r/coldcases

Hi everyone 👋 I’m new here and I’m desperate. I have not been able to get any information from the police department regarding my father’s homicide in November of 2001. My grandmother has tried for years and has been met with hostility from the investigators and records dept. The case has been unsolved and cold pretty much since 2001. I have tried to get info and I am met with the same hostility. Maybe someone can help? Even if it’s just advice on how to handle it. Thank you in advance for your kindness and patience, any help would be greatly appreciated 🙏🏽🫶🏼

San Luis Valley, please help us find justice for my aunt, Brenda Kay Shepard.

In 2008, my aunt Brenda, 45, was murdered and found chopped up and burning in a barrel in Saguache County. Some may remember her as “the woman in the barrel.” A small bone fragment was recovered and, through DNA testing and a bone marrow match to her mother, authorities were by the grace if god able to identify her.

A man named Daniel Bessey was later suspected of being responsible for Brenda’s murder. A few years after Brenda was killed, Bessey was convicted of a double homicide and is currently serving two life sentences at the Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility in Cañon City.
Although investigators, including the Colorado Bureau of Investigation and forensic experts in Quantico, reportedly concluded that they believed Bessey was responsible, prosecutors have not pursued charges in Brenda’s case because the available evidence is considered circumstantial.

We believe he had an accomplice, and our family has a person in mind whom we believe may have information about Brenda’s death. We are asking anyone who knows anything, no matter how small or insignificant it may seem to please come forward.

Brenda had a family who loved her. She struggled with addiction and did not have the best reputation, and we believe that affected how her case was viewed and investigated. But addiction does not make someone less deserving of justice. Her past does not determine the value of her life.

Brenda was a mother, grandmother, daughter, sister,  aunt, and someone who was deeply loved. Her family has never stopped wanting answers.

If you have information about Brenda’s murder or the people involved, please consider contacting law enforcement or Crime Stoppers. Even information you may have dismissed as unimportant could help bring her family the answers they have been waiting for.

Everyone deserves justice. Brenda deserves justice, too. Please help us bring her home in the only way we can now by finding the truth.

Over the weekend of 16 to 18 July 1976 a team came up through the floor of a Societe Generale vault in Nice. They had spent about two months underground first, digging a tunnel of roughly eight metres from the city sewer system towards the bank. Once they were inside they had the vault to themselves until Monday.

The preparation is the part that gets retold, and one detail in it is worth more than all the rest. Before committing to the tunnel, Albert Spaggiari rented a safety deposit box in the branch and left an alarm clock inside it, set to go off in the middle of the night. Nothing happened. That told him the vault had no acoustic alarm, which is the one assumption the whole plan rested on, and he had bought the answer for the price of a box rental. Everything after that was labour. That was the only moment where the plan could have died cheaply, and it is the moment he tested first.

They emptied somewhere around three hundred boxes and left a line painted on the wall to the effect that there had been neither weapons, nor hatred, nor violence. The total has never been settled. The figure that circulates is around forty six million francs and I would treat that as an order of magnitude rather than a number, for the reason that applies to most vault jobs. A safety deposit box is where people keep what they have not declared, so the only people able to total the loss accurately had every reason not to.

Spaggiari was arrested a few months later. In March 1977, during a session in the judge's chambers at the courthouse in Nice, he went to the window, opened it and jumped. A motorcycle was waiting for him. Accounts differ on what broke his fall. He was sentenced to life in his absence in 1979 and the French police never had him again.

He died in Italy in 1989 and even that has two versions. The press at the time ran the story that his body turned up in front of his mother's house in France. The account that now looks better supported is that his wife was with him when he died near Belluno and drove him back across the border herself. I have seen two different cancers named as the cause, so I am not going to repeat either.

Nothing from the vault has ever surfaced. In 2010 a book appeared under a pen name whose author claimed he had run the job, and in 2018 a man from Marseille stood trial in connection with laundering the proceeds. He told the court the book was fiction. He was cleared on that charge and convicted on unrelated business offences.

So the heist is closed and the ending is not. What I would like corrected is the second half. If anyone here has worked from the French court file rather than the press coverage, I want to know what it actually establishes about who was in that tunnel, because the version everybody repeats has been shaped by a book and by films rather than by the record.

I am looking for anyone that may have information about the murder of Roxanne Brown March 15th, 1985. If you know something, saw something or overheard something we want to hear from you. No detail is too small. Please help us find answers. DM or email me at sarahandryanbrown@mac.com

My partner and I are obsessed with true crime podcasts and kept wishing there was a way to actually solve a case together rather than just listen. So we built one.

