Romaine Jenkins was a homicide detective in Washington in the spring of 1971, when the first of six girls and young women was taken from a neighborhood in Southeast, and she was not allowed to work the case. The city was bracing for the May Day antiwar protests, and the entire Metropolitan Police Department, homicide squad included, had been placed on prisoner alert. Sixteen years later, newly promoted to sergeant, she reopened the file herself. She retired in 1994 without an answer. In 2023 she still kept boxes of what she had gathered.
Most murder investigations belong to a squad, a task force or a prosecutor’s office. A few come to belong to one officer, who carries the case through promotions and transfers, past the point where colleagues have moved on and sometimes past retirement. Some of those officers lived to hear a guilty plea. Others died with the file still open. What their careers record is rarely a flash of insight. More often it is the slower work of keeping evidence from being thrown away until science could use it, and of keeping faith with families who had heard too often that nothing more could be done.
Between April 1971 and September 1972, six Black girls and young women were taken from neighborhoods in Washington, D.C., and killed. Carol Spinks was 13. Darlenia Johnson was 16, Brenda Crockett 10, Nenomoshia Yates 12, Brenda Woodard 18 and Diane Williams 17. Their deaths came to light in the District and just over the line in Prince George’s County, Maryland. Police attribute all six to one unidentified man, whom local reporters called the Freeway Phantom. No one has ever been charged.
After the fourth death, according to WETA’s history site Boundary Stones, the FBI joined the Metropolitan Police in a task force. The tips pointed everywhere at once. "Every male that you could think of ended up being a suspect at one time," Jenkins said. Without an arrest, the task force eventually broke up, and the case slipped out of the newspapers.
In 1987 Jenkins took it back. What she discovered was worse than a cold trail. Case files and forensic evidence had been destroyed or lost, some of it in a warehouse. Carol Spinks’s sister put it in four words: "And now, it’s gone!" Jenkins rebuilt the files as best she could, with help from the FBI and from detectives who had worked the original investigation, and in 1990 FBI analysts drew up a profile from what survived. They described a man probably between 27 and 32 at the time of the killings, who may have lived or worked in Southeast Washington, and whom some of the girls may have known well enough to trust.
She retired in 1994. In 2023 Washingtonian reported that during her years at the department she had gathered material from several law enforcement agencies, that she still kept it in boxes, and that she believed the case could be solved.
The file passed to the department’s cold case unit and to Detective James Trainum, and the losses repeated themselves. Washingtonian reported in July 2009 that D.C. police had lost the entire case file and that none of the case’s evidence could be located in the police evidence warehouse. Trainum, by then the unit’s director, rebuilt it a second time with a group of interns, from whatever retired D.C. detectives, the FBI and the Prince George’s County police could supply. The result filled a row of binders in his office. He allowed that the missing material might still surface. "Maybe it’s over there in some box and we haven’t stumbled across it," he said. "Who knows?"
One box did surface. It held clothing from Diane Williams, the last of the six, and Trainum told WUSA9 that it might carry the DNA of the man responsible. Washingtonian reported in 2009 that testing was on hold behind the backlog at the FBI laboratory at Quantico, where cold cases went to the back of the queue. Diane’s sister had by then joined the Metropolitan Police herself and risen to lieutenant. In 2008 she told WUSA9 that she wanted the man to admit what he had done.
Boundary Stones reports that the D.C. Council later required evidence in unsolved homicide cases to be kept for at least 65 years. For most of what Jenkins went looking for in 1987, the rule came too late. As of October 2026 the case is unsolved, and the Metropolitan Police Department still publishes its appeal, with a reward of up to $150,000.
Joe Beattie never caught the man Glasgow called Bible John, and by STV’s account he spent most of the rest of his career trying.
Between February 1968 and October 1969 three women were killed in Glasgow. Patricia Docker was 25. Jemima McDonald was 31 or 32; accounts differ. Helen Puttock was 29. All three were mothers. Helen’s sister had spent that last evening with her and with a well-dressed young man who called himself John, quoted the Bible and talked about a strict religious upbringing, and she shared a taxi with them. Her description became the basis of everything that followed. A journalist supplied the nickname.
