Cold Cases of the 1970s
87 documented cases in which the crime or disappearance took place between 1970 and 1979. 38 are recorded as unsolved.
- Unsolved 38 (44%)
- Partly resolved 6 (7%)
- Charges or trial pending 1 (1%)
- Solved or convicted 39 (45%)
- Closed without conviction 3 (3%)
By type
All 87 cases
Atlanta Child Murders Victims
At least 28 young Black children and adults were murdered in Atlanta between 1979 and 1981, causing citywide panic. Wayne Williams was convicted of two adult murders and sentenced to life.
Debra Jackson ("Orange Socks")
A young woman's body was found in a culvert off Interstate 35 near Georgetown, Texas, on Halloween 1979, wearing nothing but a pair of orange socks.
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.
Holly Branagan
Seventeen-year-old Moira "Holly" Branagan was stabbed to death in the kitchen of her family's home on Pine Top Trail in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, on March 28, 1979.
Janet Chandler
Janet Chandler, a 22-year-old Hope College student working a motel night shift, was abducted, gang-raped, and strangled in Holland, Michigan, in 1979.
Josef Mengele (fugitive)
Josef Mengele, an SS physician at Auschwitz from 1943 to 1945, fled Germany in 1949 and lived in Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil without ever being arrested.
Michelle Martinko
Eighteen-year-old Michelle Martinko was stabbed to death in her family's car in a Cedar Rapids, Iowa, shopping mall parking lot in December 1979.
Robin Samsoe
Twelve-year-old Robin Samsoe was abducted while riding her bicycle to dance class in Huntington Beach. Her case led to the identification and conviction of serial killer Rodney Alcala, known as 'The Dating Game Killer,' who is…
Susan Reinert
Teacher Susan Reinert of Ardmore was last seen on June 22, 1979; her body was found three days later in the trunk of her car at a hotel near Harrisburg. Her children, Karen, 11, and Michael, 10, were never found.
Bob Crane
Actor Bob Crane, 49, star of Hogan's Heroes, was found bludgeoned to death in his Scottsdale, Arizona, apartment on June 29, 1978. His friend John Carpenter was charged in 1992 and acquitted by a jury in 1994; he died in 1998.
FSU Chi Omega Murders
Margaret Bowman, 21, and Lisa Levy, 20, were killed and two sorority sisters badly injured when Ted Bundy attacked the Chi Omega house at Florida State University early on January 15, 1978.
Georgi Markov
Bulgarian dissident writer Georgi Markov was assassinated on Waterloo Bridge in London when a ricin-filled pellet was injected into his leg using a modified umbrella.
Jeffrey Dahmer Victims
Jeffrey Dahmer murdered 17 young men and boys in Wisconsin and Ohio, engaging in necrophilia and cannibalism. He was convicted of 15 murders in Wisconsin and sentenced to 15 life terms.
Karla Brown
Karla Brown, 22, was found dead in the basement of the Wood River, Illinois, house she had moved into the day before, on June 21, 1978.
Kimberly Leach
Twelve-year-old Kimberly Leach was abducted from Lake City Junior High School in Florida on February 9, 1978. Her remains were found in April 1978 in a shed near Suwannee River State Park.
Patricia Ann Tucker ("Granby Girl")
On November 15, 1978, the skeletal remains of a woman who had been shot in the temple were found buried under leaves off a logging road in Granby, Massachusetts.
Rep. Leo Ryan & Jonestown Victims
U.S. Congressman Leo Ryan was shot dead at the Port Kaituma airstrip in Guyana on November 18, 1978, along with four others, while investigating Jim Jones's Peoples Temple.
The Connecticut River Valley Killer
An unidentified serial killer is believed to have stabbed to death at least seven women along the New Hampshire–Vermont border near Interstate 91 between 1978 and 1988.
Yuba County Five
Five young men from the Yuba City area disappeared after attending a basketball game in Chico in February 1978. Their car was found abandoned on a remote mountain road in Plumas National Forest.
Bonnie Garland
Bonnie Garland, a 20-year-old Yale student, was fatally beaten with a hammer as she slept in her parents' Scarsdale, New York, home on July 7, 1977.
Charles Morgan
Escrow company president Charles Morgan was found shot dead in the desert near Tucson wearing a bulletproof vest and with a map to a motel. He had reported being stalked and had painted his car to avoid detection.
Circleville Letter Writer
From 1977 residents of Circleville, Ohio, received hundreds of anonymous threatening letters, many aimed at school bus driver Mary Gillispie. Her husband Ron died in an August 1977 crash that the coroner ruled an accident.
