Cite for this? Wikipedia says “Although after his death Richard III was accused of having Edward and his brother killed, notably by More and in Shakespeare’s play, the facts surrounding their disappearance remain unknown.”
several sets of bones that could be the bones of the two princes have been located, including one set found under the staircase to the White Tower chapel in the 1670s, but there’s no definitive proof.
Looks like they were reexhumed in 1933 and found to contain human and animal bones, and nothing has been done since (e.g. DNA).
Prob not the oldest ever solved cold case, but two police officers were shot and killed in 1957. Gerald Mason was convicted for it in 2003.
As he was getting arrested, he said to the arresting officers “You’re here for that?”.
Murder and body dump, 430,000 years ago (most likely by a right-handed assailant).
Does it count if it broke anti-miscegenation laws?
Not applicable to non-marital sex between enslaved women and their male owners in Jefferson’s Virginia, AFAICT.
Not the oldest but interesting none the less - what about the identification of the bodies of the Russian royal family by DNA evidence (supplied by the Duke of Edinburgh, amongst others).
Obviously the rumours had always been that they’d been murdered and buried, but it wasn’t until they positively identified the bones that they could be certain. It also cleared up that whole ‘Anastasia survived’ nonsense as well.
Reinhold Hanning was convicted in 2016 of complicity in 170,000 WWII-era murders , but died before he could serve his 5-year sentence.
He was an SS guard at Auschwitz, and at the time of his conviction said he was “very, very sorry”.