Cases solved by informant
A criminal informant or an accomplice who turned — giving up the killer from the inside — solved these cases.
10 documented cases.
Charles Eddie Moore
Charles Eddie Moore was a 19-year-old Black man who, along with his 19-year-old friend Henry Hezekiah Dee, was abducted on May 2, 1964, near Meadville in Franklin County, Mississippi, beaten in the Homochitto National Forest, and then drowned alive in the Mississippi River by members of the Ku Klux Klan. Moore, a college student who had been suspended from Alcorn A&M and returned home, and Dee were hitchhiking when James Ford Seale, a Klansman posing as a federal revenue agent investigating moonshine, lured them into his car. Klansmen took the two young men into the forest, tied them to a tree, and beat them with bean sticks while interrogating them under the false belief that Black residents were stockpiling weapons for an uprising. The barely conscious teenagers were then bound to a Jeep engine block and lengths of railroad rail with chains, driven across the state line through Louisiana to a remote landing on the Mississippi River, and thrown into the water while still alive. Their partial remains were found that summer during an unrelated search for three missing civil rights workers in the Mississippi Burning case. Seale and fellow Klansman Charles Marcus Edwards were arrested by the FBI in November 1964, but state charges were dropped in January 1965 and no one was prosecuted. The case stayed cold for more than forty years. It was solved not by forensic science but by Edwards himself: decades later, the co-conspirator was granted immunity and agreed to testify against Seale, providing the inside account that finally convicted him. On June 14, 2007, a federal jury found Seale guilty of two counts of kidnapping and one count of conspiracy. He was sentenced on August 24, 2007, to three life terms, and he died in federal prison in 2011.
Debra A. Stone
Debra A. Stone, a 24-year-old Cranston woman, was strangled in a Johnston, Rhode Island apartment on the night of August 29, 1984, after taking a cab to the home of feared drug dealer Robert D. Geremia to buy narcotics. Her body was found on September 2, 1984, by teenagers boating on the Narrow River in Narragansett, wrapped in a floral sleeping bag, bound with clothesline, and weighted with a cinderblock. The case turned almost entirely on a criminal informant, a drug associate of Geremia who said he was summoned to help dispose of the body and who described details that matched the scene exactly. In the 1980s the informant failed a polygraph and the prosecution balked, and Geremia died of natural causes in 1995 before he was ever charged. In 2025, after the Rhode Island Attorney General's Cold Case Unit re-interviewed the informant and 31 other witnesses over eleven months, the office concluded the evidence proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Geremia murdered Stone and formally identified him as the killer.
Kimberly Fulton
Kimberly Fulton, 28, and her 17-month-old son Daniel were found dead in a burned-out mobile home in Palmer Township, Washington County, Ohio, on March 5, 1995. Investigators determined the pair had died before the fire was set; neither had carbon monoxide in their lungs, and gasoline was later identified on Kimberly's clothing, indicating the blaze was staged to conceal the killings. The case went cold for nearly a quarter century. Scott Hickman, a friend of Kimberly's estranged boyfriend, had been arrested in 1998 but released after roughly three weeks for lack of evidence. When the Washington County Sheriff's Office cold case unit and Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation reopened the file in 2019, the breakthrough came not from forensics alone but from people Hickman had talked to over the years -- jailhouse inmates he had confided in and a former girlfriend who said he detailed the murders to her. Hickman was indicted in October 2021, and after a two-week trial he was convicted in August 2025 on four counts of aggravated murder and two counts of murder. He was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole after 20 years.
Lita LaVaughn McClinton Sullivan
Lita McClinton Sullivan, 35, was shot to death at the door of her Buckhead townhouse in Atlanta, Georgia on January 16, 1987 by a man posing as a flower deliveryman, on the morning a hearing in her contentious divorce from millionaire James Vincent Sullivan was set to begin. Investigators long suspected Sullivan had hired the killing, but a 1992 federal murder-for-hire trial ended in a directed acquittal. The case broke only in 1997-1998 when the criminal accomplice was identified and flipped: truck driver Phillip Anthony Harwood, the man who had taken Sullivan's money, pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter for a 20-year sentence in exchange for testifying against Sullivan. Sullivan fled the country in 1998, was captured in Thailand in 2002, extradited in 2004, and convicted of malice murder in March 2006 and sentenced to life without parole.
