True Crime
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8correct to beat the crowd
This true crime trivia quiz has 276 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.
30 of 276 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
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 six years; his childhood friend Harper Lee went with him to Kansas and helped interview townspeople and investigators, filling thousands of pages of notes.
Q 02In police work, what is a 'cold case'?
An unsolved crime no longer under active investigation
An unsolved crime no longer under active investigation, usually a murder or other serious felony; the file stays open, so a new witness or fresh forensic testing can revive it years later.
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'; it covers how an offender commits a crime, avoids detection and gets away, so matching M.O.s can link separate crimes.
Q 04Which discipline uses insects to aid legal investigations, particularly in estimating time of death?
Forensic entomology
Forensic entomology reads insects as a clock: blowflies are among the first to reach a body, and the growth stage of their maggots shows roughly how long ago death occurred.
Q 05What is the post-death stiffening of muscles used to estimate time of death called?
Rigor mortis
Rigor mortis, Latin for 'stiffness of death', sets in a few hours after death and fades again within days as the muscles relax, which is why its progress helps date a 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 roughly 'you shall have the body', does more than summon the prisoner: a judge who finds no lawful ground for the detention orders a release.
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 toolmarks left at crime scenes?
Criminalistics
Criminalistics can tie a track to a single vehicle because use gives every tyre its own pattern of wear, cuts and nicks, and its impression carries the same flaws.
Q 10Which method, devised by Vancouver detective Kim Rossmo, uses the sites of linked crimes to estimate where an offender lives?
Geographic profiling
Geographic profiling assumes offenders strike near home but not too near; the same maths has since been used to trace disease outbreaks and, in 2016, to test theories about Banksy's identity.
Q 11Which investigative specialty recovers evidence from seized computers, networks and phones?
Digital forensics
Digital forensics began as a synonym for computer forensics; examiners copy a seized drive through a write blocker and work only on the duplicate, so the original evidence is never altered.
Q 12Jack the Ripper stalked which district of the East End in 1888?
Whitechapel
Whitechapel was one of the East End's poorest, most overcrowded districts; the uproar over the failure to catch the killer turned on the home secretary and on police commissioner Charles Warren, who resigned that November.
Q 13The 1888 'Dear Boss' letter, which coined the name Jack the Ripper, is widely thought to be whose hoax?
A journalist
Q 21How did the Lindbergh baby's kidnapper reach the second-floor nursery in 1932?
A homemade ladder
A homemade ladder, left behind in sections, became key evidence: wood expert Arthur Koehler matched one of its rails to the flooring in the suspect's attic.
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
A journalist: the leading theory is that the letter was faked to keep the Ripper story alive and newspapers selling, and a 2018 linguistic analysis pointed the same way.
Q 14How many Ripper victims make up the so-called 'canonical' group?
Five
Five: senior detective Melville Macnaghten wrote in 1894 that the killer had 'five victims and five victims only', though the police file on the district's murders ran to eleven.
Q 15Lizzie Borden's father and stepmother were killed with a hatchet in 1892 at their home in which Massachusetts city?
Fall River
Fall River: Andrew and Abby Borden were killed on 4 August 1892; Lizzie was tried in nearby New Bedford, acquitted in June 1893, and lived on 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 got him eleven years; the Supreme Court had ruled in 1927 that even illegal income was taxable, so prosecutors went after his unpaid taxes rather than his rackets.
Q 17Which 1929 Chicago gang killing of seven men earned Al Capone the label 'Public Enemy No. 1'?
The Saint Valentine's Day Massacre
The Saint Valentine's Day Massacre saw seven men lined up against a garage wall on Clark Street and shot; Bugs Moran, the gang leader thought to be the real target, missed it by minutes.
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 19Though famed as bank robbers, Bonnie and Clyde more often held up what?
Corner stores and gas stations
Corner stores and gas stations were their usual targets, with only the odd small-town bank; undeveloped film left at their Joplin hideout in 1933 gave newspapers the posed photographs that made them famous.
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 put 'D. B.' into the first news stories, by most accounts after police checked and cleared a Portland man of that name; the hijacker himself only ever said Dan Cooper.
Q 24Britain's 1963 Great Train Robbery targeted a Royal Mail train running from Glasgow to which city?
London
London-bound, the mail train was halted at Sears Crossing in Buckinghamshire by a rigged signal, its green lamp covered with a glove, then driven on to Bridego Bridge, where the gang unloaded 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
Fingerprints on a board game, a Monopoly set the gang reportedly played with stolen banknotes, and on a ketchup bottle let detectives match the robbers to their criminal records.
Q 26How did the thieves gain entry to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in March 1990?
Posing as police officers
Two men posing as police officers talked their way in after hours, tied up the two guards and left with 13 works, including Vermeer's The Concert; none had been recovered as of 2025.
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; because the museum's layout is meant to stay fixed, it left the empty frames hanging as placeholders for the stolen works.
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 29Which evidence left on a victim most strongly tied Ted Bundy to the 1978 Chi Omega sorority murders?
Bite marks
Bite marks on Lisa Levy's body were matched to Bundy's teeth by a forensic dentist at the 1979 trial and proved the most damning evidence; he was executed ten years later.
Q 30Which 1973 horror film gives its name to the Zodiac Killer's letter of January 1974?
The Exorcist
The Exorcist: the so-called Exorcist letter reached the San Francisco Chronicle that January and closed with the taunt 'Me – 37, SFPD – 0', far more killings than police ever tied to him.