List of unsolved murders (before 1900)

• Ötzi, also called the Iceman, is the well-preserved natural mummy of a man who lived between 3400 and 3100 BCE.[1] The mummy was found in September 1991 in the Ötztal Alps. The cause of death remained uncertain until 10 years after the discovery of the body.[2] It was initially believed that Ötzi died from exposure during a winter storm. Later it was speculated that Ötzi might have been a victim of a ritual sacrifice, perhaps for being a chieftain.[3][4] This explanation was inspired by theories previously advanced for the first millennium BCE bodies recovered from peat bogs such as the Tollund Man and the Lindow Man.[4] In 2001, X-rays and a CT scan revealed that Ötzi had an arrowhead lodged in his left shoulder when he died[5] and a matching small tear on his coat.[6] The discovery of the arrowhead prompted researchers to theorize Ötzi died of blood loss from the wound, which would probably have been fatal even if modern medical techniques had been available.[7] Further research found that the arrow's shaft had been removed before death, and close examination of the body found bruises and cuts to the hands, wrists and chest and cerebral trauma indicative of a blow to the head. One of the cuts was to the base of his thumb that reached down to the bone but had no time to heal before his death. Currently, it is believed that Ötzi bled to death after the arrow shattered the scapula and damaged nerves and blood vessels before lodging near the lung.[8]
• Caesarion (17), (Ptolemy XV Philopator Philometor Caesar), 30 BC; the son of Cleopatra and Julius Caesar, and as such the last king of the Ptolemaic dynasty of the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Ancient Egypt, ruling alone for eleven days, whose death at the orders of Augustus (while still Octavian) is accepted in 30 BC,[9] and yet the exact circumstances of his death and the location of his body are not documented.[9]
• The Emperor Valentinian II, 15/05/392; he was found hanged in his residence in Vienne in Gaul. Frankish General Arbogast claimed it was suicide, although some sources suggest that, having been dismissed by the emperor, the general had murdered him.[10]
• Dagobert II, 679; he was one of the last Merovingian kings, murdered by persons unknown in the Ardennes Forest on 23 December.[11]
• Momia Juanita, also known as the Inca Ice Maiden and Lady of Ampato, is the well-preserved frozen body of an Inca girl, who was murdered as an offering to the Inca gods, sometime between 1450 and 1480 when she was about 12–15 years old, by persons unknown.[12] She was discovered on Mount Ampato (part of the Andes cordillera) in southern Peru in September 1995 by anthropologist Johan Reinhard and his Peruvian climbing partner, Miguel Zárate.
• The Holy Child of La Guardia is a folk saint in Spanish Roman Catholicism and the subject of a medieval blood libel in the town of La Guardia in the central Spanish province of Toledo (Castile–La Mancha).[13][14] On 16 November 1491, an auto-da-fé was held outside of Ávila that ended in the public execution of several Jews and conversos. The suspects "had confessed" under torture to murdering a child. Among the executed were Benito Garcia, the converso who initially confessed to the murder. However, no body was ever found and there is no evidence that a child disappeared or was killed. Because of contradictory confessions, the court had trouble coherently depicting how events possibly took place.[15] The child's true identity is unknown as well.
• Giovanni Borgia, 2nd Duke of Gandía, 1497; his body was recovered in the Tiber with his throat slit and about nine stab wounds on his torso.[16] His father, Pope Alexander VI, launched an investigation only for it to end abruptly a week later. Theories range from the Orsini family to his own brothers, Cesare Borgia and Gioffre Borgia, having committed the crime.
• Moctezuma II, 1520, Aztec emperor; according to Spanish accounts he was killed by his own people; according to Aztec accounts he was murdered by the Spanish.[17]
• Robert Pakington (46–47), 1536, likely to have been the first person murdered with a handgun in London.[18]
• Plomo Mummy (also known as Boy of El Plomo, El Plomo Mumm, or La Momia del Cerro El Plomo in Spanish) is the well preserved remains of an Incan child who is said to have lived about 500 years ago, murdered by persons unknown discovered on Cerro El Plomo near Santiago, Chile in 1954.[19][20]
• Expatriate English Royalists are believed to have ambushed and murdered Isaac Dorislaus in 1649,[21][22] then a diplomat representing the interests of the Commonwealth to the Dutch government at The Hague, in retaliation for his role in the trial and execution of Charles I. But no suspects were ever identified, although some Royalists later boasted of having taken part.
• Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey (56), in 1678; he was found impaled on his own sword and strangled at Primrose Hill, London.[23] Three men were hanged, but later the witness' statement was found to be perjured.
• Alessandro Stradella (38), 1682, composer; he was stabbed to death at the Piazza Banchi of Genoa. His infidelities were well known, and a nobleman of the Lomellini family may have hired the killer; but this was never proven and the identity of the killer was never discovered.[24]
• Jean-Marie Leclair (67), 1764, violinist and composer; he was found stabbed in his Paris home. Although the murder remains a mystery, his nephew, Guillaume-François Vial, and Leclair's ex-wife were considered main suspects at the time.[25]
• Although the colonial authorities in Pennsylvania at the time investigated the two December 1764 Paxton Boys massacres of defenseless Conestoga communities near present-day Millersville[26] as a criminal mass murder, they were never able to identify the perpetrators, and historians have not been able to, either.

