On the night of May 11, 1994, twelve-year-old Sara woke to her mother’s screams coming from the kitchen. Too terrified to move, she hid behind her bed and listened as the cries turned to desperate pleas for mercy, then to silence. She heard the kitchen drawer open, then the sound of repeated stabbing. When the noise finally stopped, she waited motionless for what felt like an eternity before creeping to the kitchen, where she found her mother, Crystal Perry, lying in a pool of blood so vast it covered the entire floor.

The clock on the wall read exactly one in the morning. Sara tried to call 911, but both phones in the house appeared dead. She ran barefoot through the cold May rain to nearby houses, but no one answered their doors. Finally, at an Italian restaurant where the owners lived next door, someone let her in.

Police arrived to find Crystal dead from more than fifty stab wounds. Investigators noted strange details: footprints in blood led toward Sara’s bedroom but stopped before the door; the killer had tried to wipe up some of the blood; drops of blood falling at a right angle suggested the attacker had cut himself. A roll of paper towels had been taken. There was also a palm print on the front door glass, later determined to be Sara’s.

The murder weapon was never found. Crystal had been a young mother living in the small town of Bridgeton, Maine, near the lake that inspired Stephen King’s novel The Mist. She had divorced her husband Tom years earlier, after his drinking drained their finances, and had worked hard to buy a modest home for herself and Sara. At the time of her death, she was engaged to a man named Dennis, though their relationship had grown volatile.

Witnesses said she had feared him. Police investigated Dennis, her ex-husband, and several other men, but DNA testing excluded them all. The case went cold. Years passed without answers.

In 1999, a new investigator took over and collected hundreds of DNA samples from local men, but none matched. Then, in 2006, an unexpected break came. A DNA sample taken from a man named Michael Hutchinson, arrested for driving under the influence with his children in the car, had finally been uploaded to the FBI database. It matched the killer’s blood and semen left at the scene.

Hutchinson, who had been nineteen at the time of the murder and lived two miles from Crystal’s home, had never been a suspect. He had been arrested for assault in 2003, but his DNA had sat untouched in a lab for three years. Investigators also noticed a large scar on his palm, consistent with the killer wounding himself during the attack. Hutchinson denied involvement, claiming he had met Crystal at a bar and had consensual sex with her before an unknown intruder attacked them—a story contradicted by shoe prints at the scene and the absence of any witness placing them together.

In April 2007, he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole. Years later, Sara, who had become a writer, uncovered additional details while working on a book about her mother’s murder. Hutchinson had frequently borrowed his father’s black Ford truck with New Hampshire plates, matching a vehicle a witness had reported seeing near Crystal’s home on the night of the murder. A woman had also told police she saw a speeding car with bright headlights that night; the source of the sirens she heard led back to a friend of Michael Hutchinson’s.

The police had recorded his name and address in the report but never investigated him. Had they done so, they might have noticed the wound on his hand. But by then, the case was closed. Hutchinson remains in prison, and Sara has spent years trying to make sense of the loss that shaped her life.

In another case, on March 31, 2002, Janelle Patton, a twenty-seven-year-old woman who had moved from Sydney to the remote Norfolk Island, disappeared during her daily walk. Her parents, visiting for the first time, grew worried when she did not return. Police soon found her body near a waterfall, wrapped in black plastic. She had been stabbed and beaten with what was likely broken glass, and her wrists showed bruising suggesting she had been restrained.

A stranger’s DNA was found on her body. The island, with just two thousand residents, had not seen a murder since 1893. Police collected DNA samples from more than half the islanders, but found no match. For years, the case remained unsolved.

Then, in 2004, fingerprint matching revealed that a man named Glenn McNeill, who had lived on the island at the time of the murder before moving back to New Zealand, had left fingerprints on the plastic sheeting. Police found his abandoned white Honda, which contained paint fragments matching those on Janelle’s body, along with shards of glass from the same wine bottle used in the attack. In his former backyard, they found a black sheet identical to the one used to wrap her. McNeill was arrested in New Zealand and confessed, claiming he had accidentally hit Janelle with his car while reaching for a cigarette, then panicked and stabbed her when he realized she was still alive.

