Murders the legal record never closed, from The Cold File.https://thecoldfile.com/https://thecoldfile.com/articles/1817-mary-ashford/https://thecoldfile.com/articles/1817-mary-ashford/A 20-year-old domestic servant was found dead in a water-filled pit outside Erdington at seven in the morning. The man tried for her killing was acquitted in six minutes, then, when her brother brought an ancient private appeal, offered to fight him in single combat at the bar of the Court of King's Bench. The judges ruled the medieval right still good, Parliament abolished it within fifteen months, and 209 years later the case itself remains unexplained.Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://thecoldfile.com/articles/1857-madeleine-smith/https://thecoldfile.com/articles/1857-madeleine-smith/Pierre Emile L'Angelier died of acute arsenic poisoning at his Glasgow lodgings in the early hours of 23 March 1857. Madeleine Hamilton Smith, the 21-year-old daughter of a Glasgow architect, had bought arsenic at Sauchiehall Street chemists on 21 February, 6 March and 18 March 1857, and had written him roughly 250 letters over two years. On 9 July 1857 a jury at the High Court of Justiciary, Edinburgh, returned Not Guilty on one charge and Not Proven on the other two. The case has been argued over for one hundred and sixty-nine years.Mon, 08 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://thecoldfile.com/articles/1928-croydon-poisonings/https://thecoldfile.com/articles/1928-croydon-poisonings/Between April 1928 and March 1929 three members of one South Croydon family died of arsenic poisoning within ten months. The 1929 exhumation post-mortems by Sir Bernard Spilsbury, Dr Robert Bronté and the Home Office analyst Dr John Ryffel confirmed arsenic in all three bodies and in the residue of the victim's tonic. Three Croydon inquests returned wilful murder by some person or persons unknown. The Scotland Yard inquiry led by Detective Inspector Frederick Hedges focused on the household but never brought a charge. Ninety-seven years on, the case remains officially unsolved.Mon, 08 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://thecoldfile.com/articles/1483-princes-in-the-tower/https://thecoldfile.com/articles/1483-princes-in-the-tower/Five hundred and forty-three years on, the fate of Edward V and his nine-year-old brother is still contested by the documentary record itself: a 1483 London rumour, four Tudor chronicles, an unverified 1502 confession, the 1674 bones in Sir Christopher Wren's urn at Westminster Abbey, and Philippa Langley's 2023 case that both princes survived to lie behind the Simnel and Warbeck risings.Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://thecoldfile.com/articles/1920-joseph-bowne-elwell/https://thecoldfile.com/articles/1920-joseph-bowne-elwell/On the morning of 11 June 1920 the leading American auction bridge authority was found shot through the forehead in a chair in his locked Manhattan brownstone. The New York Police Department, the District Attorney, and a grand jury investigated through the summer and autumn of 1920, and no one was ever charged.Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://thecoldfile.com/articles/1678-edmund-berry-godfrey/https://thecoldfile.com/articles/1678-edmund-berry-godfrey/A Westminster magistrate left his house on a Saturday morning in October 1678 and did not come back. Five days later his body was found face down in a ditch on Primrose Hill, his own sword driven through it, his shoes clean, his money intact, a ligature mark around his neck. Three innocent men were hanged at Tyburn on the perjured testimony of two confessed perjurers. The conspiracy for which they hanged was itself a fabrication. No scholarly analysis since 1903 has produced a finding the field has accepted.Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://thecoldfile.com/articles/1876-charles-bravo/https://thecoldfile.com/articles/1876-charles-bravo/A young London barrister was poisoned at his own dinner table on the night of 18 April 1876 and died three days later. A coroner's jury, sitting at a Balham hotel for twenty-three days under the Attorney-General's eye, returned a verdict of wilful murder by a person or persons unknown. No one was ever charged. The argument over who poisoned Charles Bravo has run for fifteen decades.Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://thecoldfile.com/articles/1836-helen-jewett/https://thecoldfile.com/articles/1836-helen-jewett/A 22-year-old woman was killed with a hatchet in her bed in a Manhattan brothel in the small hours of 10 April 1836. The 19-year-old client whose cloak was found in the back yard was tried that June, instructed against by the judge, and acquitted in under half an hour. He fled west and died nineteen years later under a different name. The legal record is acquittal. Modern scholarship considers him the killer. The case is unsolved.Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://thecoldfile.com/articles/1841-mary-rogers/https://thecoldfile.com/articles/1841-mary-rogers/A young clerk left a Nassau Street boarding house on a Sunday morning in July 1841 and was found dead in the Hudson three days later. In the 184 years since, three lines of suspicion have surfaced and gone nowhere, and no one has ever been charged.Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://thecoldfile.com/articles/1892-lizzie-borden/https://thecoldfile.com/articles/1892-lizzie-borden/On a hot August morning in 1892 a Fall River banker and his second wife were killed with a hatchet in the small, locked house they shared with the banker's younger daughter and an Irish housekeeper. The daughter was tried for both murders the next year and acquitted. No one else was ever charged, and the case has been argued over for more than a century without ever being settled.Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://thecoldfile.com/articles/1922-william-desmond-taylor/https://thecoldfile.com/articles/1922-william-desmond-taylor/On the night of 1-2 February 1922 the silent-film director William Desmond Taylor was shot dead inside his Hollywood bungalow. The investigation was compromised at the scene the following morning, a string of named persons of interest came and went, and the case has remained officially unsolved for more than a century.Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://thecoldfile.com/articles/1943-harry-oakes/https://thecoldfile.com/articles/1943-harry-oakes/One of the wealthiest men in the British Empire was beaten to death in his bed in Nassau during a tropical storm in July 1943. His son-in-law was tried and acquitted by a 9-3 jury, the investigation was widely judged botched at the time, and the case remains officially unsolved.Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://thecoldfile.com/articles/1922-hall-mills/https://thecoldfile.com/articles/1922-hall-mills/In September 1922 a married Episcopal priest and a married soprano from his choir were found shot dead and posed side by side under a crabapple tree near New Brunswick, their love letters scattered between them. A botched investigation split across two counties, and a sensational 1926 trial that acquitted the priest's widow and her two brothers, left the case one of the most famous unsolved murders in American history.Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://thecoldfile.com/articles/1943-bella-wych-elm/https://thecoldfile.com/articles/1943-bella-wych-elm/In April 1943 four boys found a woman's skull inside a hollow wych elm in Hagley Wood, and police recovered the skeletonized remains of an unidentified woman who had been concealed in the trunk around October 1941, gagged and most likely asphyxiated. She was never identified. The name "Bella" came from anonymous chalk graffiti, not from any identification, and the competing wartime-spy and witchcraft theories long outran an evidence trail that has since gone cold: the remains and the original forensic report are now lost.Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://thecoldfile.com/articles/1971-db-cooper/https://thecoldfile.com/articles/1971-db-cooper/On the night before Thanksgiving 1971, a man in a dark suit hijacked a Northwest Orient jet, took $200,000 and four parachutes, and jumped into the dark over southwest Washington. After one of the largest manhunts in FBI history, the only unsolved air-piracy case in United States history was closed without a name. Who he was, and whether he survived the jump, are both still open.Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://thecoldfile.com/articles/1931-julia-wallace/https://thecoldfile.com/articles/1931-julia-wallace/In January 1931 a Liverpool woman was beaten to death in her own parlour while her husband searched the far side of the city for a customer and an address that did not exist, an errand set up the night before by a telephone caller who gave the name Qualtrough. The husband was convicted, then cleared on appeal. No one else was ever charged, and the case survives as one of the most analysed and least settled murder puzzles in the British record.Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://thecoldfile.com/articles/1970-isdal-woman/https://thecoldfile.com/articles/1970-isdal-woman/She moved through Norway under at least eight names, scratched the labels from her clothes and her doctor's name from a prescription, and kept her own travels in code. Fifty years and a modern reinvestigation later, no one can say who she was, or how she died.Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT