Never caught
1170–1174 · United Kingdom
Thomas Becket
Four of Henry II's knights cut down the Archbishop of Canterbury in his own cathedral in 1170. Within three years he was a saint and the king did penance.
The case files
Every case on the site, oldest first. Filter by kind of crime, era, country or how it ended.
Never caught
Executed
1432–1440 · France
Gilles de Rais
A Marshal of France who fought beside Joan of Arc was hanged at Nantes in 1440 for murdering children. Can his confession be trusted?
Unsolved
1483 · United Kingdom
Princes in the Tower
In 1483 a twelve-year-old king and his brother vanished inside the Tower of London and their uncle took the crown. What became of them is still debated.
Executed
1556–1560 · France
Martin Guerre
In 1556 a man walked into a Pyrenean village claiming to be its missing husband. His wife accepted him for three years, until the real one came home.
Disputed verdict
1602–1614 · Hungary
Elizabeth Báthory
Hundreds of witnesses accused a Hungarian countess of killing young women. She was walled up without trial in 1610. Was it justice or a political purge?
Executed
1605–1606 · United Kingdom
Gunpowder Plot
Thirty-six barrels of powder under the House of Lords, an anonymous letter, and a man called 'John Johnson' with a lantern: the plot behind Bonfire Night.
Convicted
1671 · United Kingdom
Colonel Blood
In 1671 Thomas Blood flattened King Charles II's crown with a mallet and ran for the Tower gate. He was caught, then pardoned and given an Irish estate.
Executed
1677–1682 · France
Affair of the Poisons
Fortune tellers selling 'inheritance powders' to the Paris elite, a secret court lit by torches, and testimony that reached the king's own mistress.
Never caught
1694–1696 · India
Henry Every
In 1695 Henry Every's pirates plundered the Mughal emperor's greatest ship. A worldwide manhunt followed. Six of his men hanged; Every vanished.
Executed
1696–1701 · United Kingdom
Captain Kidd
Sent by powerful backers to hunt pirates, William Kidd came home accused of being one, and was hanged twice at Execution Dock in 1701.
Killed before trial
1716–1719 · North Carolina
Blackbeard
Edward Teach held Charles Town to ransom for a chest of medicine, took a royal pardon, went back to sea and died on a sloop's deck at Ocracoke in 1718.
Executed
1717–1718 · South Carolina
Stede Bonnet
A rich Barbados planter bought a ship, hired a crew and went pirating in 1717. Eighteen months later Charles Town hanged him, despite his pleas.
Killed before trial
1719–1722 · Gabon
Bartholomew Roberts
A Welsh mate forced into piracy took hundreds of ships in under three years. A broadside off Gabon in 1722 ended him, and 52 of his men were hanged.
Convicted
1720–1721 · Jamaica
Anne Bonny and Mary Read
Two women sailed with John Rackham for barely two months in 1720. Their trial in Jamaica is the solid record; almost everything else is later legend.
Executed
1734–1739 · United Kingdom
Dick Turpin
No night ride to York, no Black Bess: the real Dick Turpin was an Essex gang robber and killer, hanged at York in 1739 for stealing horses.
Disputed verdict
1811 · United Kingdom
Ratcliff Highway murders
Seven people killed in two East London households twelve days apart in 1811. The suspect hanged himself before trial, and doubts have outlived him.
Acquitted
1821–1826 · United Kingdom
Gregor MacGregor and Poyais
Gregor MacGregor sold bonds, land and passage to Poyais, a Central American country that did not exist. Most of the settlers who sailed there died.
Executed
1827–1829 · United Kingdom
Burke and Hare
Two Irish labourers killed sixteen people in Edinburgh in 1828 and sold the bodies to an anatomy lecturer. Only one of them hanged.
Executed
1827–1828 · United Kingdom
Maria Marten and William Corder
A Suffolk molecatcher's daughter left home in men's clothes to elope in 1827. Eleven months later her father dug her up from the floor of the Red Barn.