Mack Lavell Proctor
On May 17, 1972, a fisherman found a decomposed body in a marshy field near the canal between Lake Lulu and Lake Shipp in the Eloise area of Polk County, Florida, southeast of the US 17 overpass. The man had been shot twice in the left side of the head with a small-caliber pistol and robbed of his wallet and identification. With no leads, he was buried as a John Doe and the case went cold for more than five decades. The break in identifying the killers had actually come less than two years after the murder: in January 1974, a Florida State Prison inmate named Charles Williams told investigators that a fellow prisoner, Clarence Ingram, had confided that he and a friend named Edgar Todd murdered a man they met at a Winter Haven bar in 1972, shooting him during an argument in the victim's car and then selling his tools and vehicle. That account named the killers but was not enough to identify the victim or to bring charges at the time. In 2017 the body was exhumed for DNA, and in 2023 the Polk County Sheriff's Office Cold Case Unit submitted bone evidence to the forensic genetic-genealogy lab Othram. In May 2024, DNA from the victim's son confirmed the John Doe was Mack Lavell Proctor, a 57-year-old master mechanic from Ellijay, Georgia. With the victim finally named, detectives matched the 1974 informant's decades-old statement to the case and publicly identified Edgar Todd and Clarence Ingram as the men responsible. Both had long since died, so neither could be prosecuted.
Mary Kay Heese
Mary Kay Heese was a 17-year-old high school junior in Wahoo, the seat of Saunders County, Nebraska. On March 25, 1969, she failed to return home, and the following morning her body was found along a rural country road outside town; she had been stabbed at least a dozen times and showed signs of having fought back, and footprints at the scene suggested she had been chased after getting out of a vehicle. A witness reported seeing Mary Kay around 5 p.m. that afternoon getting into a car carrying two men. The case went unsolved for more than fifty years. From the beginning, two young men kept recurring in the old files: Joseph Ambroz, then 22, a slaughterhouse worker who was on parole for forgery and for escaping custody, and Wayne Greaser, who died by suicide in 1977 and was later named as Ambroz's co-conspirator. The break, when it finally came, did not come from forensic science; DNA testing in fact did not connect Ambroz to the evidence. Instead, a Saunders County investigator named Ted Green reopened the case in the mid-2010s, gathered scattered reports that different agencies had never shared with one another, and located cooperating witnesses from Ambroz's own circle. In November 2024 a Saunders County grand jury indicted Ambroz, by then 77 and living in Oklahoma, for first-degree murder; the indictment followed testimony from a key witness who said a third party had told them they were with Ambroz at the killing, and prosecutors said Ambroz's ex-wife testified under immunity that she had been with him during Heese's murder. Ambroz was arrested in Ponca City, Oklahoma, and extradited to Nebraska. On July 31, 2025, he pleaded no contest to conspiracy to commit first-degree murder; under the 1969 statute that applied to the crime, the maximum penalty was two years. He was sentenced on August 27, 2025, and released from prison on November 15, 2025, having maintained his innocence throughout.
Sabrina Underwood
Sabrina Lynn Underwood was a 19-year-old woman from Huntsville, Arkansas, who vanished on January 20, 1991. Her mother dropped her off near Bear Creek in Boone County, where Sabrina planned to hitchhike roughly 70 miles east to Calico Rock to visit an inmate at the North Central Unit prison. She never arrived. When the man she planned to visit called asking why she had missed the visit, her family reported her missing. Three months later, on April 8, 1991, two turkey hunters discovered a bundle of clothing and human remains near the Gum Springs Cemetery in Fulton County, about 140 miles away. The Arkansas Medical Examiner identified the remains as Underwood, but the cause of death was initially ruled undetermined, and the case went cold for more than three decades. It was solved not by forensic science but by a criminal informant: in July 2022, a fellow inmate at the Varner Maximum Security Unit, where Rick Allen Headley was serving a life sentence for murdering his estranged wife, told Arkansas State Police that Headley had confessed to killing Underwood in a written letter. Investigators interviewed Headley on August 24, 2022, and he admitted to writing the confession letter and described in detail how he picked Sabrina up while hitchhiking, stabbed her, hid her body, and disposed of the knife and his clothes. A second person also told investigators that Headley had confessed to get the killing off his chest. Headley was charged with first-degree murder on October 17, 2023, and on December 11, 2023, he pleaded guilty in Fulton County Circuit Court and was sentenced to 40 years in the Arkansas Department of Corrections.
