List Of Unsolved Murders (1900–1979)

This list of unsolved murders includes notable cases where victims have been murdered under unknown circumstances.

1900–1924

*William Goebel (44), an American politician who was shot and mortally wounded on the morning of 30 January 1900 in Frankfort, Kentucky, one day before being sworn in as governor of Kentucky. The next day, the dying Goebel was sworn in and, despite the best efforts of eighteen physicians attending him, died on the afternoon of 3 February 1900. Goebel remains the only state governor in the United States to die by assassination while in office.
* Ernst Winter (19) was a German man who went missing from Konitz on 11 March 1900 after he had left the house where he was boarding. Parts of a body were found on 15 March 1900 and 15 April 1900. His murderer is unknown.
* Bertha Schippan (aged 12 to 14), who resided in the South Australian town of Towitta, was violently attacked and then murdered in her own house. Bertha was last seen alive at her house on 1 January 1902. The body of a girl was discovered in Bertha's house on 2 January. The body was subsequently identified after Bertha's parents quickly recognised the face as that of their daughter. Because she was the only person in the house at the time Bertha was last seen alive, her elder sister Mary was charged with the murder, but due to a lack of evidence she was released and the charges were subsequently dropped. The case remains unsolved.

* Rose Harsent was stabbed to death on 1 June 1902, in Peasenhall, Suffolk, England by an unknown assailant. Harsent was six months pregnant at the time of her death. William Gardiner, a preacher of the Primitive Methodist Chapel, was suspected due to his affair with the victim. Gardiner was tried twice for the murder, but each time, the jury failed to reach a verdict. The case has been featured on BBC One's '' Julian Fellowes Investigates''.
* Al Swearengen (59), operator of the Gem Theater brothel in Deadwood, South Dakota, was found dead in a Denver street of a massive wound to his head on 15 November 1904. No suspects were named.
*The 20th Century Limited derailment was an incident that happened on 21 June 1905, on the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway line, that killed 21 passengers. The perpetrator behind this remains unknown.
* Tomasso Petto (25–26) was both a mobster and the top hitman of the Morello crime family, who was operating in New York and was active in the early 1900s. Sometime in 1905, Petto died after being stabbed outside his home located in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. His killer was never found.
* John Otunba Payne (66–67) was a Nigerian sheriff, administrator and diarist who was a prominent personality in Lagos during the nineteenth century. He was a Chief Registrar of the Supreme Court of Lagos, and he also served as a registrar in various colonial departments such as the Police Court, the Chief Magistrate's Court, the Court of Civil and Criminal Justice and the Petty Debt court. Payne was murdered in his residence in Lagos by an unknown assailant in 1906. His murder was never solved.
*The dismembered corpse of Jeanne Van Calck (9), was found in a package deposited in front of 22 Rue des Hirondelles in Brussels, Belgium on 7 February 1906. She had gone missing the previous day after leaving her grandparents' house. Despite public unrest, the flawed investigation from the police failed to solve her killing, and she is now remembered as a martyr for childhood innocence.
* Marinos Antypas (34–35) was a Greek lawyer and journalist, and one of the country's first socialists. Antypas was murdered on 8 March 1907, in Pyrgetos, Greece, by unknown persons who were hired to kill him. His killer was never brought to justice, and the crime was never solved.
*On 12 September 1907, Emily Dimmock was found decapitated in bed by her fiancé Bertram Shaw, in Camden Town, London, England. The sole suspect, Robert Wood, was acquitted at trial.
*Pat Garrett (57), an American Old West lawman, bartender and customs agent well known for killing Billy the Kid was himself murdered on 29 February 1908. His murder remains largely unsolved.
* A headless woman was found in the ruins of a farmhouse in La Porte, Indiana, that burned to the ground on 28 April 1908. The body was thought to have been that of the Norwegian-American serial killer and disappeared fugitive Belle Gunness (48). However, this was never proven to be true. The woman's identity remains unknown, and the murder remains unsolved.
* Caroline Mary Luard was shot twice in the head near her summer house in Seal Chart, Kent, England on 24 August 1908. Her husband, Major-General Charles Luard, was widely believed to be the killer and committed suicide less than a month later, but investigators concluded he could not have been the killer. The murderer was never identified, although some authors have sought to link John Dickman to the crime; he was hanged for another murder in 1910.
*Two people were killed in a shootout with the Bolivian police on 7–8 November 1908. Authorities were unable to identify the bodies, but they were thought to have been Robert Leroy Parker (40), (also known as Butch Cassidy) and Harry Alonzo Longabaugh (41–42), (also known as the Sundance Kid). Whoever killed them was also never confirmed.
*The Guangxu Emperor (37), personal name "Zaitian", was the 10th Emperor of the Qing dynasty, and the ninth Qing emperor to rule over China proper. He died on 14 November 1908 of poisoning. One theory is that the Guangxu Emperor was poisoned by Yuan Shikai, who knew that if the emperor were to come to power again, Yuan would likely be executed for treason. Another is that the Empress Dowager Cixi, herself very ill, had him poisoned because she was afraid he would reverse her policies after her death. There were no reliable sources to prove who poisoned the Guangxu Emperor.

