List of unsolved deaths

This list of unsolved deaths includes notable cases where victims have been murdered or have died under unsolved circumstances, including murders committed by unknown serial killers. The mysteriously-deceased are listed chronologically by year. (For 'serial killer cases' which span multiple years, entries are listed under the year the first murder took place.)

Unsolved murders

Before 1800

• Dagobert II, 679, one of the last kings of the Merovingian line, murdered by persons unknown in the Ardennes Forest on December 23.
• Giovanni Borgia, 2nd Duke of Gandia, 1497, His body was recovered in the Tiber with his throat slit and about nine stab wounds on his torso. His father, Pope Alexander VI launched an investigation only for it to end abruptly a week later. Theories range from the Orsini family to his own brothers, Cesare Borgia and Gioffre Borgia, having committed the crime.
• Moctezuma II, 1520, Aztec emperor. According to Spanish accounts he was killed by his own people; according to Aztec accounts he was murdered by the Spanish.
• Robert Pakington, 1536, likely to have been the first person murdered with a handgun in London
• Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, 1678, found impaled on his own sword and strangled at Primrose Hill, London. Three men were hanged but later the witness statement was found to be perjured.

1800s

Thomas Hindman, American politician and murder victim

• Mary Rogers, also known as the "Beautiful Cigar Girl". Her body was found in the Hudson River on July 28, 1841. The story became a national sensation and inspired Edgar Allan Poe to write "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" in 1842.
• Fanny de Choiseul-Praslin, wife of French duke Charles de Choiseul-Praslin, died shortly after a beating and stabbing in the family's Paris apartment on 17 August 1847. Her husband was arrested, but committed suicide during trial, protesting his innocence all along. No other suspect has ever been identified. The scandal caused by the case helped to provoke the French Revolution of 1848.
• Thomas C. Hindman, an American politician assassinated by one or more unknown assailants on 27 September 1868. The assassins fired through his parlor window while he was reading his newspaper with his children in Helena, Arkansas, United States.^[1]
• Benjamin Nathan, 56, a financier turned philanthropist, was found beaten to death in his New York City home on July 28, 1870. Several suspects were identified, including Nathan's profligate son Washington, who discovered the body along with his brother. None were ever indicted and the case remains unsolved.^[2]
• Sharon Tyndale, former Illinois Secretary of State, was robbed and shot fatally as he walked from his house in Springfield to the train station nearby early on the morning of April 29, 1871. No suspect was ever found.^[3]
• Henry Weston Smith, 49, a minister, was found dead on the road between his home in Crook City, South Dakota, and Deadwood, where he was going to give a sermon, on August 20, 1876. While he was not robbed, it has never been established who was responsible for his death, and what their motives were.
• George Colvocoresses, Greek American naval commander and explorer, died of a gunshot wound while returning to a ferryboat on June 3, 1872, in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The insurance company claimed it was suicide, and while it eventually settled with his family the case has never been solved.^[4]
• Martin DeFoor, 73, an early settler of Atlanta, Georgia, was along with his wife the victim of an unsolved axe murder on their farm on July 25, 1879.
• John Henry Blake, 74, agent for one of Ireland's more despised British landlords, was shot and killed along with his driver on their way to Mass outside Loughrea on 29 June 1882. The case received considerable attention at the time because Blake's boss, Hubert de Burgh-Canning, 2nd Marquess of Clanricarde, was a nobleman. Although his wife survived the attack, she was unable to help identify any suspects, and the case remains unsolved.
• John M. Clayton, American politician, shot and killed instantly by an unknown assailant on the evening of 29 January 1889 in Plumerville, Arkansas, after starting an investigation into the possible fraud of an election he took part in. After his death he was declared the winner of the election but his assassin was never found.^[5]
• Andrew Jackson Borden and Abby Durfee Borden, father and stepmother of Lizzie Borden, both killed in their family house in Fall River, Massachusetts on the morning of 4 August 1892, by blows from a hatchet. In the case of Andrew Borden, the hatchet blows not only crushed his skull but cleanly split his left eyeball. Lizzie was later arrested and charged for the murders. She was the only one in the house at the time of the killing of Mrs. Borden. Lizzie and the maid, Bridget Sullivan, were the only ones in the home when Mr. Borden was killed. She was acquitted by a jury in the following year of 1893 and the case remains unsolved.^[6]
• On August 9, 1894, a train was deliberately derailed in Lincoln, Nebraska, killing 11 passengers and crew. Evidence at the scene showed signs of sabotage. The following year, a local man was convicted of second-degree murder. Doubts about his guilt led to his parole in 1910 due to lack of evidence; no other suspects have ever been identified.
• The Gatton murders occurred 1.5 miles (2.4 km) from the rural Australian town of Gatton, Queensland, on December 26, 1898. Siblings Michael, Norah and Ellen Murphy were found deceased the morning after they left home to attend a dance in the town hall which had been cancelled. The bodies were arranged with the feet pointing west and both women had their hands tied with handkerchiefs. This signature aspect has never been repeated in Australian crime and to date remains a mystery.^[7]

1900–1924

Sketch of the corpse of Little Lord Fauntleroy, unidentified since his discovery in 1921

• William Goebel, an American politician who was shot and mortally wounded on the morning of 30 January 1900 by an unknown assailant in Frankfort, Kentucky, one day before being sworn in as Governor of Kentucky. The next day the dying Goebel was sworn in and, despite the best efforts of eighteen physicians attending him, died on the afternoon of 3 February 1900. Goebel remains the only state Governor in the United States to die by assassination while in office.^[8]
• Rose Harsent, a six-months-pregnant maid who was stabbed to death on 1 June 1902 in Suffolk, England by an unknown assailant. At the time it was alleged that the murderer was a preacher of the Primitive Methodist Chapel named William Gardiner, who was having an affair with the victim. Gardiner was tried twice for the murder but each time the jury failed to reach a verdict.^[9][10] The case has been investigated in BBC One's Julian Fellowes Investigates.^[11]
• Al Swearengen, 59, famous as the operator of the Gem Theater brothel in Deadwood, South Dakota, was found dead in a Denver street of a massive wound to his head on November 15, 1904. No suspects were ever named.
• Elsie Sigel, 20, found strangled inside a trunk in an apartment in New York City's Chinatown on June 18, 1909, nine days after she had last been seen. The resident of the apartment, who had been having a love affair with her, was considered the prime suspect but was never arrested.
• Elsie Paroubek, the five-year-old daughter of Czech immigrants. Is thought to have either wandered away from her home or was kidnapped in Chicago on April 8, 1911. Her disappearance was the subject of intense police investigation over three states, with massive newspaper coverage. Her body was found a month later. Elsie, under the name "Annie Aronburg" became one of the principal characters in Henry Darger's immense novel The Story of the Vivian Girls in the Realms of the Unreal.
• Joseph Wilson, the sixty-year-old stationmaster was shot dead at Lintz Green railway station in the Northeast of England on 7 October 1911. His murder sparked one of the largest murder investigations in Northeast England.^[12]
• One suspect in the Villisca Axe Murders, which claimed eight lives in that Iowa town on the night of June 9–10, 1912, was tried twice and ultimately acquitted. Other suspects have been considered, but history has largely exonerated them as well.
• The body of Mary Phagan, 13, was found strangled and raped early on April 27, 1913 at the Atlanta, Georgia, pencil factory where she worked. Suspicion eventually fell on Leo Frank, manager of the factory, who was convicted of the murder later that year. When his death sentence was commuted to life in 1915, Frank was abducted from prison and lynched, in what is considered one of the worst episodes of antisemitism in the United States. Historians have come to believe he was wrongly convicted, and in 1986 he was pardoned. It is believed that a janitor who testified against Frank and served a year in prison as an accessory after the fact was the real killer.
• Chinese journalist Huang Yuanyong, 30, was shot and killed in San Francisco on December 25, 1915. No arrests were ever made. Most theories about the responsible parties suggest that it was a political assassination, since Huang had increasingly been in conflict with the government of the newly established Republic of China after initially supporting it.
• John Bamford was considered the prime suspect in the 1917 Wonnangatta murders in East Gippsland, Victoria, Australia; however, his body was found early the following year. The cause of death was a gunshot wound to the head. Several theories have been advanced, but no suspects have ever been identified. In the late 1970s, Barclay's son, who later worked for a mutual friend of the two who had been an early suspect, made a statement suggesting he knew who the murderers were as well but declining to identify them.
• De La Haye, principal of the Newington House school in Madras, India, was shot dead in his bed at the school on 15 March 1919. One defendant was acquitted after a highly publicized trial; no others have ever been identified.
• James Colosimo, 42, gangster who led a precursor to the Chicago Outfit. He was shot and killed at his café on May 11, 1920. No one was ever charged with the killing; it is believed that Al Capone, then one of Colosimo's henchmen, was involved.
• Joseph Bowne Elwell, 46, a bridge player, was shot and killed inside his locked house on June 11, 1920. One clearly false confession the next year was discarded, and no other suspects ever were identified. The intense media interest in the case inspired the development of the locked-room murder subgenre of detective fiction.^[13]
• Italian anarchists were suspected in the Wall Street bombing of September 16, 1920, which killed 38, making it the deadliest terrorist act in U.S. history at that point. Despite a number of arrests, no one was ever charged. One likely suspect, who was never arrested, fled to Italy shortly afterwards and never returned to the U.S.
• Chrissie Venn, a thirteen-year-old girl who was murdered on or around 21 February 1921 near the township of North Motton, near Ulverstone, Tasmania; her body was found in a hollow tree. George William King, who claimed the incriminating marks on his hands were from injuries sustained during the three-day search for Venn, was acquitted after a trial which was the first change of venue ever granted in Tasmania. No other suspects were ever named.
• "Little Lord Fauntleroy", an unidentified boy who was murdered in late 1920 or early 1921 and was found on 8 March 1921. He was killed by a blow to the head and drowning after being dropped into a quarry in Waukesha, Wisconsin, United States.^[14]
• Anthony D'Andrea, 48, an early Chicago Mafia boss, was shot and killed while entering his apartment on May 11, 1921, near the end of the city's aldermen's wars. No one was ever charged or named as a suspect.
• Professional golfer James Douglas Edgar, 36, whose book The Gate to Golf changed the sport considerably, died shortly after he was found on an Atlanta street late at night on August 8, 1921, with a leg wound. Reports that this was the consequence of his involvement in a love triangle have never led to any suspects being identified.
• William Desmond Taylor, a popular Irish-born American actor and director of silent movies. Killed by a shot in the back on 1 February 1922 inside his bungalow. His murder, along with other Hollywood scandals, such as the Roscoe Arbuckle trial, led to a frenzy of sensational and often fabricated newspaper reports, and a deathbed confession of dubious veracity.
• The Hinterkaifeck murders. Hinterkaifeck, a small farmstead between the Bavarian towns of Ingolstadt and Schrobenhausen (approximately 70 km north of Munich), was the scene of one of the most puzzling crimes in German history. On the evening of 31 March 1922, the six inhabitants of the farm were killed with a pickaxe, and the murder is still unsolved.
• Michael Collins, Commander-in-chief of the Irish Army. Was shot by an unknown assailant at Béal na Bláth, County Cork, Ireland during an ambush on 22 August 1922.
• Edward Hall and Eleanor Mills, both of New Brunswick, New Jersey, were found dead of gunshot wounds in a field in nearby Franklin Township on September 16, 1922. Hall, an Episcopalian priest, had apparently been having an extramarital affair with Mills, who sang in the church choir. His wife and her brothers were charged with the crime. After one of the first trials to attract heavy media interest, they were acquitted of all charges. No other suspects were ever identified.
• The plane crash that killed early aviator B. H. DeLay, 31 a pioneering stunt pilot, on July 4, 1923 in Venice, California, was found to have been the result of sabotage to the aircraft. No one was ever formally charged or identified as a suspect.
• Father Hubert Dahme, a popular local Catholic priest, was shot dead at an intersection in Bridgeport, Connecticut, on February 4, 1924. A local vagrant, Harold Israel, was arrested and charged with the crime; but at trial prosecutor Homer Stille Cummings, later U.S. Attorney General, not only dropped the case but discredited the evidence the city's police department had collected against Israel. No other suspects have ever been named; thirty years later a witness to the killing said it was not Israel but refused to identify the real killer out of fear for their life.
• The Janet Smith case. On July 26, 1924, the 22-year-old Scottish nursemaid was found dead of a gunshot wound to the temple in a home in an exclusive neighborhood of Vancouver, Canada. Although she was initially labeled a suicide (despite much evidence to the contrary), her friends were able to get the case reopened and deemed a murder. The initial suspect, Chinese houseboy Wong Foon Sing, was kidnapped and tortured for weeks in an unsuccessful attempt to extract a confession, causing a major scandal when it was discovered that various police officials and respected members of society were directly involved. Wong was eventually tried and acquitted for lack of evidence. A law was proposed, banning the employment of Orientals and white women in the same household, but failed to pass.
• Responsibility for the October 29, 1924, bombing of a Canadian Pacific train in British Columbia that killed Russian emigré Peter Verigin, 65, leader of the pacifist Doukhobors, along with seven others including a member of the provincial legislature. Government investigators believed the culprits were Verigin's rivals among the Doukhobors, while the remaining members of the sect accused the government of committing the crime. No suspects have ever been officially named.