Detective Superintendent Beattie ran an inquiry of a size Scotland had not seen. More than 100 detectives took more than 50,000 statements, STV reported. VICE, drawing on accounts of the first year, described a squad of 16 detectives sent into the dance hall to watch the floor, and men who had been questioned and cleared carrying cards that said they were not Bible John. Police consulted the Dutch clairvoyant Gerard Croiset. None of it produced a charge. Beattie died in 2000, according to VICE, with the man unnamed.
The case outlasted those who inherited it too. In 2019 Bob Johnstone, a retired detective superintendent who had headed Glasgow CID, told STV that he had overseen 55 murder investigations before retiring in 1991 and that every one had reached a satisfactory conclusion except this one. Every October, he said, brought the same thought: another year gone and still no solution. He believed someone still held the answer, perhaps a relative the man had confided in, and that DNA testing, unavailable in 1969, would have made "a tremendous difference."
Even the basic premise has worn thin with time. In the mid-1990s a review led by the former detective chief inspector Jim McEwan used the new genetic methods to test a former suspect who had died in 1980. In mid-1996 the Lord Advocate said the forensic evidence was not enough to link him to Helen Puttock’s death, The Courier reported. In 2010 Detective Superintendent David Swindle of Strathclyde Police told The Scotsman that police were not completely convinced all three women had been killed by the same person. Helen Puttock’s sister, the only witness, died in 2010. At the 50th anniversary of the first death, in 2018, Detective Chief Inspector Mark Bell said that "the passage of time is no barrier," and that in the view of Police Scotland "these cases are never closed." No one has ever been charged.
On the night of October 11, 1969, a cab driver named Paul Stine, 29, a student at San Francisco State College who planned to teach English, was killed in Presidio Heights. Dave Toschi and Bill Armstrong, homicide inspectors on weekend call, caught the case, according to a 2013 account by Richard Carlson in the Washington Examiner. Within days a letter to the San Francisco Chronicle claimed the killing. Its writer called himself the Zodiac, and he had already claimed deaths in Solano and Napa counties. Police attribute five killings in 1968 and 1969 to him. He has never been identified, and no one has been charged.
Toschi became the public face of the hunt and stayed on it for nine years. Duffy Jennings, who covered the killings for the Chronicle, told the Associated Press that the case "gnawed at him," that Toschi said it gave him an ulcer, and that for years he returned on the anniversary to the corner where Stine died, looking for anything that had been missed. The end of his time on the case was a humiliation. In 1978 he was taken off it after admitting that he had written anonymous letters praising his own work, the AP reported. He had joined the department in 1953 after Army service in the Korean War, and he retired in 1985. He was said to have been a model for Steve McQueen’s detective in "Bullitt," and Mark Ruffalo played him in David Fincher’s film "Zodiac." He died in January 2018, at 86, with the case open.
The file had its own long life. In 2004 the San Francisco department declared the case inactive, UPI reported, saying it had run out of viable leads. Shortly before the Fincher film, it reopened the case and handed envelopes back to the Vallejo police for fresh DNA testing, the San Francisco Examiner reported. The man who stayed at the top of the suspect list for decades, a Vallejo resident, was never charged and died in 1992. After genetic genealogy identified a suspect in a different California series in April 2018, Vallejo sent the stamps and flaps of the original envelopes to a private laboratory. Investigators believe the letter writer is dead, ABC30 reported that year, but they still want to establish who he was. As of October 2026, no charge or official identification had been reported.
Between January 1974 and January 1991, ten people were killed in and around Wichita, Kansas, by a man who wrote to the police and the press and then, for years at a stretch, went silent. Joseph and Julie Otero and two of their children, Josephine and Joseph II, died on January 15, 1974. Kathryn Bright died in April 1974, Shirley Vian on March 17, 1977, Nancy Fox in December 1977, Marine Hedge in April 1985, Vicki Wegerle on September 16, 1986, and Dolores Davis in January 1991.
