Cold Cases in New York City, New York
ColdCaseIndex documents 19 cases in New York City, New York, dated 1891 to 2023. 8 are recorded as unsolved. The earliest is Carrie Brown (1891) and the most recent is Jordan Neely (2023).
- Unsolved 8 (42%)
- Solved or convicted 8 (42%)
- Closed without conviction 3 (16%)
By type
All 19 cases
Jordan Neely
Jordan Neely, a 30-year-old homeless man experiencing a mental health crisis on a New York City subway train, died after being placed in a chokehold by fellow passenger Daniel Penny on May 1, 2023.
Orsolya Gaal
Orsolya Gaal, 51, was stabbed more than 50 times in her Forest Hills, Queens home on April 16, 2022, and her body was left in a hockey duffel bag near Forest Park.
R. Kelly (sentencing)
R&B singer R. Kelly was convicted in New York in September 2021 of racketeering and Mann Act sex trafficking offences and sentenced on June 29, 2022 to 30 years in prison.
Shele Covlin
Shele Danishefsky Covlin, a 47-year-old Wall Street money manager, was found dead in the bathtub of her Upper West Side apartment on New Year's Eve 2009.
Sarah Fox
Sarah Fox, a 21-year-old drama student at the Juilliard School, disappeared on May 19, 2004, after leaving her Inwood apartment in upper Manhattan to go jogging.
Sneha Anne Philip
Dr. Sneha Anne Philip, an internist, was last seen shopping at a store near the World Trade Center on September 10, 2001. She was never seen again. Whether she died in the 9/11 attacks or disappeared separately remains unknown.
Anjelica Castillo ("Baby Hope")
The body of a malnourished young girl was found in a cooler beside the Henry Hudson Parkway in Manhattan in July 1991, and detectives who nicknamed her "Baby Hope" could not identify her for 22 years.
Lisa Steinberg
Six-year-old Lisa Steinberg was fatally beaten on November 1, 1987, in the Greenwich Village apartment of Joel Steinberg, a lawyer who had raised her without ever legally adopting her.
Jennifer Levin
Jennifer Levin, 18, was found strangled in Central Park behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art on August 26, 1986, hours after leaving an Upper East Side bar with Robert Chambers.
John Favara
John Favara, a neighbor of mob boss John Gotti, disappeared in 1980 months after he accidentally struck and killed Gotti's young son with his car, and is widely presumed to have been murdered.
Etan Patz
Six-year-old Etan Patz was one of the first missing children to appear on a milk carton when he disappeared walking to school in SoHo. The case transformed child safety in America.
Son of Sam Victims
David Berkowitz, known as 'Son of Sam,' murdered six people and wounded seven others in New York City over 13 months. He terrorized the city with taunting letters to police and media.
Cornelia Crilley
Cornelia Crilley, a 23-year-old TWA flight attendant, was found strangled in her apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side in June 1971.
Dorothy Kilgallen
Journalist Dorothy Kilgallen, who was investigating the JFK assassination, was found dead in her New York townhouse. Her death was ruled an overdose but many believe she was murdered.
Frank Olson
Army biochemist Frank Olson, 43, died on November 28, 1953, after falling from a window of the Hotel Statler in New York, nine days after CIA colleagues gave him LSD without his knowledge. The death was treated as a suicide.
Judge Joseph Force Crater
New York Supreme Court Justice Joseph Force Crater, 41, vanished on the evening of August 6, 1930, after dining with two companions at a restaurant on West 45th Street in Manhattan.
Dorothy Arnold
Dorothy Harriet Camille Arnold, a young New York socialite, disappeared while walking in Manhattan in 1910, in one of the era's most famous unexplained vanishings.
Stanford White
Architect Stanford White, 52, was shot dead on June 25, 1906, at the rooftop theater of Madison Square Garden by Harry K. Thaw, husband of Evelyn Nesbit.
Carrie Brown
Carrie Brown, known on the Bowery as "Old Shakespeare," was found strangled and mutilated in Room 31 of the East River Hotel in Manhattan on April 24, 1891.