Towns built a substantial commercial empire across colonial Australia, but his lasting notoriety rests on his central role in establishing the Queensland labor trade — the systematic recruitment, and frequent coercion, of Pacific Islander workers known as Kanakas to labor on cotton and sugar plantations under conditions that drew contemporary criticism and later condemnation as a form of indenture bordering on enslavement. The scale of his operations and his political standing gave the practice an institutional legitimacy that helped entrench it across the colony for decades. He is remembered as a founding figure of Queensland's economy precisely because he shaped both its infrastructure and its most exploitative labor arrangements.

Operating across Barnaul and Buranovo over more than a decade, Manishin carried out a series of attacks against young girls and women that went unsolved for over thirty years — a cold case that persisted through the collapse of the Soviet Union and well into the twenty-first century. The eventual identification came not through conventional investigation but through DNA evidence collected long after the crimes, followed by a confession. His 2025 conviction closed one of Russia's more enduring unresolved serial murder cases.

A pattern of targeted violence against a specific profession gave this case an unusual forensic profile, with investigators eventually tracing the crimes to a single perpetrator whose victims shared an occupation rather than a neighborhood or social circle. Demirci's stated motive — childhood abuse at the hands of a furniture shop owner — shaped a fixation that persisted for years and crossed into homicide. The media epithet he earned reflects how clearly the targeting logic emerged once the killings were connected.

Over roughly a decade beginning in the late 1980s, Gao Chengyong killed at least eleven women and girls across Gansu and Inner Mongolia, preying predominantly on those wearing red — a detail that would later help investigators build his profile. His case remained unsolved for nearly thirty years, a cold case that closed only when advances in DNA genealogy matching led investigators to his family and then to him, operating all that time as an ordinary market vendor in Baiyin. The gap between his public life and the scale of what investigators uncovered made his eventual arrest one of the most discussed criminal cases in modern Chinese history.

As head of Hezbollah's Unit 121, he operated at the intersection of state-level politics and covert violence, overseeing assassination operations that reached the highest levels of Lebanese public life. The Special Tribunal for Lebanon identified him as a principal figure in the 2005 killing of Prime Minister Rafic Hariri — an attack that reshaped the country's political landscape and drew international condemnation. He spent years as a fugitive, tried and convicted in absentia, while a $10 million reward went unclaimed.