In the long run of unsolved murder, a handful of cases attract a particular kind of story. A strange message turns up on a wall. A healer’s book of visions is found in the house. Investigators bring in a specialist in folk religion, or villagers whisper that the dead man could talk to birds. The talk of witchcraft and ritual often travels faster and farther than the facts, and in some of these cases it has outlived everyone who knew the victims.
The eight cases that follow span eighty years and two countries. In each one, police, writers or neighbors raised the occult as a possible explanation. In none of them has a court found that it was the explanation, and in most no one has been charged at all.
Benny Evangelist was an Italian immigrant who had come to the United States as a young man and settled in Detroit, where he built houses by day. By night he was something else. ClickOnDetroit, the news site of Detroit’s WDIV, describes him as a self-styled mystic and healer who said he had begun receiving visions from God in 1904, who held services in a basement room of his home, and who charged as much as $10 for a reading. He set down his revelations in a work titled The Oldest History of the World, which WDIV describes as running to four volumes and which carried the subtitle Discovered by Occult Science. Model D, the Detroit online magazine, reported in 2025 that he had been born in Naples, that he lived for a time in Philadelphia with his brother, and that his followers knew him as Benny the Preach.
On the morning of July 3, 1929, Evangelist, his wife, Santina, and their four young children were found dead in Detroit. WDIV gives the family’s ages as 43 for Benny, 36 for Santina, and 8, 5, 3 and 18 months for the children. A man who had come to the house that morning on business found them.
The investigation began badly. Model D reports that crowds reached the scene before police could secure it, and that a fingerprint on a door handle and a bloody footprint never led anywhere. Police were ordered out in every Detroit squad on July 4, a reward of $1,000 was posted, and the coroner, James Burgess, called it, in WDIV’s account, the most unusual case. About three thousand people came to the family’s funeral on July 6.
The money angle drew attention first. The night before the killings, Evangelist had told a watchman at a building being demolished that he had bought its salvage lumber, and deliverymen were due to be paid the next morning. They never arrived, the delivery company was never identified and no cash was found. Others pointed to his practice. Some clients, WDIV reports, felt he had overcharged them for potions and cures and bore him a grudge.
Two men who often visited the house were questioned and released after giving matching alibis, according to Model D. One of them was arrested on the day of the killings and released when police could not tie him to the family. The other died in 1934, after which, Model D reports, his former wife told police he had been responsible, and two witnesses supported parts of her account. Neither man was charged. A man who confessed three years after the killings was found to have invented his story, and a police officer who blamed a prisoner in Windsor, Ontario, was found to have made up the claim to collect a reward. A former associate of Evangelist’s from Pennsylvania, a man with a violent past, was also discussed; Model D reports that police found no record that he ever came to Detroit.
Detroit police filed a final report in 1935 listing the case as unsolved. By Model D’s account, investigators came to an unofficial view about the man who died in 1934, but the fingerprint and footprint were never matched, and the weapons were never found. The house later became a funeral parlor and was torn down in the 1940s.
On February 14, 1945, in the last months of the Second World War, Charles Walton was found dead at Lower Quinton, a Warwickshire village a few miles from Stratford-upon-Avon. He was 74, a farm laborer and hedger who, according to the solicitor and crime writer James Morton, also lent money in the village. An old tin watch he carried was reported missing.
The local police did what was usual at the time and asked Scotland Yard’s murder squad to take over. The detective sent from London was Robert Fabian, later known to the public as Fabian of the Yard. He met a village that did not want to talk. Writing in the Law Society Gazette, Morton recounts that a police car ran over a dog and that a heifer died the following day, and that villagers read both as omens and closed ranks. About four thousand statements were taken and 29 samples of hair and clothing examined. Fabian went back to London without an arrest.
Two theories took hold early. The local vicar suggested that the killing looked like the work of an outsider, and suspicion briefly fell on an Italian prisoner of war who had been seen washing blood from his hands and coat; tests showed it was rabbit blood from poaching. The second theory was witchcraft. Morton writes that many villagers believed in it, and that Walton was thought to have unusual powers. The Stratford Observer, reporting in 2023 on a new book by the historian M. J. Trow, The Meon Hill Murder 1945, listed the rumors that grew up around him: that he could talk to birds and toads, that his watch had some magical property, that Meon Hill was the meeting place of a coven. Trow examined the police files, the paper reported, and found that they make no mention of witchcraft.
