1950–1974

• Marilyn Reese Sheppard wife of Sam Sheppard, attacked and killed in her home in Bay Village, Ohio, United States, on 4 July 1954. Sam Sheppard was later convicted of killing his pregnant wife but this was overturned in 1966 and he was acquitted in a new trial. He claimed his wife was killed by a bushy-haired man who also attacked him and knocked him unconscious twice. Their son slept through the night, just down the hall from the bedroom in which his mother was murdered. The trial of Sam Sheppard received extensive publicity and was called "carnival atmosphere" by the U.S. Supreme Court.^[14]
• Barbara and Patricia Grimes disappeared on 28 December 1956, in Chicago, Illinois after going to a cinema to watch an Elvis Presley movie. Their disappearance launched one of the biggest missing-persons hunts in Chicago history. However, police were not able to determine what happened to the Grimes sisters.^[15] On January 1957 their naked bodies were found off a road near Willow Springs, Illinois. The corpses contained various bruises and marks (for example puncture wounds in the chest that may have come from an ice pick) that were never fully explained.
• Mary Jane Hanselman, a 16 year old sophomore at Sacred Heart Academy, Springfield, Illinois, was discovered north of the fairgrounds on April 27, 1958. She was bound with her own stockings and clothed in the uniform she was last seen wearing at a restaurant where she worked in Springfield. A dishwasher at the Georgian, the restaurant where Hanselman worked, was arrested but there was insufficient evidence to hold him.^[16] (See Absence of Goodness.)
• Boy in the Box, sometimes known as "America's Unknown Child" is a name given to an unidentified murder victim, approximately 4 to 6 years old. The body of the boy was found battered and naked inside a cardboard box on 25 February 1957 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The case received massive media attention and pictures of the boy were placed in every gas bill in Philadelphia. It has been featured on the America's Most Wanted television series but despite all attention the case remains unsolved and the boy's identity unknown.^[17]
• Lynne Harper, 12 years old, was last seen alive on 9 June 1959 riding on the handlebars of her friend Steven Truscott's bike near an air force base which is now Vanastra, Ontario, Canada. Two days later her body was discovered in a nearby farm woodlot, she had been raped and strangled with her own blouse. 14 year old Steven Murray Truscott was convicted and sentenced to death for the murder, becoming Canada's youngest person to be sentenced to death. The sentence was later commuted to life in prison. Truscott was held in custody for 10 years: in 2007 his conviction was ruled a miscarriage of justice, although he was not declared innocent.^[18]
• The Lake Bodom murders, were an infamous multiple homicide that took place in Finland on 5 June 1960. That night four teenagers were camping on the shores of the lake when between 4 am and 6 am they were attacked by an unknown individual or individuals with a knife and a blunt object. Three of them died and the fourth one was wounded but survived. Although the sole survivor became a suspect for some time in 2004, the case remains unsolved and the killer(s) identity unknown.^[19]
• Mary Meyer, a socialite from Washington, D.C., and close friend of U.S. President John F. Kennedy.^[20] Shot to death on 12 October 1964 by an unknown assailant after finishing a painting and going for a walk. She was heard screaming for help by a mechanic on a nearby road who also heard two gunshots and saw an unidentified man standing over her body. Her murder would later stir speculation relating to the Kennedy assassination.^[21]
• Betsy Aardsma, was a 22-year-old woman from Holland, Michigan, United States, and a graduate student at Penn State University who was stabbed to death in broad daylight in the stacks of Pattee Library on Penn State's campus on 28 November 1969. She was stabbed a single time through the heart with a single-edged small knife. Approximately one minute later two men came from Betsy's location and told a desk clerk, "Somebody better help that girl," and then exited the library. The men were never identified. 25–35 minutes later Betsy arrived at a hospital where she was pronounced dead. She had worn a red dress, and since there was only a small amount of blood visible, no one immediately realized that she had been stabbed.^[22]
• The unsolved murders of Carmen Colon, 10; Wanda Walkowicz, 11; and Michelle Maenza, 11, of Rochester, New York, between 1971 and 1973. Each victim was abducted from within a different quadrant of the city proper, and their raped and strangled bodies were found in suburbs of that city that began with the first letter of their respective names. Thus, the murders were dubbed the Alphabet murders and the Double Initial murders. The cases remain open and surprisingly active. In 2009 a supernatural thriller called Alphabet Killer was released, which was loosely based on the crimes; and in 2010, a book called "Alphabet Killer: The True Story of the Double Initial Murders" was released by author Cheri Farnsworth, detailing the actual events, from the time they occurred through the present, in the only book fully dedicated to these shocking crimes. ^[23][24]
• Gus Uhlhorn, a Cincinnati, Ohio man, left the Roundup Bar on Dixie Highway, Northern Kentucky, in the early morning hours of March 3, 1973. His car was parked across the street in a parking lot. He was hit by a car as he crossed Dixie Highway. At 8:20 a.m. that morning, teenagers driving by spotted him in a water-filled ditch next to Chinatown, about 500 feet from where his car was parked. He suffered fatal injuries and was dead on arrival at St. Elizabeth Hospital, Covington, Kentucky. Erlanger police were quoted at the time as saying it was "definitely foul play—perhaps vehicular homicide." No one has ever been charged with the crime.
• Henry Bedard Jr., a 15-year-old boy from Swampscott, MA on December 16,1974. He was found beaten to death with a baseball bat in a wooded area of Swampscott. His body was covered with leaves. Henry had been shopping for Christmas gifts earlier and was on his way home. The case remains open as of December, 2010.