Cases solved by informant
A criminal informant or an accomplice who turned — giving up the killer from the inside — solved these cases.
21 documented cases.
April Kauffman
April Kauffman, 47, a veterans' advocate who co-hosted a weekly radio talk show and owned a catering business and a hair salon, was found shot in a bedroom of her home on Woodstock Drive in Linwood, Atlantic County, New Jersey, on the morning of Thursday, May 10, 2012. A person who came to feed the couple's pet birds found her. For more than five years nobody was arrested. In June 2017 her husband, Dr. James Kauffman, was jailed on weapons charges after displaying a gun when investigators arrived at his Egg Harbor Township medical practice with search warrants. On January 9, 2018, Atlantic County Prosecutor Damon Tyner announced murder and racketeering charges against him and against Ferdinand Augello, a member of the Pagans Motorcycle Club. Prosecutors said April had threatened to divorce her husband and expose a prescription-drug operation the two men ran, and that a hitman, Francis Mulholland, who died of a heroin overdose in 2013, shot her twice and was paid at least $20,000. Dr. Kauffman was found dead in a Hudson County jail cell on January 26, 2018, in an apparent suicide, before any trial. A jury convicted Augello on October 2, 2018, after two hours of deliberation, and he was sentenced to life in prison plus 30 years. He denies involvement.
Carol Ann Dougherty
On the afternoon of Monday, October 22, 1962, nine-year-old Carol Ann Dougherty, a fifth-grader at St. Mark Catholic School in Bristol, Pennsylvania, rode her bicycle toward the library and stopped at St. Mark Roman Catholic Church. Her father found her there, in the choir loft area, when she had not come home by half past four. Investigators determined she had been raped and strangled. Bristol police and the Pennsylvania State Police found hairs in her hand and pursued several suspects, among them a handyman whose confession was later admitted to be coerced. A neighbor's tip in January 1963 led to William Schrader, a local factory worker, whose alibi was contradicted by his time card. He left Pennsylvania soon after. A 1992 newspaper series prompted a reinvestigation, and in 1994 Schrader, extradited from the South, invoked the Fifth Amendment before a grand jury. He died in 2002. In November 2024 Bucks County investigators and State Police interviewed Schrader's stepson, who described two confessions he had earlier reported to Louisiana authorities. On October 29, 2025, District Attorney Jennifer Schorn announced that a grand jury had concluded Schrader alone was responsible. He was never charged.
Charles Eddie Moore
Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee, both 19, were hitchhiking at the edge of Meadville, Mississippi, on May 2, 1964, when Klansman James Ford Seale, posing as a federal revenue agent, drove them into the Homochitto National Forest. Klansmen beat them with bean poles while interrogating them about imaginary guns, then drove them, still alive, across the river into Louisiana, chained them to a Jeep engine block and railroad iron, and pushed them into the Mississippi from a boat. Their bodies surfaced in July 1964 during the search for the three civil rights workers of the Mississippi Burning case. Seale and a second Klansman were arrested that November and released; a justice of the peace dismissed the charges. Decades later the case was widely reported as closed because Seale was dead. In July 2005 Charles's older brother, working with a Canadian documentary filmmaker, found Seale alive near Meadville and took the evidence to U.S. Attorney Dunn Lampton. Indicted for federal kidnapping in January 2007, Seale was convicted on June 14, 2007, on the testimony of the second Klansman, who was granted immunity, and sentenced to three life terms. He died in prison in 2011.
Cora Ann Okonski
Cora Ann Okonski, 23, a waitress and mother of a two-year-old, vanished from her home in Tama, Iowa on Palm Sunday, April 16, 2000. Her fiancé, Tait Purk, told Tama police she had walked out to buy cigarettes and never came back. Her body has never been found. A 2003 search of a farm and salvage yard turned up only animal bones, and the case stalled for more than a decade while Purk served a federal drug and weapons sentence. In March 2015 the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation reopened it, interviewed witnesses around the country, and in November 2016 declared it a homicide. A grand jury indicted Purk for first-degree murder on December 9, 2016. At trial in May 2017, a fellow inmate testified that Purk had described killing Cora and burying her in a state park, and a jury convicted Purk of first-degree murder. A judge threw out that verdict in August 2017 for lack of evidence. At a retrial before a judge alone, Purk was found guilty of second-degree murder on December 8, 2017, and on February 1, 2018 he was sentenced to the mandatory 50 years. He denies the killing.
Deborah Elaine Deans
Deborah Elaine Deans, a 29-year-old mother of four, went missing in Spring Hope, Nash County, North Carolina, in January 2004. She had briefly lived with her former sister-in-law, Kimberly Hancock, and prosecutors later said Hancock was the last person known to have seen her. Detectives questioned Hancock in 2004, and about a year later she was arrested for cashing support checks that were addressed to Deans, but Deans stayed missing for fifteen years. In October 2019 a detailed email tip about the location of a body reached a local crime-fighting website and Facebook page, which passed it to the Nash County Sheriff's Office. On October 24, 2019 deputies with a search warrant found human remains in a shallow grave behind Hancock's home on Wiley Road, wrapped as the tipster had described. Hancock, then 49, was charged with first-degree murder after an in-depth interview. DNA from Deans's mother was used to identify the remains. In September 2022 Hancock entered Alford pleas to aiding and abetting voluntary manslaughter and to concealment of death and was sentenced to prison.
