The nude, bound and mutilated bodies of three eight-year-old Cub Scouts were found in a water-filled ditch in a forest near their West Memphis, Ark., homes, one day after they disappeared in May, 1993.
After police in University City, Missouri, found Kimberly Cantrell shot to death in August, 2000, suspicion quickly fell on her ex-husband, Kimber Edwards, who had been charged with failing to make child support payments.
In a wealthy neighborhood of ranches thirty miles east of Los Angeles, a home was broken into in the early morning hours on a June night in 1983 and three members of the family, along with a family friend, were brutally killed.
In June, 1980, a Lake County, Illinois jury sentenced a truck driver named Robert M. Kubat, who had been in and out of prison for years, to death after convicting him of the murder of Lydia C. Hyde, 63.
Jarvis Jay Masters remains on death row, accused of murdering a corrections officer at San Quentin prison in 1985.
In 1986 the bodies of two so-called “Deadheads” — fans of the Grateful Dead who traveled with the group on tour — were found beaten and shot to death in the San Francisco Bay.
A suburban St. Louis doctor came home one August night in 1998 to find the lifeless body of his wife who had been stabbed 43 times by a butcher knife.
In 1978 a Dallas flight attendant, Wanda Jean Wadle, 26, was murdered by an intruder in the Dallas apartment she shared with another flight attendant.
Sonia Jacobs was convicted of the murder of a Florida state trooper and a visiting Canadian constable at a rest stop outside Miami in 1976; she was on death row for nearly five years before the Florida state court ruled the judge had improperly imposed the death sentence even when the jury did not.
Corey Dewayne Williams took a reduced plea last year for his alleged role in a robbery-murder he confessed to at age 16, after an all-night interrogation in police custody.