The Oldest Cold Case From Every State

According to Alabama's cold case unit, the state's oldest and most unsolved serious crime is the disappearance of Sandra Williams. On the morning of Sept. 11, 1980, the body of Williams, 20 years old, was found in a cul-de-sac in Mobile, with police quickly ruling the cause of death to be murder by stabbing. Per the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, that was eight miles from Williams' apartment, where her car remained in its parking spot. There was no sign of struggle in her residence, although the door had been left open. It was a mysterious death, which led to a fruitless investigation, at least at first.

In the 2010s, Mobile police took another look at Williams' case, re-interviewing as many witnesses as they could find and using technology not at their disposal in 1980 to examine evidence. DNA led to a secret indictment of Alvin Ray Allen, arrested on a murder charge in 2019 after a standoff with police and the involvement of a SWAT team. In 2020, Williams' court appearance resulted in a hung jury and a mistrial, making this murder case cold once more.

According to All That's Interesting, Tucson financial manager Chuck Morgan left for work on the morning of March 22, 1977... and then didn't come home for three days. He wasn't exactly safe and sound, either — he let his wife know that a mysterious party had treated his throat with a drug that could kill him if he attempted to speak. Morgan also claimed to be a secret agent of the U.S. Treasury. 

He recovered within a week, but then two months later, Morgan once again disappeared. Nine days after that, Morgan's wife received a mysterious phone call, where a female voice told her that her husband was "all right," but he obviously wasn't when two days later, Morgan's body was found in the desert 40 miles west of Tucson. The cause of death — a gunshot to the back of the head, oddly from his own gun. 

In Morgan's car, authorities found more weapons, ammunition, and one of Morgan's teeth wrapped in a handkerchief. Morgan was wearing a bulletproof vest and had a $2 bill clipped to his underwear with some last names scrawled on it. As the investigation intensified, a woman identifying herself as "Green Eyes" (the same individual who called Morgan's wife) phoned the Pima County Sheriff's office with a tip that Morgan had tried to pay off an assassin who'd been hired to kill him, and that the deceased had some organized crime ties. And that's where the story ends — Morgan's strange murder was never solved.

One of California's oldest — and weirdest — unsolved murders goes back to 1866 and the years after the Gold Rush brought countless treasure-seekers way out west. According to The Press Enterprise, Herman Ehrenberg was an immigrant from Prussia (now part of Germany) who made his fortune as a miner and surveyor and had also fought in the Texas Revolution. He did most of his business in California, and he was traveling via stagecoach from the Arizona border town of Yuma to San Bernardino in the southern part of the state. 

He arrived in Dos Palmas on Oct. 9, 1866. There, he slept overnight on a pallet outside the stagecoach station. The stationmaster, W.H. Smith, was sleeping inside, and he would later attest that he heard a gunshot ring out around midnight. When he went outside, he found Ehrenberg shot and dying and also noticed that a few items had been stolen from the station's small general store. One theory at the time held that a man from the local Cahuilla Tribe had attempted to rob Ehrenberg (he had thousands of dollars worth of gold in his pockets to buy a mine), and in 1880, a friend of the deceased suggested that Smith was the guilty party. Nevertheless, his murderer was never identified.

The state of Connecticut still has on the books the unsolved case of a teenager who went missing in July 1968. That summer, 13-year-old Debbie Spickler, a resident of Mystic, Conn., went to visit relatives in the city of Vernon. One evening, Spickler and her cousin walked to the swimming pool at Henry Park. Realizing they didn't have towels, Spickler's cousin turned around to go back home on Foxhill Drive to get them, agreeing to meet up with Spickler at the pool. When the cousin arrived at the park, she couldn't find Spickler — she had evidently never arrived. 

Spickler wasn't seen or heard from again, with no conclusive evidence of life or death ever uncovered by police, although Spickler's disappearance may be related to two other also unsolved Toiland County abductions that occurred later, in the early 1970s, says the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Spickler's case still carries a $50,000 reward for information.

