Cases solved by confession
A confession years after the crime — to police, to a fellow inmate, or on a deathbed — resolved these cases.
34 documented cases.
Billy Lavaco and Judith Straub
William "Billy" Lavaco, 21, of Doylestown, and Judith "Judy" Straub, 18, of Sterling, were found dead on August 8, 1977 in Silver Creek Metropolitan Park in Norton, Ohio, south-west of Akron. Each had been shot point-blank in the neck. The case stayed open for thirty-three years. In July 2009 Edward Wayne Edwards, a 76-year-old former FBI Ten Most Wanted fugitive turned motivational speaker, was arrested in Louisville, Kentucky after DNA linked him to the 1980 killings of Tim Hack and Kelly Drew, a teenage couple who vanished from a wedding reception in Wisconsin where he had worked as a handyman. In April 2010, while he waited for trial in a Wisconsin jail, an inmate wrote to prosecutors in Akron to say Edwards had bragged about a double homicide, and Edwards himself wrote to the Summit County prosecutor offering information. A Norton detective and a prosecutor's investigator went to Wisconsin, and he told them he had killed the couple. Prosecutor Sherri Bevan Walsh announced the statement on May 4, 2010. Under a plea deal covering both states, Edwards pleaded guilty in Wisconsin on June 9, 2010 and, before Judge Thomas Teodosio in Akron on June 11, to two counts of aggravated murder, receiving two consecutive life terms, the most the law allowed for a 1977 killing. He later confessed to murdering his foster son in 1996, was sentenced to death for it in March 2011, and died in an Ohio prison medical center on April 7, 2011.
Bobby Joe Durham
Bobby Joe Durham, an 18-year-old Appalachian State University student, was murdered alongside his parents, Bryce Durham, 51, and Virginia Durham, 44, in their Boone, North Carolina home during a snowstorm on February 3, 1972. All three were found bound with their heads submerged in a running bathtub. The triple killing of the prominent local Buick dealer and his family went unsolved for 50 years until, in February 2022, the Watauga County Sheriff's Office announced that four members of a Georgia-based criminal network known as the Dixie Mafia had carried out the murders as a paid contract killing.
Brittanee Drexel
Brittanee Drexel, 17, from the Rochester, New York, area, went to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, on spring break in April 2009 after her mother told her she could not go. She was last seen on April 25, 2009, in front of the Blue Water Resort on Ocean Boulevard. Her phone last pinged near the North Santee River, 46 miles away, and searches over the next decade found nothing. Raymond Moody, a registered sex offender who received a traffic ticket in Surfside Beach the next day, was named a person of interest in 2012 but was not charged. In 2016 the FBI offered a reward and described a different theory, built on jailhouse informants, that produced no charges. The break came in April 2022, when investigators interviewed Moody's girlfriend and she said she still had her phone from 2009. A search of the home followed, and Moody's lawyer contacted authorities the same day. On May 4, 2022, Moody was taken into custody on an obstruction charge, confessed, and led investigators to a shallow grave in Georgetown County. Remains recovered on May 11 were identified as Brittanee's by dental records, with DNA analysis corroborating. On October 19, 2022, Moody pleaded guilty to murder, kidnapping and criminal sexual conduct and was sentenced to life in prison plus two consecutive 30-year terms.
Candace Rough Surface
Candace Rough Surface, an 18-year-old member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe from Kenel, South Dakota, and the mother of a two-year-old son, disappeared on August 2, 1980, during a trip across the Missouri River into the border town of Mobridge. Nine months later, in May 1981, a local ranch hand found her skeletal remains in a shallow bay of Lake Oahe, exposed by receding water; the remains carried bullet wounds. Authorities said there was little evidence, and the case went cold for fifteen years even though, the sheriff later admitted, the name of a Mobridge teenager had come up early. In 1995 that teenager's cousin, James Stroh, by then living in Wisconsin, was going through a bitter divorce. He had told his wife before they married what he had done in South Dakota, and her mother went to the authorities. Stroh confessed in October 1995 and said the killing was the idea of his cousin, Nicholas Scherr. Both were charged that month, which set off months of racial tension between Mobridge and the reservation. On May 7, 1996, the day his first-degree murder trial was to begin, Scherr pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter and was sentenced to 100 years; Stroh pleaded guilty to second-degree manslaughter and aggravated assault and received 15 years. Stroh was released in 2004. Scherr was paroled in 2019 after 23 years.
