9 Cold Cases That Have Totally Baffled Investigators

The suspects, the motives, the theories behind the drive-by shooting death of iconic rapper Biggie Smalls (aka the Notorious B.I.G., or Christopher Wallace) in Los Angeles in 1997 are almost too many to list. Was Death Row Records mogul Suge Knight involved? Was Biggie's murder linked to fellow rapper Tupac Shakur's gunning down just months earlier? Was it a gang hit? Were crooked cops involved? Books have been written, documentaries produced ( even recent ones), and thousands of articles have tried to unravel the crime. It remains unsolved.

In the early morning of March 18, 1990, two men dressed as policemen tricked their way into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. In a little less than an hour and a half, they ripped off 13 pieces of art — including two Rembrandts, a Manet and five Degas drawings — in what has been described as the single largest property theft in the world, worth as much as perhaps $1 billion. Thousands of leads later, the artwork is still missing, and the $10 million reward remains unclaimed.

A 31-year-old code breaker who worked for MI6, the British Secret Intelligence Service, was found dead in his London apartment in August 2010. His naked body was padlocked inside of a North Face bag. The twist: The key to the lock was inside the bag with him. Gareth Williams' death — the British press is calling it the "spy in the bag" case — was first ruled accidental, though a coroner said he was probably killed. The case is still under investigation.

Known as the wise-cracking Col. Hogan from the bizarre late-'60s TV show "Hogan's Heroes" — it was a sitcom set in a prisoner of war camp in Nazi Germany during World War II — actor Bob Crane, in real life, enjoyed taking pictures and videos of himself and his many sex partners in action. When his bludgeoned body, an electrical cord around his neck, was found in a Scottsdale, Arizona, apartment in 1978, suspicion first centered on a sex-chasing friend. The friend finally was charged with the murder, in 1992, but acquitted at a trial in 1994. The case remains open.

No killer in history is better known than the one who stalked the filthy streets of London in 1888, murdering at least five prostitutes in brutal fashion, terrorizing the city, and sparking an interest in serial killers that has lasted for centuries. Jack the Ripper, as the Whitechapel murderer came to be known, sexually abused his victims, mutilated them, even removed internal organs. By various counts, hundreds have been suspected. None of them were ever charged.

The young woman was just 22. She was pretty, with dark curly hair and green eyes, an aspiring actress who looked the part. And when she was found alongside a sidewalk in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles on a January morning in 1947, her naked body sliced in two just above the waist, bizarrely drained of blood, posed, and the edges of her mouth sliced nearly from lip to ear, Elizabeth Short became, to the press, the "Black Dahlia." Many falsely confessed to the murder, and the police had many suspects. But no one has ever been charged. Short's murder is often considered one of the most famous unsolved murders in American history, as well as one of the oldest unsolved cases in Los Angeles County.

Four men, three dressed as women, entered the ritzy Harry Winston jewelry store in Paris one afternoon in December 2008 and, in around 15 minutes, made off with more than $70 million in loot. The French-speaking baddies were part of a crime ring known as the Pink Panthers. Most were caught, but a lot of the bounty never has been recovered, including a huge diamond reportedly spotted on the finger of Lyudmila Putina, Russian president Vladimir Putin's ex-wife.

If any gangster ever had it coming, Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel was that made man. On a June evening in 1947, on a couch in his girlfriend's Beverly Hills mansion, the killer who once headed an outfit known as "Murder, Incorporated" got his, too, in a grisly assassination that ended his life at 41. Mob hit? Revenge by somebody he did wrong? Preemptive strike by the lover of one of his soon-to-be victim's wife? The theories are still flying. The case, officially, is still open.

Notorious among the notorious, the Zodiac Killer murdered at least five people in Northern California in the late 1960s, and maybe as many as 37, taunting the police and press (and terrorizing the region) with a series of letters and cryptographic puzzles that were printed in local newspapers. In late 2020, 51 years after it was sent, one of the killer's puzzles finally was solved, part of which read, "I AM NOT AFRAID OF THE GAS CHAMBER BECAUSE IT WILL SEND ME TO PARADICE ALL THE SOONER." Several law enforcement agencies list the unsolved case as still open.