When talking about cold cases, so many of them are swept under the rug. Even in highly publicized cases, like the Zodiac Killer case, the victim’s names almost always go forgotten. For many others, the perpetrator goes on with no consequences and there are no answers, no solutions, no happy endings, and no news articles. The next case for discussion differs in many ways from the previous cases: the victim’s name will never be forgotten, there was an arrest, and supposedly the case is closed. Still, there are a few loose ends, most notably: did they get the right guy? Did they get the ONLY guy?

Kennedy’s Motorcade. 1963. “The JFK Conspiracy Conspiracy,” by Michael Taube. Claremont Institute, 16 May 2019.

1963: President John F. Kennedy was assassinated as he rode in a motorcade through Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas, Texas. Preparing for the next presidential campaign, Kennedy traveled through nine different states in less than a week. Meant to put a highlight natural resources, conservation efforts, education, national security, and world peace, all for his run in 1964, Kennedy traveled through Texas until finally arriving in Dallas.

At noon, Kennedy, his wife Jacqueline, Governor John Connally and his wife, Nellie, all sat in the open convertible. The Kennedys entered and sat behind them, and because the weather had cleared, the roof was down.

The car turned off Main Street at Dealey Plaza around 12:30 p.m. The couples waved to onlookers, and smiled as the streets were lined with citizens overjoyed to see their President. As it passed the Texas School Book Depository, gunfire echoed.

Kennedy was shot in the head, immediately crumpling over on to Jackie’s lap. Governor Connally had been struck in the back. Panic flooded over the street, as husbands shielded their wives and wives shielded their children. Witnesses recalled hearing three shots, but testimonies differed greatly and due to shock, few can be taken as accurate recollections of the event. The car began to speed down the road toward Parkland Memorial Hospital in hopes of tending to the wounded.

At 1:00 p.m., John F. Kennedy was pronounced dead. Governor Connally would later recover from his wounds. Kennedy’s body was placed on Air Force One, and Lyndon B. Johnson took the oath of office administered by US District Court Judge Sarah Hughes in front of the White House staff, and Jacqueline Kennedy, her clothes still stained from blood.

At 1:30, Lee Harvey Oswald had been arrested and charged for the assassination. Oswald was a recent employee of the Texas School Book Depository. While fleeing the scene, Oswald was stopped by Dallas police officer J. D. Tippit, and responded by shooting him four times, killing him instantly. Once the manhunt began, e lasted 24 hours in police custody. While being transferred from police headquarters to the county jail, live television coverage suddenly saw a man aim a pistol and fire at point blank range, killing Oswald two hours later. The man, later identified to have been Jack Ruby, claimed to have been “doing America and Mrs. Kennedy a favor”.

The Impact of the Assassination. 1963. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, by JFK Library , National Archives.

Once Oswald had been killed, the police lost their only chance at understanding his motive or hearing his alibi, much less taking him to trial. Ruby’s motives have also been highly disputed, as many believe he could have been covering evidence, perhaps even a partner who had planned to kill Oswald in case of him being captured.

In fact, conspiracy shrouds JFK’s assassination. After the killing, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, known as the Warren Commission after Chief Justice of the United States, Earl Warren. The Warren Commission was meant to investigate the assassination of Kennedy, as well as Oswald’s death. The results of the Warren Commission has been highly disputed, especially his findings in that Kennedy was struck by two bullets shot by one assailant.

According to a 2013 poll, 70 percent of Americans believe there was a broader plot beyond just Lee Harvey Oswald on the sixth floor overlooking Dealey plaza in Dallas. The most popular of the theories surrounds the existence of multiple shooters, focusing on the physics of the attack and the bullet wounds. The phrase “the bullet curved” commonly gets thrown around when talking about the JFK Assassination, as many researchers and theorists point out the impossibility of the neck wound and head wound being from the same shooter in the same direction. Others surround the “Umbrella Man”, or the involvement of the KGB, CIA, and mob. The mystery surrounding the incident has resulted in too many conspiracies to touch on here. Though the Kennedy Assassination has more answers than several of our other aforementioned cases, the truth may be never uncovered. Some rumors are to be expected with the filmed murder of the President, but theorists have taken the unanswered questions and given the case a mind of its own.

