In the early morning of Aug. 9, 1976, the bodies of a young man and woman were found on a secluded dirt road in Sumter County, S.C. Each had been shot in the throat, chest, and back. Both were white and in their mid-20s. They bore no identification, but there were signs that they were wealthy: He wore an expensive Bulova watch and had had specialized dental work, and she wore a jade ring.

“They were clean, neat,” remembered county coroner Verna Moore. “She was beautiful, real pretty girl. He was also.”

Police circulated composite drawings across the country and asked anyone with information to come forward. The case was publicized on numerous national news programs, and police consulted Interpol, immigration authorities, and U.S. Customs investigators. In 30 years, thousands of tips have been offered, but every lead has fallen through. No one has ever explained who the pair were, how they came there, who might have killed them, or why.

“I have not given up on this case,” Moore said in 2001. “The reason I am haunted is, I cannot understand how two young people disappeared from somewhere and that their parents would not be looking for them. … I can’t count the times when somebody hasn’t asked, ‘Have you ever found out who those children are?'”

12/24/2023 UPDATE: In 2021, with the help of DNA evidence, the pair were identified as Pamela Buckley and James Freund. Their murders remain unsolved. (Thanks, Ron.)

In December 1895, Norwegian mining engineer Adolph Beck stepped out of his London flat and was accosted by a woman who accused him of tricking her out of some jewelry. Beck protested his innocence — he had been in Buenos Aires at the time — but the police accused him of an unsolved series of such swindles, and he was sentenced to seven years of penal servitude.

He was paroled in July 1901 and essentially the same thing happened again — a woman accused him of stealing her jewelry, he was arrested, and a jury found him guilty. He was saved only because another man was arrested for the same crime while Beck was awaiting sentencing. Wilhelm Meyer, it turned out, was the real swindler; Beck had been convicted twice for crimes he hadn’t committed.

They set him free and gave him £5,000, but he died a bitter man in 1909.

In December 1912 Hungarian tinsmith Béla Kiss told his neighbors that his wife had run off with another man. At the same time he began collecting large metal drums, telling the town constable that he planned to stockpile gasoline against the approaching war in Europe.

In November 1914 Kiss was drafted and left for the front, and in 1916 he was declared dead in combat. When soldiers visited the town that June in search of gasoline, the constable directed them to the dead man’s drums. On opening these they found that each contained not gasoline but the body of a nude woman, strangled and pickled in alcohol. A search of the house showed that Kiss had been luring women using newspaper advertisements in the name of Hoffmann, a “lonely widower seeking female companionship.”

In the surrounding countryside authorities found 17 more drums, each containing a corpse. Among them were Kiss’ wife and her lover.

It got worse. In 1919 Kiss was spotted near the Margaret Bridge in Budapest, and police discovered that the Béla Kiss who had been reported dead was in fact another man. In 1924 a deserter from the French Foreign Legion told of a legionnaire named Hoffmann who matched Kiss’ description and boasted of his skill with a garotte. But this Hoffmann himself deserted before police could apprehend him.

In 1932 New York detective Henry “Camera Eye” Oswald, who was renowned for remembering faces, insisted that he had seen Kiss emerge from the subway in Times Square, but crowds had prevented him from reaching him. Kiss was never apprehended, and his final fate is unknown.

After the Great Fire of London, a French watchmaker named Robert Hubert confessed to having started the blaze in Westminster. When he learned that the fire had never reached Westminster, he claimed to have thrown a fire grenade into a bakery window in Pudding Lane. It turned out that the bakery had no windows, Hubert was too crippled to have thrown a grenade anyway, and in fact he hadn’t even arrived in London until two days after the fire had started. He was convicted and hanged anyway.

Related: In 1797, the crew of the frigate Hermione mutinied and killed the cruel captain Hugh Pigot. An Admiralty official later reported, “In my own experience I have known, on separate occasions, more than six sailors who voluntarily confessed to having struck the first blow at Captain Pigot. These men detailed all the horrid circumstances of the mutiny with extreme minuteness and perfect accuracy; nevertheless, not one of them had ever been in the ship, nor had so much as seen Captain Pigot in their lives. They had obtained, by tradition, from their messmates the particulars of the story. When long on a foreign station, hungering and thirsting for home, their minds became enfeebled; at length they actually believed themselves guilty of the crime over which they had so long brooded, and submitted, with a gloomy pleasure to being sent to England in irons for judgment. At the Admiralty we were always able to detect and establish their innocence, in defiance of their own solemn asseverations.”

From Southwood Smith, “Lectures on Forensic Medicine,” in the London Medical Gazette, Jan. 20, 1838. See also The Campden Wonder.