The Biggest Crime Story of Every Month This Year

We already know 2020 was a nightmare. A deadly pandemic was the grim central storyline of a year, footnoted by climate catastrophe, disinformation and political ineptitude. 

As an addendum to the exhaustion, the world also endured some abhorrent crime. You might have missed those stories thanks to the aforementioned crises, so we’ve done you the favour of rounding them up, month by month.

Content warning: rape, sexual assault, domestic violence.

JANUARY

Churchgoing student Reynhard Sinaga, the “most prolific” rapist in British legal history, was jailed for life. Sinaga, 36, prowled Manchester’s clubland to lure drunk young men back to his flat by offering them a bed for the night, before drugging his victims with GHB.

Sinaga, from Indonesia, was convicted of 136 rapes against 48 men – but police fear he had more than 200 victims.

FEBRUARY

Harvey Weinstein, whose abuse of young female actors sparked the #MeToo movement, was convicted of rape and sexual assault. In a long-awaited reckoning, a New York jury found the 67-year-old producer guilty of two of five charges, a criminal sex act in the first degree and rape in the third degree. 

Weinstein, who was accused of sexual misconduct by dozens of women, including actors Asia Argento, Uma Thurman and Salma Hayek, was locked up for 23 years in a prison in upstate New York.

MARCH

As coronavirus cases ballooned around the world, lockdown triggered a global surge of domestic violence. In the UK, nine people died in four suspected domestic killings over just one weekend. 

Other countries also declared huge increases in abuse linked to the pandemic; in Hubei, China – where COVID-19 emerged – police revealed that domestic violence calls had tripled. In Spain, days into lockdown, the Catalan regional government said calls to its helpline had risen by 20 percent, while Women’s Aid chief Sarah Benson said: “In all calls we’re receiving, COVID-19 is being mentioned as an aggravating factor.”

APRIL

A gunman dressed as a police officer murdered 22 people in Canada’s deadliest killing spree. Gabriel Wortman, 51, shot his ex-wife and her new lover before picking off neighbours and passers-by in a 13-hour rampage.

The Nova Scotia gunman used a replica police car to lure innocent victims to their deaths, one of whom was a veteran policewoman. He used his police lights to pull over a car and kill its pregnant driver, while nine other victims were burned to death. Wortman’s deadly rampage was eventually ended by the Royal Canadian Mountain Police, when he was cornered and shot dead at a petrol station 60 miles from where he started.

Court papers later described Wortman as a “psychopath” who stored barrels of acid capable of dissolving corpses and was “paranoid” about the COVID-19 epidemic.

MAY

George Floyd, a 46-year-old father of five, was killed by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota on the 25th of May. Floyd begged for breath while white police officer Derek Chauvin, 44, kneeled on his neck for almost nine minutes.

The killing, which was caught on camera, sparked protests and acts of solidarity across the world. Black Lives Matter protests in more than 60 countries called on governments to finally put an end to systemic racism, especially in the US, where one in every 1,000 Black men are killed by police, a rate 2.5 times higher than that of white men.

Chauvin has been charged with second-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter, while three other officers face charges of aiding and abetting murder. All four will be tried together, with the trial scheduled to begin on the 8th of March, 2021.

JUNE

More than 13 years after Madeleine McCann vanished while on holiday in Portugal, German police named convicted paedophile Christian Brückner as a prime suspect.

Brückner, who is currently in prison on drug charges, is suspected of snatching the three-year-old from a holiday apartment in Praia da Luz in May of 2007, and has been investigated over the disappearances of two other children.

German authorities said in June that they are investigating Brückner on suspicion of murder, but prosecutors have said they do not have enough evidence to hold him on the McCann case alone.

JULY

Europe’s crime kingpins were left exposed after police accessed a secret phone network that had enabled them to keep their illicit businesses a secret. Police cracked the previously impenetrable Encrochat system used by hitmen, drug lords and other top-tier criminals. The sting saw law enforcement punch holes in crime rackets around Europe, leading to the seizure of more than £54 million in cash, 77 firearms and two tons of drugs in Britain alone.

Also in July, police finally swooped on paedophile billionaire Jeffrey Epstein’s ex-girlfriend and alleged madam, Ghislaine Maxwell, at a sprawling estate in New Hampshire after she had spent months in hiding. The British socialite, 58, who is being held on charges including enticement of minors and sex trafficking, was denied bail out of fear she might attempt to flee the country. Maxwell, who has plead not guilty, will face trial in July of 2021.

AUGUST

Alexei Navalny, a 44-year-old Russian politician and vocal critic of Vladimir Putin, was left in a coma after being poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok while on a trip to the Siberian city of Tomsk. Western security agencies say the Kremlin was behind the plot, and sanctions were imposed on Russia by the UK and the EU.

Also in August, the brother of the Manchester Arena suicide bomber was handed a record UK jail term. Hashem Abedi, 23, was jailed for life over the horrific 2017 concert attack that left 22 dead, and must serve 55 years before being considered for release.

SEPTEMBER

Rioters fire-bombed police in Colombia as crowds vented their fury over the death of lawyer Javier Ordonez, who had been pinned down and repeatedly tasered by police. At least ten people died and hundreds more were wounded in the country’s capital, Bogota, as protesters displayed their anger at yet another instance of deadly police brutality. 

Also in September, 5,000 pets stuffed into boxes were found dead at a shipping facility in China. The animals had been abandoned for at least a week at a depot in the city of Luohe, where witnesses described the scene as a “living hell”.

OCTOBER

France was left reeling from a wave of terror attacks that started with the death of teacher Samuel Paty, 47, who was beheaded outside his school in a Parisian suburb by an 18-year-old Islamist knifeman.

Two weeks later, a verger and two worshippers were murdered during mass at a church in Nice. Police described the scene at the historic Notre-Dame Basilica as “a vision of horror”. Two suspected copycat attacks were foiled the same month, while a security guard was stabbed at the French embassy in Saudi Arabia.

France was put on its highest terror alert, with French interior minister Gérard Darmanin warning: “There will be other terrible attacks.”

NOVEMBER

Three gunmen disguised in military gear stormed the campus of Kabul University in Afghanistan’s capital, killing 22 teachers and students in a six-hour siege. Footage posted on social media showed students jumping from windows and feigning death to survive, before the gunmen were all killed by security forces. Police later arrested the suspected mastermind, a former student linked to the Taliban-backed Haqqani network.

DECEMBER

A bungling English police force that had failed to log 220 crimes every day was placed into special measures. More than 80,000 crimes went unrecorded by Greater Manchester Police – the UK’s fourth-largest force – leading to Chief Constable Ian Hopkins being forced to quit after inspectors said victims of crime had been “let down”.

Also in December, people smugglers were convicted over the deaths of 39 migrants packed into a lorry trailer. The Vietnamese victims – aged from 15 to 44 – suffocated in 38.5C heat on their way to the UK in October of 2019. Members of the trafficking ring – which boasted of making £1 million a month – now face life behind bars for manslaughter.