Peter Kürten was a German serial killer, known as "The Vampire of Düsseldorf" and the "Düsseldorf Monster", who committed a series of murders and sexual assaults between February and November 1929 in the city of Düsseldorf. In the years before these assaults and murders, Kürten had amassed a lengthy criminal record for offences including arson and attempted murder. He also confessed to the 1913 murder of a nine-year-old girl in Mülheim am Rhein and the attempted murder of a 17-year-old girl in Düsseldorf.
Attica Correctional Facility is a maximum security campus New York State prison in the town of Attica, New York, operated by the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision. It was constructed in the 1930s in response to earlier riots within the New York state prisons.
San Quentin Rehabilitation Center (SQ), formerly known as San Quentin State Prison, 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.
Henry Lee Lucas, also known as The Confession Killer, was an American convicted murderer. Lucas was convicted of murdering his mother in 1960 and two others in 1983. He rose to infamy as a claimed serial killer while incarcerated for these crimes when he falsely confessed to approximately six hundred other murders to Texas Rangers and other law enforcement officials. Many unsolved cases were closed based on the confessions and the murders officially attributed to Lucas. Lucas was convicted of murdering eleven people and condemned to death for a single case with a then-unidentified victim, later identified as Debra Jackson.
Peter Howard Moore is a British serial killer who managed cinemas in Bagillt, Holyhead, Kinmel Bay and Denbigh in North Wales at the time of his arrest. He murdered four men in 1995. Due to his trademark attire of a black shirt and tie, he was dubbed the "man in black".
HM Prison Full Sutton is a Category A and B men's prison in the village of Full Sutton, near Pocklington in the East Riding of Yorkshire, England. Full Sutton is operated by His Majesty's Prison Service, and holds 596 inmates, as of September 2018. The prison's primary function is to hold, in conditions of high security, some of the most difficult and dangerous criminals in the country.
This is a list of notable overturned convictions in the United States.
Valery Georgievich Asratyan was a Soviet suspected serial killer, convicted for the killing of two women in Moscow between 1988 and 1990. Asratyan, a previously convicted serial rapist and child molester, committed over 20 rapes of girls and young women during the 1980s. Later posing as a film director, Asratyan used anesthesia to render victims unconscious, killing several out of fear of being sent to prison before being apprehended in 1990.
Craig Chandler Price is an American serial killer who committed his crimes in Warwick, Rhode Island between the ages of 13 and 15. He was arrested in 1989 for four murders committed in his neighborhood: a woman and her two daughters that year, and the murder of another woman two years earlier. He had an existing criminal record for petty theft.
The Wineville Chicken Coop murders, also known as the Wineville Chicken murders, were a series of abductions and murders of young boys that occurred in the city of Los Angeles and in Riverside County, California, United States, between 1926 and 1928. The murders were carried out by Gordon Stewart Northcott, a 19-year-old farmer who had moved to the U.S. from Canada two years prior, as well as his mother, Sarah Louise Northcott, and his nephew, Sanford Clark.
Pedro Rodrigues Filho, also known as Pedrinho Matador, Killer Lil' Pedro, Killer Killer Petey, or simply Killer Petey, was a Brazilian serial killer, spree killer, vigilante, and YouTuber known for pursuing and killing exclusively suspected criminals as a teenager, between the age of 14 and 19, in particular an entire gang in response to the murder of his pregnant girlfriend. Officially sentenced for 71 murders but claiming to have killed over 100 drug dealers, rapists, and murderers, he served 34 years in prison before his release in 2007. In 2011, Rodrigues was imprisoned again on charges of inciting riot and deprivation of liberty; he was sentenced to eight years in prison, but was released again in 2018 after seven years on good behavior.
Teresa Elena De Simone was murdered in Southampton, England, in 1979. Her murder led to one of the longest proven cases of a miscarriage of justice in English legal history. The murder occurred outside the Tom Tackle pub and was the subject of a three-year police investigation which resulted in the arrest of Sean Hodgson. Hodgson was convicted of the murder by a unanimous jury verdict in 1982 and was sentenced to life imprisonment. After serving 27 years in prison he was exonerated and released in March 2009. DNA analysis of semen samples that had been preserved from the original crime scene showed that they could not have come from him.
Sidney Charles Cooke is an English convicted child molester 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.
Edward Wayne Edwards was an American serial killer and former fugitive. Edwards escaped from jail in Akron, Ohio, in 1955 and fled across the country, holding up gas stations. By 1961, he was on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list.
Brett Peter Cowan is an Australian murderer and serial child rapist. He was convicted of the murder of Daniel Morcombe, a 13-year-old boy who disappeared from the Sunshine Coast on 7 December 2003. His abduction led to an eight-year investigation involving various suspects. As a result of these investigations, Cowan led undercover police to a potential burial site. He was charged with the murder that same month, and Morcombe's remains were discovered days later on 17 August. Cowan was sentenced to life imprisonment, on 13 March 2014 in a trial that attracted worldwide attention. Cowan had two previous convictions for sexually abusing children, the earliest dating back to 1987.
Larissa Schuster is an American convicted murderer who was sentenced to life in prison without parole in 2008 for committing the July 2003 murder of her estranged husband Timothy Schuster by submerging his body in hydrochloric acid. Due to the unusual manner in which she committed the murder, Larissa's case made national headlines. She has been dubbed "the Acid Lady" by various media outlets.
John Childs, also known as Bruce Childs, is a British hitman and serial killer from East London who was convicted in 1979 for a series of apparent contract killings, though none of the bodies have been found. He implicated Terry Pinfold and Harry MacKenney in the murders, but they were released in 2003 after the judge ruled that Childs is a "pathological liar". Childs is serving a whole life tariff. He is known as the most prolific hitman in the UK.
Anthony Cook and Nathaniel Cook are American serial killer brothers who committed a series of at least 9 rapes and murders of mostly couples in Toledo, Ohio, area between 1973 and 1981. Their guilt was established in the late 1990s thanks to DNA profiling, after which both brothers were convicted and sentenced to long terms of imprisonment.
Oleg Viktorovich Rylkov, known as The Tolyatti Ripper, is a Russian serial killer, rapist and pedophile. Between 1992 and 1997, he raped 37 underage girls and killed 12 people in the city of Tolyatti, in the Samara Oblast.
