His crimes unfolded over six years within a single Chicago neighborhood, targeting women whose circumstances left them especially vulnerable to predation and, afterward, to being overlooked. The Englewood area during the 1990s was home to at least one other active serial killer simultaneously, a convergence that complicated investigations and allowed Crawford's crimes to continue longer than they might have otherwise. The confusion between cases extended even to a false confession by another offender claiming one of Crawford's murders as his own.

DeBardeleben's crimes came to light almost by accident — it was a counterfeiting investigation that led Secret Service agents to evidence of a far more serious pattern of sexual violence spanning years and multiple states. The breadth of what investigators uncovered in his possession after his arrest placed him among the most studied subjects in criminal psychology, and the DSM-IV later cited him specifically as an exemplar of both sexual sadism and antisocial personality disorder. His 375-year federal sentence reflected the scope of documented offenses, while suspected homicides for which he was never tried remained unresolved at his death.

Renczi's case occupies an unusual position in the history of documented crime: widely repeated, luridly detailed, and largely unverifiable. The charges as reported — 35 deaths by arsenic poisoning across two husbands, numerous lovers, and a son — would represent an extraordinary concentration of domestic violence, yet no authoritative record of her trial, conviction, or even birth date has been confirmed. By 1972, the Guinness Book of World Records had declined to credit the claims. She endures in the literature less as a confirmed historical actor than as a case study in how criminal legend propagates in the absence of documentation.