Cold case - WikiHQ

thumb|A leaflet issued during the "autumn of terror" in 1888, when [[Jack the Ripper was active]]

A cold case is an unsolved crime that is not the subject of a current criminal investigation, but for which new information could emerge.

Characteristics

Violent or major crime

Typically, cold cases are violent and other major felony crimes, such as murder and rape, which—unlike unsolved minor crimes—are generally not subject to a statute of limitations. Sometimes disappearances can also be considered cold cases if the victim has not been seen or heard from for some time, such as the case of Natalee Holloway or the Beaumont children.

Solve rate

Although advances in forensic science and investigative techniques have helped solve many older cases, a substantial number of homicides remain unsolved each year in the United States, resulting in a growing backlog of cold cases.

Suspect identification

In the search for suspects, some police organizations have created websites featuring cold cases. For example, the Texas Rangers have established a website in the hopes that it shall elicit new information and investigative leads.

Tunnel vision

Sometimes, a viable suspect has been overlooked or simply ignored due to then-flimsy circumstantial evidence, the presence of a likelier suspect (who is later proven to be innocent), or a tendency of investigators to zero in on someone else to the exclusion of other possibilities (which goes back to the likelier suspect angle)—known as "tunnel vision".

Improvements in forensics

With the advent of and improvements to DNA testing/DNA profiling and other forensics technology, many cold cases are being re-opened and prosecuted. Police departments are opening cold case units whose job is to re-examine cold case files. DNA evidence helps in such cases but as in the case of fingerprints, it is of no value unless there is evidence on file to compare it to. However, to combat that issue, the FBI is switching from using the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS) to using a newer technology called the Next Generation Identification (NGI). Other improvements in forensics lie in fields such as:

Digital forensics, one application of which is to recover hidden or deleted data.
Ballistics analysis which involves the evaluation of ammunition and firearms to determine which weapon might have been used in a crime.
Forensic anthropology which analyzes skeletal remains to determine their cause of death or any other relevant information.
Mobile forensics and social media which, since their creation, have had increased involvement in any police case, cold or not.
Forensic psychology which can be used to analyze crime scenes and identify suspect profiles.
Facial recognition which has been used to identify suspects based on their facial features.
Artificial intelligence (AI) which is used in all of the above systems to help analyze data and information from crime scenes.

Famous criminal examples

thumb|right|[[Lake Bodom murders in Finland is one of the most famous unsolved homicide cases in Finnish criminal history. The tent is investigated immediately after the murders in 1960.]]

The identity of Jack the Ripper is a notorious example of an outstanding cold case, with numerous suggestions as to the identity of the serial killer. Similarly, the Zodiac Killer has been studied extensively for almost 50 years, with numerous suspects discussed and debated. The perpetrators of the Wall Street bombing of 1920 have never been positively identified, though the Galleanists, a group of Italian anarchists, are widely believed to have planned the explosion. The burning of the Reichstag building in 1933 remains controversial and although Marinus van der Lubbe was tried, convicted and executed for arson, it is possible that the Reichstag fire was perpetrated by the Nazis to enhance their power and destroy democracy in Germany.

Examples of criminal cold cases that ended in conviction

{| class="wikitable sortable"

! scope="col" | Victim(s)

! scope="col" | Convicted

! scope="col" | Location

! scope="col" | Crime date

! scope="col" | Conviction date

! scope="col" | Description

| Victims of Nazis' Neuengamme Concentration Camp (sub-camp in Meppen, Germany)

| Friedrich Karl Berger

| Meppen, Germany

| to March 1945

| In a deportation case tried in 2020 in U.S. Immigration Court in Memphis, Tennessee, US (therefore not strictly a criminal prosecution), Friedrich Karl Berger was adjudged complicit in Nazi crimes of persecution committed while serving as an armed guard for the SS in Meppen, Germany, at a sub-camp of the Neuengamme concentration camp during World War II. This decision, reported in a March 5, 2020, United States Department of Justice press release, is likely the oldest criminal conduct (75 years) ever proved against a defendant in court by prosecutors in the United States. The judge ordered Berger deported to his native Germany, as his appeal was dismissed in November 2020. Germany would opt to dismiss criminal charges against Berger in December 2020. However, Berger who was a member of the Kriegsmarine, and later worked in building wire-stripping machines, was deported in February 2021.

| Harold Blauer

| rowspan="2"|The Central Intelligence Agency

| rowspan="2"|New York City, New York, US

| Retired tennis player who was unwittingly injected with 3,4-Methylenedioxyamphetamine (MDA) after checking himself in to the New York Psychiatric Institute for depression. The experiment was part of the CIA's secret mind-control program, MKULTRA, and Blauer's medical records were altered to hide the real cause of his death. MKULTRA was revealed to the public in 1975, and Blauer's estate was awarded $700,000 in damages in 1987.

| Frank Olson

| A CIA bacteriologist and biological warfare expert who was unwittingly dosed with LSD by his supervisor. Nine days later, Olson had a nervous breakdown and jumped from his 13th-story room at Hotel Pennsylvania. Olson's family agreed to withdraw a wrongful death lawsuit against the agency in exchange for an out-of-court settlement of $750,000 and apologies from President Gerald Ford and CIA director William Colby. Olson's children ordered a new autopsy in 1994 and tried to reopen the case as murder in 1996 and 2012, but both requests were denied because of the previous deal.

| Richard Phillips, Milton Curtis

| Gerald Mason

| El Segundo, California, US

| Two police officers were shot when they pulled over a car for running a red light. Mason was arrested 45 years later after a computerized fingerprint database identified him as the purchaser of the murder weapon. At the time, he had just raped a 15-year-old girl at gunpoint at a local lovers' lane, and he killed the officers to avoid prosecution for the crime. Mason's back still bore the scar left by a bullet fired by the officers as he fled.

