Courts do not sentence a birth certificate, but the record of a trial always carries one. Some serial cases are remembered for the age of the person in the dock: a boy of sixteen in Buenos Aires in 1912, a butcher’s son in West Germany who had begun at fifteen, a man of eighty-eight in a Brooklyn courtroom in 2026. Seven such cases follow. Nobody here is called the youngest or the oldest in history. Where a newspaper made that claim, it is reported as that outlet’s claim and nothing more.
On December 4, 1912, police in Buenos Aires arrested Cayetano Santos Godino. By La Nación of Paraguay’s 2019 account he had been born in the city on October 31, 1896, so he was sixteen years and a month old. Three child witnesses had said they had seen him with a three-year-old boy who had died the day before. He confessed within hours, and La Nación of Buenos Aires reported on December 5 that he had admitted four homicides, seven attempted homicides and seven deliberate fires. A fourth, earlier death of a small child that he described was never proven.
His case matters to a study of age because the law of the time gave courts a choice. The historian María Carolina Zapiola explains that under the Argentine penal code then in force, a minor older than ten could be tried as an adult if the court held that he had acted with discernment. Everything therefore turned on the experts. Doctors at the Hospicio de las Mercedes wrote reports calling him mentally alienated; Troiani quotes one report as finding "incurable imbecility," and Kablan quotes the physician Cabred calling him a "moral madman" who nonetheless knew and remembered his destructive impulses. Judge José Antonio de Oro, who had taken part in the search that led to the arrest, acquitted him on those medical grounds. The Cámara de lo Criminal, the appeal court, confirmed the acquittal, and he was committed to the Hospicio.
That was not the end. Zapiola writes that a second appeal by the prosecutor "led to his being declared responsible," and he was sent first to the Penitenciaría Nacional in Buenos Aires and then to the prison at Ushuaia, in Tierra del Fuego. No published account gives the date of that ruling or the name of the court. Troiani places the final ruling two years after the first and reports a life sentence; Kablan also describes a life term, noting that as a minor he escaped a death sentence and was classed as beyond reform. Neither supplies a date. Because of that gap, his age at the moment the courts finally held him responsible cannot be stated, only that he was sixteen when he was arrested and that the ruling came while he was still young. Zapiola reads the sequence as the courts turning their backs on the scientific experts they had summoned: the doctors had described an irresponsible patient, and the last ruling treated him as a prisoner.
The Argentine writer and journalist Juan José de Soiza Reilly met him at Ushuaia in 1933, in a series published in Caras y Caretas. He described a man of thirty-six who had spent twenty-one years in custody and still could not read. Godino told him he had "a mental illness in his head." Yet he could recite the articles of the penal code that might shorten his sentence and hoped for a reduction. Soiza Reilly did not believe the doctors. He wrote that Godino acted with "the cunning of a sane man." Godino died at Ushuaia on November 15, 1944. Rivas and Galeano and Sinay give his age as 48; a 2021 interview in La Gaceta says 50. The recorded cause was an internal hemorrhage from a gastroduodenal ulcer.
Kablan, writing in Letra P in 2012, called him the first Argentine serial case. The label comes from a journalist, not a court.
Jürgen Bartsch was born Karl-Heinz Sadrozinski in Essen on November 6, 1946, and was adopted by a butcher and his wife. Four boys were killed in the Ruhr area between 1962 and 1966. Four sources (the Stuttgarter Zeitung, the taz, filmportal.de and ZDF) say he was fifteen at the first killing; Der Freitag, in a 2004 film review, says sixteen. The boys' ages are given as eight to thirteen by the Stuttgarter Zeitung and as eight to eleven by the taz. The Stuttgarter Zeitung noted that he was still a minor for most of the killings.
He was arrested in Velbert on June 21, 1966, at nineteen, after a fifth boy reached the police. He confessed quickly to the four killings. Two trials followed, and the difference between them.
In December 1967 the regional court in Wuppertal sentenced him to life imprisonment under adult criminal law. By his birth date he was twenty-one years old, an age that sets the verdict apart from the killings, which had begun when he was a child. The Federal Court of Justice overturned that judgment. At the retrial in Düsseldorf in April 1971, when he was twenty-four, a court sentenced him to ten years of youth detention, to be followed by commitment to a closed psychiatric institution. That judgment stood. The same defendant, tried twice for the same four deaths, was treated first as an adult and then under the rules for young offenders, and the second court placed the weight on his state of mind rather than on a fixed term of years. Rolf Bossi of Munich represented him at both trials and, according to the Stuttgarter Zeitung, put the defendant’s childhood at the center of his case.
