Cases solved by witness or tip
A witness or a tip surfacing long after the crime — someone who finally came forward — broke these cases.
33 documented cases.
Anna Mae Pictou Aquash
Anna Mae Pictou Aquash, a 30-year-old Mi'kmaq woman from Nova Scotia and a prominent member of the American Indian Movement, was taken from a house in Denver in late 1975 by three AIM associates, her hands bound, and driven to Rapid City, then across the Rosebud and Pine Ridge reservations, because AIM figures believed she was a government informant. On a bluff beside Highway 73 between Kadoka and Wanblee she was shot in the back of the head with a .32-caliber pistol. A rancher found her body on February 24, 1976. A first autopsy listed exposure; she was buried unidentified, and only after fingerprints identified her and she was exhumed did a second autopsy, on March 10, 1976, find the bullet. For 26 years the case went nowhere. Investigators made headway only after agents began talking to Arlo Looking Cloud in the mid-1990s and former AIM members, including an AIM leader's former wife who recorded conversations, broke their silence. Looking Cloud and John Graham were indicted in 2003. Looking Cloud was convicted of first-degree murder in federal court in February 2004 and sentenced to life. Graham, extradited from Canada in 2007, saw the federal case dismissed because he is not an American Indian under U.S. law; the State of South Dakota tried him instead, and on December 10, 2010 a Rapid City jury convicted him of felony murder in the kidnapping. He was sentenced to life without parole.
Corey Wieneke
Corey Wieneke, 22, a bartender at Wink's Tap in West Liberty, Iowa, was found dead on the bedroom floor of his home on the evening of October 13, 1992. He had been beaten with a baseball bat, and an aluminum bat with blood matching his blood type was found beside a gravel road near the house. His fiancée discovered him when she came home from work. Investigators looked at several theories, and at Annette Cahill, a woman who worked at the bar and was one of at least three women he was involved with. The Iowa Supreme Court later wrote that her potential motive was clear, but that with no eyewitnesses and no physical evidence the case went cold. In December 2017, a nurse in an Iowa City hospital struck up a conversation with a state cold-case agent and told him that as a nine-year-old on a sleepover in fall 1992 she had overheard Cahill, sobbing among black candles, say she had never meant to kill Corey. Cahill was arrested in Tipton on May 31, 2018. A first trial ended in a hung jury in March 2019. A second jury convicted her of second-degree murder on September 19, 2019, and she was sentenced to 50 years. Iowa's appeals courts upheld the conviction in 2021 and 2022.
Courtney Coco
Courtney Coco, 19, a criminal investigation major at Northwestern State University, was last seen at her home in Alexandria, Louisiana, in early October 2004. On October 4 her body was found in an abandoned building near Winnie, Texas, about 200 miles away. Her car and phone were missing. The pathologist ruled the death a homicide by undetermined means, with a mechanism indicative of asphyxiation. DNA on her trunk latch matched a former partner of hers, no usable fingerprints were found, and the case went cold. In 2011 people came forward with statements David Anthony Burns had made about killing her, but a detective said there was no other hard evidence. In 2019 a podcast, Real Life Real Crime, released an 18-episode series on the case, and its host turned his findings over to Alexandria police. Her family later credited him with solving it; the district attorney declined to discuss what the podcast contributed. A detective assigned in 2018 found a Texas case file naming a witness who had seen a car with Louisiana plates back out of the building the night before the body was found, and that witness picked Burns, who had been engaged to Coco's sister, from a lineup. Burns was indicted and arrested on April 13, 2021. A jury convicted him of second-degree murder on October 31, 2022, he received life without parole, and the Third Circuit affirmed in December 2023.
Diane Peterson
On June 16, 1978, the day after the school year ended, Diane Peterson, an English teacher at Branham High School in San Jose, California, was found on the floor near her classroom with a single stab wound to the chest while teachers were cleaning out their classrooms. A student had heard her calling for help and seen the attacker flee. Four days later police booked a 16-year-old, Harry "Nicky" Nickerson, on an unrelated matter. Prosecutors said his booking photo resembled a composite sketch made from eyewitness accounts; he denied killing her and denied owning a knife. In the years that followed a witness said he had confessed and carried a knife marked "Teacher Dear," a student's family said their son had seen the killing, and another witness said Nickerson had implicated himself, but none of it could be corroborated and he was never charged. He was later convicted of armed robbery, assault with a deadly weapon and kidnapping, and died by suicide in 1993. Extensive DNA work in 2023 and 2024 identified no one. In 2025 cold case detectives asked people close to Nickerson what he had said, and a relative told them he had come to their home minutes after the killing and confessed. On June 2, 2025, prosecutors and San Jose police named him as her killer, 47 years on. He could not be tried.