| Irene Garza

| John Feit

| McAllen, Texas, US

| A 26-year-old beauty queen who disappeared when she went to church for confession and was later found raped and murdered in a canal. Feit, a 27-year-old priest at the church who later pled no contest to raping a parishioner, and left the priesthood in the 1970s, was a suspect since the beginning, but little investigation was made due to the opposition of long-time district attorney Rene Guerra (1980–2014).

| John Orner

| Edward Freiburger

| Columbia, South Carolina, US

| A 60-year-old cab driver who was robbed and murdered on the job with a .32 H&R pistol. Freiburger, then 19 and a soldier stationed at nearby Fort Jackson, became a suspect when it was discovered that he purchased the same weapon at a local pawnshop only hours before Orner received his last dispatch call, after which he went AWOL. Freiburger was stopped by Tennessee State Police a month later and found with the gun in his possession, but ballistics tests were inconclusive and he was never charged. In 2002, a private firearms examiner working for the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division cleaned up the slugs and matched the bullets to the gun.

| Malika Maria de Fernandez

| Peter Reyn-Bardt

| Wilmslow, England, UK

| Reyn-Bardt, De Fernandez's estranged husband, made a detailed confession about how he had murdered, dismembered and disposed of her body in the bog behind his home after peat cutters found human remains there, 22 years later. Although Carbon 14 testing later showed the remains to be thousands of years old, Reyn-Bardt's confession was considered enough evidence to convict him of the murder of his wife, whose body was never found.

| rowspan="3"|Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, Carol Denise McNair (plus 22 injured)

| Robert Edward Chambliss

| rowspan="3"|Birmingham, Alabama, US

| rowspan="3"|

| rowspan="3"|Victims of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. Although the FBI had identified Chambliss, Blanton, Cherry and a fourth Klansman, Herman Frank Cash, as the perpetrators already in 1965, no arrests were made for political reasons, and the case was shelved in 1968. Cash died in 1994 without being prosecuted.

| Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr.

| Bobby Frank Cherry

| James Keuler

| Samuel Evans

| Seattle, Washington, US

| Evans, already incarcerated for other crimes, entered an Alford plea after DNA linked him to Keuler's crime scene. Oldest case ever solved using DNA evidence.

| Helen Betty Osborne

| Dwayne Archie Johnston

| The Pas, Manitoba, Canada

| A Cree Aboriginal woman abducted while she was walking home at 2:30 pm and subsequently beaten, raped and stabbed over 50 times. Although four Caucasian men were implicated in the murder, only Johnston was convicted for it after 16 years, and the case was officially closed on February 12, 1999. The government of Manitoba officially apologized for its poor handling of the case on July 14, 2000.

| Jackson and Daisy Schley

| Samuel Evans

| Seattle, Washington, US

| A couple attacked during a home invasion. Jackson was murdered and Daisy was abducted and raped. Evans entered another Alford Plea for the murder after his DNA was matched to semen recovered from Daisy's clothing. Daisy died of unrelated causes in 2007, before Evans was identified.

| Katherine and Sheila Lyon

| Lloyd Lee Welch

| Washington, D.C., US

| Two sisters aged 10 and 12 who disappeared during a trip to a shopping mall. For decades, the police centered their efforts in locating a 50 to 60 years old man who was seen playing a tape recorder with children in different malls. However, in 2013 the attention shifted to Welch, by then a convicted and incarcerated child molester. Welch, who was 18 in 1975, strongly resembled another man seen stalking the girls by one of their friends, and it was found that in 1975 Welch himself went to the police, claiming that he had seen the older man abducting the girls. After a cousin of Welch confessed to helping him burning two suspicious duffel bags in his property of Thaxton, Virginia in 1975, the police searched the place and found items that had belonged to the girls. While no trace of their bodies was found, Welch pleaded guilty to both counts of abduction and murder.

| rowspan="2"|Myrna Opsahl

| Emily and William Harris, Kathleen Ann Soliah, Michael Bortin

| rowspan="2"|Carmichael, California, US

| rowspan="2"|

| A 42-year-old customer killed during the robbery of the Crocker National Bank by the Symbionese Liberation Army. The case was revived only in 1999, after Soliah (indicted for the attempted bombing of two LAPD patrol cars in August 1975) was arrested in Minnesota, thanks to a tip from a neighbor who had watched her case featured in America's Most Wanted.

| James Kilgore

| Arrested on November 8, 2002, in South Africa, where he was living under an alias, and extradited to the United States. He was the last SLA member to be apprehended and convicted.

| Martha Moxley

| Michael Skakel

| Greenwich, Connecticut, US

| A 15-year-old girl last seen talking to Skakel's brother, Thomas, at a party, and who was bludgeoned and stabbed with a golf club that was traced back to the Skakel home. Over the years, suspicions switched from Thomas to Michael, who was an alcoholic and peeping tom at the time of the murder (when he was also 15) and who was said to have bragged about getting away with murder due to his family's connection to the Kennedys. Skakel was convicted of the murder in 2002, and again on retrial, in 2016.

