This week we talk about a pair of murders, but only one of them is real. The other one is fake.
These are some high stakes prank phone calls folks.
In this episode we get to the bottom of the big question, are ghosts real? Okay, not really. We mostly just make up non-sense for an hour.
A man died of a heart attack alone in his hotel room. Or did he?
We try to tell a complicated and nuanced historical tale. We'll probably mess it up.
Part 2 of our annual Halloween Spooktacular. We read scary stories and share some costume ideas.
It's the Halloween Spooktacular! We're reading some scary stories in this one. Turn off the lights and turn on your lights. Rave.
Hey guys, someone like straight up scammed McDonald's. That's pretty crazy huh?
There's an octopus in Oklahoma. Idk we didn't really try on this one.
A man strapped himself to a lawn chair and tried to launch himself into the sky.
The Man In The Hole
First seen in 1996
The man in the hole is an indigenous man who has lived alone in the Amazon for over 20 years
Believed to be the last member of his tribe
Unknown what happened to his tribe
Probably killed by loggers or ranchers
In 2007 FUNAI made a 31 mile area around The Man In The Hole a protected area
Expanded by 11.5 miles in 2008
The Man In The Hole is understandably wary of outsiders
Given tools like an axe
Seen using the tools that were given to him
In 2009 The Man In The Hole was attacked by someone with a gun
Survived
Called The Man In The Hole because he digs deep holes in every home he builds.
Over 6 feet deep
Used either as traps or protection
In 2018 FUNAI captured footage of The Man In The Hole using an axe to cut down a tree
The Sentinelese
Live on North Sentinel Island just off the coast of eastern India
Technically a part of India
Home to 40-500 people who have resisted contact from the outside world for years
First contact was with the British in 1880
Standard practice for British to kidnap
Found and kidnapped an elderly couple and 4 children
The elderly couple died
In 1967 the Indian government launched an expedition to make contact.
The Sentinelese would flee into the jungle or be hostile
Either dropped gifts in the water to wash up on shore or left gifts on the beach
In 1974 a documentary crew tried to establish contact
As soon as they were in range of the island the Sentinelese shot arrows at them
Landed their boats out of range and left gifts
a miniature plastic car, some coconuts, a live pig tied, a doll, and aluminum cookware
An arrow hit the director of the documentary in the thigh
The man who hit him could be seen laughing before he started lounging in the shade
The Sentinelese only took the coconuts and aluminum cookware
Members of other nearby indigenous tribes have been brought to the island in hope that they’d be able to communicate
These meets never work and almost always turn hostile
A cargo ship crashed near the island in 1981
The crew was evacuated by helicopter after being attacked by the Sentinelese
In the 90s the Sentinelese seemed to be less hostile to outsiders
Allowed boats to land without firing arrows
Meet unarmed
Make hostile gestures to intimidate
Fired arrows without arrowheads
In 1996 the Indian government ended attempts to contact the Sentinelese
There had been deaths in similar programs
Fear of disease
Appeared to have survived the 2004 tsunami
In 2006 two men were fishing mudcrabs nearby
Fell asleep (probably drunk)
Drifted toward the island
Killed by the Sentinelese
Attempt to retrieve the bodies resulted in attacks on helicopters
Indian government decided that this was not a murder
Sentinelese are a sovereign people with the right to kill anyone who interferes with their territory
The Korowai
Located in Indonesia near the border with Papua New Guinea
Approximately 3,000
Believed that they were totally unaware of the outside world until contact was established in 1974
First contact was simple. A scientific team was going through the area when they met 30 men
Basic contact was made and a simple word list was established
Late 1970s a team of Dutch missionaries started to live among the Korowai people
The Korowai were resistant to religious conversion
Several documentary crews made their way to the Korowai
Discovered that they practiced cannibalism to expel witches they call Khakua
Believe Khakua can inhabit someone’s body and the only way to get rid of them is to kill and eat the person
An Australian team working for 60 minutes was approach by a member of the Korowai people who said his 6 year old nephew was going to be eaten because he was accused of being a witch doctor
60 Minutes refused to help but a team from Seven Network sent a crew
Seven Network’s crew ran into visa trouble
One BBC documentary showed footage from 1999 in which the Korowai people were terrified of seeing a “white ghost” and were convinced that it was a sign that the world was ending
A woman was found dead, burned to death in a remote location. Was she murdered?
A man died in his locked apartment. Was he murdered or was it something else?
We get silly in this one. We recorded in person after eating a bunch of dumplings.
A woman and her two young children had their throats cut. Now she's on death row for their murder.
A family mysteriously fled their home. Why? And what happened to them?
A woman's mysterious hospital trip made dozens of people sick. Was it aliens? No.
Camera dude. He made the camera. Where'd he go?
There's a camp for rich white guys. People are freaking out about it.
A man walked into a bank with a bomb strapped to his chest. The story only gets weirder from there.
Queho
Who really knows about Queho?
From researching this case, it’s clear that no one really knows anything about Queho.
Some people claim to know about him, but probably a lot of their stories are inaccurate or bigoted fantasies.
He’s either an early 20th century serial killer, a scapegoat turned Boogeyman, or something in between.
Basically, this story has been shrouded in racism and histeria, making the man Queho himself a mystery.
I’m going to try to tell the story as best I can, but keep in mind I’m probably completely butchering it.
Queho became a dark legend, so it’s very difficult to discern fact from fiction. But this is MysteriYES after all, so we don’t really care about discerning fact from fiction...
Early life
Little information is known about his early life as there really is no tribal record of him.
Born sometime in the late 1800s, perhaps 1880, most likely on a Native American reservation near Las Vegas, Nevada
He was of mixed birth, with his mother generally believed to be of the Cocopah tribe. She died shortly after he was born.
His father may have either been Mexican or perhaps born of a different tribe. Nothing is known of his father except that he was not married to Queho’s mother and he was not of the same race as her.
He was born with a clubfoot, or perhaps broke his leg or foot and was unable to adequately treat it, thus giving him a characteristic limp.
Because of his physical deformity and his mixed racial background, he was an outcast in his community.
Around this time, white people were starting to overwhelm the area, making arable land and game scarce for Native people and forcing them to beg for work from the white population.
Queho was known to have taken odd jobs in the El Dorado Canyon mines.
First killing
Allegedly, the first man he killed was his half-brother Avote, who had gone on a murder spree.
When Native people committed such crimes, other Natives were expected to produce the culprit or face retaliation from whites.
This was a case of “justifiable homicide.”
Crime
In 1910, perhaps due to the trauma of never having a place to belong, he became unjustifiably violent.
For whatever reason in November 1910, he shot and killed another Native American man named Bismark on the reservation.
There are unconfirmed reports that he killed a couple other Native Americans that day and then stole their horses to escape arrest for murder.
He fled to Las Vegas to stock up on supplies.
While there, he argued with a merchant and then beat him with a pick handle, breaking the man’s arms and fracturing his skull.
From there, he escaped into the El Dorado Mountains on foot.
Meanwhile, a posse from Las Vegas followed him into the mountain.
Shortly after, a local woodcutter was found dead and was allegedly killed by Queho.
Apparently, this was because a second posse found a distinctive footprint left at the scene of the crime, and Queho had a clubfoot.
They followed the tracks into the El Dorado Canyon to a place called the Gold Bug mine.
There they found the body of a deputy, whose badge had been stolen from his shirt.
The trail of Queho was followed a bit further, but he was never captured.
A sergeant from the Nevada State Police named Newgard took a few Native American trackers and two experienced hunters into the El Dorado Canyon to search for Queho.
While they would occasionally find that distinctive clubfoot track, they were never able to find Queho.
Over the next eight years, there were several mysterious murders in the area near the Colorado River where Queho had disappeared.
Naturally, he was blamed for these.
On the Arizona side, four adults and several children were found shot to death.
On the Nevada side, prospectors and shepherds would be found dead in isolated areas.
The victims’ shoes and food supplies were usually stolen.
Panic spread throughout the area and the name Queho became synonymous with “Boogeyman”.
If a prospector disappeared in the desert (a common enough occurance) or a miner spent too long at the bar or fell asleep on the job and didn’t come home on time, the name of Queho was mentioned.
Queho was also used as a threat to children who wouldn’t behave.
In January 1919, Maude Douglas was found murdered and her cabin ransacked in the El Dorado Canyon.
Police found Queho’s footprints leading away from the scene toward the Colorado river.
Two prospectors were found shot in the back nearby around that same time, and once more Queho’s footprints were found there.
A two month long manhunt ensued despite miserable winter weather.
They found the skeletons of two miners who had disappeared years before.
Queho was blamed for these murders, even though there was no evidence.
Throughout the search, the posse would occasionally find still-warm campfires and caves that might have been used as food caches.
These were assumed to have belonged to Queho, again with little proof.
Eventually, the weather made the whole thing too difficult and the posse gave up.
In March of 1919, the state of Nevada posted a $2000 reward for the capture of Queho, and Arizona chipped in an additional $500. After Clark County, Nevada and a few private individuals contributed, the total was over $3000.
However, by this point, the mysterious murders had stopped and Queho wasn’t ever heard from again.
Discovery
In 1940, two prospectors discovered the mummified remains of a Native American man in a cave on the Nevada side of the Colorado river.
The corpse had been well-preserved because of the desert climate.
The body was in the fetal position, suggesting it had been a painful death.
There was evidence of a rattlesnake bite, which may have been the cause of death.
Along with the body, they found a
Winchester Model 94 .30-30 rifle,
a 12-gauge Hopkins & Allen double-barreled shotgun with a rope sling,
cooking utensils,
crude bows and arrows
the murdered deputy’s badge.
shotgun shells that matched those inside the body of Maude Douglas in 1919.
The body was identified as Queho’s, though there was some doubt. It was identified because it had double rows of teeth, which tribal members claimed Queho had.
After some weird but relatively uninteresting legal stuff, his body was put on display at the Las Vegas Elks Lodge, and even rode in the back of a convertible at the annual Helldorado Days parade.
Awhile later, Queho histeria died out.
In January 1962, the mummified corpse was found in a county dump. The Elks Lodge, having lost any further use for the body, had merely thrown it away.
It was then buried, finally.
Was Queho the Boogeyman?
It’s undeniable that he killed people, but lots of people in that time people did.
“Justifiable homicide” was an accepted doctrine back then.
The problem with Queho was that he was a Native American, and his supposed victims were white.
This made it incredibly easy for him to be construed as a horrific monster, and to be blamed for murders he didn’t commit.
He probably didn’t commit all the murders he’s blamed for. Probably wasn’t that much different from similar white dudes of the time, except he had the audacity to be a Native American.
The ancient story of imposters and overthrown rulers.
The largest art heist in modern history is still unsolved. Who took half a billion dollars in art?
Remember that movie Anastasia? It's nothing like that.
There was a lot of fake news and fear mongering in 2017. This week we talk about a couple of 2017's many conspiracy theories.
This week our schedules didn't allow for a new episode. Instead, here's some of the funniest stuff we've ever done.
I'm going to be honest. I wasn't really paying attention to this one. A guy in Germany got hit by a car or something.
I vant to suck your blood but in like a super awful terrible way.
Welcome to the first travel edition of MysteriYES (and Listen Up!). In this episode we declare war on a new podcast and talk about something that isn't a mystery but is still interesting.
Was the NSA involved in the death of a Greek telecom worker?
A strange meteor hit Siberia over a hundred years ago. Was it really a meteor or something more sinister?
This one is super historical and Zach and Willy are a little sleepy.
Sneha Anne Philip
Doctor working at hospital on Staten Island
Married to Ron Lieberman, also a doctor
Rented an apartment in Manhattan, a few blocks from the WTC.
September 10, 2001
Ron went to work. Sneha had 10th and 11th off.
She stayed home doing chores to prepare for a visit from a cousin two days later.
Had a two hour IM chat w/ Mom; mentioned plan to visit Windows on the World.
At 4 pm, she signed off, dropped off clothes at dry cleaner, and made a large purchase at Century 21 department store using their American Express card..
Security camera footage captured here is last evidence of her existence.
Ron returned to the apartment after midnight. Sneha wasn’t there.
He figured she was out late or would be staying out all night, which had apparently become a habit.
Determined to tell her to call so he’d know she was okay, then went to bed.
September 11, 2001
Around 4 am, there was an unknown call placed from the apartment landline to Ron’s cell phone.
He thinks that in his sleep he may have used the house phone to check his cell phone voicemail, but isn’t sure.
Ron got up at 6:30; Sneha still not home. He went to work.
At 8:46, American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the North tower of the WTC.
At 9:03, United Airlines Flight 175 crashed into the South tower.
At 9:59, the South tower collapsed, burned for 56 minutes.
At 10:28, the North tower collapsed, burned for 102 minutes.
A huge cloud of dust and rubble filled the area.
It took Ron forever to get home, and when he finally did, he found no evidence that Sneha had come home.
A huge amount of dust had come through the open windows, but only cat tracks, no human tracks.
Ron reported her missing, but thousands of people were reported missing that day and so her disappearance didn’t make a big splash.
Her brother told reporters that he had last spoken to her during the attack and that she had suggested she would go to help, since she was a doctor.
This was a lie to try and get people to pay attention.
Instead, she just got lumped in with the other missing people.
Ron’s investigation
Ron didn’t believe she died in the attacks.
He found out that Sneha had been seen the evening of the 10th by a Century 21 employee, who claimed to have seen Sneha with another woman, possibly Indian.
When Ron found the security footage, she was alone.
Ron hired a private investigator named Gallant.
Gallant found security camera footage from the lobby of the apartment on the morning of the 11th, timestamped 843 am, around the time Ron said Sneha normally came home from her nights out.
Could have been Sneha, but there was poor contrast and sunlight that kept her from being positively identified.
The woman didn’t have bags from the shopping trip.
She looks as if she’s going to get on the elevator, but then abruptly leaves, presumably because of Flight 11’s crash into the North tower.
Gallant found no evidence of Sneha trying to flee.
Instead suggested that she saw the attack and then, being so close, rushed to the scene to help wherever she could, eventually dying in the towers or as a result of their collapse.
NYPD investigation
It took awhile before NYPD could investigate.
When they did, they came to a different conclusion.
They found that earlier in the year, Sneha had worked at a different hospital called Cabrini, and had been fired due to repeated tardiness and alcohol related issues.
Shortly thereafter, went out to a bar with coworkers.
She claimed that a fellow coworker touched her inappropriately, but she was charged with falsely reporting an incident and was held in jail overnight.
After being fired, she started spending nights out at gay and lesbian bars.
NYPD stated that sometimes she left with women.
Police also claim her brother walked in on Sneha having sex with the brother’s girlfriend, but he denies this.
At her new job at the hospital on Staten Island, she was having similar problems as at Cabrini. She was off work on the 10th and 11th because she was suspended for missing an appointment with a substance abuse counselor.
On the morning of the 10th, she was formally arraigned for the charge of falsely reporting an incident.
At the courthouse, she fought loudly with Ron about her problems and all the nights out.
NYPD basically suggested that something else had happened to Sneha. Either she’d met an unseemly character while out on the 10th, or she had fled her life due to mounting issues.
Ron and the rest of Sneha’s family dispute the NYPD investigation.
They claimed she’d been fired from Cabrini due to being a whistleblower regarding racial and sexual prejudice.
Ron also claimed that her visits to lesbian bars were a result of her not wanting to be inappropriately touched by a coworker again, and that when she went home with women, they never had sex.
He agreed that she’d been drinking quite a bit, but stated that this was a temporary situation due to her depression regarding being fired from Cabrini.
Ron claimed that they never had a fight at the courthouse, and Sneha’s brother said that he never caught Sneha having sex with his girlfriend.
Was she a 9/11 victim?
This is not an episode of My Favorite Murder. It is an episode of MysteriYES.
There was quite a battle between the courts and the family regarding whether she should be considered a 9/11 victim.
There is no clear evidence of her being at the towers, but also no clear evidence that she wasn’t. (No physical remains have been found for over 1000 of the nearly 3000 victims of the attacks)
Eventually, her name was added to the list of victims at the memorial and she was declared the 2751st victims of the attack in New York.
This week we discuss two shorter mysteries. The Persian Mummy and the murder of Katarzyna Zawada.
No, it is a podcast that stole the brilliant ideas of MysteriYES. When judging podcasts there are a number of different things to consider. The first and most important is who had the idea of creating a comedy mystery podcast first?
Some people will argue that whoever published their podcast first ought to receive the credit. This is simply untrue. The fact of the matter is that MysteriYES had the brilliant idea first.
It's unclear if My Favorite Murder incepted the hosts of MysteriYES. Perhaps they have some kind of Freddy Kruger powers and were able to climb into their dreams. Regardless the final answer to that question is, no. My Favorite Murder is a bad podcast because they are 100% definitely idea thieves.
Did Hitler survive WWII
Tracey Mertens
Had moved from Birmingham to Rochdale in November, with her long-term boyfriend Joey Kavanagh.
Her family described the relationship as “strained” at times.
She spent the summer of 1994 with her sister in Rochdale, saying that she had left Joey (who was still living in Birmingham at the time) and was trying to hide from him. Sister said that she was acting strangely, like she was scared of something. A few weeks later she moved back to Birmingham with him.
31 years old in 1994 when the crime took place.
Mother of two who, according to family, “lived for her children.”
Abduction
On December 22nd, she returned to Birmingham to gather some belongings and their benefits book from her old house.
Stayed overnight at at her sister’s house, then went to the house the following morning, December 23rd.
Shortly before noon, after she’d been in the apartment for ten minutes, there was a knock on the door.
Two black men, in their early thirties, overweight, wearing brown leather baseball hats and black leather coats.
Tracey believed they spoke in a foreign language, and police believe this was probably some sort of Caribbean accent.
Police believe that the two men snatched her, blindfolded her, and tossed her into the back of a yellow Mark II Ford escort packed outside.
This was considered a distinctive car.
Murder
Taken 70 miles away to a Christchurch in the village of Eaton in Cheshire about five hours later.
She was doused in gasoline and then set on fire on the church steps.
Found by a passerby and her attackers were gone.
She was taken to the hospital.
Had suffered 90-95% burns.
She survived long enough to tell detectives what happened to her.
She died in the early hours of Christmas Eve.
Investigation
Detectives spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day interviewing family members.
Apparently, there was a witness walking by Tracey’s home as the two men were forcing her into the car, but police have never been able to track him down.
In 1995, a Birmingham man was charged with conspiracy to commit murder.
Case was dropped due to insufficient evidence.
It seems police were able to find very little information regarding the case other than what Tracey was able to tell them.
The case was featured on Crimewatch in 2010 and 2012 after advances in forensic technology gave detectives a DNA profile of the killer.
Detectives gathered and followed up 100 tips after the 2010 broadcast, but none of them were particularly helpful.
There is still a 30,000 pound reward for details leading to a conviction.
Theories
Joey
Habitual drug user
Admitted he owed people money at the time of Tracey’s death.
Abductors allegedly asked, “Where’s Joey?”
Reddit user suggest they were Yardies (British term for Jamaican expatriates) whose gangs are known for drug trafficking and gang violence in the United Kingdom.
There was a large influx of Jamaican immigration to Britain in the 1980s, which led to a rise in gang violence committed by Jamaican immigrants.
There is active Yardie gang activity in Birmingham, although to a lesser extent than in many other large British cities.
Perhaps Joey owed someone money and they went to attack him, but took her instead.
Has maintained that he was not the cause of the murder and didn’t know anyone who would do something so brutal to her.
Mistake
Could they have gone to the wrong house?
Opportunistic attack
Could she have merely misunderstood what happened due to trauma?
If there was a prejudice against Yardies, perhaps?
I don’t know.
I can’t make up my own theories.
This is stupid.
I hate this podcast.
Just kidding, I love it.
Jodi Huisentruit
27 year old news anchor in Mason City Iowa in 1995
Graduated from St. Cloud State University
Became the Iowa City bureau chief for KGAN in Cedar Rapids then was a reporter for KSAX in Alexandria Minnesota
Finally became the morning news anchor for KIMT in Mason City Iowa
Jodi lived 5 minutes from the studio and would often have to walk to work very early in the morning.
June 27th 1995
Showed up late to work
Her producer called her at 4AM asking where she was
She answered
When she didn’t show up her producer called again at 5 AM
No answer
Producer filled Jodi’s role then called police at 7 AM
Police dispatched
No sign of Jodi
Inside of apartment looked normal
Signs of struggle near her brand new (June 13th) red Mazda Miada
Bent key suggests she was attacked while unlocking her car
Struggle stretch out over the entire parking lot
Police found Jodi’s keys, a pair of her shoes, her jewelry, a can of hairspray, and a blow drier
Also found an unidentified hand print
A neighbor reported seeing a white van with its lights on parked in Jodi’s lot
At least 3 neighbors reported hearing a woman scream around the time Jodi disappeared
Jodi’s apartment was next to a park that police believe someone could have hidden out in
Jodi had told several people she was afraid of something and that she was being stalked
One of the largest manhunts in Iowa history was launched
Over 100 officers were either tracking down leads and interviewing people
Everyone who knew Jodi was questioned even those who hadn’t seen her for years
Searches turned up nothing
John Vansice
Participated in a golf tournament with Jodi the day before
Threw a birthday party for her on June 11th
She went back to his house after to watch the tape from her party
They didn’t have a romantic relationship but friends reported John wanted one
Passed lie detector
The Huisentruit family hired a private investigator from Minnesota and flew to Los Angeles to meet with 3 prominent psychics
The search continued for over a year
In June of 2008 Jodi’s personal journal was mailed to the Mason City Globe Gazette
Journal largely about her career goals
Final 3 entries June 11th, 13th, and 25th all mention John Vansice
Ourang Medan was a Dutch merchant freighter.
Name means “Man from Medan” in either Malay or Indonesian.
Medan is the largest city on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, which at the time was still a Dutch colony.
Because of this, it is believed that the ship came from Sumatra.
In June of 1947, or maybe February 1948, the ship was sailing from a small, unidentified Chinese port to Costa Rica, perhaps with the intent of avoiding authorities.
Two American ships navigating the Strait of Malacca between Sumatra and Malaysia picked up distress calls from the Ourang Medan.
Received morse code message: “SOS from Ourang Medan. We float. All officers including the Captain, dead in chartroom and on the bridge. Probably whole of crew dead.” There were a few meaningless dots and dashes and then: “I die.” Nothing else after that.
The two ships used the assistance of a British and Dutch listening posts in the area to triangulate the coordinates of the Ourang Medan.
The Silver Star went to lend aid to the ship.
It took several hours to find the ship.
Once it was found, there didn’t seem to be any sign of a crew.
Communication efforts failed.
Found it undamaged.
The crew of the Silver Star boarded the Ourang Medan.
Littered with corpses, including a dog.
Bodies were on their backs with their faces upturned; mouths and eyes open and with horror-stricken faces, perhaps screaming.
Arms seemed to be fighting off some unseen threat.
No survivors.
No visible signs of injuries.
The captain was found on the bridge, bridge officers found in wheelhouse and chart room.
Radio operator was found at his station.
Engineering crew were found at their stations.
The outdoor temperature was around 100 degrees, and yet the search party found the ship to be rather cold.
When the search party returned to the Silver Star, they decided to tow the Ourang Medan for salvage.
Soon after tethering the tow rope, smoke was seen billowing from below decks.
A fire broke out in the number four cargo hold.
Boarding parties were forced to evacuate.
Just after the tow rope was cut, the ship exploded so forcefully it jumped out of the water, and then sank.
No further investigation could be conducted.
Theories
A hoax
While there were rumors of the incident shared among salty dogs, there were no official reports until May of 1952, although this report was an official US Coast Guard report.
Many accounts of the story differ quite a bit.
There isn’t any great or reliable documentation of the event.
Ourang Medan was never registered and isn’t found in any record of seafaring vessels.
Officially, the ship didn’t exist and there is a lot of speculation about whether it was a real ship or not.
Just because the name was not registered doesn’t mean the ship’s name couldn’t have been unofficially changed and repainted or something.
The Silver Star was a real ship, though perhaps by the time of the incident (sometime in 1947) it had been acquired by the Grace Line shipping company and renamed the “Santa Juana.”
No mention of this incident in the Silver Star’s logbook.
No crew members of the Silver Star have ever come forward with the story.
Could have just been made up ghost story, or a story that started as one strange incident that snowballed as it was told over and over again, perhaps like stories of the Flying Dutchman.
Unit 731
Ship could have been purposely un-registered because of nefarious intentions.
One source states that there was potassium cyanide and nitroglycerin on board the ship, which are highly combustible.
To sail with these items would be highly negligent.
Would explain the explosion however.
This event took place just a few years after the end of World War II, so many have thought that this ship could have had something to do with the war, specifically with Unit 731.
Unit 731 was founded in 1932 by a Japanese bacteriologist named Shiro Ishii.
The intention was to create horrendous biological and chemical weapons for use by the Japanese military to decimate Japan’s enemies.
The biological experiments run by Unit 731 on prisoners of war are considered some of the worst war crimes in human history.
After the war, American General Douglas MacArthur covertly granted immunity to Unit 731, so long as they shared their research with the US government.
It is thought that perhaps the US government commissioned a seemingly non-existent ship to safely and securely transport these materials.
Taking a plane would have been out of the question, as a plane crash with such materials would have had devastating effects.
It’s suggested that sea water entered the ship’s hold and reacted with the cargo, causing poisonous gases to be released, which suffocated the crew. An increase in the amount of salt water could have reacted with the nitroglycerin would have caused the explosion.
If the US government was in fact behind this, it makes sense to expunge all record of such a ship, particularly in light of the Geneva Convention and its restrictions on the use of biochemical weapons in warfare.
Aliens
A UFO came upon the ship, killed the entire crew, and fled.
Explains the mysteriousness of the deaths, and the reason it appears as if crew members were fighting off an unseen attacker.
Doesn’t explain why the ship exploded or why this was just an isolated incident.
Boiler room fire
An unobserved fire or other such problem in the ship’s boiler system could have caused the incident.
A lot of ships at this time ran on coal for propulsion.
Burning coal pumps out a lot of carbon monoxide, which could have leaked up, suffocating the crew members.
Suffocation is a torturous way to die, so it could explain the tortured looks on the faces of the crew.
The boiler room fire then could have ignited the fuel and caused the eventual explosion.
Methane bubbles
Perhaps the crew was asphyxiated by clouds of methane bubbles that came up from a fissure on the seafloor.
This does not explain the explosion.
Facts and timeline
Corrie McKeague was/is a 23 year old royal air force gunner stationed at RAF Honington in Suffolk, England.
On September 23rd 2016 Corrie went out with friends in the nearby town of Burrie St. Edmunds (about 10 miles away)
He drove his car and intended to leave it overnight
Around 1am he was kicked out of Flex
Doorman said he was friendly
1:15-1:30 he was at Mama Mia getting take out
He took a 2 hour nap in a doorway nearby
He was seen at 3:25 am turning down an alleyway
He was never seen leaving the alley
Two entrances both would have caught him on camera. No way to leave without being seen
His phone (Nokia Lumia) traveled 12 miles to Barton Mills later in the morning. It took 28 minutes and couldn’t have been on foot.
His phone died or was damaged around 8 am
Between 3:00am and 5:00 am 39 people were captured on the same camera that last saw Corrie
13 identified
Corrie not reported until September 26th
Reported by RAF
January 2017 the back of phone found near last known phone location
No way to conclusively link
Bins in the alley
Truck reported only having 33lbs (15kg). Corrie weighed 200
Truck was searched and nothing was found
Massive search is launched
Woods along path he would have walked home
Landfill
Incinerator
February 2017 family announce 50,000 reward
March 1 2017 a 26 year old man was arrested for attempting to pervert the course of justice
Charges dropped on March 7th
Same press conference police revealed garbage truck mistake
Had actually been carrying 220 lbs
Redoubled landfill search
June- “Items from the right time”
July- Search ended. 6,500 tons out of 20,000+
Spent over 1,000,000
September- Police released CCTV footage
October- Police start new landfill search
Adjoining area
Corrie’s girlfriend was pregnant
Neither knew when he went missing
https://s3.amazonaws.com/programinfo/Grammarly+-+Welcome+Kit+%26+Talking+Points.pdf
Theories
Corrie ran away
Baby
Happy mood
Dog
Internet history
Corrie was abducted
Unidentified people
CCTV footage not thoroughly reviewed after 8
Access to building in alley
Corrie was in the dumpster
Murdered?
Nap
Dropped something and went in after it
news.co.uk/news/local-news/corrie-mckeague-disappearance-bury-landfill-13656316">http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/news/local-news/corrie-mckeague-disappearance-bury-landfill-13656316
https://www.facebook.com/cambridgenews/videos/10155131379038031/
https://www.reddit.com/r/CorriemcKeague_debate/comments/6vm0cm/thread_2/?sort=top
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Corrie_McKeague
Introductory statements
The boys, the parents, the setting, etc.
The brothers’ good relationship
The crime
Zach home sick and sleeping upstairs, Ron in Chicago, Sue at work
3:05--Greg gets off bus
3:09--first phone call from Erin.
3:10--Greg gets home; immediately attacked
3:15--second phone call from Erin, Zach wakes up, hears scuffle, goes downstairs, finds Greg.
3:17--Zach calls 911
3:24--EMS and police arrive
Zach taken to hospital; sweatshirt, socks, bloody towel from finger collected as evidence.
Physical Evidence
Bloody footprints go out and come back inside
Mound found outside with gloves and knife
Zach’s clothes
The case for Zach
The case against Zach.
Theories for third-party attacker?
Verdicts
I don’t know if you’ve noticed this Willy, but we are inching closer and closer to a full year of doing this podcast, which is the greatest mystery of them all. I went back and listened to one of our earlier episodes recently and realized just how much we have devolved. Back in the early days of the show, we were a borderline good podcast with just enough humor sprinkled onto our true crime to set us apart. Now, we’re basically the mystery podcast version of “Whose Line Is It Anyway,” only to more accurate it would be “Whose Turn to Write the Script Is It Anyway”, where everything’s made up and the mysteries don’t matter.
Anyway, the reason I bring up the early days of the show is because today’s episode is going to be a bit retro. Today we’ll be covering a good old fashioned missing person, like we used to do, back when times were simpler. I wanted to find a super interesting disappearance and usually the most interesting ones are missing children, because those cases are so tragic and gut-wrenching. However, now that I have a child, I couldn’t bring myself to do the story of a missing child, so we’re going to talk about a missing adult. Well, technically he’s an adult, but biologically he’s still an adolescent because biological adolescence lasts until you’re 23 or 24. Bam. You learn something new everyday.
In 2006, Jesse Ross was a nineteen-year-old sophomore communications major at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, over in your neck of the woods. He was a paid radio personality on a popular Kansas City radio station called 95.7 The Vibe. Willy, have you listened to 95.7 The Vibe?
In late November of 2006, the week before Thanksgiving, Jesse and thirteen other UMKC students traveled to Chicago, Illinois for a Model UN Conference along with 1000 other college students from around the country. The problem with our show is that we’re constantly dealing with victims of tragedy, so it’s totally inappropriate for me to do things like BEEEEP BEEEEP BEEEEP NERD ALERT NERD ALERT neeeeehROOOOOOOWWWWWWwwwwww neeeeeehROOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWwwwwww NERD ALERT NERD ALERT BEEEEP BEEEP BEEEP.
On the drive to Chicago, Jesse commented to his peers about how he wanted to deliver some of his music to bars and radio stations in Chicago so that he could be discovered, which is a very sad detail considering the fact that his story is being covered on MysteriYES. Here’s another sad detail: on November 20th, Jesse called his mother to tell her that he was having a great time at the Model UN Conference (nerd alert) and promised to call her the next day once he and his fellow students had loaded up in their vans for the drive home.
That night, Jesse and a school friend named Ralph Parker attended a dance thrown by the conference organizers at the Sheraton Chicago Hotel & Towers, where the conference was being held. After that, he and Ralph went to a party at a hotel room where alcohol was served. According to Ralph, Jesse had done some drinking, but in no way did he seem to be intoxicated. Around 1 am, an emergency meeting of the Model UN Security Council was called at the same hotel, and Ralph and Jesse were in attendance because (nerd alert).
At around 2:30 am, after 90 minutes of meeting in the middle of the night for a fake security council at a conference that was ending in the morning, the diligent Model UN Security Council took a 30 minute recess. At that time, Jesse left the meeting room. There is surveillance footage of Jesse from the hotel lobby walking toward the main doors but did not exit through the main doors. It has been suggested that he went out a side staff door that was frequently used by conference attendees. Jesse was wearing a white t-shirt, jeans, and a green jacket. However, there is some dissension about whether Jesse was actually caught on security cameras leaving. One report I read said that there is no footage of him leaving, only of him entering earlier in the evening. The only image I’ve found has a timestamp that looks like it says 12:46 am, which would have been about fifteen minutes before the emergency meeting began. I really don’t know which report is accurate, but I wish they could clear it up because it really affects the way I think about the case. If indeed the security footage did show Jesse leaving the hotel, it is the last trace of Jesse Ross that exists.
When Jesse didn’t return for the conclusion of the Model UN Security Council Meeting, Ralph assumed that Jesse went back to their hotel room and fell asleep. The walk back to their hotel--the Four Points by Sheraton--would have been about ten minutes. It was well-lit and heavily surveyed by security cameras, and yet none of them recorded Jesse. I’ve never been to this part of Chicago, but everything I’ve read online suggest that pretty much every square foot of this area is covered by security cameras, and so it is baffling why Jesse was never recorded outside of the hotel lobby. To me, this is part of what makes this case so interesting. There is no proof that Jesse ever left the hotel, but surely there’s no way he’s still in the hotel.
Later that night/super early morning when the emergency meeting wrapped up, Ralph returned to the hotel room he shared with Jesse. He mistook a small pile of clothes on Jesse’s bed to the thin kid’s sleeping form and went to sleep himself. It wasn’t until the next morning that Ralph realized that Jesse wasn’t in his bed. Ralph assumed that Jesse was a player and slept in another room, so he ever-so-kindly (or perhaps suspiciously?) packed up Jesse’s suitcase and met up with the rest of the group, as they were heading back to Kansas City that morning.
When Jesse didn’t show up with the rest of the group after some time, the group’s chaperone alerted the conference organizers that they were missing a student.The organizers asked around to see if they could locate him, and when they couldn’t they called hotel security. A missing persons report was filed at 4 pm, and then the chaperone called Jesse’s parents to let them know their son was missing. Meanwhile, the other students from the UMKC group headed back, while the chaperone stayed behind to help police with the search.
Jesse’s parents hoped that there was some sort of mixup and that Jesse had returned home with students from another university. However, after that first day came and went without hearing anything from Jesse, this theory seemed less and less likely until it seemed all but impossible, particularly when they realized that there had been no activity from Jesse’s cell phone or bank accounts since before he had vanished.
Jesse’s parents flew to Chicago to meet with the local police, and would later make multiple other trips to hang posters and pass out fliers. The posters stated that Jesse was a white male, 5’10, 140 pounds, with very short red hair, blue eyes, freckles, and glasses.
Now, even though Jesse was technically an adult being age 19, his case was given high priority due to the fact that he was visiting from out of town and was relatively unfamiliar with the area. However, the Chicago police had difficulty conducting their investigation for a number of reasons. The primary reason the investigation was so difficult was that most of the potential witnesses--the other students at the conference--had left Chicago before the missing persons report was even filed. Also, there was no crime scene to investigate and no physical evidence to gather. On top of that, the report came in two days before Thanksgiving, a time of year when absolutely no one wants to come in to work.
The case did draw a great deal of media attention, and as a result, investigators received hundreds of tips in the first few months after the disappearance, but nothing of any substance was turned up. The Kansas City police helped to interview some of Jesse’s fellow classmates who had also gone on the trip, but because they were teenagers or very young adults who’d been drinking alcohol in a fun, new city, they aren’t able to provide much information other than “theories and presumptions.”
The hotel where the conference was being held was right along the Chicago River, and apparently if Jesse had gone out the side door everyone claimed, he would have walked right out onto an esplanade right along the river. As a result, Chicago police’s primary theory was that there had been no foul play and he had merely accidentally drowned in the river--even though there is a four-foot security barrier along the pedestrian walkway. Police divers searched the Chicago River for any sign of Jesse Ross’s body, but they didn’t find anything.
Let’s talk about some theories, and first let’s get into the theory that Jesse chose to disappear on purpose, either by killing himself or running away to start a new life. It does seem like many times when adults disappear, it is done intentionally, however I don’t think that’s the case with Jesse. After all, if you’re going to kill yourself or run away, waiting until a thirty-minute break in a Model UN Security Council late-night emergency meeting is a really bizarro time to do it. His parents also highly doubt this theory, given that he had called earlier that day describing how much fun he was having, and that he had recently gotten the promotion to on-air personality at 95.7 The Vibe, which was a dream come true for him. By now, we should all know that people who are going to kill themselves don’t always show outward signs that this is what they’re planning, but if we’re looking at the circumstances with Jesse here, I find this very unlikely.
The next theory is the police’s theory that he either accidentally or purposely ended up in the Chicago River and drowned. After all, the river is right outside the door Jesse apparently went out, so it’s possible that he wanted to go outside during the break to appreciate the pleasant view of the river. Had he done so, perhaps he somehow fell into the river and wasn’t able to cry out for anyone to help, it being the middle of the night and there likely not being very many people around. However if this is the case, why wasn’t he captured on the security cameras that were apparently all over the place? And if there was a four-foot tall security barrier, how or why did he get over that barrier so that he was in a position to fall in? And if he did fall in, how come searches of the area turned up nothing? (Well, this is pretty easy, actually. Can you imagine having to search a body of water like that and be expected to find a single human body?)
Then there’s the various foul play theories. While police haven’t found any evidence to suggest that Jesse met with foul play, I don’t think that we--as a comedy mystery podcast--should rule it out. The first foul play theory is that one of the other nerds--er, I mean, aspiring young professionals--at the Model UN Security Council late-night emergency meeting followed him out of the building and killed him, perhaps by throwing him into the river. A few questions though. First, and primarily, why? Second, were there no witnesses? Third, was there no security footage? This one is just silly.
Another foul play theory is that he met with foul play while going to a bar to promote his music. I couldn’t tell if this was a confirmed fact, but there’s some rumor that he had declared that he was going to try promoting his music that night. Maybe he either got lost on his way, stumbled on a shady character, went home with a shady person, whatever. My problem with this theory is that it was already 2:30 am, and apparently downtown Chicago is not a city that never sleeps and so most bars were probably already closed. Plus, he was nineteen, so where could he have gone anyway?
The next foul play theory is that perhaps he was headed back to his hotel to go to sleep and got lost or took a wrong turn and stumbled upon a shady character or saw something he shouldn’t have seen and was killed and disposed of. I guess this could be possible, but apparently the downtown Chicago area is a relatively safe, quiet area with little crime, and is thus less likely to have much shady business going on between the two hotels. Plus, it was the last night of the conference. He should have been familiar with the route between the two hotels by then. And then there’s the pesky business of him not ending up on any of the CCTV footage that was between the two hotels.
So Willy, what theory are you choosing?
I don’t think that Jesse is still alive, and if I had to guess what happened to him, I would say he most likely fell into the Chicago River and drowned. It doesn’t make sense for him to have killed himself or run away, and if he met with foul play then how come his body was never found and what actually happened to him? There’s obvious problems with this theory, such as no security footage and the security barrier that should have protected him from falling in, but if someone were to put a gun to my head, I would say he’s probably in the Chicago River. Well, his body has probably decomposed so he could actually be all over the place by now. That was inappropriate.
This may be a short one Zach. This isn’t a very complicated or detailed mystery so we’re really going to have to stretch this one out. Perhaps we should read some scary stories, or take a couple random online quizzes, or maybe I should just list a few ways to kill time before actually getting into it. Look at that I managed to add an extra ____ to the podcast! This will stick it to our podcast publishers who pay us by the minute. In fact I imagine a conversation between a podcast publisher and us would go a little something like this…..
Willy (publisher): You boys have something great. You’re gonna be huge! Stick with me kids and we’ll make it all the way to the top!
Zach: Well I’m glad to hear that famed podcast producer and multi-media mogul Jonathan Shapiro.
Willy: There’s just one thing we need to change…
Zach: *gulp* uh oh…
Willy: I need you boys to kill of that officer pomples character.
Zach: No way!
Willy (as Willy): Yeah! He’s the greatest friend I’ve ever had!
Zach: Yeah! He once gave me his only working kidney, and I didn’t even need it! He just handed it to me in a paper bag!
Willy (producer): Look kids, he just doesn’t have enough sex appeal. He’s soft. A good boy who never breaks the rules.
Officer Pomples enters the room like a cool guy. He pulls out a personal vaporizer and take a cheeky rip releasing tendrils of smoke from his succulent lips.
Officer Pomples: You boys rang?
Zach & Willy: It’s officer pomples!
Audience applause
Officer Pomples: Look here boys, you don’t need to be represented by this bozo. He won’t appreciate you like I do. Here *officer pomples hands Zach and Willy a small piece of paper* the proof is in the pudding.
Zach: Wow! It’s a recipe for Officer Pomple’s famous chili pudding and the first ingredient says, “2 cups of love for Willy and Zach”!
Willy: You do love us after all!
Officer Pomples: You got it boys. Now I gotta get out of here. There’s some wicked sick grinding I need to do on my dope BMX bike. Catch you on the flippity flip.
Officer Pomples floats out of the room; arms reaching toward the heavens. For a moment you hear a chorus of angels singing before you realize it is just Officer Pomples slowly saying the word “radical” as he fades into the distance.
Zach & Willy: Thanks Officer Pomples!
Willy and Zach look back to Jonathon Shapiro. His head has exploded. Willy and Zach look at each other as a look of horror is shared between them. Police sirens can be heard in the background.
FIN
Now let’s get to the mystery.
This week we’re going back to one of our mainstays here on MysteriYes, Australia! Zach what’s your favorite city in Australia! Haha good one Zach, mine is Melbourne too. For this Mystery we’re going all the way back to May of 1960 where we’ll find a man named Sam Borg in Melbourne, Australia. Sam runs a Maltese cafe in Northern Melbourne which has a certain reputation for illegal gambling. Toward the end of the month in 1960 Sam stops showing up for work. In fact nobody has seen him for several days. Because he disappeared so suddenly one of his friends decides to stop by his place to check on him but when he got there he discovered Sam’s house was bolted shut. The friend called the police and they had to use a ladder to climb in through a window. When they entered the house they discovered Borg’s body in his guest room. He was wearing his pajamas and was wrapped in sheets. There were rags covering his head and one of his belts had been used to keep the sheets wrapped around him. He had sustained quite a bit of damage to his head and had been dead for at least a few days. After further investigation, it was determined that someone had used a chair leg to beat him to death. The most bizarre thing about the murder is that the guest room he was found in had been board up…. From the inside. Who killed Sam had climbed through a skylight, killed him, and left through the same window. A loaded gun and quite a bit of cash was found in Sam’s bedroom and police believe the killer made off with ~$1,000. Police interviewed 40+ people but no arrests were ever made.
Well that was short. Hmmmm. I guess we have time for one more.
Ad break
We’re going further back in time and practically all the way around the world for one of the most unsettling cases we’ve ever done here on MysteriYES. We’re going back to May 4th 1932 to Stockholm Sweden. HEY ZACH MAKE UP SOME STUFF TO SAY ABOUT SWEDEN BUT DON’T MAKE IT TOO OFFENSIVE!
Haha good one Zach. On May 4th 1932 the body of Lilly Lindestrom, a 32 year old prostitute was found in her apartment in the Atlas area of Stockholm. On that day police broke into her apartment and discovered that she had been dead for 2-3 days before they got there. She was completely naked, lying facedown on her bed. She was killed by blunt force trauma to her head. Some form of sexual activity had taken place because (ask Zach if I should say this) investigator found a condom that had been left in her anus. As police investigated the scene they discovered a bloody gravy ladle. Now Zach you’re probably thinking to yourself, “gee that’s a weird weapon to blugeon someone to death with”. Well you’re right, but the ladle wasn’t used to kill Lilly. Instead the killer had used it to drain and then drink nearly all of the blood in her body. Unfortunately this is where the story ends because after a lengthy investigation every lead the police had went cold and the murder remains unsolved.
Today’s episode is a bit of a bummer, because today we’ll be discussing our first ever disaster here on the show. That’s right, Willy, a lot of people are going to die, and a lot more are going to be physically and mentally traumatized for the rest of their lives. The question, really, is: Can a purer form of comedy be found?
The event we will be talking about today is the Charfield Railway Disaster, which is something I had never heard of until I started researching it, but which is apparently still a big deal in England where it took place. And while, yes, we are definitely going to have plenty of laughs along the way today, this is a sad story because there is a lot of carnage that just didn't need to happen. There was no malicious intent that caused this to happen, just negligence and human error. It kind of reminds me of the Hillsborough disaster. Did you see that 30 for 30, Willy? Man, nothing sucked the life out of me more than that documentary. The Hillsborough disaster took place at a soccer game where too many fans were allowed into the game, they got trapped and trampled, and 96 people died and hundreds more were injured. Again, there was no malice here. Just a lot of people who wanted to go to a soccer game, and some well-intentioned but sorely mistaken crowd control people who wanted to expedite the process of getting them into the game. Death for no reason. Oh, that's a good band name.
Now that's enough of the philosophizing, so plug in your record player and put in your vinyl copy of Lin Manuel Miranda’s “MyHISTORY Theme” because today we’re taking it back in time, all the way to October 13, 1928. We’re in the tiny little village of Charfield, Gloucestershire, England. The time is 4:28 am. It’s a somewhat foggy night, but all is calm and sleepy...for now. However, little do these provincial little villagers all tucked asleep in their beds know, something horrific is about to happen.
There’s a train approaching the village of Charfield at a rate of 60 miles per hour. It’s a night mail train operated by the London, Midland, and Scottish Railway, and it’s traveling from Leeds to Bristol. On board the night mail train, the fifty-some passengers are nearly all asleep.
Meanwhile, at Charfield, a 51-wagon goods train was shunting onto a side track to make room for the more important night mail train. Because of this, Henry Button, who was the signalman at Charfield, flashed a red signal to the night mail train, which should have stopped the night mail train until the goods train was clear of the tracks. However, perhaps because of the patchy fog or perhaps because of sleepy eyes or mere negligence, the driver of the night mail train, a man named Henry Aldington, and his fireman Frank Want read the red signal as green and continued to barrel their way toward Charfield.
At the Charfield station, when it became clear that the night mail train had misread the signal, the driver of the goods train tried desperately to move his train off the line. Similarly, when Aldington saw that the goods train was still on the line, he tried to slam on the brakes. Unfortunately, neither driver’s efforts were enough, and the night mail train collided into the goods train. If the night mail train had been just ten seconds later, it would have passed by the goods train safely, and Charfield, Gloucestershire, England would have remained an insignificant little village. However, luck and history can be cruel puppeteers.
The goods train was driven off the line and slammed into another goods train. The mail train partially derailed, sending several carriages and the engine off the track while the rest of the train wedged together with the goods train. The impact of the crash was so great that a passenger on the night mail train named James Gaston was thrown through the roof of his compartment. He was found by villagers a few minutes later. He was seriously injured and died later in the hospital.
Now, the collision was bad enough. However, the night mail train was an older train that was still lit by gas instead of by electricity--which at that time was becoming the norm for train lights. There were gas cylinders hung beneath the front coaches, and these ignited on impact, causing the crash to explode into flames. To make things worse, the gas pipes fractured and were set ablaze by ashes from the firebox, which caused the fire to rage even further.
Within twenty minutes, the flames were twenty feet to forty feet high and could be seen from miles away. Villagers from Charfield, railwaymen, and escaped passengers worked frantically to free those passengers who were still trapped in the wreckage. Some of these passengers had limbs that were trapped, and they desperately begged rescuers to saw off their limbs to save them from the raging fire. The nearby Railway Tavern was turned into a first-aid station where more than thirty people were treated for minor injuries, while eleven seriously injured people were rushed to the Bristol Hospital about twenty miles away.
It took five hours for the fire engines from Gloucester, Bristol, and Stroud to get the flames under control, and when this task was completed, the far grimmer task of recovering the bodies began. When all was said and done, sixteen people died in this disaster. Some reports say there were fifteen, but we’re going to go with sixteen to make the episode more sensational to our morbid, death-obsessed listeners.
Relatives of the deceased traveled to Charfield--a village whose name became a wonderfully savage pun--in order to identify their loved ones. Some of the bodies were so badly burned that they could only be identified by belongings that had survived the blaze, such as rings, watches, cigarette cases, or distinctive articles of clothing. Many family members agreed on a mass grave that was paid for by the railway station. A memorial for victims of the crash is still in Charfield to this day.
Now, Aldington, the driver of the night mail train, was blamed for the crash, since he had driven past a red light and crashed into the goods train. It was confirmed by the signalman’s records that the signal had definitely been red for danger, and Aldington claimed that the evening was foggy, which made it difficult for him to see the correct color of the light.
At an inquest into the crash, a jury found that the signalman at Charfield was not at fault in the crash, and that his signals and apparatus were in good working order. Instead, they turned the blame on the negligence of Aldington for passing through a red signal. The Coroner interpreted the guilty verdict as manslaughter, but Aldington would later be discharged without consequence.
Now, Willy, you and our listeners might be saying, “This is all well and good, who doesn’t love a good disaster where many people die and many more people are traumatized, but where is the mystery? This is MysteriYES after all! Where’s my mystery?” Well, you’re just going to have to hold your horses, because...what’s that? There’s something coming hurtling toward us at 60 miles per hour and it didn’t see the red light signal! It’s going to crash into us! What is it? Oh no! It’s an ad read! RUUUUN!
-
So, there are actually a couple of intriguing mysteries that came about as a result of the deadly Charfield railway disaster, starting with two charred bodies that were never identified. The bodies were of two children, whose bodies were so badly burnt that their sexes couldn’t be identified, although based on witness statements, they are believed to be a boy and girl, perhaps brother and sister. One report I read said that they were found huddled in each other’s arms in a third-class carriage, but I only saw that once. Some reports say that parts of a school uniform were found bearing the phrase “Luce Magistra,” which is the motto of Queen Ethelburga’s school near York, but the school has always denied any connection to the children. The report also said that a brand new pair of boys’ shoes was found, as well as part of a sock embroidered with the initials CSSS.
One witness reported that he saw two children on the train before the crash, and said that they were both well-dressed. Another witness stated that the boy looked ten and the girl looked a little younger. The train’s ticket collector stated that he had seen a boy about age twelve and a girl about age six or eight together on the train. A fireman reported that he had seen a boy and a girl talking to a guard at a stop in Birmingham, however the guard died in the crash so he wasn’t able to provide any additional information. Consistent among all of the witness statements was the report that they were never seen with an adult who seemed to be in charge of them.
The problem, though, is that no one knew who the children were, and no one ever came forward to claim them, despite the nationwide coverage of the disaster. No missing children who might fit the description of the children found in the wreckage were reported to the police that we know of either. For all intents and purposes, no one knew who these children were, so they were buried in the mass grave with a memorial that simply read “two unknown.” We’ll talk a little bit more about theories regarding who these children are here in a little bit, but first, let’s get a little bit spooky.
Starting in 1929, a year after the crash, a woman dressed in a big, long, flowing black robe began to regularly visit the grave marked for the “two unknown” children who died in the crash. She was described as frail and elderly-looking and always dressed in black. She would arrive at the memorial by limousine a few times a year, put flowers on the grave, weep, and pray. Many speculated that she knew something about the crash that no one else did, and may have even known who the dead children were. However, one day either in the late 50s or 60s, the media tried to approach the woman, but she fled in her limousine and never visited the memorial again.
So, who were the two children who died in the crash? Well, first, let’s not assume that they’re children, or even human, or even existed. There is a theory that the two bodies were not actually the bodies of children, but actually the bodies of two very small adult horse jockeys, which is an adorable thought, but it then begs the question, who are these two tiny grown-ups?
Another theory is that these bodies were not the bodies of humans at all, but rather those of ventriloquist dummies. What’s the evidence for this? Well, there isn’t any. This is just a suggestion that some people expressed to local newspapers. Now, Willy, if I'm ever found dead, I want you to forcefully and consistently,deny that my corpse is human and that I am just a 6’3” ventriloquist dummy.
Then of course there’s the fake news theory, that the bodies of the two children were just a hoax created by the local media to make the accident appear even more tragic, which, you know, that’s cool. Whatever. That just makes me think of the idiots who think Sandy Hook was a hoax and I don't feel like getting angry right now.
In 1937, a young woman from London claimed that the bodies were those of her two young brothers, but for some unknown reason this claim was never followed up on, and there’s some question whether the claim actually even happened. I don’t really buy this theory, because she claims that both bodies were boys’ bodies, even though all the witness statements say that it was a boy and a girl on the train.
There’s also the theory that the children were living in England for their education, while their parents lived elsewhere in the British Empire, such as India. This, apparently, was a pretty common practice during this time, because, you know, who needs parents anyway? My problem with this theory is that someone, whether parent or guardian or school provider or nanny, would have like had to have given permission for them to get on that train in the first place, and should have come forward when they found out that the train had crashed and the children were not counted among the survivors. We can chalk this up to “a different time”, I guess, but come on. If you've got kids and you think they might have been incinerated in a horrendous railway fire, you should follow up on that.
The final theory is that these children were orphans who had no family to claim them. However, if they were orphans, how did they afford a train ticket? Where were they going? Where were they living before they got on the train? Perhaps they were put on the train by an ambivalent family member who hoped to never see them again, and didn’t really care that they died in the fire.
So, Willy, what do you think? Who were these children? Why weren’t they ever claimed? And who was the lady who came to visit their graves? Did she know them? Was she a family member? If so, why didn't she publicly,name them?
I tend to think that they were orphans, or perhaps at least indigent children whose family didn't have the means to claim them or provide them a proper burial. Or maybe, as awful as this sounds, their family was somewhat relieved that they had died in the crash because there were fewer mouths to feed. I don't really know. I'm also not convinced that the woman in black knew the children. Part of me wonders if she was a survivor of the crash who had survivor’s guilt, and she went to honor those who had died, particularly two unknown children.
I have just one little spooky postscript to tack on here before we wrap up today. Locals have said that in the intervening years since the disaster, there have been strange sightings of ghost children standing hand-in-hand and staring down at the railroad tracks. Legend has it that they are the children who died in the crash, and they are just waiting to be identified so that they can finally sleep the sleep of death in peace.
Have you ever heard of the Greek sport of Pankration? It’s basically the ancient version of mma. There weren’t any rules other than beat up your opponent. In 564 BC Arrhichion of Phigalia was competing in the Olympic Pankration tournament. In fact he was in the final but in the final he wasn’t doing so well because his opponent had him in a stranglehold. Zach you’re experience in the martial arts are you not? What would you do if someone had you in a stranglehold? That’s right you would start kicking them. So that’s what achie did. Archie kicked and kicked his opponent and kicked him so hard that his opponent had to show the sign of defeat to the referees but as he made this sign he was in such pain and exerting so much effort that he also broke archie’s neck. So archie died but he was also proclaimed the winner posthumously.
In 1919 there was an event known as The Great Molasses Flood. The Boston’s North End neighborhood a large molasses storage tank burst which sent a wave of molasses rushing through the streets of Boston at a blazing 35 mph killing 21 people and injuring 150 more in the process. If you ask someone from the North End they’ll tell you that on hot summer days you can still smell the molasses.
Zach as one of your oldest friends I know exactly how you want to go in your old age. I have your signed and sealed will right here in front of me and I have some bad news. You’ve already been beaten to the punch. You were beaten by Charles II of Navarre (or Charles the Bad) who was suffering from illness in his old age in 1387. As a wealthy French lord he of course had the greatest of medical council and was ordered by his physician to be tightly sewn into a linen sheet soaked in distilled spirits. Probably to get schwasted through osmosis. Well I don’t know if his physician was aware but distilled alcohol is very flammable and in 1387 there was no electric lighting. So of course this very flammable sheet caught on fire and Charles died of his injuries. It’s ok though because many people considered this to be God’s judgment upon their king.
*bum bum* (Insert SVU theme here) We got ourselves a legal death here. No not an assisted suicide but a death in the courtroom. Clement Vallandigham was an Ohio lawyer and politician in 1871. Ol’ Clem took on a murder case probably from a single mother or a streetwise kid who was just a victim of circumstances. Clem was getting ready for the knockout punch, the old Mattlock moment. He was demonstrating to the courtroom who the victim might have actually shot himself while in drawing a gone and standing up at the same time. Unfortunately he got a little too carried away with his Perry Mason moment because he accidentally shot himself in the courtroom. The defendant was found innocent but Clemmy Clem Clem died of his wounds.
Let’s go back to ancient Greece for a quick one. Empedocies was a Greek philosopher whose work has been credited as one of the originators of the theory of the 4 elements. So he basically created The Last Airbender. Well Empedocies wasn’t a firebender because to prove he was a god he decided to leap in Mount Etna which was an active volcano.
Let’s fast forward to 1131 to the streets of Gay Paris. Can you smell the fresh bread or perhaps you can even taste the fine French wine. Oh look here comes Crown Prince Philip! What a sight to behold! Oh. Oh no. His horse just tripped over a black pig that was running out of a dung heap and he died.
We’re spending too much time in the distant past. Let’s do something a little more recent. Denver Lee St. Clair died of asphyxiation after receiving an atomic wedgie. He had been knocked out by his stepson during a fight and had his torn underwear pulled over his head and stretched around his neck. His stepson pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter and was sentenced to 30 years in jail.
Just last year (and this one is tragic) a seven year old girl died an elephant struck her with a stone thrown from its enclosure at a zoo in Morocco.
This is getting a little too real. We need to jump back in time and remove ourselves from the humanity of these stories. Let’s go back to 1993 hopefully that will be far enough. In 1993 48 year old Garry Hoy fell to his death after throwing himself against a window on the 24th floor of a building in an attempt to prove to a group of visitors that the glass was unbreakable. The glass did not break but instead popped out of the window frame and Hoy fell to his death.
Zach you’re a tennis fan are you not? Well so was Dick Wertheim. Ol’ Dickie was an tennis linesman and in 1983 he was struck by a wicked serve from Stefan Edberg that hit him in the groin. Dick dick dick dick dick had been sitting in a chain at the center line when the blow knocked him backwards. He fell out of the chair and onto the hard court surface, striking his head.
Maybe we should go back a bit further. In 1771 Adolf Frederick the king of Sweden died of digestion problems after he consumed a meal of lobster, caviar, sauerkraut, smoked herring, and chamagne, topped off with 14 servings of his favorite desert in a bowl of hot milk.
In 2011 Joes Luis Ochoa died after being stabbed in the leg at an illegal cockfight in California. He was stabbed by one of the birds that had a knife-like spur strapped to its leg.
Finally in 2017 a podcaster producer known only as silent Jeff died under mysterious circumstances. He was working on the podcast MysteriYES and was known for his silence. He was invited to end the show in the very famous and well known MysteriYES fashion. Silent Jeff was then struck by a falling coconut despite being indoors and in the state of Kansas which has no indigenous coconut producing trees.
Today we’re going to take a trip up north to visit our Canadian neighbors, but then we’re going to hang a tight left and travel back west back to land of the free, and the home of the brave. That’s right, Willy, we are going to visit the vast, untamed state of Alaska, so put on your parka and your ski pants and an extra pair of socks.
You didn’t notice it, but while we were traveling to Alaska, we also went back in time to October 16, 1972. As you may have figured out by all the airplanes around us, we are in the Anchorage Airport. Do you see that Cessna 310 right there? Let’s go ahead and climb aboard. But we need to be quiet, because there are some important people on board and we don’t want to disturb them. Specifically, there’s House Majority Leader Hale Boggs, Representative Nick Begich, Russell Brown who is Representative Begich’s aide, and our bush pilot for today’s flight, Don Jonz.
Now, hold onto your butt, Willy, because we’re going to be flying several hundred miles from Anchorage to Juneau for a campaign fundraiser for Representative Begich. The plane’s about to take off, but, you know, now that I think about it, I’ve got a bad feeling about this flight, so let’s go ahead and get off, okay?
Let’s fast forward a few days. You and I are hanging out in our hotel, you know, maybe eating our breakfast of Cookie Crisp and Alaska-shaped waffles in our matching PJs, when your eye catches a local newspaper headline, which says something about the House Majority Leader going missing during a flight from Anchorage to Juneau. Phew! It’s a good thing we got off that plane, but it’s still such a bummer that they went missing missing like that. I bet you there’s going to be a 39 day long search as a result of the high profile of the disappeared persons. I bet you even 400 aircraft and dozens of boats will be involved in the search effort too. But, unfortunately, I also bet you that absolutely no evidence, no matter how great or small, will ever be found of any of the men or the plane they were flying in.
Some conspiracy theorists are going to suggest that the plane crash was purposely orchestrated and covered up because of Hale Boggs’ membership on the Warren Commission and his strong doubts about the Commission’s single-bullet theory in its investigation into the JFK assassination. However, the Cessna 310 that you and I nearly died in is not the only airplane to go missing in Alaska. No, not by a long shot.
See, there is an area in Alaska known as the Alaska Triangle where many planes have disappeared or crashed for no apparent reason, and where unusually high numbers of tourists and locals go missing every year. In fact, since 1988, over 16,000 people have vanished from that area and have never been seen or heard from again. The Alaska Triangle encompasses a very large section of the state stretching from the southeast near Juneau and Yakutat, up to the Barrow mountain range to the north, and over to Anchorage in the middle of the state. This area includes large areas of unexplored wilderness, including forests, mountains, and desolate tundra.
There are a few theories to explain what in the heck is going on up there in Alaska, and of course, the first of them comes to us from the field of cryptozoology. The indigenous tribe called the Tlingit included in their mythology stories about shape-shifting creatures known as the Kushtaka, which is loosely translated as “land otter man,” since they can assume either the form of a human or an otter. Apparently these creatures are cruel creatures who lure people to their doom, particularly people who are lost or hapless. In some legends, the Kushtaka will imitate the cries of a baby or the screams of a woman to lure victims to a nearby river, where it will then either kill the person by tearing them to shreds or turn them into another Kushtaka. We’re in luck, though, because legend has it that the Kushtaka can be warded off with human urine.
Apparently the area of the Alaska Triangle is deeply connected to legends of the Kushtaka, so the theory is that these demonic creatures are responsible for the disappearances up there. Although, to be fair, I have a hard time figuring out how a creature that shape-shifts between an otter and a human is able to rip airplanes out of the sky, but I better not blaspheme the Kushtaka or else one of them might come after me.
The next theory is a super fringe-scientific one that I didn’t really understand but that I’m going to talk about as if I really know what it’s about. This next theory was suggested by an American researcher and cryptozoologist named Ivan T. Sanderson, and his theory is that the Alaska Triangle is what is known as a vile vortex.
Now, I know what you’re thinking, Willy: “What is the goshdarn heckity-heck is a vile vortex?” Well, luckily for you, I’ve got a half-assed explanation of what vile vortices are. Vile vortices are geographical areas around the world that supposedly exhibit extreme electric, magnetic, and electromagnetic anomalies, which some people believe are electromagnetic currents. The most famous example of a vile vortex is the Bermuda Triangle, but there are also many other alleged vile vortices all over the world. Some suggest that places like Stonehenge, Easter Island, and the Egyptian pyramids all lie on vile vortices, and that these monuments were built there as a result.
These vile vortices supposedly cause many strange phenomena. They affect humans physically, mentally, and emotionally by causing visions, demonstrating miraculous powers of healing, and spurts of creativity and profound epiphanies. Many people even believe that they can access their higher selves at these vile vortices. However, on top of self-actualization, these vile vortices also cause disorientation, confusion, and both visual and audial hallucinations. The vortices also purportedly cause electrical instrumentation to malfunction. Some people believe that these vortices are doorways into spiritual dimensions or gateways to other realms.
So what’s the support for this theory? Well, Alaska is heavily concentrated with magnetic anomalies which greatly disrupt compasses, so much so that compasses can be up to thirty degrees off. Also, some search and rescue workers who have worked in the area have reported audio hallucinations sounding like a swarm of bees, as well as unusual disorientation or lightheadedness. However, let’s be honest, there actually is no real evidence for the existence of vile vortices, and the theory has been met with a great deal of skepticism throughout the years.
The last theory that we’re going to discuss today is the theory put forth by the Alaskan authorities to explain the multitude of disappearances in the Alaska Triangle. I’ve got to be honest, though, this one isn’t nearly as fun, but it is our solemn duty to talk about it. The Alaskan government has actually hacked our computer screens with live video of our parents who have been kidnapped and tied up. The King of Alaska himself is holding a bottle of ketchup and is threatening to spray our lovely parents with it if we even act like we won’t talk about the theory put forth by the Alaskan authorities.
So, Alaska has more people reported missing each year than any other state in the United States, and the rate at which people go missing is twice the national average. On top of that, Alaska also has the highest number of missing people who are never found. BING BING BING: STAT OF THE DAY: in 2007, nearly 3,000 of the state’s 670,000 people went missing, and if you’re keeping track at home, that means that four out of every thousand people in Alaska went missing that year. So I guess if you’re a thrillseeker looking for a new adventure, I guess you should just go to Alaska and wait to vanish without a trace, leaving your family desperate for answers about what happened to their dearly departed loved one.
Now, why do the Alaskan authorities think so many people go missing, particularly in the Alaska Triangle, where the vast majority of disappearances occur? Well, the Alaska Triangle includes gigantic areas of remote wilderness that is almost completely unmarred by human existence, comprising more than half of the nation’s federally designated wilderness. This harsh landscape boasts cruel weather, hazardous terrain, ferocious wild animals, and about 100 active volcanoes. Many tourists go into the wilderness completely unprepared to camp or hike in such conditions, which leads to them becoming lost, encountering some danger they weren’t expecting, or being killed by a wild animal or the elements. This area is so vast, inaccessible, and wild that trying to find someone who is lost in the area is nearly impossible, particularly when unpredictable weather patterns limit the amount of time that searchers can spend looking for the missing.
So that’s the mystery of the Alaska Triangle. Any particular theory you like, Willy?
Rachel you are a musician aren’t you? You’re also a regular listener of MysteriYES right? So you’re well aware of the MyHISTORY jingle that friend of the podcast Lin Manuel Miranda wrote for us right? Well you better bust it out because this week we’re going all the way back to 1836! We’re going back to the Jackson administration this week. Or rather I should say all the way back to the William IV administration because this week we’re also making the trans atlantic trip to Scotland.
In Edinburgh 1836 we’ll find five young boys hunting for rabbits and exploring the woods of Holyrood Park (which may or may not have been a park at the time). As they approach the area around Arthur’s Seat (a gorgeous hill with fantastic views of Scotland’s capital) they came across a small cave cut into the hill. I say it was a cave but it was more of an alcove. A strange little divet in the side of the hill. Like any adventurous kids they decided to see what was inside. Rachel at this point would you like to guess what they found?
That’s exactly right! Inside were 17 miniature coffins each filled with their own super creepy doll made out of wood and cloth which were carved, painted, and dressed to look like people. If you would like to see these dolls I’d suggest googling Burke & Hare Murder Dolls.
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The dolls were split into 3 levels. One was placed on the top of a display/alter, eight were placed in the middle, and 8 more were places around the bottom. The descriptions of the dolls are a little murky after that because the boys that found them did the single most logical thing you could possibly do when you stumble upon a creepy alter surrounded by coffins filled with terrifying dolls. They started throwing them at each other. This resulted in 9 of the original 17 dolls being either lost or broken. I’ve heard some people claim that there were dolls in the shapes of both men and women but the only dolls that remain all seem to be in the shape of men. The dolls closer to the ground had decayed a fair bit but the dolls that were placed higher up had not.
That’s pretty much the mystery this week Rachel. What are these weird dolls? Why were they place in a weird cave alter? Why were they in coffins? Why would anyone make them?
The first thing that comes to mind is probably witchcraft. Maybe the person who made them was trying to cast a death spell by creating effigies of people they wanted to see dead. This is definitely seems like something that a lot of people would assume was witchcraft in 1836. It’s possible that is why these dolls were created. It’s certainly a possibility, but there isn’t any evidence to prove it nor is there a specific spell or ritual that would match these dolls.
Another theory is that these dolls are related to an infamous series of murders known as the West Port Murders.
In the early 19th century Edinburgh was a hotbed for the study of human anatomy. Many of the scientists living in Edinburgh at the time pioneered our understanding of the human body and helped it develop into a modern science. However, to properly conduct their research these people needed a lot of bodies. At the time the only corpses the law would allow them to dissect were, people who died in prison, suicide victims, and the bodies of abandoned children and orphans. Because of this the demand for corpses far outweighed the supply and a black market for exhumed cadavers was formed.
At the time disturbing a grave was a crime as was stealing the property of the deceased but stealing the body itself was not a crime because it didn’t legally belong to anyone. Prices for stolen corpses shot up to close to $1,300 in modern American dollars. By the 1820s people became aware of the practice and started to guard against it. Guards were hired to watch graveyards, watchtowers were built in cemeteries, large stone slabs were laid over graves until the body had decayed past the point of use for scientists. This higher level of protection led a critical shortage of corpses for anatomists which led two men William Burke and William Hare to a terrible solution.
Break
When we left off we were talking about William Burke and William Hare. These two enterprising entrepreneurs decided the solution to the cadaver shortage was not to rob graves but to simply create more bodies.
They started with a sitcom like problem. Hare had a man die while staying at his house so he turned to his old pal Burke for advice. In a stroke of genius Burke suggested that they should sell the body to Dr. Robert Knox so that he could dissect it in his class. They were payed slightly below the going rate at just over 7 pounds but this sparked a terrible idea. Together they started to search for living people who wouldn’t be missed and when they found a target they would invite them back home for a drink. Once their victim was drunk enough Burke would smother or strangle them to death. The two would then take the body to Dr. Knox. In total they murder 17 people including a 12 year old mentally handicapped boy named Jamie, and the daughter of a victim who came looking for her mother who they had previously murdered. In total they killed 16 people over a period of 10 months.
Eventually the two were caught and arrested. Authorities at the time decided that it would be easier to convict just one of them so Hare was turned crown’s witness on Burke. Burke was sentenced to death and executed on my birthday December 28th, 1829. They then performed a public dissection of his body, and put his skeleton on display in a museum. Oh and they also reportedly bound books in his skin.
Hare became incredibly famous and hated across the country. Some people say he was thrown into a pit of lime, blinded, and forced to spend the rest of his life as a beggar but I can’t find a source to confirm this.
By now you’ve probably forgotten what I was talking about to begin with but the diversion was necessary I mean they’re called the Burke & Hare Murder Dolls. The connection is this, if you include the man who died of natural cause there were 17 bodies involved with the West Port murders. If you remember there were 17 dolls originally found at the alter. They were also divided into two groups of 8 and one by itself. Perhaps they separated the one that died of natural causes.
It’s possible that either Burke or Hare made these dolls as they were killing their victims. It’s absolutely impossible to diagnose someone after their death but I do think it’s safe to say these men suffered from some form of mental illness. People have suggested that these dolls were some kind of fantasy or way to relive the killings. Perhaps it was remorse, a small way to atone for the terrible thing they were doing.
Perhaps it wasn’t even Burke or Hare. Maybe someone had their own gross fantasy after hearing about the murder. There were also plenty of people at the time who believe that if a body was not properly buried their soul could not enter heaven. Perhaps it was a way for someone to help the victims.
Maybe the number of dolls was simply a coincidence. There were plenty of other things that could have been killing people at the time. Scarlet fever, typhoid, and a ton of other infectious diseases were running rampant across Britain. Maybe the dolls were made to commemorate lost loved ones.
Ultimately there’s no way of knowing why these dolls were made or by whom.
Summer is winding down Zach. The weather is getting cooler and the kids are going back to school. Here in America football season has started and the leaves are starting their yearly transition from green to orange, brown and yellow. I can practically smell the pumpkin spice lattes now tickling my nostrils with its cinnamon aroma. I personally love fall. I like wearing a light jacket and sipping on a warm cider while walking along sidewalks covered in fallen leaves, but we need to hold off for one more week. Rather than dive headlong into fall we need to grasp onto the dying embers of summer because this week we’re going to the beach! Grab your boogy board and put on your mankini it’s nothing but sun and fun today.
Zach, as an aficionado of both old timey swimsuits and international beaches I’m assuming you know exactly where we’re going this week. That’s right we’re going to Somerton beach just outside Adelaide, Australia in 1948. It’s a lovely december morning around 6:30 in the morning and despite cold war tensions the mood is optimistic in Australia. Take a stroll along the beach with me Zach. Oh wow there’s a seagull! Wowie wowie wowzers there’s a….. And look over there it’s a man reclining on the beach. Wait a second. That guy looks a little strange… Wait he’s not reclining at all! He’s dead!
Who is this guy? Let’s take a look. He’s a white man in very nice clothes but none of his clothes have any tags. There’s an unlit cigar behind his ear and a half smoke one resting on his shoulder. Zach you’re a cigar expert. Can you tell me where that one is from? England that’s right and they definitely don’t sell this kind in Australia. Quick let’s check his pockets for identification (and any extra cash). There’s a pack of cigarettes in here, but the cigarettes in the box don’t match the brand on the box. This is a pretty normal thing actually, a lot of people buy a box of expensive cigarettes then refill it with inexpensive ones to seem like their smoking more expensive cigarettes. Wait, this is weird the cigarettes here are more expensive the the ones that originally came in the box. Let’s keep searching. Don’t forget to check his fob pocket! Wait, what’s this? It’s a scrap of paper… It says Taman Shud thank God I speak arabic and just happen to know that means “finished or ended”. Oh man look at this, his shoes are really really clean. This is getting too weird. We better call the police (insert hilarious bit where we call the police here that leads into the autopsy).
When police conduct their autopsy on this man they discover this man is in peak physical condition. He looks like some kind of athlete but probably not a laborer because his hands don’t have any calluses or marks. There’s a partially digested pasty in his stomach, his spleen was 3 times too big, and there was congestion in his brain and stomach that suggest that he may have been poisoned but when his blooded no poison could be found.
Despite his clothing having no tags his jacket appeared to have been made in America. Let’s send his fingerprints and dental records over there for identification. (Wait a couple weeks) Well nothing came up.
Wait, hold on, it appears that a staff member at the Adelaide railway station has discovered a brown suitcase with its label removed. Perhaps this belonged to the man! The case was check into the station cloakroom after 11:00 AM on November 30th. Inside there’s a red checked dressing gown, a size seven red felt pair of slippers, four pairs of underpants, pyjamas, shaving items, a light brown pair of trousers with sand in the cuffs, an electrician’s screwdriver, a table knife cut down into a short sharp instrument, a pair of scissors with sharpened points, a small square of zinc thought to have been used as a protective sheath for the knife and scissors, and a stencilling brush. Also found in the suitcase is a thread card of Barbour brand orange waxed thread of “an unusual type” not available in Australia and was the same type of thread used to repair a pocket of the dead man’s pants. Just like on the man all tags had been removed from the clothing but the police found the name “T. Keane” on a tie, “Keane” on a laundry bag and “Kean” (without the last e) on a singlet along with three dry-cleaning marks. While it may seem strange that these tags were not removed, they are the only tags that couldn’t be taken off without damaging the clothing.
There were no spare socks and no correspondence in the case even thought the police found pencils and unused letterforms. A search of all English-speaking countries concluded there was no T. Keane missing and police weren’t able to track down the dry-cleaning marks.
Police check incoming train records and believe the man arrived at the station by overnight train from either Melbourne, Sydney or Port Augusta. They think he may have showered and shaved the the city baths before returning to the train station to purchase a ticket for the 10:50 a.m. train to Henley Beach, which, for whatever reason, he missed or chose not to catch. He immediately check his suitcase at the station cloak room before leaving the station and catching a city bus to Glenelg.
There’s not really any more evidence. I guess this is a cold case. (A hilarious quirky character walks up) “Do you remember that piece of paper that said ‘Taman Shud’? We’ve managed to figure out that it came from a rare edition of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam a collection of persian poems.” The police conducted a countrywide search for this book and we’re lucky enough to find someone with this book. Someone (who was never publically identified) came forward and reported finding a copy of this book in the back seat of his car around the same time and place that the body was found. When police inspected the book they found the piece of paper had been torn out of the book. On the inside back cover of the book, detectives identified indentations from handwriting. These included a telephone number, an unidentified number, and a text that resembled a coded message. The code has never been decrypted but has been confirmed to be some kind of code. It’s only 4 lines and isn’t long enough to be efficiently cracked and is probably a one time pad which is effectively impossible to break.
The phone number was an unlisted number that belonged to a nurse and single mother (perhaps now married woman) named Jessica Ellen Thompson who lived less than a kilometer from where the body was found. When police when to question Jessica she told them the book had once belonged to her but three years ago she had given it to a lieutenant named Alfred Boxall at the Clifton Gardens hotel in Sydney because the two were in love. Keep in mind this was during WWII so the couple was quickly separated. Eventually Jessica moved out of Sydney and got married. She hadn’t heard from him since except when she received a letter a few years later and Jessica replied telling him she was married. Another important event happened shortly before the body was found. An unidentified man came to the door of Jessica’s neighbor and asked about her. This would suggest perhaps Alfie was the unidentified body but the neighbor was never able to positively identify the body. It’s worth noting that the ticket the unidentified man bought was for the station closest to Jessica’s house.
When the police showed a picture of the man to Jessica she claimed to have no idea who he was, but, according to the detectives who interviewed her, she appeared visibly shaken as if she was about to faint. Jessica was given another chance to identify the body when investigators showed her a plastic cast of the man’s head. Again she claimed to not know the man, but, according to investigator Jessica looked at the once then looked away and would not look at it again. Despite not being able to prove it I think we have a pretty good theory here Zach. We know Alfred Boxall had this book in his possession, the body had a scrap of paper from the same very rare book with Jessica’s phone number imprinted on it, a mysterious stranger had come looking for her around the time the man died, everything seems to point to this being the body of Alfred Boxall.
This makes sense. Alfred had been a soldier in world war two he could be involved in some kind of espionage that would explain the code and it’s possible he took his own life for whatever reason. This case seemed to be solved until July of 1049 was found alive and well in Sydney, Australia. Even stranger Alfred still had his copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and the last page was still in tact. Despite their suspicions no concrete link could be established between Jessica and the unknown man and eventually the case went cold.
In January 1949, two people identified the body as 63 year old former wood cutter Robert Walsh. A third person also viewed the body, initially could not identify it, but an hour later contacted the police to claim it was Walsh saying his hair color had changed which threw him off. Walsh had gone to buy sheep in Queensland but failed to return at Christmas as he originally had planned. The man in the photos certainly doesn’t appear to be 63 years old and while his body was consistent with the physique of a woodcutter, his hands indicated he had not cut wood for at least 18 months. While this initially seemed promising, one of the people who had positively identified him retracted their statement after noticing the absence of a particular scar on the body.
By early February 1949 there had been eight different positive identification of the body, including two men who thought the body was a friend of theirs, and other who thought it was a missing station worker, a worker on a steamship, or a Swedish man.
Don’t you dare giggle Zach. A seaman by the name of Tommy Reade from the SS Cycle, which was in port at the time of the man’s death, was thought to be the dead man, but after some of his shipmates viewed the body at the morgue, they stated it was definitely not him. By November of 1953 police announced they had received the 251st solution to the identity of the body from the public but the only clue of any value was the clothing the man wore.
There have been several more recent developments. In 2011 an Adelaide woman contacted authorities about an identification card she had found in her father’s possessions. The card was issued to an H. C. Reynolds during World War I as a form of identification for foreign soldiers fighting with the Americans. The card said H. C. Reynolds was 18, British and contained a photograph of a man who looked very similar to the missing man. Experts found that there were similarities in the nose, lips, and eyes but most convincingly their ears were described as a “very good” match and a unique identifier was found, a mole on the cheek that was the same shape and in the same position in both photographs. When searches were conducted by the US National Archives, the UK National Archives and the Australian War Memorial Research Centre no record of an H. C. Reynolds could be found.
Jessica Ellen Thompson died in 2007 and in November of 2013 her relatives gave interviews to Australia’s 60 Minutes. Jessica’s daughter Kate said that her mother said she had lied to the police and did in fact know the identity of the Somerton Man and that his identity was also “known to a level higher than the police force”. Jessica’s daughter suggested that her mother and the Somerton Man were in fact spies. She claimed her mother taught English to migrants, was a communist sympathiser, and could speak Russian but would not tell her daughter where or why she had learned it.
Do you remember that Jessica Ellen Thompson had a son? His name was Robin Thompson and even though he died in 2009 his widow and daughter were interviewed for the same 60 Minutes piece. In the piece they suggested that Robin was in fact the son of the Somerton Man. This provided a way to prove his identity through DNA testing. However, when the man’s body was exhumed any usable DNA evidence had been destroyed during the embalming process. In addition the suitcase found at the train station was destroyed 1986 and the man’s copy of The Rubaiyat was lost sometime in the 1950s.
Two more details that are of interest. There are actually two very similar cases.
In June of 1956- three years before the death of the Somerton Man- a 34 year old Singaporean man named George Marshall was found dead in Ashton Park in Sydney. He had an open copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam on his chest. His death is believed to be a suicide by poisoning and occurred two months before Jessica gave Alf Boxall the inscribed copy of the Rubaiyat. An inquest was held for Joseph Marshall on August 15th where Gwenneth Dorothy Graham testified. Her body was found dead 13 days later face down, naked, in a bath, with her wrists slit.
On June 6th 1949 the body a two-year-old Clive Mangnoson was found in a sack in the sand hills near Largs Bay only a few miles from Somerton. Lying next to him was his unconscious father, Keith Waldemar Mangnoson. The body was found by a local who claimed they had seen the location in a dream. The father was taken to a hospital in a very weak condition, suffering from exposure. After a medical examination he was transferred to a mental hospital.
The two of them had been missing for four days and police believed the boy had been dead for twenty four hours when his body was found. The coroner could not determine the cause of the boy’s death but it was not believed to be of natural causes. Following the incident the boy’s mother reported having been threatened by a masked man, who, while driving a battered cream car, almost ran her down outside her home. She state that, “the car stopped and a man with a khaki handkerchief over his face told her to ‘keep away from the police or else.’” Mrs. Mangnoson believed that it was related to her husband’s attempt to identify the Somerton Man. He claimed the man was in fact a former coworker named Carl Thompsen. Authorities also claim to have received threatening phone calls telling them not to “stick their nose into the Mangnoson affair”. Police believed the calls to be a hoax along with the man with the handkerchief. After being interview by the police Mrs. Mangnoson collapsed and required medical treatment.
What do you think Zach? Who was the Somerton Man? Was he a spy who was actually murdered by his fellow spy Jessica Ellen Thompson? Was he a former woodcutter in his 60s? Was he even murdered?
I don’t want to take the show too far down but we have a bit of a downer for this week’s mystery. I thought to myself, “we’ve been having far too many romps in the proverbial hay. We need to go back to our roots. We need a tragic story that will inevitably lead to us making a horrendously offensive joke after which we’ll be sentenced to podcast prison and Zach you won’t do well in podcast prison. Roman Mars will hold you down while Terry Gross stabs you with a shiz made from the handle of an NPR coffee mug. I won’t do much better. Sure I’ll blend in with the “comedy podcast” crowd for a bit but at some point we’ll be having some kind of prison improv contest and I won’t be able to finish the hoedown we’re doing and the McElroy brothers will take turns pounding my face in with a haunted doll. And don’t get me started on what the gang from “My Dad Wrote a Porno” are going to do to us! (just bleep it out bro) With that in mind, let’s get started.
For this week’s mystery we’re taking it back in time to 1957. Good old 1957, Wham-O had just produced the first frisbee, Elvis’s “Jailhouse Rock” is broadcasting across the country, and the Ku Klux Klan is running rampant in the Jim Crow south. However, this week we’re not talking about the racist atrocities of the era (much like white America at the time) instead we’re discussing a tragic mystery that happened in the Fox Chase neighborhood of Philadelphia Pennsylvania.
It’s February 1956, average temperatures had been below freezing all month but the weather had remained mostly dry. No snow had accumulated in quite some time. Here in the rather secluded area a young man is checking his traps for muskrats. As he wanders along woods off Susquehanna Road he comes to a sunken cardboard box. It lying on the side and the boy has to tilt his head to read the words “up furniture” written on the side. He abandons his muskrat poaching for a second to inspect the box. He pokes his head inside and he immediately regrets it.
Break
Inside the box is the naked body of a young boy between 3 and 7 years old. The young man who made the discovery runs away but doesn’t immediately report what he saw. Why you may ask? That’s all part of the mystery! (Just kidding his muskrat traps were illegal and he didn’t want to get in trouble). A few days pass before a college student is driving though the same area. While driving he spots a rabbit caught in the underbrush. He stops his car in hopes of trapping the animal but instead stumbles upon the same rectangular box. This time the discovery is reported to the police, but not until the following day.
When police arrived on the scene they found the body of a severely malnourished young boy. He was naked but wrapped in a plaid blanket. The blanket was produced either in Quebec or North Carolina but couldn’t be definitively traced. The boys hair had been recently cut and whoever had done it was quite messy with clumps of hair clinging to his body. This lead investigators to believe that the boy’s hair was cut either immediately before or immediately after his death. The boy had surgical scars on his ankle and groin as well as an L-shaped scar under his chin. There was a dark, brown residue which indicated the boy had vomited shortly before he died there were also indications that at least part of the boy had been submerged in water for quite some time before his death. The cause of death was determined to be blunt force trauma to the head which was evident in the multiple bruises he had sustained. Due to the relatively cold and dry weather the body was relatively well preserved and officials estimate the boy could have been there anywhere from 2 days to 3 weeks.
Police were initially very optimistic that the case would be resolved quickly. Obviously someone would report a missing boy but no such reports came in. The box he was found in was from J.C. Penney and originally contained a bassinet. Police were lucky enough to discover that the box was one of 12 sold from a J.C. Penney location in Darby, Pennsylvania but all of the bassinets were traced back to their owners with no suspects identified. The case quickly became a media sensation. Pictures of the boy’s face were widely published in an attempt to identify him. The crime scene was searched by over 270 police academy recruits who discovered a child’s blue corduroy cap, a child’s scarf, and a handkerchief, the Philadelphia Inquirer printed 400,000 flyers with the boy's face which were included in every gas bill in Philadelphia, the police even distributed pictures of the boy fully dressed and in a seated position in hopes that a more life like posture would help identify him. Despite these efforts, however, no one came forward to identify the body.
So, Zach, who is the boy in the box?
There are a couple theories that have surface throughout the years. The first is that the boy was from a local foster home located a mere 1.5 miles from where the body was found. A man named Remington Bristow was an employee of the examiners office that performed an autopsy on the boy. Remington desperately wanted to solve the case and what do you do when want to solve a case? Come one Zach, I know you know. I know you know that I’m not telling the truth…
That’s right! You hire a psychic and that’s exactly what Remington did. When the psychic was brought into the Philly she led Remington directly to this foster home. Now leaning as hard as possible into this Harriet the Spy fantasy of his, Remington went undercover at an estate sale at the foster home. There he discovered a bassinet similar to the one sold at J.C. Penney and blankets hanging on the clothesline that were similar to the one wrapped around the boys body. From this Remington came up with a theory. He decided the boy belonged to the stepdaughter of the man who ran the foster home and they must have disposed of the young boy after a tragic accident so the stepdaughter wouldn’t be revealed as an unwed mother.
Much like every child’s detective book when this evidence was brought to the police they weren’t able to find any definitive links between the boy and the foster family. So Remington had to take matters into his own hands. In the dead of night he grabbed his trusty slingshot and snuck into the house and poured chocolate syrup all over the residents while they slept. Justice served! Unfortunately this turned out to be another example of rampant vigilantism because a DNA test conducted in 1998 showed that the stepdaughter was not the boy’s mother but she was the new wife of her former step father...
Despite this mystery happening over 60 years ago there are still new developments (well relatively new). In February of 2002 a woman identified only as “M” came to the police. M claimed that the boy was named Jonathan and her mother had bought him from his birth parents in 1954. According to M Jonathan was physically and sexually abused for two and a half years until he was killed. According to M her mother flew into a fit of rage one day after Jonathan had vomited in the bathtub. She slammed Jonathan to the floor and killed him then forcibly cut his long hair.
M and her mother then went to dump Jonathan’s body but as they were pulling the body from the trunk of their car a man drove by and asked if they needed help. The man eventually drove off. This detail is important because it was corroborated with a confidential testimony given by a male witness in 1956 who said that the body had been placed in a box previously discarded at the scene. Mental illness
Forensic artist Frank Bender developed a theory that the victim may have been raised as a girl. The child's unprofessional haircut, which appeared to have been performed in haste, was the basis for the scenario, as well as the appearance of the eyebrows having been styled. Bender later released a sketch of the unidentified child with long hair, reflecting the strands found on the body.
Following the 59th anniversary of the discovery of the boy's body in 2016, two writers, one from Los Angeles, California (Jim Hoffmann) the other from New York, New York (Louis Romano) explained that they believed they had discovered a potential identity from Memphis, Tennessee and requested that DNA be compared between the family members and the child. The lead was originally discovered by a Philadelphia man (who introduced Romano and Hoffmann to each other) and then developed and presented, with the help of Hoffmann, to the Philadelphia Police Department and the Vidocq Society in early 2013. In December 2013, Romano became aware of the lead and agreed to help the man from Philadelphia and Hoffmann to personally obtain the DNA from this particular family member in January 2014 - which was sent quickly to the Philadelphia Police Department. Local authorities confirmed that they would investigate the lead, yet they stated that they would need to do more research on the circumstances surrounding the link to Memphis before comparing DNA.
For today’s story, Willy, you’ll be very happy to know that we’ll need to t-- t-- t-- TAKE IT BACK IN TIME! That’s right, this week we’ve got a myHISTORY! And please, we would just like to implore our listeners to go support our sponsors and our Patreon page at patreon.com/mysteriyes because Lin Manuel Miranda is charging us $1000 each time a listener listens to the myHISTORY theme song and the royalty fees are really starting to add up.
Today, we’re going to go all the way back to the days of the greatest generation, back when men were men and white people inexplicably got their own drinking fountains. You know, back when America was truly great, so grab your fidget spinners and let’s jump in. The year was 1942, and World War II was in full swing. For those of our listeners who don’t know much about American history, when World War II began in 1939, the United States was determined to stay out of the conflict. However, their hand was forced on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese Empire launched a surprise attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor in the then-island territory of Hawaii. Three-hundred-fifty-three Imperial fighters and bombers led the attack, which resulted in the deaths of over 2400 Americans and a horrendous amount of damage to the US naval fleet stationed at Pearl Harbor. The following day, the US officially declared war on Japan and thus became embroiled in the deadliest conflict in human history.
The attack on Pearl Harbor is a very important preface to today’s myHISTORY, but there’s another event that we need to talk about as well before we can really jump into our story. This event is called the Bombardment of Ellwood (and don’t worry, Willy, we’re not talking about Ellwood City, the hometown of everyone’s favorite aardvark, Arthur Reid). On February 23, 1942, just a few days after US Secretary of War Henry Stimson warned that American cities should prepare to receive occasional blows from Japanese forces, a Japanese submarine surfaced near Santa Barbara, California and began to fire upon the Ellwood Oil Field along the coast. The attack lasted for 20 minutes, and the physical damage was minimal. However, the bombardment caused great damage to the psyche of the American people, as an understandable paranoia regarding a Japanese invasion of the American mainland proliferated across the west coast. This event was also a key influence in the decision to send Japanese-Americans to internment camps, which was something that was not so great about the greatest generation.
Today’s myHISTORY began on the evening of February 24, 1942, the day after the Bombardment of Ellwood, when tensions and fears were astronomically high, particularly in coastal cities. That evening, with many Americans believing that attacks on the continental US were imminent, naval intelligence warned its units all along the California coastline to prepare for a possible Japanese attack occurring within the next ten hours. Then, at 2 am on what would have technically been the 25th, a military radar picked up some sort of unidentified target about 120 miles west of Los Angeles, which is a city right on the west coast. The radar team continued to track the potential enemy contact until it was within a few miles of the coast before it eventually vanished.
At 2:15 am, the order was given for antiaircraft guns to be manned and put on green alert, which means they were ready to fire whenever it was deemed appropriate. Searchlights began to scour the night sky for enemy targets. At 2:21 am, air raid sirens sounded throughout Los Angeles and a citywide blackout was implemented. In the time before real sophisticated target-seeking technology, cities implemented blackouts so as to hide themselves from attacking airplanes. At 2:43, planes were reported flying over Long Beach, and a few minutes later, a report came in that 25 planes had been spotted flying 12,000 feet above Los Angeles.
At 3:06 am, an unidentified object was seen in the skies, and troops in Santa Monica began to fire antiaircraft and .50 caliber machine guns at the object. Immediately thereafter, the rest of the city’s antiaircraft weapons began firing into the air as well. Chaos ensued as it appeared that the city of Los Angeles and the United States mainland were under attack. Some people claimed to see Japanese planes flying in formation, bombs falling on the city, and paratroopers being launched from the planes. Others claimed that they could only see a great deal of smoke and the light of antiaircraft fire, because antiaircraft artillery are launched into the sky where they explode after a certain period of sky, thereby shootings shrapnel at whatever may be within range. The pilots of the 4th Interceptor Command were alerted of the attack, but their planes remained grounded. Meanwhile, residents in a forty-mile arc along the coast watched from hills or rooftops as the play of guns and searchlights provided the first real drama of the war for citizens of the mainland. The barrage of defensive fire raged on for about an hour, and the final all-clear order was given and the blackout lifted at 7:21 am. When the Battle of Los Angeles was all said and done, over 1400 rounds of antiaircraft ammunition had been fired into the Los Angeles sky.
Now, Willy, you might be wondering why you never learned about a Battle of Los Angeles in school. After all, if the Japanese did in fact attack the US mainland, you’d think we’d know a little bit more about it, even if it did take place over 75 years ago.
Well, when daylight broke the next morning, the people of Los Angeles were more than a little surprised to find that there was absolutely no evidence of any bombs being dropped on the city or any Japanese planes being shot down. The only damage to the city had been caused by the US military’s antiaircraft ammunition. Shrapnel shattered windows and tore through buildings, even partially destroying some families’ homes. There were no serious injuries as a direct result of the antiaircraft fire, but at least five people died as a result of stress-induced heart attacks or car accidents in the confusion of the blackout. However, for all intents and purposes, there had been no attack on Los Angeles by the Japanese military. That, of course, didn’t stop local authorities from arresting 20 Japanese-Americans for allegedly signalling to the attacking Japanese airplanes.
In the days following the incredibly mysterious event, the reports coming out from the media and the government alike were contradictory and unclear. Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox dismissed the firefight as a mere false alarm caused by understandably jittery nerves. However, Secretary of War Henry Stimson publicly confirmed that at least 15 Japanese airplanes had been seen flying through the city of Los Angeles. The Army, meanwhile, was unable to even provide an explanation as to what happened. The media reported that some eyewitnesses claimed to have seen anywhere between one and several dozen planes, whereas others claimed to have seen a big floating object in the sky. The Los Angeles Times printed an ominous photo in which several searchlights zeroed in on some sort of glittering object hovering in the sky, which seemed to support the report of a big floating object in the sky. An editorial in The New York Times a few days after the event said, "If the batteries were firing on nothing at all, as Secretary Knox implies, it is a sign of expensive incompetence and jitters. If the batteries were firing on real planes, some of them as low as 9,000 feet, as Secretary Stimson declares, why were they completely ineffective? Why did no American planes go up to engage them, or even to identify them? ... What would have happened if this had been a real air raid?"
It’s still uncertain what actually happened that night in Los Angeles, which is of course why we’re even talking about it here on MysteriYES. But, Willy, it’s been 75 years, so I think it’s high time we solved this thing, right?
Let’s first talk about the possibility that this was actually a real Japanese attack. Now, of course, we already noted that there were absolutely no bombs dropped on Los Angeles that night, so what in the heck would the Japanese planes have been doing? Well, Secretary of War Stimson had two theories: either to conduct reconnaissance to locate antiaircraft defenses, or to further terrorize the American people. Stimson also suggested that the planes were either commercial planes being operated by an enemy from Californian or Mexican airfields or light airplanes launched from Japanese submarines. However, after the war, the Japanese military reported that it never once flew over Los Angeles, although we do know that light planes launched off of submarines were flown over Seattle during the war. The three questions that really throw a wrench into this theory are: where did the planes come from, where did they go, and why did no American planes pursue? Plus, if the Japanese were conducting reconnaissance on Los Angeles’s antiaircraft defense system, how come they never attacked Los Angeles at any other point during the war?
Another theory that was put forth by the Secretary of the Navy was that the event was merely the result of understandably nervous and paranoid US troops. Remember, Pearl Harbor had proven that the American sleeping giant was vulnerable, and American citizens truly believed that the Japanese might invade at any time. Combine this nervousness with some rudimentary radar instruments, and it’s understandable why something like this could have happened. As for the many reports of Japanese planes being spotted in the skies over Los Angeles, it’s possible that, when caught by the beams of an abundance of searchlights, the antiaircraft shells could have been mistaken for Japanese planes. My only question about this theory is this: was our military so incompetent that it would just start firing into the air at...absolutely nothing? I mean, it makes sense for the average citizen to jump to irrational conclusions, but you’d hope that the people who are in charge of all the super powerful weapons would be a little more calculating in their conclusions.
A new theory was put forth in 1983 when the Office of Air Force History noted that meteorological balloons had been released that night prior to the barrage, in order to determine wind conditions. Apparently, due to their lights and silver color, it was apparently conceivable that they could have been mistaken for Japanese planes. If indeed the troops in Santa Monica had actually seen one of these meteorological balloons, mistook it for an entire squadron of Japanese planes, and began firing, the sheer chaos of the whole thing would have likely been enough to keep people shooting into the air, even though there was nothing to shoot at. Plus, while the photo printed by the Los Angeles Times doesn’t show a lot of detail of the object in the sky, the object does look way more like a meteorological balloon than a Japanese plane. My first question for this theory is this: what in the world were people doing launching meteorological balloons during such a tense time in history? And why in the world did no one tell the military that this would be happening so they didn’t start shooting at nothing? My other question is this: if meteorological balloons had indeed been launched, how could they have been mistaken for airplanes when they moved significantly slower and looked nothing like a Japanese airplane?
But, Willy, if you’re not a fan of any of these theories, you’re in luck because there’s the old tried and true UFO theory is available for this one. I’d like to thank my wife for super helpfully pointing out that, no matter what the object was, it was indeed an unidentified flying object. So, for clarity’s sake, let’s say we are talking about the theory that the unidentified flying object was an alien spaceship. Now, it should be noted that this event happened a good five years before the Kenneth Arnold UFO sighting in Mt. Rainier, Washington, which is considered the first modern UFO sighting, so there wasn’t much precedence or vocabulary for talking about UFOs at the time of the Battle of Los Angeles. If you look at that picture from the Los Angeles Times, it does look like the searchlights could be zeroing in on some sort of flying saucer, and as much as I hate to say it, I can definitely see it, although I did read that the photo was doctored to increase the contrast so that it could be visible when printed in the newspaper. One eyewitness described seeing an object like an enormous flying lozenge. Another eyewitness stated, "It was just hovering there in the sky and hardly moving at all. It was a lovely pale orange and about the most beautiful thing you've ever seen. I could see it perfectly because it was very close. It was big!" Still other eyewitnesses described the sight as “a surreal, hanging, magic lantern.” The alleged story with the UFO is that it was indeed the object that was picked up on the military radar 120 miles west of Los Angeles, and that the radar tracked it all the way to the city. The troops in Santa Monica then sighted the UFO and opened fire. The UFO was caught on camera by the Los Angeles Times before then retreating from the scene in order to avoid further damage. Of course, you can read way, way more about the UFO theory on the internet, but that is the gist of it based upon the cursory reading I did of the theory.
So, Willy, what do you think happened during the Battle of Los Angeles?
My thoughts:
No UFO; probably just a meteorological balloon after all, especially in the Los Angeles Times photo.
No Japanese planes; the idea that they were conducting reconnaissance just doesn’t make sense; the sightings of them were probably confirmation bias based upon glimpses of antiaircraft shells caught in the searchlights.
Nerves and fear must have definitely played a role in the initial shooting, and confusion must have definitely played a role in the continuation of the barrage.
I don’t know about what the radar picked up; perhaps it was just an error of the instrument, or something else innocuous.
Zach, last week you called me out for always using the same basic format during the introduction to my topic. This week I’m going to change it up a bit. Normally I’d ask you a question about whatever topic is at the center of my mystery. This week I’m going to ask you a question that is only tangentially related and you have to figure out how it’s related to this week’s mystery. Zach have you ever seen the TV show “Lost”?
In the first season of Lost the survivors of Oceanic flight 815 discover a strange radio broadcast coming from somewhere on the island. The broadcast is an automated message from a french woman that when translated says, “If anybody can hear this, they are dead. Please help us. I’ll try to make it to the Black Rock. It (or he) killed them. It (or he) killed them all.” This message had been playing, nonstop, for 15 years. This week, Zach, we’re talking about a mysterious radio signal that has been broadcast, nonstop, for at least 44 years.
UVB-76 is a station broadcasting at 4625 kHtz somewhere in Russia. It plays a constant loop of a strange buzzing noise which you can hear under my voice right now. For quite some time, until around 1992, UVB-76 broadcasted nothing but beeps, but somewhere along the way it changed to a rhythmic buzzing that varies from 21-34 buzzes per minute with 2 quick buzzes every hour, on the hour. For this reason the station is commonly referred to as “the buzzer”. The station is thought to be run by the Russian military but this has never been confirmed by the government.
Zach I want you to follow me on a journey. You’re walking alone in the Russian wilderness with your shortwave radio slung around your neck like a crazy old guy at a baseball game. It’s getting a little dark outside but fortunately you have favorite monotonous tone to keep you company. As you walk down the dirt path you notice something is off. Maybe a buzz was slightly off, maybe a buzz was slightly too quiet. Something is different. Someone is controlling the broadcast. Then you hear………
In case you don’t speak Russian you just heard a man read a series of numbers and Russian names and most people think this is the real reason for the broadcast. The interruptions happen at random intervals that can be anywhere from minutes to months apart and they never repeat or show any kind of obvious pattern. They do have a standard format however. First the monotonous beeping is interrupted, then a voice reads the station callsign and some combination of numbers and russian names.
I know that you are well up to speed on late 20 to early 21st century Russian history but let me give you a little recap of things that have happened in the last 40 years. You have the last decade of the cold war, the end of the Afghan war, the Soviet implosion, the end of price controls, Boris Yeltsin, the bombing of parliament, the first Chechen war, the rise of oligarchs, the financial crisis, the second Chechen war, the rise of Putinism, and the beginning of the Crimean war. Despite a country going through complete and total upheaval, UVB-76 has continued to broadcast. In fact, UVB-76 has been even more active since the turn of the century with voice messages increasing to multiple times a month.
Another strange thing about UVB-76 is that it isn’t a loop or even pre recorded. It seems to be a manually generated buzzer noise. This was deferred after listeners started hearing phone conversations and banging noises in the background. The buzzer is made by some kind of device in front of a microphone and there is often a person in the room with it.
More than just background voices and banging noises have been heard from UVB-76. In 2010 the station did several very weird things. On June 5 the buzzing stopped. There was no announcement and no explanation then it started again the next day. Everything seemed mostly normal, there were some things that sound like morse but nothing dramatic. Then on August 25th at 10:13 AM everything stopped again then there was a series of bumps that could be routinely heard for the next month. For the first week of September the broadcast was regularly interrupted with portions of “Dance of the Little Swans” from Tchaikovsky’s swan lake. https://youtu.be/oH5Fn_u7XQk?t=93 There were also reports of a woman’s scream being heard on the air.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oMN_ISWA0w
Then on September 7th at 8:48 PM Moscow time a male voice issued a new call sign, “Mikhail Dmitri Zhenya Boris”. The station had now changed it’s name to MDZhB. Around this time the station also changed locations, originally it was traced to Povarovo a military outpost a few miles north of Moscow. Around the same time as the strange noises heard in 2010 the station was relocated to an unknown location near St. Petersburg. Since it’s move and rebranding UVB-76 or UZB-76 or MDZhB or The Buzzer or whatever else you want to call it has been broadcasting normally. There are occasional technical problems and the voice broadcasts have become more frequent over the years.
There are several theories about why UVB-76 exists. The first actually comes from a Russian state-funded organization called the Borok Geophysical Observatory. This group published an academic paper that explained the the signal originates from an observatory using the frequency to measure changes in the ionosphere. At first this seems like a perfectly reasonable explanation until you remember the voice. Why would a group of researches need to send coded messages in order to study the ionosphere? There’s also something I haven’t mentioned yet Zach. The original location of UVB-76 has already been found and explored.
After the station changed location two groups of explorers travelled to Povarovo. When they got there a local man told them about a storm that happened in 2010. One night a dense fog rolled in and the military outpost was evacuated within an hour and a half. After sneaking onto the former military base the groups found an abandoned bunker and several abandoned buildings. Equipment and random items had been left behind and strewn about, there were leaks that had frozen over, and the building seemed completely abandoned. During the exploration a book was found that contained a log of messages sent by UVB-76. This discovery all but confirmed the station’s affiliation with the Russian military. Now the “official” explanation seems a little strange. Why would a research group operate out of a military bunker?
Another theory is that the station is a Dead Man’s Switch. The theory claims that if Russia were to be crippled by a nuclear strike that prevented the orders for retaliation the automated system would launch a counter strike at the most likely perpetrator (aka America). This theory isn’t one of my favorites because it doesn’t explain the voice broadcast or the strange noise. Additionally the Russians would have to be incredibly stupid for this to be their automated retaliation system. First the station has gone out many many times since it first started broadcasting sometimes for several days. Second why would they rely on a manually generated tone to hold their nuclear arsenal at bay? The device generating the tone has broken on more than one occasion and the rate and pitch of the noise has varied over the years. Finally why would they use a system that would be so easy for another country to replicate? Nothing would prevent the US or any other country from broadcasting a recorded version of the station shortly before killing everyone and thereby nullifying the deadman’s switch.
For me, the best explanation is that UVB-76 is used for communication within the Russian military. It definitely explains the strange messages that are broadcast whether it be internal communication or if it’s intended for operatives overseas. Number stations such as this have been operated by dozen of countries, rebels, and paramilitary grounds for decades. They use an open frequency to broadcast coded messages (often in a series of numbers) to an unknown recipient who is the only one who can easily decode the message. This theory doesn’t explain UVB’s buzzer. Perhaps it’s meant to hold the frequency, maybe it’s to draw attention to itself, I’m not sure.
Willy, I’ve noticed that many of your scripts begin the same way. You identify the primary phenomenon about your mystery, and then you ask me about my personal experience with that particular phenomenon. So today I wanted to return the favor, and I promise it will be very contrived. Willy, have you ever been abducted by aliens?
Today’s mystery was suggested to us by our loyal Patreon supporter, Tom Krisenthal, as it came from his homeland of Australia. Of course, if any of our loyal listeners want to be as cool as Tom, you can go to patreon.com/mysteriyes to support our show and make your topic suggestions as well. Today, we’ll be talking about the very mysterious disappearance of Frederick Valentich.
Frederick Valentich was born June 9, 1958 in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. In 1978, when today’s mystery took place, he was a twenty-year-old man living at home with his parents and three siblings in Avondale Heights, which is a suburb northwest of Melbourne. He was described as a well-adjusted man with a steady girlfriend and who got along well with his family. He worked as a shop assistant at an army disposals store in Moonee Ponds, another suburb in inner Melbourne. His father described him as a “flying saucer enthusiast” who believed in and feared UFO attacks.
On top of that, Frederick was a pilot—a terrible pilot, but technically a pilot nonetheless. He received his student pilot license on February 24, 1977 and his private pilot license the following September. He had applied to the Royal Australian Air Force twice, but had been rejected both times due to inadequate educational qualifications. He was studying part-time to become a commercial pilot, but was struggling due to a poor achievement record. On two separate occasions, he failed all five commercial license examination subjects, and failed three additional subjects, including a failure one month before the event that is today’s mystery. He was also involved in multiple flight incident. Once, he received a warning for straying into a controlled zone in Sydney, and he was being considered for prosecution after deliberately flying into a cloud twice.
Somehow, considering all that, Frederick had racked up 150 total hours of flying experience and had a class-four instrument rating, which authorized him to fly at night during visual meteorological conditions, which is when the pilot can easily distinguish between what’s good to fly into (like the sky) and what’s not good to fly into (like the ground or other planes) without having to use instruments on the plane.
On the evening of October 21, 1978, Frederick decided that he wanted to increase his flying hours, so he plotted a flight from Moorabbin in Victoria to King Island, which is a small island halfway between the Australian mainland and the island state of Tasmania. This 125 miles or 235 kilometer flight would take him over a body of water called the Bass Strait. His stated intention was that he would pick up passengers in King Island and then return to Moorabbin. However, he told his family, girlfriend, and various acquaintances that he intended to pick up crayfish from King Island.
Frederick left the airport in Moorabbin at 6:19 pm, flying a Cessna 182 light aircraft. That evening, visibility was good and winds were light. At 7:00 pm, he reached Cape Otway, which was a cape on the Australian mainland west of Melbourne. At 7:06 pm, while flying over the water, he made radio contact with Melbourne’s air traffic control, asking if there was any air traffic in the area below 5,000 feet. Let’s take a listen to what happened next:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0EVi8XK-L0
So, to recap what we just heard since it might have been hard to hear, Frederick checked in with air traffic control at 7:06 to see if there were any aircraft in the area below 5,000 feet and was told that there was no known traffic. Frederick then claimed that an unidentified aircraft was following him at a distance of 4,500 feet or 1,400 meters and that the large, unknown aircraft appeared to be illuminated by four bright landing lights. He then said that the aircraft flew over the top of him at 1,000 feet or 300 meters and moving quite rapidly. He also stated that his own engine had been running roughly.
After the aircraft flew over him, Frederick stated that it was approaching him from the east and that he believed the pilot of the other aircraft was messing with him. Then he stated that the aircraft was orbiting above him and that it had a shiny metal surface with a green light on it. Several times, you heard Frederick stating, “It’s not an aircraft.”
Now, the audio that was released of the conversation was just a minute and twenty seconds, but the conversation actually lasted from 7:06 to 7:12. Right there at the end, you heard him say, “That strange aircraft is hovering on top of me again. It is hovering and it's not an aircraft.” After that, the radio went dead and Frederick Valentich was never heard from again. It’s not on the audio recording we have access to, but there was apparently seventeen seconds of an unidentified noise described as a “metallic sound” before all contact was finally lost. Later analysis described the sound as thirty-six separate bursts with fairly constant start and stop pulses bounding each one and with no discernible patterns in time or frequency. However, the significance of the sounds, if there is any, has remained undetermined.
A search and rescue alert was given immediately after radio contact was lost, and when Frederick failed to arrive at King Island by 7:33 that evening, a sea and air search began. The search for Frederick Valentich and his missing aircraft lasted four days, but no conclusive evidence of the Cessna was ever found, even though the aircraft was designed to float for several minutes and was equipped with four life jackets and an emergency radio beacon that would have also floated in the event of a crash into the water. Five years after the disappearance, parts of aircraft wreckage with partially matching serial numbers to Frederick Valentich’s Cessna 182L, but it has never been conclusively identified as Frederick’s plane. A two week long investigation by Australia’s Department of Transport immediately after the disappearance could not determine a cause for the disappearance, but it was determined that whatever happened was “presumed fatal” to Frederick.
So, Willy, our task for today is to determine what happened to Frederick Valentich. But first, let’s hear a word from our sponsor, shall we?
Okay, so before the break we were about to discuss what happened to poor old Frederick. Now of course there really isn’t all that much to discuss because obviously Frederick was abducted by aliens flying in a UFO, or at least his plane was obliterated beyond recognition by a UFO. For one thing, Valentich was a UFO enthusiast so he definitely knew a lot, so when he was describing what was happening to air traffic control, he knew exactly what he was talking about. His last transmission had him describing the aircraft as “hovering”, which is something that only UFOs do, and he also said it was “not an aircraft,” so,…there’s something there. Also, since the unidentified sounds in the last seventeen seconds of radio contact with Frederick were weird, it’s impossible that his disappearance could have been caused by anything other than a UFO. His family believes that he was abducted by a UFO, because he was apparently a well-adjusted man who wouldn’t make up stories like a UFO hovering over his plane.
There’s a bit more evidence to support the obviously correct theory that Frederick was abducted by a UFO. On the same evening as the disappearance, a plumber named Roy Manifold set up a time lapse camera on the shoreline at Cape Otway to catch the sun setting over Bass Strait. At 6:47 pm, about 20 minutes before Valentich made contact with air traffic control, Manifold’s camera caught a fast-moving object exiting the water. The object is a boxy, moderately-sized object that is seen hovering above the horizon. It is backlit by the sun, so it is completely black in the photos.
http://www.noufors.com/images/Who%27s%20Who%20in%20UFOlogy/Pilots%20and%20UFOs/Otway%201.jpg
Various UFO groups have analyzed the series of images and have suggested that based upon its movements between each image the object was moving at a speed of 200 miles per hour, which was a fair bit faster than the 140 miles per hour that Valentich was traveling. Because of this, it’s been suggested that this could have been the UFO that did Frederick in. However, UFO skeptics believe that the object is either a cloud formation or an insect flying close to the lens, since there’s no evidence of the lights that Frederick had reported, but it’s hard to give an explanation that accounts for the object’s speed.
But wait, Willy! There’s more evidence for the UFO! After news of the strange disappearance of Frederick Valentich came out, reports of other UFO sightings came in from all over Australia, including Tasmania, Victoria, West Australia, and New South Wales. Allegedly, for two months prior to the night of Valentich’s disappearance, there were cigar-shaped lights in the sky seen from King Island. Also, witnesses in northwestern Tasmania claim to have seen a UFO fifteen minutes before Frederick Valentich went missing. Other people claimed to have seen “an erratically moving green light in the sky” and a few witnesses, located about a mile west of Apollo Bay, Victoria claimed to have seen a green light trailing Frederick’s plane, and that he was in a steep dive at the time. According to ufologists, these reports of a green light were significant because they were reported before it was revealed that Frederick reported a green light.
However, Ken Williams, a spokesman for the Australian Department of Transport, was sippin’ the Haterade and told the Associated Press that “it’s funny all these people ringing up with UFO reports well after Valentich’s disappearance.”
Now, just for kicks and giggles because obviously Frederick Valentich was abducted by aliens, let’s discuss some alternative theories to explain what happened to Frederick. We should say that there is actually good reason to believe that Frederick wasn’t abducted by a UFO. If you’ll remember, Frederick’s flight plan stated that he would be picking up passengers, while he told friends and family that he intended to pick up crayfish. However, the investigation into Frederick’s disappearance later turned up that there were no passengers waiting to be picked up, nor had Frederick put in an order for any crayfish.
Also, while Frederick filed his flight plan with the airport at Moorabbin, he never once informed the airport on King Island that he was coming. As a result, there were no lights on at the airport, and I don’t know if you’ve ever landed a plane at night with no lights, Willy, but it’s difficult. I realize that I just made it sound as if I have, and I’m not going to make any effort to eradicate that idea from our listeners’ heads. Anyway, this failure to alert the airport on King Island that he was coming has led some to suggest that he had planned some sort of getaway, or that he planned to kill himself.
Let’s first talk about evidence for why he might have used the UFO sighting as a cover for a getaway. Frederick’s plane had enough fuel to fly 500 miles or 800 kilometers, which could have gotten him somewhere pretty far into the Australian mainland. To be fair, just because he had enough fuel to fly 500 miles doesn’t mean he was actually planning to fly 500 miles. Now, Willy, you might be wondering, wouldn’t Frederick’s plane have shown up on radar, proving that he was flying over Bass Strait to King Island? Wrong! Frederick’s plane was never spotted on radar, which has led some to wonder whether he actually flew the route he claimed he would be flying. Couple that with the fact that the Melbourne Police received reports of a light aircraft that might have been a Cessna landing mysteriously near Cape Otway, right around the same time Frederick disappeared and this is a downright interesting theory. However, Frederick’s family has maintained that he had no reason to get away. He had a steady job, he was working to become a pilot, he had a girlfriend, and he had a good relationship with his family.
There isn’t a lot of evidence regarding the suicide theory besides mere speculation. It could be possible that he wanted to end his own life and didn’t want anyone to know that it was suicide, so, being a UFO enthusiast, he came up with the idea to blame his demise on a UFO. His family claimed that he was a well-adjusted man with no evidence of depression, but as I’m sure many of our listeners are aware, many people who choose to kill themselves don’t show many signs of what they’re about to do before they do it. However, there isn’t much reason to believe that Frederick killed himself, and there’s way more reason to believe that he crashed due to his own ineptitude in the pilot’s seat.
What I think is one of the better non-UFO theories (because, again, he was obviously abducted by a UFO) is that he became disoriented for some reason. Maybe he was sleep-deprived or under the influence of something, and, being a UFO enthusiast who fully believed in the existence of UFOs, his confused mind grasped at a UFO to explain what was happening to him. It’s also been suggested that perhaps he had somehow flipped his plane and was flying upside down, and was seeing his own lights reflected in the water and thought that the lights belonged to a UFO. However, that doesn’t really explain why his reports of the other aircraft flying over him and past him, then turning around and doing it again. Plus, aviation authorities have stated that it was unlikely that Frederick was flying upside down, as a Cessna could not have managed this very long, but he was on the radio with air traffic control for six minutes and you’d think once he turned right side up things would have gone back to normal. And finally, when you listen back to his radio conversation with air traffic control, he doesn’t sound very disoriented. He seems pretty well in his right mind, although he is understandably confused about what’s going on around him.
I think it’s also important to remember that Frederick was just a bad pilot who was obsessed with UFOs. Who knows why he called air traffic control that night and made it sound like he was being pursued by a UFO, but it’s possible he crashed into the water because he just wasn’t very good at flying airplanes. There doesn’t necessarily have to be any UFO, or disorientation, or suicide or getaway plot. Maybe he was just being a troll to air traffic control, and it just so happened that his untimely demise corresponded with his trolling.
Now, a lot of people wonder why no conclusive evidence of Frederick’s airplane was ever found. If he did crash into the water, the strong currents of Bass Strait could have conceivably carried his lightweight aircraft a long way out to sea before it finally sank. This isn’t necessarily convincing to everyone, and since no evidence of the plane was ever found, then obviously the plane must have been swallowed up by a UFO.
So, Willy, is there any particular theory you espouse to explain the disappearance of Frederick Valentich?
Zach have you ever been to South Carolina?
-Insert hilarious Carolina goofs here.
I’ve never been to South Carolina but I’m assuming it’s a terrible place. It was the first state to secede from the union during the civil war, it has absolutely no cultural touchstones, it’s in the south so I’m assuming it’s super humid all the time, and there’s a 7 foot tall bipedal lizard man who is out to kill you.
For this week’s mystery we need to go back to the late 80s. We need to go to where the stars at night are clear and bright clap clap clap clap deep in the heart of Lee county South Carolina. As a quick side note I cannot think of a worse worse name for a county in the southern united states than Lee county.
If we go back to the year 1987 in Lee county South Carolina we’ll run into a young boy named George Holliman Jr. It’s early one fall morning in 1987 and young little Georgie is biking along the roads near Scape Ore Swamp. He’s obviously pedalling pretty hard because George is getting pretty thirsty. He stops his bike near a babbling brook and finds something more than the parasites and digestive illness you would expect from drinking from a swamp. He relaxed and started to light a cigarette. (it was here where I found a conflicting report that George was not a little boy but instead a 31 year old man who was biking past midnight) As Georgie began to puff at his cigarette something caught his eye. Across the street George noticed a weird looking tree. It looked like it had been hit by lightning leaving only an odd discolored stump. Suddenly the stump began to move. Just then a car wizzed past George and as it did he noticed the stump had glowing red eyes. This wasn’t a stump at all! It was some kind of reptilian/humanoid creature! Just as quickly as it had appeared it vanished again diving back into the swamp.
Fast forward to June 29th, 1988. Here we’ll find a 17 year old boy named Christopher Davis. When we find him Chris is driving near Scape Ore Swamp early in the morning. Suddenly a tire blows out of his 1976 Toyota Celica. Chris is able to maintain control of the vehicle but has to pull over on a road exit to Scape Ore Swamp. He sets to work replacing the tire. He took the old one off and put the spare on without incident but when he went to put his tools back in the trunk he heard a strange pounding sound behind him. Chris looked back and saw something running across a field toward him. It was about 25 yards away and had red glowing eyes. Chris panicked and ran back to his car. He quickly locked the door before the thing could grab the door handle. Next to the driver’s side door he could get a good look at it, it had three big fingers with long black nails and rough green skin. The thing then jumped on the roof of Chris’s car and he heard a grunt before seeing three long fingers spill onto the windshield.Chris took off and was able to shake the creature off his car and escape. Chris made it home in a panic and it reportedly took quite some time before he calmed down enough to tell his parents what happened. Chris’s dad went to the card and found the driver’s side mirror had been twisted around violently several times and there were deep scratches on the roof. The family kept the incident to themselves for several weeks until reports came out of this next incident.
Shortly after Chris’s encounter, on July 14th 1988, we’ll meet the Wares. On the morning of July 14th the Wares called the Lee county sheriff's department to report some strange vandalism. Their car, which was parked on a back road in Lee County had been badly damaged during the night. The car’s hood ornament was crushed, the electrical wiring had been ripped from the underside of the car, and there were strange scratched all over the body of the vehicle. The police didn’t know what could have caused these damages and to add to the confusion they found several three-toed footprints nearby which measure around 14 inches in length. After further analysis it was determined that the tracks weren’t left by a known animal.
In the summer of 1988 twelve more people claimed to see the Lizard Man of Scape Ore Swamp. Some people were chased by the creature and others were slowly being followed until the creature was spotted and ran away. There were also more reports of mutilated cars. On July 24th four teenagers on a double date saw a massive looking thing run across the road about 20 feet in front of them. Shortly after receiving this initial report the police received several more reports of howling and screeching coming from the same area. Officers were dispatched to the area and discover three 40 gallon cardboards drums smashed and scattered all over the road. Several trees also had their tops torn off about 8 feet off the ground. There were also more 3 toed footprints measuring 14 inches long by 7 inches wide that followed a trail almost 900 feet into the swamp itself.
After the summer of 1988 citings slowly stopped, but there have been a few more in recent years. In 1990 a woman and her five children saw a strange creature appear of of nowhere on the interstate near scape ore swamp. The creature lunged toward the passenger side of the car before running off. The witness said she could only see it from the waist but but she could tell it was big and definitely not a deer or a bear although it had brown hair.
In 2015, a woman, who only identified by her first name Sarah, claimed to have taken a single picture of the Lizard Man with her phone after stepping outside her church on Sunday, August 2. Shortly after the picture went viral, a hunter who wished to remain unidentified released a 25-second-long video that he had taken in the woods near the same area, depicting a dark figure briefly moving through the trees in the distance, saying that he filmed it in May and kept its existence a secret until Sarah released her picture. http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2015/08/07/13/2B2DA04B00000578-0-image-a-1_1438952254457.jpg
Theories
Lies
Tourism
Hoax
Truth
The lizardman is real
Reptilians?
Neither
Probably a bear
This week's episode is brought to you by BarkBox. Go to www.getbarkbox.com/mysteriyes for a free month with your subscription.
I hope you’re wearing old clothes today, Willy, because we’re going to get a little messy. A little bloody, in fact, because today we’ll be talking about an unsolved case of axe murder. Now this one’s going to get a little brutal, so I thought we could start out with me telling you a little about a film known as Tappy Toes.
Our story today begins in Naples, Italy, in 1885, when a child named Benjamin Evangelista was born. Benjamin Evangelista moved to the United States, to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to be exact, in 1904 at age 19, and he quickly anglicized his name, changing it to Benny Evangelist. Two years later, in 1906, he started to receive visions directly from God…or so he claimed.
As one naturally would after hearing directly from the almighty, Benny Evangelist started a cult called the “Union Federation of America” and went on to write a self-published four volume book called “The Oldest History of the World: Discovered by Occult Science.” In that book, which was the “bible” for the Union, Benny Evangelist declared that he was a divine prophet, spiritual leader, and mystical healer. The book relates the adventures and good deeds of someone named Miel, an “exalted and powerful prophet,” and “representative of God on earth.” Apparently using the Christian Jesus as a prototype, Evangelist had the prophet Miel traveling with two “assistant prophets,” obliterating dissension among peoples, winning wars for the righteous, and spreading the gospel of God’s commandments wherever he went. Evangelist wrote of one character in his bible wrenching the head of an antagonist from his shoulders and hurling it at his feet, while other characters suffered dismembered arms.
Other than being a cult leader, Benny Evangelist was a carpenter by day, and he would also charge people $10 to heal physical and mental disabilities, using methods such as religion, black magic, and herbal medicine. Evangelist attracted quite a large crowd to his rituals and earned a large sum of money as a result of these healings. These healings, along with his cult sermons, would take place in his basement, where he had a dozen or so horrifying wax figures that hung from the ceiling. There were also “celestial planets” depicted in the basement, as well as a large eye that lit up using electricity, which he used during his healing rituals. Despite all this, Benny Evangelist was a devout Roman Catholic church attendee, who, many believed, performed his séances and other cult rituals with the sole motive of making money and not because he actually believed any of it.
Not only was Benny Evangelist a faith healer and a carpenter, but he was also a family man. In 1929 when this story took place, Benny had a wife named Santina, and four children: Angeline who was 8, Matilda who was 5, Jean (or maybe Jay?) who was 4, and Mario who was 18 months. Santina was apparently even more religiously fanatical than Benny, but apparently was not shrewd enough to understand the cult activity to be a means of making money rather than an actual religion. However, other than his immediate family, it is said that Benny was rather estranged from the rest of his family, even from his brother, who lived within walking distance.
The night in question was the evening of July 2, 1929. Earlier that day, Evangelist visited a man who was keeping watch over a house that was supposed to be demolished that day. Being a carpenter by day, Evangelist told that man that he had purchased all the lumber that was salvageable after the house had been demolished. He explained to the watchman that he had made an arrangement with a delivery company for the lumber to be delivered directly to Evangelist’s home on St. Aubin Street in residential Detroit the following morning, July 3rd, and he would pay them the cash he owed then. However, as far as anyone knows, the truck never showed up on the morning of July 3rd.
The Evangelist family didn’t notice that the truck didn’t show up, as they were all over the place…literally. A real estate agent named Vincent Elias came out to the house that morning at 10:30 for a business meeting, only to discover that all six of Evangelist family had been hacked to death with an axe. Santina Evangelist and her four children had all been slaughtered while they were sleeping in their beds and their skulls had been crushed. There are a couple of different reports about where Benny’s body was found. According to the United Press, Benny had been decapitated while he was asleep in bed with Santina, and his head was sitting on a chair near the bed. However, according to the Associated Press, Benny was “Sitting before his desk, which also served as an altar, his hands folded as though in prayer….The head lay on the floor beside the chair.”
When police searched the home, there was no trace of a weapon anywhere, but they did find bloody fingerprints on the door latch. Of course, in 1929, a fingerprint is only beneficial if you have an actual finger to match it to or a copy of a fingerprint on file, which requires either a suspect in custody and someone willing to dedicate a lot of time to looking at every single fingerprint on file and trying to match it to the one found on the door latch.
Also, there was no large amount of cash that would have been set aside to pay for the delivery in the morning, as police had expected to find. Police found this to be suspicious and wondered if perhaps the money had been a motive for the murders. However, try as they might, the police were never able to identify the delivery company that Evangelist had arranged to drop the lumber off at his house.
On July 4th, the day after the bodies were found, all of Detroit’s police squads were ordered to join a city-wide search for the killer and a $1000 reward was offered for any information that led to an arrest. At first, the police believed that the Evangelist family murders were connected to the murder of a mother and her three children two weeks prior, but it was determined that there was no connection between the murders, as the fingerprints from each crime scene did not match.
Police were unable to identify any witnesses who had seen anyone enter or leave the house. They identified a suspect named Angelo Depoli who had a stained knife and axe in a barn behind his house, which police believed could have been used as the murder weapons. Although neighbors claimed that he was a frequent visitor to the Evangelist home, the stains were proven to have not been blood, and the man was let go. Police also questioned Vincent Elias, the man who had found the butchered Evangelist family, as his feet were the same size as the bloody footprints leading away from Benny’s decapitated body. However, Elias was determined to be innocent of the crime. The police also attempted to identify a list of Benny Evangelist’s followers, to determine if perhaps the family had been murdered by a disgruntled former devotee.
A psychic claimed that the murderer was a man of less than medium height, of dark complexion, and strong, agile, and wiry. His hair was reddish and he was egocentric. All of this was determined because Uranus was rising on the eastern horizon. However, because the moon was in conjunction with Venus, the psychic also stated that a woman who was not Santina Evangelist was involved in the crime. Because Mercury and Uranus were 50 degrees apart, the psychic confidently declared that the crime will be solved easily. And now we know that all this psychic stuff is mere hogwash because we are talking about this crime on MysteriYES.
A funeral for the family was held on July 6th, and a huge crowd of 3,000 curious people packed the streets. The police were hoping to identify a suspect at the funeral, and even arrested a man who was described as “acting queerly, with excited suspicion.” However, the police identified that this man had nothing to do with the murders.
In March of 1930, eight months after the murders, the Associated Press reported that an eyewitness to the brutal murders had been uncovered. The witness was a dog, which belonged to the Evangelist family. This was the last time the Associated Press printed anything worth reading.
In 1932, three months after the murders, a man named Robert Harris confessed to the crime. Harris was the founder of his own Detroit-based cult and was already in jail for murder. On November 20, 1932, police found the body of James J. Smith tied to a crudely built altar and stabbed through the heart with a silver knife. Harris claimed that Smith was a willing sacrifice and had offered himself as such. However, the fact that Harris had to knock Smith out with a wagon axle before stabbing him threw suspicion on that claim. After his arrest, Harris declared himself to be a king and revealed his plans to kill several more people, including Detroit’s mayor. While police truly believed that they had solved the mystery of the Evangelist family murders, the finger prints found at the scene did not match Harris’s, and it was determined that Harris did not commit the crime.
Even though this case remains unsolved almost 90 years later, there are a few theories that attempt to explain what happened to the Evangelist family. The first theory is that an angry client of Evangelist’s, who perhaps felt swindled out of his money by Benny’s healing rituals, was the one who murdered the family. After all, a murder with an axe is a pretty violent and angry way to kill, and it sounds as if Evangelist got the most violent treatment of all, having been completely decapitated. This theory makes some sense to me. In 1929, $10, which is what Benny Evangelist charged for a healing, would be equivalent to about $141 in 2017 money. If someone paid that much money in expectation of some kind of healing and was disappointed, I could see that person becoming very angry about that. Of course, I wouldn’t have gone to a healer in the first place nor would I have murdered an entire family when things didn’t go my way, but I know that not everyone has the exceptional coping skills that I do.
Another theory is that a disgruntled former cult member or perhaps a member or leader of a rival bn cult had been the murderer. Some evidence that lends itself to this is that it seems that the family were murdered in ways that were reminiscent of some of the violent deaths depicted in Evangelist’s four volume bible. One would suspect that, assuming this isn’t just a mere coincidence, one would have to have a pretty good knowledge of Evangelist’s cult in order to murder in ways similar to the murders in his book.
Or perhaps the murders were committed by someone involved with the delivery company, as the police originally believed. After all, no lumber had been delivered but the cash had been taken from the house. Could the deliverymen have plotted to kill the family in their sleep and steal their money while keeping all the lumber for themselves?
And finally there’s the theory that the murders were committed by some random maniac who just decided to step into the Evangelist home and kill the whole family in their sleep. Who knows?
I don’t really have a preferred theory. I think the murders could have been committed by any number of people, but I do think the large sum of money was a motive. However, brutal axe murder probably isn’t the most effective means of murder when committing a robbery, so I guess it could be possible that the cash could have just been a surprising bonus. I don’t really know what drives someone to murder an entire family—including four children—with an axe.
Things are about to get a little hot this week Zach. That is to say the rage of a several different groups will undoubtedly rain down upon us if we mess this one up. You’ve got several branches of the 7th Day Adventist church, far right pro-gun anti-government militias, and even the ghost of Timothy McVeigh. This week we’re talking about the siege of the Branch Davidians better known as the Waco Siege.
Now the actual event takes place from February 28th-April 19th of 1993 but to fully understand what happened we have to go back to 1981. That is the year a young man named Vernon Howell arrived at the Mount Carmel Center outside Waco, Texas. The Mount Carmel Center was the headquarters of a group known as the Branch Davidians. The Branch Davidians were (and still are?) an offshoot of the Davidians who were kicked out of the Seventh Day Adventist church which is itself a pretty bonkers offshoot of the Christian church. The first thing you need to know about the branch davidians (and 7th day adventists as a whole) is that they believe the end of the world is really close. Founded in 1959 following a failed prediction of the end of the world by Benjamin Roden the Branch Davidians were a more militaristic offshoot of the Davidians. By the time Vernon Howell arrived on the compound Benjamin Roden had passed away and the group was being run by his widow Lois. Now, of course Vernon had an affair with the 65 year old woman and quickly became one of the most influential people in the group. This lead to a clash with prophet-to-be and son of Lois Roden, George Roden (who apparently didn’t like his new dad). When Lois passed away George assumed control of the the Branch Davidians but was quickly losing followers to Vernon Howell.
In an attempt to regain the support of the cult, George challenged Vernon to a good old fashion resurrection contest for which he exhumed a corpse for them to raise from the dead. In response Vernon tried to file charges against George but was told he needed evidence. So, what do you do when you need evidence? That’s right you storm your former compound with 7 followers, 5 .22 caliber semiautomatic guns, 2 .22 caliber rifles, two 12-gauge shotguns and nearly 400 rounds of ammunition. This lead to a shoot-out and several arrest. Despite Roden fleeing the property with wounds to his hands and chest, Vernon’s 7 followers were found not guilty of attempted murder and Vernon himself had his trial in end in a hung jury. George Roden would later go on to murder his future roommate with an ax before being committed to a mental asylum for the rest of his life and dying of a heart attack.
Vernon went on to assert his spiritual role in the group by changing his name to David Koresh and, in 1989, Koresh declared that because he was obviously the lamb of god prophesied in Revelation 5:2 all of the marriages in the church were null and void, all men and women had to be separated, and all of the women (including underage girls) had to have sex with him. He also said God had instructed him to raise an “army of god” for the end times.
Over the next several years the Brand Davidians started to stockpile and modify guns. This caught the attention of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (which is a real thing that we have in America) who began to investigate the group. The investigation officially started on June 9th of 1992 after a UPS worker reported an accidentally opened package containing guns, inert grenades, and gun powder. The investigation went about as poorly as an investigation like this good go. The ATF sent agents undercover in a house across the street from Mt. Carmel posing as college students. These college students, however, were all in the 30s, had new cars, were not registered at any local school, and didn’t keep any kind of consistent schedule. ATF agents also never chose to talk to Koresh or the Branch Davidians directly instead opting to conduct the investigation in secret. When a search warrant was obtained there was no proof to be found that the branch davidians were doing anything wrong. They had licenses for all of the guns that they were illegally buying and selling, however a search warrant was given because of the suspicion that the Branch Davidians were modifying the guns themselves, a suspicion that was given credence by reports of automatic fire coming from the compound.
The ATF’s raid on the compound was originally planned for March 1st, 1993, but the raid was moved up to February 28th after the Waco Tribune-Herald published a series of article about Koresh called “The Sinful Messiah”. The series alleged that Koresh had taken multiple wives, several as young as 12 or 13. The article ended with a plea for law enforcement to intervene which only lead to further paranoia from Koresh and his followers.
At 5:00 the morning of the 28th 76 agents assembled at Fort Hood to drive to the staging area for the raid. Shortly after this time, any hopes of catching the Branch Davidians were dashed after a reporter who had been tipped off to the raid accidentally asked David Koresh’s brother in law directions to the Branch Davidian compound. ATF was fully aware of their lack of surprise after one of their undercover agents had to escape from the compound because it turns out he wasn’t super duper under cover. At 9:45 ATF attempted to enter the compound and a gun battle ensued. It isn’t clear who shot first, Branch Davidians say ATF shot first, authorities say Branch Davidians shot first, it’s been suggested that the first shot was an accidental misfire or a member of the dog team. Whoever shot first the result was a nearly 2 hour gun battle in which 4 ATF officers and 6 Branch Davidians were killed. Eventually a ceasefire was reached but sporadic gunfire continued through most of the afternoon.
I want to talk about one thing before we get too off track. I don’t think it matters who shot first. If the federal government has a warrant to arrest you and search your property you don’t have a right to resist. Even if the ATF agents were the ones who shot first, if they saw Branch Davidians brandishing weapons or if they were threatened in any way they were completely in their rights to fire the first shot.
Anyway, back to the story. Eventually a ceasefire is agreed on and negotiations begin. At first 4 children were allowed to leave the compound safely which authorities took as a good sign. Later Koresh said he would surrender if he was given an hour on national radio. Authorities gave Koresh 58 minutes on the Christian Broadcasting Network in Waco and the speech was a disaster. The speech was definitely not intended for anyone who didn’t already understand his teaching and it was mostly ignored when it aired. Despite this the FBI (who had now taken over the case) and the Branch Davidians prepared for a mass surrender. However, after all the details had been negotiated David Koresh called the FBI negotiator and said that god had told him to wait. If I have to guess though I’d probably say that Koresh knew that because federal officers had been killed there was no way he was going to get out of serious prison time.
Five day later the FBI gave Koresh a video camera to show conditions inside the compound. The tape they got back consisted of interviews with Branch Davidians who all said they were staying and resisting of their own free will. Suddenly the negotiations shifted from one leader with several innocent bystanders to over 100 people who were willing to do anything for Koresh. The FBI tried to at least negotiate the release of the remaining children but the only kids who remained in the compound were Koresh’s. It’s important to know that the reason Koresh had given for having sex with as many members as possible was to create these kids. David Koresh believed that his children had God’s DNA and were going to help judge the world.
For the Davidians this was the entire reason for the cult. They believed that they were living in the end times and that they were destined to suffer persecution. They were completely and totally entrenched and negotiations ground completely to a halt. This was only made worse by the tactical strategies that the FBI used. The FBI brought in tanks and helicopters to lay siege to the compound and constantly shone lights and blasted loud noises such as the sound of chickens and rabbits being killed. Eventually Koresh and the FBI agreed that the Branch Davidians would come out after Koresh had finished writing a book on his teachings.
50 days into the siege, after receiving no indication that Koresh had finished any of his work the FBI made the decision to assault the compound. Authorities contacted the Branch Davidians and told them the siege was over and they were now going to enter the building. First the FBI used tanks to insert tear gas into the compound. I think one former Branch Davidian put it best when he said, “When you see a tank coming through your front door and shooting gas at you, you don’t think it’s a very good response to exit through the hole it just made”. At first the Branch Davidians didn’t move, then a fire started. As people watched in horror on news broadcasts around the country everyone expected people to pour out of the compound. Instead only a couple of disoriented people stumbled out of the burning building. According to the department of justice 75 Branch Davidians died in the blaze include 25 children under the age of 15. 9 people survived the fire and were arrested after being treated for their wounds.
Many of the Branch Davidians including David Koresh were killed not by the fire but by gunshot wounds to the head. It’s not clear whether the gunshots were self inflicted or if they were from other members of the church.
Where did the fire come from?
The tanks
An accident from the canisters
It was set by the Branch Davidians
Defensively
Suicidally
Oklahoma City bombing
Militia movement
Zach, I may have told you this before, but I have a very simple life philosophy. It’s something that I’ve told a great many people and it’s something I’m sure I will tell a great many more. I also guarantee that when I finish this next sentence my girlfriend Rachel may permanently damage her vision after an intense and involuntary eye roll. When I was a kid my dad would read me a book called, “Simple Pictures are Best”. The book is about a shoemaker and his wife who are going to have their picture taken for their anniversary. Right before the picture is taken the shoemaker’s wife gets an idea on how to make the picture better. Then her husband has an idea and they go back and forth adding more and more things until the picture is a giant mess all while the photographer reminds them that, “simple pictures are best”.
I’d like you to keep that philosophy in mind during this week’s mystery while I try to prove to you that, “simple mysteries are best”.
Have you ever been to Seattle, Zach?
I have a particular affinity for the Pacific northwest. I honestly haven’t been, but the combination of cool rainy weather, hipsters and people making jokes about either Grey’s Anatomy or Twilight has always made it seem very appealing to me.
If you ever find yourself in Seattle I’d recommend you check out the Hotel Vintage Park downtown. While you’re there perhaps you could hop in the elevator, take it to the second floor and find your way to room 216. Then go next door to room 214. This is the room in which a woman named Mary Anderson died.
