The longest clock in the whole record started in February 1968 and has not stopped. A Glasgow mother of a young son was dead that month; two more women followed in 1969, and the police effort that grew around the three deaths became the largest Scotland had seen. More than half a century later, no one has been charged. Police Scotland says such cases are never closed. Former senior detectives who reviewed the paperwork in the 1990s say they do not believe one man killed all three women.
The first measure of a cold case is how long it has been since the first crime. A second is the number of rounds, each a fresh team, a new technique or a new theory, and a third is what finally moved the file. The comparison below keeps the three apart. Here the span runs from the first crime in a series to the review that led to a charge, or to November 2026 where the case is still open. The rounds are counted only where the published record names them. Nothing here is a world record; these are nine serial cases whose published records allow the years to be counted.
Patricia Docker, Jemima McDonald and Helen Puttock were killed in Glasgow between February 1968 and October 1969. All three were mothers, and STV’s anniversary coverage in 2018 recorded that the deaths came after nights out at the same east end dance hall. The press named the unknown man Bible John after the sister of the third victim described a taxi companion who quoted scripture. He has never been identified.
The first round was the original hunt, run by Detective Superintendent Joe Beattie, who spent most of the rest of his career on it, according to STV. More than 100 detectives took more than 50,000 statements in door-to-door inquiries. VICE, citing accounts of the first year, reported that police interviewed about 920 doctors and dentists, more than 400 barbers and hairdressers and 260 tailors, and that golf clubs handed over lists of members who had scored a hole in one. Men who were questioned and cleared were given cards stating that they were not Bible John. Beattie died in 2000 without a charge.
The second round came in the mid-1990s, when advances in DNA testing prompted a new look at the files by a team led by Jim McEwan, according to the Sunday Post. The team concentrated on John Irvine McInnes, a former private in the Scots Guards and a furniture salesman who had died by suicide in 1980, The Courier reported; he had faced four identity parades. In 1996 McInnes was exhumed so that genetic testing could be compared with a stain on Helen Puttock’s clothing. The result was inconclusive. In June 1996, The Courier reported, the Lord Advocate said the forensic evidence was not enough to link McInnes to Helen Puttock’s murder. No court has ever ruled that McInnes, or anyone else, was responsible for any of the three deaths.
Between those rounds the doubts grew inside the police. In 2010 Detective Superintendent David Swindle of Strathclyde Police told The Scotsman that officers 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 third round is a dispute about the second. In 2022 BBC Scotland released a podcast, "Bible John: Creation of a Serial Killer," built on interviews with retired officers. According to the Sunday Post column of the former MSP Joan McAlpine, those officers said McInnes had been visited by senior officers days after Helen Puttock’s death and 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 identified inconsistencies in logbooks and missing evidence. These are allegations made by retired officers; no inquiry or court has upheld them. McAlpine wrote that she was not suggesting McInnes killed Helen Puttock, only that the original inquiry was deeply flawed. In October 2023 Greatest Hits Radio reported that Police Scotland was assessing the claims with the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service.
What would finally move it? Bob Johnstone, a retired detective superintendent who had headed Glasgow CID and overseen 55 murder cases before retiring in 1991, told STV in 2019 that every one reached a satisfactory conclusion except this one. He was reminded of it every October, he said. DNA testing, unavailable in 1969, would have made "a tremendous difference." A convicted killer, Peter Tobin, 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 in 2022.
Span: about 58 years, as of November 2026. Rounds named on the record: the original hunt, the 1990s review and exhumation, the Swindle reviews, and the assessment announced in 2023. Result: none.
Five people were killed and two wounded in four incidents around the northern Bay Area between December 20, 1968, and October 11, 1969. Police attribute all of them to one unidentified man who called himself the Zodiac and mailed letters and ciphers to newspapers. No one has ever been charged.
The earliest record of an investigating agency is a piece of film. The Bay Area Television Archive at San Francisco State University holds KRON footage from December 21, 1968, the day after the first killings, with an interview with Detective Sergeant Leslie Lundblad of the Solano County Sheriff’s Department.