| Claude Snelling

|Joseph James DeAngelo

| Visalia, California, US

| Claude Snelling, a 45-year-old journalism professor, was fatally shot when he intervened in the attempted kidnapping of his 16-year-old daughter by the prolific, unidentified burglar known as the Visalia Ransacker; The Ransacker escaped and vanished afterward. In 2018, police announced that the Ransacker was also the unidentified serial killer known as the Original Night Stalker, and that his real identity was DeAngelo, who was identified as the Stalker by a DNA match. DeAngelo was a police officer in nearby Exeter during the Ransacker's spree. DeAngelo was charged with Snelling's murder because of undisclosed, non-genetic evidence. DeAngelo plead guilty to Claude Snellings murder along with 12 others and was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole

| Carol Hutto

| James B. Kuenn

| Largo, Florida, US

| A 16-year-old girl whose body was found in a lake near an abandoned house. She was last seen alive the night before when she received a call. Suspicion fell on her 17-year-old half-brother Jerry Irwin, a known juvenile delinquent who had stayed out all night and whose route home took him past the house and lake. However, the real murderer was Hutto's boyfriend, James B. Kuenn, who later joined the US Navy and served in a submarine. In 1998, Kuenn confessed to NCIS agents that he had killed Hutto and disposed of her body after she refused to have sex with him. Kuenn's confession was confirmed by DNA.

| Shirley Vian

| Dennis Rader

| Wichita, Kansas, US

| See above.

| Susan Clarke

| Ralph Andrews

| Skokie, Illinois, US

| Clarke disappeared from a babysitting job in Lincolnwood, and her body was found in a vegetable garden two days later. She had been strangled, stabbed and mutilated. A man named Ralph Andrews was suspected early on, but not charged due to a lack of evidence. Years later, after he was convicted in an unrelated 1991 murder, he was charged and eventually pleaded guilty to the Clarke murder, receiving a life sentence.

| Nancy Fox

| Dennis Rader

| Wichita, Kansas, US

| See above.

| Brian and Katie Maggiore

| Joseph James DeAngelo

| Rancho Cordova, California, US

| A young couple chased and fatally shot while walking their dog at night. The murders were attributed to the unidentified East Area Rapist, who committed over 50 home invasions and rapes around the time in Northern California, after pre-tied shoelaces with his signature diamond-type knot were found at the crime scene. The EAR was discovered to be the Original Night Stalker after DNA from both sprees was matched in 2001, and in turn, identified as DeAngelo through family DNA in 2018.

| Deana Lynne Bowdoin

| Clarence Wayne Dixon

| Tempe, Arizona, US

| A 21-year-old woman who was strangled and stabbed to death in her apartment. In 2001, DNA profiling linked Dixon to the crime, a former neighbor of Bowdoin's, who was serving a life sentence for a 1986 sexual-assault conviction. Dixon was formally sentenced to death for the murder in January 2008 and was executed in May 2022.

| Melvin "Ricky" Pittman, Ernest Taylor, Alvin Turner, Randy Johnson, Michael McDowell

| Philander Hampton

| Newark, New Jersey, US

| Five African-American teenagers who disappeared at once from Newark's Clinton Avenue. In 2008, while being interrogated for an unrelated case, Hampton confessed to having helped his cousin, local contractor Lee Anthony Evans, in luring the victims to an empty house with the promise of work, then locking them in a room and setting the house ablaze. Hampton led investigators to the place of the fire but no human remains were found. In spite of this, Hampton pleaded guilty and was convicted of five counts of murder, while Evans, who claimed innocence, was acquitted.

| Etan Patz

| Pedro Hernandez

| New York City, New York, US

| A 6-year-old boy who disappeared on his way to a school stop; his disappearance helped launch the missing child movement and he was the first child with a photo on a milk carton. For decades, suspicion was cast on a convicted child molester, Jose Antonio Ramos. However, Hernandez's brother-in-law identified him as the real perpetrator in 2012, claiming that he had confessed publicly at his church in the 1980s and that his guilt was an open secret in his family. Hernandez confessed again after his arrest, but doubts about his mental health delayed a guilty verdict until 2017.

| Floralba Sánchez

| Pedro López

| El Espinal, Tolima, Colombia

| The only identified victim of López, one of the most prolific serial killers of all time, in his native Colombia. López was tried after he completed his controversial 16-year-long sentence in Ecuador and was deported to his home country.

| Robert Offerman and Debra Manning

| Joseph James DeAngelo

| Goleta, California, US

| The two first victims of the Original Night Stalker in his Southern California spree. DeAngelo was charged with their murders.

| Roger Wheeler

| Johnny Martorano, Steve Flemmi

| Tulsa, Oklahoma, US

| The owner of World Jai Alai, murdered in his car by members of the Winter Hill Gang after he discovered that they were stealing funds from his corporation. Whitey Bulger (a fugitive since 1999) and H. Paul Rico, who died before trial, were also indicted.

| Dennis Gibson

| Tracy Petrocelli

| Calico, California, US

| Gibson was chronologically the second victim to be murdered by serial killer Tracy Petrocelli, who was convicted of another two murders in Nevada and Washington. Petrocelli was sentenced to 15 years to life in prison for Gibson's murder in May 2009.

| Green River Killer victims

| Gary Ridgway

| Near Seattle and Tacoma, Washington, US

| – March 5, 1990

| 48 prostitutes and runaways raped and strangled after being picked up along Pacific Highway South. Ridgway was identified in 2001 after a DNA test was made on samples collected from him already in 1987. Ridgway also killed a 49th woman in 1998, 38-year-old Patricia Yellowrobe.