1925–1949

• The Milaflores Massacre: Three Detroit gangsters were shot down in the Milaflores Apartments on March 28, 1927. The killings are widely believed to have been a revenge attack by members of The Purple Gang; two members were arrested the next day but never charged.
• The Killing of Lizzie O'Neill in Dublin was the shooting of a prostitute who was also known as Honour Bright. Two suspects were brought to trial, but were acquitted.
• Jewish gangster Arnold Rothstein, 46, an avid gambler best remembered for his alleged role fixing the 1919 World Series, died on November 6, 1928, of gunshot wounds inflicted the day before during a New York City business meeting. He refused to identify his killer to police. A fellow gambler who was believed to have ordered the hit as retaliation for Rothstein's failure to pay a large debt from a recent poker game (Rothstein in turn claimed it had been fixed) was tried and acquitted. No other suspects have ever emerged.
• It is historically accepted that Al Capone ordered the St. Valentine's Day massacre of seven other gangsters in Chicago on February 14, 1929. But neither he nor any of the suspected gunmen (many of whom were dead themselves within a few years) were ever formally prosecuted for the crime.
• The Wallace Case was the unsolved murder of Liverpool housewife Julia Wallace on 20 January 1931. Her husband, William Herbert Wallace, was convicted and sentenced to hang, but the verdict was overturned on appeal – the first such instance in British legal history. The chess-like quality of the puzzle has attracted a host of crime writers. Raymond Chandler said, 'The Wallace case is the nonpareil of all murder mysteries ... I call it the impossible murder because Wallace couldn’t have done it, and neither could anyone else. ... The Wallace case is unbeatable; it will always be unbeatable.'
• Harry C. Beasley, 42, a Medal of Honor recipient who later became a Newark, Ohio, police officer, died after being shot while confronting robbers on July 2, 1931. No one was ever identified as a suspect.
• On 12 September 1931, Arthur Brennan, 50, a World War I veteran and early Australian rules football player, was shot and killed while struggling with a burglar he was trying to apprehend on a neighbour's property. After investigating for three months, police announced they could not find a suspect. No arrests were ever made.
• Jack "Legs" Diamond, 34, American gangster, was found shot to death in the Albany, New York, apartment of his mistress on the morning of December 18, 1931. While he had many enemies among the underworld who wanted him dead, Daniel P. O'Connell, boss of the city's political machine, claimed in an interview with author William Kennedy four decades later that he had ordered the killing after Diamond ignored police warnings to stay out of the city's rackets. The case remains officially unsolved.
• The murder of Vera Page occurred on 14 December 1931. Page was a 10-year-old schoolgirl from Notting Hill, London, who was last seen walking towards her own house, having visited her aunt to show her new swimming certificates she had been awarded. Her raped and strangled body was found two days later. Despite strong circumstantial evidence linking a local man named Percy Rush to the crime, a jury recorded an open verdict of "Murder by person or persons unknown."^[15]
• Vampire Murder Case is the nickname given to the case of an unknown assailant who committed the unsolved murder of a prostitute who was found dead with a crushed skull in her apartment on 4 May 1932 in Stockholm, Sweden. Police noted that someone had drunk her blood.
• Left-wing Zionist leader Haim Arlosoroff was shot and killed late on the night of June 16, 1933, while walking with his wife on the beach of Tel Aviv in what is now Israel but was at the time British Mandate Palestine. Three men belonging to a rival political faction were arrested and tried; all were ultimately acquitted. Theories as to who was really responsible have ranged from the Soviets or Nazis to a failed attempt to rape Arlosoroff's wife.
• American journalist Walter Liggett, 49, was shot in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on December 9, 1935, while investigating connections between that state's governor and organized crime. No suspects were ever identified.
• Killing of Margaret Martin, 19, of Kingston, Pennsylvania, on December 19, 1938. Many suspects were investigated, but nobody was ever convicted.
• Pete Panto, 28, a labor leader who had fought Mafia control of the International Longshoremen's Association local on the Brooklyn docks, was found in a Lyndhurst, New Jersey lime pit in January 1941. He had not been seen since leaving his house on July 14, 1939. No one was ever arrested in the case; one suspect who was questioned was found dead a month later.
• On 24 March 1941, Josslyn Hay, 22nd Earl of Erroll, 39, was found shot dead behind the wheel of his car at a crossroads in Kenya. Reporting on the murder investigation outraged the British public with its accounts of carousing and partying by Lord Erroll and fellow members of the Happy Valley set while the homefront endured the hardships of World War II. Sir Jock Delves Broughton, another peer in Happy Valley who Hay might have cuckolded, was acquitted after being tried with a weak case later that year; he committed suicide the following year. No other suspects have ever been named. The crime has inspired several dramatisations, most notably the 1987 film White Mischief, which have attempted to offer solutions.
• Carlo Tresca, 63, an Italian American labor leader who led opposition to Fascism, Stalinism and Mafia control of unions, was shot dead at a Manhattan intersection on the night of January 11, 1943. Given the enemies he had made and their propensity for violence, the list of potential suspects was long; however the investigation was incomplete and no one was ever officially named. Historians believe the mostly likely suspect was mobster Carmine Galante, later acting boss of the Bonanno family, seen fleeing the scene, who had likely acted on the orders of a Bonanno underboss and Fascist sympathizer Tresca had threatened to expose.^[16]
• The beaten and partially burnt body of Sir Harry Oakes, 68, an American-born British gold-mine owner and philanthropist, was found in his mansion in Nassau, Bahamas on 8 July 1943. His son-in-law, Count Alfred de Marigny, was arrested shortly afterwards based on evidence allegedly uncovered by two Miami police detectives brought in to work the case, who had upset their Bahamanian counterparts by completely taking over the investigation. However, weaknesses in the case led to de Marigny's acquittal; no one else has ever been tried. The murder became the subject of worldwide press coverage at the time as well as several books, films, and documentaries.^[17]
• Actor David Bacon, best known for playing Bob Barton in the Masked Marvel serials of the 1930s, died shortly after crashing his car in Santa Monica, California on September 12, 1943. Afterwards he was found to have been suffering from a stab wound to the chest; no suspect has ever been identified.
• Georgette Bauerdorf, a 20-year-old oil heiress who was found face down in a bathtub in her home at West Hollywood, California, on 12 October 1944. She had been strangled with a piece of towel stuffed down her throat, and although there was a large roll of $2 bills and thousands of dollars worth of sterling silver lying in an open trunk, Bauerdorf's jewelry and other valuables were not stolen. The police believe her murderer had unscrewed an automatic night light over the outside entrance of the apartment so it would not come on and lain in wait for her.^[18]
• Tamil film critic C.N. Lakshmikanthan was stabbed while riding back to his Madras, India, home on 8 November 1944; he died in hospital the next day having been able to describe the attack to police but not identify the assailants. Six men, all film actors whom he had feuded with, were arrested; three were tried and two convicted. Their convictions were overturned on appeal three years later but their film careers were ruined. No other suspects have ever been identified.
• Ernst Dehmel, 30, a decorated officer in the German Waffen-SS, was allegedly beaten to death by French soldiers who had him in their custody at Remscheid-Lüttringhausen on 7 August 1945. No charges have ever been brought.
• The Black Dahlia (Elizabeth Short), a 22-year-old woman who was found severely mutilated and her body cut in half in Leimert Park, Los Angeles, California on 15 January 1947. Her unsolved murder has been the source of several books, films, and widespread speculation.^[19]
• On June 20, 1947, gangster Bugsy Siegel, known for making Las Vegas into a gambling destination, was shot several times with a high-powered carbine from outside as he read the newspaper at a friend's house in Beverly Hills, California. There are many suspects. Police believe he was killed by his own associates, but have never put together enough evidence against any one of them to declare the case solved.^[20]
• In the Taman Shud Case, an unidentified man was found dead on Somerton beach in Adelaide, South Australia on the morning of December 1, 1948 at 6:30 a.m. Also known as the Mystery of the Somerton Man, this case is considered "one of Australia's most profound mysteries", and no suspects have been named nor has the man ever been identified despite the best efforts of many world agencies. He was killed by an unknown poison with a piece of paper in his pocket that reads "Taman Shud", meaning "The End".
• Emily Armstrong, found in a dry cleaner's shop in London, England on 14 April 1949, about an hour after she had been murdered. An autopsy showed she was beaten to death and her skull shattered by at least 22 blows from a blunt object, believed to be a claw hammer.^[21]
• Three people died when a train derailed near Matsukawa, Japan on August 17, 1949. Investigators found that the track had been sabotaged going into a curve and arrested 20 people; all of whom were initially convicted and, in several cases, sentenced to death. However, during the appeals process, it eventually emerged that prosecutors had suppressed exculpatory evidence, and after all the defendants were released in 1970 the case was closed. No other suspects have ever been identified.

1950–1969

• Arnold Schuster, 24, a clothing salesman who had provided the tip that led to the capture of legendary bank robber Willie Sutton, was shot dead outside his Brooklyn home a month afterwards, on March 8, 1952. Police interviewed 300 people but never identified any as a suspect, although they came to believe the killing was carried out by either the Mafia or Sutton's associates. A lawsuit against the city by his family led to a landmark state-court ruling that the state has a duty to protect anyone who cooperates with the police to the extent that they seek.
• Jack Burris, 35, Mayes County, Oklahoma, county attorney, was killed by a shotgun blast just outside his house in June 1952. Investigators were unable to obtain a tape that purported to be the killer's confession later in the decade; there have been no suspects since then.
• John Acropolis, 43, a New York labor leader with organized crime connections, was shot by an unknown assailant in Yonkers on August 26, 1952.
• The severely beaten body of Betty Shanks, 22, was found in a Grange, Queensland, garden on the morning of 19 September 1952. The largest criminal investigation in the state's history yielded no solid suspects or leads; the case remains open.
• Babes in the Wood murders (Stanley Park) – two unidentified boys located on 14 January 1953 in Stanley Park, Vancouver, Canada. They were likely murdered in 1947.^[22]

Kyllikki Saari (back right), murdered in Isojoki, 1953. Her case remains one of Finland's most infamous unsolved murder cases

• The body of Kyllikki Saari, 17, of Isojoki, Finland, was found on October 11, 1953, almost five months after she was last seen. Several suspects have been considered but no one has ever been prosecuted. The case remains one of the country's best-known mysteries.
• On April 9, 1953, the body of 21-year-old Wilma Montesi washed up on a beach at Torvaianica, Italy, near Rome. The investigation delved into accounts of orgies and drug use in Roman society, but no one was ever charged.
• Alma Preinkert, 58, registrar of the University of Maryland, was stabbed by an intruder in her Washington home on February 28, 1954, and died shortly afterwards. No suspect has ever been named.
• Marilyn Reese Sheppard, wife of Sam Sheppard, attacked and killed in her home in Bay Village, Ohio, United States, on 4 July 1954. Sam Sheppard was later convicted of killing his pregnant wife, but this was overturned in 1966, and he was acquitted in a new trial. He claimed his wife was killed by a bushy-haired man who also attacked him and knocked him unconscious twice. Their son slept through the night, just down the hall from the bedroom in which his mother was murdered. The trial of Sam Sheppard received extensive publicity and was called "carnival atmosphere" by the U.S. Supreme Court.^[23] The Sheppard case was a large part of the inspiration for the television series and later movie The Fugitive.
• Carolyn Wasilewski, 14, was found dead in a rail yard near her Baltimore home on November 9, 1954. The case generated nationwide media attention, and police still get calls about the case. However, no suspects have ever been named. Filmmaker John Waters says the case and the media frenzy over some aspects of Baltimore's youth culture of the time inspired his film Cry-Baby, later adapted into a Broadway musical.
• William Morris Bioff, 55, a labor leader with organized-crime ties, was killed by a bomb that detonated when he started his car on the morning of November 4, 1955, outside his Illinois home. No suspects have ever been named.
• Mafia boss Albert Anastasia, 55, was shot to death while being shaved at a Manhattan barbershop on October 25, 1957. The list of suspects includes many other organized-crime figures of the era; no one has ever been officially named although authorities think the actual assassins were members of the Boston-based Patriarca crime family, in keeping with the mob's practice of hiring for such major hits from out of town.
• Rosemarie Nitribitt, 24, a prostitute, was found dead in her luxury apartment in Frankfurt, Germany, on 1 November 1957. She had been strangled and beaten; the investigation established that this had happened three days beforehand. Police arrested Heinz Pohlmann, a businessman and friend of Nitribitt's who had visited her that day. He was tried and eventually acquitted due to questions about whether the time of death had been accurately established. No other suspects have ever been identified; the case has inspired novels, films and plays.
• Barbara and Patricia Grimes disappeared on 28 December, 1956, in Chicago, Illinois after going to a cinema to watch an Elvis Presley movie. Their disappearance launched one of the biggest missing-persons hunts in Chicago history. However, police were not able to determine what happened to the Grimes sisters.^[24] On January 22, 1957 their naked bodies were found off a road near Willow Springs, Illinois. The corpses contained various bruises and marks (for example puncture wounds in the chest that may have come from an ice pick) that were never fully explained.
• Dancer Pearl Eaton, 60, was found dead in her Manhattan Beach, California, apartment on September 10, 1958. The police called the death a homicide, but never solved the case.
• Gus Greenbaum, 62, another Chicago Outfit figure, was stabbed and beaten to death along with his wife in their Phoenix, Arizona, house on December 3, 1958, supposedly as punishment for his continued skimming of casino profits. No suspects were ever identified.
• Lynne Harper, 12 years old, was last seen alive on 9 June 1959 riding on the handlebars of her friend Steven Truscott's bike near an air force base which is now Vanastra, Ontario, Canada. Two days later her body was discovered in a nearby farm woodlot. She had been raped and strangled with her own blouse. Fourteen-year-old Steven Murray Truscott was convicted and sentenced to death for the murder, becoming Canada's youngest person to be sentenced to death. The sentence was later commuted to life in prison. Truscott was held in custody for 10 years: in 2007 his conviction was ruled a miscarriage of justice, although he was not declared innocent.^[25]
• After a friend of Dutch prostitute Blonde Dolly, 32, born Sybille Niemans, found her shades drawn and the door locked on the morning of November 2, 1959, police in The Hague found her body upstairs. She was determined to have been strangled two days before, but in the years since no suspects have ever been identified.
• Almost 600 possible suspects have been considered in the Walker family murders of December 12, 1959, in which two children and their parents were shot by intruders at their Osprey, Florida, farmhouse. Among them are the two men executed by Kansas for the Clutter family murders, which formed the basis for Truman Capote's In Cold Blood.
• All 34 passengers and crew aboard National Airlines Flight 2511 from New York to Miami were killed on January 6, 1960, when a bomb exploded aboard the plane in mid-flight. The FBI is still investigating the case and no suspects have been named.^[26]
• The Lake Bodom murders were an infamous multiple homicide that took place in Finland on 5 June 1960. That night four teenagers were camping on the shores of the Finnish lake when between 4 am and 6 am, they were attacked by an unknown individual or individuals with a knife and a blunt object. Three of them died, and the fourth one was wounded but survived. Although the sole survivor became a suspect for some time in 2004, the case remains unsolved and the killer(s) unidentified.^[27]
• Paul Guihard, 31, an Agence France-Presse reporter covering the Ole Miss Riot of 1962, was found dead near a building of what turned out to be a gunshot wound. He was the only journalist killed during the U.S. civil rights movement; his killer has never been identified.
• Louis Allen, 44, was shot dead on January 31, 1964, on his Liberty, Mississippi, farm. An African American who had attempted to register to vote and reportedly was willing to talk to federal investigators about a 1961 murder of another black Liberty resident by a white state legislator, Allen had faced increasing harassment and was to move to Wisconsin the next day. The sheriff at the time, Daniel Jones, has long been suspected of involvement; in a 2011 television interview he denied it. No one has ever been prosecuted.
• Mary S. Sherman, 51, an orthopedic surgeon, was found dead of stab wounds and burns in her New Orleans apartment on July 21, 1964. No suspects have ever been named.
• Mary Pinchot Meyer, a socialite from Washington, D.C., and mistress of U.S. President John F. Kennedy.^[28]On October 12, 1964, Meyer was shot once in the head and once in the chest by an assailant while walking along the towpath of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal.^[28] A witness identified the assailant as Raymond Crump Jr., but without hard evidence, Crump was tried, acquitted, and released.^[28]
• The bodies of Marianne Schmidt and Christine Sharrock, both 15, were found beaten and stabbed on Wanda Beach near Sydney on the morning of 11 January 1965, having last been seen on the beach the previous evening; the killer had apparently also attempted to rape them. Several suspects have been identified over the years, but none ever formally charged; a DNA sample was taken from the preserved blood and semen at the scene but it is not known if a match has been made.
• No suspects have ever been identified in the July 8, 1965, bombing of Canadian Pacific Air Lines Flight 21 above British Columbia, which killed all 52 aboard.
• Similarly, the bombing that killed all 66 passengers and crew of Cyprus Airways Flight 284 over the Mediterranean between Greece and Cyprus on 12 October 1965 remains unsolved.
• Early in the morning of June 17, 1966, two men, later described by witnesses as African American, walked into a Paterson, New Jersey, bar and began shooting. The bartender and one patron died at the scene; a female customer died of her wounds a month later. Former professional boxer Rubin Carter and a friend, John Artis, were charged with the crime and convicted the following year, despite their own alibi, weak evidence and alleged racial bias by police and prosecutors. They always protested their innocence, and their case became a cause celebre, inspiring Bob Dylan's "Hurricane". In 1978 they won a second trial but were convicted again; after another habeas corpus petition was granted in 1985, the state declined to retry them. No other suspects have ever been identified.
• Cook County, Illinois, deputy sheriff Ralph Probst, 30, was shot and killed in the kitchen of his Hometown home from outside on April 10, 1967. In the weeks before he had told family and coworkers that he was investigating "something big" that would lead to his promotion. Since he had been working in the organized-crime unit, suspects, including Silas Jayne, have been named, but none ever charged.^[29]
• All six members of the Robison family were found shot in the head in their Good Hart, Michigan, vacation cabin on July 22, 1968; investigators established that the killings had taken place on June 25. A lengthy investigation led police to Joseph Scolaro, an employee of Richard Robison's who may also have been embezzling from him. There was much circumstantial evidence linking him to the crime, but it was not sufficient enough to charge him with it. Four years later the case was reopened in the Robisons' county of residence, and when Scolaro learned that he was about to be charged this time he killed himself, leaving beheind a typed suicide note in which he confessed to previous thefts and swindles but protested his innocence of the Robison killings. The case remains officially open.
• On October 1, 1968, the body of Stevan Marković, 31, Serbian-born bodyguard to French film star Alain Delon, was found in a garbage dump on the western outskirts of Paris. Possible nude photographs of the wife of French president Georges Pompidou were found in his car shortly afterwards, leading to a political scandal around allegations of blackmail and Marković's connections to Corsican organized crime. The murder officially remains unsolved.
• For almost 30 years after Barbara Ann Hackmann Taylor's body was found alongside a road near Georgetown, Kentucky, on December 17, 1968, it was known only as "Tent Girl". Since her identification in 1998, what investigation that has been possible has identified her husband at that time, now dead.
• Edwin T. Pratt, 38, then director of the Seattle Urban League, was shot and killed outside his Shoreline, Washington, home on January 26, 1969. Despite an extensive investigation, no arrests were ever made. Later research by area newspapers has identified three likely suspects, all of whom since died.^[30]
• Clarence 13X, 41, founder of Five-Percent Nation, a splinter group of the Nation of Islam, was fatally shot by a group of attackers in the lobby of his wife's Harlem apartment building on the morning of June 13, 1969. One suspect was arrested two months later; charges were dropped. New York police believe the murder was related to an extortion attempt; no other suspects have ever been named.
• Betsy Aardsma was a 22-year-old woman from Holland, Michigan, United States and a graduate student at Penn State University, who was stabbed to death in broad daylight in the stacks of Pattee Library on Penn State's campus on 28 November 1969. She was stabbed a single time through the heart with a single-edged small knife. Approximately one minute later two men came from Betsy's location and told a desk clerk, "Somebody better help that girl," and then left the library. The men were never identified. 25–35 minutes later Betsy arrived at a hospital where she was pronounced dead. She had been wearing a red dress, and since there was only a small amount of blood visible, no one realized immediately that she had been stabbed.^[31]

