Cases solved by new evidence / re-investigation
A cold-case re-investigation that surfaced new, non-DNA evidence — re-examined forensics, rediscovered records, or document analysis — closed these cases.
19 documented cases.
Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley
On Sunday morning, September 15, 1963, a dynamite bomb planted beneath the stairs of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, exploded as the congregation gathered for Youth Sunday. Four girls getting ready for the service in the basement were killed: Denise McNair, 11, and Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley, all 14. Addie Mae's younger sister lost an eye, and more than twenty others were hurt. Robert Chambliss, a known Klansman, was charged that fall but cleared of murder and fined over the dynamite. In 1965 the FBI formally named Chambliss, Thomas Blanton Jr., Bobby Frank Cherry and Herman Frank Cash as the bombers, but J. Edgar Hoover blocked prosecution and the file was closed in 1968. Alabama's attorney general, Bill Baxley, pried loose part of the FBI's evidence in the 1970s, found Chambliss's niece as a witness, and in 1977 won a conviction and life sentence for the murder of Denise McNair. Chambliss died in prison in 1985; Cash died uncharged in 1994. After a 1993 meeting between FBI officials and Birmingham's Black ministers, the Bureau reopened the case. Agent William Fleming found a box of 1960s surveillance tapes in the Birmingham office, including a 1964 kitchen recording of Blanton telling his wife about the meeting where they planned the bomb, and investigators found relatives and acquaintances who said Cherry had boasted of lighting the fuse. Both men were indicted in 2000. Blanton was convicted of four counts of murder in May 2001 and Cherry in May 2002; each received life, and each died in prison.
Barbara Lealyn Lenz
Barbara Lealyn Lenz, a 31-year-old woman, vanished from her apartment in Woodbine, Iowa, on May 6, 1989. Her boyfriend, Robert Davis, said he had dropped her off at home that day, and she was supposed to drive to Omaha to see her 3-year-old daughter, but she never arrived. Relatives who checked her home found her purse, keys, a half-full coffee pot still switched on and a pile of half-folded laundry, leading investigators to conclude she had been taken against her will. Her body was never found and the case went cold for more than three decades. After Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird launched a statewide Cold Case Unit in July 2024, investigators reopened the case and built it without DNA or a recovered body, relying instead on a documented history of Davis abusing and strangling Lenz and on witnesses who said he had threatened to kill her if she left him. Davis was arrested in March 2025, and on March 31, 2026 a Pottawattamie County jury convicted him of second-degree murder. He was sentenced to 50 years in prison.
Bonnie Haim
Bonnie Haim, 23, disappeared from her family's home on the west side of Jacksonville, Florida, in January 1993. Her husband, Michael Haim, said she left late one night after an argument; her friends said she was planning to leave him and take their three-year-old son. The morning after she was last seen, her purse was found in a dumpster at a hotel near Jacksonville International Airport, and her car was later found in an airport parking lot. A child protection worker interviewed the boy the next day, and detectives said he told her that his father hurt his mother. Investigators searched the property several times but, with no body, nobody was prosecuted. On December 14, 2014, the couple's son, by then a man in his twenties who had been awarded the house in a wrongful death suit against his father, found a skull while doing work in the backyard. DNA confirmed the remains were Bonnie's, a medical examiner ruled her death a homicide by unspecified means, and a .22-caliber shell casing lay near the remains. Michael Haim, who owned a .22-caliber rifle, was arrested in Waynesville, North Carolina, on August 24, 2015. At trial in April 2019 two jailhouse informants testified that he confessed. A Duval County jury convicted him of second-degree murder on April 12, 2019, and on May 21, 2019 he was sentenced to life in prison. A state appeals court affirmed on April 30, 2021.