Dagmar Hagelin
Swedish-Argentine teenager Dagmar Hagelin, 17, was shot and abducted by an Argentine Navy task group in El Palomar, Buenos Aires Province, on January 27, 1977, and was last seen by fellow detainees at the ESMA detention centre.
Helen Brach
Candy heiress Helen Brach vanished after a visit to the Mayo Clinic. Her disappearance was linked to a horse-related fraud ring. She was declared legally dead in 1984.
Hillside Strangler Victims
Cousins Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi posed as police officers, kidnapped, raped, and murdered 10 women in Los Angeles. Their victims were found on hillsides, giving rise to the 'Hillside Strangler' name.
Holly Maddux
Helen "Holly" Maddux, 30, was last seen in Philadelphia on September 9, 1977; her body was found in March 1979 in a trunk in the apartment of her former partner, Ira Einhorn.
Mary Boyle
Six-year-old Mary Boyle disappeared on March 18, 1977, near her grandparents' farm at Cashelard, outside Ballyshannon, County Donegal, Ireland.
Oklahoma Girl Scout Murders (Lori Farmer, Michele Guse, Doris Milner)
Three Girl Scouts — Lori Lee Farmer, 8, Michele Heather Guse, 9, and Doris Denise Milner, 10 — were sexually assaulted and murdered during the first night of summer camp at Camp Scott near Locust Grove, Oklahoma, on June 13, 1977.
Roger Kibbe Victims
Roger Reece Kibbe, called the I-5 Strangler, was convicted of murdering seven women and girls in Northern California between 1977 and 1987.
Thera Wilson
Thera Wilson, 26, was found stabbed to death on January 14, 1977, in the garage of the then-Statler Hilton Hotel at 10 Ford Street in Hartford, Connecticut. Hartford police followed numerous leads that year without result.
Bradford Bishop Family
Annette Bishop, 37, her mother-in-law Lobelia, 68, and sons William, 14, Brenton, 10, and Geoffrey, 5, were beaten to death at their Bethesda home on March 1, 1976.
Evelyn Colon ("Beth Doe")
The dismembered remains of a pregnant young woman were found in three suitcases along the Lehigh River near White Haven, Pennsylvania, in December 1976.
Kyle Clinkscales
Kyle Clinkscales, a 22-year-old Auburn University student, vanished while driving from LaGrange, Georgia, back to campus in 1976.
Lisa Christine Staes
On January 24, 1976, a fisherman found the nude, frozen body of a young woman under the Mirror Lake Road bridge near Lake Delton in Sauk County, Wisconsin.
Margaret Fetterolf (Woodlawn Jane Doe)
On September 12, 1976, the body of a teenage girl who had been beaten, sexually assaulted, and strangled was found near Lorraine Park Cemetery in Woodlawn, Baltimore County, Maryland.
Oakland County Child Killer Victims
A serial killer known as the 'Babysitter' abducted and murdered four children in Oakland County, Michigan. The victims ranged in age from 10 to 12 years old.
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.
Springfield Jane Doe
The nude body of a young woman was found wrapped in a shower curtain in a ditch in Springfield Township, Pennsylvania. Despite distinctive physical features and evidence of pregnancy, she has never been identified.
Sumter County Does (Pamela Buckley & James Freund)
On August 9, 1976, a truck driver found a man and a woman shot to death beside Locklair Road, a rural dirt road in Sumter County, South Carolina.
Teresa "Trenny" Lynn Gibson
Trenny Lynn Gibson, a 16-year-old Bearden High School student from Knoxville, Tennessee, vanished during a class field trip in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park near Clingmans Dome on October 8, 1976.
The Gypsy Hill Killings
Five young women and girls were murdered in San Mateo County, California, during early 1976 in a series of brutal crimes that terrorized the Bay Area.
Anna Mae Aquash
Anna Mae Pictou Aquash, a 30-year-old Mi'kmaq activist in the American Indian Movement, was shot in mid-December 1975; her body was found near Wanblee on the Pine Ridge Reservation on February 24, 1976.
David Williams & Steven Anderson
David Williams, 12, and his roommate Steven Anderson, 17, disappeared on April 7, 1975, from the New Lisbon State School, a residential center for people with developmental disabilities in Burlington County, New Jersey.
Frank Hilley
Frank Hilley died on May 25, 1975, in a death first attributed to infectious hepatitis. After his daughter Carol was found to have been poisoned with arsenic in 1979, his body was exhumed and arsenic was detected.
