Child Victims

Cases involving victims under eighteen.

104 cases

The Gorton Confession

On an April afternoon in 1996, forty-eight-year-old James Patterson Smith calmly walked into a Manchester police station to report that his teenage girlfriend, Kelly Anne Bates, had drowned in his bathtub — but the crime scene brought seasoned officers to tears.

The Toolbox Killers

Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris met behind prison walls, then bought a windowless 1977 GMC van they nicknamed 'Murder Mac' — and began cruising the Pacific Coast Highway toward a fire road in the San Gabriel Mountains.

The Security Chief

Chris Coleman guarded world-famous televangelist Joyce Meyer for a living, yet couldn't seem to protect his own family from an anonymous letter-writer's threats — until police climbed through a window of his Columbia Lake home into a scene reeking of spray paint.

A Doctor's Blood

On Halloween night 1992 in tiny Kipling, Saskatchewan, a distraught young mother sought help from the town's beloved Dr. John Schneeberger — and what she remembered from that examination room would pit her word against his DNA.

Rat Alley

In Newcastle's crumbling Scotswood slums in 1968, four-year-old Martin Brown was found dead in a derelict house — and the trail led police to Mary Bell, a ten-year-old girl the neighborhood children already feared.

The Stolen Cradle

In September 2000, two expectant mothers met by chance in a Walmart and discovered they were neighbors — days later, Theresa Andrews vanished along with the Jeep Wrangler she had arranged to sell to a mystery buyer.

Written in Blue Ink

Nine-year-old Elizabeth Olten set off on the four-house walk home from a neighbor's in tiny St. Martin, Missouri, and never arrived — and her cell phone signal pointed hundreds of searchers into the dark woods directly behind their homes.

The Photo Shoot

Jamie Reynolds told seventeen-year-old Georgia Williams he needed a model for a 'fake hanging' photo shoot at his Wellington, England home — an art project he had carefully planned for while his parents were away in Italy.

The Green Chain Killer

When Pauline Lasham told police her son Robert Napper had confessed to a rape near Plumstead Common, they checked their records, found nothing, and let it go — while the attacks along London's Green Chain Walk were only beginning.

A Walking Shadow

Nineteen-year-old Myles Fukunaga worked eighty-hour weeks to keep his family afloat in 1929 Hawaii, but when the Hawaiian Trust Company came collecting back rent once again, his quiet desperation fixed on a plan inspired by the Leopold and Loeb case.

Captain Cash

London heroin dealer Ken Avery — 'Captain Cash' to the underworld — lost everything when he turned informant, so he changed his name to Ken Regan and fixed his ambitions on a wealthy Heathrow freight importer named Amarjit 'Neil' Chohan.

God Chose Us

Two days before her high school graduation, Shari Faye Smith's little blue Chevette sat idling at the end of her family's long South Carolina driveway, the driver's door open and the mail scattered — and seventeen-year-old Shari was gone.

The Tacoma Murders

In 1986, months apart, young Michella Welch and Jennifer Bastian were murdered near Tacoma parks just three miles from each other — crimes so similar police assumed one killer, until DNA told a stranger story that took decades to finish.

The Broomstick Killer

Doted on by his pistol-packing mama in tiny Rosebud, Texas, Kenneth McDuff grew from small-town bully into one of the most sinister figures in Texan history — a killer handed unprecedented leniency by the very system meant to stop him.

Bloodthirsty Parolee

On New Year's night 1977, thirteen-year-old Bruce Kim left a party at a run-down Centralia, Washington apartment building and never came home — a murder so obscure the author knows it only because he grew up a few blocks away.

The Incest Killer

Given up for adoption to protect her from her volatile father, Katie Fusco grew up happy in Dover, New York — until, just after turning eighteen, she went looking for her biological family and found Steven Pladl waiting.

