Malvo was a teenager when he participated in the 2002 D.C. sniper attacks, a three-week campaign of random shootings that paralyzed the Washington metropolitan area and killed ten people. His case drew sustained attention to the psychological dimensions of the crimes — specifically, how John Allen Muhammad had cultivated a relationship with a young, vulnerable Malvo and shaped his worldview before enlisting him in the violence. Later accounts of abuse and manipulation complicated straightforward readings of culpability, making Malvo one of the more legally and ethically contested figures in modern American criminal history.

The five victims were all infants, taken from strollers left unattended for moments outside stores in and around Moscow over the span of roughly five weeks in the autumn of 1977. The case triggered one of the largest police operations in Moscow's history, yet Soviet authorities reportedly suppressed public information about it — in part, according to later accounts, because of the decorated military standing of Biryukov's father. The deliberate targeting of the most vulnerable victims, combined with the institutional silence that followed, gives the case a particular weight in Soviet criminal history.

What distinguished Berg's influence was the institutional architecture he built around his beliefs — a communal religious movement that systematized sexual exploitation and deployed it as both doctrine and recruitment strategy across decades. His group's practices left documented harm across generations of members, including children raised within its structures. The organization he founded outlasted him, continuing under successive names and remaining a subject of legal and journalistic scrutiny long after his death.

The wartime blackout that was meant to protect Londoners from German bombs also provided cover for a concentrated spree of killings in February 1942, carried out by an RAF serviceman who attacked six women in five days. The murders stood out even to experienced investigators for the severity of violence inflicted, and the case moved quickly from crime to execution — Cummins was hanged within months of his conviction, dying at Wandsworth during an air raid.

Ridgway operated across more than sixteen years, targeting women in vulnerable circumstances — many of them runaways or sex workers — whose disappearances drew little initial attention and whose remains were often not found for months or years. That prolonged obscurity, along with investigators' inability to build a case despite his being a suspect from nearly the beginning, allowed the crimes to continue long past what might otherwise have been possible. It was ultimately advances in DNA technology, not a break in investigative leads, that ended his freedom. "Gary Leon Ridgway (born February 18, 1949), known as the Green River Killer or the Green River Strangler, is an American serial killer who was convicted of murdering forty-nine women between 1982 and 1998 in the northwestern United States. At the time of his arrest in 2001, he was believed to be the most prolific serial killer in United States history, according to confirmed murders." — Wikipedia

Her reign marked one of the most sustained episodes of religiously motivated state violence in English history, as she pursued the restoration of Catholicism through the burning of nearly 300 Protestants — executions that earned her the enduring epithet "Bloody Mary." What distinguishes her place in this catalog is less the scale of violence by European standards of the era than its concentration and deliberate institutional character, carried out through the courts and the church working in concert. She came to power against significant opposition and proved a capable political actor in securing the throne, which makes the use to which she put that power all the more historically significant.