Carol Ann Barrett
Carol Ann Barrett, 18, of Zanesville, Ohio, was on spring break in Daytona Beach Shores, Florida, with a group of high school friends when, at about 2 a.m. on March 23, 1980, she was abducted from the Treasure Island Motel. Project: Cold Case, a Jacksonville nonprofit, wrote that a gunman forced his way into the friends' room, robbed them, and said he would take one of them with him; when a friend panicked, Barrett volunteered to go instead. A passerby found her body the next day in a ditch along Interstate 95 in Jacksonville, more than 100 miles north. A police sketch was made from her friends' descriptions, but the case went cold. The Jacksonville Sheriff's Office cold case unit reopened it in August 2017. In 2020 it identified Billy Mansfield Jr., a convicted serial killer then in prison, as the suspect. After interviews over two years, the sheriff's office said, Mansfield said in September 2022 that he was the man in the sketch and confessed to abducting and killing her. On January 25, 2024 the sheriff's office announced the case closed. The State Attorney's Office for the Fourth Judicial Circuit declined to prosecute because Mansfield is serving life in California plus four concurrent life terms in Florida for other murders.
Christopher Alvin Dailey
Christopher Alvin Dailey, a 26-year-old server at the Huntsville Hilton, was last seen on April 25, 1995, after an employee meeting and was reported missing the next day. His body, with a single gunshot wound to the head, was found in a wooded area of southwest Decatur, Alabama, and his tan 1983 Toyota Tercel was discovered half-submerged in the Tennessee River with a rock tied to the accelerator. The case went cold for 25 years. In November 2020, Johnny Dwight Whited, a Trinity, Alabama, man dying of stage-four lung cancer, telephoned the Decatur Police Department and confessed to the killing, providing details about the crime scene that detectives said only the killer or crime-scene technicians could have known. Whited was charged with murder and indicted in March 2022, but he died of his cancer in June 2022 before the case could go to trial, and the charge was dismissed.
Cindy Zarzycki
Cindy Zarzycki, 13, walked to the Dairy Queen on Nine Mile Road in East Detroit, Michigan, now Eastpointe, on the morning of Sunday, April 20, 1986, and was never seen again. She had told two friends she was meeting her boyfriend's father, Arthur Ream, who had promised to drive her to a surprise party for his son; the boy's birthday had been in January, and Ream had paid an employee to take him to Texas that weekend. Police treated her as a runaway for eight years. In 1994 the case was reclassified as a possible homicide and one of Ream's ex-wives pointed police to him; in 1995 Eastpointe Detective Derek McLaughlin was handed the file. In 2007 McLaughlin re-interviewed Cindy's friends, who told identical stories, and found a missing-child coupon with her picture in a watch box in Ream's locked-up warehouse. With Ream weeks from parole, prosecutors charged him in January 2008. In June 2008, with no body and no physical evidence beyond the coupon, a Macomb County jury took two hours to convict him of first-degree murder. In the courthouse lockup he told McLaughlin he had panicked and killed her, and weeks later drew a map marking a grave by a river in Macomb Township. On July 9, 2008, searchers found her remains, her purse and her mix tapes. He was sentenced to mandatory life and died of cancer in prison on August 15, 2024, aged 75, a suspect in the disappearances of other girls.
Danny Croteau
Danny Croteau, 13, the youngest of five altar-boy brothers from Springfield, Massachusetts, was last seen alive on Friday, April 14, 1972. The next morning a Chicopee police officer found him floating face down in the Chicopee River, still in his school uniform. He had been beaten about the head, most likely with a rock, and had a blood alcohol level of 0.18. Within days investigators were looking at the family's friend and former parish priest, Richard R. Lavigne, who was seen alone at the riverbank, asked police whether blood would still be on a stone thrown into the river, and gave statements that did not add up. A brother said an anonymous caller who sounded like Lavigne called Danny's death an accident. Lavigne was never charged. He pleaded guilty in 1992 to molesting two other boys and was defrocked in 2003; DNA testing in the 1990s and in 2004 could not tie him to the scene. In April and May 2021, after a cold-case unit reopened the file, Lavigne, 80 and in a Greenfield medical facility, gave eleven hours of recorded interviews in which he said he brought Danny to the river, gave him a good shove, tossed the object he hit him with into the water, and later saw him floating face down. On May 21, 2021 Hampden District Attorney Anthony Gulluni authorized a murder warrant; Lavigne died of COVID-19 pneumonia that evening. On May 24 Gulluni named him as the killer and closed the case.
