This is a list of solved missing person cases of people who went missing in unknown locations or unknown circumstances that were eventually explained by their reappearance or the recovery of their bodies, the conviction of the perpetrator(s) responsible for their disappearances, or a confession to their killings. There are separate lists covering disappearances before 1950 and then since 2000.
| 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| data-sort-value="1950-02-16" | 1950 | J.K. Rideout | 37–38 | China | J.K. Rideout, a British linguist and professor of Oriental Studies at both the University of Sydney and the University of Hong Kong, disappeared on 16 February 1950. His body was found 12 days later upon the shores of Lantau Island. Although suspicion pertaining to a mooted connection to British intelligence surrounds his death, authorities ruled Rideout's death to be accidental.[1] [2] | Accidental | data-sort-value="0012" | 12 days | |||
| 1950 | Ernest C. Fiebelkorn | 27 | South Korea | Fiebelkorn, a USAAF fighter ace who shot down nine aircraft during World War II and also fought in the Korean War, was listed as missing in action together with his radar operator Captain John J. Higgins on July 6, 1950, when they both failed to return to base while flying as part of a four-ship element sent to locate and strafe advancing enemy ground forces through heavy low overcast at the Suwon-Seoul area. The remains of both men were found in 1953 by UN troops on a mountainside approximately north of Seoul. | Killed in action | 3 years | |||||
| 1951 | Bill Barilko | 24 | Canada | Bill Barilko, a player for the Toronto Maple Leafs hockey team, disappeared in August 1951 while returning from a fishing trip at Seal River, Ontario. He was with his dentist, Henry Hudson, flying aboard Hudson's Fairchild 24 floatplane at the time of their disappearance. Barilko and Hudson remained missing for 11 years until the plane's wreckage was found off course north of Cochrane, Ontario, partially burned and submerged in a swamp with the men's bodies found still strapped in their seats.[3] [4] | Killed in plane crash | data-sort-value="4015" | 11 years | ||||
| Henry Hudson | Unknown | Canada | data-sort-value="4015" | 11 years | |||||||
| data-sort-value="1951-04-19" | 1951 | Philip Mangano | 53 | United States of America | A mafia underboss of Mangano crime family (the future Gambino crime family), Philip Mangano disappeared on April 19, 1951. His body was found the same day. Also that same day, his brother Vincent Mangano disappeared; his body was never found. Both are believed to have been murdered on the orders of family underboss Albert Anastasia in Brooklyn in 1951 as part of a coup.[5] [6] [7] [8] | Murdered | Less than a day | ||||
| data-sort-value="1951-07-20" | 1951 | Renata Balleyova | Unknown | Czechoslovakia | On July 20, 1951, children playing in the sand near the village of Senec discovered a human leg, leading to the discovery of the decaying remains of Renata Balleyova, a photographer from Plzeň who had intended to defect from Czechoslovakia. This in turn led to the arrest of Hubert Pilčík, a human smuggler who also killed Balleyova's father, Emanuel, and kidnapped and repeatedly raped Emanual's 12-year-old niece while forcing her to write letters addressed from Bavaria, demanding payment for the letters in jewelry. Both Balleyova and her father were killed with baton blows to the head. Pilčík killed himself in prison on September 9, 1951.[9] | Murdered | Less than a month | ||||
| 1952 | George Andrew Davis Jr. | 31 | North Korea | Davis was a highly decorated fighter pilot and flying ace of the USAAF during World War II and later of the USAF during the Korean War. During his final combat mission in northwest Korea on February 10, 1952, Davis surprised and attacked twelve Chinese MiG-15 fighter jets about to attack friendly aircraft in "MiG Alley", downing two of the MiG-15s before he was shot down and killed. He was not seen bailing out and was declared missing in action and presumed killed. The Chinese military later recovered his body from the crashed aircraft, although they never returned it to the United States. Controversies arose surrounding the circumstances of his death, and he was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions that day. | Killed in action | 1 week | |||||
| data-sort-value="1953-04-09" | 1953 | Wilma Montesi | data-sort-value="021" | 21 | Italy | 21-year-old Wilma Montesi was last seen alive on 9 April 1953; her body was discovered on the shore of Torvaianica two days later. Montesi was found partially dressed; her handbag and several of her clothes were missing. Ugo Montagna and Piero Piccioni, son of deputy prime minister Attilio Piccioni, were alleged to have been involved, causing a scandal, though both were absolved of all charges. Montesi's murder remains unsolved, and the cause of death remains unknown.[10] | Murdered | data-sort-value="002" | 2 days | ||
| data-sort-value="1953-05-17" | 1953 | Kyllikki Saari | 17 | Finland | Kyllikki Saari, a girl from Finland, was last seen alive on May 17, 1953, cycling home from a prayer meeting. Kyllikki's bicycle was recovered in a marsh that summer and her remains were found on October 11, 1953, in a bog.[11] | Murdered | data-sort-value="0147" | 147 days | |||
| 1953 | Art Gilkey | 26 | Pakistan | Gilkey disappeared while climbing K2 mountain in 1953. He had developed thrombophlebitis (blood clots in his leg), followed by a pulmonary embolism, and his fellow climbers, including Charlie Houston and Pete Schoening, wrapped him in a sleeping bag to bring him down the mountain. However, while resting at camp, Gilkey was swept away by an avalanche and disappeared. His body was found at the base of the south side of K2 in 1993.[12] | Died while climbing mountain | 40 years | |||||
| 1953 | Christine Reed | 18 | United Kingdom | Victims of the "Towpath Killer" Alfred Whiteway. Reed and Songhurst were teenage friends last seen cycling along a towpath close to the River Thames on 31 May 1953. Songhurst's body was found in the river the following day; Reed's body was discovered on 6 June. Both had been bludgeoned and raped. Whiteway was hanged for their murders on December 22, 1953.[13] | Murdered | data-sort-value="0033" | 6 days | ||||
| Barbara Songhurst | 16 | data-sort-value="0041" | 1 day | ||||||||
| 1953 | Eugene Lindsey | 45 | United States of America | Father and son Eugene and Richard Lindsey, and their friend Frederick Claar, were last seen on June 12, 1953, in the Gaspé region of Quebec, where they had driven to from Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, on a hunting trip. Eugene Lindsey's body was discovered in deep bush a month later (July 15) and those of the other two men on July 23, some 4 kilometres away. Their clothing bore bullet holes. The discoveries led to the arrest of a prospector named Wilbert Coffin and his conviction based on circumstantial evidence. He was eventually hanged. The case is well known in Canada as the Coffin affair.[14] | Murdered | data-sort-value="0033" | 33 days | ||||
| Richard Lindsey | 17 | United States of America | data-sort-value="0041" | 41 days | |||||||
| Frederick Claar | 20 | United States of America | data-sort-value="0041" | 41 days | |||||||
| 1954 | Henri La Masne | 30 | Italy | Henri La Masne was a French man who went missing, while he was skiing in the Italian Alps on March 26, 1954,[15] [16] and his body was discovered in Valtournenche, Cime Bianche in 2005[17] [18] and identified in 2017. | Froze to death after being buried underneath snow during a storm | 60 years | |||||
| data-sort-value="1954-06-22" | 1954 | Honorah Rieper | 45 | New Zealand | Murdered by her 16-year-old daughter, Pauline Parker, and her daughter's friend, 15-year-old Juliet Hulme, in Christchurch, New Zealand. The murder had been planned by the schoolgirls as she was viewed as an individual who would refuse to allow her daughter to move to South Africa with her friend. Her body was found the same day.[19] | Murdered | 1 day | ||||
| 1954 | Mary Hogan | 51 | United States of America | The first-known murder victim of Ed Gein. Hogan was a tavern proprietress whom Gein confessed to murdering on December 8, 1954. Gein transported her body to his farm, where he mutilated her corpse but retained her skull and preserved face. These were discovered following his 1957 arrest.[20] | Murdered | 3 years | |||||
| data-sort-value="1955" | 1955 | Curtis Chillingworth | 58 | United States of America | Curtis Chillingworth was a Florida attorney and state judge who disappeared from his Manalapan, Florida home in 1955. He was later discovered to have been murdered though his body was never recovered.[21] | Murdered | data-sort-value="0000" | never found | |||
| 1955 | Herman Schultheis | 55 | Guatemala | Herman Schultheis was a technician and photographer who worked for Walt Disney Studios who disappeared on May 20, 1955, near Tikal, Guatemala. His remains were found on November 23, 1956, as well as some of his belongings.[22] [23] | Died (undetermined cause) | 18 months | |||||
| data-sort-value="1956" | 1956 | Donald B. Anderson | 52 | United States of America | Anderson was a justice of the Idaho Supreme Court.[24] His body was found in his vehicle alongside U.S. Highway 30. His death was ruled a suicide. | Died by suicide | data-sort-value="4015" | 1 day | |||
| 1956 | Barbara Grimes | 15 | United States of America | Barbara and Patricia Grimes were sisters who disappeared from the Brighton Park, Chicago, Illinois area on December 28, 1956, while returning home from a movie. Their bodies were found on January 22, 1957, down an embankment off a roadway.[25] | Murdered | data-sort-value="0025" | 25 days | ||||
| Patricia Grimes | 12[26] | United States of America | data-sort-value="0025" | 25 days | |||||||
| 1957 | Willie Edwards | data-sort-value="004" | 24 | United States of America | Willie Edwards was a black American man who on January 23, 1957, was killed by unknown members of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan. His body was thrown into the Alabama River, Montgomery County, Alabama and was found three months later.[27] His murder remains unsolved. | Murdered | data-sort-value="24027" | 3 months | |||
| data-sort-value="1957-02-25" | 1957 | Joseph Augustus Zarelli | data-sort-value="004" | 4 | United States of America | The naked, extensively beaten body of 4-year-old Joseph August Zarelli was discovered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on February 25, 1957. Authorities believe the cause of death to be blunt force trauma. Zarelli remained unidentified for over 65 years and was known only as "the Boy in the Box." On November 30, 2022, the Philadelphia Police Department announced that Zarelli's identity had been determined via DNA and genealogical databases. Zarelli was publicly identified on December 8, 2022.[28] | Murdered | data-sort-value="24027" | 65 years | ||
| data-sort-value="1957-02-25" | 1957 | Mary Jane Barker | data-sort-value="004" | 4 | United States of America | Mary Jane Barker, a girl from Bellmawr, New Jersey, went missing on February 25, 1957, along with her playmate's dog.[29] Barker was found dead in the closet of a vacant house near her home on March 3, 1957, after becoming trapped with the dog, who survived (but was euthanized for examination in an attempt to better understand the circumstances).[30] | Died from starvation | data-sort-value="0006" | 6 days | ||
| data-sort-value="1957-03-15" | 1957 | Lawrence Joseph Bader | 30 | United States of America | Lawrence Joseph Bader was a cookware salesman from Akron, Ohio who disappeared on a fishing trip on March 15, 1957, in Lake Erie. Eight years later he was found alive in Omaha, Nebraska working as a local TV personality named "Fritz" Johnson. He died from a brain tumor a year later, leaving six children from two wives. It has been debated, but never determined, whether he was an amnesiac, had multiple personalities, or was simply a hoaxer.[31] [32] | Found alive | data-sort-value="2920" | 8 years | |||
| data-sort-value="1957-12-03" | 1957 | Maria Ridulph | data-sort-value="0007" | 7 | United States of America | Maria Ridulph was an American girl who disappeared on December 3, 1957, from a street corner in her neighborhood in Sycamore, Illinois.[33] Her body was found in Woodbine, 100 miles from her home, on April 26, 1958.[34] | Murdered | data-sort-value="0144" | 144 days | ||
| 1957 | Anne Noblett | 17 | United Kingdom | Watford Technical College student who disappeared while travelling to her home in Marshalls Heath on December 30, 1957. Her fully clothed body was found in a wooded area near Whitwell on January 31, 1958. It was determined that she had been killed, but to this day, nobody has been arrested in her murder.[35] | Murdered | 1 month | |||||
| data-sort-value="1958" | 1958 | Ishinosuke Uwano | 35 to 36 | Soviet Union | Ishinosuke Uwano was a former soldier in the Japanese Imperial Army who disappeared in 1958 and was found living in Ukraine in April 2006.[36] | Found alive | data-sort-value="17520" | 48 years | |||
| 1958 | Harry Baker | 61 | United Kingdom | British credit draper (loan shark) who disappeared on June 6, 1958, while visiting customers in Bootle. More than two weeks later, Baker's body was found wrapped up in two sacks, showing signs that he had been beaten and strangled.[37] | Murdered | 17 days | |||||
| 1959 | Cheryl Lynne Harper | 12 | Canada | A Canadian schoolgirl who disappeared on June 9, 1959. Harper's raped and strangled body was discovered two days later. Fourteen-year-old Steven Truscott was arrested and convicted of Harper's murder; he was released from custody in 1969 and his conviction overturned in 2007.[38] | Murdered | 2 days | |||||
| 1959 | Bob Doll | 40 | United States of America | Bob Doll was an American professional basketball player who disappeared from Rabbit Ears Pass, Colorado in early September 1959 and was found dead on September 18, 1959.[39] | Died by suicide | Around 2 weeks | |||||
| 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.[40] | 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.[41] | 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.[42] | 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.[43] | 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.[44] | 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.[45] | 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.[46] | 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.[47] | 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.[48] | 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.[49] | 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.[50] [51] | 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.[52] 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[53] and it was speculated by some that he had fled the country.[54] 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.[55] | 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.[56] | 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.[57] 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.[58] | Died by suicide | 1 day | |||||