Jimmy Hoffa
Former Teamsters Union president Jimmy Hoffa was last seen in a restaurant parking lot in Bloomfield Township, Michigan, on July 30, 1975.
Kurt Ronald Newton
Four-year-old Kurt Newton vanished while riding his tricycle at a remote northern Maine campground on Labor Day weekend 1975. One of the largest searches in Maine history found only his abandoned tricycle, and the case remains…
Martha Moxley
Fifteen-year-old Martha Moxley was beaten to death with a golf club in Greenwich, Connecticut, in 1975. Kennedy cousin Michael Skakel was convicted in 2002, but his conviction was vacated in 2018 and prosecutors declined to…
Myrna Opsahl
Myrna Opsahl, 42, was fatally shot on April 21, 1975, while depositing church collection money during a Symbionese Liberation Army robbery of the Crocker National Bank in Carmichael, California.
Patricia 'Trisha' Meleady Newsom (East Haven Jane Doe)
On August 16, 1975, a truck driver found the body of a young woman — bound, gagged, and wrapped in a tarp — in a drainage ditch behind the Bradlees department store on Frontage Road in East Haven, Connecticut.
Robert Lee Yates Victims
Robert Lee Yates Jr., a former Army helicopter pilot, pleaded guilty in 2000 to 13 murders committed in Washington between 1975 and 1998 and was sentenced to 408 years.
Arlis Perry
Arlis Perry, 19, was found murdered inside Stanford Memorial Church on October 13, 1974. In 2018 the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Office said DNA from her clothing matched Stephen Blake Crawford, the former campus security guard…
BTK Killer Victims
Dennis Rader, known as BTK (Bind, Torture, Kill), murdered 10 people in and around Wichita, Kansas between 1974 and 1991. He taunted police and media for decades.
Beverly Lynn Smith
Twenty-two-year-old Beverly Lynn Smith was shot in the back of the head in the kitchen of her home in Raglan, north of Oshawa, Ontario, on December 9, 1974, while her infant daughter was in the next room.
Carla Walker
Carla Walker, 17, was abducted at gunpoint from a Fort Worth bowling-alley parking lot in February 1974 and found murdered three days later.
Carlene Brown
Carlene Brown, 19, disappeared from the Little Britches Rodeo in Rawlins, Wyoming, on July 4, 1974, along with her friend Christine "Christy" Gross.
Coral Eugene Watts Victims
Carl Eugene "Coral" Watts admitted killing about a dozen women in Texas and Michigan under a 1982 Texas plea deal that gave him immunity for those murders and a 60-year sentence for burglary with intent to murder.
Fort Worth Missing Trio
Mary Rachel Trlica, 17, Lisa Renee Wilson, 14, and Julie Ann Moseley, 9, disappeared on December 23, 1974, after going Christmas shopping at Seminary South Shopping Center in Fort Worth, Texas.
Golden State Killer Victims
The Golden State Killer committed at least 13 murders, 50 rapes, and 100 burglaries across California. Joseph James DeAngelo, a former police officer, was identified in 2018 through genealogy DNA testing and pleaded guilty in…
Karen Silkwood
Karen Silkwood, 28, a technician and union activist at Kerr-McGee's plutonium plant near Crescent, Oklahoma, died in a single-car crash on November 13, 1974, while driving to meet a New York Times reporter.
Margaret Ellen Fox
Margaret Ellen Fox, 14, disappeared on June 24, 1974, after taking a bus from Burlington, New Jersey, to Mount Holly to meet a man who had answered her babysitting advertisement and called himself John Marshall.
Otero Family Murders
Joseph and Julie Otero and two of their children, Josephine, 11, and Joseph II, 9, were killed in their Wichita home on January 15, 1974, the first murders by the offender who called himself BTK.
Patty Hearst Kidnapping
Newspaper heiress Patty Hearst, 19, was abducted from her Berkeley apartment by the Symbionese Liberation Army on February 4, 1974.
Ruth Marie Terry (Lady of the Dunes)
On July 26, 1974, the mutilated body of a woman was found in the Race Point dunes of Cape Cod National Seashore in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
Sandra Rivett
Sandra Rivett, 29, nanny to the children of Lord and Lady Lucan, was killed in the basement of the family home at 46 Lower Belgrave Street, London, on November 7, 1974.
Ted Bundy Victims
Ted Bundy confessed to 30 homicides across seven states, though the actual number is believed higher. He was executed in Florida in 1989.
