41 Cold Cases That Were Solved In 2023

With the wealth of tools that modern homicide investigators have at their disposal, it has become mighty hard to get away with murder. Even disregarding the fact that the world is much more heavily monitored and densely connected than ever before, the practice of using DNA technology to identify parties involved with a crime has  been continually refined, ever since it was first used in criminal cases in the early '90s. 

These days, a suspected murderer need not even necessarily be identified by their own DNA — familial, or "genealogy" DNA, is just as effective a tool in some cases, and the use of DNA evidence combined with classic investigative techniques to solve cases is proving to have a wider reach on a year-by-year basis. This tech is so effective that its retroactive application is putting more and more murderers of years past, long before its use came into vogue, in the crosshairs of law enforcement. And even without DNA evidence, fresh case-breaking leads can materialize decades later; sometimes the criminals flash their cards, perhaps by bragging over drinks in a pub, or confiding to a friend. 

Virtually every state, county, and province in North America has a backlog of active cold case investigations, but those backlogs are starting to get a little thinner, due to two factors: the inevitable march of technology, and the fact that homicide investigators never, ever give up. Here are some of the most stubborn cold cases those investigators were finally able to crack in 2023.

The following article includes allegations and descriptions of domestic abuse, sexual assault, child abuse, suicide, and violent death.

In July 2023, the New Hampshire attorney general issued a report that doubtless brought a measure of peace to the family of Laura Kempton, a 23-year-old hairdressing student who was found murdered in her apartment in 1981. At the time of the crime, DNA evidence had been collected from the scene, but literally all it was able to determine then was that the perpetrator had been a man, which didn't give investigators much to go on. 

Thanks to the tireless efforts of law enforcement and a diligent reevaluation of the evidence using modern genetic genealogy technology, though, that decades-old DNA profile finally yielded the identity of the killer: Ronney James Lee, an Army veteran who had served prison time in the late '80s for burglary and sexual assault.

Kempton's surviving family issued a statement praising investigators (pictured above), saying, "Their diligence and determination, along with extraordinary personal commitment over the past decades, have led to this moment for Laura" (via ABC News). Lee died of a drug overdose in 2005, but Kempton's family can finally rest easy in the knowledge that her killer doesn't walk free. Said Portsmouth Chief of Police Mark Newport, "The members of the Portsmouth Police Department have never forgotten about Laura and any of the other victims of our unsolved homicides."

The murder of 24-year-old Rita Curran was every parent's worst nightmare; on her own for the first time and living with acquaintances in an apartment in Burlington, Vermont, Curran was sexually assaulted and strangled by an unknown assailant one night in 1971. Police were able to lift DNA evidence from the crime scene, the most viable of which came from a cigarette butt found next to Curran's body — but it never returned any matches from the national DNA database once it became active in 1998, nor did it match any of the roughly dozen suspects the cops had taken an interest in. Over time, the murder became the Burlington PD's oldest unsolved case — until a crack team of detectives, assigned to the case in 2022, took a fresh look at the evidence through the lens of modern technology.

Using newly extracted DNA and the wider scope of public ancestry records, investigators were able to pinpoint William DeRoos, a neighbor who lived two floors above Curran (pictured above, next to her surviving sister) in the same apartment building, as the perpetrator of the crime. DeRoos' then-wife Michelle, who now uses a different name, confirmed for investigators that they had had a fight on the night of the murder, and that her husband — who had confessed to her that he had a prior criminal history — had gone out for some time afterward. The couple soon divorced, and in an interview with police, DeRoos' second wife, Sarah Hepting, asserted that he had once strangled her — an eerie shadow of Curran's manner of death. DeRoos died in 1986.

In 1991, in the sleepy coastal town of Seaside, California, 34-year-old Vicki Johnson, a mother of three, met a horrendous end at the hands of a mysterious perpetrator. Johnson had been strangled and smothered, and her body had been set on fire in what may have been an attempt to destroy physical evidence. If that was indeed the case, the attempt was not successful; investigators were able to obtain DNA evidence from under her fingernails, the lone piece of evidence in a crime that offered no witnesses or other physical evidence of any kind. Long cold, the case was revived by a cold case task force in 2021 — and in cooperation with the Seaside PD, detectives were able to re-examine that evidence to find their man.

