A former police officer, Tkach used his professional knowledge to evade detection for roughly a quarter century, operating across the Soviet Union and later independent Ukraine. His victims were overwhelmingly women and girls, and the span of his crimes — 1980 to 2005 — meant he continued killing through successive political and institutional upheavals that complicated cross-jurisdictional investigation. He was ultimately convicted of thirty-seven killings, making him one of the most prolific convicted serial killers in post-Soviet history.

Rice's career spanned commerce, civic life, and armed service to the Confederacy — but the thread that places him here is his work as a slave trader in antebellum Atlanta, a trade that sat alongside his other business ventures as simply another line of enterprise.

Percy's sole conviction — for the 1969 murder of twelve-year-old Yvonne Tuohy — understates the shadow he cast over Australian cold case history. Investigators traced his movements across years of naval postings and family caravan holidays, finding him geographically proximate to a succession of unsolved child killings and disappearances throughout the 1960s; he was posthumously ruled responsible for the death of Linda Stilwell, and remained the leading suspect in several others. The cache of diaries, drawings, and clippings recovered from a storage unit in 2007 suggested a private record-keeping that outlasted his legal accountability. He died in 2013 without confirming or denying involvement in any crime beyond the one for which he was committed, leaving multiple families without resolution.

His early career as a Liberal military hero — fighting French intervention and conservative reaction — gave little indication of what three decades of near-absolute rule would look like. The regime known as the Porfiriato maintained order through a combination of co-optation, political repression, and rurales enforcement, suppressing indigenous land rights and labor organizing while opening Mexico to foreign capital. The inequalities it entrenched contributed directly to the conditions that ignited the Mexican Revolution of 1910.