18 Jaw-Dropping True Crime Mysteries That Took Decades To Solve
WARNING: This post discusses serious topics, including mentions of death, bodily harm, and murder. Please proceed with caution.
1.The death of Sherri Rasmussen
In 1986, Sherri Rasmussen was enjoying life with her new husband of three months, John Ruetten. Their condo was broken into and Rasmussen, 29, was beaten and shot, and found dead at the scene, per CBS News. A pair of robbers who attacked another woman in the area were believed to be responsible and the case went cold until May 2009, when former LAPD detective Stephanie Lazarus was linked to the crime thanks to DNA and ultimately arrested and convicted. Lazarus was sentenced to 27 years to life in prison.
2.The South Florida killer clown murder of 1990
Marlene Warren answered her front door on a day in May 1990 to be greeted by a clown, who handed her flowers and balloons before shooting her, in front of her 21-year-old son, per AP News. The case went unsolved until 2017, when an improvement in DNA technology and evidence from the crime scene pointed police toward Warren's husband's second wife, Sheila Keen-Warren, who pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in early 2023.
3.Conviction of the Golden State Killer
The East Area Rapist, later known as the Golden State Killer, terrorized areas of the state in the '70s and '80s but later went dormant, leaving victims without justice. That is, until Michelle McNamara's web sleuthing turned true crime magnum opus, I'll Be Gone in The Dark was released. Although not officially credited with helping aid in the capture and conviction of Joseph James DeAngelo in 2020, shortly after its posthumous release, forensic genealogy helped link him to the crime, per NPR.
4.Murders of Lloyd Duane Bogle and Patricia Kalitzke
Residents in a 1956 Montana town came across two gruesome discoveries in 24 hours. A group of teens found 18-year-old Lloyd Duane Bogle with his hands bound by his own belt, dead from a gunshot wound to the head. The next day, a county road worker found 16-year-old Patricia Kalitzke's body north of the area where Bogle was discovered, sexually assaulted, and shot. The two went to the "lover's lane" area together, per NPR, but it would take more than 60 years for police to determine, via forensic genealogy, a man named Kenneth Gould. Unfortunately, the discovery came in 2019, twelve years after Gould's death.
5.Disappearance of Etan Patz
One of the first kids featured on a milk carton, six-year-old Etan Patz disappeared while walking alone for the first time to a school bus stop in New York City in 1979, the BBC reports. The case remained a mystery until in 2012, a man called a hotline and told police he believed his brother-in-law, a then-teenaged deli worker named Pedro Hernandez, was responsible. Hernandez confessed to the crime in 2015, saying he strangled the boy to death in the basement of the deli after luring him with the promise of a soda. In his 50s, Hernandez was sentenced to 25 years to life.
6.Murder of the Lyon Sisters
Sheila and Kate Lyon were 10 and 12 years old, respectively, at the time they visited a suburban Maryland shopping mall in March 1975 and vanished, the Washington Post reported. Despite a massive search, no movement was made on the case. Little did authorities know that the eccentric loner they spoke to that year and dismissed as chasing a reward for information was actually involved with the case. Lloyd Lee Welch, then 18, would be found in jail for another crime against a child over 33 years later, when investigators followed up hoping for answers.
7.Murder of Nancy Marie Bennallack
Nancy Marie Bennallack was a 28-year-old working as a court reporter in Sacramento in 1970 when she was stabbed to death outside her apartment. In 2015, forensic genealogy helped determine it was a man in her apartment complex, Richard John Davis, who brutally murdered her. Sadly, Davis died in 1997, the Sacramento Bee.
8.Murder of Irene Garza
In April 1960, the beauty queen was found dead days after she failed to return home from a trip to church. Though the priest who heard her confession, Father John Bernard Feit, was the only person considered a suspect, it wasn't until two clergymen came forward in 2002 and said they heard him confess to the murder that the cold case gained traction. Father Feit was convicted in 2017 and died in prison in 2020, per CBS News.
9.List family murders
In 1971, John Emil List, a Sunday school teacher and Boy Scout troop leader in his New Jersey town, shot and killed his mother Alma, wife Helen, and their three kids, per History Despite leaving his weapon at the scene, List carefully set things up so that it would take days if not weeks to discover the family had been killed, giving him ample time to get away. Fast forward to 1989 and the List family murders were featured on America's Most Wanted, which resulted in a tip being phoned in that List had assumed the identity Robert Clark and started over in the South. It took authorities time to track him down but later that year, he was tried for his crimes and ultimately convicted, dying alone in jail in 2008, where he was serving 5 consecutive life sentences.
