20 Crimes SOLVED by One Small Detail

20 Crimes Solved by One Small Detail

Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we’re looking at twenty crimes that were solved by a seemingly insignificant detail.

Floppy Disk Metadata

Dennis Rader, better known as BTK, terrorized Kansas for decades. He bound, tormented, and killed ten victims before vanishing off the face of the Earth. But in 2004, craving the spotlight once again, he resurfaced to taunt the police. He actually sent a letter asking if a floppy disk could be traced. When police lied and said no, Rader sent a purple disk to a local TV station. Big mistake. Forensics analyzed the metadata of a deleted Word document on the drive. It listed the last user as “Dennis” and the registered organization as the local Christ Lutheran Church. A simple Google search then identified Dennis Rader as the church council president. The floppy disk he didn’t understand led police right to his doorstep, finally ending a thirty year reign of terror.

Walgreens Order Number

In February 2012, Edward Byam, Akeem Monsalvatge and Derrick Dunkley robbed a Pay-O-Matic in Queens, New York, wearing realistic masks and wearing police uniforms. They threatened the cashier with a gun and showed her a photo of her own home to prove that they knew where she lived. While this threat may have been successful in intimidating the employee, it also helped lead to their downfall. On the back of the photo was an order number and information that indicated the Walgreens where they’d developed the film. This allowed police to identify them - as did their polite thank you email to the company that manufactured the masks. Talk about a paper trail!

Murder Weapon

They say to be careful what you post on social media: apparently, this guy didn’t get the memo. In February of 2016, Rito Llamas-Juarez was shot and killed in Indianapolis, Indiana while meeting a buyer for an iPhone he posted on OfferUp. After meeting up, the buyer tried to rob Llamas-Juarez and then ultimately shot him. Police were able to locate the Facebook profile connected to the OfferUp account of the buyer, Larry Thomas. This profile turned out to be a gold mine for police when they discovered that Thomas posted a photo of himself with an AR-15-style rifle, which uses the same .223 caliber bullets that matched a shell casing found at the scene. Thomas was later sentenced to 60 years in prison.

A Bit of Phrasing

For nearly two decades, the Unabomber was a ghost. He killed three people and injured another 23, all while evading the FBI’s most expensive manhunt in history. But his downfall didn’t come from a fingerprint or DNA, but from a simple turn of phrase. After the Unabomber forced The Washington Post to publish his manifesto, David Kaczynski read it and froze. He recognized a specific, archaic reversal of a common proverb. The manifesto read: “You can’t eat your cake and have it too.” While most people say “have your cake and eat it too,” David knew his estranged brother, Ted, strictly used the inverted version. That single linguistic quirk was the key evidence that led David to turn his brother in. Ultimately, a genius mathematician was outsmarted by his own grammar.

Belt

On March 24, 2015, 18-year-old friends Cheyenne Antoine and Brittney Gargol from Saskatchewan, Canada posted a selfie on Facebook. They headed out for the night, but later, Gargol was found dead on the side of the road, with a belt nearby. While Antoine initially stated that Gargol left with a man she met that night, police determined that her story was untrue after looking at surveillance video. The selfie posted the night of Gargol’s murder came into play when authorities noticed that Antoine was wearing a belt similar to the one found at the scene. Eventually, Antoine admitted to killing Gargol by strangling her with her belt during a drunken argument.

A Parking Ticket

In the late ‘70s, David Berkowitz held New York City hostage. The so-called Son of Sam seemed like a phantom, shooting victims in parked cars with a .44 Bulldog revolver. But he was undone by the thing that gets us all - a simple traffic violation. On the night of his final murder, a witness noticed a strange man near the scene of the crime and called the police. They checked records and found that a yellow Ford Galaxie had been ticketed for parking too close to a hydrant nearby. The car belonged to one David Berkowitz. Police traced Berkowitz to his apartment and arrested him after finding a weapon inside his car. The biggest manhunt in New York history ended simply because the killer didn’t want to pay for street parking.

