Fans of true crime documentaries know of these three high profile cases that have intrigued people for years.

In Mesa, Arizona, Travis Victor Alexander was an American salesman murdered by his ex-girlfriend, Jodi Ann Arias. On Wednesday, June 4, 2008, Alexander was murdered. He sustained 27 to 29 stab wounds, a slit throat, and a gunshot wound to the head. On June 9, having been unable to reach Alexander, a concerned group of friends went to his home. His roommates had not seen him for several days, but they believed he was out of town and thus did not suspect anything was amiss. After finding a key to Alexander’s master bedroom, the group entered and found large pools of blood in the hallway to the master bathroom and Alexander’s body in the shower. While searching Alexander’s home, police discovered his recently purchased digital camera damaged in the washing machine. Police recovered deleted images showing Arias and Alexander in sexually suggestive poses taken at approximately 1:40 p.m. on June 4. The final photograph of Alexander alive, showing him in the shower, was taken at 5:29 p.m. that day. Moments later, the photos show an individual believed to be Alexander “profusely bleeding” on the bathroom floor. The investigators discovered a bloody palm print along the wall in the bathroom hallway; it contained DNA from both Arias and Alexander. On July 9, 2008, Arias was charged by a grand jury in Maricopa County, Arizona, for the first-degree murder of Alexander. She was arrested at her home six days later and was extradited to Arizona on September 5. Arias pleaded not guilty on September 11. She provided several different accounts about her involvement in Alexander’s death during this time. She first told police that she had not been in Mesa on the day of the murder and had last seen Alexander in March 2008. Arias later told police that two intruders had broken into Alexander’s home, murdering him and attacking her. Two years after her arrest, Arias told police that she killed Alexander in self-defense, claiming that she had been a victim of domestic violence.

JonBenét Patricia Ramsey was an American child beauty queen killed at the age of six in her family’s home in Boulder, Colorado. According to statements that Patsy gave to authorities on December 26, 1996, she realized that her daughter was missing after she found a two-and-a-half-page handwritten ransom note on the kitchen staircase at the Ramsey family’s residence. The only people known to be in the house on the night of JonBenét’s death were her immediate family: Patsy and John Ramsey and their son Burke. The ransom note contained specific instructions against contacting police and friends, but Patsy telephoned the police at 5:52 a.m. MST.  She also called family and friends. Two police officers responded to the 9-1-1 call and arrived at the Ramsey home within three minutes. They conducted a cursory search of the house but did not find any sign of forced entry. At 1:00 p.m. MST, Detective Arndt asked John Ramsey and Fleet White, a family friend, to search the house to see if “anything seemed amiss.” They started their search in the basement. John opened the latched door which Officer French had overlooked and found his daughter’s body in one of the rooms. JonBenét’s mouth was covered with duct tape, a nylon cord was found around her wrists and neck, and a white blanket covered her torso. John picked up the child’s body and took it upstairs. When JonBenét was moved, the crime scene was further contaminated, and critical forensic evidence was disturbed for the returning forensics team. Each Ramseys provided handwriting, blood, and hair samples to the police. John and Patsy participated in a preliminary interview for more than two hours, and Burke was also interviewed within the first couple of weeks following JonBenét’s death. There are two types of theories about the death of JonBenét. One is the family member theory. Boulder police initially concentrated almost exclusively upon the parents, John and Patsy Ramsey. According to Gregg McCrary, a retired profiler with the FBI, “statistically, it is a 12-to-1 probability that it’s a family member or a caregiver” who is involved in the homicide of a child. The police saw no evidence of a forced entry, but they did see evidence of staging of the scene, such as the ransom note. They did not find the Ramseys cooperative in helping them solve the death of their daughter. The Ramseys had said that their reluctance was due to their fear that there would not be a full investigation for intruders and that they would be hastily selected as the key suspects in the case.The second theory is the intruder theory. The police and the prosecutors followed leads for intruders partly due to the unidentified boot mark left in the basement room where JonBenét’s body was found.Early persons of interest included neighbor Bill McReynolds, who played Santa Claus; former family housekeeper Linda Hoffmann-Pugh,and a man named Michael Helgoth, who died in an apparent suicide shortly after JonBenét’s death. Hundreds of DNA tests were performed to find a match to the DNA recovered during her autopsy.   Sadly the killer has still not been found as of November 20, 2021.