| 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.[59] | 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.[60] | 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.[61] [62] [63] | 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.[64] | 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.[65] | Murdered | 1 day | |||||
| 1966 | Hedviga Golik | 42 | Croatia | Hedviga Golika was a Croatian woman from Zagreb, Croatia,[66] 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.[67] | 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.[68] | 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.[69] [70] 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.[71] | 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.[72] | 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.[73] 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.[74] 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.[75] | 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.[76] | 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.[77] | 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.[78] | 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.[79] | 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[80] 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.[81] | 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.[82] | 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.[83] | 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.[84] | 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.[85] | 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.[86] [87] [88] | 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.[89] | Murdered | data-sort-value="10950" | Body never found | |||
| 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| data-sort-value="1970-09-24" | 1970 | Jacques Vergès | 44 | France | Vergès, a French-Vietnamese lawyer, left his wife Djamila Bouhired and cut off all ties with friends and family. He was last seen on February 24, 1970, until he reappeared in 1978 and refused to explain his disappearance or whereabouts during that period.[90] It appeared in December 2017, in a Barbet Schroeder interview, that he was with extremist Palestinian militant Wadie Haddad in Palestine.[91] | Found alive | data-sort-value="2920" | 8 years | |||
| 1970 | Jacqueline Ansell-Lamb | 18 | United Kingdom | English secretary who vanished after hitchhiking along the M1 motorway on March 8, 1970. Her body was found days later in some woodlands, and detectives believe her murder is linked to that of fellow hitch-hiker Barbara Mayo, who was killed under similar circumstances in the same year. It is often reported that the two murders were linked by DNA in 1990; however, DNA was only ever extracted in Mayo's case, and not until 1997.[92] [93] | Murdered | 6 days | |||||
| 1970 | Susan Blatchford | 11 | United Kingdom | Two British children who disappeared from Enfield, North London, on the afternoon of 31 March 1970 while playing.[94] Seventy-eight days later their bodies were found in a copse in Sewardstone, Essex. Erroneously thought for nearly 30 years to have possibly died from exposure, causing the murdered children to be called the "Babes in the Wood" in the press, pedophile Ronald Jebson confessed to their rape and murder from prison in 1998, and was convicted in 2000. | Murdered | 78 days | |||||
| Gary Hanlon | 12 | United Kingdom | |||||||||
| 1970 | Pedro Eugenio Aramburu | 67 | Argentina | Argentine army general who served as the acting president from 1955 to 1958, Aramburu was kidnapped and later killed by Montoneros terrorist Mario Firmenich. His body was found a month after his disappearance at an abandoned farmhouse in Timote.[95] | Murdered | 1 month | |||||
| 1970 | Alberto Fuentes Mohr | 43 | Guatemala | Guatemalan economist, politician and founding member of the Social Democratic Party who served as Minister of Public Finance in the 1960s. He was briefly kidnapped by a FAR rebel on February 27, 1970, but released without harm shortly after.[96] | Found alive | Unknown | |||||
| 1970 | Harvey Crewe | 28 | New Zealand | Harvey and Jeannette Crewe, a New Zealand farming couple, were reported missing from their bloodstained farmhouse at Pukekawa, Lower Waikato on June 22, 1970, where their unharmed 18-month-old daughter was found in her cot. Jeannette Crewe's body was found, wrapped in a duvet and bound with copper wire, in the Waikato River on August 16, 1970, and her husband's body was retrieved upriver on September 16, 1970.[97] The initial indications from the crime scene pointed to foul play, occurring between June 17 and 22, but it was not until the bodies were recovered that it was established that both had been shot to death. | Murdered | data-sort-value="0086" | 86 days | ||||
| Jeannette Crewe | 30 | New Zealand | data-sort-value="0055" | 55 days | |||||||
| 1970 | Pierre Laporte | 49 | Canada | Laporte, a Canadian politician and deputy premier of Quebec, was kidnapped by members of the terrorist Front de libération du Québec group on October 10, 1970, and held for ransom. A week later, when the government refused the group's demands, they killed him, with Laporte's body later found in the trunk of Paul Rose's car.[98] | Murdered | 1 week | |||||
| 1970 | Donna Lass | 25 | United States | Lass, a nurse who worked at Sahara Tahoe Casino, disappeared on September 6, 1970, from Stateline, Nevada. Her disappearance has been associated with the Zodiac Killer case, despite the lack of evidence. In December 2023, South Lake Tahoe Police Department announced that human remains found in 1986 near California State Route 20 in Placer County was positively identified to be belonging to Lass. The department did not reveal a reason of death or an indication of foul play.[99] [100] | No | 53 years | |||||
| 1970 | Barbara Mayo | 24 | United Kingdom | Mayo was an English schoolteacher who vanished while hitchhiking on the M1 motorway near Catterick, North Yorkshire on October 12, 1970. Days later, her partially clothed body was found in the woods, and was later linked to the murder of Jacqueline Ansell-Lamb committed months prior. It is often wrongly reported that the two murders were confirmed to be linked by DNA in 1990; DNA was only ever extracted in Mayo's case, and not until 1997. | Murdered | 4 days | |||||
| data-sort-value="1970-11" | 1970 | Ronald Hughes | 35 | United States of America | Ronald Hughes was an American attorney who represented Manson family member Leslie Van Houten and disappeared in November 1970 during a camping trip.[101] [102] On March 29, 1971, his body was found by two fishermen in Ventura County wedged between two boulders in a gorge.[103] | No | data-sort-value="0150" | 5 months | |||
| 1971 | Theo Albrecht | 49 | West Germany | German entrepreneur who was the co-founder of the Aldi supermarket chain. In 1971, he was kidnapped by lawyer Heinz-Joachim Ollenburg and Paul Kron, who demanded seven million German marks in exchange for his return. He was later released and his kidnappers arrested, but as a result, the Albrechts became reclusive and avoid publicity.[104] | Found alive | 17 days | |||||
| data-sort-value="1971" | 1971 | Shelagh McDonald | 24 | United Kingdom | Shelagh McDonald, a Scottish folk singer and songwriter, who vanished in 1971. Following the reissue of two of her albums on CD in the mid-2000s, articles were written about her work and disappearance.[105] In 2005, McDonald read one of these articles and contacted the press to explain that following an LSD trip, which had left her with long-term severe flashbacks and disorientation, she had returned to her family who kept her isolated while she recovered.[106] [107] | Found alive | data-sort-value="12410" | 34 years | |||
| 1971 | Rubens Paiva | 42 | Brazil | Brazilian civil engineer, politician and congressman for the Chamber of Deputies who was arrested by police on January 20, 1971, for opposing the military dictatorship. He was then tortured and killed, and his body was never located.[108] | Murdered | Never found | |||||
| 1971 | Philip Kovolick | 63 | United States of America | New York mobster and associate of Lepke Buchalter who disappeared on April 8, 1971, in Miami, while expecting extradition to his home state on various charges. His body was later found sealed in a steel drum at the bottom of a rock pit in Hallandale Beach. His killer, John Alvin Baxter, was convicted and sentenced to death for the murder, but it was later reduced to life imprisonment.[109] | Murdered | 21 days | |||||
| 1971 | Carol Denise Spinks | 13 | United States of America | Spinks was the first known victim of an unidentified serial killer known as the Freeway Phantom. Spinks was abducted, sexually assaulted and murdered while walking home from a grocery store; her body was found six days later on an embankment behind Southeast Washington, D.C. alongside I-295.[110] | Murdered | 6 days | |||||
| data-sort-value="1971-06-17" | 1971 | Colette Anise Wilson | data-sort-value="013" | 13 | United States of America | 13-year-old Colette Anise Wilson disappeared from the Alvin Bus Stop on County Road 99 and Highway 6 in Alvin, Texas after she was dropped off by her band director on June 17, 1971. Wilson's body was found five months later on November 26, 1971, near the Addicks Reservoir. She had been shot in the head.[111] | Murdered | data-sort-value="162" | 5 months | ||
| 1971 | Darlenia Denise Johnson | 16 | United States of America | The second known victim of the Freeway Phantom. Johnson was abducted was abducted while en route to her summer job at a recreation center. Her body was discovered on July 19 just 15abbr=offNaNabbr=off from where victim Carol Spinks had been discovered two months previously.[112] | Murdered | 11 days | |||||
| data-sort-value="1971-07-22" | 1971 | Joyce Margaret LePage | 21 | United States of America | Last seen in the grounds of Washington State University. Her skeletal remains were found wrapped in two blankets and discarded in a ravine south of Pullman, Washington, on April 16, 1972. Serial killer Ted Bundy is considered a suspect in LePage's murder, although he denied any culpability in this case. Her murder remains unsolved.[113] | Murdered | 9 months | ||||
| 1971 | Rhonda Johnson | 13 | United States of America | Rhonda Renee Johnson and Sharon Lynn Shaw were two teenage girls who disappeared in Harris County, Texas, on the afternoon of August 4, 1971. In early 1972, skeletal remains of both girls were discovered in and around Clear Lake near Galveston Bay. A local man, Michael Lloyd Self, was charged with their murders in 1972 and convicted of Shaw's murder in 1975. Controversy arose in 1998 when serial killer Edward Harold Bell confessed to the murders. Bell's confession—and corroborating statements from both law enforcement and prosecutors that Self had been coerced into a false confession—led many to believe that Self had been wrongfully convicted.[114] Self died in prison of cancer in 2000. | Murdered | ~6 months | |||||
| Sharon Shaw | 14 | United States of America | |||||||||
| data-sort-value="1971-09-20" | 1971 | Wayne Joseph Dukette | 30 | United States of America | A Sunset Beach bartender and first suspected victim of serial killer Randy Kraft. Dukette's nude and putrefied body was discovered at the bottom of a ravine close to the Ortega Highway. His cause of death was undetermined, although his high blood alcohol content indicated alcohol poisoning as a likely cause of death.[115] | Murdered | data-sort-value="162" | 15 days | |||
| data-sort-value="1971-10-28" | 1971 | Gloria Ann Gonzales | data-sort-value="019" | 19 | United States of America | 19-year-old Gloria Ann Gonzales was last seen alive near her apartment in Houston, Texas on October 28, 1971. On November 23, 1971, Gonzales's skeletal remains were found near Addicks Reservoir in the area where the body of 13-year-old Colette Anise Wilson was also found. Gonzales had died from blunt force trauma to the head.[116] | Murdered | data-sort-value="026" | 3 weeks | ||
| data-sort-value="1971-11-09" | 1971 | Allison Anne Craven | data-sort-value="012" | 12 | United States of America | 12-year-old Allison Anne Craven was reported missing by her mother on November 9, 1971, when she returned home to their apartment in Houston, Texas near Interstate 45 after completing shopping errands for one hour. Three months later, police found partial remains in a nearby field – two hands along with bones from an arm and some teeth. On February 25, 1972, the rest of Craven's skeleton was found in a Pearland, Texas field, also near Interstate 45 and ten miles from where she was last seen.[117] | Murdered | data-sort-value="108" | 3 months | ||
| data-sort-value="1972-01-02" | 1972 | Timothy McCoy | data-sort-value="016" | 16 | United States of America | An American teenager who disappeared in Chicago, Illinois on January 2, 1972, after encountering a man named John Wayne Gacy. A few hours later, in the early hours of January 3, 1972, McCoy was stabbed to death by Gacy and was buried in the crawl space of his home. Gacy would go on to become a serial killer, murdering, raping and torturing at least 32 more victims between 1974 and 1978. McCoy's corpse was not found for nearly seven years until December 1978, where his body along with several others were recovered and was conclusively identified on May 9, 1986, via dental records, 14 years after his death.[118] | Murdered | data-sort-value="5240" | 14 years | ||
| data-sort-value="1972-02-11" | 1972 | Barbara Ann Derry | data-sort-value="018" | 18 | United States of America | A Vancouver, Washington hitchhiker last seen alive on February 11, 1972. Derry is suspected of being a victim of serial killer Warren Forrest. Her stabbed body was discovered within a gristmill silo in Woodland on March 29 and was identified on April 3.[119] | Murdered | data-sort-value="108" | 7 weeks | ||
| 1972 | Michael Blassie | 24 | South Vietnam | Blassie was an American Air Force officer and pilot from the 8th Special Operations Squadron, who was dispatched to South Vietnam in 1972. During the Battle of An Lộc, his A-37B Dragonfly was shot down, killing him instantly. His remains were found, but could not be identified and were interred at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery. He was finally identified via DNA testing in 1998.[120] | Killed in action | 26 years | |||||
| 1972 | Oberdan Sallustro | 56–57 | Argentina | Oberdan Sallustro was an Italian-Paraguayan Director General of FIAT Concord in Argentina as well as an entrepreneur who was kidnapped by six people on March 21, 1972[121] and found dead on April 10, 1972, after being murdered. | Murdered | data-sort-value="0020" | more than 20 days | ||||
| data-sort-value="1972-07-11" | 1972 | Barbara Storm | 20 | West Germany | Barbara Storm was a young German woman from Schüttorf who disappeared on 13 May 1972 was found dead on 17 May 1972 in a forest that was close to Schöppingen after being beaten and strangled.[122] She is believed to have murdered by the "Münsterland Killer". | Murdered | data-sort-value="0004" | 4 days | |||
| data-sort-value="1972-06-24" | 1972 | Kerry May-Hardy | 22 | United States of America | Abducted while hitchhiking from Capitol Hill, near Seattle in June 1972. Her skeletal remains were discovered by construction workers buried close to a golf course in Roslyn on September 6, 2010. May-Hardy's murder has been linked to serial killer Ted Bundy, although he never confessed to her murder.[123] | Murdered | 38 years | ||||