On October 9th 1996 Mary Anderson checked into the Hotel Vintage Park. She was 5’8” approximately 240 lbs and was between the ages of 33 and 45. With her she had velour outfits, slippers, black leather gloves, leather purse, Estee Lauder cosmetics, toothpaste, perfume, Metamucil, Crystal light, Panty hose, a kitchen bowl, and an iron. She paid in cash for 2 nights in the room and wrote down her address as 132 East Third Street, New York, NY which is either a small apartment building in the East Village or a modest neighborhood between greenwood cemetery and prospect park in Brooklyn. As you probably guessed this address was fake which should have been fairly obvious because pretty much nobody who lives in New York would write “New York, New York” in their address.
By all accounts Mary Anderson wasn’t seen again until October 11th 1996. She had only paid for 2 days in the room but after those two days she failed to check out. When hotel staff tried to enter the room they found it bolted shut from the inside. When they used the electronic access to unlock the door they found Mary Anderson deceased on the bed. Her outfits were neatly hung in the closet and her makeup was freshly applied.
She had ingested a combination of cyanide and metamucil. A large black Bible lay open on her chest and was open to Psalm 23. On the hotel’s stationary pad a note had been written,
To Whom It May Concern.
I have decided to end my life and no one is responsible for my death.
Mary Anderson.
P.S. I have no relatives. You can use my body as you choose.
A few more things that we know about Mary Anderson. She had an IUD and she had scars on both her breasts and around the nipple area. This would suggest that Mary was at least somewhat wealthy. You would need fairly good insurance to pay for an IUD or breast surgery (although it’s not certain if the surgery was a breast reduction, breast lift, or another medical procedure). She also had fairly expensive clothes and makeup. An autopsy also showed that she had never had children.
It’s also very strange that she was killed by cyanide. Cyanide pretty hard to get your hands on. You can’t just buy it and the loaf n jugg. Perhaps she was a researcher or in a chemistry lab or mining facility that would use it regularly. Police searched extensively through such institutions but found not matching missing persons. Cyanide is also occasionally used by jewelers or photographers to process film.
The IUD could be a potential clue. She said in her note that she had now family but having an IUD would suggest that she was at least sexually active if not in a relationship. There was also the possibility that a serial number could be found on the device but it had unfortunately been worn away.
There are a lot of Jane Does that people have tried to match to Mary Anderson but none that I saw completely fit. Either they had some distinguishing feature that wasn’t on Mary Anderson or they had previously had a child or the timeline of their disappearance just didn’t match up.
It’s even been suggested that Mary Anderson was an undercover spy. She had reddish brown hair that people have tried to suggest implies an eastern European heritage, and this wasn’t that long after the collapse of the soviet union and she did very effectively conceal her identity. Ultimately there’s just not any evidence for it.
You can spend hours trying to match missing persons to Mary Anderson and you’ll probably come up with nothing. Ultimately I think she was someone dealing with a great deal, perhaps the death of a spouse or loved one who thought she had nothing left to live for and just wanted to disappear in relative anonymity. I don’t believe that she didn’t have any family and I can’t believe that nobody missed her.
This is why this mystery is so confounding to me. At first it seems like there are just enough clues to find out who she is maybe we’re just not looking at the bowl she had with her or maybe the clues are in the places she bought her clothes or maybe even the fact that her metamucil was originally shipped to Arizona, but as all of them are crossed out you’re left right back where you started. Looking at the small list of facts asking yourself, “who is Mary Anderson”. And that, Zach, are why simple mysteries are best.
All aboard that’s coming aboard for this week’s episode of mysteriyes! Weigh the anchor and set a course for intrigue! Oh no we’ve been waylaid by the strong winds of pointless non-sense. Quickly bring her about and loose the cannons. Yar me buried treasure is in me booty and I’ll not be giving it up lest you be looking for davey jone’s locker. This week Zach weeeeeeeee’rrrrrrreeeeeee TAKING IT BACK IN TIME!
We’re going back to the year 1872 November 7th to be exact. Only 2 days after Ulysses S. Grant easily defeated Horace Greeley to earn a second term as president of the United States. We’re going to New York harbour where we’ll find a fairly inconspicuous vessel. The Mary Celeste had been build 10 years earlier in Spencer’s Island, Nova Scotia under the name, “The Amazon”. It sailed normally for 6 years before running aground during a storm and being abandoned. It was sold and salvage by an American businessman who registered it in American as The Mary Celeste. The ship was then repossessed by the businessman’s creditors and sold again to a New York group who kept no real record of the ship until they spend over $10,000 to enlarge it and appointed Benjamin Spooner Briggs as her captain.
Benjamin Spooner Briggs (yes I will say his middle name every time) was the son of a sea captain named Nathan Briggs from Wareham, Massachusetts (a place I once desperately tried to live). He was a devout christian who regularly read his bible and shared his faith often. Briggs became a partial owner of the Mary Celeste and on October 20, 1872 oversaw the loading of the ship’s first cargo since being rebuilt. The Mary Celeste was sailing to Genoa with 1,701 barrels of denatured alcohol onboard, a type of ethanol with additive to make it poisonous, bad tasting, foul smelling or nauseating to keep people from drinking it.
A week later Briggs brought his wife and baby daughter aboard for the journey. The ship was carefully chosen by Briggs. The first mate was the niece of majority owner James H. Winchester, the second mate was hand picked, the steward was given a personal recommendation by Winchester and the general seamen were described later as, “peaceable and first-class sailors”. On November 3rd Briggs wrote a letter to his mother saying he was very satisfied with the ship and his crew. His wife also wrote that the crew seemed very capable.
On November 5th the Mary Celeste left pier 50 but the weather wasn’t clear and Briggs decided to anchor the ship before they had even left New York Harbour. Two days later on November 7th the weather cleared and Mary Celeste entered the Atlantic.
A little under a month later Dei Gratia a brigantine that had left New York harbor 8 days after Mary Celeste spotted a vessel about 6 miles away. The ship’s erratic movements and the odd set of her sails led the captain to suspect that something had gone wrong. When the two ships got closer he could tell there was nobody on deck and there were no replies to his signals. That ship was Mary Celeste.
A crew was sent to investigate the mysterious ship. When climbed aboard they found that the ship was completely deserted. The were partly set and in poor condition with a few of them missing completely and much of the ship’s rigging was damaged. The main hatch to the to the lower deck was secure but the hatches at the bow and the stern were open. The ship’s single lifeboat was missing and the ship’s compass had shifted and its glass cover was broken. In the lower deck there was 3 ½ feet of water and the captain’s quarters were wet and untidy from being unattended at sea. There were personal items scattered around including a sheathed sword but most of the ship’s papers were missing along with the instruments to navigate the ship. Provisions had been left in the Galley and there was no obvious signs of fire or violence. The cargo was intact but 9 of the ship’s 1,701 barrels of alcohol were empty. The initial investigation suggested that there had been an orderly departure from the ship.
The last entry on the ship’s log was from 8:00 AM on November 25th, nine days earlier. It stated that ship was on course, approximately 400 miles away from where it was found. Dei Gratia split her crew and sailed Mary Celeste to Gibraltar where an official investigation was launch.
The hearing was conducted by Frederick Solly Flood who was described as a man “whose arrogance and pomposity were inversely proportional to his IQ”. After testimony of Dei Gratia’s crew Flood concluded that a crime must have been committed by someone under the influence of the ship’s cargo of alcohol.
On December 23rd there was a full examination of Mary Celeste. There were cuts on each side of the bow possibly caused by a sharp instrument along with possible traces of blood on the captain’s sword. The reports following the examination emphasized that the ship did not appear to have been struck by heavy weather (because of the sewing machine oil). There were also stains on one of the ship’s rails that might have been blood with a deep mark that could have potentially been caused by an axe.
These finding cemented Flood’s opinion that a crime had been committed. He wrote to the Board of Trade in London concluding that the crew must have gotten drunk on the ship’s alcohol (even though you couldn’t drink it) and murdered the Briggs family and the officers before cutting the bows to fake a collision and finally jumping into the lifeboat to probably die at sea.
The ship’s owner James Winchester sailed to Gibralter to claim his ship on January 15. Flood demanded $15,000 for it to be released and immediately began to suspect that Winchest had intentionally hired a crew who would kill Briggs and the ship’s officers, but this theory was undermined when scientific analysis concluded that the stains were not blood and the marks on the ship were not man made.
So, what happened to the Mary Celeste? What could have caused a perfectly fine ship to be abandoned by it’s crew for no clear reason?
The first theory is there was some kind of foul play. Perhaps it really was all a conspiracy by Winchester to collect an insurance payment from a ship that was reported massively over insured. This theory was very popular at the time until Winchester produced documents that showed the ship was insured at an appropriate level. Perhaps Mary Celeste had Dei Gratia in the Atlantic after which the crew was set upon and murdered so that Dei Gratia could collect a sizable reward for the ship’s return. This theory makes less sense when you remember that Dei Gratia left 8 days after Mary Celeste, took the same route, and was a slower ship so it is unlikely that Dei Gratia could have caught up. Perhaps Mary Celeste was attacked by pirates but pirates would have looted the ship but the personal possessions of the captain and the crew were left untouched. The final foul play theory is that Briggs and the captain of Dei Gratia created a scheme to collect the sizable reward money that would have accompanied the discovery and return of Mary Celeste. The two quite possible could have encountered each other and it would explain several things but Briggs also had another child who was left in America and never saw their father again. It seems unlikely that Briggs would abandon his child for a couple thousand dollars.
If we rule out foul play the next theories center around Mary Celeste being abandoned. It was suggested the missing lifeboat and unusual position of the rigging suggests that the crew had climbed into the lifeboat and attached the boat to the ship after which the line broke and the Mary Celeste sailed away.
But this theory has it’s own problems. First why would anyone in any situation think it would be a good idea to leave a seaworthy ship, with ample provisions for a lifeboat. Even if Mary Celeste had blown her timbers (which she didn’t) it still would have been a better option than a lifeboat in pretty much any situation. There’s also the testimony of anyone who knew the captain or his crew. The ship’s majority owner Winchester testified that Briggs wouldn’t have abandoned ship unless in an extreme circumstance and by all accounts the mates and crew were very experienced.
So if Briggs would have only ordered an evacuation in an extreme circumstance what could have caused it?
The first theory is a waterspout which is essentially a sea tornado. Perhaps the ship had been hit by one and the crew misunderstood how much water the ship was taking on. This makes a certain amount of sense. There was an impromptu device for measuring water depth on the ship’s deck and it’s possible for water spouts to appear without a storm.
Another proposed theory is that an iceberg had drifted unexpectedly into the path of the Mary Celeste. This could cause a fear that the ship would run aground and could explain an evacuation order but it’s unlikely for an iceberg to drift that far south and other ships, most likely, would have reported it as well.
The final theory, and my personal favorite, is that there was an explosion on Mary Celeste. Whether it was caused by choppy seas, an earthquake or the fact that the 9 empty barrels were made of a more porous wood, it’s possible that noxious fumes from the cargo leaked into the ship’s hull. This could have caused a small explosion on the ship or even simply caused an imminent enough threat through the smell for Briggs to order a temporary evacuation until the fumes dissipated.
Also aliens could have done it and then also stole the lifeboat.
The story I had researched for today’s episode actually ended up being a little shorter than I would have liked, so I decided that I would do two stories FOR THE PRICE OF ONE. The first story is a solved mystery, which is something we’ve definitely covered before. However, most solved mysteries still end with dead victims and don’t really have a happy ending. So today I want to start today’s episode with a story where a mystery was solved happily—for the most part, at least.
This is a story that I vividly remember as it happened, since it took place in Missouri around the time when I watched the news a lot. I’m not sure if you remember hearing about this story, Willy, but I hope not, so that way I can tell it to you for the first time.
Our story begins on the afternoon of Sunday October 6, 2002, in Richwoods, Missouri, which is a small unincorporated community in the eastern part of the state. Eleven-year-old Shawn Hornbeck was riding his lime green mountain bike over to a friend’s house, a route he had taken several times. However, this time, Shawn never made it there.
Immediately upon being reported missing, police, firefighters, emergency personnel, and local volunteers began to scour the area in search of the missing boy, but no evidence of him could be found. Shawn had simply vanished.
The boy’s disappearance quickly became national news, as Pam and Craig Akers appeared on The Montel Williams Show and America’s Most Wanted. Shawn’s parents even founded the Shawn Hornbeck Foundation to advocate for missing children like Shawn. Pam and Craig devoted so much of their time, energy, and money to try to find their son, but their efforts were turning up nothing. As time went on, most people began to believe that Shawn was dead.
More than four years later, on January 8, 2007, thirteen-year-old William Benjamin Ownby—better known as Ben—was getting off of his school bus on Wild Rose Lane in Beaufort, MO when he was kidnapped, just 300 feet from his home. However, a fifteen-year-old truck enthusiast named Mitchell Hults saw Ben in the passenger seat of a white 1991 Nissan pickup truck as the truck raced out of the area. He reported what he saw to the police.
On January 11, fifty miles away in Kirkwood, Missouri, two Kirkwood police officers showed up at an apartment building to serve an undisclosed arrest warrant to 41-year-old Michael Devlin, a manager at the local Imo’s Pizza. Now, Willy, I don’t know if you want to Google a picture of Michael Devlin, but he’s not what you would call classically handsome, but there are seven billion people on this planet, so I think technically that means there’s at least one or two people who find him overwhelmingly alluring.
Anyway, upon arriving at Devlin’s apartment building , the officers noticed a white pickup truck that perfectly matched the one listed in the bulletin from Beaufort. The officers asked Michael Devlin, the owner of the truck, if they could search the inside of the house. Devlin told them no.
For the rest of that day, police officers kept an eye on Devlin’s apartment. And then, the next day, they approached Devlin at his work at Imo’s Pizza. They didn’t initially expect to get anything out of the conversation, as this was only one of several leads. However, when the investigators—which included FBI personnel—confronted Devlin, he eventually confessed that he had kidnapped Ben Ownby, and, much to the investigators’ surprise, he told them that he also had Shawn Hornbeck.
After this admission, Devlin was arrested and driven back to his apartment, where he unlocked the door for police. When police entered the apartment, they found the boys playing video games together. Ben Ownby quickly bounded to his feet and ran to the FBI agent who went in first. Shawn—now fifteen years old—appeared to be in shock and didn’t move. It was as if he couldn’t believe that his captivity had come to an end.
The boys were recovered and returned to their parents. The news made national headlines right away and came to be known as the Miracle in Missouri. Cameras filmed the families’ reunions, particularly Shawn’s reunion with his parents after four years, three months, and six days. Everyone was smiling because this was a rare happy ending to not just one, but two cases of abducted children.
However, if you’ll remember, I introduced this story as a happy ending—for the most part. That’s because, as happy as the reunions were, the boys both experienced the trauma of abduction and captivity, Ben for four days and Shawn for four years.
One of the most fascinating aspects of this case is what life was like for Shawn during his four years with Michael Devlin. So let’s go back to the beginning and talk just a little bit about what happened to him.
Back in 2002, when Shawn was riding his bike on that quiet, rural road, Michael Devlin was out trolling for a young victim. Devlin saw Shawn and knocked Shawn off his bike with his pickup. Devlin then got out of the truck, pretending to be concerned for the boy, and then scooped Shawn up, threw him in the truck, and drove 50 miles away to his apartment in Kirkwood. Devlin told Shawn that he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Shawn was kept tied up for the first month of his captivity, and was repeatedly assaulted by Devlin. At one point, Devlin even attempted to strangle Shawn, until Shawn talked him out of it, saying he promised not to flee or tell anyone so long as Devlin didn’t kill him. While this agreement kept Shawn alive, it also gave Devlin ultimate control over him.
For the next four years, Devlin and Shawn posed as either father and son, godfather and godson, or just family friends. Because Devlin had Shawn convinced that any attempt to flee or tell anyone who he was would get him or his family killed, Shawn was actually allowed a remarkable amount of freedom. While Shawn was never enrolled in school, he had a girlfriend, went to sleepovers at friends’ homes, frequented the local shopping mall, and even owned a cell phone. Shawn never told anyone who he was, and no one ever figured it out.
At one point, Shawn did try to reach out. He logged onto the Shawn Hornbeck foundation website and left a comment on the page, asking how long they planned to look for Shawn. He signed the comment as Shawn Devlin.
But make no mistake, just because Shawn was allowed to do some things a normal boy his age would do doesn’t mean his life with Michael Devlin was great. In fact, without going into detail, suffice it to say that the sexual abuse enacted by Devlin made Shawn’s life a living hell.
At the beginning of 2007, Devlin decided that Shawn was getting too old, and he needed a new, younger victim. That’s when he took Ben. And while Ben was only with Devlin for four days, he was subjected to similar abuse that Shawn was.
After his arrest, Devlin told investigators that he knew that what he’d done was wrong and worried about how he was going to explain things to his parents. Devlin pleaded guilty to charges of child kidnapping, armed criminal action, attempted murder, forcible sodomy, production of child pornography. His total sentence is incarceration for the next 2000 years or so, so he won’t be able to victimize any more children. However, investigators figured that Shawn Hornbeck and Ben Ownby weren’t the only boys he’d abducted over the years, so they organized a task force to investigate possible connections between Devlin and other missing children.
Near as I can tell, both Ben Ownby and Shawn Hornbeck are doing pretty well now. Shawn is 25 and working a regular job in Missouri. Ben is 23, and became an Eagle Scout after his abduction. So there you have it. A rare happy ending to a child abduction story.
My second story is similar to my first one in that it’s about a missing boy. Only this story has no happy ending because it is still very much unsolved.
Steven Kraft, Jr. was born January 11, 1989 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and if we’re learning anything from this show, it’s that you should never be from Wisconsin, particularly if you’re a boy. This is our twenty-seventh mystery, and it’s our third about a boy from Wisconsin, so I think that means that mathematically, one out of nine mysteries worldwide involve a boy from Wisconsin, which is pretty scary since I spent significant amounts of my boyhood in Wisconsin, but I guess you could say I’m a walking miracle.
Anyway, Steven—or Stevie, as he was called—was described as being rambunctious, outgoing, and adventurous. He reportedly had few friends, but was a good student who was rarely disciplined at school.
On February 15, 2001, twelve-year-old Stevie asked permission to go outside and walk his dogs. His mother said this would be fine, but that he needed to stay in the area. The family lived on Holly Street in the Benton Heights neighborhood east of Benton Harbor, Michigan. Holly Street was a dead-end street that had very little traffic, and so Stevie spent a lot of time playing along the street and the nearby woods. He was seen between 7 and 8 pm, playing with his dogs on the 2100 block of Holly Street, half a block away from his house. This was the last time Stevie has ever been seen.
Stevie’s mother reported his disappearance after she finished making dinner and he had still not returned him. He was reported as being 5 feet 1 inch tall, 95 pound, white, light brown hair, green eyes, and a red birthmark on the left side of his chest. At the time of his disappearance, Stevie was wearing a white/tan/brown striped shirt, tan parachute pants, a purple and aqua Charlotte Hornets jacket, and black Lugz boots.
Notably, Stevie was not wearing a hat or gloves when he went missing, and temperatures were below freezing the night he disappeared and stayed similarly cold for the next several days. If Stevie had somehow gotten lost without shelter, it’s likely he would not have survived long in the elements.
Frantic searches began for Stevie shortly after he went missing, particularly in the woods near where he was last seen. These woods run along Blue Creek, which had been frozen over at the time of Stevie’s disappearance. Footprints belonging to Stevie were eventually found in the snow, and they went through the aforementioned woods, past a frozen pond near his house, and ended at Harbor Haven Ministries, one block south of Holly Drive where he was last seen.
Three days after Stevie went missing, one of his dogs returned home. The dog led Stevie’s parents to that frozen over pond, but nothing was found there that gave them a clue regarding Stevie’s whereabouts. The following day, the other dog was found. The six-month-old puppy was found a mile and a half or so north of Stevie’s house near Blue Creek along Red Arrow Highway.
In May of 2001, once things had thawed out, dive teams searched the pond the dog had led Stevie’s parents to, as well as four miles of Blue Creek nearby, but nothing was found. In November of 2002, a wooded area near the Southwestern Michigan Regional Airport was searched, but no evidence was turned up. In February of 2004, there was a reported sighting of Stevie at the Midway Airport in Chicago, but apparently this wasn’t actually him.
Stevie’s case was featured on America’s Most Wanted in the hopes that someone who knew something about what happened to the boy would speak up, but as of yet, no one has done so. There’s so little evidence in this case that the police really don’t have any solid leads to go on. The FBI is now involved in the case, but that has done very little good.
We’ve been doing this show for six months now, and it still baffles me that people can just disappear so suddenly and so completely. Stevie was just out walking his dogs one evening and then vanished, with only some footprints left as evidence. As far as we know, no one saw or heard anything. He was just gone.
Now there are a couple of theories about what happened to Stevie. The first is that Stevie ran away from home and either managed to start a new life, succumbed to the elements, or was killed some other way. If you’ll remember, we said that Stevie was a good kid who never got in trouble at school. Well, that isn’t completely true. Just before Stevie went missing, he was suspended from school for fighting. According to the source I read, another student attacked Stevie, Stevie defended himself, and both boys were suspended. Whether or not that’s fair, that’s pretty standard for physical altercations in schools, at least in the US. This was the first time that Stevie had faced any serious discipline at school, so the theory is that this could have caused Stevie to want to run away, either because he had been disciplined at home in a way that he felt was unfair, or because he felt like he had disappointed his parents.
I’m not sure what to make of this theory because I’m a grown man and I don’t think like a child anymore. I work with kids who get suspended from school all the time and it’s really not a big deal. I mean, sure, it might get them grounded or something, but it’s nothing worth running away over. But to be fair, for a well-behaved child like Stevie, perhaps getting suspended from school felt so terrible to him that he felt the need to run away. However the circumstances of his disappearance don’t sound like he was running away. For one thing, it sounds like he disappeared several days after the incident, but an irrational act like running away from home seems more like something that would happen in the moment. For another thing, he didn’t bring anything with him to actually survive in the Michigan winter, and I think that shows that he didn’t have any intention of not coming home.
I find the other theory to be very fascinating, morbidly fascinating perhaps, but still fascinating. Now, Willy, you zigged and I zagged. See, I didn’t tell you the story of Shawn Hornbeck and Ben Ownby just we could have a happy ending on the podcast. I told you the story of Shawn Hornbeck and Ben Ownby because it is the foundation for the theory that, in fact, Michael Devlin kidnapped and murdered little Stevie Kraft.
Now we’ve talked in previous episodes about how we don’t like the fanciful theories. Like you said, if you hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras. However, this theory actually does have a pretty good basis. Devlin’s family owned a vacation cottage on Lake Michigan in Pentwater, Michigan, which is two hours north of Benton Harbor. Now, while the family usually gathered up there together in the summer months, Devlin frequently went up there by himself in February. From his home in Missouri, Devlin would have taken I-94, which passes right through Benton Heights, the very neighborhood the Stevie Kraft lived in. Figuring that a violent pedophile like Devlin didn’t only prey on two boys, police have seriously considered Devlin a suspect in the disappearance of Stevie Kraft, but he has never been charged with anything.
There is an issue with the Devlin theory. If Stevie was kidnapped, it is highly likely that he was murdered, as he has never re-surfaced. However, Michael Devlin has never been linked to any murdered children. The only thing he’s done—and it feels really awful to say “the only thing he’s done”—is kidnapped and severely abuse children. While this doesn’t mean he couldn’t have murdered Stevie Kraft, we don’t know him to be a child murderer, therefore I think it sheds a little bit of doubt on the Devlin theory.
I checked to see if there was anything dubious about Harbor Haven Ministries, which is the building where Stevie’s footprints ended, like maybe it was a front for slave trade. But, unfortunately, it seems like the ministry is actually doing good work helping the poor, dammit.
So that’s the story of Stevie Kraft. What are your thoughts, Willy?
What’s that I hear Zach? It’s so faint I can hardly make it out….. Wait it’s getting louder….. I think….. Yes it’s definitely aaaaaaaaaaa MYHISTORY!!!
For this particular myhistory we’re going all the way back to 1828. To good old Deutschland. Leaders of the free world, home of the free and the brave. I thought we could go back and forth and say things we love about Germany.
This week’s myhistory starts on May 26th, 1828, in Nuremberg, Germany. It was a day like any other so it was a bit surprising when a mysterious teenage boy appeared carrying a strange letter. The letter was addressed to Captain von Wessenig, the captain of the 4th squadron of the 6th cavalry regiment. The letter had a heading that read, “From the Bavarian border/The place is unnamed/1828.
The author of the letter didn’t say their name and the letter simply said that the boy was given to them as an infant on October 7th, 1812, and that they instructed him in reading, writing, and Christianity but never let him, “take a single step out of my house”. The letter said the boy now wanted to be a cavalryman “as his father was” and told the captain to either take him in or hang him.
The boy had another short letter with him. This one claimed to be from his mother to whoever had been taking care of him. It said that his name was Kaspar, he was born on April 30th 1812, and that his father, a cavalryman of the 6th regiment, was dead.
Kaspar was found by a shoemaker named Weickmann who took the boy to Captain von Wessenig where Kaspar would only repeat the words, “I want to be a cavalryman, as my father was” and “Horse! Horse!”. Any questions or demands from Captain von Wessenig were only met by Kaspar either crying or stubbornly saying, “Don’t know”. From the captain’s house he was taken to the police station where he wrote his name as Kaspar Hauser. Through interactions with police it was discovered that he was familiar with money, could say some prayers and read a litte, but struggled to answer most questions and his vocabulary was rather limited. Eventually, because he couldn’t tell police what he was doing he was arrested as a vagabond.
He spent the next two months imprisoned in Nuremberg castle in the care of a jailer named Andreas Hiltel. He was in good physical condition and could walk well, and was able to climb over 90 steps to his room. While imprisoned he refused all food but bread and water.
Through a series of conversations with the Mayor of Nuremberg Hauser gave more details of his past life. According to his story, for as long as he could remember he spent his life totally alone in a darkened cell about two meters long, one meter wide, and one and a half meters high with only a straw bed to sleep on and two horses and a dog carved out of wood.
He claimed that he found rye bread and water next to his bed every morning. Periodically the water would taste bitter and drinking it would cause him to sleep more heavily than usual. When that happened, when he woke up his straw was changed and his hair and nails were cut. Kaspar claimed that the first human being he had ever seen was a mysterious man who visited him not long before his release, always taking great care not to reveal his face to him. This man taught him to write his name by leading his hand. After learning to stand and walk he was brought to Nuremberg. Kaspar also claimed that the mysterious man taught him to say the phrase “I want to be a cavalryman, as my father was”, but he did not know what the words meant. This was pretty big story for the time and Kaspar Hauser became quite famous.
Because of his growing fame his case was investigated further. He was formally adopted by the town of Nuremberg and money was donated for his upkeep and education. He was taken care of by Friedrich Daumer, a schoolmaster who taught him various subjects and who discovered Kaspar’s talent for drawing. This appeared to be a good environment for Kaspar and he reportedly thrived.
On October 17th, 1829, Kaspar didn’t show up to lunch. Instead he was found in the cellar of Daumer’s house bleeding from a cut wound on his forehead. He claimed that while he was…. Uh hum… sitting on the privy, he was attacked and wounded by a hooded man who also threatened him by saying, “you still have to die ere you leave the city of Nuremberg.” Kaspar said that he recognized the man’s voice as the one who had brought him to Nuremberg. Following the blood trail, it was discovered that Kaspar first ran to the first floor where his room was, but then, instead of trying to find his caretakers, he returned downstairs and climbed through a trapdoor into the cellar. The event was alarming to many people in the town and custody of Kaspar was soon transferred to Johann Biberbach, on of the town’s authorities.
Later, on April 3rd 1830, a gunshot was heard in the Biberbach’s house. It came from Kaspar’s room. Residents of the house found Kaspar passed out and bleeding from a wound in the right side of his head. He woke up quickly and said that he had gotten the wound after climbing on a chair to get some books. Kaspar said the chair fell over while he was trying to hold on to something and he accidentally dore down the pistol hanging on the wall which caused it to go off.
During this time Kaspar’s relationship with the Biberbach family started to sour. He was accused of lying by Johann and Mrs. Biberback later commented on his, “horrendous mendacity and “art of dissimulation” she also said he was “full of vanity and spite”.
In 1831 a British nobleman named Lord Stanhope gained custody of Kaspar. He had shown a great deal of interest in the boy and the Biberbachs were happy to be rid of him. Lord Stanhope put a great deal of money and effort into discovering where Kaspar came from. Kaspar had previous seemed to remember a handful of Hungarian words and had once claimed that the Hungarian Countess Maytheny was his mother. Lord Stanhope paid for two visits to Hungary in the hope that it would jog Kaspar’s memory, but both times Kaspar couldn’t recall any buildings or monuments in Hungary. After the failure of these trips Lord Stanhope seemed to lose trust in Kaspar and ultimately transferred his custody to a schoolmaster named Johann Georg Meyer in the city of Ansbach in December of 1831. Stanhope continued to pay for Kaspar’s living expenses and eventually published a book in which he presented everything he knew about Kaspar.
Johann Georg Meyer did not like Kaspar. He thought that he made too many excuses and lied too much and the two had a difficult relationship. In late 1832 Kaspar managed to get a job as a copyist in a local law office but didn’t seem to be satisfied with his life. This only worsened after Anselm von Feuerbach, the man who looked into his case and was among the first to take an interest in him, died in May 1833. On December 9th Kaspar had a serious argument with Meyer and was most likely not going to be allowed to stay with him anymore.
Five days later, on December 14th, Kaspar came home with a deep wound on the left side of his chest. He claimed that he was lured into the city’s court garden and that a stranger stabbed him there while giving him a bag. Police searched the court garden and found a small violet purse containing a pencilled note in “Spiegelschrift” or mirror writing. The message read, “Hauser will be able to tell you quite precisely how I look and from where I am. To save Hauser the effort, I want to tell you myself from where I come (blank). I come from from (blank) the Bavarian border (blank) on the river (blank) I will even tell you the name: M. L. O.”
Kaspar died of his wound on December 17th 1833.
So who was Kaspar Hauser?
The first theory is that he was the exiled prince of Baden. Baden is a small territory of Germany on the border of France. In 1812 the Grand Duke of Baden had a child which allegedly passed away a few months later. One prevalent theory (particularly at the time) is that the true prince of Baden (Kasper Hauser) was switched a different dead baby by the mother of his half brother. The “white lady” was said to have stolen the true prince in order to secure the dukedom for her son. In the 1870s there were a series of writers and historians who refuted this claim. Andrew Lang summarized the results in his book, Historical Mysteries: “It is true that the Grand Duchess was too ill to be permitted to see her dead baby, in 1812, but the baby’s father, grandmother, and aunt, with the ten Court physicians, the nurses and other, must have seen it, in death, and it is too absurd to suppose, on no authority, that they were all parties to the White Lady’s plot.”
There was also a series of DNA tests. 1996 and 2002
The second theory is that Kaspar Hauser was simply a liar. When Kaspar was initially discovered he was carrying two letters, one supposed from his captor and one from his birth mother. It was discovered much later that the two letters had identical handwriting. Prior to both the cut incident and the pistol incident Kaspar had apparently been accused of lying by his caretakers. Several people have theorized that he cut himself and fired the pistol in an attempt to gain pity or cause a distraction.
Lord Stanhope also accused Kaspar of being a liar in the book he created and said that publishing his book was his “duty openly to confess that I had been decieved. Even Feuerbach the man who initially took an interest in Kaspar and whose death caused a great deal of termoil for Kaspar said before his death, “Caspar Hauser is a smart scheming codger, a rogue, a good for nothing that ought to be killed.”
After his death a court of enquiry in Ansbach was launched which, due to the inconsistencies in Kaspar’s story, suspected that he had stabbed himself and invented the story of his attacker. The note that was found in the Court Garden had a spelling error and a grammatical error that was reportedly common for Kaspar. The note was also folded in a specific triangular form that was apparently the way Kaspar used to fold his letters according to his previous caretakers. Doctors also agreed that the could have been self-inflicted.
At this point it is believed by many people that Kaspar stabbed himself in order to revive interest in his story and to convince Lord Stanhope to take him to England but he accidentally stabbed more deeply than he had intended.
Have you ever been in a car crash Zach?
I’ve been in two
Leaving school
Target parking lot
This week’s mystery involves a car crash. In fact an incredibly tragic car crash. At 9:30 July 26 of 2009 Diane Schuler along with her husband Daniel Schuler left the Hunter Lake Campground in Parksville, New York. Daniel rode alone in his pickup truck while Diane took her brother’s 2003 red Ford Windstar. Riding with Diane were her 5 year old son and 2 year old daughter along her her brother’s three daughters ages 8,7, and 5. Around 9:00 Diane’s brother Warren Hance received a call from his oldest daughter. She said everything was going well and they had had a great time on their trip and were looking forward to getting home.
Daniel left first with Diane following close behind. As they left they said goodbye to one of the campground’s co-owners who would later say that everything seemed fine. Daniel immediately started driving to their home in West Babylon, NY while Diane made a planned stop to get gas and breakfast for the kids. Diane then went to a mcdonalds in Liberty New York then to a Sunoco across the street. There is surveillance footage showed her at both locations and by all accounts everything seemed normal. The most disturbing thing so far is that the she chose to go to mcdonalds rather than the wendy’s across the street. Wendys.com/mysteriyes.
At 11:37 Diane called her sister in law Jackie Hance to tell her they were running late. According to Jackie they had a friendly conversation before Diane went back to driving.
A witness claims that at 12 that same day they saw a red minivan swerving between lanes along the route that Diane and the kids were supposed to be taking. According to the witness he saw a woman who appeared to be very focussed on driving the car. The witness also said the driver wasn’t drifting between lanes but rather changing rather aggressively and with, “some degree of precision”. Other witnesses reported seeing Diane on the side of the road at least two times with her hands on her knees as if she was vomiting.
At 12:55 a wrong number was dialed from Diane’s phone.
Around 1 pm there was call made to Warren Hance from Diane’s cell phone. This time it was one of Diane’s nieces calling to tell her father that her aunt Diane was having trouble seeing and speaking clearly. Diane then talked to Hance and said that she was disoriented and couldn’t see clearly. It’s probable at this time that the group had pulled into a pull-off area just past the Tappan Zee Bridge toll booths. Hance reportedly told Schuler to stop driving until he could come up and meet them. The call lasted about 2 ½ minutes and was ended abruptly. Around 1:10 there were 3 more calls from Diane’s phone that were all wrong numbers. At 1:15 tried to call Diane back but the call went to voicemail because at this point Diane’s phone had been left on a guardrail on the side of the road.
It’s not exactly clear the route they took from there, but the next thing we know happens at 1:33 two drivers call 911 after noticing Diane edging onto the northbound exit ramp of the Taconic State Parkway. The ramp was clearly marked with do not enter and one way signs. Within the next minute there were four more 911 calls from people who reported a car driving the wrong way down the parkway going ~75-85mph. The van then went almost two miles further down the highway before colliding head on at ~1:35pm. It was estimated that Diane was traveling at somewhere near 85 mph on impact. Diane, her daughter, and two of her nieces were dead at the scene of the crash, along with the three men in the car they crashed into. The third niece and Diane’s 5 year old son suffered severe injuries and were rushed to the hospital. The niece died later that day and Diane’s son sustained broken bones and severe head trauma.
So what happened?
I think first we should talk about who Diane Schuler was. She was a mother of two who worked a well respected banking job in which she made over $100,000 a year. She was a headstrong person who, by all reports, was a happy and healthy woman. People who knew her claimed that they had never seen her in a drunken state (over 50 people attested to that fact).
With that it mind it came as quite a shock that a toxicology report showed that Diane had a blood alcohol content of 0.19 or approximately 10 drinks. The report also said that she had high levels of THC which indicated marijuana use. This, compounded by the fact that a large bottle of vodka had been in the passenger seat would probably indicate that she was simply drunk driving. However, this was completely dismissed as a possibility by anyone who knew Diane who insisted that she would never have done something like that. There was also testimony from the campground owner who said Diane seemed sober when she left as well as a gas station employee who said that they “knew for a fact that she wasn’t drunk when she came into the station” and several McDonald’s employees who didn’t see any signs of intoxication when ordering her food.
One theory put forward by Diane’s family is that she must have suffered a stroke, aneurysm or embolism. Diane had been suffering from an abscess in her mouth for several weeks that had reportedly caused her a great deal of pain. She also had an unidentified lump in her leg. This was ruled out by officials after an autopsy showed no sign of a stroke, aneurysm or heart attack.
Another theory is that the pain Diane was suffering lead her to a point of delirium in which she became confused and in an attempt to alleviate the pain she was feeling tried to self medicate with alcohol. Perhaps this lead to her drinking more than she had intended and she simply began to spiral out of control.
I don’t know how much I really believe either of those theories. (Talk about closeted alcoholism)
Diane’s mother left at a very early age
She was the only girl in the family.
She never reconciled with her mother even though her brothers did
She was a very private person who never talked about her emotions
She was a perfectionist
No matter what happens and no matter who you want to cast blame on I think, at the end of the day, this is just a horrific tragedy.
Today we’ll be finding ourselves in West Baltimore, Maryland. Have you ever been to Baltimore, Willy? I have never been, so I did a little research, specifically about West Baltimore. To put it bluntly, West Baltimore is not a great place to grow up. It is notorious for violent and drug-related crime, and is the setting for the TV crime show The Wire. Most travel websites I read recommended that you stay away from the West Baltimore area.
West Baltimore is also the city where Freddie Gray was arrested and eventually died in 2015. For those who aren’t aware, Freddie Gray was a black man who died while in police custody due to injuries to his spinal cord, which led to accusations of unnecessary force by police. That, of course, is not an adequate summary of the situation, but today’s case is not the case of Freddie Gray.
Now I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that West Baltimore isn’t all bad. In fact, Thurgood Marshall, the first black justice on the United States Supreme Court came from West Baltimore. West Baltimore is also an epicenter of African-American culture and history as well. However, for the most part, West Baltimore is unfortunately best known for its violence, although I did also read about some organizations that are working to help change the culture of violence and crime in the city.
Today we’re going to be talking about a boy who had the misfortune of growing up in West Baltimore. Garnell Moore was born on my half birthday in 1995, which of course you’re already aware is May 18th. Neither of his parents were ever involved in his life, as his mother was incarcerated for drug charges and his father lived a transient lifestyle, so until August of 2001, he lived with his father’s relatives in West Baltimore. He lived with them in a two-story red brick row house on Harlem Avenue, and from what I’ve been able to tell, the care he received there was inadequate for a small child.
Garnell had an older half-sister named LaTonya, but even though they shared a mother, he never got to live with her. LaTonya and her two younger sisters lived in northeast Baltimore with Trina Morton, who was Garnell’s maternal aunt, and who we’ll also come to find out is one of the only people who seemed to care about little Garnell. Garnell used to go visit Trina and LaTonya, and they would describe him as a playful, hyper boy who liked playing with toy cars and action figures.
In August 2001, then six-year-old Garnell was taken to live with an aunt on his father’s side named Belinda Cash. At the time, Belinda was not married and she had no other children, but strangely, this placement was incredibly informal and Belinda was never given legal guardianship over Garnell. It’s unclear what Garnell’s life was like while living in Belinda’s house, because the two weren’t very well connected to the rest of the family.
The last time Garnell’s maternal aunt Trina Morton saw him, it was either August of 2001 or August of 2002, so either the same month he went to live with Belinda, or a year later. The sources I was reading were really unclear about a lot of the dates in this story, so I’m doing my best approximation of what makes the most sense.
Anyway, the last time Trina Morton saw Garnell, he was playing outside his home when Trina came by to pick up two of his sisters. Trina had expected to see Garnell the following weekend when he came to stay with her for a few days, but the visit never occurred because Trina, who was pregnant at the time, went into labor. The week after the visit was supposed to have occurred, Trina tried to reschedule Garnell’s visit, but Belinda told her that this wasn’t a good time for a visit because she and Garnell were planning to move.
After this interaction, family members began to lose contact with Garnell, though to be fair, some of this wasn’t their fault. From what I could tell, it seems like Trina wanted to be in contact with Garnell, but the only phone number she had for Belinda was disconnected. And then, after Belinda and Garnell moved to a new house, Trina found that the new address Belinda had given her was false.
Eventually, sometime around 2005, Garnell’s father Harold Moore gave Trina the contact information for one of Belinda’s relatives. Trina got a hold of that relative, who then reported that she hadn’t seen Garnell in years. This caused Trina to become seriously concerned for her little nephew, so she went door-to-door down Harlem Avenue, asking if anyone had seen Belinda and Garnell. She completely struck out. Trina also contacted local social services for assistance, but they told her there was nothing they could do because there was no reason to believe that Garnell was a child in need of care. After all, they told her, just because Trina hadn’t seen him recently didn’t mean he was in danger.
Trina was able to get an updated address for Belinda from that one relative of Belinda’s I mentioned earlier. Trina confronted Belinda at her home in a public housing development and demanded to see the boy, who would have been around ten years old by this point. Cash said that Garnell was on a school trip to a place called King’s Dominion in Virginia. This immediately made Trina suspicious, as it was the weekend, which was an unlikely time for a school trip, and also because it was the middle of June, which was when school would have been out for summer.
Trina reached out to social services again, this time to see if they could visit Belinda’s home to see if Garnell was safe there with her. And again, they said they couldn’t do anything for her because they couldn’t just barge into people’s homes on a whim. Trina didn’t give up, though. She called the local schools to see if he’d been enrolled in any of them, but confidentiality laws kept her from receiving information. After that, she tried to get juvenile services involved, but they weren’t able to help her out because she wasn’t Garnell’s legal guardian.
Finally—FINALLY—in March of 2006, after almost a year of Trina searching for her nephew with no help whatsoever, the Baltimore police’s Missing Person’s Unit became involved in the case. The police were able to find out some information regarding Garnell and his “guardian” Belinda Cash. Between 2001 and 2005, Cash bounced back and forth from the home on Harlem Avenue where she lived when Garnell first came to live with her to the public housing development where Trina confronted Belinda, which was about a mile away. When questioned, people who lived in the public housing development would tell police that they saw Garnell with cash a few times in 2001, and that she had claimed him as her son.
Police also spoke with Garnell’s father Harold, who reported that he and his girlfriend had seen little Garnell at a family gathering around Easter in either 2002 or 2003. He also told them that he would visit his other children, but that he wasn’t able to visit Garnell because he didn’t have an address or contact information for Belinda.
Police were also able to find out some more information regarding Belinda Cash, who over the years had been known to use different last names. While Belinda had no significant criminal history and no history of child abuse, it was discovered that she never enrolled Garnell in school. Detectives from Baltimore PD would speak with Belinda many times during their investigation into Garnell’s disappearance. She told them that the financial burden of caring for Garnell had become so great that she could no longer handle it. So, she reported that in the summer of 2005, she left Garnell on the steps of a social services office in west Baltimore and never saw him again.
The detectives who interviewed Belinda followed up on this story and found that not only did the address she gave them not exist, but that no social services agency in Baltimore reported a child being left on their front doorstep the way she described. In fact, Garnell Moore was never on the radar of any social services agency at all, either before he disappeared or after.
In April of 2006, a month after police became involved in the case, the police went to the Harlem Avenue address where Garnell and Belinda had lived and searched the place with cadaver dogs to see if Garnell had been abandoned there. While the house was a shambles, they found nothing there. The boy was just gone.
The mystery into what happened to Garnell goes deeper. While Belinda took a lie detector test regarding the story she gave police, she also told family members various other stories that were different from the one she told police. And to this day, no one really knows what happened to Garnell Moore. He just disappeared gradually, here one day and gone the next, but no one really knows when it happened, why it happened, or how it happened.
It’s been at least fifteen years since the last confirmed sighting of Garnell Moore, and we’re no closer to figuring out what has happened to him. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children doesn’t believe that he is dead, nor does the missing persons unit with the Baltimore police. The prevailing theory among optimists is that Garnell ended up with another family somehow. It could be that Belinda gave him over to another family, or that he really was left on the steps of a social services agency and someone came along and either kidnapped him or unlawfully adopted him. If this is the case, then the hope is that Garnell ended up with a nurturing family that loved him and cared for him the way he deserved all along.
But there are less optimistic theories about what happened to Garnell, and unfortunately, the less optimistic theories are probably the more likely. While it would be great if Garnell had been adopted—even if it was done unlawfully—by a wonderful family, the odds are that he wasn’t this lucky. If I had to guess, I would say that Garnell is no longer living. I don’t think that he was necessarily murdered, but I think it’s possible he may have died while in the company of Belinda Cash. I get the sense from reading about her that she may have been a bit derelict in her care for the child, so if he endured neglect or even abuse, I think it’s entirely possible this could have led to his death.
It’s obvious that Belinda Cash knows what happened to Garnell and has something to hide. Otherwise, why would she tell Trina that he was on a school trip when he had never been enrolled in school to begin with? Plus, her story change when talking to family members. I think if she really left Garnell on the doorstep of a social services agency and was willing to admit this to police, then it’s suspicious that she would tell family members a variety of different stories. The multiple stories seem a little bit like a cover-up for what really happened, perhaps an accidental death resulting from negligence.
Was Garnell murdered, given away, kidnapped, accidentally killed, or abandoned?
This week Zach we’re heading back to jolly old England. The home double decker buses, keep calm signs, and such wonderful bands as Oasis, Blur, and S-Club 7. Much like S-Club 7 in their hit music video for the song S-Club Party we’re going back in time. In fact we’re going back to a momentous day in English history. We’re going back to Wednesday, July 29th 1981. The day that Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer were married. Now, both of us are too young and too American to remember but this wedding was a big deal. The wedding itself was attended by 3,500 of the world’s most rich and powerful including every crowned head in Europe (except for King Juan Carlos I of Spain who refused to attend because of the couple’s planned stop in Gibraltar during their honeymoon). Adjusted for inflation the wedding cost more than $70 Million. In addition to the 3,500 people who attended the wedding itself and estimated 750 million people watched the wedding on television worldwide.
One of the people who went to see the wedding procession was a young 8 year old boy named Vishal Mehrotra. After watching the festivities Vishal was walking home through the Putney area of London with his nanny and his sister. According to the two of them Vishal was walking ~100 yards in front of them. Eventually Vishal rounded a corner and was out of view of his nanny and sister. When the two finally caught up Vishal had disappeared.
Of course a search was conducted and investigation was launched, but nothing was found. It seemed as if this young boy had vanished into thin air.
It wasn’t until 6 months later in 1982 that his body was discovered, buried in the woods in Sussex, 50 miles away from where he had disappeared. This is where things start to drive me crazy. I can’t find any proper information on how the body was found, how he was buried, or even cause of death because everyone is so eager to rush to the part of the mystery. Here’s what I know, Vishal’s body was found 50 miles away from where he had disappeared, he was buried (not just dumped) in the woods, and only his torso was found. Where he was killed by blunt force trauma, a gunshot, stabbing, strangulation or any number of causes I have no idea. It is also not clear if Vishal had been raped for a couple of reasons, first, only his torso had been found, second it had been 6 months. I’m honestly not sure what evidence can be found after 6 months of decomposition. That’s about as much as I can find on the murder of Vishal Mehrotra and I’d like to take a second before we get into this next second to recognize that Vishal was a person. Way too often in stories about this mystery he’s a footnote that is merely another block building to something bigger. His disappearance was tragic. He was a happy vibrant young boy who had his whole life ahead of him and when he was killed it destroyed the lives of his family members as well.
