A career criminal before his crimes escalated to murder, Trobec carried out five killings over two years at a rural homestead, disposing of the victims' remains by burning them in a stove — a method that delayed discovery and underscored the calculated nature of the acts. His case holds a grim legal distinction as well: he became the last person sentenced to death in Slovenia before that sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. The arc of his case, from serial offending to the country's final capital sentence, made him a fixed reference point in Slovenian criminal history.

The case of the Genesee River Killer carries a particular weight because so much of the harm was preventable — his later murders occurred only after an early parole release that psychiatrists and criminologists would subsequently cite as a cautionary example of institutional failure. After serving time for the killings of two children in Watertown, Shawcross was freed and relocated to Rochester, where over the course of roughly two years he killed more than a dozen women. The controversy surrounding his release became as much a part of his legacy as the crimes themselves.

His place here rests less on the independence struggle, which carried broad legitimacy, than on what followed: the authoritarian turn of "Guided Democracy," the suppression of political opposition, and a foreign policy brinkmanship that contributed to the volatile conditions preceding the 1965–66 mass killings, in which an estimated half-million or more Indonesians died. Sukarno did not orchestrate that violence directly, but his years of consolidating personal power, marginalizing institutions, and elevating the Indonesian Communist Party as a counterweight to the military created the explosive tensions that made it possible. The scale of what unfolded under and immediately after his rule places him among the more consequential and contested figures in twentieth-century postcolonial history.