Gwen Amber Rose Araujo was an American teenager who was murdered in Newark, California at the age of 17. She was murdered by four men, two of whom she had been sexually intimate with, who beat and strangled her after discovering that she was transgender. Two of the defendants were convicted of second-degree murder, but not the requested hate-crime enhancements to the charges. The other two defendants pleaded guilty or no-contest to voluntary manslaughter. In at least one of the trials, a "trans panic defense"—an extension of the gay panic defense—was employed.
Hans Thomas Reiser is an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, and convicted murderer. In April 2008, Reiser was convicted of the first-degree murder of his wife, Nina Reiser, who disappeared in September 2006. He subsequently pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of second-degree murder, as part of a settlement agreement that included disclosing the location of Nina Reiser's body, which he revealed to be in a shallow grave near the couple's home.
Brian Gene Nichols is an accused rapist and convicted murderer known for his escape and killing spree in the Fulton County Courthouse in Atlanta, Georgia, on March 11, 2005. Nichols was on trial for rape when he escaped custody and murdered the judge presiding over his trial, a court reporter, a Fulton County Sheriff's deputy, and later an ICE special agent. Twenty-six hours after a large-scale manhunt was launched in the metropolitan Atlanta area, Nichols was taken into custody. The prosecution charged him with committing 54 crimes during the escape; he was found guilty on all counts on November 7, 2008 and was subsequently sentenced to life in prison.
Etan Kalil Patz was an American boy who was six years old on May 25, 1979, when he disappeared on his way to his school bus stop in the SoHo neighborhood of Lower Manhattan. His disappearance helped launch the missing children movement, which included new legislation and new methods for tracking down missing children. Several years after he disappeared, Patz was one of the first children to be profiled on the "photo on a milk carton" campaigns of the early 1980s. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan designated May 25—the anniversary of Etan's disappearance—as National Missing Children's Day in the United States.
Oba Chandler was an American serial killer and mass murderer who was convicted and executed for the June 1989 murders of Joan Rogers and her two daughters, whose bodies were found floating in Tampa Bay, Florida, with their hands and feet bound. Autopsies showed the victims had been thrown into the water while still alive, with ropes tied to a concrete block around their necks. The case became high-profile in 1992 when local police posted billboards bearing enlarged images of the suspect's handwriting recovered from a pamphlet in the victims' car. Chandler was identified as the killer when his neighbor recognized the handwriting.
Charles Randal Smith is a former Canadian pathologist known for performing flawed child autopsies that resulted in wrongful convictions.
Daniel Eric Markel was a Canadian-born attorney and a law professor, who wrote various works on retribution in criminal law and sentencing, with a focus on the role of punishment in the criminal justice system. A native of Toronto, he earned a J.D. degree from Harvard in 2001 and after working briefly as a law clerk and junior associate at a law firm, joined the faculty of Florida State University in 2005.
The Julie Jensen case involves the trial of a Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin man, Mark Jensen, on charges that he murdered his wife, Julie Carol Jensen on December 3, 1998. The case is notable for the eventual admission into evidence of a letter written by the deceased prior to her death expressing suspicion of her husband's intentions.
Caylee Marie Anthony was an American toddler who lived in Orlando, Florida, with her mother, Casey Marie Anthony, and her maternal grandparents, George and Cindy Anthony. On July 15, 2008, she was reported missing in a 9-1-1 call made by Cindy, who said she had not seen Caylee for 31 days. According to what Cindy told the operators, Casey had given varied explanations as to Caylee's whereabouts before eventually saying she had not seen Caylee for weeks. Casey later called the police and falsely told a police dispatcher that Caylee had been kidnapped by a nanny on June 9. Casey was charged with first-degree murder in October 2008 and pled not guilty.
The Shafia family murders took place on June 30, 2009, in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Shafia sisters Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13, along with their father's wife Rona Muhammad Omar, 52, were found dead inside a car that was discovered underwater in front of the northernmost Kingston Mills lock of the Rideau Canal. Zainab, Sahar, and Geeti were daughters of Mohammad Shafia, 58, and his wife, Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 41. The couple also had a son, Hamed, 20, and three other children. Rona, who was herself infertile, was the first wife of Mohammad Shafia in their polygamous household.
Nicholas Lindsey is a Florida juvenile convicted of murder in the first degree of a law enforcement officer from the St. Petersburg Police Department.
Lucia and Leo Krim, aged 6 and 2 respectively, were murdered in the late afternoon of October 25, 2012, at the La Rochelle apartment building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City. The children's part-time caretaker, Yoselyn Ortega, was convicted of stabbing the children to death with kitchen knives while their mother Marina Krim and three-year-old sister Nessie were a few blocks away at a swimming lesson. Upon returning home, their mother and sister found Lucia and Leo dead in a bathtub at the family apartment. Ortega then began stabbing herself repeatedly in the neck and throat. She survived the self-inflicted wounds.
Travis Victor Alexander was an American salesman who was murdered by his ex-girlfriend, Jodi Ann Arias, in his house in Mesa, Arizona. Arias was convicted of first-degree murder on May 8, 2013, and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole on April 13, 2015.
Helen Elizabeth Bailey was a British author who wrote the Electra Brown series of books aimed at a teenage audience.
Aaron Schaffhausen is a man who murdered his three daughters in their house in River Falls, Wisconsin in 2012.
Howell Emanuel "Trai" Donaldson III is a serial killer who was convicted of the 2017 murders of three men and one woman around the Seminole Heights neighborhood of Tampa, Florida. All four victims were shot dead seemingly at random. Prior to his arrest, the media called the killer the Seminole Heights serial killer.
Marrisa Shen was a 13-year-old Canadian girl whose body was found in a wooded area in Central Park in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada, on July 19, 2017.
Rania Alayed was a 25-year-old mother-of-three murdered by her husband in June 2013, in Salford, Greater Manchester, England. Greater Manchester Police (GMP) Chief Detective Inspector Bill Reade described this as an honour killing, and the prosecutors stated she was murdered for trying to achieve independence from her husband and undergoing westernisation. Alayed's remains have never been found.
William Mansfield, Jr. is an American serial killer, child molester and sex offender, responsible for the murders of five women and girls between 1975 and 1980. He buried the bodies of four victims at the family home in Spring Hill, Florida, and later traveled with his brother to California, where he raped and strangled a Watsonville woman. He was convicted of the latter homicide, and later pleaded guilty to the previous murders to avoid the death penalty in Florida, receiving four life sentences.
From 1996 to 2006, Megan Huntsman, an American woman, murdered six of her newborn children shortly after giving birth to them in Utah.