1970s

• The bodies of Harvey and Jeannette Crewe, both 29, were found in New Zealand's Waikato River near their Pukekawa farm, a month apart in August and September 1970. They had been reported missing on 22 June of that year, five days after last being seen; both had been killed with a rifle. After a short investigation, police arrested Arthur Thomas, another farmer, later that year. He was tried and convicted twice, but evidence that police had fabricated key evidence against him led to an inquiring commission that severely criticized two of the lead investigators without holding them accountable otherwise, and Prime Minister Rob Muldoon pardoned Thomas in 1979. Authorities have never identified any other suspects, although two journalists have written books proposing alternative theories of the case.
• Investigations have strongly suggested that Italian journalist Mauro de Mauro, 49, was killed by the Mafia to prevent him from completing his own inquiry into the death of Enrico Mattei after he was kidnapped while returning from work in Palermo. However, it has never been clear which of several possible motives led to his death, and his body has never been found. In 2011, the only living suspect was tried and acquitted; the prosecution continues to appeal.
• Little Miss Lake Panasoffkee was found in Lake Panasoffkee, Florida on 19 February 1971. She has never been identified and possibly originated from Greece.^[32]
• Joe Gallo, 43, was shot to death in a Manhattan clamhouse on April 7, 1972, as part of a war between New York City Mafia families. The investigation identified no suspects, although Frank Sheeran claimed shortly before his death 31 years later that he was the lone gunman.
• On April 20, 1972, New York City police officer Philip Cardillo, 32, died in the hospital of a gunshot wound inflicted six days earlier during an incident at a Harlem mosque. Another officer involved said he had seen one of the mosque's congregants, Louis 17X Dupree, standing over Cardillo with a gun pointed at his chest. Due to political complications resulting from the incident, suspects who had been in custody were not identified before being released and evidence was not collected at the scene; the detective in charge of investigating the shooting later claimed interference from senior officers impeded his efforts and procedures were ignored. Two years later, Dupree's first trial, based largely on the testimony of an informant, resulted in a hung jury and his second in an acquittal; he later served a prison sentence in North Carolina on drug charges and is currently in a Georgia prison on another charge. A later police informant in another case identified another suspect; he was never tried. Detectives who continue to investigate the case have complained that the FBI, which also had informants within the mosque, lied about what it knew in the past and is still withholding relevant information.^[33]
• Parts of Dolores Della Penna's body were found in two separate South Jersey locations in July 1972. The Philadelphia 17-year-old had last been seen leaving her house in the city's Tacony neighborhood on July 11. Her fingertips had been removed from her hands to prevent fingerprint identification and her head has never been found. In the mid-1990s police identified several suspects and claimed the motive had been revenge against her boyfriend for stealing drugs from some local dealers; however most of them were dead by that time and the living ones were not charged. No other suspects have ever been identified.^[34]
• Thomas Eboli, 61, acting boss of the Genovese crime family, was shot and killed as he walked from his girlfriend's house in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn to his car in the early hours of July 16, 1972. It has been speculated that he was killed over unpaid debts, but no one has ever been charged.
• Yosef Alon, 43, a military attaché at the Israeli embassy in Washington, was shot fatally in his Chevy Chase driveway as he and his wife returned from a party shortly after midnight on July 1, 1973. The Palestinian Black September terrorist group claimed responsibility, in retaliation for the slaying of one its members by Israeli operatives, but officially the case remains unsolved.^[35]
• Brian McDermott was a ten-year-old boy who went missing on 2 September 1973 in Belfast. His partly-burned remains were found in a sack in the River Lagan a week later.^[36]
• On December 20, 1973, Chicago Outfit member Richard Cain was shot to death by masked gunmen in Chicago.
• Athalia Ponsell Lindsley, 56, a former model and Broadway dancer, was fatally assaulted with a machete on the porch of her St. Augustine, Florida, home on January 23, 1974. The investigation centered on a neighbor she was having a dispute with at the time; he was tried and acquitted due to mishandling of the evidence. No other suspects have been named.^[37] Later that same year, on November 3, Frances Bemis, a socialite friend of Lindsley's who had reportedly been conducting her own investigation of the murder, was found with her skull crushed in the neighborhood. That case also remains unsolved.^[37]

Facial reconstructions of the Lady of the Dunes. Found murdered on July 26, 1974 in Provincetown, Massachusetts

• Lady of the Dunes, who remains unidentified, was found in Provincetown, Massachusetts on 26 July 1974. She may have been murdered by Whitey Bulger, who has yet to be charged with her murder.^[38]
• Martha Morrison's remains were found in Vancouver, Washington on October 12, 1974, alongside Carol Valenzuela. Morrison's body was unidentified until July 2015 and the killer of both victims has never been apprehended or identified.^[39]
• Writer Donald Goines, 37, was found shot dead in his Detroit apartment along with his wife on October 21, 1974. No suspects have ever been identified.
• Arlis Perry, 19, was found dead in Stanford Memorial Church, where she had gone the previous night after an argument with her husband, on the campus of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, early on October 13, 1974. She had been beaten and sexually assaulted before her death but not raped; an ice pick found lodged into the base of her skull during the autopsy turned out to be the murder weapon. David Berkowitz, the "Son of Sam" serial killer, told investigators he had heard details about the killing from another inmate purportedly linked to the Manson family, but they ultimately discounted his information. No other suspects have ever been identified.^[40]
• Betty van Patter, 52, bookkeeper for the Black Panther Party, was last seen leaving a San Francisco tavern on December 13, 1974. A few weeks later her beaten corpse was pulled out of San Francisco Bay. It has been believed that members of the party were behind her death, as she had reportedly uncovered financial irregularities that pointed toward criminal activity, but authorities have never named any suspects.^[41]
• A car bomb on 18 March 1975 in Lusaka, Zambia, killed Herbert Chitepo, 51, the first black lawyer in Rhodesia, a bodyguard and, later, Chitepo's neighbour. No suspects have ever been named. A 2001 investigation blamed infighting among members of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), which Chitepo had helped found, but a memoir by a former member of Rhodesian intelligence says instead that his agencies were behind it and planted evidence to implicate ZANU.
• Sam Giancana, 67, a longtime leader of the Chicago Outfit, was shot and killed in his kitchen on June 19, 1975, shortly before he was to testify before a Senate subcommittee investigating possible CIA and Mafia collaboration in plots to assassinate John F. Kennedy over a decade earlier. This has led to much speculation as to who wanted him dead, with the actual shooter believed to be someone Giancana knew well. However, no charges have ever been brought in the case.
• On 23 June 1975, the body of brothel keeper Shirley Finn was found shot dead in a parked car in South Perth, Australia. No suspects have ever been identified; the investigation is continuing.
• Juanita Nielsen was last seen on 4 July 1975 in Sydney, Australia after a meeting in a club owned by a major figure of organized crime. She was a publisher, activist for conservation and community issues, particularly anti-development campaigns, which may have led to her death.
• Barbara Colby, an American actress from Venice, California, United States, was shot to death while walking with a colleague to his car on 24 July 1975. She died instantly from her wounds but her colleague was able to describe the shooting to the police before he also died from his wounds. He said the shooting occurred without reason or provocation and said that there were two gunmen whom he did not recognize. There was no attempt at robbery, and the killers and their motivation are still unknown.^[42]
• When Harlem businessman Wesley Diggs returned to his Teaneck, New Jersey, home on the afternoon of December 6, 1975, he found the bodies of his wife and four children, shot sometime after he had left for work that morning. Despite an extensive investigation by local police, no suspects were ever identified. It is the largest mass killing in the history of Bergen County.^[43]
• The 1975 LaGuardia Airport bombing occurred on the evening of December 29, 1975, at the TWA baggage claim at New York's LaGuardia Airport, killing 11. It has been suspected that Croatian nationalists were behind it, due to a similar bomb found at Grand Central Terminal a year later, but the group responsible for that event has denied responsibility for the earlier attack. Officially it remains unsolved.
• All 81 aboard died on 1 January 1976 when Middle East Airlines Flight 438 fell to the ground in Saudi Arabia after a bombing. No suspects were ever identified.
• David Stack, 18, was shot and killed somewhere near Wendover, Utah, on or about June 9, 1976, while hitchhiking from his home in Broomfield, Colorado, to visit relatives in California. His body was found in a landfill and remained unidentified until 2015, when DNA and dental records verified the body was his. The investigation is continuing now that his identity is known.^[44]
• Jim Leslie, 38, a publicist and lobbyist for the government of Shreveport, Louisiana, was shot fatally in the parking lot of a Baton Rouge hotel July 9, 1976, on his way to celebrate a legislative victory. Shreveport's public safety commissioner, George W. D'Artois, was charged with ordering the murder but died before he could face trial. No one has ever been identified as the actual gunman.
• World War II German colonel Joachim Peiper, 61, who led the troops responsible for the Malmédy massacre as a member of the Waffen-SS was shot at his home in Traves, Haute-Saône, in eastern France, on the night of 14 July 1976. His still-unidentified killers then burned his house down.
• Seewen murder case: 5 people were shot during Pentecost weekend 1976 in a weekend house near the Swiss village Seewen. Although the weapon was found in 1996, the murderer remains unknown.
• The Sumter County Does were shot to death in Sumter County, South Carolina on 9 August 1976. Neither have been identified.^[38]
• Dallas police officer Robert W. Wood, 27, was fatally shot during a traffic stop in the early hours of November 28, 1976. Randall Dale Adams was initially convicted of the murder and almost executed. Errol Morris's 1988 documentary film The Thin Blue Line re-examined the case and suggested that another Texas inmate, David Harris, who had testified against Adams, was the more likely suspect after a taped statement from Harris at the end of the film that implicated him. Harris recanted his trial testimony at Adams's habeas corpus hearing, which resulted in the charges against Adams being dropped, freeing him. But Harris never explicitly confessed to the crime before his own execution for another murder in 2004, leaving the killing officially unsolved.^[45]
• The stabbing deaths of Suzanne Armstrong and Susan Bartlett occurred on 10 January 1977 in Collingwood, Australia. These murders have been linked to the disappearance of a North Melbourne woman two years earlier. However, no suspect has ever been named.
• Frank Bompensiero, 71, a longtime Mafia contract killer, was himself shot and killed on February 1, 1977, while making a phone call in the Pacific Beach neighborhood of San Diego, California. Several defendants were arrested and charged with the killing. One died before trial and the others were acquitted.
• Another Mafia assassin, Charles Nicoletti, 60, was shot three times in the back of the head while waiting in his car outside a Northlake, Illinois, restaurant on March 29, 1977. No suspects were ever identified.
• On the morning of June 13, 1977, the bodies of three young girls, beaten, strangled and raped, were found at Camp Scott, a Girl Scout camp near Locust Grove, Oklahoma. An escaped prisoner believed to have been involved was taken into custody; he later died after being returned to prison following his acquittal. No one else has ever been charged although various other theories of the crime have been floated in the intervening years.^[46]
• Mickey Spillane, 42, head of the Westies, the last major Irish-American criminal organization in New York City, was killed outside his Queens apartment. It is believed one of his underlings ordered the crime in order to take control of the organization from him, but police have never formally suspected anyone.
• Australian wallpaper designer Florence Broadhurst, 78, was found bludgeoned to death in her Paddington studio on 15 October 1977. No one has ever been officially named as a suspect; speculation has ranged from serial killer John Wayne Glover to an acquaintance (the evidence suggests she knew her killer, and s/he was familiar with the layout of her studio).
• South African National Party politician Robert Smit and his wife were found shot and stabbed in their home in a Pretoria suburb on 22 November 1977. The words "RAU TEM" were spray painted on the walls and cupboards of the house. Their meaning remains unknown, as does the identity of the perpetrators.
• On 8 January 1978, a shot through the window of his home in a suburb of the South African city of Durban killed anti-apartheid South African philosopher Rick Turner, 35. An extensive investigation at the time turned up no suspects, and none have been named since, although it is widely believed that he was murdered by the security forces due to his activism.
• Pemiscot County Does were found murdered on 17 June 1978. Although both of these unidentified people were found in different states, they are believed to have been killed by the same person, as they were both seen together before their murders.^[47]
• Bob Crane, an American actor best known for his role in Hogan's Heroes, was discovered bludgeoned to death with a weapon that was never found (but was believed by police to be a camera tripod) at the Winfield Place Apartments in Scottsdale, Ariz., on June 29, 1978. Crane had allegedly called his friend John Henry Carpenter the night before to tell him their friendship was over. Crane was involved in the underground sexual scene and filmed his numerous escapades with the help of Carpenter, who was an audio-visual expert.^{[48][49][50][51]} Police reportedly found blood smears in Carpenter's car that matched Crane's blood type, but no charges were filed against Carpenter for more than a decade. When he was charged in 1994, he was acquitted. Carpenter maintained his innocence until his death in 1998, and the case is now officially cold.^[52]
• The Burger Chef murders of four employees of that restaurant outside Speedway, Indiana on November 17, 1978, have never been solved despite extensive investigation.
• Kerry Graham and Francine Trimble disappeared on December 16, 1978 and were found dead on July 9, 1979. They remained unidentified for 36 years and no suspects have been named in the case.^[53][54]* Perry County Jane Doe was found on 20 June 1979 in Perry County, Pennsylvania. Her body has never been identified.^[55]
• Carlos Muniz Varela, 25, a Cuban refugee in Puerto Rico who supported independence movements on the island, was shot dead while driving to his mother's house in Guaynabo on April 28, 1979. A group calling itself Comando Cero took credit, but no arrests have ever been made. Documents released in 2012 by the FBI suggest the Cuban government may have been involved.
• Raymond Washington, original founder of the notorious South Central Los Angeles street gang that came to be known as the Crips was murdered on August 9, 1979. Washington was shot dead at the age of 25 when he walked up to a car on the corner of 64th and San Pedro Streets in Los Angeles. At the time of his death, Washington no longer had any real control over the gang he originally founded. He wanted to unite warring gangs in peace and had always opposed guns. Different theories exist on why he was killed and who did it but no one was ever arrested for his murder.^[56]
• Sahara Sue's body was found on 14 August 1979. She was never identified although she wore dentures at a very young age.^[57]
• Tammy Vincent's body remained unidentified for 31 years after she was found beaten, shot, stabbed and set afire after her death on a beach near Tiburon, California, on September 26, 1979. It is believed the 17-year-old runaway may be a victim of Gary Ridgway, the "Green River killer," although she likely died because she was due to testify in court against a pimp.
• An unidentified woman known as "Orange Socks" was found murdered on 31 October 1979 in Georgetown, Texas. Henry Lee Lucas falsely confessed to her murder but was later acquitted.^[58]
• The body of Tammy Alexander, 16, of Brooksville, Florida, was found in a cornfield off U.S. Route 20 in Caledonia, New York on November 9, 1979. She had been shot twice the night before. She remained unidentified, known as Caledonia Jane Doe or Cali Doe, for over 35 years until being identified via a DNA match with her sisters in 2015. Law enforcement in both states are continuing to investigate.^[59]

