Right tense for conditional event in nondescript time?

What is the right tense to describe an event that might have occured, be occuring or occur in the future, if (not) for something that happened in the past?

Unike, in the examples, which anchor the event to:

If you hadn't killed him, he would have killed countless innocents.
(past, i.e. his killing spree would have started in the past and possibly ended by now)

If you hadn't killed him, he would be killing countless innocents now.
(present i.e. his killing spree started before and would be occurring currently)

I'm interested in a form that does not suggest the time in relation to current moment, but only in relation to the moment of when the condition ocurred.

Edit: Would this simple form be what I need?

If you hadn't killed him, he would kill countless innocents.

Does this leave the event/period as future relative to the past event, but unanchored to the present moment of time as intended? Or am I understanding it wrongly?

Solution 1:

Tricky.

If I understand you, you are asking for a construction which expresses contingent killing stretching from the 'reference point', where the murderer was in fact killed to some indefinite point—which with respect to the time of utterance might be 'now' 'before now' or 'after now' but with respect to the reference point must be 'after then'.

I suggest:

If you hadn't killed him he would have gone on to kill countless innocents.

Or, possibly, if you want a more emphatically progressive sense:

If you hadn't killed him he would have gone on killing until countless innocents had died.

The second one loses your 'kill countless innocents' construction; but I'm uncomfortable with that in a progressive construction. I think this is because a serial killer's victims are only cumulatively (not continuously) countless, in either the literal or the hyperbolic sense of that word.

Solution 2:

I don't think the first sentence necessarily means that his killing spree would have ended by now but that he would have killed countless innocents before his arrest (which would have put a stop to his killing spree) or death.

The second sentence implies that he would be alive and killing at the moment the sentence was uttered.

Which tense you use depends on context.

I'd use the first sentence to talk about something that happened a long time ago as well as something that just happened. It seems to be a reassurance that killing the guy was a service to everyone: "You did the right thing and a good thing. Don't feel guilty about it."

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I'd use the second sentence regardless of when the killing occurred. The point of the sentence seems to be this: "If you hadn't killed him, we'd never have known he was a mass murderer and wouldn't have been able to capture him, so he'd (still) be killing innocent people right now." This seems to imply that the killing occurred a long time ago (more than a year). [EDIT: Put still in parentheses to indicate that it's time-dependent -- to be used if the killing occurred long ago but not to be used if it occurred very recently.]