgotten 51, published profiles under the heading Portraits of Life, along with podcasts. "Our job was not to solve the case, but to shine light on the case," Fountain told TheGrio. "These are 51 women and we should care." Latson, a senior from Matteson who edited the project, said the women should be remembered because "they were loved." West Side leaders launched a campaign called Stop Taking Our Girls, pushing police and prosecutors to put violent crimes against Black women first. "Even if she was, so what?" Latson said of one woman whose family disputed a label put on her. "She was still a human being."
As of December 2020, no one had been charged with a series of these killings, police maintained that the cases were not linked, and the Murder Accountability Project maintained that one or more serial killers were likely responsible.
John Wayne Gacy was a Democratic precinct captain in unincorporated Norwood Park Township, near Chicago, who performed at children’s parties and charity events as a clown he called Pogo. In March 1980 he was convicted of 33 murders, with other charges, and he was executed by lethal injection on May 10, 1994.
Eight of the 33 had no names when the case closed. Identifications by DNA followed in 2011 and 2017 and again in 2021, when the Cook County Sheriff’s Office announced another on October 25. The 2017 announcement, reported by the Associated Press, named a 16-year-old from Minnesota. Five of the dead are still unnamed.
The cases do not resolve the same way. Whitechapel keeps its famous name and has gained, through one historian’s book, five women with histories. Sutcliffe’s victims received an apology from the force that had sorted them into categories, decades late. The first shooting by the gunman later called Son of Sam was recognized by the NYPD in 2024. Gacy’s five unnamed victims still have no names. Hanaei’s trial was closed, and the daughters in Bahari’s film are known through his camera. In Chicago the public began with a number, and the profiles came from a student newsroom.
Marcella Claxton, who had been left out of the series because she did not fit, said in November 2020 that she still lived with her injuries and with the loss of her pregnancy.
• 1888, August 31 to November 9: five women murdered in Whitechapel; no one charged.
• 1972 to 1978: the killings for which John Wayne Gacy was convicted.
• 1975, July 5: first of the crimes later charged against Peter Sutcliffe.
• 1975, October 30: Wilma McCann dies in Leeds.
• 1976, April 9: Wendy Savino shot in New York; recognized by the NYPD as a victim in 2024.
• 1976, July 29: shooting of Donna Lauria, first of the six killings Berkowitz admitted.
• 1977, June 26: Jayne MacDonald dies; the police begin calling her the first "innocent" victim.
• 1977, August 10: David Berkowitz arrested in Yonkers.
• 1978, May 8: Berkowitz pleads guilty to six murders.
• 1980, March: Gacy convicted of 33 murders.
• 1981, January 2: Sutcliffe arrested in Sheffield; May 22: convicted of 13 murders.
• 1994, May 10: Gacy executed.
• 2001, July 25: Saeed Hanaei arrested in Mashhad.
• 2001 to 2018: the deaths of the Chicago women.
• 2002, April: Hanaei hanged.
• 2011, 2017, 2021: DNA identifications of three of Gacy’s unnamed victims.
• 2019, March: Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five published; Murder Accountability Project presents Chicago findings to police; April 11: Chicago police begin review.
• 2020, January 30: A.H. charged in the death of Diamond Turner.
• 2020, November 13: Sutcliffe dies; West Yorkshire chief constable apologizes for the language used about the women.
• 2020, December: Unforgotten 51 publishes its first Portraits of Life.
• 2024: NYPD confirms Wendy Savino as the first Son of Sam victim.
• 2025, January: relative of Catherine Eddowes demands new inquest.