Police departments do not like the word "cold." It suggests a drawer, a box, a retired detective with an unanswered letter. The agencies behind the seven series use other words: active, open, unresolved, never closed. Some mean it literally, with detectives assigned and tips logged every week. Others mean only that nobody has formally shut the file. In every one of these series, no one has been convicted of the killings, and what each agency says it is still doing is a matter of public record, with a date.
In 2009 the deaths of eleven women and girls, and of the unborn child one of them was carrying, came to light on the West Mesa, the high desert on the western edge of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Within a year all eleven had names: Monica Candelaria, Victoria Chavez, Virginia Cloven, Syllannia Edwards, Cinnamon Elks, Doreen Marquez, Julie Nieto, Veronica Romero, Evelyn Salazar, Michelle Valdez and Jamie Barela. Their deaths are dated to 2003 and 2004. Two of them, Syllannia and Jamie, were 15. Jamie was the last to be identified, on January 26, 2010. At her funeral that March her mother said, "Somebody took a bright smile away from us," and that the service was not closure.
CBS News has called the investigation the largest homicide case in the Albuquerque Police Department’s history. The department has worked it with the FBI for more than seventeen years. No one has been arrested and no one has been charged. A press nickname, the "West Mesa Bone Collector," was already in use by November 2009, when News 9 in Oklahoma City reported on Syllannia Edwards; police prefer the plainer title of their case page, the West Mesa Homicide Investigation.
The department has measured its effort in numbers at each anniversary. By 2022 it had documented more than 1,184 tips, interviewed about 200 women and run further searches in 2018 and 2021. By 2024 the tip count passed 1,400 and there had been seven additional land searches; in 2025 KOB 4 put the figure near 1,500. A police spokesman said in 2019 that a task force of detectives was working the case about 40 hours a week and that it was an active case, not a cold one. In 2024 KOB 4 reported five detectives assigned, reviewing tips weekly with the FBI.
What the department will say about suspects is narrow. Police have said they have several persons of interest. Two men drew the most public attention: one died in 2006, and the other is serving a long prison sentence in an unrelated case. Neither has been charged in connection with West Mesa. In 2010, Chief Ray Schultz told KUNM that investigators held back information so as not to tip off suspects and to protect a future prosecution. Liz Thomson, a former homicide sergeant working as a cold case investigator, said in 2022 that the person responsible would have needed the means and the knowledge to reach what was then a remote part of the mesa, and that a 2021 search of a possible site "did not find anything that provided us with any answers." She told KSFR that the person they sought had targeted vulnerable women and might have hurt others earlier without killing them.
Police have not ruled out more victims. The department believes the cases of eight other women from 2003 to 2006 may be connected, and in August 2022 it devoted a podcast episode, "The Missings," to them. The reward stands at up to $100,000, made up of an FBI offer of up to $50,000 with money from the department and the families, and the department repeats it every February.
The newest step was legislative. In 2025 the department asked for a change it tied to this case: DNA taken at a felony arrest could go into the national database, CODIS, even if the person died before charges were filed. House Bill 340 passed. Commander Kyle Hartsock said the aim was answers for families, not necessarily new charges. KOB 4 reported that one of the West Mesa persons of interest died before any charge and that the old rules barred processing his DNA. In February 2026, on the seventeenth anniversary, the president of the Albuquerque City Council said again that the killings are unsolved.
Between November 1971 and November 1973, three girls from Rochester died in separate events in the towns around the city. Carmen Colon was 10. Wanda Walkowicz and Michelle Maenza were 11. Because each girl’s first and last names began with the same letter, and because each death came to light in or near a place beginning with that letter, the press named the cases the Alphabet Murders and the Double Initial Murders. The fit is looser than the label. The New York State Police and WHAM both place Carmen’s death in Riga, and the C comes from the nearby village of Churchville. Wanda’s came to light in Webster, Michelle’s in Macedon, both exact.
The State Police, who hold the Walkowicz file, say the three cases have never been officially connected. As of October 22, 2026, the agency lists the cases as open, with an appeal to the Troop E Major Crimes Unit in Canandaigua. No arrest has been made in any of the three deaths and no one has been charged. DNA evidence from Wanda’s case has survived and has never been matched to anyone; Newsweek reported in 2023 that evidence from the other two cases was destroyed before modern testing. In March 2018 the State Police chose the Walkowicz case for a public appeal, and a later one marked 46 years since her death.
