data-sort-type="isoDate" | Date | data-sort-type="text" | Person(s) | data-sort-type="text" | Age | Country of disappearance | Circumstances | data-sort-type="text" | Outcome | data-sort-type="value" | Time spent missing or unconfirmed |
---|
1960s | António Alva Rosa Coutinho | 30s | Portuguese Angola | Portuguese naval officer who was kidnapped by FNLA guerillas while patrolling the Zaire River in Angola. He was eventually released, and went on to participate in the Carnation Revolution.[43] | Found alive | Several months |
1960 | Tang Choon Keng | 59 | State of Singapore | Tang was a Singaporean entrepreneur who founded the Tangs department store and later the Orchard Road, two of the country's principal retail stores. He was abducted by four armed gunmen in 1960, but released without incident three days later after the ransom demanded was paid.[44] | Found alive | 3 days |
1960 | Irene Garza | 26 | United States of America | Garza was a schoolteacher and beauty queen who went missing on April 16, 1960, while going to confession at a church in McAllen, Texas. Her body, bearing signs of sexual assault and suffocation, was found in a canal five days later. John Feit, the priest who heard her confession, was the prime suspect in her death for decades, until he was arrested and convicted in her murder in 2017, receiving a life sentence.[45] | Murdered | 5 days |
1960 | Graeme Thorne | 8 | Australia | Thorne was an Australian schoolboy who was kidnapped on July 7, 1960, in Sydney, Australia, by a man who wished to extort his parents who had recently won the lottery. His body was found on August 16. A Hungarian immigrant was later convicted of the killing.[46] | Murdered | 1 month |
1960 | Sharon Lee Gallegos | 4 | United States of America | Abducted by unknown individuals from her home in Alamogordo, New Mexico, with her body found in Congress, Arizona, Gallegos could not be identified at the time, and was known as "Little Miss Nobody" until her identification in 2022. Her abductors have been never been apprehended.[47] | Murdered | 62 years |
1960 | Yossele Schumacher | 6 | Israel | Abducted by his own grandparents in order that he be raised as a Haredi Orthodox Jew as opposed to his parents' intention to raise the child as a secular Jew. The FBI eventually located Schumacher in the United States and returned the then-eight-year-old child to Israel to live with his parents in September 1962.[48] | Rescued | 2 years |
data-sort-value="1961" | 1961 | Jacques Stephen Alexis | 38 | Haiti | Alexis was a Haitian communist novelist, poet, and activist who was captured by a Tonton Macoute paramilitary force in April 1961 shortly after arriving at Môle-Saint-Nicolas. He was last seen alive being placed onto a boat at Port-au-Prince, and is believed to have died on or about April 22 that year, as his death was later confirmed.[49] | Murdered | data-sort-value="18980" | c. two weeks |
1961 | Jacqueline Thomas | 15 | United Kingdom | Thomas was a biscuit factory worker who disappeared from her native Birmingham on August 18, 1961, only to be found raped and strangled a week later. Anthony Hall, who would later be convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for a similar murder in 1969, was considered a suspect from the beginning, but authorities were unable to charge him until he was identified via DNA technology in 2007. He never stood trial for Thomas's murder and died behind bars in 2011.[50] | Murdered | 1 week |
data-sort-value="1961" | 1961 | Lucy Ann Johnson | 25 | Canada | Lucy Ann Johnson disappeared in 1961 from British Columbia, Canada, but was not reported missing by her family until 1965. In 2013, she was found alive in Yukon, Canada, having started a new family after her disappearance.[51] | Found alive | data-sort-value="18980" | 52 years |
1962–1963 | Steven Crawford | 2 | United States of America | Toddler with Down syndrome whose body was found in a reservoir in Ashland, Oregon on July 11, 1963. He remained unidentified until October 2021, when his DNA was matched to a living half-brother.[52] | Murdered | 58–59 years |
1963–1965 | Pauline Reade | 16 | United Kingdom | Victims of the so-called "Moors murderers" Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, who sexually assaulted, murdered and then buried their underage victims in shallow graves. Four of the victims' gravesites were eventually discovered, with the only exception being Bennett's, whose body still has not been found.[53] [54] | Murdered | Various |
John Kilbride | 12 | United Kingdom |
Keith Bennett | 12 | United Kingdom |
Lesley Ann Downey | 10 | United Kingdom |
Edward Evans | 17 | United Kingdom |
1963 | Wallace C. Halsey | 43 | United States of America | On 27 March 1963, Wallace C. Halsey, founder of Christ Brotherhood (a UFO religious group) and his business associate Harry Cleveland Ross Jr. (a former mayor of Seal Beach, California) were flying a small Piper Tri-pacer aircraft from Utah to Nevada. Ross, the pilot, was the operator of the Meadowlark Airport in Huntington Beach, California, and a veteran aviator with an airline transport rating. The plane was lost and remained so for 13 years despite an extensive air search and attempts by Halsey's UFO coreligionists to locate him using the aid of extraterrestrial beings who indicated the key to the mystery involved the Egyptian pyramids and the number 14.[55] For example, one seeker claimed extraterrestrials informed him the "pyramids and the number 14 will solve the Halsey mystery." At the time, Halsey was facing federal charges[56] and it was speculated by some that he had fled the country.[57] The wreckage was discovered by a lost deer hunter in rugged mountainous country on 30 October 1976 approximately 30 air miles north of St. George, Utah, some 10–15 miles off the filed flight course. The bodies and wallets of both men were found inside the fuselage, which was crumpled, but unburned.[58] | Killed in plane crash | 13 years |
Harry Cleveland Ross Jr. | 48 | United States of America |
1963 | Jenny Cheok Cheng Kid | 22 | Singapore | On 27 August 1963, 22-year-old Jenny Cheok and her boyfriend Sunny Ang, a 24-year-old part-time law student, went on a scuba diving trip near Sisters' Islands, Singapore (the waters around the area were known to be dangerous). Cheok disappeared at sea after making two dives that day. Although Cheok was classified as a missing person at first, the police re-classified Cheok's disappearance as murder after it was found that Ang had notified several insurance companies that Cheok was dead and demanded for insurance compensation worth $450,000. Sixteen months after Cheok's disappearance, Ang was arrested as a suspect and charged with murder. In May 1965, Ang was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death by a unanimous decision in one of Singapore's last jury trials before the local government abolished the jury system in 1970. Ang was hanged on 6 February 1967 after he lost his appeal. Till today, Cheok's body was never found.[59] | Murdered | Never found |
1964 | Paul Fronczak | 1 day | United States of America | Paul Fronczak was a newborn baby who was kidnapped from the Michael Reese Hospital by a woman who was dressed as a nurse in Chicago, Illinois on April 27, 1964.[60] In 2019, he was discovered as a man named Kevin Ray Baty who was living in Michigan. This became known to the public a year later around the time that he died from cancer. | Found alive | 54 years |
1965 | Yukon Eric | 48 | United States of America | Eric was a former professional wrestler who committed suicide at age 48 by shooting himself in the mouth in a church parking lot in Cartersville, Georgia, and was reported missing after not showing up for a match. His body was found the following day. Eric is believed to have chosen to die by suicide due to both financial problems and having divorced his wife.[61] | Died by suicide | 1 day |
1965 | Edmond Crimmins Jr. | 5 | United States of America | The Crimmins children disappeared from their apartment in Kew Gardens Hills in the Queens borough of New York City on July 14, 1965. Their mother, Alice Crimmins, reported their disappearance to police the same day. Alice "Missy" Crimmins' body was discovered the same day; Edmond "Eddie" Jr.'s body was discovered five days later. Both children had been murdered.[62] | Undetermined | 5 days |
Alice Crimmins Jr. | 2 | Strangulation | Same day |
1965 | Roscoe Henry Fobair | 29 | Hanoi, Vietnam | Captain Roscoe Henry Fobair's F-4C Phantom aircraft was shot down by North Vietnamese forces close to Hanoi on 24 July 1965. His remains were recovered in 2001.[63] | Killed in plane crash | 36 years |
1965–1967 | Margaret Reynolds | 6 | United Kingdom | Victims of the Cannock Chase murders, a series of murders of young schoolgirls committed in Staffordshire, England, from 1965 to 1967. Raymond Leslie Morris was convicted of one murder and considered the prime suspect in the other two.[64] | Murdered | Various |
Diana Tift | 5 | United Kingdom |
Christine Darby | 7 | United Kingdom |
data-sort-value="1965" | 1965 | Jack Rosenthal | 20 months | United States of America | Abandoned as a toddler in 1965, Jack Rosenthal was raised under the identity of a kidnapped child, Paul Fronczak. He discovered his true identity in 2015.[65] | Found alive | data-sort-value="17520" | 50 years |
1965 | Robert Ivan Nichols | 39 | United States of America | Nichols last wrote to his family in March 1965 before severing contact with them, prompting them to file a missing report. Nichols worked using his real name until 1976 and before stealing the identity of a deceased boy and lived under his name until 2002 when "Joseph Newton Chandler III" committed suicide. It was only then that, when authorities tried to contact his next of kin, it was revealed that the Chandler identity was stolen, prompting speculations and investigations for his identity. It would not be until 2018 when Nichols was finally identified.[66] [67] [68] | Died by suicide | 53 years |
data-sort-value="1965" | 1965 | Ajjamada B. Devaiah | 32 or 33 | Pakistan | Ajjamada B. Devaiah, an Indian Air Force pilot, was shot down in an aerial dogfight in 1965 over Pakistan. The Indian Air Force was unaware of what happened and declared him missing. It was revealed much later by Pakistan sources, based on a 1979 book by John Fricker, that Devayya's body was found almost intact by villagers not very far from Sargodha and buried. He was decorated posthumously in 1988.[69] | Killed in action | data-sort-value="5110" | 14 years |
1965 | Marianne Schmidt and Christine Sharrock | both 15 | Australia | The murders of best friends and neighbours Marianne Schmidt and Christine Sharrock occurred at Wanda Beach near Cronulla in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, on 11 January 1965. The victims' partially buried bodies were discovered the next day. The murders remain New South Wales' oldest unsolved homicides, and are known as the Wanda Beach Murders.[70] | Murdered | 1 day |
1966 | Bernadita Gonzalez | 44 | United States | One of the victims of the unidentified serial killer Miami Strangler. Gonzalez went missing for eight weeks after she was last seen at a salon in February 1966, and her decomposing body was later found in a river. The cause of her death was likely blunt force trauma, but as of today, the murderer was never found.[71] | Blunt force trauma | data-sort-value="5678" | 8 weeks |
1966 | Hedviga Golik | 42 | Croatia | Hedviga Golika was a Croatian woman from Zagreb, Croatia,[72] who in 1966 sat down in front of her TV with a cup of tea and died from unknown reasons. Her body was discovered 42 years later when the police entered her apartment.[73] | Died (undetermined cause) | data-sort-value="5678" | 42 years |
1967 | Bernard Oliver | 17 | United Kingdom | Warehouse worker who vanished after spending the evening of January 6, 1967, with some friends in Muswell Hill, but was reported missing after he failed to arrive home. His dismembered remains were found in two suitcases, but despite intensive investigations into his death, nobody was ever charged.[74] | Murdered | 10 days |
data-sort-value="1967-03-16" | 1967 | Alvar Larsson | 13 | Sweden | Alvar Larsson was a Swedish boy who disappeared on April 16, 1967, while going for a walk.[75] [76] In November 1982 a human skull was found on a small island 6 km away that was identified as belonging to Larsson. | Died(undetermined cause) | data-sort-value="5678" | 15 years |
data-sort-value="1967-07-01" | 1967 | Anne McFall | 18 | United Kingdom | 18-year-old Anne McFall disappeared in July 1967, when she was eight months pregnant. McFall's dismembered remains were unearthed at the edge of a cornfield between Much Marcle and Kempley in June 1994. Serial killer Fred West initially denied being responsible for her murder; however, following West's arrest, he confided in a visitor that he had stabbed McFall to death following an argument.[77] | Murdered | data-sort-value="9855" | 27 years |
data-sort-value="1967-07-09" | 1967 | Mary Terese Fleszar | 19 | United States of America | 19-year-old Eastern Michigan University student Mary Terese Fleszar disappeared in Ypsilanti, Michigan on July 9, 1967. Her nude, decomposed body was discovered by two 15-year-old boys on an abandoned farm in Superior Township on August 7, 1967; the body was formally identified as Fleszar's the following day via dental records. Prior to her death, Fleszar had been severely beaten; she had been stabbed dozens of times in the chest and abdomen, and many of her limbs were severed or missing. Though never convicted for this murder, John Norman Chapman is believed to be responsible.[78] | Murdered | data-sort-value="030" | 1 month |
1967 | Jack McVitie | 35 | United Kingdom | Jack McVitie, who went by "Jack the Hat", disappeared on 29 October 1967 in Stoke Newington, London, England after going to a party when he was assaulted and murdered. His body was then wrapped in an eiderdown and disposed of. It was later discovered and then taken to a place where it was never recovered.[79] Associates of the Kray twins were later charged and convicted of his murder. | Murdered | Body never recovered |
data-sort-value="1967-12-06" | 1967 | Barbara Ann Hackmann Taylor | 24 | United States of America | Barbara Ann Hackmann Taylor disappeared on December 6, 1967, and was found dead near Georgetown, Kentucky on May 17, 1968.[80] Her unidentified body found wrapped in canvas, similar to that used for a tent, and she was dubbed "Tent Girl". The son-in-law of the man who discovered her body had an interest in the case and contacted her relatives after seeing a missing persons report. Barbara Taylor's remains were positively identified in 1998 following DNA testing. | Murdered | data-sort-value="0163" | 163 days |
1968 | Roy Tutill | 14 | United Kingdom | Tutill was an English schoolboy who was kidnapped while en route from the Kingston Grammar School to his home in Brockham. His body, showing signs of rape, was found three days later near Cherkley Court. The remained unsolved until 2001, when the perpetrator's DNA was matched to Brian Lunn Field, a long-time suspect with a history of abusing little boys. He was sentenced to life imprisonment for the crime, which is currently the oldest solved cold case in the United Kingdom.[81] | Murdered | 3 days |
1968 | Richard Robison Sr. | 42 | United States | A wealthy upper-middle-class family from Lathrup Village who were shot and killed inside their Lake Michigan holiday cottage on June 25, 1968. The murders were never solved, but are strongly believed to have been committed by an embezzling senior employee of one of Richard Robison Sr.'s businesses named Joseph Scolaro III. The alleged perpetrator committed suicide in 1973.[82] | Murdered | 1 month |
Shirley Robison | 40 |
Richard Robison Jr. | 19 |
Gary Robison | 16 |
Randall Robison | 12 |
Susan Robison | 7 |
1968 | Susan Ellsworth Perry | 17 | United States of America | Perry disappeared from Barnstable County, Massachusetts, on 10 September 1968. Her dismembered body was discovered in February 1969.[83] | Murdered | 5 months |
1969 | Mary Annabelle Bjornson | 21 | United States of America | Bjornson was abducted and murdered by serial killer John Dwight Canaday on the evening of 4 January 1969. Her body was discovered two months after her murder.[84] | Murdered | 2 months |
1969 | Mary Ann Wysocki | 23 | United States of America | A Rhode Island College student last seen alive on 25 January 1969. Her dismembered body was discovered in woodland on 5 March. | Murdered | 6 weeks |
1969 | Linda Dawn Salee | 22 | United States of America | Salee was the last of four known victims of serial killer Jerry Brudos. She was abducted from a shopping mall parking lot on 23 April 1969 and subsequently raped and strangled at Brudos' home before her body was discarded in the Willamette River.[85] | Murdered | 2 weeks |
1969 | Theodore Conrad | 20 | United States of America | On 11 July 1969, Theodore Conrad surreptitiously robbed the bank where he was employed and then vanished. He evaded capture for over 5 decades by moving around the country for several years before he finally settled down (under an assumed name) in Lynnfield, Massachusetts, where he died on 18 May 2021[86] without ever having been caught. Several months after his death, US Marshals located his grave from a newspaper's obituary page. | Died of lung cancer | 52 years |
1969 | Donald Shea | 35 | United States of America | Shea was a ranch hand at Spahn Ranch who was murdered by members of the Manson Family led by Charles Manson on 26 August 1969. He is believed to have been murdered due to having informed authorities of the Manson Family's criminal activities. Shea's body was recovered in December 1977; his autopsy revealed evidence of multiple incision wounds to the chest and blunt force trauma to the head.[87] | Murdered | 8 years |
1969 | Catherine Cesnik | 27 | United States of America | Cesnik was an American Catholic religious sister at the Archbishop Keough High School, Baltimore, Maryland who disappeared on November 7, 1969. Her body was found a few months later near a garbage dump in Lansdowne. Nobody was ever charged, although priest Joseph Maskell is considered a viable suspect.[88] | Murdered | 3 months |
1969 | Rosemary Calandriello | 17 | United States of America | Calandriello was an Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey high school student. Calandriello disappeared on August 25, 1969. Her body was never found, although convicted murderer and suspected serial killer Robert Zarinsky confessed to her abduction and murder; he was convicted of this offense in 1975.[89] | Murdered | Never found |
1969 | Joyce Malecki | 20 | United States of America | Joyce Malecki, American woman who disappeared on November 11, 1969, from Baltimore, Maryland and was found dead two days later after being killed.[90] | Murdered | 2 days |
data-sort-value="1969-11-14" | 1969 | Reet Jurvetson | 19 | United States of America | Reet Jurvetson, a Canadian-American woman disappeared on November 14, 1969, and was found murdered on November 16, 1969, in a dense bushland off Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles, California. She had been stabbed over 150 times and her body was rolled down an embankment. Jurvetson remained unidentified for 46 years until an online mortuary photograph was recognised by her family and friends.[91] | Murdered | data-sort-value="16790" | 46 years |
data-sort-value="1969" | 1969 | Reyna Marroquín | 27 | United States of America | Reyna Marroquín, a pregnant Salvadoran woman, disappeared in 1969 from Nassau County, New York. Her remains were found on September 2, 1999, in the former Jericho, New York home of Howard B. Elkins, her former boss, sealed in a drum that was stored in a crawl space. Marroquín was having an affair with Elkins and DNA test showed that Elkins was the father of the fetus. Elkins committed suicide not long after police questioning.[92] [93] [94] | Murdered | data-sort-value="10950" | 30 years |
data-sort-value="1969" | 1969 | Muriel Freda McKay | 55 | United Kingdom | McKay was a housewife kidnapped from her Wimbledon home on 29 December 1969. Her kidnappers had mistaken her for Anna Murdoch, then-wife of Rupert Murdoch. McKay's precise cause and date of death is unknown, although she is believed to have been kept alive by her kidnappers for at least three days. Her body was never found.[95] | Murdered | data-sort-value="10950" | Body never found |
|
data-sort-type="isoDate" | Date | data-sort-type="Fgtext" | Person(s) | data-sort-type="text" | Age | Country of disappearance | Circumstances | data-sort-type="text" | Outcome | data-sort-type="value" | Time spent missing or unconfirmed |
---|
data-sort-value="1980-02-13" | 1980 | Marcia King | 21 | United States of America | Marcia King left home in Little Rock, Arkansas, on an unknown date in 1980. She traveled across the United States and was murdered in Troy, Ohio, in April 1981 at the age of 21. King's body was identified in 2018.[277] | Murdered | data-sort-value="13505" | 37 years |
