Section IV · The Index
Where the small things decide everything.
A note, a fiber, a phone record. These cases turn on the smallest details, what the evidence said, and what it took to finally read it.
14 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.
How investigative genetic genealogy and a citizen sleuth finally gave names to four victims found in barrels in New Hampshire's Bear Brook State Park, decades after their deaths.
How investigators, volunteers, and forensic genealogists spent 65 years restoring a name to Philadelphia's 'Boy in the Box,' identified in 2022 as Joseph Augustus Zarelli. His identity is now known; his murder is not.
In 1986, nursing director Sherri Rasmussen was murdered in her Los Angeles condominium, and police wrote it off as a botched burglary. More than two decades later, a preserved swab of DNA identified the killer as a serving LAPD detective.
How the 1983 murder of Lynda Mann and the 1986 murder of Dawn Ashworth in Leicestershire became the first case ever solved by DNA fingerprinting, clearing an innocent man and convicting Colin Pitchfork.
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 1974, 17-year-old Carla Walker was abducted from a Fort Worth bowling-alley parking lot and murdered. The case went cold for 46 years until forensic-grade genome sequencing by the Texas lab Othram identified Glen Samuel McCurley, who pleaded guilty in 2021.
In 1981 a young woman in a buckskin poncho was found murdered near Troy, Ohio, and went unnamed for 37 years. In 2018 the DNA Doe Project used investigative genetic genealogy to restore her name: Marcia Lenore King. Her killer is still unknown.
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.
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 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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