Dorothea Burke
Dorothea Burke, 63, a retired sardine-plant worker well known in Stockton Springs, Maine, went to a family wedding reception in Prospect on Saturday, June 23, 1984, while preparing to celebrate her birthday. Prosecutors later said she left around 9:15 that night to go dancing and ended up at a bar in Bucksport, where she was last seen. When she did not come home, her family reported her missing the next day. On June 28, construction workers found her body on Meadow Road in Stockton Springs. She had been beaten to death. State Police interviewed Kirt Damon, then 20, beginning that day, and he denied any part in her death. Police searched his mother's car and found confetti from the wedding and cigarette butts of Burke's brand, but nobody was charged for 36 years. Prosecutors said the case was finally pulled together by Maine State Crime Laboratory work on fibers and confetti and by Damon's former wives coming forward to tell the state what he had told them. A Waldo County grand jury indicted Damon, 57, for murder on September 22, 2020. On February 11, 2022, he pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to 20 years in prison with all but 12 suspended, followed by four years of probation.
Everett Armstrong
Everett Armstrong, an 84-year-old World War I veteran and well-known local banjo player, was shot to death in his mobile home in rural Geneva, in Adams County, Indiana. Neighbors reported hearing a single gunshot just before dark on August 18, 1977, and a fuel oil delivery driver found his body inside the trailer on County Road 300 West around 4 p.m. the next day, August 19. The first investigation produced no suspects, and in October 1977 four witnesses came forward to name a young local man, James A. McBride II, as the person responsible; they said he had confessed to them within 24 hours of the killing and that he had shown one of them the gun he used. The case nonetheless went cold. In 1981 the Adams County Sheriff's Department arrested three other people, only to drop the charges about six months later when it became clear they had nothing to do with the murder. The Indiana State Police Cold Case Unit reopened the file in 2013 and spent years corroborating the original 1977 witness statements. On May 14, 2025, investigators announced they had concluded that McBride, who had died in Adams County on June 3, 2024, was the killer; the Adams County prosecutor agreed that if McBride were still alive he would be charged with the murder. The case was solved not by forensic science but by the witnesses who had named the right man within weeks of the crime, almost fifty years before the conclusion was finally confirmed.
Helen Mae Dutcher
Helen Mae Dutcher, 36, was stabbed to death in Ferndale, Michigan, a Detroit suburb, in 1979; Wikipedia gives the date as December 1, and the Associated Press reported that her body was found in an alley. Police suspected Coral Eugene Watts for years but never charged him, because, the AP reported, they assumed he would be in his 80s if he ever left a Texas prison. Watts had pleaded guilty in Texas in 1982 to burglary with intent to murder, in exchange for immunity on killings he confessed to, and received 60 years; an appeals ruling and mandatory release laws cut that term so that he was due out in 2006. In January 2004 Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox discussed the case on national cable television. The Attorney General's office said an eyewitness to the Dutcher killing called the next morning. The man said he had watched from his porch. There was no physical evidence, and Watts had never confessed to this killing. Over a defense challenge to the witness's memory after 25 years, a jury in Pontiac heard him, and heard about Watts's Texas confessions, which the judge admitted as evidence of a pattern. On November 17, 2004 it found Watts guilty. He was sentenced to life without parole on December 7, 2004, and died in prison in 2007.
Hiram "Ross" Grayam
Hiram "Ross" Grayam, 47, a World War II sergeant and Purple Heart recipient who delivered milk for the Borden Dairy in Indian River County, Florida, failed to come home from his route on April 11, 1968. A witness had seen him talking to two men on the side of the road. The next day a sheriff's office airplane spotted his milk truck in woods near Gifford, with his body beside it. He had been shot, and about $70 was missing. Investigators found little forensic evidence and made no arrest through sixteen investigations; it became the oldest cold case in the Indian River County Sheriff's Office. In 2006, after Grayam's son gave media interviews, a Vero Beach man named Thomas J. Williams wrote a letter to a newspaper denying any involvement, and was questioned and dismissed. Williams died of natural causes in 2016. In February 2022 a jail inmate asked to talk to detectives about the case, and in December 2023 detectives spoke with Williams's ex-wife in Miami; the ex-wife and a friend of Williams's sister each said he had confessed to them. On April 11, 2024, the 56th anniversary of the killing, Sheriff Eric Flowers announced the case solved. No one was ever tried, and a second man remains unnamed.
