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The 1969 murder of Diane Maxwell involved the death of Diane Maxwell, a 25-year-old phone operator for Southwestern Bell, who was found raped and killed in a shack in December 1969 in Houston, Texas.
On December 14, 1969, 25-year-old Diane Maxwell (b. 1944) was walking to her job as a phone operator for Southwestern Bell, but never made it to the building. [1] Later that day, a man by the name of William Bell noticed a man walking away from a shack. When Bell came to look in the shack, he found the raped, dead body of Maxwell and immediately notified police.
However, the case remained unsolved due to the lack of computer technology. In 1986, 17 years after the incident, investigators reopened the case, but could not solve it. The case remained closed until July 2003, 34 years after the murder was committed. A batch of forensics they had performed in 1969 was found by Houston police, who located James Ray Davis, a lifetime criminal. [1] [2] Davis was last convicted of kidnapping a young girl and was suspected to be the perpetrator of the Maxwell rape and murder. DNA evidence confirmed that he did rape her. Davis was convicted of first degree murder (the robbery, rape, and kidnapping statute of limitations had expired) shortly afterward, and was sentenced to life without parole. [3]
In 2008, the case was featured in the Forensic Files episode "Brotherly Love."
The Zodiac Killer, or simply Zodiac or the Zodiac, is the pseudonym of a serial killer who operated in Northern California in the late 1960s. The case has been described as the most famous unsolved murder case in American history and has become a fixture of popular culture, inspiring amateur detectives to attempt to resolve it and entertainment such as films, television, novels, and video games.
Dru Katrina Sjodin was an American woman who was abducted from the Columbia Mall parking lot in Grand Forks, North Dakota, by Alfonso Rodriguez Jr., on November 22, 2003. Her disappearance and murder garnered great media coverage throughout the United States and prompted the creation of the Dru Sjodin National Sex Offender Public Registry.
A cold case is a crime, or a suspected crime, that has not yet been fully resolved and is not the subject of a current criminal investigation, but for which new information could emerge from new witness testimony, re-examined archives, new or retained material evidence, or fresh activities of a suspect. New technological methods developed after the crime was committed can be used on the surviving evidence to analyse causes, often with conclusive results.
Marcia Virginia Trimble was a nine-year-old girl who disappeared on February 25, 1975, while delivering Girl Scout Cookies in Green Hills, an affluent area in Nashville, Tennessee.
Wrongful execution is a miscarriage of justice occurring when an innocent person is put to death by capital punishment. Cases of wrongful execution are cited as an argument by opponents of capital punishment, while proponents say that the argument of innocence concerns the credibility of the justice system as a whole and does not solely undermine the use of death penalty.
Autopsy is a television series of HBO's America Undercover documentary series. Dr. Michael Baden, a real-life forensic pathologist, is the primary analyst, and has been personally involved in many of the cases that are reviewed.
FamilyTreeDNA is a division of Gene by Gene, a commercial genetic testing company based in Houston, Texas. FamilyTreeDNA offers analysis of autosomal DNA, Y-DNA, and mitochondrial DNA to individuals for genealogical purpose. With a database of more than two million records, it is the most popular company worldwide for Y-DNA and mitochondrial DNA, and the fourth most popular for autosomal DNA. In Europe, it is the most common also for autosomal DNA. FamilyTreeDNA as a division of Gene by Gene were acquired by MYDNA, Inc., an Australian company in January 2021.
Timothy Wilson Spencer, also known as The Southside Strangler, was a serial killer who committed three rapes and murders in Richmond, Virginia and one in Arlington, Virginia in the fall of 1987. In addition, he is believed to have committed at least one previous murder, in 1984, for which a different man, David Vasquez, was wrongfully convicted. He was known to police as a prolific home burglar.
Dawn Lee Swan Magyar was found murdered in March 1973, in a wooded area in Chapin, Michigan. She had been reported missing since January 27, 1973 from her home in Chesaning, Michigan. Believed to have been abducted from a shopping center in nearby Owosso, she was found to have been raped, and shot three times.
Maria Elizabeth Ridulph was a seven-year-old girl who disappeared from Sycamore, Illinois on December 3, 1957. Her remains were found almost five months later in a wooded area near Woodbine, Illinois, approximately 120 miles from her home. Maria was last seen by her friend on her neighborhood corner of Center Cross Street and Archie Place with an unknown man in his early twenties who called himself "Johnny".
The Texas Killing Fields is a 25-acre patch of land situated a mile from Interstate Highway 45.
CeCe Moore is an American genetic genealogist who has appeared as a guest on many TV shows and as a consultant on others such as Finding Your Roots. She has helped law enforcement agencies in identifying suspects in over 50 cold cases in one year using DNA and genetic genealogy. In May 2020, she began appearing in a prime time ABC television series called The Genetic Detective in which each episode recounts a cold case she helped solve.
Rhonda Renee Johnson and Sharon Lynn Shaw were two American teenage girls who disappeared in Harris County, Texas, on the afternoon of August 4, 1971. In early 1972, the skeletal remains of both girls were discovered in and around Clear Lake near Galveston Bay.
Parabon NanoLabs, Inc. is a company based in Reston, Virginia, that develops nanopharmaceuticals and provides DNA phenotyping services for law enforcement organizations.
Suzanne A. "Suzie" Bombardier, was kidnapped, raped, and stabbed to death on June 22, 1980. On June 27, her body was found by a fisherman, floating in the San Joaquin River east of Antioch, California near its bridge, 60 miles (97 km) east of San Francisco. On December 11, 2017, after extensive DNA profiling, 63-year-old Mitchell Lynn Bacom, a convicted sex offender, was arrested as the prime suspect. He has been charged with kidnapping, rape, oral copulation, murder, and murder with use of a deadly weapon. This was Antioch's oldest cold case murder. At the time of Bombardier's homicide, Bacom was known to her family.
GEDmatch is an online service to compare autosomal DNA data files from different testing companies. The website gained significant media coverage in April 2018 after it was used by law enforcement to identify a suspect in the Golden State Killer case in California. Other law-enforcement agencies started using GEDmatch for violent crimes, making it "the de facto DNA and genealogy database for all of law enforcement", according to The Atlantic's Sarah Zhang. In May 2019, GEDmatch then tightened its rules on privacy by requiring users to "opt in" to sharing their data with law enforcement. In December 2019, GEDmatch was acquired by Verogen, Inc., a sequencing company dedicated to forensic science. A new version of the existing site currently in development will focus on solving crimes using the more than 1.2 million DNA profiles hosted on GEDMatch's platform.
April Marie Tinsley was an 8 year old girl from Fort Wayne, Indiana, who was kidnapped, raped, and murdered in 1988. Her murderer left several anonymous messages and notes in the Fort Wayne area between 1990 and 2004, openly boasting about April's murder and threatening to kill again.
Gerald "Jerry" Walter McFadden, known as The Animal, was an American serial killer and sex offender who was executed in 1999.
The Pittsburg serial murders refers to the killings of one man and four women in the city of Pittsburg, California between 1998 and 1999. Some of the victims either engaged in prostitution or were drug addicts. At the time of the killings, the city had a high crime rate which, coupled with the recent murders of several people, culminated in public outcry from both the public and the media for a resolution to the situation and capture of the supposed serial killer. Despite an investigation by the FBI and a financial reward for the killer(s)'s capture being offered by the then-Governor of California Gray Davis, none of the murders were ever solved.