Ted Bundy Washington Victims
Eight young women vanished in Washington and Oregon between February and July 1974, beginning with Lynda Ann Healy in Seattle. Remains of seven were later found near Issaquah and on Taylor Mountain; Donna Manson was never…
The Doodler
An unidentified serial killer nicknamed 'The Doodler' stabbed to death at least five, and possibly many more, gay men in San Francisco between January 1974 and September 1975.
Barbara Gibbons
Barbara Gibbons, 51, was killed in her home in the Falls Village section of Canaan, Connecticut, on September 28, 1973. Her son Peter Reilly, 18, was convicted of manslaughter in 1974 on the basis of a confession he recanted.
Penney Serra
Concetta 'Penney' Serra, a 21-year-old dental assistant, was stabbed to death in a New Haven, Connecticut parking garage in 1973.
John Wayne Gacy Victims
John Wayne Gacy tortured and murdered 33 young men and boys, burying 26 under his house. He was convicted in 1980 and executed in 1994. After his execution, investigators used DNA to identify unknown victims.
Terri Lynn Hollis
Eleven-year-old Terri Lynn Hollis disappeared while riding her bicycle in Torrance, California on Thanksgiving Day 1972 and was found dead the next day in Ventura County. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled.
The Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Murders
At least seven young women and girls who hitchhiked in and around Santa Rosa were found nude and dumped in rural areas of Sonoma County between 1972 and 1973.
Christine Marie Eastin
Christine Marie Eastin, 19, vanished in Hayward, California, on the night of January 18, 1971, after driving her former boyfriend's blue 1969 Ford Maverick to a self-service car wash on Mission Boulevard.
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.
D.B. Cooper
A man calling himself Dan Cooper hijacked Northwest Orient Flight 305 in 1971, extorted $200,000 in ransom, and parachuted from the plane somewhere over the Pacific Northwest. He was never identified or found.
Deborah Waring
Twenty-year-old Deborah Waring was found murdered in Goddard Memorial State Park in Warwick, Rhode Island. Her case is one of Rhode Island's oldest unsolved homicides.
Katherine Ann Alston (Bedford Jane Doe)
On October 6, 1971, the decomposing body of a young woman was found off a logging road in a wooded area of Bedford, New Hampshire.
List Family Murders
John List shot his wife, his mother and his three teenage children at their home in Westfield, New Jersey, on November 9, 1971, and disappeared. The bodies were found on December 7, 1971.
Little Miss Lake Panasoffkee (Maureen "Cookie" Rowan)
On February 19, 1971, hitchhikers found the body of a young woman beneath the Interstate 75 bridge over Lake Panasoffkee in Sumter County, Florida; she had been strangled with a man's belt.
Robert Hansen Victims
Robert Hansen was an Anchorage baker who abducted women, flew them to remote Alaska wilderness, and hunted them. He confessed to 17 murders and was convicted in 1984. He died in prison in 2014.
Texas Killing Fields Victims
Since the early 1970s the bodies of more than 30 women and girls have been found along the Interstate 45 corridor between Houston and Galveston, including four found in a field off Calder Road in League City known as the Killing…
The Alphabet Murders (Double Initial Murders)
Three young girls whose first and last names shared the same initial were separately abducted, sexually assaulted, and strangled near Rochester, New York, between 1971 and 1973.
The Freeway Phantom
An unidentified serial killer, dubbed the 'Freeway Phantom,' abducted and strangled six young Black females in Washington, D.C., between April 1971 and September 1972, dumping their bodies along area highways.
Cheryl Grimmer
Three-year-old Cheryl Grimmer was taken from outside the shower block at Fairy Meadow Beach, Wollongong, on January 12, 1970. A man was charged in 2017, but prosecutors dropped the case in 2019 after his 1971 confession, made as…
Dean Corll Victims
Dean Corll, with accomplices David Brooks and Elmer Wayne Henley, tortured and murdered at least 28 young men and boys in Houston. Corll was shot and killed by Henley in 1973, who then led police to multiple burial sites.
Isdal Woman
A partially burned female body was found in Isdalen Valley near Bergen, Norway surrounded by sleeping pills, bottles of liquor, and evidence of a deliberately concealed identity.
Mared Malarik & Karen Ferrell (WVU Coed Murders)
West Virginia University freshmen Mared Malarik, 19, and Karen Ferrell, 18, vanished on January 18, 1970, after leaving a movie in downtown Morgantown and accepting a ride toward their dormitory.