Nick and Demetra (or Jane) Jeatran weren't even from Florida — they moved to Clearwater in the 1960s to live out their golden years. Their retirement ended violently on Christmas Eve 1968, according to Fox 13 Tampa Bay. 

A friend arrived to drop off some gifts, and when neither Jeatran answered the door, she got worried, according to the Tampa Bay Times. She looked through a window and saw both Nick, 82, and Jane, 74, laying on the floor, still wearing their pajamas. The friend grabbed a neighbor, and they entered through an unlocked back door where they found the couple violently attacked. Jane Jeatran was dead upon discovery, while Nick was still hanging on to life. After emergency life-saving surgery, he died at a hospital three days after the attack. At the time, Clearwater police officers theorized that the Jeatrans had startled a burglar mid-crime, prompting the violent attack — the assailant struck both of them in the head with a blunt object — before he made off with jewelry. The murder weapon, nor a solid suspect, was ever found.

On Jan. 20, 1982, according to Hawaii News Now, 19-year-old hairdresser Lisa Au finished her shift at the Susan Beers Salon in Kailua, on the island of Oahu, telling coworkers she was headed to Makiki to see her boyfriend, Doug Holmes, at his sister's apartment. She stopped to buy poke on the way, headed to the apartment, spent some time there, and drove home to Kailua. She never arrived, and the next day, Au's parents called Holmes to see if he'd heard from their daughter. He retraced her trip and found Au's car parked on a highway shoulder. The driver's side window was partially rolled down, and while her purse was still in the car, her driver's license was missing. This suggested to authorities that a police officer was involved — he'd pulled Au over, asked for her license, and then possibly attacked and abducted her. 

An island-wide search lasted for ten days, until January 31, when Au's body was found in a ravine. A police officer who lived near Au and for whom a sexual harassment charge had been filed, was arrested, but prosecutors lacked evidence to pursue an indictment. (Plus Au's ID turned up — she'd left it at the poke shop when paying with a check.) A newspaper delivery driver later reported that about 2:30 a.m. the night of Au's disappearance, she saw a man drive by with a female passenger who appeared unconscious. Au's final hours, and the circumstances of her death, remain a mystery.

Just after 6 p.m. one night in December 1957, according to the New York Post, 7-year-old Maria Ridulph was playing in the snow on her street in Sycamore, Ill., with her best friend Kathy Sigman. Before long, a man in his 20s named Johnny appeared and asked the girls if they wanted piggyback rides. Ridulph said yes, and Sigman ran home to get her mittens. When she returned, Ridulph and Johnny were gone. Police surmised that Johnny was John Tessier, a local who'd once been caught trying to abduct a child. He had an alibi — he'd been 40 miles away in Rockford, enlisting in the Air Force, a story corroborated by his parents. Investigations of the 70-plus other persons of interest went nowhere, and in April 1958, Ridulph's body was found about 100 miles away. 

In 1993, Tessier's mother, Eileen, recanted her backup of the alibi and told daughter Janet that John had been responsible for Ridulph's death. On Janet's third attempt to get authorities to reopen the case, they did, in 2008. A couple of years later, a Seattle police arrested Jack McCullough, a.k.a. John Tessier, who was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life in prison in 2012. However, he was released in 2016 after an Illinois prosecutor reviewed the case and determined that Tessier was innocent, and a judge threw out the conviction. Tessier then filed lawsuits against police in Illinois and Seattle and received two settlements worth around $750,000. Ridulph's murder remains unsolved.

On the morning of July 10, 1967, 25-year-old stay-at-home mom Leota Camp saw her husband off to work and then went into the backyard of her home in a blue-collar neighborhood of Des Moines to hang laundry and look after her kids, 3-year-old Brenda and 4-year-old Kevin, reports the Des Moines Register (via Sioux City Journal). She went inside to check on her newborn, Kristine, and the older children played outside until about noon, when they went inside to find their mother to ask her to make them lunch. That's when they discovered Camp laying on a bed, face down, her mouth gagged, hands and feet bound with neckties, and a large knife plunged into her back. They ran to neighbors for help, who found Camp still alive, but with four deep stab wounds an inch apart in her spinal column. She died in an ambulance en route to Broadlawns Polk County Public Hospital.