*Elsie Sigel (20) was found strangled inside a trunk in an apartment in New York City's Chinatown on 18 June 1909, nine days after she had last been seen. The resident of the apartment, Chong Sing, who had been having an affair with her, was considered the prime suspect, but was never arrested.
*The murder of George Harry Storrs occurred on 1 November 1909, at Gorse Hall, Stalybridge, England. He was killed for an unknown reason, and despite two trials, nobody was convicted of the crime.
*Elsie Paroubek (5), a daughter of Czech immigrants, is thought to have either wandered away from her home, or had been kidnapped, in Chicago on 8 April 1911. Her disappearance was the subject of intense police investigation in three states, with massive newspaper coverage. Her body was found a month later.
* Joseph Wilson (60) was a station master who was shot dead at Lintz Green railway station in Durham, England on 7 October 1911. His murder sparked one of the largest murder investigations in northeastern England.
*Child molester C. L. Harkins was tried twice for the murder of Elsie Adams (15), a teenage girl he had been raping for three years, and her neighbours Arvie and Safrania Hurst, who were drugged with morphine and then burned alive on 3 February 1912. However, both juries failed to reach a verdict and the case was never resolved. The case was later used against Harkins at his rape trial in 1916.
*The Villisca axe murders occurred between the evening of 9 June 1912, and the early morning of 10 June 1912, in the town of Villisca in southwestern Iowa. The six members of the Moore family, as well as two house guests, were found bludgeoned in the Moore residence. All eight victims, including six children, had severe head wounds from an axe. A lengthy investigation yielded several suspects, one of whom was tried twice. The first trial ended in a hung jury, and the second ended in an acquittal. The crime remains unsolved.
* Daisy Grace was accused in 1912 of drugging her husband, Eugene H. Grace, and then shooting him for his insurance money in Atlanta, Georgia. She was tried and found not guilty. Eugene's murder remains unsolved.
* Lukijan Bogdanović (46) was the last Serbian Patriarch of the Patriarchate of Karlovci and Metropolitanate of Karlovci on 1 September 1913. He was assassinated and decapitated while walking alone along a river bank in Bad Gastein by persons unknown.
* Charles Budd Robinson (32) was a Canadian botanist and explorer whose death on 5 December 1913 in the Maluku Islands may have been caused by linguistic confusion, as he was known to speak the local language quite poorly. The Malay word for coconut, "kelapa", may have been confused with "kepala", the word for "head". Robinson apparently encountered a young boy who had climbed a coconut tree. If Robinson asked the boy to cut, "potong", down a coconut, it may have been mispronounced, and heard as a threat to cut off someone's head. There was a local myth of a werewolf-like decapitator called a "potong kepala", and that he was mistaken for one.
* Billy Stone (21) was a telegraph operator who was shot and killed at the Whitby Junction Station in Whitby, Ontario on 11 December 1914. His murder remains unsolved.
*Chinese journalist Huang Yuanyong (30) was shot and killed in San Francisco on 25 December 1915. No arrests were made. Most theories about the responsible parties suggest that it was a political assassination, since Huang had increasingly been in conflict with the government of the newly established Republic of China after initially supporting it.
* Jesse Washington (17), a black farmhand who was accused of the murder of a white woman named Lucy Fryer in Robinson, Texas, was lynched in Waco on 15 May 1916 after being found guilty of the crime under controversial circumstances. Washington was dragged from the courthouse by an angry mob and paraded through the streets in chains until the mob reached city hall, where he was hanged from a tree outside, mutilated by the crowd, and finally burned alive. No-one was ever arrested, in spite of many members of the mob openly boasting of their participation in the crime.
* Joseph Henry Loveless (45) was an American bootlegger and accused murderer who was killed by unknown means, dismembered and hidden in a pair of burlap sacks in Buffalo Cave near Dubois, Idaho. It is believed that he was killed sometime during 1916, due to a wanted poster being posted on 18 May 1916, detailing clothing in which he had escaped from prison, and in which his body was later found. Nothing of his body was discovered until 1979, when a family visiting the cave discovered his headless torso. In 1991, a girl found the hand of Loveless, which prompted an excavation that uncovered both legs and arms. Loveless was considered a John Doe until the DNA Doe Project took on the case in 2019. He was identified on 12 November 2019, and his identity was announced on 31 December 2019. The post-mortem interval of the body was initially believed to be around 5 years, due to optimal conditions in the cave. The identification is considered to be the oldest attained through forensic genealogy. The case is also still considered open by the Clark County Sheriff's office.
