San Quentin State Prison (SQ) is a California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation state prison for men, located north of San Francisco in the unincorporated place of San Quentin in Marin County.
Following the historic Lindbergh kidnapping, the United States Congress passed a federal kidnapping statute—known as the Federal Kidnapping Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1) —which was intended to let federal authorities step in and pursue kidnappers once they had crossed state lines with their victim. The act was first proposed in December 1931 by Missouri Senator Roscoe Conkling Patterson, who pointed to several recent kidnappings in the Missouri area in calling for a federal solution. Initial resistance to Patterson's proposal was based on concerns over funding and state's rights. Consideration of the law was revived following the kidnapping of Howard Woolverton in late January 1932. Woolverton’s kidnapping featured prominently in several newspaper series researched and prepared in the weeks following his abduction, and were quite possibly inspired by it. Two such projects, by Bruce Catton of the Newspaper Enterprise Association and Fred Pasley of the Daily News of New York City, were ready for publication within a day or two of the Lindbergh kidnapping. Both series, which ran in papers across North America, described kidnapping as an existential threat to American life, a singular, growing crime wave in which no one was safe.
Robert Lee Yates Jr., also known as the Grocery Bag Killer, is an American serial killer from Spokane, Washington. From 1975 to 1998, he is known to have murdered at least 11 women in Spokane. He also confessed to two murders committed in Walla Walla in 1975 and a 1988 murder committed in Skagit County.
Carol Mary Bundy was an American serial killer. Bundy and Doug Clark became collectively known as the Sunset Strip Killers after being convicted of a series of lust murders in Los Angeles during the late spring and early summer of 1980.
Robert Joseph Silveria Jr., also known as The Boxcar Killer, is an American serial killer currently serving double life sentences in Wyoming. Silveria was also convicted in Kansas for the killing of Charles Randall Boyd, and in Florida for the killing of Willie Clark.
Michael Hubert Hughes is a convicted American serial killer on death row in San Quentin. Hughes was initially sentenced to life without parole for the murders of four women and girls in California. Later, he was convicted of committing three further murders of women, linked to the crimes via DNA profiling. At the second trial, he was sentenced to the death penalty.
John Floyd Thomas Jr. is an American serial killer, serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole for the murders of seven women in the Los Angeles area during the 1970s and 1980s. Police suspect Thomas committed 10 to 15 more murders.
Gerald Parker is an American serial killer who raped and murdered five women in Orange County, California. A sixth victim, who was pregnant at the time of the attack, survived, but her child was delivered stillborn. The crimes took place in 1978 and 1979, but Parker was not identified as the killer until 1996. Parker confessed to the murders, and was sentenced to death on January 21, 1999. Following his conviction, another man, Kevin Lee Green, who had been charged with the attack of the pregnant woman who survived and who was his wife at the time had served 16 years in prison, was exonerated and released.
Roger Reece Kibbe was an American serial killer and rapist known as the "I-5 Strangler". Kibbe found all but one of his victims on freeways around Sacramento, California. In 1991 he was sentenced to 25 years to life imprisonment for the death of Darcie Frackenpohl.
Suzanne Arlene "Suzie" Bombardier, was kidnapped, raped, and stabbed to death on June 22, 1980. On June 27, her body was found by a fisherman, floating in the San Joaquin River east of Antioch, California near its bridge, 60 miles (97 km) east of San Francisco. On December 11, 2017, after extensive DNA profiling, 63-year-old Mitchell Lynn Bacom, a convicted sex offender, was arrested as the prime suspect. He was charged with and convicted of kidnapping, rape, oral copulation, murder, and murder with use of a deadly weapon. This was Antioch's oldest cold case murder. At the time of Bombardier's homicide, Bacom was known to her family.
On the evening of November 26, 1960, Larry Ralph Peyton and his girlfriend, Beverly Ann Allan, disappeared after having made plans to shop at the Lloyd Center shopping mall in Portland, Oregon, United States. The following day, November 27, Peyton's Ford coupe was found in Forest Park, with his mutilated body inside. Allan was missing from the scene, though her purse and coat were still inside the car. A widespread manhunt ensued over the following two months. In January 1961, a highway crew 30 miles (48 km) outside Portland discovered Allan's partially nude body in a ravine, and it was determined she had been raped and strangled to death.
John Ruthell Henry was an American serial killer who was convicted for the 1985 murder of his second wife and stepson in Florida, a few years after being paroled for the 1975 murder of his first wife. After he was sentenced to death in three separate trials, Henry was executed for the latter murders at the Florida State Prison in 2014.
Reginald Perkins was an American serial killer and sex offender who was executed in Texas for the December 2000 murder of his stepmother. He was also linked with DNA to the murders of two women in Fort Worth in 1991, and he is suspected of killing a further three women in Ohio in the early 1980s.
Robert Leroy Biehler was an American serial killer who killed four people in various neighborhoods of Los Angeles, California from 1966 to 1973, either to cover up previous crimes or as part of contract murders. Unable to be sentenced to death due to Furman v. Georgia, Biehler was instead given four consecutive life terms, which he served until his death in 1993.
John Charles Bolsinger was an American serial killer who was posthumously linked to the murders of three women in Eugene, Oregon from 1986 to 1988, committed after his release from prison for a 1980 murder in Utah. He was never convicted of the latter homicides, as he committed suicide shortly after the final murder, and was linked to them via DNA analysis from Oregon State Police and Parabon NanoLabs in 2022.
Ray Dell Sims is an American serial killer who is responsible for the murders of at least five girls in Fresno, California from 1974 to 1977. Originally convicted of a single murder, he was linked to the later killings via DNA in 2001, and has since been convicted of one more and is currently serving two life terms.
John William Agrue was an American serial killer. Convicted of killing his sister-in-law in Illinois in 1966, he would later be paroled and moved to Colorado, where he committed at least two additional murders in 1982. He never stood trial for these latter crimes, and was identified as the killer posthumously via DNA profiling.