Morton’s own reading of the case is more prosaic. Walton’s employer, a churchman who owed him money and who had a temper when drinking, gave accounts of the day that did not agree with each other. He was never charged. The case remains unsolved, and the Stratford Observer noted that Walton’s grave can no longer be found in the village churchyard.
Between February 1972 and December 1973, girls and young women who had last been seen hitchhiking in and around Santa Rosa, California, were found dead in rural Sonoma County. The Sonoma Index-Tribune and MendoFever, a Mendocino County news site, list among them Maureen Sterling, 12, and Yvonne Lisa Weber, 13, junior high school friends who left a Santa Rosa ice rink on the evening of February 4, 1972, and were found on December 28 of that year; Kim Wendy Allen, 19, an art student at Santa Rosa Junior College, last seen on March 4, 1972, and found the next day; Lori Lee Kursa, 13, an eighth grader reported missing in November 1972 and found on December 14; Carolyn Nadine Davis, 15 in MendoFever’s account and 14 in the Index-Tribune’s, last seen in Garberville on July 15, 1973; and Theresa Walsh, 23, a young mother from southern Humboldt County who set out on December 22, 1973, to hitchhike home for Christmas and was found on December 28. Jeanette Kamahele, 20, was last seen in Sonoma County on April 25, 1972. The California Department of Justice still lists her as missing.
The Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office led the investigation. A retired sheriff’s detective who worked the cases, John Hess, told the North Bay Bohemian in 2004 that investigators "could never come up with anything definite." The Bohemian reported that at a press conference in 1975 the sheriff and a sergeant had named the Zodiac, the unidentified Bay Area killer, as the most likely suspect, and that by 2004 the consensus within the department was that the Zodiac had not been involved. Robert Keppel, the investigator who had led the Seattle-area inquiry into Ted Bundy, told the same paper that Bundy was a possible suspect for some of the deaths, though he could neither place Bundy in Northern California at the right times nor rule him out. Bundy was never charged in Sonoma County.
In 2022 the sheriff’s detectives said they would look at a man identified by DNA in a separate 1996 Sonoma County killing, who had died in prison in December 2021, ABC7 News reported; no link to the 1972 and 1973 deaths has been announced. A 2024 documentary series put forward a family member’s theory about a late high school teacher. Reviewing it for Rolling Stone, Chris Vognar described the person responsible for the Santa Rosa deaths as still unidentified. No one has been charged with any of them.
Arlis Perry was 19, a newlywed from Bismarck, North Dakota, who had moved to Stanford, California, in August 1974 with her husband, a sophomore at the university and her high school sweetheart. They had married eight weeks before the move. She worked at a law firm, and she was religious. Late on the night of October 12, 1974, she walked alone to Stanford Memorial Church to pray, according to The Stanford Daily. She was found dead early the next morning. The man who reported finding her was a former campus police officer then working as a church night watchman and university security guard.
A killing in a church invited talk of ritual. Writing in InsideHook in 2018, the crime writer Steve Huff noted that police at the time had considered a ritual, possibly satanic, element, at a moment when the Manson killings were only five years in the past. Huff himself was skeptical of such explanations, observing that talk of devil worship has often attached itself to crimes whose staging was meant to mislead.
The case went unsolved for decades. Palo Alto Online reported that cold-case detectives in the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office kept submitting evidence for testing as the science improved, and that a new DNA sample from an item of her clothing pointed to the former security guard. He had been a person of interest from the start, by The Stanford Daily’s account, and had declined a polygraph test when others took one. On the morning of June 28, 2018, deputies went to serve a search warrant on him in San Jose. They saw that he was armed, withdrew, and heard a shot. He was 72 and had taken his own life.
"This is a case that eludes us no longer," Sheriff Laurie Smith said, and she credited her detectives for sending the evidence back to the laboratory again and again. The Stanford Daily reported that investigators were searching for evidence in her murder and in any other unsolved killings. He was never charged or tried, and the question of why Arlis Perry was killed has no answer in the public record.
Rachael Marie Runyan was born on June 23, 1979, and was three years old in the summer of 1982. She lived with her family in Sunset, a small city in Davis County, north of Salt Lake City. On August 26, 1982, at about 12:30 in the afternoon, she was playing with her two brothers in a park in Sunset when a man took her. Her older brother, then five, was the first to tell their mother that something had happened. Rachael was found 24 days later, on September 19, 1982, in Morgan County.
Police released two composite sketches that year. The Utah Bureau of Criminal Identification describes the man witnesses saw as a Black man between 25 and 35, about six feet tall, slender to medium in build, with a mustache, driving a mid-size blue car that may have had wood-grain panels on its sides. KSL reported in 2022 that investigators believed the car was a blue 1973 Ford Pinto Squire station wagon.
