A baker by trade in Anchorage, Hansen carried out a sustained campaign of abduction and murder across more than a decade, his crimes shaped by the isolation of the Alaskan wilderness, which he weaponized as part of the act itself. His method of releasing victims into remote terrain to hunt them distinguished his case from comparable crimes and reflected a calculated, prolonged pattern of violence rather than impulsive acts. Investigators connected him to at least seventeen deaths before his arrest in 1983, with the full scope of his activity only emerging through extensive forensic and geographic work.

Gargiulo's crimes unfolded across multiple states over more than a decade, targeting women in or near their homes — often those he knew as neighbors or acquaintances, a pattern that made him difficult to identify and slow to pursue. His eventual conviction in California drew renewed attention to earlier killings that investigators had long struggled to connect to a single perpetrator.

One of five brothers who collectively built one of Mexico's most formidable trafficking organizations, he assumed leadership of the Beltrán Leyva Cartel following his brother Arturo's death in a 2009 military raid — a transition that demonstrated the cartel's structural resilience amid sustained government pressure.

Few individuals occupy as singular a position in the history of state violence as the man who served as chief executioner of Paris across four turbulent decades — performing that role under a monarchy, through a revolution, and into a republic. He carried out thousands of executions, including those of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, operating the machinery of capital punishment with a procedural consistency that made him, in effect, the state's instrument regardless of who held power.

His inclusion here reflects the contested nature of this catalog: Dudayev is remembered by many Chechens as a national hero, and by the Russian state as a separatist whose armed struggle precipitated the First Chechen War and its enormous civilian toll. The conflict he led — and the brutal federal response it drew — resulted in tens of thousands of deaths and the near-destruction of Grozny. A Soviet-trained general who turned the military knowledge of one state against another, he operated in a space where liberation movement and armed insurgency are difficult to separate from the outside.

One of the most influential figures in the Miami cocaine trade, she helped shape the violent commercial networks that made South Florida a focal point of the American drug crisis in the 1970s and 1980s. Her operations were marked by a willingness to use lethal force as a tool of business, and she is linked to numerous murders over the course of her career. The scale of her enterprise and her longevity within it set her apart from many of her contemporaries in the trade.