Mugshots

With the help of old photographs, the 38-year-old mystery of Janie Landers’ murder was finally solved. On March 9, 1979, 18-year-old Landers, who functioned at an 8-year-old level, disappeared from Fairview Training Center in Salem, Oregon, and her body was found five days later. Despite numerous witnesses, the case went cold. Decades later, in 2015, police found DNA on Landers’ clothing that matched that of Gerald Kenneth Dunlap, a man who had previously been convicted of sexual assault and worked in the laundry department at the training center. Because Dunlap could have inadvertently transferred his DNA to Landers’ clothing, authorities turned to mugshots of Dunlap and compared them to composite sketches from the original witness descriptions. They were a match, and authorities named the since-deceased Dunlap as the murderer.

An Expedia Map

Maury Travis targeted the women of St. Louis, filming his depraved actions and holding the city in fear. Desperate for notoriety, he sent a letter to the St. Louis Post Dispatch with a map to a victim’s body. He thought he was being clever, but he made a sloppy error. Turns out, he simply used a map obtained from Expedia.com, and investigators were quick to source it. They contacted Expedia, who traced the IP address of the user who viewed that specific map. The digital trail led straight to Travis’s home computer. His arrogance was his downfall, proving that even anonymous letters can leave behind digital fingerprints.

Pill Bottle

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but the police only needed a few letters to solve this case. In November 2012, Stephen Keating was arrested for producing illicit material of minors. He’d been caught thanks to clever analysis of a photo he’d shared of one of his victims. Special agents removed motion blur to decipher Keating’s first name and the first three letters of his last name on a prescription pill bottle in the background, along with part of the prescription number. After contacting the pharmacy, they identified Keating and arrested him. Luckily, Keating will have ample time to think about how he was responsible for his own downfall during the 110 years he’s spending in prison.

A Single Fingerprint

In the sweltering summer of 1985, the Night Stalker had Los Angeles paralyzed with fear. And the massive break came from two things - a single fingerprint and a brand new piece of technology. After finding the killer’s abandoned Toyota, investigators dusted the car and found a single, partial fingerprint on the rearview mirror. Luckily, the LAPD had just installed a new toy called the Automated Fingerprint Identification System. What used to take months of manual searching took the computer three minutes. It matched the print to Richard Ramirez, a petty criminal with a record. That one smudge on a mirror turned a faceless monster into a known fugitive, leading to his eventual capture by an angry mob.

Cleavage Coordinates

Technology is a hacker’s best friend… until it’s not. In April of 2012, Texan hacker Higinio O. Ochoa was arrested and charged with unauthorized access to a protected computer after posting the personal information of police officers on the internet. After sharing the information, he went on to taunt authorities by posting a picture that showed a woman’s cleavage and a sign claiming responsibility for the crime, using his hacker moniker. Because the photo was taken with an iPhone, investigators were able to extract data from the post and find the coordinates of where the photo was taken in Melbourne, Australia. This information, along with other photos of the same woman and additional information Ochoa posted online, led police to the hacker.

A Missing License Plate

The 1995 Oklahoma City bombing was a devastating act of domestic terrorism, killing 168 people. While the FBI searched the country for the perp, he was already in custody. You see, State Trooper Charlie Hanger had pulled over a beat up Mercury Marquis simply because it was missing a rear license plate. The driver was one Timothy McVeigh. Hanger arrested McVeigh both for the traffic violation and for carrying a concealed weapon. While McVeigh sat in the local jail cell, the FBI eventually traced the bombing to him. They ran his name and saw that he had been arrested north of Oklahoma City, and they raced to the jail to bring him into custody. If not for that missing plate, the world's most wanted terrorist just might have slipped away.

Car Grille

On April 7th, 2012, 56-year-old Betty Marcelle Wheeler was killed by a hit-and-run driver in Waynesboro, Virginia. While the driver fled the scene, a piece of their vehicle was left behind. Authorities posted a picture of the part asking for help from the public to identify the vehicle it belonged to. Discerning commenters were able to identify it as part of the grille of a Ford F-150. Police used this information to help them apprehend two suspects after finding the vehicle in question, which was still missing the piece.

