A product of Prohibition-era organized crime, he built his reputation less through exceptional violence than through a carefully cultivated image — one that his wife Kathryn is said to have actively promoted. The 1933 kidnapping of Oklahoma oil businessman Charles Urschel brought him to national attention and ultimately to Alcatraz, making him one of the more recognizable names of the gangster era despite a career that rarely matched the legend.

Debs occupies a grim place in Australian criminal history, having been convicted of killing two police officers in a single incident — a crime that drew intense public attention and accelerated debate around officer safety. The murders spanned a period of roughly a year, beginning with the killing of a teenage girl in 1997 before culminating in the 1998 ambush. The sentences handed down — four consecutive life terms plus 27 years — reflect the scale of the court's response to what prosecutors presented as deliberate, premeditated violence.

What distinguished List from many killers was not the act itself but the methodical calm that preceded and followed it — the meticulous planning, the letters left behind, and the nearly two decades he spent living quietly under an assumed name before America's Most Wanted brought his face back into public view. His stated motivations blended financial desperation with a particular strain of religious reasoning, making his case a subject of ongoing interest to criminologists and journalists alike.