America’s Most Dangerous Death Row Killers Still Waiting for Execution
The American death row of 2026 is smaller, older, and more divided by geography than at any point in decades. Roughly 2,000 people remain under sentence of death, down from a peak of more than 3,500 at the start of the 2000s. Many of the most infamous serial killers of the late 20th century have already been executed or have died in prison. What remains is a mix of aging condemned men in states that rarely carry out sentences, a handful of federal mass murderers, and a smaller group of more recent killers whose cases are still moving toward the execution chamber.
“Most dangerous” is not a legal category. It is a public shorthand for inmates whose crimes involved multiple victims, prolonged terror in a community, or attacks designed to kill as many people as possible. The names below are among the most notorious still living under a death sentence.
The California holdouts
California has the largest death row in the country and a governor-imposed moratorium on executions. That combination has left some of the state’s most prolific killers in custody for more than 40 years.
David Carpenter, known as the Trailside Killer, is widely described as the oldest person still under a U.S. death sentence. Now in his mid-90s, he was convicted of murdering hikers on trails near San Francisco in 1979 and 1980. Courts found him guilty of seven killings in two trials, and investigators have linked him to additional unsolved cases. Carpenter has long denied the crimes. After San Quentin’s condemned unit closed, he was moved to a medical prison because of age and mobility problems. With no executions scheduled in California, he is far more likely to die of natural causes than by court order.
Randy Kraft, called the Scorecard Killer, presents an even larger suspected body count. A former computer programmer, Kraft was convicted in 1989 of 16 murders of young men in California between the early 1970s and 1983. Police recovered a coded list that investigators believe referred to dozens of additional victims. Authorities in other states have continued to examine cold cases for possible links. Kraft, now in his early 80s, remains under sentence of death in California and has never admitted responsibility. Fresh identifications of long-unidentified victims have kept his name in the news more than 40 years after his arrest.
These two cases capture the strange reality of California capital punishment: the state still sentences people to death, but the sentence functions more like permanent isolation than a timetable for execution.
Federal death row and mass murder
The federal system holds far fewer condemned inmates, but several are among the most infamous mass killers in recent American history.
Dylann Roof was sentenced to death for the 2015 massacre at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where nine Black parishioners were killed during a Bible study. Robert Bowers received a death sentence for the 2018 attack on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, which killed 11 worshippers and was the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was sentenced to death for his role in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, which killed three people and injured hundreds.
All three remain on federal death row. Federal executions have been rare in recent years, and legal challenges in these cases have stretched for more than a decade. Their crimes were not serial killings spread over years. They were concentrated acts of mass violence intended to produce maximum casualties and public fear.
Killers whose dates are approaching
In states that still carry out executions, a different kind of case is moving forward.
Daniel Conahan Jr., known as the Hog Trail Killer, is scheduled for execution in Florida on September 10, 2026. Conahan, 72, was convicted of the 1996 kidnapping and murder of 21-year-old Richard Montgomery in Charlotte County. Investigators have long suspected him in a series of killings of men found in wooded areas of southwest Florida in the 1990s. Prosecutors pursued the case they believed they could prove most clearly. Governor Ron DeSantis signed the warrant as Florida continued a record-setting pace of executions. Florida accounted for more than half of the country’s executions in 2026 through mid-August.
Christa Pike is scheduled to die in Tennessee on September 30, 2026. She is the only woman on that state’s death row. Pike was 18 when she and two others killed 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a fellow Job Corps student in Knoxville, in 1995. She was sentenced to death in 1996. If the sentence is carried out, she would be the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years. Her lawyers have argued for clemency based on her age at the time of the crime and a history of severe abuse and mental illness. The Tennessee Supreme Court rejected a request for a commutation certificate and set the date. Pike later attempted to attack another inmate while already on death row.
Other high-profile condemned inmates
Mark Goudeau, known as the Baseline Killer, remains on Arizona’s death row after convictions for nine murders and a large number of related sexual assaults, kidnappings, and robberies in the Phoenix area in 2005 and 2006. The attacks terrorized the city for months. Goudeau received nine death sentences. He continues to maintain innocence and has filed new appeals alleging police misconduct and intellectual disability. Arizona has resumed executions in recent years, but Goudeau does not currently have a firm date.
Jason Thornburg is among the newest arrivals on Texas death row. In 2024 a Tarrant County jury sentenced him to death for murdering three people in an Euless motel in September 2021. He also confessed to two earlier killings in Texas and Arizona. The case stood out even in a state accustomed to capital prosecutions because of the number of victims in a short span and Thornburg’s claim that the killings were religious “sacrifices.” He is held at the Polunsky Unit, where Texas houses its condemned inmates.
What “death row” means now
The phrase still suggests a short wait before execution. For most inmates, that is no longer true. The average time from sentence to execution, when an execution happens at all, now stretches across decades. Florida has broken from that pattern by signing warrant after warrant. Texas, Oklahoma, Alabama, and Tennessee have carried out smaller numbers. California, Pennsylvania, and Oregon have hundreds of condemned prisoners and no active execution calendar.
That split explains why some of the country’s most notorious killers are still alive. Carpenter and Kraft committed their crimes before many current prison staff were born. Roof, Bowers, and Tsarnaev committed crimes that defined a generation of American mass-casualty attacks. Conahan, Pike, Goudeau, and Thornburg show that states still use the death penalty for multiple-victim cases when political will exists.
Danger, in the legal sense, is no longer the main issue. These inmates are already locked in maximum security. The remaining question is whether the state will ever carry out the sentence written on the judgment. For some, a date is already on the calendar. For others, death row has become what critics have long called it: a life sentence with a different name, served one appeal at a time.
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