List of unsolved murders (1900–1979)

This list of unsolved murders includes notable cases where victims have been murdered under unknown circumstances.

1900–1924 William Goebel (44), an American politician who was shot and mortally wounded on the morning of 30 January 1900 in Frankfort, Kentucky, one day before being sworn in as governor of Kentucky. The next day, the dying Goebel was sworn in and, despite the best efforts of eighteen physicians attending him, died on the afternoon of 3 February 1900. Goebel remains the only state governor in the United States to die by assassination while in office. Ernst Winter (19) was a German man who went missing from Konitz on 11 March 1900 after he had left the house where he was boarding. Parts of a body were found on 15 March 1900Aizenberg, Salo (2013). Hatemail: Anti-Semitism on Picture Postcards. Philadelphia, PA: The Jewish Publication Society. p. 97. ISBN 9780827609495. and 15 April 1900. His murderer is unknown. Bertha Schippan (aged 12 to 14), who resided in the South Australian town of Towitta, was violently attacked and then murdered in her own house. Bertha was last seen alive at her house on 1 January 1902. The body of a girl was discovered in Bertha's house on 2 January. The body was subsequently identified after Bertha's parents quickly recognised the face as that of their daughter. Because she was the only person in the house at the time Bertha was last seen alive, her elder sister Mary was charged with the murder, but due to a lack of evidence she was released and the charges were subsequently dropped. The case remains unsolved.

Rose Harsent was stabbed to death on 1 June 1902, in Peasenhall, Suffolk, England by an unknown assailant. Harsent was six months pregnant at the time of her death. William Gardiner, a preacher of the Primitive Methodist Chapel, was suspected due to his affair with the victim. Gardiner was tried twice for the murder, but each time, the jury failed to reach a verdict. The case has been featured on BBC One's Julian Fellowes Investigates. Al Swearengen (59), operator of the Gem Theater brothel in Deadwood, South Dakota, was found dead in a Denver street of a massive wound to his head on 15 November 1904. No suspects were named. The 20th Century Limited derailment was an incident that happened on 21 June 1905, on the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway line, that killed 21 passengers. Despite overwhelming evidence suggesting the accident was an act of sabotage, no perpetrator has ever been identified. Tomasso Petto (25–26) was both a mobster and the top hitman of the Morello crime family, who was operating in New York and was active in the early 1900s. Sometime in 1905, Petto died after being shot outside his home located in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. His killer was never found. John Otunba Payne (66–67) was a Nigerian sheriff, administrator and diarist who was a prominent personality in Lagos during the nineteenth century. He was a Chief Registrar of the Supreme Court of Lagos, and he also served as a registrar in various colonial departments such as the Police Court, the Chief Magistrate's Court, the Court of Civil and Criminal Justice and the Petty Debt court.Elias, T. O. (1956). Makers of Nigerian law. London: Hazell Watson & Viney. p. 13 Payne was murdered in his residence in Lagos by an unknown assailant in 1906. His murder was never solved. The dismembered corpse of Jeanne Van Calck (9), was found in a package deposited in front of 22 Rue des Hirondelles in Brussels, Belgium on 7 February 1906. She had gone missing the previous day after leaving her grandparents' house. Despite public unrest, the flawed investigation from the police failed to solve her killing, and she is now remembered as a martyr for childhood innocence. Marinos Antypas (34–35) was a Greek lawyer and journalist, and one of the country's first socialists. Antypas was murdered on 8 March 1907, in Pyrgetos, Greece, by unknown persons who were hired to kill him. His killer was never brought to justice, and the crime was never solved. On 12 September 1907, Emily Dimmock was found decapitated in bed by her fiancé Bertram Shaw, in Camden Town, London, England. The sole suspect, Robert Wood, was acquitted at trial. Pat Garrett (57), an American Old West lawman, bartender and customs agent well known for killing Billy the Kid was himself murdered on 29 February 1908. His murder remains largely unsolved. A headless woman was found in the ruins of a farmhouse in La Porte, Indiana, that burned to the ground on 28 April 1908. The body was thought to have been that of the Norwegian-American serial killer and disappeared fugitive Belle Gunness (48). However, this was never proven to be true. The woman's identity remains unknown, and the murder remains unsolved. Caroline Mary Luard was shot twice in the head near her summer house in Seal Chart, Kent, England on 24 August 1908. Her husband, Major-General Charles Luard, was widely believed to be the killer and committed suicide less than a month later, but investigators concluded he could not have been the killer. The murderer was never identified, although some authors have sought to link John Dickman to the crime; he was hanged for another murder in 1910. The Guangxu Emperor (37), personal name "Zaitian", was the 10th Emperor of the Qing dynasty, and the ninth Qing emperor to rule over China proper. He died on 14 November 1908 of poisoning. One theory is that the Guangxu Emperor was poisoned by Yuan Shikai, who knew that if the emperor were to come to power again, Yuan would likely be executed for treason.Mu, Eric. "Reformist Emperor Guangxu was Poisoned, Study Confirms" . Danwei. 3 November 2008. Retrieved 2 November 2011. Another is that the Empress Dowager Cixi, herself very ill, had him poisoned because she was afraid he would reverse her policies after her death. There were no reliable sources to prove who poisoned the Guangxu Emperor.

