When a series of murders goes unsolved, the usual explanation is about the killer. He was careful, or lucky, or he stopped before he could be caught. Put a handful of unsolved series side by side, though, and another pattern shows through. It has less to do with who the killer was than with who the victims were, and with how much effort was spent on them while the killings were still going on.
Between about 1909 and 1912, more than a dozen Black women were murdered in Atlanta, most of them in the working-class neighborhoods east and south of downtown. Counts differ: Atlanta News First, drawing on the historian Jeffery Wells’s 2011 book The Atlanta Ripper, put the number at at least twenty between 1911 and 1915, and Capital B News, reviewing the case in 2025, gave a total of twenty-four. Most were found with their throats cut, many with a blow to the head as well. Many were domestic workers: Capital B’s list includes Rosa Trice, a thirty-five-year-old laundress; Addie Watts, a twenty-two-year-old laundress; Maggie Brook, a twenty-three-year-old cook; Lena Sharp, a seamstress; and Mary Putnam, a housekeeper.
The city’s newspapers called the killer the Atlanta Ripper. Its officials were slower. Some described the deaths as drunken quarrels or “Saturday night violence,” and a judge was reported to have said there was “no such thing as a Black Jack the Ripper.” Investigators began to push harder, by Capital B’s account, only after the mayor came under pressure from business leaders worried about the city’s reputation. Lucinda McNeal’s husband was convicted of her murder and sentenced to life, and the partners of two other victims were imprisoned on circumstantial evidence, but no one was ever convicted of the series, and doubts surround the convictions that were obtained.
In 1971 and 1972, six Black girls and young women from Washington, most of them from the Southeast quarter of the city, were abducted and killed, and their bodies left beside highways in the District and in Prince George’s County, Maryland.
Carol Spinks, thirteen, was one of eight children raised by a single mother, Allenteen Van Thompson Reeves. On April 25, 1971, she walked to the 7-Eleven near her home and did not come back. Police told the family she had probably run away. Her family knew she would not have. She was found on May 1 near Interstate 295, behind St. Elizabeths Hospital. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled, her shoes were missing, and the contents of her stomach suggested she had been kept alive for much of the six days she was gone. “If this happened to my sister, it could happen to anybody,” her brother, Evander Spinks-Belk, said years later of the way police treated the case.
Darlenia Johnson, sixteen, lived in the same neighborhood. On July 8 she set out for her summer job and never arrived. Before she was found, her mother, Helen, received silent telephone calls and then a call from a man who said he had killed her daughter. The calls could not be traced. Darlenia was found on July 19 beside I-295, about fifteen feet from where Carol had been found, too badly decomposed for a cause of death to be determined.
Brenda Crockett, ten, lived in Northwest Washington with her mother and her seven-year-old sister, Bertha. On July 27 she was sent to a grocery store. That night she telephoned home twice. In the first call she said a white man had picked her up and would send her home in a cab. In the second she said she was in Virginia; she was crying and confused. A hitchhiker found her body the next morning beside U.S. Route 50 near the Baltimore-Washington Parkway. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled. “I was scared for me, and every other little girl after that,” Bertha said.
Nenomoshia Yates, twelve, was sent by her father to a Safeway a block from home on October 1. Witnesses saw her pay and leave. Less than three hours later she was found on the shoulder of Pennsylvania Avenue in Prince George’s County, assaulted and strangled, her shoes missing. Brenda Woodard, eighteen, was found on November 16 on an access ramp to the Baltimore-Washington Parkway near Prince George’s County Hospital. Unlike the others she had been stabbed, and a coat had been laid over her body. Diane Williams, seventeen, disappeared after leaving her boyfriend’s house in Southeast on September 5, 1972, and was found the next morning near I-295, strangled.
In Brenda Woodard’s coat pocket was a handwritten note that spoke of the writer’s insensitivity to people, especially women, offered to admit the other killings “when you catch me if you can,” and was signed “Freeway Phantom.” After the fourth murder the FBI and local police formed a joint task force. Investigators found hairs from an African American person in the underwear of three of the victims and concluded that the killer was probably a Black man. In 1974 Morris Warren, a convicted rapist in a Virginia prison, said he knew who the Phantom was; FBI agents took him on ride-alongs, but his details kept changing, and intercepted letters showed he had lied in the hope of being released. Tips poured in about priests, police officers and doctors. A 1990 FBI profile described a misogynistic man of about twenty-seven to thirty-two at the time of the killings, possibly someone some of the victims knew and trusted, who may have lived or worked in Southeast. The task force was disbanded without an arrest.
