Bizarre, Unsolved or Otherwise Infamous True Crime Cases From Your State / Country

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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I’m a big true crime buff, and spend a lot of my time binging on old episodes of Forensic Files or watching Youtubers like Rob Gavagan and Stephanie Harlowe (I’m also gaga for the TV show Criminal Minds!). So share with me an infamous, unsolved or terrifying tale of true crime from your home state (country, if outside the US, although you can get more specific by province/territory/city, if you like)! It can be old or recent, famous or obscure - you pick. Multiple stories from the same states/countries are welcome, as are links, so don’t feel you need to summarize the entire thing.

I’ll start:

Villisca, Iowa (Midwest US)

In 1912, the entire Moore family and two childhood friends (total of 8 people, 6 of them children) were murdered with an ax. It’s suspected that the murder entered the house sometime the afternoon before, and waited in the attic for the family to go to sleep before emerging. While there have been a ton of suspects at the time, no one was ever proven guilty. The murders remain unsolved to this day, and the incident is undoubtedly Iowa’s most infamous murder and lasting mystery.

You can tour the house and actually stay the night, if you’re brave enough. It’s always been a dream of mine to take a trip there with a couple friends. I’ve driving through the area once on my way back from Nashville, not realize where I was until I saw a sign for the “Ax Murder House” (certainly not something you drive past every day!). I think it’s about 2-3 hours away from my city. If I ever do visit I’ll be sure to take photos and maybe post a thread about my experience :smiley:

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Bunnyman Bridge:

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The disappearance in May 2019 of Jennifer Dulos. Her estranged husband and his girlfriend were suspected but nothing was proven and then he committed suicide a couple of weeks ago. So we may never know what happened to her.

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The one that comes back to me from time to time is the disappearance of Asha Degree. It was front page news for weeks in Charlotte, where I was still at the time very much a newcomer.

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Well, for 13 years the Superbike Motorsports quadruple murder was a mystery, but that was solved in 2016. Still left behind is the Blue Ridge Savings triple murder from 6 months earlier. It seems reasonable that that could have been the same guy, but they haven’t been able to pin it on him.

One that sticks in my mind for some reason (enough that I actually remembered her name) was a Clemson student named Norsaadah Husain. Disappeared from a laundromat, leaving behind just a bloody floor. Her body was discovered two months later in the woods in a different town.

Another one: before I was born my mother used to work for a small Mom and Pop Drycleaners. She was good friends with the owners and we would visit them sometimes (mostly at the store but sometimes at their home) during my childhood, and I have lots of childhood memories of playing around in the store. In 2000, years after both the Mom and the Pop had died and the business had a new owner, sombody murdered a clerk in the store–just the job my mother used to do. Never solved.

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I’m pretty sure one of the channels / shows I cover featured that story. That poor kid’s photo looks extremely familiar.

South Carolina is not my home state, but this is a case I’ve seen videos about before, and I find the note that was left especially chilling: Korrina Lynne Sagers Malinoski – The Charley Project

Basically, a girl’s mother disappeared in 1987. She was never heard from again. Less than a year later, her 11 year old daughter was waiting at a bus stop. After that she vanished, leaving only a note: “Dad, momma came back. Give the boys a hug.” (referring to her two step-brothers). She, likewise, hasn’t been seen since.

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Dennis Rader. Currently incarcerated about 75 miles from where I live.
Emily Sanders. The killer is currently incarcerated about 5 blocks from where I live. I can see the west wall of the prison from my back windows.

Which obviously mean that oh, yes, the Clutter family.

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The Black Dahlia. Duh.

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I live in California, so Charles Manson is probably the most infamous.

A bit less well known, but more local to me, was Dorothea Puente, a grandmotherly old lady dubbed the “Death House Landlady”. She rented rooms in her home to the elderly and disabled, then murdered them, buried them in the yard, and continued to cash their Social Security checks. The house, an historic Victorian near downtown Sacramento, has become a bit of a minor tourist attraction, and the current homeowners acknowledge what happened there with signs and a dummy of Puente on the porch.