| data-sort-value="1972-07-11" | 1972 | Dolores Della Penna | 17 | United States of America | Dolores Della Penna was a schoolgirl from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania who went missing on July 11, 1972. Her limbs and torso were later found in different parts of New Jersey a week later, but her head was never found. She had allegedly been abducted by a gang of drug dealers who accused her of stealing from them.[124] | Murdered | data-sort-value="0007" | 7 days | |||
| data-sort-value="1972-08-07" | 1972 | Jeannette DePalma | 16 | United States of America | Jeannette DePalma was a girl who disappeared on August 7, 1972, after telling her mother she was going to visit a friend. Her body was discovered on September 19, 1972, and it is believed she was killed some time around August 7 in Springfield Township, New Jersey.[125] [126] | Murdered | data-sort-value="0043" | 43 days | |||
| 1972 | Susan Carol Place | 17 | United States of America | 17-year-old Susan Carol Place and 16-year-old Georgia Marie Jessup both disappeared on September 27, 1972, after encountering Gerard John Schaefer at an adult education center in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Place and Jessup told the former's mother that they wanted to go to the beach with Schaefer. The girls were reported missing after not returning home within four days. On April 1, 1973, the remains of Place and Jessup were discovered in Port St. Lucie; they were formally identified via dental records on April 5. On May 18, Schaefer was formally charged with first-degree murder in the deaths of Place and Jessup. He was found guilty and sentenced to two terms of life imprisonment.[127] | Murdered | 6 months | |||||
| Georgia Marie Jessup | 16 | United States of America | |||||||||
| 1972 | Mary Alice Briscolina | 14 | United States of America | 14-year-old Mary Alice Briscolina and 13-year-old Elsie Lina Farmer both disappeared while hitchhiking to a Commercial Boulevard restaurant from a Lauderdale-by-the-Sea motel on October 26, 1972. Their bodies were discovered separately in undergrowth close to Sunrise Boulevard in January and February of the following year. Both girls had been bludgeoned to death and likely raped. Briscolina and Farmer may have been victims of Gerard John Schaefer, a serial killer active in Florida.[128] | Murdered | data-sort-value="083" | 3 months | ||||
| Elsie Lina Farmer | 13 | United States of America | data-sort-value="112" | 4 months | |||||||
| data-sort-value="1972-12-04" | 1972 | Steven Stayner | data-sort-value="007" | 7 | United States of America | Steven Stayner was abducted from the Central California city and county of Merced, California on December 4, 1972, by a man named Kenneth Parnell.[129] He escaped on March 1, 1980, with Timothy White who was also abducted by Parnell.[130] | Found alive | data-sort-value="2644" | 7 years | ||
| 1973 | Malika Oufkir | 20 | Morocco | Daughter of General Mohamed Oufkir who was detained along with most of her family under arrest from 1973 to 1991, due to her father's actions against in the 1972 coup d'état attempt. A few years after her release, she emigrated to France and became a writer.[131] | Found alive | 18 years | |||||
| 1973 | Paul Martin Andrews | 14 | United States of America | Andrews was kidnapped from his family home in Portsmouth, Virginia on January 11, 1973, by pedophile Richard Ausley, who stuffed him in a wooden box and only brought him out when he wanted to assault him. On the eight-day, Ausley left Andrews unattended, giving him enough time to call for help, drawing the attention of two hunters who rescued him. Ausley later turned himself in and was sentenced to 48 years' imprisonment, while Andrews later became an advocate for rape survivors.[132] | Found alive | 8 days | |||||
| data-sort-value="1973-01-27" | 1973 | Dawn Magyar | 20 | United States of America | Dawn Magyar was abducted while she was grocery shopping in Owosso, Michigan in Shiawassee County on January 27, 1973, and her body was discovered in a wooded area in Saginaw County, Michigan on March 4, 1973.[133] The case was resolved 28 years after her body was found when a DNA match was made of her killer.[134] | Murdered | data-sort-value="0036" | 36 days | |||
| 1973 | Lynda Gough | 19 | United Kingdom | Gloucester woman who disappeared in April 1973. She had been a lodger of a couple called Fred and Rose West. Following her disappearance, Gough's mother travelled to the home of the Wests to enquire as to her daughter's whereabouts, only to find Rose wearing her daughter's clothes and slippers. In 1994, Gough's body was found buried at the home during investigations into the disappearance of the couple's daughter. Fred and Rose West were found to have murdered 12 young women between them and buried most at the home.[135] | Murdered | 21 years | |||||
| 1973 | Marlies Hemmers | 18 | West Germany | Marlies Hemmers was a female German high school student who disappeared in from Nordhorn, Hemmers on 6 August 1973 and her remains were found on 22 December 1973 across from a horse breeding ground in a small wood.[136] Since her body had decayed it could not be determined what her death cause was. It is believed though that she may have been murdered by the "Münsterland Killer". | Died (undetermined cause) | data-sort-value="13607" | Less than six months | ||||
| data-sort-value="1973-07-10" | 1973 | John Paul Getty III | 16 | Italy | A grandson of American oil tycoon J. Paul Getty. Getty was kidnapped within the Piazza Farnese in July 1973 in Rome and held captive for five months. A $17 million ransom was demanded for his safe release. When Getty's grandfather refused to pay this sum (stating his fear that if he did so all 13 of his grandchildren might become kidnapping targets),[137] his captors severed one of his ears, which they posted to a local newspaper. Following a $2.2 million ransom payment, Getty was released by his captors in December. He later suffered from drug- and alcohol-related issues caused in part by the trauma of his ordeal; becoming a partially blind quadriplegic by 1981. He died in 2011. | Found alive | data-sort-value="0036" | Five months | |||
| data-sort-value="1973-08-01" | 1973 | Peter Wilson | 21 | United Kingdom | Peter Wilson was an Irish man who was abducted on August 1, 1973, and killed by the Provisional Irish Republican Army. After receiving reliable information his remains were found on November 2, 2010, buried at a beach in Waterfoot, County Antrim.[138] | Murdered | data-sort-value="13607" | 37 years | |||
| 1973 | Kim Dae-jung | 49 | Japan | South Korean dissident leader who was kidnapped by the KCIA on August 8, 1973, during a conference in Tokyo, Japan. Dae-jung was drugged and moved from Japan to South Korea, but was eventually rescued by the Japanese authorities.[139] | Found alive | 5 days | |||||
| 1973 | Brian McDermott | 10 | United Kingdom | Young Northern Irish child who disappeared from Belfast on 2 September 1973. His body was found a week after he went missing in a sack in the River Lagan. His murder remains unsolved but his brother is the prime suspect in the case.[140] | Murdered | 7 days | |||||
| 1973 | Carol Ann Cooper | 15 | United Kingdom | Cooper was a child that was staying at a Worcester children's home. On 10 November 1973, she was allowed to travel to visit her grandmother but disappeared after boarding a bus back to the home. Extensive police enquiries failed to locate her. In 1994, her body was found in the cellar of notorious serial killers Fred and Rose West. She had been abducted by them during her journey and murdered. | Murdered | 21 years | |||||
| 1973 | Thomas Niedermayer | 45 | United Kingdom | German industrialist and managing director of a Grundig factory in Belfast, Northern Ireland who was kidnapped and subsequently killed by the Provisional IRA on December 27, 1973. His body was located by the Royal Ulster Constabulary in March 1980.[141] | Murdered | 7 years | |||||
| 1973 | Lisa Ann French | 9 | United States of America | Kidnapped, sexually assaulted and ultimately murdered by her neighbor, Gerald Miles Turner Jr., while out trick-or-treating on Halloween. French's body was later found stuffed in a garbage bag in a field near Taycheedah, Wisconsin.[142] | Murdered | 4 days | |||||
| 1973 | Svante Grände | 26 | Chile | Swedish aid worker who disappeared in Southern Chile following the 1973 Chilean coup d'état. He later resurfaced in Argentina, as part of a guerilla group fighting against the regime of Augusto Pinochet.[143] | Found alive | Unknown | |||||
| 1973 | Maurício Grabois | 61 | Brazil | Brazilian politician and founder of the Communist Party of Brazil who later started recruiting guerilla fighters to fight against the government. According to military reports, he was killed in Tocantins on December 25, 1973, but his body was never recovered.[144] | Murdered | Never found | |||||
| data-sort-value="1973-12-27" | 1973 | Lucy Partington | 21 | United Kingdom | 21-year-old University of Exeter student Lucy Partington, cousin of writer Martin Amis, disappeared from a bus stop on the night of December 27, 1973.[145] At 9am on March 6, 1994, her remains were found buried under the cellar at 25 Cromwell Street Gloucester, the home of notorious serial killers Fred and Rose West. It is believed she had been tortured, sexually abused and then murdered around January 2, 1974, as Fred West checked himself into Gloucester Hospital with a serious wound to his right hand that needed several stitches at 12.25am on January 3, 1974[146] [147] that was probably received while he dismembered her body. Seventy-two of her bones had been removed by West.[148] [149] | Murdered | data-sort-value="0021" | 20 years | |||
| 1974 | Hernán Valdés | 40 | Chile | Hernán Valdés was a Chilean writer kidnapped by civilian agents in a case of mistaken identity following Augusto Pinochet's coup d'état in February 1974. After spending more than a month in prison, where he was tortured by the guards, he was released and fled to Europe, where he would later write a book on the Chilean dictatorship.[150] | Found alive | 1 month | |||||
| 1974 | Carol Platt Valenzuela | 20 | United States of America | Carol Platt Valenzuela disappeared on August 4, 1974, during a hitchhiking journey from Camas, Washington to Vancouver. A married woman and mother to two young children, she had no known involvement in prostitution or any documented criminal history. A hunter found her skeletal remains in the Dole Valley, just outside Vancouver, on October 12, 1974. Interestingly, her remains were located in close proximity to those of Morrison.[151] | Died (unknown cause) | 2 months and 8 days | |||||
| 1974 | Carla Walker | 17 | United States of America | Student who was kidnapped from her boyfriend's car in Fort Worth on February 17, 1974. Her body, showing signs of rape, torture and strangulation, was found in a drainage ditch three days later. Her killer, Glen Samuel McCurley, was identified via DNA in 2020 and sentenced to life imprisonment.[152] | Murdered | 3 days | |||||
| 1974 | Therese Siegenthaler | 21 | United Kingdom | Woman who disappeared while hitchhiking from London to Ireland during Easter 1974. A police investigation that lasted a number of years failed to find her. In 1994 her body was found in the Gloucester home of serial killers Fred and Rose West. They had abducted and murdered her, along with 11 other women. | Murdered | 20 years | |||||
| data-sort-value="1974-02-01" | 1974 | Lynda Ann Healy | 21 | United States of America | Victim of serial killer Ted Bundy. Healy was beaten unconscious, and Bundy dressed her in her blue jeans, a white blouse, and boots; and was carried away by him. She was then decapitated and dismembered post-mortem and her mandible was recovered at Taylor Mountain, Washington site in 1975 and was matched through dental records. | Murdered | data-sort-value="13607" | Body found in 1975 | |||
| data-sort-value="1974-03-12" | 1974 | Donna Gail Manson | 19 | United States of America | Victim of serial killer Ted Bundy. Manson was abducted while she was walking to a concert at Evergreen State College and her body was left (according to Bundy) at Taylor Mountain site and she was never found. | Murdered | data-sort-value="13607" | 15 years | |||
| data-sort-value="1974-04-17" | 1974 | Susan Elaine Rancourt | 18 | United States of America | Victim of serial killer Ted Bundy. Rancourt disappeared after attending an evening advisors' meeting at Central Washington State College; her skull and mandible were recovered at Taylor Mountain site in 1975. | Murdered | data-sort-value="13607" | Rediscovered in 1975 | |||
| 1974 | Quek Lee Eng | 53 | Singapore | On 9 May 1974, 53-year-old Quek Lee Eng mysteriously disappeared after she last departed her home to go to her sister-in-law's house, and she was reported missing by her family. Two days later, a severed pair of legs belonging to Quek were discovered at a disused toilet in a mosque at Aljunied, and the police arrested 44-year-old Sim Joo Keow, Quek's sister-in-law who was the last person together with Quek before she went missing. Sim later confessed that she strangled Quek after they argued over a S$2,000 debt which Sim owed to Quek. Quek's upper and lower torso were both found hidden in the earthen jars placed in Sim's house, and a parcel containing Quek's severed head and arms was also found alongside Kallang River. Originally charged with murder, Sim pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of manslaughter and concealing evidence, and sentenced to ten years in jail on 27 January 1975.[153] | Murdered | 2 days | |||||
| 1974 | Gloria Nadine Knutson | 19 | United States of America | A student who disappeared while walking home from a Vancouver, Washington nightclub on May 31, 1974. Her body was discovered close to Lacamas Lake in May 1978. She is strongly believed to have been murdered by suspected serial killer Warren Forrest.[154] | Murdered | 4 years | |||||
| data-sort-value="1974-06-04" | 1974 | John Hely-Hutchinson, 7th Earl of Donoughmore | 71 | Ireland | Lord Donoughmore was a former Member of Parliament (MP). He and his wife were kidnapped from Knocklofty House, Clonmel in the Republic of Ireland in June 1974 by the IRA. The objective behind their kidnapping was to add pressure on both the British and Irish Governments to address the demands of IRA prisoners on hunger strike in British prisons. Both were held captive for five days before being released unharmed by their captors.[155] | Found alive | data-sort-value="13607" | 5 days | |||
| 1974 | David Kraiselburd | 62 | Argentina | Argentine journalist who condemned the actions of both right and left-wing paramilitary organizations during the Dirty War in 1974. On June 25, 1974, he was kidnapped by the Montoneros, a left-wing paramilitary organization, and later killed by them when police raided their hideout.[156] | Murdered | Less than 1 month | |||||
| data-sort-value="1974-07-14" | 1974 | Denise Marie Naslund | 19 | United States of America | Victim of serial killer Ted Bundy. Naslund was abducted four hours after Ott from Lake Sammamish State Park in Issaquah; her skeletal remains were recovered at the Issaquah site in 1974. | Murdered | data-sort-value="13607" | Body found in 1974 | |||
