A book can name a suspect without a magistrate, a grand jury or a defense lawyer ever hearing a word of it. The author weighs what survives of the evidence, offers a name, and the name goes into print and stays there. Sometimes the person named is long dead and cannot answer. Sometimes police and prosecutors have already looked at the same man and decided there was nothing to put before a court. The cases below share one feature: someone with a publisher, a camera or a podium said who they believed was responsible, and no charge ever followed. In each, the questions are the same: who made the claim, in what work, what it rested on and what the authorities did with it. None of the people named was convicted of the crimes in question, and none has been proved to have committed them.
No one was ever charged with the five canonical Whitechapel murders of August 31 to November 9, 1888. Police inquired into eleven deaths in the district between April 1888 and February 1891, and how many belong to a single hand has been argued ever since. What the first decades of writing did not argue about was the women themselves. A label attached to them in the police files and in nearly every book that followed is not supported by the evidence, the historian Hallie Rubenhold wrote in The Five (2019). Of Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman and Catherine Eddowes, Smithsonian magazine summarized, there is no evidence of the life the label implied. What the five shared, Rubenhold concluded, was poverty: most were homeless, all five drank, and each had been knocked out of ordinary life by a failed marriage, a dead child or a husband’s allowance that stopped.
The suspects came afterward, and they came in numbers. Casebook: Jack the Ripper, the long-running reference site on the case, keeps individual files on Montague John Druitt, whose file quotes a memorandum written by Sir Melville Macnaghten in February 1894; on Aaron Kosminski and Michael Ostrog; on the American Francis Tumblety; on George Chapman; on Prince Albert Victor; on the painter Walter Sickert; and on James Maybrick. Writers over the following century proposed each. Macnaghten’s memorandum is the earliest official document in that list, but it is a senior policeman’s summary written years after the murders. None of the men was ever charged, and no court has ever weighed a case against any of them.
The newest claim concerns Kosminski. In 2019 a DNA claim was made against him on the strength of a shawl. It rests on limited mitochondrial testing, and the shawl has no proven link to the crime. Live Science, reporting at the time, called the science behind it questionable. A claim of that kind has to survive two steps before it means anything: the cloth must be tied to the murders, and the genetic result must be specific to one man. Neither has been shown.
The name Jack the Ripper itself came from a letter, dated September 25, 1888, signed with that name and received by the Central News Agency on September 27. Both Sir Robert Anderson and Macnaghten later wrote that they believed the letters were the work of a journalist, and that is still the majority view. In 2009 the researcher Andrew Cook named a journalist, Frederick Best, as the likely author of the first letter. That is a claim about a hoax, not about the murders, but it shows how far the field has moved from a single villain to a tangle of competing proposals, none of them tested in a courtroom.
Between December 1968 and October 1969, five people were killed and two wounded in four separate assaults around the northern San Francisco Bay Area, all attributed by police to an unidentified man who called himself the Zodiac. His letters to newspapers opened with the line "This is the Zodiac speaking," according to FBI records released in the bureau’s online Vault. No one has been arrested or charged in any of the assaults.
For decades the best-known name attached to the case was Arthur Leigh Allen of Vallejo, the man the author Robert Graysmith named as the Zodiac in his book Zodiac Unmasked, as the North Bay Bohemian put it in 2004. Allen was the leading suspect in public discussion for years. He was never charged. DNA testing on a stamp from a Zodiac letter did not match him, the Bohemian reported, and the amateur Zodiac researchers it interviewed did not consider him a suspect in the Santa Rosa deaths. Michael Kelleher, a co-author of a book on the Zodiac, told the paper he did not consider Allen a suspect at all. Allen died in 1992. The accusation therefore stays in the form it was first made: an author’s conclusion, reasoned from circumstantial material, which police never converted into a prosecution.
Graysmith’s book did something else that matters for the next case. It counted the Santa Rosa hitchhiker deaths of 1972 and 1973 among the Zodiac’s crimes, which widened the accusation from four separate assaults in one corner of the Bay Area to a wave of deaths across a county. Nothing in the record the Bohemian reported shows that police ever made that link on evidence.
