On a summer evening in 1980, sixteen-year-old Joyce McLain left her home in East Millinocket, Maine, for a run. She never returned. For more than three and a half decades, her case haunted the community—a murder with no witnesses, no clear forensic evidence, and a suspect who remained free while the investigation went cold. Joyce was known for her academic success and her involvement in school activities as a cheerleader, musician, and athlete.
On August 8, 1980, she spent her day babysitting and giving piano lessons. Around 7:30 that evening, she went out for her run. Two days later, her body was found behind Schenck High School near the athletic fields. She was nearly naked, wearing only socks and running shoes, and had been beaten to death with a blunt object.
A thunderstorm during the time she was missing had destroyed much of the physical evidence. There was no DNA, no fingerprints, no clear eyewitnesses. One name kept surfacing: nineteen-year-old Philip Scott Fournier. Police interrogated him more than twenty times over the years.
He had drawn attention when he stole a truck the day after Joyce’s murder and crashed it into a building, injuring his head. He later admitted he had intended to take his own life. His story kept shifting—sometimes confessing, sometimes denying involvement or blaming others. Without solid evidence, investigators could not arrest him.
Joyce’s mother, Pamela McLain, refused to let the case be forgotten. She pressured investigators, spoke publicly, and kept her daughter’s story alive. In 2008, she made the difficult decision to have Joyce’s body exhumed for new forensic testing. Experts said they found new evidence that offered hope after nearly thirty years.
In 2016, thirty-six years after the case was opened, police arrested Fournier and charged him with ending Joyce’s life. Authorities said the case was solved not by a single piece of evidence but by an accumulation of evidence gathered over decades. The case went to trial in 2018. There was no physical evidence linking Fournier to the crime.
The prosecution relied heavily on his statements, arguing that he had confessed multiple times to his parents, his chaplain, and others over the years, and that he knew details about the crime only the killer could know. The defense argued his statements were unreliable and that his memory was flawed. Superior Court Justice Ann Murray rejected that argument, noting that Fournier could remember other events clearly and that he had knowledge of precise, withheld details about the crime. In February 2018, Fournier, then fifty-seven, was convicted.
The judge described the crime as brutal and violent and sentenced him to forty-five years in prison. For Joyce’s family, the conviction brought long-awaited closure. Her mother said no mother could be happier than she was at that moment. Her uncle, Daniel Hill, expressed complicated feelings, saying the conviction would not bring Joyce back and that he felt sorry for Fournier’s family.
Even with the conviction, questions remained. There was no definitive physical evidence, and some believed doubt would always remain. In December 1966, a brutal robbery at a Memphis liquor store shocked the community. Seventy-year-old store employee Hillman Robbins Jr.
was taken to a back room, bound, and shot multiple times. The case centered on the relationship between eighteen-year-old Margo Freshwater and Glenn Nash, a lawyer nearly twice her age. Freshwater claimed she acted out of fear and that Nash had threatened her life and forced her to participate. Prosecutors painted a different picture, arguing she was an active participant who helped choose the store, drove the getaway car, and served customers during the robbery.
She was convicted of ending Robbins’ life and sentenced to ninety-nine years. Years later, a fellow inmate named Johnny Box claimed Nash had confessed that he alone shot the victim and that Freshwater had been at the front of the store. That statement was never fully disclosed to Freshwater’s defense during trial. Courts later ruled this was a critical failure—the state had withheld evidence of innocence.
In 1970, a year after her conviction, Freshwater escaped by climbing a fence at the Tennessee Women’s Prison with another inmate. For more than three decades, she evaded capture, living quietly under an assumed name. In 2002, she was found in Columbus, Ohio, living as Tanya McCarter with a husband and children. In 2011, an appeals court ruled the withheld evidence could have affected the verdict and ordered a new trial.
Freshwater entered an Alford plea, was given credit for time served, and was released. After more than forty years connected to the case, she was free. In December 1999, firefighters responded to what seemed like a tragic house fire in the rural town of Welch, Oklahoma. Inside the home, they found the body of Kathy Freeman, Ashley’s mother.
She had not died in the fire—she had been shot in the head. The fire had been deliberately set to destroy evidence. The next day, the body of Ashley’s father, Danny Freeman, was found in the ruins. He too had been shot in the head execution-style.
Sixteen-year-old Ashley and her best friend, Lauria Bible, who had been spending the night to celebrate Ashley’s birthday, had vanished. Their car was still parked outside, keys in the ignition. It was clear they had been kidnapped. The case went cold for nearly two decades.