1980 | Bryon McCane II | 4 | United States of America | American boy who would become the rapper known as Bizzy Bone. He was abducted by his mother's boyfriend at an early age, together with his two sisters. For the next three years, the trio was moved around various homes across Oklahoma, with McCane being tortured and sexually assaulted. He was finally rescued after a babysitter realized that he was a missing person and contacted the authorities, who subsequently rescued him.[278] | Found alive | 3 years |
data-sort-value="1980-02-13" | 1980 | Timothy White | data-sort-value="005" | 5 | United States of America | Timothy White disappeared in California on February 13, 1980, and it was later revealed that he was abducted by a man named Kenneth Parnell. He escaped on March 1, 1980, with the help of Steven Stayner, who had been abducted by Parnell almost eight years earlier (see above).[279] | Found alive | data-sort-value="0015" | 15 days |
data-sort-value-"1980-02-14" | 1980 | Michael Rosenblum | data-sort-value="025" | 25 | United States of America | Michael Rosenblum was last seen alive on February 14, 1980, angrily driving his girlfriend's car away from a West Homestead, Pennsylvania, gas station; it was found an hour later abandoned and severely damaged along a road in nearby Baldwin, whose police department did not make public that it had the car for over three months. That, and other circumstantial evidence suggesting that the Baldwin police knew more about Rosenblum's disappearance than they claimed, accumulated over the next several years and led to the police chief being fired and reinstated in 1987. A skull fragment found in 1992 in woods near where the car was found was matched to Rosenblum; how he died is still unknown.[280] | Died (unknown cause) | data-sort-value="4448" | 12 years 2 months |
1980 | Sherri Jarvis | 14 | United States of America | Sherri Jarvis ran away from her juvenile detention hearing at the Washington County Courthouse shortly after her 14th birthday in March 1980. She traveled with 2 unidentified sisters to Green Bay, Wisconsin. The sisters decided to return home, but Sherri refused and walked away from them. In August 1980, Sherri wrote a letter to her family from Denver, Colorado stating that she was upset over being incarcerated and that they wouldn't hear from her until she was "at least 18 or 21". Sherri's body was discovered on the morning of November 1, 1980, in Huntsville, Texas, but remained unidentified until November 2021.[281] | Murdered | eight months, and remained unidentified for 41 years |
data-sort-value="1980-03-03" | 1980 | Cynthia Gastelle | 18 | United States of America | Cynthia Gastelle disappeared on April 3, 1980, while going to a job interview in Takoma Park, Maryland.[282] Her skeletal remains were found on February 12, 1982, in a secluded wooded area on Bull Run Mountain in Haymarket, Virginia, but remained unidentified for 30 years.[283] [284] | Murdered | data-sort-value="10905" | 30 years |
1980 | Jessie Earl | 22 | United Kingdom | Earl disappeared from Eastbourne in May 1980, with her body only discovered in 1989 near Beachy Head. As of November 2020, the investigation into her murder is ongoing.[285] Police have investigated links between Earl's murder and serial killer Peter Tobin, who lived in the area at the time of her murder.[286] | Murdered | 9 years |
1980 | Mary Stauffer | 36 | United States of America | Mary and daughter Bethy Stauffer were kidnapped on May 16, 1980, by Mary's former ninth-grade student and stalker, Ming Sen Shiue in Roseville, Minnesota, after mother and daughter were leaving a beauty salon before the family's move to the Philippines for missionary work.[287] Alongside kidnapping the Stauffers, Shiue would also kidnap and later murder six-year-old Jason Wilkman, who had noticed Shiue's stopped vehicle by sheer coincidence.[288] On July 7, 1980, Shiue left the house for work, allowing Mary and Beth to escape by Mary pulling one of the hinge pins on the door and call the police. Shiue would later be arrested, attack Mary at his second trial hearing, and be sentenced to life imprisonment under federal charges, 40 years under Minnesota. | Found alive | 53 days |
Bethy Stauffer | 8 | United States of America |
data-sort-value="1980-05-28" | 1980 | Dorothy Jane Scott | 32 | United States of America | Dorothy Jane Scott disappeared while getting her car on May 28, 1980, in Anaheim, California, after she had taken two co-workers to the hospital. On August 6, 1984, a construction worker discovered dog and human bones, side by side, about 30feet from Santa Ana Canyon Road.[289] The human bones were later identified as being Scott's. The identity and motive of her killer or killers remains unknown.[290] | Murdered | data-sort-value="1531" | 4 years |
data-sort-value="1980-06-16" | 1980 | Patsy Morris | 14 | United Kingdom | Morris was a schoolgirl who disappeared from her school in west London, England, during her lunch break on 16 June 1980. Police and members of the community spent two days searching for her until her fully-clothed body was found on Hounslow Heath, having been strangled. Her murder remains unsolved although in 2008 it was revealed that she was the childhood girlfriend of west London serial killer Levi Bellfield and that he had allegedly confessed to the crime in prison.[291] | Murdered | 2 days |
data-sort-value="1980-07-13" | 1980 | Shirley Soosay | 35 | United States of America | A Canadian native of Cree ancestry. Soosay's body was discovered in Delano, California, on 14 July 1980. She had been raped and stabbed thirty-nine times. Her body remained unidentified until February 2020. Her murderer, Wilson Chouest, was convicted of her rape and murder prior to her identification.[292] | Murdered | data-sort-value="13505" | 40 years |
data-sort-value="1980-07-20" | 1980 | Brenda Gerow | 20 | United States of America | Brenda Gerow was an American woman who disappeared on July 20, 1980, after leaving home with her boyfriend at the time. She was found dead in the desert at Pima County, Arizona, on April 8, 1981, but remained unidentified for 34 years. | Murdered | data-sort-value="12410" | 34 years |
data-sort-value="1980-08-17" | 1980 | Azaria Chamberlain | data-sort-value="0.1875" | nine weeks old | Australia | An Australian baby girl who disappeared on the night of August 17, 1980, during a family camping trip in Uluru. Although her remains have never been found her mother insisted that a dingo had taken her from her camping tent. In a trial sensationalized by the media her mother was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life in prison. Her sentence was overturned six years later when Azaria's jacket was found in a dingo lair. Azaria's disappearance was the subject of four inquests, the last of which in 2012, concluded that a dingo had taken and killed her.[293] | Killed in animal attack | data-sort-value="0000" | 6 years |
1980 | Tammy Terrell | 17 | United States of America | Terrell was an American teenager who was last seen in the company of an unknown couple at the Roswell State Fair in Roswell, New Mexico on October 4, 1980. Her body was found in Henderson, Nevada on the following day, but remained unidentified until December 2021. Her murder remains unsolved.[294] | Murdered | 1 day |
1980 | Giorgio Giamonna | 25 | Italy | Giamonna and Galatola were gay males. Missing since October 17, 1980, the bodies of both were discovered in the town of Giarre on October 31, 1980. Both had been shot in the head and were discovered holding hands. The perpetrator of the murders was never identified, but is believed to have been the 13-year-old nephew of one of the victims. Their deaths led to the widespread recognition of homophobia among the Italian public and the strengthening and recognition of Italian gay rights movements.[295] | Murdered | 14 days |
Antonio Galatola | 15 |
1980 | Harold "Dean" Clouse Jr. | 21 | United States of America | Young couple Dean and Tina Clouse and their infant daughter Holly Marie Clouse went missing from their home in Lewisville, Texas, where they had moved recently from New Smyrna Beach, Florida. The murdered remains of Dean and Tina would be discovered outside of Houston on January 12, 1981, but would not be identified until 2021. After losing contact with their families in October 1980, Dean, Tina, and Holly Marie were reported missing by family back in Florida; however, no concerted efforts were made by law enforcement to locate them. Dean and Tina were identified through forensic genealogy in 2021, but Holly Marie remained unlocated until 2022, when she was found alive in Oklahoma.[296] | Murdered | 40 years |
Tina Linn Clouse | 17 | United States of America | Murdered | data-sort-value="7300" | 40 years |
Holly Marie Clouse | 1 | United States of America | Found alive | data-sort-value="12775" | 41 years |
1980 | Marlene Oakes | 25 | United States of America | Marlene Oakes was an American woman who was murdered by her husband on October 11, 1980, in Verona, Kentucky, and half of her skull was found near her house on November 29, 1981. In 2001, it was identified as being hers.[297] | Murdered | Over 1 year, and not identified until 2001 |
data-sort-value="1981-04-11" | 1981 | Tina Louise Sharp | 12 | United States of America | Sharp was one of four murder victims killed in the resort town of Keddie, California, in April 1981. The other three victims—her mother, 15-year-old brother and his 17-year-old friend—were discovered at the crime scene, whereas Sharp's body was discovered in Butte County three years later. All four murders remain unsolved.[298] | Murdered | data-sort-value="12775" | 3 years |
data-sort-value="1981-04-16" | 1981 | Colleen Marian Bridgette Daignault | data-sort-value="006" | 13 | Canada | One of several victims of serial child killer Clifford Olson. Daignault—a Surrey, British Columbia, schoolgirl—disappeared while returning to her parents' home following a sleepover at a friend's home on April 16, 1981; her skeletal remains were discovered on September 17 the same year.[299] | Murdered | data-sort-value="0014" | 5 months |
data-sort-value="1981-04-16" | 1981 | Daryn Todd Johnsrude | data-sort-value="006" | 16 | Canada | A further victim of serial child killer Clifford Olson. Johnsrude was Olson's third-known victim; his body was found in woodland on May 2, 1981—ten days after his April 22 disappearance. Johnsrude had died of skull fractures. | Murdered | 10 days |
1981 | Ciro Cirillo | 60 | Italy | Italian Christian Democratic politician who was kidnapped by members of the Red Brigades in Naples on April 27, 1981. He was held for ransom, but later released after a controversial deal was made with the Red Brigades, paying them one and a half million lire, which was provided with the help of Camorra crime boss Raffaele Cutolo.[300] | Found alive | Almost 3 months |
1981 | Al Indelicato | 50 | United States of America | On May 5, 1981, infighting within the Bonanno crime family, led to Dominic Trinchera, Philip Giaccone, and Al Indelicato, being murdered by a rival faction of the family in Brooklyn, New York. Their bodies were buried in a lot in Lindenwood, Queens. On May 28, authorities discovered Indelicato's body and removed it. More than two decades later, in October 2004, after some children reported finding a body in the lot, FBI agents excavated the property and discovered the bodies of Trinchera and Giaccone.[301] In December 2004, the bodies were positively identified as Giaccone and Trinchera.[302] | Murdered | data-sort-value="8550" | 23 days |
Philip Giaccone | 48 | United States of America | data-sort-value="8550" | 24 years |
Dominick Trinchera | 44 | United States of America | data-sort-value="0023" | 24 years |
data-sort-value="1981-05-19" | 1981 | Sandra Lynn Wolfsteiner | data-sort-value="006" | 16 | Canada | The fourth-known victim of serial child killer Clifford Olson. Wolfsteiner was lured into Osen's vehicle while hitchhiking home from her boyfriend's apartment. Her remains were later discovered in Fraser Valley, fifty miles east of Vancouver. | Murdered | 2 months |
data-sort-value="1981-07-02" | 1981 | Karen Price | 15 | United Kingdom | Karen Price was a girl from Wales who was last seen on July 2, 1981. Police later concluded that Price had run away from home, then turned to sex work. Her remains were found on December 7, 1989, when workmen unearthed a rolled carpet while installing a garden behind a house. She was identified by her DNA in what is cited as one of the first instances in which DNA technology was used in this way in the UK.[303] | Murdered | data-sort-value="3080" | 8 years |
data-sort-value="1981-07-02" | 1981 | Suzanne Bombardier | data-sort-value="14" | 14 | United States of America | Suzanne Bombardier was a teenager who disappeared on June 22, 1980[304] after being kidnapped, A fisherman discovered Bombardier's body in the San Joaquin River on June 27, 1980, just five days later as her body was seen floating.[305] | Murdered | data-sort-value="0023" | 5 days |
data-sort-value="1981-07-09" | 1981 | Judy Elizabeth Kozma | 14 | Canada | A further victim of serial child killer Clifford Olson. Kozma was last seen alive in New Westminster on July 9, 1981; her body was discovered on July 25. She had been stabbed to death.[306] | Murdered | 2 weeks |
1981 | Mary Louise Day | 13 | United States of America | Teenage girl who ran away from her parents' home in Seaside, California on July 15, 1981. She remained missing until 2003, when a woman in the Phoenix area was identified via DNA as Day.[307] | Found alive | 22 years |
data-sort-value="1981-07-27" | 1981 | Adam Walsh | data-sort-value="006" | 6 | United States of America | Adam Walsh was an American boy who was abducted from the Hollywood Mall in Hollywood, Florida, on July 27, 1981. His severed head was found two weeks later in a drainage canal alongside Florida's Turnpike in rural St. Lucie County, Florida. Drifter Otis Toole confessed to Walsh's murder, but due to poor handling by the Hollywood Police he was never convicted of the crime.[308] | Murdered | data-sort-value="0014" | 2 weeks |
1981 | Vishal Mehrotra | 8 | United Kingdom | Mehrotra was an 8-year-old boy who disappeared on July 29, 1981, from Putney, London.[309] On February 25, 1982, some of Mehrotra's remains were found in Sussex on an isolated Farm. | Murdered | 212 days |
1981 | Jennifer Cardy | 9 | United Kingdom | Nine-year-old Cardy disappeared from Ballinderry, County Antrim on 12 August 1981. She had left her home to cycle a short distance away to meet a friend, but her bicycle was later found thrown over a hedge close to her home. Six days later her body was found in Hillsborough. She had been abducted and murdered by paedophile Robert Black, although he wasn't convicted for it until 2011. Before he died, Black was about to be charged in relation to the very similar case of the disappearance of Genette Tate near Exeter in 1978. She disappeared while delivering newspapers on her bicycle and was never found.[310] [311] | Murdered | 6 days |
1981 | Charles Armstrong | 55 | Crossmaglen, Northern Ireland | A labourer abducted and murdered by the Provisional Irish Republican Army in August 1981; his body was discovered in County Monaghan on 29 July 2010.[312] | Murdered | 28 years 11 months |
data-sort-value="1981-08-17" | 1981 | Dominick Napolitano | 51 | United States of America | Organized crime leaders ordered the murder of Dominick Napolitano. Responding to a summons, on August 17, 1981, he went to a meeting, knowing that he would be killed. On August 12, 1982, a body was found at South Avenue and Bridge Street in Arlington, Staten Island which proved to be Napolitano.[313] | Murdered | data-sort-value="4375" | 11 years |
1981 | Ursula Herrmann | 10 | West Germany | Ursula Herrmann was kidnapped in West Germany on September 15, 1981, and held captive by an unidentified assailant who called her family to demand ransom. Despite the family gathering the sum, no further instructions were given, and Ursula's body was found two weeks later, buried in the woods. A neighbor of the Herrmanns, Werner Mazurek, was later found guilty of the crime and sentenced to life imprisonment.[314] | Murdered | 2 weeks |
1981 | Kalingam Mariappan | 45 | Singapore | On 22 September 1981, 45-year-old boilerman Kalingam Mariappan was reported missing after he failed to return home for the past two days. According to a witness, he saw Kalingam leaving on a lorry with two young men after having drinks with them. Thereafter, the two men - 16-year-old Rathakrishnan Ramasamy and 22-year-old Ramu Annadavascan - were arrested, and one of them, Rathakrishnan, confessed to the police that Kalingam was dead, and led them to East Coast Parkway where Kalingam's burnt body was found. After the confirmation of the victim's death, the two men were charged with murder, and it ended with Ramu being sentenced to death while Rathakrishnan was imprisoned indefinitely as he was still a minor when killing Kalingam.[315] | Murdered | Five days |
data-sort-value="1981-10-29" | 1981 | Tina Harmon | 12 | United States of America | Tina Harmon was an American girl who was abducted, raped, and murdered on October 29, 1981, by Robert Anthony Buell. After being dropped off at a convenience store in Lodi, Ohio, by her father's girlfriend. Her body was found in a nearby town five days after her abduction.[316] | Murdered | data-sort-value="0005" | 5 days |
1981 | Julio Iglesias Sr. | 66 | Spain | Iglesias Sr. was a Spanish gynecologist and father of singer–songwriter Julio Iglesias who was kidnapped and held hostage by ETA separatists in December 1981. He was held for two weeks before being rescued by a police anti-terrorism unit.[317] | Found alive | 2 weeks |
1981 | Dana Bradley | 14 | Canada | Bradley disappeared while hitchhiking along the Topsail Road in St. John's, Newfoundland, with her body found four days later. Her skull had been crushed with a blunt instrument and she had been sexually assaulted. Despite extensive news coverage and rigorous investigation, the case remains unsolved.[318] | Murdered | 4 days |
1982 | Lynette Dawson | 33 | Australia | Lynette Dawson was the wife of Australian teacher and rugby league player Chris Dawson. She disappeared on 9 January 1982; her remains have never been found. Her disappearance was the subject of intense public interest due to her husband's extramarital affair with a student of his who then was only 16. On 5 December 2018, Chris Dawson was charged with the murder of Lynette, but pleaded not guilty in June 2019. In February 2020, he was committed to stand trial for the murder of Lynette. On 30 August 2022, Chris Dawson was found guilty on Lynette's murder,[319] [320] [321] [322] [323] and sentenced on 2 December to 24 years in jail with a non-parole period of 18 years.[324] | Murdered | Not found |
data-sort-value="1982-01-01" | 1982 | Lori Anne Razpotnik | 15 or 16 | United States of America | One of forty-nine known victims of serial killer Gary Ridgway. Razpotnik was last seen by her family in 1982 at age 15. She is believed to have been murdered by Ridgway in the spring or summer of the following year. Razpotnik remained unidentified until December 2023, when her body was identified vi DNA analysis.[325] | Murdered | data-sort-value="13505" | 41 years |
data-sort-value="1982-01-31" | 1982 | Kathleen McCormack Durst | 29 | United States of America | A medical student, Durst disappeared on 31 January 1982 after leaving the house of a friend to return to the South Salem, New York, residence that she shared with her husband. She has not been seen since and was declared legally dead in 2001. Since her marriage was deteriorating, police strongly suspected that her husband, Robert Durst, had murdered her, citing inconsistencies in statements he gave them. He is suspected in two other disappearances and served three years in prison for evidence-tampering in the death of a third person. On 17 September 2021, he was convicted of Kathleen's murder.[326] [327] [328] | Murdered | 39 years |
data-sort-value="1982" | 1982 | Tulasa Thapa | 13 | Nepal | Tulasa Thapa was a Nepali girl who was kidnapped and sold into prostitution in India, where she was systematically abused and raped by her abductors. She was eventually released, admitted to a hospital and saved, but suffered permanent psychological and health issues which led to her premature death in 1995.[329] | Found alive | 10 months |
data-sort-value="1982-02-01" | 1982 | Carolyn Eaton | 17 | United States of America | Carolyn Eaton was a 17-year-old girl whose body was discovered along Interstate 40 in Williams, Arizona, on February 14, 1982; she had last been seen alive in the company of an older male on February 4 at the Monte Carlo Truck Stop near Ash Fork, Arizona. Her body was identified via genetic genealogy on February 22, 2021.[330] | Murdered | 39 years |