Now then, let’s talk about what might have happened to Vishal. At the time the police seemed to implicate a notorious child murderer named Sidney Cooke. Sidney Cooke was a member of the “dirty dozen” a group of organized peadophiles who systematically kidnapped and raped minors in the 70s and 80s. During this time Cooke worked for a fair company and ran a “test your strength” contest which he would use to lure young boys. From there he would drug the boys and take them to an apartment the group had rented. The group would rape and abuse the victims. According to police reports it’s suspected that the group murdered up to 20 victims. There’s no evidence that Vishal was abducted by this group but it was brought up during later investigations as a possibility.
Okay, we got the convenient “local peadophile” theory out of the way, now this is where things go a little off the rails. In 2014 Vishal’s father, Vishambar, a former magistrate, came forward and said he had received a phone call a few months after Vishal’s disappearance. The caller was a man in his twenties who claimed that Vishal had been kidnapped by a group of “powerful and high profile” paedophiles who frequented the Elm Guest House. Vishambar taped the phone call and gave it to police but was told it was most likely a crank call and it was never followed up. This wasn’t unexpected by Vishambar, the man on the phone said he had been dismissed by police before.
Now at this point Zach you may be asking yourself, what’s the Elm Guest House? The phrase guest house isn’t something we say often in the US. Essentially it’s a bed and breakfast, a normal home that’s been repurposed to... you guessed it… host guests. Now here’s what we KNOW about the Elm Guest House. It’s located in Hammersmith, less than a mile from where Vishal disappeared. The house was run by a woman named Carole Kasir and her husband. It was widely reported that the Elm Guest House was, in fact, a gay brothel. It was advertised in gay publications as a place where homosexual men could meet in safety and comfort. The house was raided by police and shut down in June of 1982 (a couple months after Vishal’s body had been found). Carole and her husband were both arrested and it’s alleged that Carole was held for three days without being charged but (and you’re about to hear this a lot from me) this can’t be proven. The couple were given suspended sentences for running a disorderly house and having obscene videos. I’ve seen reports (and I’ll be honest, I have absolutely no way of verifying their validity) that as many as 12 underage boys gave evidence to the police that they had been abused. I don’t know what that evidence was or what the police reaction was. I’ve also seen reports that children’s clothing was found in the Elm Guest House. There weren’t any further charges at that time and (as far as I can tell) there wasn’t any further investigation. The next thing we know for sure is that Carole Kasir died in 1990. She was a diabetic and found in her apartment next to several bottles of insulin.
A man name Chris Fay (a friend of Carole Kasir and former social worker) claimed that a peadophile ring, consisting of many powerful British figures and politicians, existed and often used the Elm Guest House as a host. Chris Fay met Carole Kasir in 1989 and says that, at that time, Carole showed him a guest list of VIPs who had stayed at the guest house. Fay wrote down many of the names on the list. Fay also says that Carole showed him photos of British MPs and cabinet ministers in compromising positions with naked children. At this point in her life Carole had been on a downward spiral for several years, she was drinking heavily, had been separated from her husband, and was reportedly suicidal. When Carole died Chris Fay showed up at her inquisition (which is held for anyone who dies under unexplained circumstances in England and Wales) and testified to the existence of Carole’s records.
This is a topic that gets people super super angry, especially on the internet, so I’m going to just apologize for my lack of familiarity with the case and my inability to go into great detail as to what happened next. In the 80s there was a member of parliament named Geoffrey Dickens. Ol’ Dicks actively campaigned against a supposed ring of powerful paedophiles.
In 1984 Dickens gave a dossier on peadophiles allegedly associated with the British government was given to then Home Secretary Leon Brittan. Brittan claims that he then handed the 40 page document to the police but the police claim they received no such document. In addition the document wasn’t retained by the home office and further investigation discovered that during his term as home secretary, Lean Brittan lost 114 documents related to child abuse WARNING: I CANNOT I REPEAT CANNOT FIND CREDIBLE EVIDENCE FOR THIS NEXT STATEMENT, many of these documents implicated members of parliament.
In 2014 the Metropolitan Police of London launched several investigations into an alleged paedophile ring in parliament. These investigations were sparked by the testimony of a victim known only as “Nick” who gave 12 names of people he had been abused by in the 80s including multiple members of parliament as well as Leon Brittan and former prime minister Edward Heath. Nick also claimed that the group was organized, transported to multiple locations in London and murdered at least 3 boys. A huge media frenzy was launched when police came out and said that these claims were, “credible and true” before the investigation had even been conducted.
Eventually former Prime Minister Edward Heath, former army head Lord Bramall, and former member of parliament Harvey Proctor. With immense media coverage the investigation went on with the eventual conclusion that there was not enough evidence to bring charges against any of the three.
That should be the end of it but because of the initial media coverage there was a great deal of distrust toward the government and this mystery has been a goldmine for conspiracy theorists around the world. Here is one such theory that claims to provide proof of a link between the Elm Guest House, in advertisements for the Elm Guest House the phrase “10% discount to sparticus club members”. What is the Sparticus club? Well… NO ONE REALLY KNOWS so let’s talk about what the internet assumes it to be, the spartacus club (later known as Spartacus International) was a publisher of homosexual guides and other written material. It was run by a man named John Stamford who was a former Catholic priest. After disappearing from England and reappearing in Amsterdam Stamford supported the Paedophile Information Exchange and was a publisher and editor for the Peado Alert News which was a magazine for peadophiles by peadophiles. In 1986 Stamford took a couple undercover reporters to the Philippines where he told them he could get them “young boys”. So, in conclusion the Elm Guest House, a proven homosexual brothel, definitely was a front for a peadophile ring because they advertised with a well known homosexual publication that was founded by a man who was a paedophile.
Now why would the police come out and say that the claims were “credible and true”. (Insert explanation of Jimmy Seville here). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Yewtree
Where does all of this leave us? I really don’t know. There’s definitely some suspicious and unexplained actions. Now, this is also speculation so please put just as much weight into this as you did any other piece of speculation. Buggery had only been decriminalized in the UK in 1967 but the age of consent for homosexual intercourse was set at 21 rather than the heterosexual age of 16. Maybe the Elm Guest House was ignoring this gap which led to an effort to cover it up. I just think that any evidence that points to politicians going to the Elm Guest House would indicate that they were homosexual or bisexual way before it would indicate that they were peadophiles.
Ultimately I don’t have any answers that are going to completely satisfy anybody and I definitely don’t know what happened to Vishal Mehrotra, in this case, I don’t think there’s much of a conspiracy.
A lot of our listeners may not know this, Willy, but you and I have been friends since childhood, and one of our favorite pastimes as children was listening to that hit Christian children’s radio drama Adventures in Odyssey. And while, yes, I did describe it as a Christian children’s radio drama, I think it’s fair to say that nothing in our lives has utterly terrified us more than Adventures in Odyssey. There’s one episode in particular that cost me many nights of childhood sleep, in which the beloved character Connie Kendall receives some harassing phone calls. You know the one, Willy…
Beeeeeeewaaaaaaaaaaare…
Okay, now that we are both sufficiently frightened out of our socks, we can jump into today’s mystery. The reason I brought up that horrifying episode of Adventures in Odyssey is because today’s story involves some pretty spooky harassing telephone calls as well. However, instead of ending with a beautiful if completely impossible happy ending that also teaches us a delightful little lesson about the Christian faith, this story ends with…MURDER!!!
But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. Let’s go back in time, all the way back to the year 1980, in Anaheim, California. We’re standing on a sidewalk in Anaheim, with the hustle and bustle of Orange County all around us. If you look over there, you’ll see a man peeing on a stack of tires while singing Styx’s “Renegade” in a minor key. And if you look over there, you’ll see a woman trying to fit a dead tabby cat in her purse as her daughter fills out an application to become a gypsy. And if you look over there, you’ll see a ten-year-old bratface kid stomping bald eagle eggs with his bare feet.
But Willy, we’re not here for the people, as fascinating as they might be. We’re here for the little hippie shop on the corner there. The sign says Swinger’s Psych and Head Shop Boutique. Do you see it? Okay, let’s go inside. But let’s not stop to look at the merchandise. Let’s just go ahead and go to the back room where the secretary works. But be quiet! We don’t want to disturb her!
This is 32-year-old Dorothy Jane Scott, an attractive dark-haired, dark-eyed woman. She’s a single mom who works too hard, who loves her kids and never stops, with gentle hands and a heart of a fighter, she’s a survivor. Oh wait, no that’s Reba McEntire. But truly, Dorothy is a single mother who lives with her aunt in nearby Stanton, and she works long hours to support her four-year-old son Shawn, although such a busy schedule makes it very difficult for her to be a part of the dating scene. But as I’m sure you can tell, she is a very kind and compassionate woman, who is a very reliable and hard worker.
Wait. What’s that? Oh, she’s getting a phone call. Shh, shh, let’s listen in.
"Okay, now you're going to come my way, and when I get you alone, I will cut you up into bits so no one will ever find you."
Wow, wow, wow! Now that was a spooky phone call, wasn’t it? But, unfortunately, this isn’t the first time Dorothy has gotten a phone call like that. In fact, she’s been receiving these calls at work for a few months. The caller is a man who can’t seem to decide whether he’s totally in love with Dorothy, or whether he wants to chop her up and serve her for Thanksgiving dinner. Dorothy had no idea who the caller was, but the voice was vaguely familiar to her.
Whoever the caller was, he freaked Dorothy out. And, I guess, maybe it could be a bit unsettling to have someone repeatedly calling your work phone, telling that he’s been following you, and that he can detail your daily activities to prove it. And perhaps, if you’re a real wimpy, it might be possible that you could potentially become alarmed when a man calls you, tells you to come outside because he has something for you, and then when you go outside, there’s no one there, only a dead rose lying on your windshield.
Now, I don’t mean to belittle the freakiness of what was happening to Dorothy. Well. I mean, I do since I did, but whatever. What I mean to say is that it’s pretty understandable that Dorothy would begin to take karate class. She also considered buying a handgun, but decided not to do so for fear that her son Shawn might hurt himself with it.
Whoa. We must have been talking for a long time, because if you look at the calendar, you’ll find that it’s already the end of May, 1980! May 27, 1980, to be exact. That evening, Dorothy dropped her son Shawn off at her parents’ house and then went to work for a 9 pm staff meeting.
During the meeting, Dorothy noticed that one of her coworkers, a young man named Conrad Bostron, was experiencing excruciating pain. If you’ll remember, Dorothy was described as a kind-hearted and compassionate person, so it should be no surprise that she got to her feet in the middle of the meeting and went over to Conrad to see if he was all right. It quickly became apparent that he was not all right, as his arm was inflamed and it was developing a red streak.
Dorothy interrupted the meeting and proclaimed that Conrad needed medical attention right away, so she, along with another employee named Pam Head, helped Conrad out to her car to take him to the hospital. Inexplicably, on the way to the hospital, Dorothy decided to stop off at her parents’ house to check on her son. Even more inexplicably, while at her parents’ house—with a man who could very well be dying out in her car—Dorothy took the time to change out of the black scarf she had been wearing into a black scarf.
After Dorothy’s impromptu wardrobe change, Dorothy took Conrad to the UC Irvine Medical Center in the nearby town of Orange. At the hospital, a diagnostician identified that Conrad had been bitten by a black widow spider. Conrad was taken back to be attended to, while Dorothy and Pam stayed out in the waiting room, reading magazines, watching television, and making small talk.
Conrad was discharged shortly after 11 pm, and while he had improved considerably, he was still unsteady on his feet. Pam stayed with him as he filled out paperwork for the visit and filled the prescription he’d been given, while Dorothy ran to the restroom and then went out to the parking lot to pull her car up to the exit door.
Several minutes passed, but Dorothy did not return inside or honk to indicate that she was outside. After filling Conrad’s prescription, Pam and Conrad went out to the parking lot and saw Dorothy’s car approaching. They noticed that the high beams were on so that they couldn’t see the driver, not even as the car went racing past them before turning right out of the parking lot. Pam and Conrad chased after the car, but it sped off and shut off the headlights, virtually making the car disappear in the darkness of the night.
Pam and Conrad were understandably upset, but they figured that there must have been some sort of emergency with Dorothy’s son Shawn, and that she would be back after awhile. However, after two hours of waiting, Pam and Conrad figured something was wrong, so they informed hospital security of their concern. They also called Dorothy’s parents to ask if she had come back to the house or if there was any reason she would have left the hospital so suddenly. Dorothy’s parents said no on both counts.
A few hours later, at 4:30 am, Dorothy’s car was found about ten miles away in Santa Ana. It was parked in an alleyway, and it was on fire. Police determined that the fire had been set deliberately, but Dorothy was not found in the car, nor was there any trace of her. She was then reported as a missing person.
Because Dorothy disappeared from the UC Irvine Medical Center, it appeared that the UC Irvine police had jurisdiction in the case. Willy, if I disappear, please do not let the Kansas State University police investigate it, because this campus police force had an interesting—and ineffective—method of solving the case: the UC Irvine police decided that they would not publicize the disappearance at all, and encouraged Dorothy’s parents not to talk about it either.
Now, although this was a very strange and terrible idea on the part of the UC Irvine police, their investigation wasn’t all terrible. The first thing they did—as they should have done—was rule out Dorothy’s ex as a suspect in her disappearance. He had an airtight alibi, having been in Missouri on the evening that Dorothy disappeared. The police also determined that her kidnapper was likely not a customer at the hippie story, since she worked in a back office, away from the public eye. They also looked into local sex offenders and the people who ran in Dorothy’s social circles, but no real suspects were identified. Pretty much, though, the investigation was quite terrible, and the trail went real cold real fast.
Now, if you didn’t think that this story was already pretty spooky, then hold onto your butts, because we’re about to crank the spook factor to eleven. About a week or two after Dorothy went missing, the old telephone rang at Dorothy’s parents’ house. Dorothy’s mother Vera answered, and when she did, a man’s voice said, “Are you related to Dorothy Scott? Well, I’ve got her.” Pretty spooky, right? The Scotts figured that this caller must have been the same person who had been harassing Dorothy in her office, and that this was also the same person who had kidnapped her.
After awhile, Dorothy’s father Jacob became frustrated with the police investigation’s lack of results, so he finally broke his silence. He went to The Santa Ana Register and told them all about what happened to his daughter. The Register ran a story on Dorothy’s disappearance on June 12, two weeks after she went missing.
That same day, after the edition went out, a call came in to the office of Pat Riley, the editor of The Santa Ana Register. The caller was a male with a deep, gruff, soft-spoken voice that was obviously disguised. The caller said, “I killed her. I killed Dorothy Scott. She was my love. I caught her cheating with another man. She denied having someone else. I killed her.”
It was believed that the man who called was indeed the man who had taken Dorothy, as he was able to provide details about Dorothy’s disappearance that were not included in the original news story, which was exclusive to the Register. For instance, he knew that Dorothy was wearing a red scarf, even though she had been wearing a black scarf most of the evening and only changed into the red one on the way to the hospital. The caller also stated that he knew that Dorothy had taken Conrad to the hospital because of a spider bite, which was a detail that wasn’t known that evening until after Conrad had been seen by the diagnostician. Interestingly, the caller also claimed that Dorothy had called him from the UC Irvine Medical Center. However, Pam Head, who had accompanied Dorothy and Conrad to the bathroom, said that this could not have been possible, because she had been with Dorothy the entire evening, except for when Dorothy went to the bathroom on her way out to the parking lot. This was in the days before cell phones, so if Dorothy was going to call this guy, she would have had to have done it from a pay phone, which Pam probably would have noticed.
That spooky call to The Santa Ana Register wasn’t the last time we would hear from Dorothy’s kidnapper. In fact, pretty much every Wednesday for the next four years, this man called the Scotts’ home. The phone calls always came during the daytime hours when Vera was the only one at home. The man would alternate between asking, “Is Dorothy there?” and stating, “I’ve got Dorothy.”
The police agreed with the Scotts, believing that this caller was the man who had called Dorothy at work and kidnapped her from the hospital. They recorded the phone calls that the Scotts received, but they were never able to identify the voice. The Scotts also had their phone lines tapped, but they were never able to keep the caller on the line long enough for the calls to be traced. Now, you might be thinking that after four years, those phone calls must have gotten annoying. Why didn’t they just change their phone number? Well, Jacob and Vera Scott hoped that, if the man really did have Dorothy, at some point he would let them speak to her.
Now, in April of 1984, the caller changed up his routine and called in the evening. This time, since Vera wasn’t home alone, Jacob was the one who answer the phone. Apparently shocked by this, the caller hung up and the calls stopped. The Scotts believed that when the caller heard Jacob’s voice over the phone, he must have assumed that new people had moved to the house, and decided that he didn’t want to harass people whose daughters he hadn’t kidnapped.
On August 6, 1984, four months after the phone calls stopped, a subcontractor for Pacific Bell was about to dig a trench to lay cables under Santa Ana Canyon Road north of Anaheim when he noticed something partially submerged in the soil. If your guess was that this subcontractor had found human remains, you would be absolutely correct. The subcontractor found a skull, a pelvis, an arm, and two thigh bones. Also found at the scene was a woman’s wristwatch, which was stopped at 12:30 am on May 29, 1980, the day after Dorothy went missing, and a turquoise ring which Vera confirmed to be Dorothy’s. On August 14, dental records were used to positively identify the remains as those of Dorothy Jane Scott. The missing-persons investigation became a murder investigation. However, there really wasn’t much of an investigation to speak of.
Now, after the local newspapers announced that the remains had been identified as Dorothy’s, the phone rang again at the Scott home. When Vera answered it, a now familiar voice asked her, “Is Dorothy home?” The caller called twice, and the calls finally ended for good.
After Dorothy disappeared, the Scotts raised her son Shawn to adulthood. Jacob Scott died in 1994, one week shy of his 70th birthday. Vera died in 2002. Neither of them were able to learn the identity of their daughter’s killer, and their constant tormentor of four years.
Unlike most of the cases we cover here on MysteriYES, there are no suspects in this case. Most likely, the man who called Dorothy at work, the man who kidnapped and killed her, and the man who called her parents for four years are probably all the same person. Unfortunately, no one has any idea who this guy is.
Based on the evidence we have in this case, I think that Dorothy knew her killer, though probably not well. I imagine he was someone who saw her somewhat frequently and was in love with her, but for whatever reason, never had the stones to talk to her. Even though the police stated that they had ruled out Dorothy’s coworkers, I still kind of think that it could have been someone Dorothy worked with. A coworker would have enough run-ins with Dorothy to become obsessed with her, but could potentially remain distant enough to keep from being identified as her harasser. After all, Dorothy did say that her harasser’s voice did sound vaguely familiar. Additionally, a coworker would have known how to reach Dorothy in her office at work, and would also have been in the staff meeting to know that she had taken Conrad to the hospital on the night of her disappearance.
There’s been some speculation that Dorothy’s disappearance is connected to another disappearance of a young woman that took place in the area around that time. This young woman was 25-year-old Patricia Jean Schneider. On July 31, 1982, two years after Dorothy’s disappearance, Patricia had just finished her shift as a cocktail waitress and stopped into a Circle K in Pedley, California at around 3:45 am. She used a pay phone at the gas station, stating that her car had broken down. The clerk who was working at the time said he saw two blond white men out in the parking lot while Patricia was making her call. What happened to her after that, no one knows. A few hours later, between 5 and 6 am, Patricia’s car was found in a field...on fire. Police determined that the fire had been set deliberately, and that there was no trace of Patricia at the scene. Foul play is suspected in Patricia’s disappearance, but it, like Dorothy’s has never been solved.
I think these two cases are considered possibly connected because both women’s cars were found deliberately set on fire a few hours after they disappeared. However, this is pretty much where the similarities seem to end. Near as I can tell, Patricia never received harassing phone calls or anything like that. Plus, it seems like if Dorothy’s killer had found a new target, he would have probably moved on from tormenting the Scotts with regular phone calls. However, the phone calls continued for two years after Patricia disappeared. So, if you’re asking me, I think that Patricia and Dorothy’s cases are completely unrelated.
So that’s the story of Dorothy Jane Scott. Willy, do you have any thoughts about the case? Do you have any friends who have confessed to you that they stalked and killed a woman in California in 1980?
Have you ever had food poisoning? What was that like? (Insert pooping and or puking stories here).
Dave and Sandy Lutgens know what it’s like to have food poisoning. In 1984 Dave and Sandy ran Daves hometown pizza in The Dalles, Oregon. With a population of just over 15,000, The Dalles is a lovely little town nestled on the banks of the Columbia River about an hour and a half east of Portland. It is the county seat of Wasco county and is renowned for it’s annual cherry festival. But in 1984 evil beset this small cascadian town.
On September 25th, 1984, Dave and Sandy Lutgens both became violently ill. They both hd vomiting, cramps and diarrhea. Eventually the sickness got so bad that they needed to go to the hospital. When they arrived they discovered they weren’t the only ones sick. The hospital was completely full of people with the exact same symptoms. There were people lying on the floor, leaning on walls in the hallway, even people throwing up in the lobby. Eventually doctors were able to determine that all of these people had ingested salmonella. More specifically they had ingested a rare strain of salmonella that was extremely vulnerable to antibiotics.
While salmonella is very rarely fatal it was still cause for alarm, even more so when, 10 days later, a second outbreak occurred and the number of cases jumped from approximately 150 people to over 750. Do you know what that means Zach? It’s time to call……… THE CDC!
CDC no disease is safe
CDC germs will be erased
CDC they have special cars
CDC they’ll kill diseases from mars
CDC who are those guys?
CDC they protect your pies!
CDC best in disease control
CDC they’re on disease patrol!
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, CDC, yeah, CDC, Look out bacteria, look out disease, CDC coming for you, CDC is coming for you, CDC is coming for you, investigate, was it disease or some poo?
https://soundcloud.com/freehiphopbeatsforyou/free-the-passion-hifi-what-we-came-to-do
Yes, the center for disease control was called in to investigate the cause of the outbreak. Now Zach, I’m going to give you the greatest honor of all, that of a health and safety inspector. We have a town of about 10,000 people. A pretty major portion all got sick at the same time. How do you go about determining the cause of the illness?
Ultimately officials weren’t able to determine the cause of the outbreak either and basically said “I dunno” by attributing it to poor hygiene from food handlers.
Now, on a completely and totally unrelated note let me tell you about something else. Shree Rajneesh was an Indian guru often referred to as a godman which is a type of guru who can perform miracles. During the 1970s Rajneesh gained a fairly substantial following in India preaching many things including the importance of meditation, hard work, and free love. His following grew rapidly over a decade. He established an Ashram in the Indian city of Pune and by 1981 his Ashram attracted over 30,000 visitors a year.
Now, of course, there are always haters. This time the haters took the form of the Indian authorities who began to crack down on Rajneesh for smuggling and tax fraud. This prompted Rajneesh to move his operation to the United States. The group spent $5.75 million to buy a 64,000 acre ranch in Wasco county, Oregon.
Now Zach, I don’t know what happened the last time a cult suddenly moved next door to you, but when it happened to me I was a little upset. And so were the residents of Wasco county Oregon. Almost from the moment the Rajneeshees moved in, there were a series of legal battles. The Rajneeshees wanted to expand their compound into a world headquarters. They wanted to build hotels and input sewer lines and basically create their idea of a self governing utopia. Local officials initially told them that they weren’t allowed to do that because their land wasn’t properly zoned. The Rajneeshees tried to get around this by incorporating their ranch into a city that they dubbed Rajneeshpuram. The legal battles continued as the city grew but ultimately the Oregon supreme court ruled in favor of the Rajneeshees and they were allowed to continue and the Rajneeshees spent another $25+ million on improvements to their city. Soon Rajneeshpuram had it’s own post office, school, police force, hospital, shopping mall, and hotel with room for over 1,000 followers. Rajneesh also grew a great deal in wealth. He owned 93 Rolls-Royces and his followers were dedicated to getting him to 365 so that he could have 1 for each day of the year. Rajneesh also claimed that he had had more sexual partners than anyone in history.
During this time Rajneesh took a self imposed vow of silence and appointed Ma Anand Sheela as his spokesperson. In this role she basically took over the day to day operations of the town and was one of the only people Rajneesh would talk to. Rajneesh actually mostly appointed women to roles of power in his organization believing that a matriarchy would be less aggressive. While the Rajneeshees had won the battle to incorporate their town, the Oregon legislature passed several laws that made it significantly more difficult for their town to grow. Specifically they passed laws that targeted Rajneeshpuram by limiting the things that town with recent “challenges to their legitimacy” could do. Of course these laws only applied to Rajneeshpuram.
So how do you get around this problem if you’re a cult leader? You take over an already established town of course. About 17 miles Northwest of Rajneeshpuram was the small town of Antelope. In 1984 a sizable group of Rajneeshees relocated to Antelope, ran for city council and school board positions and essentially took over the town even going so far as to rename the town Rajneesh.
Still, taking control of Antelope didn’t solve all of the problems for the Rajneeshees and tensions started to escalate. There were reports of vandalism and violence from some of the locals including a popular “better dead than red” slogan that appeared on shirts and bumper stickers. A paranoia of local and state officials also started to grow in the group’s leadership. In response the Rajneeshees started to collect weapons and train their own 45 person militia armed with automatic weapons.
So Zach, you’re a cult leader with growing influence, a local population that is increasingly hostile, and a local government that seems to be conspiring against you. What are you going to do about it?
That’s right, you’re going to take over the county government. You have two of the three spots on the county court opening up as well as the county sheriff, but how are you going to win those elections?
There were two things the Rajneeshees tried. The first was a program they called “share-a-home” in which they had over 2,000 homeless people bussed into Rajneeshpuram. Once there they were given food and shelter and immediately compelled to register in Wasco county. The Wasco county clerk tried to counter this by increasing regulation on voter registration and they quite possibly would have been too late if not for one thing. What do many homeless people in the US have in common Zach? That’s right! A history of mental illness. The Rajneeshees had a great deal of trouble controlling their new resident often resorting to simply drugging their beer to sedate them. Eventually the Rajneeshees abandoned the program (and the people in it) at first by giving them bus tickets home then by just dropping them off at different towns and cities in the area.
So you’ve tried to increase the number of voters for your candidate. What’s the other way that you can go about winning an election? That’s exactly right Zach! You can decrease the number of people voting for somebody else!
Several members of the Rajneeshee inner circle, spearheaded by Ma Anand Sheela, hatched a plan to limit voter turnout in Wasco county. Quite simply, they were going to poison the town and make everyone too sick to vote.
Because the Rajneeshees had several former medical professionals in their ranks they actually had a fully licensed medical center at Rajneeshpuram. In this medical center, under direct command from the leaders of the cult, Rajneeshee doctors started to develop Salmonella.
Their original plan was to contaminated The Dalles water supply but they had to make sure that their plan would work. Their first test came on two county commissioners. While Bill Hulse and Ray Matthew toured Rajneeshpuram they were given two glasses of water that had been contaminated with salmonella. Ray Matthew became violently ill and was confined to his bed for two days while Bill Hulse had to be hospitalized for four days and doctors said he would have died without treatment. Hulse almost immediately accused the Rajneeshees of poisoning him but there was no proof that his sickness had come from them let alone that they had done it intentionally.
So with their first tests out of the way the group decided to escalate. They sprayed salmonella contaminated water on grocery store produce sections as well as door and urinal handles at The Dalles city hall. This did not have the desired effect as no one reported any major illness. Finally the Rajneeshees devised a plan in which they target the salad bars of 10 local restaurants. They sprayed the food with salmonella infected water and poured salmonella directly into bottles of salad dressing.
No one was killed in the attack on The Dalles which is miraculous considering that victims ranged in age from an infant, born two days after his mother’s infection and initially given a five-percent chance of survival to an 87 year old.
The Rajneeshees quite possibly would have gotten away with it if not for the great heroes of epidemiology. While investigating claims of falsified green card marriages, investigators brought along Oregon State Health Lab epidemiologist Dr. Michael Skeels. While there he seized a sample of salmonella from Rajneeshpuram licensed medical center. Testing by the heroes at the CDC discovered that it was the exact same rare strain of salmonella that had infected the town. This was essentially the smoking gun that authorities needed to make arrests.
Now because all is just and right in the world the prosecution ended in Sheela being sentenced to almost 40 years of which she served only a little over 2 years. Rajneesh was able to largely get off scot free there wasn’t any evidence proving that he had ordered the attacks and, after pleading guilty to a handful of immigration charges was forced to pay a $400,000 fine and was deported from the county. He returned to India, started going by the name OSHO and only saw his followers grow. He died in 1990 with much of the bioterror attacks erased from his history and you could probably find one of his quotes on the wall of your local yoga studio.
Willy, I’m sure you know this, and I’m sure some of our listeners know this, but this week is opening week for the 2017 Major League Baseball season. Now, America’s pastime is one of my favorite pastimes, so I figured that in honor of this momentous occasion, we would take a swing at a baseball mystery. I’m hoping that today’s show is a grand slam, but if we happen to strike out with some of our non-sports-fan listeners, rest assured that there isn’t a ton of information on this mystery, so we probably won’t go the full nine innings. But wait, there’s more! Today’s episode is also a myHISTery, because it took place during the very early days of Major League Baseball. In fact, it all began just a few years after last week’s episode took place.
Today we’re going to be talking about the mysterious death of His Majesty himself, the King of Swat: baseball hall-of-famer Edward “Big Ed” Delahanty. Ed was born on October 30, 1867 in Cleveland, Ohio. He was the oldest surviving child of Irish immigrants named Bridget and James Delahanty, who had been living in the United States for just a couple of years when Ed was born. Ed’s father James worked various blue collar jobs in town, while Ed’s mother Bridget turned the family home into a boardinghouse. As you might imagine, such a home environment was rather chaotic, so little Ed and his four brothers—who all would go on to play Major League Baseball as well—spent a lot of time playing baseball in the vacant lots of their neighborhood.
It soon became apparent that Ed was an incredibly talented hitter, and he caught the eye of local scouts, who recruited him to play for an area semipro team called the Shamrocks. I’m not sure how old Ed was at this point, but I like to imagine that he was twelve years old like that kid in the greatest movie of all time, Rookie of the Year. In reality though, I’m guessing he was around eighteen or nineteen because in 1887, when he was twenty, he quit school at St. Joseph’s College and he signed his first professional contract, earning $50 per month to play for Mansfield out of the Ohio State League. His mother was displeased with his choice of career, telling him, “Drat baseball. It’s ruinin’ the family.” After spending part of the 1888 season playing in Wheeling, West Virginia, Ed was sold to the Philadelphia Phillies of the National League for $1,900, to replace a player who had died of typhoid fever.
On May 12, 1888, Ed made his Major League debut, playing second base for the Phillies. Because of Ed’s tendency to swing freely at any pitch, experienced opposing pitchers found it easy to take advantage of him, which caused him to struggle in his early years. After three years of mediocre baseball in the majors, Ed decided to seriously devote himself to improving his play. The hard work paid off, because he showed significant improvement in his statistics in the 1892 season.
Over the next ten seasons, Ed thrived in Philadelphia. He frequently led the National League in various offensive statistical categories, and from 1897 to 1899 he batted over .400 in each season, making him the first player in baseball history to bat above .400 in three straight seasons. He led the league in homeruns twice, and hit four homeruns in one game in 1896. Ed became a confusing hitter for pitchers to throw to and for defenses to field against. Red Ehret, a pitcher for the Cincinnati Reds, said that Ed was “the hardest man in the league for pitchers to puzzle.” Ed was also a great outfielder for the Phillies after initially struggling as an infielder in his early seasons. Because of his ability to both hit and field, Delahanty was widely considered to be the greatest baseball player of the 1890s. However, the Phillies owner was a bit of cheapskate and reportedly didn’t pay his players very well. So, after the 1901 season, decided to seek better pay in the newly formed American League.
Ed found a home with the Washington Senators of the American League for the 1902 season. There, he signed a $4,000 contract with a $1,000 signing bonus, which was a far cry better than the $3,000 he earned in his final season with the Phillies. Ed’s success on the diamond continued during his time with the Senators, and he won the American League batting title in 1902, which made him the first and only player to win the batting crown in both the American League and the National League.
However, Ed’s on-field success did not follow him off the field. Ed’s wife Norine became seriously ill around the same time that Ed began to spend exorbitant amounts of money on binge drinking and betting on horse races. Suddenly his financial resources had become considerable debts, and Ed began to beg his teammates for money, even threatening to kill himself if he wasn’t given the money he needed. Prior to the 1903 season, Ed signed a tantalizing deal with the New York Giants, which would earn him $8,000 a year as well as a $4,000 advance on his salary.
Unfortunately for Ed, around that same time, players were prohibited from jumping between the American and National Leagues. As a result, Ed’s contract with New York was canceled and he found himself back with the Senators. And worse than that, Ed was forced to pay back the $4,000 advance from the Giants. Because of the stark difference between his contract with the Giants and his contract with the Senators, it was actually going to cost Ed $100 to play the 1903 season. For Ed, a man who was seriously lacking in cash, this was devastating. Luckily for him, the Senators agreed to pay the Giants the $4,000 on Ed’s behalf, but they would deduct $2,000 from his salary in each of the next two seasons. Ed showed up to play for the Senators in 1903, but he continued to seek better-paying opportunities elsewhere.
The 1903 season was rough for Ed. Not only did he begin the year out of shape, but he injured both his back and his ankle during the year. The Senator’s manager, Tom Loftus, kept assigning Ed to play in right field, while Ed refused, insisting that he would only play in left field.
Off the field, Ed’s life continued to unravel. He began to drink more and more, and also began to behave more bizarrely. He began to give valuable possessions to his teammates such as his gold watch, and there was a rumor that he had once attempted suicide. On June 17th, 1903, Ed took out a life insurance policy on himself with his daughter Florence as the beneficiary. However, on June 26th, it was reported that players were going to be allowed to jump between the leagues again. For Ed, this was great news, as it appeared he would be able to sign that deal with the Giants after all. That morning, Ed went on a drinking binge, which made him aggressive and erratic. He threatened to kill himself, and his teammates believed it was necessary to have someone keeping an eye on him at the team’s hotel, but Ed chased at least one of them away with a knife.
After sobering up, Ed accompanied the Senators to Detroit, the next city where the team would be playing. While there, his mother and two of his brothers were called up to try to talk some sense into the unhinged man. While in Detroit, Ed signed some sort of pledge to get better in the presence of his mother and a catholic priest. However, Ed continued his binge drinking. On July 1st, a court order was handed down which once more prohibited players from jumping leagues, making it evident that Ed wouldn’t be able to sign a contract with New York after all. Regardless, the next day Ed abandoned his team and jumped on a sleeper train to New York, leaving behind his belongings in his hotel room. The Senators had just lost that day to the Detroit Tigers, their 43rd loss of the season, compared to just 16 wins. It seemed he had had enough playing for such a hapless team.
On the train to New York, Ed drank five shots of whiskey and became rather intoxicated. He smoked when he was prohibited from doing so and became so out of control that he broke the glass on an emergency tool cabinet before eventually falling asleep. When the train stopped in Bridgeburg, Ontario, just across the Niagara River from Buffalo, New York, an incredibly disoriented Ed awoke and wandered into an already occupied sleeping berth, where he pulled a woman out by her ankles and began to threaten passengers with a razor. After being subdued by three men, the train’s conductor stopped the train at Niagara Falls just before crossing the US border. At around 10:45 pm, Ed was kicked off the train, and as he got off, the conductor told Ed not to make trouble because he was still in Canada. Still wildly drunk, Ed stated, “I don’t care whether I’m in Canada or dead.”
After dropping off Ed, the train crossed the International Railway Bridge, which stretched across the Niagara River to Buffalo. In the darkness of the night, Ed followed the train out onto the bridge and stood on its edge, looking into the water, where he was then grabbed by the night watchman, a man named Sam Kingston, who had been on the lookout for smugglers. The two got into a physical conflict as Kingston tried to put Ed under arrest or something. At some point, Ed knocked Kingston over and was able to get away. Moments later, Kingston saw Ed’s body go plummeting 25 feet into the Niagara River below.
One week later, a tour boat called the Maid of the Mist sawed off the leg of a dead body in the river. The corpse was determined to be that of Ed Delahanty. The body was found twenty miles downriver at the base of Horseshoe Falls in Canada. The body was naked except for his tie, his shoes, and his socks, and the body had also been gruesomely mangled. One of baseball’s first great power hitters was dead at 35, perhaps several years before his career should have ended.
The question is, why did Ed fall from the bridge? Was it suicide, an accident, or murder?
In the days leading up to Ed’s death, he displayed erratic behavior, including multiple suicidal comments and excessive drinking. He also gave away many prized possessions, which is a common warning sign for suicidal intent. His life circumstances were also not great. He was in deep financial trouble, his attempts at career advancement had been shut down, he was estranged from his wife, he was feuding with his manager, and the team he played for was terrible.
At first glance, I think suicide is the most likely explanation. However, author Mike Sowell, who wrote the book July 2, 1903 about Delahanty’s death, stated that suicide was unlikely. Sowell argued that Ed still believed that he had a shot to sign with the New York Giants and was on his way there to make the deal final. If this was the case, then it made no sense for Delahanty to kill himself. He was a man on the rise! Why would he want to die?
Another explanation is that Ed’s fall from the bridge was an accident. At the point when Ed was on the bridge, it was the middle of the night and so dark that Sam Kingston, the night watchman, said that he couldn’t tell what even happened to Ed. So it’s conceivable that, in his drunken stupor and desperation to get away from the man who’d accosted him, Ed stumbled over the edge of the bridge and plunged into the water 25 feet below.
I like this theory because it takes out any intention from either Ed or an attacker. Accidents happen all the time. We saw it with the Pamela Jackson and Cheryl Miller case. Not every tragic and mysterious death involves foul play. Plus, if Sowell’s theory is to be believed and Ed was not suicidal but rather on his way to sign a big deal in the Big Apple, then the accident theory makes the most sense.
The third and final theory is that Ed was murdered. Initially, some thought that Sam Kingston was the murderer instead of a witness—albeit a witness who claimed not to have been able to see what happened because of the darkness. I suppose this could have been possible—although I think “murder” is too strong a word for it. If Kingston caused Ed’s death, my guess is that it would have been an accident as a result of the struggle.
However, there were reports of a stranger following Delahanty as he ambled across the International Bridge, perhaps with intentions of robbery. This story was never confirmed, and you’ll be hard pressed to find anyone who really believes this.
What do you think, Willy? What happened to the old King of Swat, Ed Delahanty?
I think we can pretty quickly and easily count out murder. There’s no evidence to support this theory, and the two other theories are far more believable. I will say that when I first read that he was found nude, I thought this sounded like murder. You know, get the big famous baseball player naked and humiliate him or something. But considering how quickly things happened, it’s incredibly unlikely that anyone would have had time to strip him down and do whatever needed to happen next. More likely, the clothes were ripped off by the powerful Niagara River. The only clothes still on him were his shoes, socks, and tie, which I think are far less likely to be ripped off by the currents.
So I think the relevant question is, was Ed’s death a suicide or an accident? I keep going back and forth, and for me it comes down to whether he believed he was headed to New York to sign a deal with the Giants. If he truly believed he was signing a much better contract in New York, then it wouldn’t make sense for him to kill himself. However, most of what I read makes it seem like it was unlikely that Ed would be allowed to make the jump back to the National League. It’s possible that he was deceiving himself or convinced that he could somehow make it work in New York, but I’m skeptical about that.
I think if I had to choose between the two, I would come down kind of in the middle. Ed was incredibly drunk and obviously not thinking clearly. My guess is that—if he were sober—Ed might not have been suicidal. However, with the amount of alcohol he had consumed, it seems possible that his disoriented thinking could have led him to jump off the bridge. As we very well know, people don’t tend to make great decisions when they are incredibly intoxicated. But, in that way, I could see his death being both an accident and a suicide—an accidental suicide, if you will.
As a postscript to Ed Delahanty’s life, I’ll tell you that Delahanty was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1945. His plaque in Cooperstown states, “One of the game’s greatest sluggers. Led National League hitters in 1899 with an average of .408 for Philadelphia; American League batters in 1902 with a mark of .376 for Washington, made 6 hits in 6 times at bat twice during career and once hit 4 homeruns in a game.”
Before we get started on this week’s mystery, Zach, I want to make sure we’re mature enough for it. There are multiple names for it but the main one is a little silly. If it’s too silly we can use something else. I’m going to say it and if you laugh we have to throw the whole episode out. Ready? This week we’re talking about the Servant Girl Annihilator. Alternative names include, The Austin Axe Murderer and the Servant Girl Murders.
This week we’re heading to your favorite state in these 48 contiguous United States of America, Texas. The Friendship State, home of the alamo, king of the Andals, the Rhoynar, and the First Men, protector of the realm and first of her name. Now when I say, “let’s go to Texas.” you probably think, “No problems, we’ll just hope in our MysteriYES branded 1984 Ford Fiesta, hop on I-35 south, and be there by morning.” Well, bad news Zach. This week’s mystery actually happened mostly in 1885 so we’ll have to hop in our MysteriYES branded 1986 Oldsmobile Cutlass Cierra/Time machine, make our way down I-35 south, and then hit the big red button that says “I would like to go back to the year 1885 please”. Now that we’re in Austin in 1885 we need to hop back just a couple more months so let’s stop by this old soothsayers hut and have him teleport us back to December 1884.
Austin in 1884 was a growing city. As years of debates of it’s legitimacy as Texas’s capital ended, it doubled in population in a handful of years from a small cow town to a burgeoning metropolis. But not everything was right in this city on the move. On New year’s eve 1884 a 25 year old black servant cook named Mollie Smith was found in the snow next to the outhouse behind her employer’s home. She had a gaping wound in the side of her head. The night before someone had broken into her home as she slept, attacked her with an axe while she slept, and dragged the body from her bed to the backyard where she was raped and murdered.
A few months later on May 6th 1885, the body of Eliza Shelly, a cook for a former member of the Texas state legislature was found on the floor of her bedroom. She too had been killed by an axe wound to the head.
Three weeks after Shelly was murdered, a third black servant named Irene Cross was attacked by a man with a knife. She initially survived but was unable to tell police or reporters who attacked her. She later succumbed to her wounds, which makes sense because one reporter who spoke with her said she looked as if she had been scalped.
There were two more attacks and one more murder three months later in August of 1885. The most gruesome of which was on a mother and daughter, 50 year old Rebecca Ramey and her 11 year old daughter Mary were both attacked. Rebecca survived after being knocked unconscious while she slept. Mary was dragged to a backyard washhouse, stabbed through the ear with an iron rod and raped.
Later in September Gracie Vance and her boyfriend Orange Washinton were attacked in the house they lived. The attacker struck Washington in the head with an axe. He then carried Vance to the property’s stable where her head, as the Austin Daily Statesman put it, was, “almost beaten into a jelly.”
Until this point the killer had only gone after black victims, mostly servants of the wealthy white people of Austin, but on Christmas Eve, 1885 the body of Sue Hancock, a white woman who was described as “one of the most refined ladies in Austin” was discovered in her own backyard. Her head had been split open by an ax and a sharp thin object was lodged in her brain.
About an hour later, Eula Phillips was found dead in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the city. She was found naked in an unlit alley behind her home. Initially her husband Jimmy was found in bed nearly unconscious, a large gash in the back of his head. Their young son was sitting next to him, unharmed, and eating an apple. Eula’s body was discovered by following the trail of blood from their bedroom. Her skull had been bashed in by an ax and heavy pieces of timber had been placed across her arms as if to keep her pinned down during the attack. She had also been raped. A reporter for the Fort Worth Gazette wrote that her face was “turned upward in the dim moonlight with an expression of agony that death itself had not erased from her features”.
These murders cause a massive panic in the city of Austin. After the bodies were discovered on Christmas Eve men raced from their homes “bordering on frenzy” and gathered on Congress Ave in front of the capitol building. Gun shops ran out of weapons and citizens resorted to refurbishing the old guns used during the Texas revolution. Many black residents of the city reportedly believed that the killer had supernatural powers which explained why he could so stealthily break into people’s homes.
On Christmas Day 1885 more than 500 city leaders, clergymen, lawyers, and doctors met to figure out a way to stop the killings. Their proposal included, lighting the entire city at night with gigantic lamps and setting off fire alarms whenever an attack happened so that everyone could come out of their houses and hunt down the killer at once. It was even suggested that guards should be posted around Austin and everyone in the city limits should be interrogated about their whereabouts on the night of the murders.
Fortunately, none of the plans were necessary. Just as suddenly as they had begun, the attacks stopped.
The investigation into the murders was doomed to fail from the start. In 1883, Grooms Lee, the son of a powerful local politician was chosen to be Austin’s police chief. There were subsequent attempts to impeach him because many of the city’s 12 officers reportedly spent more time in saloons and brothels than preventing crime. In addition rumors emerged that city money had disappeared after which the chief clerk at the police station skipped town. There were even allegations that the police were robbing people themselves.
It also didn’t help that it was 1885 and it was basically the easiest thing ever to get away with murder. With no form of technology to help them police relied on a bloodhound named “Old George”. Old George may have been a perfectly fine dog but when it comes to finding murderers he’s pretty terrible, not doing much more than barking up and down the street.
Let’s also not forget that it’s 1885 and everyone is super duper racist all the time always. The consensus among the white people of Austin was that no white man would have any reason to mutilate a black servant woman. As a result the investigation was focused exclusively on black men. Because there were bare footprints found around the same area as the bodies some black men were even arrested for murder simply because they weren’t wearing shoes.
One evening Lee walked into Austin’s most popular black bar, the Black Elephant, asking for a man named Alex Mack. Mack had known one of the victims but there wasn’t any real reason to suspect him. Mack walked with Lee down the street where a group of detectives and officers threw him to the ground, kicked him, tied a rope around his neck, and demanded that he tell them what he knew about the murders. Fortunately a white man named Press Hopkins came out of his house and prevented a probable lynching. Mack was taken to jail where he was repeatedly beaten for the next week and a half.
After the Christmas Eve murders many of the same black suspects were rounded up again along with a mentally ill Mexican-American man and two suspicious looking white brothers who were found with blood on their clothes just north of Austin.
The police presence in Austin increased 5x . Officers were given the right to question random strangers on the street and if their answers weren’t good enough they were given 24 hours to leave town.
In January of 1886, Jimmy Phillips was arrested for the murder of his wife. A few weeks after that 50 year old Moses Hancock was arrested for the murder of his wife. So the police theory was that these two husbands happened to come up with the same plan on the same night.
The biggest piece of evidence that Hancock was the murderer was a letter written by his wife Sue to Moses months before she was murdered. In the letter she explained that she couldn’t live with his drinking any longer. With this letter, prosecutors believe that on the night of the crime, Moses visited a saloon, returned home, and attacked Sue in a drunken rage.
The case again Moses Hancock was pretty thin the the evidence against Jimmy Phillips was more compelling. Jimmy was a very attractive man. He was young, handsome and played the violin. He was also a supposed violent drunk who was abusive to his wife Eula. Various family member and friends testified in court that Jimmy had chased her with a knife. Eula’s sister Delia also testified that Jimmy once got so enraged at Eula that they had to run out of the house. She also had stayed at her older sister’s home for several days after another one of Jimmy’s drunken binges.