Camp's murder baffled local police. She had not been assaulted, nothing had been stolen from the house, and the kids hadn't heard anything. One neighbor told authorities that they'd seen a man driving a black Ford Mustang, who parked near the Camp home before walking toward it. The identity of that man, if he was even Camp's murderer, was never determined. The last activity on the case came in response to a tip in 2008, which ultimately proved fruitless.

Per the Lexington Herald-Leader, Betty Gail Brown had planned to study late into the evening at Lexington's Transylvania College on Oct. 26, 1961, and then drive back to the house where she lived with her parents. According to the attendant at Forrer Hall, she checked out around midnight, got into her car, and headed home on Upper Street, where witnesses spotted her. Then, for reasons unknown, Brown returned to campus and parked her car in the driveway of Old Morrison, a college building. Her mother, Quincy Brown (the sister of character actor and Pretty in Pink star Harry Dean Stanton), got worried and drove her daughter's commute three times that night, never seeing the car outside Old Morrison. After 3 a.m., a police officer noticed her driving around and broke the news that Betty Gail had been discovered dead in her vehicle. Police believe she died at about 1 a.m., strangled with her own bra. She was otherwise not assaulted, and her purse was left untouched, her keys tossed into the backseat.

Four years after the murder, Lexington police found their first major breakthrough. A man in southern Oregon named Alex Arnold confessed to the murder, although Quincy didn't believe him to be guilty. His trial resulted in a hung jury, and Arnold recanted his confession, leaving the case's outcome unresolved.

According to Film Daily, the case of Cathy Moulton is the oldest unresolved missing persons case in the state of Maine. On Sept. 24, 1971, 16-year-old Moulton was preparing for a YMCA dance that evening and asked her parents if she could head into downtown Portland, Maine, to buy a new pair of tights. Her mother told her to also grab some toothpaste and to come home before the dance. Her father dropped her off, and after buying her items, Cathy met with a friend at a record shop then started her walk back home at about 5:30 p.m. She never made it to her house.

Portland Police were initially reluctant to help, wanting to wait the customary 72 hours for a missing person to show up, but father Lyman Moulton urged them to act quickly. He also sought out the local branch office of the FBI, where agents dismissed the disappearance as a teenage runaway case. A report came in that a girl matching Cathy's description was seen in a car with a boy in Portland on the night in question, but the lead was a dead end. The case was eventually closed although reopened in 1983 when a hunter in rural Maine found remains matching that of a teen girl in early 70s clothing. But when he led authorities to the site of his discovery, he couldn't find it again. A search of the area in 2004 yielded no results.

Louis B. Allyn, an alumnus and a chemistry professor of Massachusetts' Westfield State College, according to MassLive, changed the way Americans both think about food and eat. In the early 1900s, he wrote The Westfield Pure Food Book, a scientifically backed and thoroughly tested exposé on the toxins and impurities found in commonly produced and consumed food items. Along with Upton Sinclair's similar work, The Jungle, the book helped launch the pure food movement, leading to the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 and the birth of stringent government regulation of what Americans eat. 

Naturally, this all made Allyn the enemy of industrialists and big food companies, which had to change the way they did business. He also reportedly angered the Nazis because he held a patent it wanted, and he testified against an organized crime syndicate. Any number of parties could have murdered Allyn, found shot to death in his home in May 1940, ironically while reading a book called The Gun. Allyn's is the oldest unsolved murder in modern Massachusetts and the only unsolved murder in Westfield.

