Despite what crime shows would have you believe, not every murder is solved in under an hour.
That said, no matter how hard the police and investigators try,
some killers will never be found. Here’s some famous murders that remain unsolved.
Elizabeth Short was an aspiring actress who moved from Massachusetts to L.A. at 19 to make it big.
However, her dream ended in tragedy, as her body was found in Leimert Park in Hollywood
on January 15, 1947. Short had been murdered somewhere else and dumped there intentionally.
The website Rebel Circus details how Smart’s body had been severely mutilated.
It’s unclear how she acquired the moniker "Black Dahlia,". No one really knows if
the name came from her dark hair and tendency to wear black, lacy clothing,
or if it was something that the media came up with after Short's murder. The press at the time
tried to claim the murder was a consequence of Smart's free-spirited sexual behavior, with some
papers going so far as to imply that she had been a sex worker. However, it was later
revealed that Short had a genital anomaly that would have made normal intercourse impossible.
Accusations about who murdered Short went all the way to actor Orson Welles. Author Mary
Pacios alleged that Welles paid off rape charges in the past and may have slain Short, because a
mannequin mutilated in similar fashion to Short is seen in the movie The Lady from Shanghai.
All said, around 50 people claimed that they killed Short. However, most of the
wannabe murderers were hoping to cash in on the attention or suffering from mental illness.
On Christmas morning 1996, John and Patsy Ramsey could not find their six-year-old
daughter JonBenét, a child beauty pageant winner. According to Time,
after a frantic search of their Boulder, Colorado, home, Patsy found a handwritten
three-page ransom letter demanding $118,000 for JonBenét's safe return. However,
it was much too late for that. Hours later, John found his daughter strangled in the basement.
Scrutiny immediately fell on the parents. The ransom letter was too unusual,
and the motivation for trying to ransom an already murdered girl was too strange,
especially since ransomers could have demanded much more from JonBenét's wealthy,
well-connected parents. The Ramseys were eventually cleared of the charges.
"Let me assure you that I did not kill JonBenet."
John declared that finding the killer was his, quote, "sole mission," and wanted his
daughter's murderer to get the death penalty. The family offered a $100,000
reward to this end. In an interview with The Denver Post, John and Patsy Ramsay emphatically
denied that anyone in the family had molested JonBenét and expressed their resentment that
so much police energy went into examining them rather than other potential killers.
According to Rolling Stone, other suspects were a drifter, an electrician,
and a man who played Santa Claus. A former teacher and convicted pedophile,
Mark John Karr, confessed in detail in 2006 to having killed JonBenét.
The police investigated his confession but soon dismissed Karr as a lying attention hound.
Even if you've never heard the name Amber Hagerman, you've likely received an Amber
Alert. On January 13, 1996, nine-year-old Hagerman was abducted shortly after leaving
her grandmother's house to ride her bicycle around an abandoned parking lot in East Arlington, Texas.
It took four days for her body to be found in a creek bed miles away.
The New York Times reported that heavy rains had caused Amber's body
to be swept further downstream from where it had been initially sighted.
Despite a $10,000 reward that stands to this day, and more than 7,000 leads investigated,
no credible suspect has emerged. A member of the original task force,
Sergeant Ben Lopez, stated that the East Arlington Police Force only had one witness
to Amber's kidnapping. The witness was a 78-year-old neighbor, Jimmie Kevil,
who saw Amber grabbed by a white or Hispanic man in a black pickup truck.
Police suspect that there might have been other witnesses who declined to speak to them,
fearing deportation. Detective Grant Gildon, a lead investigator on this case,
checks yearly to see if there is any technology that could help crack the cold case.
The police believe that the killer kept Hagerman alive for at least
two days. Had people known that Amber was missing and what she looked like,
she might have been found in that window of time. This tragedy inspired the creation of
the Amber Alert, and over 1,000 children so far have been saved as a result.
"The Amber Alert, I'm very, very proud of it, because it is saving,
help saving our children's lives. It's helping bringing our children back to Mommy and Daddy."
On June 13, 1912, two adults and six children in Villisca, Iowa, were murdered with an ax
belonging to the children’s father, Josiah Moore, though he would not be directly implicated in the
ensuing investigation. According to Smithsonian Magazine, the killer covered the deceased party’s
ruined faces with clothing before concealing every mirror or exposed glass with cloth.