Unfortunately, the gears of justice turned just a bit too slowly in this case. The DNA led police to Frank McClure, an ex-convict who had not been a suspect in the investigation at any time, and who had no apparent ties to the victim. Forty-six years old at the time of the slaying, McClure carried the secret of what he had done for three full decades before passing away in 2021, at the age of 77, some two years before he was identified as the killer.

The 1979 murder of Vickie Lynn Belk, who left work at the Maryland Department of Agriculture one afternoon, only to somehow wind up dead of a gunshot wound by the side of a rural road the next day, puzzled investigators for decades despite diligent processing of the crime scene for evidence by authorities. 

As the years went by, that evidence was continuously re-evaluated to see if updated technology could produce results — and in late 2022, they zeroed in on a possible suspect, 63-year-old Andre Taylor, who had been a teenager at the time of the slaying. Taylor's address records were out of date, however, and it took a concerted effort between agencies to locate him in 2023, living in Washington, D.C.

Taylor had been involved in multiple violent crimes in the intervening years, but the random nature of Belk's murder had kept him off the radar for that particular attack. Presented with the DNA evidence, a grand jury returned an indictment, and Taylor was finally arrested for Belk's murder and sexual assault in June 2023. In a statement, Belk's surviving family members, who include her mother (pictured above), said, "Nearly 44 years ago, our family lost Vickie Lynn Belk, a beloved mother, sister, and friend to a tragic and heinous crime ... We are grateful for the tireless efforts of the Charles County Sheriff's Office detectives and the forensics personnel who never ceased seeking justice on Vickie's behalf."

In 1986, Garland, Texas, resident Domingo Villareal gave police a horrific story after his 27-year-old wife, Barbara, was stabbed to death inside their home. He had, he said, heard his wife screaming in another room, and when he came to assist, he discovered armed intruders attacking her. They had then fled, but not before inflicting mortal wounds on Barbara. Police ran tests on blood that was found outside the home, and indeed, it was discovered to belong to neither Barbara nor her husband (both pictured above). Something, though, wasn't sitting right with detectives — and as it turned out, the victim's husband was lying about more than just the circumstances of his wife's death.

Decades after the crime, a review of the evidence by investigators turned up a startling fact: according to his fingerprints, Domingo Villareal was an alias. His real name was Jesus Canales, and DNA typing of the original blood sample led investigators to focus on his brother, Liborio Canales. While Jesus had passed away in Mexico in the '90s, Liborio was alive and well — and at the ripe old age of 85, in July 2023, he confessed to Barbara Villareal's murder when confronted with the evidence, saying that he had stabbed her over a family dispute of some kind. 

Said the victim's brother, Marc Dunderman, "We're happy that there's closure ... It doesn't reverse any of the pain that she suffered at the end of her life and the void that we all have and have had for nearly 40 years" (via NBC Dallas-Fort Worth). Liborio Canales was arrested and charged with murder for Villareal's slaying.

Pamela Lynn Conyers was only 16 years old when, while going to the mall to buy shoe polish for a school dance the next day, she happened upon the predator that would take her life. Conyers (pictured above) was strangled and asphyxiated, her body dumped near a highway that was under construction, and her death stunned close-knit Anne Arundel County, Maryland. But it was 1970, and the physical evidence collected from the crime scene was not enough to point police toward any suspects; the case went cold, and it remained that way for 52 long years.

It was the steady advances in DNA technology which finally allowed the case to be closed. Using a publicly available commercial database and investigative genealogy, authorities were finally able to pin the crime on Forrest Williams, only 21 at the time of the murder, who would not have set off any alarm bells back in 1970; he had no connection to Conyers, and even in the years since her death he amassed only a petty criminal record. 

Williams passed away in 2018, and unfortunately, by the time the crime was solved, nobody was left to mourn Conyers. Michael Golden, a high school classmate, attended the announcement of the resolution of the case, where he offered a sad coda to the decades-long story. "I still mourn her death. I got to be old. She didn't. She's forever 16," he said. "It's something that all of our classmates, all of our peers have been struggling with for all these years" (via The Baltimore Banner).

