List of unsolved murders (21st century)

This list is incomplete; you can help by . (September 2021)

This list of unsolved murders includes notable cases where victims have been murdered in unknown circumstances.

2000s[]

• Gaffar Okkan (49), was a Turkish police chief who was assassinated on 24 January 2001 in an ambush in Diyarbakır, southeastern Turkey.^[1]
• Jill-Lyn Euto (18), a student, was found stabbed to death in her sixth-floor apartment at 600 James St, Syracuse, NY, on 28 January 2001. No arrests have been made.^[2]
• Bonnie Lee Bakley (44), was the second wife of actor Robert Blake. Bakley was fatally shot while sitting in Blake's parked car outside a Los Angeles area restaurant in May 2001. In 2002, Robert Blake was charged with Bakley's murder, solicitation of murder, conspiracy and special circumstance of lying in wait. In March 2005, a jury found Blake not guilty of the crimes. Seven months later, Blake was found liable in a wrongful death lawsuit brought against him by Bakley's children. Officially, Bakley's murder remains unsolved.^[3][4][5]
• On 1 May 2001, Chandra Levy (24), a college student who had just ended an internship with the Federal Bureau of Prisons, left her Washington, DC apartment building and disappeared. Her remains were found on 22 May 2002 in Washington's Rock Creek Park.^[6]
• Abraham Grünbaum (71), a Polish-Israeli orthodox rabbi who led a yeshiva in Bnei Brak, was murdered while on his way to a prayer session in Zürich, Switzerland. While connections were suggested to a right-wing terrorist group, nobody has been arrested in his murder.^[7]
• The body of a 15-to-16-year-old girl, nicknamed the Girl from the Main, was found floating along the Main in Nied, Germany on 31 July 2001. She had apparently suffered serious physical abuse prior to her murder, probably over the years. The decedent is thought to originate from the Pakistan-Afghanistan border area, but lived in Frankfurt am Main. Neither her identity or that of her killers has been established.^[8]
• Thomas C. Wales (49), was an American federal prosecutor and gun control advocate. On 11 October 2001, he was killed by a bullet fired through the window of his basement home-office in Seattle, Washington. No suspects have been charged, and the investigation continues.^[9]
• Henryk Siwiak (46), a Polish immigrant to New York City, was shot and killed on a Bedford-Stuyvesant street known for its heavy drug activity on the night of 11 September 2001. He is officially the only homicide victim in the city on that day, since the victims of 9/11 are not included in crime statistics. The diversion of police resources in the aftermath of the attacks constrained the investigation. No suspects have ever been identified.^[10]
• Digna Ochoa (37), was a human rights lawyer in Mexico.^[11] She was born in Misantla, in the state of Veracruz; she was killed on 19 October 2001 in Mexico City.^[12] Her body was found in the law office where she worked. A note was found by her body, warning the members of the human rights law center where she had recently worked that the same thing could happen to them.
• Five people died as a result of the U.S. 2001 anthrax attacks in autumn of that year. However, no one has ever been arrested in the case. Biowarfare researcher Bruce Edwards Ivins (62), killed himself in 2008^[13] just before he was supposedly to be charged. He was the FBI's prime suspect. Others, including some of the targets of the attacks, have disputed that conclusion or believed he may not have been acting alone.
• Kent Heitholt (48), sports editor of Missouri's Columbia Daily Tribune, was found beaten and strangled in his car at the newspaper's parking lot early on 1 November 2001.^[14] Ryan W. Ferguson was convicted of the murder in 2005 despite strongly protesting his innocence; eight years later he was released after the two key witnesses against him said they had been pressured to lie on the stand. No other suspects have been named in the case.
• Odunayo Olagbaju was a Nigerian politician who was an Osun State legislator. He was stabbed to death in December 2001^[15] right in front of a police station in Ile Ife, Nigeria.^[16] In May 2002, eleven suspects were arrested for the killing. In August, seven additional suspects were arrested. By the end of 2002, the original eleven had been freed on bail, but the incident remained under investigation and has not been solved.
• Nigerian Minister of Justice Bola Ige (71), was shot and killed in his Ibadan home on 23 December 2001.^[17] Several suspects have been tried in the case; all were acquitted. No other suspects have been identified.
• Daniel Pearl (38), an American journalist, was kidnapped^[18][19] on 1 February 2002 in Karachi, Pakistan, and was found dead on 16 May 2002. Pearl's murder remains unsolved.
• John Gilbride (34), a baggage handler for US Airways at Philadelphia International Airport, was shot dead in his car outside his home in Maple Shade, New Jersey, on 10 September 2002. He was involved in a custody dispute with his former wife, the widow of the founder of the radical group MOVE, and was worried that members of the group might carry out threats they had made to kill him. While other former members of MOVE believe the group is responsible, and current members assert in turn that the murder was either faked or that the government did it in an attempt to frame them, it has also been suggested that gambling debts were involved. No suspects have been identified.^[20]
• Jennifer Servo (22), a TV news reporter, was found beaten and strangled in her Abilene, Texas, apartment on 16 September 2002. Police have suspected either her former boyfriend or a co-worker she had begun a new relationship with, but so far lack the evidence to arrest either.^[21]
• On 30 October 2002, two gunmen went into a Queens, New York, recording studio and shot Jason Mizell (37), better known as Jam Master Jay, a founding member of pioneering hip hop group Run-DMC, in the head at point-blank range; he died shortly thereafter.^[22] No one was charged for the crime until August 2020, but conviction is still outstanding.
• Ilia Pavlov (42), a Bulgarian banker, financier and alleged member of the Bulgarian mafia, was shot to death in his office on March 7, 2003. While authorities that a sniper had taken him out, his killer was never arrested.^[23]
• Bulgarian-born Australian mobster Nik Radev (44), was shot fatally as he got out of his car 15 April 2003, in the Melbourne, Australia suburb of Coburg.^[24] Like many other Melbourne gangland killings, police believe it was related to his criminal activities, and suspect a rival drug dealer, but have not made any arrests.
• Edelio López Falcón (37–38), also known as "El Yeyo" was suspected to be a drug lord and former member of a major criminal group called the Gulf Cartel, who were based in Tamaulipas. Even though López Falcón survived an attempt on his life once before he was killed in Guadalajara on 6 May 2003.^[25] His killers are unknown, but investigators believe they were probably members of Los Zetas former paramilitary group, who were based in the Gulf Cartel's.
• Camoflauge (21), whose real name was Jason Johnson, was an American rapper, who was shot dead in Savannah, Georgia on 19 May 2003.^[26] The murderer remains unsolved.
• The body of Molly Bish (16), of Warren, Massachusetts, was found in woods near neighboring Palmer on 9 June 2003, almost three years after she was last seen by her mother when she dropped her off at her lifeguarding job. Several suspects have been investigated, but no arrests have been made.^[27]
• On August 13, 2003, a group of Serbian children were fired upon by unknown assailants while playing in Goraždevac, Kosovo. Two of them were killed, while four others were injured.^[28]
• In September 2003 a body was found among other bodies in Boston that was thought to have been the remains of Paul McGonagle (35),^[29] an Irish-American mobster who had disappeared in November 1974, but this has not been proven to be true. The bodies' identities remain unknown.
• South African memoirist and socialite Hazel Crane (52), a close friend of Winnie Mandela, was shot and killed on 10 November 2003, in her car while traveling to Johannesburg, where she was expected to testify in the trial of an Israeli man accused of killing her husband.^[30] She was the third witness in that trial to be killed.
