Cold Cases of the 1910s
6 documented cases in which the crime or disappearance took place between 1910 and 1919. 4 are recorded as unsolved.
- Unsolved 4 (67%)
- Partly resolved 1 (17%)
- Solved or convicted 1 (17%)
By type
All 6 cases
New Orleans Axeman Victims
An unidentified attacker known as the Axeman struck homes in and around New Orleans between May 1918 and October 1919, killing six people and injuring several others, many of them Italian grocers and their families.
Bobby Dunbar
Four-year-old Bobby Dunbar vanished during a 1912 fishing trip at Swayze Lake, Louisiana. A boy recovered months later was claimed and raised as Bobby, but 2004 DNA testing proved he was not a Dunbar, confirming a century-old…
Villisca Axe Murders
During the night of June 9-10, 1912, eight people, including six children, were bludgeoned to death with an axe inside the Josiah Moore family home in Villisca, Iowa.
Virginia Christian Case
Ida Belote, 51, was killed in her Hampton, Virginia, home on March 18, 1912. Her 16-year-old laundress, Virginia Christian, was convicted of first-degree murder by an all-white, all-male jury in April 1912 and was electrocuted…
Elsie Paroubek
Elsie Paroubek, a Chicago girl of four or five, disappeared on April 8, 1911, while walking to her aunt's house. A month later her body was recovered from the drainage canal near Lockport, about 35 miles away.
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.