Kenneth Alessio Bianchi is an American serial killer, kidnapper, and rapist. He is known for the Hillside Strangler murders committed with his cousin Angelo Buono Jr. in Los Angeles, California, as well as for murdering two more women in Washington by himself. Bianchi is currently serving a sentence of life imprisonment in Washington State Penitentiary for these crimes. Bianchi was also at one time a suspect in the Alphabet murders, three unsolved murders in his home city of Rochester, New York, from 1971 to 1973.
Reginald Oliver Denny is a former construction truck driver who was pulled from his truck and severely beaten during the 1992 Los Angeles riots. His attackers, a group of black men who came to be known as the "L.A. Four", targeted Denny because he was white. The attack was captured on video by a news helicopter and broadcast live on U.S. national television.
A home invasion, also called a hot prowl burglary, is a sub-type of burglary in which an offender unlawfully enters into a building residence while the occupants are inside. The overarching intent of a hot prowl burglary can be theft, robbery, assault, sexual assault, murder, kidnapping, or another crime, either by stealth or direct force. Hot prowl burglaries are considered especially dangerous by law enforcement because of the potential for a violent confrontation between the occupant and the offender.
The rapes and murders of Julie and Robin Kerry occurred on April 5, 1991, on the Chain of Rocks Bridge over the Mississippi River in St. Louis, Missouri. The two sisters were raped and then murdered by a group of four males, who also attempted to murder the sisters' cousin.
This is a list of notable overturned convictions in the United States.
The Ripper Crew or the Chicago Rippers was an organized crime group of serial killers, cannibals, rapists, and necrophiles. The group composed of Robin Gecht and three associates: Edward Spreitzer, and brothers Andrew and Thomas Kokoraleis. They were suspected in the murders of 17 women in Illinois in 1981 and 1982, as well as the unrelated fatal shooting of a man in a random drive-by shooting. According to one of the detectives who investigated the case, Gecht "made Manson look like a Boy Scout."
Brian James Dugan is a convicted rapist and serial killer active between 1983 and 1985 in Chicago's western suburbs. He was known for having informally confessed in 1985 to the February 1983 abduction, rape and murder of 10-year-old Jeanine Nicarico of Naperville, Illinois, which was a highly publicized case. He was already in custody for two other rapes and murders, one of a woman in July 1984 and the other an 8-year-old girl in May 1985. He was sentenced to life after pleading guilty to the latter two crimes.
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.
Harvey Louis Carignan was an American serial killer who was sentenced to life in prison for the murders of two women in the early 1970s. He had been previously convicted of a 1949 rape and murder he committed while stationed in the U.S. Army, in Anchorage, Alaska. He was imprisoned at the Minnesota Correctional Facility – Faribault until his death in 2023.
On May 24, 2013, Gabriel Fernandez, an eight-year-old boy from Palmdale, California, who had been abused and tortured over a period of months, died due to a beating from his mother, Pearl Fernandez, and her boyfriend, Isauro Aguirre, two days earlier. Pearl Fernandez and Isauro Aguirre were charged and convicted of first-degree murder with special circumstances of torture. According to prosecutors, Aguirre was allegedly motivated to abuse Fernandez because he believed Fernandez was gay. Pearl was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole and Aguirre was sentenced to death.
On June 2, 2020, David Dorn, a 77-year-old retired police captain, was fatally shot after interrupting the burglary of a pawn shop in The Ville, St. Louis. The incident occurred on the same night as riots in St. Louis, Missouri over the murder of George Floyd. Stephan Cannon, who was 24 years old at the time of the incident, was convicted of his murder on July 20, 2022.
Lorenzo Fayne is an American serial killer and rapist who, between 1989 and 1993, murdered one woman and five children in the states of Wisconsin and Illinois. In 2001, he was convicted and sentenced to death, but the following year, in response to numerous miscarriages of justice in other cases, the Governor of Illinois George Ryan imposed a moratorium on capital punishment, commuting all prisoners' sentences to life imprisonment.
Robert Mark Edwards is an American murderer who killed two female realtors in sexually-motivated murders, one in California in 1986 and another in Hawaii in 1993. In separate trials, he was sentenced to death and to life imprisonment in the respective states and is currently awaiting execution at the San Quentin State Prison.
Ramon Torres Hernandez was an American serial killer, kidnapper and rapist responsible for at least three murders in Bexar County, Texas from 1994 to 2001, and is a prime suspect in two others. Following his arrest, he admitted to the killings, was sentenced to death and ultimately executed in 2012.
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 Wesley Ewell is an American serial killer and former activist who murdered four people in Hawthorne, California, in late 2010. Ewell rose to prominence in the 1990s and 2000s when he advocated against California's "3-strikes" law. In 2006, he appeared on an episode of The Montel Williams Show to express his opinion. Following a guilty plea in 2019, he was sentenced to four consecutive life terms without parole.
Mauricio Rodriguez Silva, known as The Monster, is an American serial killer who killed three people, including his half-sister, during a May 1984 crime spree that spread across California, shortly after being paroled from serving a manslaughter conviction. He was convicted of the latter crimes and sentenced to death and is currently awaiting execution.
Norman Keith Flowers is an American serial killer who killed three women by beating and strangling them in their Las Vegas apartments from March to May 2005. DNA left at each crime scene eventually linked him to the killings and he was arrested. Flowers was tried in 2008 and convicted, receiving a life sentence without parole. He entered an alford plea for the remaining charges in 2011 and received two more life sentences.
Reginald McFadden was an American serial killer who committed a series of rapes and two murders in Rockland and Nassau counties, New York in 1994, which started only 92 days after his parole from a rape-murder committed as a juvenile in Pennsylvania. Sentenced to life imprisonment for the latter crimes, his case brought on changes to the parole system and clemency applications for juvenile offenders in the state of Pennsylvania, as well as similar reforms in New York.
Eugene Blake is an American serial killer who murdered two people in Ohio and West Virginia from 1982 to 1984, shortly after being paroled from a life term for the 1967 murder of a young woman.
