The Most Infamous Crime Committed in Every State

On April 20, 1999, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris entered Columbine High School and gunned down 12 students and one teacher and wounded more than 20 others in what was then the worst school shooting in U.S. history. The shooting spree ended when Klebold and Harris took their own lives. Although a motive was never determined, investigators learned both teens had planned to bomb the school in an attack like the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. The victims obtained some measure of justice when Mark Manes, the man who had sold the gun and ammunition to Harris, was sentenced to six years in prison.

Eleven days before Christmas, 20-year-old Adam Lanza strode into Sandy Hook Elementary School and killed 20 first graders and six adult staffers. Lanza killed his mother before the school shootings, and it was later learned he had a history of mental illness. Before police could capture him, Lanza killed himself. The senseless crime kicked off a debate on gun safety that continues today.

John Preston Dunning cheated on his wife with several women. When he broke it off with Cordelia Botkin, whom he had met in San Francisco, to return to his wife, Mary, in Delaware, the spurned other woman didn’t take too kindly to the rejection. Botkin sent a box of poisoned chocolates to Mary that killed her and her sister. When police found a piece of string in her hotel room that had been cut so she could fill the box of candies laced with arsenic, Botkin’s fate was sealed. She was found guilty and sentenced to the women’s prison ward at San Quentin. She died in 1910.

Gerard John Schaefer was a sheriff’s deputy, gaining his job with a forged letter of recommendation, when he abducted two teenage girls, tied them to trees, and threatened to rape and murder them. He was called back to the station, though, where he told officers that he had tied the girls up to teach them a lesson. They were rescued and Schaefer was sentenced to a year in jail in December 1972. Earlier that year, though, another two teenage girls hadn’t so lucky. Though their bodies weren’t discovered until April 1973, 16-year-old Georgia Jessup and 17-year-old Susan Price had been bound and butchered by Schaefer the previous September. He was eventually arrested and convicted of the murders, but he was also linked to at least nine other murders and disappearances and perhaps as many as 28. Given a life sentence for the Jessup and Price killings, Schaefer was stabbed to death in prison by another inmate at age 49.

The death of 10-year-old Emani Moss shocked the public and even brought hardened police officers to tears. After the body of the little girl was found burned in a trash bag, her father and stepmother, Eman Moss and Tiffany Moss, were charged with murder and child abuse. The couple had literally starved the child to death and incinerated her body to cover their crime. Eman Moss accepted a plea deal to escape the death penalty and was sentenced to life without parole. In 2019, Tiffany Moss was given the death penalty for the murder of her step-daughter.