1980s

Pastel drawing of Óscar Romero, murdered Archbishop

• Óscar Romero, the fourth Roman Catholic Archbishop of San Salvador, El Salvador, was killed by a shot to the heart on 24 March 1980 while celebrating Mass at a small chapel located in a hospital. It is believed, but never proven, that the assassins were members of Salvadoran death squads. During the funeral, a bomb exploded in Plaza Barrios fronting San Salvador Cathedral, and shots were fired. Many people were killed during the subsequent mass panic.^[60]
• War saxophonist Charles Miller, 41, who cowrote and sang their hit "Low Rider", was killed during a robbery in Los Angeles on June 14, 1980. No suspects have ever been identified.
• The explosion that killed all 81 on board Aerolinee Itavia Flight 870 near the Italian island of Ustica on 27 June 1980 has been variously attributed to a bomb or a missile strike. Whatever the cause, the investigations have been criticized as ineffective, and no suspects identified.
• Arroyo Grande Jane Doe, an unidentified girl, was discovered on October 5, 1980 in Henderson, Nevada. She was between fourteen and twenty-five and had a distinct gap between two teeth on the right side of her mouth.^[47]
• Walker County Jane Doe, an unidentified girl whose body was found on November 1, 1980 in Huntsville, Texas, United States. A possible runaway matching her description was reported by a witness to have asked for directions to a prison unit, which she never arrived to. The victim was killed by strangulation and beating, also being sexually assaulted.^[61][62]
• Carol Cole was discovered stabbed to death in Bellevue, Louisiana in January 1981, after her 1980 disappearance. Her body was identified in February 2015. The man who found her, now in prison for killing his wife, is considered a person of interest.^[63]
• The Keddie Murders, in which four people were found dead in Keddie, California on April 11 (and possibly into April 12), 1981.^[64]
• Brenda Gerow was found murdered in early April 1981 in Tucson, Arizona. Her body remained unidentified until 2015 after a photograph of her was found in a convicted killer's possession and led police to believe she was the unidentified victim, based on a resemblance to a facial reconstruction. Gerow was subsequently identified to be the girl in the picture and later confirmed to be the victim through DNA tests. The man who possessed her photograph is considered a person of interest and her murder remains unsolved.^[65][66]
• Buckskin Girl, an unidentified young woman found in Troy, Ohio on April 23, 1981. She had been beaten and strangled to death.^[67]
• Raymond Nels Nelson, Administrative Assistant to Senator Claiborne Pell and former bureau chief of The Providence Journal, Rhode Island. He was found bludgeoned to death with a typewriter in his Washington, D.C. apartment on June 1, 1981.^[68]
• Wonderland murders are four unsolved murders that occurred in Los Angeles on July 1, 1981.[2] It is assumed that six people were targeted to be killed in the known drug house of the Wonderland Gang, five were present, and four of those five died from extensive blunt-force trauma injuries: Billy DeVerell, Ron Launius, Joy Miller, and Barbara Richardson. Launius' wife, Susan Launius, survived the attack. The attack was allegedly masterminded by organized crime figure and nightclub owner Eddie Nash. He, his henchman Gregory DeWitt Diles,[3][4] and porn star John Holmes were at various times arrested, tried, and acquitted for their involvement in the murders.
• Ken McElroy, 47, long considered the "town bully" of Skidmore, Missouri, was shot dead while in the cab of his pickup truck on July 10, 1981. None of the 46 potential witnesses to the crime have ever come forward to identify a suspect.^[69]
• Marcel Francisci, 62, French member of Union Corse criminal organization who created the French Connection drug pipeline, was shot fatally as he walked to his car from his Paris apartment on 16 January 1982. No suspects have ever been identified.
• Roberto Calvi, 62, CEO of Banco Ambrosiano, found hanged under Blackfriars Bridge in London on 17 June 1982. Initially considered a suicide, authorities later changed their minds and investigated it as a homicide. An Italian court acquitted five defendants in 2009; charges against a sixth defendant were later dropped.^[70]
• The body of a strangled teenage girl found on July 1, 1982, outside Baytown, Texas, remained unidentified for 32 years. In 2014 the corpse's DNA was matched to Michelle Garvey, a 15-year-old runaway from Connecticut. The investigation is continuing.^[71]
• In Blairstown, New Jersey, an unidentified girl dubbed "Princess Doe" was found on 15 July 1982. Extensive research and investigation to discover the identities of her and her killer have been unsuccessful.^[72]
• The FBI continues to investigate the Chicago Tylenol murders which took place in late 1982, but has not identified any suspects.^[73]
• On January 20, 1983, three days before he was to be sentenced for attempting to bribe a U.S. Senator, Allen Dorfman, 60, an insurance and close associate of Jimmy Hoffa believed to have ties to the Chicago Outfit, was shot to death in a Lincolnwood, Illinois, hotel parking lot. While it is believed he was killed by former associates to prevent him from offering information about them in exchange for a reduced sentence, no suspects have ever been named.
• Peter Ivers, television host and musician, was found bludgeoned to death in his Los Angeles apartment on March 3, 1983. The murder was never solved, although on the basis of new information found in the book In Heaven Everything Is Fine: The Unsolved Life of Peter Ivers and the Lost History of New Wave Theatre (2008) by Josh Frank and Charlie Buckholtz, the Los Angeles Police Department has reopened their investigation into Ivers' death.
• On 10 April 1983, Palestinian Liberation Organization peace negotiator Issam Sartawi, 48, was shot and killed in the lobby of a Portuguese hotel while attending that year's Socialist International conference. The Abu Nidal organization later claimed responsibility, but no arrests have ever been made.
• While Dursun Aksoy, 39, an administrative attaché at the Turkish embassy in Brussels, Belgium, was starting his car on Avenue Franklin Roosevelt 14 July 1983, a man walked up to him and shot him twice in the head; he died almost instantly. Two militant Armenian groups claimed responsibility, but no one has ever been charged.
• Gérard Lebovici, 51, French film producer, was found in his car on 7 March 1984 in a Paris parking garage. He had been shot several times two days earlier. No suspects have ever been identified.
• On the morning of 14 April 1984, the body of a male infant, its neck broken and repeatedly stabbed, was found on the beach at Cahersiveen in Ireland's County Kerry. Later named Baby John, the police investigation became known as the Kerry Babies case after it led to a young woman in nearby Abbeydorney who was mistakenly charged with the crime along with her family. While she had in fact hidden the corpse of a baby she gave birth to who died of undetermined causes shortly afterwards, she was found to have no connection to the Cahirseveen baby, whose identity and killer remains unknown.^[74]
• Vernon County Jane Doe, an unidentified victim was found on 4 May 1984 near Westby, Wisconsin. Her hands were severed and never found, making identification through fingerprinting impossible.^[75]
• Catrine da Costa, Swedish prostitute. Parts of her dismembered body were found in Solna, just outside Stockholm, during the summer of 1984.
• The strangled bodies of Margaret Tapp, 35, and her daughter Seana, 9, were found at their home in Melbourne's Ferntree Gully neighborhood on & August 1984; Seana had been sexually assaulted as well. Two suspects were cleared after their DNA did not match that left at the scene; the case was reopened in the 2010s.
• Lenny Breau, 42, music teacher and guitarist. His body was found floating in the swimming pool at his Los Angeles apartment complex on August 12, 1984; the coroner's office found that rather than having drowned he was strangled. While his wife was suspected, she was never charged, and no one else has been.^[76]
• Christine Jessop, an eight-year-old girl of Queensvilldee, Ontario, was raped and murdered in October 1984. Her next-door neighbour, Guy Paul Morin, was convicted of the crime in 1992 but DNA testing led to a subsequent overturning of this verdict in 1995.^[77][78]
• Günther Stoll, a German food-engineer, is suspected to have been murdered under strange circumstances on 26 October 1984, after leaving behind the cryptic message "YOGTZE."
• The body of Kylie Maybury, 6, was found in the streets of the Melbourne suburb of Preston very early on the morning of 7 November 1984. She had last been seen returning from an errand to buy sugar for the family dinner the evening before. An autopsy showed she had been raped and choked to death under the influence of Valium. DNA eventually excluded one suspect; no others have been identified.
• Tscherim Soobzokov, 59, a Circassian refugee in the United States, died on September 6, 1985, of injuries suffered when a pipe bomb exploded outside his house almost a month earlier. An anonymous caller, claiming that Soobzokov had been a Nazi collaborator during World War II, claimed credit for the bombing on behalf of the Jewish Defense League (JDL); however the organization has formally denied any responsibility. No other suspects have ever been identified.^[79]
• Olof Palme, Prime Minister of Sweden and the leader of the Swedish Social Democratic Party was shot in the back while walking home from a cinema together with his wife shortly after 11 pm on 28 February 1986 in Stockholm, Sweden.^[80]
• Alejandro Gonzalez Malave, Puerto Rican who was involved in the Cerro Maravilla murders case, was shot at his mother's home on April 29, 1986. The assailants were never apprehended.^[81]
• Yvan Leyvraz, 32, a Swiss member of the international solidarity brigades in Sandinista-run Nicaragua, was killed in a contra ambush upon leaving Wiwili, with four others, on July 28, 1986. No arrests have ever been made.
• Dutch mathematician Willem Klein, 73, was found dead of stab wounds in his Amsterdam apartment on 1 August 1986. A young man was arrested shortly afterwards but released. No other suspects have ever been named.
• Police in East Orange, New Jersey, initially believed that the March 8, 1987, death of 79-year-old Harry Dudkin, former judge, Congressional candidate and clerk of the state Assembly, was due to a fall in his family's stationery store. But the autopsy revealed a bullet lodged in his brain, and on further investigation discovered the store's receipts for that day were missing. The case remains open.
• A body found June 11, 1987, in Fort Collins, Colorado, field turned out to be that of Peggy Hettrick, 37. She had been stabbed and "sexually mutilated." Police initially suspected Timothy Masters, a teenage boy who lived nearby, and eventually arrested him a decade later. His 1999 conviction was vacated in 2008 when physical evidence that had been withheld from the defense at his original trial was found to rule him out as a suspect. Two other individuals, one of whom took his own life in 1995, have been described as possible suspects. The case remains open.
• The decomposing body of Deanna Criswell, 16, was found off Interstate 10 near Tucson, Arizona, on November 23, 1987. She had been there for anytime from several days to several weeks. She remained unidentified for 28 years until DNA tests matched her with her family in Spokane, Washington; they had not reported her disappearance at the time because she habitually ran away only to return later. Another DNA profile at the scene matched that of the main suspect in her death, William Ross Knight, a local criminal who had died in 2005.
• Several motorcyclists opened fire on Punjabi singer Amar Singh Chamkila, 27, and his wife as they got out of a car before a performance in Mehsampur on March 8, 1988. The couple and two of Chamkila's musicians were killed. Several theories as to who might have been responsible for the killings have been floated since then, but no suspects have ever been officially identified.
• Brian Spencer, 39, who played for several National Hockey League teams during a 10-year career that ended in 1979, was shot during a robbery after allegedly buying cocaine in Riviera Beach, Florida, on June 2, 1988. He died the next day. The year before, Spencer had been acquitted of a 1982 murder and kidnapping. Despite not entirely believing the story told them by Spencer's companion that night, police said he was not a suspect. No one else has ever been named in connection with the crime.^[82]
• Julie Ward, murdered in Kenya on September 6, 1988 while on safari in the Masai Mara game reserve. Her burnt and dismembered body was found a week later. The original statement by Kenyan officials was that she had been eaten by lions and struck by lightning but this was later revised to say she was murdered.^[83]
• Jaclyn Dowaliby, 7, disappeared from her home in Midlothian, Illinois during the night of September 10, 1988. Her body was found in a nearby dump four days later. Her mother and adoptive father were charged with her murder; she was acquitted and he was convicted, a verdict later overturned on appeal due to lack of evidence. No other suspects have been named since then.
• Seymour and Arlene Tankleff were found murdered in their Long Island home on September 17, 1988. Their 17-year-old son Martin was charged with the crime and convicted, a verdict overturned on appeal in 2004; the state decided in 2008 not to retry him.^[84] His lawyers accused the police detective who originally arrested Martin of having lied during the investigation to cover for a business associate who they believe was the actual killer; he denies it. Neither the business associate nor anyone else have ever been formally named as a suspect.^[85]
• Venus Xtravaganza, featured in the documentary film Paris is Burning, was found strangled under a New York City hotel bed on December 21, 1988, four days after having been killed. There are no suspects.^[86]

1990s

Racine County Jane Doe (reconstruction pictured), unidentified since her discovery in 1999