• Katsuhiko Oku (45), was a Japanese diplomat who played rugby for Oxford and Waseda University,^[31] who was killed on 23 November 2003,^[32] by persons unknown. No suspects have ever been identified.
• James Adarryl Tapp Jr., better known by his stage name Soulja Slim, was an American rapper and songwriter. He was known for writing the U.S. number one hit "Slow Motion".^[33] Tapp died on 26 November 2003, after an assailant shot him four times, three in the face and once in the chest, on the front lawn of the home of his mother and stepfather, Phillip "Tuba Phil" Frazier of Rebirth Brass Band,^[34] in the Gentilly neighborhood of New Orleans.^[35][36]
• Retired Major League Baseball outfielder Iván Calderón (41), was shot in the back several times outside a bar in his native Puerto Rico on 27 December 2003.^[37][38] No suspects have ever been identified.
• Jonathan Coulom (10), was abducted on the night of 7 April 2004 in Saint-Brevin-les-Pins, Loire-Atlantique. His body was found, bound with a cinderblock, in a pond in Guérande on 19 May 2004. A prison inmate says that German serial killer Martin Ney killed Coulom,^[39] but has not has been charged with the crime. (Ney has been extradited to France as of January 2021 and is now facing a French judge for Coulom's murder later this year).
• Kaj Linna, a Finnish man who was accused of murdering a man named Robert Lindberg and was arrested in Swansea, Wales in 2004, three months after the murder and was remanded into custody on 12 July the same year. In 2005, Linna was sentenced to life imprisonment.^[40] He was later found to be innocent and set free.^[41] Robert Lindberg's killer has not been found.
• John Whitehead (55), half of the McFadden & Whitehead songwriting team, was shot fatally while fixing a car outside his Philadelphia home on 11 May 2004.^[42] It may have been a case of mistaken identity; however, no suspects have been named.
• Zhang Hong Jie (25), a communications student murdered in her flat in Belconnen, Australia in June 2004, whose body was discovered in January 2005. Hongjie's former boyfriend Zhang Long was detained as he was accused of killing Hong Jie, but he has not been charged with her murder.^[43]
• Paul Klebnikov (41), was an American journalist and historian of Russian history.^[44] On 9 July 2004, while leaving the Forbes office, Klebnikov was attacked on a Moscow street late at night by unknown assailants who fired at him and shot four times from a slowly moving car.^[45] He survived for a short while, but later died in the hospital. Though the murder appeared to be the work of assassins for hire, as of 2018, the organizers of the murder had yet to be identified.^[46]
• Joana Isabel Cipriano (8), disappeared on 12 September 2004 from Figueira, a village near Portimão in the Algarve region of Portugal. An investigation by the Polícia Judiciária, Portugal's criminal police, concluded that she had been murdered by her mother, Leonor Cipriano, and her uncle, João Cipriano, after witnessing them in incestuous rape. Her body was never found. Both suspects were convicted of murder based on apparent confessions, but later retracted their confessions, claimed that they are innocent and alleged police misconduct. Similarities to the disappearance of Madeleine McCann a short distance away in 2007 have been noted.^[47]
• Mac Dre (34), whose real name was Andre Louis Hicks, was an American rapper and record producer from California,^[48][49] who was murdered in Kansas City, Missouri on November 1, 2004,^[50] by an unknown person. The murder remains unsolved.
• Enrique Salinas (52), who was the brother of former Mexican president Carlos Salinas was found dead with a plastic bag over his head in a parked car in municipality of Huixquilucan, Estado de México outskirts of Mexico City on 6 December 2004.^[51] Who was behind Salinas' murder remains unknown.
• Deyda Hydara (50), was a co-founder and primary editor of The Point, a major independent Gambian newspaper. He was also a correspondent for both AFP News Agency and Reporters Without Borders for more than 30 years. Hydara also worked as a radio presenter in the Gambia called Radio Syd during his early years as a freelance journalist. On 16 December 2004, he was assassinated by an unknown gunman while driving home from work in Banjul.^[52]
• In 2005 ten members of the local Musaev family were kidnapped and killed in Grozny; they were later found in a mass grave.^[53][54]
• The Jeff Davis 8: Eight women, all involved in prostitution and/or drugs, were found dead in Jefferson Davis Parish, Louisiana, between 2005 and 2009. Investigators initially believed they were murdered by a serial killer, but reporting by Ethan Brown has suggested instead that there are multiple suspects, and local law enforcement personnel may be complicit.^[55]
• On 9 February 2005, the body of Geetha Angara (43), was found in a water tank at a Totowa, New Jersey, water treatment plant; the autopsy showed that before drowning she had been choked and beaten the previous day around the time she was last seen. Investigators ruled the death a homicide; despite minimal forensic evidence they were eventually able to narrow the case down to three suspects since access to the plant was tightly controlled and usually limited to employees only. But no arrests have ever been made.^[56]
• Rashawn Brazell (19) disappeared from his house in Bushwick, Brooklyn on 14 February 2005. Four days later, severed body parts were found on the tracks near the Nostrand Avenue station and were positively identified through fingerprints as being his.^[57] One of his arms and legs were found in a recycling plant in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.^[58]
• Françoise Chabé (28–29), was a French woman, murdered by strangulation on 26 February 2005 at her home in Humbercourt, in the Somme département of northern France. Her widower, Ludovic Chabé, was convicted of her murder in 2013, but was acquitted on appeal in 2015.^[59][60]
• Jonathan Reader (19), was brutally murdered while walking home from a night out in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He was found unconscious in the early morning of 7 August 2005 and later succumbed to his injuries. No arrests have ever been made.^[61]
• Brett Kebble (41), was a South African mining magnate with close links to factions in the ruling political party, the African National Congress.^[62] Kebble was shot dead near a bridge over the M1 in Abbotsford, Johannesburg at around 9 p.m. on 27 September 2005^[63] while driving to a dinner engagement with his business associate, Sello Rasethaba.
• The body of a toddler wrapped in a blanket off an interstate highway near Naperville in DuPage County, Illinois, on 8 October 2005 was identified six years later as Atcel Olmedo (2).^[64] The exact cause of death was impossible to determine due to the condition of his remains, but it appeared he had been severely beaten. His mother and stepfather are considered possible suspects; they are believed to have returned to Mexico.
• Stepan Senchuk (50), was the deputy of the Lviv regional council from 1994 to 1998,^[65] where he headed the Agrarian Party. He was shot dead on 29 November 2005 at 19:20 in his car.^[66] His killer is unknown.
• Adre-Anna Jackson (10), was a Native American girl who disappeared on December 2005 in Lakewood, Washington.^[67] In April 2006, children found her body that was skeletonized in Tillicum in a thicket.^[68] Whoever killed Jackson is not known.
• Tiago João da Silva (17), was a Brazilian robber who became known as the "Menino-aranha" (lit. spider-boy) because he scaled buildings to steal. He once scaled a 14-floor building^[69] and scaled more than 40 buildings^[69] during his robbery spree, beginning when he was nine.^[70] He was murdered on 18 December 2005 by unknown assailants.^[71]
• Tom Fox (54), an American peace activist affiliated with the Christian Peacemaker Teams, was abducted and killed by Islamic militants while on a mission in Baghdad, Iraq. His body was found in a garbage dump on March 10, 2006. The man believed to have ordered his killing, Muharib Abdul-Latif al-Jubouri, was never arrested, as he was killed a year later.^[72]
• Ifeoma Aggrey-Fynn (34), a Ghanaian-Nigerian media personality, writer and public speaker,^[73] who had gone to visit her parents at Aba in Abia State. She was on her way back to Port Harcourt on 2 June 2006 when the bus she was traveling in was attacked by armed bandits.^[74] As the driver was fleeing, the gunmen opened fire on the vehicle. Aggrey-Fynn was hit by bullets and died of the wounds.^[75][76] Her killer's identities remain unknown.