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.
Janet Couture
Janet Couture, 21, who was doing office work and some modeling, was found stabbed to death on October 13, 1973, in her Cannon Road home in East Hartford, Connecticut. Police said she was home alone when a man came in through a window. George Legere, who visited men who lived next door, was an early suspect. He told police he had been in her apartment to use the phone and denied harming her, and police said there was not enough evidence to charge him. The case stayed open for more than five decades. In 2019 a DNA sample taken from Legere in Massachusetts matched evidence in a 1984 kidnapping and rape in Avon; he was arrested in 2021 and sentenced in 2023 to 25 years. That arrest led East Hartford detectives to review older cases with similarities to Couture's. In 2025 a fellow inmate told police that Legere had admitted killing Couture and had signed a written confession in July. Legere then confessed to detectives, according to the arrest warrant affidavit, and was charged with murder on September 24, 2025. He was found unresponsive in his cell on October 3 and died early on October 4, before any trial. The cause of death was listed as pending further study.
Janet March
Janet March, a 33-year-old artist and mother of two, was last seen on August 15, 1996 at her home in the Forest Hills area of Nashville, Tennessee. That night her husband, attorney Perry March, told her parents she had left after an argument. She had arranged to see a divorce lawyer the next day. Her parents reported her missing on August 29, and her Volvo was found on September 7 at an apartment complex. When detectives came to search the house, the computer hard drive had been removed. Perry March moved the children to Chicago and then to Mexico, and for years there was no body, no blood and no charge. A grand jury secretly indicted him in December 2004. Mexico expelled him in August 2005. In jail he asked a fellow inmate to kill Janet's parents, and the inmate, working with police, recorded the plan and phone calls to Perry March's father, Arthur, in Mexico. Arthur March was confronted at an airport, charged, returned to Nashville, agreed to plead guilty and testify, and told investigators he had helped his son move and hide Janet's remains in Kentucky. A jury convicted Perry March of second-degree murder in August 2006. Her body has never been found.
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 at the door of her Buckhead townhouse in Atlanta on the morning of January 16, 1987, by a man carrying a box of roses. It was the day of a hearing in her divorce from James Vincent Sullivan, a Palm Beach millionaire who was 600 miles away at the time. Phone records tied his home to a motel where three men had stayed under false names and to a rest-stop pay phone used 40 minutes after the shooting, but nobody could prove who was on the calls. A federal murder-for-hire case ended in a directed acquittal in 1992. In 1998 a woman in Texas told police her former boyfriend, truck driver Phillip Anthony Harwood, had described the contract and she had seen Sullivan pay him. Harwood confessed, Sullivan was indicted and fled, and he was caught in Thailand in 2002 after a television appeal. Extradited in 2004, he was convicted of malice murder in March 2006 and sentenced to life without parole. Harwood pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and served 20 years.
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.
Marlene Oakes (Marlene Major)
Marlene Major, 25, of Verona in Boone County, Kentucky, disappeared on October 11, 1980. That day she had told her sister that she planned to divorce her husband, William Major, and that she had proof against him hidden away. Her diaries, which she had given to a friend, recorded that she had seen him sexually abusing their son. Major told people she had left, sold his property, and moved the children to Rhode Island. A skull found on a nearby farm in November 1981 could not be identified. Major was later imprisoned in Rhode Island for about ten years for abusing his children. In 1996, held in Boone County on a Kentucky detainer, he telephoned his father and said he had killed Marlene. Detectives learned of the call in early 2001 and had the father tape a second call. A 2001 mitochondrial DNA test showed the skull belonged to a maternal relative of her daughter. Major was charged in July 2001, arrested in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, and told Kentucky detectives that he shot her during an argument in her car. A jury convicted him of murder and tampering with physical evidence in August 2003. The Kentucky Supreme Court reversed in 2005. After a second trial he was convicted again, and the verdict was affirmed in 2009. He died in October 2017.
Marlys Wohlenhaus
Marlys Wohlenhaus, 18, who worked at the restaurant in Afton, Minnesota, was found by her mother at about 3:30 p.m. on May 8, 1979 in a downstairs room of the family home, beaten about the head; a neighbor had seen a car fishtail out of the driveway fifteen minutes earlier. She died in hospital without regaining consciousness. The night before, a friend said, a man had unsettled her at the restaurant and followed the two women on a motorcycle. The Washington County sheriff looked at several suspects and charged no one. One man checked and cleared was Joseph Ture Jr., a drifter believed to have been at work at the Ford plant in St. Paul that afternoon. In 1981, while jailed for the murder of waitress Diane Edwards, Ture told a county attorney's office employee that he had killed Marlys with a hatchet after she refused him, and had a fellow inmate write out a confession that he signed. Nothing happened until BCA cold case agent Everett Doolittle reopened the file in the early 1990s and found that the Ford alibi belonged to Ture's father, who had the same name. A 1996 broadcast of 48 Hours brought forward dozens of women who said Ture had attacked them, and the 1981 witness called Doolittle. Ture was indicted in 1996 and, after a 1998 trial in which five more former inmates described his admissions, convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life, consecutive to his existing term. In 2000 he was convicted of the 1978 Huling family murders. The Minnesota Supreme Court affirmed the Wohlenhaus conviction in 2004. He maintains his innocence.