• The body of Amy Mihaljevic, 10, was found in Ruggles Township, Ohio, on February 10, 1990. She had been abducted from a Bay Village shopping center three months earlier. No suspects have ever been named, although police have been exploring some promising leads in recent years.^[87]
• Despite extensive investigation and publicity, the gunmen who killed four people, including two children, at a Las Cruces, New Mexico, bowling alley on February 10, 1990, have never been identified or apprehended.^[88]
• The body of Joanna Parrish, 20, a British exchange student in the Burgundy region of France, was found in the Yonne River near Auxerre on 17 May 1990, a day after she had last been seen going to set up a private English lesson. Serial killer Michel Fourniret was initially suspected of responsibility for her death, and charged, but the case was dropped when prosecutors decided they had insufficient evidence. Investigations of another suspect began in 2012.
• The dismembered body of gay porn star William Arnold Newton, 25, was found in a Los Angeles trash container on October 29, 1990. No suspects have ever been named.^[89]
• The body of French Baptist minister Joseph Doucé, 45, was found in a forest in October 1990, two months after he was last seen being led away from his apartment by two men who claimed to be police officers. No suspect has ever been identified.
• On November 20, 1990, the body of Susan Poupart was discovered in Wisconsin's Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest, six months after she had last been seen leaving a party in Lac du Flambeau. The two men she was last seen with have been considered suspects. Charges against one led to several hearings in 2007, but were dropped after witnesses failed to testify. The investigation continues.^[90]
• Five boys aged 9 through 13 went to the woods around South Korea's Mount Waryong on March 26, 1991, to hunt for frogs and never returned. Despite a massive search of the mountain and surroundings, their bodies were not found until 2002, after an anonymous phone call led police to an area that had already been searched near the boys' village. At first it was theorized that they had died of exposure, a conclusion disputed by their families since the boys knew that area well and their clothes had been tied in knots. An autopsy showed that four had died of blows to the head and the other killed with a shotgun. Although the statute of limitations on the case expired in 2006, police continue to investigate for historical reasons.
• Karmein Chan, 13, was abducted from her family's home in Templestowe, Victoria by an unidentified man who was later dubbed "Mr. Cruel" by Melbourne newspapers on April 13, 1991. Her body was discovered on April 9, 1992 in Thomastown, she had been shot in the head. Though Victoria Police knew a great deal about the perpetrator from previous, non-fatal child abductions and rapes dating back to 1985,^[91] there has never been enough evidence to charge any of the 27,000 men interviewed at the time.^[92] The case is still open with a second police operation, Taskforce Apollo, formed in 2010 to examine new evidence and material from the original Operation Spectrum.^[93] If the perpetrator is still alive he would be between approximately 60 and 75 years old in 2014.^[94] The murder of Karmein Chan is still one of the extensive and expensive investigations in Victorian history, with a combination of investigative errors and the perpetrator's precautions preventing his identification and arrest.^[95]
• Ioan P. Culianu, 41, a Romanian American professor of religion at the University of Chicago, was shot in the back of the head in a bathroom of the university's divinity school building on May 21, 1991. While rightist Romanian nationalists in the then-new Romanian government of Ion Iliescu, some of whom openly celebrated his death, and members of the Communist-era Securitate intelligence service were suspected, along with occultists who also clashed with Culianu, no one has ever been formally identified as one.^[96]
• On December 6, 1991, police in Austin, Texas, discovered the bodies of four young women, stripped, bound and shot in the head, after a nighttime fire at a yogurt shop. Eight years later, two suspects were convicted, but those convictions were overturned in 2009 and charges dismissed due to questions about the DNA evidence. No other suspects have ever been named although the investigation is continuing.^[97]
• Writer Joe Cole, 30, was shot and killed on December 19, 1991, during a robbery outside the Venice Beach, California, home he shared with Black Flag lead singer Henry Rollins, who was present and escaped. No suspects have ever been identified.^[98]
• A suicide bomber drove a truck filled with explosives into the Israeli embassy in Argentina on 17 March 1992, killing 29 in the deadliest attack ever on an Israeli diplomatic mission. Argentinian officials said they strongly believed Iran was behind the attack. They have not formally prosecuted any suspects, though they suspected Imad Mughniyah was involved in both this attack and the deadlier AMIA bombing two years later.
• Exiled Iranian dissident Fereydoun Farrokhzad, 53, was found dead of multiple stab wounds in his house in Bonn, Germany, on 13 August 1992. The autopsy established that he had been killed five days earlier. No one has ever been named as a suspect although it is widely believed that he was killed at the behest of the Iranian government.
• Piotr Jaroszewicz, 82, a former Prime Minister of Communist Poland, was found murdered along with his wife Alicja Solska at their home in the Warsaw suburb of Anin on 3 September 1992. He had been strangled with a belt, which was still around his neck, after being beaten (and bandaged); she had been shot several times with one of the couple's hunting rifles after her hands were tied behind her back. She may have injured one of their attackers, who apparently also tried to kill the couple's dog with poison gas, while fighting back. A safe was left open and documents were taken from it while valuables were left behind. The killings were found to have occurred two days before; friends and family say that Jaroszewicz, who was obsessed with security to begin with, had been acting extremely paranoid in the days before the murders. No suspects have been named.^[99]
• The Alcasser Girls, Valencia, Spain, 1992–1993
• Retired Canadian professional wrestler Adolfo Bresciano, 44, who performed under the name Dino Bravo, was found dead of multiple gunshot wounds in his Laval, Quebec home on March 10, 1993. It is believed by law enforcement and those who knew him that he was killed by the Montreal Mafia over his successful cigarette smuggling business. Officially no suspects have ever been identified.
• Colin Ridgway, 56, the first Australian to play in the National Football League, was murdered in his University Park, Texas, home on May 13, 1993. Police suspect a man serving time in Florida for a 2011 murder committed the crime after being hired by Ridgway's wife and his father; however, they have not found sufficient evidence to arrest anyone.^[100]
• The body of Holly Piirainen, 10, was found on October 23, 1993, in the woods of Brimfield, Massachusetts. She had disappeared in August while visiting her grandparents in nearby Sturbridge. Police have identified two persons of interest, one of whom died in 2003, the other of whom has been named in connection with the Molly Bish murder which occurred several years later in the region. Neither has been named as a suspect in the case, however.^[101]
• David Cullen Bain of Dunedin, New Zealand, was initially convicted of the 20 April 1994 murder of his parents and three siblings at their home. Prosecutors claimed he had staged the crime to look like his father had committed a murder-suicide of his family while David was out delivering papers; his defence claimed that was exactly what had happened. with help from former rugby star Joe Karam, David pursued appeals and was eventually acquitted after a 2009 retrial.
• Inokashira Park dismemberment incident in Japan, April 23, 1994.^[102]
• Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, found dead of multiple stab wounds in front of her condo in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles late on the night of June 12, 1994. Her ex-husband, former professional football star O.J. Simpson, was arrested and charged with the crime two days later; after an eight-month trial covered heavily by the media, in which the defense argued that there had been extensive mishandling of the evidence and that some investigators were racially biased, he was acquitted. However, strong public sentiment remained that he was guilty, and he was held liable in a suit by the victims' families later. No other suspects have ever been officially named.^[103]
• The 18 July 1994 suicide bombing of a Jewish organization's building in Buenos Aires killed 85, surpassing the similar attack on the Israeli embassy two years earlier as Argentina's deadliest terror attack. Five suspects, four of whom were local police officers, were acquitted in a 2004 trial; the investigating judge was removed from the case and later impeached after it was disclosed that he had paid for evidence. British authorities arrested an Iranian suspect named by Argentina in 2003 but declined to extradite him due to weak evidence. No other suspects have been named although investigations continue, one of which has since led to the unsolved death of Alberto Nisman, the investigating prosecutor.
• The day after that bombing, another suicide bomber brought down a plane in Panama, killing 21, 12 of whom were Jews. While an apparently fictitious Arab terrorist organization claimed responsibility, no suspects have ever been identified.
• Irish crime boss Martin "The General" Cahill, 45, was shot and killed at a Dublin intersection on 18 August 1994. The Provisional IRA claimed responsibility, citing Cahill's dealings with the Ulster Volunteer Force; however, it has also been reported that the IRA took exception to this only after being paid by two of Cahill's subordinates who were not eager to share profits from a drug operation with him. No arrests have ever been made.
• Johan Heyns, 66, an Afrikaner Calvinist theologian, was shot and killed from outside his house in Pretoria, South Africa's capital, while playing cards with his wife and grandchildren on 5 November 1994. While no suspects have ever been identified, it is widely believed the killing was the work of radical white supremacists unhappy with Heyns' increasingly liberal political views, which in addition to opposition to apartheid had also called for tolerance of homosexuals.
• Deanna Cremin, a 17-year-old girl from Somerville, Massachusetts, United States, was murdered on March 30, 1995. Her body was found behind a senior housing complex. An autopsy revealed she had been strangled. She was last seen alive by her boyfriend who, unlike on other occasions when he would walk her to the door, walked her only halfway and she continued on her own toward her house. Her murder remains unsolved.^[104]
• Michael Nigg, 26, an aspiring actor and waiter at a Los Angeles restaurant, was shot and killed during an attempted robbery on September 8, 1995 while withdrawing money from an ATM.^[105] Three suspects were arrested a month later but released for lack of evidence and the case remains unsolved. Since Nigg was a friend of Ronald Goldman, with whom he had worked, and seemed to live quite well for someone in his position, leading to some reports that he was involved in drug trafficking, his death has been used to support theories that the murders of Goldman and O.J. Simpson's ex-wife Nicole the year before were in fact drug-related as well.
• Mitchell Bates, a sleeping-car attendant for Amtrak, was killed when the Sunset Limited derailed on October 9, 1995, near Palo Verde, Arizona. Investigators later found notes from a group identified as the "Sons of the Gestapo", supposedly angry over the Waco siege earlier that year. The tracks were found to have been tampered with in a way that circumvented safety warning systems, suggesting a perpetrator with knowledge of rail operations. No suspects have ever been identified, however, although the FBI believes the real plan was to rob a passing freight and there were no terrorist motivations.
• Rapper Randy Walker, 27, better known as Stretch, was shot and killed by the occupants of a vehicle passing his minivan in Queens Village, New York, shortly after midnight on November 30, 1995. No suspects have ever been identified, but it is often believed to be somehow related to Tupac Shakur's later death, since it took place exactly one year after an apparent robbery attempt in which Shakur had been seriously injured.
• Jacksonville Jane Doe, a body found on 6 December 1995. She is believed to have been murdered in the early 1990s and was then disposed of in Jacksonville, North Carolina. She has never been identified.^[106]
• The body of Barbara Barnes, a Steubenville, Ohio, 13-year-old, was found strangled on a riverbed on February 22, 1996, over two months after she was last seen walking to school. Some of her relatives have been suspected, but the case remains open.^[107]
• Amber Hagerman, victim of an abduction and murder. On 13 January 1996, the 10-year-old girl was kidnapped while riding her bike near her grandparents' home in Arlington, Texas. Four days later, a man walking his dog found her body in a creek bed. An autopsy revealed that her throat had been cut. Although a $75,000 reward was offered for information leading to Hagerman's killer, the perpetrator was never found. Her murder would later inspire the creation of the AMBER Alert system.^[108]
• Tupac Shakur, a top-selling American rapper who was shot four times in a drive-by shooting on 7 September 1996, in Las Vegas, Nevada, United States. He died six days later of respiratory failure and cardiac arrest at the University Medical Center.^[109]
• Nigerian businesswoman Bisoye Tejuoso, 80, daughter of a former Egba tribal chief, was assassinated on September 19 during a dispute over the tribe's obaship. The killers have never been identified.
• Sophie Toscan du Plantier. Wife of French filmmaker Daniel Toscan du Plantier, found beaten to death outside her home in Toormore near Schull in County Cork, Ireland, on the morning of the 23 December 1996. Former French President Jacques Chirac was a friend of the couple and gave the case national attention. The main suspect, Ian Bailey, has been questioned 2 times by the Irish Authorities in relation to the murder, but the DPP (Director of Public Prosecutions) decided not to prosecute. In early April, 2010 the French authorities issued an arrest warrant for Mr. Bailey. On 24th, April, 2010 the Gardaí in Ireland arrested Ian Bailey and brought him in front of the High Court in Dublin to appeal his extradition. This case is ongoing and is expected to take many months.^[110][111]
• JonBenét Ramsey, a six-year-old American girl who had competed in child beauty pageants, was made famous by her Christmastime murder and the subsequent media coverage. She was found dead in the basement of her parents' home in Boulder, Colorado, on December 26, 1996, nearly eight hours after she was reported missing. The official cause of death was asphyxia due to strangulation associated with craniocerebral trauma. After several grand jury hearings, the case is still unsolved.^[112] Her parents were suspects, but authorities eventually confirmed that the couple had been cleared of any involvement.^[113]
• On February 5, 1997, Richard Aderson, 47, a school administrator from LaGrange, New York, had a minor collision with another driver just before crossing the Newburgh-Beacon Bridge along Interstate 84. Across the river, just outside Fishkill, the two pulled over to exchange information. After they argued briefly, the other driver shot Aderson. He was able to describe the assailant and his vehicle before dying at the scene. A sketch has been circulated, but no suspect has ever been identified.^[114]
• Ali Forney, 22, an advocate for homeless LGBT youth in the New York neighborhood of Harlem, was found shot dead on a street there on February 5, 1997. The case remains unsolved.