The investigation never formally closed. In 1984 the Wichita police set up a secret unit at City Hall, known inside the department as the Ghostbusters, which spent about three years on the case. It narrowed a list of local men to 225 and was disbanded in 1987 with about a dozen names still unresolved. By the early 1990s the case had faded from public view. Ken Landwehr had not let it fade from his.
On March 19, 2004, a letter reached The Wichita Eagle with a photocopy of Vicki Wegerle’s driver’s license, a case no one had publicly tied to the series. By March 25, Lieutenant Landwehr, who had worked the case for more than 20 years and now led a new task force, confirmed that the letter was authentic. A DNA profile from Wegerle’s case, developed only months earlier, matched the profile on file from the earlier killings. Within days police had 365 tips.
The writer kept writing, 11 communications in all before his arrest, police said. In January 2005 he asked whether he could send a floppy disk without being traced, and police answered him through a classified advertisement: "Rex, it will be OK." On February 16, 2005, a disk reached KSAS-TV. Data on it pointed to a Lutheran church and to the name "Dennis." The president of the congregation was Dennis Rader, 59, a municipal code officer in Park City and a former Cub Scout leader. A court-ordered sample from a close relative gave investigators a familial DNA match. Rader was arrested in Park City on February 25, 2005, and charged on March 1 with 10 counts of first-degree murder.
He talked for about 30 hours. "His arrogance helped catch him," said Larry Welch, director of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation. "He should have kept his mouth shut." On June 27, 2005, Rader pleaded guilty to all 10 counts. On August 18, 2005, District Judge Gregory Waller imposed 10 consecutive life terms, with a minimum of 175 years before parole eligibility.
Twenty years later, Wichita officials still credit one detective with keeping the case alive. "Kenny was a better cop than Rader was a criminal," the Sedgwick County district attorney, Marc Bennett, said in 2025, noting that investigators had collected swabs from about 1,600 men over the years, none of which matched. KWCH reported on August 18, 2025, that Rader was held at the El Dorado Correctional Facility in Butler County.
Frank Stiles led the Toledo police investigation into a series of killings that began in 1973 and ended with the murder of Peter Sawicki, a real estate developer, on September 18, 1981. Anthony Cook was arrested several weeks later and convicted of Sawicki’s murder in March 1982. In an interview that was not recorded, Cook asked Stiles whether a man who had done such things could ever win parole. Stiles told him he believed he would never be released. Because the death penalty law then in force did not reach his crime, Cook was sentenced to a fixed term to life, which left him eligible for parole.
For 16 years police suspected Cook and his younger brother, Nathaniel, in the other killings and could not prove it. On October 15, 1997, the Lucas County prosecutor, Julia Bates, telephoned Stiles to suggest testing old evidence from a 1980 case, WTOL reported. In 1998 DNA matched both brothers to the May 1980 killing of Tom Gordon. Under a plea agreement signed in 2000, the brothers were to confess fully to every killing they had committed in Lucas County and pass polygraph examinations; in return, Nathaniel would be released after 20 years. Anthony pleaded guilty to the aggravated murder of Tom Gordon and received a second life term. In videotaped interviews on April 3, 2000, the brothers accounted for nine killings between 1973 and 1981. Prosecutors agreed not to pursue charges for the ones that had never been tried.
Stiles watched the tapes. "Tony Cook enjoys killing," he said. The brothers denied four other deaths police had linked to them, and Stiles believes they avoided one of those cases because the victim was the niece of a retired Toledo detective. He and the FBI went on working half a dozen other possibilities, hoping to tie the brothers to something that would keep Nathaniel in prison. "We always thought within 20 years we could come up with something," Stiles told the Associated Press in 2018. "But it didn’t happen, and now those 20 years are up." Nathaniel Cook was released under the agreement in August 2018.
Stiles kept coming back for the parole hearings. Before one scheduled for December 5, 2024, he told WTOL that he had no doubt Anthony Cook would have kept killing, and called him "the worst human being I’ve ever seen, talked to, known or investigated." That hearing was moved to March 2025 after Cook declined to meet the board, 13abc and WTOL reported. Local12 later reported that he had been denied parole and could not apply again until 2034.