Unsolved
1833 · Germany
Kaspar Hauser
A foundling who claimed a childhood in a dark cell, rumours of a stolen prince, and a stab wound in an Ansbach park in 1833. Murder or self-inflicted?
Convicted
1839–1840 · France
Marie Lafarge
A Parisian bride, a crumbling former monastery in Corrèze, a husband dead of 'cholera', and the Marsh test that made toxicology a courtroom science.
Unsolved
1841–1842 · New Jersey
Mary Rogers
In 1841 New York's 'beautiful cigar girl' was found dead in the Hudson. Her death was never solved, and it gave Edgar Allan Poe a detective story.
Legend
1846–1847 · United Kingdom
Sweeney Todd
The demon barber of Fleet Street was born in a penny serial in 1846. No record shows he ever lived, yet the 'true story' claim has never quite died.
Executed
1849 · United Kingdom
Frederick and Maria Manning
In 1849 a Swiss lady's maid and her husband buried their dinner guest under the kitchen floor, then each tried to cheat the other of his fortune.
Convicted
1855–1857 · United Kingdom
Great Gold Robbery of 1855
In May 1855 four men emptied the bullion safes on the London-to-Folkestone night train and refilled them with lead shot. Nobody noticed until Paris.
Executed
1855–1856 · United Kingdom
William Palmer
A Staffordshire doctor deep in racing debts, a friend's winnings at Shrewsbury, and a strychnine trial moved to London by Act of Parliament.
Acquitted
1857 · United Kingdom
Madeleine Smith
A Glasgow architect's daughter, a secret lover, his bundle of letters and three purchases of arsenic. In 1857 the jury said: not proven.
Convicted
1860–1865 · United Kingdom
Constance Kent
A three-year-old taken from his cot in a Wiltshire country house in 1860. Five years later his half-sister walked into Bow Street and confessed.
Executed
1864–1865 · United Kingdom
Dr Edward Pritchard
A Glasgow doctor poisoned his wife and her mother while nursing them, and in 1865 became the last man hanged in public in the city.
Executed
1865 · D.C.
Lincoln Assassination
Good Friday, 1865: an actor shoots the president at Ford's Theatre, a manhunt crosses two states, and a military court hangs four conspirators.
Convicted
1866–1874 · United Kingdom
Tichborne Claimant
A bankrupt butcher from Wagga Wagga said he was a lost English baronet. A grieving mother believed him; two juries and 188 court days did not.
Convicted
1868–1895 · Texas
John Wesley Hardin
A preacher's son who killed a deputy on his 21st birthday served sixteen years, came out a lawyer, and was shot from behind in an El Paso saloon in 1895.
Executed
1872–1873 · United Kingdom
Mary Ann Cotton
A County Durham nurse buried husbands, children and a lover to 'gastric fever'. A seven-year-old stepson's death finally brought arsenic to light.
Unsolved
1874–1875 · Pennsylvania
Charley Ross
In 1874 two men lured a four-year-old into a buggy in Germantown and demanded $20,000. Charley Ross was never found, and America learned to fear strangers.
Convicted
1875–1888 · Northern California and southern Oregon
Black Bart
A polite robber in a flour-sack mask held up Wells Fargo stagecoaches for eight years. A laundry mark on a dropped handkerchief led detectives to his door.
Executed
1876–1879 · United Kingdom
Charles Peace
A limping Sheffield burglar shot two men, let an innocent one take the blame, and lived as a respectable gentleman in Peckham until a Blackheath break-in.
Killed before trial
1876–1882 · Missouri
Jesse James
Northfield's townspeople broke the James-Younger gang in seven minutes in 1876. Six years later a new recruit shot Jesse James in his own parlour.
Killed before trial
1877–1878 · Texas
Sam Bass
Sam Bass took $60,000 in new gold coins from a Union Pacific train in 1877. A year later an informer led him into a Ranger trap at Round Rock, Texas.