The first multi-agency round is documented in the FBI’s own file. On October 20, 1969, San Francisco Police Captain Martin Lee held a press conference on cooperation among the departments now involved, according to the archive’s catalog of KRON film. FBI records show that on October 21 the bureau began passing information to the San Francisco police and the Napa County sheriff, and that its fingerprint examiners spent the following weeks comparing latent prints from the case with the prints of suspects submitted by Vallejo, Napa and San Francisco. Vallejo’s police chief, Jack Stiltz, had asked the bureau for the fingerprint comparisons on October 31. Each comparison legible in the released file is marked "not identical."
The second round followed a letter. In April 1978 the San Francisco Chronicle received the first Zodiac letter in more than four years. Inspector Dave Toschi, then heading the inquiry, told KPIX on April 26 that he and his colleagues would review all open cases in its light. Within three months Toschi was off the case. At a press conference on July 11, 1978, the writer Armistead Maupin said anonymous fan letters praising Toschi resembled the tone of the new Zodiac letter. Toschi admitted that he had written the fan letters himself but denied any involvement in the Zodiac letter. The Associated Press, reporting his death in January 2018 at 86, said he had been removed after admitting that he wrote anonymous letters praising his own work. He had been on the case about nine years.
A third round ran through a single suspect. Arthur Leigh Allen of Vallejo was the leading suspect for decades, and he was never charged. As KQED summarized in 2021, Michael Mageau identified him, Bryan Hartnell said his voice and build resembled those of the man who confronted him, and Allen was reported to share the assailant’s glove and shoe sizes and to own a typewriter of the same make. Against that, his fingerprints, palm prints and handwriting did not match the evidence. In 2002 a partial DNA profile was developed from saliva on a stamp and envelope from one of the letters; it did not match Allen. He died in Vallejo in 1992, at 58, after denying to ABC7 in 1991 that he was the Zodiac.
The fourth round was institutional fatigue. In 2004, UPI reported, Lieutenant John Hennessey declared the San Francisco case inactive; the department said it had run out of viable leads. Shortly before the 2007 film, the department reopened the case and gave envelopes, possibly the ones tested in 2002, back to the Vallejo police for new DNA testing. "DNA testing of five years ago is not as efficient as it is now," Vallejo Lieutenant Rick Nichelman told the San Francisco Examiner.
The fifth round arrived in May 2018, weeks after the arrest of the Golden State Killer by genealogy, when Vallejo police said they were submitting DNA evidence in the Zodiac case in the hope of a database match, according to Associated Press and ABC30 reports. UPI marked the fiftieth anniversary of the first killings in December 2018 with a piece headlined that the case "still taunts Bay Area investigators." In December 2020 three amateur codebreakers solved a cipher that had gone unread for 51 years; it did not contain a name, CBS News reported. In October 2021 a private group announced that it had identified the writer, KTVU reported, and the claim did not produce a charge.
Span: about 58 years. Rounds on the record: the 1969 multi-agency fingerprint comparisons, the 1978 review, the 2002 and later DNA work, the 2004 close and 2007 reopening, and the 2018 resubmission. Result: no charge and no official identification as of October 20, 2026.
The Golden State Killer series is the clearest example of a case solved by a method that did not exist when it began. The first murder charged against Joseph James DeAngelo was that of Claude Snelling in 1975; the last came in 1986. DeAngelo was arrested on April 24, 2018, 42 years and seven months after the first killing, according to the Associated Press report carried by KSL.
The rounds are many but sparsely documented in the public record. They include a federal one: on June 15, 2016, FBI Sacramento announced a $50,000 reward and a national campaign to identify the unknown assailant, whom the bureau then called by two names. They include a local one that was almost accidental. The Ventura County medical examiner’s office had kept a duplicate of an evidence kit from a 1980 case in a freezer for 37 years, and that DNA profile became the starting point of the genealogy search. The Ventura County District Attorney’s Office later called it the first use of genetic genealogy to solve a murder or rape case.