Mary Schlais was studying at the University of Minnesota in 1974, according to CBS Minnesota, when she decided to hitchhike to Chicago to attend an art show. Thumbing a ride was much more common in the 70s than it is today, and it's a practice Schlais engaged in often, according to her family. She never made it to Chicago, and authorities later determined that she'd been killed just a few hours after she departed, stabbed more than 15 times. A Minnesota man called police when he saw a man by the side of a road emerge from a compact car and throw what looked to be a body into a ditch off a rural road. He helped a sketch artist come up with a drawing of the suspect, but no arrests were ever made of a viable suspect who matched the rendering. 

Schlais' body was exhumed in 2009, and DNA testing uncovered physical evidence of her assailant. That matched with a profile of Randall Woodfield, a failed Green Bay Packers prospect who went on to be convicted of one murder, although authorities believe he killed more than 40 women — who, like Schlais, were caucasian, of small build, and in their 20s — in the Pacific Northwest and the Midwest. He never confessed to any crimes other than the one for which he's serving a 90-year prison sentence, so police in Dunn County, Minn., never formally interviewed him about the disappearance of Schlais.

Missouri's oldest unsolved death dates back to 1983, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, although little is known about the potential perpetrator or victim of the crime. On Feb. 28, 1983, authorities in St. Louis responded to a call of a small body found in an abandoned and uninhabited building. 

Forensic testing suggested that the individual, an African-American female, was between the ages of 8 and 11 years old, a relatively tall 5 foot 5 inches, suffered from an improperly formed spine as a result of the birth defect spina bifida, and that she had died less than a week before her remains were recovered. Her only other distinguishing characteristics were the red fingernail polish and yellow sweater she wore, and testing of her bones indicated she was not from the St. Louis area but had spent most of her childhood in the upper Midwest. After more than 30 years, the individual is still referred to in records as "Jane Doe 1983."

Mary Kay Heese, 17 years old at the time, was last seen standing alone on a street corner about five blocks from her home in the small town of Wahoo, Neb., on March 25, 1969, reports Thomson Reuters. That night, her parents reported her missing. Not long after, a farmer came across the body of a young woman in a ditch on a country road a few miles outside of town. She was identified as Heese, and she was found fully clothed but with her shoes nearby along with her personal items — a school textbook, a notebook, and purse — carefully stacked, says the Lincoln Journal Star. The cause of death — Heese had been stabbed at least a dozen times, and an autopsy revealed signs of a physical struggle. Investigators also determined that she tried to run away from her murderer.

From crime scene evidence, police were able to determine the killer's shoe size, hair length, and hair color, and from that, put together a list of 15 suspects. None of them quite matched up with the evidence. The primary suspect, ultimately ruled out, had served time in a Nebraska prison and then moved to Florida, while the secondary suspect committed suicide two years after Heese's death. The murder remains the oldest unsolved homicide in Nebraska history.

Law enforcement officials in the state of New Hampshire never closed the case of a teenager who, in 1968, disappeared and was believed to be murdered. On June 11, 1968, shortly after 7 a.m., 15-year-old Joanne Dunham left home in the Raiche Mobile Homes in Charleston, setting out on foot to catch the bus that would take her to school, reports the New Hampshire Department of Justice. She never made it to the school, and she never made it to the bus, either. The next day, on a closed dirt road on Quaker City Road in Unity, about five-and-a-half miles away, Dunham's body was discovered. Authorities ascertained that Dunham had been abducted, and then murdered, officially dying of asphyxiation by strangulation.

This 50-plus-year-old case was never officially solved, but it may be linked to a larger criminal enterprise. The nature of Dunham's death matches the victims of others in the geographic proximity in the same time period, attributed to a serial murderer known as the Connecticut River Valley Killer.

