James Henry Sanford

On a late-summer day in 1933, James Henry Sanford, a 27-year-old white man, was shot to death, his name now surviving mainly as a line in later serial-killer research that lists him as the earliest confirmed victim of a man who would come to be known as Frank J. Leaver. In those brief notations, Sanford appears only with the essentials: his name, his age, the date of August 29, 1933, and the fact that he died by gunfire, the first in a string of killings that would unfold over three decades acro ...