Cases solved by ballistics
Firearms evidence — a recovered weapon, a NIBIN hit, or a toolmark comparison linking bullets and casings — tied these killings to their perpetrators.
8 documented cases.
Donald Bartron and Peter Zito Jr.
Donald Bartron, 16, and Peter Zito Jr., 18, both students at Aloha High School, were found shot to death early on October 3, 1974, in the parking lot of the Oak Hills Recreation Center in the unincorporated area west of Beaverton in Washington County, Oregon. Both teenagers had been shot multiple times in the head with a .22 caliber handgun while one of them worked on a 1956 Oldsmobile. The double homicide went unsolved for 48 years. In November 2022 the Washington County Sheriff's Office announced that ballistics testing by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the Oregon State Police crime lab had matched the bullets from the 1974 killings to a .22 caliber handgun that an early suspect, Steven Paul Criss, had used two years later, in 1976, to murder his Army commanding officer. Criss was arrested and indicted on two counts of second-degree murder. Authorities described it as the oldest known ballistics match the ATF had confirmed for a prosecutable case.
John Orner
John Orner, a 63-year-old taxi-cab driver who regularly carried soldiers to and from Fort Jackson in Columbia, South Carolina, took his last dispatch call at 11:15 p.m. on February 28, 1961, to pick up a fare at the post. His bloody cab was found abandoned in downtown Columbia the next morning, and his body was discovered on March 3, 1961, beside Highway 601 in lower Richland County; he had been shot once in the head, consistent with a passenger firing from the back seat. Edward Freiburger, an 18-year-old Army private stationed at Fort Jackson, had bought a .32 caliber Harrington and Richardson revolver from a Columbia pawn shop on the day Orner vanished, and a Tennessee state trooper found him hitchhiking weeks later carrying that same loaded revolver. In 1961, ballistics testing was inconclusive and no one was charged. The case stayed cold for nearly four decades until the Richland County Sheriff's Department reopened it in 2000 and an independent firearms expert, John Cayton, concluded the recovered H and R revolver was the weapon that fired the fatal bullet. On that ballistics finding, Freiburger was charged and, in August 2002, convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison in what was described as one of the oldest murder cases ever to go to trial in the United States.
Kendra Roberts
Kendra Roberts, a 27-year-old woman, was found shot to death on the morning of August 7, 2016, in a grassy area off Riverside Drive near the River Walk Apartments in Macon, Georgia, after a passing motorist saw what looked like a body and called 911; she had been shot multiple times at close range, including twice to the face and once to the back of the head. Within a day, investigators arrested her boyfriend, Daniel Cornel Hall, then 22, who was indicted for murder and spent roughly two years in jail despite a lack of physical evidence tying him to the killing. The case effectively stalled until a chance break in another jurisdiction. On August 17, 2016, ten days after the murder, police in Clarkston, Georgia had arrested Sterling Breynard Bell at a park after hours for an unrelated matter and confiscated a loaded Glock 9mm pistol from his vehicle; Bell never reclaimed the gun, and it sat in the Clarkston Police Department evidence room. In early 2018, a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agent, Brian Moore, took roughly fifty stored Clarkston guns to be test-fired and their casings compared against casings recovered from crime scenes. The casings from Bell's Glock matched those found at the Roberts murder scene. On that ballistics finding, the murder charges against Hall were dismissed in October 2018 and Bell was indicted in Bibb County on December 3, 2018. Bell, who had bought the Glock weeks before the killing by lying about his drug use, later pleaded guilty to Roberts' murder and was sentenced to 20 years in state prison, and in 2025 he received a separate 25-year federal sentence on related firearms charges.
Nadal Haq
On March 30, 1997, in the South Paterson section of Paterson, New Jersey, Nadal Haq was shot to death execution-style and a second man, Isaam Atsham, was killed later the same day, with a third man, Adnan Ali, wounded in the leg. The weapon was a .38 caliber handgun. What made the case historic was not how it was investigated on the street but how the gun itself was traced: investigators ran the ballistic evidence from the Paterson shootings through the Essex County Sheriff's Integrated Ballistics Identification System (IBIS), an early computerized ballistics database, and the system matched the Paterson casings and bullets to a separate execution-style killing thirteen days earlier in New Britain, Connecticut, where a restaurant owner had been shot during a robbery. It was the first time IBIS had ever linked a New Jersey crime to an out-of-state crime, and the firearms match tied the same gun, and ultimately the same shooter, Gino Gentile, to both scenes. On February 19, 2000, Gentile was convicted of murder in what authorities describe as the nation's first case to obtain a murder conviction using IBIS-generated ballistics evidence. He was sentenced to 40 years for the two Paterson homicides and was later convicted in the Connecticut killing and sentenced to 100 years.