As always, the Buzzfeed Unsolved video delving into the specifics and theories is linked here for further reading. Best of luck in your searching, until next time.

For the first entry NOT about homicide, I’ve picked a doozy. Everything that I’ve written about so far seems so bleak, and the fact that they’ve gone unanswered just adds salt to the wound. For a change, here’s something that doesn’t involve a murder (though it does include a bomb, a plane hijacking, and a quarter of a million dollars).

Police Sketch of Cooper. 1971. “D.B. Cooper Hijacking,” by Federal Bureau of Investigation. FBI, 12 July 2016.

1971: Flight #305 is bound for Seattle, Washington from Portland, Oregon. On his ticket it reads, “D.B. Cooper”, and he boards the flight after paying with cash. He wears a business suit and tie, orders a bourbon and coke, and once the flight takes off, he puts his plan into motion.

Mr. Cooper calls a stewardess over to his seat, and he shows her a note that asks her to sit. He has a bomb on board, and she needs to do exactly as he asks.

She does.

Within his briefcase lies a mass of colored wires. “Take his note to your captain”, he says. Cooper demands four parachutes, $200,000 in twenty-dollar bills, and a re-fueling truck for when the plane lands. They’d be landing in Seattle for fuel for the rest of the trip, south towards Mexico.

Once they landed, the other 36 passengers were released in exchange for the cash. Three crew members and the captain remained as the plane traveled south. Near Reno, Nevada, Cooper made his move:

He jumps.

Never to be seen again.

That’s it.

Whether Cooper survived or not is unknown. Law-enforcement officials in five different planes tailed the jetliner, yet no one witnessed the jump. By using wind speed and free fall data, researchers have found that Cooper landed somewhere on Bachelor Island, an area along the Columbia River in Washington. Near this same river, several twenty-dollar bills have washed up, believed to belong to Cooper. These bills have been the only physical evidence found.

The FBI launched a nation-wide investigation. From the official investigation report, “We’re calling it NORJAK, for Northwest Hijacking, we interviewed hundreds of people, tracked leads across the nation, and scoured the aircraft for evidence. By the five-year anniversary of the hijacking, we’d considered more than 800 suspects and eliminated all but two dozen from consideration.”

D.B. Cooper. 1971. “Was The FBI Wrong About D.B. Cooper’s Infamous Skyjacking? An Amateur Sleuth Thinks So,” by Sharon Lynn Pruitt. Oxygen, NBCUniversal, 28 June 2019.

Evidence suggested that Cooper was not an experienced jumper. His parachute was unable to be steered, he wasn’t dressed for a rough landing (which he most certainly had), and he jumped at night. Many believe he died on impact, though his body and parachute has never (nor will they) been found.

1980 – A young boy finds a wet, rotting package full of twenty-dollar bills ($5,800) that matches the ransom money serial numbers. Again, this is all that’s ever been discovered from the hijacking, and it came nearly ten years later.

For everyone that believes that Cooper never survived, just as many believe he walked away with the cash and got away with it. Leading suspect Richard Floyd McCoy, Jr. was arrested a year after the D.B. Cooper hijacking for hijacking a plane from Denver to Los Angeles after jumping with $500,000. Never officially prosecuted, McCoy died in 1974 after escaping prison and getting into an altercation with pursuing guards. Since, the case has gone cold.

As always, BuzzFeed Unsolved’s video is linked here. Best of luck theory hunting, until next week.

Does crime affect your day to day life? Depending on where you’re from, and your personal experiences, some of us would answer ‘yes’. Whether you have a heightened sense of fear and awareness of violence, or you were lucky enough (as I am) to be from an area where you’ve been blessed with the gift of blissful ignorance about how growing up in a high crime neighborhood can affect you.

