One of three core members of the National Socialist Underground, Böhnhardt was part of a neo-Nazi cell that operated for over a decade in Germany largely undetected by authorities, carrying out murders, bombings, and bank robberies. The group's victims were predominantly people of Turkish and Greek origin, and the full extent of the NSU's crimes only came to light after the cell's collapse in 2011. The case exposed significant failures in German domestic intelligence and law enforcement, and prompted years of parliamentary inquiry and public reckoning with institutional blind spots around far-right violence.

Operating under the guise of neighborly care in rural Missouri, Gifford reportedly took in ailing community members and tended to them during illness — a pattern that drew suspicion only after deaths accumulated over years. She was charged with three murders and suspected in as many as fifteen, making her one of the more quietly significant figures in the history of American female serial homicide. The rural setting and her role as a trusted caregiver likely allowed her actions to go unquestioned for as long as they did.

The only woman to have been declared a Jewish messiah, she inherited leadership of a syncretic religious cult at her father Jacob Frank's death in 1791 and sustained it for decades through a combination of claimed divine incarnation and aristocratic patronage. Her effectiveness rested on a carefully constructed mystique — rumors of royal illegitimacy, devotional subcults, and the favor of European courts including a personal visit from Tsar Alexander I — even as the movement's finances and following slowly collapsed around her. The Frankist community she shaped persisted well into the mid-nineteenth century.

Tramunti's tenure as boss of the Lucchese family was brief and marked by legal siege — indicted on stock fraud, convicted of contempt, and ultimately brought down by his connection to one of the most consequential drug cases in organized crime history. His role in financing the French Connection heroin operation placed him at the center of a network that federal authorities had pursued across two continents. He died in federal custody in 1978, having never accepted the narcotics conviction that defined his end.

Operating a private nursing home gave her sustained, unsupervised access to a vulnerable population, and the deaths she caused were for years absorbed into the ordinary arithmetic of an institution caring for the elderly and infirm. At least five murders were confirmed by authorities, though the total count of suspicious deaths at the Archer Home ran to 48. The case prompted enough public attention to leave a cultural trace, later cited as an influence on the dark comedy Arsenic and Old Lace — a fact that underscores how thoroughly the gravity of what happened there was, for a time, repackaged into something else entirely.

His legacy sits at the uneasy intersection of art, crime, and literary mythology — a figure whose actual convictions involved bank fraud, while suspicions of poisoning several people close to him, including a sister-in-law whose life he had insured, were never proven in court. What makes Wainewright enduringly notable is partly the gap between what was suspected and what was prosecuted, and partly how enthusiastically figures like Wilde transformed him into an aesthete-villain for their own purposes. The embellishments say as much about the 19th century's appetite for a certain kind of cultivated wickedness as they do about the man himself.