Eige Sober-Adler
Eige Sober-Adler, 37, of Kensington, Maryland, was found dead on September 8, 1987, behind a Days Inn under construction on Centreville Road in Herndon, Virginia. Her car, in running condition and apparently abandoned, was about half a mile away on the Dulles Toll Road. Fairfax County detectives collected numerous items of evidence and, a police major later said, talked to a man who was a person of interest, but no one was charged and the case went cold. That man, Charles Helem, was later convicted of strangling his ex-girlfriend Patricia Bentley in 2002. In 2010 and 2017 he wrote to Maryland police claiming knowledge of the 2002 death of 19-year-old Jennifer Landry, then refused to be interviewed. In September 2021 Prince George's County cold case detectives tried again and he agreed; he confessed to Landry's death and gave information about an unsolved Fairfax County murder. Fairfax detectives interviewed him in October 2021, and police said he confessed to killing Sober-Adler with details only the killer would know. A grand jury indicted him on January 18, 2022. On December 8, 2022, Helem pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life without parole. The Fairfax police chief said her parents had both died never knowing what happened to their daughter.
Etan Patz
Etan Patz, 6, vanished on the morning of May 25, 1979, the first day he was allowed to walk the two blocks from his family's apartment on Prince Street in SoHo to his school bus stop alone. No trace of him was ever found. His face went on milk cartons, the anniversary became National Missing Children's Day, and he was declared dead in 2001. For two decades the investigation circled a convicted child molester who had dated his babysitter, but no prosecutor charged him. In April 2012, two years after the Manhattan district attorney reopened the case, the FBI dug up a basement on Prince Street and found nothing. The coverage prompted a New Jersey man to call police about his brother-in-law, Pedro Hernandez, who had been a teenage stock clerk at the bodega beside the bus stop in 1979 and had told a church group, a neighbor and his first wife that he had killed a child in New York. On May 23, 2012, after about seven hours of unwarned questioning, Hernandez confessed and then repeated it on video: he said he had lured Etan into the store's basement with a soda, choked him and left him in a box with the trash. There was no physical evidence. A 2015 jury hung 11 to 1; a second jury convicted him of kidnapping and felony murder on February 14, 2017, and he was sentenced to 25 years to life. The Second Circuit overturned the conviction in July 2025 over the judge's answer to a jury note; the Supreme Court reinstated it, 6 to 3, on June 22, 2026.
Inez Deaton
Inez Deaton, a 20-year-old wife and the mother of a two-year-old girl, was found dead on the slope of a bayou in Houston, Texas, on May 27, 1979. She had been stabbed with an ice pick and sexually assaulted. A few days earlier she had stopped at a house next door to where Danny Paul Bible lived to use the telephone, and a neighbor saw her go into Bible's house. Around the time of her funeral, Bible left. The killing went unsolved for about twenty years. In November 1998 Bible attacked a woman in a hotel room in Louisiana and was arrested in Florida. In December 1998 he told Louisiana detectives that he had killed Deaton, then gave two tape-recorded statements, the first confessing to her death. Harris County indicted him for capital murder in March 2001. A federal judge later wrote that, apart from his behavior after she vanished, only his confession connected him to the killing. A jury convicted him in June 2003 and sentenced him to death. Courts rejected his appeals, and he was executed by lethal injection in Huntsville on June 27, 2018, at 66.
Jacob Erwin Wetterling
Jacob Wetterling, 11, was abducted at gunpoint near St. Joseph, Minnesota on the night of October 22, 1989, while biking home from a convenience store with his brother and a friend. The case haunted Minnesota for 27 years until 2016, when Danny Heinrich, who had been linked by DNA to a 1989 assault on another boy, admitted in federal court that he had abducted, assaulted and killed Jacob, and led authorities to the remains near Paynesville.
James Ricks
James Ricks, a 27-year-old African-American father from North Little Rock, Arkansas, was abducted in 1967 by two brothers fleeing a robbery whose own car had broken down. They took Ricks and his 1964 Oldsmobile, shot and wounded him, handcuffed him, and drove roughly 90 miles to a farm near Newport in rural Jackson County, where James Leon Clay shot him in the back of the head. His skeletal remains were found by a man and his son on August 27, 1967. The Clay brothers were convicted in the 1960s only of stealing the car and crossing state lines with it, never of the murder. Nearly half a century later, a fellow inmate's tip and a recorded jailhouse confession reopened the case, and in 2016 James Leon Clay pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 20 years in the Arkansas Department of Correction.
