Operating across colonial New South Wales during a period when the interior was sparsely settled and difficult to police, Lynch carried out a sustained series of killings over six years before his capture and confession. His case stands as one of the earliest documented instances of serial murder in Australian history, notable both for the span of his crimes and the number of victims he ultimately acknowledged.

His victims were all elderly women, the youngest sixty years old, the oldest ninety-three — a pattern of predation that earned him the press designation "Granny Killer" and prompted widespread alarm across Sydney's North Shore communities during the fourteen months his crimes went unsolved.

His path from decorated veteran and credentialed educator to mass murderer unfolded over decades of documented deterioration — psychiatric, professional, and social — that went largely unaddressed despite repeated warnings. The attack on the welding shop appears to have been rooted in a specific grievance, making it a targeted act of lethal violence rather than random, but its scale placed it among the deadliest single-perpetrator shootings in Florida history at the time. What the record preserves is less a sudden break than a long accumulation of signs that the institutions around him — schools, courts, the mental health system — were unable or unwilling to act on.

Over six years in the late Soviet period, Golovkin carried out a sustained campaign of abduction and killing targeting children in the Moscow region, operating largely undetected through the social cover of his work with a state horse-breeding facility. The crimes took place during a moment of institutional upheaval, as Soviet law enforcement frameworks were poorly equipped to pursue what Western investigators had long categorized as serial offending. His 1996 execution — carried out by shooting — marked the end of an era in Russian criminal justice, making him the last person put to death before the country's moratorium on capital punishment took effect.

Her path to Ravensbrück was unusual — twice imprisoned by the Nazis for relationships with Jewish men — yet once inside the camp's medical wing, she participated in the systematic killing of female prisoners, overseeing gassings and, by early 1945, reportedly poisoning those too weak to be transported. At her trial she acknowledged the circumstances that made prisoners distrust her, while deflecting responsibility for the killings themselves, and she mounted an elaborate clemency appeal involving claims of espionage and stolen V-2 schematics. The contrast between her pre-camp record and her conduct inside it made her case one of the more complicated to emerge from the Ravensbrück Trials.