History Main / ExtremelyColdCase

** One of the mysteries in "[[https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Recap/MonkS2E15MrMonkGetsMarried Mr. Monk Gets Married]]" centers on foul play between prospectors during TheWildWest. Both this and the present-day case are {{reverse whodunit}}s, but Monk figures out how both crimes went down.
** Used as a quick gag in "[[https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Recap/MonkS3E10MrMonkAndTheRedHerring Mr. Monk and the Red Herring]]". Playing undercover as a security guard of a museum and pondering the clues of the murder of the week, Adrian randomly points out to Stottlemeyer that a Neanderthal skeleton that is on a nearby exhibit shows signs of having been murdered, rather than the natural causes the exhibit says were the cause of death (and that none of the anthropologists or analysts or other people who have seen it in the many years since being unburied noticed). Overall, it is just more evidence that [[MysteryMagnet Adrian Monk is a living lightning rod for murder mysteries]].

* Atapuerca's "Skull 17" has been lauded as the oldest unambiguous instance of murder, some 430,000 years ago. The owner of the skull, a male ''Homo heidelbergensis'', was hit with the same hard object, likely a rock, on two different areas of the skull shortly before his death, which excludes an accidental impact. A little more ambiguous is "Skull 5" from the same site and era, who received a single blow to the face and died months or years later from an infected broken tooth. Atapuerca itself has instances of cannibalism going back over 800,000 years, but it can't be excluded that those were eaten after their natural death.

* The 1809 death of Meriwether Lewis (of the 1804 Lewis & Clark Expedition) in the Tennessee countryside was considered a suicide by UsefulNotes/ThomasJefferson, which tarnished his contemporary reputation and legacy. However his body was only examined by a doctor once, in 1848, and he claimed that Lewis didn't kill himself but was murdered. From 1993 to 2010 about 200 members of Lewis's family petitioned for his body to be exhumed and subjected to forensic analysis, but this was ultimately rejected.

* The 1809 death of Meriwether Lewis (of the 1804 Lewis & Clark Expedition) in the Tennessee countryside was recorded as a suicide, which tarnished his contemporary reputation and legacy. However his body was examined by a doctor only once, in 1848, and that doctor claimed that Lewis didn't kill himself but was murdered. From 1993 to 2010 about 200 members of Lewis's family petitioned for his body to be exhumed and subjected to forensic analysis, but this was ultimately rejected.

* The dismembered, headless remains of a man were found in a cave in Lewiston, Idaho in 1979. He was speculated to be a hiker murdered a couple of decades before at most... until 2020, when he was identified through family DNA as Joseph Henry Loveless, a bootlegger who had disappeared after fleeing from jail ''in 1916''. In a real-life example of MeaningfulName, Loveless was jailed for the murder of his wife, and it is speculated that he was found and lynched by her relatives, as he was known to be dead and even had a [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cenotaph cenotaph]] to his name. Nevertheless, his is still listed as an open case by the Clark County Sheriff's Office.
* Another skeleton was found by hikers in October 2019, buried under some rocks in Mount Williamson, California. Family DNA identified him as Giichi Matsumura, a fugitive from a [=WW2=] Japanese-American internment camp in Manzanar. As it turned out, Matsumura was known to have died in a snowstorm after escaping Manzanar, but his burial site had been lost.
* The oldest entry in [[https://charleyproject.org/ The Charley Project]] missing person database is Dorothy Arnold, who disappeared in New York City in 1910. She was 25 years old at the time of her disappearance, and would be 115 years old if she lived to the year 2000. She's been excluded as the identity of the Saskatoon Lady of the Well if you are wondering.
* [[TheFateOfThePrincesInTheTower What happened to Edward V and his younger brother Richard of Shrewsbury after they were sent to the Tower of London in 1483, ostensibly for their protection, then never to be seen again after that summer? ]] For over half a millennium, the leading theory has been that the boys were killed by their uncle UsefulNotes/RichardIII (their legal guardian at the time of their disappearance) so he could have the throne for himself. The remains of two children were found in the tower 1670s by workmen and then buried as the princes. In 1933, the bones were removed and studied using more modern scientific techniques. However the study was sloppily done. It's unclear if the bones supposedly belonging to the boys were tested to see if they were male or female or even human as they were originally found with some chickens. One of the skulls was supposedly too large to have belonged to a child. Several of the bones had been destroyed by the original workmen as well. Queen Elizabeth II never allowed for the bones to be DNA tested, even after interest in Edward and Richard's fate was renewed due to the discovery of their aforementioned uncles' remains in 2012. Although, her son Charles III reportedly is interested in having the bodies re-exhumed and tested.