1982 | Nava Elimelech | 11 | Israel | Elimelech disappeared while going to a friend's house in Bat Yam, Israel on March 20, 1982. A search party later found her severed head wrapped in a plastic bag, along with the rest of her remains. Her murder is unsolved.[331] | Murdered | 10 days |
data-sort-value="1982-06-03" | 1982 | Michelle Garvey | 14 | United States of America | Michelle Garvey was an American girl who ran away in Connecticut on June 3, 1982, and was found murdered in Texas almost one month later on July 1. The body was not identified as hers until more than three decades later, in 2014.[332] | Murdered | data-sort-value="0028" | 28 days |
1982 | Christelle Bancourt | 12 | France | Abducted while going to an appointed meeting with her dentist in Marseille, France, on June 10, 1982, Bancourt's kidnapper, an acquaintance named Christian Marletta, later raped and strangled her before dismembering the body, which was found a month later.[333] | Murdered | 1 month |
1982 | Dawn Olanick | 17 | United States of America | Dawn Olanick, who was formerly known as "Princess Doe", was a teenage girl from West Babylon, New York who went missing on June 24, 1982, and was found dead on July 15, 1982, in Cedar Ridge Cemetery in Blairstown, New Jersey after being murdered.[334] | Murdered | Less than one month |
1982 | Zechariah Baumel | 22 | Lebanon | IDF soldier who was declared missing in action on June 11, 1982, during the Battle of Sultan Yacoub in the 1982 Lebanon War. In 2019, President of Russia Vladimir Putin announced that the Russian Army, in coordination with the Syrian military, had found Baumel's remains in the old Martyrs' Cemetery in the Yarmouk refugee camp south of Damascus, Syria.[335] | Killed in action | 37 years |
1982 | Hezi Shai | 28 | Lebanon | IDF tank commander who was declared missing in action on June 11, 1982, during the 1982 Lebanon War. Shai, who had been captured by PFLP-GC militants, was later released as part of a prisoner exchange in 1985.[336] | Found alive | 3 years |
data-sort-value="1982-07-17" | 1982 | Krista Harrison | 11 | United States of America | Krista Harrison was murdered on July 17, 1982, in Marshallville, Ohio. Her body was found 6 days later. The case remained unsolved for two years, until Robert Anthony Buell was convicted of her murder.[337] | Murdered | data-sort-value="730" | 6 days |
data-sort-value="1982-07-30" | 1982 | Susan Maxwell | 11 | United Kingdom | 11-year-old Maxwell vanished after last being seen walking alone in the English village of Cornhill-on-Tweed on July 30, 1982. 13 days later her body was found 264 miles away in Staffordshire. She had been abducted and murdered by paedophile and serial killer Robert Black.[338] | Murdered | 13 days |
data-sort-value="1982-08-26" | 1982 | Rachael Runyan | 3 | United States of America | Rachael Runyan was an American female child from Sunset, Utah who was kidnapped on 26 August 1982 and was found dead in a creek bed in nearby Morgan County three weeks later.[339] | Murdered | 3 weeks |
data-sort-value="1982-09-11" | 1982 | Carole Pappas | 42 | United States of America | Carole Pappas, the wife of former Major League Baseball pitcher Milt Pappas disappeared after leaving the couple's home in Wheaton, Illinois. In 1987, workers drained a pond four blocks from the Pappas' house and found the car with Carole's body inside. It is theorized that she mistook a driveway near the pond for one leading to her neighborhood, and that she may have been drinking.[340] | Died by drowning | data-sort-value="1825" | 5 years |
data-sort-value="1982-09-28" | 1982 | Lisa Ann Millican | 13 | United States of America | The first of two victims of Alvin and Judith Neelley. Millican was abducted from the Riverbend Mall in Rome, Georgia, on 25 September 1982. She was sexually assaulted by both individuals before she was shot to death on 28 September. Her body was discovered three days later.[341] | Murdered | data-sort-value="1825" | 3 days |
1982 | Don Kemp | 34–35 | United States of America | Kemp was a New York advertising executive who disappeared under mysterious circumstances in Wyoming, where he had planned to begin a new life. His remains were discovered in 1986, but the circumstances surrounding his death, and whether it is homicidal in nature or not, remain unclear.[342] | No | 4 years |
data-sort-value="1982-11-24" | 1982 | Alisha Heinrich | 1 | United States of America | Alisha Heinrich and her mother, Gwendolyn Clemons, were last seen around November 24, 1982, in Kansas City, Missouri. Heinrich's body was recovered in Moss Point, Mississippi after nearly two weeks; she was a victim of homicide. She remained an unidentified decedent until 2020. Clemons' remains have never been recovered.[343] | Murdered | data-sort-value="1982-11-24" | 2 weeks |
1983 | Ervin Dwayne Gibson | 16 | United States of America | Gibson was an Uptown teenager abducted and murdered by serial killer Larry Eyler on 24 January 1983. He was murdered in Lake County. Gibson's body was discovered on 15 April, but remained unidentified until November 1983.[344] | Murdered | 10 months |
1983 | Richard Edward Bruce Jr. | 25 | United States of America | Bruce was the fifteenth known victim of serial killer Larry Eyler. He was murdered on 18 May 1983 and his body was thrown from a bridge into a creek in Effingham, Illinois. Bruce's body was discovered by a trapper on 5 December, but remained unidentified until August 1994.[345] | Murdered | 11 years |
data-sort-value="1983-05-29" | 1983 | John Brandenburg Jr. | 19 | United States of America | Brandenburg was a Kentucky native murdered in Newton County, Indiana by serial killer Larry Eyler on or about May 29, 1983. According to Eyler, Brandenburg's murder was one of five of the twenty-two murders to which he posthumously confessed which he committed with his alleged accomplice Robert David Little. Brandenburg's body was found on October 19, 1983; his body was identified in April 2021.[346] | Murdered | 38 years |
1983 | Caroline Hogg | 5 | United Kingdom | 5-year-old child Caroline Hogg disappeared while playing outside her home in the Edinburgh suburb of Portobello on 8 July 1983. A boy later revealed he had seen her walking away with an unknown man. The case received widespread media coverage across the UK. Her body was found many miles away in Leicestershire 10 days later. She had been abducted and murdered by paedophile and serial killer Robert Black.[347] | Murdered | 10 days |
data-sort-value="1983-07-11" | 1983 | Keith Bibbs | 16 | United States of America | Bibbs was a Chicago teenager murdered in Newton County, Indiana by serial killer Larry Eyler on or about Monday July 11, 1983. He was abducted while hitchhiking from Indiana to Illinois upon Indiana State Road 63 and driven to an abandoned farmhouse where he was duped into allowing himself to be bound to a wooden post, then blindfolded and gagged before he was stabbed multiple times in his upper and lower torso. His body was found on October 18, 1983, and identified in July 2023.[348] | Murdered | 40 years |
1983 | Andrea Scherpf | 24 | Canada | German tourists who vanished while hitchhiking near Chetwynd, Canada on October 3, 1983. Their bodies were found three days later, and both had been shot to death. A man was convicted of their murders in 1991, but later exonerated via DNA evidence in 2013.[349] | Murdered | 3 days |
Bernd Göricke | 27 | Canada |
data-sort-value="1983-10-10" | 1983 | Heide Marie Villarreal-Fye | data-sort-value="025" | 25 | United States of America | 25-year-old cocktail waitress Heide Marie Villarreal-Fye was last seen alive at a convenience store located off of West Main Street and Hobbs in League City, Texas on October 10, 1983. On April 4, 1984, Heidi's remains were discovered after a dog brought her skull to a nearby house in Calder Field on the 3000 block of Calder Road near League City. The medical examiner determined that Heidi had broken ribs and had been beaten with a club; she is believed to have died from blunt force trauma to the head.[350] | Murdered | data-sort-value="0189" | 6 months |
1983 | Freddy Heineken | 60 | Netherlands | The Dutch businessman and chairman of Heineken N.V. was kidnapped together with his driver and held for ransom by a group of men. After paying the ransom of 35 million Dutch guilders, Heineken and his driver were released, and all of the kidnappers were eventually captured and served prison sentences for the crime.[351] | Found alive | 21 days |
1983 | Danny Katz | 14 | Israel | Israeli boy who was abducted by five Arab assailants while waking to a friend's house in Haifa on December 8, 1983. His body was found three days later, having been sexually assaulted, tortured and strangled. The five men were convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment, but there are allegations that they had been tortured into confessing.[352] | Murdered | 3 days |
1984 | Katsuhisa Ezaki | 42 | Japan | The president of the Ezaki Glico company was kidnapped by two masked men and then held for a ransom of 1 billion yen and 100 kg of gold bullion. However, Ezaki managed to escape three days later from the warehouse in Ibaraki.[353] | Found alive | 3 days |
1984 | Kassim Ouma | 6 | Uganda | Kidnapped as a child to serve in the National Resistance Army. After leaving the army, Ouma took up boxing and is now a professional boxer, holding the IBF light middleweight title from 2004 to 2005.[354] | Found alive | 5 years |
1984 | Hassan Jangju | 16–17 | Iraq | Iranian Basij operative who became the subject of a famous photograph taken by photographer Alfred Yaghobzadeh. He was killed during Operation Kheibar circa February 1984, and his remains were discovered and returned to Iran in 2017.[355] | Killed in action | 33 years |
1984 | George Crooks | 28 | United States of America | On March 26, 1984, in the U.S. state of Georgia, 28-year-old lawyer George Grant Crooks was murdered by his homosexual lover Robert Dale Conklin, who stabbed him to death with a screwdriver and dismembered the body, and the body parts were discovered two days after the killing (as well as a day after Crooks was reported missing). Conklin was found guilty of the murder and sentenced to death. 21 years after the murder, Conklin was executed on July 12, 2005.[356] | Murdered | Two days |
1984 | Benjamin Weir | 61 | Lebanon | American Presbyterian missionary who was abducted by Islamic Jihad militants from his Beirut, Lebanon home in May 1984. He was later released during the Iran-Contra affair in exchange for anti-tank weapons.[357] | Found alive | 16 months |
data-sort-value="1984-06-01" | 1984 | Mark Tildesley | data-sort-value="007" | 7 | United Kingdom | Mark Tildesley disappeared while visiting a funfair in Wokingham, Berkshire, England, on the evening of June 1, 1984. He was lured away from the fair and his bicycle was found chained to railings nearby.[358] In 1990 it emerged that Tildesley had been abducted, drugged, tortured, raped and murdered by a London-based paedophile gang on the night he disappeared.[359] | Murdered | data-sort-value="0000" | Never found |
1984 | Luis de Lión | 44 | Guatemala | Guatemalan writer and leader of the Guatemalan Party of Labour who was abducted by Guatemalan Army soldiers from Guatemala City on May 15, 1984. His fate remained unknown until 1999, when his name and photograph appeared in an unsealed military document, indicating that he had been killed three weeks after his arrest.[360] | Murdered | Never found |
data-sort-value="1984-06-20" | 1984 | Ruth Waymire | 24 | United States of America | On June 20, 1984, the dismembered torso of a female murder victim was discovered in the Spokane River in Spokane, Washington. Nearly 14 years later, on April 19, 1998, the decedent's skull was discovered in a vacant lot in Spokane. On March 29, 2023, the decedent was identified by Othram as 24-year-old Ruth Waymire, whose murder remains unsolved.[361] | Murdered | data-sort-value="14161" | 38 years |
1984 | Jonathan Wright | Unknown | Lebanon | British journalist for Reuters who was kidnapped by a Palestinian splinter group in the Beqaa Valley, Lebanon. His kidnappers planned to trade him in exchange for three members who attempted to assassinate Israeli diplomat Shlomo Argov, but Wright managed to escape on September 16 through a ventilation hole. He was later picked up by a militia patrol and returned to Beirut.[362] | Found alive | More than 2 weeks |
data-sort-value="1984-09-10" | 1984 | Laura Lynn Miller | data-sort-value="016" | 16 | United States of America | 16-year-old Laura Lynn Miller was last seen alive on September 10, 1984, using a payphone to call her boyfriend at the same convenience store in League City, Texas where 25-year-old Heide Marie Villarreal-Fye was last seen a year earlier. Miller's remains were found on February 2, 1986, 60 feet from where police discovered Villarreal-Fye's remains.[363] | Murdered | data-sort-value="0510" | 1 year |
data-sort-value="1984-09-16" | 1984 | Lisa Nichols | 28 | United States of America | The body of 28-year-old Lisa Nichols, a resident of West Virginia, was discovered along Interstate 40 near West Memphis, Arkansas on September 16, 1984. Her identity remained unknown until she was identified nine months later, in June 1985, through the use of fingerprints. Nichols is believed to be one of the first victims of the unsolved Redhead murders.[364] | Murdered | data-sort-value="0273" | 9 months |
data-sort-value="1984-09-17" | 1984 | Vicki Lynne Hoskinson | data-sort-value="008" | 8 | United States of America | Vicki Lynne Hoskinson was a girl from Flowing Wells, Arizona, who disappeared on September 17, 1984, while riding her bike to mail a birthday card to her aunt. Her remains were found on April 12, 1985.[365] | Murdered | data-sort-value="0217" | 7 months |
1984 | Christine Jessop | 9 | Canada | Jessop went missing on 3 October 1984, and her body was found two months later, with signs of being raped and murdered. Jessop's next-door neighbour, Guy Paul Morin, was wrongfully convicted of the crime and his charges were all cleared after post-conviction DNA tests revealed that Morin was not the killer. A 2020 DNA testing would identify another man as the real murderer based on DNA extracted from Jessop's underwear but the suspect, Calvin Hoover, died in 2015 due to suicide.[366] | Murdered | 2 months |
1984 | Yumi Hasebe | 5 | Japan | 5-year-old Yumi Hasebe went missing from a pachinko parlor in Ashikaga, Tochigi. Her skeletized remains were found about a mile (1.7 km) from her home. Fukushima's case is considered to be one of the cases that make up the North Kanto Serial Young Girl Kidnapping and Murder Case. | Murdered | 3 months |
data-sort-value="1984-12-20" | 1984 | Jonelle Matthews | 12 | United States of America | Jonelle Matthews disappeared from Greeley, Colorado on December 20, 1984. Her remains were discovered on July 23, 2019, located about 15miles southeast of Jonelle's home.[367] [368] | Died from gunshot wound | data-sort-value="12410" | 33 years |
data-sort-value="1984-04-06" | 1984 | Elizabeth Lamotte | 17 | United States of America | Elizabeth Lamotte disappeared from Manchester, New Hampshire on April 6, 1984. Her body was discovered in Tennessee a year later, but was not identified until 2018. Lamotte was possibly a victim of an unidentified serial killer.[369] | Murdered | data-sort-value="12410" | 34 years |
1985 | Lawrence Jenco | 51 | Lebanon | American Catholic priest who was kidnapped by Islamist extremists in Beirut, Lebanon while working as a director of the Catholic Relief Services. After numerous negotiations, he was released and repatriated back to the U.S.[370] | Found alive | 18 months |
data-sort-value="1985-02-07" | 1985 | Kiki Camarena | 37 | Mexico | 37-year-old Kiki Camarena, an American intelligence officer, was abducted by corrupt Mexican officials working for the major drug traffickers in Mexico on February 7, 1985. Camarena was subsequently taken to a residence in Guadalajara, owned by Mexican drug lord Rafael Caro Quintero, where he was tortured over a 30-hour period and murdered. Camarena's body was found wrapped in plastic in a rural area outside the small town of La Angostura on March 5, 1985.[371] | Murdered | data-sort-value="026" | 26 days |
1985 | Terry A. Anderson | 38 | Lebanon | American journalist for the Associated Press who was abducted by Islamic Jihad militants on March 16, 1985, from a street in Beirut, Lebanon. He was held hostage during the Lebanon hostage crisis, but was eventually released without harm on December 4, 1991.[372] | Found alive | 6 years |
data-sort-value="1985-01-01" | ca. 1985 | Espy Pilgrim | 33 | United States of America | Espy Pilgrim of North Carolina lost contact with her family sometime in the early to mid 1980s. Her body was discovered on April 1, 1985, in Kentucky, but her body remained unidentified until 2018.[373] | Murdered | data-sort-value="12045" | 33 years |
data-sort-value="1985-05-05" | 1985 | Rima Danette Traxler | 8 | United States of America | Traxler was an eight-year-old schoolgirl who disappeared while walking home from St. Helen's Elementary School to her Longview home on 15 May 1985. She was declared legally dead in 1988. Her murderer, Joseph Kondro, confessed to Traxler's murder in a plea bargain to avoid the death penalty in 1999. Traxler's body has never been found.[374] | Murdered | data-sort-value="12045" | Never found |
1985 | Pebco Three | Various | South Africa | South African anti-Apartheid activists who were, tortured and subsequently killed by members of the Bureau of State Security on May 8, 1985. Their fate remained unclear until November 11, 1997, when former Police Col. Gideon Nieuwoudt confessed that he and several others were responsible for their deaths.[375] | Murdered | 12 years |
1985 | Thomas Sutherland | 52 | Lebanon | Scottish-American academic who was kidnapped by Islamic Jihad militants from his home in Beirut, Lebanon on June 9, 1985, who had mistaken him for Calvin Plimpton. He was released years later, together with English author Terry Waite.[376] | Found alive | 6 years |
1985 | Carole Packman | 40 | United Kingdom | A British woman who disappeared from her home in Bournemouth, England in July 1985. Although her body has never been found, her husband, Russell Causley, was found guilty of her murder at a 2004 retrial.[377] | Murdered | Never found |
data-sort-value="1985-07-15" | 1985 | Ellen Rae Simpson Beason | data-sort-value="029" | 29 | League City, Texas, U.S. | 29-year-old Ellen Rae Simpson Beason was last seen with friends on July 29, 1985, at the Texas Moon Club in League City, Texas, where she met local construction worker Clyde Hedrick. Later that evening she told her friends that she and Hedrick had made plans to go swimming. Beason's decomposed remains were discovered underneath a sofa in a wooded area beside Old Causeway Road in Galveston County, Texas. Though the medical examiner was initially unable to determine the cause of death, upon the exhumation of Beason's remains in 2012, it was ruled that she had suffered several severe skull fractures.[378] | Murdered | Unknown |
1985 | Jeanine Sigala | 17 | United States of America | Jeanine Sigala, female American teenager who was not seen for five days was found dead in Scotts Valley[379] in late August 1985 after being murdered by serial killer Terry Childs. | Murdered | 5 days |
1985 | Michele Avila | 17 | United States of America | On October 2, 1985, Avila left her Los Angeles home to meet with a friend from high school, Laura Doyle. She never returned, and three days later, her body was found along a stream in Angeles National Forest. The case went unsolved until July 1988, when her two friends, Karen Severson and Laura Doyle, were arrested and convicted for her murder. According to the prosecutors, the two girls suspected that Avila had slept with their boyfriends, and so, they lured her to the creek and drowned her there.[380] | Murdered | 3 days |
1985 | Alison Day | 19 | United Kingdom | British woman Alison Day went missing on her way to visit her boyfriend who worked next to Hackney Wick station. She was last seen getting off at the station, using a telephone box and then walking towards the nearby canal. Three weeks later her body was found in the canal. She had been raped and murdered by "The Railway Killers" John Duffy and David Mulcahy, who would go on to murder two more women near stations in or around London in the following months.[381] | Murdered | 3 weeks |
data-sort-value="1986-02-02" | 1986 | Anita Cobby | 26 | Australia | Cobby, a registered nurse and beauty pageant contestant, was kidnapped from Blacktown railway station after dinner at Sydney Hospital in Surry Hills, Australia. Her body was found two days later on a rural farm in Prospect, showing signs of being sexually assaulted prior to her death. Five men would later be convicted of her murder, each sentenced to life imprisonment without parole.[382] | Murdered | data-sort-value="1986-02-02" | 2 days |