Graffiti of The Notorious B.I.G., who was murdered in 1997

• The Notorious B.I.G., a famous American rapper killed by an unknown assailant in a drive-by shooting on 9 March 1997, in Los Angeles, California, United States. Even though a composite sketch^[115] of the perpetrator was made, the case is still unsolved.
• Jane Thurgood-Dove, 35, was shot outside her car, in full view of her young children, as she pulled into the driveway of her home in the Melbourne suburb of Niddrie on 6 November 1997; the killer escaped into a waiting getaway car which was found, burnt, shortly afterwards not too far away.^[116] Her husband and a police official believed to have been infatuated with her have been eliminated as suspects. More recently a theory has been floated that the killers were members of a local biker gang who had mistaken her for their real target, another local woman of similar appearance married to a fellow criminal. Police believe that the shooter and getaway car driver have since died of a heart attack and boating accident respectively; they have offered the remaining participant immunity if he testifies against the man whom they believe ordered the killing.^[117]
• On 1 January 1998, the body of Australian 14-month-old Jaidyn Leskie was found in a lake far from his home. He had been kidnapped the previous June. Greg Domaszczewicz, acquitted of the murder charge after a 1998 trial, was nevertheless found by a 2006 inquest to have had at least a contributing role in the crime, including the disposal of the body. However, current double jeopardy laws in Victoria do not allow the state to try him again, and the case is still officially unsolved.
• Australian organized-crime boss Alphonse Gangitano, 40, the "Black Prince of Lygon Street", was found in his home dead from gunshot wounds shortly before midnight 16 January 1998, the first of the Melbourne gangland killings. Graham Kinniburgh and Jason Moran, both of whom were believed to have been in Gangitano's home that night, were suspected. They were both murdered later themselves. No arrests have been made.
• Stephanie Crowe, 12, was found stabbed to death in her Escondido, California, bedroom on the morning of January 21, 1998. Since there were no signs of forced entry, police focused on and eventually arrested her older brother Michael and two friends; however, charges against them were abruptly dimissed when later lab tests found several drops of Crowe's blood on a local transient. He was tried and convicted, but that was overturned on appeal and a 2013 retrial acquitted him. The Crowe family reached a legal settlement with San Diego County over the wrongful prosecution of their son. No other suspects have been named.^[118]
• Father Alfred Kunz, 56, a Roman Catholic priest, was found with his throat cut on March 4, 1998, in his Dane, Wisconsin, church. A wide pool of initial suspects was narrowed to one unnamed individual by 2009, whom police say they still track in the hope that eventually they will have enough evidence to arrest.^[119][120]
• On March 25, 1998, NASCAR driver Chris Trickle, 24, died of injuries sustained in a Las Vegas drive-by shooting on February 9, 1997. A quirk in Nevada law at the time meant that the gunmen could not be prosecuted for his murder, since his death had occurred more than a year and a day after the attack; it was subsequently changed. No suspects have ever been identified, and the case is considered cold.^[121]
• Marek Papała, 38, former Chief of Polish State Police, was shot in the head on 25 June 1998 while parking his car. In 2012 a former car thief turned state witness given immunity of prosecution came forward with the revelation that he had killed Papała. He also testified some Polish mafia bosses had encouraged the crime. However, in 2013 the indictment against the mafia bosses was dropped due to numerous factual and logical inconsistencies. The murder of Papała remains unsolved.
• Ita Martadinata Haryono, an Indonesian human rights activist, found dead on 9 October 1998 in her bedroom in Central Jakarta, Indonesia. She was stabbed ten times and her neck had been slashed. The murder occurred just three days after a Jakarta press conference held by the human rights organizations she had been involved with.^[122]
• Suzanne Jovin, a 21-year-old senior at Yale University, was found stabbed to death on December 4, 1998 on the campus of Yale.^[123] Allegations that her thesis advisor was a suspect led to the end of his career at Yale, but the crime remains unsolved.
• A badly mutilated body found deep in a New South Wales state forest in January 1999 was identified as Lois Roberts, 38, of Lismore, who had not been seen since leaving the police station in Nimbin the previous July 31. The case remains open.
• Big L, a Harlem rapper, was shot multiple times in the head and chest near his Harlem home on February 15, 1999.^[124]
• The body of Immigration and Naturalization Service attorney Joyce Chiang, 28, was found in the Potomac River in April 1999 by a canoeist, three months after she had last been seen. Washington police, who had initially called the case a suicide, later changed their minds and said it was a homicide. They have suspects, who are currently in prison, but have not publicly identified them.^[125]
• Jill Dando, an English journalist and television presenter who worked for the BBC for 14 years. She was killed by a single gunshot wound to the head on 26 April 1999, after leaving the home of her fiancé. Her death sparked "Operation Oxborough", the biggest murder inquiry and largest criminal investigation since the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper.^[126]
• On June 12, 1999, exactly seven months after her disappearance, the body of 13-year-old Christina Marie Williams was found on the former Fort Ord Army base next to California's Monterey Bay. Police suspect a man in prison for other abductions; in 2011 a woman recanted her corroboration of his 1998 alibi in the case, saying she had been threatened into making it. However no charges have been filed.
• Ricky McCormick whose body was found in a field by sheriff's officers in St. Charles County, Missouri, on June 30, 1999. The only clues to the mystery are two notes in his pockets, apparently written in a complex cipher.^[127]
• On 21 July 1999, the unidentified Racine County Jane Doe was found murdered. She was tortured for several weeks before her body was found in Raymond, Wisconsin.^[128]
• Raonaid Murray, an Irish young woman stabbed to death at the age of 17 within a few hundred metres of her home in Glenageary, Co. Dublin, in the early hours of Saturday morning, 4 September 1999.^[129]
• Later that month, a 55-gallon drum in the basement of a house in Nassau County, New York, turned out to contain the pregnant body of Reyna Marroquin, an El Salvadorean immigrant murdered 30 years earlier. Police suspected a former owner of the house who had also run a dye company that used the drum. He had reportedly been having an affair with Marroquin. The day after police interviewed him in Florida and told him they would get a court order to produce a DNA sample, he killed himself. DNA tests later showed he had fathered the fetus. Police consider him their main suspect, but as he is dead himself he cannot be charged and the case remains officially open.
• On December 28, 1999, a friend visiting the apartment of Larry Dale Lee, 41, an American journalist in Guatemala City, found his body with multiple stab wounds. It was determined that he had been killed two days earlier, shortly after he was last seen alive. Police developed several theories of the crime but no arrests have ever been made.

2000s

Rashawn Brazell, murdered in 2005

• Mark Moran, 35, of Australia's Moran crime family, was shot and killed outside his Aberfeldie home on the evening of 15 June 2000, another of the many still-unsolved Melbourne gangland killings. Carl Williams, who was beaten to death by a fellow prison inmate a decade later, is the prime suspect.
• A 17 August 2000 bombing at the Centrs shopping mall in Riga, the capital of Latvia, killed one person. A suspect arrested and tried for planting one of the bombs was acquitted a year later by the country's Supreme Court; no one else has ever been identified.
• Former Indiana state trooper David Camm was convicted of the September 28, 2000, murder of his wife and children in their home while he was out playing basketball. After extensive evidence tampering and other investigative misconduct was uncovered, he was retried and acquitted. Camm's lawyers identified a career criminal who left forensic evidence at the scene and had committed similar crimes in the past as the more likely suspect, but he has not been prosecuted.
• Jill-Lyn Euto, an 18-year-old student, was found stabbed to death in her sixth-floor apartment at 600 James St, Syracuse, NY on 28 January 2001. No arrests have been made.^[130]
• The May 4, 2001, gunshot murder of Bonnie Lee Bakley, while she waited in a car for her husband actor Robert Blake in Studio City, remains officially unsolved. He was tried and acquitted, but later held liable in a civil suit brought by Bakley's family.^[131]
• Thomas C. Wales (born 1952) was an American federal prosecutor and gun control advocate. On October 11, 2001, he was killed by a bullet fired through the window of his basement home-office in Seattle, Washington. No suspects have been charged, and the investigation continues.^[132]
• Five people died as a result of the 2001 anthrax attacks in autumn of that year; however, no one has ever been arrested in the case. Biowarfare researcher Bruce Edwards Ivins killed himself in 2008 just before he was supposedly to be charged; he was the FBI's prime suspect. Others, including some of the targets of the attacks, have disputed that conclusion or believed he may not have been acting alone.
• Kent Heitholt, 48, sports editor of Missouri's Columbia Daily Tribune, was found beaten and strangled in his car at the newspaper's parking lot early on November 1, 2001. Ryan W. Ferguson was convicted of the murder in 2005 despite strongly protesting his innocence; eight years later he was released after the two key witnesses against said they had been pressured to lie on the stand. No other suspects have been named in the case.
• Nigerian Minister of Justice Bola Ige, 71, was shot and killed in his Ibadan home on 23 December 2001. Several suspects have been tried in the case; all were acquitted. No other suspects have been identified.
• John Gilbride, 34, a baggage handler for US Airways at Philadelphia airport, was shot dead in his car outside his home in Maple Shade, New Jersey on September 10, 2002. He was involved in a custody dispute with his former wife, the widow of the founder of the radical group MOVE, and was worried that members of the group might carry out threats they had made to kill him. While other former members of MOVE believe the group is responsible, and current members assert in turn that the murder was either faked or that the government did it in an attempt to frame them, it has also been suggested that gambling debts were involved. No suspects have been identified.^[133]
• Jennifer Servo, 22, a TV news reporter, was found beaten and strangled in her Abilene, Texas, apartment on September 16, 2002. Police have suspected either her former boyfriend or a coworker she had begun a new relationship with, but so far lack the evidence to arrest either.^[134]
• On October 30, 2002, two gunmen went into a Queens, New York, recording studio and shot Jason Mizell, 37, better known as Jam Master Jay, a founding member of pioneering hip hop group Run-DMC, in the head at point-blank range; he died shortly thereafter.^[135] While some suspects have been identified in the years since, no one has ever been prosecuted.
• Bulgarian-born Australian mobster Nik Radev, 44, was shot fatally as he got out of his car 15 April 2003 in the Melbourne suburb of Coburg. Like many other Melbourne gangland killings, police believe it was related to his criminal activities, and suspect a rival drug dealer, but have not made any arrests.
• The body of Molly Bish, 16, of Warren, Massachusetts, was found in woods near neighboring Palmer on June 9, 2003, almost three years after she was last seen by her mother when she dropped her off at her lifeguarding job. Several suspects have been investigated, but no arrests have been made.^[136]
• South African memoirist and socialite Hazel Crane, 52, a close friend of Winnie Mandela, was shot and killed on 10 November 2003 in her car while traveling to Johannesburg, where she was expected to testify in the trial of an Israeli man accused of killing her husband. She was the third witness in that trial to be killed; the case remains unsolved.
• John Whitehead, 55, half of the McFadden & Whitehead songwriting team, was shot fatally while fixing a car outside his Philadelphia home on May 11, 2004. It may have been a case of mistaken identity; however, no suspects have been named.
• Lindsay Cutshall, 22, and her fiancé Jason S. Allen, 26, both counselors at a nearby Christian summer camp, were found shot dead on a public beach near Jenner, California, on August 18, 2004. The autopsy established that they had died around three days earlier. Two possible suspects have been named; one is in prison for another murder committed around the same time and the other died in 2009. The investigation continues.^[137]
• The body of a 2-year-old boy found wrapped in a blanket off an interstate highway near Naperville in DuPage County, Illinois, on October 8, 2005, was identified six years later as Atcel Olmedo. The exact cause of death was impossible to determine due to the condition of his remains, but it appeared he had been severely beaten. His mother and stepfather are considered possible suspects; they are believed to have returned to Mexico.
• The Jeff Davis 8: Eight women, all involved in prostitution and/or drugs, were found dead in Jefferson Davis Parish, Louisiana, between 2005 and 2009. Investigators initially believed they were murdered by a serial killer, but reporting by Ethan Brown has suggested instead that there are multiple suspects, and local law enforcement personnel may be complicit.^[138]
• Rashawn Brazell disappeared after leaving his home in Bushwick, Brooklyn, New York, United States, on the morning of 14 February 2005. His dismembered body parts were later found in garbage bags. America's Most Wanted profiled the case five times, most recently in 2008.^[139][140]
• South African businessman Brett Kebble, 41, was fatally shot in his car on 27 September 2005 while driving along Johannesburg's M1 motorway to a dinner engagement. The bullets used were a special low-powered type normally used by bodyguards and security personnel to reduce the likelihood of injuries to people other than those targeted. Another South African businessman, Glenn Agliotti, was charged with the crime a year later but acquitted in 2010 when the court hearing the case ruled that the state had not presented a case against him strong enough to require trial. No other suspects have ever been named.
• Mario Condello, 53, a member of the Australian Mafia, was fatally shot in the driveway of his Brighton home on 6 February 2006, the day before he was to stand trial for plotting to murder another mob boss, Carl Williams.^[141] While Williams would later be convicted of in turn conspiring to have Condello murdered, and police believe the killer was a hit man currently in prison for another killing, the murder officially remains unsolved.
• The strangled body of Chanel Petro-Nixon, 17, was found in a garbage bag on a Brooklyn street June 22, 2006, four days after she had been reported missing. No suspects have ever been identified.^[142]
• Robert Wone, age 32, was murdered on August 2, 2006, in his friend's Washington, D.C., apartment. He was "restrained, incapacitated, and sexually assaulted" prior to his death. The only individuals present in the apartment at the time were its three residents, all friends of Wone. They have denied involvement and insisted that an intruder committed the crime. Authorities claim that there was no evidence of a break-in: the apartment appeared to be washed and cleaned, the three residents appeared freshly showered, and the evidence was not consistent with the residents' accounts. In addition, the residents tampered with the crime scene, waited an inordinate amount of time to call 911, and exhibited strange behavior when paramedics and police arrived. Authorities believe that either some or all of the three house-mates murdered Wone and engaged in a cover-up.^[143][144]
• The unidentified body of Lavender Doe was found on 6 October 2006 in Kilgore, Texas. She died shortly before she was found, but was not recognizable because her body had been badly burned.^[145]
• Bryan Pata, 22, a defensive lineman for the University of Miami football team, was shot dead outside his apartment on November 7, 2006. No suspects have been identified.^[146]
• Helen Hill, 36, animator, was shot fatally during an attempted robbery of her home in the Faubourg Marigny section of New Orleans on January 4, 2007. Her death was one of six murders in the city that day, which inspired a protest march demanding a safer city in the wake of the disruptions caused by Hurricane Katrina. No suspect has ever been identified.^[147]
• During a February 19, 2007, convoy to the Central American Parliament in Guatemala city, one car carrying three ARENA party members of the El Salvadoran Congress, abruptly left the others for a dirt road near El Jocotillo. The burnt and tortured bodies of all three, along with their driver, were found in the vehicle a short distance away the following day. Four Guatemalan police officers were arrested shortly afterwards, but then were killed in prison two weeks later. Attempts to further investigate the crimes have resulted in either acquittals of suspects or the murders of investigating officials.
• Colorado marijuana activist Ken Gorman, 51, was shot and killed in his home on February 17, 2007. The case remains open.
• On the morning of 21 July 2007, the strangled body of Snehal Gaware, 27, was found in a drawer under her bed in her home in the Mumbai suburb of Dombivili. It was believed she had been killed the previous day. Her boyfriend was charged with her murder, but acquitted in 2011 after the case against him was found lacking. No other suspects have ever been named.
• Almost a month after she was last seen being forced into a van at a Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, wet market, the body of 8-year-old Nurin Jazlin was found stuffed in a bag outside a Petaling Jaya shop. She had apparently died hours earlier of a bacterial infection resulting from injuries sustained during a sexual assault. Several suspects were arrested but eventually released for lack of evidence; police have released a CCTV video showing the body being discarded by a motorcyclist, as well as several other people who may have been involved. However they have not been able to identify any of them.
• Paul Quinn, 21, died on 20 October 2007 in Drogheda, Ireland, after being beaten with farm implements by a group of people with such length and severity as to break every major bone in his body. It is believed his death was the result of a feud with local IRA members. No suspects have been named.
• John Pezzenti, 55, a wildlife photographer, was found shot dead in his Anchorage, Alaska, apartment December 3, 2007. Neither a motive nor a suspect has emerged from the investigation.
• Lane Bryant shooting – on February 2, 2008, a gunman trying to rob a Lane Bryant store in the Brookside Marketplace in Tinley Park, Illinois killed five women (a manager and four customers). The shooter has not been apprehended, although police do not consider it a "cold case" yet.^[148]
• The Fond du Lac County Jane Doe, found on 23 November 2008 in Ashford, Wisconsin. No arrests have been made and her body has never been identified.^[149]
• Five members of the Lin family were found bludgeoned to death, in some cases to the point that they could not be visually identified, at their home in the Sydney suburb of North Epping on 18 July 2009. Robert Xie, an uncle of one victim, was charged, but three trials have failed to convict him.^[150]