Adding additional motivation to this theory, apparently Eula had been slipping away to May Tobin’s house of assignation which was a hotel with a reputation for discretion. Many of Austin’s high end prostitutes would meet clients there as well as adulterers. She had reportedly been there nearly half a dozen times and she had been there briefly on Christmas Eve.
After a highly publicized trial Jimmy Phillips was convicted of uxoricide and was given the totally fair sentence of 7 years. Six months later the Texas court of appeals overturned the conviction and ordered a new trial.
The trial of Moses Hancock resulted in a hung jury after their teenage daughter testified that her mother never got the courage to show the letter to Moses.
Moses and Jimmy were released from custody and never tired again.
There were no more investigations after that. The murders had stopped and so much time and effort went into the trials that no one really started over. The city did do its best to ensure that no such crimes could ever happen again. Huge arc lights were installed over various neighborhoods, casting a glow over a radius of three thousand feet (Those moonlight towers are still in operation today and a scene from Dazed and Confused takes place on one of them). To keep criminals from congregating, saloons and gambling dens were ordered closed at midnight. To prevent other innocent women from traversing the same path that Eula did, a campaign was begun to shut down the city’s brothels.
Now Zach you may be thinking to yourself, “Gee whiz a 17th century serial killer who terrorized a city, gruesomely murdering “undesirable” victims before suddenly disappearing sound awfully familiar”. Because it does Zach. There are a number of theories that the Servant Girl Annihilator was also *pause for dramatic effect* Jack the Ripper. While there is absolutely no way to prove this conjecture, there are a couple theories that have developed.
One such theory is that both murderers were in fact a Polynesian cook named Maurice who was “running on ocean vessels”. The Austin American-Statesman reported in 1888 that “a Malay cook had been employed at a small hotel in Austin in 1885.” The paper reported that they “investigated the matter, calling on Mrs. Schmidt, who kept the Pearl House. It was ascertained that a Malay cook calling himself Maurice had been employed at the house in 1885 and that he left some time in January 1886. It will be remembered that the last of the series of Austin women murders was the killing of Mrs. Hancock and Mrs. Eula Phillips, the former occurring on Christmas Eve 1885, just before the Malay departed, and that the series then ended. A strong presumption that the Malay was the murderer of the Austin women was created by the fact that all of them except two or three resided in the immediate neighborhood of the Pearl House.” That’s pretty much all they came up with.
There is another theory that a Liverpool cotton merchant named James Maybrick. In her book “Jack the Ripper: The American Connection” Shirley Harrison claimed that Maybrick often travelled to the southern United States and his journal entries showed that he was in Austin during the murders. While a connection between Maybrick and Jack the Ripper has never been proven (and I won’t get into it because Jack the Ripper is a very complicated story) it is at least interesting that this man may have been present for two of the most infamous crimes of the century.
Do you have a favorite theory so far Zach?
Well let me tell you mine. I cheated by not even telling you about it yet. In February 1886 a 19 year old black man named Nathan Elgin got into a drunken rage. He reportedly dragged a young girl from the saloon they were in to his brother’s house down the street. There were plenty of witnesses by nobody intervened out of fear. Eventually the police arrived. The office waited outside while the saloon keeper and a neighbor went into the house and tried to pull Elgin out. Elgin pulled a knife on the two men and a fight ensued. As they fought the office tried to handcuff the man. Despite the fight being 3 on 1 they couldn’t subdue Elgin. He threw them off and as he tried to escape he was shot, directly in the spine, by the officer. Elgin died the following day without police having an opportunity to question him. There was no explanation for his rage from witnesses.
During Elgin’s autopsy (or whatever they did back then) doctors discovered Elign was missing a toe. According to a PBS documentary that aired in 2014, one detail that police never shared with the public was that the footprints left by the murderer only had 4 toes on the right foot. This fact was brought up by the defense during the trials of Hancock and Phillips but it wasn’t very convincing for the jury.
In 1976, the town of Franklin, Wisconsin was a small suburb of Milwaukee with a population of about 15,000. It was also the new home of the Zera family, who had decided to move away from urban Milwaukee to the more rural Franklin the year before. John and Janice Zera had three sons: Mark who was 15, Johnny who was 14, and Phil who was 13. The three boys struggled to get along at their new school in Franklin, as small rural schools like Franklin High tend to be very closed off to newcomers. However, the boys enjoyed playing together, particularly in the woods near their house, which was big enough to allow each boy to sleep in his own room.
On Friday, February 20th, 1976, shortly after lunch at Franklin High School, 14-year-old freshman Johnny Zera obtained a hall pass and walked out of his study hall class. Reports of what happened to him next are conflicting. Some have said he was last seen walking out of the school where a Ford Torino was waiting for him in the parking lot. Others said he just hung out in the school lobby and was never seen leaving the building. Still others reported that he was seen outside of his next period class, but that he never went in. The only thing that is known for sure is that Johnny never came home from school and he was never seen alive again.
That afternoon, when Johnny failed to come home with his older brother Mark, his parents realized that something was wrong, as Johnny wasn't the type to just run off, particularly not without letting anyone know where he was going. They called the police, who assured John and Janice that everything was fine, and that Johnny must just be out playing. That evening, John Sr. Mark went out searching for Johnny in the town of Franklin and the surrounding rural areas. Janice stayed home and called anyone she could think of to ask if they had seen Johnny. Neither the search nor the phone calls turned up any information. When night fell and John Sr. and Mark gave up their search for the day, snow began to fall, and by the following morning, snow covered everything, surely to include clues as to what happened to Johnny.
The next day, John Sr. and Mark met the Franklin High principal at the school to see if they could find out any more information about what happened to Johnny. When they went to Johnny's locker, they found it stuffed with books. They also found his green coat. Because it was February in Wisconsin, they found this discovery to be alarming, so the police were called.
Emergency services and volunteers were called in to conduct a search of the area, while police interviewed people who may have last seen Johnny. The police also had a strong suspicion that Mark was hiding something and questioned him multiple times. However, they came to realize that Mark knew nothing about what happened to his brother.
Johnny’s body was found eight days later, on the morning of Saturday February 28th, 1976, Johnny’s dead body was found in a clearing at Whitnall Park by some teenagers who were out doing some exploring. He was found facedown and naked, with his head resting on a log. When police examined the scene, they found no clear evidence of a struggle or of Johnny’s body being dragged. Twenty feet away from the body, police found Johnny’s clothes: a pair of jeans, a white t-shirt, a pair of boxers, two brown shoes, with blue socks tucked neatly inside. They also found a pencil, a pen, and the hall pass Johnny had been given. On his wrist, the word “hell” had been written in block letters with a ball point pen. There was a rock found nearby with blood and hair on it, and police believed that this was the murder weapon that Johnny was bludgeoned to death with.
Now Whitnall Park was a pretty large area situated both in Franklin and the neighboring town of Hales Corner. The nearest entrance to the park was five miles away from Franklin High School and eight miles away from Johnny’s home. The questions the police were now tasked with answering was this: why did Johnny leave his school in the middle of the day? How did he get all the way to Whitnall Park? And, of course, who killed Johnny?
After Johnny’s body was found, jurisdiction in the case got a little hairy. Johnny’s missing persons report was made in Franklin where he lived, but because the murder had apparently been committed in Hales Corners, primary jurisdiction was granted to the Hales Corners Police Department, which happened to be the smallest police force of any Milwaukee suburb with just thirteen officers. In the twenty years prior to Johnny’s murder, the Hales Corners police had dealt with just one murdered, that of a man who called the police himself to report that he had killed his wife. This was going to be the first true murder investigation that anyone from Hales Corners had ever worked. They quickly realized that they were out of their depth, so they called in the Wisconsin Department of Justice and the Milwaukee FBI. Hales Corners police interviewed over 1000 potential witnesses and dozens of suspects, however they were limited by the technology available as well as their inadequate training for such an investigation.
Because Johnny’s body was found completely naked even down to his socks, it was suspected that there was a sexual element to the murder. Semen was found on the body, and the medical examiner concluded that Johnny had likely been sodomized on multiple occasions in the weeks or months leading up to his death, but that his anus showed no signs of recent injury. His time of death was also determined to be around 1 or 2 pm, which would have been pretty shortly after he left the school. Now, I will say that the medical examiner was a goofy goober with a history of muddling things up, and this case is no different, so we do have to take the information from the autopsy with a grain of salt. However, we press on.
An FBI profiler was called in to advise on the case. While profilers are portrayed as superhuman investigators in Criminal Minds, the science of criminal profiling was in its infancy in 1976. Here is what the profile said, verbatim: “Battering of head is a sadistic male homosexual act. Bi-sexual, likes women and men. Very Sadistic, Psychopathic behavior when it comes to sex. Peculiar sexual demands of females. Wife or girlfriend has left him because of his desire for anal intercourse. Women he likes, slight build, boyish figure. Dominant father. Docile, quiet, protective mother. Strong religious background, does not practice it now, expect him to seek help. Average intelligence or below average. Not known to be a homosexual by anyone other than another homosexual, wife may have inkling. Probably has known boy for a few months. Probably has had relations with boy before. 18-50 years old, probably 18-35. Reason he killed boy was because anal sex is very sadistic. Probably killed boy during act because of frenzy. 60-70% of buggery committed by family members. Outgoing, makes a lot of noise, braggart, masculine appearance, indicates he is town stud. Heavy drinker, may have been arrested for some assault act.”
Based upon this very politically incorrect profile, the police began to identify suspects, often by just asking people who they knew who was gay. However, unlike some of the cases we’ve discussed previously, investigators were actually able to come up with some pretty good suspects, all of them just stand-up guys, pillars of the community, the kind of men you’d kill to share a beer with.
The first suspect I want to talk about is the first one the police identified. Now, I would love to tell you his name, but unfortunately, his name has never been released. However, I don’t want to call him the unnamed construction worker, so let’s just call him Teddy, since that’s the name of David Wallace’s son and I was watching The Office while doing research for this case.
In 1976, Franklin High School was having a new addition built onto the school, meaning that there were construction workers all over the police. There were two construction workers in particular who caught the attention of the police. According to FHS students, these men would try to sit with the kids at lunch, and were suspected by police of selling marijuana to the students. There was also a rumor that one of the construction workers—Teddy—was bisexual, which of course made him skyrocket to the top of the police’s suspect list.
Teddy was called in for questioning with the police, and according to the police report I read regarding this interview, Teddy seemed to be under the influence of some sort of drug. He told the police some bizarre things, such as the fact that he was concerned that his girlfriend and her mother were telepathic and could control him with their minds. He also stated that he could control animals with his mind. When he choked on his Winston cigarette, Teddy said that someone was trying to control his behavior through the cigarette.
Teddy gave the police a pretty good alibi, saying that he was not at the school on the day Johnny went missing because was working on a flooded roof at a factory elsewhere. He said he knew the date was correct because the night before he had attended an orgy at the home of a male stripper. The only problem is that Teddy did, in fact, get his dates wrong. Records showed that he had worked on the flooded roof on February 19th, the day before Johnny went missing. Even more damning, it was shown that Teddy didn’t even go to work on that Friday.
At one point during the interview, the detective conducting it handed Teddy a picture of Johnny, I guess to gauge his emotional response. Teddy held the picture in both hands, made strange faces at it, and said, “He was a beautiful boy. He was one of God’s children.”
Teddy maintained that he had never met Johnny before in his life, and agreed to take a polygraph test. Back in the 70s, polygraphs were considered miracle machines that could never be wrong, and the evidence gained from them was still admissible in court. When Teddy took the polygraph test, it showed that he was being completely truthful when he stated that he had nothing to do with Johnny’s death.
Later, after the interview, Ted was able to prove to police that the reason he hadn’t been at work on February 20th was because he had been to the doctor for a 3:00 turn-your-head-and-cough. Police did confirm this with the doctor’s office, but his whereabouts earlier in the day are still unknown. Johnny’s time of death was estimated to have been 1 or 2 pm, so it’s conceivable that Teddy could have killed Johnny in time to make it to his hernia check, but it’s probably a bit unlikely.
Teddy remained a suspect for two years, but was never charged with the crime.
Our next suspect is a real wacky-jacky, a bit of a screwball, and maybe a cold-blooded killer. This man’s name is Dan Acker. In the 1970s, Acker was an aide at the Milwaukee County Mental Health Complex, as well as a swimming coach and a lifeguard. Oh, and I should mention that he was also a pedophile. Dan Acker loved—I mean, loved—naked teenage boys, particularly those between the ages of about 13 and 16. He also rocked the old business-up-front-party-in-the-back which made him look extra trustworthy.
After Johnny went missing, Acker was the only person to lead searches through Whitnall Park, where Johnny’s body would eventually be found. He later explained that the reason he was so invested in the search and subsequent investigation was because he felt guilty for not being in the park to stop the murder, as he usually rode his bike through Whitnall Park, but on that day he went to sleep after an overnight shift.
Police first noticed Acker the day after Johnny’s body had been found. An officer patrolling the crime scene saw Acker making his way through the trees toward the clearing where Johnny’s body had been found. When confronted by the officer about what he was doing there, Acker stated that he was looking for the place where the body was found. And then he looked down on the ground, saw some drops of Johnny’s blood, and said, “Apparently this is it.” That is…chilling.
Acker became a serious suspect later, after the police receive a tip regarding Acker’s attraction to teenage boys. Apparently, Acker had been asked to move out of an apartment after an inappropriate amount of teenage boys were seen coming into and leaving his apartment. There were also some credible allegations that Acker would convince the boys coming into to let him take nude photos of them. However, Acker was only briefly considered a suspect in the 70s because he passed a polygraph, even though his alibi of being asleep when the murder happened was really shaky.
Over the years, Acker developed an unusual interest in the case. Upon deciding that the official police investigation wasn’t doing enough to solve the case, Acker announced that he was going to conduct his own investigation. He informed the police that he had learned that three men forced a man with a developmental disability named Joe to be involved in the assault and murder. While police did look into this theory, they found that it was nonsense, since the man couldn’t even pick Johnny out of a photo lineup. Acker even became family friends with the Zeras, telling them that he knew for a fact that this man with an developmental disability had been involved in Johnny’s murder. Police weren’t sure what to think of Acker, but mostly they just thought he was a walking eccentricity.
In 2009, Dan Acker was arrested and pleaded no contest to two counts of second-degree sexual assault. In fact, not only was Acker happy to speak with detectives for hours, but he willingly admitted to sexual encounters with at least twenty underage boys over the years. However, he consistently denied killing Johnny Zera or even knowing the boy. After a long interview with detectives, Acker let them search his condo in Waukesha.
Now, I need to pause here for a correction and apology to all our loyal listeners from Waukesha, Wisconsin. In our episode about Little Lord Fauntleroy, I unknowingly mispronounced the town’s name, saying it as Wah-kee-shuh instead of Wah-keh-shaw. So my sincerest and utmost apologies to all of our listeners for the horrendous offense I perpetrated on all of you. Now back to the mystery.
At first, they didn’t really find anything noteworthy or unusual in Acker’s apartment. When they went into the basement, they found models of classic cars, ambulances, police cars, and fire trucks. They also found a miniature police station and fire station made of balsa wood. While this stuff may have been fairly unusual for a grown man, none of it was particularly incriminating. That is, until they lifted the roofs from the model stations.
Inside the models, they found pictures of children, each one illuminated by an LED light. But they weren’t just any children—they were missing and murdered children, some of them noteworthy, such as Etan Patz (Ay-tawn Paytz), Jacob Wetterling, and Konerak Sinthasomphone, who was the youngest victim of the hometown serial killer, Jeffrey Dahmer. One officer picked up a Matchbox car and found two names printed on the bottom. One was Carl Galbraith, who was a boy from Kenosha, Wisconsin whose 1977 murder was never solved. The other name was John Zera. When Acker was asked about this, he stated that he wanted to dedicate his hobby to honoring kids—specifically boys—who no longer got to have hobbies.
And more harrowing than that, police also found a combined photo album and 173 page journal that was completely dedicated to the Johnny Zera case, beginning a few months Johnny went missing and continuing for decades. There were maps and pictures of Whitnall Park and Franklin High, as well as pictures of the Zera family. Some of these pictures of the family were staged and therefore taken by family members, while other photos looked like they had been taken in secret, like surveillance was being conducted. Some of the pictures of Mark and Phil Zera looked like they were taken years after Johnny was killed.
Now, this journal seems to be more of a historical record than an actual journal. So, for example, the entry with the heading February 20, 1976—the day Johnny disappeared—is about what happened that day, but wasn’t necessarily written on that day. I want to read a little excerpt from the preface Acker wrote to the journal, just so we can all get a feel for Dan Acker’s bizarre thought processes:
“For John Christopher Zera. 1962-1976. Aug ’62-Feb 20th ’76. The following is an account of a tragedy that passed so close to me, yet I was kept so far away. Despite this, I became involved because I took the time to care and because this crime was so appaling [sic]. My efforts are for a young youth now gone so early in his life and for his family who now lives on after such a wasteful and terrible loss. Fate played a strange hand in this event and kept me away. I do not understand why and I feel poorly I did not follow my plans as I had set for the day. Maybe I could have done something to have prevented or interfered with this crime. Even if I failed to do so, at least the young man whould have had someone else with him to try and stop this cruel crime. Not looking to be a hero, nor seeking any recognition, I just want this evil person off the streets and unable to assault or kill again. To this end, I dedicate my efforts for John Christopher Zera and his family.”
I read a lot of Acker’s journal, and it’s weird. It’s more than just a well-intentioned trying to help solve a crime. Acker is completely obsessed with this case, and contrary to what he claims, fancies himself some sort of Messiah for the Zera family, believing that he alone can solve the case. It’s a pretty unsettling thing to read, even if Acker didn’t commit the crime. Assuming that Acker wasn’t the killer, I still think he got some sort of weird sexual gratification out of completely investing himself in the case.
Acker is serving a twenty year sentence the state prison in Osh Kosh for the sexual assault charges. He has never admitted to killing John, even though he pretty much has nothing to lose since he was already 62 when he was sentenced for twenty years. No murder charges have ever been brought against him either, as botched handling of the DNA evidence in the case couldn’t link him to the crime scene and the only evidence against him was so circumstantial that it was described as a “defense attorney’s dream.”
Our next suspect is a man named Michael Uporsky. He was a full-time substitute teacher, hall monitor and girls’ basketball coach at Franklin High in 1976 when Johnny was murdered. Police questioned all the teachers at the high school, and Uporsky told the police he was most likely on his lunch break reading a newspaper when Johnny left his study hall period. Uporsky said that he didn’t remember seeing Johnny at all that day, and that his only interaction with Johnny had come about a week earlier. Johnny had attended a swimming class taught by Uporsky, and Johnny only stuck out in Uporsky’s memory because Johnny had been reluctant to get in the water for some reason. Uporsky was actually more familiar with Johnny’s older brother Mark, because Mark was involved in school sports.
Uporsky became a suspect in December of 1978, when the Franklin police received an anonymous tip about that point. By that point, he was a scout for the NBA basketball team, the Seattle SuperSonics, and while on a scouting trip to Milwaukee, Uporsky allegedly invited a young man to his hotel room, presumably for sex. The caller said she didn’t know what happened after that, but she told police that they should investigate Uporsky in connection to Johnny’s death.
When the police looked into Uporsky’s background, they found that he had a record for some bizarre behavior. When Uporsky was twelve, he lured a six-year-old boy into his house, promising the boy there was a puppy inside that he could play with. When the boy came inside, Uporsky took off the boy’s shoes and socks and began to play with the boy’s feet. Two years later, Uporsky’s tackled a twelve-year-old boy, took off the boys shoes and socks, and twisted the boy’s toes. As a result of these attacks, Uporsky was sent to youth court and required to receive mental health treatment. However, less than a year later, police received a report that Uporsky had played with a nine-year-old boy’s bare feet. It happened again when Uporsky was 22, this time the feet of an 18-year-old hitchhiker, and then the feet of a 12-year-old delivery boy, and then the feet of a 14-year-old boy. After three arrests as an adult, Uporsky was required to receive mental health treatment again.
Now, if you’ll remember, Johnny’s feet were bare when he was found, which could have indicated that the killer was attracted to boys’ feet. I think the theory was that the socks might have been an afterthought to anyone who didn’t have a particular interest in Johnny’s feet. If this theory was to be accepted, it made Uporsky look pretty guilty.
Uporsky always denied any involvement in the murder of Johnny Zera. He explained that his prior arrests had not been sexual or violent in nature, unlike the sexual assault and murder of Johnny Zera. He wrote to the Franklin police, admitting his prior mistakes and stating that he is now a “rational heterosexual man.”
In January 1979, Uporsky flew to Wisconsin to take a polygraph test. The first one was inconclusive, while the second one indicated that he was lying when he said that he was not involved in the Johnny Zera murder. However, there was not enough evidence to detain him, so they let him go back to Washington.
Over the years, the police’s strong belief that Uporsky murdered Johnny weakened, particularly after the 2009 arrest of Dan Acker. However, the thing with the boy feet and the failed polygraph test still make him an interesting suspect.
Our next suspect is not a nice fellow. His name is James Lee Crummel, and in August of 1967 Crummel attacked a 14-year-old boy from Mequon, which is just on the other side of Milwaukee from Franklin. Crummel, who was a Laundry truck driver, sexually assaulted the boy, strangled him until he passed out, and then beat him with a tree limb. Shockingly, the boy survived.
Crummel was arrested and convicted for this crime. While he was expected to serve at least 30 years for the assault, for some unfathomable reason, Crummel was released on parole after five, meaning that he was a free man when Johnny was killed.
There were strong similarities between this attack and the murder of Johnny Zera, such as the age and sex of the victim, the sexual assault, and the brutality with which it occurred. Crummel also caught police attention because he had a tattoo of a devil on his right wrist with the words “born to raise hell.” If you’ll remember, Johnny had the word “hell” written on his right wrist.
Because of the similarities between the two cases, police decided they wanted to talk to Crummel. However, when they went to find him, he was gone, which was a direct violation of the terms of his parole. When he was found in August of 1976, Crummel was confined to the state hospital for the criminally insane. Crummel was questioned by the FBI, and he stated that he had been in California on the day that Johnny disappeared, although he refused to take a polygraph test.
After Crummel was released again, he would be charged with violent assaults in four different states, including two that ended with the deaths of children. He was convicted of both homicides, and was also charged with the molestation of three teenagers in California, and questioned in connection with a murdered boy and another missing boy. So, QED, not a nice fellow.
In 2012, while he was on death row for one of the two homicides he was convicted for, Crummel hanged himself. Near as I can tell, he was never further questioned regarding the Johnny Zera case, and DNA never linked him to the crime.
Our final suspect is a bit of a dark horse, but I think he’s a pretty interesting suspect. He’s checking it at 5 feet 8 inches and a hefty 230 pounds from Des Plaines, Illinois, ladies and gentlemen, get on your feet for Mr. John Wayne Gacy! For those of you who don’t know, John Wayne Gacy was an American serial killer who raped and murdered at least 33 boys and young men during the 70s.
Gacy was arrested in 1978, meaning that he was actively killing boys just like John Zera in 1976. While he killed boys from his hometown in suburban Chicago and buried them in his crawlspace, he was known to spend time working on construction jobs in southeastern Wisconsin. If you’ll remember, there was construction work being done on Franklin High School when Johnny was killed, although Gacy has never been linked to the work being done on Franklin High.
While I think it would be fascinating if Johnny were a long lost victim of John Wayne Gacy, this is pretty unlikely. For one thing, he killed all but one of his victims by strangling, and the other one was stabbed to death. Johnny, meanwhile, had been bludgeoned to death. Also, all of Gacy’s known victims were either buried on his property or in the Des Plaines River, so it seems unlikely that he would kill Johnny and dump him in plain sight. Although, I don’t know, I’ve never been a serial killer on vacation, but I guess maybe there comes a time when you really just need to kill a boy, even if you can’t do it exactly the way you normally prefer to. I guess it’s kind of like when I didn’t have a car for awhile and I really wanted Chipotle, but only Qdoba was within walking distance. You take what you can get, whether that’s a fat meaty burrito or a fat meaty boy.
So, Willy, who did it?
I think that, of the five suspects we discussed, the most likely is Dan Acker. I think we can easily cross John Wayne Gacy off the list, and I think that Teddy the construction worker was just an innocent gay man who happened to be under the influence when he was interviewed by the police. I also don’t think it was Uporsky. There was no physical evidence against him, and his arrests were never for violent or sexual attacks; he just liked to suck on boy toes. While that may be a little unusual, creepy, and disgusting, it certainly doesn’t mean he is a killer.
For me, that just leaves Acker and Crummel. The piece of evidence that leads me to choose Acker was the note the medical examiner made that it appeared as if Johnny had been sodomized multiple times in the weeks leading up to the murder. Now I’ll admit that the autopsy done on Johnny’s body was somewhat suspect, but if that fact can be believed, it makes me think that perhaps Johnny was a victim of grooming by a pedophile, who manipulated Johnny into a sexual relationship. This sounds like Acker to me, because he seemed to be interested in developing relationship with boys, whereas Crummel seemed more interested in killing them. The circumstances of Johnny leaving school early makes it seem more like he was meeting up with someone—perhaps for some illicit sexual tryst and eventual murder—rather than being a victim of an opportunistic killer. The use of a rock as a murder weapon suggests to me that the murder was not premeditated, but that it was something that just happened for one reason or another. And finally, the fact that the murder weapon and the body were left at the scene might suggest that the unexpected murder caused the killer to panic and flee the scene frantically.
The biggest question I have is, Why would Acker kill Johnny? After all, he doesn’t seem like a cold-blooded killer, and if you read the journal about Johnny, it seems like Acker really loved Johnny—as weird as it is to say about a grown man and a 14-year-old boy. Maybe Johnny said he was going to spill the beans about Acker’s exploitation of him, and Acker acted impulsively by bashing him over the head with a rock. But for whatever reason, I think Acker purposely inserted himself into the aftermath of the murder—either because of his immense guilt, or because he wanted to get off on his crime again and again. Either way, I think the journal and the shrine to dead kids casts a hell of a lot of suspicion on Dan Acker.
The Hales Corners and Franklin police departments are still investigating this case, but the medical examiner pretty much lost all of the DNA evidence from Johnny’s body, making it all but impossible that the police would be able to make a DNA link to any of the suspects. It really sucks because semen is great for DNA evidence, but the medical examiner’s negligence ruined that. I find it ironic that she lost super important semen evidence, but she was also caught keeping human testicles from past autopsies in a jar in her office.
Today’s mystery is known by two different names. One of them is the Mineral Murders, named for the teeny tiny Washington town called, as you may have guessed, Mineral. The other name for the mystery is the Tube Sock Killings. We’re going to call them the Tube Sock Killings not only because it sounds better, but also because I find the name Mineral Murders to be somewhat misleading.
So today we will be looking into the case of a potential serial killer who could have had as many as six victims, or we could also be looking into the case of three similar but ultimately unrelated incidents of double homicide. Or we could be looking at a serial killer with four victims and another double homicide. Or we could be looking at two unrelated double homicides and an unrelated murder-suicide.
Like I said earlier, we will be in the state of Washington, in the relatively remote areas of Lewis and Pierce Counties, south of the metropolitan areas of Seattle, Tacoma, and the state’s capital of Olympia. The minuscule town of Mineral, from which the mystery gets one of its names, sits right on the county line separating Lewis and Pierce. Mineral boasts a population of 202 people, and is about 55 miles south of Olympia. Now, not very much in today’s mystery actually happens in Mineral which is why I find the name Mineral Murders to be misleading. However, the mystery is named for Mineral because there isn’t that much else around to name the mystery after, as this area of the state is quite uninhabited, with tiny unincorporated communities dotting the area in little pockets. Mineral is just a few miles west of Mt. Rainier National Park, and does feature a view of the mountain from the community. The town is named after Mineral Lake, which provides the town’s main industry through recreational fishing.
The area surrounding Mineral is a sight to behold, especially for a guy like me who has only ever lived in the Midwest. If you Google Image search Mineral, Washington, one of the first images you’ll find is of Mineral Lake. And then, miles beyond the lake, west of Mineral, is Mt. Rainier, which rises up from thick forestland to tower 14,000 feet above the surrounding foothills. I’m not even a nature guy, but I definitely got caught up in looking at pictures of this area. Not only is it crazy awesome to look at, but some of it is kind of creepy. And it becomes especially creepy when you realize that six people were murdered out there in 1985.
Our first couple up is twenty-five-year-old Kim La Vine and twenty-six-year-old Ed Smith. The two met at the University of Southeastern Massachusetts at Dartmouth, where they both graduated in June of 1984 with degrees in accounting. Following graduation, they picked up and moved out to the Seattle area, where both had received jobs in the accounting field. The two got engaged while living in Washington, and were planning to travel back east in the summer of 1985 for their wedding. Unfortunately, they wouldn’t live that long.
On Saturday, March 9, 1985, the couple left their home in Kent, a suburb of Seattle, driving southeast on I-90 for some sightseeing in the Grant County area, near the Columbia River. The following morning, Ed’s dead body was found in a gravel pit in Beverly, Washington, which is a small town along the Columbia River, about ten miles south of I-90 and 144 miles away from Ed’s home in Kent. Ed’s hands were bound and his throat had been cut, and initially authorities weren’t able to identify him. He had no identification with him and the only item on him was a penny in his pocket. The following Monday, March 11, both Ed and Kim’s employers called the police in Seattle after they both uncharacteristically failed to show up for work that day.
Two weeks later, their car would be found at a scenic overlook off of I-90, south of the town of Vantage, about twelve miles north of where Ed’s body was found. Kim was nowhere to be found. However, because their car was found, authorities were finally able to connect Ed’s corpse in Beverly to the missing couple from Seattle. Also, there was a single fingerprint found on the car.
Kim’s skeletal remains weren’t found until five months later, in August of 1985. She was found by accident in some sage brush about two miles away from where Ed’s body had been found. I’m not sure that they were able to determine cause of death or how long she had been there, but it was possible that she was abducted, held for awhile, and then dumped, but that’s just conjecture. I really couldn’t figure out anything more about Kim and the investigation into their deaths struggled to get going.
All right, let’s go ahead and move on to our next lucky couple. Ruth Cooper was the forty-two-year-old single mother of four, whose ages ranged from fifteen to twenty. Steven Harkins was her twenty-seven-year-old boyfriend who had been living with her since 1983. On August 10, 1985, the couple left a wedding reception in Tacoma with the plan to camp at Tule Lake, near the town of Yelm in southern Pierce County. Coworkers became concerned when they didn’t show up to work at a local vocational school the next day, and their families officially reported them missing on August 14th.
A few days earlier, a man noticed their VW parked near the lake. He didn’t think anything of it until it was still parked in the same location on the fourteenth, the same day the couple was reported missing. The man investigated the car, and was horrified to find the dead body of Stephen inside the car. He was inside of his sleeping bag and had been shot in the head, probably while he had been asleep.
Searchers were called in to find Ruth, but instead of finding her, they found the hunting dog that the family brought with them on the trip. The dog was found several hundred feet away from where Stephen was found, and was also dead of a gunshot wound. Ruth was still nowhere to be found, and was believed to have been kidnapped.
Two and a half months later on October 26th, Ruth’s skull was found by a couple of hunters who were walking along the dead end of Eighth Avenue South, about one and a half miles west of where Stephen had been found. She was identified using dental records. Two days later, the rest of her body was found fifty feet away from her skull, along with her purse. And, interestingly, a tube sock had been tied around her neck, which is an interesting detail considering her head had been cut off.
Most of the reports I read stated that, because of the effect of decomposition on Ruth’s body, the police were unable to attribute a cause of death to anything other than a vague description of “homicidal violence,” although I did read a newspaper article that said a spokesperson reported that she had been killed by a gunshot wound to the abdomen. Whatever the case may be, it’s more than likely that the decapitation had been postmortem and not the cause of death.
Police struggled to identify any suspects in the case, but they did wonder if the murders of Stephen and Ruth were tied to the murders of Ed and Kim, as they were both couples on weekend camping trips in remote areas of Washington, and both the man and the woman were separated from one another, with the woman being found much later. However, there were marked differences in the murders, such as the means by which they were murdered, the binding of the first couple, and the tube sock tied around Ruth’s neck.
A suspect did surface in the case of Stephen and Ruth’s murders in the form of a man with whom Stephen was having a dispute. Apparently this unnamed man was upset with Stephen regarding some damage that Stephen had done to man’s Harley-Davidson motorcycle. This man reportedly showed up at the wedding reception Stephen and Ruth had attended, but found that they had already left by the time he arrived. When he was told that Stephen and Ruth had gone for a camping trip, the man stormed off, appearing as if he intended to confront Stephen. However, if we accept this man as a suspect, then we’re accepting that he was so mad that, not only did he kill Stephen in his sleep, but he also brutally murdered Ruth as well. I’ll let you know that this suspect really didn’t pan out, because the police couldn’t find any evidence to link him to the crime scene. Other than him, they had no other suspects.
Now it’s time to discuss our third and final couple. Thirty-six-year-old Michael Reimer and twenty-one-year-old Diana Robertson had been dating for four years, since Diana was seventeen, and the two of them had a two-year-old daughter named Crystal together. Michael worked as a roofer in the warm months, and trapped animals for their pelts in the winter. However, Michael was a bit of a hothead and was known to have been abusive toward Diana. In fact, on October 19, 1985, Michael had been arrested for domestic assault and malicious damage. Diana had been the one to make the report after Michael had kicked in a door at her apartment, thrown her to the floor, and rubbed her face into the carpet. As a result of this arrest, there was an order of no contact between Michael and Diana. There were also two other known reports of domestic assault that hadn’t resulted in arrests.
Diana and Michael were back together by December of 1985, and on the twelfth of that month, they, along with their daughter Crystal, left their home in the Tacoma suburb of Puyallup (Pyoo-all-up) to go down to the Nisqually River area to check the animal traps that Michael had laid and to find a Christmas tree for their family. That was the last time anyone knew of Diana and Michael alive.
Later that same day, two-year-old Crystal showed up unattended at a Kmart in Spanaway, which is 30 miles from where they had been checking the traps and 12 miles away from their hometown of Puyallup. Crystal was reportedly “dazed but unharmed,” however she was unable to explain who she was, how she had gotten there, or where her parents were. She was placed in emergency foster care until she could be identified. When her foster mother took her to the doctor to get some minor scratches and bruises checked out, a nurse there recognized her as the daughter of the missing family she had seen on the news.
Crystal was placed in the care of her maternal grandmother, Louise Conrad, who stated that her granddaughter, who was usually an energetic girl, was unhappy and withdrawn after whatever had happened to her and her parents. When police attempted to question Crystal about what had happened to her parents, the only thing she told them was a little unnerving: “Mommy is in the trees.” After all, she was two years old, so her verbal skills and her ability to understand events were not good enough to adequately explain what had happened.
Diana’s remains were found on February 18th, 1986, two months after she and Mike disappeared. A man who had stopped his car to walk his dog found them buried in the snow along a logging road off of Highway 7, between the town of Mineral and the unincorporated community of Elbe. She was found deep in the woods, which is probably what Crystal meant when she said, “Mommy is in the trees.” Diana had been stabbed seventeen times and, coincidence of coincidences, a tube sock had been died around her neck. Many searches of the area were conducted, but Mike was nowhere to be found.
However, while Mike wasn’t found, his truck was. It was fairly close to where Diana’s body was found, and there were bloodstains on the front seat of the car. Tests were run on samples of the blood, but they could only conclude that the blood was human. There was also a manila envelope under the windshield in the truck with the words “I Love You, Diana” scrawled across it. Handwriting analysis was run on the words, but they came back inconclusive, probably because handwriting analysis is a bogus science. For what it’s worth, Diana’s family stated that they believe this is Mike’s handwriting. It’s uncertain whether there was anything inside the manila envelope, but if there was, the police haven’t released this information. Finally, there were also some shell casings found a short distance from the truck, but the police didn’t discuss them as evidence in the case and it’s uncertain whether they’re even connected to it.
Police began to suspect that Mike may have been the perpetrator of the crime, since he had a history of violence toward Diana and because he was nowhere to be found. Mike was also well-known as an outdoorsman who would have likely had the skills to have lived in the wilderness on his own, on the run from society. Plus, some people interpreted the message on the manila envelope as an expression of remorse. Diana’s family agreed with the police, believing that Mike had killed her. Diane’s sister would state that Mike had a tendency to beat her up and blame her for pretty much anything and everything. And honestly, I think if your daughter or sister is constantly getting beat up by some dude, it wouldn’t take too much to make you believe that that dude—who was the last person she was known to have been with—had been the one to kill her.
However, there was some pushback against this theory, namely against Mike’s family and friends, who believed that he was a victim just as much as Diana. Mike’s father Lloyd put up a reward for information that helped find his son, and also led searches through the area where he knew his son frequently went to trap. Mike’s boss publicly stated that Mike cared too much about his daughter to have just abandoned her at a Kmart. Plus, there was quite a bit about the theory of Mike being the killer that didn’t quite make sense. For instance, why not take Crystal to a family member’s house? And why didn’t she tell anyone that her dad had been the one to drop her off? And why abandon his truck with Diana’s body? And would it really have been possible for him to have survived outdoors in the frigid winter months? And, finally, where did Mike go? How far could he have gotten without his truck?
Now, as you might have guessed, police suspected that the murder of Diana was connected to the murders of Ruth and Stephen because of the tube sock that was tied around both women’s necks. However, they also were forced to concede that there weren’t many other similarities, so it’s possible, if implausible, that the tube sock was a coincidence. Like a huge, major, unbelievable coincidence, especially because the socks were reportedly identical and tied in the same way.
Now, let’s talk for a minute about my personal favorite subject of conversation: tube socks. As near as I can tell, the tube socks found on the two women were identical to one another. I know at least one of them had a thick navy blue stripe around the calf, but I couldn’t find a picture of the other one. Both socks reportedly had knots tied in them that were laid over the women’s throats, which led the police to believe that they were not weapons to kill, but to control.
I have wondered about the possibility of a copycat killer, whether that was Mike or someone else. I tried my best to find out whether the tube sock detail was reported after Ruth’s murder and before Diana’s, but I couldn’t find out. If it was, then it’s possible that this could have been a copycat. If it wasn’t, then it would have to have been a coincident, which I don’t think it was. So if it wasn’t a copycat killer then, Willy, we might just have a serial killer on our hands. But before we discuss whether this is the case, we have a few more developments in the case to discuss.
Do you remember how I mentioned that a single fingerprint had been found on the car of the first couple, Ed and Kim? Well, in 1989, this fingerprint was matched to that of an inmate in a Wyoming named Billy Ray Ballard, Jr. Ballard was an itinerant truck driver from Plains, Montana who was serving time for the abduction, rape, and torture of two women in Wyoming. Ballard would later confess to the murder of Ed Smith and Kim La Vine and would receive a life sentence without the possibility of parole.
I tried to find more information about Billy Ray Ballard, but what I just told you is just about all there is available. What I really wanted to know was when Ballard was arrested for the abduction in Wyoming to find out if it was possible that he could have killed the other two couples. I had even dialed up the Wyoming State Penitentiary when I realized that he was no longer in that prison, and that I didn’t know where he was now, or if he’s even still alive. What I did find out is that there are a shocking amount of people who are named Billy Ray Ballard.
There’s one more development in the case that really got things wild and crazy, but this wouldn’t come until more than 25 years after the Tube Sock Killings. On March 26, 2011, a partial human skull was found in a wooded area near the town of Mineral, about a mile away from where Diana’s body had been found. A human jawbone was also found a few feet away, and using dental records, this skull was determined to be that of none other than Michael Reimer, the main suspect in the case.
After finding Mike’s skull, the police came out and said that they no longer believed that Mike was the prime suspect in the case. A cause of death was unable to be determined, but the police did state that they had ruled out the possibility of a gunshot wound to the head, as the partial skull fragment had shown no sign of trauma. Likewise, it was impossible to determine just when Mike had died.
There was no trace of Mike’s body ever found, though whether that’s because he had been decapitated and his skull dumped there or because animals had scavenged his body, we’ll never know. It’s worth noting that police also found an old driver’s license that was so faded it was impossible to figure out who it belonged to. They also found a pair of rubber boots, but there were no dead, decomposed feet in the boots.
So, while the discovery of Mike’s skull was a huge development and all but eliminated him from the list of suspects, police had to admit that it really brought them no closer to solving the mystery of the tube sock killings. So let’s see if we can solve it ourselves, shall we, Willy?
Actually, figuring out a theory to explain this case is a little complex because I don’t think we have great suspects, and because we kind of have to combine suspects and theories in order to adequately explain the case. The three couples could have all been killed by the same guy, three different guys, or any combination in between.
We know for a fact that Billy Ray Ballard killed the first couple, so if all six people were killed by the same person, it would have to be him. Now, I suppose it could be possible that the same man killed them all, even though the causes of death were different and there was no tube sock. While serial killers tend to maintain a single type of killing—known as a modus operandi—they don’t always, thus making it possible that Ballard could have killed them all with different causes of death. Plus, the lack of tube sock in the first murder could have just meant that Ballard hadn’t yet evolved to the point where he used the tube sock for control. And the fact that Ballard was imprisoned shortly after could explain why there were no other tube sock killings after Diana and Mike. Finally, it’s important to note similarities: the victims were an unmarried couple who were attacked and brutally murdered in a remote area, and the man and the woman were found quite a ways apart from one another.
There are a few things working against the Ballard theory, such as the fact that I’m not sure he was even still a free man when the other murders were committed. And while the lack of tube sock and the different MO don’t necessarily rule out Ballard, they do cast a considerable amount of doubt on the possibility that Ballard killed the two later couples. Also, because Ballard was a semi truck driver, it’s unknown how often he went through the area where the murders were committed. And if he did commit all of the murders in Washington, then it’s likely he would have murdered other places as well, only there’s never been other reported tube sock murders anywhere else. But I think the most convincing evidence against Ballard is that, as near as I can tell, he has never been considered by police as a person of interest in the later murders. You assume they would have questioned him about the later murders, and so if they didn’t even consider him a person of interest, then there’s a fair chance he had nothing to do with them.
The only suspect unique to Stephen and Ruth’s murders was the man who had shown up at the wedding reception ready to confront Stephen. But we kind of touched on it earlier, just because he’s upset with Stephen, doesn’t mean he’s going to shoot Stephen in the head and then saw off Ruth’s head. Plus, the fact that we don’t even know his name tells us that the police didn’t find him to be a very compelling suspect.
The only other suspect we know of is none other than Mike Reimer, the police’s main suspect before he turned up dead. But, no matter what the police say, just because Mike is dead doesn’t make it impossible that he killed Diana—and maybe even Ruth and Stephen too. It’s possible he could have killed Diana, driven Crystal to the Kmart in Spanaway, driven back to the scene of Diana’s murder, walked a mile away, and killed himself. One problem with this theory is that there was no gun found at the scene, but of course a gunshot wound is not the only way to kill one’s self. Mike could have slashed his wrists with the knife Diana was killed with and then chucked the knife away, or he could have overdosed on some sort of medication. We’ll never be able to know how Mike died though, because the partial skull that was found provided no clues as to Mike’s cause of death.
I have a few hang-ups with the Mike-as-killer theory. The first is Crystal. Mike’s boss said he would never abandon his daughter, particularly not in a Kmart. If Mike was really going to kill Diana, you’d think he would drop his daughter off with a family member instead of a department store. Plus, if Mike had been the one to drop her off at Kmart, you’d think she would have been able to tell people that it had been her dad who had taken her there. Second, I don’t think it’s very likely that Mike also killed Ruth and Stephen. If the murders are connected, then I think it is a huge leap to say that Mike committed all of them. Of course, it’s possible that Mike hadn’t killed Ruth and Stephen, but that he had killed Diana and tied the tube sock around her neck to make it look like she had been the victim of a serial killer. But if you’re going to kill yourself, I don’t understand why you would need to frame someone else for your partner’s murder.
In researching this case, I found that some people theorized that the couples could have been killed by a known serial killer who was active in Washington at the time, such as Gary Ridgeway, the Green River Killer. I suppose this could have been possible, but the MO of the tube sock killer doesn’t match the MO of any of the known serial killer in Washington, and believe me, Washington is a cesspool of serial killers. I also found that some people suspected a well-known drifter from the Northwest named Joseph Henry Burgess who was also suspected a double homicide of a young California couple in 2004. Frankly, I think that there’s no good reason for suspecting that the tube sock killer was another known serial killer or that he was Joseph Henry Burgess, so we’re not going to go any deeper into those theories.
If the tube sock killer wasn’t Billy Ray Ballard, Mike Reimer, Joseph Henry Burgess, or Gary Ridgeway, then it must have been someone else, someone we don’t have any idea about. Perhaps this killer was an opportunistic killer who couldn’t stop himself from killing couples found in remote areas, and who either uses a tube sock as a signature, or as a means to control the woman. It is interesting that the killer refused to kill Crystal and even risked being noticed to drop her off somewhere she could be taken care of, which shows that the killer has some sort of personal moral code. Whoever the killer was, I think it’s likely that they either died or were arrested for an unrelated crime, soon after, which would explain why there has never been another tube sock killing. Or perhaps the killer kept killing but only had the one pair of tube socks.
This week Zach we’re going back to the great year 1968. Back to the old Caledonia (better known to you non-romans as Scotland). More specifically to that Dear Green Place, the Red Clydeside, the shipbuilding capital of the world (better known to those of you who haven’t looked at the List of City nicknames in the United Kingdom wikipedia page as Glasgow, Scotland).
Before I get started I just want to put a little disclaimer here that 1. This is a case that involves crimes of a sexual nature and 2. Scottish newspapers are terrible and get super simple facts wrong all the time. Pretty much every article I found had some really small, slight contradiction that made it hard to research this mystery. So if I get some details wrong and you just some happen to be an expert on this case I’m sorry.
Glasgow in 1968 was a happening place. People just had to get their dance on. One such woman was Patricia Docker. At the time Patricia was 25 years old and worked as a nurse at Glasgow’s Victoria Infirmary. She’s 5’3” with brown, wavy curls cut in a medium-short style. She was married and her husband was stationed with the British army in England. On the night of February 22, 1968, Patricia, and several of her friends, caught that dancing fever. They all went to an over-25 ballroom called the Majestic. According to police reports Patricia danced with several different men throughout the night and at some point left the Majestic and went (without her friends) the the Barrowland ballroom. Nobody knew exactly who she had danced with and who she might have left with that night.
The next morning a man on his way to work only a short walk from where Patricia lived. He turned down an alley and saw the naked body of Patricia Docker. Someone had raped and strangled her at some point after she left the Majestic. The killer had also taken her handbag and left her body only a few yards from where she lived.
The police interview people who were at the Majestic the night before, but, as I said earlier, no one could remember who Patricia had left with. It wasn’t even discovered until several days later that Patricia had actually left the Majestic and gone to the Barrowland. Eventually the police ran out of leads and the trail started to go cold. Her handbag and her clothes were never found.