Roger Kibbe, a furniture maker from Citrus Heights, outside Sacramento, was convicted by an El Dorado County jury in 1991 of the first-degree murder of Darcie Frackenpohl, 17, and sentenced to 25 years to life. Investigators already suspected him in six other deaths of women in Northern California, but prosecutors could not charge them, the Associated Press reported. For more than a decade he was a prisoner serving time for one murder, and the other families had nothing.
Vito Bertocchini, the lead homicide detective on the case for the San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Office, spent 24 years on it. The break came in 2002, when an investigator for the San Joaquin County District Attorney’s Office resubmitted old evidence from five killings of the 1980s for DNA testing, CBS San Francisco reported, and the results pointed to Kibbe. Trace evidence tied him to others, the Lodi News-Sentinel reported. In September 2009, at 70, to avoid a possible death sentence, he pleaded guilty to six counts of first-degree murder covering Lou Ellen Burleigh, killed in 1977, and Lora Heedick, Barbara Ann Scott, Stephanie Brown, Charmaine Sabrah and Katherine Kelly Quinones, all killed in 1986. On November 5, 2009, Judge George Abdallah Jr. sentenced him in Stockton to six consecutive terms of life without parole.
Bertocchini never accepted that seven was the full count. "Absolutely. He’s responsible for many more," he told CBS Sacramento in 2021. He remembered Kibbe telling him once: "I have two cans in my head. I’m opening the lid to one can and letting some secrets out." A San Joaquin County prosecutor said in 2009 that Kibbe had been a suspect in the 1987 killing of Karen Finch of Lodi. He was never charged with it, never admitted it, and one of his own lawyers said he did not believe there were others.
The detective stayed in contact. He last spoke with Kibbe in 2019, and said Kibbe had been afraid of the general prison population. "He was worried that somebody would make a name for themselves," Bertocchini said. Early on February 28, 2021, Kibbe, 81, died in the cell he shared with another prisoner at Mule Creek State Prison in Ione, and the Amador County Sheriff’s Office classified the death a homicide. In January 2024 the AP reported that the cellmate was serving a second term of life without parole for the killing. "This is evil killing evil," Bertocchini told CBS Sacramento. What troubled him was that the answers for other families might now be gone with Kibbe.
Hector Clark was assistant chief constable of Northumbria Police when he took charge of the joint inquiry into the murders of Susan Maxwell, 11, in 1982, and Caroline Hogg, 5, in 1983. The two cases straddled the border between England and Scotland, and the inquiry ran incident rooms in Northumberland and at Leith, sending photographs between them by early fax machine. Clark moved on in 1984 to become deputy chief constable of Lothian and Borders Police, and the case went with him. A third girl, Sarah Harper, 10, of Morley in West Yorkshire, was killed in 1986. Over the years the inquiry gathered 189,000 witness statements, The Scotsman reported.
The man responsible was a van driver named Robert Black. He was arrested in Stow, in the Scottish Borders, on July 14, 1990, after a neighbor raised the alarm, and was convicted that year of an offense against a six-year-old girl. There was no confession to the murders. Under Clark, officers from five forces built a circumstantial case from about half a million fuel receipts, expense records and delivery schedules kept by Black’s employer, which placed him in the right towns on the right days. It took four years. In May 1994 a jury at Newcastle upon Tyne Crown Court convicted Black of murder, with other charges, in the cases of Susan Maxwell, Caroline Hogg and Sarah Harper. "What Hector Clark and his team did, painstakingly, was build a circumstantial case which proved compelling in court," Tom Wood, who had linked the Stow arrest to the earlier cases, said when Clark died in 2021.
A fourth case belonged to another detective. Jennifer Cardy, 9, was killed in August 1981 after leaving Ballinderry, in County Antrim, and for two decades no one was charged. In June 2002 Detective Superintendent Raymond Murray of the Police Service of Northern Ireland reopened the investigation, and he led it for nine years. There was no DNA and no fingerprint evidence. The case, Murray said, depended on "convincing a jury that this was how it was."
