Lois Heather Mack is an American heiress convicted of murdering her mother, Sheila von Wiese, while on vacation in Bali, Indonesia, in August 2014. The murder was widely publicized internationally because Mack and her boyfriend stuffed von Wiese-Mack's body in a suitcase. She was sentenced to 10 years, of which she served seven. However, in 2021 on her arrival to United States, Mack was arrested on conspiracy and obstruction charges. In June 2023, Mack pleaded guilty to one count of conspiring to kill a U.S. national, and was later sentenced in January, 2024 to 26 years in prison.
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 with murder 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 whom he may have attacked in the wilderness 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.
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 LGBT people in the United States is made up of assaults on gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender individuals (LGBT), 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 LGBT 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.
Sian Emma O'Callaghan was a 22-year-old British woman who disappeared from Swindon, Wiltshire, England, having last been seen at a nightclub in the town in the early hours of 19 March 2011. Her body was found on 24 March near Uffington in Oxfordshire. On 19 October 2012, at Bristol Crown Court, Christopher Halliwell, 48, of Nythe, Swindon pleaded guilty to O'Callaghan's murder.
The Peterborough ditch murders were a series of murders which took place in Cambridgeshire, England, in March 2013. All three victims were male and died from stab wounds. Their bodies were discovered dumped in ditches outside Peterborough. In Hereford, two other men were stabbed but survived. The perpetrator was Joanna Christine Dennehy, a Cambridgeshire woman, who was later sentenced to life imprisonment with a whole life order.
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.
On May 31, 2014, in Waukesha, Wisconsin, United States, two 12-year-old girls, Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser, lured their friend Payton Leutner into a wooded area of a local park and stabbed her 19 times to appease the fictional character Slender Man. Weier and Geyser were both found not guilty by mental disease or defect and committed to mental health institutions. Weier received a sentence of 25 years to life and Geyser was sentenced to 40 years to life. After seven years in custody, Weier was granted early release and will be under supervision until age 37.
Brendan Ray Dassey is an American convicted murderer from Manitowoc County, Wisconsin, who at 16 confessed to being a party to first-degree murder, mutilation of a corpse, and second-degree sexual assault. He was sentenced to life in prison with the earliest possibility of parole in 2048. His videotaped interrogation and confession, which he recanted at trial, substantially contributed to his conviction. Parts were shown, but much was left out, in the Netflix documentary series Making a Murderer (2015). The series examined the 2005–2007 investigation, prosecution, and trials of Dassey and his uncle, Steven Avery, both of whom were convicted of murdering the photographer Teresa Halbach on October 31, 2005.
Aaron Schaffhausen is a man who murdered his three daughters in their house in River Falls, Wisconsin in 2012.
The Mitsero murders were a series of killings committed by Nikos Metaxas, a military officer in the Cypriot National Guard, between September 2016 and August 2018. Five of his seven victims were female foreigners he had met on the online dating site Badoo. The remaining two victims were young children and were the daughters of two of his adult victims.
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.
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.