• Christopher Arepa and Cru Omeka Kahui, two New Zealand infants from a Māori family who died in Auckland's Starship Children's Hospital after being admitted with serious head injuries on 18 June 2006.^[77] Their family initially refused to cooperate with police in the homicide investigation into the children's deaths. The father, Chris Kahui, was charged with their murder. His defence was that the mother, Macsyna King, was responsible for the deaths. After a six-week trial, the jury took just one minute to acquit him.^[78] No other suspects have been named.^[79]
• Mario Condello (53), a member of the Australian Mafia, was fatally shot in the driveway of his Brighton home on 6 February 2006, the day before he was to stand trial for plotting to murder another mob boss, Carl Williams.^[80] While Williams would later be convicted of in turn conspiring to have Condello murdered, and police believe the killer was a hit man currently in prison for another killing, the murder officially remains unsolved.
• Big Hawk (36), whose real name was John Edward Hawkins was an rapper from Houston, Texas who was murdered on 1 May 2006^[81] by persons unknown in the very city that he was from. The murder remains unknown.
• Frauke Liebs (21), a student nurse disappeared on 27 June 2006 and on 4 October 2006, the skeletonized remains of her were found off a road near Lichtenau, Germany.^[82] She had last been seen leaving a bar on 20 June, and called her roommate several times in the days afterwards indicating she would come home but was being vague about when or how, and although the body was too decomposed to establish a cause of death, the police now believe she was being held against her will and was murdered.
• Robert Wone (32), was murdered on 2 August 2006, in his friend's Washington, D.C., apartment. He was "restrained, incapacitated, and sexually assaulted" prior to his death. The only individuals present in the apartment at the time were its three residents, all friends of Wone. They have denied involvement and insisted that an intruder committed the crime. Authorities claim that there was no evidence of a break-in: the apartment appeared to be washed and cleaned, the three residents appeared freshly showered, and the evidence was not consistent with the residents' accounts. In addition, the residents tampered with the crime scene, waited an inordinate amount of time to call 911, and exhibited strange behavior when paramedics and police arrived. Authorities believe that either some or all of the three house-mates murdered Wone and engaged in a cover-up.^[83][84]
• Ubiratan Guimarães (63), known as Colonel Ubiratan, was a colonel in the São Paulo Military Police and Brazilian politician. He was the commanding officer responsible for the Carandiru massacre. Guimarães was killed under unclear circumstances in his São Paulo apartment on 9 September 2006.^[85]
• Anna Politkovskaya (48), was a Russian journalist, writer, and human rights activist who was reporting political events in her country, mainly the Second Chechen War that was currently happening. She had previously been poisoned in retaliation for her work in journalism, but recovered after receiving treatment. On 7 October 2006, she was murdered in an elevator^[86] Several suspects were charged, but the identity of her killer remains unknown.
• Movladi Baisarov (39–40), was a Chechen warlord and former Federal Security Service (FSB) special-task unit commander.^[87] Baisarov was shot dead on the street in central Moscow by members of the Chechen extra-agency guard on 18 November 2006.^[88]
• Jukka S. Lahti (51), was murdered in Ulvila, Finland on 1 December 2006, and it is currently unknown who killed him despite investigations having been conducted.^[89][90]

Filmmaker and social activist Helen Hill was murdered in 2007.

• Helen Hill (36), an animator who was shot fatally during an attempted robbery of her home in the Faubourg Marigny section of New Orleans on 4 January 2007. Her death was one of six murders in the city that day, which inspired a protest march demanding a safer city in the wake of the disruptions caused by Hurricane Katrina. No suspect has ever been identified.^[91]
• Beginning in February 2007 and lasting until August 2008, a series of 13 murders of gay men were committed in Paturis Park in Carapicuíba, Brazil. The killer, known as the "Rainbow Maniac", has yet to be identified.
• During a 19 February 2007 convoy to the Central American Parliament in Guatemala City, one car carrying three ARENA party members of the Salvadoran Congress, abruptly left the others for a dirt road near El Jocotillo. The burnt and tortured bodies of all three, along with their driver, were found in the vehicle a short distance away the following day.^[92] Four Guatemalan police officers were arrested shortly afterwards, but then were killed in prison two weeks later. Attempts to further investigate the crimes have resulted in either acquittals of suspects or the murders of investigating officials.
• Frank Newbery was beaten to death inside his convenience store at Cooks Hill, Australia.^[93] His killer has not been found.
• Colorado marijuana activist Ken Gorman (51), was shot and killed in his home on 17 February 2007.^[94] The case remains open.
• On 14 March 2007, a torso was found that was thought to be that of Thiruchelvam Nihal Jim Brown (33–34), a minority Sri Lankan Tamil, Roman Catholic parish priest who disappeared with Wenceslaus Vinces Vimalathas during the Sri Lankan civil war on 20 April 2006 and is presumed dead.^[95] However, the Sri Lankan government announced in June 2007 that subsequent DNA analyses had proved that the remains were not those of either man.^[96][97] Its identity remains unsolved.
• Michèle Kiesewetter (22) was a police officer from Germany, who was killed in Heilbronn on 25 April 2007 by neo-Nazi terrorists.^[98] The police are trying to find out further clues as to the perpetrators.^[99]
• Snehal Gaware (21), a resident of Dombivili, Thane, Maharashtra, in India, was murdered on 20 July 2007,^[100] allegedly by her boyfriend,^[101] who was arrested and charged with her murder in April 2010. He had continued his education in the United States in the meantime. Police dropped the charges the following year, citing a lack of evidence.^[102][103]
• Almost a month after she was last seen being forced into a van at a Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, wet market, the body of 8-year-old Nurin Jazlin was found stuffed in a bag outside a Petaling Jaya shop.^[104] She had apparently died hours earlier of a bacterial infection resulting from injuries sustained during a sexual assault. Several suspects were arrested, but eventually released for lack of evidence; police have released a CCTV video showing the body being discarded by a motorcyclist, as well as several other people who may have been involved. However, they have not been able to identify any of them.
• Rizwanur Rahman (30), a computer graphics trainer who according to the Central Bureau of Investigation was forced to commit suicide on 21 September 2007 in West Bengal, India.^[105] He may have also been murdered.
• Paul Quinn (21), died on 20 October 2007 in Drogheda, Ireland, after being beaten with farm implements by a group of people with such length and severity as to break every major bone in his body.^[106] It is believed his death was the result of a feud with local IRA members. No suspects have been named.
• John Pezzenti (55), a wildlife photographer, was found shot dead in his Anchorage, Alaska, apartment 3 December 2007.^[107] Neither a motive nor a suspect has emerged from the investigation.
• Yuriy Chervochkin (22), was a Russian opposition activist who was fatally attacked on 10 December 2007. In the early hours of 11 December 2007, Chervochkin died in hospital.^[108] His case shook Russian opposition because he was attacked two days before the Dissenters' March and some observers remained convinced that the perpetrators of the crime were members of the Russian Militsiya.
