Every file we've opened, reported like a case file — sourced, documented, and corrected in public. Filter by status, then read the ones that won't let you go.
On the last afternoon of her life, a 16-year-old Nevada cowgirl posted a smiling photo from the passenger seat of a friend's truck. For days, searchers hunted the man he said she left with, a tall cowboy in an old green Ford F-150. The last photo of her alive had already captured the real killer.
A long-haul trucker carried two hunting knives, a choke wire, and a DVD about a killer who stalks his victims through three states in seventeen days, murdering women in their own homes. Then he picked a house where a 15-year-old had left the back door unlocked for her brother, and found her parents instead.
In 1978, a charming photographer won a televised dating show and a date with a bachelorette who took one look at him and refused to go. He was already, by then, in the middle of a murder spree that stretched from Los Angeles to Manhattan to rural Wyoming. Investigators would eventually link him to eight killings, recover more than a thousand photographs of women and children whose identities remain unknown to this day, and need three trials over three decades to make a death sentence stick.
An unemployed community theater actor needed money for his wedding and honeymoon. His neighbor, an Afghanistan veteran, had $62,000 in saved combat pay. So he shot him in a theater attic, went onstage that same night to perform in a musical, then used the dead man's phone to lure a second victim to her death to frame him for it.
For more than a year, someone kept breaking into the Pleskovic house. Anna's fiancé, who had moved in and fathered her child, called the police about it more than once himself. Nine days before the wedding, a declined credit card threatened to expose him, and the family's 49-year-old matriarch was shot and stabbed to death in her own kitchen. Three days before his arrest, he carried her casket.
A bodybuilder on federal probation for trafficking steroids married a woman with a seven-year-old son, then beat and choked the boy so badly a school counselor had to retrieve him from the cold. The night before his own child-abuse hearing, he learned his wife would not testify for him. By morning she was dead in their bed, and he was on the interstate, driving toward her parents' house instead of his own.
A 7-year-old in a Flint Township hoarder house weighed more than three times what is healthy for his height when his heart gave out. Seven months later, the county prosecutor charged both parents with murder — and said the family's dog had seen a veterinarian more recently than the boy had seen a doctor.
A gunman waited outside a Midtown hotel for a health-insurance executive who had no public security detail. Nineteen months, two indictments, and one death-penalty fight later, the case still has not reached a jury.
She told her sister she'd be back before the rain. The trail logged her in at 6:02 a.m. and never logged her out. Twenty months later, the case is still open — and so are the questions.
A salesman checks in for one night in 1994. The room is paid through Friday. He is never seen again.
Forty-one boarded. The manifest counted forty when it docked. It took thirty years to learn who was missing.
Every night at 3:14 a.m., the county dispatch line rang once. No voice — just breathing, and running water.
When the developers cleared the Harlan orchard, the backhoe stopped forty centimeters down. Then it stopped again.
A disconnected landline logged nine outgoing calls in one night — three years after the house burned down.
She boarded at Dunmore with a single suitcase. By the next station, the suitcase was hers and the seat was empty.
He surfaced four minutes after going under, and could not say where the other eleven minutes went.
The library's overdue copy of a 1971 atlas came back with a name, a date, and an apology in pencil.