01. Kari Lynn Nixon was 16 when she disappeared from her neighborhood in 1987. Unsolved Mysteries featured her case in May 1989, but unfortunately, it did not produce any good leads. Years later, Kari’s mom watched a New Kids on the Block video when she saw a girl in the audience whom she believed could be Kari.
Kari was also a fan of the group, so it seemed plausible that it could have been her. Unsolved Mysteries featured Kari’s story again on the show and used the NKOTB video clip. The members of the group also got involved and asked the girl in the video to step forward.
The girl did, but unfortunately, it was not Kari. The case was finally solved in 1994 when a man named Robert Jones confessed to the crime. It turned out that Robert was a bank robber. In exchange for a lighter sentence for his wife, who drove the getaway car during a robbery, he made a deal with prosecutors for information about Kari’s disappearance. Jones had abducted, raped, and murdered Kari and then buried her in a shallow grave a few miles from her home.
02 . A mother and her teenage daughters were on vacation in Florida when they were found dead in Tampa Bay. While on holiday, they had met a man who offered to take them on a boat ride around the bay.
He ended up raping and killing all three and dumping their bodies in the water. Their bodies were discovered bound, gagged, and weighed down with concrete blocks. The police had not much evidence to go on but a note with directions to a local hotel on it that was found in their hotel.
The handwriting on the note was not the handwriting of any of the three victims. After several more years of no leads, the police decided to put a copy of the handwritten note on a billboard. This proved to be the key that solved the case when they received handwriting samples of the killer. Oba Chandler was arrested two months later and executed for the crimes in 2011.
03. 17-year-old Daphne Boyden was murdered in her home in California in 1996. The killer set her body on fire and had escaped with Daphne’s 25-day-old son. Witnesses said they saw two girls leave the house, but the police had no other leads after that. Six years later, in 2002, the police were finally able to solve the crime. An anonymous tip came in after the case had been rebroadcast on Unsolved Mysteries.
It turned out that the killer was Latasha Brown, who, with the help of her cousin, shot Daphne and set fire to cover her tracks. Latasha had fled to Texas, where she obtained a fake birth certificate and then returned to California.
She raised Daphne’s son just two miles from the scene of the crime. Prosecutors said that Latasha had had a previous relationship with the baby’s father, and jealousy had caused her to commit the murder and steal the baby. She was sentenced to 37 years in prison.
04 . A man named John List killed his family in New Jersey in 1971 and then disappeared. In 1989, a woman was watching America’s Most Wanted and covered the case of the man who had murdered his family.
After showing a re-creation of what the man might look like now, the woman was shocked to discover that the man looked just like her neighbor. She called it in, and it turned out that she was right. John List, now going under the name Robert Clark was arrested and convicted 19 years later.
05. In 1986, Sherri Rasmussen was shot and bludgeoned to death in the apartment she shared with her husband. The police assumed that two robbers had broken in and murdered Sherri and the case went cold. Twenty-seven years later, the issue was solved, and a former Los Angeles police detective named Stephanie Lazarus was found guilty of killing Sherri.
Her saliva DNA matched to a bite mark on Sherri’s arm. Prosecutors claimed that Stephanie was jealous that her ex-partner, who she had feelings for, married Sherri, and she decided to get revenge. She was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to 27 years to life in prison.
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