Samuel Gilbert Jr., a 69-year-old white male, spent his days in the Waikiki Whaler apartment building at 232 Kaiulani Avenue. On June 30, 1998, he was found stabbed to death. 
Gilbert wasn't a passerby or a tourist caught up in the district's glitter; he was tied to the place itself. He was described as the owner of Kapuni Developers and the property manager for the Waikiki Whaler, and he was also known as the president of Kapuni Development Corp., a family company associated with ownership of the building. In the days after his death, those who knew him gathered to remember him, while the details of how someone reached him in that office lingered like a question that wouldn't settle. 
From early on, the killing was publicly framed as something more than a personal dispute: reports at the time said he was apparently killed during a robbery attempt. Yet even with that working theory, the case did not quickly resolve into a named suspect, an arrest, or a courtroom story. By the end of that year, police were still describing the stabbing as the one unsolved murder on Oahu in 1998, and they reported that no arrests had been made. 
Over the years, the facts that can be said with confidence have remained stark and spare: the place, the date, the method, and the silence where an answer should be. The Honolulu Police Department continues to list Gilbert's death as an open cold case and still asks the public for information, a sign that investigators have not identified a suspect publicly and that no arrest has closed the account of what happened in that office.