Nancy Dunning
Nancy Dunning, a 62-year-old Alexandria real-estate agent and the wife of then-Sheriff James Dunning, was shot dead in the front hallway of her home on December 5, 2003 after answering a knock at her door. The killing baffled investigators and went cold for a decade. It was only after two strikingly similar daytime door-step shootings of prominent Alexandria residents -- transportation planner Ronald Kirby in November 2013 and music teacher Ruthanne Lodato in February 2014 -- that ballistics testing linked all three crimes to the same extremely unusual ammunition and type of firearm, an uncommon North American Arms .22-caliber revolver. That forensic firearm linkage transformed the unsolved Dunning case into one node of a serial pattern and focused the investigation on Charles Stanard Severance, a man who harbored a grudge against the city's leaders after losing custody of his son. A jury convicted Severance of all three killings on October 29, 2015.
Patricia Jones
Patricia Jones, a 23-year-old Internal Revenue Service file clerk and mother of two from the Kansas City area, was lured from her home near Independence, Missouri, in May 1960 and shot four times with a .22-caliber pistol; her body was found in a wooded area on May 27, 1960. Suspicion fell on Sharon Kinne, a young housewife who had been having an affair with Patricia's husband, but the pistol used in the killing could not be found, and a jury acquitted Kinne of the murder in 1961. The case appeared closed by that acquittal. The decisive break came years later and far away: after Kinne shot a man to death in a Mexico City hotel room in September 1964, police recovered a High Standard .22 pistol from her room. Kansas City police ballistics testing proved that this was the same gun that had fired the bullets that killed Patricia Jones, and the gun's serial number matched an empty gun box found in Kinne's home before her trial. Because Kinne had already been acquitted, double jeopardy barred her from ever being retried for the Jones murder. Kinne was convicted of the Mexico killing, escaped from prison in 1969, and vanished. In January 2025, Kansas City police and the Jackson County Sheriff's Office announced that Kinne had lived for decades under an alias in Canada and had died there in 2022, formally identifying her as the killer of Patricia Jones.
San Chiu Wong
San Chiu Wong, the owner of a Chinese restaurant in New Britain, Connecticut, was shot in the back of the head and robbed in his own kitchen on March 17, 1997. The killing went unsolved for years. The break came not from a witness or a confession but from a gun: thirteen days after the New Britain robbery, Gino Gentile fired the same .380 caliber handgun in a shooting in Paterson, New Jersey, that left one man dead and two others shot. When firearms experts at the Connecticut State Police Forensic Laboratory compared the ballistics, they proved conclusively that the same weapon had been used in both states, tying Gentile, by then serving a 40-year sentence for the New Jersey killings, to the cold New Britain case. Gentile was convicted of felony murder, first-degree robbery and conspiracy and sentenced to 100 years, and his getaway driver, Edgar DeJesus, pleaded guilty to second-degree manslaughter and was sentenced to 19 years.
Shirley Ramey
Shirley Ramey, a 79-year-old woman who had served the tiny town of Hope, Idaho as its city clerk for more than two decades, was shot twice in the head at her home on Trestle Creek Road on April 5, 2017. There was no forced entry and no obvious motive; a family Savage Model 99 rifle was taken, but the killing looked random. The case stalled for two years. The break was almost entirely ballistic: Bonner County investigators had recovered 9mm shell casings at the scene, and in February 2018 an ATF agent submitted them to the National Integrated Ballistics Information Network. On May 18, 2019 NIBIN matched those casings to test-fires from a Glock 19 9mm pistol that Lincoln County, Montana deputies had seized from Judith Carpenter, a 57-year-old real-estate appraiser from Coeur d'Alene, when they arrested her in a road-rage incident on Bull Lake Road on the very day Ramey was killed. Carpenter had no known connection to Ramey. The Savage rifle deputies took from her that day proved to be the gun stolen from the Ramey home. Authorities said it was the first homicide ever solved in Idaho through NIBIN. Carpenter was arrested on August 1, 2019, and in May 2021 entered an Alford plea to second-degree murder; First District Judge Barbara Buchanan sentenced her to 15 years to life in prison.