Hammond's criminal record predated his murders, but it was a two-year span of shootings across Fresno that defined his place in the record. Three men were killed in separate incidents, the last two occurring within roughly two weeks of each other in late 2022, before his arrest six days after the final killing.

Operating in a rural Piedmontese community where his crimes were initially attributed to wolves, Orsolano carried out a sequence of attacks against children over roughly a year, each followed by deliberate concealment of remains. His eventual exposure came not through investigative method but through a surviving physical clue and a coerced confession. The postmortem treatment of his body — dissection and retention of anatomical specimens by the University of Turin — reflects the period's nascent criminological interest in locating the origins of violent behavior in physical form.

As president of the Confederacy, he led a government whose founding explicitly centered the preservation and expansion of slavery, making him the political face of a secessionist project that cost hundreds of thousands of lives. His prior decades of federal service — as a U.S. Army officer, congressman, and Secretary of War — gave him the institutional knowledge and credibility to organize a sustained military resistance against the Union. The Confederacy he led ultimately failed, but the ideological cause he championed left a durable imprint on American political and social history.