Mom, I'm a Monster

On October 5, 2012, ten-year-old Jessica Ridgeway started her ordinary morning walk to school in Westminster, Colorado and vanished — while the man who had attacked a jogger at nearby Ketner Lake months earlier was still unidentified.

The Homeschoolers

Eleven-year-old Hana Alemu was adopted from Ethiopia into Larry and Carri Williams' strict homeschooling household of nine in Sedro-Woolley, Washington — a rescue rooted in faith, and in the harsh discipline of a book called To Train Up A Child.

Divine Justice

In a Pacific Northwest decade haunted by vanishing girls — several later confirmed as Ted Bundy victims — fourteen-year-old Kathy Devine's 1973 disappearance near Olympia sat unsolved for decades, filed under the wrong killer.

The Werewolf Butcher

In September 1994, nine-year-old Penny Davis wandered off along Patterson Creek near tiny Tonasket, Washington and vanished without a trace — the beginning of a case that led to a man who believed himself a werewolf.

Consumed by Desire

When eighteen-year-old Heather Gibson tried to break up with Chad Wiersma, he drove her to a remote spot outside Kalamazoo and threatened to kill her and her family — the opening act of an obsession that would not let go.

Gay Panic

Seventeen-year-old Gwen Araujo had found the courage to live openly as a girl in California's Bay Area — but in the late summer of 2002, she began partying with a group of young men at the Merél brothers' house in Newark, where suspicion about her was growing.

Saving a Soul

Devout Tom Pendergast made it his God-given mission to rescue wayward boys, so when he found six-foot-four teenage runaway Carl Eder sleeping in a coat closet at the Mission Beach Ballroom, he brought him home to his wife and children in El Cajon.

The Jacksonville Monster

Struggling mother Rayne Perrywinkle thought the kindly stranger offering a $150 Walmart gift card for her daughters' clothes was an answered prayer — but 'Don' was a man a Jacksonville girl had once hidden from inside a playground slide.

Dead in the Water

Jo Rogers and her daughters Michelle and Christe left their Ohio dairy farm for their first real vacation, snapping photos from a hotel room overlooking Tampa Bay — days before the Coast Guard began pulling bodies, roped to concrete blocks, from the water.

Blue Mist #22

On a snowy January morning in 1972, eight-year-old Shelly Mickelson climbed into her trusted neighbor Robert Moorman's Chevelle for a lunch her mother never approved — the start of a story that would end at the Blue Mist Motel in the prison town of Florence, Arizona.

Like Mother, Like Son

In Pennsylvania's Pocono Mountains, Cheryl Kunkle raised her son Greg Rowe on resentment and control. When sixteen-year-old Kristin Fisher refused the abortion Greg demanded and gave birth to baby Kaylee, mother and son came to share far more than a grudge.

A Heartless Mother

After her young son David died, St. Louis mother Ellen Boehm bought a new car rather than pay his $2,348 funeral bill — and seemed more upbeat than ever. She still held a $5,000 life insurance policy on each of her surviving children.

The Family Murders

In 1972, Bevan Spencer von Einem was hailed a hero for rescuing two men thrown into Adelaide's River Torrens. Seven years later, sixteen-year-old Alan Barnes stuck out his thumb on Grand Junction Road to hitch a ride home — and never arrived.

The Llama Farm Murder

Seventeen-year-old Leanna Walker told friends she planned to run away with Sky McDonough, a self-styled Rastafarian who quoted Bible verses about killing a wife who leaves. When she vanished from Milford, Pennsylvania, the search closed in on the woods around a llama farm.

The Killer Cop

When a sheriff's cruiser stopped teenage hitchhikers Nancy Trotter and Paula 'Sue' Wells on Florida's Treasure Coast in July 1972, Deputy Gerard Schaefer lectured them about the creeps and kidnappers out there — then kindly offered the girls a ride to Jensen Beach.

Slayer's Book of Death

Texas teenager Jason Massey tortured animals to feed the urges festering inside him and filled notebooks with fantasies of death. When a younger boy asked him for a ride to see his girlfriend, thirteen-year-old Christina Benjamin, Massey started making plans of his own.

