His rise to dominance within the Sicilian Mafia rested on a deliberate strategy of extreme violence that broke with the organization's own internal codes — targeting rivals, witnesses, magistrates, and civilians alike. As head of the Corleonesi, Riina used law enforcement's response to his campaigns as a tool, allowing state crackdowns to eliminate established bosses who stood in his way. The assassinations of prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992 brought his methods to their most visible and consequential point, triggering a national reckoning with organized crime in Italy.

Operating in the Novosibirsk Oblast town of Berdsk across several years, Yudin targeted women in public spaces and isolated locations, often retaining objects taken from victims as trophies. His crimes prompted widespread behavioral changes among the local population — women altering their appearance and avoiding going out after dark — before DNA evidence finally connected the killings. The subsequent revelation that a man who falsely confessed to one of the murders was himself linked to separate murders added a further layer of complexity to the case's already troubled investigative history.

Operating across rural southeastern France in the 1890s, Vacher preyed largely on isolated young farm workers and shepherds over a three-year span, making his crimes difficult to connect and his movements hard to track. The uncertainty in the victim count — anywhere from eleven to fifty — reflects both the geographic spread of the killings and the investigative limitations of the era. His eventual capture and trial became a landmark moment in the developing field of forensic psychiatry, as courts grappled seriously with questions of criminal responsibility and feigned insanity.

Ranked among the ten greatest jurists in American history by Harvard Law School Dean Roscoe Pound, Ruffin's legal legacy is inseparable from his role in sustaining slavery — as an enslaver, a slave trader, and the author of North Carolina v. Mann (1829), which declared the power of an enslaver over an enslaved person to be absolute. The opinion's logic was as precise as it was consequential, and its influence reached well beyond North Carolina's borders. That the same mind shaped foundational doctrine in property, torts, and economic development makes his case a particular study in how legal authority can simultaneously advance and entrench profound harm.