What distinguished Helm from other violent figures of the American frontier was the particular nature of his crimes — killings that extended beyond robbery or conflict into acts of cannibalism that were, by some accounts, not entirely driven by desperation. He operated during a period when vast stretches of the West offered little law and considerable opportunity for men willing to use violence, and he used that environment with a kind of ruthless pragmatism. His eventual capture and execution came at the hands of a vigilance committee in Montana Territory, a fitting end for a man who had largely evaded formal justice for years.

Taylor's path from embezzler and escaped prisoner to warlord to head of state traces an arc of compounding violence that left Liberia devastated across two civil wars. His support for Sierra Leone's Revolutionary United Front — whose hallmark atrocities included systematic amputations of civilians — formed the basis of his eventual war crimes conviction by the Special Court for Sierra Leone, making him the first former head of state convicted by an international tribunal since Nuremberg. The scale of regional destabilization he helped engineer across West Africa in the 1990s places him among the most consequential figures of that era's conflicts.

His crimes spanned two decades and two countries, moving from wartime atrocities in China to a sustained campaign of murder in postwar Japan, where he exploited the desperation of women struggling to survive food shortages. The method was consistent: an offer of food or work, the seclusion of forested areas, and violence. What made his postwar killings particularly significant historically is that they unfolded in the immediate aftermath of Japan's defeat, when social dislocation created conditions he systematically used to his advantage.

His case is remembered not only for the act itself but for what it revealed about institutional failure — a prolonged pattern of disruptive and threatening behavior that Concordia University, by later official assessment, was too slow to address. The 1992 shooting of four colleagues on campus prompted lasting policy changes in Canadian university conduct codes and contributed to a major national debate on handgun ownership. Even after conviction, Fabrikant continued to pursue aggressive legal strategies from prison, ultimately being declared a vexatious litigant by the Quebec Superior Court.

Henry VII's inclusion here rests less on atrocity than on the ruthless pragmatism with which he consolidated power — using attainders, financial penalties, and the suppression of rival claimants to neutralize threats to a dynasty that had no deep roots. He came to the throne through force, having spent much of his early life as a fugitive, and governed with a calculated suspicion that kept potential opponents perpetually off-balance. The machinery of his reign — bonds, recognizances, the work of agents like Empson and Dudley — allowed the crown to extract compliance and wealth in ways that later generations would judge as extortion.