In Taos, N.M., a federal marshal discovered a shockingly grisly crime scene in the sprawling, 19-room Spanish hacienda-style estate of 70-year-old Arthur Rochford Manby on July 3, 1929. A corpse, both bloated and partially consumed by maggots, according to Taos News, lay on a cot in one room. The body had been separated from its head, which the authorities discovered in a different room of the house. Any number of Taos residents could have been responsible for the decapitation-related death of Manby, who emigrated from England in 1883 and was soon thereafter regarded as the most hated man in town, the result of his tendency to swipe people's land and make sketchy deals for property, mines, and water rights, reportedly thanks to his connections with crooked state-level politicians. At the time of his death, he faced dozens of civil lawsuits and criminal charges for his alleged actions — his body was discovered by a marshal serving him a new suit.

Manby was perceived as such a shady individual that some locals didn't think the body was even Manby's, rather that he'd staged the crime scene in order to abscond. Still, no murderer was ever apprehended.

In the summer of 1965, 21-year-old Suellen Evans transferred to the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, hoping to get some extra college credits taken care of before the beginning of fall term, according to Raleigh's News and Observer. Around noon on Friday, July 30, Evans met with a friend at campus landmark rotunda The Old Well, then spoke with a professor in Alumni Hall, and then planned to stop by her room in the Cobb Dormitory residence hall to pack for a weekend trip home. She took a shortcut through the campus' Coker Arboretum, and just as she was about to emerge from the exit, witnesses say they saw a man grab Evans from behind and violently pull her into bushes. Evans screamed out and fought off her attacker, alerting a passing student and a nun to come help. Their arrival, and Evans' tenacity, scared off the man, and he ran away. Asked if Evans was hurt, she answered in the negative, explaining that the assailant had unsuccessfully attempted to assault her. Then she said she felt faint, collapsed, and died, as a result of a slashed throat and stab wound in the heart.

Local police, with help from the North Carolina Bureau of Investigation, picked up five suspects that afternoon, and after questioning, released them all without filing charges. A 200-man search of the arboretum for the knife used to kill Evans didn't produce the evidence needed. The murderer was never brought to justice.

According to Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, a three-year period — September 1935 to August 1938 — marked one of the most gruesome and baffling eras in the history of the Ohio metropolis. The remains of what police at the time believed were a total of seven men and five women appeared in or near the Kingsbury Run area of Cleveland, in a creek bed near the Cuyahoga River in the southeast portion of the city. Two of the victims were discovered together, on Sept. 23, 1935. Only one of the two bodies was identified — a hospital orderly named Edward Andrassey. A third victim, a woman named Florence Polillo, appeared on Jan. 26, 1936. One trait that all the victims had in common — their limbs had been removed with skillful, even "surgical precision."

Most of the rest of the bodies were never identified, leading police to theorize that the victims were people from the fringes of society, homeless people, and residents of Cleveland's Depression-era shantytown. The city's Safety Director Eliot Ness, coming off a career busting organized crime rings in Chicago, had a solution — burn down the shantytown, forcing those who lived there to disperse and robbing the suspected murderer of a victim pool. It worked — after the shantytown was destroyed, the killings stopped. Frank Dolezal, a suspect in the so-called "Torso Murders," confessed to the murder of only Polillo but committed suicide before his trial. The other deaths and dismemberments remain a mystery.

The mysterious vanishing of Marvin A. Clark isn't only the oldest active cold case in Oregon, it's the oldest unresolved missing persons matter in the United States, according to The Oregonian. The final time anybody purported to see the 75-year-old Clark alive was on Saturday, Oct. 30, 1926, when he arrived at a bus terminal downtown Portland, having just made the trip from his home in suburban Tigard, likely to visit his daughter. A former town marshal of Linnton (later absorbed into Portland), news reports of the time say that Clark walked with a limp and had no identification on his person at the time. And then, just like that, Clark disappeared — a hefty cash award offered by the subject's daughter didn't lead to any viable information about her father's whereabouts.

Sixty years later, loggers working in a rural area outside Portland uncovered an almost completely intact skeleton, along with a loaded handgun, a few coins, and police-issue shoes. State medical examiner Dr. Karen Gunson ruled that the unidentified man, who some believed to be Clark, had died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. In 2011, state forensic anthropologist Dr. Nici Vance sent a sample of the recovered skull to the University of North Texas for DNA analysis. Technicians were able to find living descendants of Clark, but the bones might not be his. Analysis indicates that the remains were of a middle-aged man, not one in his 70s.

