Vereș carried out a series of hammer attacks in Romania during the 1970s that left five people dead and others severely injured, yet he never faced criminal imprisonment — a psychiatric determination of schizophrenia redirected his case entirely into the forensic and institutional system. The investigation that followed was unusually extensive for its era, involving thousands of witnesses over three years, suggesting authorities understood the gravity even as state media largely suppressed public coverage. That suppression created a vacuum filled by rumor, inflating the victim count dramatically in popular memory and obscuring the documented record for decades.

His 1974 plot to commandeer a commercial aircraft and crash it into the White House anticipated, in stark outline, the methods used in the September 11 attacks more than two decades later. Byck killed a police officer and a co-pilot before being shot by authorities, never getting the plane off the ground. The scheme drew little public attention at the time, but its logic — civilian aviation as a weapon against a seat of government — later gave it a grim retrospective significance.