The Murder of Stephanie Hebert

Five-year-old Stephanie Hebert set off for a friend's house three doors down Aster Lane in Waggaman, Louisiana, in June 1978 — and never made it. More than 150 deputies searched the canals and levees for the little girl in baby-blue glasses without finding a trace.

The Eagle Scout

Thirteen-year-old paperboy Danny Joe Eberle vanished from his Bellevue, Nebraska route one Sunday morning in 1983, leaving behind his beloved BMX bike and a bag of undelivered newspapers. Just thirteen days earlier, another paperboy had disappeared two hours away in Des Moines.

Baby Lollipops

A utility crew working along Miami's North Bay Road spotted what looked like a candy wrapper behind a hedge. It was a lollipop decal on a tiny shirt — worn by a battered, starved toddler no one could identify, a boy the case would name Baby Lollipops.

The Slumber Party

At a sleepover just a few houses from home in Louisville, twelve-year-old Jessica Thornsberry opened the front door around 11:00 p.m. and whispered that the neighborhood boys were back. Her best friend April told her to send them away — and never saw her alive again.

Beyond Redemption

Sixteen-year-old Jason Sweeney saved every paycheck from his father's construction company to pay for military academy — his first step toward becoming a Navy SEAL. In Philadelphia's Fishtown, his lifelong best friend Eddie Batzig and the Coia brothers were growing jealous of every dollar.

Angelic

In 2008, Karlie Pearce-Stevenson left remote Alice Springs with her toddler, Khandalyce, and a boyfriend fifteen years her senior, Daniel Holdom. A year later her calls and texts home stopped — though her bank account stayed strangely active.

A Sad Holiday Season

Sixteen-year-old Leanne Tiernan said goodbye to her best friend after a day of Christmas shopping in Leeds and took the unlit shortcut through Houghley Gill. Police searched 1,400 houses, drained three miles of canals, and questioned 140 men — and found no trace of her.

A Perfect Holiday

Failed stage hypnotist Martin Smith controlled every corner of Lianne's life — even after his crimes surfaced and the family fled Britain for Spain under false names. For her children, Rebecca and Daniel, the perfect holiday their mother promised would be their last.

The Girl Scout

Selling Girl Scout cookies door to door in Sabre Springs, California, Brenda van Dam and seven-year-old Danielle stopped at the immaculate home of wealthy neighbor David Westerfield — who bought cookies, showed off his kitchen, and mentioned his 'adult parties.' That weekend, Danielle vanished.

The Bushy-Haired Stranger

Eight-year-old Vicki Lynne Hoskinson pedaled her pink Christmas bicycle two blocks to mail a birthday card in Tucson, Arizona, in September 1984. Minutes later, her sister found the bike lying in the middle of the road — and no sign of Vicki.

The Conman

In September 1991, lawyer Ernest Brendel, his librarian wife Alice, and their eight-year-old daughter Emily vanished without a trace from Barrington, Rhode Island. Six weeks later, the sleepy town learned it had been living with a sociopath in its midst: Christopher Hightower.

The Sunday School Teacher

Eight-year-old Sandra Cantu skipped across the street outside her Tracy, California mobile home park on March 27, 2009, and was never seen again. At a community vigil, a tearful Sunday school teacher named Melissa Huckaby pressed a note into the hands of police.

The Leg Thing

Fourteen-year-old Chris Steiner vanished from his Baraboo, Wisconsin home on the night of July 4, 1994, leaving a window screen cut from the outside and muddy footprints on the carpet. A year later, thirteen-year-old Thad Phillips woke to find himself being carried into the dark.

The Santa Fe Strangler

A maid opening room 205 of a Santa Fe motel in November 1983 found a twenty-two-year-old woman strangled with a red handkerchief, her hands bound with a pillowcase. When secretary Teri Mulvaney was murdered months later, her family already had a name: David Bruce Morton.

