This list of unsolved murders includes notable cases where victims have been murdered under unknown circumstances.
The Zodiac Killer is the pseudonym of an unidentified serial killer who operated in Northern California in the late 1960s. The Zodiac murdered five known victims in the San Francisco Bay Area between December 1968 and October 1969, operating in rural, urban, and suburban settings. He targeted three young couples and a lone male cab driver. The case has been described as "arguably the most famous unsolved murder case in American history," and has become both a fixture of popular culture and a focus for efforts by amateur detectives.
The Axeman of New Orleans was an unidentified American serial killer who was active in and around New Orleans, Louisiana, between May 1918 and October 1919. Press reports during the height of public panic over the killings mentioned similar crimes as early as 1911, but recent researchers have called these reports into question. The attacker was never identified, and the murders remain unsolved.
Amy Renee Mihaljevic was a ten-year-old American elementary school student who was kidnapped and murdered in the U.S. state of Ohio in 1989.
The Texarkana Moonlight Murders, a term coined by the contemporary press, was a series of four unsolved serial murders and related violent crimes committed in the Texarkana region of the United States in early 1946. They were attributed to an alleged unidentified perpetrator known as the Phantom of Texarkana, the Phantom Killer, or the Phantom Slayer. This hypothetical suspect is credited with attacking eight people, five of them fatally, in a ten-week period.
The Oakland County Child Killer (OCCK) is the name given to the perpetrator(s) responsible for the serial killings of at least four children in Oakland County, Michigan, between 1976 and 1977. The victims were held captive before being killed, and the four deaths triggered a murder investigation, which at the time was the largest in U.S. history, with Detroit's two daily newspapers, as well as the area's numerous radio and television stations, covering the case. A presentation on WXYT radio, titled Winter's Fear: The Children, the Killer, the Search, won the Peabody Award in 1977.
Robert Tyrone Hayes is an American serial killer who has been convicted of three murders in the Daytona Beach, Florida, area between December 2005 and February 2006. DNA tests have also linked him to a fourth murder committed in March 2016. In addition, he remains the prime suspect in the murder of another woman in December 2007.
Christopher Bernard Wilder, also known as the Beauty Queen Killer and the Snapshot Killer, was an Australian-American serial killer who abducted at least twelve young women and girls, killing eight of them during a six-week, cross-country crime spree in the United States in early 1984. Wilder's series of murders began in Florida on February 26, 1984, and continued across the country through Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, Nevada and California, with attempted abductions in Washington and New York. Wilder victimized attractive young women, most of whom he would entice by promising to take their pictures. After subduing them, he would torture and rape them before shooting, stabbing with a knife, or strangling them to death. Two or more of his victims were electrocuted using a makeshift electrical cord.
Steven Gerald James Wright is an English serial killer, also known as the Suffolk Strangler. He is currently serving life imprisonment for the murder of five women who worked in Ipswich, Suffolk. The killings took place during the final months of 2006 and Wright was found guilty in February 2008 and given a whole life order.
The Doodler is an unidentified serial killer believed responsible for between six and sixteen murders and three assaults of men in San Francisco, California, United States, between January 1974 and September 1975. The nickname was given due to the perpetrator's habit of sketching his victims prior to stabbing them to death. The perpetrator met his victims at gay nightclubs, bars and restaurants.
Ruth Marie Terry, also known as Lady of the Dunes, was a formerly unidentified murder victim found on July 26, 1974, in the Race Point Dunes near to Provincetown, Massachusetts, United States. Her body was exhumed in 1980, 2000, and 2013 in efforts to identify her. On October 31, 2022, the FBI field office in Boston announced that Terry had been officially identified. Her husband, Guy Muldavin, was officially named as her killer on August 28, 2023.
Neal Martin Falls was an American suspected serial killer who was shot and killed in self-defense by Heather Saul, a woman in Charleston, West Virginia. Falls had been stopped by police in over twenty states during his life but did not incur any serious criminal charges.