Two researchers, Michael Benson and Donald Tubman, told WXXI in 2018 they believed at least two killers were responsible, and that Carmen’s was probably a different man from the one who killed the other two. That is their view, not an official finding. Carmen’s uncle, Miguel Colon, was her family’s best-known suspect, according to Newsweek. He left Rochester for Puerto Rico two days after her death, was brought back and questioned, and was never charged; he died in 1991. No court has ever held him responsible for anything.
The comparison that drew national attention came in 2011. Joseph Naso, who had lived in the Rochester area, was compared with the New York cases because the names of his California victims also carried matching initials. A jury in Marin County convicted him of four counts of first-degree murder on August 20, 2013. The Associated Press reported that a DNA sample from one of the New York cases did not match him and that a trooper said no other evidence linked him to Rochester. He has never been charged in New York. ABC7 reported in September 2025 that he was 91 and pursuing an appeal.
Mark Mariano, who retired in 2008 as commanding officer of the Rochester Police Department’s major crimes unit and had served on a task force on the murders, said in 2019 that there was still "meat on the bone" and active leads to follow. In November 2023 Newsweek reported that Tubman regards a Rochester man, released that year after a long period in custody on an unrelated sentence, as the likeliest suspect in two of the deaths. Newsweek did not name him. No official has named him, he has not been charged, and no DNA match to him has been reported. Tubman himself urged caution, noting that many callers over the years had accused their own relatives.
The Redhead Murders is a name that stuck to a group of unsolved killings of young women in the South and Appalachia in the mid-1980s. Between February 1983 and April 1985, women’s bodies came to light in West Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and Kentucky, and further cases in Mississippi have been drawn into the count. Several of the women had red or auburn hair. For decades most had no names.
The grouping rests on a pattern rather than on physical evidence. Law enforcement agencies have never confirmed that the deaths are connected. Detective Aaron Frederick of the Kentucky State Police told UPI in October 2018 that the cases were "probably connected," but that there was too little evidence to link them officially. The name itself came from outside the agencies. In 2018 a sociology class at Elizabethton High School in East Tennessee spent a semester on the cases and gave the unknown killer a name of its own; an Indiana podcaster, Shane Waters, had researched the same cases for years.
Identification has been the field’s real progress. Since 2018, fingerprints, DNA databases and genetic genealogy have named most of the women. A woman from Knox County, Kentucky, was identified in October 2018 as Espy Regina Black-Pilgrim of Spindale, North Carolina. A Greene County, Tennessee, woman was identified that November as Elizabeth Lamotte, 17, of Manchester, New Hampshire, who, according to later reports, was not reported missing to Manchester police until 2017. Tracy Sue Walker, about 15, was named in August 2022 after a Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI) sample went to Othram, a Houston company that uses forensic genetic genealogy. A Cheatham County woman was identified in July 2023 as Michelle Lavone Inman of Nashville, born April 17, 1961; the TBI reclassified her case as a homicide and asked the public for information about people she may have known. In March 2024 DeSoto County, Mississippi, announced that a woman in its file was Lorie Ann Mealer Pennell, a native of Missouri. The department said it would keep working and that "justice has no time restrictions."
Only one name has ever been attached to a death in the group. In December 2019 a grand jury in Campbell County, Tennessee, said Jerry Leon Johns, a long-haul trucker, would have been indicted for first-degree murder in the death of Tina Marie McKenney Farmer had he been alive. He had died in prison in December 2015. In 1987 he had been convicted of aggravated kidnapping and attempted first-degree murder in a Knox County, Tennessee, case involving a woman who survived. The TBI said at the time it had no evidence linking him to any other case in the group.
What agencies say now varies by state. Kentucky, Tennessee and Mississippi investigators describe their cases as open. In May 2025, at the request of District Attorney General Jared Effler, Governor Bill Lee announced a $10,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction in the Tracy Sue Walker case, and TBI agents said they believed someone in Campbell County had crucial information. "We are determined to bring justice to Tracy Sue’s case," Effler said. The official announcements about Walker do not mention the redhead series. In July 2026 WVLT reported on a docuseries about the Elizabethton students' work. As of October 22, 2026, no arrest or charge had been reported in any case in the group.