1986 | Sarah Harper | 10 | United Kingdom | 10-year-old child Sarah Harper disappeared from the Leeds suburb of Morley while walking to a shop 100 yards from her home to buy bread. The owner of the shop confirmed she had bought the bread, just before a "balding man" had entered the shop. A white Ford Transit van was seen in the area where she disappeared from. 24 days later her body was found 71 miles away in the River Trent near Nottingham. She had been abducted and murdered by paedophile serial killer Robert Black.[383] | Murdered | 24 days |
1986 | Bambi Woods | 30 or 31 | United States of America | An American former pornographic actress and exotic dancer best known for her appearance as the title character in the 1978 film Debbie Does Dallas. Woods disappeared in 1986, and rumors soon emerged she had died of a drug overdose. She was discovered alive and well in Des Moines, Iowa, in 2005, having severed all connections to her previous occupations and lifestyle.[384] | Found alive | 19 years |
1986 | Jennifer Guinness | 49 | Ireland | Irish socialite and member of the Guinness family who was kidnapped and held for ransom in Dublin by career criminal John Cunningham, aided by his brother and two associates. She was later rescued, and her kidnappers were sentenced to various sentences.[385] | Found alive | 8 days |
1986 | Brian Keenan | 36 | United Kingdom | Northern Irish writer who was kidnapped by Islamic Jihad militants in Beirut, Lebanon on April 11, 1986. After being held in detention for 4 years, he was released following negotiations with the Irish government, and later wrote a book about his experience as a hostage.[386] | Found alive | 4 years |
data-sort-value="1986-05-12" | 1986 | Wanda Jean Mays | 26 | United States of America | Wanda Jean Mays disappeared after midnight on May 12, 1986, while staying with her aunt and uncle's home near Guntersville Lake, Alabama. In the morning, her aunt and uncle discovered her room empty and the window broken from the inside. In 2008, the FBI confirmed that remains found at the foot of a cliff 2miles from her relatives' home were Mays', and her death was ruled an accident.[387] | Died in accidental fall | data-sort-value="11680" | 32 years |
data-sort-value="1986-05-24" | 1986 | Shelley Kathleen Sikes | data-sort-value="019" | 19 | Galveston, Texas, U.S. | 19-year-old Shelley Kathleen Sikes was last seen leaving her job as a waitress at Gaido's Seafood Restaurant on the beachfront in Galveston, Texas just before 12:00 a.m. on May 24, 1986. Sikes's car was found the next day, stuck in mud, blood-stained, and abandoned on the side of an Interstate 45 access road, south of the Galveston causeway. Though Sikes has never been found, Gerald Zwarst was convicted of aggravated kidnapping in connection with her disappearance and sentenced to life in prison.[388] | Murdered | Body never found |
1986 | Anne Lock | 29 | United Kingdom | 29-year-old British woman Anne Lock caught the train home from work to Brookmans Park railway station and was never seen alive again. Lock was the third woman in 8 months to disappear near a railway station within a 25-mile radius of London. 9 weeks later her body was found on an embankment near Brookmans Park station. She and the other two women had been abducted and murdered by serial killers John Duffy and David Mulcahy, also known as "The Railway Killers".[389] | Murdered | 9 weeks |
1986 | Anthony "Tony the Ant" Spilotro | 48 | United States of America | American mobsters and brothers Anthony "Tony the Ant" Spilotro and Michael Spilotro had disappeared on June 14, 1986, from their Oak Park home.[390] On June 22, 1986, both their bodies were found[391] with only their undershorts on after being buried in a cornfield in the Willow Slough preserve near Enos, Indiana. | Murdered | 8 days |
Michael Spilotro | 41 | United States of America |
1986 | Liliane Barrard | 37–38 | Pakistan | Married French couple Lilian and Maurice Barrard were famous climbers. They successfully climbed K2 in June 1986, but disappeared during the descent. One month later Liliane's body was found in a snow field at 17,500 ft, while Maurice's body was not on the mountain found until 1998.[392] | Died in mountaineering accident | 1 month |
Maurice Barrard | 44–45 | Pakistan | 12 years |
1986 | Tanya Moore | 31 | United States of America | Moore and Rodriguez were two transgender friends working as prostitutes on Philadelphia's thirteenth street in 1986.[393] The pair disappeared on June 30, 1986, after getting into the car of a couple of clients. On July 3, 1986, their mutilated and dismembered bodies were found burning at a baseball diamond in Middletown.[394] [395] Their murder remains unsolved. | Murdered | 4 days |
Tina Rodriguez | 27 | United States of America |
1986 | Sherry Ann Duncan | 16 | Thailand | Thai-American high school student who was abducted and killed after leaving her school in Bangkok on July 22, 1986, who was found a few days later in some wetlands. Four men were erroneously arrested and sentenced to death for her murder, but were acquitted in 1995, some of them posthumously. Duncan's real killer(s) has/have not been found.[396] | Murdered | A few days |
1986 | Alison Parrott | 11 | Canada | Alison Parrott, a Canadian female child from Toronto, Ontario who disappeared from her home after having received a phone call from a stranger was found dead two days later in a nearby woods on July 25, 1986 after being murdered.[397] | Murdered | 2 days |
1986 | Dawn Ashworth | 15 | United Kingdom | 15-year-old Dawn Ashworth did not return home after visiting a friends house in Narborough, Leicestershire, on 31 July 1986. Two days later her body was found nearby on a footpath called Ten Pound Lane. Her murder was not solved until 1988, when Colin Pitchfork, who was also found to have killed another 15-year-old in the same village in 1983, was convicted of her murder in what was the first time someone was convicted as a result of DNA profiling in the UK.[398] | Murdered | 2 days |
1986 | Samantha Knight | 9 | Australia | Samantha Knight was an Australian girl from Bondi who missing on August 19, 1986,[399] and was never found. It was later discovered that she had been killed. | Murdered | Never found |
1986 | Kimberly Maria McLean | 17 | United States of America | The future Lori Erica Ruff, McLean went missing after running away from her parents' home in the suburban area of Philadelphia in the fall of 1986. Over the following years of her life, she acquired the false identity of the deceased Becky Sue Turner, legally changed her name to Lori Erica Kennedy, and married into a wealthy family in Texas. But frequent quarrels over her mental instability, erratic behavior, and secretive past, led to her suicide in 2010. Her true identity went undiscovered until 2016, when she was identified following a DNA test.[400] | Found alive | 30 years |
1986 | Nicola Fellows | 9 | United Kingdom | Two nine-year-old girls who were reported missing from Brighton, England, on October 9, 1986.[401] The next day they were found dead in Wild Park in what became known as the "Babes in the Wood" murders. The girls' murderer, pedophile Russell Bishop, would only be convicted after 32 years and two trials in 2018, but not before he would abduct and attempt to kill another local girl in 1990. | Murdered | 1 day |
Karen Hadaway | 9 | United Kingdom |
1986 | Helle Crafts | 39 | United States of America | Danish flight attendant who was murdered by her husband Richard at their home in Newtown, Connecticut, on November 19, 1986. Her body was supposedly destroyed, but the overwhelming evidence eventually led to the state's first murder conviction without a body.[402] | Murdered | 2 months |
1986 | Cara Knott | 20 | United States of America | Cara Knott, a young American woman who disappeared from San Diego County, California on December 27, 1986,[403] and was found dead the next day after being killed. | Murdered | 1 day |
1987 | Brahim Dahane | 22 | Western Sahara | Sahrawi human rights activists who were detained by Moroccan security forces in 1987 for protesting against the MINURSO referendum. They were kept in various detention centers until their release in 1991, and have continued their activism since.[404] | Found alive | 4 years |
Aminatou Haidar | 21 | Western Sahara |
1987 | Roger Auque | 31 | Lebanon | French journalist, diplomat and war correspondent who was arrested by Hezbollah militants in Lebanon in January 1987, for spying on behalf of Israel. He was detained together with another French journalist, until both men were released in November of that year.[405] | Found alive | 10 months |
1987 | Terry Waite | 47 | Lebanon | English humanitarian who was kidnapped by the Islamic Jihad Organization on January 12, 1987, while he was working as a hostage negotiator in Beirut, Lebanon. He was held in solitary confinement until November 18, 1991, when he was released without incident.[406] | Found alive | 4 years |
data-sort-value="1987-05-12" | 1987 | Kandy Janell Kirtland | 9 | United States of America | 9-year-old Kandy Janell Kirtland was last seen alive in Huntsville, Texas, on the afternoon of May 12, 1987. Kirtland was spotted talking to a man who had parked in her house's driveway after she was dropped off by bus. On May 22, an arrest warrant was issued for 44-year-old James Otto Earhart, who had visited Kirtland's home prior to her abduction. Earhart was arrested on May 26; Kirtland's remains were discovered later that day and identified as hers on May 28. Earhart was charged with and convicted of Kirtland's murder and sentenced to death; he was executed by lethal injection on August 11, 1999.[407] | Murdered | data-sort-value="16" | 16 days |
1987 | Cam Lyman | 54–55 | United States of America | Lyman was a multimillionaire dog breeder from Westwood, Massachusetts who disappeared in the summer of 1987. His body was found in a septic tank on his estate in Hopkinton, Rhode Island by the new owners of the house in December 1997.[408] | No | data-sort-value="11680" | 11 years |
1987 | Heather West | 16 | United Kingdom | 16-year-old Gloucester girl Heather West was never seen again after 1987. Although she was never reported missing by her parents, police began to investigate her disappearance after rumours were heard of there being a "family joke" at her family's home that the couple's daughter was "under the patio". The police were given a search warrant in 1994 to search the family home and found her body, before finding many other bodies buried at the property. Heather, and the other victims, had been killed by her parents, the notorious serial killers Fred and Rose West.[409] [410] | Murdered | 7 years |
1987 | Jermaine Allan Mann | 1 | Canada | Mann was a Canadian citizen kidnapped by his father, Allan Mann, on 24 June 1987, when he was 21 months old. He and his father lived under assumed identities in the United States. His true identity was revealed in 2018.[411] | Found alive | 31 years |
1987 | Teresa Cormack | 6 | New Zealand | New Zealand schoolgirl who was abducted, raped and killed while wandering around Napier on 19 June 1987. Her body was found under a tree more than a week later. Her killer, teenage sex offender Jules Mikus, was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment decades after her death.[412] | Murdered | 8 days |
1987 | Larry Wayne Pearson | 20 | United States of America | The final victim of serial killer Robert Berdella. Abducted on 23 June 1987, Pearson was killed on 5 August after enduring six weeks of captivity. His severed head was recovered from Berdella's property in April 1988.[413] | Murdered | 10 months |
1987 | Tomoko Oosawa | 8 | Japan | 8-year-old Tomoko Oosawa was last seen leaving her home in Ojima, Gunma (now Ota, Gunma) on 15 September 1987. Her partial remains would not be found on the banks of Tone River until November 27 of the following year. Oosawa's case is considered to be one of the cases that make up the North Kanto Serial Young Girl Kidnapping and Murder Case. | Murdered | 1 year 2 months |
1987 | Shirley Banks | 29 | United Kingdom | British woman Shirley Banks mysteriously disappeared while shopping in Bristol on 8 October 1987. Three weeks later her Mini car was discovered, painted blue, in the garage of known rapist John Cannan, and her body was found on 3 April 1988 in "Dead Woman's Ditch" in the Quantock Hills. Cannan was convicted of her murder and of various other abductions, attempted abductions and rapes. Cannan is also the prime suspect in the much wider-known case of the disappearance of Suzy Lamplugh from Fulham, 28 July 1986, three days after he was released from prison in the same area. When Bank's car was discovered in Cannan's garage, it had been fitted with the false number plate "SLP 386S",[414] believed to refer to Suzy Lamplugh and 1986, the year of her disappearance.[415] | Murdered | 6 months |
data-sort-value="1987-11-20" | 1987 | Steven Tuomi | 25 | United States of America | The second victim of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. A native of Ontonagon, Michigan, Tuomi was murdered in the Ambassador Hotel in Milwaukee. His body was dismembered within Dahmer's grandmother's West Allis residence. Dahmer confessed to Tuomi's murder shortly after his 1991 arrest.[416] | Murdered | data-sort-value="13505" | 4 years |
1987 | Kathy Bonney | 19 | United States of America | Kathy Bonney was a 19-year-old Norfolk, Virginia, student murdered by her own father on November 21, 1987, in what he alleged was an argument within his vehicle. Her father shot her twenty-seven times and discarded her body close to a canal in North Carolina.[417] | Murdered | 1 day |
data-sort-value="1987-11-23" | 1987 | Deanna Criswell | 16 | United States of America | Deanna Criswell disappeared on November 23, 1987, from Spokane, Washington. A body was found on November 25 two days later in Pima County, Arizona, but it was not identified as hers until February 11, 2015.[418] | Murdered | data-sort-value="9942" | 27 years |
1987 | Sian Kingi | 12 | Australia | Sian Kingi, an Australian-born New Zealander schoolgirl, was abducted on November 27, 1987, from Noosa, Australia, by married couple Barrie John Watts and Valmae Faye Beck, who subsequently raped and killed her. Kingi's body would later be discovered on December 3 near the Tinbeerweh Mountain State Forest. Both Watts and Beck were later convicted in a much-publicized trial, Watts was sentenced to life imprisonment, and Beck to years' mprisonment.[419] | Murdered | data-sort-value="1987-11-27" | A week |
data-sort-value="1987-12-01" | 1987 | Heidi Härö | data-sort-value="019" | 19 | Finland | 19-year-old Heidi Härö disappeared in Mäntsälä in December 1987 after leaving a local bar and possibly hitching a ride. Her decomposed body was found five months later in a forest area in Pukkila with some of her clothes missing. Härö may have been a victim of the Hausjärvi Gravel Pit Murders.[420] | Murdered | data-sort-value="0150" | 5 months |
1987 | Isabelle Laville | 17 | France | Isabelle Laville did not return home from college on December 11, 1987. In 2004, Michel Fourniret and Monique Olivier of Saint-Cyr-les-Colons, France, confessed that they had kidnapped Laville as she walked in the direction of her Saint-Georges-sur-Baulche home and brought her to their house where she was raped and killed before her body was dumped in a well in Bussy-en-Othe. Her remains were recovered from the well in July 2006.[421] | Murdered | data-sort-value="6777" | 18 years |
1988 | James Edward Doxtator | 14 | United States of America | The third victim of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer and the first victim who, according to Dahmer, he murdered with malice aforethought. He was murdered at Dahmer's grandmother's West Allis residence and much of his body was subsequently disposed of in the trash. No remains were ever found. Dahmer confessed to murdering Doxtator following his 1991 arrest.[422] | Murdered | 3 years |
1988 | Andrés Pastrana Arango | 34 | Colombia | Colombian politician and then-Senator who was abducted on January 18, 1988, by the Medellín Cartel, who demanded that the government prevent the extradition of Pablo Escobar to the United States. Pastrana was rescued a week later, and continued with his political career.[423] | Found alive | 1 week |
1988 | Helen McCourt | 22 | United Kingdom | Insurance clerk who disappeared in Billinge, England, on February 9, 1988. While her body has never been recovered, local pub owner Ian Simms was convicted via DNA profiling, making it one of the few cases where a conviction has occurred without a body.[424] | Murdered | 1 year |
1988 | William R. Higgins | 43 | Lebanon | American USMC corporal who was abducted by a Hezbollah-linked terrorist group on February 17, 1988, while on a peacekeeping mission in Lebanon. Higgins was supposedly executed a few months after his capture, but his remains went unrecovered until 1991.[425] | Murdered | 3 years |
1988 | Sarah Cherry | 12 | Maine, United States | On July 6, 1988, 12-year-old Sarah Cherry was abducted and murdered by Dennis Dechaine, who was sentenced to life in prison for the murder.[426] | Murdered | Several days |
1988 | Lisa Marie Kimmell | 18 | United States of America | Kimmell disappeared while travelling to her parents home in Billings, Montana, with her body later found near the North Platte River in Casper, Wyoming. She had been bludgeoned and stabbed to death there. The case remained unsolved until 2002, when the perpetrator's DNA was matched to Dale Wayne Eaton. He was subsequently convicted of the murder and sentenced to death, but following a new trial is now awaiting resentencing.[427] | Murdered | 8 days |
1988 | Farida Hammiche | 30 | France | The wife of a bank robber, Farida Hammiche went missing from her home in Vitry-sur-Seine in April 1988. Michel Fourniret and Monique Olivier confessed to having kidnapped and killed Hammiche to steal loot that Fourniret had hidden in Hammiche's home. Hammiche's body has not been found. In 2018, Fourniret was convicted of the murder of Hammiche, while Olivier was convicted of complicity.[428] | Murdered | data-sort-value="0000" | 16 years |
1988 | Michael Henley | 9 | New Mexico | Michael Henley was an American child from New Mexico who disappeared in 1988 and was found dead in the Zuñi Mountains,[429] in June 1990. His death cause is unknown. | Over 2 years | Died (undetermined cause) |
1988 | Marie Wilks | 22 | United Kingdom | British woman who suddenly disappeared in sight of traffic while using an emergency phone on the hard shoulder of the M50 near Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire. While on the line to the operator she mysteriously stopped speaking and the operator could then only hear the sound of passing cars. Later, police found the phone dangling on its cord next to her broken down car. Two days later her body was found at the bottom of the Eastbound carriageway embankment three miles from her car. Although a man was convicted of her murder, he was later released on appeal. Her murder remains unsolved.[430] | Murdered | 2 days |
1988 | Wojciech Pryczek | 13 | Poland | The first of four boys kidnapped and murdered by Polish serial killer Mariusz Trynkiewicz. Pryczek was last seen alive on July 4, 1988; he was strangled to death. Trynkiewicz was found guilty of murdering all four of his victims and sentenced to death. His sentence was later commuted to 25 years in jail.[431] | Murdered | 1 month |
data-sort-value="1988-07-08" | 1988 | Marie-Angèle Domèce | 18 | France | Marie-Angèle Domèce, an 18-year-old disabled women, disappeared in Auxerre on 8 July 1988. In February 2018, French serial killer Michel Fourniret confessed to Domèce's murder. However, her body has yet to be located.[432] | Murdered | Never found |
1988 | Janine Balding | 21 | Australia | Balding was abducted near Sutherland railway station in Sydney, Australia on September 8, 1988, by a gang of five homeless people who hijacked her car and drove to the M4 Motorway near Michinbury, where three of them raped her at knifepoint. She was then bound, gagged and carried off to a nearby paddock, where the three main culprits drowned her. Her body was found the same day, and the culprits arrested and sentenced to long imprisonment terms.[433] | Murdered | Same day |
data-sort-value="1988-09-10" | 1988 | Jaclyn Dowaliby | data-sort-value="007" | 7 | United States of America | Jaclyn Dowaliby was taken from her home in Midlothian, Illinois, on September 10, 1988, and found dead five days later. | Murdered | data-sort-value="0005" | 5 days |