In 2017, investigators discovered a box of old case files, including an insurance card that led them to three men: Ronnie Dean Busick, Warren Phil Welch II, and David Pennington. Witness statements revealed that the girls had been held captive for days, bound, abused, and eventually strangled. Their bodies were never found. In 2018, Busick was arrested and charged.
The other two suspects had already died. In 2020, Busick pleaded guilty to being an accessory after the fact and was sentenced to ten years plus five years of probation. He was released in 2023 after serving only thirty-eight months. In March 2025, Oklahoma lawmakers passed a bill named Lauria and Ashley’s Law, requiring those convicted of aiding a murder to serve 85 percent of their sentence before becoming eligible for parole.
During the oil crisis of the 1970s, a mysterious entrepreneur emerged promising a revolutionary vehicle. Geraldine Elizabeth Carmichael presented the Dale, a futuristic three-wheeled car that supposedly achieved seventy miles per gallon and sold for under two thousand dollars. Carmichael founded 20th Century Motorcar in California and convinced investors and customers to pour millions into the project. But behind the scenes, the Dale barely existed.
Only a few prototypes were built, and most did not even work. Carmichael had a complex past—she was born Jerry Dean Michael, had a criminal record, and later transitioned and adopted a new identity. In 1977, she was convicted of fraud but fled before sentencing. Twelve years later, after a television appeal on Unsolved Mysteries, she was found living quietly in Texas.
She served about thirty-two months in prison. Investors lost millions, and the dream of the Dale collapsed completely. On a warm evening in May 1993, five-year-old Alie Berrelez was sitting outside her apartment complex in Englewood, Colorado, eating pizza. Within minutes, she vanished.
Her three-year-old brother told investigators that an old man had taken her. A bloodhound tracked her scent toward the apartment of Nicholas Stofer, a forty-one-year-old man living in the same complex. Four days later, Alie’s body was found inside a duffel bag about fourteen miles away. The autopsy revealed no clear cause of death.
For nearly two decades, the case remained unsolved. In 2011, advances in DNA testing allowed investigators to re-examine the evidence. DNA found on Alie’s clothing matched Stofer. But Stofer had died in 2001, ten years before the match was confirmed.
There was no trial, no conviction, no chance for the family to confront him. Alie’s grandfather, Richard Barrajas, founded Alie’s Foundation to provide bloodhounds to law enforcement agencies across the country. On a cold January night in 1999, twenty-eight-year-old attorney Joyce Chiang left friends after dinner and a movie, planning to walk four blocks to her apartment in Washington, D. C.
She never arrived. Her wallet was found in Anacostia Park by a couple walking there, but it sat in lost and found for days before being connected to her disappearance. Then her keys, ID, gloves, and torn jacket were found. For months, searches intensified.
Her body was found in the Potomac River in April 1999. The autopsy could not determine a cause of death. Investigators initially believed she may have taken her own life, despite the torn clothing and scattered belongings. Her family fiercely opposed that theory.
In 2011, the case was reclassified—Joyce was the victim of a crime, likely attacked during a robbery attempt. Two potential suspects were identified, but one was in prison and the other had been deported to Guyana. No one was ever prosecuted. The case was officially closed in 2011, not because it was solved, but because investigators had reached the limits of what could be proven.
In September 1977, twenty-one-year-old Lou Ellen Burleigh left her home in California for what she said was a job interview. She never returned. Years later, investigators connected her case to Roger Kibbe, the serial killer known as the I-5 Strangler. During the 1980s, multiple bodies were found near highways, bound and strangled.
In 1987, a woman survived Kibbe’s attack, and her resistance led to his arrest. In 1991, he was convicted. While serving his sentence, Kibbe confessed to ending Lou Ellen’s life, admitting he lured her with the job interview ruse. But her body was never found.
In 2011, a detective searching the same remote area discovered a bone. DNA testing confirmed it was Lou Ellen. After thirty-four years, her remains had finally been found. Kibbe died in prison in 2021, killed by another inmate.
On a quiet school day in 1994, a man entered an elementary school in Oklahoma armed with a gun. Six-year-old Michael Hughes was abducted from his first-grade classroom in broad daylight. The kidnapper was Franklin Delano Floyd, the same man who had raised Michael’s mother, Susan Sevikakis, after kidnapping her years before. Floyd had posed as her father and later as her husband.
