Cases solved by cold-case re-investigation
A fresh look at the file — re-examined evidence and renewed legwork — finally closed these cases.
15 documented cases.
Adam Walsh
Adam Walsh, six, disappeared on July 27, 1981 from the toy department of the Sears store at the Hollywood Mall in Hollywood, Florida, where his mother had left him for a few minutes watching older boys play video games. A teenage security guard had told the older boys to leave, and investigators believe Adam followed them out and was taken outside the store. On August 10, 1981, two fishermen found his severed head in a drainage canal beside the Florida Turnpike more than a hundred miles north; dental records confirmed the identification and the rest of his body has never been found. In October 1983 Ottis Toole, a Jacksonville drifter already jailed for murder, confessed to abducting and killing Adam, then recanted, then confessed again, two dozen documented times in all. Blood was found in his Cadillac and on a machete, but it could not be typed in 1983, and by 1995, when DNA testing was possible, Hollywood police had lost both the bloodstained carpet and the car. Toole was never charged with Adam's murder and died in prison on September 15, 1996, serving life sentences for other killings. After a fresh review ordered by a new chief, Chadwick Wagner, the Hollywood Police Department announced on December 16, 2008 that Toole had abducted and murdered Adam, closed the case, and apologized to his family for its mistakes. The case reshaped how America searches for missing children.
Ben Chester White
Ben Chester White, a 67-year-old Black Baptist deacon who had worked all his life on a white family's farm outside Natchez, Mississippi, was killed on June 10, 1966, in the Homochitto National Forest in Adams County. Three men tied to the Ku Klux Klan, Claude Fuller, James Jones and Ernest Avants, had asked him to help find a lost dog. The Justice Department later said the plan was to lure Martin Luther King Jr. to the area by killing a Black man. Jones named all three in statements to state officers. Avants was acquitted at a state trial in December 1967, Jones's trial ended in a hung jury, and Fuller was never tried. Federal officials considered a civil rights charge in 1970 and did not bring one. In 1999 a national news program gave them a videotape of a recent interview with Avants, and they realized the killing had happened on federal land. Avants was indicted in June 2000 for aiding and abetting murder on federal property. Jones and Fuller were dead by then. In February 2003 a federal jury in Jackson convicted him, on Jones's 1966 testimony read aloud and on the account of an FBI agent to whom Avants had said in 1967 that he shot White. He was sentenced to life, and the Fifth Circuit affirmed in April 2004. Avants died in prison in 2004.
Crystal Rogers
Crystal Rogers, a 35-year-old mother of five from Bardstown, Kentucky, was last seen on the evening of July 3, 2015, at the farm owned by the family of her boyfriend, Brooks Houck, where the couple had gone with their two-year-old son. Houck said she was home playing on her phone when he went to bed and gone when he woke; he did not report her missing. Her mother did, on July 5, the day her maroon Chevrolet Impala was found on the Bluegrass Parkway with a flat tire, the keys in the ignition and her purse and phone inside. The Nelson County sheriff named Houck a suspect that October and said he believed Rogers was dead; Houck's brother, a Bardstown police officer, was fired the same day for interfering. In November 2016 her father, Tommy Ballard, was shot dead while hunting; that killing is unsolved. The FBI took over in 2020, searched the farm and a subdivision Houck had built. A 13-second call to Houck at 12:07 a.m. on July 4, 2015, from an employee, Steve Lawson, and cell data placing Lawson near where the Impala was found became the spine of a circumstantial case. Houck was indicted and arrested in September 2023 with Lawson's son Joseph; Steve Lawson was charged that December. All three were convicted in Bowling Green in 2025. Houck was found guilty of murder as principal or accomplice on July 8, 2025, and sentenced to life on September 17, 2025. Rogers' body has never been found.
Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore
Harry T. Moore founded the Brevard County NAACP in 1934, became its first statewide executive secretary in Florida, organized a league that registered more than a hundred thousand Black voters, and in 1946 he and his wife Harriette lost their teaching jobs for it. On the night of December 25, 1951, their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, a dynamite bomb under the bedroom floor of their house in Mims exploded minutes after they went to bed. Harry died that night. Harriette died nine days later at the hospital in Sanford, thirty miles away, the nearest that treated Black patients. FBI informants pointed to two violent central Florida Klansmen, Earl Brooklyn and Tillman Belvin, but both died within a year, and a third Klansman, Joseph Cox, shot himself the day after his second FBI interview. The file closed in 1955. In 1978 a dying former Klan officer, Edward Spivey, told Brevard County investigators that Cox had confessed to being paid $5,000 to plant the bomb; a grand jury presentment was being prepared when the state attorney lost his seat, and the case sat untouched. Attorney General Charlie Crist reopened it in December 2004. After a twenty-month reinvestigation that interviewed more than a hundred people, excavated the bomb site and ran title searches, Crist announced on August 16, 2006, at the park on the Moores' home site, that Brooklyn, Belvin, Cox and Spivey were responsible. All four were long dead. The Justice Department closed its own file in 2011.
