A film about a solved crime can end where the court ends. A film made about a crime that nobody has answered for has no such edge. Its makers have to pick an ending, and an audience tends to take the ending as the record. The six cases that follow are ones in which producers, directors and broadcasters went to work while the person responsible was unidentified or untried, or, in one case, while a defendant was still awaiting the court’s judgment. In five of the six, no court has ever ruled on the killings at the center of the picture. In the sixth, a verdict was due within the year, and the film was stopped anyway.
Between September 1986 and 1991, women and girls were killed in the farming villages around Hwaseong, in Gyeonggi Province south of Seoul. Police counted the series at nine or ten cases. A man named Yoon Seong-yeo was convicted of the 1988 killing of a 13-year-old girl and sentenced to life in 1989. He served about 20 years and was paroled in 2009, and he said that police had forced his confession.
Bong Joon-ho made Memories of Murder in the middle of that silence. It was his second feature, released in 2003, and it was built on a 1996 stage play by Kim Gwang-rim, Come to See Me, which Bong had seen while working as an assistant director. He took from the play a succession of three suspects and the device of a radio song request. Bong spent a year interviewing people connected with the murders, and he has said he most wanted to talk to the killer himself. Interviewed in Seoul in December 2003, he told Tony Rayns that the film’s main theme might be the anonymity of crime, and that he did not know whether its third suspect was the real killer. The film became South Korea’s box-office leader for 2003, beating the highest-grossing import, The Matrix Reloaded, by nearly two million admissions. Its detectives resort to unlawful methods to extract a confession, and the film has been read as criticism of the national police.
The answer came 16 years later. In September 2019, Gyeonggi police announced that DNA evidence had identified Lee Choon-jae, 56, a prisoner at Busan who was already serving a life sentence for the 1994 murder of his sister-in-law in Cheongju. When Cheongju police took him to Hwaseong to look for evidence in 1994, Hwaseong detectives saw similarities to their own unsolved cases and asked to question him at their station. The Cheongju police declined and told them to come to Cheongju. Lee was tried only for the sister-in-law’s murder.
He confessed in 2019, and on July 2, 2020 police announced that he was responsible for 14 killings in all, 11 of them in Hwaseong and three elsewhere. None could be tried. Felony cases carried a 15-year limit until 2007, when it was extended to 25 years, and in 2015 it was removed for murder, though not retroactively; the period for the Hwaseong cases ran out in 2006. Lee’s legal position is therefore exact and narrow: he is convicted of one murder, he has confessed to 14 killings, police attribute them to him, and no court has tried him for any of the others.
The 2019 news reached Bong while he was in Los Angeles to promote Parasite. At a Beyond Fest session on October 4, 2019, he said it was very complicated to hear. He said he had seen a photograph of the man’s face the week before and needed more time to explain his feelings, and he praised the police for their persistence. On December 17, 2020 the Suwon District Court acquitted Yoon at his retrial, and the presiding judge apologized on behalf of the judiciary. Police Chief Bae Yong-ju had apologized to Yoon at the July 2020 announcement, when police also acknowledged mistakes in the original investigation. The film’s first audience watched police who never got their man. Its later audience learned that the man police now named had been in custody since 1994, and that detectives had asked to question him in that year.
In the spring of 1946 eight people were assaulted in and around Texarkana, the twin city on the line between Bowie County, Texas, and Miller County, Arkansas. Five of them died and three were wounded. The first assault came on February 22 and the last on May 3. The Texarkana Gazette called the unknown assailant the Phantom Killer and the newspapers also spoke of the Moonlight Murders. The Texas Department of Public Safety once described it as the number one unsolved murder case in Texas history.
The man investigators named most often was Youell Lee Swinney, a repeat offender with convictions for car theft, counterfeiting and burglary. He was arrested in July 1946 on a theft matter and questioned about the killings. He was never charged with them. Officials declined to prosecute him because the account of the woman who became his wife was judged unreliable and she could not be compelled to testify against him. In 1947 he received a life sentence in Bowie County for car theft under the habitual-offender law. On September 25, 1973, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ordered him released in Ex parte Swinney, on a point concerning his right to counsel at an earlier conviction in 1941. He died in the 1990s; accounts differ on the year. The James Presley book of 2014 makes the case that Swinney was the assailant; Texas Monthly called it convincing, and both it and the Texas Observer describe the case as officially unsolved.
In 1976, with Swinney free and the case a generation old, the Arkansas filmmaker Charles B. Pierce made The Town That Dreaded Sundown, his fifth film. It was shot in about four weeks in June and July 1976, mostly around Texarkana, with local residents as actors and extras. Ben Johnson played a fictional Texas Ranger, Andrew Prine a sheriff’s deputy and Dawn Wells, known from Gilligan’s Island, a victim. Pierce moved the story to the Arkansas side of the city, and his opening narration presents it as true. The film gave its killer an ending that the case never produced.