• Benazir Bhutto (54), a former prime minister of Pakistan, was assassinated by gunfire and a suicide bombing on 27 December 2007, in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. Mishandling of the crime scene and poor evidence-gathering hampered the investigation, and the assassins and their backers were never identified.^[109]
• Lane Bryant shooting – on 2 February 2008, a gunman trying to rob a Lane Bryant store in the Brookside Marketplace in Tinley Park, Illinois, killed five women (a manager and four customers). The shooter has not been apprehended, although police do not consider it a "cold case" yet.^[110]
• Real-estate agent Lindsay Buziak (24), was stabbed an undisclosed number of times while showing a house to an unknown couple in Saanich, British Columbia, Canada, on 2 February 2008.^[111] Buziak had expressed reservations to her boyfriend, as the couple had claimed to have been referred to her by a coworker who was unreachable at the time. He had waited outside in his car for part of the time, and was taken into custody along with a friend but was later cleared. Buziak was stabbed from behind without any defensive wounds and the couple had made the appointment with a disposable cell phone. The investigation is continuing.
• Georgi Stoev (35), a former member of the Bulgaria mafia and later a writer who wrote extensively on organized crime, was shot to death on the streets of Sofia on April 7, 2008. Nobody was ever charged in his murder.^[112]
• VL Mike (32), was an American rap artist from New Orleans, Louisiana whose real name was Michael Allen. He was murdered by persons unknown on April 20, 2008^[113] in the very city that he was from. The murder remains unsolved.

Reconstruction of Amy Yeary, formerly known as Fond du Lac County Jane Doe, murdered in Wisconsin in 2008.

• Tonderai Ndira (32–33), a Zimbabwean MDC–T activist, was abducted and later killed by a group of armed gunmen between May 13–22, 2008. While it has been proposed that he was the target of a government-backed death squad, his killers have never been identified.^[114]
• Aarushi Talwar (13), and Hemraj Banjade (45), were murdered on the night of 15–16 May 2008 at Aarushi's home in Noida, India.^[115] Aarushi's parents were first suspected and charged, but the charges were dropped and their domestic servants became suspects. Then her parents were again charged, and were convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment, but were exonerated after an appeal in the High Court. No other arrests have been made and the murderer is unknown.^[116]
• Soran Mama Hama (20–21), was a reporter for Livin magazine in Kirkuk, Iraq. He was shot by unidentified gunmen and died in Kirkuk at approximately 9 p.m. on 22 July 2008 in the suburban neighborhood of Shorija. It is believed that he was the victim of corrupt police and government personnel, which he had previously reported on.^[117]
• Malalai Kakar (41), the highest-ranking woman in the Afghan police force, was shot and killed by an unknown assassin while leaving her Kandahar home for work on 28 September 2008.^[118] No suspects have been officially named although it is believed that the Taliban may be connected to the crime.
• Miguel Angel Villagómez Valle (29), was a Mexican journalist, editor and publisher who founded and operated the newspaper La Noticia de Michoacán in 2004 until his murder in La Unión, Guerrero, Mexico.^[119][120] On the night of 9 October 2008, he was kidnapped on his way home from work after he took two colleagues home. The state attorney said that minutes later, he was intercepted by at least two cars with armed individuals who abducted him. On the following day, police found his body at around 10 a.m. at the side of the road near a dump about a kilometer away from the exit to the town of La Unión. His body was covered in bruises^[120] and had six gunshot wounds to the back and one to the head.^[121]
• The Fond du Lac County Jane Doe, found on 23 November 2008 in Ashford, Wisconsin. No arrests have been made and her body has never been identified.^[122] Recent isotope tests indicate she was originally from the American Southwest and resided in the Midwestern region for less than a year before her death.^[123]
• Francis Nyauri (30–31), also known as "Mong'are Mokua", was a Kenyan freelance journalist for the Weekly Citizen newspaper in Nyamira, Nyamira County, Kenya.^[124] He had published several articles about local police officials exposing acts of corruption and malpractice^[125] approximately two weeks before his dead body was found decapitated with hands bound on 29 January 2009.^[126]
• Matt Stewart (31), was a nurse and father of three who was beaten and shot to death inside his home on 9 June 2009 in Mooresville, NC.^[127] His wife, Angel, claims the couple were attacked in their bed by an unknown intruder. Following the attack, Angel ran to a neighbor's house to call for help.^[128] In January 2010, Mooresville Police released a composite sketch of the suspect.^[129] Investigators briefly pursued the possible involvement of South Carolina spree killer Patrick Tracy Burris, only to later declare there to have been no connection between Burris and the unsolved murder of Matt Stewart.^[130] No arrests have been made.
• Lavelle Felton (29), was an American professional basketball player who was celebrating signing a new contract with a German football team at a Milwaukee, Wisconsin nightclub on 13 August 2009. After leaving and stopping at a gas station, he was fatally injured by an unknown gunman.^[131]
• Christian Poveda (41), was a Hispanic-French photojournalist and a film director,^[132] who was assassinated on 2 September 2009 in El Salvador, probably by a member of a mara.^[133][134]
• José Arturo Vásquez Machado was governor of the Cabañas department in the Republic of El Salvador from 1994 to 2003.^[135][136] During the night of 9 November 2009, Arturo Vasquez was taken to an emergency room in San Salvador^[137] where he died from wounds that he sustained in an attack perpetrated by unknown individuals.^[138]
• Ivan Khutorskoy (26), was a RASH skinhead, nicknamed "Bonecrusher,"^[139] who was a prominent member of the Russian anti-fascist movement. He was murdered in his home in a suburb of Moscow on 16 November 2009.^[140]
• José Luis Romero (44), was a Mexican radio journalist for Línea Directa Radio and Radio Sistema del Noroeste in Los Mochis, Sinaloa, Mexico; he was known for his reporting about drug trafficking.^[141] He disappeared on 30 December 2009 and had been missing for two weeks until his body was found tortured and brutally murdered.^[142] Romero's murder, along with other Mexican journalists who have been killed during their job, was interpreted by CNN as intimidation toward journalists.^{[143][144][145][146]}

2010s[]

• Mahmoud al-Mabhouh (52), a senior military commander of the terrorist group Hamas and cofounder of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, its military wing, was found dead in his Dubai hotel room on 19 January 2010. Initially his death was thought to be from natural causes, and Hamas, in a public statement, attributed it to cancer, but later investigation showed that he had been injected with suxamethonium chloride to paralyze him and then suffocated with a pillow. The Dubai police circulated pictures of 20 guests and visitors believed to have been associated with the killing, who they suggested were operatives of Israel's foreign intelligence service, the Mossad. Many had entered the United Arab Emirates on forged passports from other Western countries; the disclosures caused diplomatic tensions between those countries and Israel but did not lead to any public arrests or identifications.^[147]
• Lorenzo González Cacho (8), of Dorado, Puerto Rico, was pronounced dead on arrival at a clinic his mother brought him to on 9 March 2010. She claimed his injuries had resulted from a fall from bed; this was contradicted by an autopsy which revealed severe facial and head wounds, as well as some stabbing injuries. She and several other people in the house at the time have been publicly identified as suspects, but not charged.^[148]
• Pedro Alcantara de Souza, was a Brazilian land reform activist operating in the state of Pará.^[149] He was killed in the town of Belém on 1 April 2010 after being shot in the head five times.^[150]
• Scott Guy a farmer from New Zealand was shot dead at the gate of the family farm in Feilding in July 2010. Six months later, his brother-in-law, Ewen Macdonald, was charged with his murder, but was found not guilty so the murder remains unsolved.^[151]
• The body of Namibian schoolgirl Magdalena Stoffels (17), was found in a river near Windhoek on 27 July 2010; she had been raped and then murdered.^[152] Police arrested a local man they found washing some clothing in a nearby portion of the river shortly afterward and charged him with the crime due to scratches on his body and what they believed were bloodstains on the clothing. A year later, he was released because the forensic evidence did not provide any stronger link to the crime. The investigation is continuing.