18 months later on August 18th, 1969, a 32 year old single mother of three, Jemima McDonald, also caught that terrible rhythmic fever. She’s described as 5’ 7” with a slim build and shoulder length hair that had been dyed brown. Before going out she put on black pinafore dress (which is basically the overalls of dresses), a white frilly blouse, off-white sling backed heels, and a brown woolen coat. Mima, as her friends called her, also went to the Barrowland ballroom.
The next day when Mima’s sister, Margaret O’Brien, hadn’t heard from her she started to panic. Margaret started walking through the streets looking for Mima. Eventually she overheard a group of boys talking about “the body” they had found. It turns out that what the boys though was a tailor’s dummy was actually the body of Jimima McDonald. Jimima had been strangled, raped, and beaten to death and her body was left in an abandoned apartment building about a mile from the Barrowland ballroom and only a few yards from her home. Unlike Patricia, Mima was fully clothed but the killer had taken her handbag.
Police immediately sealed off the building and started their investigation. They knew that Jimima had been to the Barrowland but over 2000 other dancers had been there as well. They questioned as many as they could even going so far as having 20 detectives standing outside the Barrowland asking revelers if they had seen the missing woman. The ballroom even offered to interrupt the music so a detective could make an announcement. Several witnesses claimed that she had left around midnight with a tall man about 6 ft 2 with short reddish hair. He was reportedly aged between 25 and 35 years old with a slim build and wearing a “good” blue suit with hand stitched lapels and a white shirt. The police also conducted door to door interviews in the area and found a woman who reported hearing screams after midnight on the street where Mima’s body was found. The police even had a female detective walk the from the ballroom the the street Mima was murdered on while wearing similar clothes in the hope that it would jog someone’s memory.
The police quickly made connections between the murders of Patricia Docker and Jamima McDonald. Now the police knew they were looking for a double murderer who may strike again. For the first time in a Scottish murder hunt the police distributed an Identikit picture of the suspect and thousands of posters were printed. While this generated several leads eventually the trail went cold.
On October 30, 1969 29 year old Helen Puttock decided to go dancing, at the Barrowlands, with her sister Jean. The two had heard about the recent murders but they decided that they couldn’t come to any harm if they stuck together all night. At one point during the night Helen met an attractive, well spoken man at the hall’s cigarette machine. Apparently the machine had taken her money and subsequently jammed. The man, who said his name was John. helped her un-jam the machine and the two started to get along. He bought her a drink, they danced together, and, according to her sister Jean, they seemed to like each other. At the end of the night John suggested that he help ensure that the two women get home safely, because after all it had been a dangerous year. The man was good looking and charming. He was a stylish dresser and apparently a good dancer. The trio got in a cab together and during the ride he told the women that his parents had been very religious people. He said they tried to raise him and his sister in the same way but were unsuccessful. He could still recite passages of the Bible from memory and did so on several occasions.
The taxi took Jean home first and as the cab pulled away she saw her sister Helen wave goodbye to her through the back window. In the early hours of Friday, October 31, the body of 29 year old Helen puttock was discovered in a back court about a 10 minute drive from where she had left Jean. She was still dressed and lying face down. As with the other two murders Helen had been raped and strangled, as before her body was left by the killer only a few yards from her home, and as before her handbag was missing. This is the last information we have on Bible John other than a report of a well dressed young man matching Bible John’s description in a, “dishevelled state” with possible scratch marks on his face, getting off a bus around 1:30 AM. He was reportedly last seen heading toward the public ferry to cross the River Clyde to the south side of the city. After this the murders stopped and Bible John was never captured.
There were a couple more leads, however.
In 1983, a man claimed to have frequented the Barrowland Ballroom with Bible John and claimed that he knew who he was. He said that after reading an article about the murders he suddenly realised that his friend was Bible John. The police found the alleged suspect living in the Netherlands and married to a Dutch woman. The lead wasn’t pursued and was dismissed by the police.
In 1996 the police exhumed the body of John Irvine McInnes, who was one of the original suspects. McInnes had committed suicided in 1980 and was found in a pool of blood after slashing his brachial artery in his upper arm. Police ran a DNA test and compared it with semen found on Helen Puttock’s tights and announced it to be inconclusive. Investigators said there just wasn’t enough evidence to link the murders with McInnes. During the initial investigation McInnes was released because Jean was unable to pick him out of a lineup.
In 2004 the police announced that they were going to DNA test several suspects in an attempt to solve the case. Reportedly, DNA found on the scene of a minor crime was an 80% match to Bible John. Enough of a match to make investigators believe that the person who committed the crime was at least related to the killer.
Finally, in 2007 a man named Peter Tobin was convicted of the murder of a student named Agelika Kluk. This lead to speculation, spearheaded by a professor named David Wilson, that Tobin was in fact Bible John. Tobin was in his 60s when the murder was committed, an unusually late start to a killing career. Wilson claimed that the ferocity with which she was attacked and the way in which Tobin hid the body and ran to London did not suggest that this was his first time. There were also several parallels between Bible John and Peter Tobin. All three of Tobin’s former wives gave accounts of being imprisoned, throttled, raped, and beaten by him. There are also strong similarities between photographs of Tobin in his 20s and the artist’s impression of Bible John. Tobin moved away from Glasgown in 1969, the same year as Bible John’s known killings ended.
Tobin’s former wives reported that he was driven to violence by the menstrual cycle which had long been a suspected motive behind the Bible John murders. Tobin was also a Roman Catholic with strong religious views.
During a subsequent police investigation a woman said she had been raped by Tobin after she had met him at the Barrowland Ballroom in 1968.
Another woman also came forward in 2010 who claimed to have had a threatening experience at the Barrowland. She said that Tobin introduced himself as Peter and pestered her to go with him to a party.
However, when discussing her sister’s killer several decades later, Jean dismissed Peter Tobin as Bible John and emphatically stated that he was not the man she shared the taxi with. In September of 2010 Jean McLachlan passed away at the age of 74. While DNA had been used to rule out a previous suspect detectives now believe that a DNA link to Tobin is unlikely because of deterioration of the samples through poor storage.
Willy, I’m going to start today’s story off with a story, which I will be reading from http://www.snopes.com/horrors/madmen/babysitter.asp.
A young couple living in a large isolated house had gone out to a dinner party one evening and left the baby-sitter in charge of their two children. The children had been put to bed and the baby-sitter was watching the television when the phone rang. She answered but all she heard was a man laughing hysterically and then a voice saying, “I’m upstairs with the children, you’d better come up.” Thinking it was “one of those phone calls” or a practical joke she slammed down the receiver and turned the television sound up. A short time later the phone rang again and, as she picked it up, the unmistakable hysterical laughter came down the line and the voice once again said “I’m upstairs with the children, you’d better come up.”
Getting rather frightened she called the operator and was advised they would notify the police and, should he phone again, could she keep him talking in order to give them time to trace the call and have him arrested. Minutes after she replaced the receiver the phone rang again and, when the voice said, “I’m upstairs with the children, you’d better come up,” she tried to keep him talking. However, he must have guessed what she was trying to do and he put the phone down.
Only seconds later the phone rang again, this time it was the operator who said, “Get out of the house straight away, the man is on the extension.” The baby-sitter put down the phone and just then heard someone coming down the stairs. She fled from the house and ran straight into the arms of the police. They burst into the house and found a man brandishing a large butcher’s knife. He had entered the house through an upstairs window, murdered both the children and was just about to do the same to the poor baby-sitter.
Now that was a pretty well-known urban legend called The Babysitter and the Man Upstairs, which was the inspiration for several horror movies, such as When a Stranger Calls. In preparation for today’s episode, I rewatched a few scenes from the 1979 version of When a Stranger Calls, and I’ve got to say that that is a pretty spooky movie. I mean, the concept is pretty ridiculous, but it gets a little unnerving if you think about it too long.
The story of The Babysitter and the Man Upstairs was inspired by the true story of an unsolved murder that took place in the 1950s, and we’re going to talk about that true story during today’s episode. However, we’re going to find that this story, while awful, has been so sensationalized by urban legend and horror cinema that it is hardly recognizable anymore.
But beyond being the true story behind an urban legend, this case features police turf wars, racial profiling of potential suspects, shady investigative work, a very compelling suspect who gets off Scott free, and an ominous string of similar crimes in the area. And where could such horrible crimes and bumblingly terrible police work take place other than the state of Missouri?
Now, if we offended any of our Missourian listeners...then good. Both Willy and I were raised in Kansas, so we know how terrible Missouri can be. And let's not forget that Kansas and Missouri basically went to war because Missourians loved slavery so much that they snuck into Kansas so they could vote to make Kansas a slave state.
Anyway, we will be in Columbia, Missouri for today's mystery. In 1950 when this crime was committed, Columbia was a city of 31,000 people and home to the University of Missouri. 1950 was the first year the University allowed black students to attend, but the school's marching band still waved the confederate flag while playing Dixie at Mizzou football games. I don't point this out to slander the school, but to point out that racism was particularly problematic at the time and almost part of the culture in Columbia. I mean, it's still problematic in the state of Missouri today, what with the situations in Ferguson, Missouri and on the University of Missouri campus in recent years. Again, while I love to talk bad about Missouri, I'm bringing this up because racism is going to become a bit of a roadblock when it comes to the investigation of the crime I'm about to tell you about.
Janett Christman was thirteen years old in 1950, and was the daughter of Charles and Lula Mae Christman, the owners of Ernie’s Café & Steakhouse in Columbia. She had two sisters named Reta and Sheryl, who described her as a hardworking girl who lined up several part time jobs for herself to earn money, including babysitting gigs.
The night of March 18th, 1950 was an ugly one as far as weather goes. High winds, heavy rain and sleet, and temperatures in the mid-twenties made the evening almost cliché in its eeriness for the crime that occurred. In the midst of the weather, the local middle school had a party for its eighth grade students, but Janett chose not to attend because she would be babysitting for Ed and Anne Romack’s three-year-old son Greg. She was willing to skip the party because she wanted to make enough money to make the last payment on a burgundy suit she’d bought for Easter.
The Romacks were one of the two families Janett was allowed to babysit for, and they lived in a small, one-story house just a few hundred feet just outside of Columbia city limits at the time, although now the house would be inside of city limits. The area surrounded the house was undeveloped, making the house remote and isolated. Ed and Anne were planning to attend a bridge party with their friends at a restaurant in east Columbia, but before they left, Ed showed Janett how to use his shotgun and instructed her to turn on the very bright porch light if someone came to the front door.
Little Greg was already sleeping when Janett arrived so he wasn’t expected to give her any trouble, but Janett was instructed to leave the radio on for him while he slept. The Romacks left the house at around 7:50 that night, locking the door tight behind them.
Because of the nasty weather outside, March 18th was a slow night for police. At 10:35 pm that night, Officer Roy McCowen received a phone call from a girl who was screaming hysterically. Officer McCowen was only able to understand the words “come quick” before the phone call ended. Because the girl hadn’t been able to say who she was or where she was calling from, McCowen tried to trace the call. However the test board at the telephone company wasn’t staffed that late at night so the trace couldn’t be done, leaving the officer helpless to help the girl.
At the same time that Officer McCowen was receiving that frantic phone call, Anne Romack went to the phone at the restaurant and tried to call her house to see if Greg was managing to sleep through the storm. Anne received a busy signal, so she figured that someone from their party line was on the phone.
At 1:35 am, the Romacks returned home from the restaurant, which tells me that must have been one hell of a card game if they were gone for almost six hours. Before they entered the house, they noticed that the porch light was on and the front Venetian blinds were open. On their way inside, they found that the front door was unlocked, even though they specifically locking it on their way to the restaurant.
Inside the house, they came upon a horrible scene. Janett was lying on the shag-carpeted floor of the living room next to the piano, dead, with an electric iron cord wrapped around her neck and her skirt pushed up, suggesting that she had been raped. The Romacks rushed to their son’s bedroom and found young Greg still sleeping, and it appeared that he had slept through whatever had happened to Janett.
The Romacks immediately called the police. While they technically lived outside of city limits and jurisdiction in the investigation should have belonged to the county sheriff’s department, the first officer to respond was from the city police department. This would be the beginning of a turf war that would have a severe impact upon the authorities’ ability to solve the case.
Officers from the county sheriff’s department also arrived in short order to work the case alongside the city police. What they found at the scene was evidence of a terrific struggle that stretched from the living room, through a hallway, to the kitchen at the back of the house where the phone was. The walls and floors in this room were spattered with blood and smeared with bloody handprints.
A window looking into the living room from the side of the house was broken from the outside. When the police looked outside, they found a sawhorse set up outside the window, which they found had been broken by a garden hoe sitting on the lawn. When asked about it, the Romacks confirmed it belong to them, but that it had been put away in a utility closet when they left. This window was just above the family’s piano, but the Venetian blinds and most of the family pictures and various papers set atop the piano were relatively undisturbed, although city police did find that there was a brown smear on one of the papers, which could have been caused by a muddy boot.
Police also found that the family’s shotgun hadn’t been touched, and that the back door had been left wide open. Bloodhounds were called in to trace a trail out the back door, but the dogs were unable to trace the trail very far before they lost it.
It was determined that Janett had died of asphyxiation from the electric iron cord. The iron cord is interesting, because it wasn’t ripped off of the iron—it was cut. The iron it was cut from was in a sewing room down the hall, and the Romacks stated that it had to have been cut with a pair of scissors that was also in the sewing room.
Police also found out that Janett had indeed been raped, although they couldn’t determine whether she was raped before or after she was murdered. Janett had fingernail scratches on her face and other wounds on both sides of her head. There were also two puncture marks on her scalp which seemed to have been made by some sort of small metal instrument, such as a cork borer or a small round pipe.
Like I said earlier, both city and county police were in on the investigation, and both insisted on taking the lead. After investigating the scene of the crime, city police came to the conclusion that the killer had crawled in through the window. While the blinds and pictures on the piano were not greatly disturbed, that muddy smear on one of the papers convinced the city police that the attacker had indeed come through the window and escaped through the back door. They also believed that the killer had most likely been a stranger to Janett, an opportunist who forced entry into the house upon realizing that Janett was alone in the house.
However, the county police came to a different conclusion after their investigation of the crime scene. They found no evidence to suggest that anyone had crawled across the piano, as it had recently been waxed and yet it showed no marks on its surface. Contrarily, they believed that the attacker had come in through the front door and had been someone that Janett knew. The evidence for this? Well, the porch light had been left on, which is what Ed had told Janett to do if someone came to the door. Additionally, the front door was unlocked even though the Romacks specifically remembered locking it after them. The shotgun, which was right by the front door, had been untouched, which also suggested that she knew her attacker. Finally, the fact that the killer used an electric iron cord from a sewing room down the hall from the front door suggested that the attacker was familiar with the layout of the house, as well as someone who Janett would have felt comfortable letting into the house.
These two very different interpretations of the crime scene by the two agencies led them on two completely different investigations. The city police, believing that the killer was a stranger who had taken advantage of a girl found all alone, hauled in hundreds of potential suspects for interrogation, most of them being black men. These suspects were identified based upon tips called in by community members or by reports of “suspicious behavior” as observed by police, but these were vague and lame reasons to try and get black men to confess to the crime. We’ll see in a little bit that there was almost a precedent for this kind of thing in Columbia around this time.
The county police, who believed the attacker was someone Janett knew, began by interviewing the Romacks, and based upon their solid alibis, they were quickly ruled out as suspects in the case. Next, they asked the Romacks who would have known the layout of the house. The county police figured the killer must have known the layout of the house, because he had cut the iron cord from a room down a hallway using scissors from the same room, when there were far more accessible cords in the living room of the house. Based upon the information given by the Romacks, the county police’s investigation zeroed in on one main suspect.
But before we talk about that suspect, let’s take a break and tell our listeners about today’s sponsor.
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I promised before the break that we would talk about the county police’s main suspect in the case, but before we do that, let’s go back in time a little bit.
The rape and murder of Janett Christman was not the first such instance in Columbia. In fact, in the four years leading up to Janett’s murder, there were multiple instances of voyeurs, rapes, and even another murder.
On February 5, 1946, twenty-year-old Mary Lou Jenkins was found dead in her home, strangled by a cord ripped from a lamp in the house. She was attacked late in the evening while she was alone in her house, and wasn’t found until the next day when her mother returned home after spending the night with an elderly couple who lived next door. Like Janett, Mary Lou had also been raped. However, unlike Janett, a suspect was arrested, convicted, and executed for the murder of Mary Lou Jenkins.
On February 23, 1946, just two and a half weeks after Mary Lou’s death, an intellectually disabled black man named Floyd Cochran was arrested for the rape and murder of Mary Lou. Earlier that day, he had killed his own wife and had attempted to kill himself. Cochran didn’t try to hide the fact that he had murdered his wife, because he confessed this openly. However, it’s still uncertain why he was arrested for Mary Lou’s death. The prosecuting attorney in the case stated that Cochran made statements suggesting he was guilty of murdering Mary Lou, but it was later determined that Cochran had made no such statements. However, he would be dead before any suspicion could be cast on his conviction, as Cochran was executed via gas chamber on September 26, 1947, just a year and a half after his arrest.
There are obvious similarities in the cases of Mary Lou Jenkins and Janett Christman, such as the age of the victim, the fact that they were alone in the house, the murder weapon, and the rape. Plus, Willy, Mary Lou was murdered just .42 miles away from where Janett would be murdered four years later. And then, the murky circumstances under which the Jenkins case was allegedly solves leaves open the possibility that Mary Lou’s killer was never actually caught, and was free to commit similar crimes in the future.
As I mentioned earlier, there were many reports of Peeping Toms in Columbia over the next few years, but there wouldn’t be another rape until 1949, when there would be three rapes within the span of a few weeks.
Sometime in late October of 1949, an unnamed 16-year-old girl was raped in her home by a man wearing a white sack on his head, with holes cut out for eyes.
A few weeks later on November 29th, 1949, 18-year-old Sally Johnson reported an attempted rape while she was alone in her parents’ house and sleeping on their couch. We ought to note that the house where this attempted rape occurred less than a block away from where the October rape occurred.
The very next day, on November 30, 1949, a man in a white hood and holding a gun approached a University of Missouri couple in their car. The attacker led them away from the car about a quarter-mile where he tied up the man and robbed him. Then he led the woman away and raped her.
People in Columbia believed that the three attacks in 1949 were linked, as two of the three attacks occurred in incredibly close proximity, and because of multiple reports of a man wearing a white sack on his head as a mask.
On December 4th, 1949, city police arrested a black man named Jake Bradford was arrested after being caught in the act of looking in somebody’s window. He was taken back to the station where, after ten hours of questioning, he admitted to both the October rape of the 16-year-old girl and the attempted rape of Sally Johnson.
But then, three and a half months after Bradford’s arrest, while he was still behind bars, Janett Christman was raped and murdered. The fact that the circumstances of Janett’s rape and murder were so similar to that of Mary Lou Jenkins cast considerable suspicion on the conviction and execution of Floyd Cochran, but Janett’s rape and murder also cast suspicion on the arrest of Jake Bradford to the two previous attacks. Most historians who have studied this case don’t believe that Jake Bradford had anything to do with the attacks. Instead, they think that city police focused in on him because they had caught him in the acting of voyeurism and probably also because he was a black man.
Now, you might try to point out that Jake Bradford admitted to two of the attacks, so he must have done it, right? Wrong. As crazy as it may seem, false confessions are really not all that uncommon, particularly when someone is intensely questioned by police. Remember, Jake Bradford was questioned for ten hours before he confessed, and I’m guessing that the only reason he confessed was that he figured they weren’t going to let up on him unless he did confess, even if he didn’t commit the crimes at all.
Bradford would later retract his confession, stating that police had used threats to evoke a confession from him. His attorney would also point out that Sally Johnson had never positively identified Bradford as her attacker, and even went so far as to say that she thought he was too small to have been the man who tried to rape her. Regardless, Bradford was still convicted of these crimes.
However, even though Jake Bradford probably didn’t commit the 1949 rapes, and even though he was in jail when Janett was murdered, the Columbia city police continued to believe that these crimes must have been committed by black men and kept barking up that tree. Meanwhile, the Boone County Sheriff’s Department was a little wiser in its investigation and, like I hinted at earlier, their investigation turned up a very compelling suspect.
If you’ll remember before the break, I explained how the county police talked to the Romacks about who would have known the house as well as the murderer seemed to have known it. The only name the Romacks could come up with was twenty-seven-year-old Robert Mueller.
Robert Mueller and Ed Romack had been friends since high school, and Mueller had reportedly been to the Romacks’ house several times. Mueller was a former Army Air Corps captain who had developed a distinguished military record in World War II, but was now working as a tailor. Because Mueller was a tailor and frequented the Romacks’ house, Ed stated that Mueller would have definitely known where their iron was, as well as the scissors used to cut the cord from the iron.
While Ed and Mueller were friends, Anne Romack was scared of Mueller. Allegedly, the day before the murder, Mueller had run his hand across Anne’s breasts while helping her hem a dress. She described him as a man who “doesn’t use his words” but who “uses his hands,” and cited multiple other instances of him touching her inappropriately.
To make Mueller look even creepier, Ed gave testimony that Mueller had once commented on his attraction to Janett’s well-developed figure, in particular her breasts and hips. Ed also stated that Mueller speculated that Janett was still a virgin, and would talk about his desire to have sex with a young virgin.
Now, you might be wondering how Robert Mueller even knew Janett Christman? Well, at the beginning of the story, I mentioned that Janett was only allowed to babysit for the Romacks and another family. Who was that other family? As luck would have it, it was none other than the Mueller family. In fact, on the morning of March 18th, Robert Mueller called Janett to see if she could babysit for his kids, as he was attending the same bridge party as the Romacks. Janett turned him down, explaining that she had already agreed to babysit for the Romacks.
But Willy, I know the question that you’re about to ask: If Robert Mueller was at the bridge party on the night of March 18th, how on earth could he have also been murdering Janett Christman at the Romacks’ house across town? Well, Willy, several guests at the party reported seeing Mueller leave the venue, only to return an hour or two later. When asked about this, Mueller stated that he had gone home because a doctor was visiting his sick child. The only problem with this story is that the doctor would tell police that he hadn’t been at the Mueller house that night at all.
As if all that wasn’t bad enough, in the days after the murder, Mueller exhibited some pretty strange behavior. At 9:00 the morning after the murder, before the news of it had been publicized, Mueller called the Romacks and offered to help clean up the bloody mess in the house. Later, he would discuss the crime with Ed Romack on multiple occasions, often offering his own theories as to what happened, such as that he didn’t believe that the killer had come through the window, but in fact had come through the door. Ed Romack even reported that Mueller went so far as to say, “I might have done it and forgotten it.”
Mueller was also apparently well-known for carrying around a mechanical pencil with a round metal end that police believed could have caused the two puncture wounds to Janett’s scalp. When the pencil was sent to the Highway Patrol crime lab, it was determined by the technicians there that the pencil generally had the same diameter as the wounds on Janett’s head.
And here’s one last interesting note on Robert Mueller: when questioned by police, he would admit to them that, ten years prior to the murder, he had been the chairman of the Senior Play Stage Set Committee at Hickman High School in Columbia. Now that, in and of itself, is not suspicious, but what is suspicious is one of the props it was his responsibility to make: masks made out white sacks with holes cut out for eyes, hauntingly similar to the mask allegedly worn by the 1949 rapist.
On May 4th, 1950, nearly two months after the murder, the county police believed they had probable cause to arrest Mueller and came up with a plot to make sure he had his mechanical pencil on his person when they did. They had Ed Romack invite Mueller to a card game with some friends, as Mueller typically kept score with his trusty mechanical pencil. Mueller was taken into custody by county police on his way to the game.
The county sheriff Powell met Mueller and the arresting deputy at the deputy’s farmhouse, where Mueller would be questioned all night, which is definitely not acceptable police work. The Powell would later state that they did this to avoid publicity, but it’s more likely that they did this to hide what they were doing from the city police.
The next day, Powell took Mueller to Jefferson City, the capital of Missouri, to take a polygraph test, which he passed. Mueller was then released by the county police in Columbia at 5:30 pm that day.
While the Boone County Police had a very good suspect in Robert Mueller, their handling of the investigation completely ruined the case they had against him. For one thing, they arrested him without a warrant, and then instead of taking him to the police station for questioning, they took him to the farmhouse of one of the officers and detained him there unlawfully.
In June of 1950, a grand jury was brought in to investigate the possibility of Mueller’s participation in the rape and murder of Janett Christman. Instead of indicting Mueller as expected, however, the grand jury merely scolded the city and county police for their poor handling of the case. Since then, there has been some suspicion that Mueller had some connections that helped him avoid any charges, but this has never been proven.
Soon after the grand jury gave its findings, Mueller moved away from Columbia. He joined the newly formed United States Air Force, which took him all the way to Tucson, Arizona. Coincidentally, or perhaps not so coincidentally, the rapes and murders ended after Mueller left the state. He died in 2006, at the age of 83.
According to the Columbia City Police and the Boone County Sheriff’s Department, the rape and murder of Janett Christman has never been solved.
To be fair to Robert Mueller, all the evidence against him in this case is circumstantial and there really is no legitimate evidence to put him at the crime scene. It’s very possible that he was just a creepy pervert who happened to have left a bridge party for a few hours on the same night his usual babysitter was killed. So Willy, what do you think about old Mr. Mueller?
While I try to give people the benefit of the doubt and am a huge proponent of innocent until proven guilty, I think Robert Mueller killed Janett, and he’s probably guilty of at least a few of the other rapes that took place in Columbia around those times. There’s just way too much going against him to think that he’s somehow innocent of the crime. I only hope he didn’t commit any other rapes or murders after he left Missouri.
I do wonder if he ever watched one of the many movies based upon the urban legend that Janett’s murder spawned. What would it be like to sit through a horror movie and know that it was the crime you committed which inspired it?
The only participating character from today’s story who’s still living is Greg Romack, the toddler who slept through the rape and murder of Janett Christman. He now lives in Alaska, and in 2000 he broke his arm because a family of moose was blocking the bike trail he was riding on. That’s totally unrelated to today’s case, I just thought it was an interesting anecdote.
Today’s mystery came to light on March 8, 1921, and on that day, the Spanish Premier Eduardo Dato e Iradier was assassinated while exiting the parliament building in Madrid. That’s not today’s mystery, I just thought I’d inform you that that’s what happened on that particular day in history. But for good measure, I should let you know that also on March 8, 1921, Allied forces—the victors of World War I—took occupation of the German cities of Dusseldorf, Ruhrort, and Duisberg.
But today we will not be in Spain, nor will we be in an Allied-occupied version of Germany that at that point was still reeling from the harsh terms of the treaty of Versailles and ripe for the rise of the Third Reich, led by a charismatic Austrian leader named Adolf Hitler. We will actually be in the great state of Wisconsin, which is the part of the country where my mom’s family is from and where every word that comes out of a native’s mouth sounds like patronizing baby talk. And I’m going to be honest, I spent way too much time this week researching the phonological description of the North Central American English dialect (which is what they speak in Wisconsin and Minnesota), and especially how it relates to the North Midland American English dialect (which is what I speak). None of this relates to the case in any way, but there’s a definite lack of information available in this case compared to some of our other cases, so I had to fill that extra time with something.
The town of Waukesha, Wisconsin is about twenty miles due west of Milwaukee and had a generous population of about 12,000 people back in the 1920s when our mystery took place. On March 8, 1921, the same day that Eduardo Dato e Iradier was assassinated and Allied forces took occupation of Dusseldorf, Ruhrort, and Duisberg, a quarry worker for the O’Laughlin Stone Company in Waukesha found the body of a little boy floating in a pond near the stone company. The boy was obviously dead, so the quarry worker called the police and they came out to investigate.
The boy was young, and investigators guessed that he was born sometime between 1914 and 1916, meaning that he would have been between five and seven years of age when he died. He was three feet, six inches tall and had blond hair, blue eyes, and was missing a tooth from his lower jaw as boys between the ages of five and seven tend to do. He was dressed in a manner that suggested an affluent upbringing, which was as follows: a gray Bradley sweater, size 6 Munsing-brand underwear (which was based out of Minnesota, suggesting the boy was from the Upper Midwest), black stockings, a blouse, and patent leather shoes with cloth tops. Reportedly, there was no overcoat found on the body or in the surrounding area, which was a bit odd, as the time of his death was determined to be sometime between the fall of 1920 to February of 1921, which would have been a very cold time of year in Wisconsin.
The cause of death was determined to be blunt force trauma to the back of the head, as if he were struck by some sort of blunt instrument. Investigators believed that his death had been a murder, only their investigation could not go much farther because no one was able to identify the boy and there weren’t many tests they could run on the body in 1921. The authorities displayed the boy’s body at a local funeral home hoping someone would be able to identify him, but both this and a $1000 reward brought forth no information.
This is somewhat understandable, I think, because at this time in history there was no social media or even broadcast television to get his face out to the public outside of the Waukesha area. The story could get disseminated via newspaper, I guess, but the only sketch that was made of the unidentified little boy isn’t particularly distinctive and may not have caught the eye of someone who knew the boy. Plus, when people have been dead for awhile, their faces swell, their skin becomes discolored, and their eyes begin to bulge out of their sockets, which can alter a person’s appearance quite a bit, so if a person isn’t expecting to see this, I could see how they might not recognize a loved one whose remains could have been floating in a pond for months.
A different male employee at the O’Laughlin Stone Company reported that five weeks prior to the discovery of the boy’s dead body, a woman in a red sweater and a man with no description given approached him, asking if he had seen a young boy around. The woman appeared to be upset and was crying, while the man was reportedly surveying the pond where the boy would later be found. After being told that the employee had not seen a boy around, the couple got into a Ford vehicle and left. They have never been identified or heard from again. Whether or not they were looking for the same boy that would be found in the pond five weeks later has also never been confirmed.
Inevitably the investigation into the boy’s identity and death stalled, as there was no one to claim the body and there was very little forensic investigation they could do in 1921. A Waukesha woman named Minnie Conrad raised money from people in the area in order to bury the child in a nearby cemetery, where Minnie would one day be buried herself. The boy was interred on March 17, just nine days after being discovered in the water. And in case you were wondering, also on March 17, 1921, the Soviet army crushed the Kronstadt rebellion, which caused a large number of sailors to flee to Finland.
Just a side note here, since the boy was never identified, he would come to be known as Little Lord Fauntleroy, because he was dressed like the titular character in Francis Hodgson Burnett’s 1886 novel called Little Lord Fauntleroy. Apparently that book is about an American boy who finds out that he is the heir to a British dukedom, so, you know, the story of my life. I tried to watch some of the 1936 movie version of the book, but it was very boring and not relevant to the case at all.
Over the years, there were reported sightings of a woman in red, wearing a heavy veil, leaving flowers at the boy’s grave. It is suspected that she may have known the boy somehow, but apparently no one ever thought to approach her and question her about this. And, of course, by now, it’s probably too late to find out if she knew anything about the boy’s identity.
This case had no leads for almost thirty years until 1949, when a medical examiner from Milwaukee put forth a theory regarding the boy’s identity. This theory was actually born out of another mystery being uncovered 15 miles east of Waukesha in the Milwaukee suburb of Wauwatosa.
On June 16, 1948, a woman named Cecilia Lemay disappeared from her Wauwatosa home. She was the third wife of a man named Edmond Lemay and the two had been married for five years before she went missing. Before her disappearance, Cecilia had been planning to move to Newark, New Jersey with Edmond, as he had gotten a job there with better pay.
After Cecilia disappeared, her neighbors began to wonder where the housewife went, and Edmond came up with a few different explanations for them. He told one neighbor that she had gone to Canada to visit a sick aunt, but he also planted a note in his home that read: “I’m going west with Bill. Cecilia.” Lemay would later admit to writing the note to prove to neighbors that Cecilia had left on her own and to indicate that she had been dissatisfied with his salary and married life in general. However, Cecilia’s friends, who believed they knew Cecilia pretty well, decided this was unlikely and called the police to report that she was missing. A search for her began on September 9th of 1948, and investigators believed foul play was involved in her disappearance. And, by the way, also on September 9th, 1948, a pitcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers named Rex Barney threw a no-hitter in a 2-0 win over the New York Giants.
A few days after Cecilia vanished, Edmond decided to go ahead and move to Newark without his potentially endangered wife, where he had bought a house with a different woman named Eva Clark, who pretended to be his wife sometimes and also claimed to be his housekeeper other times, which is very suspicious behavior if you ask me. These two also wrote letters to Cecilia’s work, saying that she had moved to New Jersey all of a sudden and would no longer be working there. After being called out for this, Edmond claimed that he and Eva had done this to cover up for Cecilia after she allegedly left him, so that her workplace would not be caught off-guard when she didn’t show up. You know, because apparently Edmond is such a do-gooder and cares about that sort of thing.
On September 13th of 1948, four days after the search for Cecilia began, Edmond was questioned regarding Cecilia’s disappearance and repeatedly denied knowing anything about what happened to her. However, a polygraph suggested that he was being deceptive with his answers. And then, strangely, on September 16th, Edmond apparently began his own investigation into what happened to Cecilia, but I think that may have just been to make a show of his own innocence.
Edmond would later be arrested for forging his wife’s signature on her payroll checks so that he could cash them while she was missing, which is more suspicious behavior. Edmond would not be found guilty for forging his wife’s signature and was let go after the investigation into his wife’s disappearance stalled. Cecilia has never been found to this day. You know what we should say about this? It’s a mystery, so mysterious—but not too mysterious, because I’m 95% certain that Edmond was responsible for her disappearance.
Now, you may be wondering what in the gosh darn heck a missing woman in one town has to do with an unidentified dead boy found almost 30 years earlier in a different town? Well that’s a great question, but first, Willy, let’s tell our listeners a little bit about our sponsor.
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If you’ll remember, earlier I told you that Cecilia was Edmond’s third wife. Edmond was married to his first wife until she died of tuberculosis in 1919. The two had a son named Homer Lemay, who was born in 1914. After the first Mrs. Lemay died, Edmond reported that he left his son Homer in the care of some family friends named Mr. and Mrs. James Norton. I’m not sure if this is some sort of de facto foster care placement or something, but Edmond claims that his son was no longer living with him after his wife’s death. Sometime in 1920 or 1921, the Nortons apparently took six-year-old Homer to Argentina on vacation, which is a nice thing to do for a child who isn’t yours. Since Edmond seemed to no longer be involved in little Homer’s life, he did not go on this trip with his son.
Edmond reported that his son Homer died in a car accident in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and that he didn’t actually find out about his boy’s death until the Nortons sent him a clipping from a South American newspaper chronicling the accident, which is a really bizarre way to tell someone their child died while they were in your care. However, when investigators looked into Edmond’s story, they could find no accounts of the boy’s death in Argentina, even though Edmond claimed that at least one newspaper had covered the story, since the Nortons had sent him a clipping about it. Investigators were also unable to confirm the existence of any family friends named the Nortons who would have taken Homer to Argentina, which, like so much of Edmond’s behavior we’ve seen thus far, is very suspicious.
I guess like the situation with Edmond’s missing third wife, nothing happened to him as a result, even though the circumstances of his son’s disappearance were incredibly suspicious.
However, like I said earlier, that Milwaukee medical examiner came out in 1949 and suggested that Homer Lemay could be the true identity of Little Lord Fauntleroy. Homer disappeared shortly before Little Lord Fauntleroy was found, and while Edmond claimed his son died in South America, there is no evidence of this whatsoever, so it is conceivable that Little Lord Fauntleroy is, indeed, Homer Lemay. And if you look at the picture of Homer Lemay, he does kind of like look the sketch of Little Lord Fauntleroy. Although, to be fair, Homer Lemay doesn’t have any particularly distinctive characteristics, so to say that this one boy looks kind of like this other boy isn’t really saying all that much.
As near as I could tell, before he disappeared, Homer lived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which is about twenty miles away from Waukesha. So the going theory is that Edmond—who we’ve already decided is a rather nefarious character—did not want to raise his son as a single father. But, instead of turning custody of the boy over to some family friends called the Nortons as he claimed he had, Edmond whacked his son on the back of the head with some sort of blunt object. As intended, the boy died and his body was dumped in a pond in the nearby town of Waukesha. And, if Little Lord Fauntleroy was murdered by his own father, it makes sense why he was never identified by family members.
There has never been any conclusive evidence to legitimately link Homer Lemay to Little Lord Fauntleroy, although the circumstantial evidence is certainly compelling. I read in a newspaper headline from 1949 that there were talks of exhuming Little Lord Fauntleroy’s body, but I wasn’t able to figure out if this actually ever happened, although I don’t think it did.
This theory seems like it’s pretty clean, but it does leave us with some unanswered questions. For example, who was the couple that approached the quarry worker five weeks before the boy was found? Edmond’s wife was dead, and I doubt he would want to draw any attention to the fact that his son was missing, since the boy was allegedly in Argentina. I’ve seen some speculation that this couple could have been the Nortons, but since there is no evidence that the Nortons actually existed, I find this unlikely.
Another unanswered question we have to deal with if we accept the Homer Lemay theory is, who was the veiled woman visiting Little Lord Fauntleroy’s grave? It couldn’t have been the boy’s mother, since she died in 1919. It could be explained that she was another family member of Homer’s (perhaps an aunt or a grandmother) who knew what happened to the boy, but who didn’t want to come out with the information, either because she wanted to protect Edmond or because she was being threatened by him to stay silent. It’s still baffling to me that rumors about the woman could spread without anyone choosing to ask her who the heck she is.
The Homer Lemay theory isn’t the only theory out there about this case, though I’ll admit that it’s the only one that has any real circumstantial evidence to it, however little. But we would be remiss if we didn’t discuss the other theories about how this boy came to end up dead in a pond.
There’s one theory that suggests that the boy was playing in or around the pond, which may have been in a quarry—I couldn’t quite tell—when he was struck in the back of the head by falling rocks from the quarry. This theory would then suggest that the couple met by the quarry worker were the boy’s parents, who were frantically looking for their son after he either wandered off or didn’t come home when he was expected to. The man was reportedly surveying the area where the boy would eventually be found, which might suggest that this was the area from which the boy went missing.
I think this is an enticing theory because I think some people would rather believe that a boy died accidentally instead of being murdered and dumped in a pond. However, I think this is unlikely because the boy was fully dressed, and if you’re playing in a pond, you’re probably going to remove some of your clothing—at least your shoes and socks. I guess the reason why he would have been fully clothed was because his estimated time of death was in the fall or the winter in Wisconsin, and I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Wisconsin during that time of year, but it is very cold. However, because it was the fall or winter, I think it’s unlikely that the boy was playing near the pond at all, especially because he didn’t have an overcoat on, nor was it found nearby. If he was going to play near the pond when it was probably so cold, you’d think he would be wearing an overcoat. Also, if the boy had been playing near the pond when he died, how come his parents—who obviously knew he was missing in that area if they were searching for him—never came forward to claim him?
But the best reason I think we can disregard this theory is that, if the boy was killed by falling rocks and fell into the pond, he would have been floating in the water when the parents were searching for him and he would have been found. This happened five weeks before the boy was found, and I find it hard to believe that the body was floating there for five weeks before it was finally found.
A similar theory is that he was playing above the pond and fell into the quarry, landing in the water where he would later be found. However, I think this is even less likely than the previous theory, since the only documented injury was to the back of his head. If you’re going to fall into a quarry, you’re probably going to have quite a few injuries to various parts of your body. And again, why would you be playing outside in the Wisconsin winter without an overcoat? And why didn’t his parents—who we would assume had searched the area—claim the boy’s body as their son? And then who was the woman in the red veil, and why did she feel the need to conceal her identity?
The last theory I want to touch on is that Little Lord Fauntleroy was not Homer Lemay, but was a boy who was kidnapped from somewhere else, murdered, and then dumped in the pond in Waukesha. According to this theory, if the boy was from far enough away, this could explain why he was never identified, because maybe the news of the boy’s discovery never made its way to the family. I mentioned it earlier, but the boy was most likely from the Upper Midwest because his underwear was from a Minnesota-based company, but even if he was abducted from Minnesota or even another part of Wisconsin, there’s a fair chance that news of his discovery may not have made it to the family.
I don’t know that I buy the stranger abduction theory, though. For one thing, a death blow to the back of the head could suggest that the boy might have been comfortable enough with his killer to turn his back to him, but I’m not sure if this would have happened if he was abducted and killed by a stranger. It certainly doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen, but the injury suggests to me that the boy knew and trusted his killer.
Another reason I don’t know that I believe this theory is that the boy was fully dressed and there was no documented evidence of sexual assault. While not all child abductions and subsequent murders are sexually motivated, it seems fair to me to say that a majority of them are. There’s nothing that I read that would suggest any sexual element to this crime, which casts another shadow of doubt on the stranger abduction theory.
And then of course, that pesky couple causes problems with this theory as well. If the boy was abducted from far away, who were these people and why were they searching for the boy in Waukesha, so close to where he would later be found? It seems unlikely to me that, if these were the boy’s parents, they would frantically search for their son so serendipitously near the spot where his body would be discovered if he was, indeed, from far away.
I stumbled upon a few other theories or unpolished attempts at theories on the internet that got a little wild, so we won’t go in to any more of those. So let me outline what I think is the most likely explanation of the crime.
The boy was found fully dressed, but without his overcoat, which likely should have been worn if the boy were to be outside during the fall and winter months in Wisconsin, when it is estimated that the boy died. This suggests to me that the boy was inside, perhaps in his own home, when he was murdered. If this is the case, it’s a little interesting that the boy is fully dressed in his own home. When I’m at home leisurely, you’ll be lucky to get me to put on socks, much less the almost formal layers this boy is wearing. I suppose the family could have been going out that day or just gotten back from somewhere, which could explain why the boy was all dressed up. Or I guess it could have just been the culture of the time or the family to be that dressed up at home.
Additionally, I think the fact that the blow was to the back of the boy’s head suggests familiarity with the killer, as if the killer could have been a family member who the boy trusted. If someone in the family was responsible for the boy’s death, it makes sense why they or anyone else in the family wouldn’t have come forward to claim the boy’s body. Now, a blow to the back of the head by no means confirms that the little boy knew and trusted his attacker. He could have been snuck up on by a stranger or told “turn around or I’ll kill your whole family.” But I do think that it’s fair to suspect that the injury at least suggests that the boy knew his attacker.
I’m not necessarily saying that Little Lord Fauntleroy was Homer Lemay, but I think that a boy who was killed by a family member seems like the most likely explanation. There is no sign of overkill, torture, or sexual assault on the boy, which suggests that the blow to the head was merely a functional necessity to cause the boy to die. If Little Lord Fauntleroy was Homer Lemay, then most likely he was killed by his father Edmond who, after his wife died a couple years before, may have decided he was no longer interested in raising a boy by himself. Edmond dumped the boy’s dead body twenty miles away in Waukesha, and then invented a story about his son dying in South America, which would have been a lot easier to pass off in 1921 than 2017, as evidenced by the fact that no one batted an eyelash at the story until almost thirty years later when authorities realized that there’s no evidence to suggest that this major event actually happened.
The couple seen five weeks before Little Lord Fauntleroy was found doesn’t really fit with this theory, and it really doesn’t fit well with any of the theories, which makes me wonder if it is even related to the Little Lord Fauntleroy case at all. I mean, just because a couple was searching for a boy five weeks before a boy was found dead doesn’t necessarily mean it was the same boy. The couple could have asked the man if he’d seen their boy, and then driven off and found him later, and then it was a completely different boy who was found in the water five weeks later. I don’t believe that the couple and the missing boy are necessarily related. It would be a pretty big coincidence if they weren’t, but coincidences happen all the time, so we shouldn’t dismiss something simply because it’s a coincidence. Although, to be fair, I don’t think we should accept something on the pretense that just any coincidence is probable or even possible.
Oh, and about the woman in the veil? I think she could either be a family member who knew about what happened to Homer, or just somebody who wanted to honor the boy and maybe play up the mystery factor a little bit. Or perhaps the woman never actually existed in the first place and the reported sightings of her were mere urban legend. Either way, I don’t think her identity is all the important to solving the case. It’s just a somewhat spooky footnote to an unsolved and—at this point— probably unsolvable case.
So that’s the story of Little Lord Fauntleroy. Any new insights to bring to this nearly century old case?
Today's mystery comes to us all the way from Siberia in the super classy nation of Russia. Actually, if we want to be super accurate, this mystery actually took place in the Soviet Union, because the year was 1959. Just a side note here: the phrase the "Soviet Union" gives me chills...I mean, it was a pretty terrible regime, but the dudes really knew how to name a country.
Like I said, we are going to be in Siberia today, which is the last place on earth I ever want to visit because, as far as I can understand it Siberia is only ever cold and miserable. Seriously, I spent a ton of time researching today's case, and I'm pretty sure I shivered the entire time I was reading about it. However, the unfortunate victims of today's story did not have the same sensibilities that I do. The people we are going to talk about today are people who made hiking in the Siberian wilderness their hobby, which I think is part of the reason that they are the subject of a mysteriYES episode and I am not.
The name of today's story is the Dyatlov Pass Incident and is named after a 23-year-old college student named Igor Dyatlov. Along with most of the victims of the incident, Igor was a student at Ural Polytechnic University in Sverdlovsk, Russia’s fourth largest city, which is now known as Yekaterinburg. A descendant of a family of engineers, Igor was described as having a scientific mind and was a radio engineering student at the university. In addition to his technical acumen, Igor was also considered an expert hiker and cross country skier at the university, and would often lead groups on expeditions through Siberia. However, not just any old hiker could join a Dyatlov Expedition; only those skilled hikers who had earned their spot were invited along with him. Igor was also described as a totalitarian commander, and would have stringent rules such as no smoking and no drinking (which is very un-Russian), as well as requiring his comrades to regularly wash their feet, even when there was no heater or hot water.
In January of 1959, Igor and eight other UPI students, who were all experienced hikers and skiers, planned to complete what was known as a Grade III expedition, which was the highest level that a hiker could attain in Soviet Russia. The parameters for what qualified as a Grade III expedition were as follows: at least 186 miles of hiking with a third of this being done on rough terrain, and must last at least sixteen days with at least 8 days spent in uninhabited regions, and at least six nights sleeping in a tent. In order to prove that their expedition was, in fact, worthy of a Grade III certification, the hikers had to thoroughly document their trip through journal entries and photographs. Because of this stipulation, we have quite a bit of information from the hikers about how their trip went leading up to the fateful night of their demise.
The hikers planned to hike to Otorten Mountain in the Northern Ural Mountains. Because they would be making their hike in the heart of winter, the Dyatlov group could expect subzero temperatures and multiple feet of snow—which sounds like hell itself to me, but is apparently a somewhat desirable environment for these fine, upstanding Communists.
The original group was made of seven men and two women in their early twenties. The men were Igor Dyatlov, Yuri Doroshenko, Alexander Kolevatov, Rustik Slobodin, Georgy Krivonishchenko, Koyla Thibault-Brignoles, and Yuri Yudin. The women were Lyuda Dubinina and Zina Kolmogorova. Just before the group got on the train out of Sverdlovsk, a thirty-seven-year-old acquaintance of Igor’s joined the group. His name was Sasha Zolotaryov, and even though he was quite a bit older, heavily tattooed, and a World War II veteran, he seemed to fit in with the rest of the group well.
