The Cold Case Ledger

On the morning of May 25, 1979, six-year-old Etan Patz walked two blocks from his SoHo loft to his school bus stop — alone for the very first time. He never arrived. The case became one of the most consequential child disappearance cases in American history: it gave us National Missing Children's Day, the milk carton campaign, and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. It also gave us 33 years of unanswered questions, a false suspect, a dramatic 2012 confession, two criminal trials, and a stunning 2025 appeals court ruling that overturned the only conviction the case ever produced. As of today, a third trial looms — and the U.S. Supreme Court may decide the case's fate any day.

In December 1978, a missing teenager in Des Plaines, Illinois led police to a quiet contractor's house — and one of the most disturbing discoveries in American criminal history. EP13 traces the full arc of John Wayne Gacy: a childhood shaped by abuse and shame, an elaborate double life as Pogo the Clown, the methodical killing of 33 young men and boys, a trial in which he claimed insanity and called himself the thirty-fourth victim, and a case that still carries five unidentified names.

On May 5, 1993, three eight-year-old boys vanished after school in West Memphis, Arkansas — and were found murdered the following afternoon in a drainage ditch. Within weeks, police had arrested three local teenagers. The evidence against them was almost nothing. What followed was one of the most documented wrongful conviction cases in American history: a coerced confession from a teenager with a 72 IQ, a prosecution built on Satanic panic, and eighteen years of a man sitting on death row for a crime the DNA evidence says he didn't commit. As of late 2025, the case evidence sits at a laboratory waiting to be tested. The real killer has never been charged.