| data-sort-value="1974-07-26" | 1974 | Ruth Marie Terry | 37 | United States of America | On July 26, 1974, the decomposing body of a woman was found by a 12-year-old girl in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The woman, who is believed to have died from a blow to the head, was missing both hands, a forearm, and several teeth. The body was exhumed in 1980, 2000, and 2013 in unsuccessful efforts to identify the woman. On October 31, 2022, the FBI announced the identification of the decedent as 37-year-old Ruth Marie Terry, who had been reported missing by her husband in the summer of 1974. Terry's murder remains unsolved.[157] | Murdered | data-sort-value="17629" | 48 years | |||
| data-sort-value="1974-08-24" | 1974 | Inshirah Moussa | 36–37 | Egypt | Moussa and her partner, Ibrahim Shaheen, were an Egyptian couple who, from June 1967, worked for the Israeli intelligence service Mossad. Both were arrested by Egyptian Intelligence Services in August 1974; each was tried and sentenced to death by hanging. Shaheen was executed in 1977, whereas Moussa was pardoned following an appeal to Anwar Sadat by Israeli authorities the same year. Moussa subsequently disappeared and then relocated to Israel with her three children. She later converted to Judaism.[158] | Released | data-sort-value="2920" | 3 years | |||
| 1974 | Linda Pagano | 17 | United States of America | Pagano was a teenager who disappeared from Akron, Ohio on September 1, 1974, following a fight with her stepfather, Byron Claflin, the previous night. Initially, law enforcement thought Pagano had run away. On February 5, 1975, an unidentified partial skeleton was found in Strongsville, Ohio. The skeleton belonged to a young white female, and the cause of death had been a gunshot to the head. The case was never connected with Pagano, and due to a clerical error, the unidentified body was never added to NamUs or other databases of unidentified. In 2016, the skeleton was rediscovered by an amateur genealogist looking through records of the cemetery where the young woman was buried. In 2018, forensic DNA analysis confirmed the remains found in 1975 as belonging to Pagano. The key suspect in her case has since died.[159] | Murdered | 44 years | |||||
| 1974 | The Cowden family | Various | United States of America | On September 1, 1974, the Cowden family mysteriously vanished from a campground in Copper, Oregon. Their bodies were found Carberry Creek, with the adults shot in the head, one of the children bludgeoned and the other dead from an unknown cause. Convicted murderer Dwaine Little is the prime suspect in the murders, but has never been charged.[160] | Murdered | 7 months | |||||
| data-sort-value="1974-09" | 1974 | Martha Morrison | 17 | United States of America | Martha Morrison disappeared some time in September 1974. On October 12, 1974, the remains of two women were found in Dole Valley near Vancouver, Washington. One victim was quickly identified as Carol Platt Valenzuela, who had been reported missing, but the other set remained unidentified. In 2015 Martha Morrison's remains were identified by means of DNA profiling after they were found to have been mislabeled by the police as Carol Platt Valenzuela.[161] [162] | Murdered | data-sort-value="14600" | 40 years | |||
| data-sort-value="1974-09-06" rowspan="2" | 1974 | Brooks Bracewell | data-sort-value="012" | 12 | United States of America | 12-year-old Brooks Bracewell and 14-year-old Georgia Caroline Geer were both last seen at the UtoteM convenience store off of Interstate 45 on September 6, 1974. Though some remains were discovered by police in Alvin, Texas in 1976, they remained unidentified until April 1981.[163] | Murdered | data-sort-value="2402" rowspan="2" | 6 years | ||
| Georgia Caroline Geer | data-sort-value="014" | 14 | United States of America | ||||||||
| 1974 | Arlis Kay Perry | 19 | United States of America | A 19-year-old American newlywed who was murdered inside Stanford Memorial Church, within the grounds of Stanford University in California, on October 12, 1974. Her body was discovered displayed in a ritualistic and degrading position close to the altar of the church the following day. Her alleged murderer was identified via DNA profiling in 2018, but died by suicide before he was apprehended.[164] | Murdered | 1 day | |||||
| data-sort-value="1974-10-18" | 1974 | Melissa Anne Smith | 17 | United States of America | Victim of serial killer Ted Bundy. Smith vanished from Midvale, Utah and her body was found nine days later on a hillside in Summit Park.[165] She was beaten, raped, sodomized, and strangled with nylon stockings. Bundy shampooed Smith's hair and applied makeup to her post-mortem. | Murdered | data-sort-value="13607" | Body found on October 27, 1974 | |||
| data-sort-value="1974-10-31" | 1974 | Laura Ann Aime | 17 | United States of America | Victim of serial killer Ted Bundy. Aime disappeared from Lehi, Utah, her body discovered by hikers in American Fork Canyon roughly a month later. She was beaten, raped, sodomized, and strangled with nylon stockings. Bundy shampooed Aime's hair and applied makeup to her post-mortem. | Murdered | data-sort-value="13607" | Body found on November 28, 1974 | |||
| 1974 | Shirley Hubbard | 15 | United Kingdom | Girl who disappeared from Worcester, England on 14 November 1974 while walking home from work. Police investigations failed to find any trace of her. In 1994 her body was found buried at the home of notorious Gloucester serial killers Fred and Rose West, who in total killed 12 women. Hubbard had been abducted by them in their car and murdered. | Murdered | 20 years | |||||
| 1974 | Mohamed Azad Mohamed Hussein | 29 | Singapore | Mohamed Azad went missing in Singapore on 16 November 1974, after he last went to his fiancée's house to meet his future father-in-law. Five days later, his body was discovered inside a gunny sack washed up the shore of Kallang Basin, with severe open wounds on his head, indicating that he had been murdered. Nadarajah Govindasamy, a businessman and father of Mohamed Azad's fiancée, was charged with the murder, and later sentenced in August 1975 to execution by hanging at Changi Prison on 28 January 1977.[166] [167] [168] [169] [170] | Murdered | data-sort-value="13607" | Five days | ||||
| 1974 | Betty Van Patter | 45 | United States of America | Van Patter was a bookkeeper for the Black Panther Party who disappeared on December 13, 1974, and her body later found on a beach in the San Francisco Bay. It's believed she was murdered by party members when she threatened to reveal that they had major tax problems, but nobody has been charged in her murder to this day.[171] | Murdered | 5 weeks | |||||
| 1974 | Janet Lesley Stewart | 15 | United Kingdom | British schoolgirl who went missing from Manchester on New Year's Eve, 1974. Two years later police found the dismembered body of a woman on waste ground in the Newton Heath area of the city, which was identified as Stewart's. She and two other women in Manchester had been killed by serial killer Trevor Hardy.[172] | Murdered | 2 years | |||||
| 1975 | Lesley Whittle | 17 | United Kingdom | Whittle was a British heiress who was kidnapped and held for ransom at a drainage reservoir at Bathpool Park by serial killer Donald Neilson on January 14, 1975. She was killed on the same day, but her body was found months later. Neilson would later be convicted of her and another three murders, receiving four life sentences.[173] | Murdered | 2 months | |||||
| 1975 | Marcia Trimble | 9 | United States of America | Girl Scout who was kidnapped, sexually assaulted and finally strangled while delivering cookies in Nashville, Tennessee on February 25, 1975. Her body was found on Easter Sunday, but her murder remained unsolved until 2008, when Jerome Sidney Barrett was convicted and sentenced to 44 years' imprisonment for her murder.[174] | Murdered | 33 days | |||||
| data-sort-value="1975-01-12" rowspan="1" | 1975 | Caryn Eileen Campbell | 23 | United States of America | Victim of serial killer Ted Bundy. On January 12, a registered nurse named Caryn Eileen Campbell disappeared while walking down a well-lit hallway between the elevator and her room at the Wildwood Inn (now the Wildwood Lodge) in Snowmass Village, 400miles southeast of Salt Lake City. Her nude body was found a month later next to a dirt road just outside the resort. She had been killed by blows to her head from a blunt instrument that left distinctive linear grooved depressions on her skull; her body also bore deep cuts from a sharp weapon. | Murdered | data-sort-value="14600" | 36 days later | |||
| data-sort-value="1975-03-15" rowspan="1" | 1975 | Julie Cunningham | 26 | United States of America | Victim of serial killer Ted Bundy. On March 15, northeast of Snowmass, Vail ski instructor Julie Cunningham, disappeared while walking from her apartment to a dinner date with a friend. Bundy later told Colorado investigators that he approached Cunningham on crutches and asked her to help carry his ski boots to his car, where he clubbed and handcuffed her before sexually assaulting and strangling her at a secondary site near Rifle, west of Vail. Weeks later, he made the six-hour drive from Salt Lake City to revisit her remains. | Murdered | data-sort-value="14600" | 15 years | |||
| data-sort-value="1975-03-25" rowspan="2" | 1975 | Katherine Lyon | 10 | United States of America | Katherine and Sheila Lyon disappeared on March 25, 1975[175] while walking home from a nearby mall in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. In 2014 Lloyd Lee Welch, a criminal serving time in a Delaware prison for molesting a child in that state, became a person of interest after cold-case investigators in Montgomery County, Maryland followed up on an interview he gave to a detective at the time of the girls' disappearance. In 2015 Welch was formally indicted and in September 2017, he pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree murder "for the abduction and killing of Katherine and Shelia Lyon in 1975". Police said he had burned their bodies. | Murdered | data-sort-value="14600" | 40 years | |||
| Sheila Lyon | 12 | United States of America | data-sort-value="14600" | 40 years | |||||||
| data-sort-value="1975-04-15" | 1975 | Melanie Suzanne Cooley | 18 | United States of America | A high school student who vanished after leaving Nederland High School in Nederland, Colorado on April 15, 1975. Her body was discovered in Coal Creek Canyon on May 2. She had been bludgeoned with a large rock and strangled. Cooley's murder has been tentatively linked to Ted Bundy, although her murder remains an open case.[176] | Murdered | data-sort-value="13514" | 17 days | |||
| data-sort-value="1975-07-07" | 1975 | Priscilla Ann Blevins | 27 | United States of America | Priscilla Ann Blevins was a 27-year-old woman who was last seen alive at her home in Charlotte, North Carolina on July 7, 1975. Her remains were discovered nearly a decade later along Interstate 40 in Waynesville, North Carolina on March 29, 1985. Blevins remained unidentified for an additional 27 years; her identity was determined via DNA and dental records in 2012.[177] | Murdered | data-sort-value="13514" | 37 years | |||
| data-sort-value="1975-07-31" | 1975 | John Butkovich | data-sort-value="018" | 18 | United States of America | A PDM Contractors employee who vanished without a trace in July 1975. The day before his disappearance, Butkovich confronted John Wayne Gacy about overdue wages. Gacy strangled Butkovich to death on July 31, 1975, and buried him under the concrete floor of the tool room extension of his garage. Butkovich's remains were recovered on December 22, 1978, and was conclusively identified on December 29, 1978.[178] | Murdered | data-sort-value="1247" | 3 years | ||
| 1975 | Helen Bailey | 8 | United Kingdom | British child Helen Bailey disappeared while playing near her home in Great Barr, Birmingham, on 10 August 1975. The next day her body was found on a farm, her throat had been cut. An inquest in 1976 concluded she may have died as a result of an "accident or practical joke gone wrong", but it has since come to light that she was strangled before her throat was cut and her case has been reclassified as murder. No one has been convicted of her murder as of 2021, despite a prisoner making a plausible confession in 1979.[179] | Murdered | 1 day | |||||
| 1975 | Margaret Fetterolf | 16 | United States of America | Student and frequent runaway who vanished from her home in Alexandria, Virginia in the summer of 1975. Her body was found on September 11, 1976, in Woodlawn, Maryland, showing signs of sexual assault and strangulation, but her killer(s) have not been arrested. She was not immediately identified, and was known as "Woodlawn Jane Doe" until her positive identification in 2021.[180] | Murdered | 45 years | |||||
| 1975 | Linda Kay Harmon | 17 | United States of America | Harmon was the first victim of serial killer Larry Ralston; she disappeared on her way to school. Her skeletal remains were discovered one month later.[181] | Murdered | 1 month | |||||
| data-sort-value="1975-09-24" | 1975 | Pat Lowther | 40 | Canada | Pat Lowther was a Canadian poet from Vancouver, British Columbia who disappeared on September 24, 1975. Her body was found three weeks later in a creek near Squamish, British Columbia and her husband was convicted in 1977 of killing her.[182] | Murdered | data-sort-value="0021" | 3 weeks | |||
| 1975 | Tiede Herrema | 54 | Ireland | Dutch businessman who ran a factory in Limerick, Ireland, who was abducted by the Provisional IRA near his home in Castletroy on October 3, 1975. He was held in a house in Monasterevin during a two-week standoff between his kidnappers and the police, but was eventually released without incident.[183] | Found alive | 2 weeks | |||||
| 1975 | Lesley Molseed | 11 | United Kingdom | Molseed was an English girl who was kidnapped from her home in Rochdale, and subsequently sexually assaulted and murdered by her abductor. Molseed's body was found three days later, and a mentally ill man was erroneously convicted of her murder but later exonerated in 1992. Molseed's actual killer, Ronald Castree, was identified via DNA evidence in 2006, and sentenced to life imprisonment.[184] | Murdered | 3 days | |||||
| 1975 | Anna Mae Aquash | 30 | United States of America | The body of Native American civil rights activist Anna Mae Aquash was found at Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota on February 24, 1976. She had been missing for two months.[185] | Murdered | data-sort-value="0060" | 2 months | ||||
| 1975 | Stephen Menheniott | 18 | United Kingdom | Menheniott, a British teenager with severe learning difficulties, disappeared from his home on the Isles of Scilly on Christmas Day 1975. His parents claimed he had gone to the mainland to visit a girlfriend, but his dentist had been troubled by the injuries he had seen on Menheniott and reported his concerns to the police. His body was found on 1 March 1977, crudely buried in the local graveyard. He had been murdered by his abusive parents, most likely in the first weeks of 1976. The case gained notoriety because it was a rare example of murder on the islands.[186] | Murdered | 2 years | |||||
