Working as a nursing assistant at a care facility in Olot, Vila i Dilmé carried out a series of killings targeting the most vulnerable residents — elderly patients in their final years of life, some nearly a century old. The crimes unfolded over roughly fourteen months before he was apprehended, and the trust inherent in a caregiving role made the breach all the more complete. His 2014 conviction by the Supreme Court of Spain resulted in a sentence of over 127 years.

Parnell's case drew lasting attention partly because of what ended it: Steven Stayner, held for seven years before escaping in 1980, took Timothy White with him when he fled — an act that exposed the full span of Parnell's crimes. The abductions, separated by nearly a decade, reflected a sustained pattern of targeting and acquiring young children, and his 2004 conviction for attempting to buy a child demonstrated that the pattern persisted well into old age.

His name is most closely associated with the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943, an operation he commanded with deliberate thoroughness and documented in a self-congratulatory report — bound in leather, illustrated with photographs — that he presented to Heinrich Himmler. That report later served as evidence against him at Nuremberg. As SS and Police Leader across occupied Poland and Greece, he oversaw mass deportations and executions on a significant scale, operating within a system he helped enforce at its most brutal point of implementation.

His place in organized crime history rests less on territory or wealth than on violence as a management tool — Anastasia helped build Murder, Inc. into a killing operation that served the broader Mafia infrastructure, and his willingness to order or personally carry out homicides gave him an authority that outlasted any particular racket.

His unit, the SS-Sturmbrigade Dirlewanger, was unusual even by the standards of wartime Germany — staffed largely with convicted criminals and deployed in anti-partisan operations where atrocity became routine rather than exceptional. What distinguished Dirlewanger was not ideology alone but a documented pattern of violence that predated the war, persisted through it, and was deliberately institutionalized in the structure of the force bearing his name. The death toll attributed to his command in Poland and Belarus runs to at least tens of thousands, with the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 among the most concentrated episodes of that destruction.