Category Archives: Cold Cases

Police only thought Jos Brech was curious when he rode his bicycle past an active crime scene in a forest in the Netherlands in August 1998.
The officers had just recovered the body of 11-year-old Nicky Verstappen, who, on a summer camp trip, had disappeared from his tent the night before. The boy had been raped and killed, police said, in a case that would haunt the nation in the decades to come.
But, that night, Brech said he didn’t know anything. Police took his name and let him go.
They kept his name for a long time — until finally, this year, it came up again.

Lawyers for Tasmanian convicted killer Susan Neill-Fraser say new DNA evidence is a “game- changer” in her push for a fresh appeal, but prosecutors say it ­supports the case against her.

In the Dupont Circle area incident, which occurred three days later, police said the female victim was also approached from behind and sexually assaulted in the 1500 block of P Street NW.
In Georgetown, two incidents occurred, with one at 10:30 p.m.on Sept. 5, 2016, in the 1200 block of Potomac Street NW, and another about 8:15 p.m. on Oct. 26, 2016, in the 1600 block of 33rd Street NW, police said.
Prosecutors charged three of the incidents as misdemeanors and one as first-degree sexual assault.
“The forensic evidence establishes a common profile of all four assaults and the fifth assault in Virginia,” McKenna said.

A Nevada inmate who was convicted of attacking a couple with an ax handle is now linked to the 1984 killings of four people who were beaten with a hammer in two separate attacks in suburban Denver, authorities said.

It’s one of the oldest cold cases in Australia’s history: an unknown man found dead, slumped by a seawall, at a popular beach on the first day of summer, 1948.
He has come to be known as the Somerton Man.

Officials are using DNA testing to determine whether Drayton’s DNA turns up in forensic evidence collected from any unsolved homicides.

Australia- Forensic specialists have shed light on two mysterious cases they have never been able to solve – one involving an almost perfectly preserved skeleton and another body found hanging from a purple scarf as a noose.

Detective Melissa Rendon with the Victoria Police Department talks about coming across this photo of Linda Singh. Cold case detective Rendon and her partner, Amy Grothe, have reopened the investigation surrounding the disappearance of Linda Singh and have now classified it as a homicide. Singh’s remains were recently identified in Harris County. Singh went missing in April 1984.

(CNN)For three decades, the abduction, rape and murder of 8-year-old April Tinsley in April 1988 had frustrated Indiana investigators.
The mysterious killer’s taunting messages admitting to the crime, scrawled on a barn door and on paper notes threatening to kill again, only added to the desire to solve the cold case. Still, no suspect could be found.
But thanks to advances in genealogy and DNA technology, the suspected killer was arrested and then confessed to the crime on Sunday — more than 30 years after April’s death.

A renewed wave of DNA testing in the JonBenet Ramsey case has been completed and although investigators are not talking about what was learned, further forensic examination of evidence in the case could still be on tap.