| 1975 | Terry Peder Rasmussen | 32 | United States of America | Terry Peder Rasmussen was last seen by his family in Christmas of 1975 or 1976 with an unidentified woman. Rasmussen, under multiple aliases, would go on to commit numerous crimes, including the Bear Brook murders and the murder of his wife Eunsoon Jun. While serving a 15 years to life in prison for Jun's murder, Rasmussen died in 2010 under a pseudonym. His name would not be tied to the Bear Brook murders until 2017, and his real name would also not be revealed until later that year through the use of Y-DNA testing.[187] [188] | Died in prison | 42 years | |||||
| 1976 | Deborah Diane Smith | 17 | United States of America | 17-year-old Deborah Diane Smith disappeared in Salt Lake City, Utah in early February 1976. Her body was discovered by a Utah Power and Light worker checking on poles in an open pasture near Salt Lake City International Airport on April 1, 1976. Serial killer Ted Bundy is believed by some to be responsible for Smith's homicide, though he was never convicted of this murder.[189] | Murdered | 2 months | |||||
| 1976 | Franz Jalics | 49 | Argentina | Hungarian Jesuit priest kidnapped by a death squad in Argentina during the Dirty War. He and another hostage, Orlando Yorio, were held captive for five months before being released by their captors.[190] | Found alive | 5 months | |||||
| 1976 | P. Rajan | Unknown | India | Student at the National Institute of Technology Calicut who was abducted and tortured by Indian police on March 1, 1976, succumbing to his injuries. His remains were never retrieved, despite repeated inquiries from his family which brought the case to national attention.[191] | Murdered | Never found | |||||
| 1976 | Guillermo Vargas Aignasse | 33 | Argentina | Argentine Peronist politician who served as the Provincial Senator for the Tucumán Province until the 1976 Argentine coup d'état, when he was abducted by security forces. He has never been found, but two officers were later convicted of his suspected murder and sentenced to life imprisonment in 2008.[192] | Murdered | Never found | |||||
| data-sort-value="1976-04-06" | 1976 | Darrell Samson | data-sort-value="018" | 18 | United States of America | Darrell Samson was last seen alive on April 6, 1976, in Chicago, Illinois. That same day, he was kidnapped and murdered by John Wayne Gacy. Gacy buried him underneath his dining room, with cloth lodged in his throat. | Murdered | data-sort-value="1321" | 3 years | ||
| data-sort-value="1951-04-19" | 1976 | John Roselli | 71 | United States of America | A mobster in the Chicago Outfit, on April 23, 1976, Roselli was called before the committee to testify about a conspiracy to kill President John F. Kennedy.[193] Three months after his first round of testimony, the Committee wanted to recall Roselli, only to learn he had been missing since July 28, 1976. On August 3, Senator Howard Baker, a member of the new SSCIA, requested that the FBI investigate Roselli's disappearance. On August 9, 1976, Roselli's decomposing body was found by a fisherman in a 55-gallon steel fuel drum floating in Dumfoundling Bay near Miami, Florida. | Murdered | data-sort-value="0012" | 12 days | |||
| 1976 | Randall Reffett | data-sort-value="015" | 15 | United States of America | On May 14, 1976, Randall Reffett disappeared in Chicago, Illinois, shortly after returning home from a dental appointment. Just hours after Reffett was last seen alive, Samuel Stapleton also vanished without a trace as he walked home from his sister's apartment; the two teenagers were close acquaintaces with each other. They were both murdered by John Wayne Gacy in the same evening and buried underneath his crawl space. | Murdered | data-sort-value="1063" | 2 years | |||
| Samuel Stapleton | data-sort-value="014" | 14 | data-sort-value="1279" | 3 years | |||||||
| 1976 | Margarita Trlin | 21 | Argentina | Argentine architect who was kidnapped in August 1976 during the Dirty War and held in various detention centers, where she was physically and mentally tortured by military officers. She was later released following an Executive Decree.[194] | Found alive | 7 months | |||||
| 1976 | Nancy Lourie Grigsby | 22 | United States of America | A victim of serial killer Larry Ralston. Grigsby is believed to have been abducted while hitchhiking in Clifton, Ohio on May 4, 1976. Her skeletal remains were discovered in woodland in Clermont County six months later. Grigsby's murderer is known to have become acquainted with her through drinking at a tavern frequented by both in the year prior to her disappearance.[195] | Murdered | 6 months | |||||
| data-sort-value="1976-06-03" | 1976 | Michael Bonnin | data-sort-value="017" | 17 | United States of America | On June 3, 1976, Michael Bonnin disappeared while traveling from Chicago to Waukegan. He was killed by John Wayne Gacy, who strangled with him a ligature and buried him underneath his spare bedroom. | Murdered | data-sort-value="947" | 2 years | ||
| 1976 | David Stack | 18 | United States of America | Stack was a hitchhiker who was killed on June 9, 1976, by unknown assailants while travelling from Colorado to Utah, with his body found one day later in rural Tooele County. His body remained unidentified until 2015, and his killers remain unknown.[196] | Murdered | 39 years | |||||
| data-sort-value="1976-06-13" | 1976 | William Carroll Jr. | data-sort-value="016" | 16 | United States of America | On June 13, 1976, John Wayne Gacy lured teenager William Carroll Jr. to his home; he was never seen alive again. Gacy shortly thereafter murdered him. Carroll was buried in a common grave in Gacy's crawl space. | Murdered | data-sort-value="1007" | 2 years | ||
| 1976 | Dora Bloch | 74–75 | Uganda | Bloch was an Israeli-British citizen who was held hostage during the hijacking of Air France Flight 139 on June 27, 1976. She suffered an illness during the process and the plane was landed in Kampala, Uganda for treatment, but an indeterminate amount of time later, Bloch's body was found in a sugar plantation. It was determined that she had been killed on orders of then-President Idi Amin.[197] | Murdered | Unknown | |||||
| 1976 | Carol Ann Park | 30 | United Kingdom | British woman who went missing from her Cumbria home on 17 July 1976. Her husband, Gordon Park, did not report her disappearance for six weeks, claiming she had gone to live with another man. In 1997 amateur divers found her body in Coniston Water, where Park was known to sail, and her case became known as the "Lady in the Lake". Gordon Park was convicted of her murder.[198] | Murdered | 21 years | |||||
| 1976 | Cecelia Genatiempo | 17 | United States of America | High school student abducted, raped and murdered by serial killer John W. Hopkins. Her body was buried in a shallow grave, and was discovered by hunters three months later.[199] | Murdered | 3 months | |||||
| data-sort-value="1976-08-05" | 1976 | James Haakenson | data-sort-value="016" | 16 | United States of America | On August 5, 1976, James Haakenson was last heard phoning his family, possibly from John Wayne Gacy's home shortly before his murder. Haakenson died of suffocation. He remained unidentified for four whole decades, before his identification on July 19, 2017. | Murdered | data-sort-value="14958" | 40 years | ||
| data-sort-value="1976-08-06" | 1976 | Rick Johnston | data-sort-value="017" | 17 | United States of America | On August 6, 1976, just 24 hours after the murder of James Haakenson, Rick Johnston was also murdered by John Wayne Gacy. His body was buried in Gacy's crawl space on top of Haakenson's body. | Murdered | data-sort-value="878" | 2 years | ||
| 1976 | Kenneth Parker | data-sort-value="016" | 16 | United States of America | On October 24, 1976, teenage friends Kenneth Parker and Michael Marino disappeared after last being seen on Clark Street in Chicago, Illinois. They were abducted and killed by John Wayne Gacy. | Murdered | 3 years | ||||
| Michael Marino | data-sort-value="014" | 14 | |||||||||
| data-sort-value="1976-10-26" | 1976 | William Bundy | data-sort-value="019" | 19 | United States of America | On October 26, 1976, two days after the deaths of Kenneth Parker and Michael Marino, construction worker William Bundy also disappeared after informing his family he was to attend a party. He was suffocated by John Wayne Gacy. He remained identified for 35 years before his November 2011 identification. | Murdered | data-sort-value="12817" | 35 years | ||
| 1976 | Renee MacRae | 36 | United Kingdom | Scottish woman Renee MacRae and her son Andrew were last seen on 12 November 1976. Their bodies have never been found. In September 2022, William MacDowell was found guilty of the murder of MacRae and her son and sentenced to a minimum of 30 years in prison.[200] | Murdered | Not found | |||||
| Andrew MacRae | 3 | United Kingdom | |||||||||
| data-sort-value="1976-12-01" | 1976 | Francis Alexander | data-sort-value="021" | 21 | United States of America | Sometime around December 1, 1976, Francis Alexander was murdered by John Wayne Gacy. His last contact with his family was a phone call to his mother sometime in November and his family did not report him missing as they believed he had moved to California shortly thereafter and started afresh. He remained unidentified for 44 years before having his identity confirmed on October 25, 2021. | Murdered | data-sort-value="16399" | 44 years | ||
| 1976 | George Seitz | 81 | United States of America | George Seitz was an American military veteran of World War I who disappeared on December 10, 1976, in Jamaica in New York City after he was murdered. Some of his remains were discovered and identified in 2019.[201] Martin Motta pleaded guilty to his murder in October 2022, and received a 20-year sentence.[202] | Murdered | 43 years | |||||
| data-sort-value="1976-12-12" | 1976 | Gregory Godzik | data-sort-value="017" | 17 | United States of America | In December 1976, Gregory Godzik disappeared. He was last seen alive by his girlfriend outside her house. Godzik had started working for John Wayne Gacy less than three weeks before his disappearance; he was later murdered by Gacy on December 12, 1976. Godzik's car was later found abandoned and his family had contacted Gacy about Godzik's disappearance, with Gacy claiming that Godzik had expressed desire to run away from home; he also claimed to have received an answering machine message from Godzik shortly after he had disappeared. When asked if he could play the message for Godzik's parents, Gacy said he had erased it. | Murdered | data-sort-value="747" | 2 years | ||
| 1976 | Evelyn Colon | 15 | United States of America | The dismembered remains of Colon, a pregnant teenager from New Jersey, were found stuffed in several suitcases in White Haven, Pennsylvania in 1976. She remained unidentified for over four decades, known only as "Beth Doe". In 2021, she was officially identified, and in response, authorities arrested her then-boyfriend, Luis Sierra, and charged him with the murder. He is now awaiting trial for the murder.[203] | Murdered | 45 years | |||||
| 1977 | Elaina Marie Bear | 15 | United States of America | Bear was the fourth victim of serial killer Larry Ralston; she disappeared while hitchhiking home. Her nude, frozen remains were discovered in a Clinton County creek bed six weeks later. | Murdered | Six weeks | |||||
| data-sort-value="1977-01-20" | 1977 | John Szyc | data-sort-value="019" | 19 | United States of America | On January 20, 1977, John Syzc was never seen alive again after being lured into John Wayne Gacy's car on the pretext of buying Syzc's Plymouth Satellite. Gacy later confessed to strangling the youth in his spare bedroom, as well as selling Szyc's car to an employee. | Murdered | data-sort-value="708" | 1 year | ||
| 1977 | Dagmar Hagelin | 17 | Argentina | Swedish-Argentine teenager who was kidnapped, tortured and later killed by Argentine military officers during the Dirty War on January 27, 1977. Her death is believed to be a result of mistaken identity.[204] | Murdered | Never found | |||||
| 1977 | Adriana Calvo | 30 | Argentina | Physicist, university professor and researcher who was kidnapped and detained by the Argentine military dictatorship on February 4, 1977. She was released together with her newborn daughter on April 28, and was the first witness to testify at the later Trial of the Juntas in 1985.[205] | Found alive | 2 months | |||||
| data-sort-value="1977-03-15" | 1977 | Jon Prestidge | data-sort-value="020" | 20 | United States of America | On March 15, 1977, Jon Prestidge disappeared and was last seen alive exiting a Near North Side restaurant in Chicago. John Wayne Gacy likely murdered him in the hours that followed. Shortly before his disappearance, Prestidge had mentioned he had obtained work with a local contractor. | Murdered | data-sort-value="662" | 1 year | ||
| 1977 | Guido De Martino | 34 | Italy | Italian politician and member of the Socialist Party who was kidnapped and held hostage by the Camorra, but was released after the ransom of one billion lire was paid.[206] | Found alive | 6 weeks | |||||
| 1977 | Gordon Sanderson | 26 | Canada | Gordon Sanderson was a migrant worked whose body was found in a septic tank in Lindbrook, Canada on April 13, 1977. He had been shot to death, possibly up to a year before his body was found. Until his identification in 2021, he was referred to as "Septic Tank Sam".[207] | Murdered | 44 years | |||||
| 1977 | Pilar Calveiro | 24 | Argentina | Argentine political scientist by a member of the Air Force on May 7, 1977, and held in detention by the military dictatorship. After her release, she went into exile in Mexico, where she has continued work to this day.[208] | Found alive | 1 year and a half | |||||
| data-sort-value="1948-08-31" | 1977 | Robert Nairac | 28 | United Kingdom | Nairac was a British Army officer in 14 Intelligence Company who was abducted from a pub in Dromintee, County Armagh, during an undercover operation on May 15, 1977, during his fourth tour of duty in Northern Ireland as a Military Intelligence Liaison Officer. It was later revealed that Nairac was killed by the Provisional Irish Republican Army. Although several individuals were convicted of Nairac's murder, his body has never been found. He is one of three individuals murdered by the IRA whose graves have never been revealed.[209] | Murdered | data-sort-value="0012" | 6 months | |||
| 1977 | Javier Ybarra Bergé | 64 | Spain | Spanish industrialist and writer who was kidnapped by ETA separatists from his home in Bilbao on May 20, 1977. While he was initially held for ransom, Ybarra was later killed by his captors and his body dumped in a farmhouse, where he was located by authorities. His killers have never been apprehended.[210] | Murdered | 1 month | |||||
| data-sort-value="1977-07-05" | 1977 | Matthew Bowman | data-sort-value="019" | 19 | United States of America | On July 5, 1977, Matthew Bowman disappeared after his mother last saw him at a suburban train station; he had intended to travel to Harwood Heights, Illinois for a court appointment. Shortly after vanishing, he was killed by John Wayne Gacy. | Murdered | data-sort-value="573" | 1 year | ||