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.
Rayna Rison
Rayna Rison, 16, worked after school as the kennel girl at the Pine Lake Veterinary Hospital in La Porte, Indiana. She disappeared on March 26, 1993, after her shift. Her car was found that evening beside a road with its hood up, and a ring inside was later identified as belonging to Jason Tibbs, a friend who had dated her briefly in middle school or junior high. Her body was found in a pond off Range Road on April 27, and a forensic pathologist concluded that she died of strangulation. Her brother-in-law, who had pleaded guilty to molesting her, was indicted for her murder, but the State later dismissed the charge, and the case stayed unsolved for fifteen years. In March 2008 a man serving a sentence for an unrelated murder told police that, at age 14, he had seen a body in the trunk of a car in his parents' pole barn on the night she vanished. His account led investigators to the car's driver, a friend of Tibbs, who was granted immunity. Tibbs was arrested on August 23, 2013, at age 38. After a trial of about two weeks and nearly 25 witnesses, a jury convicted him of murder on November 7, 2014, and he was sentenced to forty years. State appeals courts affirmed, and a federal judge denied habeas relief on June 1, 2023.
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.
Shannon Melendi
Shannon Melendi, a 19-year-old Emory University sophomore from Miami, disappeared on March 26, 1994, during a lunch break from her part-time job keeping score at the Softball Country Club on North Decatur Road in DeKalb County, Georgia. Her car was found at the gas station across the street, unlocked, with the keys in the ignition. A caller claiming to hold her led police to a pay phone where her ring was found, wrapped in a bag and tape. Suspicion fell at once on Colvin Hinton, known as Butch, the umpire of her last game, a Delta Air Lines maintenance worker with earlier convictions for attacks on women, who had left the club within minutes of her. Police searched his Clayton County home and found pits in the yard but no trace of her; six months later his house burned, and he went to federal prison for arson. There he talked to fellow inmates, one of whom said Hinton woke screaming and told him a demon inside him had killed her. After the DeKalb County district attorney's office took over the file, a grand jury indicted him and he was arrested on August 30, 2004. With no body and no crime scene, a jury convicted him of malice murder on September 19, 2005, and he was sentenced to life. The Georgia Supreme Court affirmed on June 12, 2006, and on July 17, 2006, Hinton confessed to kidnapping Shannon at knifepoint, raping and strangling her, and burning her body in his back yard. Her remains have never been found.
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
Vincent Vehar, 67, an Evanston, Wyoming lawyer, his wife Beverly, 51, and their son John, 18, were killed at about 3:35 a.m. on August 7, 1977, when thirty sticks of dynamite thrown through a basement window destroyed their home. Their older son survived. Vehar was suing Mark Hopkinson, a trailer-park developer, on behalf of a sewer district over unpaid hookup fees and threats, and was due to depose him two days later. The case broke in 1978 and 1979 when two young men in Hopkinson's circle talked: Jeff Green, a carpenter who testified that Hopkinson had tried to hire a killer for Vehar, and Mike Hickey, who confessed to a grand jury that he had thrown the bomb on Hopkinson's orders. Green was tortured and shot in May 1979, two days before the grand jury opened, while Hopkinson was in a federal prison in California; prosecutors proved through telephone records and money transfers that he had arranged it. In September 1979 a jury in Jackson convicted Hopkinson of all four murders. He received three life terms for the Vehars and death for Green, and was executed on January 22, 1992, Wyoming's first execution since 1965 and still its last. Nobody has been charged with killing Green.
William Ercanbrack
William Ercanbrack, 47, a well-known rancher in Summit County, Utah, was shot in the back on Thursday, October 28, 1976, as he opened the gate to his ranch in Clarks Canyon, about seven miles east of Coalville. The sheriff's office said the shot came from about 300 feet away, fired from a high-powered, small-caliber rifle by someone who had waited along a fence line. Some investigators first thought it was a hunting accident during deer season, but that idea was ruled out. Nobody was arrested, and the case stayed open for more than 30 years. In November 2010 the sheriff's office publicly appealed for information. In early 2015 the Summit County Sheriff's Cold Case Team obtained information from what it called a reliable source, who was granted anonymity. On July 28, 2015, the sheriff's and county attorney's offices announced that the evidence would now be enough to charge George B. Toone, of San Bernardino, California, but that he had died of natural causes on September 11, 2001. Investigators said the motive was a land dispute. In May 2022 Salt Lake City police said that fingerprints from a 1974 Salt Lake City murder also matched Toone.