What moved the file was not a new theory but a new database. Investigators built family trees from the DNA of distant relatives, narrowed them to a man of the right age who had lived in the right places, and then matched him with a tissue he had put out with his trash, ABC10 reported in June 2018.
DeAngelo pleaded guilty on June 29, 2020, to 13 counts of first-degree murder and 13 counts of kidnapping to commit robbery, and admitted dozens of crimes too old to prosecute. Prosecutors counted 87 victims across 53 sites in 11 counties, the joint release of six district attorneys stated. On August 21, 2020, he was sentenced to 11 consecutive terms of life without the possibility of parole, plus a further life term and eight years. The U.S. Department of Justice’s interim policy on forensic genetic genealogical analysis took effect on November 1, 2019.
Span: 42 years 7 months to arrest. Rounds on the record: the 2016 FBI campaign, the long storage of the 1980 kit, and the 2018 genealogy search. Result: arrest, guilty pleas and sentence.
Christine Eadie and Helen Scott, both 17, ended an evening in Edinburgh on Saturday, October 15, 1977, and were dead by the following day. For almost 30 years no one was charged. The inquiry went through more named rounds than any other in this comparison, and it is one of two with an acquittal in the middle.
The first round ran from 1977. Lothian and Borders Police issued descriptions of two men and later a photofit, and over the years took witness statements from more than 20,000 people in Britain and Europe, according to the High Court’s 2016 opinion in Sinclair’s sentence appeal, which also records that anonymous letters and calls came in and detectives interviewed Scottish trawler crews and questioned Peter Sutcliffe. Sinclair’s name did not feature at any of these stages. The opinion records that in 1988 samples from Helen’s raincoat were sent to a laboratory, but DNA profiling was too new to produce a result.
The second round was forensic. In 1998, the Edinburgh Evening News reported, scientists working for Strathclyde Police obtained a male profile from the coat; police then tested about 400 men, including many with records of sexual or violent offenses, and every result was negative. In April 2004 scientists tested another part of the same stain and obtained a match to Sinclair, with odds of a billion to one against the DNA coming from anyone else. He was by then serving life for earlier crimes: on August 31, 1982, a High Court jury had convicted him of offenses against children, and on June 4, 2001, a jury in Glasgow convicted him of the 1978 murder of Mary Gallacher, with a punishment part of 15 years. That same year police began a new operation reviewing seven unsolved killings of young women, the Sunday Post reported in 2019.
Sinclair appeared on petition on March 31, 2005, charged with the murders of both girls, 27 years and five months after the crime. The case went to trial in August 2007 before Lord Clarke. At the close of the prosecution case the defense made a submission of no case to answer. On September 10, 2007, the judge upheld it and acquitted Sinclair; the jury never considered a verdict. "There was no forensic evidence to link the accused to the items used to kill the girls," the judge said, according to the High Court’s opinion. The Crown Office noted there was no right of appeal against an acquittal by a judge.
The third round was a change in the law. The Double Jeopardy (Scotland) Act 2011 allowed the Crown to ask the High Court to set aside an acquittal on new evidence. In March 2012 the Crown Office asked Lothian and Borders Police to reinvestigate, The Scotsman reported, and by December 2012 the Lord Advocate had applied to the High Court, the first application under the new law. The new evidence came largely from DNA work by the forensic company Cellmark in 2011 and 2012, using a light source called Crime-Lite that could show where material had been deposited on a garment. "Without Crime-Lite, there would have been no trial two," Frank Mulholland, the Lord Advocate who prosecuted the retrial, said later.
On March 27, 2014, three judges of the High Court granted the application, and the Law Society of Scotland published the ruling that November. Sinclair was indicted again in May 2014. On November 14, 2014, a jury convicted him of the murders of both girls, and he received a punishment part of 37 years, described as the longest a Scottish court had imposed. His appeal against the sentence was refused on March 24, 2016. He died in custody on March 11, 2019, at 73.
Span: 27 years 5 months to the first charge; 37 years to the final verdict. Rounds on the record: the 1977 inquiry, the 1988 and 1998 forensic work, the 2004 match and review of seven unsolved cases, the 2007 trial, and the 2011 to 2012 retesting. Result: conviction at the second trial.