A mysterious and shockingly violent crime unnerved the residents of North Kingstown, R.I., in 1980. More than 40 years later, local law enforcement authorities can't explain quite why Joanne Reynolds was brutally murdered or who committed the horrific act, reports The Independent. Reynolds, a North Kingstown native who graduated from high school there in 1973, went on to enroll at Rhode Island Junior College, studying music with aspirations of becoming a singer (via Facebook). 

On the evening of Feb. 16, 1980, she arrived home at her rented cottage situated behind a two-story apartment building, and a neighbor attests that they saw her come home, alone. North Kingstown police calculated that Reynolds died sometime between just after midnight and before 10 a.m. the next morning, viciously stabbed to death more than a dozen times. Neighbors in the apartments didn't remember hearing any strange sounds or screaming coming from Reynolds' cottage, which didn't show signs of a forced entry. "I feel it was somebody that she knew," Det. Lt. Louis Narciso told the Journal-Bulletin. "She was careful about keeping her door locked." Four decades on, Reynolds' murder is still unsolved.

Naomi Cheney was an Alabama native, but she relocated to Sioux Falls, S.D., during World War II while doing her part for the war effort. A Women's Army Corps officer, the 25-year-old walked home from the state's U.S. Air Force base one day in early October 1943, but she only got within about three blocks — Cheney's body was discovered underneath a bridge by a 10-year-old girl playing nearby, reports the Argus Leader. 

The Minnehaha County sheriff's office determined that Cheney had been killed by a powerful blow to the head with a blunt item as she walked, her body abandoned not far from the site of her death. Police arrested a farm hand who lived less than 50 feet away from where Cheney's body was discovered, and blood matching Cheney's type was located on the man's shoes and on the ground outside his residence. Sophisticated blood testing didn't exist in 1943, so police couldn't be sure it was Cheney's. They set free the farm hand, who was never publicly identified but whom authorities say died in the war. Cheney's murder was never solved.

On June 1, 1948, 21-year-old Mary Virginia Carpenter left Texarkana, Texas, for Denton, 200 miles away, to attend the Texas State College for Women. According to Of Misdeeds and Mysteries, cab driver Edgar Ray "Jack" Zachary picked her up at a train station and then dropped her at Brackenridge Hall at approximately 9 p.m. Zachary would later tell investigators that he saw Carpenter walk to a parked convertible where she spoke familiarly to two young men inside. Those two men were never identified, and Carpenter was never seen again. The missing persons investigation zeroed in on Zachary, who said he'd been home by 10 p.m. after driving Carpenter, and he passed a polygraph test, too.

Almost ten years later, in Jefferson, Texas, 200 miles away from Denton, a box of human remains surfaced, containing the bones and skull of a woman. This person would have had a similar height as Carpenter and had one leg shorter than the other — just like Carpenter. However, it wasn't the missing college student, because dental records didn't match.

Zachary's wife would later recant her corroboration of her husband's alibi, while the cab driver was arrested and charged with assault in 1957. He submitted to another polygraph test over the Carpenter case, and he passed it before dying in 1984. The next development in the case came in 1998, when a man said he knew where on campus her body was buried. An excavation failed to turn up those remains.

The death of Orville Gibson remains unofficially unsolved more than 60 years after the fact, although local legend and conjecture in Newbury, Vt., suggest that the community knows exactly what happened. The facts are these, according to CBS News – on Dec. 31, 1957, New Year's Eve, Gibson, a wealthy and disliked dairy farmer disappeared. Three months later his body, with his hands bound together, surfaced in the Connecticut River not far from Newbury. 