Susan Schwarz
Susan Schwarz, a 24-year-old woman, was found bound and shot to death in her home in the Alderwood Manor area near Lynnwood, Washington, on October 22, 1979. She had been a high-school friend of Gregory Johnson's estranged wife and had helped that friend escape an abusive marriage, and prosecutors concluded Johnson killed her in revenge. The case went cold for more than three decades. The break came not from forensics but from a criminal informant: in 2010 a prison inmate saw Schwarz featured as the queen of hearts in a deck of cold-case playing cards the Snohomish County Sheriff's Office had distributed to inmates, recognized the case, and told detectives that Johnson had admitted to him that he had killed her. That tip led investigators to a woman who had been Johnson's teenage girlfriend in 1979 and who, breaking decades of fear-driven silence, told them she had been present when Johnson killed Schwarz. Johnson was arrested in 2011, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in January 2012, and was sentenced in March 2012 to a minimum of 24 years in prison.
Timothy Coggins
Timothy Coggins was a 23-year-old Black man who was abducted and brutally murdered in October 1983 near Sunny Side in Spalding County, Georgia, in a racially motivated killing. Prosecutors said Coggins was targeted by two white men, Franklin George 'Frankie' Gebhardt and his brother-in-law William 'Bill' Moore Sr., because he had been socializing with a white woman, a transgression the men viewed as a violation of the rigid racial order they wanted to enforce. Coggins was stabbed more than thirty times, his lungs were punctured, he was mutilated, and his body was tied with a logging chain to the back of a truck and dragged across a field off a rural road. His body was found on October 9, 1983, near a power line in Sunny Side, a small community south of Atlanta. The original investigation stalled within weeks, in part because those involved intimidated potential witnesses and because, as later evidence showed, the local sheriff's office of that era had ties to the Ku Klux Klan. The case stayed cold for more than three decades. It was solved not by DNA or forensic science but by criminal informants: while serving prison time on other charges, Gebhardt repeatedly bragged to fellow inmates and associates that he had killed a Black man, and roughly half a dozen of those men, including a former cellmate and one informant who wore a recording device while in a cell with Gebhardt, eventually came forward and testified. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the Spalding County Sheriff's Office reopened the case in December 2016, made arrests in October 2017, and on June 26, 2018, a jury convicted Gebhardt of malice murder and other counts. He was sentenced to life in prison plus 30 years. Moore pleaded guilty in August 2018 to voluntary manslaughter and concealing a death and was sentenced to 20 years; Moore died in prison in 2021.
Vincent Vehar
Evanston, Wyoming attorney Vincent Vehar, 67, his wife Beverly, 51, and their son John, 18, were killed when a dynamite bomb planted in the crawlspace of their home detonated before dawn on August 7, 1977. Another son, Tony, survived. The bombing grew out of a years-long feud between attorney Vehar and Mark Allen Hopkinson, a former federal drug convict who had lost legal disputes in which Vehar represented his adversaries. The case broke when Michael Hickey, the man Hopkinson had hired to plant the bomb, confessed before a Uinta County grand jury and turned state's evidence against Hopkinson in exchange for a plea deal, after a second witness, Jeff Green, who had also implicated Hopkinson, was tortured and murdered days before he was to testify. Hopkinson was convicted of four counts of first-degree murder in September 1979, received three life terms for the Vehars and the death penalty for Green's killing, and was executed in 1992 in Wyoming's only modern execution.