Has there ever been a case where someone convicted of three or more murders was released from prison?
Frans Hooijmaijers, Dutch nurse who killed between 5-259 people from 1970-1974. Was originally sentenced to life however this was changed in 1977 to 18 years imprisonment and Hooijmaijers was released in 1987. He died in 2006.
Only two convicted murders but one of them was her own sister, Karla Homolka served 12 years and got out in 2005.
I would add an addendum that they’re 3 separate murders cases and not a single event.
I don’t immediately know what in particular transitions someone from killer to “serial” killer.
But I could see if it was someone who wiped out a van of people or a husband coming back home to his wife cheating with a couple and murdering them being potentially released after a long sentence.
generally, a serial killer does multiple individual murderers over an extended period. this contrasts with a mass murderer, who kills a bunch of people in a single event, or a spree killer who does multiple killings over a short time span. a serial killer may take a couple years to kill 5 people while a spree killer does it in a weekend, and a mass killer manages it in a few minutes.
Quite a few eventually get released, Wikipedia has a long list of serial killers, just search that list for the word “released”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_serial_killers_by_country
I asume you mean “in the USA”? I mean, there are many countries in which life sentence isn’t a thing.
I know in counties like Colombia, Brazil and Norway. I did some research and I found out about the cases of Arnfinn Nesset in Norway who killed at least 22 people in the early 80s and was released in 2004. Abel Mikaelsen Klemmensen in Greenland who killed 7 people at a party in 1989 and was released in 2015 and Australian criminal Berwyn Rees who was paroled in 2019 after serving 39 years in prison for killing three people including a police officer between 1977-1981. British Child killer Simon Smith who murdered three of his infant children between 1993-and-1997 who despite being sentence to a whole life term later applied against this sentence and it was reduced to 24 years-to-life and was released in 2020. Teenage serial killer Warren Harris in America who killed four people in the 1970s and given parole in 2024.
