30 Crime Investigators On The Unsolved Case That Still Haunts Them

If you have a weak stomach, you probably won’t want to read about these unsolved cases from Ask Reddit.

1. Two girls in their 20s were murdered in a their car. McDonald’s food in their laps. Windows up. Doors locked. No sign of a struggle.

Was my last case I ever worked. 3 years ago. No suspects have been arrested.

2. At my first department, someone was stringing up dogs in the trees behind houses with their throats cut and bled dry. Serial killer behavior, obviously just killing them to kill them. Worked on that case a couple weeks, but after four or five dogs, it just stopped and my bosses wouldn’t let me work on it anymore with all the “real crime” going on.

I still think it was a future serial killer practicing.

3. Hinterkaifeck Murders 1922 Germany, creepy sounds in a barn and an entire rural family is slaughtered including a maid who had just arrived. Evidence at the scene showed that the killer had stayed in the home for several days, lit a fire, and fed the animals. Nothing valuable was taken.

4. The case of Missy Bevers. Murdered in 2016 as she waited for the arrival of her yoga class. There’s video of the suspect in SWAT gear as they’re leaving the scene but they’ve never been caught.

5. The William Tyrell case. This is the most famous missing persons case in Australia. A three year old boy named William Tyrell went missing from his grandmother’s house in 2011 and has never been found. Not even his body. The grandmother said he was there one second, she went inside to get something, then when she came back out he was gone just like that.

6. A boy in my town went missing maybe a decade ago. He disappeared out of school without a trace. No camera footage, no evidence. It’s like he simply vanished.

His step-mother’s story has never added up, and everyone knows she killed him and buried him on a nearby island. But they never were able to find him or prove it. He is still missing, and she is still free to walk the earth.

7. A guy driving through my town jumped out of his car randomly and has been missing ever since. The story still gives me goosebumps, to my knowledge he/his remains haven’t been found.

So him and two buddies are in the car driving from Florida to Greensboro, NC. They stopped off in Benson, NC off 95, and the guy driving just stopped in the street off the highway, got out and started running (allegedly). No explanation why, they allegedly were not even traveling to people they knew in Benson. Really really strange and scary for such a small town, everyone knows everyone and nothing scary or inexplicable like that happens.

They searched for him for a long time and nothing ever came up.

My best guess is some drug deal gone wrong, maybe they were meeting people out here for something. But why was his body never found?

8. A man from Australia called Mr Cruel… kidnapped a bunch of teenage girls, did a lot of disgusting things to them and his last victim wound up dead. My aunty personally knew 2 of the girls who were kidnapped. He hasn’t struck in 20 years and has never been found.

9. I was living in a small ski town in CA. A guy who lived on my street, woke up and began walking to Von’s (grocery store) to start his 5am shift. He walked the same route every day to work. Everyone on the block is woken up to what sounds like warfare in our small town. Turns out the guy was gunned down with two fully loaded extended clips from 9mm handguns. That’s basically all the evidence.

Town rumor was he was killed over drug money by cartel members. I could see the murder scene from my bedroom window probably 30 feet away.

10. Richard “Cody” Haynes has been missing since September 11, 2004. His dad and step mom were the last to see him alive. He refused to do his chores that night and he was forced to stay in the kitchen until midnight and was then sent to his room. His sisters were told to not go near him. There was a scuffle between Cody and his father’s girlfriend and at 2:30 am, his father went on a drive to “look for car parts” while Cody was supposedly in his room and doesn’t return until 4pm the next day. During this time no one checked on Cody and at 5pm his father filed a missing persons report.

His father and his girlfriend lawyered up pretty quickly and it creeps me out that seemingly nothing is getting done about finding who killed him.

I hope his mom gets justice for her son’s killer.

11. In my town we found a dead body in the middle of a street, a good neighborhood. Never figured out who was this person since nobody ever filed a missing person for him.

Creepy part? He was beheaded, and the head was inside his stomach.

12. Girl went missing, pregnant at the time, 36 weeks.

Police interviewed everyone, the boyfriend, the other boyfriend, friends, mother, neighbors, etc.

Body was found almost a year and a half later, in a shed. Not 100 yards from her house, the killer tied her up, and buried her alive, all the while SHE WAS IN LABOR, then covered her with concrete. When found, the baby was halfway through the birthing canal, head already out.

Case is still ongoing, they have a suspect but there is still a couple of years away from anything concrete.

13. In my neighborhood a 30 year old Russian girl with a mental disability went missing for 7 days. She was then found dead in a park, only partially clothed. She had been set on fire and died as a result of the burns.

14. My friend’s mom is a lawyer and she was involved in a case where a teenage girl was raped and murdered in the woods outside a small town with a military base nearby. The person who did it was never found but a teenage boy was wrongly imprisoned for a few years. There are conspiracy theories that a military officer did it and the government covered it up.

I saw a play about it with my friend’s family but I can’t remember the name of the town. One of the investigators wrote a book about it that was pretty popular a while ago.

15. Diao Aiqing went missing about a decade ago and was found in boxes, it is estimated that she was cut up into around 2,000 pieces, when they put her back together they were missing a heart, spleen and liver. My personal theory is black market organ transplants, to sell or to use I don’t know, maybe to sell because the heart sells for around 1 million dollars USD on the black market.