Jessica Cain
Jessica Cain, 17, of Tiki Island, Texas, left a Bennigan's restaurant in the Clear Lake area after a theater cast party on August 17, 1997 and never made it home. Her vehicle was found abandoned on Interstate 45 with her wallet inside, and volunteers searched for weeks. Tiki Island investigators soon had leads pointing to William Lewis Reece, an Oklahoma parolee who had kidnapped a 19-year-old woman in Webster that May, but nothing to charge him with. Reece got 60 years for that kidnapping in 1998, and the Cain case went cold for nearly two decades. In 2014 Oklahoma investigators retested DNA from the body of Tiffany Johnston, murdered near Oklahoma City in July 1997, and in September 2015 Reece was charged with her murder. Facing the death penalty, he began talking to the Texas Rangers. Under a deal that took death off the table in the Cain case if he led investigators to her, Reece was brought in shackles to a field in southeast Houston in February 2016. Bones were found there in March and the Harris County medical examiner identified them by DNA as Jessica's; Kelli Cox's remains were found in Brazoria County the same way. A Galveston grand jury indicted Reece on September 1, 2016. After an Oklahoma jury sentenced him to death in 2021, he was returned to Texas and on June 29, 2022 pleaded guilty to murdering Jessica Cain and Laura Smither, taking a life sentence for each.
Julia Critchfield
Julia Critchfield, a 36-year-old mother of four who loved karaoke, was found on January 22, 1978, at the bottom of a dirt pit below a cliff in Saucier, in Harrison County, Mississippi. An autopsy and a coroner's inquest showed she had been strangled by hand and died about two hours before she was thrown from the cliff. She had been at Chris's Lounge on Courthouse Road the night she died, but no suspect was found and the case went cold. A sheriff's investigator and a crime scene investigator took it up again a few years before 2018. In October 2018 the Texas Rangers told them that Samuel Little, a 78-year-old inmate, had given information linking him to a killing in Harrison County while being questioned about a Texas cold case. Little had been convicted in 2014 of three Los Angeles murders after a DNA match in those unrelated cases, and he was by then confessing to a Texas Ranger. On October 31, 2018, Harrison County investigators interviewed him at the Wise County Sheriff's Office in Decatur, Texas; the sheriff said he confessed, giving details only the killer would know, and he was charged with murder. Little eventually confessed to 93 killings between 1970 and 2005, of which the FBI had verified 50 by October 2019. He died in custody on December 30, 2020, aged 80. The sources reviewed report no trial in Mississippi.
Kaitlyn Arquette
Kaitlyn Arquette, 18, was driving home from a friend's house in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on the night of July 16, 1989, when she was shot in the head on Lomas near Arno. Her car hit a pole, and she died the next day. Police believed the shooting was random. Her mother, the young-adult novelist Lois Duncan, investigated on her own, wrote the 1992 book Who Killed My Daughter?, and died in 2016 without an answer. In July 2021 a University of New Mexico security guard found a man outside UNM Children's Hospital who said he wanted to confess to three murders. University police arrested Paul Apodaca on a probation violation on July 20, 2021. He first admitted killing a UNM student, Althea Oakeley, in 1988, then, in interviews with Albuquerque detectives, the 1988 killing of 13-year-old Stella Gonzales and the 1989 killing of Kaitlyn Arquette. Police said he had no known connection to the victims but knew key details of each killing. A grand jury had indicted him in Arquette's death by February 2022. In November 2023 a judge refused to suppress his confessions. In January 2024 he pleaded guilty to three counts of second-degree murder and was sentenced to 45 years in prison.
