Cold Cases

In the late 1960s, a killer stalked the roads and lovers’ lanes of Northern California. He didn’t just murder — he performed. He sent coded ciphers to newspapers, taunted police with cryptic letters, and gave himself a name that would echo through decades of true crime history: The Zodiac. More than 50 years later, his identity remains officially unknown. No arrest was ever made. No conviction was ever secured. The Zodiac Killer is one of the most investigated cold cases in American history — and one of the most frustratingly unresolved. ...

On the day before Thanksgiving in 1971, a quiet, well-dressed man bought a one-way ticket for a short flight from Portland to Seattle. He ordered a bourbon and soda, lit a cigarette, and handed a flight attendant a note. The note said he had a bomb. What followed was the only unsolved case of air piracy in American aviation history — a brazen, meticulously executed hijacking that has captivated investigators, amateur sleuths, and the public for over 50 years. The hijacker’s name was almost certainly not D.B. Cooper. But that’s what the world came to call him. And despite one of the longest-running FBI investigations in history, nobody knows who he really was. ...

On the night of February 1, 1959, nine experienced Soviet hikers cut their way out of their tent from the inside and fled into the darkness of a Ural mountain in temperatures approaching minus 30 degrees Celsius. They were found weeks later in states that defied easy explanation — some with catastrophic internal injuries but no external wounds, one missing her tongue, several with traces of radiation on their clothing, and all of them dead. ...