Carol Jenkins
Carol Jenkins was a 21-year-old Black woman from Rushville, Indiana, who was stabbed to death on the night of September 16, 1968, while selling encyclopedias door to door in the small town of Martinsville, in Morgan County, Indiana. According to investigators, two white men in a car taunted her, then chased her down a street; one man held her while the other drove a flat-blade screwdriver into her chest, piercing her heart. She collapsed on a rain-soaked sidewalk and was pronounced dead a short time later. The killing was widely regarded as racially motivated, and despite an investigation that quickly drew in the NAACP and, eventually, state police, it went unsolved for more than thirty years. The break came not from forensic technology but from a single witness who finally spoke. In November 2001, the Martinsville Police Department received an anonymous handwritten letter naming Kenneth Clay Richmond, a career criminal and Ku Klux Klan affiliate then living in an Indianapolis nursing home, and stating that his youngest daughter had witnessed the murder as a seven-year-old child. When detectives located that daughter, Shirley Richmond McQueen, she confirmed she had watched the killing from her father's car, and she recalled a detail that had never been released to the public: that Jenkins had been wearing a yellow scarf. On May 8, 2002, Richmond was arrested and charged with first-degree murder. He was later ruled incompetent to stand trial because of terminal cancer, and he died on August 31, 2002, at age 70, before he could be tried. A second man who allegedly took part in the attack has never been identified.
Carroll Bonnet
Carroll Bonnet, a 61-year-old hospital worker who lived alone in Omaha, Nebraska, was found stabbed to death in his apartment in October 1978. His killer cut the phone cord, took his wallet and his car, and left behind a taunting note. Latent fingerprints and palm prints were lifted from the scene, but in 1978 there was no way to match them to anyone, and the case went cold for three decades. When the Omaha Police cold-case unit re-examined those same prints in 2008 and ran them through the FBI's national fingerprint database, the system returned a name that had never surfaced in the original investigation: Jerry Watson, a career burglar then in an Illinois prison. The fingerprint hit, not DNA, was the break that finally put a name to the killer; physical evidence later confirmed it. Watson was convicted of first-degree murder in 2011 and sentenced to life in prison.
Christine Thornton
Christine Ruth Thornton, 28, of San Antonio, Texas, who had earlier lived in the Hancock, Michigan area, vanished in 1977. The Sweetwater County prosecutor's office said she and a boyfriend travelled to Wyoming to pan for gold, argued there and separated. In April 1982 a rancher found human remains in a remote area northeast of Granger, in rural Sweetwater County. Investigators decided the person had been the victim of a homicide, but the remains stayed unidentified for 33 years. In 2013, after Huntington Beach police released photographs found in the possession of the California serial killer Rodney Alcala, a relative who had been searching recognized her in one. That year a Sweetwater County detective also sent a tissue sample from the 1982 remains for DNA analysis and entry into a national missing-persons database, and in July 2015 her siblings' samples led to a positive identification. Detectives determined that the photograph of her was taken a short distance from where she was found, and said other evidence, which they have not described, linked Alcala to her death. On September 20, 2016 the sheriff and county attorney announced a first-degree murder charge against Alcala, then 73. Wyoming did not extradite him because of his health. He died on California's death row on July 24, 2021, and the county attorney said he would dismiss the charge. Alcala was never tried for her death.
Elizabeth 'Betty' Wolsieffer
Elizabeth 'Betty' Wolsieffer, 32, was found strangled in the bedroom of her Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania home on the morning of August 30, 1986, while her husband, dentist E. Glen Wolsieffer, lay injured downstairs claiming an intruder had broken in, killed Betty, and choked him unconscious. The case stalled for years until investigators methodically dismantled the intruder story by re-examining the physical evidence: a backwards ladder that left no marks in the ground, a window screen cut from the inside, blue denim fibers under Betty's fingernails consistent with the outfit Glen had worn that night, his own hairs torn out by the roots on the bed, and strangulation marks on Glen that were inconsistent with his account. Glen was arrested in 1989, convicted of third-degree murder by a jury in November 1990, and sentenced to eight to twenty years. He admitted responsibility before being paroled in 2005.
JoAnn Nichols
JoAnn Nichols, 55, taught first grade at Gayhead Elementary School in Hopewell Junction, New York, and lived with her husband James in the Town of Poughkeepsie. She taught her last day before the winter break on December 20, 1985. The next day she missed a hair appointment and was reported missing. James told detectives he had last seen her when he left for work that morning and had found a typed note at home; her locked car was found at a nearby shopping center on December 22. The couple's only child had drowned three years earlier, and a detective said the note showed depression but was not a suicide letter. James later said she telephoned on Christmas Eve; police could not confirm the call and said he described it to them differently. Police reviewed the file every year and said James, who let detectives into the house at first, grew guarded; he was never ruled out. He died of natural causes in the house on December 27, 2012, aged 82. No relative claimed him, so Dutchess County buried him and hired a contractor to clear the house. On June 28, 2013 the contractor found a sealed plastic container behind a false wall in the basement. The medical examiner identified JoAnn by dental records: she had been struck in the head, her hands tied, her body wrapped in a sheet and plastic. Police reopened the case and said it was now safe to call James Nichols a suspect. He was never charged, because he was already dead.