Margaret Martin was a resident of Kingston, Pennsylvania, United States, who went missing on December 17, 1938, and was found dead in Wyoming County, Pennsylvania, several days later. Martin was a recent graduate of the Wilkes-Barre Business College. On December 17, 1938, she met an unknown man who claimed to be offering her a secretarial job, and was never seen alive again. Her body was discovered in the wilderness 25 miles (40 km) away by a hunter four days later. Martin's death resulted in a lengthy manhunt. Numerous suspects were examined, but no one was ever convicted of the crime. As of 2024, it remains an unsolved case.
Terry Peder Rasmussen was an American convicted murderer and suspected serial killer who was convicted of one murder, and linked to at least five more in a series of crimes that stretched across the contiguous United States between 1978 and 2002. Due to his use of many aliases, most notably "Bob Evans", Rasmussen is known as the Chameleon Killer.
Alexander Mengel, also known as the Scalp Collector, was a Guyanese-born tool and die maker, security guard, fugitive, murderer and suspected serial killer who committed at least two murders during a week-long, cross-country crime spree in the United States and Canada in early-1985. While returning home from the Catskill Mountains on February 24, 1985, Mengel allegedly killed a patrol officer and fled on foot in Westchester County, New York.
Joseph William Kappen, also known as the Saturday Night Strangler, was a Welsh serial killer who committed the rape and murder of three teenage girls in Llandarcy and Tonmawr, near his home town of Port Talbot, in 1973. Kappen is also suspected of committing a fourth murder in February 1976.
On 16 June 1980, Patricia "Patsy" Morris, a 14-year-old schoolgirl from Feltham, London, was murdered by strangulation. She disappeared after leaving her school during her lunch break, and was found dead in undergrowth on Hounslow Heath near her home two days later. Despite repeated appeals for information by police, her murder remains unsolved.
On June 25, 1982, Lee Gunsalus Rotatori, a 32-year old American woman, was sexually assaulted and murdered in her hotel room by Thomas Oscar Freeman in Council Bluffs, Iowa. The murder went unsolved for nearly 40 years, until it was announced by authorities in 2022 that the perpetrator had been identified as Freeman using investigative genetic genealogy.
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: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)Quote: 'over 40 victims [were found] on her property'.
Daisy Grace drugged her husband and then shot him. Her action was the execution of a diabolical plot to murder Eugene H. Grace for his insurance money, which the woman planned several days before. She says she drugged him before she shot him, and the evidence so far uncovered proves it. ...
Mrs. Daisy Ople Grace was declared not guilty of trying to kill her husband by a jury here at 6 o'clock this evening.
Arnold Rothstein, the gambler, died yesterday in Polyclinic Hospital without disclosing who had shot him on Sunday night in the Paris Central ...(subscription required)
Jack (Legs) Diamond, human ammunition dump for the underworld, was killed in a cheap rooming house at 67 Dove ...(subscription required)
Den 7mars 1932 hittades Hjalmar von Sydow ihjälslagen i familjens våning på Norr Mälarstrand 24på Kungsholmeni ... Affärsjuristen Anders Frigell, som 2002 skrev boken von Sydowmordens gåta, är däremot skeptisk till kokainteorin. Efter att ...
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: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)Death took The Executioner yesterday. Umberto (called Albert) Anastasia, master killer for Murder, Inc., a homicidal gangster troop that plagued the city from 1931 to 1940, was murdered by two gunmen.
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: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)According to the Oak Park police, Joseph DiPersio, the caretaker, [...] went to the basement, he found the gangster lying face up in a pool of blood on the floor of the kitchen. Six .22‐caliber shell cases were found near the body. [...] Recently he underwent gall bladder surgery at the Methodist Hospital in Houston. The authorities said that he returned to Chicago only this week.
On Feb. 11, 1976, Barboza, living under the name Joe Donati, left his San Francisco apartment and was hit by four shotgun blasts fired from a Ford van. The Animal was carrying a Colt .38, but never got the chance to use it.
Charles Nicoletti, 61, suffered three gunshot wounds in the back of the head when he was contered at the Golden Horns Restaurant lot in suburbian Northlake about midnight. He died about 5 1/2 hours later in the intensive care unit of Northlake Community Hospital.