Holly Bobo
Holly Bobo, a 20-year-old nursing student, was taken from her family's home in Parsons, Decatur County, Tennessee, on the morning of April 13, 2011. Her brother told police he saw a man in camouflage lead her into the woods; her blood was found in the carport, and her phone and lunch box turned up in the woods. The TBI called it the most expensive investigation in its history, but for three years the lead agent pursued a local sex offender who was never charged, and the case stalled. In March 2014 a grand jury indicted Zachary Adams, a methamphetamine user from the same county, for aggravated kidnapping and felony murder; his friend Jason Autry was charged in April, and later Adams's brother. On September 7, 2014, two men digging ginseng found her skull in woods off Interstate 40, about ten miles from the Adams family property; dental records confirmed it the next day. No DNA linked Adams to Holly. At his September 2017 trial, Autry testified that he kept watch under a river bridge while Adams shot her, and friends and jail inmates said Adams had spoken of harming her. The jury convicted Adams on all counts on September 22, 2017, and he was sentenced to life plus 50 years. His brother pleaded guilty and got 35 years; Autry got eight. In 2024 Autry recanted, saying he built the story from discovery files; a judge dismissed the petition, and in July 2026 a further request for a new trial was denied.
Irene Garza
Irene Garza, a 25-year-old second-grade teacher, drove to Sacred Heart Church in McAllen, Texas, for confession on the evening of April 16, 1960, the night before Easter, and never came home. Her body was found in a McAllen irrigation canal five days later. An autopsy found she had been struck on the head, raped while unconscious and suffocated. The visiting priest who spoke to her that night, John Feit, then 27, was the main suspect within weeks, but he was never charged at the time and his religious order moved him out of Texas. In 2002 a former monk and a retired priest each told investigators that Feit had admitted the killing to them in the early 1960s. A 2004 grand jury declined to indict. After a new district attorney took office, Feit was arrested in Arizona in 2016, and on December 7, 2017, a Hidalgo County jury convicted him of murder. He was sentenced to life in prison and died in custody in February 2020, aged 87, while appealing.
Jack and Elaine Denney
Jack Denney, 65, and Elaine Denney, 66, were shot to death in their home near Locust Grove, Oklahoma, in December 2007. Prosecutors put the date at December 23. Their daughter and her family found them on Christmas morning. Neighbors knew the couple as the grandparents of the neighborhood, and it was hard for investigators to imagine anyone with a grudge against them. Jack's wallet was empty, but the scene did not look like a typical robbery, and the case reached a dead end. About a year later an inmate in Cherokee County, Justin Walker, wrote a letter claiming responsibility. Investigators treated him as a good suspect, but a palm print from the house did not match his, and prosecutors declined to charge him. After his release in 2012 he recanted. Roughly ten years after the killings, a former mental health professional who had treated Walker told authorities about a conversation she had had with him. A multi-county grand jury indicted him on two counts of first-degree murder in March 2018. In March 2019 he pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder and was sentenced to 40 years, separate from a 10-year sentence in an unrelated case. His motive was never firmly established.
James Greene
Atlanta police officer James Greene, 27, an Army veteran with four years on the force, was shot and killed in his parked police van shortly after midnight on November 3, 1971, while working a one-man unit. His badge and revolver were taken, a mark of the Black Liberation Army, a revolutionary group that advocated killing police officers. Prosecutors said they did not have enough evidence to take either man to trial, and one of the two men later blamed, Twymon Myers, was shot dead by New York police and the FBI in 1973. The case went cold for about 30 years. It reopened after the other man, Freddie Hilton, who by then called himself Kamau Sadiki, was arrested in New York City in 2001. Atlanta cold-case detective Jim Rose and Fulton County investigator M.C. Cox then crisscrossed the country finding former Black Liberation Army members who had seen the shooting or heard the gunmen brag about it. Hilton was indicted on July 12, 2002. At his trial in 2003, three former cell members testified that he told them he and Myers had killed an officer and that he had the officer's badge and gun; the defense said no physical evidence linked him to it. A jury convicted him, and he was sentenced to life plus ten years. The Georgia Supreme Court affirmed in 2010.
James Sackett
Just after midnight on May 22, 1970, a woman telephoned St. Paul police to say her sister was in labor at 859 Hague Avenue, in the Selby-Dale neighbourhood. Patrolman James Sackett, 27, eighteen months on the force and the father of four, the youngest three weeks old, arrived with his partner four minutes later. While he knocked at the front door and his partner went around the back, a single rifle shot came from the dark across the street. Sackett was hit in the chest and died at the hospital. No gun and no casing were ever found. The call was traced to a phone booth a block away and, by voice print, to the 18-year-old girlfriend of a local activist named Ronald Reed. She was tried for murder in 1972, acquitted, and jailed for contempt when she refused to say who had told her to make the call. Reed and his friend Larry Clark were questioned and let go. In 1994 the caller admitted on television that she had made the call and that Reed had been with her at the booth; police reopened the file, and in June 2004 she told detectives that Reed had asked her to make it. Other witnesses then broke their silence: a man Reed had tried to recruit to "bring down the first pig", a man who had carried a bolt-action rifle for Reed and Clark, and a federal inmate who said Reed had confessed in the 1980s. A grand jury indicted both men in January 2005. A jury convicted Reed of first-degree murder and conspiracy on March 1, 2006, and he was sentenced to life. Clark was convicted that May, won a new trial in 2008, and in 2009 pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit murder.
