Etan Patz will forever be remembered as the “little boy on the milk carton.”
The 6-year-old’s disappearance from his lower Manhattan neighborhood helped ignite a national missing children’s movement and changed the way authorities tracked down children who had disappeared.
On the morning of May 25, 1979, the blond-haired, blue-eyed first-grader was excited about reaching a milestone of his childhood: After months of begging his parents to let him walk the two blocks to his bus stop alone, Stan and Julie Patz had finally, although reluctantly, relented.
Etan set out from his SoHo loft wearing an Eastern Airlines Future Flight Captain cap and a huge grin. His parents would never see him again.
Despite a few different suspects — convicted pedophile Jose Ramos and bodega worker Pedro Hernandez — Etan’s body has never been found — nor have investigators been able to say with certainly what happened to the little boy.
The kidnapping and grisly murder of freckle-face first-grader Adam Walsh sent shockwaves across the nation in 1981.
On a hot July afternoon, the 6-year-old and his mother, Reve, headed out to a Sears department store in Hollywood, Fla., not far from where they lived.
With Reve’s permission, Adam stayed near a video game kiosk in the store while his mother looked at lamps just a few aisles away.
Within seven minutes, Adam was gone forever.
Two weeks later, on Aug. 10, two fisherman found Adam’s head in a drainage canal in Vero Beach, Fla., 120 miles north of the mall. It was the only part of Adam’s remains that were ever recovered.
No arrests were ever made in Adam’s abduction and murder, but for decades, authorities had one prime suspect — a drifter and admitted serial killer Ottis Toole.
Toole confessed to the crime 24 times, and new photographic evidence of his car discovered in the mis-2000s corroborated his claims.
Hollywood Police Chief Chad Wagner declared Ottis Toole the murderer of Adam Walsh in 2008 and officially closed the case.
What should have been a night of fun and frivolity for 12-year-old Polly Klaas — a slumber party with two of her closest friends on Oct. 1, 1993 — turned into the ultimate nightmare come true when a knife-wielding, bearded stranger broke in through her bedroom window and carried her off into the night.
Polly’s mother and sister had been sleeping in the very next room when the monster had crept into Polly’s bedroom, tied up her friends and put pillowcases over their heads, then took Polly. That monster was a 39-year-old ex-convict named Richard Allen Davis who’d served time for a previous kidnapping and who had a history of alcohol and drug abuse.
An evidence trail led police to Davis, who admitted to abducting and strangling Polly and led investigators to the shallow grave off Highway 101 near Cloverdale where he’d buried her.
Davis was tried and convicted of first-degree murder in 1996. He remains on death row in California’s San Quentin State Prison.
For nine days in the fall of 1994, South Carolina mom Susan Smith sobbed on national TV, her estranged husband David by her side, begging for the safe return of her young children.
She claimed her two boys, Michael, 3, and Aexander, 14 months, had been abducted during a carjacking, but the truth was something far different — and it was almost too heartbreaking to fathom. In a desperate attempt to rid herself of the boys so she could have a relationship with a local wealthy man, Tom Findlay, who’d told her he didn’t want children, Susan drove her car to the edge of a ramp at John D. Long Lake, got out, put the vehicle in drive, and watched as it slowly sank in the water, her babies still inside, still strapped into their car seats.
After increasing pressure from investigators, Smith broke down and confessed to her dastardly act. Police divers found her car 60 feet from shore, upside-down, her children dangling from their restraints.
On July 22, 1995, Susan was sentenced to life in prison. She’s locked up at South Carolina’s Leath Correctional Institution, near Greenwood, where she’ll remain until at least Nov. 4, 2024, when she is eligible for parole.
Beautiful little JonBenet Ramsey seemed to have the perfect life.
She lived in a sprawling brick Tudor home in the affluent suburb of Boulder, Colo., and she had two seemingly doting parents, John and Patsy, who lavished attention and material gifts on her. She also was a favorite on the child beauty pageant circuit, having numerous titles under her belt by the time she was just 6.
But the kindergartner’s charmed life came to an abrupt and violent end sometime in the early morning hours of Dec. 26, 1996, when she was brutally murdered and left, broken and lifeless, on the basement floor of her family home.
To date, no one has been charged in her death.
Suspicion quickly fell on John and Patsy, and for a period of time, even young Burke, JonBenet’s brother. In 1999, a grand jury voted to indict John and Patsy for murder, but then-district attorney Alex Hunter refused to file charges.
Patsy Ramsey died of ovarian cancer in June 2006, still living under a cloud of suspicion.
In 2008, the Ramseys were publicly exonerated when advances in DNA technology revealed the match of unknown male DNA in three separate places on two separate articles of JonBenet’s clothing. Its owner has yet to be identified.
Today, nearly two decades after her death, JonBenet’s killer remains at large.
On June 20, 2001, five beautiful children had their lives snuffed out in a Houston, Texas, bathtub by the one person who was supposed to keep them safe from harm — their own mother.
On that terrible morning, Andrea Yates — who had a long history of severe mental illness — said goodbye to her husband Rusty as he left for work and locked the family dog in its crate. Rusty had been warned by Andrea’s psychiatrist not to leave his wife alone with the children unsupervised. He had arranged for his mother to come over an hour after he left the house.
In the space of that hour, Andrea filled the bathtub and methodically drowned her children, one by one.
Yates was charged with capital murder in the deaths of three of her children and faced the death penalty if convicted. Prosecutors decided not to try her in the cases of two of her sons so that they would be able to try her again in the event she was acquitted the first time around.
Despite entering a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity, it took jurors less than four hours to find her guilty of murder. She was spared the death penalty but sentenced to life behind bars.
In 2005, the conviction was reversed because of erroneous testimony by a prosecution expert. The following year, she was found not guilty by reason of insanity at a retrial and ordered to a mental hospital. In 2007, she was transferred to a lower security mental facility in Kerrville, Texas, where she currently resides.
Nearly four years after a jury acquitted her in the death of her 2-year-old daughter Caylee, Casey Anthony remains one of the most reviled women in America.
The last time anyone saw little Caylee alive was on June 16, when she and Casey left the Anthony home (where Casey and Caylee lived) together. Over the course of the next 31 days, Casey stayed away from home. Her mother, Cindy, asked her repeatedly during the month to see Caylee, but Casey made multiple excuses as to why her mother could not see the child.
On July 15, Casey’s father George learned that her car had been towed and went to retrieve it. Both he and the attendant noticed a foul odor coming from the vehicle, which they later testified they believed to be human decomposition, though all that was found was a bag of garbage.
On Dec. 11, six months after she vanished, Caylee’s remains were discovered by a meter reader just a half-mile from the Anthony home. Her tiny body had been wrapped in her favorite blanket and stuffed into a trash bag. There was duct tape over her mouth.
In April 2009, prosecutors announced they were seeking the death penalty. Casey’s trial lasted six weeks, and On July 5, 2011, the world was stunned when the jury, after deliberating for just 11 hours, found Casey not guilty of first-degree murder and manslaughter. She was found guilty of four misdemeanor counts of providing false information to law enforcement.
There are arguably no crimes more chilling than those where children are the victims, whether they disappear without a trace or are slaughtered by unknown evildoers — or even more sinister — their own mothers. From the mysterious 1979 disappearance of six-year-old Etan Patz in New York City and the killing of Adam Walsh — son of former America’s Most Wanted host John Walsh — to the tragic murder of pageant princess JonBenet Ramsey and the senseless drowning of five children by deranged mother Andrea Yates, here’s a brief look at seven of the most notorious true crimes over the years involving murdered or missing children.