16. My father was a police officer some time ago. While in school his platoon was called with every other policeman in region. A kid was missing. They were looking for him for quite some time, yet they did not find him. He was supposed to be somewhere in small forest near the town he was living in. Kid just sunk. After some time people would contact police and say that kid was seen almost 500 km away – alone. They had many suspects but they all had an alibi. The case was open for almost 20 years and was closed like ten years ago.

17. I’m a cop but this isn’t my case.

The FBI believes that over nearly two decades a trucker or multiple truckers have been killing women and dumping their bodies along their routes.

In 2004 an FBI wonk notices a trend of bodies being dumped along a commercial trucking route in the south and submits it to a crime tracking database. Texas analyst picks it up and they find dozens of identical cases.

No leads to this day. No suspects. No convictions.

18. The Texas killing fields. One theory was it was a truck driver picking girls up and dumping them since it’s so close it I45.

19. Back in the early 80’s a 16 year old boy was walking home from a party about a mile from his house when he was intentionally hit by a vehicle and dragged by the vehicle before being dumped in front of his house for his father to find his body in the morning.

The police say they have suspects but not enough evidence to make any arrests. There are still posters all over the town and surrounding areas with his picture asking for information more than 35 years later. Really a tragic story that needs closure.

20. The Molly Bish case. A 16 year old girl was dropped off for work at the lake where she was a lifeguard by her mom. She was never seen alive again. This happened in the summer of 2000 in a small town in central Massachusetts, about 30 minutes from where I grew up. I remember seeing missing persons signs all over local business when I was a kid looking for Molly.

21. I don’t work in Crime Investigation anymore. I do animal rescue. But we kept receiving animals found stray that had been sexually abused with sticks and we had to take them in, help then recover and find new homes. It happened for 2 years straight then nothing. He’s either dead, locked up or moved onto humans. Police have DNA but no one has ever been caught or linked to it.

22. A local girl went missing about 2 years ago. Whole community and neighboring communities got involved. Had a hashtag they painted on car windows and everything, tried like crazy to find her. The parents still hold out hope, but I’m not convinced they really do, and it’s devastating to watch. I have friends that know the family. I have 2 young girls, and this is a fear that my job forces me to take home with me, that one day they’ll disappear and that’s it. There are some sex trafficking hot-spots nearby. A week after that girl disappeared, I told my wife she was most likely already dead.

23. Not a criminal investigator but I do CPS / joint investigations. We’ll never fully know what one little girl went through as she was very young (she’s doing very well now), but she had nightmares for years of a big grey man that would come into her room at night. Horrible case of sexual abuse… really shook me.

24. I had a good buddy that went missing in a cornfield when he was a two year old kid, back in ’80 or ’81. Literally thousands of volunteers came out to help search the fields and land around his farm for two days, but he was nowhere to be found. They even brought in a psychic, his parents were so desperate. On the third day he was finally found, quite some distance from where he disappeared. His parents still think to this day that he was abducted, but because of all the media attention and people searching for him, the kidnappers “returned” him, pretty much just dropping him off and high tailing it out of there.

25. Someone was picking up drunk homeless people in my town, about 20 years back, beating them up and dropping them far from town during the winter season. Which can last for about to 8 months and drop as low as -45 celcius.

26. Guy let his dog out and it came back with a decaying limb. When they went to search they found a makeshift alter. Creepy stuff.

27. Someone killed 50 dogs and left them on top of parked cars for a year, then it just stopped.

28. There’s a man who comes into the bar I work at everyday around 4pm. He’s nice, has a group of other guys he socializes with. His wife comes in every Sunday with him for football season.

Their daughter went missing a few years ago. They had a suspect (who my older sister actually dated for a short period). When they couldn’t definitively connect him to the case they cut him loose.

He’s now serving time for a completely separate kidnaping/murder. He hasn’t confessed to the first one so the couple will never really know if they caught he guy. Everyone just assumes. I don’t think the family will ever get closure off of an assumption though.

29. In a town close to me, a few years ago a little boy went missing. He was in a foster home with his siblings. There were apparently previous reports from neighbors of them wandering off frequently because they were left alone without food, breaking into garages I think. He was reported missing by the foster mom, she went on tv and everything. There were so many search parties, we live in the desert so there’s a lot of open land. I stopped hearing things about it, eventually I asked one of my buddies who works in that PD and he told me they never got any real answers, they found remains years later that they believed to be his in a canal, but it had been so long not much was left, also they think wild animals had probably spread what was left of the remains around after all these years.

30. Worked in forensics 2004-2008, mostly rapes, homicides, and cold cases. Never forgot one where a baby was abused because a burglar threatened to kill the entire family if the parent didn’t do it. Wasn’t solved before I left and nothing came up on Google (never forgot names). The idea that someone out there free is that fucked up or that someone would make that shit up is so disturbing to me. Thought Catalog Logo Mark

January Nelson is a writer, editor, and dreamer. She writes about astrology, games, love, relationships, and entertainment. January graduated with an English and Literature degree from Columbia University.