Between February 1976 and March 1977, four children from the suburbs north of Detroit were taken and killed in southern Oakland County, Michigan. Mark Stebbins was 12. Jill Robinson was 12. Kristine Mihelich was 10. Timothy King was 11. By the accounts of WDIV and WXYZ the investigation was the largest of its kind in the United States at that time. A task force formed in 1977 was disbanded in December 1978. Fifty years after the first death, no one has been charged.
The record since is a list of leads that did not hold. In April 1977 a man calling himself Allen wrote to Bruce Danto, a Detroit psychiatrist advising the task force, claiming to be the roommate of the killer, whom he called Frank. Allen later telephoned and agreed to a meeting but never came. Neither Allen nor Frank has ever been identified. Christopher Busch, a Bloomfield Township man who died in November 1978, became a focus decades later, and the King family continued to believe he was responsible. The Oakland County prosecutor’s office did not agree: by 2010 it no longer regarded him as a suspect, and in 2012 said new evidence pointed away from him. Paul Walton, the chief assistant prosecutor, told WXYZ in 2020 that Busch’s DNA did not match the physical evidence. Busch was never charged.
Another prime suspect, D.N., had died by 1999, when the former prosecutor L. Brooks Patterson organized a trip to Wyoming to obtain his DNA, calling it a long shot. Cleveland Scene reported that D.N. had come under suspicion after a necklace bearing the name Kristine turned up among his belongings. The DNA was compared with a hair from one of the victims and did not match; the Associated Press reported in 2006 that the lead had collapsed in November 2000.
The case was revived in February 2005 with plans to re-examine evidence with newer databases and forensic methods. A Livonia detective, Cory Williams, received a tip from R.L., a man convicted in an unrelated killing, who described a group of men who had targeted boys in Detroit in the 1970s. The information pointed to T.L., a retired auto worker in Parma Heights, Ohio, whom the Associated Press described in December 2006 as a suspect. In March 2007 the AP reported that T.L. denied striking a deal and pleaded guilty to other charges. He was not charged in the Oakland County deaths.
Even the car has been doubted. The suspect vehicle in the 1970s appeals was a Gremlin; Walton told WXYZ in 2020 that it was probably the wrong vehicle and the sketch was a composite of several descriptions. The task force had also received more than 11,000 tips, WDIV reported in 2026.
What police say now: in February 2026 the Michigan State Police said the case is open and that evidence is evaluated as new technology develops. The Oakland County sheriff said his detectives still ask whether new tools can be brought to bear. In July 2026 WXYZ reported that a suspect had given detectives new information hours before his death. A later joint task force of State Police and Oakland County Sheriff’s investigators has worked the case since 2005.
Between the spring and late summer of 1988, at least eleven women in and around New Bedford, a fishing city on the south coast of Massachusetts, became part of the case as investigators later counted it. By April 1989 nine of them were confirmed dead; the other two have never been found. Boston 25 News has described the case as possibly the largest unsolved murder case in New England, and investigators told the station it was the largest homicide investigation in Massachusetts since a Boston series of the 1960s.
One man was indicted. In 1990 a New Bedford lawyer, identified only as K.P., was charged with the murder of Rochelle Clifford Dopierala, whose death the indictment described as a beating. In the summer of 1991 a special prosecutor, Paul Buckley, cleared him for lack of evidence and called the indictment "a fishing expedition," the ABA Journal reported. K.P. was disbarred in 1997 for taking $12,000 from a client’s insurance settlement, and died in January 2010 in circumstances the authorities did not consider suspicious. The families of Nancy Paiva and Debra DeMello have said they never believed he was responsible. He is the only person ever indicted in the series, and no one has been convicted.
The families have kept pressing. A victim’s daughter, who was a teenager when her mother died, told Boston 25 News thirty years afterward that there was no justice and no answers: "There has to be somebody who saw something, heard something, knows something." The brother of Debra Medeiros, the first of the women to come to light, has said he does not believe the case would have gone unsolved if the women had been the daughters of police officers, judges or lawyers. Filmmakers who spent about a year and a half on a documentary told Boston 25 in 2016 that eleven families were waiting for answers.