*The Preparedness Day bombing occurred on 22 July 1916 when a bomb was detonated at a Preparedness Movement parade in San Francisco, killing ten people and injuring forty. Two radical labour activists were convicted but later released after their convictions were found to be based on perjured testimony.
*John Bamford was considered the prime suspect in the 1917 Wonnangatta murders in East Gippsland, Victoria, Australia; however, his body was found early the following year. The cause of death was a gunshot wound to the head. Several theories have been advanced, but no suspects have been identified. In the late 1970s, victim Jim Barclay's son, who later worked for a mutual friend of the two who had been an early suspect, made a statement suggesting he knew who the murderers were as well, but declining to identify them.
*No suspects were identified in the 24 November 1917 Milwaukee Police Department bombing, which killed nine officers and two civilian employees, after a citizen brought the bomb found in the basement of a local church to the local police station. Italian anarchists of the Galleanist faction were believed to have placed the bomb.
* Vladimir Bogoyavlensky (70) was a bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church. He served as Metropolitan of Moscow and Kolomna between 1898 and 1912, Metropolitan of St. Petersburg and Ladoga between 1912 and 1915, and Metropolitan of Kiev and Gallich between 1915 and 1918. Bogoyavlensky was murdered by Bolshevik soldiers on 7 February 1918, and the case has never been solved.
* Nikolay Vtorov (52) was a Russian industrialist. According to a 2006 ''Forbes'' study, which excluded the ruling House of Romanov, he held the title of Russia's wealthiest man on the eve of World War I. Vtorov decided to stay in Russia after the 1917 Revolution and pledged loyalty to the Bolshevik regime. Less than a year later, in May 1918, he was assassinated; the exact circumstances of his death remain unknown.
* Jüri Vilms (29), an Estonian politician and lawyer, volunteered to go to Finland during World War I to take funds and instructions to the Estonian missions working to get diplomatic recognition for the newly sovereign nation. He is believed to have been captured upon reaching the Finnish coast and executed by German troops in Helsinki or executed by a unit of the Swedish Brigade in Hauho.
*The Axeman of New Orleans was responsible for a number of axe attacks in New Orleans between May 1918 and October 1919, leaving six dead and six injured. The killer was never identified.
* Mabel Greenwood died on 17 June 1919 after being poisoned with arsenic. Her husband Harold was charged with the murder, but was acquitted after his lawyer Edward Marshall Hall demonstrated that the poison could not have been administered in the way the prosecution alleged.
* Bella Wright was found dead from a gunshot wound to the head on 5 July 1919, near the English village of Little Stretton. Shortly before the killing, she had been seen in the company of teacher Ronald Light, who was riding a distinctive green bicycle which gave the killing the moniker ''Green Bicycle Case''. As the prime suspect, Light was acting suspiciously and gave contradicting statements, but was later acquitted, mostly due to a lack of motive. The bullet that killed Wright could not be positively identified, so it has been speculated she had been hit by accident from an unrelated shooting.
* Clement De La Haye, principal of the Newington House school in Madras, India, was shot dead in his bed at the school on 15 October 1919. One defendant was acquitted after a highly publicized trial; no others have been identified.
* James Colosimo (42), a gangster who led a precursor to the Chicago Outfit, was shot and killed at his café on 11 May 1920. No one was charged with the killing; it is believed that Al Capone, then one of Colosimo's henchmen, was involved.
*Venustiano Carranza (60) was the 44th President of Mexico and former Governor of Coahuila who was assassinated on 21 May 1920 while attempting to flee persecution by revolutionaries. General Rodolfo Herrero's forces are believed to have carried out the murder, but nobody was prosecuted for it.
* Joseph Bowne Elwell (46), a bridge player, was shot and killed inside his locked house in New York City on 11 June 1920. One clearly false confession the next year was discarded, and no other suspects were identified. The intense media interest in the case inspired the development of the locked-room murder subgenre of detective fiction.
*Italian anarchists were suspected in the Wall Street bombing of 16 September 1920, which killed 38, making it the deadliest terrorist act in U.S. history at that point. Despite a number of arrests, no one was charged. One likely suspect, who was never arrested, fled to Italy shortly afterwards and never returned to the U.S.
* Chrissie Venn (13) was murdered on or around 21 February 1921, near the township of North Motton, near Ulverstone, Tasmania; her body was found in a hollow tree. George William King, who claimed the incriminating marks on his hands were from injuries sustained during the three-day search for Venn, was acquitted after a trial which was the first change of venue granted in Tasmania. No other suspects were named.

