Jean McConville was a woman from Belfast, Northern Ireland, who was kidnapped and murdered by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) and secretly buried in County Louth in the Republic of Ireland in 1972 after being accused by the IRA of passing information to British forces.
Susannah Jane Lamplugh was a British estate agent reported missing on 28 July 1986 in Fulham, London, England, United Kingdom. She was officially declared dead, presumed murdered, in 1993. The last clue to Lamplugh's whereabouts was an appointment to show a house in Shorrolds Road to someone she referred to as "Mr Kipper". As of 2023, the case remains unsolved.
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, United States, between 1976 and 1977. The victims were held captive before being killed, and forensic DNA testing has indirectly implicated two suspects, one of whom has since died, with the other serving life in prison for offenses against children. A DNA profile created from samples taken from some of the victims' bodies is from the main perpetrator, but does not match the DNA of anyone named in connection with the case; the perpetrator's identity is unknown.
Rocío Wanninkhof Hornos was a Dutch-Spanish teenage girl who was murdered in her hometown of Mijas, Málaga, Spain, a town located on the Costa del Sol. In 2001, amidst popular pressure and a media circus, a jury trial convicted 52-year-old María Dolores "Loli" Vázquez, the estranged lover of Wanninkhof's mother Alicia Hornos, for the murder, even though there was no evidence relating her to the crime. This miscarriage of justice has been blamed on prejudices about Vázquez's homosexuality and the fabrication of an unsubstantiated narrative about her being a "dominant", "predatory" lesbian. Others have also cited malinterpretations of Vázquez's behavior due to her Galician extraction and traditional British education being in dissonance with local social norms, attitudes and expectations.
András Pándy was a Hungarian-Belgian serial killer, convicted for the murder of six family members in Brussels between 1986 and 1990.
Caylee Marie Anthony was an American girl who lived in Orlando, Florida, with her mother, Casey Marie Anthony, and her maternal grandparents, George and Cindy Anthony. On July 15, 2008, she was reported missing in a 9-1-1 call made by Cindy, who said she had not seen Anthony for 31 days and that Casey's car smelled like a dead body had been inside it. Cindy said Casey had given varied explanations as to Anthony's whereabouts before finally telling her that she had not seen Anthony for weeks. Casey later called the police and falsely told a police dispatcher that Anthony had been kidnapped by a nanny on June 9. She was charged with first-degree murder in October 2008 and pled not guilty.
John David Guise Cannan is a British murderer, serial rapist, serial abductor and suspected serial killer. A former car salesman, Cannan was convicted in July 1988 of murder and multiple sexual offences, abductions and attempted abductions. He was given three life sentences for the murder of Shirley Banks in Bristol in October 1987; the attempted kidnapping of Julia Holman on the previous night; the rape of a woman in Reading, Berkshire, in 1986; the rape of his girlfriend in December 1980; and several other abductions, attempted abductions and sexual offences. He became eligible for parole in October 2022.
Jaidyn Raymond Leskie was the Australian child of Bilynda Murphy and Brett Leskie, kidnapped and murdered in 1997. Leskie is believed to have died of head injuries. Despite intense public interest, several leads, and the arrest and trial of a prime suspect, Leskie's murder remains unsolved. Although the decision was made in 2002 not to hold an inquest into the toddler's death, the case remained in the news for several more years. An inquest was later held in 2006, implicating the mother's boyfriend, Greg Domaszewicz, who at the time of the kidnapping was babysitting the boy at his house at Newborough. The exact circumstances of Leskie's disappearance and death were never clear, and were complicated by vandalism at the house on the evening of the toddler's disappearance; several false tips and pranks about the boy's fate; and the body not being discovered until six months later.
The Long Island serial killer is an unidentified suspected serial killer who is believed to have murdered between 10 and 18 people over a period of nearly 20 years, and to have disposed of their bodies in areas on the South Shore of Long Island, New York. Most of the known victims were sex workers who advertised on Craigslist.