2010s

• Lorenzo González Cacho, 8, of Dorado, Puerto Rico, was pronounced dead on arrival at a clinic his mother brought him to on March 9, 2010. She claimed his injuries had resulted from a fall from bed; this was contradicted by an autopsy which revealed severe facial and head wounds, as well as some stabbing injuries. She and several other people in the house at the time have been publicly identified as suspects, but not charged.^[151]
• The body of Namibian schoolgirl Magdalena Stoffels, 17, was found in a river near Windhoek on 27 July 2010; she had been raped and then murdered. Police arrested a local man they found washing some clothing in a nearby portion of the river shortly afterward and charged him with the crime due to scratches on his body and what they believed were bloodstains on the clothing. A year later, he was released because the forensic evidence did not provide any stronger link to the crime. The investigation is continuing.
• The badly decomposed body of former NBA player Lorenzen Wright, 34, was found in woods near his Collierville, Tennessee, home on July 28, 2010, ten days after he had last been seen, with several gunshot wounds. Records showed that his cell phone had been used to make a 9-1-1 call that was interrupted by gunshots shortly after he disappeared; it had not lasted long enough for its location to be fully established. The case remains unsolved.
• A worker at a landfill outside Wilmington, Delaware, spotted the body of John P. Wheeler III, 66, founder of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, contract employee of Mitre Corp., and an official who had served in the Department of Defense under Republican administrations, in some waste being unloaded on December 31, 2010. He had been beaten to death sometime after being seen at an intersection downtown the preceding afternoon; witnesses who had seen him in various locations around Wilmington over the previous two days said he had appeared somewhat confused and disoriented but sober, claiming at one point to have been robbed, but refused offers of help. He was reportedly involved in a feud with a neighbor and may have been involved in an attempted arson; no suspects have emerged.^[152]
• Muzafar Bhutto, 41, a Sindhi nationalist politician in Pakistan, was last seen alive 24 February 2011. His body, with many gunshot wounds, was found near a Hyderabad bypass 14 months later. No suspects have been officially identified.
• On the afternoon of September 12, 2011, Brendan Mess, Erik Weissman, and Raphael Teken were found with their throats cut almost to the point of decapitation in different rooms of Mess's Waltham, Massachusetts, apartment, their bodies sprinkled with $5,000 in cash and seven pounds of marijuana, an amount having an even higher street value at the time, suggesting robbery had not been the motive. It was determined that the three had been killed the previous evening. After Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed by police following the Boston Marathon bombings a year and a half later that his brother Dzhokhar was later convicted of perpetrating, it was disclosed that he had been suspected of involvement in the Waltham murders, due in part to his acquaintanceship with one of the victims. Ibragim Todashev, another friend of Tsarnaev's who had been suspected of involvement, was killed when he reacted violently during an FBI interrogation shortly after the bombings. Police still suspect Dzhokhar, sentenced to death in 2015 for his role in the bombings, of being involved as well, but have not formally charged him.
• Married Bangladeshi journalists Sagar Sarowar and Meherun Runi, both 27, were found stabbed to death in their Dhaka apartment on 11 February 2012. Their deaths, of all the many murders of journalists in the country, drew protests and public outrage both in Bangladesh and abroad. Both were working on stories at the time that could have led to violent reprisals. The government initially promised to have suspects in custody within days, but to date no arrests have been made.
• Bashir Ahmed Qureshi, 54, another Sindhi nationalist leader, suddenly collapsed during a dinner with members of his party on 7 April 2012 in Sakrand, Pakistan. He died in hospital early the next morning. A week later, pathologists announced that he had been poisoned with phosphorus and ruled his death a murder; no suspects have been identified.
• The person or persons behind the Annecy shootings, in which an Iraqi-born British engineer, several of his family members and a French cyclist were murdered at a campsite in the French Alps on 5 September 2012, have never been identified officially, and the case remains under investigation.
• Keith Ratliff, 32, producer of the popular YouTube gun-enthusiast channel FPSRussia, was found dead from a gunshot wound to the head in his custom gun shop in Carnesville, Georgia, on the evening of January 3, 2013, about 24 hours after he had last been seen alive. Police believe he knew his killer, as none of his guns were taken nor used to kill him, and he would have only allowed an acquaintance to get close enough to him to do it. The investigation is continuing.^[153]
• In the early morning hours of 11 January 2013, Paris police forced their way into a local Kurdish information center, where they found the bodies of Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) members Sakine Cansız, 55, Fidan Doğan, 33 and Leyla Söylemez, a younger woman. They had last been seen in the office where they were found the previous afternoon. Nothing had been taken, all were shot execution-style and the killer or killers locked the door after leaving, suggesting that someone acquainted with at least one of the victims committed the crime with the intention of killing all three.
• Irish police detective Adrian Donohoe, 41, was shot fatally when ambushed by an armed gang which then robbed a credit union in Bellurgan, County Louth on the morning of 26 January 2013; he was the first Garda Siochana officer killed in the line of duty since 1996. No arrests have been made although the Garda have several suspects, all but one of whom have fled the country; the other is in prison on unrelated charges.
• Two members of Greece's right-wing Golden Dawn political party were shot by passing motorcyclists and killed outside the party's offices in the Athens suburn of Neo Irakleio on November 1, 2013. A leftist organization claimed the attack was retaliation for the murder of an antifascist rapper several weeks earlier for which another Golden Dawn member is facing charges. The investigation is continuing.
• Dan Markel, 41, a law professor at Florida State University, was shot as he pulled into the driveway of his Tallahassee home on July 19, 2014; he died the next day. No suspects have been identified; police are investigating the possibility his death was linked to hostile commentary he had received online.^[154]
• Crimean Tatar activist Reşat Amet, 39, was abducted during a March 3, 2014, protest against the recent Russian military occupation of the peninsula in Simferopol. His bound, beaten and stabbed body was found 12 days later in a forest 60 kilometres (37 mi) away. No arrests have been made.
• Rapper The Jacka, 37, born Dominick Newton, was shot to death along an Oakland, California, street on February 2, 2015. Police have not identified any suspects.
• Kenyan investigative journalist John Kituyi, 63, was attacked and beaten fatally by two assailants on motorcycles while walking home from work on 30 April 2015. A man was later arrested and charged with robbery after Kituyi's mobile phone SIM card was found in his possession, but no suspects have been identified in the murder.
• Gerard Davison, 47, a commander in the Provisional IRA, was shot dead on the morning of 5 May 2015 on Welch Street in Belfast. No suspects have been named although press reports speculate that he may have been killed by fellow Irish nationalists who had a grudge against him.
• Lionel Pickens, 31, better known as rapper Chinx, was fatally wounded during a drive-by shooting in Queens, New York on May 17, 2015. The investigation is continuing.

Unsolved serial killer murders

1800–1899

• Servant Girl Annihilator (aka Austin Axe Murderer), Austin, Texas, USA, 1884–85.

3 October 1888 Illustrated London News contemporary depiction of Jack the Ripper

• Jack the Ripper murders, London, England, 1888.

1900–1949

• Atlanta Ripper, Atlanta, Georgia, USA, 1911
• Axeman of New Orleans murders, USA, 1918–19.
• Cleveland Torso Murderer (aka The Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run), Cleveland, Ohio, USA, 1935–38.
• Phantom Killer, Texarkana (Texas and Arkansas), USA, 1946.

1950–1999

• Jack the Ripper, London, UK, 1964–65.
• Zodiac Killer, Northern California, USA, 1968–69.
• Bible John, Glasgow, Scotland, 1968–69.
• Monster of Florence, Province of Florence, Italy, 1968–1985.
• Freeway Phantom, Washington, D.C., USA, 1971–72.
• Alphabet murders, Rochester, New York, USA, 1971–73.
• Charlie Chop-off, Manhattan, USA, 1972–74
• Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Murders, Sonoma County, California, USA, 1972–74.
• The Doodler, San Francisco, California, USA, 1974–75.
• Ann Arbor Hospital Murders, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA, 1975
• Flat-Tire murders, USA, 1975
• Gypsy Hill killings, San Mateo County, California, USA, 1976.
• Oakland County Child Killer, Oakland County, Michigan, USA, 1976–77.
• South County car bomber, St. Louis County, Missouri, USA, 1977.
• Connecticut River Valley Killer, USA, 1978–87.
• Redhead murders, USA, 1977–1992.
• Original Night Stalker, Southern California, USA, 1979–86. (DNA has also identified this killer as the East Area Rapist in and near Sacramento, California.)
• Ohio prostitute killer, Ohio, USA, 1981 – 1990
• Monster of Udine, Province of Udine, Italy, 1980–89.
• Chicago Tylenol murders, Chicago area, USA, 1982.
• Brabant killers, Belgium, 1982–85
• Paraquat murders, Japan, 1985.
• Mineral, Washington murders, Washington, 1985.
• Frankford Slasher, Philadelphia, USA, 1985–90.
• Honolulu Strangler, Hawaii, USA, 1985–86.
• Colonial Parkway Killer, Colonial Parkway, USA, 1986–89
• Hwaseong serial murders, South Korea, 1986–91.
• New Bedford Highway Killer, New Bedford, Massachusetts, USA, 1988–89.
• Stoneman, Kolkata, India, 1989.
• Bowraville Murders, Bowraville, New South Wales, Australia, 1990–91
• Lisbon Ripper, Lisbon, Portugal, 1992–93.
• Claremont serial murders, Claremont, Western Australia, 1996–1997.
• The Long Island serial killer, Long Island, New York, 1996–2013

2000–2009

• The Smiley face murder theory
• West Mesa murders, Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA, 2003–05.
• B1 Butcher, B1 road, Namibia, 2005–07.
• Daytona Beach killer, Daytona Beach, Florida, USA, 2005–07.
• Edgecombe County serial killer, USA, 2005–08
• Eastbound Strangler, Atlantic City, USA, 2006
• Beer Man, Mumbai, India, 2006–07
• Feb 9 Killer, USA, 2006–08
• Paturis Park murders, Carapicuíba, Brazil, 2007–08

Suspected serial killers

• John Bodkin Adams, a physician suspected of being a serial killer in England. One alleged victim, Gertrude Hullett, was found to have committed suicide at the inquest in 1956, but Dr. Adams was indicted for her murder the following year. The case was then dropped by the prosecution via a nolle prosequi, an action described by the judge as an "abuse of process".

Other unsolved deaths

Before 1899

• A mummified man found high in the Alps at the Austrian-Italian border in 1991, later named Ötzi, is believed to have died in the 31st–32nd centuries B.C.E. For ten years after the discovery his death was attributed to hypothermia; however later X-rays found an arrowhead lodged in his shoulder, matching a small tear on his coat. The wound would likely have been fatal even today, but the body shows evidence of other blunt force trauma, including a blow to the head which most likely killed him. The blood of four other individuals was also found on his effects. Theories of his death now include murder, battle, or a mercy killing when his injuries proved untreatable. It has also been suggested that his body was moved there after his death, or after the injuries.
• Alexander the Great died in 323 B.C.E. after a short illness. Exactly what the illness was is a subject of debate; some historians believe there is a possibility he was poisoned.
• Roopkund, a high-elevation glacial lake in the Indian Himalayas, holds the bones of approximately 30 people. Radiocarbon dating has established the 8th century C.E. as their time period; however the cause of their death is not known.
• King William II of England, 1100, killed by an arrow while hunting; it may not have been an accident.
• Regiomontanus (aka Johannes Müller), 1476, German mathematician and astronomer died mysteriously in Rome. Some say of plague, others by assassination.
• Colorado rancher Gottlieb Fluhmann, 55, was last seen alive in 1892. His disappearance was not resolved until his bones were found in a secluded Park County cave in 1944; the cause of his death could not be determined.

1900–1924

• The death of Ross Gilmore Marvin, 28, during Robert Peary's 1908 North Pole expedition was for years believed to have been an accidental fall through the ice. However, reports emerged in the 1920s that one of the two Inuit guides he was with at the time confessed to shooting him, possibly accidentally or in self-defense, after converting to Christianity; the allegations were never formally investigated due to the passage of time and uncertainty over who might have had jurisdiction.
• Death of Rudolf Diesel, 1913, the place is unknown and many theories are given about Diesel's death. He disappeared in the English Channel and was found dead at sea ten days later.
• Silent film actress Virginia Rappe, 26, was found to have died of peritonitis due to a ruptured bladder following her death on September 9, 1921. While this could have been the result of some of her ongoing health problems, such as cystitis, or complications from a recent abortion (illegal at the time), Maude Delmont, an acquaintance, told San Francisco police that star film comedian Fatty Arbuckle had sexually assaulted Rappe during a Labor Day party in his suite at the St. Francis Hotel, another possible cause of the ruptured bladder. Arbuckle was charged with rape and involuntary manslaughter. Belmont did not testify against him at trial due to her criminal background; some prosecution witnesses admitted on the stand they had been pressured to change their testimony, and Arbuckle's defense also brought to light Rappe's health issues and history of promiscuity and alcohol consumption. After two hung juries, he was acquitted; however his career was effectively over due to the negative publicity the case attracted. Whether Rappe's death was indeed the result of nonconsensual sexual activity is still a matter of historical debate.

1925–1949

• Ottavio Bottecchia, 1927, Italian cyclist, was found by the side of a road, covered with bruises and with a serious skull fracture. His bicycle was undamaged, propped against a nearby tree. He was taken to a hospital but died soon afterwards. An official inquiry concluded accidental death but many suspected that he had run afoul of the powerful and growing fascist movement in Italy at the time.
• The exact circumstances under which Cuban rumba dancer José Rosario Oviedo, known as Malanga, died at the age of 42 in 1927 have never been known for certain. One common account has it that he was murdered after a dance contest through broken glass hidden in his food, but no death certificate was ever filed and the location of his grave is unknown.
• Starr Faithfull, 1931, a Greenwich Village flapper, was found drowned on the beach at Long Beach, Nassau County, New York on June 8. Although Faithfull had left a suicide note, her family contended that she was murdered by wealthy politician Andrew James Peters, former Mayor of Boston, who had allegedly sexually abused Faithfull for years beginning when she was 11 years old and paid the Faithfulls to keep silent about it. Despite a lengthy investigation, it was never determined whether Faithfull's death was homicide, suicide, or accident.
• The body of Princeton University undergraduate Jay Ferdinand Towner, 23, was found on campus shortly after a November 11, 1933, football game. He had suffered broken wrists and severe internal injuries. His death was variously attributed to a fall suffered in the stands during the game or a car accident amid conflicting accounts of his whereabouts prior to his death; its exact cause has never been determined.
• Jose Gallardo Díaz, 22, was found unconscious on a road near a Commerce, California, swimming hole on the morning of August 2, 1942. He died shortly after being taken to a nearby hospital; the autopsy found a fracture at the base of his skull, and his death was ruled a homicide even though one of the medical examiners involved believed a car accident was the more likely cause. The Los Angeles-area press soon termed it the Sleepy Lagoon murder and along with the police attributed it to gang activity among Mexican American youth. A trial of 17 defendants, all alleged members of the 38th Street Gang, took place without full regard for due process and heavy racial animus; tensions over the trial led to the Zoot Suit Riots the following year when Mexican youths and servicemen stationed in the area clashed over that garment. The 12 convictions were overturned on appeal two years later; the incident helped launch the Chicano civil rights movement.
• King Ananda Mahidol of Thailand, 1946. Died of gunshot wounds; suicide, accident or assassination.
• Jan Masaryk, 1948, son of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk; Czech diplomat, politician and Foreign Minister of Czechoslovakia, was found dead in the courtyard of the Foreign Ministry below his bathroom window. The initial investigation concluded that he committed suicide by jumping out of the window, although many are convinced that he was pushed.
• Sadanori Shimoyama, 1948, first director of Japanese National Railways, was last seen leaving his official car to go into a department store on his way to work the morning of July 5 of that year. Others reported seeing him at various train stations, and walking along one line, that afternoon. His dismembered body was found at noon the next day on the Jōban Line. It had indisputably gotten that way as a result of being struck by a train, but the autopsy suggested he had died before being struck. That conclusion has been disputed, and whether his death was a suicide or murder remains undetermined.

