The ones still waiting for an answer.
Open U.S. cold cases that have refused to close — strange, singular, and revisited again and again. Each is documented from the public record: cited timelines, the theories investigators and reporters have chased, and a narrative account built only on what the sources support. Nothing here is invented.
The Servant Girl Annihilator
Stalking Austin by night with an axe nearly three years before Jack the Ripper, this unidentified killer left one of the earliest documented serial-murder trails in the United States.
The Villisca Axe Murders
Eight people, including six children, were bludgeoned to death with an axe in a single Iowa farmhouse on a June night in 1912, and more than a century later no one has ever been convicted.
The Axeman of New Orleans
An unidentified axe-wielding intruder terrorized New Orleans for over a year, then sent a letter signed from 'Hell' promising to spare anyone whose home had a jazz band playing in full swing.
The Hall–Mills murders
An Episcopal priest and a married choir singer were found shot dead side by side beneath a crab apple tree, their torn-up love letters scattered between them.
The Cleveland Torso Murders
An unidentified killer dubbed the 'Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run' decapitated and dismembered at least a dozen people across Depression-era Cleveland while Eliot Ness, the famed leader of the Untouchables, served as the city's Safety Director.
The Texarkana Moonlight Murders
Over ten weeks in the spring of 1946, an unidentified attacker known as the 'Phantom Killer' stalked couples on the lovers' lanes around Texarkana, killing five people before vanishing forever.
The Moore's Ford lynching
Four sharecroppers were shot by a mob in broad daylight in 1946 and about 55 people were suspected, yet no one was ever charged, and the one record that might say more, the federal grand jury's sealed testimony, was kept sealed by a 2020 appeals court ruling.
The Black Dahlia: the murder of Elizabeth Short
A young woman who came to Los Angeles chasing the movies was found in a vacant lot severed at the waist and drained of blood, posed in the morning grass like a mannequin.
The murder of Marilyn Sheppard
A pregnant young wife bludgeoned to death in a quiet lakeside home, a husband who swore a 'bushy-haired intruder' did it, and a conviction so tainted by press frenzy that it helped inspire 'The Fugitive.'
The Grimes sisters
Two Elvis-loving sisters slipped into a Chicago winter night to see Love Me Tender and never came home, sparking one of the largest missing-persons hunts in the city's history.
The Boy in the Box
For 65 years he was 'America's Unknown Child' in a cardboard box; in December 2022 forensic genetic genealogy finally gave him a name — Joseph Augustus Zarelli — but who killed him is still unknown.
The abduction and murder of Maria Ridulph
A man was convicted in 2012 in what CBS News called the nation's oldest cold case to go to trial, then freed in 2016 and declared innocent in 2017, leaving a seven-year-old's 1957 abduction as unsolved as it was the night she vanished.
The Zodiac Killer
A taunting serial killer who mailed coded ciphers to newspapers and was never identified — one of whose codes went unsolved for 51 years until amateur codebreakers cracked it in 2020.
The murder of Sister Cathy Cesnik
Baltimore County police dug up a deceased priest accused of abuse by former students, to test his DNA against evidence from a nun's 1969 murder; the lab excluded him, and police said that on its own does not clear him.
The murder of Betsy Aardsma
A graduate student was stabbed once through the heart in the crowded stacks of a university library at dusk — and so little blood showed that people stepped past her before anyone realized a murder had happened.
The Freeway Phantom
Between 1971 and 1972, an unidentified killer abducted and strangled six young Black girls and women in Washington, D.C., leaving several of their bodies along Interstate 295 and even a taunting note signed 'Free-way Phantom.'
The Alphabet murders
Each murdered girl shared her first and last initial — Carmen Colón, Wanda Walkowicz, Michelle Maenza — and each was found in a town whose name began with that same letter.
The Doodler
An unidentified killer sketched gay men in 1970s San Francisco bars, charmed them with the drawings, then led them into the dark and stabbed them to death.
The disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa
The most famous disappearance in American labor history has sent the FBI from a Michigan horse farm to a New Jersey landfill, and in 2025 it was reportedly revived at the White House's direction, yet officially it is still a missing person's case with no one charged.
The murder of Martha Moxley
A Kennedy cousin was convicted of killing a fifteen-year-old neighbor, spent more than eleven years in prison, and then saw the conviction thrown out in 2018 and the state give up on a retrial in 2020, leaving the case exactly where it began in 1975: a golf club, a driveway and no one convicted.
The Oakland County Child Killer
Across thirteen months in suburban Detroit, four children were taken off ordinary streets and returned, days later, as if carefully arranged in the snow — and half a century on, no one has been charged.
The murder of Bob Crane
The wisecracking star of 'Hogan's Heroes' was found bludgeoned to death in his Scottsdale apartment, an electrical cord knotted around his neck, and nearly half a century later no one has ever been convicted of the crime.
The Connecticut River Valley Killer
For a decade, women who vanished while hitchhiking or driving the back roads of the New Hampshire–Vermont border turned up stabbed in the woods, killed by a man no one ever identified.
The Monroe murders of Angie Hill, Kathy Whorton and Sherry Alford
Three young women were shot after their cars were left on Monroe roads in 1980, 1981 and 1982, and in August 2025 two agencies exhumed all three to look again with modern forensics.
The Keddie Cabin murders
Four people were bound and bludgeoned to death in a tiny Sierra Nevada cabin while three children slept unharmed in the next room, and the case remains unsolved more than four decades later.
The Chicago Tylenol murders
Seven people across the Chicago area died after swallowing everyday Tylenol capsules that an unknown hand had quietly emptied and refilled with potassium cyanide.
The death of Nancy Argentino
A pathologist wrote in 1983 that a young woman's death in a wrestlers' motel should be treated as a homicide, a grand jury agreed thirty-two years later and charged a wrestling star, and then dementia ended the prosecution twelve days before it ended him.
The disappearance of Ann Gotlib
Police say they know who took her, the prosecutor's office says its case is closed, and the suspect's name sat in an FBI memo seven months after she vanished — yet no one was ever charged, her body was never found, and her parents call it unsolved.
The disappearance of Kevin Collins
The neighbor police questioned six days after Kevin vanished turned out, twenty-nine years later, to have lived under at least five names with a hidden record of crimes against boys in two countries — and the department only pieced it together after he was dead.
The Colonial Parkway murders
Across four years, young couples vanished or were killed along a quiet 23-mile colonial-era parkway through the Virginia tidewater — and the case haunted investigators for nearly four decades before DNA pointed to a long-dead waterman.
The disappearance of Tara Calico
Thirty-five years after a college student vanished with her bicycle on a desert highway, the sheriff announced there was enough evidence to charge a group of local suspects whose names a judge has sealed — and more than two years later the district attorney is still reviewing the file.
The murder of Cathy Zimmer
A woman was found strangled on the back-seat floor of her car at the San Jose airport, covered by a homemade quilt no one could identify, and 25 years later the murder case against her husband and brother-in-law collapsed when the lead prosecutor's undisclosed relationship with the DNA criminalist came out.
The murder of Amy Mihaljevic
A ten-year-old walked to a shopping plaza to meet a man who had phoned with a story about a gift for her mother, and 37 years later a police chief says the case "feels close" even as the latest DNA test, on hairs found on her clothing, came back unusable.
The murder of Susan Poupart
Evidence the Vilas County Sheriff's Office has held since 1990 went to several laboratories in 2024 and 2025, and the Lac du Flambeau Tribe has posted a $25,000 reward, but no results have been made public.
The disappearance of Timothy Wiltsey
New Jersey's highest court decided that a jury could find a mother had some involvement in her five-year-old son's death, yet that the State never proved murder, so it vacated her conviction and entered an acquittal that bars any retrial.
The I-70 Killer
Over 29 days in the spring of 1992, an unseen gunman walked into small shops a few miles off Interstate 70 and shot six clerks in the back of the head, then vanished before anyone learned his name.