The forensic psychiatrist Norbert Leygraf, quoted by the Stuttgarter Zeitung in 2016, said that very few offenders kill at so young an age and that this showed how severe the disorder was. The criminologist Britta Bannenberg, in the same article, rejected the idea that such people can be spotted and detained in advance, calling it a Hollywood fantasy.
Bartsch was held at the state hospital in Eickelborn, near Soest. In 1974 he married a nurse from Essen. On April 28, 1976, he died there during an operation he had requested, after an error with the anesthetic. The taz gave the cause as acute heart failure caused by the error, and the Stuttgarter Zeitung reported that the surgeon was later convicted of negligent homicide. He was twenty-nine. The case set off a long public argument in West Germany about punishment, juvenile justice and psychiatry, and it has been the subject of books, a documentary and a feature film.
A Lehigh County jury convicted Harvey Miguel Robinson in November 1994 of three counts of first-degree murder in Allentown, Pennsylvania, with related counts, and sentenced him to death on each. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court records that he was seventeen at the first killing, in August 1992, and eighteen at the second, in June 1993. A federal court recorded that he spent from September 1992 to May 1993 in a juvenile placement for an unrelated offense, a period that fell between the two. His birth date is not reported; WFMZ gave his age as fifty-one in March 2026, which means his age on the day of the 1994 verdict cannot be calculated.
The first victim, Joan Burghardt, a nurse’s aide, died when he was seventeen. The second was a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl. The third, Jessica Jean Fortney, a 47-year-old grandmother, died in July 1993. The jury sentenced him to death in all three. The law as to a defendant of his age was settled only later, by the Supreme Court of the United States in Roper v. Simmons. On April 25, 2006, a life sentence was imposed in the Burghardt case because he had been under eighteen at that killing, under Roper, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court recorded. He was eighteen at the two later killings, so Roper did not reach them. The death sentence in the 15-year-old’s case was vacated in 2001, and on December 14, 2012, a life sentence was imposed there after the prosecution and defense reached an agreement. WFMZ-TV reported that he gave up his appeal rights in that case in exchange.
The death sentence for Fortney’s murder stands. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court rejected his appeals in 2013, the federal district court denied relief in 2020, the Third Circuit affirmed on April 4, 2024, and the Supreme Court of the United States denied review on January 21, 2025. On February 23, 2026, the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections announced that an execution notice had been signed for March 24, 2026. Governor Josh Shapiro issued a reprieve. Robinson was held at SCI Phoenix, in Skippack Township, as of March 24, 2026.
Separately, he pleaded guilty on February 28, 1994, to burglary, attempted criminal homicide and firearms counts involving a woman who survived, and received 40.5 to 81 years.
On September 11, 2014, a jury in Prince George, British Columbia, convicted Cody Alan Legebokoff of four counts of first-degree murder: three women, Jill Stuchenko, 35, Natasha Montgomery, 23, and Cynthia Maas, 35, and a fifteen-year-old girl. The killings were dated October 2009 to November 27, 2010. Press reports put him at nineteen at the time of the first and twenty when he was arrested. When jury selection began on May 31, 2014, he was twenty-three, according to the coverage.
Early reports called him Canada’s youngest serial killer. That is a press label, and an attributed one at that: no court has ranked offenders by age, and the label was later disputed in print. A conviction at twenty-three is not a record of any kind.
He was arrested on November 27, 2010, and charged with one murder. In October 2011, while in custody, he was charged with three more. His trial lawyer, Jim Heller, asked in December 2012 for the trial to be moved to Vancouver because of local coverage, including stories that tied the case to unsolved cases of missing women in northern British Columbia. Justice Glen Parrett refused. A late offer to plead guilty to four counts of second-degree murder failed because the Crown did not agree. The Crown called 93 witnesses, and the jury returned its verdicts on all four counts.
On September 16, 2014, Justice Parrett sentenced him to life imprisonment on each count, to be served at the same time, with no eligibility for parole for twenty-five years, and ordered his name added to the national sex offender registry. The judge called it one of the most difficult cases of his career and said there was no reasonable doubt about who had committed the murders. The British Columbia Court of Appeal dismissed his appeal on September 26, 2016, and the Supreme Court of Canada refused leave to appeal on February 16, 2017.
Legebokoff was moved from Kent Institution, a maximum-security prison in British Columbia, to Warkworth Institution, a medium-security prison in Ontario, in early 2019. Todd Doherty, the member of Parliament for Cariboo-Prince George, campaigned against the move and raised it again in 2023. He was reported at Warkworth as of August 2023.