The townspeople went into an understandable state of paranoia,
adding locks to doors and carrying weapons everywhere. Many suspected their own neighbors,
even though it was difficult to imagine that any of the townspeople were capable of this savagery.
Police interviewed hundreds, but the investigation produced no solid leads.
According to the Villisca murders website, the suspect list included Josiah Moore's former boss,
Iowa state senator Frank Jones. Jones had at one point been enraged that Moore had
opened his own business and was possibly sleeping with Jones' daughter-in-law.
Other leading suspects in the case included a mentally disturbed minister,
a random drifter, and a cocaine-addled killer-for-hire named William Mansfield.
The last man is a promising culprit, as he allegedly murdered his wife, baby,
and father- and mother-in-law two years after the Villisca murders.
If Mansfield was not the culprit, there was another serial killer, Henry Moore — of no
relation to the deceased — in the area at the time of the killings. He was convicted
of killing his mother and grandmother, with an ax, months after the Villisca murders, though
he was never implicated in this case. Whoever the killer was, they took their secret to the grave.
The Chicago Tylenol murders changed your life if you've ever fumbled with a hard-to-open pill
bottle that read, "Do not use if seal is broken." It’s a crime that one could
picture the Joker committing, and there seem to be few comprehensible motives.
The New York Times reports that, in 1982, someone filled capsules
of Extra-Strength Tylenol with potassium cyanide, to widespread and deadly effect.
"Don't take any Tylenol Extra Strength for the time being until you hear otherwise."
The first to die was a 12-year-old named Mary Kellerman. Sadly, six more people died
before Johnson & Johnson could issue a recall — the first ever of its kind. In the meantime,
copycats caused more deaths around the country. According to PBS,
Johnson & Johnson lost over $100 million recalling around 31 million bottles. However,
the company was also applauded for regaining the trust of a panicked public. To reassure customers,
Johnson & Johnson changed their packaging. As a result, other businesses followed suit.
There was never a motive discovered for the murders, though a tax consultant,
James W. Lewis, sent a letter saying he would, quote, "stop the killing" for $1 million.
Though Lewis was arrested and imprisoned for 12 years for extortion, he was not found to
be the culprit. No one credible ever came forward to claim that they had done this.
ABC reported in 2011 that the FBI had taken DNA from Ted Kaczynski,
aka the Unabomber, as he was in the right place at the right time. However, it was another dead end.
Dian Fossey was one of the most prominent voices for gorillas, having written Gorillas
in the Mist about her experiences with the animals. Inspired by Louis and Mary Leakey,
Fossey broke off her engagement and took up a life of wildlife preservation,
using her prior work with children to help her gain the gorillas' trust.
According to the BBC, Fossey was found in her cabin in Rwanda, murdered with a machete.
Given how she'd help soften the reputation of gorillas and contribute to their preservation,
it seems difficult to imagine who would’ve had a grudge against her.
Upon deeper reading into Fossey's life, however, it becomes clear that
the conservationist had a certain degree of infamy. It has been claimed that she would
kidnap and torture poachers while interrogating them. Furthermore, Fossey allegedly practiced
black magic against those who would harm her gorillas, or at least she pretended to do so.
One theory posits that Fossey was murdered by the family of a poacher whose sumu — a magical
protection bag — Fossey had stolen. Even if this did not explain the motive behind her death,
Fossey still made life difficult for a variety of poachers. Fossey was buried among her gorillas,
her headstone bearing the Rwandese words for "the lady who lives alone in the forest."
Bob Crane was most famously known for his role in Hogan's Heroes — the only hit he ever had,
despite nearly two decades in the industry.
"I think most people identify Bob Crane with Hogan's Heroes, and thank goodness for that."
But on June 29, 1978, Crane was found dead in a Scottsdale,
Arizona apartment. The actor's skull was broken and an electrical cord was wrapped around his
neck. As his career had declined, Crane had ended up working the dinner theater circuit,
which brought him into a friendship with video equipment salesman John Carpenter — no relation
to the director of the same name. The two would engage in sexual activity with Crane's fans.
Since Carpenter was always at the cutting edge of videography, Crane used Carpenter
to make allegedly non-consensual video recordings of the sessions.