| Kalinka Bamberski

| Dieter Krombach

| Lindau, Bavaria, Germany

| A French 14-year-old girl who died in the home of her German doctor stepfather (Krombach) after being injected with a cobalt-iron solution. Because German authorities declined to prosecute Krombach in spite of his testimony being inconsistent about the purpose of the injection and with the autopsy report, Bamberski's biological father, André, lobbied for Krombach to be prosecuted in France. Krombach was tried in absentia in 1995 and found guilty, but the verdict was annulled by the European Court of Human Rights in 2001. In 2009, Bamberski had Krombach abducted from his home and delivered to a French police station in Alsace, where he was arrested. Krombach was tried again and sentenced to 15 years in prison, while Bamberski received a one-year suspended sentence for his abduction in 2014. Since 1997, several German women have come forward claiming that Krombach drugged and raped them as teenagers.

| rowspan="2"|Dos Erres massacre

| Manuel Pop, Reyes Collin Gualip, Daniel Martínez Hernández, Carlos Carías

| rowspan="2"|La Libertad, El Petén, Guatemala

| rowspan="2"|

| rowspan="2"|Over 200 unarmed Maya people murdered in a punitive expedition of the Guatemalan Army Kaibiles during the presidency of Efraín Ríos Montt, mostly by bludgeoning. Each convict was sentenced to 6,060 years in prison for the crimes.

| Pedro Pimentel Ríos

| Jeanine Nicarico

| Brian Dugan

| Naperville, Illinois, US

| A ten-year-old girl kidnapped from her home by a burglar and subsequently raped and murdered. Two men, Alejandro Hernandez and Rolando Cruz, were convicted in several trials before they were respectively acquitted in 1995, and pardoned by the Governor in 2002. Dugan, who pleaded guilty to the crime in 2009, had already confessed to it in 1985.

| Elaine Graham

| Edmond Jay Marr

| Los Angeles, California, US

| A 29-year-old nurse and student at California State University at Northridge who was abducted and murdered. Marr became a suspect when he was seen in the immediate area of her disappearance and at a sister's home only a few blocks from where the victim's car was found. Her skeletal remains were found by hikers in a wooded area halfway between where she was last seen alive and where the car was found, some six months later. A knife found in the suspect's possession when he was arrested for armed robbery a month later, was later proven to be the murder weapon when DNA evidence matched blood found in the knife's crevices.

| Grace and Candice Reed, and Joshua Durocher

| Michael Durocher

| Jacksonville, Florida, US

| Serial killer Michael Durocher murdered his son Joshua, as well as his girlfriend and her daughter, Grace and Candice Reed, in 1983. He confessed to the crime seven years later while in prison for killing two more people. Durocher was sentenced to death and executed in 1993 for the triple murder.

| Mark Tildesley

| Leslie Bailey

| Wokingham, England, UK

| A seven-year-old boy who disappeared while visiting a funfair in Wokingham, Berkshire, England on the evening of 1 June 1984. He was lured away from the fair and his bicycle was found chained to railings nearby. In 1990 it emerged that Mark had been abducted, drugged, tortured, raped and murdered by a London-based paedophile gang on the night he disappeared. His body has never been found.

| Paula Godfrey

| John Edward Robinson

| Overland Park, Kansas, US

| A 19-year-old woman vanished after she was hired by Robinson, a con man and serial killer, to work as a sales representative for his shell company. Her body was never found.

| Elisabeth Fritzl

| Josef Fritzl

| Amstetten, Austria

| An 18-year-old girl imprisoned in an underground cell and raped by her father for 24 years, resulting in the birth of seven children. The truth was discovered when one of their daughters was admitted to a hospital with life-threatening kidney failure.

| Angela Samota

| Donald Andrew Bess Jr.

| Dallas, Texas, US

| A SMU student raped and killed in her apartment. Bess was identified in 2008 by a DNA match while he was serving life imprisonment for another offense. He was tried, convicted, and given the death penalty. He died in prison in October 2022.

| Kylie Maybury

| Gregory Keith Davies

| Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

| A six-year-old girl kidnapped, drugged, raped and murdered after leaving a convenience store on Melbourne Cup Day. Davies became a suspect only in 2014, when Victoria Police made a public call for help.

| Tiffany Stasi

| John Edward Robinson

| Overland Park, Kansas, US

| The four-month-old daughter of a 19-year-old single mother who Robinson met at a battered women's shelter. Robinson promised her a job, home and daycare for the baby in Chicago, and days later gave the baby to his own brother, who had been unable to conceive, under the claim that the mother had committed suicide. Stasi's identity was confirmed by DNA in 2000. Robinson was also convicted for the murder of the mother (whose body was never found), but the conviction was overturned on technicalities in November 2015.

| Jonathan Sohus

| Christian Gerhartsreiter

| San Marino, California, US

| The neighbor of Gerhartsreiter, a con man. After Sohus and his wife Linda disappeared, Gerhartsreiter told other people that they had moved to Europe, and was later pulled over by police while driving Sohus's car under an alias. In 1994, the dismembered skeleton of a man was disinterred in the Sohus home, but he could not be identified until 2010 because Sohus was adopted and his DNA could not be compared to his known relatives.

| Marine Hedge

| Dennis Rader

| Park City, Kansas, US

| See above

| Gail Katz-Bierenbaum

| Robert Bierenbaum

| New York City, New York, US

| A licensed pilot's wife who disappeared. Her husband was convicted of murder after it was learned that he took an unexplained two-hour-flight over the Atlantic Ocean the day she went missing.

| Debra Jackson, Henrietta Wright, Barbara Ware, Bernita Sparks, Mary Lowe, Lachrica Jefferson, Monique Alexander, Margette Washington

| Lonnie David Franklin, Jr.

| Los Angeles, California, US

| – c. September 11, 1988

| Eight African-American women raped (and in the first seven cases, murdered) by a serial killer who went dormant for two decades after the last victim survived. Law enforcement was led to Franklin after the killer's DNA was partially matched to his son, who was incarcerated on an unrelated weapons charge, in 2010. A full match was subsequently extracted from a piece of pizza partially eaten by Franklin.

