Murders take place either on the spur of the moment or they are premeditated. Police forces around the world find it easy to catch murderers who leave behind clues and footprints (fingerprints, if you may wish), but murders that are cold-blooded and premeditated often put police on the wrong trail.
In India, the Aarushi-Hemraj murders caught the media's attention in recent years. Both the UP police and the CBI tried their best to find out the murder weapons, but failed.
The murderer, or murderers are yet to be nailed down, primarily because of lack of evidence. There may be circumstantial evidences, but the fingerpointing may be based purely on conjectures.
Here we list ten of the most famous murders in modern history which till this day remain unsolved:
1. Oscar Romero
Archbishop Oscar Romero was a prominent Roman Catholic priest in El Salvador during the 1960s and 1970s, who was shot while celebrating mass at a small chapel near his cathedral .
The assassin or assassins were never caught, but it is believed tht they were members of Salvadorean death squads, including two graduates of the School of the Americas.
Romero, after witnessing numerous violations of human rights, had begun to speak out on behalf of the poor and the victims of El Salvador's long and bloody civil war.
He spoke out against U.S. military support for the government of El Salvador, and appealed to soldiers to disobey orders that harmed human rights.
2. Olof Palme
Sweden's prime minister Olof Palme (1982 – 1986) was shot while he was walking home with his wife after a visit to a cinema hall in Stockholm. The notive and identity of the killer still remain a mystery.
The nuclear accident in 1979 at Three Mile Island in the United States had a great impact in Sweden, and Palme contributed to a referendum (passed in 1980) to remove all nuclear reactors in Sweden.
After being elected prime minister again in 1982, Palme tried to reinstate socialist economic policies in Sweden, and he continued to be outspoken on matters of European security.
3. The Boy in the Box
In 1957, an unidentified Caucasian male, probable age 4 to 6 years, whose nude body, wrapped in a cheap flannel blanket, was found lying face up inside a large cardboard carton just a few feet from the edge of Susquehanna Road in Northeast Philadelphia.
The body was dry and clean. The boy's arms were carefully folded across his stomach. The finger and toenails had been recently trimmed short and neat. His hair had been cut recently – very close to the head, in a crude, hurried way, perhaps as a deliberate attempt to conceal the child's identity.
Small clumps of cut hair clung to his entire body, suggesting that someone had groomed him while he was unclothed, probably either shortly before or immediately after death.
There were many bruises all over the child's body; particularly on the head and face. All of the bruises appeared to have been inflicted at the same time. Despite recent DNA investigations in to the crime, it remains unsolved.