This alone could give a jilted husband motive to end Crane's life, but one of
the main suspects was Carpenter himself. Carpenter was brought to trial in 1994,
based on a strange speck found on a photo that prosecutors said might have been fat
from inside Crane's skull. The Phoenix New Times quoted Carpenter as saying:
"I never even had a fight with Bob [...] He was my friend. And he was
the goose who laid the golden egg for me, in terms of meeting ladies."
In the end, the forensic evidence was too weak for conviction. The Scottsdale
police had failed to secure the crime scene and even lost the supposed human tissue.
In 2017, a Phoenix television anchor wrote a book about the case. The news
anchor had managed to analyze some blood found on Carpenter's rental car. It did not match Crane.
Alexander Litvinenko was a former lieutenant colonel in the Russian FSB before receiving
political asylum in Great Britain, after being charged with abuse of office. He was bold about
making enemies of powerful people, such as when he told Indymedia London that Vladimir Putin was,
quote, "the originator of the acts of terrorism in London." Litvinenko also
told the British news outlet that the Russian special services engaged in terrorism worldwide.
When accusations against the Russian government come out of one's mouth, one must be careful what
goes into it. No amount of polonium is safe to ingest, but the dose Litvinenko received was
unambiguous. He lived for three weeks after the poisoning. Whoever poisoned him seems to
have wanted not only to silence him but also to demonstrate what could happen to their enemies.
Dmitry Kovtun, an ex-KGB agent, told the BBC's Russian service that the accusation
of his involvement was, quote, "completely absurd," though he was with Andrei Lugovoi,
the chief suspect. The two met Litvinenko at the Millennium Hotel on November 1,
2006, when it is suspected that they spiked his tea with polonium. After the murder,
Lugovoi became a celebrity in Russia and was elected MP of the Liberal Democratic Party.
Given the reach of the likeliest conspirators behind this murder,
it is no surprise that the case has yet to be solved. Those who might have information
are less likely to want to go public with it, for fear that they could meet a similar fate.
According to Smithsonian Magazine, on October 12,
1964, two men in Washington D.C. heard a nearby gunshot, a cry for help, and then another shot.
They claimed to have then found a Black man standing over Mary Pinchot Meyer's body.
The police located Ray Crump Jr. nearby, with wet clothing and a cut on his hand. He told them that
his fishing pole had dropped, then that he was drunk and had fallen into the Potomac River.
When they investigated, they found his fishing pole safe at home. What they did not find — there
or anywhere else — was the murder weapon. Crump was acquitted due to a lack of evidence.
So what would have been his motive for killing an artist out for a lunchtime walk?
When Meyer died, few knew of the affair she'd had with President John F. Kennedy. Her ex-husband and
CIA deputy director Cord Meyer alleged that Mary was killed by the same people that assassinated
Kennedy, because she knew too much. To many, Cord Meyer's allegation was far more captivating than
the theory that Crump had killed Mary, perhaps out of some nonspecific racial animosity.
Crump was a mentally unsteady man who would have had a challenging time committing such
an efficient murder, which led some to speculate that he was a patsy.
Conspiracy theorists were free in their speculations,
but no one else was ever charged. If the CIA was indeed involved, it's unlikely anyone will be.
Dorothy Jane Scott, a single mother, had been plagued by a telephone stalker.
According to The Lineup, the stalker would say,
"When I get you alone, I will cut you up into bits so no one will ever find you."
Other times, the man on the phone fawned over her. He was aware of what she was doing on a
daily basis, and once told her to go outside, where he had left a dead rose on her car.
The stalking came to a head on May 27, 1980, when she and a coworker took another coworker
to the hospital. When the coworker was released from the hospital, Scott left
to bring the car around, but when she didn't return, her coworkers went to the parking lot.
Here, Dorothy's coworkers saw her car speeding off. At around 4:30 a.m. the next day,
the vehicle was found ten miles away, engulfed in flames, but empty.
The Los Angeles Times reported that, a week later, the stalker called Scott's mother,
telling her, quote, "I've got her." The police could never trace the calls since
the stalker hung up so quickly. After a story appeared in the Santa Ana Register,
its editor received a call. The caller told the editor:
"I caught her cheating with another man. [...] I killed her."
