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24

The figures born on this date share a profile common to a particular strain of violent criminality: serial killers whose crimes unfolded across years or even decades, leaving investigators to piece together patterns long after the damage was done. Richard Biegenwald, whose murders in New Jersey spanned multiple eras of his life, and Dontae Morris, whose killing spree compressed five deaths into a matter of weeks in Tampa, represent opposite ends of that spectrum — one a slow accumulation of violence, the other a sudden eruption. Alongside France's Patrick Tissier, whose offenses stretched across more than twenty years, this cohort reflects how such trajectories can take shape across very different cultures and criminal histories.

August 24, 1952 - Patrick Tissier

His crimes spanned more than two decades, beginning when he was still a teenager, and the victims included children. Beyond the killings themselves, Tissier's case carried legislative weight — it directly prompted France to reform how its penal code addressed child murderers, leaving a procedural mark on the justice system that outlasted his convictions.

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August 24, 1985 - Dontae Morris

Over a span of roughly six weeks in the summer of 2010, Morris carried out a series of shootings in Tampa that left five people dead, including two police officers. The concentrated timeline and the targeting of law enforcement made the case unusually alarming for the city, and the resulting prosecutions produced three separate death sentences across two trials.

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August 24, 1940 - Richard Biegenwald

His criminal record began at sixteen with car theft and escalated to murder within two years of his release back to the New York area — a pattern that would repeat itself after his 1975 parole, when killings resumed after a brief dormant period. What distinguished the later phase of his crimes was their concealment: bodies were stored in garages, buried in basements, and transported across state lines, suggesting a sustained and deliberate effort to avoid detection. The cache of weapons, sedatives, and floor plans found at his Asbury Park home at the time of his arrest pointed to a criminal infrastructure well beyond the crimes he was ultimately charged with.

Read more …August 24, 1940 - Richard Biegenwald

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