The abduction and beating death of 8-year-old Gretchen Harrington in 1975, as she walked to her last day of Bible school, devastated the small community of Marple Township, Pennsylvania. It was a crime that took investigators nearly five long decades to solve, but in this case, the break came not from improved technology, but — amazingly — from a witness, who at the time was friends with the daughter of David Zandstra, a pastor at the Bible school (pictured above). Zandstra had, she said, attempted to grope her during a sleepover at his house — and she also recalled a former classmate having a couple of close calls with an adult who attempted to kidnap her, a man the witness suspected may have been Zandstra based on her experience with him.

Police had interviewed Zandstra at the time of the crime, but he had denied seeing Harrington at all that day, and despite the fact that multiple witnesses had placed him in the area where she was abducted, there was not enough evidence for an arrest. When presented with the new recollections of the witness, however, the now-83-year-old former pastor admitted that he had given Harrington a ride that day; he had asked that she take off her clothes, and when she did not, he had cruelly beaten her to death.

Upon the occasion of his arrest, District Attorney Jack Stollsteimer did not mince words, saying during a press conference, "He's gonna die in jail ... Then he's gonna have to find out what the God he professes to believe in holds for those who are this evil to our children" (via NPR). 

One spring day in 1987, Mary Davis of Lexington, North Carolina — a married mother with two children — departed the Ace Hardware store where she worked (pictured above), and simply didn't return. Her husband Richard grew concerned that she hadn't come home from work after he returned from his sister's house, and the very next day, the worst was confirmed: Davis was found behind an area supermarket, strangled to death. DNA samples collected from the scene proved to be of no help to investigators at the time — but Davis' case remained open, and with the help of investigative genealogy, it can now be closed.

The DNA evidence was re-examined using the latest techniques in 2022, and it generated leads for investigators that eventually led to the identification of Lexington resident Russell Wood, who passed away in 2013. After reviewing the conclusions drawn by detectives, District Attorney Garry Frank provided her family with a letter stating that, had he been living, Wood would have been charged with crimes including first-degree murder and sexual assault. 

Speaking with local CBS affiliate WFMY News, Davis' daughter Traci — just an infant at the time of her death — expressed relief at the resolution of the case, and offered a plaintive memorial for her mother. "They tell me I look a lot like her, and I act like her sometimes," she said. "I've always heard that she was kind and sweet, and that she had a lot of patience, and she just liked people."

The 1987 sexual assault and murder of Carlsbad, New Mexico, resident Donna Sue Hyatt is a case which, if not for the diligent processing of the crime scene by the investigators who initially responded, might never have been solved. While the DNA collected from the scene sat in a warehouse awaiting the march of technology, police followed up on leads: Hyatt had last been seen at a store in Carlsbad with a tall, Caucasian, male companion, but interviews with the witnesses who offered up this information unfortunately yielded little else that was useful. The investigation soon hit a wall — but in 2023, it came roaring back to life.

DNA testing with the latest technology had led cold case detectives to focus on Michael Wigley, whom they confirmed was living in Carlsbad at the time of the crime, and who had served prison time for sexual assault. Wigley died in a car accident in 1989 and was buried in Amarillo, Texas; working with authorities there, Carlsbad police exhumed his body, which yielded DNA confirming that he was Hyatt's murderer. 

During a press conference, Carlsbad mayor Dale Janway thanked the investigators on the case for their diligence, and remarked, "We would also like to recognize the officers and detectives from 1987 who responded to the residence that tragic night. Their diligent work and dedication to the crime scene integrity and collection of potential evidence proved to be the difference in making it possible for officers to bring resolution to this case."

In 1979, police in El Dorado County, California, were baffled by the case of an unidentified woman who had been beaten and strangled to death at a Lake Tahoe campground. It took over a quarter century for the victim to be named; investigators on the case made public a piece of jewelry she had been wearing at the time of her death, which finally prompted her daughter to come forward to identify her in 2015 as Patricia Carnahan. The identity of her killer, though, remained a mystery until 2023 — when a Washington State audit of its backlog of sexual assault collection kits bore unexpected fruit.

