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This true crime trivia quiz has 228 free questions with answers and covers the cases people still argue about: Jack the Ripper and the canonical five, Lizzie Borden, Al Capone's tax bill, Bonnie and Clyde, the Lindbergh kidnapping, D. B. Cooper's parachute jump, the Great Train Robbery and its Monopoly-board fingerprints, the Isabella Stewart Gardner heist, the Mona Lisa theft, Ted Bundy, the Zodiac's ciphers, Charles Manson, the Brink's job, Hatton Garden, Bernie Madoff, the Unabomber and the 1962 Alcatraz escape. It also covers how crime gets solved: Scotland Yard and the Bow Street Runners, the Pinkertons, the first fingerprint conviction, Miranda rights, the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list and Interpol, plus a forensic-science round on rigor mortis, ballistics, entomology and geographic profiling. Easy questions open it; the back half will test a podcast obsessive. Every answer has been checked against a primary source, mostly Wikipedia's case articles, and shows its citation once you have answered.
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Q 01Which Truman Capote 'non-fiction novel' reconstructs the 1959 murders of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas?
In Cold Blood
In Cold Blood took Capote years of research, with Harper Lee's help; killer Dick Hickock had described the plan as 'a cinch, the perfect score'.
Q 02In police work, what does the term 'cold case' refer to?
An unsolved crime no longer under active investigation
An unsolved crime no longer under active investigation, typically a violent felony like murder, which carries no statute of limitations, so genealogy testing can revive it.
Q 03Which Latin phrase do investigators use for a criminal's characteristic way of committing crimes?
Modus operandi
Modus operandi, shortened to M.O., means 'mode of operating' and describes a criminal's habitual way of working.
Q 04Which discipline uses insects to aid legal investigations, particularly in estimating time of death?
Forensic entomology
Forensic entomology is the application of the study of insects and other arthropods to aid legal investigations, most commonly to determine the elapsed time since death.
Q 05What is the post-death stiffening of muscles used to estimate time of death called?
Rigor mortis
Rigor mortis, from Latin for 'stiffness of death,' is a post-mortem phenomenon characterized by the stiffening of the limbs of the corpse due to chemical changes in the muscles after death.
Q 06Which branch of psychology serves courts and the criminal justice system?
Forensic psychology
Forensic psychology applies psychological expertise to legal questions; its practitioners assess competency to stand trial and testify as expert witnesses in criminal and civil proceedings.
Q 07What writ forces a jailer to bring a prisoner before a judge and justify the detention?
Habeas corpus
Habeas corpus, Latin for 'you shall have the body', orders the custodian to produce the prisoner in court so a judge can rule on whether the detention is lawful.
Q 08Which specialty examines firearms, ammunition, and the flight of projectiles to help solve crimes?
Forensic ballistics
Forensic ballistics covers firearms, ammunition and projectile behaviour; examiners match the striations a barrel leaves on a bullet to a specific weapon, and the ATF's NIBIN database links cartridge cases across crimes.
Q 09Which discipline compares fingerprints, tyre tracks and ballistics in criminal cases?
Criminalistics
Criminalistics is the forensic-science discipline that examines physical evidence: fingerprints, footwear and tyre impressions, firearms and toolmarks, trace evidence and controlled substances.
Q 10Which profiling method did former Vancouver detective Kim Rossmo develop for serial-offender investigations?
Geographic profiling
Geographic profiling is a criminal investigative methodology that analyzes the locations of a connected series of crimes to determine the most probable area of offender residence, workplace, or other base of operations.
Q 11Which forensic branch recovers and analyzes evidence from computers, networks and phones?
Digital forensics
Digital forensics, originally a synonym for computer forensics, recovers and analyses data from any device that stores it, with sub-branches for network and mobile-device forensics.
Q 12Jack the Ripper stalked which district of the East End in 1888?
Whitechapel
He was also called the Whitechapel Murderer and Leather Apron in the case files.
Q 13The name 'Jack the Ripper' came from which letter, widely thought a journalist's hoax?
The Dear Boss note
Q 21How old was Charles Lindbergh Jr. when he was taken from his crib in March 1932?
20 months
He was 20 months old, born 22 June 1930 and taken on 1 March 1932; his body was found on 12 May 1932 a few miles from the family's Hopewell, New Jersey home.