John Curtis Patterson
John Curtis Patterson, a 20-year-old gas station clerk, was found fatally stabbed in the chest in the restroom of the Cascade Service Station on North Broadway in Boulder, Colorado, on September 29, 1975. The cash register had been emptied, pointing to a robbery. A 32-year-old career criminal named Louis Jess Locicero, who was staying at a nearby motel, was arrested days later after detectives found a .30 caliber M1 carbine, a knife matching the victim's wound, fibers from Patterson's shirt and hairs matching Patterson's head in his room, yet he was released before charges were filed and the case went cold for nearly 50 years. In 2025 the Boulder County Sheriff's Office announced the case solved after modern ballistics technology and re-examined physical evidence tied Locicero to the killing; the district attorney concluded the proof established guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, but Locicero had died in 2024.
Jonelle Matthews
Jonelle Matthews, 12, sang with her Greeley middle school's honor choir at a Christmas concert on December 20, 1984, and was dropped at her home about 8 p.m. by a friend and the friend's father. When her father got home about an hour and a half later the front door was open, her shoes were by a chair and her stockings on the couch, and there was no sign of a struggle. President Reagan spoke of her the following spring and her face went onto milk cartons; nobody was ever arrested. On July 23, 2019, a crew digging an oil pipeline in rural Weld County turned up human remains that dental records identified as Jonelle. She had been shot in the head. Within weeks Greeley police travelled to Idaho to see Steve Pankey, a former neighbor from her family's church who had talked about the case to courts and police for years, had once asked for immunity, and knew that a rake had been used to wipe out footprints in the snow, a detail police had never released. His former wife told a grand jury he had taken her on an unexpected trip to California two days after Jonelle vanished and dug in the yard when they got home. He was indicted in October 2020. A first trial ended in a hung jury in November 2021, with a conviction only for false reporting. On October 31, 2022, a second Weld County jury convicted him of felony murder and second-degree kidnapping, and he was sentenced the same day to life with parole possible after 20 years.
Joseph Otero, Julie Otero, Josephine Otero, Joseph Otero II, Kathryn Bright, Shirley Vian, Nancy Fox, Marine Hedge, Vicki Wegerle and Dolores Davis
Between January 1974 and January 1991 a killer who called himself BTK, for bind, torture, kill, murdered ten people in and around Wichita, Kansas: Joseph and Julie Otero and their children Josephine, 11, and Joseph II, 9, in January 1974; Kathryn Bright, 21, that April; Shirley Vian, 24, in March 1977; Nancy Fox, 25, that December; Marine Hedge, 53, in 1985; Vicki Wegerle, 28, in 1986; and Dolores Davis, 62, in 1991. He wrote to police and the press from 1977 to 1979, then fell silent for 25 years, until a letter to The Wichita Eagle in March 2004 enclosed a photocopy of Wegerle’s driver’s license and photographs. A task force led by Wichita Police Lt. Ken Landwehr kept him writing. In early 2005, after police answered his question about floppy disks with a newspaper ad, a diskette he mailed to a television station was traced, through the file’s properties, to Christ Lutheran Church and a user named Dennis. A web search found Dennis Rader, the church council president and a Park City compliance officer. A DNA sample from his daughter then matched the crime scenes. Rader, 59, was arrested on February 25, 2005, confessed, pleaded guilty on June 27 to ten counts of first-degree murder, and on August 18, 2005 was sentenced to ten consecutive life terms, a minimum of 175 years.