data-sort-value="1988-10-01" | 1988 | Unnamed 14-year-old Native American girl | data-sort-value="014" | 14 | United States | In October 1988, serial rapist-kidnapper John Jamelske abducted his first victim, a 14-year-old Native American girl, whom he held her captive for over two years. Jamelske compelled her to his will by threatening violence against her younger brother. The victim was 17 by the time Jamelske released her; she made no attempt to report to authorities after she was released.[434] | Released | 3 years |
1988 | Richard Evelyn Byrd III | data-sort-value="007" | 68 | United States of America | Richard Evelyn Byrd III was an Antarctic explorer and a United States naval officer who had gone missing on September 13, 1988, in Baltimore, Maryland, and was found dead on October 3, 1988.[435] | Died from Alzheimer's disease and starvation | Less than one month |
1988 | Brenda Schaefer | 36 | United States of America | Schaefer was kidnapped on September 23, 1988, by her boyfriend Mel Ignatow and his ex-girlfriend Mary Ann Shore, who held her at the latter's house in Louisville, Kentucky. There, she was raped, tortured and finally killed by both abductors, who then buried her in Shore's backyard. More than a year later, the body was located, but Ignatow would be acquitted in a controversial trial.[436] | Murdered | 1 year |
1988 | Junko Furuta | 17 | Japan | Japanese high school student who was abducted in Misato, Saitama, Japan, by a gang of teenage boys while riding her bike home on November 25, 1988. Furuta was then repeatedly raped, tortured and finally murdered by her captors, who encased her body in concrete, with police finding it on March 29, 1989.[437] | Murdered | 4 months |
data-sort-value="1988-12-16" | 1988 | Stacy Lyn Chahorski | 19 | United States of America | The body of 19-year-old Stacy Lyn Chahorski was discovered along the east side of northbound I-59 near Rising Fawn in Dade County, Georgia, on December 16, 1988. Chahorski was not officially reported missing until January 1989; she had been last heard four months earlier via telephone, informing her mother that she planned to hitchhike back to her home in Michigan. Chahorski remained unidentified until March 2022. On September 6, 2022, Charhoski's killer was identified as Henry Frederick Wise, a truck driver and stunt driver who died in a car accident in South Carolina in 1999.[438] | Murdered | data-sort-value="12053" | 33 years |
data-sort-value="1988-12-21" | 1988 | Kenyatta Odom | data-sort-value="005" | 5 | United States | The decomposed remains of five-year-old Kenyatta "KeKe" Odom were discovered in Millwood, Georgia, on December 21, 1988, though remained unidentified until November 2023, when Odom's mother, Evelyn, and Evelyn's boyfriend, Ulyster Sanders were indicted on multiple charges in connection with Odom's death, including felony murder.[439] | Killed | data-sort-value="12733" | 34 years |
data-sort-value="1988-12" | 1988 | Venus Xtravaganza | 23 | United States of America | The body of transgender performer Venus Xtravaganza was found under a bed in a New York hotel on December 25, 1988, after going missing four days earlier. Xtravaganza had been strangled.[440] | Murdered | data-sort-value="0004" | 4 days |
1988 | Stompie Seipei | 14–15 | South Africa | UDF activist kidnapped along with three other boys by a group of Winnie Mandela's bodyguards on December 29, 1988, after being accused of being a police informant. One of the men later killed him, slashing his throat.[441] | Murdered | 3 days |
1989 | Paul Vanden Boeynants | 70 | Belgium | Belgian politician who served two separate terms as the country's prime minister. On January 14, 1989, he was kidnapped by members of Patrick Haemers's gang, who demanded a ransom in exchange for the safe return of Boeynants. The ransom was paid, but all the members were later captured.[442] | Found alive | 1 month |
1989 | Avi Sasportas | 20 | Israel | Israeli soldier who was abducted and subsequently killed by the newly founded Hamas on February 16, 1989. His murder, coupled with that of Ilan Saadon, caused a stir in Israel and subsequent manhunt and apprehension for the militants responsible.[443] | Murdered | More than 2 months |
data-sort-value="1989-03-03" | 1989 | Kelly Ann Tinyes | 13 | United States of America | Tinyes was a thirteen-year-old Valley Stream, New York schoolgirl who was strangled, stabbed, and sexually mutilated in the home of a neighbor. Her killer, 21-year-old neighbor Robert Golub, was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.[444] | Murdered | 1 day |
1989 | Aundria Bowman | 14 | United States of America | Bowman disappeared under mysterious circumstances from her adoptive family's home in Hamilton, Michigan on March 11, 1989. Her adoptive father, Dennis Bowman, claimed that she had stolen money and then fled, and was thus classified as a runaway. More than three decades later, after Dennis was arrested for an unrelated murder in Virginia, he confessed that he had killed Aundria because she tried to escape being molested by him. He revealed the burial site in Monterey Township, near the family home, and Aundria's remains were subsequently recovered. The elder Bowman is due to stand trial for both murders he is accused of.[445] | Murdered | 31 years |
1989 | Helén Nilsson | 10 | Sweden | Abducted while she was out to meet some friends in Hörby, Sweden on March 20, 1989. She was kept alive for a few days before her captor killed her and dumped her body in the woods. The killer, Ulf Olsson, was identified and convicted of her killing in the early 2000s after his DNA linked him to the crime scene.[446] | Murdered | 6 days |
1989 | Jeanne-Marie Desramault | 21 | France | Jeanne-Marie Desramault was dropped off at the gare de Charleville-Mézières on the morning of March 18, 1989, by a nun whose convent she was staying at, with plans to travel to Béthune to visit her parents. She never boarded the train and was not seen alive again. In 2004, Michel Fourniret and Monique Olivier confessed to kidnapping and killing Desramault, whose remains were found on July 3 that year, buried in the garden of a Donchery chateau formerly owned by the Fourniret couple.[447] | Murdered | data-sort-value="5586" | 15 years |
data-sort-value="1989-04" rowspan="2" | 1989 | Urban Höglin | 23 | New Zealand | Urban Höglin and Heidi Paakkonen disappeared while tramping on the Coromandel Peninsula of New Zealand in April 1989. Fugitive offender David Wayne Tamihere was convicted of their murders in December 1990. Höglin's body was discovered in October 1991, while Paakkonen's body has not been found.[448] | Murdered | data-sort-value="913" | 2 years |
Heidi Paakkonen | 21 | New Zealand | data-sort-value="0000" | not found |
1989 | Ilan Saadon | Unknown | Israel | Israeli soldier who vanished mysteriously while hitchhiking back home on May 3, 1989. Large searches were organized to locate his remains, which were found on August 11, 1996. It was determined that Saadon had been killed by the then-newly formed Hamas, and his murder, coupled with that of Avi Sasportas, caused a stir in Israel and subsequent manhunt and apprehension for the militants responsible.[449] | Murdered | 7 years |
1989 | Jackie Mann | 75 | Lebanon | British RAF fighter pilot who was abducted in Beirut, Lebanon on May 13, 1989, by a Hezbollah-linked insurgent cell. Mann was held in detention for two years, as his kidnappers demanded the release of Palestinian prisoners, until he was released without incident on September 24, 1991.[450] | Found alive | 2 years |
data-sort-value="1989-05-25" | 1989 | Cindy James | 44 | Canada | James, a Vancouver, British Columbia nurse with a history of mental illness, had reported being stalked and harassed for seven years, sometimes to the point of vandalism of her home and physical assault. Police were unable to find any evidence that someone else had been involved during that time, despite spending almost C$1.5 million. On May 25, 1989, she disappeared after a shopping trip at a local grocery. Her tied-up body was found in the backyard of an abandoned house in Richmond, with what an autopsy later found was excessive amounts of morphine, diazepam and other drugs in her system. A lengthy inquest concluded that while the drug overdoses had caused her death, the manner—suicide, homicide or accident—could not be determined.[451] | Died (undetermined cause) | 14 days |
1989 | Peter Dixon | 51 | United Kingdom | Couple Peter and Gwenda Dixon failed to return home after going on one last walk on the Pembrokeshire coast on June 29, 1989 whilst on holiday. Ten days later their bodies were found in undergrowth next to the nearby cliff path. They had been robbed and then shot dead at point-blank range with a shotgun by psychopathic Pembrokeshire burglar and serial killer John Cooper.[452] | Murdered | 10 days |
Gwenda Dixon | 52 | United Kingdom |
data-sort-value="1989-09-01" | 1989 | Donna Sue Nelton | 28 | United States of America | The body of 28-year-old Donna Sue Nelton was found eight miles west of Decatur, Arkansas off of Highway 102 in Rogers, Arkansas on May 7, 1990. She had been shot, set on fire, and possibly run over with a vehicle. Nelton remained unidentified until October 25, 2022; she had last been seen alive in the fall of 1989. Her boyfriend, George Alvin Bruton, was suspected in her murder; Bruton died in prison in 2008.[453] | Murdered | data-sort-value="11859" | 33 years |
data-sort-value="1989-10-02" | 1989 | Liang Shan Shan | 17 | Singapore | A Malaysian teenager who went missing after leaving her school on October 2, 1989. Her body was discovered on October 14 in Yishun Industrial Park. Although no official cause of death was determined, her death was classified as murder. The prime suspect in her murder, Oh Laye Koh, was initially acquitted of her murder, but eventually found guilty following a retrial. Oh was sentenced to death and hanged at Changi Prison in May 1995.[454] | Murdered | 12 days |
data-sort-value="1989-10-22" | 1989 | Jacob Wetterling | 11 | United States of America | Jacob Wetterling was abducted on October 22, 1989, by a masked gunman while cycling home in the dark with his brother and a friend after going to rent a video from a convenience store in St. Joseph, Minnesota. His remains were found on September 1, 2016, when Danny Heinrich, already serving time on child pornography charges, led police to them.[455] | Murdered | data-sort-value="9811" | ~29 years |
data-sort-value="1989-10-27" | 1989 | Amy Mihaljevic | 10 | United States of America | Amy Mihaljevic, an American elementary school student, was kidnapped and murdered in Bay Village, Ohio, on October 27, 1989. Her body was found on February 8, 1990, in a field off a rural road in Ashland County.[456] | Murdered | data-sort-value="0104" | 3 months |
1989 | Patricia Candace Walsh | 23 | United States of America | Walsh and Zyskowski, a married couple from Seattle, Washington, disappeared shortly after leaving the city in November 1989. Zyskowski's remains were discovered in January 1990 in Ozona, Texas; Walsh's body was discovered by deer hunters in Millard County, Utah, on October 26, 1990.[457] | Murdered | 11 months |
Douglas Scott Zyskowski | 26 | 2 months |
- | data-sort-value="1989-12-03" | 1989 | Melissa Brannen | data-sort-value="005" | 5 | Melissa Brannen disappeared on December 3, 1989, from an apartment complex in Lorton, Virginia, while attending a Christmas party there.[458] Caleb Hughes was charged and convicted of kidnapping her.[459] | Presumed murdered | data-sort-value="0000" | never found --> |
1989 | Tsutsumi Sakamoto | 33 | Japan | Tsutsumi Sakamoto, a lawyer working on a lawsuit against the cult Aum Shinrikyo, was kidnapped and murdered by members of the cult along with his wife and 14-month-old son on November 5, 1989. Their bodies were dumped in three different areas of Japan in order for police to not link their cases. Their disappearance was not linked to the cult at first, but was uncovered following the cult's attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995, and their bodies were found in September 1995.[460] [461] | Murdered | 5 years 10 months |
Satoko Sakamoto | 29 | Japan |
Tatsuhiko Sakamoto | 1 | Japan |
1989 | Elisabeth Brichet | 12 | Belgium | Elisabeth Brichet left her friend's house in Namur, Belgium, on the evening of December 20, 1989, and did not arrive home. In 1996, her mother helped organise the White March in honour of Belgium's missing and murdered children following the arrest of Marc Dutroux. On July 3, 2004, the girl's remains were found buried in the garden of a Donchery chateau which formerly belonged to Michel Fourniret and Monique Olivier.[462] | Murdered | data-sort-value="5309" | 14 years | |
data-sort-type="isoDate" | Date | data-sort-type="text" | Person(s) | data-sort-type="number" | Age | Country of disappearance | Circumstances | data-sort-type="text" | Outcome | data-sort-type="value" | Time spent missing or unconfirmed |
---|
1990 | Mami Matsuda | 4 | Japan | Mami Matsuda went missing from a pachinko parlor in Ashikaga, Tochigi on May 12, 1990. Her nude remains were found the following day along the Watarase River. A kindergarten bus driver, Toshikazu Sugaya, was arrested and tried for her kidnapping and murder; but a reexamination of DNA evidences revealed Sugaya's innocence, and was subsequently released following a retrial.[463] [464] Matsuda's case, which is considered part of the North Kanto Serial Young Girl Kidnapping and Murder Case, has since gone cold. | Murdered | 1 day |
data-sort-value="1990-05-20" | 1990 | Susan Poupart | 29 | United States of America | Susan Poupart, a Native-American woman from Lac du Flambeau, Wisconsin, disappeared on May 20, 1990. Her body was found six months later in the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest.[465] | Murdered | 6 months |
1990 | Diana Turbay | 39 | Colombia | Colombian journalist who was abducted on August 30, 1990, by members of the Los Priscos, who deceived her into believing that she was going to interview guerilla leader Manuel Pérez. She was detained in Copacabana, where she would later be killed during a botched rescue attempt.[466] | Murdered | 5 months |
1990 | David Courtney Thomas | 22 | United States of America | The ninth victim of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Thomas was a 22-year-old father of two whom Dahmer encountered at the Grand Avenue Mall on September 24, 1990. Thomas was drugged strangled and dismembered. Dahmer confessed to his murder following his 1991 arrest. | Murdered | 1 year |
1990 | Tan Hui Ngin | 30 | Singapore | Tan Hui Ngin, a Singaporean, was last seen on October 12, 1990 to be heading to her brother-in-law's house to babysit her three nephews and nieces before she failed to return home as usual, resulting in her family filing a police report to report her missing. Four days later, Tan's half-naked corpse was discovered at an abandoned egg hatchery located 300 m away from her kampong house in Punggol, and there were signs of her being raped before her death. Tan's childhood friend and former lover, 30-year-old Lim Lye Hock, was found responsible for the killing, and he was sentenced to death on 1 December 1993.[467] [468] [469] | Murdered | 4 days |
data-sort-value="1990-10-22" | 1990 | James Bernardo | 12 | United States of America | Bernardo was abducted from a Pittsfield, Massachusetts theater by convicted child killer Lewis Stephen Lent Jr. on October 22, 1990. He was strangled to death in an area of woodland in Newfane, New York, the following morning. Bernardo's body was found by a hunter on November 21.[470] | Murdered | Four weeks |
data-sort-value="1990-10-31" | 1990 | Lazaro Figueroa | 3 | United States of America | Figueroa was a three-year-old boy murdered by his mother, Ana Maria Cardona, and her lover, Olivia Gonzalez, on October 31, 1990, following an extensive period of physical and psychological abuse. His body was discovered in Miami Beach on November 2. Cardona was later sentenced to life in prison; Gonzalez was released after 14 years' imprisonment.[471] | Murdered | Two days |
1990 | Fusako Sano | 9 | Japan | Sano was kidnapped by a 28-year-old man in 1990 after watching a baseball game in Sanjō, Niigata. She was held captive in his Kashiwazaki home for nearly a decade when police were summoned to the home after the kidnapper caused a disturbance with public health center officials that had visited his home.[472] [473] | Found alive | 9 years |
data-sort-value="1990-12-31" | 1990 | Barbara Kaye Williams | 30 | United States of America | Williams' decomposed body was found in Salt Lake City, Utah, on March 22, 1991. She had died of a gunshot wound, and had been missing since the previous year. Her body remained unidentified until March 1999. Her husband, Howell Williams, was later convicted of her murder.[474] | Murdered | c. 6 months |
data-sort-value="1991-02-10" | 1991 | Vicky Hamilton | 15 | United Kingdom | 15-year-old Vicky Hamilton was last seen waiting for a bus in Bathgate, West Lothian, in February 1991 as she travelled home after a night out.[475] The case became Scotland's biggest missing persons enquiry. On November 14, 2007, the body of Hamilton was discovered buried at the Margate home of Peter Tobin, who was already being investigated for the murder of Angelika Kluk in Glasgow in 2006. Tobin was convicted of Hamilton's murder, as well as the murder of Kluk and Dinah McNicol, and given a whole-life order. | Murdered | 16 years |
data-sort-value="1991-04-13" | 1991 | Karmein Chan | 13 | Australia | Karmein Chan, an Australian girl who was abducted from her home at night on April 13, 1991, in the Melbourne suburb of Templestowe; her body was found on April 9, 1992, in Edgars Creek, Thomastown.[476] | Murdered | 1 year |
data-sort-value="1991-04-14" | 1991 | Rachel McLean | 19 | United Kingdom | British student at the University of Oxford Rachel McLean disappeared on April 14, 1991. Her boyfriend John Tanner, known to be controlling and abusive, made public appeals for her return, but 17 days later police found her body hidden in a gap under the stairs at their home. Tanner was convicted of her murder and was released in 2003. In 2018 he was jailed again for assaulting his partner.[477] | Murdered | 17 days |
data-sort-value="1991-04-17" | 1991 | Tuula Lukkarinen | data-sort-value="028" | 28 | Kellokoski, Finland | 28-year-old Tuula Lukkarinen disappeared on the morning of April 17, 1991 after leaving a Kellokoski psychiatrist hospital where she had been staying as an inpatient, planning to travel to Hyrylä to attend a meeting about her son's custody case. The following day, Lukkarinen's multilated body was discovered by a landowner in Hikiä. Police also recovered her handbag and a possible murder weapon at the scene.[478] | Murdered | data-sort-value="0001" | 1 day |
data-sort-value="1991-05-05" | 1991 | Ailton Fonseca | 10 | Brazil | A victim of the Altamira child emasculations. Fonesca disappeared on May 5, 1991; his body was discovered on June 20.[479] | Murdered | 46 days |
data-sort-value="1991-05-25" | 1991 | Timothy Wiltsey | 5 | United States of America | Wiltsey's mother told the police that he went missing from a local carnival in South Amboy, New Jersey on May 25, 1991. Almost a year later, his remains were discovered in nearby Edison.[480] A quarter-century later, his mother was convicted of his murder; five years after that the New Jersey Supreme Court vacated that conviction for insufficient evidence.[481] | No | 1 year |
data-sort-value="1991-06-10" | 1991 | Jaycee Dugard | 11 | United States of America | Dugard was abducted on June 10, 1991, and was found alive on August 26, 2009, when her abductor brought her to a Concord, California parole office.[482] | Found alive | 18 years |
1991 | Leslie Mahaffy | 14 | Canada | Leslie Mahaffy was a female Canadian teenager who disappeared on June 16, 1991, from Burlington, Ontario. Mahaffy's body was discovered in Lake Gibson on June 29, 1991. She was the second Canadian murder victim of killers Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka. | Murdered | Less than two weeks |
1991 | Margaret Perry | 26 | United Kingdom | Margaret Perry was from Portadown, County Armagh, Northern Ireland; she disappeared on June 21, 1991. After a tip from the IRA, her body was found buried across the border in a field in Mullaghmore, County Sligo, Ireland, on June 30, 1992. She had been beaten to death. Her murder has never been solved.[483] | Murdered | 1 year |
data-sort-value="1991-06-29" | 1991 | Sheree Beasley | 6 | Australia | Beasley, an Australian schoolgirl from Rosebud was kidnapped, raped, and murdered by a man named Robert Lowe on June 29, 1991,[484] and her body was found weeks later on September 24 in a stormwater drain.[485] | Murdered | 3 months |
1991 | Donna Marie Prudhomme | 34 | United States of America | Donna Marie Prudhomme disappeared from Nassau Bay, Texas in July 1991 and was found dead on September 8, 1991.[486] | Died (undetermined cause) | 2–3 months |
