Bernard Madoff presented himself as a respected Wall Street investment figure, but his business concealed a vast fraud that collapsed in December 2008.

John Gotti became an unusually public figure associated with New York organised crime. His 1992 conviction marked a turning point in a lengthy investigation into the Gambino crime family.

A series of attacks in Northern California during the late 1960s became linked to letters sent to newspapers by someone calling himself the Zodiac. The case remains one of the best-known unresolved criminal investigations in the United States.

Elizabeth Short was 22 when she was killed in Los Angeles in January 1947. The investigation became one of the city’s most discussed unsolved cases and a lasting example of the risks of sensational crime reporting.

In March 1990, 13 artworks disappeared from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The empty frames left behind remain among the most recognisable symbols of an unresolved art theft.

A passenger using the name Dan Cooper boarded a flight in November 1971 and vanished after a hijacking and ransom demand. Decades later, his identity remains unconfirmed.

In June 1962, Frank Morris and brothers John and Clarence Anglin disappeared from Alcatraz, leaving investigators with a question that has fascinated readers for decades: what happened after they left the island?

John Dillinger became one of the most widely recognised bank robbers of the 1930s. His escapes and the national search for him also became an early test of modern federal investigations.

Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow became folk-culture figures in 1930s America, but the FBI record describes a dangerous series of robberies and other offences rather than the romantic adventure portrayed in films.

Al Capone became a symbol of organised crime in Prohibition-era Chicago, but his most consequential conviction came from federal tax charges rather than a sensational gangland trial.