• Amber Tuccaro (20), a Canadian First Nations woman who was last seen alive on 18 August 2010 hitchhiking to Edmonton with an unknown man. Her body was found in 2012 in nearby Leduc County.^[153]
• Marisela Escobedo Ortiz (51–52), was a Mexican social activist from Chihuahua City, who was killed while protesting the murder of her daughter that occurred in 2008.^[154] On 16 December 2010, Marisela was killed by an unknown assassin by a single shot to the head.^{[155][156][157]}
• A worker at a landfill outside Wilmington, Delaware, spotted the body of John P. Wheeler III (66), founder of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, contract employee of Mitre Corp., and an official who had served in the Department of Defense under Republican administrations, in some waste being unloaded on 31 December 2010. He had been beaten to death sometime after being seen at an intersection downtown the preceding afternoon; witnesses who had seen him in various locations around Wilmington over the previous two days said he had appeared somewhat confused and disoriented but sober, claiming at one point to have been robbed, but refused offers of help. He was reportedly involved in a feud with a neighbor and may have been involved in an attempted arson; no suspects have emerged.^[158]
• Peter Gibb (48), an Australian fugitive who died on the morning of 23 January 2011 at Frankston Hospital^[159] from injuries caused by three unknown men who attacked him at his home in Seaford. The case remains unsolved.
• Muzafar Bhutto (41), a Sindhi nationalist politician in Pakistan, was last seen alive on 24 February 2011. His body, with many gunshot wounds, was found near a Hyderabad bypass on 22 May 2012 fourteen months later.^[160] No suspects have been officially identified.
• The Dupont de Ligonnès murders involved the murder of five members of the same family in Nantes, in the département of Loire-Atlantique in north-western France, followed by the disappearance of the father of the family. Agnès Dupont de Ligonnès and her four children were murdered in early April 2011. Their bodies were found on 21 April 2011 at their home in Nantes. The father, Xavier Dupont de Ligonnès, disappeared at the same time and is considered the prime suspect in their murders. He has reportedly contacted the French media, but has not been captured.^[161]
• Phylicia Barnes is an American woman who is thought to have been murdered in Baltimore, Maryland who disappeared on December 28, 2010 and was found dead on April 20, 2011.^[162] The murder remains unsolved.
• Anjuman Shehzadi (33–34), a Pakistani stage and film actress,^[163] known for her bold dance.^[164] She died on 15 May 2011 in Lahore under mysterious circumstances.^[165][166]
• José Cláudio Ribeiro da Silva (52), a Brazilian conservationist and environmentalist, and his wife Maria do Espírito Santo (51), campaigned against logging and clearcutting of trees in the Amazon rainforest. They were shot and killed in an ambush attack on 24 May 2011 at a settlement called Maçaranduba 2, which is located near their home in Nova Ipixuna, Pará. José Cláudio Ribeiro da Silva had been refused police protection by local authorities, according to reports by the Diário do Pará and The Guardian.^[167]
• On the afternoon of 12 September 2011, Brendan Mess, Erik Weissman, and Raphael Teken were found with their throats cut almost to the point of decapitation in different rooms of Mess's Waltham, Massachusetts apartment.,^[168][169] their bodies sprinkled with $5,000 in cash and seven pounds of marijuana, an amount having an even higher street value at the time, suggesting robbery had not been the motive. It was determined that the three had been killed the previous evening. After Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed following the Boston Marathon bombing a year and a half later, which his brother Dzhokhar was later convicted of perpetrating, it was disclosed that he had been suspected of involvement in the Waltham murders, due in part to his acquaintanceship with one of the victims. Ibragim Todashev, another friend of Tsarnaev's who had been suspected of involvement, was killed when he reacted violently during an FBI interrogation shortly after the bombings. Police still suspect Dzhokhar, convicted for his role in the bombings, of being involved as well, but have not formally charged him.
• On the evening of December 27, 2011, Russ Faria returned to his Troy, Missouri, home to find his 42-year-old wife Betsy dead of multiple stab wounds, some of which had nearly severed her arms. He told 9-1-1 that he believed she had taken her own life since she was suffering from terminal breast cancer, but within days police arrested and charged him with murder, and he was convicted of the charge in November 2013. A local journalist exposed inconsistencies in the evidence and prosecutorial misconduct, and in late 2015 the conviction was overturned on appeal and Faria was retried and acquitted. A key reason for the appeal was prosecutors' failure to investigate Pam Hupp, a friend of Betsy's with a checkered past who had been the last person to see her alive, was found to have benefited financially from her death, and had changed her story about her whereabouts at the time of the killing several times. In 2017 Hupp pleaded guilty to another murder prosecutors believe she committed in an attempt to cast further suspicion on Russ Faria; she was sentenced to life without parole. The investigation into Betsy Faria's death has been reopened.^[170]
• Christopher Guarin (41), was a Filipino journalist, radio show host and a local tabloid publisher and editor-in-chief, murdered in General Santos City, Mindanao, Philippines. Guarin was the 150th Filipino journalist to have been killed since the democratic revolution of 1986.^{[171][172][173]} Guarin was attacked and killed on 5 January 2012 after receiving death threats.^[174]
• Wendy Albano (52), was an American businesswoman murdered in February 2012 in a hotel room in Thailand.^[175] Authorities in the U.S. got in touch with the U.S. State department, eventually leading to the arrest of a suspect hiding in India years later.^[175] The chief suspect was an Indian business associate who fled to India after her death. He has yet to be charged in court.
• Married Bangladeshi journalists Sagar Sarowar and Meherun Runi, both 27, were found stabbed to death in their Dhaka apartment on 11 February 2012.^[176][177] Their deaths, of all the many murders of journalists in the country, drew protests and public outrage both in Bangladesh and abroad. Both were working on stories at the time that could have led to violent reprisals. The government initially promised to have suspects in custody within days, but to date no arrests have been made.
• Bashir Ahmed Qureshi (54), another Sindhi nationalist leader, suddenly collapsed during a dinner with members of his party on 7 April 2012 in Sakrand, Pakistan. He died in hospital early the next morning.^[178] A week later, pathologists announced that he had been poisoned with phosphorus and ruled his death a murder; no suspects have been identified.
• Regina Martínez Pérez (48), a Mexican journalist and veteran crime reporter for Proceso, a center-left Mexican news magazine known for its critical reporting of the social and political establishment, was murdered early in the morning of 28 April 2012 in her home in the Felipe Carrillo Puerto neighborhood in Xalapa, the capital of Veracruz. When police went to her home to investigate in response to a neighbor's call about her door being open all day, Martínez Pérez's corpse was found on the bathroom floor.^[179]
• Lorena Escalera (25), known professionally as "Lorena Xtravaganza", was an American transgender performer known for her impersonations of Beyoncé and Jennifer Lopez.^[180] She was found unconscious and unresponsive in her Bushwick apartment on 2 May 2012. Escalera's apartment was set on fire after she had been strangled and suffocated.^[181]
• Fareeda Kokikhel Afridi, a Pakistani feminist and women's rights activist, was shot to death by two motorcyclists on July 5, 2012, while en route to her workplace in Hayatabad.^[182]
• The person or people behind the Annecy shootings, in which an Iraqi-born British engineer, several of his family members, and a French cyclist were murdered at a campsite in the French Alps on 5 September 2012,^[183] have never been identified officially, and the case remains under investigation.