Terry Peder Rasmussen was convicted of one murder. Under the name Curtis Kimball he was sentenced in Contra Costa County, California, in 2003 to 15 years to life for killing Eunsoon Jun, and he died in prison in December 2010, the New Hampshire Attorney General’s office stated. The authorities who held him did not know his real name. Everything else about him was assembled afterward, in rounds that stretch across more than four decades from the first case he is believed to be tied to.
Four unidentified victims, a woman and three girls, came to light in Allenstown, New Hampshire, in 1985 and again in 2000. For decades they were the only unidentified victims known to the state’s homicide unit, a retired Allenstown police chief told reporters in 2019. Separately, the 1981 case of a Manchester woman named Denise Beaudin has been under review since; the Attorney General’s office has said it believes the man it then knew as Robert "Bob" Evans was responsible for what it calls her likely murder.
The break was a paternity question. In 2013 the case of a girl whom the man had abandoned in 1986 was assigned to Detective Peter Headley of the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Office. At the end of 2014 the woman, by then grown, raised it with him again, and the genetic genealogist Barbara Rae-Venter began working with her in 2015. "All we had was her DNA," Rae-Venter told ABC News. From more than 200 genetic cousins she built family trees that pointed to a man in New Hampshire, who proved to be the woman’s maternal grandfather. She learned that she had been born in 1981 and that her mother was Denise Beaudin. In July 2016 the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Office contacted New Hampshire authorities.
The next rounds were quick. In October 2016, the Attorney General’s office has said, testing showed that the man known as Kimball was the biological father of the middle child of the four. On January 17, 2017, investigators, with help from the FBI, searched the Manchester house where Beaudin had lived with Evans and her daughter, CBS Boston reported. Senior Assistant Attorney General Jeffery Strelzin, then chief of New Hampshire’s homicide unit, described him at the first announcement as "a chameleon" who fit the criteria for a serial killer, the Concord Monitor reported. On August 18, 2017, Attorney General Gordon MacDonald announced that Evans had been Terry Peder Rasmussen, born in Denver in 1943, a Navy veteran discharged in 1967. In November 2017 the office published a revised timeline of Rasmussen’s life with a 1973 booking photograph.
Identification of the four victims took longer. Three of them were named in June 2019, the Associated Press reported. The last was named in September 2025, and the Attorney General’s release that announced it said the investigation into the cases of two missing women, Beaudin and another, remained open. Rasmussen was never charged in New Hampshire, because he was dead before anyone knew who he was.
Span: about 35 years from the Beaudin case to the search of her house; 44 years to the final identification. Rounds on the record: the 1985 and 2000 discoveries, the 2013 reassignment of the abandoned-child case, the 2015 genealogy, the 2016 DNA comparison, the 2017 searches and naming, and the 2019 and 2025 identifications. Result: a name, no trial.
This is the odd case in the group: the reviews did not look for a suspect. They tested whether two other men had been rightly convicted of killings that Cooke, already executed, had confessed to. Eric Edgar Cooke was executed at Fremantle Prison on October 26, 1964, at 33, the last person executed in Western Australia. A jury had convicted him of a single wilful murder. By then he had confessed to eight killings and 14 attempted murders between 1959 and 1963, ABC News reported in 2017; the Australian Dictionary of Biography records that the state acknowledged him responsible for two other murders. The rest of his confessions were never tested by a court.
Two of them mattered to other men. J.B. had been convicted in the death of Rosemary Anderson, 17, and decades later told the Central Western Daily that detectives had beaten him until he gave a confession. The second man, D.B., was also in prison for a killing that Cooke later confessed to. Cooke’s final confession did not reopen either file; the Central Western Daily reported that police opened no inquiry afterward and that both men stayed in prison.
The review began with a journalist, not an agency. In 1991 Estelle Blackburn met J.B.'s brother at a social occasion and began to look into Anderson’s death, Canberra CityNews reported. Over six years she went through police and prison files, trial records and press reports, and located witnesses who had never been interviewed. Her book Broken Lives appeared in November 1998, according to her own website, and argued that both convictions were wrong. A barrister and a solicitor took on both men’s cases without fee.