James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner
On June 21, 1964, during Freedom Summer, three civil rights workers went to Neshoba County, Mississippi to look at a Black church outside Philadelphia that the Klan had burned the week before. James Chaney, 21, was a Black Mississippian from Meridian; Andrew Goodman, 20, and Michael Schwerner, 24, were white New Yorkers. Leaving the site, they were stopped for speeding and held for hours in the county jail. After their release, carloads of Klansmen intercepted them on an isolated road, beat them and shot them. Their bodies were found forty-four days later under an earthen dam. Mississippi never charged anyone with murder. In 1967 federal prosecutors tried eighteen men for conspiring to violate the victims' civil rights; seven were convicted and none served more than six years. The jury deadlocked eleven to one on Edgar Ray Killen, a sawmill operator, Baptist preacher and Klan organizer whom witnesses said had gathered the mob; the holdout would not convict a preacher. Decades later new witnesses surfaced, and on January 6, 2005, a Neshoba County grand jury indicted Killen, 79, for murder. On June 21, 2005, forty-one years to the day after the killings, a jury convicted him of three counts of manslaughter, and Judge Marcus Gordon gave him the maximum, sixty years. The Mississippi Supreme Court upheld the conviction in 2007; the state closed the wider investigation in 2016. Killen died at the state penitentiary at Parchman on January 11, 2018, a week short of his 93rd birthday.
Jimmie Lee Jackson
Jimmie Lee Jackson, 26, a farmer, woodcutter and the youngest deacon in the history of St. James Baptist Church in Marion, Alabama, had tried several times to register to vote. On the night of February 18, 1965, he joined a march of more than 200 people protesting the jailing of a civil rights organizer. When Alabama state troopers broke up the march, Jackson went into Mack's Cafe with his mother and grandfather. Witnesses said he was trying to protect them when trooper James Bonard Fowler shot him in the stomach. Jackson died in a Selma hospital on February 26. His death led to the Selma-to-Montgomery marches and the Voting Rights Act. The shooter was never in doubt: Fowler said he fired in self-defense. But federal and state grand juries brought no charges, and nobody was prosecuted for more than 40 years. In an interview with the Anniston Star, Fowler publicly admitted firing the shot. In 2005 a new district attorney, Michael Jackson, reopened the case, and a Perry County grand jury indicted Fowler for murder on May 9, 2007. On November 15, 2010, two weeks before trial, Fowler pleaded guilty to second-degree manslaughter and received six months in jail. He died in 2015.
Kathleen Savio
Kathleen Savio, a 40-year-old divorced mother of two who was studying to be a nurse, was found face down in the dry bathtub of her Bolingbrook, Illinois home on March 1, 2004, with a gash on the back of her head. She had divorced Drew Peterson, a Bolingbrook police sergeant, about five months earlier; a hearing to divide their assets, including part of his pension, was weeks away, and in 2002 she had written in an order of protection that she feared he could kill her. A coroner's jury that included a police officer who vouched for Peterson ruled the death an accidental drowning. In October 2007 Peterson's fourth wife, Stacy, 23, vanished and he became the suspect. Will County State's Attorney James Glasgow reopened the Savio case, convened a special grand jury and had her body exhumed in November 2007. A second autopsy found she had drowned after a beating, and on February 21, 2008 her death was reclassified as a homicide. Illinois passed a hearsay law written with the case in mind, and Peterson was indicted and arrested on May 7, 2009. With no physical evidence and no eyewitness, prosecutors relied on what Kathleen had told her sister, a classmate and the authorities, and what Stacy had told her pastor and a divorce lawyer. A jury convicted Peterson of first-degree murder on September 6, 2012; he was sentenced to 38 years, later drew 40 more for trying to have Glasgow killed, and lost his appeal in the Illinois Supreme Court in 2017. Stacy Peterson has never been found.
