David Edward Maust’s first attempts at killing came when he was just nine years old — that, says The Chicago Tribune, is when he first set his brother’s bed on fire, then tried to drown him in a local lake. It was 1963 and he was placed in the care of the state, and when he turned 17, he headed off to Vietnam. He later confessed that it was while he was stationed in Germany that he first carried through with killing (although he’d gotten close numerous times before). He wrote in his journal, “I never told anybody the truth about that night, because it was a sad bad thing…”

Maust was convicted on a manslaughter charge after claiming the victim had been killed in a moped accident, served his three years, was released, and was on trial for attempted murder not long after. Lying on the stand got him a not guilty verdict, and it wasn’t long before he killed 15-year-old Donald Jones and kicked off a violent spree that took him from Illinois to Texas.

Maust was arrested and jailed in Texas but extradited to Illinois in 1982. Instead of serving his full 35-year sentence, he was paroled in 1999. In 2003, he was on trial again for the murders of 16-year-old James Raganyi, 13-year-old Michael Dennis, and 19-year-old Nick James. He was sentenced in 2005 — confessing to two more murders — then hanged himself in his cell (via Psychology Today).

When Albert Flick was convicted of murder in 2019, it was another in a long list of murders that kicked off when he wife, Sandra, served him with divorce papers in 1979. Three weeks later, he stabbed her 14 times, and after her 12-year-old daughter summoned a neighbor for help, she made sure everyone knew who’d done it with her dying breath.

The Washington Post says Flick served 21 of his 30-year sentence before being arrested again in 2007 — this time, for punching and stabbing a woman. A list of violent offenses finally culminated in another murder that took place in 2018, after he was released again. That’s when witnesses say he “developed an obsession” with a woman named Kimberly Dobbie. When she didn’t reciprocate, he stabbed and killed her. The murder was captured on a surveillance camera (and witnessed by the victim’s 11-year-old twins), and Flick was convicted. The families of his victims were outraged: Elsie Clement — the daughter of Flick’s 1979 victim — said, “There is no reason this man should have been on the streets in the first place, no reason.”

So, why was he? In 2014, Maine Supreme Court Justice Robert E. Crowley explained that he was sentencing Flick to just two years for threatening to kill a woman with a screwdriver. His rationale was this: “At some point, Mr. Flick is going to age out of his capacity to engage in this conduct, and incarcerating him beyond the time that he ages out doesn’t seem to me to make good sense.”

In 1976, Jimmy Lee Gray kidnapped 3-year-old Deressa Jean Scales. What followed was a brutal assault and murder; Gray was found guilty and executed via Mississippi’s gas chamber in 1983. Scales’ father, Richard, said (via The New York Times): “Even in prison he had been able to talk, to breathe, and to laugh, and he had taken all these things from my little girl. He didn’t have the right to continue living.”

Still, that didn’t keep anti-capital punishment groups from pushing for Mississippi Gov. William Winter to overturn the death sentence, but one of the most prominent voices in favor of execution was Gray’s mother, Verna Smith. She’d been through a murder trial involving her son before.

When Gray killed the toddler, he was out on parole after serving just seven years of a two-decade sentence for his conviction in the murder of his 16-year-old then-girlfriend, Elda Prince. Prince, says Capital Punishment U.K., was strangled before having her throat cut by boyfriend Gray after an argument. The judge that had overseen that trial had argued against releasing Gray early on parole, but it had been approved in spite of his opposition.

There’s a good chance that Louisa Peete already had a few victims under her belt when she left Waco, Texas (and a boyfriend who ended up mysteriously dead) to head to Los Angeles — an undeniably exciting place in 1920. LA Mag says it was there that she hooked up with the wealthy mining exec Jacob Denton, and when he disappeared in May of the same year, Peete claimed he had argued with a “Spanish-looking woman” and had gone into hiding as he was embarrassed she’d chopped off one of his arms and one of his legs.

Denton’s body was later found buried in his own basement, and Peete was tracked to Colorado, where she’d since remarried. She was found guilty of the murder but was released on parole in 1939. That parole came with the help of some very vocal advocates, including Arthur and Margaret Logan. The Logans — who had cared for Peete’s daughter, Betty, while she was in prison — gave Peete a job and a place to stay on her release.

Margaret soon disappeared, and Arthur — who was suffering from dementia — was committed by his “sister.” That sister was, of course, Peete, and it didn’t take too long before someone noticed all the forged signatures on their financial documents. That, says Executed Today, was when she was arrested again. This time, she became the second woman to be executed in California’s gas chambers.