• The body of Faith Hedgepeth (19), an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was found in her apartment on the morning of 7 September 2012; she had been sexually assaulted and beaten to death sometime in the preceding seven hours. Most records pertaining to the investigation were kept under seal for two years; when they were finally released, they revealed some evidence that might help identify the killer, including a note and an accidentally-recorded voicemail conversation.^[184] In 2016, the police released an image, based on DNA evidence left at the scene, of what the suspect might look like, after the DNA cleared two early suspects.^[185] In 2021 police arrested a suspect.^[186]
• Alfred Schakron (51), was a Belizean businessman and the ex-husband of People's United Party political hopeful Yolanda Schakron. He was murdered in broad daylight on 24 October 2012 outside a Belize City gym, leaving police mystified as to the motive or the identity of the killers.^[187][188]
• Mohammed Shuwa (72), was a Nigerian Army Major General and the first General Officer Commanding of the Nigerian Army's 1st Division. Shuwa commanded the Nigerian Army's 1st Division during the Nigerian Civil War. He was murdered in his Maiduguri home on 2 November 2012 by suspected Boko Haram militants.^[189]
• The Kharkiv beheadings, was a crime committed on 15 December 2012 Ukraine, in which a judge and his family were beheaded with a machete.^[190]
• Keith Ratliff (32), producer of the popular YouTube gun-enthusiast channel FPSRussia, was found dead from a gunshot wound to the head in his custom gun shop in Carnesville, Georgia, on the evening of 3 January 2013, about 24 hours after he had last been seen alive. Police believe he knew his killer, as none of his guns were taken or used to kill him, and he would have only allowed an acquaintance to get close enough to him to do it. The investigation is continuing.^[191]
• In the early morning hours of 11 January 2013, Paris police forced their way into a local Kurdish information center, where they found the bodies of Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) members Sakine Cansız (55), Fidan Doğan (30), and Leyla Söylemez, a younger woman. They had last been seen in the office where they were found the previous afternoon. Nothing had been taken, all were shot execution-style, and the killer or killers locked the door after leaving, suggesting that someone acquainted with at least one of the victims committed the crime with the intention of killing all three.^[192] The person who was captured by the police and is said to have killed them later died of cancer, so the murder remains unsolved.
• Irish police detective Adrian Donohoe (41), was shot fatally when ambushed by an armed gang which then robbed a credit union in Bellurgan, County Louth on the morning of 26 January 2013;^[193] he was the first Garda Síochána officer killed in the line of duty since 1996. No arrests have been made although the Garda have several suspects, all but one of whom have fled the country; the other is in prison on unrelated charges.
• Fausto Valdiviezo (53), was a senior Ecuadorian journalist and television presenter who was murdered^[194] on 11 April 2013. The investigation into his murder is looking at suspects.^[195]
• An explosion at a fertilizer factory in West, Texas, on 27 April 2013 killed fifteen people. After an investigation that took almost three years, the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives announced that the cause was an ammonium nitrate fire that had been deliberately set,^[196] although this finding has been disputed. No suspects have been named.
• Islam Bibi (38–39), a female Muslim who was the highest ranking police officer in Afghanistan in the Helmand province Headquarters and had also fought for feminism and was among the first to do so.^[197] Bibi was assassinated on 4 July 2013 by unknown persons after she had received multiple death threats^[198] and her murder remains unsolved.
• Otávio Jordão da Silva, a Brazilian amateur football referee,^[199] was lynched, quartered and beheaded by football spectators after he stabbed a player in a match he officiated on 30 June 2013.^[200][201]
• Daniel Pedreira Senna Pellegrine (20), better known by his stage name "MC Daleste" was a Brazilians funk paulista singer, songwriter and rapper. Daleste was fatally shot in the abdomen on 7 July 2013 while performing during a free show in Campinas, São Paulo, before a crowd of four thousand people. He died later the same day in Paulínia's City Hospital.^[202][203]
• Dwayne Jones (16), a Jamaican teenager who was killed in a violent mob in Montego Bay on the evening of 21 July 2013, after he attended a dance party dressed in women's clothing. The incident attracted national and international media attention and brought increased scrutiny to the status of LGBT rights in Jamaica.^[204]
• Fernando Solijon (48), a Filipino radio journalist for DXLS, an affiliate of the Love Radio Network in Iligan city, Philippines. Solijon was known for being analytical of alleged corruption and wrongdoing in the Philippines. Solijon was shot multiple times as he was getting into his car after drinking with friends. Solijon died on his way to the hospital on 29 August 2013.^[205]
• João Rodrigo Silva Santos (35), was a Brazilian footballer,^[206] who was murdered by suspected drug traffickers on 29 October 2013 in Rio de Janeiro.^[207]
• Two members of Greece's right-wing Golden Dawn political party were shot by passing motorcyclists and killed outside the party's offices in the Athens suburb of Neo Irakleio on 1 November 2013. A leftist organization claimed the attack was retaliation for the murder of an antifascist rapper several weeks earlier for which another Golden Dawn member is facing charges. The investigation is continuing.^[208][209]
• On 5 November 2013 the Mexican police had stated that several mutilated bodies were found at a ranch known as La Borbolla along the highway that connects Jiménez and Padilla and that Carlos Ornelas Puga a Catholic priest who is believed to have been kidnapped by gunmen in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas on 3 November 2013,^[210] may be among them.^[211] This has not be proven to be true and their murder cases remain unsolved.
• On 30 January 2014 family members Maoye Sun (50), Mei Xie (49), Timothy Sun (9), and Titus Sun (7), were found dead from gunshots in their home in Cypress, Texas.^[212] Officials ruled all four deaths to be homicides and estimated the time of death to be 24–25 January 2014. A window was broken and the back door was open. No weapons were found at the scene. Zhou Yangkang, a former Chinese Communist Party leader, reportedly confessed to ordering the hit in order to hide his illicit oil dealings, but the claim is disputed and not likely to be true, and their murder cases remain unsolved.
• Pedro Palma (47), was a Brazilian journalist, editor and publisher for the Panorama Regional in Miguel Pereira, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Palma was killed by two unknown people on 13 February 2014.^[213]
• Benjamín Galván Gómez (41), was a Mexican businessman, PRI politician and mayor of Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas between 2011 and 2013. Frequently threatened due to his anti-organized crime sentiment, Galván was abducted from a drugstore on February 27, 2014. His mutilated corpse was found the next day, and positively identified a month later. Several suspected Los Zetas members were arrested for his murder, but all were killed before they could go to trial.^[214]
• Reşat Amet (39), was a Crimean Tatar activist for ethnic Tatar causes and a Crimean Tatar hero.^[215] On 3 March 2014 was abducted by three unidentified men in military uniform from the "Crimean self-defense" detachments who took him away.^[216] On 15 March 2014 Amet's body was found by police in a forest near the village of Zemlyanychne in Bilohirsk district about 60 kilometers east of the Crimean capital.^[217]
• Rubylita Garcia (52), was a Filipino host for a local radio talk show on channel DWAD and a journalist for the daily tabloid Remate in Bacoor, Philippines. She reported on corruption in the Philippines.^[218] She was murdered on 6 April 2014 after being shot.^[219]
• On 6 May 2014, the headless body of Russell Dermond (88), was found slumped over a seat in his car in the garage of his house on Lake Oconee in Putnam County, Georgia. The severely beaten body of his wife Shirley (87) was found 10 days later, weighted down in the lake. The couple had last been seen alive 1 May. Russell's head has never been found and no suspects have ever been identified.^[220]
• Camille Lepage (26), was a French photojournalist who was killed during the conflict in the Central African Republic by persons unknown on 12 May 2014. Her death was described as a "murder" by the French presidency and it marked the first death of a Western journalist in the conflict.^[221]
• Octavio Rojas Hernández, was a Mexican reporter who was murdered at his home in San José Cosolapa, Oaxaca, Mexico on 11 August 2014,^[222] after a young man came to Hernández's door to ask about buying the vehicle that was parked outside his home. Rojas had just arrived at his home following a social event in Palma Sola, Cosolapa, and was about to eat, but left the house to talk with the young man about the vehicle.^[223] The unidentified man shot Rojas four times: two times in the head, once in his abdomen, and once in his left arm. After hearing the gunshots, his wife ran outside to see what had happened, but the murderer had fled the area.