| Hugh Scrutton

| Ted Kaczynski

| Sacramento, California, US

| A computer store owner killed by a bomb planted in his parking lot by a neo-luddite terrorist.

| Edit Fintor, Ilona Sőrés; Andrea, Dániel, Zoltán and Tünde Pándy

| Ágnes and András Pándy

| Brussels, Belgium

| –1990

| The successive wives and stepchildren of András Pándy, who told people that they had left for other countries and forged evidence to make it look like they were still alive. After their arrest during an unrelated investigation in 1997, Ágnes, the eldest stepdaughter, confessed that she had helped Pándy in the murders and disposing of the bodies.

| Thomas Underwood

| Michael Durocher

| Jacksonville, Florida, US

| Serial killer Michael Durocher murdered Thomas Underwood during a robbery in 1986. The case remained unsolved off three years before Durocher confessed to the crime while he was facing a life sentence for another murder. Durocher was sentenced to death for killing Underwood, but he was ultimately executed for an unrelated triple murder he previously committed in 1983.

| Sherri Rasmussen

| Stephanie Lazarus

| Van Nuys, California, US

| A 29-year-old woman killed during a home invasion. The case was classified as a robbery gone wrong until 2009, when DNA from a bite mark on Rasmussen's body was identified as female and detectives reviewing the case determined that the robbery had been staged. The DNA was positively matched to Lazarus, who had had an affair with Rasmussen's husband shortly before she was killed.

| Michelle Dorr

| Hadden Clark

| Silver Spring, Maryland, US

| A six-year-old girl who disappeared from her father's backyard while he was taking a nap. The father confessed to the murder in a psychotic episode, but was later exonerated. Clark offered to disclose the body's location as part of a plea deal; though the deal was not made, he still showed police where to find Dorr's body after his conviction.

| Samantha Knight

| Michael Guider

| Bondi, New South Wales, Australia

| A nine-year-old girl abducted from her home. Guider, a self-educated expert on Aboriginal sites of the Sydney area, aroused the suspicions of journalists working with him when he made several bizarre statements about Knight. Eventually, Guider confessed to have drugged and molested several girls in New South Wales through the 1980s, with Knight dying from an accidental overdose. Guider also led police to the place he buried Knight; no body was found, likely because the area was altered later for development, but cadaver dogs reacted positively to the site.

| Vicki Wegerle

| Dennis Rader

| Wichita, Kansas, US

| See above.

| rowspan="2"|Lita McClinton

| Phillip Anthony Harwood

| rowspan="2"|Atlanta, Georgia, US

| rowspan="2"|

| rowspan="2"|A 35-year-old woman killed by a hitman (Harwood) on behalf of her ex-husband (Sullivan), who was in Florida at the time of the murder. Sullivan fled to Thailand after Harwood was arrested in 1997, but was extradited to the US in 2004.

| James Sullivan

| Catherine Clampitt

| John Edward Robinson

| Overland Park, Kansas, US

| A 27-year-old woman from Texas who disappeared after being hired by Robinson. Her body was never found.

| Carlina White

| Annugetta "Ann" Pettway

| New York City, New York, US

| A 19-day-old infant kidnapped from Harlem Hospital Center by a woman posing as a nurse, who then raised her as her own daughter. White (raised as Nejdra "Netty" Nance) solved her own kidnapping when she was 23 years old, after checking missing children websites and contacting her birth family.

| Isabelle Laville, Farida Hellegouarch, Fabienne Leroy, Jeanne-Marie Desramault, Elisabeth Brichet, Natacha Danais

| Michel Fourniret

| Northern France and Belgium

| – November 1990

| Victims of Fourniret's first serial raping and killing spree. After going dormant in 1990, Fourniret resumed his crimes in Belgium in 2000, and killed two more teenage girls before being apprehended in 2003.

| Richard Mason, Kenneth Griffith, Earl Smock

| Frank Casteel

| Chattanooga, Tennessee, US

| Three men shot for trespassing in private farmland while going for a swim. The conviction rested on the three men being registered in a logbook of trespassers kept by Casteel and given to police by his mistress.

| Lisa Marie Kimmel

| Dale Wayne Eaton

| Casper, Wyoming, US

| An 18-year-old woman who was raped and murdered during a road trip from Billings, Montana to Cody, Wyoming. In 2002, male DNA found in Kimmel's body was matched to Eaton, who was serving a sentence for a 1997 kidnapping in Colorado. Kimmel's car was also found buried in Eaton's property.

| Betty Jane May

| Daryl Mack

| Reno, Nevada, US

| A 55-year-old woman who was raped and strangled to death in her basement room. In 2002, DNA evidence linked Mack to the murder. Mack was already serving a life sentence for a 1994 murder. He was sentenced to death for May's murder in 2002 and executed in 2006 after waiving his appeals.

| Pan Am Flight 103

| Abdelbaset al-Megrahi

| Lockerbie, Scotland, UK

| A transatlantic flight covering the route between Frankfurt and Detroit that was destroyed by a bomb, killing all 243 passengers, 16 crew and 11 people on the ground. Two employees at Libyan Arab Airlines were tried in a special court set in Camp Zeist, Netherlands, with al-Megrahi being found guilty and sentenced to life in prison and the other, Lamin Khalifah Fhimah, being acquitted. al-Megrahi was released on health concerns in 2009 and died of cancer in Libya in 2012.

| Cheryl Anne Commesso

| Franklin Delano Floyd

| Pinellas County, Florida, US

| c.