When Robert Lee Massie was executed in 2001, his last words were “Forgiveness. Giving up all hope for a better past.” There was a lot to forgive, because it wasn’t even his first time on death row. Between January 7 and 15 of 1965, Massie embarked on a spree of robberies and assaults that included the shooting death of Mildred Weiss. Several others were shot and wounded, and when it came time for his trial, the counts of murder, attempted murder, and robbery were enough to get him the death penalty.

Things changed in 1972, though — that, says the Office of the Clark County Prosecuting Attorney, was when the state of California overturned all death penalty convictions and ruled that the whole idea was unconstitutional. In a shocking change of fortune for the convicted killer, he went from death row to a free man when he was paroled in 1978.

And that’s when he killed again: Massie was robbing a liquor store on January 3, 1979 — just 8 months after he was released from jail — when he shot and killed liquor store owner Boris Naumoff. He was once again on trial for murder, and in spite of the fact that it was argued he hadn’t been in control of his actions and suffered from mental illness, Massie pulled appeals and insisted on his own execution — just as Executed Today says he did while on death row in the 1960s. He got his wish on March 27, 2001.

Today, Arthur Shawcross (pictured with his daughter and granddaughter) is known as the Genesee River Killer, the serial killer so-named after his New York State hunting grounds. Shockingly, he did most of his killing after being paroled from a sentence for earlier murder convictions.

Shawcross’ first victims were a 10-year-old boy and an 8-year-old girl, killed four months apart in 1972. He was sentenced to 22 years, and according to The New York Times, he started the parole process in 1987. After several rejected attempts, he was released on parole in 1987, and settled in Rochester, New York. By the time he was arrested three years later, he was connected to the deaths of at least 11 women — although it was suspected he had at least a few more victims. Law enforcement found Shawcross — who didn’t own a car — borrowed vehicles before heading out to pick up local sex workers, who he either suffocated or strangled when they got into the car with him.

Not surprisingly, there was a massive outcry and a demand to know why the state’s parole board had authorized Shawcross’ release, but the county’s district attorney, Howard R. Relin, told the NYT that tragedies weren’t as uncommon as one might hope. He said, “Every prosecutor in New York State can recount three or four horror stories about people who never should have been paroled and were.” Shawcross was given a sentence of 250 years, and died in prison in 2008.

When 15-year-old Randy Laufer (pictured) went missing in 1987, John McRae — the father of one of his friends — wasn’t a suspect. Not, at least, until Florida investigators called detectives with questions about other missing boys.

McRae, it turned out, had been convicted of murdering an 8-year-old when he was just 15 years old. After spending decades in jail, he was paroled in 1971, bringing an end to what had been a life sentence. Not long after Laufer disappeared, McRae and his son headed to Arizona, and while Oxygen says he was questioned, there was no real evidence of his involvement… aside from the fact that Laufer had last been seen in a car sporting a bumper sticker that read “Don’t Let Your Child Go With Strangers.”

It wasn’t until 1997 that workers on McRae’s old property found Laufer’s remains. He had been brutally murdered and buried, just about 25 feet from the McRae’s home. McRae was arrested along with his son, who was charged as an accessory, says the Associated Press, but since he had been a minor when the murder took place, it was ruled that he couldn’t be tried as an adult. It took a jury just three hours to find him guilty on the charges of first-degree murder, and even though it took until June 15, 2005 for the sentence to be handed out, he was given life in prison. On June 29, 2005, the Midland Daily News reported he had died of natural causes.

Sometimes, justice takes a little while. It took more than 30 years for Darryl Kemp to be given the death penalty for the murder of Armida Wiltsey (pictured), says the East Bay Times, and when the verdict was finally handed out in 2009, Kemp’s only response was, “Is that it?” It was the second death sentence for Kemp, who was 73 years old at the time. Attorneys voiced their doubts that he was going to live long enough to be executed, but the death penalty stuck. That time.

Wiltsey was killed while she was out jogging in 1978, and it was just four months after Kemp had been released from prison on parole. He had been put on death row for the 1957 murder of a Los Angeles nurse named Marjorie Hipperson but was one of a number of convicted criminals who had their death sentence overturned en masse with a 1972 ruling that declared the entire practice unconstitutional.

SFGate says that at the time Wiltsey was killed, Kemp was arrested as a suspect. When they were unable to match Kemp’s hair with hair found at the scene, he was released. It wasn’t until the case was reopened in 2000 that DNA technology had advanced to the point of allowing blood under the victim’s nails to be sequenced and matched with the DNA of convicted felons, and Kemp was a match.