His team spent a year planning a single set of interviews. Black was brought from Wakefield prison to the serious crime suite at Antrim police station, which was cleared for three days, and the first session began on May 16, 2005, Jennifer’s birthday. The interviews, led by an officer named Pamela Simpson, filled 21 tapes. Black traced old delivery runs on a 1981 atlas with his finger and accepted that he would have been in Northern Ireland on the day in question. He was charged in January 2010. On October 27, 2011, a jury at Armagh Crown Court convicted him of murder, with other charges. Murray called him "a lost cause to humanity." The Court of Appeal in Northern Ireland dismissed his appeal on June 27, 2013.
The ruling mattered beyond Ulster. Detective Superintendent Paul Burgan of Devon and Cornwall Police called it "a game changer," because it showed that Black’s past could be put before a jury, and his force reopened the unsolved 1978 case of Genette Tate, 13, of Aylesbeare in Devon. In January 2016, after Black died at HMP Maghaberry on January 12 at 68, Devon and Cornwall Police said he would in all probability have been charged. He never was, and that case has never been tested in court.
The crimes that ended with Joseph James DeAngelo’s guilty pleas ran from 1975 to 1986 and crossed eleven California counties. For most of those years they sat in separate files under separate names. DNA joined them slowly. Orange County crime laboratory comparisons in 1996, 1998 and 2001 linked murders in Orange and Ventura counties and crimes in Contra Costa County to a single unknown man, according to the prosecution’s statement of facts, and a state database upload in 2011 added the Santa Barbara County murders. The profile matched no one in any offender database. In June 2016 the FBI announced a $50,000 reward and a national publicity campaign.
Paul Holes was an investigator in Contra Costa County. In the fall of 2017, as assistant chief investigator for the county district attorney, he asked the Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office to help him try something no American murder investigation had yet relied on: comparing evidence DNA not with criminal databases but with the profiles ordinary people had shared online to find relatives. A genealogy-style data file was produced from evidence preserved since 1980, and in January 2018 it was uploaded to a public genealogy database.
The search produced no name, only distant cousins. A six-person team that included Holes, an FBI attorney and the genealogist Barbara Rae-Venter built family trees backward to shared great-grandparents and forward again, confirming each branch with birth, death, marriage and census records, according to a 2026 account in the University of Texas School of Law’s magazine. The trees narrowed thousands of relatives to six men of the right age who had lived near the crimes. On March 18, 2018, an investigative assistant reported that the team had another candidate, the prosecution’s statement of facts records. A DNA sample collected without the man’s knowledge matched.
The man was a 72-year-old grandfather in Citrus Heights who had once been a police officer in Exeter and Auburn, The Sun-Gazette reported. DeAngelo was arrested in Citrus Heights on April 24, 2018. The search had taken 63 days and cost 217 dollars in test kits and a website subscription, by the Texas account.
On June 29, 2020, in a ballroom at California State University, Sacramento, DeAngelo pleaded guilty to 13 counts of first-degree murder and 13 counts of kidnapping to commit robbery, and admitted dozens of uncharged crimes. On August 21, 2020, Judge Michael Bowman sentenced him to 11 consecutive terms of life without parole, a further consecutive life term and 8 years. In January 2021 he was moved to a protective housing unit at California State Prison, Corcoran, ABC30 reported. Ventura County District Attorney Greg Totten, speaking at the sentencing, addressed anyone still out there with an old case behind him: "We will find you."
Set side by side, the eight cases divide less by talent than by luck in what survived. Landwehr had a DNA profile that had waited in storage for a writer foolish enough to resume writing. Holes had a duplicate evidence kit that a Ventura County medical examiner kept in a freezer for 37 years. Bertocchini had old evidence that an investigator thought to send back to the laboratory. Clark and Murray had paper: fuel receipts, expense records, delivery schedules, a 1981 atlas, and the patience to wait for a jury. Stiles had a prosecutor who telephoned him in 1997 to suggest testing evidence from a 1980 killing.