Jill Behrman
Jill Behrman, a 19-year-old Indiana University sophomore, left her parents' house in Bloomington on the morning of May 31, 2000 for a bike ride before a noon shift at the campus recreation center, and did not come back. Her bicycle was found less than a mile from the home of John R. Myers II, a local man detectives interviewed that June. In 2002 a woman facing unrelated felony charges falsely confessed, and searchers drained part of Salt Creek before her story collapsed. In March 2003 hunters found Jill's skeletal remains in woods in Morgan County. The breakthrough came in 2004, when Myers's own grandmother and an aunt told state police about things he had said, and others, including a former girlfriend and a man who shared his jail cell, came forward. A grand jury indicted Myers in April 2006. There was no murder weapon, eyewitness or physical evidence, and the October 2006 trial turned on what witnesses said he had told them. A jury convicted him in about 50 minutes, and he was sentenced to 65 years. A federal judge overturned the conviction in 2019 over his lawyer's performance, the Seventh Circuit reinstated it in 2020, the Supreme Court declined review in 2021, and in October 2023 the same federal judge again denied relief. The latest reporting found lists his earliest release as June 2037.
Jim Craig Martin
Jim Craig Martin, 39, of Normangee, Leon County, Texas, vanished in early August 2007 after a night spent with Hollis Willingham and others. His silver Honda Accord was found burned out and abandoned the next day, and his body has never been found. The Texas Rangers believed he was killed and left in a rural area of Leon, Madison or Brazos County. For years there were witnesses and rumors but no charge. The Rangers featured the case in August 2018 and raised the reward to $6,000. On July 22, 2020, according to the Rangers, a Leon County grand jury indicted Willingham, then 44, of Hearne, and he was arrested. At a trial in Centerville in March and April 2022 the State relied on a woman who was in the car that morning, two jailhouse informants, a woman Willingham ran over in Normangee, and people who had heard him talk about getting rid of bodies. The State did not seek death. On April 4, 2022, a jury convicted Willingham of capital murder, and he was sentenced to life without parole. In August 2023 a Texas appeals court affirmed the conviction, finding errors in the jury charge but no harm.
Joyce Goodener
Joyce Goodener, a 35-year-old Nashville woman, was found dead on July 5, 1995, inside an abandoned house at 4522 Ashland City Highway in Davidson County, Tennessee, after two passersby spotted smoke and went to investigate. Her body had been beaten with a cinder block, stabbed twice in the neck, rolled in a rug and doused with an accelerant and set on fire; an autopsy showed she had no carbon monoxide in her blood, meaning she was already dead before the fire was set. Metro-Nashville police developed James Murray Washington as a person of interest in 1995 after the victim's boyfriend said Washington may have been with her that day and a passerby reported seeing a black Camaro and a male figure at the house, but there was no physical evidence linking him to the killing and the case went cold for years. The break came not from forensics but from Washington's own mouth. On March 3, 2009, while incarcerated for another offense and being transported to a Nashville hospital after reporting seizures, Washington told corrections officer James Tomlinson and Corporal Homer Lee Carey that he needed to confess, saying he had beaten a woman named Joyce to death. He survived his medical crisis and tried to take the confession back, but the two officers had come forward and reported what he said. Washington was charged with first-degree murder in 2009. At a 2012 trial his defense argued the confession was an unreliable product of medication and possible hallucinations, but the Davidson County jury convicted him, and the court imposed a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole. The Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the conviction on March 31, 2015. The case was solved by the witnesses who heard and reported his confession.
Joyce McLain
Joyce McLain, a 16-year-old high school student, went jogging on the evening of August 8, 1980, near Schenck High School in East Millinocket, Maine, and never came home. Two days later her partially clothed body was found behind the school's athletic fields, near a row of power lines; she had been beaten to death, the back of her skull caved in, and her hands tied behind her back with a blue cloth. Heavy rains had washed away crime-scene evidence, no fingerprints were recovered, and no identifiable DNA was ever obtained from her clothing, so the case went cold for decades. The conviction rested not on forensic science but on witnesses who came forward over the years to describe Philip Scott Fournier's own statements: Fournier had confessed to a minister and to his parents in 1981 before recanting, and in 1989 he told a co-worker that he had killed Joyce McLain. The decisive witness was John DeRoche, a Bangor High School janitor who had worked alongside Fournier in 1989; after learning of Fournier's 2016 arrest through a television news report, the 78-year-old DeRoche called investigators and testified about Fournier's incriminating workplace statements. Fournier had been publicly named a person of interest in 2009 by a federal judge during an unrelated child-pornography sentencing, and Maine State Police had relaunched the investigation in 2008 after the victim's mother helped fund a re-examination. Fournier was arrested on March 4, 2016. After a jury-waived trial, Superior Court Justice Ann Murray found him guilty of murder on February 22, 2018, and sentenced him to 45 years in prison. The Maine Supreme Judicial Court upheld the conviction on February 21, 2019.
