Over the course of 2003, Howell killed seven women in Connecticut, concealing their remains in a wooded area behind a strip mall where they went largely undiscovered for years. The delayed identification of victims and the extended gap between the crimes and his eventual conviction for all seven murders made his case a prolonged reckoning for investigators and the families involved.

His victims were children already on the margins — runaways and orphans — whom he targeted precisely because their disappearances were less likely to draw immediate attention. Operating in Nakhodka through the mid-to-late 1990s, Krotov combined sexual abuse, alcohol, and the production of child pornography before his crimes escalated to murder; the killings themselves began almost incidentally, then continued as a matter of concealment. The nickname assigned to him by Russian media reflects both the regional notoriety of his case and the broader cultural weight of the Chikatilo comparison in post-Soviet crime history.

What made Romand's case so unsettling was not the violence alone but the architecture of deception beneath it — nearly two decades of sustained fabrication, complete with false credentials, invented professional obligations, and embezzled savings, all maintained within the intimate circle of a family who trusted him completely. When that structure finally threatened to collapse, he chose annihilation over exposure. The case prompted serious literary and psychological examination, most notably Emmanuel Carrère's 2000 book The Adversary, precisely because the lie itself seemed to demand as much explanation as the killings it ultimately produced.

Noriega's career traced a long arc from CIA asset to international fugitive, making him one of the Cold War era's more instructive case studies in the consequences of proxy relationships. He held power in Panama not through any formal office but through control of the military and a willingness to use intelligence services as instruments of personal rule. His eventual indictment on drug trafficking charges and removal by U.S. military invasion in 1989 marked a rare instance of a former intelligence collaborator becoming the explicit target of the country that had cultivated him.