| An 18-year-old exotic dancer who disappeared after having an argument with Floyd, the husband of a coworker, Sharon Marshall. Commesso's remains were found in 1995 and identified in 1996. Around the same time, pictures depicting Commesso bound and beaten were found in a truck stolen by Floyd in Oklahoma and abandoned in Texas. Floyd was initially deemed unfit to stand trial on the grounds of mental health, which he denied and fought vigorously. He was subsequently tried and sentenced to death.

| Katharine and Robert Baskin

| Marvin L. Maple

| Murfreesboro, Tennessee, US

| c.

| Two eight and seven-year-old siblings kidnapped by their grandparents and taken to San Jose, California, where they lived under aliases until they were identified in 2009. Maple's wife faced no charges because she had already died in 2007, but he was extradited to Tennessee and sentenced to four years probation. The grandchildren refused to reunite with their parents.

| Lisa Kay Kelly

| Billy Edwin Reid

| Denver, Colorado

| Prostitute who was murdered and remained unidentified for 17 years before her identity was uncovered. Fingerprints found on her body matched to Lannell Williams (see below), and were eventually matched to drifter Billy Edwin Reid in 2006. Two years later, he was found guilty of both murders and sentenced to life imprisonment.

| Renee Baker

| Scott Erskine

| Palm Beach, Florida, US

| A 26-year-old woman who was raped, had her neck snapped, and was left to drown with the tide. Erskine, already on death row for two other murders, pleaded guilty after a DNA match was made in 2003.

| Lannell Williams

| Billy Edwin Reid

| Denver, Colorado

| Prostitute who was murdered and found in a humiliating position. Fingerprints found on her body matched to Lisa Kay Kelly (see above), and were eventually matched to drifter Billy Edwin Reid in 2006. Two years later, he was found guilty of both murders and sentenced to life imprisonment.

| Jacob Wetterling

| Danny Heinrich

| Saint Joseph, Minnesota, US

| An 11-year-old boy who was abducted while he biked home with his younger brother and a friend. Heinrich, who had been a person of interest in the case for a long time, confessed to having raped and murdered Wetterling only after he was arrested for possession of child pornography decades later. Heinrich also led police to Wetterling's remains as part of a plea deal.

| Tsutsumi, Satoko and Tatsuhiko Sakamoto

| Shoko Asahara, Kazuaki Okazaki, Tomomasa Nakagawa, Satoro Hashimoto

| Yokohama, Kanagawa, Japan

| Sakamoto was a 33-year-old lawyer working on a class action lawsuit against Aum Shinrikyo cult, his 29-year-old wife and 14-month-old son – all were murdered in their home by members of the cult. Their bodies were buried in metal drums in different rural areas of Niigata, Toyama and Nagano, where they remained unnoticed until members of the cult confessed and led police to the sites in the aftermath of the 1995 Tokyo subway sarin gas attack. The cult's leader, Asahara, was also convicted as the instigator of the murders, while a fourth material participant, Hideo Murai, was murdered before the trial.

| Lisa Story and Robin Cornell

| Joseph Zieler

| Cape Coral, Florida, US

| At an apartment in Cape Coral, 11-year-old Robin Cornell and her 32-year-old babysitter Lisa Story were both raped and murdered by a intruder. The killer, Joseph Zieler, was not caught until 26 years later, when he was linked to the case via DNA testing while under remand for an unrelated assault charge. Zieler was found guilty of two counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to death in 2023.

| Linda Yalem

| Altemio Sanchez

| Amherst, New York, US

| A college student who was raped and killed while training for the New York City Marathon. Sanchez was identified as the perpetrator during the revision of the case against Anthony Capozzi, who was wrongfully imprisoned for 21 years for two rapes committed with the same modus operandi.

| Dolores E. Davis

| Dennis Rader

| Wichita, Kansas, US

| See above.

| Pamela Rose Aldridge McCall

| Clark Perry Baldwin

| Spring Hill, Tennessee, US

| At the time of her death, McCall was five months pregnant. She was raped and strangled by Baldwin, a long-haul trucker, who was linked to her murder and those of two other women (see below) in 2020. He was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment in this case, but died before standing trial for the other two.

| Jessica Keen

| Marvin Lee Smith, Jr.

| West Jefferson, Ohio, US

| A 15-year-old girl from Columbus who was abducted from a home for troubled teens and raped. At one point, Keen escaped and tried to hide in Foster Chapel Cemetery, but her abductor found her and beat her to death with a headstone. Police suspected of her 18-year-old boyfriend, but he was ruled out by DNA. The same evidence later led them to Smith, who confessed and pleaded guilty in exchange for not facing the death penalty.

| Timothy Wiltsey

| Michelle Lodzinski

| South Amboy, New Jersey, US

| A five-year-old boy reported missing by his mother, Lodzinski, at a carnival on National Missing Children's Day. Lodzinski became a suspect when she told contradictory versions about how her son went missing, and she was arrested after Wiltsey's babysitters recognized the blanket found wrapped around Wiltsey's body as coming from Lodzinski's house.

| Jaycee Dugard

| Phillip and Nancy Garrido

| South Lake Tahoe, California, US

| An 11-year-old girl abducted from the street and kept in captivity for two decades, during which she was raped and had two daughters with her captor. The Garridos were arrested after Phillip took the daughters to a Berkeley campus and arouse suspicions because, as a convicted sex offender, he was not allowed to be near children.

| Ariane Mazijn, Lutgarda Bogaerts, Maria Van den Reeck and Eve Poppe

| Stephaan Du Lion

| Antwerp and Oelegem, Belgium

| –1997

| Four women who were raped and murdered by window cleaner Stephaan Du Lion. Their murders were at first considered unrelated, and were unsolved until October 2018, when Du Lion was linked via DNA to the Mazijn murder. He then confessed to the other three murders.Due to the overwhelming evidence against him, he was convicted of all four and sentenced to life imprisonment.