Jumar Joiner
Jumar Joiner, a 25-year-old man from Windsor, Connecticut, was fatally shot on May 3, 2008, in the area of West Morningside Street in Hartford. According to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, he suffered multiple gunshot wounds. In the days, weeks, and months after the killing, investigators followed up on tips and leads but made no arrest, and the case went cold for nearly a decade. In 2017, the Connecticut Division of Criminal Justice's Cold Case Unit received new leads through its tip line, including the names of two men who told police they had witnessed the shooting. That witness information helped lead to the March 2022 arrest of Mark White, who was then in custody in New Mexico on unrelated illegal-handgun and cocaine charges. A Hartford Superior Court jury found White guilty of murder on March 7, 2025, and on June 6, 2025, he was sentenced to 40 years in prison with credit for about six months already served.
Karen Lee Spencer
Karen Lee Spencer, 12, of the Huntington area of Fairfax County, Virginia, was last seen alive on November 29, 1972. On December 2, 1972, a group of young boys found her body in Fifer's Field, a wooded area near what is now the Huntington Metro station. An autopsy found she died of blunt force trauma. In the weeks afterward, police gave polygraph tests to young people in the neighborhood and identified several persons of interest, including 16-year-old James "Jimmy" Edwards, who was believed to have been her boyfriend. Edwards denied involvement and died on August 23, 1997. The case stayed open for nearly five decades. In summer 2018, two independent acquaintances of Edwards told Fairfax County detectives that in the early 1990s he had confided that he killed a girl and buried her in a field when he was a teenager. After a June 2019 public appeal and a FOX 5 report, and over the following year and a half, more tips supported that account, and other persons of interest were ruled out. In December 2019 the Commonwealth's Attorney's Office determined there would have been enough evidence to arrest and prosecute Edwards had he been alive. Police announced the case solved on April 1, 2020. Edwards was never charged or tried.
Kenneth Atchison
Kenneth Atchison, a 57-year-old man known to friends as Doc, was killed on February 8, 1993, after he went to the Bel-Ridge, Missouri, home of Gary Muehlberg in St. Louis County to complete a car deal, carrying several thousand dollars in cash. When Atchison disappeared, a tip about belongings being hauled to a landfill led investigators to search Muehlberg's property, where they discovered Atchison's body sealed inside a homemade plywood coffin in the basement. Muehlberg fled but was located and detained in Illinois, and in September 1995 a St. Louis County jury convicted him of first-degree murder and armed criminal action; he was sentenced to life in prison without parole. Decades later, while Muehlberg was incarcerated for the Atchison killing, DNA evidence linked him to a separate string of early-1990s killings of women across the St. Louis area attributed to the so-called Package Killer, and he pleaded guilty to four of those murders.
Kristin Smart
Kristin Smart, a 19-year-old Cal Poly freshman from Stockton, left an off-campus party in San Luis Obispo around 2 a.m. on May 25, 1996, so drunk that two students had to walk her toward campus. A classmate, Paul Flores, joined them, said he would get her home safely, and was the last person seen with her on Grand Avenue. Flores, who had a black eye, invoked the Fifth Amendment for decades, and Smart was declared legally dead in 2002. A 2016 dig on the campus hillside found nothing. In 2019 a podcast, Your Own Backyard, brought forward witnesses who had never been interviewed, and with them came new evidence: an order to intercept his communications, searches in 2020 that turned up date-rape drugs and videos, and in March 2021 an excavation beneath the deck of his father Ruben Flores's home in Arroyo Grande that found a casket-sized soil disturbance and human blood too degraded for DNA. Father and son were arrested on April 13, 2021. After a four-month trial in Salinas before two juries, Paul Flores was convicted of first-degree murder on October 18, 2022; Ruben was acquitted as an accessory. Paul Flores was sentenced to 25 years to life in March 2023; the conviction was affirmed in 2025 and the California Supreme Court declined review in January 2026. A May 2026 search of his mother's home ended without finding Kristin, who has never been recovered.