Elsie Sigel (20) was found strangled inside a trunk in an apartment in New York City's Chinatown on 18 June 1909, nine days after she had last been seen. The resident of the apartment, Chong Sing, who had been having an affair with her, was considered the prime suspect, but was never arrested. The murder of George Harry Storrs occurred on 1 November 1909, at Gorse Hall, Stalybridge, England. He was killed for an unknown reason, and despite two trials, nobody was convicted of the crime. Andrei Yushchinsky (12), a student at the preparatory class of the Kyiv-Sophia Theological School in Kviv, Ukraine, was murdered on March 12, 1911. Elsie Paroubek (5), a daughter of Czech immigrants, is thought to have either wandered away from her home, or had been kidnapped, in Chicago on 8 April 1911.Several newspaper accounts give the address as 2820 S. Albany Avenue. Her disappearance was the subject of intense police investigation in three states, with massive newspaper coverage. Her body was found a month later. Joseph Wilson (60) was a station master who was shot dead at Lintz Green railway station in Durham, England on 7 October 1911. His murder sparked one of the largest murder investigations in northeastern England. Child molester C. L. Harkins was tried twice for the murder of Elsie Adams (15), a teenage girl he had been raping for three years, and her neighbours Arvie and Safrania Hurst, who were drugged with morphine and then burned alive on 3 February 1912. However, both juries failed to reach a verdict and the case was never resolved. The case was later used against Harkins at his rape trial in 1916. The Villisca axe murders occurred between the evening of 9 June 1912, and the early morning of 10 June 1912, in the town of Villisca in southwestern Iowa. The six members of the Moore family, as well as two house guests, were found bludgeoned in the Moore residence. All eight victims, including six children, had severe head wounds from an axe. A lengthy investigation yielded several suspects, one of whom was tried twice. The first trial ended in a hung jury, and the second ended in an acquittal. The crime remains unsolved. Daisy Grace was accused in 1912 of drugging her husband, Eugene H. Grace, and then shooting him for his insurance money in Atlanta, Georgia. She was tried and found not guilty. Eugene's murder remains unsolved. Lukijan Bogdanović (46) was the last Serbian Patriarch of the Patriarchate of Karlovci and Metropolitanate of Karlovci on 1 September 1913. He was assassinated and decapitated while walking alone along a river bank in Bad Gastein by persons unknown. Charles Budd Robinson (32) was a Canadian botanist and explorer whose death on 5 December 1913 in the Maluku Islands may have been caused by linguistic confusion, as he was known to speak the local language quite poorly. The Malay word for coconut, "kelapa", may have been confused with "kepala", the word for "head". Robinson apparently encountered a young boy who had climbed a coconut tree. If Robinson asked the boy to cut, "potong", down a coconut, it may have been mispronounced, and heard as a threat to cut off someone's head. There was a local myth of a werewolf-like decapitator called a "potong kepala", and that he was mistaken for one. Billy Stone (21) was a telegraph operator who was shot and killed at the Whitby Junction Station in Whitby, Ontario on 11 December 1914. His murder remains unsolved. Chinese journalist Huang Yuanyong (30) was shot and killed in San Francisco on 25 December 1915.Lai, H. Mark (2010). Chinese American Transnational Politics. University of Illinois Press. p. 14. No arrests were made. Most theories about the responsible parties suggest that it was a political assassination, since Huang had increasingly been in conflict with the government of the newly established Republic of China after initially supporting it. Jesse Washington (17), a black farmhand who was accused of the murder of a white woman named Lucy Fryer in Robinson, Texas, was lynched in Waco on 15 May 1916 after being found guilty of the crime under controversial circumstances. Washington was dragged from the courthouse by an angry mob and paraded through the streets in chains until the mob reached city hall, where he was hanged from a tree outside, mutilated by the crowd, and finally burned alive. No-one was ever arrested, in spite of many members of the mob openly boasting of their participation in the crime. Joseph Henry Loveless (45) was an American bootlegger and accused murderer who was killed by unknown means, dismembered and hidden in a pair of burlap sacks in Buffalo Cave near Dubois, Idaho. It is believed that he was killed sometime during 1916, due to a wanted poster being posted on 18 May 1916, detailing clothing in which he had escaped from prison, and in which his body was later found. Nothing of his body was discovered until 1979, when a family visiting the cave discovered his headless torso. In 1991, a girl found the hand of Loveless, which prompted an excavation that uncovered both legs and arms. Loveless was considered a John Doe until the DNA Doe Project took on the case in 2019. He was identified on 12 November 2019, and his identity was announced on 31 December 2019. The post-mortem interval of the body was initially believed to be around 5 years, due to optimal conditions in the cave. The identification is considered to be the oldest attained through forensic genealogy. The case is also still considered open by the Clark County Sheriff's office. The Preparedness Day bombing occurred on 22 July 1916 when a bomb was detonated at a Preparedness Movement parade in San Francisco, killing ten people and injuring forty. Two radical labour activists were convicted but later released after their convictions were found to be based on perjured testimony.