Over the course of seven years, Zhang and his associates carried out a sustained campaign of armed robbery across five Chinese provinces, leaving a trail of casualties that made him one of the most wanted criminals in the country during that period. The scale and duration of the operation — spanning dozens of locations and resulting in dozens of deaths and injuries — drew intense public attention and ultimately a nationally publicized manhunt.

The crimes attributed to Barausov unfolded over more than a decade in the remote Sakha region of Russia, with the victims — all underage girls — remaining unconnected to a single perpetrator for decades. His 2023 confession, made while already imprisoned for rape, closed cases that had gone cold for as long as forty years. The long gap between the killings and their resolution reflects both the geographic isolation of the area and the limitations of Soviet-era investigative infrastructure.

A participant in the "Kolínský Gang" operating in the Czech Republic during the mid-1990s, Biederman served as the group's primary instrument of violence across a series of robberies and contract killings. His victims included a department store security guard, a small business owner murdered for money that ultimately wasn't there, a gas station attendant killed during a robbery, a former accomplice eliminated for property interests, and a man targeted as a debt-collection measure by outside contractors. What distinguishes his case is the range of contexts in which lethal violence was employed — opportunistic, premeditated, and hired — and his apparent willingness to act where others in the gang declined.