From the assassination of Gianni Versace in front of his Miami mansion to JonBenét Ramsey's unsolved killing, explore some of the most infamous murder cases in history.
Warning: This article contains graphic descriptions and/or images of violent, disturbing, or otherwise potentially distressing events.
Some deaths stick with us. Some lives are extinguished in such strange and horrifying ways that they haunt us for years. They become those famous murders that dominate headlines and airwaves around the world and haunt our collective dreams.
It’s not just the deaths themselves that makes these murder cases so chilling. Millions of lives end every day without a single peep on the news. But in a handful of cases, there’s something else that hits us on a deeper, more primal level, something that feeds into our darkest fears.
Wikimedia Commons, Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images, Julian Wasser/Online USA Inc./GettyVictims of some of history’s most famous murder cases, from left: Elizabeth Short, Sharon Tate, Kitty Genovese, JonBenét Ramsey, Lizzie Borden (infamously, not a victim but a suspect), and Dorothy Stratten.
Below, read the full stories behind some of history’s most famous murders and see for yourself why, after so many years, we’ve never been able to shake them.
Famous Murders: The Boy In The Box
Wikimedia CommonsThe boy in the box, depicted on a flyer sent out to residents of surrounding towns.
It started on a chilly February day in 1957, on a roadside highway just outside of Philadelphia. A young muskrat hunter, checking his traps, stumbled upon a cardboard box lying in the woods. Inside was the dead body of a young boy, stripped naked and mutilated.
The muskrat hunter didn’t tell a soul. He was terrified that, if he reported it, the police would come down on him for his illegal traps. And so, for days, until a braver soul found him, the boy’s body lay cold and rotting, alone in the woods.
The boy was somewhere been three and seven years old, and he had undergone terrible neglect. He was small, malnourished and unkempt. His hair had been cut around the time of his death; clumps of it still clung to his body. The body itself was covered in small scars, most notably on his ankle, groin, and chin.
Only one small act of care had been given to the boy abandoned naked in that box. Whoever had killed him had wrapped up tightly in a blanket before leaving him to rot. It was the only hint of love he’d been shown.
Wikimedia CommonsA facial reconstruction of the boy in the box.
The police fingerprinted the boy in hopes of finding a match, but nothing came up. Hundreds of thousands of flyers were sent out to the surrounding area, begging for information about the unidentified boy, but no one came forward. His parents never claimed him as their own.
The investigators tried everything they could. They analyzed the evidence from the crime scene, from the cardboard box to the blanket he was wrapped in.
Every clue they followed, though, just led to a new dead end.
Elizabeth Short, a.k.a. “The Black Dahlia”
Wikimedia CommonsA mugshot of Elizabeth Short from 1943, when she was arrested for underage drinking.
The “Black Dahlia,” Elizabeth Short, was an aspiring actress who wanted be famous more than anything else in the world. She never could have imagined, though, how she would earn it: as the victim of a brutal murder that has haunted America for decades.
On January 15, 1947, a young woman and her three-year-old daughter stumbled upon the body of 22-year-old Elizabeth Short. She was horribly mutilated, lying in the grass of a Los Angeles residential neighborhood, her body completely chopped in half.
Bettmann/Getty ImagesA sheet covers the horrific dissection of Elizabeth Short’s corpse.
The two pieces of her body were about a foot apart. Her intestines had been removed, folded up and then shoved back into her gut. There were ligature marks on her wrists, pieces of her skin had been removed, and her body had been completely drained of blood.
Perhaps the worst part, though, was her face. The killer had cut it open from the corners of both sides of her mouth to her ears, permanently etching a Joker-like smile on the young woman’s face.
Wikimedia CommonsThe body of Elizabeth Short lies uncovered in the grass on the day of one of America’s most famous murders: January 15, 1947.
One week later, an editor at the Los Angeles Examiner received a call from someone claiming to be the murderer. He kept souvenirs, he said, and he would be sending them over in the mail.
He made good on his promise. Four days later, a postal worker pulled out a letter addressed to the Examiner. Inside was Elizabeth Short’s birth certificate, business cards, photographs, and her address book.
But like so many other famous murders, this one’s ensuing chaotic media circus only obscured the investigation. The police were overrun with too many tips to filter out the truth from the lies.
They interviewed 12 possible Black Dahlia suspects and listened to more than 60 people who tried to insist they were the killers. But though suspects, including George Hodel, have become favorites of amateur sleuths, the police never managed to make a single arrest.