Romaine Jenkins had been a young homicide detective when Carol Spinks died. During the May Day antiwar protests of 1971, her commander pulled her off the case because the whole department was on prisoner duty. When Jenkins, by then a sergeant, reopened the case in 1987, she found that case files and physical evidence had been lost or destroyed, and she had to rebuild the record with the FBI’s help. She retired in 1994 without solving it. The Metropolitan Police Department still lists the case as open. “You never forget. There is no closure,” Diane Williams’s sister, Patricia, said. In 1997 she put it more bluntly to The Washington Post: “Whoever did it has gotten away.” One thing did change. After the loss of the Phantom evidence came to light, the D.C. Council required that evidence in unsolved homicides be kept for at least sixty-five years.
Between January 1974 and June 1975, at least five gay men were stabbed to death in San Francisco; four of the bodies were found near Ocean Beach and the city’s western edge and one in Golden Gate Park. Gerald Cavanagh, about fifty, was found on Ocean Beach on January 27, 1974. Joseph Stevens, twenty-seven, a drag performer, was found that June by Spreckels Lake in Golden Gate Park. Klaus Christmann, thirty-one, a German national, was found on Ocean Beach in July. Frederick Capin, a registered nurse in his early thirties, was found in May 1975, and Harald Gullberg, a Swedish sailor in his sixties, was found near the sixteenth tee of the Lincoln Park golf course that June. In July 1975 two more men were stabbed and survived. One of them told police the attacker had been sketching caricatures in an all-night diner and said he was a cartoonist, which gave the killer his name. The killer was said to meet men in gay bars and late-night places in the Castro, Polk Gulch and the leather bars south of Market, the Cinch Saloon among them, sketch them, and then leave with them. A man was detained outside a Tenderloin bar in 1976 and questioned, and police took his fingerprints, but he was never charged. Investigators have said since that they believe they know who he is, a man who by 2022 was in his seventies and living in the East Bay. He has not been named, and until he is charged he is a suspect, nothing more. Investigators believed witnesses were reluctant to come forward because they feared being publicly identified as gay, and in the mid-1970s that could cost a man his job. The two survivors were a diplomat and a well-known actor, and neither wanted to be associated with the case. Police attention in those years went to the Zodiac, the Zebra killings and the Patty Hearst kidnapping, and many gay men did not trust the department. “They’ve proven that our lives are not valued,” the former supervisor and gay activist Tom Ammiano said of why so few went to the police. “Well they could be fired,” a San Francisco resident told CBS News in 2022, recalling the time.
The police kept the case alive. In 2019 they released a new sketch showing how the killer might look at about forty, and in 2022 they doubled the reward to $200,000 and named a possible sixth victim, Warren Andrews, who was beaten at Land’s End on April 27, 1975, and died weeks later. “I’d be a fool not to consider him as a Doodler victim,” Detective Dan Cunningham said. The Andrews case, unlike the others, had DNA evidence, and it was sent for testing. Joseph Stevens’s sister, Melissa, saw the renewed attention as progress in itself: “The fact that people are interested in it now means we’re getting closer because for years it went unnoticed.” No arrest has been announced.
Between 1985 and 1990, at least eight women were stabbed to death in and around the Frankford section of Northeast Philadelphia. All were white women who went to the bars along a three-block stretch of Frankford Avenue. Each had been sexually assaulted and stabbed, one of them seventy-four times. Several of them had lived through hard years before they met the killer. Helen Patent, fifty-two, was found on August 26, 1985, in the SEPTA train yard at Penn and Bridge Streets; her former husband identified her body. Anna Carroll, sixty-eight, a quiet regular of the Frankford Avenue bars, was found in her apartment on January 3, 1986. Susan Olszef, sixty-four, was found in her apartment on Christmas Day that year. Jeanne Durkin, twenty-eight, a mother of four who was living on the streets, was found beneath a truck on a lot off Pratt Street on January 8, 1987. Margaret Vaughan, sixty-six, was found in the foyer of a Penn Street apartment building on the day she had been evicted from it. Theresa Sciortino, thirty, who lived alone and was an outpatient after time in psychiatric hospitals, was found in her apartment on Arrott Street on January 19, 1989. In 1990 Carol Dowd, forty-six, was found in an alley behind a fish market. Leonard Christopher, a Black man who worked there, was convicted of her murder and sentenced to life. No weapon, motive or blood linked him to the crime, and he did not match the description of the middle-aged white man believed to be the killer. In September 1990, while he was in jail awaiting trial, another woman was killed in the same way. Christopher maintained his innocence until he died of cancer in prison. The woman killed while Christopher sat in jail was Michelle Dehner, thirty, found in her fourth-floor apartment on Arrott Street on September 6, 1990. Police later focused on a man who posed as a counselor, rented an office in a nearby church and befriended women in the bars. They took a DNA sample from him and drew a composite, but before they could close in he moved to another state, and the killings stopped. By about 2008 police had learned he was dead. He was never charged, and he remains a suspect only. Eight of the killings remain open and unsolved.
