Wayne Bertram Williams is an American convicted murderer and suspected serial killer who is serving life imprisonment for the 1981 killings of two men in Atlanta, Georgia. Although never tried for the additional murders, he is also believed to be responsible for at least 24 of the 30 Atlanta murders of 1979–1981, also known as the Atlanta Child Murders.
A thrill killing is premeditated or random murder that is motivated by the sheer excitement of the act. While there have been attempts to categorize multiple murders, such as identifying "thrill killing" as a type of "hedonistic mass killing", actual details of events frequently overlap category definitions making attempts at such distinctions problematic.
Lemuel Warren Smith is an American convicted serial killer who was the first convict to kill an on-duty female corrections officer. Smith was already in prison for the murders of at least five people when he murdered prison guard Donna Payant at Green Haven Correctional Facility in 1981.
Keith Hunter Jesperson is a Canadian-American serial killer who murdered at least eight women in the United States during the early 1990s. He was known as the "Happy Face Killer" because he drew smiley faces on his many letters to the media and authorities. Many of his victims were sex workers and transients who had no connection to him. Strangulation was Jesperson's preferred method of murdering, the same method he often used to kill animals as a child.
Altemio C. Sanchez, also known as the Bike Path Rapist, was a Puerto Rican serial killer who is known to have raped and murdered at least three women, and raped at least 9 to 15 girls and women in and around Buffalo, New York, during a 31-year span from 1975, though perhaps earlier, to 2006. He was apprehended in 2007 through DNA evidence and sentenced to 75 years-to-life, serving 16 years before dying from apparent suicide in 2023.
Henry Louis Wallace, also known as the “Taco Bell Strangler”, is an American serial killer who killed eleven black women in South Carolina and North Carolina from March 1990 to March 1994. He is currently awaiting execution at Central Prison in Raleigh.
Lorenzo Jerome Gilyard Jr., known as The Kansas City Strangler, is an American serial killer. A former trash-company supervisor, Gilyard is believed to have raped and murdered at least 13 women and girls from 1977 to 1993. He was convicted of six counts of murder on March 16, 2007.
Carlton Michael Gary was an American serial killer who murdered three elderly women in Columbus, Georgia, and one in Syracuse, New York, between 1975 and 1978, though he is suspected of at least four more killings. Gary was arrested in December 1978 for an armed robbery and sentenced to 21 years in prison. He escaped from custody in 1983 and was caught a year later. Evidence was found linking him to the earlier murders and he was convicted and sentenced to death in August 1986. He was executed by lethal injection on March 15, 2018.
This is a list of notable overturned convictions in the United States.
Chillicothe Correction Institution, or CCI, is a state-run medium security prison on the west bank of the Scioto River just outside Chillicothe, Ohio. It is located adjacent to Ross Correctional Institution and Hopewell Culture National Historical Park. The prison is a former military camp, named for Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman. It later became a federal penitentiary and has housed several high-profile prisoners including Charles Manson in 1952, bootlegger and future NASCAR driver Junior Johnson, and serial killer Anthony Sowell.
Terry Anthony Blair was an American serial killer who was convicted of killing seven women of various ages in Kansas City, Missouri, although investigators believed that there were additional unidentified victims.
Sidney Charles Cooke is an English convicted child molester, murderer and suspected serial killer serving two life sentences. He was the leader of a paedophile ring suspected of up to twenty child murders of young boys in the 1970s and 1980s. Cooke and other members of the ring were convicted of three killings in total, although he was only convicted of one himself.
Anthony Kirkland is an American serial killer. Between 2006 and 2009, Kirkland murdered two women and two girls in the Cincinnati area, following a 16-year prison term for the 1987 killing of his girlfriend.
Michael Madison is an American convicted serial killer and sex offender from East Cleveland, Ohio who was known to have committed the murders of at least three women over a nine-month period in 2012 and 2013. He was arrested and charged with the crimes in 2013 and was sentenced to death in 2016.
Eddie Lee Mosley was an American serial killer and rapist who murdered at least eight women in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, between 1973 and 1987. He was arrested in 2001 following the results of a DNA profiling test, after being the prime suspect in several murders for many years. Before his arrest, two other men were wrongly convicted of several murders later attributed to Mosley: Frank Lee Smith, who spent 15 years in prison and died behind bars before he could be exonerated, and Jerry Townsend, who spent 22 years in prison before being released. Mosley's true victim count is unknown, with authorities speculating that he committed at least 16 murders and dozens of rapes.
The Southside Strangler is the media epithet given by the media, and later used by law enforcement, to a serial killer active in the South Side of Chicago from the 1990s and 2000s, responsible for the murders of numerous girls and young women. It would later be established that the killings were committed by different offenders, including several different serial killers.
Jerome Dennis is an American serial killer and kidnapper who abducted and sexually assaulted seven women and young girls in Essex County, New Jersey, from late 1991 to early 1992, killing five. At the time of the murders, he was on parole for a prior rape conviction. After his arrest, Dennis pleaded guilty and was later sentenced to life imprisonment in 1993.
Steven Dean Gordon is an American serial killer and sex offender who, together with accomplice Franc Cano, killed at least four sex workers in Santa Ana and Anaheim, California from 2013 to 2014. Convicted and sentenced to death for his crimes, Gordon admitted responsibility for at least one further murder, with which he has never been charged.
Donald Gene Miller, known as The East Lansing Serial Killer or simply Don Miller, is an American serial killer and rapist who committed a series of six attacks in East Lansing, Michigan from 1977 to 1978. Four of these resulted in fatalities, to which Miller would later plead guilty and received a lengthy prison sentence with a chance of parole.
