Murders are the most serious of crimes and, many might speculate, the most difficult to solve. However, depending on how the person was killed, a murderer may leave behind clues that allow police detectives to piece together what happened.
Murder, First Degree
The most severe criminal charge that anybody may face is first-degree murder. Although all murder charges are serious, first-degree murder carries the worst punishments. This is because it entails premeditation, which means the defendant is accused of pre-planning their victim's death.
Jack the Ripper
Probably the most famous serial murder mystery of all, the killings which took place in London 1888 have cemented themselves in the world of crime as one of the most infamous murder cases of all time.
— The murder of Nancy Marie Bennallack, a 28-year-old court reporter who was brutally stabbed to death in October 1970 in her Sacramento apartment, remained a cold case for nearly 52 years.
Marvin Alvin Clark (ca. 1852—disappeared October 30, 1926) was an American man who disappeared under mysterious circumstances while en route to visit his daughter in Portland, Oregon during the Halloween weekend, 1926. Clark's case has the distinction of being the oldest active missing person case in the United States.
In what The Telegraph called "the most heavily reported missing-person case in modern history," 3-year-old Madeleine McCann disappeared from a vacation home in Portugal while her parents ate dinner just 180 feet away in May 2007.
Of the four ciphers he produced, two remain unsolved, and one was cracked only in 2020. While many theories regarding the identity of the killer have been suggested, the only suspect authorities ever publicly named was Arthur Leigh Allen, a former elementary school teacher and convicted sex offender who died in 1992.
An intentional killing in which the death is never identified as murder is an example of one of the more rigorous definitions of perfect crime. Other criminologists narrow the range to only those crimes that are not detected at all. By definition, it can never be known if such perfect crimes exist.
Jack the Ripper was an English serial killer. Between August and November 1888, he murdered at least five women—all prostitutes—in or near the Whitechapel district of London's East End. Jack the Ripper was never identified or arrested.
In the most recent data available from the FBI, the clearance rate hit an all-time low of just over 50 percent. That means that about half of all murders in the United States today go unsolved.
Examples of an impossible crime, which formerly was not punishable but is now under article 59 of the Revised Penal Code, are the following: (1) When one tries to kill another by putting in his soup a substance which he believes to be arsenic when in fact it is common salt; and (2) when one tries to murder a corpse.
Murder. Murder through premeditation, an accident during the commission of a crime, or as part of an assault carries the harshest penalties under the law. You can be sentenced to 50 or more years in jail. Some people receive life imprisonment.
Felony. The most serious type of crime a person can commit is termed as a felony. Felonies can often involve physical harm or an intent to cause physical harm to another person.
Whether it was Gary Francis Poste or not, one thing that is clear according to the authorities is that the Zodiac killer would now be around 90 years old.
In October 2021, a cold case investigation team known as the Case Breakers claimed to have successfully unmasked the serial killer as Gary Francis Poste.
Cryptographic researchers have finally cracked a 51-year-old code left by the Zodiac, a serial killer who terrorized Northern California in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Much of the work of cracking the code was done in Mathematica, the statistics package from Wolfram.
But both Hitler and Stalin were outdone by Mao Zedong. From 1958 to 1962, his Great Leap Forward policy led to the deaths of up to 45 million people—easily making it the biggest episode of mass murder ever recorded.
1. Jack the Ripper. Jack the Ripper is by far the most infamous serial killer of all time. There are many serial killers who have a higher count of victims than him but what makes him unique is the fact that very little is known about him.
Each year, around 30,000 people are reported missing in Australia—one person every 18 minutes.
According to our research and experience, out of the half a million children that go missing every year in the United States, nearly all of them are found. That's 97.8%.