40+ Creepy Cold Cases That Still Haven’t Been Solved

In 2016, Terri “Missy” Bevers was due to lead an early morning fitness class. However, she never made it as she was stabbed to death inside of a Texas church shortly before her fitness class began. Her killer was caught on CCTV dressed in full SWAT gear.

The killer in the CCTV is also wielding a hammer, which would be consistent with the trauma that Missy endured. Despite these CCTV images, no one has ever been charged or convicted for Missy’s death.

The Walker family was murdered in their own home in Osprey, Florida. A few clues were found during the investigation, including a bloody cowboy boot and a fingerprint on the bathtub faucet. Despite these clues and almost 600 suspects, the case has not been solved.

The killer took some trophies with them after they successfully killed the family. This included the marriage license of Christine and Cliff, Cliff’s pocket knife, and Christine’s majorette uniform. One serial killer confessed to the crime but was a known liar so it was dismissed.

One of the most famous cold cases in New England is the Lady of the Dunes. A body of a woman was discovered in Race Point Dunes in Massachusetts in 1974. However, she was never identified but her clothing became the main focus of the investigation in 2015.

The Lady of the Dunes was found in Wrangler jeans and a blue bandana. People then began to notice that a woman wearing similar clothes was spotted in the film Jaws. Jaws was also filmed not too far away from where the woman was found.

The disappearance of the Iowa Paper Boys helped a lot of missing children’s cases as their case kickstarted the idea of putting missing children on milk cartons. In the early ’80s, paperboys from Des Moines, Iowa both went missing about two years apart.

Johnny Gosch, who went missing in 1982, was first reported missing after a neighbor contacted his mother to say that the paper was never delivered. Eugene Martin also went missing, and even though investigators have many leads, they don’t know if the cases are connected.

Disappearance cases are always tough, especially for the parents who are missing children. Jackson Baltimore just wants to know where her son, Henry, went after he vanished from his off-campus apartment at Michigan State University in 1973.

Henry worked at the MSU library and was co-drum major of the university’s marching band. After his older sister went to his apartment to get a final exam paper, she discovered he was missing. He was due to appear in court to testify, but when he didn’t show, alarm bells sounded.

In 1976, several Circleville, Ohio residents started to receive letters that detailed personal information about their lives. A bus driver, Mary Gillispie, received letters that accused her of a supposedly non-existent affair with the superintendent of schools. Despite keeping the letters to herself, her husband also received one.

In August 1977, Ron received a phone call from the alleged writer and Ron had his suspicions confirmed on the identity of the letter writer and left with his gun. A few moments later, Ron was found dead in his pickup truck.

It isn’t unusual for it to rain in Washington. It is the wettest place in the continental US, after all. However, this was completely different. In Oakland, Washington in 1994, it began to rain but whatever came down was not water. It was a strange, gelatinous substance.

Residents who touched the blobs started to contract a flu-like illness and pets died. A lab technician examined the blobs and determined that they contained human white blood cells, but couldn’t understand how they fell from the sky. Kinda creepy!

This next case still hasn’t been solved because they could never identify the victim. In the 1940s, a body was discovered in Somerton Park, Adelaide. In an attempt to identify the man, doctors looked in his pockets but only found a scrap of paper saying “tamám shud.”

In Persian, this translates to “finished” or “ended,” and a journalist quickly recognized the paper from a collection of poems by the Persian poet, Omar Khayyám. Despite a worldwide search and matching names to databases, the man was never identified.

Japan is one of the world’s most peaceful countries. Therefore, when this crime took place, it seemed to shock the whole country and the police who were investigating. The Setagaya family was murdered in their home on December 30th, 2000 in one of the most secluded areas.

Unlike other unsolved murders, there was plenty of evidence left behind as the killer spent hours in the home after he committed the crime. Despite all of this evidence, the Japanese police have still not been able to figure out the culprit.

In the early hours of March 18th, 1990, a vehicle pulled up near Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and two men in police uniforms requested to be let in to deal with a disturbance. The two guards on duty were then handcuffed and tied up in the basement of the museum.

They left with 13 works 81 minutes later, which the FBI later valued at $500 million. No arrests have been made and no works have been recovered despite the $10 million reward. The museum says that despite the fact that the theft occurred 30 years ago, it remains its top priority.

In 1986, the bodies of Cathy Thomas and Rebecca Dowski were discovered inside a 1980 Honda Civic that belonged to Thomas’ sibling. Even stranger, the car had been pushed down an embankment off the Colonial Parkway in Virginia. This was the first of four gruesome killings.

From 1986 to 1989, four homicides took place either on or near Colonial Parkway. All those killed were young and were either a romantic couple or could resemble one to an outsider. Unfortunately, the cases have never been solved and there has been no justice.

