Jacob Erwin Wetterling was an American boy from St. Joseph, Minnesota, who was kidnapped from his hometown and murdered on October 22, 1989, at the age of 11. The identity of his abductor remained a mystery for nearly 27 years.
Victim blaming occurs when the victim of a crime or any wrongful act is held entirely or partially at fault for the harm that befell them. There is historical and current prejudice against the victims of domestic violence and sex crimes, such as the greater tendency to blame victims of rape than victims of robbery if victims and perpetrators knew each other prior to the commission of the crime. The Gay Panic Defense has also been used to justify violence against LGBT people.
Earl Kenneth Shriner is an American criminal who in 1990 was convicted of first-degree attempted murder, first-degree rape and first-degree assault of seven-year-old Ryan Alan Hade and sentenced to 131 years' imprisonment.
The Drop is the 24th novel by American crime author Michael Connelly, and the fifteenth novel featuring Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) detective Harry Bosch. The book was published on 22 November 2011.
The Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal consists of the organised child sexual abuse that occurred in the town of Rotherham, South Yorkshire, Northern England from the late 1980s until 2013 and the failure of local authorities to act on reports of the abuse throughout most of that period. Researcher Angie Heal, who was hired by local officials and warned them about child exploitation occurring between 2002 and 2007, has since described it as the "biggest child protection scandal in UK history", with one report estimating that 1,400 girls were abused by "grooming gangs" between 1997 and 2013. Evidence of the abuse was first noted in the early 1990s, when care home managers investigated reports that children in their care were being picked up by taxi drivers. From at least 2001, multiple reports passed names of alleged perpetrators, several from one family, to the police and Rotherham Council. The first group conviction took place in 2010, when five British-Pakistani men were convicted of sexual offences against girls aged 12–16. From January 2011 Andrew Norfolk of The Times pressed the issue, reporting in 2012 that the abuse in the town was widespread and that the police and council had known about it for over ten years.
During the 2015–2016 celebrations of New Year's Eve in Germany, approximately 1,200 women were reported to have been sexually assaulted, especially in the city of Cologne. In many of the incidents, while these women were in public spaces, they were surrounded and assaulted by large groups of men who were identified by officials as Arab or North African men. The Federal Criminal Police Office confirmed in July 2016 that 1,200 women had been sexually assaulted on that night.
The murder of Roy Tutill occurred on 23 April 1968 in Surrey, England, United Kingdom. The victim was a 14-year-old schoolboy who was raped and murdered on his way home from school. The murder went unsolved for 33 years, until Brian Lunn Field confessed to the crime after DNA evidence surfaced in 2001. It was the oldest cold case to be solved in the United Kingdom until the conviction of David Burgess for the 1966 murder of Yolande Waddington in 2012.
Kurt-Friedhelm Steinwegs, nicknamed The Monster from Lower Rhine, is a German serial killer who murdered six people between 1974 and 1983.
Marc Hoffmann is a German sex offender and murderer. In 2005 Hoffmann was sentenced to life imprisonment for the sexual abuse and murder of two children that took place in 2004. He may be responsible for other unresolved sexual offences and murders.
Marco Metzler is a German serial killer, who attacked women on the highways between Hesse and North Rhine-Westphalia from 2003 to 2006, raping four and killing three of them.
The Göhrde murders were two double murders which took place in the summer of 1989 near Göhrde in Lower Saxony, West Germany. Within the space of a few weeks, two couples were found dead in the Göhrde State Forest, deemed by police to have been victims of the same killer. Although the murders remain unresolved, police announced in December 2017 that Kurt-Werner Wichmann, a suspected serial killer who committed suicide in 1993, was their prime suspect. Investigators have also speculated that another unknown person may be linked to the killings. The murders were widely reported on in the German press, and the area where they took place was largely avoided by members of the public for nearly thirty years.
On the morning of 10 August 1998, 11-year-old Nicky Verstappen disappeared from a summer camp he was attending in Brunssum, Limburg. His body was found on the evening of 11 August, 1.2 kilometres (0.75 mi) away in Landgraaf, and a murder investigation was subsequently launched. Despite extensive investigation, the case remained unsolved for over twenty years.
Kurt-Werner Wichmann was a German serial killer who was possibly linked to the Göhrde Murders.
The Saw-Killer of Hanover is the name of an unidentified German serial killer, who is supposedly responsible for murdering and dismembering at least four women and two men, whose body parts were found in Hanover and the surrounding area in the 1970s. None of the victims have been identified, and the case is also referred to as The Found Corpses of Hanover. The "SOKO Torso" Unit of the Hanoverian police, directed by Commissioner Günter Nowatius, investigated the murders at the time.
Margaret Oliver is an English former Detective Constable with the Greater Manchester Police. She is known as a whistleblower for exposing the poor handling of the Rochdale child sex abuse ring case by her own force.
Medomsley Detention Centre was a prison for young male offenders near Consett in Durham, England from 1961 until the late 1980s, where more than 1,800 living former inmates have reported sexual and physical abuse by staff. Police believe many of the staff belonged to a child sex abuse ring.
Operation Voicer was a major police investigation into serious sexual offences against pre-school aged children and infants across England, launched in 2014. The perpetrators groomed the families of the young victims, in some cases before the babies were even born. By September 2015, seven offenders were jailed, 28 further suspects had been arrested, three victims were identified, and 33 children were safeguarded. Ten offenders received significant prison sentences.
The murder of Jonathan Coulom, also referred to as the Jonathan Affair, is a French criminal case in which the 10-year-old Coulom was abducted on the night of 7 April 2004 in Saint-Brevin-les-Pins, Loire-Atlantique. His body was found, bound with a cinderblock, in a pond in Guérande on 19 May 2004. German Martin Ney, a convicted serial killer of children in Germany has been charged with the crime as of 26 January 2021. He was transferred to the French city of Nantes from his high security prison cell in Germany to stand trial for the murder of Coulom.
In October 2019, a 61 year-old man from South Wales was sentenced for 33 years for serious sexual offences against three of his daughters, spanning 20 years, one of whom was also his granddaughter. He frequently raped his daughters from the ages of 12, 13, or 14, fathering six of his own grandchildren with one. He also arranged for other men to rape his daughters.
The Favoriten Girl Murders were a series of sexually-motivated crimes committed against a young woman and two young girls: Alexandra Schriefl, Christina Beranek and Nicole Strau in the Viennese district of Favoriten. This case was among the most extensive and costliest investigations in Austrian history.