Kelsie Schelling
Kelsie Schelling was 21 and living in Denver when, on February 4, 2013, an ultrasound confirmed she was eight weeks pregnant. That night she drove two hours south to Pueblo because her boyfriend, Donthe Lucas, had texted that he had a surprise for her. She waited for him in a Walmart parking lot, then on a street near his grandmother's house, and was never seen again. The next morning Lucas withdrew $400 from her account at a bank; texts from her phone claimed a miscarriage; her car was left in a hospital lot, where police found it on February 14, cleaned out. Lucas gave Denver police an account of a hospital visit that records showed never happened, and told two detectives different times he last saw her. For years it stayed a missing-person case. The Colorado Bureau of Investigation joined in 2016, investigators dug up the backyard of the house where Lucas had lived in April 2017, and in November 2017, after he was arrested at Denver International Airport on an unrelated robbery charge, Lucas admitted in a recorded interview that the hospital story was false and that he had moved her car. He was charged with first-degree murder on December 1, 2017. After years of delay, a Pueblo County jury convicted him on March 8, 2021, in under three hours, and he was sentenced that day to life without parole. Her body has never been found.
Lori Ann Slesinski
Lori Ann Slesinski, 24, a 2004 Auburn University graduate who worked at a mental health center in Auburn, Alabama, was last heard from on the evening of June 10, 2006, when she called her best friend on the way to a girls' night; the friend could hear Derrill Richard "Rick" Ennis, a friend of Lori's from a bowling alley, in the background. Lori never arrived. Her mother reported her missing on June 13, and the next day her Mazda Tribute was found burning at the dead end of DeKalb Street. Ennis, the last person known to be with her, had fresh scratches on his arms and hands when police questioned him; he left Auburn soon afterwards and the case went cold. In 2016 the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency's new cold case unit took the file as its first case, re-interviewed witnesses and sent the old evidence to a laboratory, which found Ennis's DNA on a hand-rolled cigarette near the burned car, in blood inside Lori's front door and in semen on her bedsheet. A Lee County grand jury indicted him on August 2, 2018, and a fugitive task force arrested him in Pilot, Virginia four days later. At trial in 2022 Ennis testified that the two had consensual sex and that Lori left to meet a drug dealer; the defense said evidence had been planted. On April 14, 2022 a jury convicted him of capital murder during a kidnapping and during a burglary. At her mother's request prosecutors dropped the death penalty, and he was sentenced to life without parole. Lori's body has never been found.
Mary Horton Vail
Mary Horton Vail, 22, died on October 28, 1962, in the Calcasieu River in Louisiana, while on a boat with her husband, Felix Vail. He told police she had fallen overboard while they were setting trotlines. He was arrested and held for three nights, but the death was ruled an accidental drowning and no charge followed. Vail later moved to California with their son. Two other women linked to him vanished: his girlfriend Sharon Hensley in 1973 and his wife Annette Craver Vail in 1984. In 2010 Annette's mother contacted Jerry Mitchell, an investigative reporter at The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Mississippi. His series ran in November 2012 and quoted a pathologist who said the autopsy photographs indicated homicide. Calcasieu Parish authorities reopened the case, coroner Terry Welke classified the death a homicide, and Vail, then 73, was arrested in Canyon Lake, Texas, in May 2013. The jury at his 2016 trial in Lake Charles was allowed to hear about the two missing women. On August 12, 2016, it convicted him of second-degree murder after deliberating for less than an hour, and he was sentenced to life in prison. The conviction was upheld on appeal in 2017 and 2018. Vail has not been charged in the other disappearances.
Paige Birgfeld
Paige Birgfeld, a 34-year-old mother of three, left her Grand Junction, Colorado, home on the morning of Thursday, June 28, 2007, telling her children she was working in Glenwood Springs, and did not come back. Her red Ford Focus was found burning in an empty parking lot on July 1. Investigators learned that she ran an escort business called Models Inc. By October 2007 they had named a suspect, Lester Ralph Jones, a client who worked as a mechanic. Prosecutors said store video showed him buying a TracFone two days before she vanished, and that the phone's only calls were to her. Without a body there was no arrest, and the case went cold. In March 2012 a hiker found her remains in a dry creek bed in Wells Gulch, Delta County, and dental records identified her. A cold case team at the Colorado Bureau of Investigation took over in 2013, and the Mesa County Sheriff's Office arrested Jones on November 21, 2014. A first trial in 2016 ended in a mistrial on September 9 with the jury split nine to three. A second jury convicted him of murder and kidnapping on December 27, 2016, and Judge Brian Flynn sentenced him to life without parole. No DNA linked him to her, and the case rested on circumstantial evidence.
