It was the summer of 1909 in New York City, and twenty-year-old Elsie Sigel left her family’s apartment to visit her grandmother not far away. Elsie, who was the granddaughter of famed Civil War general Franz Sigel, was herself a missionary who worked in Chinatown, helping young women who had become involved in drugs and … More Elsie Sigel
On May 24th, 1970, sixteen-year-old Claire Gagnon was spending time out and about near her house in Dieppe, New Brunswick, Canada. She was seen alive by witnesses between two and three p.m., but afterward, her whereabouts were unknown. Her parents became concerned when the teenager didn’t come home for dinner at five o’clock as she … More Claire Gagnon
On July 16th, 1994, ten-year-old Marie-Chantale Desjardins left her home in Sainte-Thérèse, Quebec, Canada at around nine-thirty a.m. on her bicycle. She was heading to a friend’s house, but when she arrived, her friend was getting ready to leave, so Marie decided she’d find something else to do. According to witnesses, she spent some time … More Marie-Chantale Desjardins
On the evening of March 13th, 2015, fifty-year-old antique dealer Robyn Mercer had just finished dinner and then went out the front door of her house in West Molesey, Surrey, England, presumably to throw something into the garbage bins at the end of her driveway. She never returned to her home. The following morning at … More Robyn Mercer
It was New Year’s Day of 1902 in a rural town called Towitta, in South Australia. Thirteen-year-old Bertha Schippan and her twenty-four-year-old sister Mary were spending the evening at the family farm alone. Their parents, Matthes and Johanne, were visiting relatives, and their three brothers were away working on other nearby farms. Sometime around ten … More Bertha Schippan
At a little after six a.m. on the morning of August 9th, 1976, trucker Martin Durant noticed the fully-clothed dead bodies of a man and woman sprawled alongside a remote unpaved track between Interstate 95 and Lynches River Road in South Carolina. Each victim had been shot three times with a .357 caliber revolver: once … More Pamela Buckley and James Freund: Sumter County Does
On the morning of September 12th, 1976, a body was discovered near the back gate of a cemetery off Dogwood Road in Woodlawn, Maryland. The victim was a young woman between the ages of fifteen and thirty, who had been beaten, savagely raped, and then strangled to death. Police determined that she had been killed … More Margaret Fetterolf: Woodlawn Jane Doe
In the summer of 1976, a forty-six-year-old hotel manager in Australia would check into a fancy hotel and never check out. Rex Keen lived in Bowen on the coast of Queensland, but on August 9th, 1976, he traveled to Brisbane to attend the Queensland Royal Show, which he did every year. Another thing he did … More Rex Keen
It was July 10th, 1976, and twenty-year-old Debra Bennett had just been evicted from her apartment in Madison, Wisconsin. She had only been living there for about seven months, having moved from her native Ridgeway, but apparently she had failed to come up with the rent, and neighbors saw her packing up her things and … More Debra Bennett
Shirley Finn was, in 1975, a notorious figure in Perth, Western Australia. Though she had come from a respectable middle class family and seemingly had a bright future ahead of her, an ill-advised sexual encounter with an older boy at the age of fourteen saw her spirited off to a strict Catholic reform school, where … More Shirley Finn
Crime Immemorial 