Have you ever wondered why there are child-proof locks on medicine bottles? It didn’t come from protecting children, but rather the threat of another attack like this. In 1982, there were a series of deaths in Chicago associated with drug tampering in pharmacies throughout the city.

The culprit had gone into pharmacies across Chicago and replaced the power in Tylenol with cyanide, a deadly substance. As a result, seven people died and Johnson & Johnson recalled all of their Tylenol stock worth $100 million. This case has never been solved.

This has been a case that has been on the Reddit forums a lot as many different people have tried to solve cases like these. In 2006, Brian Shaffer, a medical student at Ohio State University, went out to a bar with friends to celebrate the beginning of spring break.

As he was separated from his friends, they assumed he had gone home. However, security footage caught him re-entering the bar despite no evidence of him leaving the area. He has been missing ever since.

When departing for Jamaica in 2000, Claudia Kirschhoch probably didn’t anticipate it being the last time anyone would see her. A travel guide writer, Kirschhoch had traveled as a last-minute replacement but later became stranded in Jamaica and so, she stayed at a Sandals resort in Negril until she was able to fly back to the US.

Claudia struck up a conversation with the bartender and the two became friends. The day after Claudia was due to return to New York, she was reported missing. She was never found and to this day, this appears to be one of the strangest missing person cases.

It’s unthinkable that the biggest ship in the US Navy disappeared without a trace. In 1918, the USS Cyclops disappeared on a voyage somewhere between the West Indies and Baltimore. It also had a crew of 306 people. A century on, and nowhere knows where it went.

No wreckage or bodies were ever discovered. Many people have used the ship’s disappearance to push the theory of the Bermuda Triangle. Others pointed their fingers at the captain who was unsuitable to steer a ship due to addiction problems.

This is another one of those cases that still has people confused to this day. On November 22nd, 1987, two Chicago TV stations had their broadcast hijacked by someone wearing a Max Headroom mask. One incident took place during the 9pm news for 25 seconds, and the other two hours later.

The person in the broadcast behaved erratically and even presented themself in a compromised position. However, despite an FCC investigation and many years of speculation on Reddit, no one was ever caught or identified. This might be because the punishment is a $100,000 fine.

In June 1994, Nicholas Brady called his home asking for a ride after finishing playing basketball with his friends. After his family didn’t pick him up, he never returned home. However, police state this was normal as Brady often ran away after arguments with his family.

In 1997, the Brady family received word of Nicholas and flew him from Europe. However, the individual had dark hair and dark brown eyes. They also spoke with a French accent. In 1998, after an FBI court order, it was revealed that the man was Frederic Bourdin, a serial imposter.

This is a mystery that has been investigated for more than 800 years now. However, people are still interested and want to be the ones to find it. Before Genghis Khan died, he made it known that he did not want to be found, with 1,000 horses riding over his grave to destroy any trace.

Whenever he died, a grieving army carried his body home and killed anyone they met in order to keep the route a secret. Whilst many operations took place to find his tomb, no one has found it.

It’s disappointing that this case still isn’t solved as the main suspect is still on the loose. In 2011, French police discovered the bodies of Agnes Dupont de Legonnès and her four children buried under the terrace of their home in Nantes.

The main suspect, Xavier, husband and father of those murdered, was last seen a week before his family was found. In 2015, he apparently contacted French media saying “I am still alive” but has not been caught since.

This is one of the most chilling cases we’ve ever heard. After receiving a call for a welfare check on Fred and Edwina Rogers in 1965, officers paid a visit to their home. After no response, they kicked down their door and checked their refrigerator where they found their dismembered bodies.

The following day, police had narrowed down their suspect list to their 43-year-old son, Charles, who was a recluse and communicated only through letters under his door. After the murders, he was never seen or heard from again.

Unfortunately, this next case has never been solved either. Two sisters, Barbara and Patricia, went to the movies to watch the Elvis Presley film, Love Me Tender in 1956. The police originally did not take the case seriously as they thought that they had only run away from home.

After going missing for almost a month, the two girls’ bodies were found on the side of a road in Willow Springs, Illinois in 1957. They both apparently died of shock and exposure to the cold, but no one has ever been convicted for their deaths.

Scientology has plenty of famous members like Tom Cruise, John Travolta, and Elizabeth Moss. However, there’s a strange mystery surrounding the whereabouts of Shelly Miscavige, wife of Scientology leader, David Miscavige. Since 2007, after David left Scientology’s international, his wife has not made a public appearance.

Whilst the police have confirmed that Shelly is indeed not missing, the Church is not commenting on Miscavige’s location. Some former members suggest that she’s being held against her will at a compound! We may never know her true whereabouts.