* A variation is the main plot of the Creator/AgathaChristie novel ''Postern of Fate'' (1973). Literature/TommyAndTuppence attempt to investigate a poisoning death from the UsefulNotes/WorldWarI era, decades following the death of most witnesses and suspects. But the killers in the case were the founders of a spy ring, and the detectives have current members of the spy ring trying to "silence" them.
* In Creator/ArturoPerezReverte's ''The Flemish Panel'' (adapted to film as ''Uncovered''), an art restorer finds the hidden message "Who killed the Knight?" in a 1471 painting, then decides to investigate the 500-year old murder with her friends.
* The Non-fiction book ''The Cases That Haunt Us'' (2000) by John Douglas and Mark Olshaker reexamine the cases of Jack the Ripper, Lizzie Borden, and the Lindbergh Baby through the lens of modern profiling among others.
* In "The Fall of the House of Voticky" by Creator/KarelCapek, a historian turns to a police investigator to try making sense of a 15th century noble family drama. Here, the reason isn't that it was unsolved or solved incorrectly - the case was plain, but ''no one bothered to write the details down''.

* The Richard III Society is looking into TheFateOfThePrincesInTheTower, investigating the possibility that UsefulNotes/RichardIII sent the boys away for their own safety. Meanwhile, there's talk that King Charles III might very well allow the remains speculated to be the princes, who were the disinherited sons of UsefulNotes/EdwardIV, to be tested using modern forensic science.

* ''Series/CSINY'': In "Death House", an episode loosely inspired by H. H. Holmes's "murder hotel", the [=CSIs=] come to the titular house after a person trapped inside calls 911. While trying to find the caller before he runs out of oxygen, they find the body of a man killed in 1923 and investigate his murder as if it was a fresh one.

* The oldest entry in [[https://charleyproject.org/ The Charley Project]] missing person database is Dorothy Arnold, who disappeared in New York City in 1910. She was 25 years old at the time of her disappearance, and would be 115 years old if she lived to the year 2000. She's been excluded as the identity of the Saskatoon Lady in the Well if you are wondering.

* The oldest entry in [[https://charleyproject.org/ The Charley Project]] missing person database is Dorothy Arnold, who disappeared in New York City in 1910. She was 25 years old at the time of her disappearance, and would be 115 years old if she lived to the year 2000.

* The Richard III Society is looking into TheFateOfThePrinces in the Tower, investigating the possibility that UsefulNotes/RichardIII sent the boys away for their own safety. Meanwhile, there's talk that King Charles III might very well allow the remains speculated to be the princes, who were the disinherited sons of UsefulNotes/KingEdwardIV, to be tested using modern forensic science.

* Used as a quick gag on an episode of ''Series/{{Monk}}'': while playing undercover as a security guard of a museum and pondering the clues of the murder of the week, Adrian randomly points out to Stottlemeyer that a Neanderthal skeleton that is on a nearby exhibit shows signs of having been murdered, rather than the natural causes the exhibit says were the cause of death (and that none of the anthropologists or analysts or other people who have seen it in the many years since being unburied noticed). Overall, it is just more evidence that [[MysteryMagnet Adrian Monk is a living lightning rod for murder mysteries]].