The occult entered the case later, and indirectly. In October 1989, as NBC’s Unsolved Mysteries prepared to broadcast a segment on her murder, the Deseret News reported that a Sunset police lieutenant, Phil Olmstead, had at first dismissed the idea that her death was part of an occult ritual, but that later developments had revived interest in it. About two and a half years after her death, someone had written a message in black ink on a wall of an all-night laundromat a few miles from the park: "I’m still at large . . . I killed the little Runyan girl! Remember Beware!!!!" Beneath it was a symbol the paper described as occult. A psychologist who advised on the case said the message could have been a prank, or could have come from the person responsible. On two occasions, the paper reported, Rachael’s father found black roses on her grave.
The same report described the dead ends. A woman told police in 1989 that her brother had killed Rachael, then admitted she had lied; she was charged with obstruction of justice and theft by deception and served 40 days in jail. Investigators were also examining a lead involving a state prison inmate serving time on an unrelated assault charge. No one was charged with the murder.
The case has passed through many hands since. In 2007, on the 25th anniversary, the Associated Press reported that cold-case specialists would re-examine all the evidence. Ken Eborn, then the Sunset police chief, said the case had "always been open," and added, "I refuse to believe that the person or persons who did this kept it quiet for 25 years." By 2022, KSL reported, the evidence had been examined by the Davis County Sheriff’s Office crime lab, the Utah State Crime Lab, the Utah Attorney General’s Office and several DNA laboratories in and outside the state. Early testing consumed much of what had been collected in 1982, and every test since had been inconclusive. A private investigator working with the family since 2019 was exploring whether the man in the sketches had been described correctly at all. The reward stood at $65,000.
Rachael’s mother, Elaine Runyan, became a campaigner for missing children. Her advocacy helped inspire Utah’s Rachael Alert, an early statewide system for child abductions that was first used in June 2002 after the abduction of Elizabeth Smart and was later merged into the national Amber Alert. Sunset renamed the park where Rachael was last seen in her memory; Elaine Runyan called it the last place her daughter played on earth. In August 2026, on the 44th anniversary, KUTV reported that the case remained unsolved and that investigators were still asking for tips. Ken Eborn’s words from years earlier still stood: "I will go to my grave insisting someone has information on this case."
On March 14, 1986, a newborn boy, about a day old, was found dead in Fairfield, Connecticut. The Connecticut Division of Criminal Justice, which lists the case among its open cold cases, states that he had been strangled and that his death was ruled a homicide.
In Fairfield the occult link comes from investigators themselves. The state’s description of the case characterizes it as possibly ritualistic and possibly connected with Palo, an Afro-Caribbean religious practice. That remains a hypothesis. The boy has not been identified, no one has been charged, and the Division of Criminal Justice offers a reward of $25,000 for information. The Fairfield Police Department and the state’s Cold Case Unit both take tips.
On the afternoon of Friday, September 21, 2001, a member of the public reported the body of a young boy in central London. He was perhaps four to seven years old. He had died of violent trauma to the neck. The Metropolitan Police could not learn his name, and gave him one: Adam.
The investigation that followed reached across three continents. Southwark News, marking the 20th anniversary in 2021, listed inquiries in South Africa, the Netherlands, Germany and Nigeria as well as across Britain. Nelson Mandela, the former South African president, made a public appeal for information. At one stage, Al Jazeera reported in 2003, police believed the boy might have been the victim of a South African muti killing, a form of ritual murder in which body parts are taken for use in traditional medicine. Forensic science moved the inquiry west. Tests on traces in his body pointed to Nigeria, and DNA later indicated that he had been born near Benin City. According to Agence France-Presse, the tests showed that he had been in southeast England for only days or weeks before his death, and that he had ingested plant material used in witchcraft ceremonies. The orange shorts he wore were traced to a small number of shops in Germany, without result.
Police came to believe that Adam had been trafficked into Britain and killed in a ritual. In July 2003, after the arrest in Dublin of a Nigerian man held in connection with child trafficking and the inquiry into Adam’s death, police raided nine addresses in London and arrested 21 people. Commander Andy Baker of Scotland Yard said there was "a very strong link" between those suspects and the murder. No one was charged with killing Adam. A woman arrested on suspicion of murder was released without further action, as were two men arrested on suspicion of trafficking, Southwark News reported.
