A cold case is an unsolved crime that is not the subject of a current criminal investigation, but for which new information could emerge.
Typically, cold cases are violent and other major felony crimes, such as murder and rape, which—unlike unsolved minor crimes—are generally not subject to a statute of limitations. Sometimes disappearances can also be considered cold cases if the victim has not been seen or heard from for some time, such as the case of Natalee Holloway or the Beaumont children.
The rate of cold cases being solved is slowly declining; soon less than 30% will be solved per year.
In the search for suspects, some police organizations have created websites featuring cold cases. For example, the Texas Rangers have established a website[1] in the hopes that it shall elicit new information and investigative leads.[2]
Sometimes, a viable suspect has been overlooked or simply ignored due to then-flimsy circumstantial evidence, the presence of a likelier suspect (who is later proven to be innocent), or a tendency of investigators to zero in on someone else to the exclusion of other possibilities (which goes back to the likelier suspect angle)—known as "tunnel vision".
With the advent of and improvements to DNA testing/DNA profiling and other forensics technology, many cold cases are being re-opened and prosecuted.[3] Police departments are opening cold case units whose job is to re-examine cold case files. DNA evidence helps in such cases but as in the case of fingerprints, it is of no value unless there is evidence on file to compare it to. However, to combat that issue, the FBI is switching from using the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS) to using a newer technology called the Next Generation Identification (NGI). Other improvements in forensics lie in fields such as:
The identity of Jack the Ripper is a notorious example of an outstanding cold case, with numerous suggestions as to the identity of the serial killer. Similarly, the Zodiac Killer has been studied extensively for almost 50 years, with numerous suspects discussed and debated. The perpetrators of the Wall Street bombing of 1920 have never been positively identified, though the Galleanists, a group of Italian anarchists, are widely believed to have planned the explosion. The burning of the Reichstag building in 1933 remains controversial and although Marinus van der Lubbe was tried, convicted and executed for arson, it is possible that the Reichstag fire was perpetrated by the Nazis to enhance their power and destroy democracy in Germany.
| Victim(s) | Convicted | Location | Crime date | Conviction date | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Victims of Nazis' Neuengamme Concentration Camp (sub-camp in Meppen, Germany) | Friedrich Karl Berger | Meppen, Germany | to March 1945 | In a deportation case tried in 2020 in U.S. Immigration Court in Memphis, Tennessee, US (therefore not strictly a criminal prosecution), Friedrich Karl Berger was adjudged complicit in Nazi crimes of persecution committed while serving as an armed guard for the SS in Meppen, Germany, at a sub-camp of the Neuengamme concentration camp during World War II. This decision, reported in a March 5, 2020, United States Department of Justice press release,[4] [5] is likely the oldest criminal conduct (75 years) ever proved against a defendant in court by prosecutors in the United States. The judge ordered Berger deported to his native Germany, as his appeal was dismissed in November 2020.[6] Germany would opt to dismiss criminal charges against Berger in December 2020.[7] However, Berger who was a member of the Kriegsmarine, and later worked in building wire-stripping machines,[8] was deported in February 2021.[9] | |
| Harold Blauer | The Central Intelligence Agency | New York City, New York, US | Retired tennis player who was unwittingly injected with 3,4-Methylenedioxyamphetamine (MDA) after checking himself in to the New York Psychiatric Institute for depression. The experiment was part of the CIA's secret mind-control program, MKULTRA, and Blauer's medical records were altered to hide the real cause of his death. MKULTRA was revealed to the public in 1975, and Blauer's estate was awarded $700,000 in damages in 1987. | ||
| Frank Olson | A CIA bacteriologist and biological warfare expert who was unwittingly dosed with LSD by his supervisor. Nine days later, Olson had a nervous breakdown and jumped from his 13th-story room at Hotel Pennsylvania. Olson's family agreed to withdraw a wrongful death lawsuit against the agency in exchange for an out-of-court settlement of $750,000 and apologies from President Gerald Ford and CIA director William Colby. Olson's children ordered a new autopsy in 1994 and tried to reopen the case as murder in 1996 and 2012, but both requests were denied because of the previous deal. | ||||
| Richard Phillips, Milton Curtis | Gerald Mason | El Segundo, California, US | Two police officers were shot when they pulled over a car for running a red light. Mason was arrested 45 years later after a computerized fingerprint database identified him as the purchaser of the murder weapon. At the time, he had just raped a 15-year-old girl at gunpoint at a local lovers' lane, and he killed the officers to avoid prosecution for the crime. Mason's back still bore the scar left by a bullet fired by the officers as he fled. | ||
| Irene Garza | John Feit | McAllen, Texas, US | A 26-year-old beauty queen who disappeared when she went to church for confession and was later found raped and murdered in a canal. Feit, a 27-year-old priest at the church who later pled no contest to raping a parishioner, and left the priesthood in the 1970s, was a suspect since the beginning, but little investigation was made due to the opposition of long-time district attorney Rene Guerra (1980–2014). | ||