The editor also revealed that the stalker knew details about Dorothy's disappearance
that hadn't been reported publicly. Four years after she disappeared, Scott's charred bones
were found in a ditch, at which point the stalker resumed taunting her family.
In July 1974, the severely decomposed body of a woman was found in the dunes outside Provincetown,
Massachusetts. She lay nude on a beach towel, her hands cut off at the wrists with a pile of pine
needles in their place. Several teeth had been removed as well, and her entire head had nearly
been severed. Beside the woman were her jeans and a blue bandana, which was neatly folded.
No one could identify the woman, despite police reconstructions and the fact that
she'd undergone extensive dental work during her life. The case was cold for decades. Then,
in the 2010s, horror author Joe Hill, son of fellow horror writer Stephen King,
noticed an extra in Jaws that looked uncannily like the so-called Lady of the Dunes.
"This particular woman bears a shocking resemblance
in appearance and wardrobe to the murder victim."
Regrettably, records for movie extras were not as diligently kept when Jaws was in production,
so this was more of a curiosity than a lead. Another such theory was introduced
by CapeCodToday, which speculated that, given the method of mutilation,
time, and place, the woman may had been one of mobster Whitey Bulger's victims.
"It never was a secret that James White Bulger had spent time in Provincetown."
However, Bulger never admitted to the murder. According to CapeCod.com,
serial killer Hadden Clark once confessed to murdering her, and it could fit his M.O.
However, he also had paranoid schizophrenia, and his confession might be nothing more than his own
wishful thinking in prison. Because the identity of the Lady of the Dunes isn’t known, there is
a vanishingly slim chance that her killer will ever be brought to justice after all this time.
In March 1922, Viktoria Gruber, daughter of Andreas Gruber, heard voices and footsteps
in the attic. On March 30th, Andreas found that somebody had broken the locks on his barn. Upon
further inspection, he found footprints in the snow going into the barn that did not come out.
Friends advised Andreas to go to the police, but he was sure that he could defend his family.
The next day, a killer apparently lured the family into the barn, one by one.
Viktoria went first, and died after receiving nine blows with a mattock. When she was missed,
the next family member left to find her, then the next to check on the previous family member.
Each was killed in turn. This continued until only the baby and maid remained inside,
but the killer found them and ended their lives as well. The
killer covered the bodies in the barn with hay and those in the house with blankets.
The killer then remained for several days, feeding the cows and eating all the bread from the pantry.
According to reports, the police did not take fingerprints when they finally discovered the
scene of the crime. The investigation was also hindered by nosey neighbors and clingers-on,
some even going so far as to cook in the home’s kitchen.
According to Hinterkaifeck.net, Viktoria and her father had at one point spent time in prison,
charged with incest, the year that Viktoria’s husband died at war. This
could have given the killer a motive. Viktoria had recently declined a marriage proposal,
too. Ultimately, many were accused, but none of the evidence was sufficient. All the police
knew was that the motive was not financial, as no money had been taken from the property.
Benny Evangelist was born in Italy, where he was known as "Evangelista". There, he became known as
a faith healer and self-proclaimed prophet, before being murdered in Detroit in 1929.
Given his strange and blasphemous spiritual concepts and unsatisfied customers of his
faith-healing work, there was no lack of people who might have wanted him dead.
The motive for Benny Evangelist's murder might not have been righteousness or revenge, however,
but greed. In addition to his ministry on both sides of the pond, Evangelist was also
a carpenter and had arranged to pick up a large load of lumber on the day he was murdered. He
also intended to pay for the lumber with cash. On account of being dead, he missed that appointment,
but so did the people who were going to be delivering the lumber. How could they
have known that Evangelist would not be there unless they were the ones who had made him late?
The money for this transaction was not found. Additionally, Evangelist had not recorded the
last names of the party with whom he was transacting, so the lead was a dead end.
Like many memorable unsolved murders, this one touches on black magic. According to American
Hauntings, when he lived in York, Pennsylvania, Evangelist practiced the darker side of the occult
with another Italian immigrant, Aurelius Angelino. This man went on to brutally murder his wife and
children before being locked away in prison for the criminally insane. Angelino escaped in 1923,
which would have given him plenty of time to pay Evangelist a visit in Detroit.
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