TIME's TOP 10 Unsolved Crimes

1)Jack the Ripper


1888 was a bad year to be a prostitute. Between August 7 and November 10 of that year, five women were killed in the Whitechapel district of London’s East End, their throats slashed and their bodies mutilated in a way that indicated they all met their fates at the hands of the same person. One victim’s kidney was even mailed to the police, along with a series of taunting notes penned by someone calling himself Jack the Ripper. Serial murder was a relatively new phenomenon and the attacks were highly publicized. The law's failure to identify the killer led to such an outcry that both the home secretary and London police commissioner resigned in disgrace.

Jack the Ripper, whoever he was, has been the subject of hundreds of books and articles. The theories surrounding his identity vary from a covert Masonic plot to a member of the royal family. Here are the most likely suspects:

Montague Druitt, a barrister with knowledge of human anatomy. Rumored to be insane, he disappeared after the last murder; his body was later found floating in the River Thames.

George Chapman, a barber who lived in Whitechapel during the time of the murders and who was later found guilty of poisoning three of his wives.

Aaron Kosminski, a Whitechapel resident known for his affinity for prostitutes. He was hospitalized in an asylum several months after the last murder.

2)The Zodiac Killings

"I like killing people because it is so much fun."

So began one of the many encrypted letters sent to San Francisco newspapers by the man who called himself the Zodiac. For most of 1969, a serial killer terrorized Bay Area residents, killing five and possibly more. It started on Dec. 20, 1968, when a couple was shot to death while sitting in a car on a lover's lane. The killer would strike several more times over the next 10 months, shooting a couple in a public park, trussing up and stabbing yet another man and woman near a peaceful lake, and shooting a cabdriver in the head.



What made the case so fascinating, though, was the way he toyed with police and reporters. He called in several of the murders and began to send coded letters to newspapers, using a cross within a circle as his symbol. At one point, he mailed in a piece of bloodied shirt to prove he was who he claimed to be. Another time, he threatened to shoot up a school bus full of children. The investigation went on for years. Several suspects were considered and questioned, but to no avail. The Zodiac was never caught. The story continues to terrorize people to this day (see David Fincher's masterful 2007 film).

3)Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G.

(photo from http://reallyclueless.wordpress.com)

Tupac Shakur had been shot before. The tattooed, urban poet and self-identified thug was a central figure in the East Coast-West Coast hip-hop rivalry. The first Tupac shooting —November 30, 1994— left the rapper with five bullet wounds, including two in the head. Los Angeles-based Shakur pointed his finger at a number of New York rappers, including Sean Combs and the Notorious B.I.G. He would later release a number of scathing rhymes against both Combs and Biggie, including one in which he claimed to have slept with Biggie's wife.

On September 7, 1996, Tupac Shakur attended a Mike Tyson boxing match at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, then got into the passenger seat of Death Row Records CEO Suge Knight’s car. At a stoplight, a white Cadillac pulled up next to Knight’s car rolled down its windows and fired multiple rounds into Shakur’s passenger seat. Shakur was taken to the hospital, where he died of internal bleeding after six days. A few months later, while waiting at a Los Angeles stoplight, the Notorious B.I.G. met the same fate. Thanks to fanatical conspiracy theories, uncooperative witnesses and shoddy police investigations, neither murder case has ever been solved.

Shakur’s last album, Makaveli: The Don Killuminati/The 7 Day Theory, was released a month after his death. The title referenced Niccolo Machiavelli, the Italian philosopher who was rumored to have faked his own death (this has been largely disproved) and whose works Shakur studied while serving an eleven-month prison sentence in 1994. So did Tupac Shakur really die, or does he still walk among us, cloaked in a new identity?

Nah, he died.

4)Tylenol Poisonings


In late September/early October 1982, seven Chicago-area people died from popping Tylenol pills laced with cyanide. Adam Janus was experiencing chest pain. He popped a few Extra-Strength Tylenol and collapsed an hour later. He died. That night, Janus' younger brother and sister-in-law, grief-stricken and achey, popped a few of Adam's Tylenol pills. They died. A 12-year old girl with a cold took some Extra-Strength Tylenol on account of a cold. Dead. All in all, seven were felled by the poisoned pills. Hysteria followed. A 1982 TIME story reports, "Police cruisers, rolling through Chicago streets Thursday afternoon and evening, blared warnings over loudspeakers." The drug was removed from shelves. Vague copycat incidents — pins and needles discovered in candy bars — led several communities to ban Halloween trick-or-treating. A gentleman was arrested after trying to extort Johnson & Johnson for $100,000, though he was never charged with the murders. Tamper-proof seals became the norm.

5)The Death of Edgar Allen Poe


The Raven author left New York City in 1849 bound for Richmond, but only made it as far as Baltimore, where a passer-by noticed the delirious and incoherent writer slouched in front of a bar on October 3. He was taken to a nearby hospital, where he died four days later. The local newspaper attributed his death to "congestion of the brain," then a common euphemism for alcohol poisoning. But scholars later discovered that rumors of his drug and alcohol abuse were greatly exaggerated, especially by vindictive literary critics like Rufus Wilmot Griswold. The death certificate, if it ever existed, cannot be found.

Some historians believe Poe may have suffered from rabies, cholera or syphilis. But because he turned up on the streets the same day as a citywide election, others argue that Poe fell victim to "cooping," a fairly common practice back then in which corrupt politicians paid thugs to kidnap men (especially the homeless), drug them, disguise them, and drag them to polls all over the city or state. This may at least explain why Poe turned up in Baltimore wearing clothes that weren't his.