The courts moved slowly. J.B. was vindicated in 2002, and in October 2004 a court heard that the second man’s guilt was unlikely, ABC News reported; on April 1, 2005, ABC News reported that his murder conviction had been quashed after 40 years. The Western Australian government later made an ex gratia payment to the second man, ABC News reported in 2011.
Span: about 39 years from the Anderson killing to J.B.'s vindication in 2002, and 42 years to the quashing of the second conviction. Rounds on the record: the 1964 appeals and execution, the 1991 to 1998 journalism, and the 2002 to 2005 court processes. Result: two convictions undone; Cooke never tried for either killing.
Rex Heuermann, an architect who commuted from Massapequa Park to Midtown Manhattan, pleaded guilty on April 8, 2026, to murdering seven women and admitted killing an eighth. The first of the Gilgo Beach cases came to public notice in December 2010, and for more than a decade no one was charged. His earliest attributed killing, that of Sandra Costilla in North Sea, dates to 1993; the Trinidad Express reported that testing in February 2024 matched a male hair connected to her case to Heuermann. Counted from 1993, the arrest of July 13, 2023, came after 30 years.
The stall was in part institutional. James Burke, the Suffolk County Police Department’s chief, was arrested on December 9, 2015, pleaded guilty in federal court to a civil rights violation and conspiracy to obstruct justice, and was sentenced on November 2, 2016, to 46 months in prison, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York announced. A new multiagency task force formed in early 2022, with the Suffolk County Police Department, the State Police, the Sheriff’s Office, the FBI and the district attorney’s office. Accounts differ on the month and on who formed it: the 2023 bail application says January 2022, the district attorney’s 2024 statement says February 2022, and CNN and the Associated Press credit the newly appointed police commissioner, Rodney Harrison.
The break came quickly. On March 14, 2022, a New York State Police investigator searching vehicle registration records learned that Heuermann had owned a first-generation Chevrolet Avalanche at the time of the killings, the model a witness had described in 2010, according to the bail application. On January 26, 2023, investigators watching him in Manhattan retrieved a pizza box he had thrown into a trash can and swabbed the crusts. On June 12, 2023, a laboratory reported that he could not be excluded as the source of a male hair recovered in one of the Gilgo Beach cases, a result that, prosecutors said, excluded 99.96 percent of the population.
Charges came in stages: an indictment in July 2023, then in January 2024, in June 2024 (the 1993 and 2003 killings, announced on June 6) and in December 2024 (the seventh woman, announced December 17). The defense challenged the science. Prosecutors had used whole genome sequencing to build nuclear DNA profiles from rootless hairs, a technique never before used in a New York court. After a hearing, Judge Timothy Mazzei ruled on September 3, 2025, that the method was generally accepted in the relevant scientific community. After the ruling the district attorney said, "Full speed ahead for trial." The plea followed seven months later. On June 17, 2026, Heuermann was sentenced to three consecutive terms of life without parole and four consecutive terms of 25 years to life.
Span: 30 years from the earliest attributed killing to arrest; 12 years 7 months from December 2010. Rounds on the record: the original inquiry to 2015, the arrest of the department’s chief, the 2022 task force, and the 2023 to 2025 DNA litigation. Result: guilty plea.
The Green River investigation opened in August 1982. The man later convicted in it was arrested on November 30, 2001, 19 years and four months after the series began, according to HistoryLink’s account of the arrest. What led to the arrest was a saliva sample taken from him in 1987; when the crime laboratory could test it, the DNA matched evidence from three of the 1982 victims. HistoryLink recorded his guilty pleas on November 5, 2003, to 48 counts of aggravated first-degree murder.