Q 22In 1971 the hijacker known as D. B. Cooper parachuted from a Boeing 727 with how much ransom money?
$200,000
Cooper collected $200,000 in $20 bills and four parachutes at Seattle; only $5,800 of the cash ever turned up, found on a Columbia River bank in 1980.
Q 23The 1971 hijacker called himself Dan Cooper, so why is he remembered as D. B. Cooper?
A reporter's error
The separate 'From Hell' letter arrived with half a preserved human kidney.
Q 14How many Ripper victims make up the so-called 'canonical' group?
Five
The canonical five — Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly — died between 31 August and 9 November 1888; the police file holds eleven Whitechapel murders in all.
Q 15Lizzie Borden was tried and acquitted of the 1892 axe murders in which Massachusetts town?
Fall River
Fall River, Massachusetts: Andrew and Abby Borden were killed on 4 August 1892; Lizzie was acquitted in June 1893 and lived in Fall River until her death in 1927.
Q 16Al Capone was finally sent to prison in 1931 for what crime?
Tax evasion
Tax evasion, five of 22 counts, got him eleven years; the courts had ruled that even a gangster's illegal income was taxable.
Q 17Which 1929 killing of seven rival gang members in Chicago earned Capone the label 'Public Enemy No. 1'?
The Saint Valentine's Day Massacre
The Saint Valentine's Day Massacre, 14 February 1929, saw seven men linked to Bugs Moran's North Side gang shot in a Clark Street garage; the Chicago Crime Commission named Capone Public Enemy No. 1 in 1930.
Q 18Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were ambushed and killed in 1934 in which state?
Louisiana
They died in Louisiana on 23 May 1934, ambushed by a posse led by former Texas Ranger Frank Hamer on a road near Gibsland in Bienville Parish.
Q 19Despite their fame for bank robberies, what did Bonnie and Clyde actually prefer to rob?
Corner stores and gas stations
Corner stores and gas stations were their usual targets; bank jobs were fewer and riskier during the 1932–34 spree across the central United States.
Q 20Who was executed in 1936 for the kidnapping and murder of aviator Charles Lindbergh's baby son?
Bruno Richard Hauptmann
Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a German-born carpenter, was electrocuted at Trenton State Prison on 3 April 1936 after ransom gold certificates were traced to him; he protested his innocence to the end.
A reporter's error: early wire reports confused the hijacker with a Portland suspect named D. B. Cooper, who was quickly cleared, and the wrong initials stuck.
Q 24Britain's 1963 Great Train Robbery targeted a Royal Mail train running from Glasgow to which city?
London
The Glasgow-to-London Euston mail train was stopped at Bridego Bridge in Buckinghamshire by a tampered signal on 8 August 1963; the gang took about £2.6 million.
Q 25Which piece of evidence found at the Great Train Robbers' farmhouse hideout led to most of the arrests?
Fingerprints on a board game
The gang were playing the game with real stolen banknotes; the ringleaders got 30 years each.
Q 26How did the thieves gain entry to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in March 1990?
Posing as police officers
Two men posing as Boston police officers talked their way in, tied up the two guards and left 81 minutes later with 13 works, including Vermeer's The Concert.
Q 27Whose only known seascape, The Storm on the Sea of Galilee, was stolen from the Gardner Museum?
Rembrandt
Rembrandt painted The Storm on the Sea of Galilee in 1633, his only known seascape; Vermeer's The Concert, also taken, is thought to be the most valuable unrecovered painting in the world.
Q 28What job had Vincenzo Peruggia held at the Louvre before stealing the Mona Lisa in 1911?
Glazier
Peruggia had worked at the Louvre as a glazier fitting protective glass over paintings; he kept the Mona Lisa for more than two years before trying to sell it in Florence in December 1913.
Q 29In which state was Ted Bundy executed in 1989 for murders after his second jail escape?
Florida
He typically lured women by feigning injury or posing as an authority figure.
Q 30How many murders did the Zodiac Killer claim in his final 1974 letter to the San Francisco Chronicle?
37
The January 1974 'Exorcist' letter ended 'Me – 37, SFPD – 0'; the attacks police could attribute to him ran from December 1968 to October 1969 in the San Francisco Bay Area.