If there was a woman you didn’t want to come across in the late 19th century, it was Belle Gunness. She immigrated to the US at the age of 21 and both of her partners — and children that came into her care — died.

In 1908, a fire consumed the farmhouse where Belle lived with three children. The authorities found the bodies of three children and one woman, but the woman’s head was missing. Gunness was never seen again, but more buried bodies were discovered at the farmhouse.

Tragically on Christmas Eve in 1945, the Sodder family home caught on fire and burned down. The mother and father, and four of the nine siblings managed to escape. The five other bodies were never found or recovered, making the parents believe there was foul play as they were outspoken opponents of Mussolini.

In desperation to find their missing children, the Sodders spent years traveling the US until their death. One day, the mother received a letter with a photo of one of the children, Louis, all grown up. However, there was no return address.

Have you ever wanted to take yourself off to a remote island and be at one with nature? Cases like these might make you reconsider. When the boat came to collect three men at the end of their two-week lighthouse shift, they soon realized that something was very wrong.

The door to the lighthouse was unlocked and all three men were missing. The logbooks also had very disturbing messages about a storm raging when the waters had been clear for the dates logged. The men were never seen again.

This case has gone unsolved for almost 80 years! Near the end of the Second World War, a hospital in Boston got a new patient that was suffering from a lot of serious injuries. He also had amnesia so could give no details about himself, his family, or his background.

The doctors said that he was around 60 years old, however, his card stated that he was 49. Unfortunately, Charles Jamison could not be placed anywhere. After 30 years in the hospital, he died without finding out his real identity.

Whilst it was Thomas Edison who famously invented the motion picture camera, there was actually someone who was just ahead of him. Louis Le Prince, a French inventor, recorded a series of moving images in Leeds in 1888, and had been granted a number of patents.

However, just two years after the invention that would change the world forever, he disappeared without a trace. He was due to arrive in France after spending time in England but never returned at his arrival time.

Cases that involve septic tanks are the worst because it’s awful to think about how the victims perished. When an Alberta couple opened their septic tank in 1977, they never expected to find a body. He was later known as Septic Tank Sam.

Before being put in the tank, Sam had endured a lot, so much so that medical officials could not identify him. In an attempt to find this man’s identity, his teeth were sent to 800 dentists, but there was never a match found.

In 1960, two 18-year-old boys and two 15-year-old girls went camping on the shores of Lake Bodom, Finland. However, during the night, three of them were murdered and the fourth was badly injured but managed to survive. Finnish people say this is the biggest unsolved case in Finnish history.

The police only came up with a handful of suspects. This included the survivor, whenever he was arrested 44 years after the event but later cleared. Another theory was KGB spy Hans Assman who could be seen at the funerals.

The Oklahoma City bomb of 1995 is an event that few will ever forget, especially those who live in the city. Whilst justice was able to be served against the two who detonated the bomb, one mystery remains about a missing leg that had been found.

The FBI matched the DNA of the missing leg to Airman Lakesha Levy who unfortunately passed in the explosion. However, upon further investigation, they had found that Levy had been buried with both of her legs, meaning the other leg belonged to someone else.

In 2007, many different people on islands in the Salish Sea started reporting that feet were starting to wash ashore. Over the next 12 years, a total of 15 feet had washed up around Vancouver Island, and six in the Puget Sound, which lies across the US border.

Contrary to popular belief, the establishment of Canada’s new National Missing Persons DNA Program in 2018 meant that the DNA of some feet could be traced. The longest missing person was from 1958, and the most recent was a young man’s foot, and it was noted that he disappeared in 2016.

Could it be possible that someone can forget a whole portion of their life? It happened in this case to Lawrence Bader. In 1957, Bader rented a boat and kissed his wife goodbye before going fishing on Lake Erie. A storm hit and his boat was found the next day, without Bader.

John “Fritz” Johnson then made his appearance in Nebraska four days later. After someone from his hometown spotted him eight years later, Fritz has apparently no memory of his past life. He died in 1966 so his condition was never resolved.

Cases like these are always hard. On February 14th, 2000, Asha Degree went missing after running into the woods to avoid a motorist who had slowed down to check if she was alright in the storm. When her parents discovered she went missing, they began an intensive search.

18 months later, her backpack was discovered alongside a foreign shirt and book. However, there has never been a sighting of her since. In 2015, new information about the car Asha may have entered was reported, but it was no closer to finding out what happened.

The nature of Alcatraz meant that it would be almost impossible for those who were locked up there to escape. In 1962, there was an escape that took place, but the three men who left were never seen or heard from again.

