Using the Nexis database of newspapers and newswires across the United States, we collected the following 37 cases covering a three-year period (June 2017 to July 2020) in which a death that was originally classified as something other than homicide was subsequently reclassified as homicide.

David Schlachet (Vincent and Dorn, 2020)

In July 2018, the superintendent at 48-year-old Lara Prychodko’s Manhattan apartment building found her mangled body in the trash compactor after an apparent 27-flight fall down the garbage chute. Authorities said she had an abnormally high alcohol level in her system and ruled it a “fatal accident.” A year later, however, New York City former chief medical examiner Michael Baden agreed to take another look. Finding indications that Prychodko had been strangled to death before being placed into the chute, as well as seeing little bleeding from lacerations sustained in the fall, the doctor concluded that the manner of death was most likely homicide. Moreover, Baden said the fact that Prychodko’s body was found topless would be unusual in an accident scenario and might be evidence that a struggle took place. At the time of her death, Lara and her estranged husband were in the midst of a highly contentious divorce, even though 55-year-old David Schlachet’s construction company continued to struggle after a 2016 bankruptcy. He had also been ordered to pay alimony and attorney fees to Prychodko, who was favored to gain child custody and a percentage of their millions of dollars in assets.

Karl Karlsen (Flynn, 2020)

Karl Karlsen’s first wife, 30-year-old Christina, died in a January 1991 house fire in Murphys, California. When the fire broke out, she was trapped in a bathroom behind a boarded-up window and had no way to escape the conflagration. Firefighters ruled the blaze accidental, and Karl Karlsen collected $200,000 in life insurance that he had taken out on Christina shortly before her death. He then moved with his children across the country to Varick, New York and remarried. In November 2008, he killed his son by making a truck slip off its jack while the 23-year-old was underneath it, crushing him to death.