Killed before trial
1878–1881 · New Mexico Territory
Billy the Kid
Convicted of killing a sheriff, Billy the Kid shot his way out of the Lincoln jail in 1881. Eleven weeks later Pat Garrett found him in a dark bedroom.
Executed
1878–1880 · Australia
Ned Kelly
Three police dead at Stringybark Creek, two bank raids and a last stand in plough-iron armour: how the Kelly outbreak ended on a Melbourne gallows.
Executed
1881–1882 · D.C.
Garfield Assassination
A disappointed office-seeker shoots President Garfield in a Washington railway station in 1881. The doctors' probing may have done the rest.
Acquitted
1881 · Arizona Territory
Gunfight at the O.K. Corral
About thirty shots in thirty seconds on Fremont Street, Tombstone, in 1881: three Cowboys dead, the Earps charged with murder, and a month-long hearing.
Acquitted
1886 · United Kingdom
Adelaide Bartlett
A London grocer died on New Year's Day 1886 with liquid chloroform in his stomach and no burns in his throat. His wife was tried for murder and acquitted.
Unsolved
1888 · United Kingdom
Jack the Ripper
Five women killed in ten weeks in London's East End in 1888, a name invented in a letter, and a killer the police never identified.
Killed before trial
1889–1908 · Bolivia
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
From Telluride to the Wild Bunch, Patagonia and a mule with the wrong brand: the trail that ended at San Vicente, Bolivia, in November 1908.
Disputed verdict
1889–1904 · United Kingdom
Florence Maybrick
An American wife, a Liverpool cotton broker who dosed himself with arsenic, and a verdict so doubtful the Home Office reprieved her within weeks.
Executed
1891–1896 · Ontario
H. H. Holmes
Swindler, bigamist and killer of at least nine people, hanged in 1896. The '200 victims' and the murder castle of legend are another matter.
Executed
1891–1892 · United Kingdom
Thomas Neill Cream
A McGill-trained doctor gave strychnine to young women in south London in 1891-92, then wrote blackmail letters that led Scotland Yard straight to him.
Killed before trial
1892–1907 · Kansas
Dalton Gang at Coffeyville
On 5 October 1892 the Dalton gang tried to rob two Kansas banks at once in a town that knew their faces. In about ten minutes eight people were dead.
Acquitted
1892–1893 · Massachusetts
Lizzie Borden
Andrew and Abby Borden were killed in their Fall River home in 1892. A jury took barely an hour to acquit his daughter Lizzie. No one else was charged.
Disputed verdict
1894–1906 · France
Dreyfus Affair
A torn note from a wastebasket, a Jewish captain sent to Devil's Island, and the real spy acquitted in three minutes: the injustice that split France.
Executed
1896 · United Kingdom
Amelia Dyer
For £10 'Mrs Harding' promised a mother's love to babies born outside marriage. In 1896 the Thames at Reading gave up what she had done with them.
Never caught
1900–1908 · Indiana
Belle Gunness
When her Indiana farmhouse burned in 1908, searchers found a dozen people buried on her land. Belle Gunness was declared dead. Many doubted it.
Executed
1901 · New York
McKinley Assassination
Buffalo, 1901: a young anarchist hides a revolver under a handkerchief in the president's receiving line. Eight days later McKinley is dead.
Convicted
1902–1903 · France
Thérèse Humbert
For twenty years Paris lent fortunes against an American millionaire's legacy locked in Thérèse Humbert's safe. In May 1902 they opened it.
Convicted
1904–1905 · Ohio
Cassie Chadwick
A Cleveland doctor's wife hinted she was Andrew Carnegie's secret daughter. Banks lent her millions on notes no one dared check.
Convicted
1906–1908 · Germany
Captain of Köpenick
In 1906 an unemployed shoemaker in a second-hand captain's uniform commandeered a squad of soldiers, arrested a mayor and walked off with the town's cash.