Thomas Hindman, American politician and murder victim

• Líbero Badaró (28), an Italian Brazilian physician, botanist, journalist and politician, was murdered on 21 November 1830 by persons unknown.[27] The assassination of Libero Badarò made the environment more conducive to the most exalted liberals. He is honored in São Paulo with a street that bears his name, Líbero Badaró Street.[28]
• Elijah Parish Lovejoy (34), was an American Presbyterian minister, journalist, newspaper editor, and abolitionist. He was shot and killed on 7 November 1837[29] by a pro-slavery mob in Alton, Illinois, during their attack on the warehouse of Benjamin Godfrey and W. S. Gillman to destroy Lovejoy's press and abolitionist materials. The murder remains unsolved.
• Mary Rogers (21–22), also known as the "Beautiful Cigar Girl"; her body was found in the Hudson River on 28 July 1841. The story became a national sensation and inspired Edgar Allan Poe to write "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" (1842).[30]
• Helen Jewett (22), American prostitute who was murdered on 10 April 1836.[31] The murder to this day remains unsolved.
• Fanny de Choiseul-Praslin, wife of French duke Charles de Choiseul-Praslin; she died shortly after a beating and stabbing in the family's Paris apartment on 17 August 1847.[32] Her husband was arrested, but committed suicide during trial, protesting his innocence all along. No other suspect has ever been identified. The scandal caused by the case helped to provoke the French Revolution of 1848.
• Sakamoto Ryōma (31), was a Japanese samurai and a prominent figure in the movement to overthrow the Tokugawa shogunate who was assassinated at the Ōmiya Inn in Kyoto, not long before the Meiji Restoration took place. On the night of 10 December 1867, assassins gathered at the door of the inn and one approached and knocked, acting as an ordinary caller. The door was answered by Ryōma's bodyguard and manservant, a former sumo wrestler who told the stranger he would see if Ryōma was accepting callers at that hour of the evening. When the bodyguard turned his back, the visitor at the door drew his sword and slashed his back, which became a fatal wound. His killer remains unknown.[33]
• Nakaoka Shintarō (29), a samurai in Bakumatsu period Japan, and a close associate of Sakamoto Ryōma in the movement to overthrow the Tokugawa shogunate.[34] was killed on 12 December 1867 by persons unknown. His murder remains unsolved.[35]
• Thomas C. Hindman (40), an American politician assassinated by one or more unknown assailants on 27 September 1868. The assassins fired through his parlor window while he was reading his newspaper with his children in Helena, Arkansas, United States.[36]
• Alexander Boyd was the county solicitor of Greene County, Alabama, who was lynched by the Ku Klux Klan on 31 March 1870.[37] His murderers were never brought to justice.