The kit in question was from 1994, and contained the DNA of Harold Carpenter, who had been accused of, but not charged, with sexual assault in Washington that year. As part of the backlog-clearing initiative, the DNA from that long-ago kit was uploaded to CODIS, the FBI's DNA database — where it was matched with DNA taken from the 1979 crime scene. Carpenter was arrested in March in Spokane, and it was reported at the time that he was to be extradited to California to stand trial for the murder. In a statement, Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson made a public appeal for more states to follow Washington's lead, saying, "Cases like this illustrate the need to test every sexual assault kit and get their DNA profiles loaded into the federal database. Every untested kit could be a potential break in a cold case."

If you or anyone you know may be the victim of child abuse, domestic abuse, sexual assault, and/or is in crisis, contact the relevant resources below:

• The Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-4-A-Child (1-800-422-4453) or contact their live chat services.

• The National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1−800−799−7233. You can also find more information, resources, and support at their website.

• The Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network website or contact RAINN's National Helpline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673).

• Call or text 988 or chat 988lifeline.org

The 2009 murder of Durango, Colorado, man Larry Fuller rocked that small mountain town, being the type of crime its residents just aren't used to seeing. While on his way home from a New Year's Eve celebration at a local bar, Fuller was shot dead on the street right in front of the community church — and, as the 49-year-old stepfather was not exactly the type to look for trouble and the crime appeared to be a random one, police had a difficult time pinpointing any suspects. Fuller's companion, Paula Silva, told police at the time that he had not gotten into any altercations of any kind at the bar that night, and the initial round of witness interviews produced no good leads. 

In February 2023, the Colorado Bureau of Investigation took over the case, conducting new interviews with those present at the bar that night — and this time, they hit paydirt. Based on those interviews, they identified and obtained a confession from 38-year-old David Hendren, who told police that he had mistaken Fuller for somebody else. Monyca Escalante, Fuller's stepdaughter, told the Durango Herald that as surreal and random as Fuller's murder had been, she was amazed that police were finally able to bring his murderer to justice. "I never thought, ever, that they were going to figure it out," she said. "It's like a dream come true."

The murder of Bradenton, Florida, woman Cynthia "Cindy" Ruth Wood in 1984 was not exactly a mystery; before her death, she had met with a man named Donald Santini, who had promised to provide her with damning information on her husband Barry, with whom she was involved in a custody battle. The mystery lay in what had become of Santini after the crime — as he had simply vanished, leaving behind exactly zero clues as to his whereabouts. Despite being profiled on "America's Most Wanted" three separate times in the space of 23 years, and the determination of investigators to bring him to justice, Santini remained a ghost — until 2023, when a single tip from a Fugitive Task Force brought his four-decade-long flight to an end.

Santini was finally collared living in the tiny town of Campo, California, where folks knew him as Wellman Simmonds, a 65-year-old married family man and the president of the local water board. According to prosecutors, Santini had killed Wood while fleeing Texas authorities after a convenience store robbery, and he had continued to elude investigators by using over a dozen different aliases over the years. During his arraignment, Judge Catherine Catlin ordered Santini held without bond while awaiting trial, at the request of Wood's family. "You are the definition of [a] flight risk," she told Santini. "There is nothing I can do to preserve the safety of this community if I was to [give you bond]."

For investigators, the road to justice for 34-year-old Nusinaida Ramos, who was strangled to death in her Yonkers, New York, apartment in 1997, was a frustratingly long one. As agonizing as it must be when the identity of a murderer stubbornly refuses to reveal itself, one can imagine that it must be even more difficult for the cops when they know they have their man, but there simply isn't enough evidence to make an arrest — and so it was in the death of Ramos, whom police always suspected was murdered by her estranged husband and father of her two small children, Rafael Ramos.

Ramos, a former Sing Sing correctional officer, told investigators that he had found the door locked with music blaring from inside the apartment when he arrived to drop off the children one night, and his wife had failed to answer the door; finding the situation to be the same the next morning, relatives allowed police to enter, and they found Nusinaida Ramos deceased amidst signs of a violent struggle. While investigators reported that they had a strong suspect in the early '00s, they privately told family members at that time that they were leery of making an arrest absent a confession. That, apparently, is no longer the case. While whatever new evidence has been uncovered has not been made public, police finally arrested Rafael Ramos in June 2023 — giving Nusinaida's mother, who told the Journal News that she had resigned herself to "going to the grave with nothing ever happening in this case," a measure of closure.