6)The Nicole Brown/Ron Goldman Double Murder


Your objection is noted and overruled. Yes, you might have a hunch who killed O.J. Simpson's ex-wife and her lover on June 12, 1994 in Los Angeles. We all do. But though the court of public opinion has long pinned this crime on "The Juice," the law says otherwise. With circumstantial evidence piled up against him — from forensics to the slowest, most riveting high-speed chase in history to the dubious decision to pen a book called If I Did It — Simpson, the former All-Star running back and B-list actor, assembled a dream team of lawyers who convinced jurors that since the glove didn't fit, they had to acquit. And to the disbelief of a transfixed nation, on Oct. 3, 1995, they did. Though Simpson was found liable for the deaths in a related civil suit, the criminal matter remains unsolved.

7)The Case of the Disembodied Feet


Since August 2007, five human feet have washed ashore near Vancouver, British Columbia. No bodies, no heads, no clothes, just feet (4 left, 1 right), nearly all still clad in sneakers. Canadian authorities have yet to determine how the feet ended up there or why, though DNA tests matched one of the severed feet to a man who'd been missing for several months. A number of theories have been tossed around, including the possibility of foul play (though coroners familiar with the case say ocean currents and decomposition could have naturally separated the feet from their owners). Others speculate the remains might belong to four unrecovered victims of a 2005 plane crash off Quadra Island.

In June, a prankster spooked local authorities by planting a gruesome surprise for one unwitting beachgoer — a rotting animal paw stuffed inside an Adidas shoe. The most recent discovery was made in November, when another foot turned up in Washington, less than 50 miles south of the U.S.-Canadian border. As to why there have been so few leads, police spokesperson Sharlene Brooks told CNN, "We suffer from the 'CSI' effect: People think we can do things faster than we can.'' But a Vancouver panhandler told Bloomberg News he's already cracked the case: "I'll bet you it was murder. You just don't find feet lying around.''

8)JonBenet Ramsey


Almost twelve years have passed since Dec. 26, 1996, when John Ramsey, a wealthy software executive, found his 6-year-old daughter JonBenet dead in the basement of their Boulder, Colo. home. Eight hours prior, his wife Patsy had found a ransom note demanding $118,000 for their daughter's safe return. No call ever came from a kidnapper. So unraveled the saga of the young beauty queen whose murder has put a cloud over her entire family, the Boulder Police Department and the District Attorney in charge of solving the case. Investigators in Boulder — who were dealing with the city's first murder that year — failed to conduct a proper search of the house and even allowed friends of the family to walk in and out of the crime scene as the family and police waited for a ransom call.

While John's two adult children from a previous marriage were cleared of the murder early on, suspicion remained on the three people who were the only ones known to be home when JonBenet was killed — her 9-year-old brother Burke and her parents. Almost three years after the murder, Burke, now 12, was questioned by a grand jury, but never charged. John and Patsy published The Death of Innocence in 2000 detailing their story even as they remained suspects in the case. In June of 2006, Patsy died of ovarian cancer, just two months before the arrest of John Mark Karr, an American man who had admitted to killing JonBenet, only to have the case dropped against him two weeks later when DNA tests showed he could not have been at the crime scene.

This past summer, prosecutors were finally able to conclude that John and Patsy were not responsible for their daughter's murder, but that DNA points to an "unexplained third party." John Ramsey still retains hope that evidence will track down his daughter's killer and finally rid his family of the stain that continues to make its mark.

9)The Black Dahlia


Hollywood's most famous murder case unfolded on January 15, 1947 when the raven-haired, 22-year-old actress Elizabeth Short was found dead on Norton Avenue between 39th and Coliseum streets in Los Angeles. Her body had been cut in half and appeared to have been drained of blood with precision. The murderer had also cut 3-inch gashes into each corner of her mouth, creating a spooky clown-esque smile.



Short's murder quickly became a sensation, not only because of its location in the show biz capital, but also because the police worked in tandem with the press to disseminate clues in hopes of locating a suspect. Several people confessed, only to be later released for lack of evidence. Much speculation surrounded the details of Short's life. Grieving after the death of a man she fell in love with, she reportedly befriended many men while frequenting jazz clubs, making it nearly impossible to pin down who she could have been with before she died. Her unsolved murder has spawned several movies, television specials, and books. One such account was written by Steve Hodel who implicated his own father, a Los Angeles doctor, as the Black Dahlia murderer. No charges were ever filed.

10)The Women of Ciudad Juaréz (Raped and Killed)


Sometimes called the City of the Lost Girls, Juarez is a poor, Mexican border town where hundreds (some say thousands) of women have been raped, tortured and then killed over the past decade. Many of these women work in the town's numerous factories or live there because it is close to the U.S. border, which they can cross for jobs. Amnesty International has urged Mexican authorities to make finding perpetrators a priority. But with an ever-intensifying drug war taking place in the country's poor neighborhoods and a government rife with corruption, little has been done to stop the assault on the women of Ciudad Juaréz. Marisela Ortiz, the coordinator of the non-governmental organization Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa (roughly translating to: "May Our Daughters Return Home"), told the Latin American Herald Tribune on Dec. 14 that the murders are largely a result of the "toll of an internal war between the drug trafficking mafias who are fighting to conquer the territory." The date ticker on the group's website reads: "Today is Dec. 18, 2008 and that doesn't solve anything."

Article from TIME.com



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