1950–1974

• Indian politician Syama Prasad Mukherjee, 52, died in a prison hospital 23 June 1953 one and a half months after his arrest for attempting to enter Jammu and Kashmir without a permit. The exact cause of death has never been disclosed; Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, whose government Mukherjee had resigned from in protest over Nehru's decision to normalise relations with Pakistan despite that country's treatment of its Hindu population, said at the time he made inquiries and was satisfied that his former minister's death was due to natural causes; speculation has continued that Mukherjee was actually murdered due to some unusual circumstances of his arrest and treatment.
• The Dyatlov Pass incident was the death of nine hikers on the Kholat Syakhl mountain in the northern Ural Mountains range on 2 February 1959; all the bodies were not recovered until that May. While most of the victims were found to have died of hypothermia after apparently abandoning their tent high on an exposed mountainside, two had fractured skulls, two had broken ribs, and one was missing her tongue. After testing, the clothing of some of the victims was found to be highly radioactive. There were no witnesses or survivors to provide any testimony, and the cause of death was listed as a "compelling natural force", most likely an avalanche, by Soviet investigators.^[155]
• Dr Gilbert Stanley Bogle, 39, and Margaret Olive Chandler, 29, were found dead, both partially undressed, near the banks of the Lane Cove River in Sydney, Australia, on 1 January 1963. Their bluish pallor and the presence of vomit and excrement led to a finding that they had been poisoned, but the coroner was unable to determine at the time what the toxin was, and it was suspected they had been murdered (possibly by Chandler's husband) although no suspects have ever been identified. A 2006 TV documentary, however, has suggested their deaths were not due to foul play but natural, the result of hydrogen sulfide leaking from the river bed and reaching dangerously high concentrations in the air of the low-lying depressions near the river where their bodies were found.
• Lead Masks Case in Niterói, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1966.
• Oakland, California, police officer John Frey was fatally shot on the morning of October 28, 1969, during a traffic stop where he had pulled over Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton, who was wounded in the shootout and convicted of voluntary manslaughter the following year. The gun Newton purportedly used was never found, and following two hung juries after the conviction was overturned on appeal in 1970 the district attorney's office announced it would not try him a fourth time. Newton suggested that Frey may have been shot by his partner; there has been no new investigation to determine whether this was the case and whether this was an accident.
• Joan Robinson Hill, 1969, Texas socialite. At first ruled to have died of influenza following a brief hospitalization on March 19, suspicions were aroused when her body was released to the funeral home and embalmed before a legally required autopsy could be carried out. Despite the compromised evidence, three autopsies, all with their own irregularities, were performed and her husband John eventually became the only person indicted by a Texas grand jury for murder by omission, or failing to take proper action in the face of a life-threatening situation. The first attempt to prosecute him ended in a mistrial in 1972; he was murdered before he could be retried and the gunman who was suspected of his murder died in a police shootout. Two other alleged accomplices were later convicted.
• Ronald Hughes an American attorney who disappeared while on a camping trip in November 1970. His body was found in March 1971, but his cause of death could not be determined.
• Isdal Woman, a partially charred corpse found on November 29, 1970, hidden off a hiking trail near Bergen, Norway. She has never been identified, despite extensive investigation. The official conclusion that her death was a suicide has not been widely accepted.^[156]
• Nuclear-power whistleblower Karen Silkwood died in a car accident on November 13, 1974, while driving to a meeting with a New York Times reporter in Oklahoma City. Whether that accident involved another vehicle, which may even have deliberately run her off the road, or resulted from her own fatigue has always been a matter of debate.

1975–1999

• Theresa Allore, 19, a student at Champlain College Lennoxville in Quebec, was last seen alive in a campus dining hall on November 3, 1978. When her body was found in a nearby pond five months later, police, who had initially believed she had run away when the college had not reported her missing until a week after her disappearance, suggested instead that she had overdosed on drugs, but never officially announced a cause of death. Bruises on the body and strangulation marks on her neck, the existence of which was not made public until 2002, have led to theories that she was instead murdered. A 2001 reopening of the case was hindered when it was found that most of the original physical evidence, including clothing that purportedly belonged to Allore found near the body, had been destroyed in the interim.
• On March 24, 1979, two boys playing near Ayer's Cliff, Quebec, found the frozen body of Manon Dubé, 10, who had disappeared from her Sherbrooke home, 50 kilometres (31 mi) to the north, 14 months earlier. Other than a small cut on her face which could have been caused by the ice she was encased in, there were no signs of any kind of violence, and investigators were unable to determine a cause of death. A reopening of the case in 2001 found that most of the original physical evidence had been destroyed; journalists have suggested she might have been murdered by the same person who may have killed Theresa Allore around that time.
• Marcia Moore, 60, a writer on yoga and astrology, disappeared near her home in the Seattle, Washington, area during winter 1979. Her skeletal remains were found in nearby woods in 1981. It has been presumed in the absence of any evidence that would more conclusively establish a cause of death, that she died of hypothermia while wandering the woods under the influence of ketamine, a drug whose use she had promoted. However, true-crime writer Anne Rule, a friend, says what appeared to be a bullet hole was found in her jawbone, although authorities said it could just as easily have been a result of the bone decaying during the cold winters. Officially the cause of Moore's death remains undetermined.
• On November 29, 1981, actress Natalie Wood, who had been boating with her husband Robert Wagner and fellow actor Christopher Walken, was found drowned near Santa Catalina Island, California. While that has always been accepted as the direct cause of her death, the circumstances under which she went into the water have never been clear, and after reopening the investigation in 2012 the coroner changed the cause of death from "accident" to "undetermined", based on cuts and bruises on her body that may or may not have been suffered before her death.^[157]
• Eduardo Frei Montalva, 1982, president of Chile from 1964 to 1970. As of 2005, his death is being investigated because of allegations that he was poisoned.
• The cause of death of the baby born to Joanne Hayes in Ireland's 1984 Kerry Babies case was never established.
• Uwe Barschel, 43, minister-president of Schleswig-Holstein, was found dead in his hotel bathroom, fully dressed in a full tub of water, on 11 October 1987. The cause of death has never been conclusively established.
• Whether the 17 August 1988 plane crash that killed Pakistani president Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, 64, the country's longest-serving leader, and 30 others including the country's top military leaders and the U.S. ambassador, was an accident or deliberate, the result of sabotage or a shootdown, is a matter of debate. American investigators came to the former conclusion, while their Pakistani counterparts produced a report reaching the latter. Theories as to responsibility if it were an act of malice have put the blame on a number of domestic and foreign actors.
• Zviad Gamsakhurdia, 1993, former president of Georgia, died in circumstances that were (and still are) very unclear. It is known that he died in the village of Khibula in the Samegrelo region of western Georgia.
• Screenwriter Gary DeVore, 55, left Santa Fe, New Mexico, on June 28, 1997, for Hollywood to drop off his final draft of the script for a remake of The Big Steal, a 1949 film about, in part, a man who stages his own disappearance. He never arrived, and was considered missing for a year until his body was found in his car in the California Aqueduct. Its hands were missing, and it did not appear from the position in which it was found that the car had gone into the waterway after an accident. No cause of death has been conclusively established.
• Yves Godard and family, 1999. A French doctor who disappeared on board a sailing boat with his two children. Several years later, bones belonging to Dr Godard and his young daughter were discovered in the English Channel. No trace of his son or his wife (the latter did not go on the sailing trip) has ever been found, nor has any trace of the boat. Prosecutors believe Dr Godard probably murdered his family before committing suicide at sea, but they also acknowledge that they cannot be certain of this.

2000–2010

• Rodney Marks, 32, an Australian astrophysicist, died of a sudden illness on 12 May 2000 at Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica. Only six months later, after the Antarctic winter ended, was his body able to be flown to New Zealand and autopsied, where the cause of death was found to have been methanol poisoning. Suicide was ruled out as he did not seem to have a motive and had readily sought treatment for his apparent illness, nor did an accidental overdose seem likely either as plenty of alcohol was available for consumption at the base should he have wanted it. The New Zealand police believed instead that the methanol had been "unknowingly" introduced into Marks' system, but could not conclusively call the case a homicide. Further investigation has been frustrated by the refusal of American agencies to share their findings, the global dispersal of researchers and personnel at the base that winter, the 2006 disappearance of the doctor who treated Marks, and the loss of any possible crime-scene evidence during the winter after Marks' death.
• Abu Nidal, 65, Palestinian terrorist leader behind the 1985 Rome and Vienna airport attacks, already suffering from leukemia, was reported to have died from a gunshot wound in Baghdad on 16 August 2002. Iraq's government at the time claimed his death was a suicide;^[158] the Palestinians believe he was assassinated on Saddam Hussein's orders to prevent his possible capture during the American invasion of Iraq that began six months later.^[159]
• Jonathan Luna, 38, an assistant U.S. attorney from Baltimore, was found dead of multiple stab wounds inflicted with his own penknife in Denver, Pennsylvania, on the morning of December 4, 2003, in a stream underneath his car, which had been driven there overnight from Baltimore. The FBI, which has jurisdiction over the possible murder of any U.S. federal employee, found that Luna had mounting financial problems and was facing an investigation over missing money at his office, considered it a suicide or botched attempt at staging a kidnapping. However, the Lancaster County coroner's office, pointing to evidence suggesting he had been abducted and someone else was driving for at least the final stage of his drive, ruled it a homicide and considers the case open.^[160]
• The coroner investigating the death of Richard Lancelyn Green, 51, a British Arthur Conan Doyle scholar who was found garrotted with a shoelace on his bed in his home on April 27, 2004, returned an open verdict. Many of his friends and family suspected homicide as he had complained of someone following him in his efforts to stop the auction of a cache of Doyle's personal papers that he believed to have been wrongfully acquired. However, despite suicide by garrotte being unusual and difficult, some investigators believed that he had followed the example of one of Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories in which a woman stages her suicide to look like a murder.
• On October 4, 2006, the skeletonized remains of Frauke Liebs, 21, a student nurse, were found off a road near Lichtenau, Germany. She had last been seen leaving a bar on June 20, and called her roommate several times in the days afterwards indicating she would come home but was being vague about when or how. Police now believe she was being held against her will and might have been murdered, although the body was too decomposed to establish a cause of death.
• Three years after the body of 44-year-old Corryn Rayney was found in the Perth suburb of Kings Park, Western Australia a week after her 7 May 2007 disappearance, her husband Lloyd was charged in her murder even though a cause of death had not been determined. A judge acquitted him at his 2012 trial, finding the largely circumstantial case was further compromised by police misconduct. The verdict was upheld on appeal the following year; Rayney and his lawyers have called for two known sex criminals to be investigated as well.
• Barbara Precht's body was found on 29 November 2006 in Cincinnati, Ohio. She remained unidentified until November 2014. Her husband was located later on and is considered a person of interest in her death, which has unknown circumstances.^[161]
• Joyce Carol Vincent, 38, was found dead in her London flat in December 2006, three years after she had died, by which time the body had decomposed so much as to make identifying a cause of death impossible; her story was profiled in the 2011 documentary Dreams of a Life.^[162]
• Two-year-old Caylee Anthony, of Orlando, Florida, was reported missing by her grandmother in the summer of 2008, when she learned that her daughter Casey hadn't seen her in over a month. Casey claimed the girl had been kidnapped by someone no one else but she had ever met, and circumstantial evidence led to her arrest on murder charges that fall. A tip that could have led to the body's discovery in August was not fully acted upon until December; by then the body was so decomposed that it was impossible to establish how Caylee had died, although the coroner ruled it homicide. Casey Anthony, despite public sentiment strongly against her, was acquitted of the murder and child-abuse charges (but convicted of the lesser charges of lying to the police) after a heavily covered trial in 2011, where her lawyer claimed that Caylee had accidentally drowned in the family pool and Casey's domineering father had led a cover-up.
• Bob Woolmer, Pakistan's cricket coach was found dead in his hotel room after losing in the Cricket World Cup 2007 in the West Indies. Investigators at first ruled the death a suicide, but the jury that heard the inquest was not so sure and returned an open verdict.

2010s

• Skeletal remains found in a dry creek bed in California's Malibu Canyon on August 9, 2010, turned out to be those of Mitrice Richardson, 25, who had last been seen on the night of the previous September 16 in the backyard of a former local television news anchor, after being arrested for marijuana possession and failure to pay the bill at a local restaurant where she had been acting strangely, behavior that investigating officers did not believe was caused by alcohol or drugs. While the coroner has said her death did not appear to be a homicide, the body was too decayed to determine the exact cause of death.^[163]
• On 23 August 2010, the partially decomposed body of Gareth Williams, 32, a Welsh mathematician who worked for British intelligence GCHQ, but who was seconded to MI6 at the time of his death, was found in a padlocked bag in the bathroom of a safe house in the London neighborhood of Pimlico. It was determined he had been dead for about a week. Due to the nature of his work, the investigation had to withhold details of it and some other aspects from any material made public; his family and friends allege that the Metropolitan Police compromised and mishandled key forensic evidence in the early stages of their response. An initial investigation by the coroner's office concluded that the death was a homicide; a later re-investigation by the police claimed that it was instead an accident.
• On November 15–16, 2013, skeletal remains of two adults and child were found in a field outside Red Oak, Oklahoma. A year later they were identified as the Jamison family, who had gone missing in 2009 while looking into some land they wanted to purchase. Their abandoned pickup truck was three miles (4.8 km) from where their bodies were found. No cause of death has been determined.
• The decomposing remains of Canadian journalist Dave Walker, 57, were found in Cambodia's Angkor temple complex on May 1, 2014, ending a search that began shortly after he failed to return to his hotel's guest house on the night of February 14. While the medical examiner concluded that he had died weeks earlier, the cause of Walker's death could not be determined.
• On June 27, 2014, the body of 20-year-old Andrew Sadek was recovered from the Red River near Breckenridge, Minnesota, with a small-caliber gunshot wound and a backpack full of rocks. He had last been seen by a security camera leaving his dorm at North Dakota State College of Science in Wahpeton around 2 a.m. on May 1. At the time of his disappearance he had been working as a confidential informant for local police as a result of his own arrest for selling marijuana on campus, which could otherwise have resulted in a long prison sentence. It has not been determined yet whether his death was suicide or murder. Like Rachel Hoffman's death, the case has been used as an example of the mishandling of youthful CIs by police.^[164]
• Alberto Nisman, 51, an Argentine federal prosecutor, was found dead in his apartment of a single gunshot wound to the head on January 18, 2015. He had been investigating the 1994 AMIA bombing, Argentina's deadliest terror attack, and had publicly accused President Cristina Kirchner and other high officials close to her of covering up for suspects in the case for foreign-policy reasons; he was scheduled to present these allegations to Congress the next day. While some of the circumstances of his death are consistent with an early statement that he committed suicide, friends and relatives say that he was eagerly looking ahead to his appearance before Congress and did not seem depressed or despondent at all. Kirchner has suggested the country's intelligence services were behind the killing, since he was about to expose their attempts to bring her down, and called for them to be dismantled. The case remains under investigation.^[165]
• On 22 April 2015, the body of Ambrose Ball, 30, of London, was recovered from the River Lea in Tottenham. He had last been seen leaving his vehicle following a single-car accident early on the morning of 24 January after visiting a local pub with friends. The body was too decomposed to determine a cause of death; police requested an adjournment of the inquest in order to further investigate, implying a murder charge was in the works. No charges were ever filed, and threats were later made against Ball's friends and family after they set up a Facebook page appealing for help from the public and questioning the conduct of the investigation.
• The body of 12-year-old Queensland schoolgirl Tiahleigh Palmer was found on the banks of the Pimpama River on 5 November 2015, six days after she was last seen leaving her high school in Logan, 30 kilometres (19 mi) away, shortly after the beginning of the school day, apparently intending to skip class for the day. Her remains were so badly decomposed police have admitted that without witnesses it may be impossible to determine how she died.^[166]

Date of death disputed

• Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish humanitarian who worked in Budapest, Hungary, was most likely executed in Russia in or around 1947 after being captured by the Red Army in 1945. His death is dated by Soviet authorities as 16 July 1947, but this is disputed, and the case remains unsolved.

See also

• Lists of people by cause of death
• List of unsolved murders in the United Kingdom
• List of unidentified decedents in the United States
  • List of unidentified murder victims in the United States
• List of people who disappeared mysteriously
• Cold case
• Forensic science

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