Criminals Who Mysteriously Vanished

Being a criminal can be an exhausting career. You live your life on the wild side and dance with the devil in the pale moonlight, or you get caught at some point and watch your criminal empire come crashing down. But then there are the ones who escape justice, those who are never caught. No matter how small or large their crimes are, the fact that they managed to outrun the cops for any period of time might be impressive by itself.

Johnny Law couldn't catch up with these fugitives because they were brilliant hiders, paid enough people enough money, or sometimes just vanished into thin air. And while the authorities rarely give up looking, for some it took chance finds to reignite cold cases from decades ago. From Prohibition-era whisky kings to skydiving vanishing acts, here are some infamous criminals who managed to stay on the lam for years at a time.

Szilveszter Matuska claimed at his trial that he liked seeing people die, to the point of getting sexual gratification from it. But killing just one person at a time wasn't enough, so he engineered train wrecks to see lots of people die at once, and Matuska had the background to make that happen. 

Born in 1892, he trained as a mechanical engineer and may have even been an explosive specialist in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I. Matuska went on into mining, but by the 1930s he had realized his true passion was derailing trains. He succeeded in blowing a few up before he was finally caught and charged for his crimes. Matuska fully admitted to what he had done, even the fact that he got off on it, and said God had told him to.

He was sentenced to death, but it was commuted to life in prison. He spent a while inside before World War II made it possible to escape, and after that, no one knows what happened to him. Matuska may have worked as an explosive expert for the Russians at the end of the war, and there were rumors he fought with the Chinese during the Korean War. Whatever he ended up doing, all we have are whispers and Matuska was never captured again.

If you want to become rich, tipping the police off to the whereabouts of Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar wouldn't be a bad way to do it. This gangster has had rewards put on his head totaling millions, and he's worth a pretty penny himself: He is the second-richest criminal to ever live, after Pablo Escobar, rolling in illicit dough amounting to $6.7 billion. And he's got 21 aliases, but mostly he goes by The Don.

In Kaskar's case, the apple did fall far from the tree since his father was a policeman, and he has managed to create a global crime empire called D Company that wraps around the world with property in 16 countries on five continents. While no one knows for sure where he is, the U.N. thinks he's in Pakistan, where he is reputed to have a place called the White House.

Kaskar is alleged to have links to Al Qaeda and may be behind a series of bombings in Mumbai in 1993 and 2008. He's also said to be a big cricket fan, but of course he had to be all gangster about it and is wanted for fixing some big games. The U.S. officially declared him a global terrorist in 2013. Until he is caught, he'll keep up with his other hobbies of drug trafficking and counterfeiting.

The U.S.A. wasn't the only country to go through Prohibition. Canada also went through a dry spell and it meant that, starting in 1916, some people who were willing to break the law could become rich with bootleg liquor. At one point, bootleggers were making about $1 million a month — even in 1920s dollars. One Italian immigrant called Rocco Perri found a niche for himself, and the Canadian "Whiskey King" was born.

Perri's job was not without dangers. When his wife, who was heavily involved in the business, tried to expand into the narcotics area, she was murdered and Perri was distraught (although some people think he might have had something to do with her killing).

Perri himself would go down in history as the Canadian Jimmy Hoffa; He was there one day and then just gone. If he was killed, no one ever found the body, and if he walked off into a new life he did an amazing job of it. Perri's disappearance happened one day in 1944, when he was visiting his cousin and decided to walk off a headache. He planned to be back in time for lunch, but lunch came and went and he never returned. Seventy years later no one knows for sure what happened to Perri, but his biographer likes to think he was tipped off about a plot to kill him and used his connections to flee to the U.S.

Omid Tahvili was a good actor, and in 2007 he was dressed as a very convincing janitor as he calmly strolled out of a $49 million prison. It also helped that he had bribed a guard with $50,000 to open some doors for him. To keep up the disguise for the 100 security cameras that were watching him literally walk out of the place unmolested, he would stop and mop the floor from time to time.