Now set those four beside the unsolved cases that most people can name.
Jack the Ripper killed at least five women in and around Whitechapel in 1888. The name itself came from a letter that senior police officials later believed was the work of a journalist.
The Zodiac is officially credited with five killings in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1968 and 1969, though in one letter he claimed as many as thirty-seven. He mailed coded messages to Bay Area newspapers. One, the “340 cipher” of 1969, held out for fifty-one years, until three private citizens, David Oranchak, Sam Blake and Jarl Van Eycke, solved it in December 2020. The FBI confirmed the solution and said the investigation remained open. Private claims to have unmasked him have kept coming. In 2021 a group calling itself the Case Breakers named a dead Air Force veteran and tied him to the 1966 murder of Cheri Jo Bates in Riverside as well. Riverside police answered flatly: “Unequivocally, we are saying that the Cheri Jo Bates case and the Zodiac Killer case are not related.” The FBI said the case remained open and it had no new information. The man the group named is a suspect only in their own account.
The Cleveland Torso Murderer left the remains of what were thought to be seven men and five women between September 1935 and August 1938, most of them found in or near Kingsbury Run, a creek bed running to the Cuyahoga River. All were decapitated and most were dismembered. Only a few, among them Edward Andrassy, a twenty-nine-year-old hospital orderly, and Florence Polillo, were ever identified. Eliot Ness, then Cleveland’s safety director, ordered the shantytowns in the Run burned. A man named Frank Dolezal confessed to the Polillo murder and hanged himself in jail before trial; there was never enough evidence against anyone else.
The Phantom Killer of Texarkana attacked couples and a farm family between February and May 1946. Jimmy Hollis and Mary Jeanne Larey survived the first attack, on February 22. Richard Griffin and Polly Ann Moore were found shot on March 24, and Paul Martin and Betty Jo Booker on April 14. On May 3 Virgil Starks was shot dead at his farmhouse; his wife, Katy, was shot twice in the face and escaped. The attacker wore a burlap sack with eye slits over his head. A career criminal, Youell Swinney, was the main suspect, but prosecutors declined to charge him because the key witness’s story kept changing. The case became the 1977 film The Town That Dreaded Sundown.
Two later series show what happens when a case stays unsolved into the era of genetic testing, and how differently that can turn out.
Between 1986 and 1989, four couples were killed or vanished along or near the Colonial Parkway, the scenic road that links Jamestown, Williamsburg and Yorktown in southeastern Virginia. On October 9, 1986, Cathleen Thomas, twenty-seven, and Rebecca Dowski, twenty-one, were found in Thomas’s Honda Civic, which had been pushed down an embankment from a parkway pullout near Williamsburg. In September 1987 David Knobling, twenty, and Robin Edwards, fourteen, were found shot to death on the shore of the James River at the Ragged Island refuge in Isle of Wight County. Knobling worked for his father’s landscaping company in Hampton and was about to become a father. In April 1988 Keith Call, twenty, and Cassandra Hailey, nineteen, students at Christopher Newport University, left a party after a movie date and were never seen again; Call’s Toyota was found at a York River overlook with their clothes inside. In September 1989 Annamaria Phelps, eighteen, and Daniel Lauer, twenty-one, disappeared, and their bodies were found more than a month later about a mile from an Interstate 64 rest area in New Kent County.
For more than thirty years the cases were treated as one unsolved series. Then, in January 2024, Virginia State Police and the FBI named Alan Wade Wilmer Sr., a tree-service owner, commercial fisherman and hunt-club member from the Northern Neck, as the man whose DNA matched evidence in the Knobling and Edwards killings and in the 1989 murder of Teresa Lynn Spaw Howell, twenty-nine, in Hampton. Wilmer had no felony record, so his DNA had never been collected; it was obtained only after he died at his Lancaster County home in December 2017, at sixty-three. Prosecutors said they would have charged him had he lived. At the time, the state police said there was no forensic or physical evidence linking him to the other parkway cases.
That changed in stages. In January 2026 the FBI announced that retesting of clothing Dowski had been wearing, at a private laboratory, had produced a DNA match to Wilmer in the Thomas and Dowski killings. “We wouldn’t have gotten these results as recently as five years ago,” Cathleen Thomas’s brother, Bill, said. On September 18, 2026, the FBI attributed the disappearance of Keith Call and Cassandra Hailey to Wilmer as well. This time there was no DNA. The bureau said it relied on “the totality of circumstances,” the timing, place and manner of the disappearance, and acknowledged that direct forensic evidence was unavailable. The families were not all persuaded. “They didn’t base this on anything solid. It’s all circumstantial,” a member of Call’s family said. Hailey’s brother-in-law, Jim Meehan, described what was left: “My sister-in-law is a frozen picture on a mantle.” Neither body has been found. The killing of Annamaria Phelps and Daniel Lauer is still unsolved and has not been attributed to anyone. Wilmer was never arrested, never questioned about the killings while alive, and never tried. Whether he acted alone is an open question.