Acquitted
1906–1908 · New York City
Stanford White
In 1906 Harry Thaw shot the architect Stanford White before a theater crowd at Madison Square Garden. Two trials later, a jury called Thaw insane.
Unsolved
1907–1908 · Ireland
Irish Crown Jewels theft
Days before a royal visit in July 1907, the diamond regalia of the Order of St Patrick vanished from a safe in Dublin Castle. They have never been found.
Executed
1910 · United Kingdom
Dr Crippen
In 1910 a mild American medicine seller fled London with his lover dressed as a boy, and a ship's wireless message brought him back to hang.
Executed
1911–1912 · United Kingdom
Frederick Seddon
An insurance man took over his lodger's savings for an annuity. Weeks after she fell ill and died, the arsenic in her body sent him to the gallows.
Convicted
1911–1914 · France
Mona Lisa theft
In 1911 a glazier walked out of the Louvre with Leonardo's portrait. It was gone 28 months, and the empty wall made it the world's most famous painting.
Executed
1912–1915 · United Kingdom
George Joseph Smith
Three newly married women drowned in small baths in three towns. A grieving father's newspaper cutting exposed the bigamist behind all of them.
Unsolved
1912–1917 · Iowa
Villisca axe murders
Eight people, six of them children, were killed in one house in a small Iowa town in June 1912. Two men faced the law. Neither was convicted.
Convicted
1913 · United Kingdom
Great Pearl Robbery of 1913
In July 1913 a Hatton Garden dealer opened a registered parcel from Paris and found sugar lumps instead of the world's most valuable pearl necklace.
Convicted
1914–1915 · Bosnia and Herzegovina
Franz Ferdinand Assassination
A wrong turn, a stalled engine and a nineteen-year-old with a pistol: how Franz Ferdinand and Sophie were killed in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914.
Executed
1915–1922 · France
Henri Désiré Landru
A fugitive swindler answered wartime France's lonely-hearts columns. Eleven people who went with him to rented villas outside Paris were never seen again.
Executed
1916–1917 · France
Mata Hari
France shot the famous dancer as a German spy in 1917. She took money from both sides; whether she gave either anything of value is still argued.
Never caught
1916–1917 · Russia
Rasputin
Poisoned cakes, a man who would not die, a body under the ice: the famous story comes from one of Rasputin's killers. The autopsy tells a plainer one.
Unsolved
1918–1919 · Louisiana
Axeman of New Orleans
In 1918-19 an intruder with an axe terrorized New Orleans, above all its Italian grocers. He was never caught, and his famous jazz letter may be a hoax.
Convicted
1920 · Massachusetts
Charles Ponzi
Boston, 1920: an Italian immigrant promised 50% in 45 days on postage coupons. Eight months later his name was a byword for fraud.
Executed
1920–1922 · United Kingdom
Herbert Rowse Armstrong
'Excuse fingers': a Hay-on-Wye solicitor handed his rival a buttered scone, and the arsenic trail led back to his wife's grave.
Disputed verdict
1920–1927 · Massachusetts
Sacco and Vanzetti
Two Italian anarchists executed in 1927 for a Braintree payroll robbery and double murder. Their guilt is still argued; their unfair trial is not.
Acquitted
1922–1926 · New Jersey
Hall-Mills murder
A New Jersey rector and his choir singer were found shot under a crab apple tree in 1922. His rich widow and her brothers were tried in 1926 and acquitted.
Unsolved
1922–1955 · Germany
Hinterkaifeck
Six people were killed on a lonely Bavarian farm in 1922, and someone kept feeding the cattle for days afterwards. A century later no one has been charged.
Executed
1922–1923 · United Kingdom
Thompson and Bywaters
A young ship's steward stabbed his lover's husband on an Ilford street in 1922. Her letters, not her actions, took her to the gallows beside him.