The official line has been steady and brief. In February 2021 the Bristol County District Attorney’s office told CBS Boston that it was using up-to-date technology on the case, that DNA testing had been completed, and that the investigation was active and ongoing, with investigators following up tips. In February 2025 Boston 25 reported a tip that had reached one family: a man had told Debra DeMello’s brother that he saw two men throw a wrapped object from a van near a Westport beach in the summer of 1988. The man who gave the tip later died in a house fire. The brother said he had passed the information to the district attorney’s office, which, he said, had done nothing with it. In June 2026 WBSM 1420 AM reported an FBI search in Westport; no result has been announced.
The most recent legal turn came from a different case. On April 28, 1988, Mary Harris, 33, died in Dartmouth. Shawn Tanner, 23, was charged within a week, and a jury convicted him of first-degree murder in 1989. The Supreme Judicial Court affirmed in 1994, and he always maintained his innocence. Her death was not counted in the series: Tanner was in jail for nearly all of those killings. But relatives of the series' victims, among them the daughters of Nancy Paiva and Debra DeMello, joined the effort to test the evidence from her case, arguing that a third person’s DNA might open a new line of inquiry into the unsolved deaths. The New England Innocence Project took Tanner’s case in 2020. A Superior Court judge ordered testing; Tanner, granted medical parole, died on September 13, 2022, at 57, before the work began. The district attorney’s office moved to vacate the order on the ground that he was dead, and argued that it had ruled out any connection between Tanner’s case and the serial killings. On February 27, 2026, the Supreme Judicial Court allowed the testing to go ahead. No result had been reported by June 2026.
In 1989 a series of killings ran through Calcutta, now Kolkata, in which the victims were among the poorest people in the city: men and women who slept on the pavements and had nowhere else to sleep. A popular English-language daily named the unknown killer the Stoneman, and the name stuck, India TV News reported in 2012. Press accounts credit the Stoneman with thirteen deaths over about six months from June 1989, among them India TV News in 2012, The South First in 2023, Vice in 2021 and The CSR Journal in 2025. A 2013 feature in Open magazine counted ten. No one was ever charged.
No victim’s name has been published, and no victim’s age, origin or work. That absence is part of the case. Open wrote that in both Calcutta and Bombay the dead often had no family to come forward and many were never identified. The police had little to work with: no witness and no forensic trace, Open and The CSR Journal wrote, and the profile of a "well-built tall person" went no further. The CSR Journal said the police put extra officers on patrol across the city. Those held during the hunt were released.
The Bombay police traded information with their Calcutta counterparts about a similar series there, one Open dated 1985 to 1987 and counted at twelve deaths. The two forces shared information and saw no evidence that the same hand was at work; only the method matched. Counts differ: The South First wrote in 2023 of twenty-six similar deaths in Mumbai, a figure it did not explain. India TV News wrote that it was never established whether one person or a group was responsible, or whether some deaths were copycats. The killings stopped as abruptly as they began, and no reason has ever been given.
"Stoneman" has since been given to other men accused of similar crimes: ten beggars in Kolhapur in 2013, where a man was arrested and the magazine questioned whether he was the right one; a man remanded in custody in Hyderabad in June 2023; a suspect in Madhya Pradesh in 2022. None has a shown link to Calcutta. In July 2025 The CSR Journal reported the death of a young man on a Kolkata footpath under a headline asking whether the Stoneman was back; police traced it to a dispute with another worker and said the suspect had confessed. The paper used it to look back, and described the 1989 case as unsolved. No later charge, reopening or new lead in the 1989 deaths has been reported.
Three young women were killed in Glasgow between February 1968 and October 1969. Patricia Docker was 25, Jemima McDonald 31 or 32, Helen Puttock 29. All three were mothers, and each had spent an evening at the same dance hall in the city’s east end. The hunt that followed was the largest Scotland had seen: more than 100 detectives took over 50,000 statements, and a police drawing of a suspect became one of the best-known images in Scottish crime. The press called the unknown man Bible John, after the way he spoke to Helen Puttock’s sister. No one has ever been charged.
The case has a history of suspects who never reached a charge. In the mid-1990s a fresh review of the case papers, aided by advances in DNA testing, focused on John Irvine McInnes, a former private in the Scots Guards who had taken his own life in 1980. DNA tests were run in 1996. 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 held that McInnes, or anyone else, was responsible for any of the three deaths.