data-sort-value="1991-07-23" | 1991 | Anjelica Castillo | 4 | United States of America | Castillo, an American girl from New York City who disappeared on July 18, 1991, and was found dead on July 23, 1991. Her body was not identified until 2013. After her identification, Castillo's paternal cousin, Conrado Juarez, confessed to murdering the girl.[487] [488] | Murdered | 22 years |
data-sort-value="1991-08-05" | 1991 | Dinah McNicol | 18 | United Kingdom | Dinah McNicol disappeared after she and a male friend accepted a lift from a man while hitchhiking after a music festival in Hampshire in August 1991.[489] Her friend was dropped off by the M25 motorway near Reigate, while she continued her journey alone with the man, but was never seen again. A large amount of money was then suspiciously withdrawn from her bank account in Hampshire and Sussex. In 2007, McNicol's body was found alongside Vicky Hamilton's, a girl who also vanished in 1991, in the Margate home of Peter Tobin, who was already being investigated for a murder.[490] Tobin was given a whole-life tariff in 2009. | Murdered | 16 years |
1991 | Mandy Lemaire | 11 | United States of America | Mandy Lemaire was a young girl who went missing on August 22, 1991, in Tazlina, Alaska and was found dead then days later[491] after being murdered. | Murdered | 10 days |
1991 | Leanne Holland | 12 | Australia | Went missing under unclear circumstances from her home in Goodna, Queensland, Australia, on September 23, 1991, and her mutilated body was found days later in Redbank Plains. Her sister's live-in boyfriend, Graham Stafford, was erroneously convicted of her murder before his conviction was quashed in 2009.[492] | Murdered | 3 days |
data-sort-value="1992-01-05" | 1992 | John D'Amato | Unknown | United States of America | D'Amato was a New Jersey mobster who was suspected of homosexual activity. He disappeared in January 1992 after Anthony Capo and the other two hitmen entered D'Amato's car to drive to lunch. Sitting in the back seat, Capo shot D'Amato four times, killing him. Capo and Rotundo left the body at a safe house, where other mobsters disposed of it. D'Amato's body was never recovered.[493] In 2006, Abramo, Schifilliti and Vitabile were sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder. | Murdered | Never found |
1992 | Shanda Sharer | 12 | United States of America | Sharer was abducted, tortured and then burned alive by a group of teenage girls in Madison, Indiana on January 11, 1992. The case gained notoriety due to the perpetrators' age, and has served as inspiration for several fictional true crime shows.[494] | Murdered | 1 day |
data-sort-value="1992-04-16" | 1992 | Kristen French | 15 | Canada | French, a Canadian school girl from Ontario who disappeared on April 16, 1992, was held captive for three days and then was killed and was found dead on April 30, 1992. She was murdered by Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo. | Murdered | 2 weeks |
1992 | Ebony Simpson | 9 | Australia | Ebony Simpson was an Australian girl who disappeared on August 19, 1992, in New South Wales. Simpson was later found dead just two days later on August 21, when Simpson's body was discovered by the police near her home at a wildlife sanctuary in a dam.[495] | Murdered | 2 days |
data-sort-value="1992-10-97" | 1992 | Nikki Allan | 7 | United Kingdom | A seven-year-old English girl bludgeoned to death in a derelict building in Sunderland, Tyne and Wear, England. Her body was discovered the following day, although her murderer, David Boyd, was only convicted of her death in 2023.[496] | Murdered | 1 day |
data-sort-value="1992-11-06" | 1992 | James Donald Lusher | 16 | United States of America | 16-year-old James Donald Lusher disappeared near his home in Westfield, Massachusetts on November 6, 1992. In 2013, Lewis Stephen Lent Jr., a man convicted of kidnapping and murdering both James Joseph Bernardo of Pittsfield, Massachusetts and Sara Anne Wood of Frankfort, New York, confessed to Lusher's abduction and murder, claiming to have discarded his body in Becket, Massachusetts. Despite Lent's confession, Lusher's remains have yet to be found.[497] [498] | Murdered | 21 years |
1992 | Miriam Iborra | 14 | Spain | The Alcasser Girls were three teenage girls from Alcasser, Spain, who disappeared on November 13, 1992,[499] and were found dead on January 27, 1993, and it was revealed that they had been kidnapped, raped, beaten, and tortured after they were abducted.[500] [501] | Murdered | 24 days |
Antonia Rodríguez | 15 | Spain |
Desirée Folch | 14 | Spain |
1992 | Suzanne Capper | 16 | United Kingdom | Kidnapped, tortured and ultimately killed by four people who lured her to their house in Greater Manchester on December 8, 1992. Capper later died at hospital from severe burns from being lit on fire. All four of the perpetrators were later given long prison sentences.[502] | Murdered | 6 days |
data-sort-value="1992-11-03" | 1992 | Gail Shollar | 35 | United States of America | Shollar was a 35-year-old Piscataway, New Jersey carjacking victim who was raped and murdered after her vehicle was commandeered from the Middlesex Shopping Mall in South Plainfield, New Jersey. Shollar's body was discovered in a drainage ditch four days later. Her murderer, 23-year-old Scott Johnson, was found guilty of her rape and murder in 1995.[503] | Murdered | 4 days |
data-sort-value="1992-11-15" | 1992 | Eugenio Berríos | 45 | Uruguay | Berríos, a Chilean biochemist who worked for the DINA intelligence agency, was captured in 1992 while in hiding in Uruguay and disappeared. His corpse was found in 1995 near Montevideo and identified by dental records and DNA.[504] | Murdered | 3 years |
data-sort-value="1992-11-29" | 1992 | Tan Heng Hong | 32 | Singapore | On 29 November 1992, 32-year-old Tan Heng Hong was last seen leaving his home, and he never came back. Four days later, his charred body was discovered inside his burnt car abandoned at Mandai. Two suspects, Maniam Rathinswamy and S. S. Asokan, who were both security guards, were arrested and later executed by hanging in 1995.[505] [506] [507] [508] | Murdered | 4 days |
1992 | Arnold Archambeau | 20 | United States of America | Archambeau and Bruguier left her cousin behind in a car that overturned following a predawn accident outside Lake Andes, South Dakota; neither is known for certain to have been seen alive again although there were sightings reported to police later postdating the accident. Almost three months later, their bodies were found in a ditch near the accident site despite not having been seen there since the accident; while autopsies ruled the cause of death to be exposure there is evidence in addition to the sightings that has led local enforcement to believe that they died somewhere else and were moved to where they were found. An FBI investigation was inconclusive.[509] | Died from hypothermia | 3 months |
Ruby Bruguier | 18 | United States of America |
data-sort-value="1992-12-28" | 1992 | Katie Beers | 10 | United States of America | Beers disappeared on December 28, 1992, during a shopping trip with neighbor John Esposito and was found in a secret room underneath Esposito's home on January 13, 1993. Esposito had been considered a family friend. Prior to the kidnapping she had been the subject of a lengthy custody battle between her mother and godmother and had suffered material deprivation, sexual abuse and hardship.[510] [511] | Found alive | 16 days |
1992 | Angela Toler | 23 | United States of America | After moving from Princeton, North Carolina to Richmond, Virginia with her boyfriend in late 1992,[512] Toler lost contact with her family. The boyfriend later returned to Princeton without her, and no explanation for her whereabouts. Toler's body was discovered without identification near railroad tracks in Richmond in November 1992,[513] having died of hypothermia. Toler was identified in 2012 after a cousin of her mother recognized a reconstruction of her. | Accidental death by hypothermia | Less than 3 months |
data-sort-value="1993-02-01" | 1993 | David Glenn Lewis | 39 | United States of America | Lewis disappeared from his home near Amarillo, Texas, following unusual behavior over the Super Bowl weekend of January 29 – February 1, 1993. Late the latter night, he was struck by an unidentified vehicle and killed on a state highway in the town of Moxee, Washington, just outside Yakima. His body was unidentified for 11 years; the reason for his presence over from his home has never been determined.[514] | Died in vehicle collision | 11 years |
data-sort-value="1993-02-12" | 1993 | James Bulger | 2 | United Kingdom | Two-year-old James Bulger disappeared on February 12, 1993, while shopping with his mother at the Strand Shopping Centre in Bootle, Liverpool.[515] Security camera footage showed that he had been led out of the shopping centre by two young boys. His mutilated body was found on a railway track 2 miles away two days later. The boys, later found to be Jon Venables and Robert Thompson and who were only 10 years old, had abducted, tortured and murdered Bulger.[516] | Murdered | 2 days |
1993 | Rajab Mohamed | 35 | Singapore | On March 8, 1993, Inspector Rajab Mohamed of the Central Narcotics Bureau (CNB) went missing after he last phoned his colleagues to prepare themselves for an upcoming drug bust. Before this last phone call, Inspector Rajab was last seen alive by his wife, who saw him responding to a pager call at his home and was told that her husband wanted to go and meet his informant. A day after his disappearance, Inspector Rajab's 32-year-old wife reported her husband missing, and as part of their investigations, the police arrested the inspector's 34-year-old informant Roshdi Abdullah Altway, who confessed that he murdered Inspector Rajab during a fight over an unsettled monetary debt, and three days after Inspector Rajab's disappearance, Roshdi led the police to Inspector Rajab's abandoned car in a Tampines carpark, where the decomposing corpse of Inspector Rajab's body was found in the backseat. Originally convicted and sentenced to death for murder, Roshdi's appeal in 1994 led to him serving ten years' jail instead for manslaughter, after an appeal court accepted that Roshdi acted in self-defence while killing Inspector Rajab. Although Roshdi escaped the gallows for killing the inspector, he was once again sentenced to death 26 years later in 2020 for drug trafficking.[517] [518] [519] | Murdered | 3 days |
1993 | Anabel Segura | 22 | Spain | On 12 April 1993, Anabel Segura, a 22-year-old university student, was kidnapped and murdered by two men, Emilio Muñoz Guadix and Candido Ortiz Aon, who were not caught until two years later in 1995. Segura's body was found buried on the grounds of an abandoned factory two years later, and the cause of death was strangulation. Both Muñoz and Ortiz were sentenced to 43 years in prison in 1999 for murdering Segura.[520] [521] | Murdered | 2 years |
data-sort-value="1993-05-26" | 1993 | Jayne Furlong | 17 | New Zealand | Furlong, a sex worker, was a New Zealander, who disappeared from a street in Auckland on May 26, 1993. Her remains were found at a beach in 2012 after being exposed by erosion of a sandbank. She had been abducted and murdered.[522] | Murdered | 19 years |
1993 | Jennifer Ertman | 14 | United States of America | Two teenage girls who were abducted, raped and strangled to death by six gang members in Houston, Texas on June 24, 1993, with their bodies found four days later.[523] | Murdered | 4 days |
Elizabeth Peña | 16 | United States of America |
1993 | Sim Ah Lek | 50 | Singapore | Sim Ah Lek, a Singaporean contractor and moneylender, was last seen on 14 July 1993, going out for an appointment. Sim was reported missing the next day by his family after he failed to return home for the night. Four hours after the report was made, Sim was found dead with his neck slashed and his body stuffed inside a gunny sack, which was first discovered by a passer-by at a carpark outside Jurong Swimming Complex. After 39 hours of police investigations, 36-year-old Phua Soy Boon, who admitted to killing Sim after the victim refused to lend him S$10,000, was arrested and charged with murder. Phua was found guilty and sentenced to death on 6 May 1994, and after the rejection of his appeal, Phua was hanged in Changi Prison on 16 June 1995. | Murdered | 1 day |
data-sort-value="1993-08-05" | 1993 | Holly Piirainen | 10 | United States of America | Piirainen, an American girl from Grafton, Massachusetts, disappeared on August 5, 1993. She and her brother had been visiting their grandparents in Sturbridge, Massachusetts when Holly was murdered.[524] Piirainen's remains were found by hunters in Brimfield on October 23, 1993.[525] | Murdered | 79 days |
1993 | Mansour Rashid El-Kikhia | 62 | Egypt | Libyan politician and human rights activist known for his opposition to Muammar Gaddafi's regime. On December 10, 1993, he was kidnapped while on a diplomatic visit to Cairo, Egypt, allegedly by Mukhabarat operatives. His fate remained unclear until October 2012, when his body was found in a refrigerator in Tripoli, indicating that he had likely died while in custody.[526] | Murdered | 19 years |
data-sort-value="1993-01-01" | 1993 | Kori Lamaster | 17 | United States of America | Lamaster, an American female murder victim who went missing in 1993,[527] was found on January 29, 1994, and was not identified until 2013.[528] | Murdered | 19 years |
1994 | Peggy Johnson | 18 | United States of America | A homeless medical student from McHenry, Illinois, Johnson accepted work as a housekeeper for nurse Linda La Roche sometime in 1994. During her stay there, La Roche physically and sexually abused her for years before eventually killing her in 1999 and dumping her body in Raymond, Wisconsin. The body was unidentified until 2019, and La Roche was arrested and charged with the murder soon after.[529] | Murdered | 5 years |
1994 | Tina Susman | Unknown | Somalia | Susman was an American journalist who travelled around the world, covering the various current events with a primary focus on Africa. In 1994, while she was on another visit to Somalia, she was kidnapped in Mogadishu and held captive for 20 days. She later released without harm, and continued to cover stories for the Associated Press.[530] | Found alive | 20 days |
1994 | Vickie Deblieux | 37 | United States | On February 21, 1994, 37-year-old Vickie Deblieux was abducted, tortured and murdered in Alabama by a group of four youths (aged 16 to 19) while she was hitchhiking from Tennessee to her mother's house in Louisiana. Deblieux's body was discovered four days later, and the police managed to arrest the youths responsible for her abduction and death. Three of the offenders were sentenced to life in prison, while the fourth and final member, Carey Dale Grayson, was sentenced to death.[531] [532] | Murdered | Four days |
1994 | Mohamed Hassaïne | 49 | Algeria | Journalist for Alger républicain who was kidnapped and murdered by armed militants after being abducted from his house in Larbatache on February 28, 1994. His beheaded body was later found in a neighboring area.[533] | Murdered | Several days |
1994 | Monyane Moleleki | 43 | Lesotho | Lesotho politician and then-Minister of Natural Resources, who was kidnapped together with three other ministers by soldiers on April 14, 1994. During this incident, Deputy Prime Minister Selometsi Baholo was killed. Moleleki was eventually released and returned to politics.[534] | Found alive | More than 1 year |
1994 | Mehdi Dibaj | 58–59 | Iran | Mehdi Dibaj was an Iranian former Muslim who later became a Christian pastor. On July 5, 1994, Dibaj's was body was discovered west Tehran in a park.[535] after he had been murdered by unknown members of Iran's regime. | Murdered | Less than two weeks |
1994 | Rosie Palmer | 3 | United Kingdom | British child Rosie Palmer disappeared after buying an ice cream from an ice cream van outside her home in Hartlepool on June 30, 1994. Her body was discovered after police searched the home of local man Shaun Armstrong on July 3. Armstrong had abducted her after she had bought the ice cream and murdered her.[536] | Murdered | 3 days |
1994 | Lounès Matoub | 38 | Algeria | Algerian Kabylian singer, poet and intellectual who was abducted by the Islamist militant group Armed Islamic Group of Algeria on September 25, 1994. He was held in a stronghold and threatened with execution, but eventually released after a large gathering of protestors warned that they would attack if Matoub was killed.[537] | Found alive | 2 weeks |
data-sort-value="1994-09-12" | 1994 | Michael Anthony Hughes | 6 | United States of America | Michael Hughes was abducted at gunpoint from school on September 12, 1994, by his step father, Franklin Delano Floyd. No trace of the boy has ever been found.[538] Floyd is considered a suspect in the hit-and-run death of his wife, whom he had abducted as a child and raised as his daughter. In a 2015 interview with the FBI, Floyd admitted to killing Hughes the same day of the kidnapping,[539] and died in prison while on death row in January 2023.[540] | Murdered | 21 years |
data-sort-value="1994-10-02" | 1994 | Daniel Handley | 9 | United Kingdom | Handley was a British child who went missing from a street in Beckton, London while fixing a chain on his bicycle.[541] Suspected to have been abducted by paedophiles, his case was solved in part due to appeals on the Crimewatch television programme. His skull and then body were found buried in a field in Bristol 5 months later, and known paedophiles and homosexual couple Timothy Morss and Brett Taylor were found to have abducted Handley in their car before sexually assaulting and killing him in Hungerford. | Murdered | 5 months |
data-sort-value="1994-01-07" | 1994 | Lindsay Rimer | 13 | United Kingdom | A British schoolgirl who disappeared from Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire, on the evening of 7 November 1994 while returning home from buying cornflakes from a local shop.[542] Her body was discovered in the Rochdale Canal five months later. In 2016 police announced they had a DNA profile of the murderer, but no one has yet been convicted of her murder. | Murdered | 5 months |
data-sort-value="1994-01-01" | 1994 | Randi Boothe-Wilson | 33 | United States of America | Randi Boothe-Wilson disappeared from New York when planning to meet family members. Her remains were discovered in December 1995 in North Carolina and were not identified until January 2019.[543] [544] | Murdered | 23 years |
data-sort-value="1995-01-01" | 1995 | Henning Wehn | 21 | Spain | Henning Wehn was listed by Interpol as a missing person after disappearing while on holiday in Spain in 1995, while sending mysterious postcards to a friend in Germany. He reappeared in Spain after having traveled to Morocco for three weeks with a man he met on a train.[545] | Found alive | 3 weeks |
1995 | Scott Sherrin | 23 | United Kingdom | English child star who went missing in 1995, with his body found in the River Thames in March 1996. His death was determined to be the result of drowning, while he was under the influence of drugs.[546] | Died from drowning | 1 year |
1995 | Melanie Carpenter | 23 | Canada | The 23-year-old Carpenter was abducted from her workplace in Surrey, Canada on January 6, 1995. Her body was found on January 15 near the town of Hope, where it had been dumped in a crevice and covered with a blanket. On that same day, Fernand Auger, the prime suspect in the case as he had been observed withdrawing money from her bank account, committed suicide at his home.[547] | Murdered | 9 days |
data-sort-value="1995-02-12" | 1995 | Philip Taylor Kramer | 42 | United States of America | Kramer, a computer engineer and former bass guitarist for the rock band Iron Butterfly, disappeared on February 12, 1995, before he was to meet a business partner at the Los Angeles International Airport; he changed his plans and asked his guest to meet him at a nearby hotel instead, but failed to appear. During his travel to and from the airport, Kramer made a flurry of cell phone calls, including to his wife, his Iron Butterfly bandmate Ron Bushy and finally to the police. In the latter call, Kramer said, "I'm going to kill myself."[548] He was never heard from again, which led to an extensive search for his vehicle. On May 29, 1999, Kramer's body was discovered by hikers inside his wrecked minivan at the bottom of a canyon in Malibu, California.[549] | Died by suicide | 4 years |
data-sort-value="1995-02-18" | 1995 | Tracie McBride | 19 | United States of America | McBride was a woman who was a United States Army soldier from Centerville, Minnesota[550] who disappeared on February 18, 1995[551] after being kidnapped, raped and murdered. She was found dead on March 1, 1995. | Murdered | 2 weeks |
data-sort-value="1995-03-01" | 1995 | Unnamed 14-year-old Latina girl | 14 | United States | A victim of serial rapist and kidnapper John Jamelske. Jamelske abducted this individual on an unknown date in March 1995. She was held captive for fifteen months in his Syracuse, New York, home before being released in the summer of 1996.[552] | Released | 15 months |
