The idea of a "perfect crime" has tantalized authors and criminals alike for decades. While the goal of almost every crime, from bank robbery to murder, is always to get away with it, very few criminals actually succeed. Most "unsolvable crimes" are eventually figured out, because most criminals simply aren't smart enough to not leave clues behind. Or they get away with one thing, but are too greedy to pull off only one heist, and trip up when they try something else.
But a few times in history, everything has lined up perfectly for a criminal to get away with something and not get caught. Sometimes it's skill, sometimes it's the incompetence of investigators, and sometimes it's just dumb luck that lets them ride off into the sunset with sacks of cash, art or jewels. Each one of these crimes tells a story - criminals one step ahead of the law, disappearances, epic shootouts, one guy who really, truly deserved what happened to him, and huge amounts of money that have simply gone into the wind.
Here are some of the most perfect crimes and cases of undetected crime committed in the last century - robberies and murders with no trace of who did them, or where the spoils went.
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Ken McElroy
In 1981, Ken Rex McElroy, a bully who had terrorized the citizens of tiny Skidmore, MO for years, was shot dead by at least two people in the middle of the day, in full view of dozens of people. But the town had had enough of McElroy's viciousness, which included dozens of felony charges for robbery, assault, attempted murder, child molestation, cattle rustling, and finally, shooting a man in the neck with a shotgun. But he was able to get off every time, and go right back to bullying the town.
So when police began investigating his murder, not a single person came forward to give evidence. While McElroy’s widow identified a man she thought was one of the shooters, nobody was willing to corroborate her testimony, and the case went unsolved – with the town breathing a sigh of relief that a man who had brutalized them for years was gone.
British Bank of the Middle East Robbery
On January 20, 1976, a gang of robbers suspected of having ties to the Palestine Liberation Organization broke into the British Bank of the Middle East in Beirut, Lebanon. No skill or trickery was employed, as they simply blasted through a wall and burst in with guns. As Lebanon was engulfed in civil war, nobody really noticed what was happening, and they occupied the bank for several days.
Unable to get into the bank’s main vault, the gang enlisted a group of Corsican safecrackers to bust in, and once they were inside, they plundered its contents. The bandits made off with anywhere from $20 million to $50 million worth of gold bars, currency, stocks, and jewels. The vast majority of the money was never recovered, and the thieves were never captured.
Northern Bank Heist
The ransacking of the Northern Bank headquarters in Belfast, right before Christmas 2004, is considered one of the largest bank heists in UK history. The night before the heist, the robbers visited the homes of two Northern Bank officials, dressed as police officers. They took the managers’ families hostage, and demanded access to the vaults, which they then plundered after business hours.
The Irish and UK governments blamed the Irish Republican Army, who vehemently denied any involvement. The heist still remains unsolved, and Northern Bank had to recall and reissue hundreds of millions of pounds worth of cash to prevent the loot from being spent.
Banco Central Tunnel Heist
A group of Brazilian burglars dug a 200 meter long tunnel under the vault of Fortelaza’s Banco Central in 2005. After three months of digging, the gang crawled beneath two city blocks to the bank, blasted their way through a meter of steel-reinforced concrete and emptied out the vaults.
Nearly $65 million was stolen, and the money wasn’t insured. Some of the cash was eventually recovered, and one of the masterminds of the robbery was found dead a while later. But 18 other culprits were never brought to justice, and their identities remain unknown.
Jimmy Hoffa's Murder
Famed labor leader Jimmy Hoffa had a lot of clout, and a lot of enemies. Those enemies were closing in on the embattled president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, with the FBI suspecting him of pilfering a staggering amount from the union’s pension fund. Two weeks after the investigation became public, Hoffa vanished leaving a Detroit restaurant with several known Mafia members.
After seven years of dead ends, tight lips, and go-nowhere leads, the FBI declared Hoffa dead. Despite rumors of his body being buried everywhere from a horse farm in rural Michigan to under the grass at Giants Stadium, no trace of the man, or his killer, has ever been found.
The Twin Jewel Thieves
On February 25, 2009, three masked robbers used a rope ladder to break into the second largest department store in Europe, Kaufhaus Des Westens (KaDeWe to locals), and stole $7 million worth of diamonds. In their haste to get away they left behind a single glove. What should have been a slam-dunk prosecution turned into a fiasco thanks to a loophole in German law, because the DNA found on the glove matched TWO people.
The culprits were identical twins, identified only as Hassan and Abbas O. German law requires that each person involved in a crime be individually convicted and because the twins’ DNA was so similar, it couldn’t be determined which one was actually involved in the crime. They were both set free, and the third robber was never identified.
The 300 Million Yen Robbery
On December 10, 1968, a Tokyo-based Nihon Shintaku Ginko Bank car that was transporting Toshiba employee bonuses amounting to 300 million Yen (worth $817,000 at the time), was pulled over by a policeman on a motorcycle. The cop warned the four passengers in the car that there was a bomb planted underneath, and they quickly vacated the vehicle, leaving the uniformed patrolman to crawl under the car. Moments later, smoke and flames poured out of the bottom, causing the occupants to run for it – whereby the cop jumped in the bank car and drove off.
The ensuing investigation involved 120 pieces of evidence, 110,000 suspects, and 170,000 police detectives. But it was all in vain, as the phony cop was never caught. In 1975, the statute of limitations ended and in 1988 all charges were dropped, but the culprit still never came forward.
Operation Goral
The Polish resistance to Nazi rule needed large amounts of cash currency to operate. So when informants learned of regular movements of Polish currency to a German-controlled bank in Krakow, the resistance hatched a plan to rob it. Over a year of plotting, as well as information from sympathizers in the bank, allowed them to pull off an astonishingly fast robbery, looting the equivalent of $1 million ($20 million today) and killing between six and nine German soldiers, with no loss of life on their side.
German authorities had no idea who pulled off the heist, and since they didn’t know if it was the resistance or common criminals, they didn’t take reprisals against the population of Krakow.
DB Cooper's Hijacking
On Thanksgiving Eve, 1971, a hijacker who called himself Dan Cooper boarded a Northwest Airlines flight in Portland, OR, wearing a suit and tie. Once the flight was in the air, he ordered a drink and passed a note to the stewardess saying, "I have a bomb in my briefcase. You are being hijacked." He demanded $200,000 in unmarked bills, two parachutes and a fuel truck.
When the plane landed in Seattle, Cooper exchanged the hostages on the plane for the money and parachutes, and ordered the plane to take off again. 30 minutes into the flight, Cooper deployed the back stairs of the airplane and jumped out. An exhaustive investigation turned up no clue as to where Cooper (who was misidentified as "DB Cooper" in a local news story) or the money wound up, though a small amount was found near the Columbia River some years later.
Dar Es Salaam Bank Robbery
On July 12, 2007, the Dar Es Salaam bank, one of the largest in Baghdad, was robbed by Iraqi security guards working the overnight shift. When the bank’s employees came into work that morning, they found the front door open, the bank vault doors ajar and nearly $300 million in cash gone.
Much of the money was eventually recovered, but the guards themselves were never found - it's thought they vanished into one of the many sectarian militias in the city.