The Zodiac’s own cryptograms show the same pattern of a name sought and not supplied. The first cipher, mailed to three newspapers on July 31, 1969, was solved within days by a schoolteacher and his wife. A second cipher went unread for 51 years until three amateur codebreakers solved it in December 2020. The message did not contain a name, and the last 18 characters have never been explained. As UPI noted in 2018, fifty years after the first assault, the case was still taunting Bay Area investigators.
Between February 1972 and December 1973, girls and young women from Santa Rosa and from towns farther north died in rural Sonoma County, California. The youngest were 12 and 13. By the summer of 1973 the county sheriff, Don Striepeke, was telling television reporters on KPIX film that the deaths were as much a mystery to his department as to the public. In 1975 he spoke of at least six or seven young women killed. No one has been charged with any of the deaths.
At a 1975 press conference, the Bohemian reported in 2004, Striepeke and Sergeant Butch Carstedt named the Zodiac as the most likely suspect in a string of killings of young women across six western states, and described the pattern of the cases on a map as a sideways letter Z. The theory did not hold. By 2004, the Bohemian wrote, the consensus within the sheriff’s department was that the Zodiac had not been involved in the Santa Rosa deaths. The archive record of the KPIX film notes that the theory was disputed at the time and was never proved or disproved.
Other names followed. Robert Keppel, who led the Seattle-area investigation of Ted Bundy, told the Bohemian that Bundy was a viable suspect for some of the Santa Rosa deaths. It was "definitely possible," he said, though he could not place Bundy in Northern California at the right times and could not rule it out. A sheriff’s lieutenant, Mike Brown, had told Kelleher that Bundy remained a suspect in two or three of the cases; Kelleher himself ranked Bundy low. A tip that Bundy had worked for an electronics company in Forestville in 1972 stayed unproven, and Keppel said there was no evidence for it. Bundy was never charged with any death in Sonoma County. MendoFever, a Mendocino County news site, lists further men whom investigators or writers have named over the years, including two men later convicted of killings in Los Angeles and a former Santa Rosa Junior College instructor who died in 1976. None was charged in Santa Rosa.
The most recent proposal came from a family member. In February 2024 Max released The Truth About Jim, a four-part documentary in which a woman investigates her late step-grandfather, Jim Mordecai, a former college football player who became a high school agriculture teacher and died of cancer. Reviewing it for Rolling Stone, Chris Vognar wrote that she gathers what he called an impressive amount of circumstantial evidence pointing toward Mordecai in the Santa Rosa deaths, and that a further attempt to link him with the Zodiac was far less convincing. The review describes the person responsible as still unidentified. Mordecai was never charged. The series sets out one relative’s theory, not a finding by investigators. A separate 1996 Sonoma County case was solved by DNA in 2022 against a man who had died in prison; that result did not touch these deaths.
Between September 1935 and August 1938 at least a dozen people, most of them poor and transient, were killed in Cleveland. The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History counts what were thought to be seven men and five women. Only two were identified with certainty. Eliot Ness, the city’s director of public safety from December 1935, presided over the largest manhunt Cleveland had seen. A bricklayer, Frank Dolezal, was arrested in July 1939 in the death of one victim, confessed, retracted, and died in jail before any trial. No one was ever tried for the series.
Ness believed he knew who was responsible, and for decades he kept the name to himself. The historian James Jessen Badal told Cleveland Scene that Ness used the pseudonym "Gaylord Sundheim" when he described the suspect to his biographer, and that the man was a surgeon who had become an alcoholic and a drug user. The man was Dr. Francis E. Sweeney, a physician from a prominent Cleveland family, according to Cleveland Magazine, CBS News and Mental Floss. He practiced from an office near Kingsbury Run. Sweeney died in 1964 and was never arrested or charged.