| John Orner | Edward Freiburger | Columbia, South Carolina, US | A 60-year-old cab driver who was robbed and murdered on the job with a .32 H&R pistol. Freiburger, then 19 and a soldier stationed at nearby Fort Jackson, became a suspect when it was discovered that he purchased the same weapon at a local pawnshop only hours before Orner received his last dispatch call, after which he went AWOL. Freiburger was stopped by Tennessee State Police a month later and found with the gun in his possession, but ballistics tests were inconclusive and he was never charged. In 2002, a private firearms examiner working for the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division cleaned up the slugs and matched the bullets to the gun.[10] | ||
| Malika Maria de Fernandez | Peter Reyn-Bardt | Wilmslow, England, UK | Reyn-Bardt, De Fernandez's estranged husband, made a detailed confession about how he had murdered, dismembered and disposed of her body in the bog behind his home after peat cutters found human remains there, 22 years later. Although Carbon 14 testing later showed the remains to be thousands of years old, Reyn-Bardt's confession was considered enough evidence to convict him of the murder of his wife, whose body was never found. | ||
| Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, Carol Denise McNair (plus 22 injured) | Robert Edward Chambliss | Birmingham, Alabama, US | Victims of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. Although the FBI had identified Chambliss, Blanton, Cherry and a fourth Klansman, Herman Frank Cash, as the perpetrators already in 1965, no arrests were made for political reasons, and the case was shelved in 1968. Cash died in 1994 without being prosecuted. | ||
| Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr. | |||||
| Bobby Frank Cherry | |||||
| James Keuler | Samuel Evans | Seattle, Washington, US | Evans, already incarcerated for other crimes, entered an Alford plea after DNA linked him to Keuler's crime scene.[11] Oldest case ever solved using DNA evidence.[12] | ||
| Helen Betty Osborne | Dwayne Archie Johnston | The Pas, Manitoba, Canada | A Cree Aboriginal woman abducted while she was walking home at 2:30 pm and subsequently beaten, raped and stabbed over 50 times. Although four Caucasian men were implicated in the murder, only Johnston was convicted for it after 16 years, and the case was officially closed on February 12, 1999. The government of Manitoba officially apologized for its poor handling of the case on July 14, 2000. | ||
| Jackson and Daisy Schley | Samuel Evans | Seattle, Washington, US | A couple attacked during a home invasion. Jackson was murdered and Daisy was abducted and raped. Evans entered another Alford Plea for the murder after his DNA was matched to semen recovered from Daisy's clothing. Daisy died of unrelated causes in 2007, before Evans was identified. | ||
| Steven Stayner | Kenneth Parnell | Merced, California, US | A seven-year-old boy kidnapped and held in captivity for eight years by Parnell, a pedophile. After Stayner hit puberty, Parnell lost interest in him and kidnapped five-year-old Timmy White from Ukiah, California as his replacement. However, Stayner and White escaped on March 1, 1980, while Parnell was at work, leading to his identification and arrest. | ||
| Joseph, Julie, Joseph Jr. and Josephine Otero | Dennis Rader | Wichita, Kansas, US | A family victim of "BTK", a serial killer who would invade homes and kill women after stalking them for long periods; other members became unintended victims when they returned home earlier than expected. BTK would later write taunting letters to the media and police about his crimes. Rader's arrest was made possible by metadata found in a floppy disk he sent to police and a partial DNA match to his daughter. Neither technology existed at the time he committed the murders. | ||
| Kathryn Bright | |||||
| Lizbeth Wilson | John Henry Horton | Prairie Village, Kansas, US | A 13-year-old girl last seen running across the field of Shawnee Mission East High School by her brother, who was racing ahead of her. Her remains were found in an empty field six months later. Horton became a suspect because he was the only adult working on the school grounds at the time, and the investigation revealed that he had taken a suspicious break and also tried previously to lure other girls into the school. A duffel bag and a bottle of chloroform was found in his car, which Horton claimed using to "get high", but this was deemed circumstantial. In 2002, investigators interviewed an overlooked 15-year-old girl at the time of the murder who had been given chloroform by Horton and was sexually molested while she was unconscious. However, the Kansas Supreme Court overturned Horton's conviction in 2005 on the basis that the "prior bad act" had not been placed on the public record and the testimony should not have been allowed. Leave to re-try and re-file the case was granted, and this time the same evidence and the testimony of two fellow inmates was enough to declare him guilty.[13] | ||
| Katherine and Sheila Lyon | Lloyd Lee Welch | Washington, D.C., US | Two sisters aged 10 and 12 who disappeared during a trip to a shopping mall. For decades, the police centered their efforts in locating a 50 to 60 years old man who was seen playing a tape recorder with children in different malls. However, in 2013 the attention shifted to Welch, by then a convicted and incarcerated child molester. Welch, who was 18 in 1975, strongly resembled another man seen stalking the girls by one of their friends, and it was found that in 1975 Welch himself went to the police, claiming that he had seen the older man abducting the girls. After a cousin of Welch confessed to helping him burning two suspicious duffel bags in his property of Thaxton, Virginia in 1975, the police searched the place and found items that had belonged to the girls. While no trace of their bodies was found, Welch pleaded guilty to both counts of abduction and murder. | ||
| Myrna Opsahl | Emily and William Harris, Kathleen Ann Soliah, Michael Bortin | Carmichael, California, US | A 42-year-old customer killed during the robbery of the Crocker National Bank by the Symbionese Liberation Army. The case was revived only in 1999, after Soliah (indicted for the attempted bombing of two LAPD patrol cars in August 1975) was arrested in Minnesota, thanks to a tip from a neighbor who had watched her case featured in America's Most Wanted. | ||
| James Kilgore |