Danilo Restivo is an Italian double murderer. Restivo is serving a life sentence with a 40-year tariff for murdering his neighbour Heather Barnett in 2002. Investigators' suspicions that Restivo had murdered Barnett were raised because of his alleged involvement in the 1993 disappearance of Elisa Claps in Potenza, Italy, but he was not charged due to insufficient evidence. Subsequent to the 2010 discovery of Claps's body, Restivo was tried for the murder of Barnett, with evidence of similarities in ritualistic placing of hair on the bodies of Claps and Barnett being heard by the English court. He was found guilty of murdering Barnett, and later found guilty in his absence for murdering Claps by an Italian court.
This is a list of notable overturned convictions in Canada.
Seya Sadewmi, was a four-year-old Sri Lankan child who was abducted, raped and murdered. The girl went missing from her house on 12 September 2015 while sleeping with her mother. After an extensive search of the premises by the police K9 unit, the naked body was discovered on the morning of 13 September 2015 near a canal. The body was found 200 meters away from the house. An autopsy revealed that Sadewmi had been sexually assaulted and was strangled to death. Four arrests were made by the Kotadeniyawa police, and two of them were later exonerated after a DNA testing. Third suspect, Dinesh Priyashantha subsequently confessed to the crime. Later he revealed that his brother, Saman Jayalath, manipulated him into confessing. Once arrested, Jayalath concurred with Priysantha's allegations and was detained for further investigations.
Marta del Castillo Casanueva was a Spanish high school student who disappeared and was presumably murdered on January 24, 2009. Despite extensive searches and the conviction of Miguel Carcaño Delgado in 2011, her body has never been found. The case is popularly known in Spain as the Disappearance of Marta del Castillo or simply as the Marta del Castillo Case.
Eva Blanco Puig was a Spanish high school student who was murdered in Algete, Community of Madrid. The case remained unsolved for over a decade, gaining significant attention in Spain and is popularly known as the Eva Blanco Case, the Crime of Algete or Operation Gang, the code name given to the investigation by the Spanish Civil Guard. In 2013, new advancements in genealogical DNA research led to the determination that the suspect had North African origins. Hundreds of people with North African origins that had lived in the Algete community subsequently contributed their DNA profile to help the investigative effort; one of the donors showed a sibling-level match with the perpetrator, and further investigations eventually led to the arrest of Ahmed Chelh Gerj, a Moroccan-Spanish citizen who had lived in Algete with his brother in 1997. Chelh committed suicide in prison in 2016, and the case was closed.
William Devin Howell is an American serial killer who was convicted of murdering seven women in 2003. He is one of the most prolific serial killers in Connecticut history. In November 2017, while already serving a 15-year prison sentence for manslaughter, he was sentenced to six consecutive life sentences, which he is currently serving at Cheshire Correctional Institution.
Kirsty Marianne Bentley was a teenager living in Ashburton, New Zealand, who went missing while walking her family dog on the afternoon of 31 December 1998. After an extensive search lasting several weeks, her body was found in dense scrub approximately 40 km away. The New Zealand Police consider the case to be a homicide, and it remains one of the highest-profile unsolved murders in New Zealand.
Leigh Marine Occhi is an American teenager who vanished under mysterious circumstances at her home in Tupelo, Mississippi during Hurricane Andrew. Her mother, Vickie Felton, returned home on the morning of August 27, 1992, to find Occhi missing and evidence of blood in the house.
Mary Louise Day was an American teenager who, at age 13 in 1981, mysteriously disappeared from her home in Seaside, California. She was found alive in 2003, a little more than twenty-two years after her disappearance.
The Fall River murders were a series of three homicides that took place in Fall River, Massachusetts, from October 1979 to February 1980 allegedly by a satanic cult. It was the onset of a period in American history known as the Satanic panic.
The Ghosts of Highway 20 refer to a number of individuals who disappeared, or were victims of rape and murder, along Highway 20 in the U.S. state of Oregon from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. John Arthur Ackroyd, a highway mechanic with the Oregon Department of Transportation, was a suspect in these cases. However, detectives were only able to prosecute the murder of Kaye Turner of 1978, for which he was sentenced to five life sentences for aggravated murder. Ackroyd pleaded no contest in the murder of his stepdaughter Rachanda Pickle and agreed to not seek parole for the murder of Turner. A case was developed against Ackroyd for the murders of Melissa Sanders and Sheila Swanson, but since he was in prison and it would be costly to prosecute the case, it was closed. Marlene Gabrielsen was the only known victim to have lived and is the first known victim. Her case was not prosecuted.