The interrogation is known mainly from David Cowles, who headed Cleveland’s scientific identification bureau. In a 1983 interview with the Cleveland Police Historical Society, Cowles said that Sweeney was held in a downtown hotel room in 1938 for roughly ten days to two weeks. Ness brought in Leonarde Keeler, a developer of the modern polygraph, who tested Sweeney in secret. Sweeney failed, and Keeler reportedly told Ness this was the man. CBS News, citing the police account, reported that Sweeney was questioned for a week and never confessed. Without enough to take to court, Ness let him go. Cleveland Magazine reported that Sweeney entered a veterans' home in Sandusky about a week after the last victims in the usual count came to light, and that he later mailed Ness cryptic postcards, one of them signed "F.E. Sweeney, paranoidal nemesis."
Sweeney’s name stayed confidential even after Ness died in 1957. Cleveland Magazine reported that in the 1970s the writer Marilyn Bardsley worked it out herself after former investigators, citing promises to Ness, refused to give it. Badal’s first book on the case, In the Wake of the Butcher (2001), confirmed both the interrogation and the name. In a 2014 revised edition Badal added a drifter’s account of a doctor’s office near the ravine in 1934, and photographs of a building where Sweeney practiced. Badal said all of it was circumstantial and that a personal letter or diary would be needed to prove it. He told News 5 Cleveland in 2018 that he was 99.9 percent sure of who was responsible.
The case against Sweeney, as Cleveland Magazine’s reporting sets it out, rests on Ness’s belief, a polygraph result, his medical skill, where he worked and the timing of his departure from Cleveland. No physical evidence has ever linked him to any victim, Badal writes. Steven Nickel, author of Torso (1989), judged the drifter’s story convincing but believed killings near New Castle, Pennsylvania, were by the same hand, which in his view ruled Sweeney out. John Stark Bellamy, author of The Maniac in the Bushes (1997), called Sweeney the top suspect for some of the killings but said Badal had not proved it. The lead detective, Peter Merylo, was open to a doctor but dismissed Sweeney as too heavy and out of condition to ride freight trains, and never knew of the 1938 interrogation. Daniel Stashower’s American Demon (2022) offers its own conclusion, which the Chicago Review of Books called no better grounded than earlier theories, resting on "inconclusive hearsay."
In the spring of 1946 someone assaulted eight people in and around Texarkana, the twin city on the line between Bowie County, Texas, and Miller County, Arkansas. Five died. The Texarkana Gazette called the unknown gunman the Phantom, and the case became known as the Moonlight Murders. Texas Monthly and The Texas Observer both record that the Texas Department of Public Safety once described it as the number one unsolved murder case in Texas history.
The name that officers settled on was Youell Lee Swinney. According to the Dallas Observer, the trail began with stolen cars. In late June 1946 an Arkansas state trooper, Max Tackett, watched a parking lot in Texarkana where a stolen car had been left, and arrested the young woman who came for it. She had recently married a local ex-convict with convictions for burglary, counterfeiting and car theft. His name was Swinney. Questioned, she gave an account of the night of April 13 that she said she had witnessed, and a polygraph test in Austin indicated she was telling the truth about that night. Swinney was arrested in July 1946 on car-theft grounds and, the Dallas Observer says, told the officers they wanted him for more than stealing a car.
He was never charged with any of the killings. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas gives two reasons: his wife’s testimony was considered unreliable, and she could not be compelled to testify against her husband. Swinney was prosecuted for theft instead. In 1947 a Bowie County court convicted him of felony theft and, because of earlier convictions, enhanced the sentence under the habitual-offender article to a mandatory life term. On September 25, 1973, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ordered his release in Ex parte Swinney, holding that a 1941 Arkansas conviction used to enhance the sentence was invalid because he had no lawyer. The opinion deals only with the theft case and does not mention the 1946 killings. He was later convicted of counterfeiting and served two years in the federal facility at Texarkana.