The identification work did not end with the plea. A 49th count, for Rebecca Marrero, was announced in February 2011 and ended with a plea and a further life term on February 18, 2011, KOMO and KNKX reported. In January 2021 CBS Colorado reported that Wendy Stephens, 14, of Denver was now believed to be one of the unidentified victims among his counts; in January 2024 KPTV reported the last unidentified victim named, 40 years after the killings. Ridgway has claimed many more victims than the 49 for which he was convicted; authorities treated a 2013 claim with skepticism, the Associated Press reported. In March 2025 KOMO reported that he had been returned to King County to help locate more victims.
Span: 19 years 4 months to arrest. Rounds on the record: the 1982 task force, the 1987 sample, the 2001 testing, and the post-plea identifications.
The shortest span in the group belongs to a series that was never cold in the usual sense, only unlinked. Nancy Dunning, the wife of Alexandria’s sheriff, was killed on December 5, 2003. Ronald Kirby was killed on November 11, 2013, and Ruthanne Lodato on February 6, 2014. Charles Severance was arrested on March 13, 2014, in Wheeling, West Virginia, on a Loudoun County warrant for possession of a firearm by a felon, and was charged with the three killings on September 8, 2014, the Washingtonian reported: 10 years and nine months after the first of them.
The Dunning case had gone unsolved for more than ten years. In September 2015, Patch reported, Judge Randy Bellows ruled that the defense could try to show at trial that the late sheriff had been responsible for his wife’s death. A jury in Fairfax County, where the trial was moved from Alexandria, convicted Severance on all counts on November 2, 2015. He was sentenced on January 21, 2016, to three consecutive life terms plus 48 years, the Associated Press reported. The Supreme Court of Virginia affirmed the convictions on July 19, 2018.
Span: 10 years 9 months. Rounds on the record: the ten-year gap and the 2013 and 2014 investigations that tied the series together. Result: conviction on all counts.
Ranked by years alone, the order is Bible John, the Zodiac, DeAngelo, Sinclair, Rasmussen, Heuermann, Cooke, Ridgway and Severance. Ranked by rounds, it changes: Sinclair and the Zodiac went through the most named reviews, and one of Sinclair’s ended in an acquittal that had to be undone by statute. The cases that closed did so on a new technique applied to evidence that had been kept: a raincoat sample, a saliva sample, a duplicate kit, hairs. The two that are still open were reviewed, and then reviewed again, on the same stored material, and so far the new technique has not been enough.
Length does not predict an outcome. Cooke’s case was reviewed for four decades because someone outside the system asked. The two longest, Bible John and the Zodiac, are the two in which police themselves have questioned whether the original theory was right.
• October 26, 1964: Eric Edgar Cooke is executed at Fremantle Prison.
• February 1968: first of three Glasgow deaths later linked to Bible John.
• December 20, 1968: first killings attributed to the Zodiac.
• October 20 to 31, 1969: multi-agency cooperation and FBI fingerprint comparisons in the Zodiac case.
• September 11, 1975: first murder later charged against DeAngelo.
• October 15 to 16, 1977: deaths of Christine Eadie and Helen Scott.
• November 1981: Denise Beaudin’s case begins in New Hampshire.
• August 1982: Green River investigation opens.
• 1991: Estelle Blackburn begins looking into the Anderson killing.
• 1993: earliest killing attributed to Heuermann.
• 1996: McInnes exhumed in the Bible John review.
• November 1998: Blackburn’s book Broken Lives appears.
• November 30, 2001: Ridgway arrested.
• 2002: J.B. vindicated.
• December 5, 2003 to September 8, 2014: from the Dunning killing to Severance’s murder charges.
• April 2004: DNA match to Sinclair.
• April 1, 2005: the second man’s murder conviction is quashed.
• September 10, 2007: Sinclair acquitted by the trial judge.
• December 2010: first Gilgo Beach case comes to public notice.
• March 27, 2014: High Court sets aside Sinclair’s acquittal; November 14, 2014: convicted.
• August 18, 2017: Rasmussen named.
• April 24, 2018: DeAngelo arrested.
• December 2020: Zodiac cipher solved, without a name.
• July 13, 2023: Heuermann arrested; April 8, 2026: guilty plea; June 17, 2026: sentence.