One of Australia's most consequential career criminals of the 1980s, Smith built a criminal enterprise spanning violent robbery, drug trafficking, and murder at a scale his associates placed at A$25 million. His reach extended beyond street crime into documented corruption, making him a figure of lasting significance in Australian organized crime history. He died in prison in 2021, having been incarcerated since 1989.

Engelhardt drew followers from Europe to a remote Pacific island with promises of immortality through coconut consumption and sun worship, and several of them died there — of starvation, disease, or the consequences of radical dietary restriction. His colony on Kabakon operated at the intersection of late nineteenth-century European life-reform movements and a personal ideology that grew increasingly detached from physical reality as his own health deteriorated. What makes him a figure for this site is less malice than the harm produced by conviction: his followers trusted a system that killed them.

Malta's place in history is narrow but consequential — as one of two U.S. Army executioners who carried out the hangings at Nuremberg, he was present at the literal conclusion of the most significant war crimes tribunal of the twentieth century. The ten men executed that morning in 1946 had been convicted for their roles in orchestrating the Second World War and the Holocaust, and the gallows work fell to a small detail of enlisted men tasked with carrying out the court's final verdicts.

Operating within a largely unregulated Victorian market for unwanted infants, Dyer exploited the practice of baby farming over nearly three decades, turning what began as neglect into systematic killing on a scale that remains among the most significant in British criminal history. The infant mortality she caused was obscured by the normalcy of high child death rates in the era, allowing her to continue long after early convictions. Her eventual capture came not through sustained official scrutiny but through a chance discovery in the Thames, underscoring how structural blind spots — legal, medical, and social — enabled her.

Operating through Japan's marriage-hunting websites in the late 2000s, she cultivated relationships with men seeking spouses and systematically defrauded them before poisoning them with carbon monoxide. Convicted of three murders and suspected in four additional deaths, her case drew unusual public attention in Japan — partly for its calculated methodology and partly for the courtroom scrutiny of how an unconventionally presented woman had secured such trust from her victims. The trial prompted broader discussion about vulnerability in online matrimonial spaces and the particular effectiveness of social performance as a means of deception.