Case files
The cases behind
the drawings.
Every portrait in these books started as a real case. These are the facts of them — the dates, the victims, what the record does and doesn’t say — with the page from the book to color at the end.
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Lizzie Halliday: the first woman sentenced to the electric chair
She was condemned to the electric chair in June 1894 and never sat in it. Twelve years later she killed again, inside the asylum that had saved her from it.
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Juan Vallejo Corona: twenty-five graves in the peach orchards
Twenty-five men were buried in the orchards they had been hired to work. Four of them have never been identified.
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Douglas Gretzler and Willie Steelman: seventeen killings in three weeks
It ended in a farmhouse in Victor, California, with nine people dead in a single evening — two of them children — and the pair arrested in Sacramento the next day.
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Christine Falling: the babysitter whose victims were ruled natural deaths
Six people died around her in two and a half years. Every death but the last was written off as natural, and she was hired again each time.