Steven Allan Avery is an American convicted murderer from Manitowoc County, Wisconsin, who had previously been wrongfully convicted in 1985 of sexual assault and attempted murder. After serving 18 years of a 32-year sentence, Avery was exonerated by DNA testing and released in 2003, only to be charged in another murder case two years later.
Robert Christian Boes Hansen, popularly known as the Butcher Baker, was an American serial killer active in Anchorage, Alaska, between 1972 and 1983. Hansen abducted, raped and murdered at least seventeen women. Many of the women abducted were released by Hansen into the wilderness and hunted with a Ruger Mini-14 and hunting knives. Hansen was captured in 1983 and sentenced to 461 years' imprisonment without the possibility of parole. He died in 2014 of natural causes at age 75.
The Mahmudiyah rape and killings were a series of war crimes committed by five U.S. Army soldiers during the U.S. occupation of Iraq, involving the gang-rape and murder of 14-year-old Iraqi girl Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi and the murder of her family on March 12, 2006. It occurred in the family's house to the southwest of Yusufiyah, a village to the west of the town of Al-Mahmudiyah, Iraq. Other members of al-Janabi's family murdered by American soldiers included her 34-year-old mother Fakhriyah Taha Muhasen, 45-year-old father Qassim Hamza Raheem, and 6-year-old sister Hadeel Qassim Hamza al-Janabi. The two remaining survivors of the family, 9-year-old brother Ahmed and 11-year-old brother Mohammed, were at school during the massacre and orphaned by the event.
Kiplyn Davis was a 15-year-old Spanish Fork high school student who disappeared from her high school campus in Spanish Fork, Utah. She is one of the featured children on the Polly Klaas Foundation website. In 2011, a classmate was convicted of manslaughter in the murder of Davis and sentenced to 15 years in prison. However, the man refused to name his alleged accomplices or indicate where Davis's remains were supposedly concealed.
Guin "Richie" Phillips was a gay man in Elizabethtown, Kentucky. Phillips disappeared on June 17, 2003. His body was found on June 25, 2003, in a suitcase in Rough River Lake.
The body of Dean Shillingsworth was discovered by children in a pond in Mandurama Reserve at Ambarvale, New South Wales, Australia on 17 October 2007. The child's body was wrapped in two plastic bags contained within a tartan suitcase. Due to the length of time the child was in the water, the body was decomposed. The local police set up a crime scene which was investigated by NSW Police Forensic Services Group. The forensic evidence and investigation led to the boy's mother. Police subsequently arrested his mother, Rachel Pfitzner, who lived in nearby Rosemeadow. She was charged with Dean's murder. She pleaded guilty to murder and was sentenced to a maximum of 25½ years in prison.
Sandra Renee Cantu was an American girl who gained national attention after she disappeared from Tracy, California, on March 27, 2009. Her body was discovered ten days later inside a suitcase in a local irrigation pond. On April 10, police arrested a local woman, 28-year-old Melissa Huckaby, and charged her with the kidnapping, rape, and murder of Cantu. Huckaby pleaded guilty to the kidnapping and murder of Cantu and was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole in 2010.
The Maywand District murders were the thrill killings of at least three Afghan civilians perpetrated by a group of U.S. Army soldiers from January to May 2010, during the War in Afghanistan. The soldiers, who referred to themselves as the "Kill Team", were members of the 3rd Platoon, Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion, 1st Infantry Regiment, and 5th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division. They were based at FOB Ramrod in Maiwand, in Kandahar Province of Afghanistan.
The history of violence against LGBTQ people in the United States is made up of assaults on gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender individuals, legal responses to such violence, and hate crime statistics in the United States of America. The people who are the targets of such violence are believed to violate heteronormative rules and they are also believed to contravene perceived protocols of gender and sexual roles. People who are perceived to be LGBTQ may also be targeted for violence. Violence can also occur between couples who are of the same sex, with statistics showing that violence among female same-sex couples is more common than it is among couples of the opposite sex, but male same-sex violence is less common.
Melanie Lyn McGuire is an American former nurse who was convicted of murdering her husband on April 28, 2004, in what media dubbed the "suitcase murder". She was sentenced to life in prison on July 19, 2007, and is serving her sentence at the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women in Clinton, New Jersey. She will not be eligible for parole until she is 101 years old.
Amber Gail "Aimee" Creek was an American teenage girl from Palatine, Illinois, who was murdered in February 1997. Creek's body was found in Burlington, Wisconsin, not long after she ran away from a youth shelter. Creek remained unidentified for approximately one year, and it was not until April 2014 that police arrested a suspect, James Eaton, a native of Palatine. Eaton pleaded no contest to a reduced charge of reckless homicide in late 2016.
Kenneth "Ken" R. Kratz is a former American lawyer who served as district attorney of Calumet County, Wisconsin. He gained attention for trying a highly publicized homicide case, State of Wisconsin v. Steven Avery (2007), in which Avery and his nephew Brendan Dassey were both convicted. The trial served as the subject of Making a Murderer (2015), a 10-episode documentary series produced by Netflix.
Alfred J. Gaynor is an American serial killer and rapist who committed a series of nine murders in the city of Springfield, Massachusetts from 1995 to 1998. For these crimes, Gaynor was subsequently given four sentences of life imprisonment without parole.
Phoenix Netts was a murder victim whose body was found hidden in two suitcases in the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire, near the England–Wales border in May 2020.
Ee Lee was an American woman who was raped and murdered by two black teenagers in a racially-motivated daylight attack in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The two perpetrators, Kamare Lewis and Kevin Spencer, pleaded guilty to first-degree reckless homicide and second-degree sexual assault in 2023. Later that year, Lewis was sentenced to 26 years in prison, while Spencer was sentenced to 32 years in prison.
Sunny Ang Soo Suan, alias Anthony Ang, was a Singaporean racing driver and part-time law student who gained notoriety for the murder of his girlfriend Jenny Cheok Cheng Kid near Sisters' Islands. Ang was charged and tried for murder in the High Court of Singapore solely based on circumstantial evidence and without a body. His case attracted substantial attention in Singapore and Malaysia given that he was the first to be tried for murder without a body in these two countries.
Ashley Zhao was a five-year-old girl who was discovered dead in her family's restaurant in Jackson Township, Stark County, Ohio, U.S., on January 10, 2017. Her death sparked an investigation led by the local police department in cooperation with the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
George Lamar Jones was an American serial killer who killed at least three women in Mississippi and Wisconsin from 1972 to 1997, with his latter murders occurring at the same time as those of Walter E. Ellis, another unrelated serial killer. For his respective crimes, Jones was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment, remaining behind bars until his death in 2012.
On 11 June 2014, 59-year-old Muhammad Noor, a Pakistani tissue paper seller, was murdered by his two compatriots Rasheed Muhammad and Ramzan Rizwan, who both smothered him to death and robbed him of S$6,000, after they lost their own money to Muhammad over a game of cards.