The death of 16-year-old Krisann Baxter, who was strangled and dumped in a pine grove near Spokane's Whitworth University in 1978, was another that was simply waiting patiently for the science of DNA genealogy to catch up to the available evidence. While ample DNA was collected from the scene at the time of the crime, there was little that could be done with it — and after a month of failing to turn up any solid leads, police were well and truly stumped. At that time, Sheriff's Lieutenant Robert Sennette spoke to the press, saying, "Do cases get any tougher than this one?" He then answered his own question: "Not a hell of a lot" (via The Spokesman-Review).

Following further testing in 2006, the presence of male DNA was found in the samples collected from the scene, but efforts to find a match with any potential suspects in the national DNA database bore no fruit. Finally, in 2023, a renewed investigative focus employing genealogy allowed police to name the killer: Keith Lindblom, who had copped a plea to narrowly avoid being convicted for sexually assaulting a different 16-year-old girl in 1975, and who had died in a house fire in 1981. Unfortunately, the development came a hair too late for Baxter's brother, Steve Baxter, who had carried out the unfortunate task of identifying his sister's body; he passed away in early 2023, just months before Lindblom was identified as the murderer.

The 2015 disappearance of 35-year-old mother of five Crystal Rogers of Bardstown, Kentucky, proved to be a difficult case for investigators to untangle. Early on in the investigation, her boyfriend Brooks Houck was named as a person of interest, and he remained so for eight years — in an investigation that, for all that time, failed to yield a body or remains of any kind. Bizarrely, not even a year and a half after Crystal's disappearance, her father Tommy Ballard was preparing for a hunting trip, when he was shot once in the chest from a distance by an unknown gunman, killing him — and, perhaps not-so-surprisingly, it turns out that the two cases are intertwined.

After the investigation was taken over by the FBI in 2020, previously searched locations — including Houck's family farm and other properties owned by his relatives — were inspected again with fresh eyes, and while whatever new evidence was obtained was not made public, it was enough to indict 32-year old Joseph Lawson with conspiracy and evidence tampering — an indictment that was followed just weeks later by the arrest of Houck for murder. The following month, at a court hearing prosecutors told the judge that they were closely eyeing a gun owned by Houck's father, Nick — a weapon they believe was used to murder Ballard. The court proceedings are still ongoing as of this writing.

On May 20, 1977, a telephone line repair worker in Maryville, Tennessee made a shocking discovery: the body of a woman, 54-year-old Helen Fine, sitting in a car outside of her home. Mrs. Fine had suffered multiple gunshot wounds, and when police were called to the scene, they found that her husband, 67-year-old Maynard Fine, had met the same fate — he had been shot to death inside the home. The murder weapon was subsequently located in a local landfill, and although physical evidence was collected from the crime scene, investigators were unable to definitively tie anyone to the crime for almost five decades.

The breakthrough finally came when that diligently collected evidence was re-examined using modern technology, and said evidence pointed in a horrifying direction. District Attorney Ryan Desmond and Police Chief Tony Crisp (pictured above) announced in November 2023 that said evidence had placed the Fines' son Michael — 34 at the time of the crime — to both the entryway of the house and the murder weapon. At 80 years old, Michael Fine was finally arrested for the murder of his parents — and while authorities are obviously confident enough in their case to make that arrest, they are as of this writing seeking one more piece of the puzzle: a teenage girl, whose name they do not know, who was living with the Fines at the time of their murder. "They would not be a suspect at all in this, but they ... observed some things in the weeks or months leading up to the homicide that potentially could be very relevant," Desmond explained (via WATE 6).

In late 2023, Jackson County, Indiana saw the resolution of one of its oldest cold cases: the murder of 24-year-old Clifford Smith, whose body had been discovered in the woods outside Seymour, Indiana about a month after he had been reported missing by his wife in 1982. Smith had been shot in the head with a shotgun and left to die, and over the years, the case had its way through generations of detectives — before Sergeant Kip Main took over in 2015.