1995 | Deanna Cremin | 17 | United States of America | Deanna J. Cremin was a teenage American girl from Somerville, Massachusetts who disappeared on March 30, 1995, and was found dead four days later after being murdered.[553] | Murdered | 4 days |
1995 | Carl Isaacs Jr. | 20 | United States of America | Isaacs walked away from the Walworth County Jail in Elkhorn, Wisconsin in April 1995. His skeletal remains were discovered on November 26, 1995, alongside Turtle Creek in Bradford, near Clinton, Rock County, Wisconsin, but he remained unidentified until June 14, 2022. | Died from natural causes; possibly hypothermia | 27 years |
1995 | Sonja Engelbrecht | 19 | Germany | Sonja Engelbrecht was a young teenage woman who went missing on the night of 1995 April 10–11 in Munich, Germany and whose remains were discovered on November 23, 2021.[554] Her cause of death remains unknown.[555] | Died (unknown cause) | 26 years |
data-sort-value="1995-05-02" | 1995 | Kiplyn Davis | 15 | United States of America | Davis, a high school student, was reported missing on May 2, 1995, in Spanish Fork, Utah. She is a featured child of the Polly Klaas Foundation. Several people have been arrested in connection with her murder, although her death has not been confirmed by the discovery of a body.[556] On February 11, 2011, Timmy Brent Olson pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to 15 years in prison. He claimed he saw another individual hit Davis in the head with a rock and helped him move her body, but declined to name the other individual.[557] | Murdered | Not found |
1995 | Julie Lejeune | 8 | Belgium | Eight-year-old friends Julie Lejeune and Mélissa Russo were reported missing by their families on June 24, 1995, after they left the Russo family home in Grâce-Hollogne, Belgium, and did not return. Their bodies were found buried in the garden of a house in Sars-la-Buissière on August 17, 1996. After being kidnapped, they had been held in Marc Dutroux's house in Marcinelle for between five and nine months. Locked in the basement, the girls starved to death, Dutroux's wife having neglected them while her husband was in police custody between December 1995 and March 1996.[558] | Homicide caused by neglect | 2 years |
Mélissa Russo | 8 | Belgium |
data-sort-value="1995-06-01" | 1995 | Jason Callahan | 19 | United States of America | Callahan made no contact with friends or family after June 1995. The body of a passenger that was found in the wreck of a car on June 26, 1995, was identified as his on December 9, 2015, after his mother formally reported him missing.[559] [560] [561] [562] | Died in automobile accident | 20 years |
1995 | Yolanda Panek | 21 | United States of America | Panek was an American woman who vanished from the Capri Motel in Portland, Oregon. Even though her body was never found, there is physical evidence exists to indicate she was murdered in the hotel room and her body transported from the residence in her vehicle. Panek's common-law husband, Abdur Rashid Al-Wadud, was charged and convicted of her murder in March 1996.[563] | Murdered | 10 months |
1995 | Eefje Lambrecks | 19 | Belgium | Eefje Lambrecks and An Marchal, from Hasselt, Belgium, were on holiday on the Flemish coast with a group of friends when they disappeared on the night of August 22–23, 1995. The pair took a tram to Blankenberge where they attended a hypnosis show, and did not return to their holiday home in Westende. On September 3, 1996, their bodies were found buried in the garden of a house in Jumet. Marc Dutroux and his accomplice Michel Lelièvre had kidnapped the teenagers and brought them to Dutroux's house in Marcinelle. After being kidnapped, Lambrecks and Marchal had been buried alive.[564] | Murdered | 1 year |
An Marchal | 17 | Belgium |
data-sort-value="1995-08-27" | 1995 | Madalyn Murray O'Hair | 76 | United States of America | Madalyn Murray O'Hair, an American activist, founder of American Atheists, and the organization's president from 1963 to 1986, disappeared on August 27, 1995,[565] and was found dead in 2001.[566] | Murdered | 6 years |
1995 | Avdo Palić | 37 | Bosnia and Herzegovina | Bosnian military officer who was detained by Bosnian Serb Army soldiers on September 5, 1995, and promptly disappeared. His remains were first located in a mass grave in November 2001, but were not positively identified until late July 2009.[567] | Murdered | 14 years |
1995 | Jaswant Singh Khalra | 43 | India | Khalra was an Indian Sikh human rights activist who received global acclaim for his research into approximately 27,000 illegal killings perpetrated by the Punjabi police during the 1990s. In response to his investigation, he was kidnapped by seven officials on September 6, 1995, and detained at the police station in Jhabal, where he was presumably killed.[568] | Murdered | Body never found |
data-sort-value="1995-09-11" | 1995 | Jimmy Ryce | 9 | United States of America | Ryce, a child who was abducted on September 11, 1995, and was raped and killed by Juan Carlos Chavez in Redland, Florida, and his body was found three months later near Chavez's trailer.[569] | Murdered | 3 months |
data-sort-value="1995-10-06" | 1995 | Nicole van den Hurk | 15 | Netherlands | Nicole van den Hurk disappeared on her way to work in Eindhoven, in the Dutch province of North Brabant on October 6, 1995, and was found dead on November 22, 1995, in the woods between the towns of Mierlo and Lierop.[570] | Manslaughter | 7 weeks |
1995 | Bernard Weinstein | 43 | Belgium | Weinstein, a Frenchman living in Belgium, was last seen alive in mid-November 1995. His body was found buried in the garden of a house in Sars-la-Buissière on August 17, 1996. Weinstein had been sought by police since he and Marc Dutroux kidnapped three people, one of whom had escaped and alerted the police. To stop Weinstein from informing on him, Dutroux kidnapped Weinstein and killed him by burying him alive.[571] | Murdered | 2 years |
data-sort-value="1995-12-22" | 1995 | Barbara Barnes | 13 | United States of America | Barnes, an American schoolgirl, was kidnapped on December 7, 1995, while walking to school, and her body was found on February 22, 1996, in Pennsylvania.[572] People have speculated that her uncle may have been responsible for her death, but others believe that the crime was committed by someone local.[573] | Murdered | 3 months |
data-sort-value="1995-12-29" | 1995 | Céline Figard | 19 | United Kingdom | Figard was a French woman who, while visiting the United Kingdom, disappeared on December 19, 1995. She was found dead on December 29, 1995.[574] | Murdered | 10 days |
data-sort-value="1995-12-31" | 1995 | Justina Morales | 8 | United States of America | Morales, an American girl from the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, New York, who was killed by her mother's boyfriend, Luis Santiago, on December 31, 1995. Her disappearance went unnoticed for 15 months. In 1997, Santiago was convicted for the murder.[575] Morales' body has not been found. | Murdered | 2 years |
1996 | Nancy Ann Mueller | 28 | United States | Three individuals murdered by Chevie Kehoe and Daniel Lewis Lee in the commission of a robbery at their Arkansas home on January 11, 1996. All three died of suffocation. Their bodies were discovered in Russellville in June 1996.[576] | Murdered | 5 months |
William Frederick Mueller | 52 | United States |
Sarah Elizabeth Powell | 8 | United States |
data-sort-value="1996-1-17" | 1996 | José Antonio Ortega Lara | 38 | Spain | Spanish prison officer who was kidnapped by ETA terrorists on January 17, 1996, while en route to his job. He was kept in detention and tortured in a dungeon up until he was rescued by the Spanish police forces. He later enrolled in politics, and now heads the Vox party.[577] | Found alive | 1 year |
1996 | Sabine Dardenne | 12 | Belgium | Dardenne was kidnapped in Tournai, Belgium, by Marc Dutroux and Michel Lelièvre as she cycled to school on May 28, 1996. When Dutroux and Lelièvre were arrested in August after kidnapping 14-year-old Laetitia Delhez, police raided Dutroux's home on August 15 and found both girls alive in the basement.[578] | Found alive | 3 months |
data-sort-value="1996-02-10" | 1996 | Tanya Nicole Kach | 14 | United States of America | Tanya Nicole Kach, a student at the Cornell Middle School in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, was kidnapped by school security guard Thomas Hose on February 10, 1996. In the time leading up to this event, Hose befriended Kach to earn her trust. Kach escaped on March 21, 2006, with the help of Joe Sparico, the owner of a grocery store in the neighborhood where Kach had been held captive. | Found alive | 10 years |
1996 | Robert Wykel | 65 | United States of America | Sheet metal worker who was supposedly killed by associate Myron Wynn on February 23, 1996, while the pair were on a trip to buy a car in Yelm, Washington. Wykel's body was never found, but Wynn has been convicted and sentenced to 20 years' imprisonment.[579] | Murdered | Never found |
1996 | Nadezhda Chaikova | 33 | Russia | Correspondent for the Russian weekly newspaper Obshchaya Gazeta who frequently travelled to Chechnya to record events in the region. On March 20, 1996, she was kidnapped by unidentified gunmen in Sernovodskoye, and her body found later in the Urus-Martanovsky District. She had been shot to death.[580] | Murdered | 3 weeks |
1996 | Kristin Smart | 19 | United States of America | Smart was a California Polytechnic State University student murdered on or about May 25, 1996 by Paul Flores. She was declared legally dead May 25, 2002. Her disappearance and the lack of effective initial response ultimately inspired the passing of a law requiring public colleges reporting cases involving any form of violence against students, or the possibility of such violence.[581] | Murdered | Never found |
data-sort-value="1996-06-09" | 1996 | Melanie Hall | 25 | United Kingdom | Melanie Hall, a British hospital clerical officer from Bradford on Avon, who disappeared on June 9, 1996.[582] [583] On October 5, 2009, her partial remains were discovered, after a plastic bin bag containing human bones was located by a workman on the M5 motorway near Thornbury, South Gloucestershire. The bones, which included a pelvis, thigh bone, and human skull, were analyzed and identified as belonging to Hall.[584] | Murdered | 13 years |
data-sort-value="1996-06-11" | 1996 | Ulrike Everts | 13 | Germany | German Ulrike Everts was last seen in a pony-drawn carriage on June 11, 1996. In July 1998, Ronny Rieken, arrested for the murder of 11-year-old Christina Nytsch, confessed to killing Everts and directed police to the location where he had hidden her body.[585] | Murdered | 2 years |
data-sort-value="1996-07-23" | 1996 | Death Valley Germans | 4–34 | United States of America | A family of four German tourists (two adults and two children) disappeared July 23, 1996, in a remote area of Death Valley in California after their rental van broke down. Their remains were discovered in November 2009 by two off-duty search-and-rescue hikers who had been looking for them as a cold-case hobby. | Death by misadventure | 13 years |
data-sort-value="1996-08-09" | 1996 | Laetitia Delhez | 14 | Belgium | Delhez was kidnapped by Marc Dutroux and Michel Lelièvre as she walked home from a swimming pool in Bertrix, Belgium, on August 9, 1996. An eyewitness who was present at the scene of the kidnapping was able to tell the police part of Dutroux's van's numberplate. After Dutroux and Lelièvre confessed to kidnapping Delhez, police raided Dutroux's home on August 15 and found Delhez and Sabine Dardenne alive in the basement. | Found alive | 6 days |
1996 | Janet March | 33 | United States of America | March was an American children's book illustrator who vanished under mysterious circumstances from her in Forest Hills, Tennessee on August 15, 1996. Her family reported her missing two weeks later, and in the ensuing investigation, her husband was arrested, convicted and sentenced to 56 years' imprisonment for her murder. Despite this, March's body has never been found.[586] | Murdered | 10 years |
data-sort-value="1996-09-09" | 1996 | Sofia Silva | 16 | United States of America | Abducted from the porch of her home in Spotsylvania County, Virginia by serial killer Richard Evonitz. Her body was discovered in King George County one month later.[587] | Murdered | 1 month |
data-sort-value="1996-09-14" | 1996 | Tegan Lee Lane | 2 days | Australia | Tegan was the daughter of former Australian water polo player and teacher Keli Lane, who was convicted of the child's murder approximately two days after giving birth to her. Tegan Lee's body has never been found.[588] | Murdered | Never found |
data-sort-value="1996-09-27" | 1996 | Karyn Hearn Slover | 23 | United States of America | Slover disappeared on September 27, 1996, in Decatur, Illinois, shortly after leaving her job at the Decatur Herald & Review, and her dismembered body was discovered wrapped in plastic bags sealed with duct tape in Lake Shelbyville on October 1, 1996.[589] | Murdered | 4 days |
1996 | Angela Atim Lakor | 14 | Uganda | Ugandan students at the Saint Mary's College Aboke boarding school were among those abducted by members of the Lord's Resistance Army in October 1996. Lakor was kept as a sex slave and married off to a captor in Sudan, but was eventually rescued in 2012. She later became a community activist and founded an organization dedicated to helping fellow abductees.[590] | Found alive | 16 years (Lakor)/8 years (Nyanjura) |
Victoria Nyanjura | 14 | Uganda |
data-sort-value="1996-10-01" | 1996 | Jakub Fiszman | 39 | Germany | Fiszman, a millionaire German businessman from Frankfurt am Main, disappeared in Eschborn, Germany, on October 1, 1996, and his body was found on October 19, 1996, in the Taunus mountains, after a massive search operation involving some 500 police officers.[591] | Murdered | 18 days |
1996 | Heather Rich | 16 | United States of America | High school student who was sexually assaulted, raped and finally killed by a trio of students from her school on October 2, 1996. Her body was found on October 10, 1996. All three of them were later sentenced to life imprisonment.[592] | Murdered | 8 days |
data-sort-value="1996-10-03" | 1996 | April Lacy | 14 | United States of America | Lacy, a girl from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, disappeared on October 3, 1996, and was found dead on October 8, 1996, in Decatur, Texas.[593] Her body was not identified until 1998. | Murdered | 2 years |
data-sort-value="1996-11-14" | 1996 | Vera Holland | 47 | United Kingdom | Mother-of-three Holland vanished after leaving her home in Reading, Berkshire, England, on the evening of 14 November 1996 to make the three-minute walk to the nearby KFC restaurant. There was no sign of her on CCTV reaching her destination and it's believed that she never made it to the restaurant. Her body was discovered two days later after a fire was reported by motorists on a roadside three miles south of her home. Her body was found burning in the fire. As of 2021, her murder remains unsolved.[594] | Murdered | 2 days |
1996 | St. Mary's College students | Various | Uganda | The Aboke abductions refers to the abduction of 139 female students from a boarding school in Aboke, Uganda, perpetrated by the Lord's Resistance Army. While a number of the hostages died in captivity, the rest of them were released following negotiations, with the last one returning to her family in 2009.[595] | Released/Died in captivity | Various |
data-sort-value="1997-02-09" | 1997 | Amber Creek | 14 | United States of America | Creek, a girl from Palatine, Illinois ran away from a youth shelter in January 1997, and was found dead on February 9, 1997, and was not identified until a year later.[596] | Murdered | 1 year |
1997 | Silvia Melis | Unknown | Ogliastra, Sardinia | Melis was the victim of a kidnapping for extortion which occurred on 19 February 1997 in Ogliastra, Sardinia. She was discovered alive close to Nuoro on November 11 the same year by two plainclothes agents, having endured 265 days of captivity. Although controversy remains regarding the circumstances of her release, Melis has always insisted she freed herself.[597] | Rescued | 265 days |
1997 | Ebrahim Zalzadeh | 47–48 | Iran | Ebrahim Zalzadeh was an Iranian editor and author who mysteriously disappeared on February 22, 1997, and was found dead on March 29, 1997, in Tehran.[598] | Murdered | 35 days |
data-sort-value="1997-04-03" | 1997 | Laura Smither | data-sort-value="012" | 12 | United States | 12-year-old Laura Smither was last seen alive in Friendswood, Texas on April 3, 1997, jogging down her home street after telling her mother she was going on a 20-minute run. Seventeen days later, on April 20, 1997, Smither's body was found in a retention pond in Pasadena, Texas. In 1998, her parents established the Laura Recovery Center, a non-profit organization that aids the search for and recovery of kidnapping victims. In June 2022, William Lewis Reece was convicted of the murders of Laura Smither, Kelli Cox and Jessica Cain in June 2022.[599] | Murdered | data-sort-value="0017" | 17 days |
1997 | Judy Smith | 50 | United States of America | Smith, a nurse, was last seen by her husband at a hotel in Philadelphia around April 10, 1997, but her bones were found nearly six months later in Pisgah National Forest. It is unclear how Smith reached North Carolina, and her killing remains unsolved.[600] | Murdered | Almost 6 months |
1997 | Pai Hsiao-yen | 16 | Taiwan | Japanese-Taiwanese school student abducted from her school in Taipei on April 14, 1997, by a gang of criminals who later demanded $5 million in ransom. She was murdered a week after her abduction, with her mutilated body found two weeks later in an irrigation ditch.[601] | Murdered | 2 weeks |
1997 | Eva Blanco | 16 | Spain | Spanish high school student who disappeared while walking home on a detour from the town center in Algete on April 19, 1997. Her body, showing several stab wounds, was found by an elderly couple on the next day. The case remained unsolved until 2015, when DNA linked Moroccan-Spanish deliveryman Ahmed Chelh Gerj to the crime. Chelh committed suicide in the middle of trial proceedings.[602] | Murdered | 1 day |
data-sort-value="1997-04-28" | 1997 | Zephany Nurse | < 1 | South Africa | Nurse, a South African female, was abducted on April 30, 1997, from a hospital two days after she was born and raised by her abductor. At age 17 she was, by coincidence, attending the same school as her younger sister, and their physical resemblance was noticed. DNA testing confirmed her identity.[603] | Found alive | 17 years |
data-sort-value="1997-05-06" | 1997 | Kerry Whelan | 39 | Australia | Whelan was last seen entering a Mitsubishi Pajero with her murderer, Bruce Burrell, on May 6, 1997. Burrell had been a friend and former employee of the Whelan family. Her murderer refused to disclose the location of her body, which has never been found.[604] | Murdered | Not found |
data-sort-value="1997-05-29" | 1997 | Jeff Buckley | 30 | United States of America | Jeff Buckley, an American singer known for his only studio album, "Grace", which was released in 1994, including his hit song, a cover of Leonard Cohens "Hallelujah." On 29 May 1997, Buckley disappeared after going for a swim in Wolf River Harbour while fully clothed, accompanied by roadie named Keith Foti. Foti moved his boombox away from the edge of the water, and when he looked back up, he was unable to spot Buckley in the water. On June 4, passengers on the boat named "American Queen" spotted his body caught in some branches, upstream from where he had disappeared. His autopsy states that there was no drugs or alcohol in system, and his death was ruled an accidental drowning. | Accidental Drowning | 6 days |
data-sort-value="1997-06-28" | 1997 | Gary DeVore | 55 | United States of America | DeVore, a Hollywood screenwriter best known for the movie Raw Deal, disappeared on June 28, 1997, and a year later he and his car was discovered submerged in the California Aqueduct in Palmdale, California with his hands removed.[605] | Murdered | 1 year |
data-sort-value="1997-07-15" | 1997 | Kelli Ann Cox | data-sort-value="020" | 20 | United States | 20-year-old Kelli Ann Cox was last seen alive on July 15, 1997, at a Connoco gas station and convenience store in Denton, Texas after locking herself out of her car and making a call to her boyfriend for help using the station's outdoor payphone. Over 18 years later, on March 18, 2016, Kelli's remains were discovered after suspected serial killer William Lewis Reece directed investigators to search an area in Brazoria County, Texas. Reece confessed to and was convicted of the murders of Laura Smither, Kelli Cox, and Jessica Cain in June 2022.[606] | Murdered | data-sort-value="6821" | 18 years |