| Shauna Howe

| James and Timothy O'Brien, Elfred "Ted" Walker

| Oil City, Pennsylvania, US

| An 11-year-old girl abducted while coming home from a Girl Scouts Halloween party, raped, and subsequently killed when she was thrown from a railroad bridge. The perpetrators were identified after a DNA match was made to O'Brien, who was serving a prison sentence for another attempted kidnapping in 1995.

| Majane Mazur

| Altemio Sanchez

| Buffalo, New York, US

| A prostitute victim of Sanchez. See above.

| Beverly Bonner

| John Edward Robinson

| Raymore, Missouri, US

| The 49-year-old prison librarian at Western Missouri Correctional Facility, where Robinson was imprisoned for fraud between 1987 and 1993. Upon his release, Bonner left her husband for Robinson and promptly disappeared, while Robinson continued to cash in her alimony checks. In 2000, her body was discovered in a metal drum stored in a garage rented by Robinson.

| rowspan="2"|Richard and Lynn Ehlenfeldt, Guadalupe Maldonado, Michael C. Castro, Rico L. Solis, Thomas Mennes, Marcus Nellsen

| Juan Luna

| rowspan="2"|Palatine, Illinois, US

| rowspan="2"|

| rowspan="2"|The two owners and five employees of a Brown's Chicken & Pasta, all killed during a robbery and stashed in the walk-in freezer. Luna, a former employee, and Degorski, whom he had met in high school, became suspects when Degorski's girlfriend denounced them in March 2002. Luna confessed after he was matched to DNA recovered from a half-eaten chicken in the freezer.

| James Degorski

| Charlie Keever, Jonathan Sellers

| Scott Erskine

| San Diego County, California, US

| Two boys, one 13 and another 9 years-old, who disappeared during a bike ride and were later found murdered. Sellers, who was African–American, was hanged on a tree, while Keever was raped and sexually mutilated. In March 2001, DNA retrieved from Keever's mouth was matched to Erskine, who was imprisoned for a rape committed six months after the murders.

| Ángel Ibáñez, Sara Dotor

| Gustavo Romero Tercero

| Valdepeñas, Castilla-La Mancha, Spain

| A young couple abducted from a public park, robbed and murdered (the woman was also raped). Romero, who fled to the Canary Islands shortly after the murder, was identified as the culprit when he was arrested for domestic violence in 2003 and his DNA was matched to that found at the scene. He confessed and led investigators to the place where he had thrown the murder weapon.

| Mia Zapata

| Jesús Mezquía

| Seattle, Washington, US

| Lead singer of the punk band The Gits, who was raped and murdered while coming home from a music venue. A DNA match was made to Mezquía after he was arrested for burglary and domestic violence in Florida in 2002. Mezquía had been reported for indecent exposure in Seattle within two weeks of Zapata's murder.

| Chekannur Maulavi

| V. V. Hamsa

| Edappal, Kerala, India

| Progressive Islamic cleric abducted from his home by members of A.P. Aboobacker Musalyar's ultraorthodox Muslim sect. Hamsa was the only convicted of ten people charged.

| Rita Tangredi

| rowspan="2"|John Bittrolff

| rowspan="2"|Suffolk County, New York, US

| rowspan="2"|

| rowspan="2"|Two prostitutes killed while working. Bittrolff became a suspect when his brother Timothy was arrested for an unrelated charge and he was partially matched to DNA found on the victims. Subsequently, Bittrolff provided a full match. Bittrolff is also a suspect in the murder of a third woman, Sandra Costilla, who was found dead in North Sea, New York on November 20, 1993, and in at least one of the murders attributed to the unidentified Long Island Serial Killer.

| Colleen McNamee

| Sheila and Debbie Faith

| John Edward Robinson

| Raymore, Missouri, US

| A 45-year-old woman and her 15-year-old daughter, who used a wheelchair due to spina bifida, from Fullerton, California. The Faiths moved to the Kansas City area after Sheila met Robinson through the internet and he offered her a job and to pay for Debbie's medical expenses. Afterward, Robinson cashed in Debbie's pension checks for seven years. Their remains were found at the same garage as Bonner's, also in metal drums.

| Kiyoshi Kariya

| rowspan="2"| Makoto Hirata

| rowspan="2"| Tokyo, Kantō, Japan

| rowspan="2"|

| A 68-year-old lawyer who was kidnapped, fatally tortured and subsequently incinerated by Aum Shinrikyo, who wanted to learn the whereabouts of Kariya's sister after she defected from the cult. Hirata surrendered to authorities in 2011 and confessed to the abduction, but not to the murder which remains unsolved.

| Hiromi Shimada

| A college professor who was the target of a false flag bombing by Aum (Shimada was considered sympathetic to Aum, and the attack intended to deviate attention from the coming subway attacks), but he was unharmed. Hirata was convicted for the bombing despite denying any role in it.

| A 21-year-old woman shot with the gun of her live-in boyfriend, Sponza, who had ties to organized crime. The death was ruled an accident resulting from McDermott picking up the gun while Sponza was cleaning it. However, the case was reinvestigated decades later at the request of McDermott's son, actor Dylan McDermott, and ruled a homicide by Sponza. Sponza was himself murdered in 1972 and his murder remains unsolved.