Vanished Innocence

Two days after Christmas 1962, six-year-old Mona Rae Minyard walked to Portland's Three Brothers Market with a five-dollar bill and her mother's short grocery list. She never came home — and suspicion settled on Joseph Walton Holmes, the man who lived just across the field.

The Crossword Murder

Seven-year-old Lars Bense set off through the snow to meet friends at the cinema in Halle-Neustadt, East Germany — a planned city of numbered concrete blocks with no street names. He vanished in the final few hundred feet, and the strangest clue would be a crossword puzzle.

Better Off in Heaven

To her Pittsburgh-area church and school colleagues, Laurel Schlemmer was sweet, kind-hearted, and devout — a woman who had never wanted the children her husband Mark insisted on. One morning, with their grandmother watching television downstairs, Laurel ran a bath for the boys.

The Groomer

'Hi, how are you? I've seen your picture. You're very pretty.' The Facebook message that reached fifteen-year-old Kayleigh Haywood on Halloween 2015 came from twenty-seven-year-old Luke Harlow — and thirteen days of hidden messages convinced her she was loved.

The Screwdriver Killer

In 1957, Connecticut's George Davies answered a newspaper ad — 'French girl desires light housekeeping' — with devious intentions. Seventeen-year-old Gaetane Boivin left a note about a job opportunity and never came home; days later, nine-year-old Brenda Jane Doucette vanished walking to school.

Tennessee

Algebra teacher Colleen Ritzer stayed after class at Danvers High School to help any student who needed it. On October 22, 2013, fourteen-year-old Philip Chism — a quiet newcomer from Tennessee — was in her final class of the day.

The Fifth Nail

A Wolf Lodge, Idaho, man called 911 about a strange white truck on his property; hours later he called back, frantic, after finding blood smeared on his neighbors' door. Inside the Groene home, deputies found bodies bound with duct tape — and the youngest children gone.

Tony the Pervert

Three-year-old Rosie Palmer bought an ice pop from the ice cream van outside her Hartlepool, England home and vanished within the hour. Police went door to door; a few houses away, Shaun 'Tony' Armstrong told them he hadn't seen her, and they moved on.

The Leaf Killer

When Tina Herrmann missed her shift at the Mount Vernon Dairy Queen, her manager drove out to check on her — and found a house full of blood but no trace of Tina, her two children, or her friend Stephanie Sprang.

The Creepy Uncle

Fifteen-year-old Danielle Jones left for her school bus stop in East Tilbury, Essex, and vanished. Witnesses saw a girl in uniform arguing with a man in a blue van — a van that belonged to her own uncle, Stuart Campbell.

Folly Beach

In May 1973, fourteen-year-old Alexis Latimer and her best friend Sherri Clark took one last stroll down Folly Beach before dark. Police insisted the girls had run off with boys — until more young women were attacked in the sleepy South Carolina beach town.

Mr. Big

Thirteen-year-old Daniel Morcombe stood beneath a Queensland overpass in December 2003, waiting for a bus that had broken down. When the next bus arrived ten minutes later, Daniel — and the man seen lingering behind him — had vanished.

The River Brent Killer

On a warm August afternoon in 2014, fourteen-year-old Alice Gross texted her father that she was heading home along West London's canal towpath. Dinner came and went, and Alice never arrived — and the search would lead police to a Latvian immigrant with a dark past.

The Castle Doctrine

On Thanksgiving Day 2012, two teenagers slipped into the basement of Byron Smith's secluded home in Little Falls, Minnesota. What the retired security engineer did next — with an audio recorder running — ignited a national debate over how far self-defense can go.

Room 308

Twenty-one-year-old British backpacker Grace Millane was partway through her round-the-world gap year when she matched with a man named Jesse on Tinder in Auckland. On December 1, 2018, she agreed to meet him for drinks — and was never seen again.