10.Murder of George and Catherine Peacock
George Peacock, 76, and Catherine Peacock, 73, were found stabbed to death in their Vermont home in September 1989, despite no sign of forced entry, per CBS News. Though their then-son-in-law Michael Anthony Louise was identified as a suspect two years later, there wouldn't be enough evidence to tie him to the crime until in May 2020, forensic testing confirmed a DNA match to George Peacock in a spot of blood found inside Louise's car at the time of the murders.
11.Murder of Susan Galvin
Susan Galvin, a 20-year-old records clerk for Seattle PD was reported missing after failing to show up for work in July 1967. Galvin was found sexually assaulted and strangled to death in the parking garage of the Seattle Center. Developments in DNA technology in 2002 led investigators to the already deceased Frank Wypych, a security guard in the complex at the time, per ABC News. Forensic genealogy confirmed Wypych as the killer in 2019.
12.Murder of Mary Agnes Klinsky
Mary Agnes Klinsky was just 18 in 1965 when she went to mail a letter and never returned to her New Jersey home. She was found raped and beaten to death in Telegraph Hill Park in Holmdel, just off the Garden State Parkway entrance, per USA Today. Revisited with new DNA technology in 2016, detectives were able to determine Klinsky was the first victim of serial killer Robert Zarinsky.
13.Central Park jogger case
In 1989, five Black and Latino teens were wrongly accused of assault and rape of a woman named Trisha Meili, 28, who was jogging in New York City's Central Park. In 2002, DNA evidence proved the five men — Raymond Santana Jr., Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, Korey Wise, and Yusef Salaam — were innocent of the crime, per The New York Times. Matias Reyes, who was already imprisoned for his crimes against other women, ended up meeting Wise in prison, leading him to confess to the crime in 2002. Reyes was not charged because the statute of limitations on the crime had been exceeded.
14.Murder of Jenny Zitricki
Jenny Zitricki was enjoying a night alone in her Greenville, South Carolina apartment in 1990 when the 28-year-old was assaulted, strangled to death, and left in her running bathtub, per The Greenville Journal. The case was cold until 2018 when DNA technology linked her death to Robert Eugene Brashers, whose DNA was collected at the time of his 1999 death by suicide. He went on to be linked to several other unsolved murders.
15.Murder of Patricia Beard
Patricia Beard, 32, was found strangled to death in her Denver apartment in a group home for mentally disabled people in 1981 after loved ones alerted police she hadn't been heard from in days. In July 2013, DNA technology linked Hector Bencomo-Hinojos to the crime, per The Denver Post.
16.Murder of Everett Delano
Retired Navy veteran Everett Delano was shot and killed by an armed robber in September 1966 in the New Hampshire garage where he worked. The cold case was reopened in 2013, with DNA pointing to Thomas Cass. Cass was interviewed in 2014 and days later, he died by suicide, per WMUR.
17.Dalson, UK's 'Bayonet' Murders
Norma Richards, 27, was raped and murdered with a 19th-century bayonet in 1982. Two of her three children, seven and nine, were also killed in a similar way, and all three bodies were left stripped, per the BBC. Richard's four-year-old daughter came home from a sleepover the next day to discover the remains. In 2011, the case was reopened after new DNA technology helped identify Wilbert Dyce, a serial predator in the area whose ex-wife survived being terrorized by him in a matter similar to the murders, per The Evening Standard. He was officially convicted in 2012.
18.And finally, the murders of Shannon Rose Lloyd and Renee Cuevas
Shannon Rose Lloyd, 23, was murdered in her own bedroom in Garden Grove, CA in May 1987, with the cause of death later determined to be strangulation after sexual assault. Two years later, Renee Cuevas, 27, was found on the side of the road in Garden Grove, near the El Toro Marine base, per CBS News. When cold cases were reviewed in the area in 2021, the two cases were concluded to have been committed by someone with the same DNA profile, later identified as Reuben J. Smith, who died by suicide in 1999, a year after being arrested for attempting to do the same to a third woman.