| 1977 | Elizabeth Roberts | 17 | United States of America | Elizabeth Roberts, formerly known as "Precious Jane Doe", was a teenage girl who went missing on July 25, 1977[211] from Roseburg, Oregon and was found dead in Everett, Washington on 14 August 1977 after being murdered. She was not identified until 43 years later. | Murdered | Less than one month | |||||
| 1977 | Hanns Martin Schleyer | 62 | West Germany | German business executive and industry representative with SS ties who was kidnapped by RAF guerillas on September 5, 1977. His kidnappers demanded that the Germans free several of their members, but after learning that they had died in prison, they drove towards Brussels, executing Schleyer near Mulhouse, France, on October 18.[212] | Murdered | 1 month | |||||
| data-sort-value="1977-09-15" | 1977 | Robert Gilroy Jr. | data-sort-value="018" | 18 | United States of America | 18-year-old Robert Gilroy Jr., the son of a Chicago police sergeant, was last seen alive on September 15, 1976. He was murdered by John Wayne Gacy and lived four blocks from Gacy's house. He was buried in Gacy's crawl space. | Murdered | data-sort-value="478" | 1 year | ||
| data-sort-value="1977-09-25" | 1977 | John Mowery | data-sort-value="019" | 19 | United States of America | On September 25, 1977, former U.S. Marine John Mowery disappeared after leaving his mother's house. John Wayne Gacy strangled Mowery and buried his body beneath his master bedroom. | Murdered | data-sort-value="489" | 1 year | ||
| data-sort-value="1977-10-17" | 1977 | Russell Nelson | data-sort-value="021" | 21 | United States of America | On October 17, 1977, Russell Nelson disappeared after last being seen outside a bar in Chicago, Illinois, looking for contracting work. He was never seen alive again. He was murdered by John Wayne Gacy and buried his body underneath his guest bedroom. | Murdered | data-sort-value="446" | 1 year | ||
| data-sort-value="1977-11-09" | 1977 | Evelyn Jane King | 28 | United States of America | The fourth victim of the Hillside Stranglers. King was lured from a bus stop into her murderers' vehicle. Her body was discovered near the Los Feliz Boulevard off-ramp of the Golden State Freeway.[213] | Murdered | 14 days | ||||
| 1977 | Usharani Ganaison | 7 | Singapore | A seven-year-old schoolgirl who went missing after she went out running an errand for her father late in the night. Her family searched for her but to no avail, and they subsequently reported Usharani missing. The next day in the morning, Usharani was found dead nearby her home in Toa Payoh. An autopsy revealed the child had been sexually assaulted and strangled to death. Her uncle, Kalidass Sinnathamby Narayanasamy, was arrested two days later and due to sufficient evidence linking him to the crime, Kalidass was sentenced to death for his niece's murder.[214] [215] [216] [217] | Murdered | 12 hours | |||||
| data-sort-value="1977-11-10" | 1977 | Robert Winch | data-sort-value="016" | 16 | United States of America | On November 10, 1977, Robert Winch vanished without a trace and was murdered by John Wayne Gacy. He was buried in Gacy's crawl space. | Murdered | data-sort-value="670" | 1 year | ||
| 1977 | Dolores Cepeda | 12 | United States of America | Two school friends abducted by the Hillside Stranglers while returning home from the Eagle Rock Plaza on Colorado Boulevard in Southern California on November 13, 1977. Their strangled bodies were discovered close to the Dodger Stadium on November 20.[218] | Murdered | 7 days | |||||
| Sonja Johnson | 14 | United States of America | |||||||||
| data-sort-value="1977-11-18" | 1977 | Tommy Boling | data-sort-value="020" | 20 | United States of America | On November 18, 1977, 20-year-old Tommy Boling disappeared after leaving a bar in Chicago, Illinois. He was killed by John Wayne Gacy. | Murdered | data-sort-value="662" | 1 year | ||
| 1977 | Cheng Geok Ha | 10 | Singapore | Cheng Geok Ha was a ten-year-old schoolgirl abducted from a car park close to her home at Chai Chee, Singapore, on 25 November 1977. Her body was discovered beneath a manhole on 7 December. An autopsy revealed the child had been sexually assaulted and strangled to death. Her neighbour, Quek Kee Siong, was later sentenced to death for Cheng's murder.[219] [220] | Murdered | 12 days | |||||
| data-sort-value="1977-12-09" | 1977 | David Talsma | data-sort-value="019" | 19 | United States of America | On December 9, 1977, U.S. Marine David Talsma disappeared after telling his mother he was to attend a rock concert in Hammond, Indiana. He was lured by John Wayne Gacy to enter his house and died by cause of ligature strangulation. He was buried in Gacy's crawl space. | Murdered | data-sort-value="707" | 1 year | ||
| 1978 | Doina Bumbea | 28 | North Korea | Romanian painter who was kidnapped by North Korean agents while doing a supposed art exhibition in Pyongyang, North Korea. She was later forcefully married to American defector James Joseph Dresnok, with whom she had two children. She died of cancer in January 1997, having never returned to her homeland.[221] | Detained until her death | 19 years | |||||
| data-sort-value="1978-01-01" | 1978 | Nicholas Scibetta | 22 | United States of America | Scibetta was a New York mobster who was killed by his brother-in-law, Sammy Gravano and disappeared on New Years Day 1978. Part of the motive for the murder was that Scibetta was suspected of being gay. Scibetta was dismembered and except for an arm, his body was never found.[222] | Murdered | Body not found | ||||
| 1978 | Roberto Herrera Ibarguen | 57 | Guatemala | Guatemalan politician and member of the National Liberation Movement who was kidnapped and held hostage by a leftist militant group who accused him of organizing the murders of guerilla leaders and repressing teachers' strikes. He was released without incident after a ransom and a commander of theirs was released.[223] | Found alive | 27 days | |||||
| 1978 | Harry Domela | 78 | Unknown | Latvian-German impostor who pretended to be a deposed crown prince, for which he would be put on trial, but later acquitted. After experiencing a short term burst of popularity, he disappeared from public view until 1933, when it was learned through Dutch author Jef Last that he was living in the Netherlands under the pseudonym "Victor Zsajka".[224] After Domela was last seen alive in 1978[225] it has now been clarified that according to research done by Jens Kirsten who is a Weimar-based scholar that Domela had died in Maracaibo on October 4, 1979. | No | 1 year | |||||
| 1978 | Shin Sang-ok | 26 (both) | British Hong Kong | Shin, a South Korean film director, and Choi, an actress and his wife, were both abducted six months apart by North Korean agents on orders from Kim Jong-il. After spending three years in prison, the pair were reunited and ordered to direct movies to boost the North Korean film industry, which they did until their escape in 1986.[226] | Found alive | 8 years | |||||
| Choi Eun-hee | British Hong Kong | ||||||||||
| 1978 | Manon Dubé | 10 | Canada | Canadian girl from Quebec who disappeared from her native village of Massawippi on January 27, 1978. Her body was found on March 24, but the cause of death was never ascertained. Some theories suggest that she had been kidnapped and murdered. | Died (undetermined cause) | 2 months | |||||
| 1978 | Édouard-Jean Empain | 41 | France | French-Belgian industrialist and the CEO of the Schneider-Empain industrial holding company, Empain was kidnapped[227] and held captive by a group of men, who demanded ransom in exchange for his release. Empain would eventually be rescued and most of his abductors arrested, but would be left permanently traumatized by the event. | Found alive | More than 2 months | |||||
| data-sort-value="1978-02-16" | 1978 | William Kindred | data-sort-value="019" | 19 | United States of America | On February 16, 1978, John Wayne Gacy killed 19-year-old William Kindred, who disappeared after telling his fiancée, who knew Gacy, that he was going to a bar. He would be the final victim to be buried in Gacy's crawl space. | Murdered | data-sort-value="454" | 1 year | ||
| 1978 | Giovanna Amati | 18 | Italy | Amati was kidnapped by a trio of French gangsters, led by Jean Daniel Nieto, and held for ransom, during which she was allegedly raped by the ringleader. She was released on April 27, 1978, after the ransom of 800 million lire was paid, but the kidnappers were all later caught, including Nieto, with whom Amati had fallen in love. She later became a professional racing driver and the most recent female driver to enter the Formula One World Championship.[228] | Found alive | More than 2 months | |||||
| data-sort-value="1978-05-13" | 1978 | Charles Hattula | data-sort-value="025" | 25 | United States of America | On May 23, 1978, Charles Hattula was found deceased in the Pecatonica River near Freeport, Illinois. He had been missing since May 13. Des Plaines authorities had suspected that Hattula may have possibly been murdered by John Wayne Gacy; Hattula was known to have conflicts with Gacy. At the time of his death, Gacy had murdered at least 29 young men and boys and had disposed of many of the bodies in his crawl space. As no more bodies could fit in the crawl space, it left the possibility that he may have disposed of Hattula's body in the Pecatonica River. However, Des Plaines authorities were told Hattula had fallen to his death from a bridge, and his death was ruled as asphyxia by drowning. | Died by drowning | data-sort-value="10" | 10 days | ||
| data-sort-value="1978-06-16" | 1978 | Timothy O'Rourke | data-sort-value="020" | 20 | United States of America | Sometime between June 16–23, 1978, Timothy O'Rourke disappeared after last being known to have left his apartment to purchase cigarettes. Shortly before his disappearance, O'Rourke had told his roommate a contractor on the Northwest Side of Chicago, Illinois, had offered him a job. He was murdered by John Wayne Gacy and his body was dumped into the Des Plaines River, as Gacy had no more space for bodies in his crawl space. | Murdered | data-sort-value="204" | 6 months | ||
| data-sort-value="1978-06-18" | 1978 | Steven Hicks | 18 | United States of America | On June 18, 1978, Serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer picked up a hitchhiker named Steven Mark Hicks, who was almost 19.[229] Dahmer lured the youth to his house on the pretext of drinking. Hicks, who had been hitchhiking to a rock concert at Chippewa Lake Park, Ohio, agreed to accompany Dahmer to his house upon the promise of "a few beers" with Dahmer as he had the house to himself. According to Dahmer, the sight of the bare-chested Hicks standing at the roadside stirred his sexual feelings, although when Hicks began talking about girls, he knew any sexual passes he made would be rebuffed. After several hours of talking, drinking and listening to music, Hicks "wanted to leave and I didn't want him to leave."[230] Dahmer bludgeoned Hicks with a 10lb dumbbell. He later stated he struck Hicks twice from behind with the dumbbell as Hicks sat upon a chair. When Hicks fell unconscious, Dahmer strangled him to death with the bar of the dumbbell, then stripped the clothes from Hicks' body before exploring his chest with his hands, then masturbating as he stood above the corpse. Hours later, Dahmer dragged the body to the basement. The following day, Dahmer dissected Hicks' body in his basement. He later buried the remains in a shallow grave in his back yard. Several weeks later, he unearthed the remains and pared the flesh from the bones. He dissolved the flesh in acid before flushing the solution down the toilet. He crushed the bones with a sledgehammer and scattered them in the woodland behind the family home. | Murdered | More than 3 weeks | ||||
| 1978 | Kaoru Hasuike | 20 | Japan | Kaoru Hasuike and his then-girlfriend, Yukiko Okudo, were abducted by North Korean agents from Kashiwazaki, Niigata on July 31, 1978. The two eventually married in North Korea and gave birth to two kids before the family was repatriated to Japan in October 2002.[231] [232] | Found alive | 24 years | |||||
| 1978 | Hitomi Soga | 19 | Japan | Hitomi Soga and her mother, Miyoshi, was abducted by North Korean agents from their home island of Sado on August 12, 1978. Hitomi was able to return to Japan in October 2002, and her American husband Charles Jenkins as well as their two daughters came to Japan in July 2004. Miyoshi, however, still has not returned to Japan.[233] [234] [235] [236] | Found alive | 24 years | |||||
| data-sort-value="1978-08-22" | 1978 | Marilee Bruszer | 33 | United States of America | Marilee Bruszer went missing on August 22, 1978, from Long Beach, California. In August 2015, a body that had been discovered in Utah in September 1978 was identified as hers.[237] [238] | Murdered | data-sort-value="13483" | 37 years | |||
| data-sort-value="1978-08" | 1978 | John Dawson Dewhirst | 26 | Democratic Kampuchea | John Dawson Dewhirst was a British teacher and amateur yachtsman. He disappeared after being captured and detained as a suspected spy by the Khmer Rouge August 13, 1978. It is known that he was killed some time after October 13, 1978. No remains were found, and it was speculated that the body may have been burned.[239] | Executed | body never found | ||||
| 1978 | Marlyse Honeychurch | 24 | United States of America | Marylese Honeychurch and her two daughters, Sarah McWaters, and Marie Vaughn were last seen in November 1978 with a man claiming to be Bob Evans, who would later be identified as serial killer Terry Peder Rasmussen. The bodies of Honeychurch and Vaughn were found in a metal drum near a burned down store in the Bear Brook State Park in Allenstown, New Hampshire in 1985, while McWaters' body was found nearby in 2000 together with a still-unidentified body of a little girl, whose DNA analysis showed that she was the daughter of Rasmussen. The identity of the three other victims would not be identified until 2019, and it is believed the four victims were murdered some time between 1977 and 1981.[240] | Murdered | 3 to 7 years | |||||
| Marie Vaughn | 7 | ||||||||||
| Sarah McWaters | 11 months | 18 to 22 years | |||||||||
| 1978 | Theresa Allore | 19 | Canada | Theresa Allore was a Canadian college student who disappeared on November 3, 1978, from Champlain College Lennoxville in the Eastern Townships of Quebec and was found dead five months later.[241] | Murdered | data-sort-value="0150" | 5 months | ||||
| data-sort-value="1978-11-04" | 1978 | Frank Landingin | data-sort-value="019" | 19 | United States of America | On November 4, 1978, Frank Landingin was last seen alive by his father walking along Foster Avenue in Chicago, Illinois; he was killed by John Wayne Gacy later that day. Eight days after his disappearance, his naked body was found close to an inlet in the Des Plaines River by two duck hunters on November 12. He was identified on November 14; he was the first victim of Gacy's to be identified. | Murdered | data-sort-value="10" | 10 days | ||
| data-sort-value="1978-11-24" | 1978 | James Mazzara | data-sort-value="020" | 20 | United States of America | On November 24, 1978, James Mazzara disappeared after Thanksgiving dinner with his family; he was last seen walking in the direction of Bughouse Square. Mazzara had informed his sister the day before his disappearance that he was working in construction. He was killed by John Wayne Gacy and his body was discarded in the Des Plaines River. | Murdered | data-sort-value="36" | 1 month | ||
