Cold Case episodes Ripped from the Headlines.
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Season 1
- 1x01 "Look Again" — Murder of Martha Moxley
- 1x03 "Our Boy is Back" — Troy Graves, the Center City Rapist
- 1x05 "The Runner" — Murder of Daniel Faulkner
- 1x06 "Love Conquers Al" — Murder of Adrianne Jones
- 1x07 "A Time to Hate" — the Stonewall Riots
- 1x14 "The Boy in the Box" — The Boy in the Box
- 1x15 "Disco Inferno" — the Station nightclub fire
- 1x16 "Volunteers" — the Jane Collective
- 1x17 "The Lost Soul of Herman Lester" — Murder of Ben Wilson
- 1x19 "Late Returns" — Murder of Chandra Levy
- 1x21 "Maternal Instincts" — Murder of Cathleen Krauseneck
- 1x23 "Lovers Lane" — Murder of Krystal Dawn Steadman meets the Zodiac Killer
Season 2
- 2x06 "The Sleepover" — Murder of Shanda Shearer
- 2x08 "Mind Hunters" and 2x23 "The Woods" — the series first Serial Killer is a composite of Robert Hansen, Edmund Kemper and Charles Albright
- 2x11 "Blank Generation" — the Jonestown mass murder-suicide
- 2x16 "Revenge" — the kidnapping of Steven Stayner
- 2x17 "Schadenfreude" — Murder of Marilyn Reese Sheppard
- 2x19 "Strange Fruit" — Murder of Emmett Till
- 2x21 "Creatures of the Night" — Carl Eugene Watts, The Sunday Morning Slasher
Season 3
- 3x13 "Debut" — the Drew Peterson case, inverted (instead of being found guilty of the second murder because of similarities to the first, the second murder turns out to be an accident and the perp is found guilty of the first)
- 3x16 "One Night"— Larry Gene Bell also abducted two kids, forced one to write a last will and testament, and insisted on tormenting the parents and police.
- 3x21 "The Hen House" — Elfriede Rinkel
Season 4
- 4x01 "Rampage" — the Columbine High School Massacre
- 4x09 "Lonely Hearts" — Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck, The Lonely Hearts Killers
- 4x13 "Blackout" — Murder of Florence Unger
- 4x15 "Blood on the Tracks" — Sarah Jane Olson and the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion
- 4x23 "The Good Death" — Diane Pretty
- 4x24 "Stalker" — Joe Ture
Season 5
- 5x01 "Thrill Kill" — The West Memphis Three and several other false confession cases
- 5x08 "It Takes a Village" — the Atlanta Child Murders
- 5x12 "Sabotage" — Ted Kaczynski, Unabomber
- 5x15 "The Road" — John Jamelske. The key differences being that Jamelske eventually released his victims, whereas his TV counterpart didn't rape them as he did, but still ultimately left them to die.
- 5x18 "Ghost of My Child" — Kidnapping of Delimar Vera
Season 6
- 6x03 "Wednesday's Women" — Murder of Viola Liuzzo
- 6x05 "Shore Leave" — Disappearance of Andrew Muns
Season 7
- 7x03 "Jurisprudence" — the "Kids for Cash" scandal
- 7x17 "Flashover" — Cameron Todd Willingham
Miscellaneous
- Even when not based on specific cases, many other episodes reference the hot-button social issues of the day—the AIDS crisis of the early-80s ("It's Raining Men"), the stock market boom of the mid-80s ("Greed"), the dot.com boom of the late-90's ("Start Up"), etc. The oldest case revisited ("Torn") is the murder of an activist for women's suffrage in 1919.