Harvey Marcelin was convicted three times in the deaths of women across more than six decades, and his age is part of each verdict’s weight. The Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office gave his age as eighty-three at the arrest in March 2022 and eighty-eight at the sentencing on June 10, 2026. A state corrections listing, as UnHerd reported in 2022, gave his birth year as 1938. If that year is right he was about twenty-five at the first verdict. Marcelin was identified in press reports as a woman for some years before and after the 2022 arrest, and asked at the 2026 trial to be referred to as a man, and is referred to that way here.
The first conviction came in Manhattan. The District Attorney’s Office gives the date as October 16, 1963, for the death of his girlfriend, Jacqueline Bonds, on April 18 of that year. A 2024 WABC-TV report says April 1963, which is the month of the death and not of the verdict. The jury was reported to have been unable to agree on whether he should be put to death, so the judge sentenced him to life. CBS New York and the Brooklyn Paper, citing state records, gave 20 years to life. A 2010 New York court decision describes it simply as "a term of life imprisonment under a sentence imposed for a murder he committed in 1963."
He was paroled in May 1984. In 1986 he was arrested and charged with first-degree manslaughter in the death of a woman he had been living with in 1985. The sources differ on the month of that death, October or November, and agree on the plea: the 2010 decision records that, "as the result of a plea bargain," he was sentenced to an additional six to twelve years. The plea did not end the life term. When he argued years later that he had served the full plea bargain, the court ruled that the original life sentence still ran. Parole boards refused him again and again, and in August 2019 the state released him on lifetime parole.
In March 2022 Susan Leyden, 68, of Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, was reported dead in East New York, where he lived. A Brooklyn jury convicted him in May 2026, after deliberating about an hour, of first-degree murder, tampering with physical evidence and concealment of a human corpse. The first-degree murder count rested on the 1963 Manhattan conviction, and the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office tracked down the old case files for the Brooklyn prosecutors. On June 10, 2026, Justice Danny Chun sentenced him to life without parole. In court, News 12 reported, Marcelin denied the killing again and said he had been infatuated with Ms. Leyden and had not done enough to protect her. The judge said that if he were ever released he had no doubt Marcelin would kill again. District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said the sentence meant he would never be able to hurt anyone else. No appeal has been reported. Marcelin was in state custody on June 10, 2026.
Joseph James DeAngelo was born in Bath, New York, on November 8, 1945. Police arrested him in Citrus Heights, California, on April 24, 2018, when he was seventy-two. He was a retired supermarket warehouse worker and a former police officer: Exeter hired him in 1973 at twenty-seven, according to The Sun-Gazette, and he later served in Auburn.
The case had been unsolved for more than three decades. The crimes ran from 1975 to 1986 and spread from the San Joaquin Valley to the Sacramento suburbs, the Bay Area and the Southern California coast. Investigators identified him by uploading a DNA profile from the crimes to genealogy databases and building family trees from relatives. The Ventura County District Attorney called it the first use of genetic genealogy to solve a murder case.
On June 29, 2020, in a university ballroom fitted out as a courtroom in Sacramento, he pleaded guilty to 13 counts of first-degree murder and 13 counts of kidnapping to commit robbery, and admitted dozens of other crimes that were too old to be prosecuted. By his birth date he was seventy-four. The six district attorneys who had consolidated the charges counted 87 victims in 11 counties across the whole body of charged and uncharged crimes. On August 21, 2020, Judge Michael Bowman sentenced him to 11 consecutive terms of life without parole for the murders, a further consecutive life term for the kidnappings and eight years for weapon enhancements.
The prosecutors had filed a notice of intent to seek the death penalty on April 10, 2019, and it was withdrawn under the plea. The brother of Keith Harrington, who with his wife, Patrice, was among those killed, told the court that if DNA databases had existed in 1980 the offender might have been stopped before he moved on to murder. At the sentencing a daughter of one of the women killed, who was fifteen when her mother died, said: "Today the devil loses and justice wins."
He was moved to the Protective Housing Unit at California State Prison, Corcoran, on January 26, 2021, according to ABC30 in Fresno. As of that report, February 2021, he was held there.
Faye Copeland and her husband, Ray, farmed near Mooresville in Livingston County, Missouri. United Press International gave their ages at the January 1990 arraignment as sixty-eight and seventy-five. On Saturday, November 10, 1990, a jury of eight women and four men in Chillicothe convicted Faye Copeland, then sixty-nine, of five counts of first-degree murder. The five men had been hired as farm workers or cattle buyers and killed between October 1986 and May 1989; the courts described a scheme in which transient men were sent to cattle auctions with checks that could not be covered. There was no evidence that she fired a shot. The State’s case was that she was an accomplice who kept records and helped hide the couple’s connection to the men, and the jury agreed.
