Theresa Jimmie Francine Knorr (née Cross; born March 14, 1946) is an American woman convicted of torturing and murdering two of her six children while using the others to facilitate and cover up her crimes. She was acquitted of murdering her first husband and was also considered a suspect in the unsolved murder of her sister. She is currently serving two consecutive life sentences at the California Institution for Women in Chino, California.
John Altoon (November 5, 1925 – February 8, 1969) was an American artist. Born in Los Angeles to immigrant Armenian parents, from 1947 to 1949 he attended the Otis Art Institute, from 1947 to 1950 he also attended the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, and in 1950 the Chouinard Art Institute. Altoon was a prominent figure in the LA art scene in the 1950s and 1960s. Exhibitions of his work have been held at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Corcoran Gallery, Washington D.C, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, The Baxter Museum, Pasadena, and The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (opened June 2014).
Aaron Kosminski (born Aron Mordke Kozmiński; 11 September 1865 – 24 March 1919) was a Polish barber, hairdresser, and suspect in the Jack the Ripper case.
Kosminski was a Polish Jew who emigrated from Congress Poland to England in the 1880s. He worked as a hairdresser in Whitechapel in the East End of London, where a series of murders ascribed to an unidentified figure nicknamed "Jack the Ripper" were committed in 1888. From 1891, Kosminski was institutionalised after he threatened his sister with a knife. He was first held at Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum, and then transferred to the Leavesden Asylum.
Police officials from the time of the murders named one of their suspects as "Kosminski" (the forename was not given), and described him as a Polish Jew in an insane asylum. Almost a century after the final murder, the suspect "Kosminski" was identified as Aaron Kosminski; but there was little evidence to connect him with the "Kosminski" who was suspected of the murders, and their dates of death are different. Possibly, Kosminski was confused with another Polish Jew of the same age named Aaron or David Cohen (real name possibly Nathan Kaminsky), who was a violent patient at the Colney Hatch Asylum.
In September 2014, author Russell Edwards claimed in the book Naming Jack the Ripper to have proved Kosminski's guilt. In 2007, he had bought a shawl which he believed to have been left at a murder scene and gave it to biochemist Jari Louhelainen to test for DNA. A peer-reviewed article on the DNA analysis was published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences in 2019. However, scientists from Innsbruck Medical University have criticised the paper and its conclusions, pointing to a number of mistakes and assumptions made by its authors.
Martín Ramírez (January 30, 1895 – February 17, 1963) was a self-taught artist who spent most of his adult life institutionalized in California mental hospitals, diagnosed as a catatonic schizophrenic. He is considered by some to be one of the 20th century's best self-taught masters.
Robert John Bardo (born January 2, 1970) is an American man serving life imprisonment without parole after being convicted for the July 18, 1989, murder of American actress and model Rebecca Schaeffer, whom he had stalked for three years.
Herbert William Mullin (April 18, 1947 – August 18, 2022) was an American serial killer who killed 13 people in California in the early 1970s. He confessed to the killings, which he claimed prevented earthquakes. In 1973, after a trial to determine whether he was legally insane or culpable, he was convicted of two murders in the first-degree and nine in the second-degree, and sentenced to life imprisonment. During his imprisonment, he was denied parole eight times.Mullin and Edmund Kemper overlapped in their 1972 to 1973 murder sprees, adding confusion to the police investigations and ending with both being arrested, within a few weeks of each other, after the deaths of 21 people.