Rumors about Gibson's fate and final moments persist, including one that he'd beaten an elderly hired hand, prompting a group of townsfolk to enact mob justice, kidnapping him, and throwing him into the trunk of a car where he suffocated, his lifeless corpse then thrown into the river. Vermont state troopers questioned dozens of parties, most of whom claimed to have no knowledge of the murder. Two men were arrested, tried, and acquitted, and Gibson's murder has stayed unsolved ever since.

According to the Spokesman-Review, Candice Elaine Rogers, or just Candy, was a 9-year-old Camp Fire Girl in March 1959 when she went door-to-door in neighborhoods near her home in the eastern Washington state city of Spokane selling mints as a fundraiser. And then she was never seen alive again. A few hours after she vanished, according to Unsolved Mysteries Fandom, boxes of Camp Fire mints were found by a bridge, and police collected more than 700 tips from locals. Two weeks after her disappearance, the body of Rogers was found in the woods, underneath a heap of pine needles. Spokane Police investigators theorized that she'd been abducted, assaulted, and strangled with a portion of her own clothing.

Detectives interviewed dozens of persons of interest, and over the decades, more than a dozen men confessed to the Rogers' murder, albeit falsely, and they were ruled out as suspects. Police were especially interested in Hugh Bion Morse, a serial killer who struck the Spokane area twice, but DNA testing in 2011 disproved the theory. Another possible murderer, according to authorities was Alfred Graves, who committed suicide the day Rogers' body was discovered. 

In 2021, thanks to DNA testing of a sample taken from Rogers' clothing, Spokane Police Department detectives were able to narrow matches down to now-deceased John Reigh Hoff. They exhumed his body and confirmed the match. At the time of Rogers' murder, Hoff was a 20-year-old Army man and lived in the same neighborhood as the young girl. He made waves a couple of years later after assaulting a woman and fleeing the scene. He was caught and served six months, after which he was dishonorably discharged. He died by suicide in 1970.

Over a 14-year period, seven women were killed in what became known as the Capital City Killings, according to Madison.com. Nearly all the victims had long, middle-parted hair, and some connection to the University of Wisconsin-Madison. None of the murders were ever solved, and police believe them to be the work of a serial killer. In May 1968, a student found the body of freshman Christine Rothschild in the bushes outside Sterling Hall. She'd been stabbed and also strangled. Suspects were pursued, but the charges didn't stick, and no one ever stood trial.

That was a standalone event, until the killings resumed in the mid-1970s. In 1976, the burned body of 20-year-old Debra Bennett was found in Cross Plains, outside Madison. Two years later, 18-year-old Julie Ann Hall was found in a makeshift grave near Waunakee, killed by a blow to the head. The body of Julie Speerschneider, who left a campus bar in March 1979, was discovered in the Yahara River in 1981. Susan LeMahieu, 24, vanished in 1979, and her brutally stabbed body surfaced in the Madison Arboretum the next year. Shirley Stewart disappeared in early 1980, her body found in a Madison-adjacent forest in July 1981. And in July 1982, Donna Mraz was stabbed to death outside the university's Camp Randall Stadium, and witnesses heard her scream and saw the assailant run off. That was the last in the string of the murders, and police are still looking for the killer.

According to the cold case crime database Uncovered, the oldest unsolved affair in Washington state dates to March 1, 1951, and concerns the disappearance of Alvin Edwin Matlock. According to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, at the time, the 21-year-old Matlock, a veteran of the U.S. Armed Forces (he's in uniform in his handful of publicly released photos) was living in a cabin in the Browne's Mountain neighborhood on the edge of the city of Spokane. Located Persons reports that his family last spoke with him in the spring of 1951, but in November of that year, after he didn't show up for Thanksgiving dinner, his mother went to his cabin and, finding him absent, reported him missing. 

Relatives and authorities had little to work off of beyond speculation, like the rumor that Matlock had quietly moved to Alaska, or that he'd been shot to death by the jealous husband of a married woman with whom he'd been romantically involved. Those leads proved fruitless, and Matlock was never found, dead or alive.