• On 28 September 2014 John and Joyce Sheridan, were found dead in their Skillman, New Jersey, home. Firefighters found their bodies in the house's master bedroom after putting out a fire there. Both had suffered stab wounds which were found to have killed them; the case was initially believed by the Somerset County prosecutor's office to have been a murder-suicide.^[224]
• The Chens, a Chinese family of four, were found slain in their Guilderland, New York, home on 8 October 2014, stabbed and beaten with hammers early that morning, the first quadruple homicide ever to occur in New York's Capital District. Links to organized criminal activity, particularly gambling and the trafficking of immigrant restaurant workers from the Chinese province of Fujian to and within the U.S. have been posited, as well as to two other unsolved killings of Chinese families in the U.S. in preceding years. The investigation is continuing.^[225]
• Alexander Bednov (45), was the leader of the pro-Russian Batman Rapid Response Group.^[226] He was assassinated in Luhansk on 1 January 2015, with conflicting reports on who was responsible for his murder.^[227]
• Alberto Nisman, an Argentine lawyer and prosecutor who specialized in international terrorism, was found dead in the early hours of 19 January 2015, a few days short of making an appearance before the congress to accusate Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. He was found shot in the head in his apartment in the Torre del Parque building in the upscale Le Parc Puerto Madero development in the neighborhood of Puerto Madero in Buenos Aires.^{[228][229][230]}
• Rapper The Jacka (37), born Dominick Newton, was shot to death along an Oakland, California street on 2 February 2015. Police have not identified any suspects.
• Boris Nemtsov (55), was a Russian physicist and liberal politician, was assassinated on 27 February 2015, beside his Ukrainian partner Anna Duritskaya, on a bridge near the Kremlin in Moscow,^[231][232] with four shots fired from the back.^[233] Though five men were found guilty of agreeing to kill Nemtsov for 15 million rubles these men were hired to kill him, but were not the people who did kill him, so the case is unsolved.^[234]
• Kenyan investigative journalist John Kituyi (63), was attacked and beaten fatally by two assailants on motorcycles while walking home from work on 30 April 2015. A man was later arrested and charged with robbery after Kituyi's mobile phone SIM card was found in his possession, but no suspects have been identified in the murder.^[235]
• Gerard Davison (47), a commander in the Provisional IRA, was shot dead on the morning of 5 May 2015 on Welch Street in Belfast. No suspects have been named although press reports speculate that he may have been killed by fellow Irish nationalists who had a grudge against him.^[236]
• Lionel Pickens (31), better known as rapper Chinx, was fatally wounded during a drive-by shooting in Queens, New York on 17 May 2015.^[237] The investigation is continuing.
• Rubén Espinosa (32), was a Mexican self-taught photographer and journalist. He worked for AVC News agency and Proceso and Cuartoscuro magazines. He covered daily news and social protests.^[238] He documented several protests where individuals were assaulted. Espinosa was killed on 31 July 2015 in Narvate, Mexico City, Mexico along with four women.^[239]
• Ebby Steppach (18), an American woman who disappeared on 25 October 2015^[240] from Little Rock, Arkansas,^[241] and was found dead on 14 May 2018.^[242] Steppach has been determined to have been murdered and her killer is unknown.
• Giulio Regeni (28), was an Italian Cambridge University graduate who was disappeared on 25 January 2016 and was found murdered on 3 February 2016 in Egypt.^[243][244] Regeni was a PhD student at Girton College, Cambridge,^[245] researching Egypt's independent trade unions,^[246] and a former employee of the international consulting firm Oxford Analytica.^[247] The killer is unknown.
• The Ivashevka massacre, involved the murder of six members of a family and the critical wounding of a seventh on the night of 24 April 2016^[248] in the village of Ivashevka, Syzransky District, Samara Oblast. The victims included Colonel Andrey Gosht, the deputy head of police HQ in Samara Oblast and former head of the Syzran town police from 2013 to 2015, his wife, his mother and father, his sister-in-law and her daughter.^[249]
• Eunice Olawale, was a Nigerian Christian female preacher who was murdered by suspected Muslim extremists in the early hours of 9 July 2016 while evangelizing in the Federal capital city of Abuja.^[250][251]
• Emilie Meng (17), a teenager who disappeared in Korsør in the early hours of 10 July 2016. Five months later, her body was found in Køge Municipality.^[252]
• Seth Rich (27), a Democratic National Committee (DNC) staffer, was found with two gunshot wounds in his back shortly before dawn on 10 July 2016, near his home in the Bloomingdale neighborhood of Washington, D.C.. He never regained consciousness and died later in the hospital. Police have attributed his death to a botched robbery attempt; his wristwatch band was torn but nothing else was taken from him, and there were signs of a struggle.^[253] Conspiracy theorists have claimed he was murdered for leaking DNC emails to WikiLeaks.^[254]
• Pavel Sheremet (44), was a Belarusian-born Russian and Ukrainian journalist who was imprisoned by the government of Belarus in 1997, sparking an international incident between Belarus and Russia. Sheremet died in Kyiv on 20 July 2016 in a car explosion.^[255][256] The Ukraine Prosecutor's Office have said the explosion was caused by a bomb and labelled the death of Sheremet as an unsolved murder.^[257]
• Arsen Pavlov (33), had led the Sparta Battalion, an armed group fighting the Ukrainian army, in the ongoing War in Donbass.^[258] Pavlov was killed on 16 October 2016 by an IED explosion in his apartment's elevator^[259] in Donetsk. Pavlov's bodyguard was also killed in the blast.^[260] Donetsk People's Republic officials claimed the IED explosion was activated from a distance by a Ukrainian neo-nazi group, the self-styled "Misanthropic Division". The leader of the group, however, denied any involvement in the assassination.^[261][262] Ukrainian officials also denied the allegations, stating that Arsen Pavlov was "lucky" to be killed so he would not have to face justice for his crimes, further suggesting the rebel leader was likely assassinated by Russia's special forces as part of a wider purge against the early leaders of the rebel movement, pointing to the fact that about half dozen rebel commanders have been assassinated.
• Elwyn Crocker Jr (14), and Mary Crocker (13), were children discovered buried in their father's backyard in Effingham County, Georgia.^[263] Elwyn Crocker Jr. disappeared in November 2016,^[264] and his sister Mary Crocker disappeared in October 2018.^[265] Neither child was reported missing to the police, and were only discovered after a tip was received that Mary Crocker was deceased and then after talking with Crocker, Sr., police began to believe that they should search the grounds of the home. Various people were all arrested and were charged with concealing a death and child cruelty. No trial has yet taken place.