data-sort-value="1997-08-17" | 1997 | Jessica Lee Cain | data-sort-value="017" | 17 | United States | 17-year-old Jessica Lee Cain was last seen alive at the Bennigan's restaurant near Baybrook Mall in Clear Lake, Texas. She was reported missing on August 17, 1997, when her father found her truck abandoned along Interstate 45. On March 18, 2016, Cain's remains were discovered in a field near Hobby Airport after suspected serial killer William Lewis Reece directed investigators to the site. Reece confessed to and was convicted of the murders of Laura Smither, Kelli Cox, and Jessica Cain in June 2022. | Murdered | 18 years |
1997 | Marijoy Chiong | Unknown | Philippines | Filipino sisters who were kidnapped, raped and ultimately murdered by a gang of seven men in Cebu City on July 16, 1997. Marijoy's body was supposedly found two days later, while Jacqueline's has never been located. Their killers were all arrested and served a variety of sentences for their respective roles.[607] | Murdered | 2 days |
Jacqueline Chiong | Philippines | Not found |
data-sort-value="1997-08-31" | 1997 | Unnamed 53-year-old Vietnamese woman | data-sort-value="053" | 53 | United States | A 53-year-old Vietnamese woman, a foreign refugee who spoke little English, was abducted by serial rapist-kidnapper John Jamelske on August 21, 1997. She was forced into Jamelske's car and taken to an abandoned house, where he raped her. Jamelske then tied the woman to a stack of flattened cardboard boxes and drove her to his house, where he held her captive, raped her daily, and forced her to fulfill various menial tasks for him. Jamelske released the woman on May 23, 1998, at a Greyhound bus station, with $50; she reported to the police that day. Jamelske later pleaded guilty to five counts of first-degree kidnapping, and in July 2003 was sentenced to 18 years to life in prison.[608] | Released | data-sort-value="0265" | 9 months |
data-sort-value="1997-10-21" | 1997 | Ricky Reel | 21 | United Kingdom | A computer science student at Brunel University, Reel was last seen alive in the early morning of 15 October; his body was recovered from the River Thames six days later. Although the Metropolitan Police initially declared his death accidental, an open verdict was later returned. Speculation remains as to a possible racial motive behind his death.[609] | Died (open verdict) | 6 days |
1997 | Walter Kwok | 47 | Hong Kong | Hong Kong real estate developer who was kidnapped by gangster Cheung Tze-keung on September 30, 1997. Held for ransom of HK$600 million, Kwok was blindfolded and kept in a wooden container for half of his detention, he was later released after his wife paid the ransom. Kwok would sustain psychological trauma from the event, while Tze-keung would later be captured and executed in China the following year.[610] | Found alive | 1 week |
data-sort-value="1997-11-07" | 1997 | William Earl Moldt | 40 | United States of America | William Moldt somehow drove his car unnoticed into the canal in the Grand Isles neighbourhood of Lake Worth, Florida on November 7, 1997. His car was spotted by a man looking at a Google Earth image in late August 2019 and his remains were recovered from the canal on August 28 of that year.[611] | Presumably drowned | 22 years |
data-sort-value="1997-11-14" | 1997 | Reena Virk | 14 | Canada | Virk went missing on November 14, 1997, and was found dead on November 22, 1997, Warren Glowatski and Kelly Ellard were charged with murdering Virk and were found guilty. | Murdered | 8 days |
1997 | Nicholas Wright | 18 | United Kingdom | 18-year-old sailor in the Royal Navy Nicholas Wright disappeared from Portsmouth on 12 December 1997. He had last been seen in a nightclub with fellow Royal Navy sailor Allan Grimson, who has previously been known to have made unwanted advances towards Wright. Grimson was later arrested and led police to the body of Wright and another of his victims in December 1999. Grimson, a homosexual, had murdered Wright after taking him back to his flat and attempting to advance on him sexually before being rebuked, which enraged him (Wright was not homosexual). Grimson is the prime suspect in the disappearance of Simon Parkes in Gibraltar in 1986, in part because his known victims were killed on 12 December, and Parkes was also killed on this date when Grimson was known to have been in Gibraltar with the Royal Navy. Grimson is now eligible for parole and is currently being held in an open prison.[612] | Murdered | 2 years |
data-sort-value="1998-01-22" | 1998 | Jennifer Long | 16 | Kansas City, Missouri, U.S. | A teenager murdered by double murderer Wesley Ira Purkey. Long was lured into Purkey's vehicle and driven to his home where she was raped, then stabbed to death. Her body was dismembered, then incinerated. Purkey confessed to Long's murder in an effort to serve a life sentence in a federal prison as opposed to a state prison. He was later convicted of Long's murder and sentenced to death. Purkey was executed at United States Penitentiary, Terre Haute in July 2020.[613] | Murdered | Not found |
1998 | Vincent Cochetel | Unknown | Russia | French UNHCR official who was kidnapped by three armed men on January 29, 1998, out of the organization's office in Vladikavkaz, Russia. While in captivity, he was kept in a cave and was regularly abused, until he was rescued by security forces in December 1998.[614] | Found alive | 10 months |
data-sort-value="1998-08-23" | 1998 | Natascha Kampusch | 10 | Austria | Natascha Kampusch, an Austrian girl, who was kidnapped on her way to school in March 1998, was locked in a cellar, and escaped on August 23, 2006.[615] | Found alive | 8 years |
1998 | Patricia Lee Partin | Unknown | United States of America | Partin was among four women who left Los Angeles, California and disappeared alongside Florinda Donner in 1998; her remains were found in the desert sands of Death Valley in 2003[616] | Died (cause unknown) | 5 years |
data-sort-value="1998-07-31" | 1998 | Lois Roberts | 39 | Australia | Roberts, a woman from Australia disappeared outside the Nimbin Police Station on July 31, 1998, and her dismembered remains were found in the Whian Whian Forest on the mid-NSW north coast in January 1999.[617] [618] | Murdered | 5 months |
data-sort-value="1998-01-01" | 1998 | Natasha Ryan | 14 | Australia | Ryan, an Australian teenage girl who went missing in 1998, was found hiding in a wardrobe at her boyfriend's home in 2003.[619] | Found alive | 5 years |
1998 | Ben Smart | 21 | New Zealand | Ben Smart and Olivia Hope, New Zealand party goers last seen in the early hours of January 1, 1998, who disappeared in mysterious circumstances in the Marlborough Sounds. Scott Watson was arrested for and convicted of their murder, but the verdict remains controversial and no trace of Smart or Hope has ever been discovered.[620] | Murdered | Never found |
Olivia Hope | 17 | New Zealand |
data-sort-value="1998-03-26" | 1998 | Rukhsana Naz | 19 | United Kingdom | Naz was a 19-year-old British Pakistani woman and mother-of-two from Normanton, Derby, who was murdered by family members in an honour killing on 26 March 1998. Her body was discovered in Denby Dale, West Yorkshire, five days after her murder.[621] | Murdered | 5 days |
1998 | Arlene Fraser | 33 | United Kingdom | Fraser disappeared from her home in Elgin, Scotland in April 1998. Her husband was known to have previously attempted to murder her. He was convicted of her murder in 2000, despite her body having not been found.[622] | Murdered | Not found |
data-sort-value="1998-06-01" | 1998 | Dimitris Liantinis | 55 | Greece | Liantinis, a Greek philosopher and professor at the University of Athens who disappeared on June 1, 1998. In July 2005 human bones were found in the area of the mountain Taygetos; forensic examinations verified that it was the body of Liantinis.[623] No lethal substances were found to determine the cause of death. | Died by suicide | 7 years |
1998 | Christina Marie Williams | 13 | United States of America | Schoolgirl who was kidnapped on June 12, 1998, while walking her dog in Fort Ord. Her body was found months later, with authorities determining that she had been killed. In 2016, longtime suspect Charles Holifield was arrested, later charged and sentenced to life imprisonment without parole for her murder.[624] | Murdered | 7 months |
data-sort-value="1998-07-10" | 1998 | Kamiyah Mobley | < 1 | United States of America | Mobley was abducted on July 10, 1998, from a hospital in Jacksonville, Florida shortly after her birth and was recovered 18 years later after having been raised by her alleged abductor.[625] | Found alive | 18 years |
data-sort-value="1998-08-10" | 1998 | Nicky Verstappen | 11 | Netherlands | On the morning of August 10, 1998, 11-year-old Nicky Verstappen disappeared from a summer camp he was attending in Brunssum, Limburg. His body was found on the evening of August 11, 1.2km (00.7miles) away in Landgraaf, and a murder investigation was subsequently launched. Despite extensive investigation, the case remained unsolved for over twenty years. | Murdered | 1 day |
1998 | Jhon Frank Pinchao | 28 | Colombia | Colombian policeman and Second Lieutenant who was one of the 60 people kidnapped and taken as hostage by FARC during their attack on Mitú on November 1, 1998. Pinchao managed to escape into the jungle on April 28, 2007, wandering for seventeen days until he was located by an indigenous tribe who escorted him to safety.[626] | Found alive | 9 years |
data-sort-value="1998-08-12" | 1998 | Mohammad-Ja'far Pouyandeh | 44 | Iran | Mohammad-Ja'far Pouyandeh was an Iranian, an activist, a writer, and also did translating.[627] Pouyandeh disappeared in Shahriar County, which is located in Tehran after leaving his house on December 8, 1998, and was found dead just three days later on December 11.[628] | Murdered | 3 days |
1998 | Katarzyna Zowada | 28 | Poland | Katarzyna Zowada was a female student at the Jagiellonian University who disappeared from Nowa Huta on November 12, 1998, and on January 6, 1999, some of her remains were found in a river in Vistula. Eight days later some more of her remains were found.[629] | Murdered | 1 month and 3 weeks |
data-sort-value="1999-12-12" | 1998 | Sion Jenkins | 20 | United Kingdom | 20-year-old Royal Navy sailor Sion Jenkins disappeared from the port of Portsmouth on December 12, 1998. He was last seen in a nightclub in the city. A suspect arrested by police, fellow Royal Navy sailor Allan Grimson, led officers to his body in December 1999. It emerged that Grimson, a homosexual, had taken the heavily intoxicated Jenkins back to his flat and forced him to have sex with him after threatening him (Jenkins was not a homosexual). The next morning Jenkins had asked to leave but Grimson beat him to death with a baseball bat. Grimson, described by his trial judge as "a serial killer in nature if not in number", had also killed another sailor in the city exactly one year earlier, and is the prime suspect in the disappearance of Simon Parkes from Gibraltar in 1986, as Grimson was known to be in the port with the navy at the time and Parkes also disappeared on 12 December. Grimson is now eligible for parole and is being held in open prison conditions with day release provisions. | Murdered | 1 year |
data-sort-value="1998-12-31" | 1998 | Kirsty Bentley | 15 | New Zealand | Bentley, a teenage girl in Ashburton, New Zealand, disappeared on December 31, 1998, while walking her family dog in the afternoon. After an extensive search lasting two weeks, her body was found in dense scrub approximately 40 km away.[630] Police consider the case to be a homicide, and it remains one of the highest-profile cold cases in New Zealand. Her killer has never been identified. | Murdered | 2 weeks |
1999 | Tulay Goren | 15 | United Kingdom | Turkish-born teenager who was killed by her father on January 7, 1999, in an honor killing at the family home in Woodford Green. While her body was never found, her father, who was convicted in 2009, admitted that he had dismembered the corpse and placed the remains in garbage bags which were thrown away.[631] | Murdered | 10 years and 11 months |
1999 | Hae Min Lee | 18 | United States of America | Hae Min Lee was a Korean-American high school student who disappeared from Baltimore County, Maryland on January 13, 1999, and was found dead a month later in Leakin Park. It was revealed that she was strangled to death.[632] | Murdered | 1 month |
1999 | Marcella Davis | 19 | United Kingdom | Sex worker and mother Marcella Davis disappeared from the red light district of Wolverhampton on February 7, 1999. At 9.11pm that night she rang her babysitter and said that she would return to her home at 11 p.m., but the call was suddenly disconnected. In April a suspect arrested by police confessed and led police to the location where he had burned her body, and the remains were identified as belonging to her. She had been killed by serial killer Paul Brumfitt, who had previously been released from prison for killing two men.[633] [634] | Murdered | 2 months |
1999 | Ingrid Washinawatok | 41 | Colombia | American Menominee human rights activist who was kidnapped together with two colleagues on February 25, 1999, while en route to help set up a school for the U'wa people in Arauca Department, Colombia. The trio's abductors, FARC guerillas, killed them and later dumped their bodies across the border in Venezuela.[635] | Murdered | 1 week |
data-sort-value="1999-02-26" | 1999 | William DaShawn Hamilton | data-sort-value="006" | 6 | United States | The remains of six-year-old William DaShawn Hamilton were discovered by a cemetery worker in a wooded area near a church cemetery in DeKalb County, Georgia, on February 26, 1999, though they remained unidentified until June 13, 2022, when it was also announced that Hamilton's mother, Teresa Ann Bailey Black, had been arrested in connection with his death. Black was charged with multiple counts, including felony murder, though was acquitted of all but one charge and sentenced to 10 years in prison in January 2024.[636] | Found deceased | data-sort-value="8508" | 23 years |
1999 | Juan Manuel Corzo Román | 38 | Colombia | Colombian politician and member of the Chamber of Representatives who was kidnapped along with 39 other passengers on a flight between Bucaramanga and Cúcuta by ELN militants on April 12, 1999. He was held in captivity until his eventual release in September 2000.[637] | Found alive | 17 months |
1999 | Fan Man-yee | 23 | Hong Kong | Man-yee was a nightclub hostess who was abducted from a housing estate in Kwai Chung, Hong Kong, on March 17, 1999. She was tortured, raped and sexually humiliated by four individuals while confined in an apartment in Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon before succumbing to her injuries on or about April 14, 1999. Her body was later dismembered, with her head later sewn inside a Hello Kitty doll. The case is also known as the Hello Kitty murder case.[638] | Murdered | 1 month |
1999 | Marianne Vaatstra | 16 | Netherlands | Vaatstra was kidnapped while cycling to her parents' house in Kollum, Netherlands on April 30, 1999. The next day, her body was found in a field close to Veenklooster, with signs of sexual aggression and her throat slit. For a long time, the killing was pinned on asylum seekers, but with the help of DNA profiling, police identified the killer as local farmer Jasper Steringa, who was charged and subsequently convicted for the killing.[639] | Murdered | 1 day |
data-sort-value="1999-05-05" | 1999 | Debbie Griggs | 35 | United Kingdom | Griggs was a 34-year-old housewife who disappeared from her family home in Deal, Kent, on May 5, 1999. She was murdered by her husband, Andrew, shortly after discovering he had been grooming an underage girl and her body buried within a garden. Her remains were only discovered in 2022.[640] | Murdered | 23 years |
1999 | Fehmi Agani | 67 | FR Yugoslavia | Kosovar sociologist, politician and leading strategist for the Democratic League of Kosovo who was abducted by Yugoslav security forces while attempting to escape into Macedonia on May 6, 1999. His body was found in Lipljan several days later.[641] | Murdered | Several days |
data-sort-value="1999-05-235" | 1999 | Haley Alison McHone | 13 | United States of America | A victim of serial killer Tommy Lynn Sells. McHone was kidnapped and dragged into a wooded area, where she was raped, then strangled to death with her own T-shirt. McHone had been playing upon a swing when Sells encountered her.[642] | Murdered | 10 days |
data-sort-value="1999-07-23" | 1999 | Yin Jianhua | 35 | Hefei, China | A victim of Chinese serial killers Fa Ziying and Lao Rongzhi. Jianhua was the general manager of an electronics company. He was murdered following a failed attempt by one of his abductors to collect a ransom from his wife.[643] [644] | Murdered | 4 days |
data-sort-value="1999-09-09" | 1999 | Girly Chew Hossencofft | 36 | United States of America | Girly Chew Hossencofft, a Malaysian-born woman who disappeared on September 9, 1999, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The investigation into the murder of Girly Chew revealed a conspiracy theory involving reptilian queens, UFOs and reports of cannibalism.[645] [646] Girly Chew's husband Diazien Hossencofft and his girlfriend Linda Henning were convicted of her murder.[647] Girly's body has never been found.[648] | Murdered | 3 years |
1999 | Jorge Velosa | 50 | Colombia | Colombian singer-songwriter and veterinary physician credited for creating the carranga folk music genre. On September 25, 1999, he and his bandmates' transport car was intercepted by EPL guerillas, who kept Velosa hostage. Following numerous protests around the country, he was released without harm the following month.[649] | Found alive | 19 days |
1999 | Jaryd Atadero | 3 | United States of America | Jaryd Atadero was an American boy who went missing on October 2, 1999, in Colorado in the Arapaho & Roosevelt National Forest. On May 6, 2003, some of his remains were discovered by two businessmen while they were hiking.[650] Though there are different theories to how he died, the true cause is not known. | Died (undetermined cause) | More than 3 years |
1999 | Yves, Marie-France, Camille and Marius Godard | 44 (Yves); 44 (Marie-France); 6 (Camille); 4 (Marius) | France | Yves Godard (43), was a French doctor who disappeared from a sailing boat with his two children in September 1999.In 2000, a skull fragment belonging to his daughter Camille was found while some bone fragments of Dr Godard were discovered six years later in the English Channel. No trace of his son or his wife (the latter did not go on the sailing trip and stayed at home) has ever been found, nor has any trace of the boat. However, investigators found traces of blood in the family home and in Godard's caravan, raising suspicion that Godard's wife was murdered. In 2012, the case was closed without charges. Prosecutors ruled out accidental death and believe that Dr Godard probably murdered his family before committing suicide at sea, but they also acknowledge that they are not certain of this.[651] | Died (unknown cause) | 1 year (Camille); 7 years (Yves) |
1999 | Rocío Wanninkhof | 19 | Spain | Spanish teenager who vanished while walking to a fair on October 9, 1999, with her nude body found three weeks later with nine stab wounds. Initially, her mother's girlfriend was wrongfully convicted for the murder, but was later exonerated after the DNA of convicted murderer Tony Alexander King was found on the body. King was convicted and sentenced to 19 years' imprisonment for the murder.[652] | Murdered | 3 weeks |
data-sort-value="1999-11-20" | 1999 | Jorge Matute Johns (es) | 23 | Chile | Jorge Matute, a Chilean forestry student who disappeared on November 20, 1999, in a discotheque near Concepción. In February 2004 human bones were found in the road to Santa Juana; forensic examinations verified that it was the remains of Matute.[653] | Murdered | 4 years |
1999 | Lauria Bible | 16 | United States of America | Bible and Freeman were American teenagers who disappeared between the evening of December 29 and the early morning hours of December 30, 1999, from Freeman's home in Welch, Oklahoma. The Freeman home was burned and Freeman's parents were found murdered; however, law enforcement was unable to find any trace of Bible or Freeman in the rubble of the home. On April 26, 2018, it was reported that Ronnie Dean Busick was being charged with four counts of first-degree murder in the killings of Bible and of the Freeman family. In 2020, Busick was convicted and sentenced.[654] | Murdered | Never found |
Ashley Freeman | 16 | United States of America | Murdered |
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