Section II · The Index
The cases everyone thinks they know.
The cases that escaped the file and entered the culture, names you already half-remember, examined past the headlines and the myth.
21 cases reported in full
How investigators identified the Wichita serial killer who called himself BTK after a floppy disk he mailed in 2005 revealed hidden metadata pointing to a man named Dennis and a local church, ending a manhunt that spanned three decades.
The 1998 killing of University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard near Laramie became a national catalyst for hate-crime law, culminating in the 2009 federal Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act.
The 1964 murder of Catherine 'Kitty' Genovese in Queens and the disputed '38 witnesses' narrative that gave rise to bystander-effect research, examined against the later corrections by The New York Times and scholars.
How the 1994 murder of seven-year-old Megan Kanka in Hamilton Township, New Jersey, by a twice-convicted neighbor led to Megan's Law and nationwide sex-offender community notification.
Twelve-year-old Polly Klaas was abducted at knifepoint from a Petaluma slumber party in 1993. Her case helped pass California's Three Strikes law and reshaped how the nation searches for missing children.
In December 2002, Laci Peterson, eight months pregnant, vanished from Modesto, California. The recovery of Laci and her unborn son, Conner, and the conviction of her husband helped shape the federal Unborn Victims of Violence Act, known as Laci and Conner's Law.
The Zodiac Killer murdered at least five people in Northern California in 1968 and 1969 and taunted newspapers with ciphers. One was cracked by a schoolteacher couple in 1969; another defeated experts until amateur codebreakers solved it in 2020. The case is still unsolved.
In 1982, seven people in the Chicago area died after taking Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules laced with cyanide. The killer was never identified, but the case rewrote how every sealed product is sold.
In late March 1922, six people on the isolated Hinterkaifeck farmstead in Bavaria were killed with a mattock. Strange events preceded the crime, the killer apparently lingered for days, and the case remains unsolved a century later.
Six-year-old Adam Walsh was abducted in 1981 from a Florida department store. His parents turned grief into a national missing-children movement and a federal law that still bears his name.
In September 1922, Episcopal priest Edward Wheeler Hall and choir singer Eleanor Mills were found shot dead near New Brunswick, New Jersey. The case became a national press sensation; a 1926 trial ended in acquittals, and it was never solved.
In January 1947, 22-year-old Elizabeth Short was found murdered in Los Angeles. The press named her the Black Dahlia, and the case became one of America's most famous unsolved crimes.
On the night before Thanksgiving in 1971, a calm, well-dressed man hijacked a jetliner over the Pacific Northwest, parachuted into the dark with $200,000, and vanished, the only unsolved skyjacking in U.S. history.
The 1948 Tamam Shud case: an unidentified man dead on an Adelaide beach, a cryptic scrap of poetry, and a seventy-year hunt for his name.
A long-running serial-murder investigation around Seattle and the Green River, beginning in 1982 and closed two decades later when DNA evidence identified the killer.
How online animal-cruelty sleuths spent two years chasing the man who would murder Montreal student Jun Lin, and what their hunt did and did not accomplish.
In 1932 the 20-month-old son of aviator Charles Lindbergh was taken from his crib near Hopewell, New Jersey. The case ended in a conviction still debated today and created federal kidnapping law.
An evidence-led look at the Atlanta Child Murders and the 1982 trial of Wayne Williams, where rare textile fibers, including a distinctive 'English Olive' Luxaire carpet fiber, became the prosecution's silent witness.
How a two-and-a-half-page handwritten ransom note became the most scrutinized piece of evidence in the unsolved 1996 killing of six-year-old JonBenét Ramsey in Boulder, Colorado.
How the public ended the Night Stalker's reign: a released mug shot, a recognized face, and East Los Angeles residents who chased down and held Richard Ramirez until police arrived on August 31, 1985.
How investigators used investigative genetic genealogy and the GEDmatch database to identify the Golden State Killer, Joseph James DeAngelo, a former police officer hidden in plain sight for four decades.
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