But his confession did not match the forensic evidence, and he later changed his story, blaming a drug dealer he claimed forced him to dispose of the body. He was convicted in March 2007 and sentenced to twenty-four years in prison. He was released early in February 2024 and deported to New Zealand, still maintaining that others were responsible. His case remains a source of controversy, with many still questioning whether he acted alone.

A third murder shook the small town of Boynton Beach, Florida, on March 24, 1984. Karen Slattery, a fourteen-year-old babysitter, was caring for two young girls when an intruder entered through a window with a cut screen. He found a hammer in the house, attacked Karen in the kitchen, dragged her to the master bedroom, and stabbed her eighteen times. He removed some of her clothing, washed up in the bathroom, and left through the front door.

The girls slept through the attack and were unharmed. The killer left no fingerprints and took the murder weapon with him. For months, police pursued hundreds of leads. Then, on May 29, a second woman, Georgia Ann Warden, was killed in a nearly identical manner in her home, also with a hammer and in her bedroom, with an intruder who washed up before leaving.

Investigators linked both murders, along with a series of break-ins and assaults across the area, to a man named Dwayne Owen, a twenty-three-year-old with a long criminal record. His fingerprints matched those found on a book beside Warden’s body. Owen eventually confessed to both murders, laughing as he described how he had cut his hand during the attack on Karen and used paper towels to stop the bleeding. He had worn women’s gloves from the house to avoid leaving prints.

He was sentenced to death in both cases, but in 2007, his conviction in Karen’s case was overturned on appeal due to improper interrogation. He was retried and again sentenced to death. On June 15, 2023, nearly thirty-nine years after the murder, he was executed, with Karen’s younger sister present. In a fourth case, Christie Weismann, a fifteen-year-old girl from Glen Ellyn, Illinois, went to a nearby store on July 21, 1985, and never returned.

Her body was found in a field near a shortcut she often took, stabbed eight times. She had also been sexually assaulted. Her pearl ring was missing. Police had a DNA sample from the killer, but the technology was not yet available to use it.

The case went unsolved for decades. In 2015, a DNA match emerged from the FBI database: Michael Jones, a sixty-two-year-old man with a history of violence against women. He had been released from prison in 1983, two years before the murder, after serving only six years of a ten-to-twenty-year sentence for a sexual assault. Police had never considered him a suspect.

He was convicted in 2018 and sentenced to eighty years in prison. Christie’s mother expressed bitter regret that Jones had not served his full sentence, insisting that if he had, her daughter would still be alive. A man named Dana Henry, who had been wrongly suspected and jailed for refusing to give a DNA sample, told reporters the ordeal destroyed his life. Finally, the 1984 disappearance of nine-year-old Christine Jessop from Queensville, Canada, ended with her body found in a field thirty-five miles away, stabbed to death.

Police charged their neighbor, Guy Paul Morin, based on fibers and witness testimony, despite a weak timeline. He was acquitted in his first trial, then convicted in a second after the Crown appealed. He spent nearly two years in prison before DNA testing proved he was innocent. He was exonerated in 1995 and received a settlement of more than a million dollars.

The case became a landmark example of wrongful conviction and led to major reforms in the Canadian justice system. For decades, the true killer remained unknown. In 2019, a new investigator used genetic genealogy, a technique that had never been used in Canada before, to trace the killer’s family tree. The search led to Calvin Hoover, a close friend of Christine’s parents who had died in 2015.

DNA taken from his stored blood matched the killer’s sample perfectly. Hoover had known Christine well, and his wife had been aware that the girl would be home alone on the day she vanished. The original police had accepted his alibi without ever questioning him personally. Christine’s parents were devastated to learn that their trusted friend had been the murderer all along.

Morin told reporters that even after being proven innocent, the trauma and suspicion never fully left him.