In 1989, Susan died in what was officially ruled a hit-and-run accident, though many investigators suspected foul play. Floyd’s attempt to gain custody of Michael was denied when DNA testing proved he was not the biological father. On September 12, 1994, Floyd forced the school principal at gunpoint to take him to Michael’s classroom. He took the boy and drove him and the principal to a wooded area, where he tied the principal to a tree and drove away with Michael.
The principal survived. Michael was never seen again. Floyd gave conflicting accounts over the years. In 2014, he finally confessed, saying he shot Michael twice in the back of the head and disposed of the body near Interstate 35.
Searches found nothing. Floyd was sentenced to death but died in 2023. In September 1998, forty-two-year-old Nancy Marie Lapont Dardisio, a divorced mother of five trying to rebuild her life, accepted a ride to Indianapolis after her car broke down in Bowling Green, Kentucky. She was never seen alive again.
In September 2000, teenagers found skeletal remains wrapped in upholstery fabric outside a cave near Park City. The remains were identified as Nancy’s. Forensic analysis showed she had been stabbed to death. The case went cold for nearly a decade.
In 2009, investigators questioned David M. Bell, who was already serving a sixty-three-year sentence for killing Claire Ellison in Indiana. Bell confessed to ending Nancy’s life as well, saying he picked her up while she was looking for a ride, struck her with a pipe, and when she regained consciousness and resisted, choked and stabbed her. Bell claimed responsibility for multiple crimes and was described by the sheriff as potentially one of the most prolific serial offenders.
Although Bell was never formally tried for Nancy’s murder, authorities considered the case effectively solved. The lives of two promising young people were cut short by a man whose violent path went unchecked for years. Hayden Clark was born in April 1951 in Troy, New York, into a chaotic household with alcoholic parents. By age four, doctors suggested he might have brain damage.
He faced cruelty at home and early violence toward animals. As a teenager, he was arrested for wearing women’s clothing and beating by his father. In May 1986, six-year-old Michelle Door disappeared while visiting her father in Silver Spring, Maryland. Investigators pointed to Clark, who lived nearby.
He was questioned, but his time card proved he was at work by 2:46 p. m. , and without physical evidence, he was released. In 1992, Clark, working as a gardener for the Hotling family, entered their home disguised in the mother’s clothing and wig.
Armed with a rifle, he forced twenty-three-year-old Laura Hotling to undress and shower, then bound her and covered her face with tape, causing her to suffocate. In 1993, Clark pleaded guilty and was sentenced to thirty years. In 1999, he was tried for Michelle Door’s murder and convicted, receiving an additional thirty years. The next year, he led authorities to her remains.
At his grandfather’s property, investigators found a bucket containing about two hundred pieces of women’s jewelry, some linked to Laura Hotling. In 1976, Dr. Steven Scherr, an allergist in Montrose, Pennsylvania, accompanied his close friend Martin Dillon on a skeet shooting trip. Scherr told police that Dillon tripped on his shoelace and fell on the shotgun, dying of a chest wound.
The death was ruled accidental. Shortly after, Scherr divorced his wife and married Dillon’s widow, Patricia, raising her sons as his own. Dillon’s father never believed his son’s death was an accident. After an exhumation and second autopsy in the 1990s, the coroner concluded that Dillon had been shot while sitting, not running, and that his death was a homicide.
Scherr became the prime suspect. During his 1997 trial, Scherr abandoned the story he had told for two decades. He admitted the crime scene had been staged, saying Dillon had confronted him about an affair with Patricia. Scherr claimed the gun went off during a struggle, and he then wiped his fingerprints, placed the gun in Dillon’s hands, and loosened a shoelace to make it look like an accident.
He admitted the affair was real and said he lied to protect Patricia and the children from scandal. The jury convicted him, but a Pennsylvania appeals court overturned the conviction due to the passage of time and lost evidence. He was retried and convicted again in 2008, sentenced to life in prison. Scherr died of natural causes in 2015 at age seventy, while serving his life sentence.
In June 1978, twenty-two-year-old Carla Lou Brown was found dead in the basement of her new home in Wood River, Illinois, her head in a bucket of water, her hands bound with electrical wire, and her fiancé’s socks wrapped tightly around her neck. She had been beaten, with a fractured jaw and bruises, and may have been alive when her head was placed in the water. Investigators found the bindings on her wrists were loose and orderly, her clothing was strangely arranged, and the crime scene appeared staged. A bite mark on her body, unnoticed for years, was discovered during a re-examination of crime scene photos.