Pamela Butler
Pamela Butler, a 47-year-old computer specialist at the Environmental Protection Agency, was last seen on February 12, 2009, outside her home on Fourth Street in northwest Washington, D.C. Her boyfriend at the time, Jose Angel Rodriguez-Cruz, was a suspect, and cameras at her house recorded him entering and leaving, but police had no body and no concrete evidence and made no arrest for eight years. A court declared her legally dead in 2016, which allowed police to pursue murder charges. In early 2017 a cold case detective, Michael Fulton, re-examined the file; police said he found information suggesting a troubled history of domestic violence that, with evidence already collected, supported a first-degree murder warrant. Rodriguez-Cruz was arrested in Arlington, Virginia, on April 7 or 8, 2017. On October 6, 2017, he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, said he had punched and strangled her, and agreed to show police where he buried her, for 12 years in prison. He pointed to the median of Interstate 95 in Stafford County, Virginia. Police searched on December 8, 2017, and then decided the remains could not be recovered. Her body has never been found. His first wife, Marta Rodriguez, disappeared from Arlington in 1989 after telling police he had assaulted and kidnapped her; remains found on I-95 in 1991 were identified as hers in 2018, and he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in her death in 2020.
Susan Cox Powell
Susan Cox Powell, 28, a mother of two who worked at a Wells Fargo call center, was last seen at her home in West Valley City, Utah on the evening of December 6, 2009. Her husband, Josh Powell, told police he had left her asleep at half past midnight and taken their sons, aged four and two, camping in the desert of Tooele County in freezing weather. Officers found fans drying a wet patch on the carpet, and later drops of Susan's blood beside a freshly cleaned sofa. Josh hired a lawyer, stopped answering detectives and was named a person of interest. He moved the boys to his father's house in Puyallup, Washington. In September 2011 his father, Steven Powell, was arrested on voyeurism charges, prosecutors said Susan was among the women he had secretly photographed, and a judge gave the boys to Susan's parents. On February 5, 2012, Josh locked a social worker out of a supervised visit and killed himself and both boys in a house fire. His brother Michael, who had sold a Ford Taurus for scrap in Oregon weeks after Susan vanished and was the main beneficiary of Josh's life insurance, died by suicide in February 2013. On May 20, 2013 West Valley City police closed the active investigation, saying they believed Josh killed his wife and that Michael was heavily involved in getting rid of her body. Susan has never been found.
Tiffany Sessions
Tiffany Sessions, a 20-year-old University of Florida finance student, left her off-campus apartment in Gainesville on the afternoon of February 9, 1989 for her daily power walk along Williston Road, carrying a Sony Walkman and wearing a two-tone Rolex, and never came back. She left her wallet, keys and identification behind. Her father, a South Florida real-estate developer, organized what the FBI has called the largest search in Florida's history, with hundreds of volunteers and a reward that reached $250,000, but no trace of her was found. In 1992 another student, Elizabeth Foster, was raped, beaten to death and buried in a shallow grave about a mile away. Twenty years later the Alachua County Sheriff's Office cold case unit matched DNA from the Foster scene to Paul Eugene Rowles, a paroled Miami murderer who in 1989 had delivered pizzas and scaffolding in Gainesville along Tiffany's route. Rowles died in prison in February 2013. Detective Kevin Allen spent a year reconstructing his life, and among Rowles's belongings investigators found an address book listing his victims, with the date 2/9/89 written between two notations of "#2". On February 6, 2014, Sheriff Sadie Darnell named Rowles as Tiffany's abductor and killer, calling it highly probable. Excavations in 2014 and 2020 found nothing. Her remains have never been found.
Vernon Dahmer
Vernon Dahmer, 58, ran a farm, a sawmill and a grocery store north of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and led the local NAACP. After the 1965 Voting Rights Act he offered publicly to collect poll taxes for his neighbors, and to pay them for anyone who could not afford it. Early on January 10, 1966, two carloads of White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan attacked his house with gasoline and shotguns. He fired back from the doorway while his family escaped, and he died of his injuries. The FBI investigation led to charges against fourteen Klansmen: one pleaded guilty to arson and three were sentenced to life for murder. But the White Knights' Imperial Wizard, Sam Bowers, whom prosecutors said gave the order, was freed by hung juries in four trials. The case was reopened in the 1990s. After published reports in March 1998 that Bowers had admitted tampering with a 1968 jury, state prosecutors brought new indictments, arrested him on May 28, 1998, and put a former Klansman who had taken part in the attack on the stand. On August 21, 1998, a multiracial jury in Hattiesburg convicted Bowers of murder and arson after deliberating just over two hours. He was sentenced to life, always denied it, and died in the Parchman prison hospital on November 5, 2006, at age 82.