Lauria Bible and Ashley Freeman
On the night of December 29, 1999, Lauria Bible, 16, stayed over at her best friend Ashley Freeman's mobile home outside Welch, Oklahoma, for Ashley's sixteenth birthday. At about 5:30 the next morning firefighters found the home in flames. Kathy Freeman was inside, shot in the head; state agents first suspected her husband Danny of killing her and fleeing with the girls, until Lauria's parents searched the released rubble the next day and found his body too. Lauria's car sat in the driveway with the keys in it. The girls were never found. The case ran through national television, a recanted confession and a 2005 mine search that found nothing. In 2017 a new Craig County sheriff found a crate of old case files left by a previous administration. They led investigators to witness interviews that had been filed away: at least a dozen people said three men from a Picher-area methamphetamine circle, Warren "Phil" Welch II, David Pennington and Ronnie Dean Busick, had bragged about killing the Freemans over a drug debt, holding the girls for days and photographing them bound with duct tape. Welch died in 2007 and Pennington in 2015. Busick was charged with four counts of first-degree murder in April 2018, pleaded guilty in July 2020 to accessory to murder, and got 10 years after a dig he directed found nothing. He was released in May 2023. Lauria and Ashley remain missing.
Naomi Michelle Miller
Naomi Michelle Miller, a mother of two in San Angelo, Texas, was killed in December 2005, and for about a decade almost nobody asked where she was. Her husband, Robert Lamar Miller, told friends and family that she had run off with another man, and her last recorded contact with authorities was a traffic ticket on July 19, 2005. In May 2015 a relative contacted the Tom Green County Sheriff's Office, and an investigator, Billy Fiveash, began working what the sheriff's office later called a missing person case that turned into a murder investigation. Miller's own family told Fiveash that Miller had made comments about killing Naomi and hiding her body, and in June 2015 cadaver dogs alerted at a former residence, but no remains were found. On March 1, 2017 investigators interviewed a woman who had lived in the home in 2005. Miller was arrested on March 2, and on March 8 volunteers with a cadaver dog found a body about 40 inches down at the former San Angelo Speedway, which Miller had leased. A woman who had lived with the Millers, LuDonna Gail Yoder, gave a written statement describing the killing and burial and was charged on March 14. Both pleaded guilty: Miller in July 2018 in exchange for 38 years in prison, and Yoder to a sentence reported as 35 years.
Patricia Moreno
Patricia "Tricia" Moreno, 17, lived with a foster mother and the woman's two teenage daughters in a third-floor apartment on Henry Street in Malden, Massachusetts. Just after 3 a.m. on July 20, 1991, police found her face down on the fire escape landing with a single gunshot wound to the head. She was still breathing and died at Massachusetts General Hospital that afternoon. No gun or cartridge casing was found and there was no sign of forced entry. Everyone in the apartment said they had heard two shots and could not say who fired them. Police learned that Rodney Daniels, the boyfriend of the foster mother's oldest daughter, who was staying there that night, had several handguns and had threatened Moreno, but he said he had been asleep in an armchair and no one was charged. In 2020 the Middlesex County district attorney's new cold case unit reconstructed the shooting and found that the bullet's path fit a shot from the apartment doorway. Investigators then located a former downstairs neighbor, who had been out of the country, and who described a man fitting Daniels's description on the fire escape. A woman who had protected Daniels in 1991 had also told friends and relatives, before she died, that he killed Moreno. Daniels was arrested in South Fulton, Georgia on September 27, 2021. In August 2023 a Middlesex Superior Court jury convicted him of first-degree murder.
Peggy Lynn Johnson
Peggy Lynn Johnson was 18, cognitively impaired and alone when her mother died of AIDS in November 1994. She went to a medical clinic in McHenry, Illinois for help, and a registered nurse there, Linda La Roche, took her home to work as a nanny and housekeeper for her family. For the next five years, according to La Roche's own children and former husband, Peggy was slapped and beaten, made to sleep in a crawl space under the house and once stabbed at with a pitchfork. On July 21, 1999 a man walking his dog found her body at the edge of a cornfield in the Town of Raymond, Wisconsin, about forty miles from McHenry. An autopsy found she had died of sepsis pneumonia from infected injuries inflicted through chronic abuse. Nobody had reported her missing. Racine County buried her as Jane Doe, exhumed her in 2013 for new testing and reburied her in 2015, still without a name. In 2019 a concerned citizen told the sheriff's office that a woman in Cape Coral, Florida was telling people she had killed a woman when she lived in Illinois. Investigators interviewed one of La Roche's children, learned that a Peggy Lynn Johnson had lived with the family, and confirmed the identity with familial DNA. La Roche was arrested on November 5, 2019, convicted of first-degree intentional homicide and hiding a corpse on March 16, 2022, and sentenced to life without parole. Peggy was reburied beside her mother in Belvidere, Illinois on March 4, 2020, her forty-fourth birthday.