Jenkins had none of that. She reopened her case and discovered that the department had lost it, and the detective who followed her discovered that it had been lost again. In Glasgow the men who followed Beattie came to doubt that he had been hunting one man at all. Toschi’s nine years ended in an embarrassment that followed him into his obituaries, and the letters he spent those years reading still carry no name.
Several of these officers kept going long after the job stopped requiring it. Bertocchini was still taking Kibbe’s calls in 2019. Stiles was still speaking at parole hearings in 2024, more than four decades after he told Anthony Cook he would never be released. Jenkins, retired for nearly 30 years, still had her boxes. The cases that closed did so in courtrooms, with dates and sentences. The ones that never closed are measured differently, in the anniversaries the detectives kept.
• February 1968 to October 1969: Three women are killed in Glasgow; Detective Superintendent Joe Beattie leads the Bible John inquiry.
• December 1968 to October 11, 1969: Five killings in Solano and Napa counties and San Francisco are later attributed to the Zodiac; Inspectors Dave Toschi and Bill Armstrong take the San Francisco case.
• April 1971 to September 1972: Six girls and young women are killed in the Washington area.
• January 15, 1974: The first four of the Wichita killings.
• September 18, 1981: Peter Sawicki is killed in Toledo; Anthony Cook is convicted of his murder in March 1982.
• August 1981: Jennifer Cardy, 9, is killed in County Antrim.
• 1982 and 1983: Susan Maxwell and Caroline Hogg are killed; Hector Clark leads the joint inquiry.
• 1984 to 1987: Wichita’s secret Ghostbusters unit works the case.
• 1985: Toschi retires, seven years after being taken off the Zodiac case.
• 1986: Sarah Harper, 10, is killed in West Yorkshire.
• 1987: Sergeant Romaine Jenkins reopens the Washington case and learns that files and evidence were lost.
• July 14, 1990: Robert Black is arrested in Stow.
• 1991: Roger Kibbe is convicted of first-degree murder by an El Dorado County jury.
• 1994: Jenkins retires; in May, Black is convicted of murder, with other charges, in three cases at Newcastle upon Tyne Crown Court.
• 1996: A Glasgow review tests a former suspect’s DNA; the Lord Advocate says the evidence is insufficient.
• October 15, 1997: Toledo prosecutor Julia Bates suggests DNA testing to Detective Frank Stiles.
• 1998: DNA links Anthony and Nathaniel Cook to a 1980 killing.
• April 3, 2000: The Cook brothers give videotaped confessions to nine killings.
• 2000: Beattie dies.
• 2002: San Joaquin County evidence is resubmitted for DNA testing in the Kibbe cases; Detective Superintendent Raymond Murray reopens the Cardy case.
• 2004: San Francisco police declare the Zodiac case inactive; it is reopened before 2007.
• March 25, 2004: Lieutenant Ken Landwehr confirms a new Wichita letter is authentic.
• February 25, 2005: Dennis Rader is arrested in Park City.
• May 16, 2005: Black is interviewed at Antrim police station.
• June 27, 2005: Rader pleads guilty to 10 counts of first-degree murder; he is sentenced on August 18.
• July 2009: Washingtonian reports that the Washington case file was lost and rebuilt by Detective James Trainum’s unit.
• November 5, 2009: Kibbe is sentenced to six consecutive terms of life without parole after pleading guilty to six counts of first-degree murder.
• October 27, 2011: Black is convicted at Armagh Crown Court; his appeal is dismissed on June 27, 2013.
• January 12, 2016: Black dies at HMP Maghaberry.
• Fall 2017: Paul Holes proposes a genetic genealogy search.
• January 2018: Toschi dies at 86.
• April 24, 2018: Joseph James DeAngelo is arrested in Citrus Heights.
• August 2018: Nathaniel Cook is released under the 2000 agreement.
• June 29, 2020: DeAngelo pleads guilty; he is sentenced on August 21, 2020.
• February 28, 2021: Kibbe dies at Mule Creek State Prison; the death is classified a homicide.
• 2021: Hector Clark dies.
• 2025: Anthony Cook is denied parole and is next eligible in 2034.
• October 2026: The Washington, Glasgow and Zodiac cases remain unsolved.