His place in history is defined less by cruelty than by proximity to state power at its most absolute — the man who operated the guillotine on behalf of the French Republic during some of its most turbulent decades, including the Occupation and its aftermath. As the last executioner to carry out a public execution in France, he marks a particular threshold in the long history of capital punishment's relationship with public spectacle.

Fernandez and his partner Martha Beck exploited the vulnerability of lonely, often middle-aged women who sought companionship through newspaper personal ads — a predatory method that gave their crimes both their scale and their particular cold quality. Operating over roughly two years in the late 1940s, the pair are suspected of killing as many as twenty people, though confirmed victims number three. The case drew widespread public attention after their 1949 arrest and has remained a reference point for the study of predatory partnerships and the dangers of deception dressed as romance.

Operating in the closed nuclear city of Novouralsk across a span of roughly five years, Petrov targeted young girls and managed to continue largely unimpeded in part because local authorities were slow to acknowledge a serial offender was active in the area. The pattern of his crimes — abduction from public spaces, including in daylight — created sustained fear in the community before investigators identified him. He was ultimately convicted of eleven murders and sentenced to life imprisonment in 2005.

The case drew international attention not only for the severity of the crime — the rape and murder of a seven-year-old girl from Iran's Afghan minority community — but for the legal and ethical questions surrounding the execution of a juvenile offender. He was sixteen at the time of the offense and was put to death days after turning eighteen, a sequence that placed the case at the intersection of criminal justice, child rights, and Iran's treatment of its Afghan population.

Operating across three countries over a two-year period, Rigo conducted a sustained campaign of violence against women before Slovak authorities brought him to account. The cross-border nature of his crimes — spanning Bratislava, Munich, and Amsterdam — complicated early investigative efforts and allowed the killings to continue. He died in Leopoldov Prison while serving a life sentence for nine murders and one attempted murder.

Her tenure as a concentration camp overseer lasted less than a year, yet the testimony against her at the Stutthof trial documented a pattern of deliberate cruelty toward prisoners in her charge — including exposure to freezing temperatures and cold water in winter conditions. She was tried, convicted, and executed in 1946, one of relatively few camp personnel to face formal postwar justice. Her case is a documented instance of how ordinary institutional roles within the Nazi camp system were used to inflict calculated suffering at a personal level.