JonBenét Patricia Ramsey was an American child beauty queen who was killed at age six in her family's home at 755 15th Street in Boulder, Colorado, on the night of December 25, 1996. Her body was found in the house's basement about seven hours after she had been reported missing. She had sustained a fractured skull, and a garrote was tied around her neck. The autopsy report stated that JonBenét's official cause of death was "asphyxia by strangulation associated with craniocerebral trauma". Her death was ruled a homicide. The case generated worldwide public and media interest, in part because her mother Patsy Ramsey, a former beauty queen, had entered JonBenét into a series of child beauty pageants.
The Central Park jogger case was a criminal case concerning the assault and rape of Trisha Meili, a woman who was running in Central Park in Manhattan, New York, on April 19, 1989. Crime in New York City was peaking in the late 1980s and early 1990s as the crack epidemic surged. On the night Meili was attacked, dozens of teenagers had entered the park, and there were reports of muggings and physical assaults.
The Colonial Parkway murders were the serial murders of at least ten people in the U.S. state of Virginia between 1986 and 1989. The killings were associated with the Colonial Parkway, a 22-mile long thoroughfare that cuts through the Colonial National Historical Park and connects Jamestown, Williamsburg and Yorktown. Long stretches of the road are devoid of any streetlights and are extremely isolated, making it a popular lovers' lane location frequented by young adults.
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.
Amanda Marie Knox is an American author, activist, and journalist. She spent almost four years incarcerated in Italy after her wrongful conviction in the 2007 murder of Meredith Kercher, a fellow exchange student, with whom she shared an apartment in Perugia. In 2015, Knox was definitively acquitted by the Italian Supreme Court of Cassation. In 2024, an Italian appellate court upheld Amanda Knox's slander conviction for falsely accusing Patrick Lumumba of murdering Meredith Kercher.
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.
Timothy Wilson Spencer, also known as The Southside Strangler, was an American 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.
Meredith Susanna Cara Kercher was a British student on exchange from the University of Leeds who was murdered at the age of 21 in Perugia, Italy. Kercher was found dead on the floor of her room. By the time the bloodstained fingerprints at the scene were identified as belonging to Rudy Guede, an Ivorian migrant, police had charged Kercher's American roommate, Amanda Knox, and Knox's Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito. The subsequent prosecutions of Knox and Sollecito received international publicity, with forensic experts and jurists taking a critical view of the evidence supporting the initial guilty verdicts.
The Gilgo Beach serial killings were part of a series of murders spanning from the early 1990s until 2011. Many of the victims' remains were found over a period of months in 2010 and 2011 during a police search of the area along Ocean Parkway, a road near the remote beach town of Gilgo on Long Island in Suffolk County, New York. The search was prompted by the disappearance of Shannan Gilbert, who, like many of the known victims, worked as an escort and advertised on Craigslist. The perpetrator in the case is known as the Long Island Serial Killer.
The Central Park Five is a 2012 documentary film about the Central Park jogger case, directed by documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, his daughter Sarah Burns, and her husband David McMahon. It covers the arrests, interrogations, trials, convictions and vacating the convictions of the five men who were teenagers in 1989 at the time of the case. It was released in the US on November 23, 2012.
CeCe Moore is a prominent American genetic genealogist. She has appeared on many TV shows and worked as a genetic genealogy researcher for others such as Finding Your Roots. She has reportedly helped law enforcement agencies in identifying suspects in over 300 cold cases 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. In addition to her television work, she is known for pioneering the genetic genealogy methodologies used by adoptees and others of unknown origin for identifying biological family.
Vanessa Teresa Marcotte was a 27-year-old American woman who, while walking on a rural road in Princeton, Massachusetts, was assaulted and murdered. Her case went unsolved until April 15, 2017, when authorities announced that 31-year-old Angelo Colon-Ortiz of Worcester, Massachusetts, had been arrested for her murder after being linked by DNA evidence.
Karina Anne Vetrano was a 30-year-old American woman who was attacked, sexually assaulted, and murdered while running in Spring Creek Park in the Howard Beach neighborhood of Queens, New York City. The case attracted national media attention, partially due to how it went unsolved for nearly six months. A suspect, Chanel Lewis, was arrested and charged with her murder in February 2017 after being linked by DNA evidence. Lewis' trial began on November 5, 2018, and ended in a mistrial on November 21, 2018. A retrial took place in March 2019. On April 1, 2019, Lewis was found guilty on three counts of murder and one count of sexual abuse; he was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
15-year-old Nicole van den Hurk disappeared on 6 October 1995 in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. Her body was found in the woods between Mierlo and Lierop on 22 November.
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.
Parabon NanoLabs, Inc. is an American company based in Reston, Virginia, that develops nanopharmaceuticals and provides DNA phenotyping services for law enforcement organizations.
Jay Roland Cook and Tanya Van Cuylenborg were a Canadian couple from Saanich, British Columbia who were murdered while on a trip to Seattle, Washington in November 1987.
April Marie Tinsley was an eight-year-old girl from Fort Wayne, Indiana, United States, who was kidnapped, raped, and murdered in 1988. Her killer 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.
Charles Thurman Sinclair, also known as the Coin Shop Killer, was an American criminal suspected of various murders of coin shop owners between the early 1980s and the 1990s. He was categorized as a nomadic killer who was linked to murders across the western United States and Canada.
