Gary Leon Ridgway is an American serial killer known as the Green River Killer. He was initially convicted of 48 separate murders committed between the early 1980s and late 1990s. As part of his plea bargain, another conviction was added, bringing the total number of convictions to 49, making him the second-most prolific serial killer in United States history according to confirmed murders.
The Atlanta murders of 1979–1981, sometimes called the Atlanta child murders, are a series of murders committed in Atlanta, Georgia, between July 1979 and May 1981. Over the two-year period, at least 28 children, adolescents, and adults were killed. Wayne Williams, an Atlanta native who was 23 years old at the time of the last murder, was arrested, tried, and convicted of two of the adult murders and sentenced to two consecutive life terms.
Erica Michelle Marie Green, also known as Precious Doe, was an American three-year-old girl who was murdered in Kansas City, Missouri, in April 2001. Green's decapitated body was discovered on April 28, 2001, and her head was found nearby on May 1, but remained unidentified until May 5, 2005. Green's murder attracted significant media and public attention due to the brutality of the crime and the lengthy period without identification.
Keith Hunter Jesperson is a Canadian-American serial killer who murdered at least eight women in the United States during the early 1990s. He was known as the "Happy Face Killer" because he drew smiley faces on his many letters to the media and authorities. Many of his victims were sex workers and transients who had no connection to him. Strangulation was Jesperson's preferred method of murdering, the same method he often used to kill animals as a child.
Franklin Delano Floyd was an American murderer, rapist, and death row inmate. He was convicted of the 1989 murder of Cheryl Ann Commesso, as well as the kidnapping of 6-year-old Michael Anthony Hughes, who he claimed was his son, from his elementary school in Choctaw, Oklahoma. Floyd was also considered a person of interest in the 1990 hit-and-run death of his second wife and kidnapping victim Sharon Marshall, mother of Michael Anthony Hughes. It was later discovered that before becoming his wife, Sharon had been raised by Floyd from an early age as his daughter and was kidnapped by Floyd as a child.
Tammy Jo Alexander was an American teenage girl who was found murdered in the village of Caledonia, New York on November 10, 1979. She had been fatally shot twice and left in a field just off U.S. Route 20 near the Genesee River after running away from her home in Brooksville, Florida, earlier that year. For more than three decades, she remained unidentified under the names Caledonia Jane Doe or Cali Doe until January 26, 2015, when police in Livingston County, New York, announced her identity 35 years after her death.
The Gilgo Beach serial killings were a series of killings between 1996 and 2011 in which the remains of 11 people were found in Gilgo Beach, located on the South Shore of Long Island, New York, United States. Most of the known victims were sex workers who advertised on Craigslist. The perpetrator in the case is known as the Long Island Serial Killer.
The Bear Brook murders are female American murder victims, two discovered in 1985 and two in 2000, at Bear Brook State Park in Allenstown, New Hampshire, United States. All four of the victims were either partially or completely skeletonized; they were believed to have died between 1977 and 1981.
Evelyn Colon was a formerly unidentified American teenager from New Jersey who was found murdered and dismembered in three suitcases along with her unborn daughter on December 20, 1976, in White Haven, Pennsylvania. The brutality of the crime, the fact that she was pregnant when she was killed and the length of time that she remained unidentified created national attention.
The Redhead murders is the media epithet used to refer to a series of unsolved homicides of redheaded females in the United States between October 1978 and 1992, believed to have been committed by an unidentified male serial killer. The murders believed to be related have occurred in states including Tennessee, Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. The murders may have continued until 1992. The victims, many remaining unidentified for years, were usually women with reddish hair, whose bodies were abandoned along major highways in the United States. Officials believe that the women were likely hitchhiking or may have engaged in prostitution.
Alisha Ann Heinrich, previously known as "Baby Jane" and "Delta Dawn", was a formerly unidentified American child murder victim whose body was found in Moss Point, Mississippi, in December 1982. The child — aged approximately 18 months — was partially smothered before she was thrown alive from the eastbound Interstate 10 bridge into the Escatawpa River, where she ultimately drowned. Her body was recovered between 36 and 48 hours after her death.
Robert Benjamin Rhoades, also known as The Truck Stop Killer, is an American serial killer and rapist. He is confirmed to have tortured and killed at least two couples in Illinois and Texas in 1989 and 1990, and is additionally suspected of torturing, raping, and killing more than fifty women between 1975 and 1990, based on data about his truck routes and women who went missing during those years and who met the profile of his preferred victims. At the time he was caught, Rhoades claimed to have engaged in these activities for fifteen years.
Bella Neveah Amoroso Bond, previously known as the Deer Island Jane Doe and "Baby Doe", was an American child whose body was found in a plastic bag on the shore of Deer Island in Boston, Massachusetts, on June 25, 2015.
Samuel Little was an American serial killer who confessed to murdering 93 people, nearly all women, between 1970 and 2005. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)'s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (ViCAP) has confirmed Little's involvement in at least 60 of the 93 confessed murders, the largest number of confirmed victims for any serial killer in United States history.
Othram is an American corporation specializing in forensic genetic genealogy to resolve unsolved murders, disappearances, and identification of unidentified decedents or murder victims. The company also offers law enforcement agencies tools and programs to infer kinship among individuals, both closely and distantly related, through a combination of short tandem repeat and single nucleotide polymorphism testing, as well as forensic genome sequencing of DNA.
Sean Patrick Goble, known as The Interstate Killer, is an American serial killer. A former truck driver, Goble kidnapped and murdered at least four women in the Southern United States between 1994 and 1995. Since his arrest, authorities in ten other states have investigated him for numerous unsolved killings of women. While he was cleared in some of those cases, as of today, his true victim count remains unclear.
The Great Basin Murders is the name given to a series of murders of at least nine women committed between 1983 and 1997 across the states of Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, and Idaho. It derives its name from the Great Basin geographical area, as most of the victims had their bodies dumped near interstate highways that transverse it.
Amore Joveah Wiggins, formerly known as Opelika Jane Doe was a formerly unidentified murder victim whose skeletal remains were found in a trailer park in Opelika, Alabama. Her identity was not known until nearly 11 years later in January 2023. Wiggins's father, Lamar Vickerstaff, was subsequently charged with felony murder and failure to report a missing child, while her step-mother, Ruth Vickerstaff, was charged with the latter. If convicted, Lamar would face up to life imprisonment without the possibility parole or the death penalty, and Ruth would face up to 10 years in prison.
On February 26, 1999, a cemetery worker in DeKalb County, Georgia discovered the skeleton of a male child in a wooded area near a church cemetery. The child remained unidentified until June 2022 when he was identified as 6-year-old William DaShawn Hamilton. His mother, Teresa Ann Bailey Black, was arrested and charged with murder, child cruelty, aggravated assault, and concealing his death.