The three inmates fled Alcatraz in the early morning of June 11th and left the island in a raft. After a 17-year investigation, the FBI concluded that the men had drowned while trying to reach land. However, new evidence continues to surface.

In 2001, Branson and his friend, Jena, were cleaning the house for his father’s return from the hospital. There were also two men working out front, fixing his father’s car. When Branson declared he was going to put the jumper cables in the shed, he was never heard from again.

Five days after Jena last saw him, Branson was reported missing. Even more mysteriously, the jumper cables had never made it to the shed. This means that Branson was gone before he ever got to the shed. No answers after 20 years!

After the Broadduses believed they had bought their dream house, they started to receive letters from someone who branded themselves as “the Watcher.” The Watcher declared that their grandfather watched the house in the 1920s, and their father in the 1960s so it was their turn.

The Watcher even made reference to the three children who lived in the house, too. The Broaddus family even hired a private detective! Eventually, they sold the house, so there are now new owners to deal with this!

It’s impossible to think of someone as well-known in Mason City, Iowa as Jodi Huisentruit was to go missing. Jodi was an anchorwoman for Iowa TV. On the morning of her disappearance in 1995, she accidentally overslept and was late to her 4am shift to anchor the morning news.

When Jodi didn’t show at work, people began to panic. The news director even drove to her apartment and found that her belongings were scattered around her car, making it clear there was a struggle. No trace of Jodi has ever been found.

These cases just get weirder and weirder. Ricky McCormick was found dead near West Alton, Missouri in 1999. Ricky didn’t have a car and was 15 miles away from his current address. Ricky had also dropped out of high school.

That fact is important as when Ricky was brought into the morgue for a post-mortem, staff found two cryptic notes in this pocket, which were in his handwriting. As McCormick was practically illiterate questions remain about those notes and if they point to Ricky’s killer.

In 2016, a family of five disappeared during a tech-free road trip. Each of the family members started to turn up one by one after a week. When the police came to their home when the report came in, they found passports, phones, and cards had been left behind.

Each member of the Tromp family eventually made their way back home. It was noted that the family had been paranoid that someone was coming to get them. The police called it a “massive meltdown” as no one could explain their behavior.

Cold cases can often go unsolved for years, like the mystery of the Isdal Woman. In 1970, the victim’s body was found burnt in Isdalen, Norway and many have suggested foul play for her death due to some bizarre circumstances. She checked into many hotels under different names and had codified notes.

She was spotted near the spot where she was found with two other men, but they were never found or convicted. Many people have theorized that in cold cases like these, the victim was a Cold War spy.

Unlike other cold cases, the perpetrator of this crime had a name, but the identity was never revealed. In 1932, the body of a woman was found in an apartment in Stockholm, along with a blood-stained ladle and saliva on the woman’s neck.

The criminal became known as the Atlas Vampire due to the fact that detectives who arrived at the scene suspected that they drank the woman’s blood after killing her, as little blood was found at the scene. It continues to be one of the weirdest unsolved cases in Europe.

One child coming into contact with an alien is strange, however, what about 62 of them? In 1994, school children in Zimbabwe saw aliens land and start communicating with them telepathically. Many of the parents called the school the next day wondering why their children were scared.

Soon after, the children were asked to draw pictures of what they had all seen. Even though the drawings were done separately, all of them were the same, showing a creature with large eyes. Even professionals concluded the children were telling the truth.

If you’re planning a trip to Texas, make sure to avoid going near this location. The Texas Killing Fields got its name from the fact that over a 30-year period, many murder victims have been found in the fields. It’s believed that this is the work of multiple serial killers.

Despite efforts of the police, alongside the FBI, very few of these murders have ever been solved. There are also several missing girls from the area, but their bodies have never been found. One of the strangest cases we’ve heard!

Gloria Ramirez arrived at Riverside General Hospital with respiratory and cardiac distress. Going into full cardiac arrest, nurses and doctors tried to help Ramirez but all noticed a pungent odor before passing out. When doctors drew blood, they noticed crystals in the syringe.

Ramirez’s body also had an oily sheen to it. After 45 minutes, Ramirez unfortunately passed but the effort to keep her alive resulted in 23 hospital staff members becoming ill. One was even placed in intensive care for two weeks. To this day, no one knows what happened.

Cases like this are mind-boggling. In 2014, Lars Mittank took himself to Bulgaria for a holiday with friends. However, he had gotten into a fight and was advised against traveling by air due to a burst eardrum. After his friends left, Lars started acting suspiciously and paranoia soon kicked in.

He was last seen two days after his friends had left. He was last spotted on CCTV running away from something, before climbing a fence and into a field of sunflowers. No one has seen or heard from Lars since.