On the first day of June 1975, twenty-three-year-old teacher Ellen Choate left her home in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and set out for Bangor, Maine, where she was supposed to start a new job on June 2nd. At some point along her journey, she vanished without a trace. It would be more than two years before she … More Ellen Choate

On Valentine’s Day of 1978, a young girl was found slain near San Diego, California, having been subjected to brutal torture before her death. To this day, she remains unidentified, and is referred to only as San Diego County Jane Doe. The victim was white, between fourteen and eighteen years old, and stood only about … More San Diego County Jane Doe

The summer of 1977 began fading into autumn, and in New Jersey, it was almost time for college classes to begin. Twenty-five-year old Sigrid Stevenson, a graduate student in music, had just returned to the campus of Trenton State College (now known as the College of New Jersey), but found that the family she’d been … More Sigrid Stevenson

It was the evening of Friday, January 14th, 1977, and the weather in Port Huron, Michigan had been far crueler than usual. Twenty-year-old Iris Johnston simply wanted to go down the block to the store, but was unable to get her car out of the driveway, so decided to bundle up and set out on … More Iris Johnston

Collingwood was, in 1977, a fairly safe, working-class suburb of Melbourne, Australia, and it had seemed the perfect place for longtime friends and roommates—twenty-eight-year-old high school teacher Susan Bartlett and twenty-seven-year-old mother Suzanne Armstrong—to maintain a house and raise Suzanne’s sixteen-month-old son Gregory. On the evening of January 10th, Susan’s brother and his girlfriend stopped … More Easey Street Murders: Suzanne Armstrong & Susan Bartlett

Sixteen-year-old Deborah Lynn Rosencrans was undergoing some trying family turmoil. Her parents were divorced, and her mother had been forced to work several jobs in order to make ends meet. Recently, though, Deborah’s mother had remarried, and the family was planning to move back to their former home in Orlando, Florida. Deborah, though, wanted to … More Deborah Lynn Rosencrans

Florence Broadhurst had been born in a remote, rural part of Queensland, but she apparently had much bigger ambitions than her unassuming origins would suggest. She was an accomplished singer and comedian, and parlayed these talents into a career that took her out of her humble hometown and eventually around the world. Florence opened an … More Florence Broadhurst

Twenty-four-year-old Elizabeth “Betty Jane” Berquist lived in an apartment on Seneca Street in Greenock, Pennsylvania with her two-year-old daughter Tara. Betty Jane had previously had a job as a server at the Canopy Restaurant in McKeesport while she was making her way through nursing school, but just recently she had got her first nursing position … More Elizabeth “Betty Jane” Berquist

It was Sunday, February 27th, 1978, and twenty-three-year-old Julie Campbell, a medical records clerk at the Lahey Clinic in Boston, had been spending the evening with two friends at a bar called the Plough and Stars in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After parting from her friends at around one a.m. on the morning of February 28th, Julie … More Julie Campbell

On July 3rd, 1979, in Bend, Oregon, a man enjoying a night out on the town would be randomly gunned down for seemingly no reason at all. Forty-nine-year-old John C. Talbott was playing pool and drinking wine at the West Side Tavern on Galveston Avenue in Bend, accompanied by his new girlfriend. The pair had … More John C. Talbott