Rebekah Gould
Rebekah Christian Gould was a 22-year-old Northwest Arkansas Community College student from Mountain View, Arkansas. On the morning of September 20, 2004, she dropped her boyfriend, Casey McCullough, at his job at a Sonic in Melbourne, stopped at the Possum Trot convenience store for coffee and a breakfast sandwich, and returned to McCullough's mobile home in rural Izard County to pack for the drive back to school. She was never seen alive again. A week later, on September 27, 2004, a search party found her body down a steep embankment beside Arkansas Highway 9 south of Melbourne. She had been bludgeoned about the head. For sixteen years the case stalled, with investigators' suspicion lingering on people close to her. The break did not come from forensic science. It came from the public: after journalist and licensed private investigator Catherine Townsend launched the podcast Hell and Gone in 2018 and used local radio and social media to push the case back into view, tips poured in. Among more than a hundred leads, two people who did not know each other independently reported the same thing about William Alama Miller, the cousin of Gould's boyfriend. Those tips, combined with reinvigorated police work by a new Arkansas State Police investigator, led to Miller's arrest in Oregon on November 7, 2020. He confessed, pleaded guilty to first-degree murder on October 18, 2022, and was sentenced to 40 years in the Arkansas Department of Correction.
Regina Krieger
Regina "Gina" Krieger, 14, was reported missing on the morning of February 28, 1995, when her father went downstairs to wake her for school in their Burley, Idaho home and found a trail of blood leading from her basement bedroom into the backyard. Her body was found on the bank of the Snake River east of Rupert in April, and an autopsy showed she had been stabbed. No one was charged for more than two decades. A 1996 newspaper report had named Gilberto Flores Rodriguez as a suspect, but the case went cold, and a former sheriff later said detectives had made mistakes in the early investigation. In 2017 the FBI joined the Cassia County Sheriff's Office, and on February 20, 2019 Rodriguez, then 56, was arrested after at least three witnesses, according to court documents, linked him to the killing. A Cassia County jury convicted him of first-degree murder in May 2021 after deliberating less than four hours, and on October 15, 2021 he was sentenced to life in prison. The case rested on witness testimony; the murder weapon was never found. His attorney told jurors the witnesses were liars, said DNA evidence in the case does not match Rodriguez, and said he would appeal. Rodriguez says he did not kill her.
Regina Rowe Hicks
Regina Rowe Hicks, 25, left her boyfriend's home in Huron County, Ohio, at about 8 p.m. on October 18, 2001, to pick up her four-year-old son and never arrived. Four days later her white Camaro was found in a pond in Willard with her body inside. The autopsy showed bruising on her head and authorities did not believe it was an accident. Her estranged husband, Paul Hicks, had filed for divorce the day after she was reported missing and told police he thought she had killed herself. Investigators found no direct evidence and he made no admissions; a polygraph did not go forward. Regina's mother spent about a decade on billboards, rewards and ads, and died before the case moved. Eventually a cold case team from the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation re-interviewed witnesses, including a friend of Hicks who was granted immunity. Hicks was arrested on April 22, 2025, and a Huron County jury found him guilty of three counts of murder and one of kidnapping on December 19, 2025. A state analyst testified there was no physical evidence tying him to the death; the case rested largely on the friend's testimony. He was sentenced to 25 years to life and is appealing.
Rick and Gail Brink
Rick Brink, 28, and his wife Gail, 22, newlyweds of 18 months, were shot to death at their home in Park Township, near Holland, Michigan, with their bodies discovered on November 23, 1987. Rick was found in his Chevy Blazer in the driveway and Gail in bed inside the house. Gail's older brother, Ryan Wyngarden, was interviewed within days but was not treated as a suspect, and his then-girlfriend confirmed his alibi. The case went cold. In 2009 the Ottawa County Sheriff's Office formed a cold case team, and in 2011 two detectives were assigned the Brink murders. They read the old files, conducted more than 200 interviews and noticed a discrepancy in the alibi. On January 18, 2013 they brought in Wyngarden's wife, who said her husband had admitted to her years earlier that he killed his sister and brother-in-law. He was arrested within hours. A fellow inmate later testified that Wyngarden confessed to him in jail. At trial in March 2014, prosecutors said Wyngarden acted out of jealousy and to keep secret sexual contact with his sister when they were younger. The defense said his wife's testimony could not be trusted. A jury convicted him of two counts of first-degree premeditated murder on March 28, 2014, and he was sentenced to life without parole. Appeals failed. He maintains his innocence.