Nicole Brown Simpson was the ex-wife of a former professional American football player, O. J. Simpson, whom she was married to from 1985 to 1992. She was the mother of their two children, Sydney and Justin.  Two years after her divorce from Simpson, on June 12, 1994, Brown was stabbed to death outside her home, along with her friend, 25-year-old restaurant waiter, Ron Goldman. Her body was discovered shortly after midnight on June 13. She was lying in the fetal position in a pool of blood. An autopsy determined that Brown had been stabbed seven times in the neck and scalp, and had sustained a 14 cm-long gash across her throat, which had severed both her left and right carotid arteries and breached her right and left jugular veins.[32] The wound on Brown’s neck was so severe, it penetrated a depth of 1.9 cm into her cervical vertebrae, nearly decapitating her.She also had defensive wounds on her hands. During their marriage, Simpson physically abused Brown. Though Brown called the police multiple times to report Simpson’s physical abuse throughout their marriage, Simpson was only arrested once, in 1989, after which he pleaded no contest to spousal abuse. O.J. Simpson was tried for the murders of both Brown and Goldman. In October of 1995, after a public trial that lasted nearly nine months and presented both circumstantial and physical evidence that Simpson had killed both victims, he was controversially acquitted.

.The Manson Family  was a commune, gang, and cult led by Charles Manson that was active in California in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The group consisted of approximately 100 followers, who lived an unconventional lifestyle with habitual use of hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD. Most were young women from middle-class backgrounds, many of whom were radicalized by Manson’s teachings and drawn by hippie culture and communal living.  The most notable murder commited by the family was the murders of Tate, Sebring, Folger, Frykowski, and Parent. On the night of August 8, 1969, Manson directed Tex Watson to take Susan Atkins, Linda Kasabian, and Patricia Krenwinkel to Melcher’s former home at 10050 Cielo Drive in Los Angeles and according to Watson, kill everyone there. The home had only recently been rented to actress Sharon Tate and her husband, director Roman Polanski. Manson told the three women to do as Watson told them. The Family members proceeded to kill the five people they found: Sharon Tate (eight and a half months pregnant), who was living there at the time; Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, and Wojtek Frykowski, who was visiting her; and Steven Parent, who had been visiting the caretaker of the home. Atkins wrote “pig” with Tate’s blood on the front door as they left. The murders created a nationwide sensation.  The Manson Family was closely tied with the band The Beach Boys.  Dennis Wilson was initially fascinated by Manson and his followers, referring to him as “the Wizard” in a magazine article at the time. The two struck a friendship, and over the next few months, members of the Manson Family – mostly women who were treated as servants – were housed in Wilson’s residence, costing him approximately $100,000 (equivalent to $740,000 in 2020). Much of these expenses went into cars, clothes, food, and penicillin shots for their persistent gonorrhoea. This arrangement persisted for about six months.

Elizabeth Short more commonly known  as the Black Dahlia, was an American woman found murdered in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, on or before January 15, 1947. Her case became highly publicized due to the gruesome nature of the crime, which included her corpse having been mutilated and bisected at the waist. An autopsy of Short’s body was performed on January 16, 1947, by Frederick Newbarr, the Los Angeles County coroner. Newbarr’s autopsy report stated that Short was 5 feet 5 inches tall, weighed 115 pounds, and had light blue eyes, brown hair, and badly decayed teeth. There were ligature marks on her ankles, wrists, and neck, and an “irregular laceration with superficial tissue loss” on her right breast. Newbarr also noted superficial lacerations on the right forearm, left upper arm, and the lower left side of the chest. On January 21, 1947, a person claiming to be Short’s killer placed a phone call to the office of James Richardson, the editor of the Examiner , congratulating Richardson on the newspaper’s coverage of the case, and stated he planned on eventually turning himself in, but not before allowing police to pursue him further. Additionally, the caller told Richardson to “expect some souvenirs of Beth Short in the mail”.In 2003, Ralph Asdel, one of the original detectives on the case, told the Times that he believed he had interviewed Short’s killer, a man who had been seen with his sedan parked near the vacant lot where her body was discovered in the early morning hours of January 15, 1947. A neighbor driving by that day stopped to dispose of a bag of lawn clippings in the vacant lot when he saw a parked sedan, allegedly with its right rear door open; the driver of the sedan was standing in the lot. His arrival apparently startled the owner of the sedan, who approached his car and peered in the window before returning to the sedan and driving away. The owner of the sedan was followed to a local restaurant where he worked, but was ultimately cleared of suspicion.  The murderer has still not been found.  There have been suspects through out the years. Steve Hodel a homocide detective even believe that his father was the one who murdered short.