The jury recommended death on four counts and life without parole on one. UPI reported that if the recommendations were accepted she would become the oldest person on Missouri’s death row. She was later described as the oldest woman on death row; the phrase is a headline’s, St. Louis Public Radio’s 2003 obituary "Oldest Woman on Death Row Dies," credited to the AP and KWMU, and not a finding of any court.
Her husband was convicted of the same five murders in a separate trial in 1991 and sentenced to death; he died in prison in 1993. Faye Copeland’s own death sentences were affirmed by the Supreme Court of Missouri on August 20, 1996. The federal district court vacated them on August 4, 1999, and the Eighth Circuit affirmed on November 30, 2000, holding that the prosecutor’s closing argument at the penalty phase had been improper and that her lawyers had not objected. The court noted that she had no history of violence. Her lawyers had told the jury at the penalty phase that she was the mother of six, the grandmother of twelve and the great-grandmother of five, and that she had never been arrested before.
In May 2001 she was sentenced to life without parole. The Lawrence Journal-World reported in 2002 that an eighty-one-year-old inmate had been paroled, and Missourinet reported that the parole board freed her after a stroke. She died in a Chillicothe nursing facility at the end of 2003. The Associated Press gave her age as eighty-two.
Put side by side, the seven cases do not make a table of records. Godino’s age raised a legal question that the Argentine courts answered one way and then another. Bartsch’s youth lies in the gap between the killings and the verdicts. Robinson’s two ages, seventeen and eighteen, fall on either side of a line that the Supreme Court of the United States drew later, and the line decided two of his three sentences. Legebokoff’s age produced a newspaper label that was later disputed in print. Marcelin, DeAngelo and Copeland were convicted when most defendants are approaching the end of their working lives, and in each case the judgment has no practical end other than the person’s death. In each case something outside the person’s biography, a statute of limitations, a plea agreement, a closing argument that should have drawn an objection, determined what the age meant in court.
• October 31, 1896: Cayetano Santos Godino born in Buenos Aires (La Nación of Paraguay, 2019).
• December 4, 1912: Godino arrested in Buenos Aires aged 16; confession reported December 5.
• After 1912: two acquittals on medical grounds; a second prosecution appeal then declares him responsible (date not recorded).
• 1933: Soiza Reilly interviews Godino, aged 36, at Ushuaia.
• November 15, 1944: Godino dies at Ushuaia.
• 1962: first of four killings by Jürgen Bartsch, who is 15 (four sources; one says 16).
• October 16, 1963: Harvey Marcelin convicted in Manhattan; life sentence.
• June 21, 1966: Bartsch arrested at 19.
• December 1967: Bartsch sentenced to life under adult law in Wuppertal, aged 21; overturned on appeal.
• April 1971: Bartsch retried in Düsseldorf, aged 24; ten years of youth detention and psychiatric commitment.
• April 28, 1976: Bartsch dies during an operation, aged 29.
• May 1984: Marcelin paroled; arrested 1986 and later pleads guilty to first-degree manslaughter.
• November 10, 1990: Faye Copeland, 69, convicted of five counts of first-degree murder in Chillicothe.
• August 1992: first of three killings in Allentown; Harvey Miguel Robinson is 17 (Pennsylvania Supreme Court).
• February 28, 1994: Robinson pleads guilty to burglary, attempted homicide and firearms counts in a separate case.
• November 1994: Robinson convicted of three counts of first-degree murder; death sentences on each count.
• August 4, 1999: federal court vacates Copeland’s death sentences; Eighth Circuit affirms November 30, 2000.
• May 2001: Copeland sentenced to life without parole; paroled on medical grounds in 2002; dies at the end of 2003.
• April 25, 2006: life sentence imposed in the first Robinson case (he was 17 then).
• November 27, 2010: Cody Legebokoff arrested; charged with three more murders in October 2011.
• September 11, 2014: Legebokoff convicted on four counts; sentenced September 16.
• February 16, 2017: Supreme Court of Canada refuses leave to appeal.
• April 24, 2018: Joseph James DeAngelo arrested at 72.
• August 2019: Marcelin released on lifetime parole.
• June 29, 2020: DeAngelo pleads guilty at 74; sentenced August 21, 2020.
• March 2022: Marcelin arrested at 83 in Brooklyn.
• April 4, 2024: Third Circuit affirms denial of relief to Robinson.
• March 2026: Governor Shapiro issues a reprieve against the execution notice set for March 24.
• May 2026: Marcelin convicted by a Brooklyn jury; sentenced June 10 to life without parole at 88.