Loretta Jones
Loretta Jones, a 23-year-old mother, was stabbed to death in her home in Price, Utah, in July 1970, and her body was found the next morning by her 4-year-old daughter, Heidi. She had been sexually assaulted and stabbed seventeen times. Police quickly focused on Thomas Edward Egley, a man Loretta had briefly dated, but a judge dismissed the murder charge in November 1970 for lack of evidence, and Egley moved to Colorado. The case sat cold for nearly four decades, and much of the original physical evidence, including a swab that might have yielded usable DNA, was lost over the years. The case was not reopened until 2009, when the victim's grown daughter asked a high-school acquaintance who had become a Carbon County sheriff's sergeant, David Brewer, to look again. Brewer rebuilt the case without DNA: he re-examined the single surviving crime-scene photograph and made out the letters T and O that Loretta had written in her own blood, he tracked old witnesses across the country, and he finally obtained a recorded confession from Egley with the help of one of Egley's own neighbors. Egley pleaded guilty to murder in 2016 and was sentenced to ten years to life.
Maryann Bagenstose
Maryann Bagenstose, a 25-year-old nurse's aide, vanished on June 5, 1984 from the home she shared with her 2-year-old son on West Willow Road in Pequea Township, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, while separated from her husband Jere Bagenstose. Her body was never found. During the original 1984 investigation, police discovered a crumpled note inside a wooden nail keg in the living room reading 'Had to run a quick errand, be right back,' which Jere claimed Maryann had written before walking to a nearby convenience store. Days into the search, officers found a piece of cardboard covering freshly dug earth in the garage; a search warrant revealed a grave-shaped hole roughly 3 feet by 6 feet and about 5 feet deep, but no body. No charges were filed for decades. The Pennsylvania State Police reopened the case in the late 2010s and focused on the note. Investigators gathered samples of Jere Bagenstose's handwriting, including items seized in a September 20, 2022 search warrant, and the Pennsylvania State Police Bureau of Forensic Services compared them to the 1984 note, concluding the note recovered in 1984 had been written by Jere Bagenstose, not by Maryann. He was charged with criminal homicide on December 22, 2022. On April 8, 2025, a Lancaster County jury convicted him of voluntary manslaughter while acquitting him of first- and third-degree murder, in only the second no-body homicide ever tried in the county. He was sentenced on June 17, 2025 to four to ten years in prison. District Attorney Heather Adams stated plainly that the case was not solved with DNA, but through decades of investigative work culminating in the handwriting analysis of the planted note.
Medgar Evers
Medgar Evers, 37, the NAACP's first field secretary in Mississippi, was shot in the back in the driveway of his Jackson home shortly after midnight on June 12, 1963, hours after President Kennedy's televised civil rights address. He had stepped out of his car carrying an armload of T-shirts; a sniper hidden in the honeysuckle of a vacant lot across the street fired a single rifle shot, and he died about fifteen minutes after reaching the hospital. Police found a .30-06 Enfield rifle in bushes near a drive-in lot, and an FBI examiner matched a fingerprint on its scope to Byron De La Beckwith, a fertilizer salesman and White Citizens' Council member from Greenwood, who was charged on June 21. Two trials in 1964 ended in hung juries of white men, and in 1969 the indictment was dismissed. In October 1989 The Clarion-Ledger reported that the state's secret Sovereignty Commission had helped Beckwith's defense screen prospective jurors; his widow called for a new prosecution the next day. Hinds County prosecutors rebuilt the case without the original file, found crime-scene negatives and witnesses who said Beckwith had bragged about the killing, and in December 1990 a grand jury re-indicted him. A jury of eight Black and four white Mississippians convicted him on February 5, 1994, in the courtroom where he had been tried thirty years earlier. He was sentenced to life, the conviction was affirmed in 1997, and he died in custody on January 21, 2001, aged 80.
Natalie Scheublin
Natalie Scheublin, a 54-year-old wife, mother of two, and cancer survivor, was found bound, gagged, beaten, and stabbed to death in the basement of her Bedford, Massachusetts home on June 10, 1971. Her husband, Lexington Trust Bank president Raymond Scheublin, discovered her body. A set of bank keys was missing and the couple's 1969 Chevrolet Impala had been taken and abandoned at a nearby Veterans Administration hospital lot. The case went unsolved for decades. In 1999, Massachusetts State Police ran latent prints lifted from the Impala through the FBI fingerprint database and matched a print on the car to Arthur L. Massei. Massei was not arrested until a revived cold case investigation built the rest of the case around that print, including a witness to whom he had bragged about a knife killing. He was convicted of first-degree murder in 2024 and sentenced to life without parole.