| Louisa Dunne

| Ryland Headley

| Bristol, UK

| On June 28, 1967, 75-year-old Louisa Dunne was found raped and dead at her home on Britannia Road in Easton. Avon and Somerset Police began reviewing the case in 2023. Modern forensic examination was not available at the time of Louisa's death, but police obtained a full DNA profile and fingerprint. The DNA profile was compared to the national database and matched to that of Ryland Headley, who was placed into the system in 2012 following an unrelated incident.

| Andrew Lee Muns

| Michael LeBrun

| Subic Bay, Philippines

| Ensign serving aboard the fleet oiler during the Vietnam War, who disappeared along with $8,600 from the ship's safe. Muns was officially listed as a thief and a deserter until the NCIS started an investigation at the request of Muns's family, 30 years later. LeBrun, who also worked at the reimbursing office at the time, confessed to being the real thief, to have murdered Muns when he confronted him over it, and to have disposed of the body in one of the ship's tankers. However, he recanted later and the confession was considered not admissible before the court. Nevertheless, Muns was officially cleared and given a burial with military honors at Arlington National Cemetery.

| Reyna Angélica Marroquín

| Howard B. Elkins

| Jericho, New York, US

| A 28-year-old Salvadoran immigrant who was having an extra-marital affair with Elkins when she disappeared, and was never reported missing. In 1999, Marroquín's mummified body was found in a barrel at Elkins's previous home, which he had sold in 1972. She was pregnant at the time of her death, and a DNA test of the fetus identified Elkins as the father. Elkins committed suicide the day after he was interrogated by detectives about the murder.

| Betty Jo Richards

| Jack Trawick

| Quinton, Alabama, US

| Richards was stabbed to death in an alley, with witnesses at the time reporting that she was last seen screaming while running away from an unknown white man. Initially, police detained a man named Thomas Barnett for the crime, but he was ultimately let go.

More than twenty years later, serial killer Jack Trawick confessed to killing Richards, providing information that only the killer could have known. He was not charged with the murder, and was later executed for an unrelated murder in 2009.

| Siobhan McGuinness

| Richard William Davis

| Turah, Montana, US

| The 5-year-old McGuinness was abducted from her home in Missoula, after which she was raped, stabbed, and beaten to death on a highway near Turah. There was no notable progress on the case until 2018, when genetic genealogy company Othram was contacted to test DNA isolated from McGuinness' body. This was used to identify her killer as Richard William Davis, who died of natural causes in 2012.

| Arlis Perry

| Stephen Blake Crawford

| Stanford, California, US

| A 19-year-old newlywed who was sodomized with a candlestick and murdered while praying at Stanford Memorial Church in Stanford University. Crawford, the security guard who found the body, was identified as the culprit after a DNA test was performed on semen found at the scene. The same evidence had earlier excluded Crawford after being tested with more primitive technology. Crawford shot himself when police arrived at his residence with a search warrant.

| Suzanne Marie Sevakis

|Franklin Delano Floyd

| North Carolina, US

| A young girl kidnapped by Floyd, her stepfather, while her mother was serving a month sentence in prison. Floyd subsequently raised and married Sevakis under different aliases. Sevakis, then known as "Sharon Marshall", died in a suspicious hit and run in 1990 and her real identity remained a mystery until 2014. In 1995, several photographs depicting Sevakis being sexually abused were found in a truck stolen and abandoned shortly after by Floyd. She could be as young as four years old in some images.

| Allenstown Four

| Terry Peder Rasmussen

| Allenstown, New Hampshire, US

| –1984

| A woman and three young girls, whose bodies were found inside two steel barrels abandoned in Bear Brook State Park. The woman and two of the girls were maternally related, and the third girl, aged 4, was identified as Rasmussen's biological daughter in 2017. Rasmussen had worked for the owner of the property between 1977 and 1981, using the alias "Robert Evans". He died in prison in 2010, while serving a sentence for murdering his wife in 2002.

| Charlene and Lyman Smith, Keith and Patrice Harrington, Manuela Witthun, Cheri Domingo and Gregory Sanchez, Janelle Cruz

| Joseph James DeAngelo

| Ventura, Dana Point, Irvine, and Goleta, California, US

| – May 4, 1986

| Southern California couples and lone women targeted by the Original Night Stalker, whose M.O. included stalking his victims for a prolonged time, invading their homes, binding them, raping the women while the men watched, and then killing both by either shooting or bludgeoning. DeAngelo was identified by police after DNA from the crime scenes was uploaded to a fake profile in the open-source DNA database GEDmatch, and found to have distant relatives among its users. DeAngelo was charged with all murders and is pending trial.

| Suzanne Bombardier

| Mitchell Lynn Bacom

| Antioch, California, US

| A 14-year-old girl kidnapped, raped and stabbed to death. Her body was found floating in the San Joaquin River. DNA found in the body was matched to Bacom, a registered sex offender with three prison sentences served.

| Denise and Dawn Beaudin

| Terry Peder Rasmussen

| Manchester, New Hampshire, US

| A woman, Denise, and her six-month-old daughter, Dawn, who disappeared with Rasmussen. The daughter was abandoned by Rasmussen in Scotts Valley, California in 1986, after raising her alone for some time, and also neglecting and molesting her. Dawn discovered her real identity through genealogy websites when she was 35. Denise Beaudin was excluded as the adult victim at Allenstown and her whereabouts are unknown, but she is presumed murdered by Rasmussen.

References

External links

Cold Case Investigation Units TELEMASP Bulletin, Texas Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics Program
– explains sentencing in the UK, for cases that took place long ago.

Characteristics

Violent or major crime

Solve rate

Suspect identification

Tunnel vision

Improvements in forensics

Famous criminal examples

Examples of criminal cold cases that ended in conviction

See also

References

External links