The Springfield Three
Three women vanished overnight from a Springfield home, leaving behind their cars, purses, money, and an agitated dog, with the only sign of disturbance a shattered porch light globe.
The murder of Tammy Zywicki
On the 34th anniversary of her disappearance, Illinois State Police and the FBI named a deceased woman who hitchhiked as a person of interest in the roadside abduction of a college student, and said items were being retested with modern DNA technology.
The murder of Holly Piirainen
A ten-year-old who walked down a lake road to see a neighbor's puppies was found by hunters eleven weeks later — and the case has moved in jolts ever since: a dead man linked to the scene by re-tested evidence in 2012, a grave opened in 2020 in search of a letter, a thirty-year-old tank top shown to the public in 2023, and cheek swabs collected in Brimfield in 2025.
The abduction of Morgan Nick
Twenty-nine years after a six-year-old vanished while emptying sand from her shoes at a Little League game, a hair recovered from a red pickup that had changed hands several times let Alma police name a dead sex offender as her abductor, yet Morgan has still never been found.
The disappearance of Zachary Ramsay
The only man ever charged with killing ten-year-old Zachary Ramsay was a convicted child predator whose coded notes prosecutors said described cooking a child — and the charge collapsed because the boy's own mother said she would testify that her son was still alive.
The murder of JonBenét Ramsey
A 6-year-old beauty-pageant queen found slain in her own Boulder home the morning after Christmas, in a case so scrutinized that the district attorney eventually wrote her family a letter of apology.
The murder of Suzanne Jovin
A Yale senior was last seen walking out of a campus gate at 9:25 on a warm December night and was found stabbed 17 times, two miles away, half an hour later, and the knife, the route and the killer remain unknown.
The disappearance of Asha Degree
A nine-year-old walked out of her house before dawn on Valentine's Day and vanished from the shoulder of a highway — and twenty-four years later, DNA on items from the bookbag she carried pointed investigators toward a man dead since 2004 and a local family who deny any involvement.
The murder of Molly Bish
A sixteen-year-old lifeguard vanished from her beach chair in broad daylight minutes before swim lessons, her sandals still on the sand, and twenty-one years later the district attorney named a dead convicted rapist who resembled the mustached man her mother had seen in the parking lot the day before.
The murder of Leah Freeman
A man was convicted of manslaughter in the death of his 15-year-old girlfriend, and the conviction fell apart in 2019 when a court found the state crime lab had never reported an unidentified man's DNA on her shoes, a profile that, as of September 2025, had still not been matched to anyone.
The murder of Chandra Levy
A man was convicted of Chandra Levy's murder and sentenced to 60 years, then the jailhouse informant at the center of the case unraveled, prosecutors dropped the charges and he was deported, which left the killing of a 24-year-old intern officially unsolved for a second time.
The death of Alonzo Brooks
A young Black man was left without a ride at a farmhouse party of a hundred people in rural Kansas and was found a month later in the creek beside the house — and seventeen years on, a federal exhumation turned an "undetermined" death into a homicide with no one charged.
The Huntington prom night murders
Four teenagers were shot in a front yard hours after a prom, and the woman police say ordered it has never been charged; a court ruling in 2025 put her earliest parole date for a different murder at November 2026.
The West Mesa murders
A woman walking her dog across the Albuquerque desert found a single human bone, and the West Mesa gave up the remains of eleven women and an unborn child.
The disappearance and murder of Lindsey Baum
A ten-year-old walking five blocks home on a summer evening vanished, and her remains were found eight years later in a remote part of eastern Washington; in 2023 about 160 searchers combed ten wooded acres on a tip, and in 2024 the sheriff said investigators had tied her to Kittitas County.
The deaths of John and Joyce Sheridan
A county prosecutor ruled a prominent couple's 2014 deaths a murder-suicide, but the state medical examiner later changed the husband's manner of death to undetermined, and in 2022 the state Attorney General's Office opened its own investigation.