| data-sort-value="1978-11-24" | 1978 | Robert Piest | data-sort-value="015" | 15 | United States of America | In the late hours of December 11, 1978, teenager Robert Piest was working at the Nisson Pharmacy. He was approached by John Wayne Gacy, who mentioned that his firm often hired teenage boys almost double the pay Piest earned at the pharmacy. He lured the 15-year-old youth to his house and suffocated him. Gacy stated that Piest was "crying, scared", while also admitting to having received a phone call from a business acquaintance as Piest lay dying. He was dumped in the Des Plaines River. On April 9, 1979, a man walking along a Grundy County towpath discovered a decomposed body tangled in roots on the edge of the Des Plaines River. The body was identified via dental records as being that of Robert Piest the same evening. | Murdered | data-sort-value="119" | 3 months | ||
| 1978 | Elena Holmberg | 47 | Argentina | Argentine diplomat and official of the military dictatorship who vanished on December 20, 1978. Her decomposed body was found over a month later, and positively identified by her cousin. It's believed that she had been assassinated by military officers on orders from Emilio Eduardo Massera, who believed that she had information that would reveal his connections to the Montoneros.[242] | Murdered | 1 month | |||||
| 1978 | Kerry Graham | 15 | United States of America | Friends Kerry Graham and Francine Trimble disappeared on December 16, 1978, after leaving their homes in Forestville, California to visit a shopping mall in Santa Rosa. Their remains were discovered on July 8, 1979, approximately 80 miles north of Forestville, but they were not identified. In November 2015 their identities were confirmed via the use of DNA profiling.[243] | Murdered | data-sort-value="13469" | 37 years | ||||
| Francine Trimble | 14 | data-sort-value="13469" | 37 years | ||||||||
| 1978 | Stephen Dean Holmes | 14 | United Kingdom | The first victim of serial killer Dennis Nilsen. Holmes was an Irish teenager whom Nilsen lured to his Cricklewood home upon the promise of drinking alcohol on the evening of December 29, 1978; he was strangled to death the following morning and his body later incinerated upon a bonfire. Holmes' identity was established in November 2006.[244] | Murdered | 28 years | |||||
| data-sort-value="1979" | 1979 | Tammy Alexander | 15 | United States of America | Tammy Alexander disappeared some time in early 1979 after it is believed she ran away from her home in Hernando County, Florida. She was found dead, shot to death in a field, in the town of Caledonia, New York on November 10, 1979. She was not identified until 2015, over 35 years later, by a DNA match after an old school friend tried to locate her and a missing persons report was filed.[245] | Murdered | data-sort-value="12775" | 35 years | |||
| data-sort-value="1979-01-04" | 1979 | Diann Joyce Remington | 22 | United States of America | Remington was a Spokane Community College student who disappeared from her mother's home in Richland, Washington on January 4, 1979. She was last seen in a brown sedan. Her body was found by goose hunters in a field near Benton City on December 29.[246] | Murdered | data-sort-value="0009" | 11 months | |||
| data-sort-value="1979" | 1979 | Marcia Moore | 50 | United States of America | Marcia Moore was an American writer, astrologer and yoga teacher who disappeared on January 14 in the winter of 1979. Her remains were found two years later in the woods near her Washington home.[247] | Murdered | data-sort-value="0730" | 2 years | |||
| data-sort-value="1979" | 1979 | Gerard Evans | 24 | Ireland | Gerard Evans disappeared in County Monaghan, Republic of Ireland in March 1979 and his remains were found in October 2010 in the townland of Carrickrobin, near Hackballscross, County Louth.[248] | Murdered | data-sort-value="11315" | 31 years | |||
| 1979 | Harriet Simmons | 40 | United States of America | A victim of serial killer Terry Hyatt. Simmons was mother of seven and a night manager at a Raleigh restaurant. Simmons disappeared while travelling to her boyfriend's home on April 15, 1979. Her skeletal remains were discovered in the Pisgah National Forest on March 23, 1980.[249] | Murdered | 11 months | |||||
| data-sort-value="1979-05-25" | 1979 | Etan Patz | data-sort-value="006" | 6 | United States of America | Etan Patz disappeared while on his way to school in lower Manhattan on May 25, 1979, and by 2001 he was considered legally dead. He was the first missing child featured on a milk carton.[250] In May 2012, authorities re-opened the case.[251] Pedro Hernandez, a former bodega stock clerk, was convicted in February 2017 of kidnapping and murdering the boy, based solely on his own confession. Neither Patz's body, which Hernandez said he put in the trash, nor any other relevant physical evidence was ever identified.[252] | Murdered | body never found | |||
| data-sort-value="1979" | 1979 | Lucinda Lynn Schaefer | 16 | United States of America | Lucinda Lynn Schaefer who disappeared on June 24, 1979 [253] from Redondo Beach after being murdered.[254] Even though she was known to have been murdered by Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris her body was never found.[255] | Murdered | 2 years | ||||
| 1979 | Sally Ann McGrath | 22 | United Kingdom | British woman last seen in Cathedral Square, Peterborough at 2:45pm on 11 July 1979, after telling friends that she was heading to the nearby unemployment office. Her body was found in a shallow grave in a forest at Castor Hanglands, Cambridgeshire, in March 1980. It would not be until 2012 that sex offender Paul Taylor would be convicted of her murder.[256] | Murdered | 8 months | |||||
| 1979 | Alison Chambers | 16 | United Kingdom | 16-year-old British child who lived in a children's home in Gloucester. She was a frequent visitor to the home of Fred and Rose West who lived in the city. Her disappearance in August 1979 was reported to the Missing Persons Bureau and initially to the police as an absconder from care. Her body was found in the home of the Wests in 1994. Along with 11 other women, she had been murdered by the couple. | Murdered | 15 years | |||||
| 1979 | Gwenn Story | 19 | United States of America | A young Ohio native discovered stabbed to death in a Las Vegas, Nevada, parking lot on August 14, 1979. She had died hours prior to her discovery, but remained unidentified until December 2023. Her murder remains unsolved.[257] | Murdered | 44 years | |||||
| 1979 | Maya Fukushima | 5 | Japan | 5-year-old Maya Fukushima went missing from a shrine near her home in Ashikaga, Tochigi. Her body was found naked and stuffed in a backpack on the banks of the Watarase River. Fukushima's case is considered the first of the North Kanto Serial Young Girl Kidnapping and Murder Case, a series of unsolved kidnapping and murder cases of young girls in the Northern Kanto Region.[258] | Murdered | 6 days | |||||
| 1979 | Dori Ghezzi | 33 | Italy | Italian singer and the country's representative for the Eurovision Song Contest of 1975 who was kidnapped on August 27, 1979, and held for ransom together with fellow singer Fabrizio De André.[259] Both were held in the Supramonte mountains, but released after a ransom of 500 million lire was paid to the abductors. | Found alive | 4 months | |||||
| data-sort-value="1979-08-30" | 1979 | Jean Seberg | 40 | France | Jean Seberg was an American actress who lived in France, and disappeared on August 30, 1979. Her body was found on September 8, 1979, wrapped in a blanket in the back seat of her Renault which was parked near her Paris apartment.[260] | No | data-sort-value="0009" | 9 days | |||
| data-sort-value="1979-12-03" | 1979 | Kenneth Ockenden | 23 | United Kingdom | Kenneth Ockenden, a Canadian student on a tour of the UK, was last seen in London on December 3, 1979.[261] In 1983, investigators discovered that he had become a victim of the serial killer Dennis Nilsen, who had invited him to his house and strangled him with a headphone cord. Ockenden was one of the few victims of Nilsen who was widely reported as a missing person.[262] | Murdered | data-sort-value="0004" | 4 years | |||
| data-sort-value="1979" | 1979 | Michelle Busha | 18 | United States of America | Michelle Busha left her home in December 1979 after an argument with her father in Bay City, Texas. Busha was murdered in May 1980 while hitchhiking in Blue Earth, Minnesota and remained unidentified until 2015.[263] | Murdered | data-sort-value="12775" | 35 years |
| 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.[264] | 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.[265] | 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).[266] | 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.[267] | 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.[268] | 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.[269] 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.[270] [271] | 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.[272] Police have investigated links between Earl's murder and serial killer Peter Tobin, who lived in the area at the time of her murder.[273] | 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.[274] 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.[275] 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.[276] The human bones were later identified as being Scott's. The identity and motive of her killer or killers remains unknown.[277] | 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.[278] | Murdered | 2 days | ||||
| 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.[279] | 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.[280] | 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.[281] | 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.[282] | 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.[283] | 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.[284] | 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.[285] | 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.[286] | 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.[287] In December 2004, the bodies were positively identified as Giaccone and Trinchera.[288] | 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.[289] | 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[290] 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.[291] | 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.[292] | 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.[293] | 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.[294] | 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.[295] 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.[296] [297] | 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.[298] | 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.[299] | 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.[300] | 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.[301] | 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.[302] | 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.[303] | 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.[304] | 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,[305] [306] [307] [308] [309] and sentenced on 2 December to 24 years in jail with a non-parole period of 18 years.[310] | 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.[311] | 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.[312] [313] [314] | 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.[315] | 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.[316] | 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.[317] | 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.[318] | 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.[319] | 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.[320] | 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.[321] | 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.[322] | 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.[323] | 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.[324] | 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.[325] | 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.[326] | 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.[327] | 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.[328] | 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.[329] | 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.[330] | 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.[331] | 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.[332] | 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.[333] | 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.[334] | 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.[335] | 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.[336] | Murdered | data-sort-value="0189" | 6 months | ||
| 1983 | Colette Aram | 16 | United Kingdom | British trainee hairdresser who was abducted while walking towards her boyfriend's home in Keyworth on October 30, 1983. Her body was found a day later, showing signs that she had been raped and strangled. Despite and extensive manhunt, her killer, Paul Stewart Hutchinson, was identified with the help of DNA evidence only in 2009. He was later sentenced to life imprisonment.[337] | Murdered | 1 day | |||||
| 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.[338] | 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.[339] | 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.[340] | 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.[341] | 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.[342] | Killed in action | 33 years | |||||
| 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.[343] | 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.[344] 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.[345] | 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.[346] | 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.[347] | 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.[348] | 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.[349] | 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.[350] | 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.[351] | Murdered | data-sort-value="0217" | 7 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.[352] [353] | 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.[354] | 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.[355] | 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.[356] | 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.[357] | 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.[358] | 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.[359] | 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.[360] | 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.[361] | 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.[362] | 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.[363] | 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[364] 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.[365] | 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.[366] | 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.[367] | 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.[368] | 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.[369] | 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.[370] | 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.[371] | 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.[372] | 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.[373] | 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".[374] | 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.[375] On June 22, 1986, both their bodies were found[376] 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.[377] | 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.[378] 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.[379] [380] 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.[381] | Murdered | A few 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.[382] | Murdered | 2 days | |||||
