Over the course of just three weeks in early 1996, Gamper carried out a series of street executions in Merano, targeting victims apparently on the basis of language and perceived ethnicity, using a rifle concealed in a backpack. The killings unfolded against the long-standing tensions between South Tyrol's German-speaking and Italian-speaking communities, lending the case a political dimension that drew significant attention from the German press. His background — marked by childhood trauma, association with a secessionist group, and an escalating pattern of grievance — made him a figure studied as much for what the murders revealed about regional ethnic hostility as for the crimes themselves.

Operating under an assumed identity in Panama, he methodically befriended American expatriates before killing them and burying their bodies on his property — a pattern of predatory trust-building that allowed him to claim multiple victims before his arrest. His case drew particular attention because of how effectively he had embedded himself in a loose, remote community of foreign nationals with limited ties to law enforcement. The Panamanian conviction and lengthy sentence came years after his 2010 arrest, with proceedings complicated by questions of applicable sentencing law.

His case drew federal attention not for the first murder — committed while serving in the Marines — but for what followed inside the highest-security prison in the United States, where the constraints meant to contain him proved structurally insufficient. Between 1979 and 1983, Fountain killed four people at USP Marion, including a correctional officer stabbed to death hours after a fellow Aryan Brotherhood member killed another officer in the same facility on the same day. The coordinated nature of those 1983 killings prompted the Attorney General to address Congress on the limits of federal sentencing, and the Marion lockdown that followed contributed directly to the design and construction of ADX Florence, the federal supermax that still operates today.

Stano operated across Florida and New Jersey over the course of roughly a decade, targeting women and girls in vulnerable circumstances — hitchhikers, sex workers, runaways — and adapting his methods across dozens of attacks before his arrest in 1980. The gap between his confirmed 23 victims, his 41 confessions, and the estimated upper count of 88 reflects how difficult investigators found it to verify crimes that had gone undetected for years.