America’s 5 Most Notorious Cold Cases (Including One You May Have Thought Was Already Solved)

The Zodiac killer

Believed to have killed at least five people in northern California from 1968 to 1969, the Zodiac killer has remained unknown since his first murders: the shooting of a teenage couple. When another couple was shot in 1969 (this time one of the victims survived), the killer called the police to take responsibility for both crimes. He also wrote taunting letters to newspapers. The letters often began with the words “This is the Zodiac speaking” and ended with a symbol resembling the crosshairs of a gunsight.

Those newspapers published not only the killer’s letters but also the ciphers he sent along with them. The papers encouraged the public to help decode the secret messages. One text, known as the “408 cipher,” contained the message “I like killing people because it is so much fun.” Another, the “340 cipher,” wasn’t decoded until 2020. It began, “I hope you are having lots of fun in trying to catch me.”

But the letters and the decoded ciphers haven’t been enough to crack the case. Though several suspects have been investigated, the Zodiac killer’s identity has never been proven. (The most scrutinized suspect, schoolteacher Arthur Leigh Allen, was institutionalized in 1975 for unrelated crimes.) And when we consider the theories that the killer was active before 1968 and well into the ’80s, we have to admit that we don’t even know for sure how many people he killed.

JonBenét Ramsey

No suspects have ever been arrested for the murder of JonBenét Ramsey, a six-year-old beauty pageant winner found dead in the basement of her family’s Boulder, Colorado, home on December 26, 1996. Early that morning JonBenét’s mother, Patsy, had called 911 and stated that her daughter was missing and that a ransom note found in the house demanded $118,000 for her return.

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A few hours later, though, the family and the police discovered that JonBenét had never actually left the house. When prompted to conduct a second search of the house, her father, John, found her body in the basement. She’d been bound and gagged and killed with a blow to the head and a garotte fashioned from one of Patsy’s paintbrushes and a length of cord. Investigators later revealed that JonBenét had also been sexually assaulted.

Suspects soon emerged, including a random intruder, a family friend who had dressed as Santa Claus for the Ramseys’ Christmas parties, JonBenét’s parents, and her nine-year-old brother, Burke. One reason the case remains in the public imagination is that much of the investigation was bungled. Soon after the police first arrived at the Ramsey home, before it could be thoroughly combed for physical evidence, friends of the Ramseys arrived to show support for the family, and the police allowed them to traverse the house freely. Some of the friends even helped Patsy clean the kitchen. If conclusive physical evidence had existed, it was almost immediately destroyed.

The Black Dahlia

On January 15, 1947, 22-year-old Elizabeth Short was found dead in residential Los Angeles. Her body was so mutilated that the woman who discovered it—a mother on a walk with her young daughter—thought she had stumbled upon a mannequin.

The case was an immediate sensation. Short was soon nicknamed the Black Dahlia—in reference to her alleged penchant for sheer black dresses and to the 1946 film noir The Blue Dahlia, which featured the murder of an unfaithful housewife. Short was characterized as a flighty party girl with a record of underage drinking. Apparently, developing a catalog of a young woman’s exploits was more exciting than mourning her loss. Letters the alleged killer sent to the police only exacerbated the media frenzy.

Ever since Short’s murder was deemed a cold case, amateur sleuths have presented their own solutions. One former police detective publicly accused his late father of the murder, inspiring the TV miniseries I Am the Night. A British researcher suggested that California police had conspired with the killer.

But because most of the physical evidence in the case has been lost to time and police mishandling—and because most of the key players are now deceased—no theory is likely to ever be proved beyond a reasonable doubt.

The Hall-Mills murders

The murders of a pastor and a choir singer on a makeshift lovers’ lane shocked a small town—and brought forth rampant accusations, inconsistent witness testimony, and more than one false confession.

The year was 1922, and New Brunswick, New Jersey, minister Edward Wheeler Hall was having an extramarital affair with a member of his congregation: the also-married Eleanor Mills. On September 14 the two left their respective family homes to meet each other. When Hall didn’t return home that night, his wife, Frances, and one of his brothers-in-law began a search, but neither Hall nor Mills was found until two days later, when another couple walking lovers’ lane found their bodies under a crab apple tree. Hall had been shot once through the head, but Mills’s body had been brutalized: she had been shot in the face three times, and her throat had been slashed so deeply that she had nearly been decapitated. Later an autopsy revealed that her tongue and larynx had been cut out. After they were killed, the couple’s bodies had been arranged in a near-embrace.

The case was clearly personal. Though Hall and Mills’s affair had apparently been common knowledge around town, both of their spouses claimed to have been in the dark—an assertion that struck investigators (and the tabloids, which seized upon the story immediately) as highly suspicious. Frances, along with her brothers William and Henry Stevens, were considered prime suspects.

But try as it might, the prosecution could find no evidence to convict the siblings. Witness statements kept changing, likely influenced by the press coverage; attention-seekers kept confessing to the murders; and physical evidence was destroyed when sightseers trampled the crime scene, looking for “souvenirs.” As a result, Edward and Eleanor’s murders were never solved.

Lizzie Borden

Lizzie Borden took an axe / And gave her mother forty whacks; / And when she saw what she had done, / She gave her father forty-one.

The famous rhyme makes it seem as if there has never been any doubt as to whether Lizzie Borden killed her father and stepmother on August 4, 1892. Officially, though, the identity of the murderer remains a mystery.

Lizzie and a maid, Bridget Sullivan, were alone in the Borden house with Mr. and Mrs. Borden when Lizzie—according to her testimony—discovered her father dead. He had been repeatedly struck in the head with a blunt instrument. Upstairs she found the body of her stepmother. Initially, the evidence against Lizzie looked damning: she had recently attempted to purchase prussic acid (a poison) and was alleged to have burned a dress in the stove. What’s more, Sullivan, her suspected accomplice, was seen on the evening of August 4 carrying a parcel out of the house.

But at Lizzie’s trial in 1893 the court determined that all that evidence was merely circumstantial. Lizzie wasn’t convicted, and no other suspects were ever arrested.