Katherine Foster
Katherine Foster, an 18-year-old freshman at the University of South Alabama in Mobile, vanished on February 21, 1980, after telling a friend she would meet her at the car. A search party of students found her body in the woods near the dormitories within days; she had been shot twice in the head. The friend, Jamie Kellam Letson, who had grown up with her in Pascagoula, Mississippi, was the last person known to have seen her, but the first investigation produced no substantial suspect and the case went cold. Prosecutors later said that in 2002 Letson, working through the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, wrote an unsigned letter to Foster confessing to the killing, and that she also told her sponsor. Investigators reopened the case after learning of the letter, and a grand jury indicted Letson in November 2008, when she was brought to Mobile from a Christian shelter in Jackson, Mississippi. At trial in May 2010 her lawyer argued that she had falsely confessed to impress a friend. On May 27, 2010, a Mobile County jury convicted her of first-degree murder after about six hours. On June 18, 2010, a judge sentenced her to life in prison, and the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals upheld the conviction on December 9, 2011.
Linda Lois Little
Linda Lois Little, 43, a North Carolina native who had lived in the Daytona Beach area for about two years, finished her shift as a waitress at the Chart House restaurant around 1 a.m. on October 11, 1991 and rode her bicycle across the International Speedway Boulevard bridge. She stopped at a bar and was seen at a 7-Eleven after 2 a.m. She missed work the next day, and a friend reported her missing on October 14. Police found no evidence of foul play at the time, and her family's fliers and billboards brought nothing. Police said there were little to no leads for 29 of the 31 years that followed. In January 2020 Michael Townson, who was serving a life sentence for a separate Brevard County murder, was moved to a prison in Volusia County and asked to speak to Daytona Beach detectives. He confessed to killing Little after meeting her at a hotel bar. Police spent time verifying the confession, and a Volusia County grand jury indicted him on October 24, 2022. On December 20, 2022 he pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole after 25 years. Her body has never been found.
Linda Sue Boards
Linda Sue Boards was 23 when she was last seen leaving the Peacemaker's club on 3rd Street in Bowling Green, Kentucky, in May 1981. On May 15, 1981 her body was found on a farm off Hydro-Pondsville Road, about a mile and a half southeast of Smiths Grove in Warren County. Kentucky State Police said she had been raped and strangled. The case went cold for thirty-seven years. In September 2018 the FBI's Violent Criminal Apprehension Program sent the state police a lead: a Texas inmate named Samuel Little, convicted in 2014 of killing three women in Los Angeles County, had begun confessing to a Texas Ranger to some ninety killings across the country, and the method in his California cases matched the way Boards had died. Kentucky investigators went to Texas in October 2018 and interviewed him. On December 12, 2018 a Warren County grand jury indicted Little, then 78, for her murder, the day before he pleaded guilty in Odessa, Texas to the 1994 strangling of another woman. Little eventually confessed to 93 murders committed between 1970 and 2005, and the FBI confirmed about sixty of them. He was never brought to Kentucky to stand trial. He died in a hospital in Los Angeles County on December 30, 2020, aged 80, with the Warren County indictment still pending.
Mary Ann Pryor and Lorraine Marie Kelly
On the afternoon of August 9, 1974, Mary Ann Pryor, 17, and her friend Lorraine Marie Kelly, 16, left their homes in North Bergen, New Jersey, to buy bathing suits at the Garden State Plaza in Paramus for a weekend at the Jersey Shore. They were last seen walking on Broad Avenue in Ridgefield; witnesses told police the girls were hitchhiking and got into a car driven by a white man nobody knew. Their families reported them missing that night. Five days later, on August 14, their bodies were found naked and face down in woods in Montvale, near the New York line, and were identified by their jewelry. Investigators exhausted every lead. After Richard Cottingham, a Lodi computer operator later known as the Torso Killer, was arrested in 1980 and convicted of murders in New Jersey and New York, detectives suspected him but could not prove it, and for decades he toyed with them. On April 14, 2021, after about fifteen years of prison interviews with Chief of Detectives Robert Anzilotti, Cottingham gave a sworn, recorded statement admitting he kidnapped the girls, held them in a motel room, raped them and drowned them in the bathtub. On April 27, 2021, aged 74, he waived indictment and pleaded guilty to two counts of murder in a virtual hearing before Superior Court Judge Keith Bachmann, under an agreement for two concurrent life sentences.
Michelle Busha
Michelle Yvette Busha, an 18-year-old from Bay City, Texas, was hitchhiking along Interstate 90 in southern Minnesota on May 26, 1980, when she was picked up, sexually assaulted, and strangled; her body was found four days later in a drainage ditch near Blue Earth in Faribault County. For years she was an unidentified Jane Doe and the killing went unsolved. The case broke not through forensics but through a confession: in 1988, Robert Leroy Nelson, an on-duty Minnesota State Patrol trooper at the time of the murder who was by then imprisoned in Texas, admitted to the killing. He pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter in 1989. The victim herself was not positively identified until 2015, when DNA from her exhumed remains matched a family sample, prompting the local sheriff to call it not a question of who done it, but who she was.