It’s a printable cold case detective game designed specifically for two people. You download a PDF, print it or open it on screen, and work through 24 documents together — police reports, autopsy results, therapy notes with redacted names, witness statements, a forged letter, personal journals. Everything connects. Nothing is filler.

Case 001 is called The Perfect Wife. A woman is found dead at the base of her stairs. Her husband has an alibi. The case was closed in nine days. Her therapist never believed it.

Case 002 is The Inheritance. A 74-year-old man predicts his own murder in a handwritten note sealed in his safe. One of the 24 documents in the file is a forgery planted by the killer. Your job is to find it.

Both take 60–90 minutes, no host required, hints included if you get stuck.

We just launched on Etsy — shop is called ColdCaseVault if anyone wants to check it out. Happy to answer questions about how we designed them.

The link is: http://etsy.com/shop/ColdCaseVault

Over the weekend of 15 and 16 February 2003, a crew emptied most of the safe deposit boxes in the vault of the Antwerp Diamond Centre. Reported losses start at around a hundred million dollars. Almost none of it has ever been recovered, which is why this belongs here rather than in a heist thread.

The vault sat two floors underground behind roughly ten independent layers of security: a combination lock with about a hundred million possible settings, a magnetic field on the door, a seismic sensor, Doppler radar, infrared heat and motion detection, light sensors, and private security on top of the building's own guards. None of it was defeated by force. The crew got past all of it without a single alarm reaching anyone in time.

The way in was patience rather than technology. Leonardo Notarbartolo had rented an office in the building for years, which gave him a tenant's access, a tenant's badge, and the ordinary right to walk past the reception desk without anyone looking twice. Reporting puts the crew's preparation at around twenty eight months.

They were not caught in Antwerp. They were caught in a wood beside a motorway outside the city, where one of them dumped the team's rubbish instead of burning it. A local man who walked there regularly reported the mess. In it were gloves, camera film, envelopes printed with the Antwerp Diamond Centre's name, and a partly eaten salami sandwich carrying Notarbartolo's DNA. The sandwich also led investigators to shop footage of another member of the crew buying it.

Convictions followed. The stones did not turn up.

Two things here are worth arguing over, and I would rather be corrected than agree with myself on either.

The first is the number. The hundred million figure comes from claimed losses, and claimed losses in a room full of people who trade untraceable stones are not the same thing as verified losses. Nobody in that building had an incentive to be precise.

The second is Notarbartolo's own account. In a prison interview published in 2009 he claimed the job was arranged by a diamond dealer as an insurance fraud, that most boxes had been quietly emptied beforehand, and that the real haul was far smaller. It is a good story and I do not buy it, for a reason that is checkable rather than instinctive: the vault had been refused an insurance policy because of weaknesses in its security. A fraud built on a policy is hard to run without one. Writers and investigators on the case have generally not accepted his version either.

What I keep coming back to is the shape of it. Ten layers of engineering held. A man with a lease walked through all of them. Then the whole thing came apart because somebody would not stop at a bin.

If anyone here knows whether any of those stones have ever surfaced in a traceable way, that is the part I have never been able to settle.

Sources: the case is covered at length by Joshua Davis, writing in Wired in March 2009, which is also where Notarbartolo's own account appears. Guinness World Records lists it as the largest diamond theft on record. Belgian court reporting from the 2005 trial covers the convictions.

Oakley Carlson is a missing young girl near Rochester, Washington state. She was last seen alive in February 2021, at age 5, and reported missing in December of the same year. She was declared dead in 2025.

She was in the foster system, and CPS related things, before given back to her parents at around age 4 1/2. Her father is an ex-police man, Andrew Carlson. Both parents involved with drugs and alcohol.

Only a few months after she was given back to her parents, she was reported missing. Her six year old sister is said to have stated Oakley was "No longer around" with no further elaboration. Her 9 year old brother stated that their mother, Jordan Bowers, would put Oakley in the closet, and witnessed Jordan beat Oakley with a belt, and worried of her starving. Her sister further went on to say she was instructed not to speak of Oakley, and "she had gone out into the woods and had been eaten by wolfs".

Her parents were the main suspects, having been arrested,but no charges came of it.

There is no known perpetrator for her disappearance or murder, Oakley now living on in memories.

(Sorry it's not the most detailed, I just want awareness for this poor baby)