*"Little Lord Fauntleroy", an unidentified boy who was murdered in late 1920 or early 1921, was found on 8 March 1921. He was killed by a blow to the head and drowning after being dropped into a quarry in Waukesha, Wisconsin, United States.
*Anthony D'Andrea (48), an early-era Chicago Mafia boss, was shot and killed while entering his apartment on 11 May 1921, near the end of the city's aldermen's wars. No one was charged or named as a suspect.
*Professional golfer James Douglas Edgar (36), whose book ''The Gate to Golf'' changed the sport considerably, died shortly after he was found on an Atlanta street late at night on 8 August 1921, with a leg wound. Reports that this was the consequence of his involvement in a love triangle have never led to any suspects being identified.
* Alma Tirtschke (12) was raped and murdered in Melbourne on 30 December 1921. Colin Campbell Ross was hanged for the crime, but DNA testing in the 1990s proved his innocence; the victim's family had always maintained that Ross was not the killer. Nobody else has ever been charged with Tirtschke's murder.
*Soviet politician Torokul Dzhanuzakov (28), the deputy chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic and chairman of the Commission for Refugees in 1916, was killed in 1921 apparently on the order of Cheka authorities, but his killers remain unknown.
*William Desmond Taylor (49), a popular Irish-born American actor and director of silent movies, was killed by a shot in the back on 1 February 1922, inside his Los Angeles bungalow. His murder, along with other Hollywood scandals, such as the Roscoe Arbuckle trial for his alleged murder of Virginia Rappe, led to a frenzy of sensational and often fabricated newspaper reports, and a deathbed confession of dubious veracity. The murder remains an official cold case.
* Hans Keimes (17) was a German youth last seen alive in south Hanover on 17 March 1922. The teen is strongly believed to have been murdered by serial killer Fritz Haarmann—likely in an effort to frame his lover, Hans Grans. Keimes' parents distributed posters throughout Hanover offering a reward for information as to their son's whereabouts. In response, Haarmann visited the Keimes household, offering to locate their son "within three days". Keimes' nude, bound body was found in a canal outside the city on 6 May.
*The Hinterkaifeck murders occurred at a small farmstead named Hinterkaifeck, between the Bavarian towns of Ingolstadt and Schrobenhausen (approximately north of Munich). On the evening of 31 March 1922, all six inhabitants of the farm were killed with a pickaxe. Although some suspects were identified, the circumstances remain unclear, and no one was charged. The case has inspired many books, films and other works of art, fictional and non-fictional.
* Michael Collins (31), who was commander-in-chief of the National Army of the Irish Free State, was shot and killed by an unknown assailant at Béal na Bláth in County Cork, Ireland on 22 August 1922. The murder remains unsolved.
* Edward Hall and Eleanor Mills, both of New Brunswick, New Jersey

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