Michelle Dorr
Michelle Dorr, six, spelled Michele in most press reports, vanished on May 31, 1986, from the back yard of her father's rented house on Sudbury Road in Silver Spring, Maryland, where she had been playing in a wading pool in a pink polka-dot bathing suit. Montgomery County police spent months on her father, who broke down under the questioning and gave irrational confessions that led nowhere. A neighbour two doors away, Hadden Clark, a Navy-discharged cook with paranoid schizophrenia who was moving out of his brother's house that day, cried and vomited when questioned and said he might have blacked out, but his time card seemed to clear him. The case went cold until October 1992, when Clark killed Laura Houghteling, 23, in Bethesda; he pleaded guilty in June 1993 and was given 30 years. In prison, fellow inmates got him talking, and he told them he had cut Michelle with a knife in his niece's bedroom and carried her out in a duffel bag. In 1995 investigators pulled up that bedroom's floorboards and found blood in eighty-five places. Clark was charged on September 23, 1998, convicted of second-degree murder in October 1999 without a body, and sentenced to a further 30 years. On January 7, 2000, he led police to her grave in a ravine off Route 29 in Silver Spring. The Court of Special Appeals affirmed the conviction in September 2001.
Mike Williams (Jerry Michael Williams)
Mike Williams, 31, left his home in Tallahassee, Florida before dawn on December 16, 2000 to go duck hunting on Lake Seminole in Jackson County, with plans to celebrate his sixth wedding anniversary that evening. His truck, trailer and boat were found, a 14-day search turned up no body, and the case was classified as a drowning, with alligators blamed. His mother kept pressing for an investigation. Years later, while his widow Denise was divorcing Brian Winchester, who had been Mike's best friend and whom she married in 2005, Winchester kidnapped her at gunpoint in 2016. Facing a possible life sentence, he agreed to cooperate, confessed in October 2017 that he had killed Mike, and led investigators to the remains. The state announced a homicide that December. A grand jury indicted Denise Williams in May 2018, and a jury convicted her in December 2018. In 2021 an appeals court reversed her murder conviction but upheld her conviction for conspiracy to commit murder, and she was resentenced to 30 years. Winchester was sentenced to 20 years for the kidnapping and was not convicted of the killing.
Miranda Fenner
Miranda Fenner, an 18-year-old clerk, was stabbed and had her throat slashed during a robbery of The Movie Store, a video rental shop in Laurel, Montana, on November 15, 1998. A passing motorist found her crawling from the doorway; she died within hours at a Billings hospital. Despite more than 700 interviews, the case went cold for nearly two decades. It was broken not by physical evidence at the scene but by the killer himself: Zachary David O'Neill voluntarily walked into the Yellowstone County Sheriff's Office in 2017 and confessed. He pleaded guilty in 2019 and was sentenced to three concurrent life terms.
Pamela Dorrington
Pamela Ann Dorrington, 19, a Helena High School graduate who worked as a surgical tech at St. Peter's Hospital, was last seen by others on the evening of February 16, 1968 at The Hofbrau in Helena, Montana, and was reported missing on February 17. On June 13, 1968 the custodian of the Gates of the Mountains marina on Holter Lake found part of a human torso floating near the docks, which then-Sheriff Dave Middlemas said fit her description. Her landlord, Courtney Brooke Atlas, then 26, was a suspect from the start, but officials said there was no forensic evidence tying him to the crime. In 1985 he was sentenced to 120 years with no parole for the 1983 murder of his wife, Donna, and arson. In December 2021 Lewis and Clark County detectives interviewed Atlas, then 79, at Crossroads Correctional Center in Shelby. After they offered him a letter of immunity from prosecution, with Dorrington's family consulted, he confessed on December 1, 2021. Sheriff Leo Dutton announced on December 3 that the case was solved, saying Atlas gave details only the killer could have known, such as the sash and knife. Because of the immunity, Atlas was not charged with her death and no court has heard the evidence.
