Solved
Files that finally closed — and what it took to close them.
Files on record
Solved
The Golden State Killer, and the Family Tree That Caught Him
For forty years, investigators pursued crime series under different names without knowing who was responsible. The answer came from preserved evidence, distant relatives in a genealogy database and a direct DNA match.
Solved
The King Under the Car Park
The last English king to die in battle vanished from the record for five centuries. He was found in the first trench of a long-shot dig, under a painted letter R in a municipal car park.
Solved
The Somerton Man, Named at Last
A well-dressed man was found dead on an Australian beach without identification. A torn line of Persian poetry, an undeciphered sequence of letters and a missing name turned him into a national mystery. Genetic genealogists now say he was Carl Webb — but the official file is not yet fully closed.
Mysteries
Ötzi the Iceman: A 5,300-Year-Old Murder on the Mountain
Two hikers found a corpse melting out of a glacier and assumed it was a lost mountaineer. It was a man who had been dead for fifty-three centuries — and a CT scan, ten years later, proved someone had shot him in the back.