The Cape Coral Monster

Jan Cornell rushed home before her early-morning shift in May 1990 to find her Cape Coral townhouse silent — her eleven-year-old daughter Robin and roommate Lisa Story inside. The DNA left behind would wait twenty-six years for a match.

The City Planner

Twelve-year-old Tina Marie Harmon stopped for a fudgesicle in Creston, Ohio, and never caught up with her friends. Two men were charged in her death — while matching orange carpet fibers kept turning up wherever more young girls were found.

Collateral Damage

Five-year-old Nathan O'Brien begged to sleep over at his grandparents' Calgary home the night of their estate sale in June 2014. When his mother returned the next morning, Nathan, Alvin, and Kathy Liknes were gone — and the house told a grim story.

The Griekwastad Farm Murders

On Good Friday 2012, fifteen-year-old Don Steenkamp burst into the Griekwastad police station drenched in blood, telling officers he had found his parents and sister shot on the family farm. The question was what had really happened inside that farmhouse.

A Killer Breakthrough

Fifteen-year-old Lynda Mann took the Black Pad footpath to a babysitting job in Narborough, England, one November evening in 1983 and never came home. Solving her murder — and a second one nearby — would require a scientific technique no police force had ever used.

The French Nanny

Sabrina Kouider craved fame and glamour long before she and her partner Sam Medouni brought a shy French au pair named Sophie Lionnet into their London home to care for the children. Behind that front door, Sophie's life became a nightmare no one outside could see.

Friendly Reminders

No one outside the family noticed that thirteen-year-old Erica Parsons had been missing for a year and a half — until her adoptive brother Jamie, kicked out after a fierce argument, walked into the Rowan County Sheriff's Office with a chilling accusation about their parents.

No Body, No Crime

On Mother's Day 2018, hairstylist Joleen Cummings failed to pick up her three children in Yulee, Florida. Suspicion fell on a coworker at Tangles Hair Salon — a woman who, it turned out, had lived under eighteen different names across fourteen states.

Sacred Trust

Thirteen-year-old Danny Croteau was found dead along the Chicopee River in 1972, and suspicion quickly settled on a family friend no one dared accuse: Father Richard Lavigne, the parish priest. The case would stay open for nearly fifty years.

The Krug Park Killers

A jogger's trembling 911 call one October morning in 2016 reported a body on a trail in St. Joseph, Missouri's Krug Park. Seventeen-year-old Kaytlin Root had been lured there by a Facebook message from someone calling herself 'Amanda Panda.'

The Vanishing

During a family night program at a St. Paul church in November 1981, six-year-old Cassie Hansen asked her mother for permission to use the bathroom just steps away. She never came back — and an abduction inside a sanctuary changed how the city thought about safety.

Child of Chaos

Lorraine Thorpe was fifteen, drifting between squalid flats, and caring for her alcoholic father among Ipswich's forgotten street drinkers in the summer of 2009. What unfolded inside that hidden world would force Britain to confront an almost unimaginable case.

The Waterbed

Eight-year-old Maddie Clifton finished her piano practice and went out to play in her Jacksonville neighborhood on November 3, 1998, then vanished. For days, hundreds searched — while the answer lay closer to home than anyone could bear to imagine.

Count to Three

A security camera caught sixteen-year-old Skylar Neese slipping out her bedroom window at 12:30 a.m. and climbing into a waiting car in Star City, West Virginia. She knew the people inside — which made what happened next all the more incomprehensible.

The Pink Notebook

Tracey Richter told the 911 dispatcher that two intruders had attacked her in her Early, Iowa home and that she had shot one to save her children. The dead man was a quiet twenty-year-old neighbor — and a pink notebook would tell a far stranger story.

The Viking Princess

Seven-year-old Athena Strand, who dreamed of being a Viking princess in pink armor, hopped off the school bus near her home in Paradise, Texas, in November 2022. By nightfall she was missing — and the search led to a delivery driver named Tanner Horner.

The Limburg Schoolgirl Murders

Best friends Jasmin and Yvonne, both sixteen, left a German discotheque at 3:00 a.m. in October 1994 and accepted a ride from a friendly middle-aged couple — a motherly woman and her quiet husband. Neither girl made it home to Limburg.

The Witch's Castle

Hunters walking a frozen Indiana soybean field in January 1992 thought they had found a burned mannequin. It was twelve-year-old Shanda Sharer — and those responsible were four teenage girls, drawn together by jealousy over a single classmate.

Fox Hollow Farm

Exploring the woods behind his family's eighteen-acre Indiana estate in 1994, thirteen-year-old Erich Baumeister carried a human skull back to the house. His father Herb had an explanation — one that would hold for two more years.

The Long Walk Home

Seventeen-year-old Mary Quigley never made it home from a back-to-school keg party in Santa Clara, California, in September 1977. For decades the question of who followed her into the night went unanswered — until DNA pointed to a name: Richard Archibeque.

The Hammer Killer

In January 1984, residents of Aurora, Colorado, began waking to a nightmare: an intruder standing over their beds with a hammer. The attacks were only the beginning of a spree that would take decades to unravel.

Silent Screams

Sarah Hallow's frantic 911 call said her stepdaughter had drowned in the bathtub — but when Elk River officers reached eight-year-old Autumn Hallow, her skin was dry, her body frail, and rigor mortis had already set in.

The Digital Trail

Seventeen-year-old Taylor Behl arrived at Virginia Commonwealth University brimming with excitement for college life. She had no idea that Ben Fawley — a 38-year-old 'goth' photographer whose apartment was a shrine to death — was watching her.

The Gilbert Goons

Sixteen-year-old Preston Lord was walking away from a Halloween party in Queen Creek, Arizona, when a mob of teenagers descended. The beating exposed months of organized violence festering beneath Gilbert's wealthy suburban surface.

The Baseline Killer

It began on Baseline Road in Phoenix in August 2005, when a calm stranger with a silver handgun ambushed three children walking home from church — the first attack in one of Arizona's most terrifying crime sprees.

The Crown Hill Murder

Sixteen-year-old Becky Watts was home alone in Bristol's Crown Hill neighborhood on an ordinary Thursday in February 2015. By evening she had vanished — and the search would lead somewhere her family never imagined.

The Middletown Nightmare

Twelve-year-old Valerie Smelser vanished from a Virginia gas station restroom on a freezing January night in 1995. The story told by Norman Hoverter, the man traveling with her mother, would soon begin to unravel.

They'll Blame Us

When four-year-old Genny Rojas was found burned and lifeless in her aunt and uncle's Chula Vista apartment, Veronica Gonzales begged the neighbors not to call police — and she and her husband Ivan each had a story to tell.

The Cleveland Monster

Michelle Knight was rushing to a custody hearing in 2002 when a familiar Cleveland school bus driver named Ariel Castro offered her a ride — with a quick stop at his ordinary-looking house on Seymour Avenue.

The Kite Flyer

Eleven-year-old Junny Rios-Martinez made the local paper when he won a kite contest on Florida's Space Coast. The very next day, a man calling himself a Florida Today photographer phoned his family asking to meet the young champion.

The Lakewood Monster

On the Fourth of July 1996, nine-year-old Cynthia Allinger left her Lakewood, Washington, apartment in her favorite flowered dress to visit friends nearby. By the time the fireworks faded, she still hadn't come home.

Bad John

Four teenagers left a Fort Leonard Wood card game to find pizza and gas on a January night in 1977. On the dark roads of the Missouri military base, they met military policeman Johnny Lee Thornton.

Mockingbird Hill

On a December morning in 1987, a man in a black coat and cowboy hat shot receptionist Kathy Kendrick in a Russellville law office and drove off toward the next name on his list — and what Ronald Gene Simmons had already done at Mockingbird Hill was worse.

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