Pamela Pitts
Pamela Pitts, 19, was last seen at a party in a forest outside Prescott, Arizona, on September 16, 1988. Her burned remains were found at the same spot on September 29. The medical examiner could not determine how she died, and she was identified from dental records. Her roommate, Shelly Norgard, now Shelly Harmon, was suspected for years, but detectives could not build a case. In 1993 she was sentenced to 20 years for the killing of her boyfriend, Raymond Clerx, a separate case. A Yavapai County sheriff's detective who inherited the Pitts file in 2011 kept coming back to her, her prison phone calls were monitored, and a cold case team spent hundreds of hours rebuilding the timeline. Harmon was arrested in Nevada in June 2017 and charged with first-degree murder. A court later barred evidence of the Clerx killing and ruled that no one could suggest at trial that Pitts's death was a homicide. In March 2021 Harmon pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, told the court she lost her temper over rent and a joint bank account and killed Pitts, and was sentenced to 20 years with credit for time already served, so she serves no further prison time. Pitts's family called her account unbelievable but said it was an ending.
Robert Huntbach
Robert Huntbach, 85, a retired meatpacking worker and First World War veteran, and his wife Goldie, 77, were found bound, gagged and shot in their home at 311 West Tenth Street in Waterloo, Iowa, on the morning of January 12, 1981. The house had been ransacked and there was evidence they had been tortured with a cattle prod. Police interviewed dozens of people, including a truck driver who had been seeing a relative of the couple, but nobody was charged and the case went cold. On May 8, 2012, that man, Jack Wendell Pursel, then 66, walked unannounced into the Waterloo police station and confessed, giving details that had never been made public. He pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree murder on June 7, 2012, and was sentenced to life without parole.
Roseann "Ann" Sturtz
Roseann Sturtz, 20, who went by Ann and was a dancer at a Baltimore club, was reported missing on August 24, 1975. Her body was found on December 15, 1975 in a wooded area off Route 108 in Columbia, Howard County, Maryland. She had been strangled. Police had no suspect, and said later there was no DNA to test, no witness and little physical evidence. In 1981 detectives interviewed Charles William Davis Jr., who had been in prison since 1978 for other murders. Police suspected she was his fourth victim, and a prosecutor granted him immunity for information about her death, but on a recorded tape he did not identify her from an old photograph. The tape and the immunity letter were rediscovered by Cpl. Wade Zufall, Howard County's cold-case detective, who took over the case in 2022. The Baltimore Banner reported that a Loyola University Maryland student's term paper on the case, asking whether the killer might be a serial killer, pointed to Davis. In 2024 Zufall showed Davis a different photograph, taken a month before she vanished. Davis recognized her and confessed. Because the 1981 immunity still stands, he cannot be charged. Howard County police announced on March 11, 2025 that they had exceptionally cleared the case.
Sarah Hunter
Sarah Hunter was the golf professional at the Manchester Country Club in Manchester, Vermont. A co-worker reported her missing on September 19, 1986, after she did not arrive for work, and her body was found in a wooded area in Pawlet on Thanksgiving Day, November 27, 1986. Her car had been found near a gas station in Manchester where David Allen Morrison, then 26, worked. State police said Morrison was a top suspect from the start but that investigators could not find the evidence to charge him. He left Vermont in January 1988 and was later convicted in California, in a separate case, of kidnapping, attempted murder and sexual assault. In 2012 he was charged with Hunter's murder after DNA testing appeared to link hair from his car to her, but the Bennington County state's attorney dismissed the charge in February 2015 because the hair had come from Hunter's own car. In the summer of 2024 Vermont and Massachusetts investigators interviewed him in a California prison, and prosecutors said he confessed. On December 9, 2025, he pleaded guilty to murder in Bennington and was sentenced to life without parole.
Susan Carter
Susan Carter, 41, and her 10-year-old daughter Natasha 'Alex' Carter were last seen on August 8, 2000, in Raleigh County, West Virginia, where they had been living in the home of Larry Webb, a man Susan was in a relationship with. The mother and daughter simply vanished, and the case went cold for more than two decades. The breakthrough came not from technology but from the killer himself: in the first week of April 2024, Webb, by then in his 80s and in failing health, gave investigators what the prosecutor called a detailed, undeniable, unconflicted confession, admitting he had shot Susan during an argument over money and then shot Alex to keep the child from exposing him. He described wrapping the bodies in bed linens, hiding them in his basement, and burying them in a grave he dug in his backyard. Acting on his account, searchers excavated the property at 100 Kyle Lane in Mabscott and recovered human remains on April 22, 2024, the same day Webb died in custody after a medical episode. He had been indicted in October 2023 and arrested on April 12, 2024, but he was never tried, dying as the bodies he confessed to burying were finally being unearthed.