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2018 thread: Unsolved mysteries and murders.

Nine year old Erica Baker went missing 21 years ago. It happened one block from where we lived.

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My pet theory: Certain loose ends from the OJ Simpson case.

I don’t doubt for a moment that he did it. But I have had this theory that, after a long history of known hostility and threats toward his ex-wife, he finally had a total psychotic break, wherein he did it, and afterward was totally unaware that he did it.

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Another one from my area: the disappearance of Cheryl Coker 15 months ago. Am guessing her husband had something to do with it.

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I’ve lived in Colorado a little over 4 years. I think the Jon Benet Ramsey murder is the state’s most prominent unsolved case.

Regarding where I’m from, I can’t really think of any prominent unsolved cases…Florida people tend to do their weird shit all out in the open.

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In 1970, in West Virginia, two female college students (“coeds”) were brutally murdered. The region’s isolation and low crime rate made the crime even more perplexing, and terrifying. I was a young kid and remember the ‘stranger danger’ fear going through the roof.

About six years later, a suspect (already in prison) was tried and convicted, but many were skeptical.

Some authors and retired police detectives who’ve been examining the case for decades have some ideas. One of the most feasible IMO involves another rapist/kidnapper who died in prison in 2002.

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The Gilgo Beach murders (what they’re generally known as on Long Island).

While searching for Shannan Gilbert, who disappeared in the area in 2010, 10 bodies were found (separately, not in a group) dumped in a marshy area off Ocean Parkway on the South Shore of the Island. Gilbert’s body was found later. None of these murders has yet been solved, but speculation of course is that it’s the result of one or more serial killers. (Gilbert’s death isn’t thought to be linked to the others and may have been at least partially an accident, drowning after tripping in the marsh, but she seemed to have been fleeing from … what?)

Still a mystery, still being investigated, and still popping up in the local news from time to time.

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The Alphabet Murders. Three young girls were abducted, raped, and murdered within a two year period in the early seventies. All three had first and last names that started with the same letter. And all three were abducted in the city of Rochester but their bodies were found miles away in the suburbs - and in each case it was a suburb whose name started with the same letter as the victim’s name.

Nobody was sure whether it was the work of a single killer or a horrible coincidence. All three cases are still unsolved.

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Around here, there was Claire Lortie. She was a lawyer who hired an entrepreneur in the summer of 1983 to dig a hole on her property, supposedly to find the sewer connection. The digger found this odd because he knew the sewer wasn’t in that part of the lot. She insisted, he dug the hole, but he also warned his brother who was the local police chief. When the police came to investigate, the hole had been filled up; when they dug again, they found a freezer with Ms. Lortie’s former spouse inside. In pieces.

At trial, she claimed she had found his dead body (and that she didn’t know who had killed him). She said he had decided to cut him up, freeze the resulting parts, arrange for the freezer to be moved from the basement to a pick-up truck (the lid must have been locked, I guess), then have the hole dug and push the freezer down into the hole herself.

The jury eventually acquitted her of the murder charge.

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Not unsolved, but infamous.

The murders of Don Bolles and Bob Crane.

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Here in Australia the disappearance of Prime Minister Harold Holt has never been explained, it probably wasn’t a crime but nobody knows for sure

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The Hall-Mills murders in New Jersey in 1922 were never solved. A clergyman and one of his choir members were having an affair and were murdered in a field. The man’s wife and her two brothers were charged and tried, but acquitted for insufficient evidence.

I’m currently reading a novel very loosely based on the trial, which was the most notorious and widely covered until the Lindbergh trial took over that honor a few years later. The novel is called The Bellamy Case by Frances Noyes Hart, and it is a real page-turner. Unlike real life, the author provides a solution at the end in the form of a confession letter.