Cold Cases
Decades-old investigations where leads went cold but families still wait for answers.
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The Keddie Murders: The Cabin 28 Killings That Haunted a California Mountain Town
On the night of April 11, 1981, three people were beaten and stabbed to death in Cabin 28 in the tiny resort town of Keddie, California, while younger children slept nearby and survived. A twelve-year-old girl vanished that night. The… Continue reading
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Hinterkaifeck: The German Farm Where Someone Lived With the Family They Killed
In the days before March 31, 1922, a Bavarian farmer found footprints leading to his house but none leading away. Days later, all six people on the farm were dead — and whoever killed them stayed for days afterward, feeding… Continue reading
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Adam Walsh: The Murder of a Six-Year-Old That Changed How America Protects Its Children
A mother in a Hollywood, Florida, department store left her six-year-old son watching a video game demo for a few minutes in the summer of 1981. He was never seen alive again. The half-century of American child-protection law that followed… Continue reading
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Adnan Syed and the Murder of Hae Min Lee: When a Podcast Became Evidence
A seventeen-year-old high school senior was strangled in Baltimore in January 1999. The boy convicted of killing her spent twenty-three years in prison, became the subject of the most-downloaded true-crime podcast ever made, and walked out a free man in… Continue reading
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The Atlanta Child Murders: Thirty Black Children, One Conviction, and the Doubt That Never Left
Between 1979 and 1981, at least thirty Black children, teenagers, and young adults were murdered in Atlanta. The man eventually convicted in two of those killings was Black, was prosecuted using fiber evidence that had never before decided a homicide… Continue reading
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JonBenét Ramsey: Thirty Years of Wrong Theories in a Boulder Basement
For three decades, the strangling of a six-year-old girl in her family’s Boulder basement on Christmas night 1996 has been America’s most picked-over unsolved homicide. The investigation made every mistake an investigation can make. The DNA on her clothing belongs… Continue reading
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America’s Unknown Child: The 65-Year Mystery of the Boy in the Box
For sixty-five years, the small boy whose body was found in a cardboard bassinet box in a wooded Philadelphia field in 1957 was known only as ‘America’s Unknown Child.’ In December 2022, after one of the longest unsolved-identity cases in… Continue reading
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The Black Dahlia: Hollywood’s Darkest Unsolved Murder
On a January morning in 1947, a young mother walking her daughter to the playground in a Los Angeles neighborhood thought she saw a broken department-store mannequin in a vacant lot. It was the body of Elizabeth Short, twenty-two years… Continue reading
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How DNA Genealogy Is Cracking America’s Coldest Cases
In April 2018, a retired cold-case investigator and a part-time genealogist used a public genealogy website to identify the Golden State Killer after 42 years. Since then, the same technique has solved more than 600 cases that everyone had given… Continue reading
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The Tylenol Murders: Seven Deaths That Changed an Industry Forever
In the fall of 1982, seven people in the Chicago area died after taking Extra-Strength Tylenol laced with potassium cyanide. Forty-four years later, no one has been charged. The case rewrote how America packages medicine — and remains one of… Continue reading
