Laci Denise Peterson was an American woman murdered by her husband, Scott Lee Peterson, while eight months pregnant with their first child. Laci disappeared on December 24, 2002, from the couple's home in Modesto, California, after which Scott reported her missing. The remains of her and her unborn son, whom the couple had planned to name Conner, were discovered in April 2003 on the shores of San Francisco Bay. Subsequently, Scott was arrested and charged with two counts of murder. In November 2004, he was found guilty of the first-degree murder of Laci and the second-degree murder of the infant.
Mark Fuhrman is a former detective of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). He is primarily known for his part in the investigation of the 1994 murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman in the O. J. Simpson murder case.
Hans Thomas Reiser is an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, and convicted murderer. In April 2008, Reiser was convicted of the first-degree murder of his wife, Nina Reiser, who disappeared in September 2006. He subsequently pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of second-degree murder, as part of a settlement agreement that included disclosing the location of Nina Reiser's body, which he revealed to be in a shallow grave near the couple's home.
Richard Leonard Kuklinski, also known as "The Iceman", was an American criminal and convicted murderer. He was engaged in criminal activities for most of his adult life; he ran a burglary ring and distributed pirated pornography. He committed at least five murders between 1980 and 1984. Prosecutors described him as killing for profit.
Melvin Henry Ignatow was a resident of Louisville, Kentucky, who was tried for the 1988 murder of his former girlfriend, Brenda Sue Schaefer. The case was controversial since Ignatow was acquitted of the charge, but later admitted to killing Schaefer. Under the legal principle of double jeopardy, however, Ignatow could not be tried a second time for the murder. He was instead convicted and served roughly 10 years in prison for several instances of perjury in his grand jury testimony for the case.
Francis Patrick Salemme, sometimes spelled Salemmi, also known as "Cadillac Frank" and "Julian Daniel Selig", was an American mobster from Boston, Massachusetts who became a hitman and eventually the boss of the Patriarca crime family of New England before turning government witness.
Marion Albert Pruett was an American serial killer.
David Ray Camm is a former trooper of the Indiana State Police (ISP) who spent 13 years in prison after twice being wrongfully convicted of the murders of his wife, Kimberly, and his two young children at their home in Georgetown, Indiana, on September 28, 2000. He was released from custody in 2013 after his third trial resulted in an acquittal. Charles Boney is currently serving time for the murders of Camm's wife and two children.
The Norfolk Four are four former United States Navy sailors: Joseph J. Dick Jr., Derek Tice, Danial Williams, and Eric C. Wilson, who were wrongfully convicted of the 1997 rape and murder of Michelle Moore-Bosko while they were stationed at Naval Station Norfolk. They each declared that they had made false confessions, and their convictions are considered highly controversial. A fifth man, Omar Ballard, confessed and pleaded guilty to the crime in 2000, insisting that he had acted alone. He had been in prison since 1998 because of violent attacks on two other women in 1997. He was the only one of the suspects whose DNA matched that collected at the crime scene, and whose confession was consistent with other forensic evidence.
David Parker Ray, also known as the Toy-Box Killer, was an American kidnapper, torturer, serial rapist and suspected serial killer. Though no bodies were found, Ray was accused by his accomplices of killing several women, and was suspected by the police to have murdered as many as sixty women from Arizona and New Mexico while living in Elephant Butte, New Mexico. Ray was convicted of kidnapping and torture in 2001, for which he received a lengthy sentence, but he was never convicted of murder. He died of a heart attack about one year after his convictions in two cases, the second of which resulted in a plea deal.
It is possible to convict someone of murder without the purported victim's body in evidence. However, cases of this type have historically been hard to prove, often forcing the prosecution to rely on circumstantial evidence, and in England there was for centuries a mistaken view that in the absence of a body a killer could not be tried for murder. Developments in forensic science in recent decades have made it more likely that a murder conviction can be obtained even if a body has not been found.
Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter is a German convicted murderer and impostor. Born in West Germany, he is currently serving a prison sentence in the U.S. state of California. After moving to the U.S. in his late teens, Gerhartsreiter lived under a succession of aliases while variously claiming to be an actor, a director, an art collector, a physicist, a ship's captain, a negotiator of international debt agreements, and an English aristocrat.
On April 21, 2015, the remains of a woman found in South Blooming Grove, New York, were identified as those of Ramona Moore. The 21-year-old woman had last been seen on July 31, 2012, re-entering her apartment in a house near Crotona Park in the Bronx, New York City. In 2014, New York City police had charged her building superintendent, Nasean Bonie, with her murder although there was no body.
The Michigan Murders were a series of highly publicized killings of young women committed between 1967 and 1969 in the Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti area of Southeastern Michigan by an individual known as the Ypsilanti Ripper, the Michigan Murderer, and the Co-Ed Killer.
The disappearance of Melissa Brannen occurred on December 3, 1989, at the Woodside Apartments in Lorton, Virginia. The five-year-old daughter of Michael and Tammy Brannen, she was raised by her single mother who lived in the complex. She disappeared while attending a party held at the complex for its residents. Caleb Daniel Hughes, a handyman for the complex, was convicted of abduction with the intent to defile and sentenced to 50 years in prison. Her body has never been found, she has never been proven to be dead, and murder charges have never been filed. The case is considered an unsolved homicide by local police.
Ryan W. Ferguson is an American man who spent nearly 10 years in prison after being wrongfully convicted of a 2001 murder in his hometown of Columbia, Missouri. At the time of the murder, Ferguson was a 17-year-old high-school student.
James Matthew Boyd was an American man who was fatally shot by Albuquerque Police Department officers Keith Sandy and Dominique Perez in the foothills of the Sandia Mountains in Albuquerque, New Mexico on the evening of March 16, 2014. A resident of a nearby subdivision called police at 3:28 p.m. to report that a man had been camping on the mountain behind his house for the previous month, a violation of local regulations. Two Open Space officers were the first to respond. They approached Boyd as he lay under a sheet of plastic; Boyd, mentally ill with a diagnosis of schizo-affective disorder, became irate, wanting to know why the "raid" was occurring. When an officer tried to pat him down, he produced two pocket knives, threatening the officers with them. The caller watched the confrontation from his second-story window and later testified that Boyd threatened the officers.
The Ford Heights Four were formerly imprisoned convicts, who were falsely accused and convicted of the double murder of Lawrence Lionberg and Carol Schmal in Ford Heights, Illinois, and later exonerated. Jimerson and Williams were sentenced to death, Adams to 75 years in prison and Rainge to life. Following the murder in 1978, the four spent almost two decades in prison before being released in 1996. This miscarriage of justice was due to false forensic testimony, coercion of a prosecution witness, perjury by another witness who had an incentive to lie, and prosecution and police misconduct. The DNA evidence uncovered in the investigation to clear their names eventually led to the arrest and conviction of the real killers.
On August 24, 2016, the body of 10-year-old Victoria Martens was found in an apartment building in Albuquerque, New Mexico. After responding to a 9-1-1 call regarding a domestic dispute, officers discovered Martens' dismembered remains partially wrapped in a burning blanket in her mother's apartment. The victim's mother, 35-year-old Michelle Martens; her boyfriend, 31-year-old Fabian Gonzales; and Gonzales' cousin, 31-year-old Jessica Kelley, were arrested at the scene and charged with first-degree murder, child abuse resulting in grievous bodily harm or death, kidnapping, tampering with evidence, and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. All three suspects pled not guilty in the state's court. On June 29, 2018, Michelle Martens pled guilty to one count of child abuse resulting in death. The same day, the Albuquerque Police Department announced a fourth unidentified male suspect was being sought in connection to the case based on DNA evidence recovered from the scene.
On January 24, 2009, Marta del Castillo Casanueva, an Spanish high school student disappeared and was presumably murdered. Despite extensive searches and the conviction of Miguel Carcaño Delgado in 2011, her body has never been found.