Maybe that’s why I have such a fascination with crime; it’s uncharted territory for me. Being from a small rural town, we were never scared to go outside at night. We didn’t think about carrying weapons (other than the hunting knives that most boys brought to school and the occasional rifle in a truck), and we never looked at our neighbors in fear.

This simply isn’t reality in other towns and cities in the United States, especially in large metropolitan areas like Los Angeles, as our next cold case details. For bustling California in the 40’s, crime was all too familiar.

The Black Dahlia. “The Black Dahlia: How ‘Moral Panic’ Gripped the Community in the Wake of Elizabeth Short’s Gruesome Murder,” by Laura Barcella. A&E Television Networks, 14 Jan. 2019.

1947: A mother and her child walk the streets of Los Angeles, only to stumble upon a horrific sight in a vacant lot: a young woman, who had been severed at the waist, with a crude blanket covering her blood-drained body. Her mouth had been carved into a permanent grin. Ligature marks bruised her wrists, ankles, and neck, with other signs of prolonged torture. She was naked, and not a single drop of blood stained the lot, meaning that she had only been dropped off here, and murdered elsewhere.

Using her fingerprints, the FBI and LAPD found her name to be Elizabeth Short. She was from Medford, Massachusetts, and had moved to Los Angeles in hopes of becoming a Hollywood starlet. She was known by friends as being friendly, graceful, kind, and even a bit of a spitfire. She was passionate, strong, and free.

Her romantic interest was Major Matt Gordon, a pilot, whom she told her close friends that she intended to marry once he returned from serving in India. Gordon would never return, instead killed in action, leaving Elizabeth heartbroken and alone. In her grief, she rekindled an old flame with former boyfriend Lieutenant Gordon Fickling, and began staying in several different friend’s homes until she “found her footing”. During this time, she was going out late at night, drinking, and finding herself in trouble with the law. Those closest to her believed this behavior was to cope with her loneliness and feeling of being lost in the world, with no true home or calling.

On January 9th, she had her current boyfriend Robert Manley drop her off at the Biltmore Hotel in Hollywood in order to meet up with her sister prior to visiting Massachusetts. By January 15th, she had been missing for nearly a week, until she was found butchered in a parking lot.

She was 22.

Elizabeth Short’s Mugshot, captured when she was 19 for underage drinking in Santa Barbara . [1944]. “The Black Dahlia,” by Federal Bureau of Investigation. FBI: Famous Cases and Criminals.

Within hours, the crime scene was flooded with reporters. Newspapers referred to her as “The Black Dahlia”, in reference to a crime film of the previous year. The public was obsessed with the gruesomeness of her death, and her stardom. Seemingly furious with the holy treatment being given to Short, the killer sent letters to the Los Angeles Examiner, offering her personal belongings (birth certificate, photos, address book, etc.). DNA testing on the letters has wielded no results.

Letters From the Supposed Killer. [1947]. “Cold Case #5 – The Chilling Death Of The Black Dahlia,” by Maitri Patel. Odyssey, 20 Mar. 2017.

Warning: The above link contains extremely graphic images, and shouldn’t be viewed by those who may be sensitive to crimes of this nature. Caution is advised.

Since her death, over 50 men and women have confessed to the murder. Several suspects, (most notably George Hodel, her then-boyfriend Robert Manley [who would later be diagnosed with schizophrenia and admitted to a mental hospital], and Mark Hansen to name a few) have been pinpointed but never charged.

Short’s promiscuous behavior near the time of her death has made it nearly impossible for investigators to determine possible suspects, sexual partners, and even friends. Having the public eye put her in such a high podium (thanks to the media and the alias given to her in order to increase recognition) made the investigation cumbersome, as well as the lack of advanced genetic testing at the time. The odds of finding The Black Dahlia killer are slim to none, doomed to be unsolved and “cold” for eternity it seems.

For further reading, BuzzFeed Unsolved has a short but fantastic video detailing the murder and further explaining several suspects and theories, and I recommend for those interested to check it out. Thank you for reading, and best of luck with creating your own theories.