Officers who worked the case never let go of him. Tillman Johnson, a deputy in 1946, told the Dallas Observer: "I’ve always been convinced that he killed the Booker girl and her boyfriend." Mark Bledsoe, a Texarkana realtor and former probation officer who researched the case, said he was "at least 99 percent convinced" that Swinney committed most of the assaults. Bowie County’s sheriff, Bill Presley, told his family the man had been caught, according to his nephew, James Presley. In 2014 that nephew published The Phantom Killer: Unlocking the Mystery of the Texarkana Serial Murders. Texas Monthly says the book makes a convincing case that Swinney was responsible; The Texas Observer called it compelling while adding that it is impossible to know whether Presley is right. Both describe the case as officially unsolved.
When Bledsoe traced Swinney to a Dallas halfway house in 1992, Swinney spoke freely about his counterfeiting and angrily denied any part in the killings. Accounts differ on when he died: the Dallas Observer implies 1993, The Texas Observer says 1998. The doubts are old and specific. Johnson believed someone else shot the Arkansas farmer; Captain Manuel T. Gonzaullas of the Texas Rangers said in a 1977 oral history that the Arkansas case had nothing to do with the Texas killings. People who doubt Swinney point to a 1946 double killing in Florida that happened while he was in jail, and to telephone calls in 1999 from a woman apologizing for what her father had done, though Swinney had no known daughter. Gonzaullas said four or five people had confessed over the years and that none knew details that had never been made public. He told his interviewer the case had never been completely solved. He died the following month.
Patrick Mackay’s case differs from the others because he was convicted. In November 1975 he pleaded guilty at the Old Bailey to three counts of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility, for the deaths of two elderly women in London and of a Roman Catholic priest, Father Anthony Joseph Crean of Shorne, Kent, who had once befriended him. He received life imprisonment. Two further murder charges were ordered to lie on file for lack of evidence, the Press Association reported in 2021.
In 1976 the journalists Tim Clark and John Penycate published Psychopath: The Case of Patrick Mackay. The psychiatrist David J. Barry reviewed it in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law in 1977. By Barry’s account, Mackay was caught through detective work shortly after Father Crean’s death, when he was 21, and once in custody admitted five homicides. The book’s authors and the police suspected him of six more. None of those further deaths was ever tried, and no court has made any finding about them. That is the distinction that runs through all of these cases: a suspicion held by the police and written down by authors is not a charge, even when the person at its center has already been convicted of other deaths.
Barry’s review is not kind to the book. He judged it a slight piece of work, awkwardly written, whose authors stopped short of firm criticism of the people who had failed Mackay early on or released him, and which treated the defense of diminished responsibility only briefly. A young man diagnosed as a psychopath at 15 and committed to a special hospital had been released and was later charged with killing three people; the public anger the book drew on was aimed at that failure. The Parole Board refused Mackay’s release in May 2021 but recommended he stay in open conditions. He was 65.
Three young women, Patricia Docker, Jemima McDonald and Helen Puttock, all mothers, were killed in Glasgow between February 1968 and October 1969, each after an evening at the same dance hall in the city’s east end. Helen Puttock’s sister had spent the last evening with her and a well-dressed young man who called himself John, and rode with them in a taxi. A journalist coined the name Bible John in 1969, the Sunday Post reported, because of what he said on the journey. "I don’t drink at Hogmanay, I pray," he told the sisters, as The Scotsman quoted. STV reported that more than 100 detectives took more than 50,000 statements in door-to-door inquiries. No one was charged.
Names did arise. The Courier recorded that a former suspect who had died in 1980, McInnes, had faced four identity parades; in 1996 police obtained his DNA for comparison with evidence in Helen Puttock’s case. The results were described as inconclusive. In June 1996, the Courier reported, the Lord Advocate said the forensic evidence was not enough to link McInnes to her death. No court has found that McInnes or anyone else was responsible for any of the three deaths. Peter Tobin, a convicted killer who died in 2022, was later the subject of speculation, but the officer who led the inquiry into his crimes said there was no evidence linking him to these murders, The Scotsman reported.