Peter Tobin, the convicted killer who died in prison in 2022, was later the subject of speculation. David Swindle, the senior investigating officer of Operation Anagram, which examined Tobin’s life between 2006 and 2011 for links to unsolved cases, said there was "no evidence to link Tobin to the Bible John murders," and when Tobin died Police Scotland said it had "no current lines of investigation" into him. The Courier reported in 2023 that two unsolved deaths near Dundee in 1979 and 1980 were examined in 1996 after a woman named a suspect; the author Donald Simpson has argued that Bible John moved on to Dundee, a theory of his and not a police finding.
Former senior detectives who went through the case papers have said publicly that they do not believe one man killed all three women. In 2019 Bob Johnstone, a retired detective superintendent who had headed Glasgow CID and overseen 55 murder cases before retiring in 1991, told STV that all of them reached a satisfactory conclusion except this one, and that he was reminded of it every October. He believed someone still held the answer, and said DNA testing, unavailable in 1969, "would have made a tremendous difference." In December 2022 the former MSP Joan McAlpine wrote in the Sunday Post that retired officers who spoke on a podcast allege the original inquiry protected a suspect and that evidence went missing; these are allegations, and no inquiry or court has proved them. McAlpine wrote that she was not suggesting McInnes killed Helen Puttock, only that the original inquiry was flawed.
What does Police Scotland say now? In 2018, on the fiftieth anniversary of the first death, Detective Chief Inspector Mark Bell said: "The passage of time is no barrier to the investigation of unresolved murder cases," and that "in the view of Police Scotland these cases are never closed." The force’s Homicide Governance and Review unit keeps unsolved cases under review and meets regularly with the Crown Office, STV reported. In October 2023 Greatest Hits Radio reported that Police Scotland and the Crown Office were assessing claims made in the podcast. No later development had been reported as of October 22, 2026.
The seven files do not look alike. In Albuquerque, detectives are assigned and a reward is posted every February. In Rochester, the State Police keep an appeal on a public page and hold DNA that has never matched. In Tennessee, identification work has outrun every investigation of who is responsible, and a grand jury’s statement about a dead man is the nearest thing to a finding. In Michigan, fifty years of leads have each fallen away. In Massachusetts, a ruling in someone else’s case may produce the first new DNA in decades. In Calcutta, an agency’s silence is the whole record. In Glasgow, the sentence "never closed" is a promise about procedure, not about progress.
None of these agencies has said the work is finished. In none of them has the work produced a conviction.
• 1968 to 1969: Patricia Docker, Jemima McDonald and Helen Puttock die in Glasgow.
• November 1971 to November 1973: Carmen Colon, Wanda Walkowicz and Michelle Maenza die in the Rochester area.
• February 1976 to March 1977: four children die in southern Oakland County, Michigan.
• April 1977: a letter from "Allen" reaches a Detroit psychiatrist.
• December 1978: the Oakland County task force is disbanded.
• February 1983 to April 1985: the deaths most often grouped as the Redhead murders.
• 1987: Jerry Leon Johns is convicted in Knox County, Tennessee, of aggravated kidnapping and attempted first-degree murder.
• Spring 1988 to April 1989: nine women from the New Bedford area come to light as deaths.
• 1989: the Calcutta Stoneman deaths begin in June.
• 1990: a New Bedford lawyer is indicted for one death; the charge is dropped in the summer of 1991.
• 1996: DNA tests in the Bible John case; the Lord Advocate says the evidence does not link a former suspect.
• 2003 and 2004: the period in which the West Mesa women died.
• 2005: the Oakland County investigation is revived.
• 2009: the West Mesa deaths come to light; all eleven are identified by January 26, 2010.
• December 2019: a Campbell County grand jury says Jerry Leon Johns would have been indicted in one death.
• August 2022: Albuquerque police devote a podcast episode to eight other women whose cases may be connected.
• 2025: New Mexico passes House Bill 340.
• February 27, 2026: the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts allows DNA testing in a related 1988 case.
• February 2026: Michigan State Police say the Oakland County case is open.
• October 22, 2026: the New York State Police list all three Rochester cases as open.