Acting had helped him get away with his biggest scam as well. He looked like a stout, respectable Iranian businessman while he ran a car rental shop in British Columbia. However. he was secretly a scam artist the whole time, calling up elderly citizens and telling them they'd won or were close to winning a lottery; they just had to hand over some cash to him in order to secure their winnings and, of course, those winnings were totally imaginary. But he was also charged with crimes like kidnapping, unlawful confinement, assault with a weapon, sexual assault, threatening, and use of an imitation gun. Indeed, Tahvili was not a nice guy and as of 2024, he's still at large.

One of the most famous prisons in the world has to be Alcatraz. Situated in the middle of the freezing cold San Francisco Bay, it was known as the place you put people if you wanted them to stay put. Over the course of 30 years there were 36 escape attempts, and they mostly went very badly. Twenty-three were immediately caught, six were killed during capture attempts, and another two drowned. But three guys might just have made it, and if they did they're some of the most successful escapees ever.

Their names were John Anglin, Clarence Anglin, and Frank Morris. They did their planning well, using information from the library to learn how to build rafts. To make sure no one missed them on the night they tried to escape, they built papier-mâché heads that were painted skin color and had real human hair on them. The heads must have worked because the guards didn't notice anything was wrong until the next morning. They squeezed through a cement wall and used pipes to make it up onto the roof, then they shimmied down a smokestack. They made a raft using 50 raincoats and grabbed driftwood for paddles.

It's possible they left at just the right time and took advantage of the tide, making it ashore easily. Others think they succumbed to hypothermia. Whatever the case, they were never seen again.

When you get the nickname "Dr. Death," you know you haven't been a saint in life. Aribert Heim worked as a doctor in concentration camps — among the worst crimes ever committed by Hitler and the Nazis — during World War II, where he earned the sobering moniker. Unfortunately, he managed to escape after the war ended, and went on to become the most wanted Nazi war criminal still believed to be alive and in hiding.

The crimes he was wanted for were disturbing. He was accused of taking organs out of perfectly healthy "donors" and leaving them to die on the operating table. He was known to inject poison into the hearts of living victims. And since he was so proud of the stuff he was doing, Heim took at least one skull as a memento of his work, which is bad even by Nazi standards.

Heim was thought to be located in Latin America, but until the 1960s he managed to live a decent life in Germany itself. Once the cops were closing in on him, he fled to Egypt, where he converted to Islam and walked 15 miles a day to keep busy. Neighbors knew him as Tarek Hussein Farid, the guy who would never let anyone photograph him. He died in 1992 and was never captured.

Perhaps one of the most infamous missing criminals of all time was known as D.B. Cooper. Cooper was cool as a cucumber when he pulled off a hijacking in 1971. He was wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase when he bought a one-way ticket at the Portland airport, and while he waited for the plane to take off he ordered a drink. Once in the air, Cooper handed the flight attendant a note saying he had a bomb in his briefcase, and wanted a parachute and $200,000. What he didn't want was hostages, so he let everyone off once they landed in Seattle. 

He got what he wanted, then told the pilot to fly to Mexico City but not to go higher than 10,000 feet. Somewhere along the way, he took the parachute and the money and jumped out of the plane. He was never heard from again by the authorities and never found, even when in 1980, a young boy walking near the Columbia River found a bunch of $20 bills whose serial numbers matched the ransom money. In 2016, the FBI finally stopped looking for Cooper after one of the longest active searches in its history, but the investigation got an unexpected shot in the arm a few years later.

In 2020, two individuals, Chanté and Rick McCoy III, handed over to the FBI a parachute that they had found in their shed. The two siblings have since claimed that their father, Richard McCoy Jr, was in fact the infamous D.B. Cooper, and the FBI appears to have taken their claims and the parachute evidence seriously. As of late 2024, the investigation has moved on to seeking verification via DNA testing, using samples taken from both the parachute and the plane D.B. Cooper leaped to freedom from.