Robert V. Richardson

• Robert V. Richardson (49), an ex-Confederate General officer was killed in 1870 by a shotgun blast outside a tavern he was staying in at Clarkton, Missouri.[38] He died the next day and is buried in Elmwood Cemetery in Memphis.[39] The identity of his assailant and motive are unknown.
• Benjamin Nathan (56), a financier turned philanthropist; he was found beaten to death in his New York City home on 28 July 1870. Several suspects were identified, including Nathan's profligate son Washington, who discovered the body along with his brother. None were ever indicted, and the case remains unsolved.[40]
• Juan Prim (56), a Spanish general and statesman; in December 1870, he was shot through the windows of his carriage by several unknown assailants and died two days later.[41] In 2012, his body was exhumed; the ensuing autopsy showed he may have been strangled in his deathbed, but results were deemed inconclusive.
• Sharon Tyndale (65), former Illinois Secretary of State, was robbed and shot fatally as he walked from his house in Springfield to the train station nearby early on the morning of 29 April 1871. No suspect was ever found.[42]
• Henry Weston Smith (49), a minister, was found dead on the road between his home in Crook City, South Dakota, and Deadwood, where he was going to give a sermon, on 20 August 1876.[43] While he was not robbed, it has never been established who was responsible for his death, and what their motives were.
• George Colvocoresses (55), Greek American naval commander and explorer, died of a gunshot wound while returning to a ferryboat on 3 June 1872, in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The insurance company claimed it was suicide, and while it eventually settled with his family the case has never been solved.[44]
• Arthur St. Clair, an African-American community leader in Brooksville, was killed by a white mob in 1877[45] after presiding over an interracial marriage. The papers relating to the case were incinerated when the county courthouse was destroyed in an arson attack, preventing the killers from being found.
• Martin DeFoor (73), an early settler of Atlanta, Georgia, was along with his wife the victim of an unsolved axe murder on their farm on 25 July 1879.[46]
• Two trials in Canada's Black Donnellys massacre, in which five members of a family of Irish immigrants were found murdered in the ashes of their Ontario farm after an angry mob attacked it on 4 February 1880,[47] allegedly as a result of feuds with their neighbors, resulted in all the suspects being acquitted.
• John Henry Blake (74), agent for one of Ireland's more despised British landlords, was shot and killed along with his driver on their way to Mass outside Loughrea on 29 June 1882.[48] The case received considerable attention at the time because Blake's boss, Hubert de Burgh-Canning, 2nd Marquess of Clanricarde, was a nobleman. Although his wife survived the attack, she was unable to help identify any suspects, and the case remains unsolved.
• The Whitehall Mystery In 1888, the dismembered remains of a woman were discovered at three different sites in the centre of London, including the future site of Scotland Yard.[49]
• Print Matthews (43), a Reconstruction-era supporter of civil rights and former sheriff of Copiah County, Mississippi, was shot and killed by a neighbor as he attempted to vote on 6 November 1883, in defiance of threats against his life.[50][51] The neighbor was subsequently acquitted by an all-white jury.
• The Rahway murder of 1887 also known as Unknown Woman and Rahway Jane Doe is the murder of an unidentified young woman whose body was found in Rahway, New Jersey on 25 March 1887. Four brothers traveling to work at the felt mills by Bloodgood's Pond in Clark, New Jersey early one morning found the young woman lying off Central Avenue near Jefferson Avenue several hundred feet from the Central Avenue Bridge over the Rahway River.[52] Her body was very bloody and had been subjected to a beating.[53] Her case remains unsolved.
• John M. Clayton (48), American politician, shot and killed instantly by an unknown assailant on the evening of 29 January 1889 in Plumerville, Arkansas, after starting an investigation into the possible fraud of an election he took part in. After his death he was declared the winner of the election, but his assassin was never found.[54]
• Belle Starr (40), who real name was "Myra Maybelle Shirley Reed Starr" was a notorious female American outlaw.[55] On 3 February 1889, two days before her 41st birthday, she was killed. She was riding home from a neighbor's house in Eufaula, Oklahoma when she was ambushed. After she fell off her horse, she was shot again to make sure she was dead. Her death resulted from shotgun wounds to the back and neck and in the shoulder and face.[56] Her killer’s identity is unknown.
• Andrew Jackson Borden and Abby Durfee Borden, father and stepmother of Lizzie Borden, both killed in their family house in Fall River, Massachusetts on the morning of 4 August 1892, by blows from a hatchet. In the case of Andrew Borden, the hatchet blows not only crushed his skull but cleanly split his left eyeball. Lizzie was later arrested and charged for the murders. She was the only one in the house at the time of the killing of Mrs. Borden. Lizzie and the maid, Bridget Sullivan, were the only ones in the home when Mr. Borden was killed. She was acquitted by a jury in the following year of 1893 and the case remains unsolved.[57]
• The Gatton murders occurred 1.5 miles (2.4 km) from the rural Australian town of Gatton, Queensland, on 26 December 1898. Siblings Michael, Norah and Ellen Murphy were found deceased the morning after they left home to attend a dance in the town hall which had been cancelled. The bodies were arranged with the feet pointing west and both women had their hands tied with handkerchiefs. This signature aspect has never been repeated in Australian crime and to date remains a mystery.[58]

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