Susan Jaeger
Susan Marie Jaeger was 7 years old when she was abducted in the early hours of June 25, 1973, from the family tent at a campground near the Missouri Headwaters by Three Forks, in Gallatin County, Montana, the intruder cutting through the tent fabric while the family slept. The kidnapper made taunting phone calls demanding ransom, and the case stalled for a year despite a wide search. The break came not from forensic science but from a confession that was set up by a remarkable piece of human persistence: on the one-year anniversary of the abduction, the killer called Susan's mother, Marietta Jaeger, and Marietta, instead of breaking down, kept him on the line for about an hour and answered his cruelty with compassion until he wept. The FBI recorded the call, and audiophonoscopic voice analysis tied the caller to a local 23-year-old contractor, David Meirhofer, whom FBI profilers had already flagged. Confronted with the evidence, Meirhofer confessed on September 29, 1974, to four murders, three of them children, committed in Gallatin County between 1967 and 1974: 13-year-old Bernard Poelman, 12-year-old Michael Raney, Susan Jaeger, and 19-year-old Sandra Dykman Smallegan. About four hours after confessing, Meirhofer hanged himself in his jail cell with a towel, so he was never tried. The investigation is widely cited as the first serial-murder case cracked with the FBI's emerging behavioral-profiling technique.
Susan Marcia Rose
Susan Marcia Rose, a 24-year-old woman from Johnstown, Pennsylvania who had moved to Boston and dreamed of becoming a lawyer, was found dead on October 30, 1979 in a Back Bay building under renovation at 285 Beacon Street. She had been struck in the head with a hammer and sexually assaulted. A Brighton man was tried for the killing and acquitted in 1981, and the case went cold for more than four decades. It was broken not by forensic science but by a confession: in August 2023, John Michael Irmer walked into the FBI field office in Portland, Oregon and told agents he had killed Rose in 1979, saying he had gotten sober and found religion. Investigators only afterward matched his DNA to material preserved from the scene, corroborating the account he had volunteered. Irmer pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in April 2026 and received a mandatory life sentence without parole.
William Blodgett
William "Bill" Blodgett, 69, a landlord in Roswell, New Mexico, disappeared in late December 2008. His son reported him missing on January 3, 2009, after the family could not reach him for more than ten days. Police learned that Blodgett had had a dispute with his tenant, Tony Peralta, and had tried to evict him. Peralta was considered a suspect early on and was interviewed, but "no new leads" came of it. Searches of the home and neighborhood, including with a cadaver dog, found nothing; Blodgett's vehicle was still at the house and there had been no withdrawals from his bank account. The case was closed pending further leads and went cold. On May 1, 2023, Peralta, then 37, borrowed a phone at a convenience store, called 911 and said he had killed someone. He took officers to the house, where they removed plywood floorboards and found bones, a boot and a set of dentures. The dentures were compared with dental records obtained in 2009. Peralta was charged with first-degree murder and pleaded not guilty. In August 2023 he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and received a 15-year prison sentence.
Zebb Quinn
Zebb Quinn, 18, vanished on January 2, 2000, after clocking out of his shift at a Walmart in Asheville, North Carolina. He had planned to look at a car with a co-worker, Robert Jason Owens, and a surveillance camera recorded the two at a convenience store at about nine. Owens said Quinn left after receiving a page. Two days later a man phoned Walmart claiming to be Quinn; the call was traced to Owens's workplace, and Owens admitted making it. Quinn's car turned up two weeks later with a live puppy inside and lipstick lips on the rear window. His body has never been found. Owens was a suspect for fifteen years. After his March 2015 arrest for the killing of Cristie and J.T. Codd, he told his lawyers and detectives that a family member, his uncle, had killed Quinn; searches found no remains. A grand jury indicted him for first-degree murder in July 2017. On July 25, 2022, he pleaded guilty not to murder but to accessory after the fact of first-degree murder, and was sentenced to 150 to 189 months, to run at the same time as his sentence in the Codd case. Prosecutors said they were skeptical that he was not the killer. The district attorney said the plea legally establishes that Quinn was murdered.