As a society, we thrive on crime and violence. The most popular shows on television are nearly all true crime: NCIS, Criminal Minds, Law and Order, CSI, Bones, etc. It’s not a coincidence that we are fed stories of crime from the media, and that our movies, our books, our Facebook feeds are filled with violence.

The more horrifying, the more fascinating. It’s attention grabbing, it’s appealing because its taboo. It’s wrong, but we love to hear about the ones who live outside the confines of our societal norms. Stories about crime sell quicker, sell out, and sell the story.

And if the story goes unsolved?

Suddenly we’re all Sherlock Holmes.

JonBenét Ramsey. “Court papers: Grand jury in 1999 sought to indict JonBenet Ramsey’s parents,” by Michael Martinez and Faith Karimi. CNN, 25 Oct. 2013.

1996: December 26th, the morning after Christmas, the Ramsey house awoke to find their beautiful six-year old daughter JonBenét missing from her bed. JonBenét was a pageant star, who lived a life of luxury. She was an American icon, recognized by her curly blonde hair, her smile, and her supportive family cheering her on at events: her mother Patsy, a former beauty star herself, her father John, a successful multi-millionaire businessman, and her elder brother Burke, who was nine at the time of her disappearance. She loved camera time, and captured the hearts millions who watched her captivate her audiences with her southern charm and confidence. JonBenét was poised to be a star.

And she was gone.

In place of their loving daughter, Patsy and John found a ransom note demanding 118,000 dollars. Though the note explicitly warned against notifying the police, authorities were called and arrived at around 6:00 A.M. Once they began their investigation of the home, the first mistakes were made. None of the house was sectioned off other than JonBenét’s room, meaning the family was allowed to roam and tamper with evidence. John and Patsy were never interviewed separately. In fact, as they examined the house the officers instructed the family to help them search and investigate.

This presented to pose a problem when John Ramsey went into the basement and came back with the body of his daughter.

Jonbenét had suffered a skull fracture, had been strangled (with what would later be revealed to be made from parts of Patsy’s paintbrush), had been gagged and bound, sexually assaulted (there would be no DNA found), and the autopsy revealed that she died primarily from asphyxiation with complications from the skull fracture.

Followers of the case usually fit within two groups: those who believe the family did it, and those who believe an intruder did it. Though all three members of the immediate family were investigated, the media coverage and public has held them as the primary suspects.

Ransom Note. 1997. “Disguised Handwriting: Unmasking The Ramsey Ransom Note,” by Brenda Anderson. Expert Handwriting Analysis, 9 July 2013.

Handwriting analysis has been inconclusive in determining whether or not Patsy wrote the ransom note (which is an odd thing to leave in a home if you’re going to kill the child and dump her in the basement). Much of the language in the note raised flags as well, as it was verbose and oddly specific. Considering how contaminated the DNA at the crime scene was, fingerprint data has been inconclusive both on her body and in the home. Initially, Patsy and John were considered hostile witnesses and were difficult to work with, citing their fear of being accused. Years would go by before any development in the case.

1999: A grand jury decides to convict John and Patsy for their presumed involvement, however insufficient evidence prevents a formal conviction. Prior to Patsy’s death in 2005 due to cancer, she and John released a memoir titled, “The Death of Innocence” which detailed their struggles with being perceived as murderers of their own child. They believe an intruder broke into the home late at night, (and investigators have several names of people of interest in this theory) and framed the family in order to cover their tracks.

2016: JonBenét’s brother Burke speaks to the media for the first time during an interview with Dr. Phil in which he defends his family (though the interview has been torn apart by behavioral analysts and body language experts who have pointed out a few red flags of their own).

Yet, we’re no closer to knowing who for certain killed JonBenét.

This case has interested me in similar ways as the Zodiac did, both because it went unsolved, and because I’ve been developing my own theories as to what I think happened. BuzzFeed Unsolved has another amazing video detailing the crime and explaining theories much better and more in depth than me, so if interested please check it out.

Several people have taken responsibility for the murder, and new loopholes seem to pop up every couple of years. While hope may still remain for determining what happened, it’s clear that investigative incompetence and media played a powerful role in preventing the truth from being revealed.