Adam was buried in an unmarked grave in a London cemetery. In September 2021 the Met renewed its appeal, asking people who might once have been bound by loyalty to others to be "bold." Detective Chief Inspector Kate Kieran of the Specialist Crime Command said it was "incredibly sad and frustrating that Adam’s murder remains unsolved." Southwark News described it as the longest-running unsolved child murder in the force’s history.
Bobby Jamison was 44, his wife, Sherilyn, was 40, and their daughter, Madyson, was six. The family came from the Oklahoma City area and had moved to Eufaula. On October 8, 2009, they were seen by a landowner in the Red Oak area of southeastern Oklahoma, where they had been looking at a 40-acre plot near the San Bois Mountains, according to the then sheriff of Latimer County, Israel Beauchamp. Nine days later, on October 17, hunters found their pickup parked at a remote well site near the land. Inside were a wallet, a purse, the family’s cell phones, cash and Madyson’s small dog.
More than three hundred volunteers and dozens of officers searched the area without result. Investigators said at the time that they saw no sign of foul play and believed the family had meant to return to the truck. The Associated Press later reported that, about six months before the disappearance, Bobby Jamison had filed a petition for a protective order in McIntosh County, stating that a close relative had twice threatened to kill him and his family, in November 2008 and in April 2009. The relative died in December 2009, two months after the family vanished.
On November 16, 2013, deer hunters found the remains of two adults and a child near Kinta, about 2.7 miles northwest of where the truck had been found, the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation said. In July 2014 they were identified as the Jamisons. The medical examiner’s office was unable to determine the cause or manner of death of any of the three, KTUL reported.
No one has been charged in connection with their deaths, and the official record ends with the medical examiner’s finding: cause unknown.
Eight cases, and in none of them has anyone answered in court. In Arlis Perry’s, the break came not from any ritual or cult but from a DNA profile that pointed to a man the police had looked at from the beginning, and he died before he could be charged. In Lower Quinton the files that are supposed to be full of witchcraft turn out to say nothing about it. In Detroit, the motive the police kept returning to was money. The occult has given these cases their reputation. It has not, in any of them, given anyone a name.
• July 3, 1929: Benny Evangelist, his wife, Santina, and their four children are found dead in Detroit.
• July 6, 1929: about three thousand people attend the Evangelist family’s funeral.
• 1935: Detroit police file a final report listing the Evangelist case as unsolved.
• February 14, 1945: Charles Walton, 74, is found dead at Lower Quinton, Warwickshire; Scotland Yard’s Robert Fabian leads the inquiry.
• February 4, 1972: Maureen Sterling, 12, and Yvonne Weber, 13, are last seen in Santa Rosa, California.
• March 4, 1972: Kim Allen, 19, is last seen; she is found the next day.
• April 25, 1972: Jeanette Kamahele, 20, is last seen in Sonoma County; she remains missing.
• December 14, 1972: Lori Kursa, 13, is found in Sonoma County.
• December 28, 1972: Maureen Sterling and Yvonne Weber are found in rural Sonoma County.
• July 15, 1973: Carolyn Davis is last seen in Garberville.
• December 28, 1973: Theresa Walsh, 23, is found in Sonoma County.
• October 12 and 13, 1974: Arlis Perry, 19, walks to Stanford Memorial Church to pray and is found dead the next morning.
• August 26, 1982: Rachael Runyan, 3, is abducted from a park in Sunset, Utah.
• September 19, 1982: Rachael is found in Morgan County.
• March 14, 1986: a newborn boy is found dead in Fairfield, Connecticut; his death is ruled a homicide.
• November 1989: NBC’s Unsolved Mysteries schedules a segment on the Runyan case.
• September 21, 2001: the body of the boy police call Adam is recovered in London.
• July 2003: police arrest 21 people in London raids linked to the Adam inquiry; no one is charged with his murder.
• August 2007: cold-case specialists re-examine the Runyan evidence.
• October 8, 2009: the Jamison family is last seen near Red Oak, Oklahoma.
• October 17, 2009: their pickup is found.
• November 16, 2013: hunters find the remains of two adults and a child near Kinta.
• July 2014: the remains are identified as the Jamisons; the cause and manner of death cannot be determined.
• June 28, 2018: the man named by the Santa Clara County sheriff as the suspect in Arlis Perry’s murder takes his own life as deputies arrive with a search warrant.
• September 21, 2021: the Metropolitan Police renew their appeal in the Adam case.
• February 2022: Sonoma County detectives say they will examine a man linked by DNA to a 1996 killing in connection with the hitchhiker cases.
• August 26, 2026: on the 44th anniversary, the Runyan case remains unsolved.