Unsolved
1922 · California
William Desmond Taylor
A leading Hollywood director was shot in his bungalow in 1922. The suspects included two film stars and a stage mother, and the case files later vanished.
Convicted
1924 · Illinois
Leopold and Loeb
Two rich Chicago students killed Bobby Franks, 14, in 1924 to prove they could commit a perfect crime. A pair of glasses gave them away.
Convicted
1924 · Illinois
Rondout train robbery
June 1924: the Newton brothers stop a mail train north of Chicago and take some $2 million, America's biggest train robbery. A postal inspector planned it.
Convicted
1925–1947 · France
Victor Lustig
Did Victor Lustig really sell the Eiffel Tower for scrap in 1925? His counterfeiting and Alcatraz are on record. The tower sale rests on one later book.
Executed
1929–1931 · Germany
Peter Kürten
For fifteen months Düsseldorf hunted a killer it could not see. The break came from a survivor's letter, misaddressed and opened at the post office.
Unsolved
1929–1931 · Illinois
St. Valentine's Day Massacre
Seven men lined against a garage wall in Chicago, 1929. Gunmen dressed as police. Capone blamed by everyone, charged with nothing. Nobody was ever tried.
Unsolved
1930–1979 · New York City
Judge Crater
On 6 August 1930 a New York judge left a Midtown chophouse and was never seen again. The 'missingest man in America' and the Tammany scandal around him.
Convicted
1931 · Illinois
Al Capone tax evasion trial
Chicago could never convict Al Capone of murder. In 1931 the Treasury got him with a lawyer's letter, a bookkeeper's ledger and his own grocery bills.
Disputed verdict
1931 · United Kingdom
William Herbert Wallace
A phone message sent a Liverpool insurance man to an address that did not exist. He came home to find his wife dead, and was sentenced to hang.
Killed before trial
1931–1935 · Florida
Ma Barker
Hoover called her the brains of a murderous gang. A robber who knew her said she couldn't plan breakfast. Kate Barker and the shootout at Lake Weir.
Killed before trial
1932–1934 · Louisiana
Bonnie and Clyde
Two years, at least nine dead lawmen and a posse waiting in the Louisiana pines: the real Barrow gang, from Eastham prison farm to the ambush at Gibsland.
Executed
1932–1936 · New Jersey
Lindbergh baby kidnapping
A ladder, a misspelled note and $50,000 in gold certificates: how the Lindbergh baby case ended in the electric chair, and why doubts still linger.
Killed before trial
1933–1934 · Chicago
John Dillinger
Out of prison in May 1933, dead by July 1934: Midwest bank raids, a jailbreak with a gun that may have been wood, and a summer night at the Biograph.
Disputed verdict
1933–1938 · Missouri
Kansas City Massacre
Thirty seconds outside Union Station in June 1933 left four lawmen and their prisoner dead. The FBI blamed Pretty Boy Floyd. Historians are still arguing.
Convicted
1933 · Texas
Machine Gun Kelly and the Urschel kidnapping
Blindfolded for nine days, an Oklahoma oilman counted the planes overhead. His memory led the FBI to a Texas farm and put Machine Gun Kelly away for life.
Unsolved
1934 · Belgium
Ghent Altarpiece theft
In April 1934 a panel of van Eyck's Ghent Altarpiece was stolen and held to ransom. The man who seemed to know where it was died before he could say.
Convicted
1937–1947 · Netherlands
Han van Meegeren
Arrested in 1945 for selling a Vermeer to Göring, a Dutch painter saved himself by proving he had painted it. Then he had to prove he had faked the rest.
Executed
1942–1946 · France
Marcel Petiot
In occupied Paris a doctor sold a secret route to safety for 25,000 francs a head. In March 1944 smoke from his chimney showed where his clients had gone.
Unsolved
1947–1949 · California
Black Dahlia
Elizabeth Short, 22, was murdered in Los Angeles in January 1947. Hundreds confessed, dozens were suspected, and no one was ever charged.
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