Photo Receipt

John Wayne Gacy was a respected local contractor who secretly murdered 33 young men throughout the 1970s. He seemed untouchable - until 1978, when 15-year-old Robert Piest disappeared. Piest told his mother he was going to meet a contractor about a job. When the boy never returned, Gacy denied knowing anything, but police were suspicious enough to get a search warrant for his home. Inside, they found a crumpled photo receipt. This didn’t belong to Gacy, but to the victim’s co-worker, who had left it in Piest’s jacket earlier that day. Finding that receipt in the trash proved that Piest - or at least his jacket - had definitely been inside Gacy’s house. That single scrap of paper unraveled Gacy’s lies, leading police to the crawlspace where they eventually discovered the bodies of his victims.

Purse in a Tree

Teenager Tina Faelz was murdered on April 5, 1984 while on her way home from school in Pleasanton, California. The crime scene, a culvert along Faelz’s route home, didn’t offer many clues. She had been stabbed 44 times, but no murder weapon or fingerprints were left at the scene, and the case remained unsolved for decades. In 2007, Detective Dana Savage looked back at crime scene photographs and noted Tina’s purse in a tree. She found this odd and believed that the murderer must have touched it. FBI analysts found four drops of blood on the purse and matched it to Steve Carlson, a high school classmate of Tina Faelz. Carlson was sentenced to 26 years in prison, and he later confessed to the murder.

Topography & Buildings

A video appearing to depict Cameroonian soldiers executing two women and two children gained attention on social media in July 2018. BBC Africa Eye decided to look into the origin of the video by using forensic analysis of the topography, buildings, and other details of the video to determine the location of the murders. Through their analysis, BBC Africa Eye found that the video took place near the town of Zelevet between March 20th and April 5th of 2015. Despite attempts to persuade the world that Cameroonian soldiers were not to blame for the killings, the Cameroonian government eventually relented and arrested seven soldiers in connection with the murders. Four of the soldiers were subsequently sentenced to 10 years in prison.

A Watch’s Serial Number

When a fisherman pulled a body from the English Channel in 1996, police had a John Doe with no ID and significant decomposition. The only clue was a Rolex Oyster Perpetual still on the victim’s wrist. Because Rolex maintains meticulous service records, investigators traced the watch’s serial number to a man named Ronald Platt. But there was a twist. When police went to Platt’s address, they found a man already claiming to be him. Of course, this was not Platt, but a fugitive named Albert Johnson Walker. He had killed the real Platt to steal his identity, assuming the body would never be found or identified. He forgot that a luxury watch is practically a fingerprint.

A Yellow Sock

Sometimes a detail that seems mundane or insignificant can turn out to be critical. That was the case when Byron Wolfe, head of photography at Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University, was asked to help authorities looking into the 1991 murder of 27-year-old Denise Sharon Kulb. Kulb’s body was found in Delaware County, Pennsylvania wearing just a sweater and with the rest of her clothes piled on top of her. Wolfe was able to look at some of the 35mm negatives authorities had from the crime scene and restore them enough to note a yellow sock on Kulb’s body that matched one found in the apartment of the suspect, Kulb’s then boyfriend, Theodore Dill Donahue.

The Boxer Tattoo

This case from 1935 is truly stranger than fiction. It all began when a tiger shark in a Sydney aquarium vomited up a human arm in front of a crowd. It was immediately clear that the arm hadn’t been bitten off; it had been severed with a knife. With no body, police were stumped. Until they released a photo of a distinct tattoo on the forearm which showed two boxers sparring. A witness recognized the tattoo as belonging to Jim Smith, a missing bookmaker and amateur boxer. Fingerprints confirmed the match, unraveling a complex web of forgery and murder in the Sydney underworld. It remains one of the only times that a shark has effectively turned informant for the police.

A Telling Search History

In 2003, Robert Petrick played the grieving husband when his wife, Janine, went missing. He claimed she had run away, but police were suspicious of his story. The smoking gun wasn’t a weapon or a witness. It was his browser history. Investigators discovered that weeks before Janine disappeared, Petrick had searched for terms like “neck snap,” “cadaver decomposition,” and “how deep is the lake.” And the timestamps proved he was researching murder methods long before she supposedly ran away. This digital evidence destroyed his defense and even helped police locate her body in the specific lake that he had researched. A pro tip for criminals: the internet never forgets.

Do you think you would have caught these details? Let us know in the comments below!