The most pointed claim came in 2022 from the BBC Scotland podcast Bible John: Creation of a Serial Killer, reported by the Sunday Post columnist and former MSP Joan McAlpine. According to her account, retired officers said that senior officers visited McInnes days after Helen Puttock’s death, that he was never shown to her sister, that the taxi driver and a doorman who had seen the man were never asked to view line-ups, and that the 1990s team found inconsistencies in logbooks and missing evidence. These were allegations by the retired officers; no inquiry or court has found them proved. McAlpine wrote that she was not suggesting McInnes killed Helen Puttock, only that the original inquiry was deeply flawed.
Police Scotland’s answer has been consistent in tone. In February 2018 STV reported that the force said such cases are never closed. In October 2023, Greatest Hits Radio reported, officers confirmed that they were assessing the podcast’s claims with the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service. Doubt about the single-killer premise has come from inside the police: Detective Superintendent David Swindle of Strathclyde Police told The Scotsman in 2010 that police were not completely convinced all three women had been killed by the same person, and that a copycat or a different killer was one theory.
The claims differ in kind. Graysmith’s identification of Allen and the Santa Rosa sheriff’s identification of the Zodiac were made with confidence, and both have been undercut by the same people who first heard them. Badal’s case for Sweeney was built over two editions of a book by a historian who says himself that it is circumstantial. The Texarkana case is the nearest to a prosecution that never happened: a suspect, a witness, a polygraph and a spouse the law would not compel. Mackay shows that a conviction for some deaths leaves others in suspicion only. Bible John shows a claim that rests on retired officers' recollection, answered by a police force that says it is assessing it. In none did a court test the name. In each, the name outlived the people who put it forward, and the case outlived the name.
• April 1888 to February 1891: police inquiry takes in eleven Whitechapel deaths; five are counted as canonical.
• September 27, 1888: the Central News Agency receives the letter signed "Jack the Ripper."
• February 1894: Sir Melville Macnaghten writes his memorandum on the Whitechapel suspects.
• 1935 to 1938: Cleveland torso murders; in 1938 Eliot Ness has Dr. Francis E. Sweeney questioned in secret and tested on a polygraph.
• July 1939: Frank Dolezal arrested; he dies in jail before trial.
• 1946: eight people assaulted in Texarkana, five die; Youell Lee Swinney is arrested in July on car-theft grounds and never charged with the killings.
• 1947: Swinney convicted of felony theft in Bowie County and given a mandatory life term.
• 1964: Sweeney dies.
• February 1968 to October 1969: three Glasgow women killed; the name Bible John coined in 1969.
• December 1968 to October 1969: the Zodiac assaults around the Bay Area.
• 1972 and 1973: deaths of girls and young women in Sonoma County.
• September 25, 1973: Texas Court of Criminal Appeals orders Swinney’s release in Ex parte Swinney.
• 1975: Santa Rosa sheriff’s press conference names the Zodiac as most likely suspect; Mackay pleads guilty in November.
• 1976: Clark and Penycate publish Psychopath: The Case of Patrick Mackay.
• 1992: Allen dies; Mark Bledsoe traces Swinney to a Dallas halfway house.
• 1996: Police take genetic samples from a former Bible John suspect; the Lord Advocate says the evidence is not enough.
• 2001: Badal’s In the Wake of the Butcher confirms Sweeney’s name.
• 2004: North Bay Bohemian reports on the Santa Rosa and Zodiac theories.
• 2014: Presley’s The Phantom Killer; Badal’s revised edition.
• 2019: Rubenhold’s The Five; DNA claim against Kosminski.
• December 2020: Zodiac 340 cipher solved.
• May 2021: Parole Board refuses Mackay’s release.
• 2022: BBC Scotland podcast; Stashower’s American Demon.
• October 2023: Police Scotland confirms it is assessing the podcast’s claims.
• February 2024: The Truth About Jim released.