The world premiere was held in Texarkana on December 17, 1976, with general release on December 24. The poster line said that the killer still lurked in Texarkana, Arkansas, and city officials threatened to sue. Pierce reportedly worked with the distributor, American International Pictures, to drop the line, and it stayed on the posters. The picture cost about $400,000 and earned about $5 million, reviews were mixed, and it became a popular drive-in title in 1977 and is often counted among the first slasher films. A loose remake and sequel set 65 years later appeared in 2014, with a Pierce cameo. Since 2003 Texas Parks and Recreation has screened the original free in a Texarkana park every October.
M. T. Gonzaullas, the Texas Ranger captain who worked the 1946 case, gave an oral history to the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum in Dallas on January 26, 1977, while the film was in theaters. He said the case had never been completely solved, and that four or five people had confessed to it without knowing details that were never made public. He died the next month at 85. The attacker has never been identified, and the case is cold.
In 1965, while he was held at Bridgewater State Hospital on charges involving other women, Albert DeSalvo confessed to a run of killings of women in the Boston area between June 1962 and January 1964. Officials counted 11 of them as linked, and he confessed to those. The state did not charge him with any of them. The confessions were uncorroborated, and he was tried instead for offenses against four women who survived. A Middlesex County jury found him sane and guilty on January 18, 1967 and he was sentenced to life. The Supreme Judicial Court affirmed the judgments on January 4, 1968, in Commonwealth v. DeSalvo.
Nine months later Twentieth Century-Fox released a film about the Boston case. It was directed by Richard Fleischer, written by Edward Anhalt from Gerold Frank’s 1966 book, produced by Robert Fryer and starred Tony Curtis and Henry Fonda, with a New York opening on October 16, 1968. The film appeared while its subject was in prison for different crimes, and no judge or jury had heard the case that the picture dramatized.
DeSalvo recanted. He was killed in prison in November 1973, and no one was convicted of killing him. In 2001 a private forensic project reopened the question. Its stated aim was to identify whoever was responsible for the killings, not to prove DeSalvo innocent. The families of DeSalvo and of Mary Sullivan, believed to be the last of the 13 victims counted, doubted that he was responsible. They thought he had hoped to profit from book and movie deals.
In July 2013 Boston police, the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office and the Suffolk County District Attorney announced that evidence taken from DeSalvo’s body linked him to the 1964 murder of Mary Sullivan, 19. Officials said DNA evidence from the 1964 case matched DeSalvo. Attorney General Martha Coakley said it was, in her words, most likely that he was responsible for the other women he confessed to killing. No court heard that evidence, because he had been dead for 40 years. Legally he died a man convicted of robbery and related offenses, not of murder, and the film about the case was made in the years when the question had not been tested.
Akira Nishiguchi killed five people in three separate incidents in the autumn of 1963: two men in Fukuoka Prefecture on October 18, two women in Hamamatsu on November 18 and an elderly man in Tokyo on December 29. Between those killings he lived on frauds, and police hunted him across the country for 78 days. He was arrested on January 3, 1964 in Tamana, Kumamoto Prefecture. He was indicted on five murders, ten counts of fraud and two of theft.
Within days a film company moved. A final screenplay for a picture titled One Hundred Million Eyes (Ichioku-nin no me) was ready about a month after the arrest, and a new director was to make it. The company dropped the project after Nishiguchi’s father pleaded that, whatever his son had done, the film should not condemn his grandchildren too. The decision belonged to the company, and what moved it was a relative’s request, made while the defendant’s case was still open.
The court spoke before the year was out. Nishiguchi was sentenced to death at the end of 1964, gave up his last appeal in 1966 and was executed at the Fukuoka Detention House on December 11, 1970. The best-known film of the case came nine years after the execution. Ryuzo Saki’s novel based on it won the Naoki Prize, and Shohei Imamura’s 1979 film of the book, released in English as Vengeance Is Mine, starred Ken Ogata. In a 1988 essay for the Criterion Collection, David Ehrenstein wrote that it shows the crimes plainly and does not glamorize the killer or offer easy explanations. That film is a work of fiction drawn from the case. The abandoned picture of 1964 is the more telling example: it was written and cast within weeks of an arrest, and a family’s plea was enough to stop it.
Three women were killed in Glasgow between February 1968 and October 1969: Patricia Docker, Jemima McDonald and Helen Puttock. Police and the press have linked the three deaths to one unknown man, whom the press called Bible John. No one was charged. In 2018, at the 50th anniversary of the first death, Detective Chief Inspector Mark Bell said that the passage of time is no barrier to the investigation of unresolved murders and that, in the view of Police Scotland, such cases are never closed. A theory naming a convicted murderer, popularized by a criminologist, could not be confirmed because DNA samples had deteriorated.
Television took the case up twice in the decades that followed. IMDb lists Calling Bible John (also titled Calling Bible John: Portrait of a Serial Killer), a 26-minute television film from 1996 directed by Sarah Barclay from a script by Andrew O’Hagan, as a documentary about the unidentified man believed to have killed three young women in Glasgow in 1968 and 1969. In November 2021 BBC One Scotland broadcast The Hunt for Bible John, a two-part series. It presented a new artist’s impression, by the police forensic artist Melissa Dring Little and based on an earlier drawing by Lennox Paterson, and included an interview with the husband of the third victim, who said he wanted the truth and wanted the person responsible punished. Despite many theories and thousands of men interviewed, the killer has never been identified.
