The independent true-crime archive
True crime stories, cold case breakthroughs, forgotten victims, and the clues that changed everything.
Editor's note
We publish fewer cases than we could. The ones we take on, we report all the way down, against the public record, sourced, and written end to end. This issue is anchored by two we keep coming back to: the only unsolved skyjacking in American history, and the poisoning that rewrote how every sealed product is sold.
The Case on the Case editors
Eight-year-old April Tinsley was abducted and killed in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1988. Her case stayed cold for thirty years, until forensic genetic genealogy finally identified her killer in 2018.
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.
Browse
Six sections, one archive. Start wherever the case pulls you.
Files that sat untouched for years, sometimes decades, and the DNA, dogged detectives, or single overlooked detail that finally broke them open.
Review the fileThe cases that escaped the file and entered the culture, names you already half-remember, examined past the headlines and the myth.
Read the recordsPeople who stepped out of an ordinary day and never came back. Disappearances, unidentified remains, and the questions still left open.
Follow the trailA 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.
Enter the archiveBefore investigators closed in, ordinary people were already looking. The tips, forums, and quiet obsessions that moved real cases forward.
Explore the casesSome crimes end in a verdict. These ended in new rules, for packaging, for policing, for safety, for the rest of us.
Open the casebookA closer look
A note left on a barn door. A ransom letter. A fiber, a phone record, a tie with no name. The cases here turn on the smallest things, and on the people patient enough to read them.
Enter the archiveCold → closed
Cold for years. Then a database hit, a discarded cup, a name, and an answer that arrived a generation too late, but arrived.
Eight-year-old April Tinsley was abducted and killed in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1988. Her case stayed cold for thirty years, until forensic genetic genealogy finally identified her killer in 2018.
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.
Our standard
Every case here is built from the public record and primary sources, written with care and without shock for its own sake. Where a case is unsolved, we say so. Where someone wasn't convicted, we say that too.
How we reportA cold case, a local mystery, a name that deserves another look, send it to the desk.