• Soe Moe Tun (34–35), a Burmese investigative journalist for the Daily Eleven in Monywa, Sagaing Region found murdered on 13 December 2016. He was best known for his investigative reporting about sensitive issues, such as illegal logging, the Letpadaung Copper Mine project, and illegal karaoke lounges in his local area.^[266][267]
• Mikhail Tolstykh (36), was a commander of the Donetsk People's Republic's Somalia Battalion of the Separatist Forces in the War in Donbass.^[268] On 8 February 2017 while working in his Donetsk office, Tolstykh was killed by an explosion said to be caused by the RPO-A Shmel rocket launcher fired from an unknown distance.^[269] DPR officials accused Ukrainian forces of carrying out the attack,^[270] while Ukrainian security officials claimed it to be the result of DPR infighting.^[271][272] It is unknown for certain who killed him.
• On 14 February 2017, police found the bodies of Abigail Williams (13) and Liberty German (14), on a Delphi, Indiana, hiking trail where they had last been seen the day before; they have not disclosed how the girls died but have called it a homicide. An image and audio recording of a possible suspect were found on one of their cell phones; despite being widely disseminated he has not been identified publicly.^[273]
• Denis Voronenkov (45), was a Russian politician who served as a member of the State Duma from 2011 to 2016. He was a member of the Unity party from 2000 to 2003 and the Communist Party of the Russian Federation from 2011 to 2016. Voronenkov was shot dead in Kyiv as he left the Premier Palace hotel on 23 March 2017.^{[274][275][276]}
• Amílcar Henríquez (33), was a Panamanian footballer. On 15 April 2017, Henríquez was killed in his hometown of Colón^[277] in a drive-by shooting.^[278] He was shot while leaving his house, two other people were also injured in the incident.^[279]
• On 18 April 2017 Professor of Molecular Genetics Tahira Malik was found stabbed to death in her house in the residential colony of the University of the Punjab in Lahore, Pakistan. She was an Ahmadi, a member of a minority Islamic movement, severely persecuted in Pakistan for its beliefs. A sectarian motive for the killing was suspected; the perpetrator remains unknown.^[280][281]
• Maksym Shapoval (38), was an officer in the Ukrainian military and head of the special forces of the Chief Intelligence Directorate. Shapoval had just recently returned from the conflict zone in eastern Ukraine, on 27 June 2017, when he was assassinated in a car bomb attack in central Kyiv.^[282][283]
• Houssenaly Zahid Raza was an Honorary Malaysian Consul in Madagascar who was assassinated in Antananarivo on 24 August 2017. His murder is suspected to be linked to the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. Raza had been tasked with returning pieces of debris suspected to be from flight 370 that had been washed up on Madagascan shores to Malaysia. Other people involved in the investigation of MH370 have received death threats as well.^[284]
• Daphne Caruana Galizia (53), was a Maltese journalist, writer, and anti-corruption activist, who reported on political events in Malta who on 16 October 2017, Caruana Galizia died in a car bomb attack close to her home.^[285][286] The perpetrators of this crime remain unknown.
• On 15 December 2017, the bodies of Canadian pharmaceutical magnate Barry Sherman (75), one of the country's richest men, and his wife Honey (70), were found hanging from belts, their hands tied, seated on the deck of their indoor swimming pool at their home in the Toronto suburb of North York. A month later the police, who had first explored a murder-suicide theory, confirmed earlier unofficial reports that the Shermans' deaths were, in fact, homicides. The investigation was hampered by legal resistance to search warrants for evidence at Sherman's notoriously litigious corporation, Apotex;^[287] as of April 2019 police said that they had a working theory of the crime, but have not publicly identified any suspects; their investigation is continuing.^[288]
• Iryna Nozdrovska (38), was a Ukrainian lawyer, who was reported missing on 29 December 2017. Her body was found in a river outside of Kyiv on 1 January 2018 and a murder investigation was opened. An autopsy revealed multiple stab wounds in her neck.^{[289][290][291]}
• Oliver Ivanović (64), was a Kosovo Serb politician who served as the State Secretary of the Ministry for Kosovo and Metohija from 2008 to 2012 and was also a member of the Coordination Center for Kosovo and Metohija from 2001 to 2008. He was assassinated by unknown perpetrators on 16 January 2018 in North Mitrovica.^[292]
• The 2018 Bulawayo bombing happened after a grenade exploded in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe at the White City Stadium on 23 June 2018.^[293] The explosion killed two people^[294] and left forty seven people injured, and the people behind this are not known.
• Dennis Day (76), who was an original cast member of The Mickey Mouse Club disappeared on 17 July 2018 in Phoenix, Oregon and was found dead on 7 April 2019 after being murdered.^[295] The case is currently unsolved.
• Alexander Zakharchenko (42), was a separatist leader^[296][297] who was the head of state and Prime Minister of the Donetsk People's Republic, a self-proclaimed state and rebel group which declared independence from Ukraine on 11 May 2014.^[298] Zakharchenko was killed by a bomb explosion in the café "Separ" on Pushkin Boulevard in Donetsk, on 31 August 2018.^[299] Preliminary reports say DNR's finance minister Alexander Timofeyev was also wounded in the blast.^[300] His murderer remains unknown.
• Fernando Albán (56), a Venezuelan–Colombian politician, activist, and lawyer who died while he was being held in the headquarters of the Bolivarian Intelligence Service (SEBIN) in Plaza Venezuela, Caracas. His death is claimed to have been a murder,^[301][302] but it is unknown who is responsible for it.
• Edmundo Rada, Venezuelan councilman and opposition politician was reported missing on 16 October 2019. He was found dead the following day on the side of the road out of Petare, Caracas,^[303] burned and with two coup de grâce shots in the back of his neck.^[304]
• Telésforo Santiago Enríquez, was a Mexican radio journalist and professor of indigenous education in Oaxaca who was ambushed and shot dead on 2 May 2019. His dead body was found in a vehicle that afternoon. Authorities reported that he had been driving in the neighborhood of Ampliación Tres Cruces when he was ambushed and killed.^[305][306]
• The 2019 Northern British Columbia murders was a spree killing that took between 14 and 19 July 2019 on both the Stewart–Cassiar Highway and Alaska Highway in the Canadian province of British Columbia.^[307] After a manhunt was conducted to find the killers, two suspects committed suicide between 23 July and 7 August 2019.^[308][309] The case is currently unsolved.
• Yoshiji Kigami (61), a Japanese animation director at Kyoto Animation, was among the 35 victims who were killed during the Kyoto Animation arson attack. Shinji Aoba, a mentally-ill ex-con, has been charged with murder in relation to the incident.^[310]

2020s[]

• Luca Attanasio (43), was an Italian ambassador to the Democratic Republic of the Congo who was killed in an attack on a World Food Programme convoy on 22 February 2021, along with carabiniere Vittorio Iacovacci (30) and driver Mustapha Milambo.^[311] The perpetrators of the attack are unknown. On 5 March 2021, Mwilanya Asani William, an attorney investigating the case, was also killed by gunmen in an ambush.^[312]
• Four dead youths (13–17), who had gone missing earlier in the month of March and were later discovered on 21 March 2021 after a shepherd's dog picked up their scent in the Bannu District, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan. It was revealed that the teenagers, whose identities later became known, had been badly tortured,^{[313][314][315]} and their killer is unknown. The cases have been named the "Janikhel incident" by media.

References[]