Lundgren operated at the intersection of religious authority and coercion, using self-styled scriptural interpretation to consolidate control over a small but devoted following. The 1989 killing of the Avery family — including three children — was carried out by Lundgren and his followers as a calculated act within the group's internal logic, making it a case where cultic belief systems produced direct, organized violence. His story remains notable as an example of how charismatic religious leadership, even at a small scale, can generate lethal outcomes.

The Dalton Gang's raid on Coffeyville, Kansas stands as one of the most catastrophic failures in the history of American outlawry — an attempt to rob two banks simultaneously that left four of five gang members dead in the street. Emmett alone walked away, though barely, absorbing 23 gunshot wounds before he was captured and later imprisoned. His story occupies an unusual place in the record of frontier crime: a surviving witness to the consequences of that violence, who lived on for another four and a half decades after the gunfight that killed his brothers.

Operating in the small Chilean town of Queilén over the course of roughly a year, Millatureo committed three murders that left a lasting enough mark on the community to earn him a lasting epithet. His case is notable for its legal trajectory as much as the crimes themselves — a death sentence handed down, then commuted, then followed by release after two decades. That he was freed in 2018 places him among the relatively rare figures on this site whose story has a living, unresolved dimension.

His inclusion here rests less on his own actions than on the lasting influence of his ideas — particularly the argument, laid out in The Prince, that effective rulers must be willing to act outside moral constraints when power demands it. Written in 1513 during a period of political exile and upheaval in Florence, the work became a reference point for generations of rulers and strategists who found in it a justification for ruthlessness dressed as pragmatism. His name eventually entered common usage as a shorthand for cynical manipulation, a fate that somewhat obscures the nuance of his broader body of work as a diplomat, historian, and observer of Renaissance statecraft.