Reyna Angélica Marroquín
Reyna Angélica Marroquín, a 27-year-old immigrant from El Salvador, vanished from her New Jersey apartment in early 1969. She had been working at Melrose Plastics, a Manhattan artificial-flower company, and was pregnant by her married boss, according to a friend who spoke to CBS. On September 2, 1999, a man moving out of a house in Jericho, Long Island, pried open a steel drum from the crawl space and found a mummified, nine-months-pregnant woman who had died of a blow to the head. Detectives dried a decayed address book, read a name under a video spectral comparator, and identified her. A plastic flower stem in the drum and the drum's origin led to Melrose Plastics and to Howard Elkins, who in 1969 owned the factory and the Jericho house. Detectives questioned Elkins in Boca Raton, Florida. He said he could not recall the employee he admitted an affair with and refused a DNA swab, and about a day later he shot himself. Elkins was never charged. DNA from his autopsy was reported to show a 99.93 percent probability that he fathered the baby, and in March 2000 a detective said the case was closed. Marroquín's body was returned to El Salvador for burial.
Ricky Ridings
Ricky Ridings, a 27-year-old man from St. Peters, Missouri, was reported missing on June 30, 1981, and was found dead on July 8, 1981 inside a vehicle parked alongside Little Tavern Creek outside Portland, in Callaway County, killed by a shotgun wound to the head. The case stayed cold for 36 years. The break did not come from DNA: in June 2017, Conrad Schmitt III, who was already serving a life sentence for an unrelated 1998 first-degree murder, was overheard on a recorded prison phone call admitting his involvement in the killing. Investigators reopened the file, exhumed Ridings' body in 2018 to reevaluate the evidence, and interviewed further witnesses. A Callaway County grand jury indicted Schmitt for capital murder in May 2018, and in 2023 he pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to an additional 10 years.
Sheila Mary Lyon and Katherine Mary Lyon
Sheila Lyon, 12, and her sister Katherine Lyon, 10, vanished on March 25, 1975 after walking to the Wheaton Plaza shopping center in Wheaton, Montgomery County, Maryland, during their Easter school break. Their disappearance triggered one of the largest investigations in Washington-area history, but the case went cold for nearly four decades. The break came not from DNA but from a Montgomery County cold-case squad re-examining the original paper file: Detective Chris Homrock matched a 1977 burglary mugshot of a drifter named Lloyd Lee Welch to a 1975 composite sketch and rediscovered a six-page 1975 statement Welch had given that detectives had dismissed as a lie. Re-interviews of Welch beginning in 2013, family-witness testimony, 1970s eyewitness accounts, and physical evidence from the family property at Taylors Mountain in Bedford County, Virginia, built the case. Welch pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree felony murder on September 12, 2017 and was sentenced to 48 years; the girls' bodies have never been recovered.
Susan Berman
Susan Berman, 55, a writer and the daughter of a Las Vegas mob figure, was found on Christmas Eve 2000 on the floor of her home in Benedict Canyon, Los Angeles, shot once in the back of the head. Police had been sent there by an anonymous note, in block capitals and misaddressed to the "Beverley Hills" police, giving her address and the word "cadaver." Berman was a close friend of the New York real estate heir Robert Durst, had acted as his spokeswoman after his wife Kathie vanished in 1982, and had recently received $50,000 from him as New York investigators reopened the Kathie case and prepared to talk to her. Durst was a suspect but was never placed at the scene, and the case went cold for fourteen years. In 2015 the HBO series "The Jinx" showed a 1999 letter from Durst to Berman, found by her stepson, in the same block lettering with the same misspelling, and ended with Durst muttering into a live microphone that he had "killed them all." Los Angeles prosecutors reopened the case and Durst was arrested in New Orleans on March 14, 2015. A longtime friend of both testified that Durst had told him over dinner in 2014, "It was her or me. I had no choice." At trial Durst admitted writing the note. A jury convicted him of first-degree murder on September 17, 2021; he was sentenced to life without parole, charged in New York with Kathie's murder weeks later, and died in custody on January 10, 2022. Because his appeal was pending, the conviction was abated.