In the course of his investigation, Main was able to determine that Smith had last been seen in the company of Ronald Anderson, an acquaintance with whom he and several others had been hanging out into the wee hours of the night on October 30, 1982. Anderson and Smith had left together, with Anderson returning briefly to retrieve (wait for it) a shotgun. That was the last time Smith had been seen alive. The following morning, Anderson had returned to the house in order to, as investigators put it, "hide potential evidence" (via NBC News). In light of these findings, the 61-year-old Anderson was arrested at his home in Seymour and charged with Smith's murder in November 2023.

In 1981, police in Callaway County, Missouri discovered the body of 27-year-old Ricky Ridings in a truck; he had been shot to death, and the cops may not have been terribly surprised. At the time, Ridings was known to be involved in a lucrative crime ring, trafficking in drugs and stolen cars, which was active in the St. Louis area — but with no witnesses and no viable evidence, they were unable to pin the crime on anybody. That may have remained the case forever, if not for what may have been a flash of conscience on the part of Ridings' killer — Charles Schmitt III, who since 1998 had been serving a life sentence with no chance for parole in a different murder case.

In 2017, police received information that Schmitt had admitted to killing Ridings in a recorded phone call from prison. Authorities began pursuing capital murder charges against him, but in 2023, a charge of manslaughter was ultimately decided upon after Schmitt agreed to sit down with Ridings' family to face questions about the crime that only he would know the answers to. That occurred in August, and Schmitt was subsequently sentenced to an additional 10 years, the maximum sentence. In a press release (via the Fulton Sun), prosecuting attorney Chris Wilson said, "At the end of the sentencing, the Ridings family thanked Mr. Schmitt for his candor regarding his role in Ricky's murder, demonstrating a remarkable, and extremely unique, instance of restorative justice."

The case of 20-year-old Krista Martin, who was discovered dead in a home in Wichita, Kansas in 1989, stands as a sterling example of how sheer diligence can lead to the resolution of a murder case that for years had stubbornly refused to yield any suspects. DNA evidence was carefully collected from the scene, which bore no fruit; this evidence was reviewed by the FBI in the early '90s, to no avail. The evidence was not sent back to attempt to find a match in the national database until 2009, by which time the murderer — a man named Paul Hart — had been, unbeknownst to investigators, dead for ten years.

Even though Hart could no longer commit any crimes that might result in his DNA being added to the database, investigators kept doggedly reviewing the evidence, and in 2021 and 2022, they worked with private genealogists to attempt to put together a profile of the suspect. Turning to familial DNA finally produced results, and Hart was identified as the only viable suspect in April 2023; Hart lived in the same neighborhood as Martin, although police were unable to determine whether they actually knew each other; Martin was known to befriend people she met while out at local watering holes, though, and it is theorized that she simply put her trust in the wrong man. Detective Adam VanDerMolen summed up the investigation succinctly while talking with the press (via CNN), saying, "This was a long road."

Prosecutors in Cincinnati, Ohio finally got their man in the heinous 2003 murder of Herman Brown, whom authorities found after a wellness check on him was requested by a neighbor who called 911 to report a stench coming from his apartment. Responding officers came upon a horrendous scene; Brown was dead on the floor inside, having been strangled with an extension cord and stabbed multiple times, with blood found in multiple rooms. Some of that blood did not belong to Brown, and other forms of DNA evidence including cigarette butts were found — but the cops were unable to use it to finger a suspect until 2023.

Investigators re-examined DNA lifted from one of the cigarette butts through the lens of forensic genealogy, and at long last, it pinpointed Brown's killer as now-64-year-old Robert Stewart after an exhaustive investigation. As Detective Jeff Smallwood explained to WCPO Cincinnati, the process they used to nail Stewart involves combing through hundreds of names returned from public genealogy databases using traditional police work, which enables the cops to snare criminals whose DNA has never been collected by law enforcement. "It is a puzzle," said one of the detectives assigned to the case, Heather Saidler. "And it can be really hard at times." But that hard work paid off; as of this writing, Stewart is in jail awaiting trial on a charge of first-degree murder.