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.
10 documented cases.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.