| 1986 | Samantha Knight | 9 | Australia | Samantha Knight was an Australian girl from Bondi who missing on August 19, 1986,[383] 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.[384] | 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.[385] 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.[386] | 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,[387] 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.[388] | 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.[389] | 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.[390] | 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.[391] | 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.[392] | 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.[393] [394] | 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.[395] | 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.[396] | 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.[397] | 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",[398] believed to refer to Suzy Lamplugh and 1986, the year of her disappearance.[399] | 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.[400] | 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.[401] | 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.[402] | 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.[403] | 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.[404] | 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.[405] | 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.[406] | 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.[407] | 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.[408] | 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.[409] | Murdered | 3 years | |||||
| 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.[410] | 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.[411] | 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,[412] 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.[413] | Murdered | 2 days | |||||
| 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.[414] | 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.[415] | 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.[416] | 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.[417] | 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.[418] | 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.[419] | 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.[420] | Murdered | data-sort-value="12053" | 33 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.[421] | 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.[422] | 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.[423] | 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.[424] | 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.[425] | 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.[426] | 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.[427] | 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.[428] | 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.[429] | 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.[430] | 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.[431] | 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.[432] | 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.[433] | 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.[434] | 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.[435] | 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.[436] | 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.[437] | 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.[438] | 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.[439] Caleb Hughes was charged and convicted of kidnapping her.[440] | 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.[441] [442] | 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.[443] | 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.[444] [445] 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.[446] | 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.[447] | 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.[448] [449] [450] | 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.[451] | Murdered | Four weeks | ||||
| 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.[452] [453] | 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.[454] | 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.[455] 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.[456] | 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.[457] | 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.[458] | 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.[459] | 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.[460] 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.[461] | 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.[462] | 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.[463] | 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,[464] and her body was found weeks later on September 24 in a stormwater drain.[465] | 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.[466] | 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.[467] [468] | 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.[469] 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.[470] 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[471] 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.[472] | 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.[473] 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.[474] | 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.[475] | 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.[476] | 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.[477] [478] | Murdered | 21 years | ||||
| 1992 | Miriam Iborra | 14 | Spain | The Alcasser Girls were three teenage girls from Alcasser, Spain, who disappeared on November 13, 1992,[479] 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.[480] [481] | 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.[482] | 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.[483] | 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.[484] | 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.[485] [486] [487] [488] | 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.[489] | 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.[490] [491] | 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,[492] 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,[493] 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.[494] | 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.[495] 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.[496] | 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.[497] [498] [499] | Murdered | 3 days | |||||
| 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.[500] | 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.[501] | 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.[502] Piirainen's remains were found by hunters in Brimfield on October 23, 1993.[503] | 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.[504] | 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,[505] was found on January 29, 1994, and was not identified until 2013.[506] | 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.[507] | 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.[508] | Found alive | 20 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.[509] | 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.[510] | 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.[511] 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.[512] | 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.[513] | 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.[514] 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,[515] and died in prison while on death row in January 2023.[516] | 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.[517] 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.[518] 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.[519] [520] | 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.[521] | 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.[522] | 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.[523] | 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."[524] 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.[525] | 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[526] who disappeared on February 18, 1995[527] 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.[528] | 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.[529] | 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.[530] Her cause of death remains unknown.[531] | 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.[532] 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.[533] | 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.[534] | 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.[535] [536] [537] [538] | 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.[539] | 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.[540] | 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,[541] and was found dead in 2001.[542] | 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.[543] | 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.[544] | 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.[545] | 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.[546] | 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.[547] | 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.[548] People have speculated that her uncle may have been responsible for her death, but others believe that the crime was committed by someone local.[549] | 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.[550] | 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.[551] 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.[552] | 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.[553] | 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.[554] | 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.[555] | 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.[556] | 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.[557] | 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.[558] [559] 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.[560] | 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.[561] | 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.[562] | Murdered | 10 years | |||||
| 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.[563] | 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.[564] | 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.[565] | 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.[566] | 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.[567] | 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.[568] 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.[569] | 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.[570] | 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.[571] | 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.[572] | 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.[573] | 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.[574] | 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.[575] | 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.[576] | 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.[577] | 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.[578] | 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.[579] | Murdered | Not found | ||||
| 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.[580] | 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.[581] | 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.[582] | 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.[583] | 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.[584] | 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.[585] | 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.[586] | 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.[587] | 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.[588] | 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.[589] | 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.[590] | 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[591] | 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.[592] [593] | 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.[594] | 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.[595] | 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.[596] | 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.[597] | 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.[598] 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.[599] | 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.[600] | 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.[601] | 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.[602] 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.[603] | 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.[604] | 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.[605] 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.[606] | 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.[607] | 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.[608] [609] | 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.[610] | Murdered | 1 week | |||||
| 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.[611] | 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.[612] | 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.[613] | 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.[614] | 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.[615] | 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.[616] | 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.[617] [618] | 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.[619] [620] Girly Chew's husband Diazien Hossencofft and his girlfriend Linda Henning were convicted of her murder.[621] Girly's body has never been found.[622] | 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.[623] | 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.[624] 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.[625] | 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.[626] | 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.[627] | 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.[628] | Murdered | Never found | |||||
| Ashley Freeman | 16 | United States of America | Murdered | ||||||||
ja:土屋公献
. 1995-09-06 . 坂本堤弁護士遺体発見に関する声明 . 2023-10-03 . Japan Federation of Bar Associations . ja.