Cold Cases in Connecticut
ColdCaseIndex documents 13 cases in Connecticut, dated 1973 to 2021. 8 are recorded as unsolved. The earliest is Penney Serra (1973) and the most recent is Lauren Smith-Fields (2021).
- Unsolved 8 (62%)
- Solved or convicted 4 (31%)
- Closed without conviction 1 (8%)
Homicide clearance in Connecticut, 1965 to 2024
A homicide is "cleared" when police make an arrest or close it by exceptional means, so an uncleared case is not always an unsolved one. Source: Murder Accountability Project analysis of FBI Uniform Crime Report data, as published by Project: Cold Case. These are statewide totals and are separate from the ColdCaseIndex entries listed below.
By type
All Connecticut cases
Lauren Smith-Fields
Lauren Smith-Fields, 23, was found dead in her Bridgeport, Connecticut apartment on December 12, 2021 after a first date with a man she met on a dating app.
Jennifer Dulos
Jennifer Dulos, 50, disappeared from New Canaan, Connecticut, on May 24, 2019, amid a contentious divorce. Her estranged husband, Fotis Dulos, was charged with her murder but died by suicide in January 2020 before trial and was…
Sandy Hook Victims
Twenty first-grade students and six educators were shot dead at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, on December 14, 2012.
Bianca Lebron
Bianca Elaine Lebron, 10, was last seen at about 8:30 a.m. on November 7, 2001, getting into a two-toned brown van outside the Elias Howe School in Bridgeport, Connecticut, after telling classmates her uncle was taking her to…
Suzanne Jovin
Suzanne Jovin, a 21-year-old Yale University senior, was stabbed to death in a New Haven neighborhood in December 1998. Her thesis adviser was wrongly cast as a suspect and later cleared; the killing remains unsolved.
New Britain Jane Doe
On October 11, 1991, a survey crew found the badly decomposed body of a woman in garbage bags near railroad tracks off Myrtle Street in New Britain, Connecticut, across from the former Fafnir Bearing plant.
Helle Crafts
Helle Crafts, a 39-year-old Pan Am flight attendant, was murdered by her husband Richard Crafts at their Newtown, Connecticut home in November 1986.
Mary Badaracco
Mary Badaracco, a 38-year-old woman planning to divorce her husband, vanished from her Sherman, Connecticut home in August 1984.
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.
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…
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.
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.