These are documentaries, and they make no claim to have an ending. Both were made when the case was unresolved, and it remains so. The 1996 film and the 2021 series share a last frame: a face drawn from one person’s memory that has still not been matched to a name.
The most recent title in this group was made while the cases it covers remain open. Murder 101, a three-episode docuseries on Prime Video that appeared in July 2026, follows a history and sociology class at a high school in Elizabethton, Tennessee, whose students studied a group of unsolved killings of young women in the American South and Appalachia in the mid-1980s. The cases are called the Redhead Murders, because several of the women had red hair. The students believed the cases pointed to one killer. In 2018 the class held a press conference. According to WVLT, an FBI profiler supported its work, and the teacher, Alex Campbell, describes the series as victim forward and not glorifying the killer.
The grouping rests on a pattern, not on a court record, and no one has been charged or convicted for any killing in the group. The one legal finding came in December 2019, when a Campbell County, Tennessee, grand jury found that Jerry Leon Johns would have been indicted for first-degree murder in the death of Tina Marie McKenney Farmer had he still been alive. Johns died in custody in December 2015, so the question could not be tried. The district attorney general, Jared Effler, said he was disappointed that the case could not end in a prosecution, and the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation said it would keep pursuing unsolved cases while viable leads exist. Investigators also linked Johns to a similar case in Knox County, in which the woman survived and her statement led to his arrest. He was convicted in 1987 of aggravated kidnapping and assault in that case.
The answer in law is the grand jury’s single finding and nothing wider. The series was made without a wider answer: a class project that began in 2018 became a film whose subject is the question and not its resolution.
Set side by side, the six stories differ in how much the courts had to say. For the Korean film of 2003 and the Texarkana film of 1976, no court has ruled on the killings they depict. The 1968 picture appeared after a conviction for other offenses and 45 years before an announcement of a DNA link that no court tested. The Japanese project of 1964 was stopped by its own producers within weeks of an arrest and months before a death sentence. The Glasgow programs and the Tennessee series are documentary work that stayed with an open question.
The people who stopped, softened or sold these films were not judges. A father’s plea ended the Japanese picture. A city’s threat to sue produced a poster line that, by one account, stayed on the posters. A police apology and a director’s cautious public statement followed the Korean film. In none of the six did a verdict arrive in time to tell the filmmakers how their story ended. Where an answer did arrive, it came from DNA, matched in one case to a man already in prison and in the other to a man long dead, years after the audience had left the theater.
• 1946, February 22 to May 3: eight people are assaulted in and around Texarkana; five die. No one is charged.
• 1962 to 1964: the Boston killings later attributed to DeSalvo.
• 1963, October 18 to December 29: Akira Nishiguchi kills five people in Fukuoka Prefecture, Hamamatsu and Tokyo.
• 1964, January 3: Nishiguchi is arrested in Tamana, Kumamoto Prefecture, after 78 days at large. A film company plans a picture within a month and drops it after his father’s plea.
• 1964, late: Nishiguchi is sentenced to death.
• 1965: DeSalvo confesses at Bridgewater State Hospital; he is never charged with the killings.
• 1967, January 18: DeSalvo is convicted in Middlesex County and sentenced to life.
• 1968, January 4: the Supreme Judicial Court affirms the judgments in Commonwealth v. DeSalvo.
• 1968 to 1969: three women are killed in Glasgow.
• 1968, October 16: Twentieth Century-Fox opens its film about the Boston case in New York.
• 1970, December 11: Nishiguchi is executed.
• 1973, September 25: Texas Court of Criminal Appeals orders Swinney released.
• 1973, November: DeSalvo is killed in prison.
• 1976, December 17: The Town That Dreaded Sundown has its world premiere in Texarkana; general release December 24.
• 1977, January 26: Gonzaullas tells the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame the case has never been completely solved.
• 1986 to 1991: killings of women and girls in Hwaseong.
• 1994: Lee Choon-jae is held for the murder of his sister-in-law in Cheongju.
• 1996: the television film Calling Bible John is made.
• 2003: Memories of Murder is released and tops the South Korean box office.
• 2013, July 19: officials in Boston announce a DNA link between DeSalvo and the 1964 death of Mary Sullivan.
• 2015, December: Jerry Leon Johns dies in custody in Tennessee.
• 2019, September: Hwaseong DNA identification of Lee Choon-jae; December: Campbell County grand jury finding on Johns.
• 2020, July 2: Gyeonggi police announce 14 killings attributed to Lee; December 17: Yoon Seong-yeo is acquitted at retrial.
• 2021, November: BBC One Scotland broadcasts The Hunt for Bible John.
• 2026, July: Murder 101 streams on Prime Video.