In the spring of 1992, over about a month, a gunman walked into small shops along Interstate 70 and shot the people working there. On April 8 Robin Fuldauer, twenty-six, the manager of a Payless shoe store in Indianapolis, was shot twice in the head in a back storage room; she had been her high school’s salutatorian and was a graduate of Indiana University. The killer took less than a hundred dollars. Three days later and about seven hundred miles west, Patricia Magers, thirty-two, and Patricia Smith, twenty-three, were killed at La Bridal, a bridal shop in Wichita, Kansas. On April 27 Michael McCown, forty, was killed in Sylvia’s Ceramics, the shop he ran in Terre Haute, Indiana; he was the only male victim. On May 3 Nancy Kitzmiller, twenty-four, was killed in the back room of a Boot Village store in St. Charles, Missouri, and on May 7 Sarah Blessing was killed inside the Store of Many Colors in Raytown, Missouri.
Ballistics tied the killings together: the same rare .22-caliber pistol, believed to be an Erma Werke ET22, was used in Indianapolis and Wichita and in the other attacks. Then the shootings stopped. In 2021 the St. Charles police formed a task force with the other departments and assigned Detective Kelly Rhodes to the case full time, and the FBI and ATF have joined the effort. Investigators released an age-enhanced sketch and hope DNA, which was barely available in 1992, will name the killer. “Science was not as developed then as it is now,” said Columbus Ricks of the Indianapolis unsolved homicide unit. His partner, David Ellison, was blunt about what an answer would and would not give the families: “Closure is an overrated term.” As of 2024 tips were still arriving almost every week. No one has been charged.
The famous four are not famous because they were harder to solve. Jack the Ripper and the Zodiac are famous partly because the killer, or someone writing as the killer, produced text that newspapers could print, and the Zodiac’s ciphers have kept amateurs working for half a century. Cleveland is remembered partly because Eliot Ness, already famous, ran the city’s safety department and could not close it. Texarkana is remembered for a masked attacker and a Hollywood film.
The other four are well documented. The victims’ names, the dates and the places are all on record. What they share is how little attention they received. They were Black women who worked as cooks and laundresses in 1910, Black girls from Southeast Washington in 1971, gay men in San Francisco in 1974 and women who drank in the same few bars in Philadelphia in the 1980s. In Atlanta, officials were reluctant to call it serial murder at all. In Washington, the evidence was lost. In San Francisco, the survivors had reason to stay silent. In Philadelphia, the one conviction went to a man who did not match the description, and the killing went on while he sat in jail.
The two later series sharpen the point. In Virginia, evidence that had been kept for decades let investigators put a name to most of the Colonial Parkway killings, though only after the man had died. Long Island’s Gilgo Beach murders, once a fixture of lists like this one, ended with an arrest, and Rex Heuermann pleaded guilty in April 2026 to seven murders, admitted an eighth, and was sentenced on June 17, 2026. In both, the answer came from material collected and preserved at the time. In Washington, the evidence that might have done the same for the Freeway Phantom’s victims was gone by 1987.
Nine series remain unsolved, and the tenth was answered only in the grave. What separates the remembered from the forgotten is not how much is known about the killer. It is how much was done while the killings were still happening, and how much of it was kept.
• 1888: The Whitechapel murders in London. • About 1909 to 1912: The Atlanta Ripper killings begin; counts run to twenty or more by 1915. • September 1935 to August 1938: The Cleveland Torso murders. • February 22 to May 3, 1946: The Texarkana attacks. • 1968 and 1969: The Zodiac killings in northern California. • April 25, 1971, to September 5, 1972: The Freeway Phantom murders in Washington and Prince George’s County. • January 1974 to June 1975: The Doodler killings in San Francisco. A suspect is detained in 1976 and released. • August 1985 to September 1990: The Frankford Slasher killings in Philadelphia. • October 1986 to September 1989: The Colonial Parkway murders and disappearances in Virginia. • 1987: Romaine Jenkins reopens the Freeway Phantom case and finds the evidence lost. • April 8 to May 7, 1992: The I-70 shootings. • December 2020: The Zodiac’s 340 cipher is solved by private citizens. • January 2022: San Francisco police name Warren Andrews as a possible sixth Doodler victim and double the reward. • January 2024: Alan Wade Wilmer Sr. is named in three Virginia killings. • January and September 2026: The FBI links Wilmer to the Thomas and Dowski murders and to the Call and Hailey disappearance. • April and June 2026: Rex Heuermann pleads guilty in the Gilgo Beach case and is sentenced.