Ronald Holtz
Ronald Holtz, a 24-year-old Vietnam veteran, was last seen by his family at Christmas 1974, the day after his release from the psychiatric unit of the Veterans Administration hospital in Sheridan, Wyoming, where he had met and, in September 1974, married a nurse, Alice, who already had five children and two marriages behind her. She filed for divorce in February 1975 and it was granted because he could not be found to be served. Nobody reported him missing. In 1989 one of her sons told police that in the 1970s she had told him she shot a husband named Ron in the back of the head with a .22 rifle while he slept, put him in a cardboard barrel and dropped it down a mine shaft on the Remount Ranch between Cheyenne and Laramie, where she had once been a caretaker. Agents searched the shaft three times and found animal bones, identified Ron as Holtz, confronted Alice in Missouri in 2005, and were shown the right shaft by her son in 2007, but had no money or safe way to excavate it. In August 2013 they dug forty feet down and recovered a nearly complete skeleton with a .22 bullet in the skull; DNA matched Holtz's relatives. Alice Uden, 74, was arrested at her home in Chadwick, Missouri on September 26, 2013. The next day her husband Gerald Uden confessed to the unrelated 1980 murders of his ex-wife Virginia and her sons Richard and Reagan. At trial in Cheyenne in May 2014 Alice said she shot Holtz as he reached into her daughter's crib; prosecutors said he was asleep in bed. A jury convicted her of second-degree murder on May 8, 2014, and she was sentenced to life. She died in custody on June 12, 2019, aged 80.
Stephen Lindsey
On April 20, 2002, 28-year-old Stephen Lindsey was found shot once in the head, slumped over the wheel of a Chevrolet van in the parking lot of the former Red Roof Inn on Rothrock Road in Copley Township, Ohio. Copley police identified a prime suspect within their investigation, a 20-year-old man named Neil Anderson, but with no eyewitness and no direct physical evidence tying him to the killing, the case went cold for more than two decades. It was not DNA or new forensics that finally closed it. In March 2023, while dying of a terminal illness, Anderson confessed to his brother that he had shot Lindsey rather than repay a debt he owed him. The brother carried the secret for roughly a year and a half before bringing it to police in November 2024, supplying details investigators said only the killer or the police could have known. With those details matching the original crime scene, detectives declared the case solved and officially closed it more than 22 years after the murder.
Toshio Kawano
Toshio Kawano, 58, and his wife ran the Moiliili Bakery, a small liquor and sundries store on South King Street in Honolulu that had kept the name of the bakery it once was. On the evening of September 26, 1977, he was tending the store alone when he was shot in a gunfight with two would-be robbers. He wore a gun in a holster, against his wife's wishes, because of earlier robberies, and he died at Queen's Medical Center a few hours later. There were no eyewitnesses and, the Star-Bulletin reported, police had no suspects and could not find any witnesses. In 2000, in a plea agreement over an unrelated purse snatching, Aaron Meyer told authorities about his part in the shooting, and later that year Melvin Kumukau also made a statement. In August 2001 Honolulu police told the family they were pursuing charges against two suspects. The state attorney general's Cold Case Unit, created in 2004, took the case, and an Oahu grand jury indicted both men for murder on December 14, 2006. In January 2009 each pleaded guilty to manslaughter and first-degree robbery and received a 20-year term. The state said the men went to the shop to rob Kawano of his collection of samurai swords. His family said they had closure, although neither man was convicted of murder.
Unnamed 23-month-old girl (name not publicly released)
In the early morning hours of September 4, 1992, a 23-month-old girl, the daughter of Jay Adams Jr.'s girlfriend, was killed at a home on the Lake Traverse Indian Reservation in Roberts County, South Dakota. The toddler had been living in the home of Adams's parents. According to court records summarized by federal prosecutors, after Adams returned from a night shift he discovered the child had soiled her diaper and bedding, and he reacted violently, slamming her body to the ground and striking her head against a hard concrete floor; an autopsy also found evidence of forceful blows to her abdomen. The death was treated for decades as an unexplained child death, and the case went cold. The break did not come from DNA or forensic science but from a person: in early 2023, a witness to the crime came forward and identified Adams as responsible for the girl's death. The Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate Tribal Police Department and the FBI reopened the investigation, working through the U.S. Department of Justice's Missing or Murdered Indigenous Persons Regional Outreach Program. A federal grand jury indicted Adams on a charge of first-degree murder in April 2023. Adams, an enrolled member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate who had himself worked as a dispatcher for the tribal police, pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter on November 20, 2023. On June 24, 2024, in Aberdeen, U.S. District Judge Charles B. Kornmann sentenced him to 10 years in federal prison, followed by three years of supervised release and a special assessment to the Federal Crime Victims Fund, roughly 32 years after the child's death. The victim's name has not been publicly disclosed.