Over five months in the early 1990s, Lastennet targeted elderly women across several Parisian suburbs, killing five before his arrest. The concentrated timeframe and the vulnerability of his victims made the case a notable instance of serial predation in postwar French criminal history. He spent the remainder of his life incarcerated, dying in prison in 2023.

Active across London's gay nightlife circuit in the mid-1980s, Lupo carried out a series of strangulations that targeted men he met in bars and clubs, killing at least four and leaving others severely injured. His crimes went undetected for a period partly because the victims were connected only through the spaces where they moved, and partly because the social and institutional attitudes of the era shaped how both witnesses and police interpreted what they saw.

What unfolded in Colebrook on August 19, 1997 was the end point of a grievance that had been building for roughly fifteen years — a sustained, fixating anger directed at government institutions over a property dispute that Drega apparently never let go. His targets that day were not random: two state troopers, a judge, and a newspaper editor each represented, in some way, the authority structures he held responsible. The deliberateness of the target selection, combined with the sustained engagement with law enforcement that followed, distinguishes this case from more impulsive acts of violence.

Coffman's case drew sustained attention partly because of its collaborative nature — she and her boyfriend James Gregory Marlow carried out the killings together, raising questions about coercion, culpability, and the dynamics of violence within intimate partnerships that courts and criminologists continued to examine long after the convictions. Her prosecution in California in connection with the 1986 deaths of two women resulted in one of the earlier instances of a woman being sentenced to death in that state.

Greenwood operated across more than a decade in Southern California, targeting a population whose deaths were unlikely to draw sustained public attention — a pattern that allowed him to continue long after his first killings. His victims were unhoused men on the margins of Los Angeles, and the ritualistic elements found at crime scenes complicated an already difficult investigation. When he was finally identified, it was through a surviving victim rather than forensic breakthrough.

Operating in and around Buffalo, New York for over three decades, Sanchez carried out a sustained pattern of sexual violence and murder that went undetected for much of that span. His ability to avoid identification while continuing to attack — across a period stretching from the mid-1970s into the 2000s — reflects both the investigative challenges of cold-case serial crimes and the geographic consistency of his methods. The eventual break in the case came not through traditional detective work but through familial DNA, marking it as an early example of that technique's utility in identifying long-sought offenders.

His wealth was built at the intersection of land, finance, and human trafficking — he traded enslaved people alongside livestock, helped found a regional bank, and became Tennessee's first millionaire. The scale of his commercial enterprise placed him among the most economically influential figures in the antebellum South, and his success depended directly on the buying and selling of human beings as property.

His military record before 1861 was exemplary — decades of service, the Mexican-American War, West Point's superintendency — which made his decision to resign his U.S. Army commission and take command of Confederate forces in Virginia all the more consequential. As commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, he prolonged a war fought in defense of a slaveholding republic, inflicting and absorbing enormous casualties across four years of major engagements. His tactical effectiveness is what makes him a figure of lasting historical weight: a more capable general might have shortened the war, a less capable one might never have extended it so far.