Witnesses claimed a neighbor, John Branti, had described details of the crime that had never been made public, including the bite mark itself. Branti was arrested in 1982, four years after the murder. The 1983 trial centered on bite mark evidence, one of the earliest uses of this forensic method in the United States. Branti was convicted and sentenced to seventy-five years.
Over time, bite mark analysis came under widespread scrutiny. Branti maintained his innocence throughout. In 2019, after thirty-six years in prison, he was granted parole. He died in July 2023 at age seventy-three.
On September 17, 1984, eight-year-old Vicki Lynne Hoskinson left her home in Tucson, Arizona, to mail a postcard. Her pink bicycle was found abandoned on a dirt road. A boy in the neighborhood remembered seeing a dark Datsun Z with California plates driving slowly nearby. A teacher at Vicki’s school, who had seen a similar car parked near the school, had written down the license plate number.
It was traced to Frank Jarvis Atwood. Atwood was arrested in Texas, and forensic evidence linked his car to Vicki’s bicycle. Witnesses testified they saw Atwood that evening with blood on his hands and clothes, claiming he had stabbed a man in a dispute. Atwood was convicted in 1987 of kidnapping and murder and sentenced to death.
The case went through decades of appeals and delays. Vicki’s mother, Debbie Carlson, waited thirty-seven years for final justice. In June 2022, Arizona executed Atwood by lethal injection. He made a brief statement thanking his supporters but did not mention Vicki or her family.
For thirty years, a terrible secret lay hidden beneath an ordinary house in Jericho, New York. In September 1999, a homeowner opening a heavy fifty-five-gallon drum in a crawl space discovered the mummified remains of a small woman, between four feet nine and five feet tall, with unusual dental work suggesting treatment outside the United States. The autopsy determined she had been pregnant and had suffered blunt force trauma to the head. The barrel contained plastic pellets, green dye, artificial plants, jewelry, a necklace, and a damaged address book.
Investigators recovered a social security number from the book, identifying the woman as Reyna Angelica Marroquin. Born in El Salvador in 1941, Reyna had come to the United States in 1966, worked at Melrose Plastics in Manhattan, and sent money home. Around the winter of 1969, her letters home abruptly stopped. Investigators learned of an affair between Reyna and Howard B.
Elkins, a part-owner of the company who was married. The barrel was traced to Melrose Plastics, and Elkins had once owned the Jericho house. When investigators questioned Elkins in Florida, he disappeared the next day, found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. No charges were ever filed.
DNA testing later proved Elkins was the biological father of Reyna’s unborn child. Authorities considered him the primary suspect. They theorized he may have killed Reyna and intended to sink the barrel in the ocean, but it remained in the crawl space for three decades. After identification, Reyna’s remains were returned to El Salvador, where her ninety-five-year-old mother said she had dreamed her daughter was trapped in a barrel.
In September 1979, twenty-one-year-old Diana Green, pregnant with her first child, was brutally attacked inside her apartment in Tustin, California. She was beaten repeatedly on the head and sexually assaulted. Rushed to the hospital in a coma, doctors performed an emergency cesarean, but the baby could not be saved. Diana suffered severe brain damage and extensive memory loss.
Her husband, Marine Corporal Kevin Green, told investigators he had left to buy food and returned to find his wife injured. Investigators soon focused on him. After Diana regained consciousness, she identified Kevin as her attacker, saying they had argued and that he had become violent when she refused his advances. Kevin maintained his innocence, but he was convicted in 1980 of second-degree murder in the death of his unborn child, attempted murder, and assault.
Sentenced to fifteen years to life, he served nearly seventeen years. Meanwhile, investigators were dealing with a series of brutal attacks against women in Orange County during the late 1970s. Five women had been killed. The press called the unknown assailant the Bedroom Strangler.
The suspect was Gerald Parker, a former Marine with a criminal history. In the 1990s, DNA testing of the biological evidence from Diana’s attack produced a match—Parker. He admitted to the attacks, describing entering homes through unlocked doors and windows and assaulting women after striking them with weapons like wooden boards or hammers. In June 1996, Kevin Green’s convictions were vacated and charges dismissed.
A judge apologized to him. Diana, however, continued to insist Kevin had attacked her before Parker entered the apartment. In 1998, Parker was convicted and sentenced to death.
Kevin Green received compensation from the state for the years he spent in prison for crimes authorities concluded he did not commit.