The group left Sverdlovsk on January 23, and had to make stops at several staging points before actually taking off into the Siberian wilderness. At the very last stop in human civilization, on January 28th, Yuri Yudin—who had been plagued by many chronic health problems throughout his life—decided to turn back due to intense pain in his back and legs after a rough night of sleeping on the floor. The group of ten became nine.
The hikers would follow two rivers on their journey—first the Lozva River and then the Auspiya River. They would hike when possible and then use skis when the snow was too high. I read that they had to deal with as much as four feet of snow the closer they got to their destination of Otorten Mountain. At the end of each day, they would find a place to set up camp, eat dinner, and then sing and make music. They had a portable stove that they’d set up in the tent that would apparently heat up the tent so much that the ideal sleeping place was as far away from the stove as possible. This made it possible for the hikers to sleep in various states of undress—which will become important later.
February 1st was the last day of all of the hikers’ lives. Judging from the pictures that were taken that morning, everyone’s spirits were high. The later pictures taken that day revealed a difficult trek in the direction of Holatchahl Mountain—which means “dead mountain” in the area’s indigenous language of Mansi. One of these pictures is particularly eerie to me. It is taken from behind the group as they ski in a single file line, and the weather is such that you can’t tell the ground from the sky. On either side of the group are black shadows that make it seem like the group is skiing into some hopeless abyss. And, I guess, in a way they were.
The group would stop to set up camp around 3 pm on February 1st, about 3540 feet high on the eastern slope of Holatchahl Mountain, in the shadow of Otorten Mountain, their intended destination. This spot would be the last place the hikers set up their tent, and would someday come to be known as Dyatlov Pass. It took them several hours to set up camp, such that they weren’t situated in their tent until 9:00 pm. The hikers undressed for the night and went to sleep, thinking that in the morning they would begin the climb to the summit of Otorten Mountain. Unfortunately for them, they would never make it there, because by the time the sun rose on February 2nd, they would all be dead.
Back in civilization, it wasn’t until February 15th that people began to express concern for the hikers’ wellbeing. Their plan was to have returned to Vizhay by February 12th, but as of yet, none of their families had heard anything. The next day, February 16th, Igor’s sister, Rufina approached the administration of UPI with her concerns about the hikers’ whereabouts. The administrators stated that they believed that the group was merely running behind. It was a fair enough assumption, because delays were very common. The only way to communicate with civilization was via telegram from an outpost, but these apparently didn’t happen very often. Something like a twisted ankle or a case of diarrhea could set a hiking group back a few days or more—and if they didn’t have an opportunity to dispatch a telegram, then no one would know.
By February 17th though, the pressure from the families forced the UPI administration to send a telegram to Vizhay, inquiring after the group of hikers. The Vizhay response was ominous: “The Dyatlov group did not return.”
On February 20th, the official search for the hikers began, in the air and on the ground. Also on that day, the prosecutor’s office in the city of Ivdel opened a criminal investigation into the missing hikers.
On February 26th, two UPI students named Boris Slobtsov and Michael Sharavin found the Dyatlov group’s campsite. The tent poles were still standing vertically out of the ground and the south-facing entrance was still intact, but most of the tarpaulin had collapsed and was covered in snow. Outside of the tent, they found an ice axe near the entrance, and a partially buried flashlight that is turned on, but has dead batteries. The searchers called out for the hikers, but there was no response.
Using an axe to tear open the tents, the searchers went inside. The tent was about 80 square feet, and almost all of that was covered by empty backpacks, coats, and blankets to form a layer of insulation against the cold. At the south end of the tent were several pairs of ski boots, and a few personal items such as a camera, money, and a diary are sitting out in the open. There were no bodies in the tent, and it was very tidy, as if the hikers would be coming back any moment.
The searchers believed that the hikers were alive somewhere, perhaps hiding out in a tent somewhere. However, before they could begin to search the area surrounding the tent, the weather began to get bad and the searchers were forced to return to their camp. From there, a radio operator dispatches a message to Ivdel, stating that the hikers had been found.
The next day, more searchers begin scouring the area around the tent, while investigators determined that the tent had been cut open from the inside. Searchers found eight or nine footprints made by bare feet leading down the mountain toward a nearby forest. They followed these footsteps for about 1500 feet before they disappeared in the snow.
However, at the edge of the forest, some of the searchers happen upon the remains of a slipshod fire pit beneath a cedar tree, and just north of the fire pit, they see a human knee sticking out of the snow. The searchers uncover the bodies of Yuri Doroshenko and Georgy Krivonishchenko, lying next to each other on the ground, in shredded, weather-inappropriate clothing.
Yuri Doroshenko is found face down in the snow with his arms folded under his head like a pillow, with broken cedar branches underneath his body. He is dressed in a checkered shirt, swim trunks underneath long underwear that only covers his right leg, and bare feet, with snow in between his toes.
Georgy Krivonishchenko is found lying on his back, face up, with his eyes and mouth pecked at by a bird. Georgy is dressed in an undershirt, and checkered shirt, long underwear, briefs, and socks.
The cedar tree under which the fire pit had been found had broken branches as far as fifteen feet up the trunk, as if one of the hikers—probably Yuri—had climbed up the tree, as if looking for something.
A few hours later, in a valley about a mile away from the camp and a few hundred yards from the cedar tree, two more bodies, one male, one female, are found. The male body is partially buried in snow with the arms held across the chest in a defensive posture. The body is dressed in a sweater over a checkered shirt, a fur vest, ski trousers, and mismatched socks pulled over painfully curled feet. The watch on the wrist is stopped at 5:31. The body is determined to be that of Igor Dyatlov.
About a thousand feet away, the female body is lying on its right side and buried face down in the snow, with the arms twisted underneath the body, the face stained with dried blood, and the right leg bent. From the way the body is oriented, investigators believed that this hiker was headed back up the mountain toward the tent when she collapsed and died. The body is dressed in a hat, ski jacket, ski pants, and socks. This body is determined to be that of Zina Kolmogorova.
On March 5th, the body of Rustik Slobodin is found about 3,000 feet from the tent, between Zina and Igor. He is face down with his right leg bent beneath him and his right fist pulled to his chest. He is dressed in a checkered shirt, a sweater, ski trousers, several pairs of socks on his feet, a ski cap, and a single shoe. Like Zina, the orientation of his body suggested that he was making his way back up the slope. However, unlike Zina, Rustik showed signs of blunt force trauma to the head.
After these five bodies were found, they were returned to the city of Ivdel, where autopsies were performed. The autopsies determined that all five had died of hypothermia. But, while the cause of death had been determined, the circumstances that led to them getting hypothermia in the first place were still a mystery, as were the locations of the four other hikers.
On May 4th, the bodies of the four remaining hikers were finally found in a ravine about 250 feet deeper into the woods than the cedar tree where the first bodies were found. Because the weather has warmed in the three months since their deaths, and because the bodies were found in a creek bed of melting snow, decomposition had set in such that Lyuda’s body is the only one that is recognizable. She was wearing a cap, a yellow undershirt, two sweaters, brown ski trousers, and two socks on one foot, while the other foot is wrapped in a sweater.
The first body to go under autopsy was Alexander Kolevatov. As expected, the examiner determined that Alexander had died of hypothermia, just like the five previous hikers. But things got weird with the next three. Next up was the 37-year-old Sasha Zolotaryov. He was dressed warmly, but he was barefoot and his skin showed the discoloration of hypothermia. But the examiner noticed that the right side of Sasha’s chest had five broken that caused severe hemorrhaging and was the cause of Sasha’s dead.
Kolya Thibault-Brignoles had similar injuries as Sasha, only to the head. The examiner stated that Kolya died of “impressed fracture of skull dome and base with abundant hemorrhage.”
Lyuda’s midsection had sustained massive damage complete with internal hemorrhaging near hear heart and nine broken ribs. Disturbingly, her tongue was missing.
With very little physical evidence to shed light on what happened that night, the case was officially closed on May 28, 1959 due to pressure from regional supervisors. The lead investigator on the case, a man named Lev Ivanov, ended the case file by stating that the deaths had been caused by “an unknown compelling force.”
So the first six hikers had died of hypothermia, but the last three had died due to violent injuries they had sustained. This caused wild speculation among the public—even more wild than the speculation had been before. The question on everyone’s mind—and the question that we’re still trying to answer—is what could have possibly driven these experienced hikers to flee their tent into a -40 degree wind chill, only partially dressed and in bare feet? And how on earth were they able to make it a mile away from their tent in heavy snow and strong winds?
To try to answer the question of what caused the hikers to leave the tent, let’s look at some of the most popular theories used in explanation of the incident.
The first theory was very popular in the initial investigation of the incident, and that is that an avalanche had driven them away from their campsite in search of cover. Based upon the way the hikers were dressed, it’s pretty well accepted that they were probably asleep right before they fled the tent. According to the avalanche theory, the hikers must have realized that an avalanche was imminent and cut their way out of the tent to get to the forest down slope. However, they had gotten separated from each other, and in the darkness of the night, could not find their way back to the tent. Three tried, but died of hypothermia before they could make it there. Two tried to build a fire to stay warm, but ultimately succumbed to the cold. The other four fell into a ravine—one died of hypothermia, and the other three died of the blunt force trauma caused by such a dramatic fall. Many of these bodies were then covered by the snow dispelled by the avalanche.
There are some issues that make the avalanche theory unlikely. First off, the fact that the avalanche hadn’t completely destroyed the tent and the fact that the hikers had managed to outrun the avalanche in bare feet and through thick snow made this seem unlikely. Second, there was no evidence found to support there being an avalanche in the area, either on the surrounding landmarks or on the bodies. Third, the slope of Holatchahl was not particularly steep, and this apparently makes the possibility of an avalanche rather unlikely.
Another theory is that the hikers had witnessed some sort of weapons testing or UFO phenomenon that caused them to panic and flee their tents. In mid-February of 1959, a few weeks after the deaths of the hikers, a few other hikers in the area reported seeing strange orbs of light in the sky. While he was pressured by the government not to say anything about this until much, much later, the lead investigator Lev Ivanov stated that he believed that the orb-sightings had something to do with the deaths of the hikers. He has never stated whether he believes that the orbs are weapons, UFOs, or rocket launches; he only states that—being the expert on the case—he thinks there is a direction connection between the orbs and the mysterious deaths.
An interesting piece of evidence that lends some support to this theory is the last photo found on the Dyatlov Group’s camera. The picture is mostly dark, with a bright circle near the center, with another brighter streak in the upper right hand corner. Some people believe that this is a picture of one of the orbs in the sky, but I don’t think there’s much reason to believe this. Very easily, it could have been an accidental picture, taken either by the hikers or by one of the search crews. Plus, if the orbs in the sky caused them to panic and flee their tent in bare feet, why would they spend the time to snap a picture instead of putting on appropriate clothing and footwear? The picture is interesting to look at and speculate about, but frankly, I think it’s just an accidental shot of nothing in particular.
There’s no real reason to believe this theory, but there are a few reasons to disbelieve it. There were no known orb sightings during the first week of February. The only reported sighting is from February 17th, more than two weeks after the hikers died. Plus, there were no documented weapons tests in the Soviet Union during that time, so it’s unlikely the hikers witnessed anything.
And, as far as UFOs go, I don’t believe this at all. The only reason aliens are even suggested is because the case is unexplained and two weeks after the incident some people said they saw a light in the sky. That’s it. In my mind, there’s no reason whatsoever to make the logical leap that aliens must have been involved.
Another theory that is somewhat related to the weapons test theory is that the hikers were exposed to unnatural amounts of radiation. Some of the hikers clothing was shown to have somewhat high levels of radiation, and the hikers skin was dark, which suggested some sort of effect of radiation. However, it has been determined that the amount of radiation was not at a dangerous level. Plus, the darkness of the skin is probably due to exposure to the sun. You can get a sunburn in the winter, and even on a cloudy day.
Perhaps the most unlikely theory—but also perhaps the most interesting—is the cryptozoological explanation. Apparently in Russian mythology, there is some sort of yeti that eats tongues. If you’ll remember, Lyuda’s tongue was missing from her mouth. Also, the statement in the autopsies that the injuries that the three non-hypothermic skiers had sustained could not have been caused by a human lends itself to this theory. However, there is no physical evidence of a horrible monster chasing the skiers—and also, there’s no such thing as Russian yetis.
Another theory, which is popular in Russia, particularly those with a distrust of the Soviet government, is that the answer to the mystery has been covered up in classified government documents. One piece of evidence in support of this would be the fact that Lev Ivanov was pressured by Moscow to suppress any explanation that involved murder. Also, the way that government officials dealt with the families of the victims was reportedly suspicious, as was the heavy presence of police and KGB agents at the funerals. However, none of these things necessarily point to a government cover-up, and also the fact that the case file still exists—even though it could have been destroyed after 25 years—suggests that the government doesn’t have much interest in completely covering up whatever information they have.
The last theory I’m going to talk about is that posited by Donnie Eichar, the author of the book Dead Mountain, which I read in preparation for today’s episode. Along with physicists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Eichar postulated that a natural phenomenon known as infrasound had caused the hikers to flee from their tent. Infrasound is the opposite of ultrasound, meaning that it occurs below the threshold of human hearing. Apparently infrasound can have a strong psychotropic effect on the human body, causing people to feel intense fear and panic as a result, and has been suggested as an explanation for why people have realistic paranormal experience.
While infrasound is typically caused by things like earthquakes, explosions, diesel engines, and wind turbines, Eichar and his team believe that a combination of the intense wind on the night of February 1st and the symmetrical dome shape of Holatchahl would have created the perfect conditions for what’s known as a Karman vortex street, which are basically miniature tornadoes created when a horizontal vortex of wind collides with a mountain and splits the horizontal vortex into two vertical vortices. These vortices—which produce infrasound—would have passed on either side of the tent and continued down the slope before dissipating.
So basically, Eichar’s hypothesis is that the infrasound caused the hikers to experience a temporary panicked psychosis, where they became convinced that the only logical solution was to flee their tent in bare feet and clothing that was inappropriate for the frigid temperatures. Then, upon coming back to reality, they realized that they had made a grave mistake and were very far away from their tent, which they couldn’t even see because, at the point when it is believed the hikers left their tent, the moon had not yet risen. They were now hopelessly lost in the life-threatening cold and the unrelenting dark.
I’m not sure what to think of Eichar’s hypothesis. It makes sense to me, but I’m by no means a physicist, so I don’t know of any way to figure out any problems with it. Near as I can tell, it is a perfectly plausible explanation—but it does seem like it was grasped out of thin air. However, there don’t seem to be as many issues with it as the other theories, although admittedly I haven’t been able to find any rebuttals to the theory.
When it comes to what happened to the hikers, I think it’s pretty clear. They were scared out of their tent by something and made a mad dash down the slope, but became separated into three groups. One group of two hikers, realizing they were in trouble, decided to stop and make a fire, and perhaps climb a cedar tree to look for the tent. The two died of hypothermia. Another group of three decided they would try to climb back up the slope to the tent, even though they weren’t sure exactly where it was. They each died of hypothermia on their way up the slope. The final group of four skiers ran so far into the forest that they fell into a ravine, where one died of hypothermia, and the other three died from the wounds caused by landing in the ravine.
However, what’s not clear is what drove them out. That’s the real mystery here. Was it one of the popular—if flawed—theories, or is it the new theory of infrasound put forth by Eichar? Or was it something that we have no idea about? At this point, almost sixty years removed from the incident, it may be impossible for us to know for sure.
Disclaimer: Zach and Willy were planning on talking about the Frog Boys in an episode of MysteriYES and by no means did they ask me to guest and talk about it because of my ethnicity. Me being Korean-American does not make me an expert or give me extra insight; I know as much as the internet has told me.
On March 26, 1991, five boys (U Cheol-won (aged 13) Jo Ho-yeon (aged 12) Kim Yeong-gyu (aged 11) Park Chan-in (aged 10) Kim Jong-sik (aged 9)) between the ages of 9-13 were exploring a mountain near where they lived (Daegu, South Korea) to search for frogs. Growing up in that area, they were very familiar with the mountain that they were exploring (Mount Waryong) and it was fairly typical for kids in that area to be out all day playing.
Nothing was too significant about that day other than the fact that it was a national holiday because of the 1991 local elections, so people didn’t have work and kids didn’t have school. It being the early 1990s and seeing as their town was surrounded by mountains, it is not much of a surprise that they took advantage of the holiday to go on an outdoor adventure to capture frogs or salamanders.
Later that day, the parents reported the boys missing after they didn’t come home and a large-scale search quickly erupted. What started out with just townspeople and local police became a nation-wide search as over 300,000 policemen were ordered by President Roh Tae-woo to search for the boys but millions of flyers were distributed as well. A reward of 42 million won ($35,000) was accumulated by donations from companies, groups and individuals and was offered to whoever could locate the boys. Along with that, a local elementary school started a “Find the Frog Children Campaign” and milk cartons started to have photographs with the boys pictured on them.
Despite a practically nation-wide search and Waryong Mountain being searched over 500 times, there was no luck for years in finding any trace of the boys. There were over 550 false leads reported to authorities but most of them lead nowhere.
One day, however, the police received a call. A man claimed that he had abducted the Frog Boys. He said that they were malnourished and in danger of dying and demanded a ransom in exchange for the boys. And while this explanation seemed like an answer to the mystery, after further investigation it was found that the man was lying about abducting the children. There is not a lot a great amount of detail about this man and why he lied about this. I can’t imagine wanting to a) take responsibility for such a crime and b) getting the parents’ hopes up of having their children returned. I don’t know what could have been gained from this false lead but if anything, it makes the case that much more frustrating.
During the investigation, many theories arose as people searched for the answers. Kidnappings by various groups including both North Korea and South Korean “authorities” were not out of the questions. Some people didn’t write off the chance of an alien abduction, and some even went as far to accuse the parents of killing and burying their sons. This may be one of the more absurd explanations for the case, but the movie Children… (2011) explores this theory more as the film is based off of the missing Frog Boys.
Over eleven years after the initial disappearance of the Frog Boys, they were finally found. On September 26th, 2002, a man in the foothills of Waryong Mountain searching for acorns came across shoes and clothing. He called the police via an anonymous phone call and upon searching the area, the five Frog Boys were found dead in a shallow pit. The bodies were lying in a gully and eventually water exposed their remains.
The initial investigation lead to the police coming forth with the statement that the boys had died of hypothermia. The day they went missing was cold and rainy, and when the bodies were found, they were closely huddled together, possibly for warmth. The police ruled out a possibility of the homicide, despite the holes found in the boys’ skulls.
Given that the mountain was searched multiple times, the boys were familiar with the mountain and surrounding area, and there bodies were approximately two kilometers away from home, the parents’ of the Frog Boys refused to believe this and demanded a more in-depth investigation. Upon this “proper investigation” it was found that the police and investigation team did not handle the case properly at all and evidence was damaged in the process.
Shell casings were found nearby and the boys were tied together. All of the boys had some sort of damage to their skull, whether it was a bullet-hole or marks indicating blunt-force trauma. “We found marks on three of the five skulls that appeared to be created by blows with metal objects, possibly a tool of some kind,” a forensic medicine team from Kyungpook National University said. After six weeks of investigation to determine causes of death, it was “tentatively concluded that the boys were murdered.”
The police believed that the murder was not premeditated and that there were no motive for anyone to kill the boys. Because of the way the boys were killed, the police believe that it might have been an act of rage. Moss growing inside the skulls lead investigators to believe that they had been hastily buried. Some theories point at individuals with dysfunctional personalities or possibly bullies. Others say that maybe the shooting was an accident and the rest of the deaths were an attempt to cover up the original mistake. Because of the terrain, police believe that the murder was planned or the perpetrator had time to go back down the mountain to get tools to buy them because the terrain is generally rock hard, even during wet weather.
After the boys’ autopsy in 2002, no further developments took place and finally on March 25, 2004 the bodies were buried, however, their skulls were donated to Gyeongbuk University for medical research. In 2006 investigation was stopped and if the murder was found, they cannot be prosecuted for the crime because of South Korea’s 15 year statute of limitations on murder. Many murder/missing persons cases are solved years after the incident, and being without an explanation of their deaths, one could imagine the frustration this might’ve incited. It wasn’t until July of 2015 that this statute was removed, so there is a possibility of finding out the truth and the families receiving justice, but I’d imagine the nine year period sans formal investigation makes that increasingly difficult.
While I’m not familiar with Korea’s political climate during the 1990s, one theory that I have that wasn’t really mentioned in any articles is that maybe politics played a role in this murder. It could be that the parents’ political views conflicted with an individual or individuals and they went as far to attack and murder their kids. It probably wasn’t that extreme, and honestly that might be a theory of mine given the current political climate in the U.S. because other than the fact that it was a national holiday, the fact that that it was election day did not surface in any theories or explanations.
I personally don’t believe it was bullies. Maybe I have too much faith in humanity, but I also just don’t think that 9-13 year olds would be capable of shooting and beating and burying five children. Maybe it was an accident and maybe it was a murder. I’m leaning towards it being a murder done by one or more disgusting individuals, for God knows what reason. The most bizarre pieces of the mystery are the facts that the mountain was searched literally hundred of times and the bodies weren’t found until an anonymous phone call claimed to have come across clothing. Especially considering they were in a wet area of the mountain, I have a hard time believing that the bodies were there the entire investigation. Maybe the anonymous caller was the “accidental murder” and felt guilty and wanted the parents to know that they were dead.
Honestly, I cannot even begin to imagine the reason to murder and hide not one but five young children. It is sick and tragic and devastating and I can’t imagine being a parent of the child and not thinking about it everyday for the rest of my life. Not only were these children’s lives taken from them, but ruined the lives of the families.
If you haven’t listened to last week’s episode, go back and listen to it, because it’s part one of the story we’ll be finishing today. And I’m just going to say this here, during today’s episode we’re going to talk some about pedophilia, child pornography, and child sexual abuse, which can be upsetting to some people. We’re not going to discuss it in great detail, but it is an important aspect of today’s case, so it’s going to be kind of hard to avoid. We just wanted to give you a heads up beforehand in case you like to listen to our episodes around your children or something. Okay? Okay.
Anyway, let’s do a little recap of our last episode before we jump feet first back into this thing. In 1982, twelve-year-old Johnny Gosch disappeared early in the morning while delivering papers. There was very little evidence and no real explanation for what happened to him. Johnny’s parents Noreen and John were tireless in their efforts to find Johnny, and continued to believe that he was still alive as the years went by. Little snippets of evidence surfaced over the years, which the Gosches believed were absolute proof that Johnny was alive. In 1984 and 1986, two other boys around Johnny’s age disappeared in the Des Moines area, but police never connected the three cases to one another, and none of the cases led to evidence in any of the others. After nearly a decade with no solid leads, the Johnny Gosch case suddenly blew wide open in 1991 and took a very bizarre, horrifying turn.
As I teased in our last episode, an inmate in a Nebraska prison told his lawyer that he had been involved in the abduction of Johnny Gosch. This man was 24-year-old Paul Bonacci, who was serving a prison sentence for molesting a child and who had been a victim of sexual abuse himself since the age of six. Now, before we talk more about what Paul had to say about Johnny, I feel like we should back up and talk a little about Paul’s background.
Paul had been a plaintiff in a grand jury’s investigation into allegations of a child prostitution ring based in my birthplace of Omaha, Nebraska during the 1980s. Paul’s claims were that he and other at-risk youth had been used as part of a child prostitution ring that was allegedly run by Lawrence E. King, who ran the Franklin Credit Union in Omaha, Nebraska. According to Paul and the other plaintiffs in the case, King and other members of his child sex ring would fly foster children, some of whom were lured from the campus of nearby Boys Town, which was a sort of refuge for at-risk youth, across the country to service high-level US politicians, as well as prominent citizens of Omaha. I could go into more of the dirty details of this child sex ring, but the details are pretty horrifying and don’t really warrant full discussion here.
Anyway, in 1990, the grand jury investigating the allegations of child sex abuse found that it was a carefully crafted hoax, stating that, “We found no credible evidence of child sexual abuse, interstate transportation of minors, drug trafficking or participation in a pornography ring.” Paul Bonacci, who had claimed to be a victim of the sexual abuse, was indicted on charges of perjury. Those who had brought the accusations against Lawrence E. King and the others involved in the child sex ring claimed that there had been a massive cover-up to protect the high-level government officials who were allegedly serviced by the child prostitutes.
And now, in 1991, here’s Paul Bonacci saying that he was involved in the abduction of Johnny Gosch. A production crew from Des Moines went to Nebraska to interview Paul. In that interview, Paul stated that by 1982 he was no longer being used for sexual abuse and was instead being forced to assist in the abductions of boys to be used in the child sex ring. Paul said that it was his job to hold Johnny down in the back of the car that took him and place chloroform over Johnny’s face to make him fall asleep. Paul also described telling Johnny that everything would be all right and that he would survive this terrifying situation if he did what he was told. During the interview, Paul claimed to have dissociative identity disorder, which at the time was known as multiple personality disorder, and would place his head on the table and call up various personalities to tell the story of what happened to Johnny.
Now, anytime I hear about someone claiming to have dissociative identity disorder, I instantly become skeptical. For those who aren’t aware, DID is an incredibly controversial mental health diagnosis, as it is a somewhat rare and difficult to identify disorder that has frequently been falsified to fortify a criminal defense. I’m not saying that DID doesn’t exist or that Paul Bonacci definitely didn’t have it. I’m just saying I’m a bit skeptical about this.
But I digress. After the dissemination of Paul’s account of kidnapping Johnny, Noreen Gosch decided that she wanted to meet with him and discuss what happened to her son. Noreen traveled to Nebraska, and just before going in to meet with Paul, she told the camera crew that had gone with her that she didn’t feel any hatred for Paul because she knew he had been a victim of abuse himself. Paul filled out a release for her to meet with him without knowing who she was. When they were in the same room together and Noreen’s true identity was revealed to him, Paul broke down into tears.
Paul told Noreen about how the mastermind of Johnny’s abduction—a man named Emilio—wanted to abduct boys who hadn’t been sexually assaulted before, and who were close to their families, and that’s why they had targeted Johnny. Paul said that, after his abduction, Johnny had been bound and gagged, and that Paul had been the first to sexually assault Johnny on film.
In a very strange and unnatural segue, Paul brought up yoga, saying that Johnny told him that his mother did yoga. Noreen stated that it was true, that she did do yoga, and that this was something she hadn’t told the press before. Paul also told Noreen that he had seen a birthmark on Johnny’s chest that was shaped like South America, but this detail was widely publicized after Johnny’s disappearance, so this didn’t really prove that Paul had actually been present at Johnny’s abduction or seen him naked afterward. However, Paul did bring up other means of identification that hadn’t been widely publicized, such as a scar on Johnny’s tongue, a scar on his leg, and a tendency to stammer when he became upset. Noreen corroborated these things, stating that Johnny had once bitten through his tongue and brushed up against his older brother’s hot tailpipe. To Noreen, this was undeniable proof that Paul had, in fact, been involved in the abduction of Johnny Gosch.
The police, however, were not convinced, stating that they did not believe Paul had shown any legitimate firsthand knowledge of the crime. Because of this, West Des Moines Police never once traveled to Nebraska to interview Paul. Even though I found Paul’s story difficult to believe, it’s still pretty strange to me that the police didn’t even want to talk to the guy. I mean, the guy is admitting his involvement into one of their most famous cold cases, and yet they’re not even willing to talk to him about it? It seems pretty weird.
The West Des Moines Police did, however, travel to Paul’s hometown of Omaha to interview his siblings. Paul’s siblings stated that on the day of Johnny’s abduction, Paul had in fact been in Omaha, which was enough for the police to dismiss Paul’s story as mere hogwash. I have two problems with this interview, though. First, the interview was conducted ten years after Johnny’s disappearance and regarded a day that, for the Bonacci family, was probably just any regular Sunday. The second issue I have is that, just because Paul was in Omaha doesn’t mean he couldn’t have been in Des Moines as well. According to Google Maps, West Des Moines is a two hour and one minute drive from Omaha, so if Johnny was abducted at around six am, Paul could have conceivably been back in Omaha and with his family by 8 or 8:30 that morning.
The Gosch family believed that the police refused to interview Paul because they were a part of a massive government conspiracy to cover up the horror of what had been taking place in Omaha. This led Noreen to become an even greater advocate for children, as well as a voice speaking out against human trafficking.
In 1992, America’s Most Wanted covered the Johnny Gosch story to commemorate the ten year anniversary of the boy’s disappearance. Noreen and John Gosch were actually friends with John Walsh, the host of America’s Most Wanted and a man whose son had also been kidnapped. Both the Gosch family and the Walsh family were instrumental in the creation of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, so it was about time Walsh covered Johnny’s story.
Anyway, during that episode, Paul discussed how the people who ran the child sex ring would force him to engage in sex acts with other kids, which they would film to “split your mind up so you don’t even remember who you are” or to blackmail you into staying with them instead of going to the police. Paul also stated that Johnny had been sold to a man in Colorado called the Colonel who was selling Johnny for sex, and that Paul had seen Johnny there in 1986. Johnny had apparently tried to run away once, and after that he had been branded with an X, that had a curved line connected to the bottom of the X, kind of like a rocking chair.
After the episode aired, a bunch of kids came forward, stating that they had been a part of this child sex ring, and what’s really crazy is that many of these kids had the exact brand that Paul had been talking about. For what it was worth, it seemed that Paul was speaking at least some truth about this child sex ring.
Also in that episode of America’s Most Wanted, Paul talked about a house in Colorado where kids, including Johnny, had been kept. He also talked about these secret underground chambers where the kids would be ushered if the police were to show up at the house. Paul and the crew of America’s Most Wanted flew out to Colorado, and the house that Paul described was actually there. The house was abandoned, and the owner of the house, a former prison guard, had disappeared. When they went inside the house, they found the underground chambers that Paul was talking about, complete with children’s initials carved into the woods. This gave further credence to Paul’s story of a child prostitution ring that transported kids across the country to service high-ranking officials.
Noreen and John Gosch divorced in 1993, which is fairly common among couples who are forced to endure the loss of a child. Over the years, Noreen has publicly hinted that she believes that John might have been involved in selling Johnny to the child sex ring, which, frankly, seems pretty unlikely, unbelievable, and uncalled for, although it is an interesting theory to entertain for half a second.
In 1999, Paul Bonacci filed a civil suit against Lawrence E. King, citing allegations of sexual assault and false imprisonment. King never appeared in court, and Bonacci was awarded $1 million, although this amount was never paid to him.
During the civil suit, Noreen Gosch was called to testify for some reason, even though she really didn’t have any direct connection to Paul Bonacci’s case. While under oath, Noreen was asked whether she had seen her son since his disappearance. At first, Noreen would not answer the question, but upon a threat from the judge to be held in contempt of court, Noreen stated that yes, she had seen Johnny once since he had disappeared.
Noreen described one night in 1997 when she had heard persistent knocking on her door around 2:30 in the morning. When she opened the door, she saw a young man with long black hair. Noreen said that she immediately recognized Johnny’s eyes, because, according to her, “the eyes don’t change.” Apparently, 27-year-old Johnny also opened his shirt to show Noreen his birthmark and said, “It’s me, Mom. It’s Johnny.” Noreen said that there was another man there whom she had never seen before and who didn’t speak at all. She invited the two men in, and they talked for about an hour and a half. Johnny described what had happened to him, discussing how children were forced to engage in illegal activity to keep them from going to the police. Johnny also stated that he had to stay in hiding because he knew too much and his life was in danger. Noreen said that throughout their conversation, Johnny kept looking at the other man as if for his approval before speaking. Noreen also said that Johnny asked her not to say anything about the visit for his own safety, and then he disappeared into the night, never to be seen again.
Paul agreed with Noreen, stating that Johnny is still alive, but that he is hiding, because he knows too much about the trafficking ring and would be killed if he came forward with the information that he had.
There were no further developments in the Johnny Gosch case for almost an entire decade. However, in August of 2006, Noreen began to receive disturbing photographs on her front doorstep. One was a color photo of three boys, perhaps in their early teens, fully clothed and tied up on a bed. Another was a black-and-white image of another early teenage boy who is bound and gagged, lying on his stomach, bare-chested and barefoot. Noreen pointed out that there was a branding on the boy’s shoulder like the one Paul had described, as well as a dark spot on the boy’s chest that she claimed was his birthmark. For what it’s worth, I’ve seen this photo, and I don’t see what she’s describing at all. There were other pictures of other boys in various states of binding and undress, all of whom Noreen firmly believed were Johnny. She was able to track these images to a website featuring child pornography, which was quickly shut down.
Noreen turned these images over to the authorities. The picture of the three boys was connected to a solved case in Florida, while experts determined that they were unable to conclusively state that the boys in the other pictures were of Johnny Gosch. Johnny’s father, John, states that he doesn’t believe that these pictures were of Johnny, citing that he doesn’t see a birthmark on the boy’s chest and that Johnny had large feet, but that the boys in the picture had rather average sized feet.
I’ve seen all of the photos that Noreen received, and I agree with John Gosch. I do not believe the boys in these photos are Johnny. For one thing, they don’t even look like Johnny in the face. Also, in the pictures I saw of Johnny before he was kidnapped, he was a pretty stocky kid, and the boys in these pictures are very thin. And sure, Johnny probably would have lost weight in captivity, but I don’t think you lose that large frame that easily. My personal theory is that some dirt bag went onto a child porn site, printed off a few images of boys with similar hair colors as Johnny, and sent them to Noreen to mess with the poor, bereaved woman.
There isn’t much else to this case that warrants a lot of discussion, but I did want to note something that I thought was interesting. The filmmakers of the documentary Who Took Johnny went to Washington DC to interview an FBI spokesperson about Johnny Gosch, but when they asked their first question about Johnny, a woman who is off-screen interrupts, saying that there will be no discussion regarding Johnny Gosch. I found this to be a little bit suspicious, but it also makes sense. Whether or not Johnny was actually kidnapped by a child prostitution ring that is part of a major cover up, his case is still a highly publicized and contentious case, and so institutional protection is probably warranted to guarantee the integrity of the FBI.
Finally, it should be noted that, while Noreen believes she knows exactly what happened to Johnny and that he is still alive today, Johnny’s father John is not sure exactly what happened. I find it very interesting that two parents, who were once a united front to get their son back, are now so different in their interpretations of what happened to their boy.
So, Willy, that is the Johnny Gosch case. What are your thoughts?
Like I said at the beginning of our last episode, the Johnny Gosch case is a rabbit hole. What begins as a simple child abduction is this snowball that gathers more substance and intensity the more it rolls down the hill. We basically have three options when dealing with this case: believe all of it, believe some of it, or believe none of it.
I personally land on the “believe some of it” side. I do believe that Johnny Gosch was abducted in order to be used for sexual gratification, and I do believe that Paul Bonacci was a victim of a child prostitution ring based in Omaha, Nebraska. However, I do not believe that Johnny was abducted by the same child prostitution ring that victimized Paul Bonacci. In fact, I don’t think that Paul Bonacci was involved with Johnny Gosch at all.
Now, of course, that statement begs the question of why Paul would admit to being involved in Johnny’s abduction if he wasn’t actually involved?
Well, let’s think about this for a second. Paul is sitting in prison for sexual abuse of a child, but is a long-time victim of sexual abuse himself. One year prior to his confession, a grand jury declared that the vile sexual abuse he had endured was merely a hoax, and that same jury had indicted Paul on allegations of perjury. It must really suck to have been a victim of sexual abuse for most of your life, and then for a bunch of bureaucratic bimbos to say that it was all a lie. So what did Paul do? He claimed that one of the most high profile child abductions in American history had been pulled off by the very child prostitution ring that a grand jury had decided never existed in the first place. It’s pretty brilliant, actually, because it brought the whole Franklin Credit Union scandal and Paul’s own sexual abuse back into the limelight once again.
Now, there are some issues that I have to deal with concerning this theory. Probably the biggest issue is the fact that Paul knew things about Johnny that hadn’t been publicized, such as the scars on his tongue and his leg. Now I don’t know about you, Willy, but when I was Johnny’s age, I had a scar on practically every part of my body. That’s just what happens when you’re an active boy, which it sounds like Johnny was. If someone were to have mentioned a scar I had to my mom, she probably would have been able to identify an incident that could have caused it, even if she couldn’t picture precisely which scar it was. So I personally think that Paul offered up some conceivable possibilities, and Noreen, who time and time again has proven herself to be someone who will believe a lot without much evidence, was quick to find a way to make what Paul was saying fit Johnny.
Plus, Paul’s knowledge of Johnny’s stuttering when upset and his scars are actually the only evidence whatsoever that Paul was involved with Johnny. If Paul really was telling the truth about Johnny, then how come he wasn’t able to give any real information? How come his story didn’t lead to Emilio, or to the car used in the kidnapping? I just think that if Paul really was involved in Johnny’s abduction, then something more would have come of his confession. But if we’re really being honest, Paul didn’t shed much actual conclusive light on Johnny’s case.
Now, like I said earlier, I definitely believe that Paul was abused as a part of a child prostitution ring, I just don’t think that Johnny was.
So what do I think actually happened to Johnny? I think the most likely explanation is that he was kidnapped by a local pedophile (or perhaps a pair of pedophiles) with a penchant for twelve, thirteen, fourteen-year-old boys, and that perhaps this same person also kidnapped Eugene Martin and Marc Allen. Unfortunately, I think Johnny was sexually assaulted by this pedophile and later killed, and that his remains are somewhere yet to be found along with Eugene and Marc.
To me, it just doesn’t make sense why Johnny would be a target for a child prostitution ring that already had a steady pipeline of children from Boys Town and the Nebraska foster care system. Unfortunately, many kids in the foster care system are at-risk youth who are more prone to run away, and if they do go missing, are far less likely to be missed. However, kidnapping a boy from an affluent neighborhood is an incredibly risky move, not only because there is a higher probability of someone witnessing the crime, but also because kidnapping a boy like Johnny is far more likely to cause a greater uproar and should have caused a much deeper investigation than taking a kid from foster care would. Paul stated that the reason they would have taken boys from affluent neighborhoods was because Emilio, the apparent mastermind of the abduction plot, liked to take kids who were close to their families, because he liked to hurt people. But frankly, Emilio would have to have been an idiot to risk his whole human trafficking business just so he can swipe a rich kid from a stable family over a poor kid from an unstable family.
Something else I find difficult to believe is Noreen and Paul’s assertion that Johnny’s life is in danger because he knows too much about the child prostitution ring. If the people involved with the child prostitution ring were just waiting to kill Johnny Gosch the moment they could get their hands on him, then how come they haven’t taken out Paul or Noreen? After all, what on earth could Johnny reveal that Paul and Noreen hadn’t already? It doesn’t make sense for Paul to feel safe being in the limelight with all he’s done to reveal the child prostitution ring and yet still maintain that for some reason Johnny’s life is in considerably more danger.
I think Noreen Gosch is an incredible woman who has faced incredible obstacles in her life and has done so with grace and strength. The things she has done to improve the way our nation responds to missing children have been instrumental in protecting the most vulnerable members of our society. It is also undeniable that she loves and cares for her son, as she went to such extreme lengths to do whatever she could to find him.
Unfortunately, because Noreen received very little assistance from her local police department and the FBI, she was forced to investigate her own son’s disappearance herself. And, let’s face it, Noreen Gosch is not a trained investigator. I think that she was so committed to finding her son, and finding her son alive, that she became seriously at-risk for being manipulated and defrauded.
For example, she took every witness statement from the morning of Johnny’s disappearance as fact, even when they couldn’t be corroborated, and even though eyewitness statements are inherently unreliable.
Then, there was the dollar bill saying “I am alive. Johnny Gosch,” which she immediately accepted as having come from Johnny, when it just as easily could have been written by some puckish teenage boy who thinks he’s prodigiously funny.
I already talked about how I think she was fooled into believing Paul Bonacci’s story, and how I don’t think his story is true at all.
I also don’t believe that Johnny came to visit Noreen in 1997, but I’m not sure that she’s lying about it either. I think it could easily be true that some punks decided that they were going to play a prank on this lady, and that Noreen, who so desperately wanted her son to be alive, believed them wholeheartedly. Or she could have made it up, perhaps to vouch for Paul in court, or to keep Johnny’s story alive and in the media’s mind. Either way, I don’t think this visit from Johnny actually happened.
And then, finally, there are the pictures of the bound and gagged teenage boys she found on her front doorstep. While everyone else, including Johnny’s father, concluded that the boy in the photos couldn’t have been Johnny, Noreen continued to claim that they were, in fact, pictures of her son. In the documentary Who Took Johnny, she even went so far as to say, “Those photographs are my son, and it matters not to me if people think it isn’t Johnny. We know that it is, and the West Des Moines police are mistaken.” I mean, when you hear her say that, it almost sounds like she’s completely refusing to listen to what anyone else has to say about it, kind of like someone who is caught up in a cult. She has her opinions about what is true and what is not, and you just can’t convince her otherwise.
Unlike a lot of people on the internet, though, I don’t think that Noreen is crazy. I think she is seriously misguided, but I don’t think she is crazy. I think she is a desperate, tireless, hard-working woman who just wants the best for her son, and for other children like him. If that means believing that he is alive and hiding somewhere, then that’s good for her. She has made peace with what happened to Johnny, and if he’s alive somewhere, then he is, and if he’s dead somewhere, then he is.
Today’s story is a pretty well-known one, and has received some recent notoriety due to a documentary that is available on Netflix called Who Took Johnny. As the title of that documentary would suggest, today we’re going to be talking about the disappearance of Johnny Gosch. This case was one of the first really well-known kidnappings in American history, and it was a precipitating factor in huge shifts in parenting and law enforcement in America.
I hadn’t heard of Johnny Gosch until I was reading a list of missing people who still hadn’t been found a few years ago, but much of my research suggests that, for the people alive when Johnny went missing, particularly those people who lived in Iowa, where Johnny was from, the name Johnny Gosch carries a lot of weight with it.
So I decided to experiment with this, since, you know, we just had the holidays and there’s no greater tradition than sitting down with your family and talking about horrible tragedies that happen to children!
At the time Johnny went missing, both of my parents, my aunt and uncle, and my grandmother were all living in Iowa, so I was curious if they’d ever heard of Johnny Gosch. I began my question like this: “In 1982, in West Des Moines, there was a twelve-year-old paperboy—”
At that point, my uncle interrupted me. “Johnny Gosch,” he said, and then my aunt chimed in with something like, “Oh, goodness, Johnny Gosch. I remember his mom was kind of…interesting.” Then my grandma said that she thought she’d heard that they’d found him recently, and then we got into a debate about that. For what it’s worth, we figured out that she was talking about Jacob Wetterling, another boy who disappeared in the 80s. My parents hadn’t heard about Johnny Gosch, but to be fair, Johnny disappeared the day after their wedding, so they were on their honeymoon by then and had other concerns.
My point is, the Johnny Gosch case was and is a pretty big deal. While Johnny has never been found, and while there’s no real conclusive evidence as to what actually happened to him, his disappearance sparked a lot of really good things, most of which were spearheaded by his mother, Noreen Gosch, who is an interesting character study herself. A lot of people have a lot of opinions about Noreen, myself included, but no matter your opinion about her, you can’t deny that she is a diligent, tireless, amazing woman who has accomplished so many great things in order to protect our nation’s children.
But Johnny’s case is also an incredibly fascinating one, and one with a lot of bizarre twists and unbelievable developments. In fact, the best word I can think of to describe the Johnny Gosch case is a rabbit hole. So, Willy…are you ready to jump down the rabbit hole?
All right, folks, then strap in, because things are about to get a little wild.
John David Gosch was born on November 12, 1969 to his parents John and Noreen Gosch. He had an older half-brother and half-sister, both of whom were born out of Noreen’s previous marriage. Johnny was described as a thoughtful, caring boy who had varied interests and took great joy in living his life.
The family lived in West Des Moines, Iowa, which, at the time, was a very affluent city of about 20,000 people that was a part of the Des Moines metropolitan area. West Des Moines is a microcosm of the classic understanding of a pleasant, suburban America, and has been included in several lists of best places to live in America. Also, interesting tidbit, in 2015 West Des Moines was awarded the title of the 18th most hipster city in America.
My point in talking about all this is to make it clear that West Des Moines is a safe place. Kids don’t run away from West Des Moines, and they don’t get kidnapped from West Des Moines. Until 1982 at least, West Des Moines was the kind of place where kids ran around outside barefoot until well past dark, where kids walked to school by themselves, where kids only had to be afraid of the fictional monsters in stories. Terms like “pedophile,” “human-trafficking,” and “sex abuse,” were not well-known, if not completely foreign ideas at this time.
Twelve-year-old Johnny Gosch was a paper boy for the Des Moines Register in 1982, a job he inherited from his older brother and had been working at for thirteen months before he disappeared. Johnny got the job with the intention of earning enough money to buy himself a dirt bike, a goal he was actually able to attain, which I find to be impressive. I don’t know about you, Willy, but when I was a twelve-year-old boy, anytime I proclaimed that I was saving my money for some large purchase, the project usually lasted a week before I went out and bought myself a new Redwall book, because I was a major nerd.
Now, Willy, did you ever have a paper route as a kid? I never did, and researching this case reminded me why: being a paperboy sounds terrible. Instead of sleeping in on weekends like a normal kid his age, Johnny—and other paperboys like him—had to get up ridiculously early to distribute the Sunday funnies to the rich white people of West Des Moines, Iowa.
It was on one of these early weekend mornings that Johnny went missing. The date was Sunday, September 5, 1982. Johnny awoke before dawn as he usually did and got ready to deliver the Sunday edition of The Des Moines Register. Unlike every other morning, Johnny did not wake up his father John to accompany him on his paper route. Instead, he leashed up his miniature dachshund Gretchen, grabbed the wagon where he usually stashed his yet-to-be-delivered papers, and left his house around 5:45 am. As you may have guessed, Johnny never made it home.
Johnny’s parents were first made aware that something was wrong at around 7:30 that morning, when they began receiving phone calls from their neighbors, asking why they hadn’t received their Sunday morning newspapers yet. Becoming concerned, Johnny’s father John got up and began to search Johnny’s usual paper route to find the boy and see what was up. He didn’t necessarily think anything was wrong; he figured maybe Johnny was just running behind or was lollygagging around. However, John found Johnny’s wagon filled with newspapers along with Johnny’s dog Gretchen, but there was no Johnny to be found. I’ve heard people say it was almost like Johnny had completely ceased to exist.
Accounts differ as to what actually happened that early morning when Johnny Gosch disappeared. If you were to ask the West Des Moines Police Department what happened, they would tell you that they can’t be sure, since there really was no crime scene to investigate. In those days, it was very easy and very common for kids to run away from home, so the police weren’t convinced that Johnny hadn’t just taken off, since there really was no way to prove that a crime had been committed. The police did interview the witnesses who were about that morning and do have a version of what they believed may have happened, but like I said, they’re not convinced of what actually happened.
However, Johnny’s mother Noreen believes she has crafted an intricate and accurate description of what happened that morning, based largely on witness statements. I’m going to go ahead and tell you about Noreen’s account of what happened, even though I personally think some—though not all—of her information is a little bit unreliable.
The last time Johnny was seen by multiple witnesses was at the paper drop, which was the place where each day’s editions of the newspaper were dropped off for all the paper boys in the area to come by and pick up. It’s there that the boys who roll up the newspapers—which would come in a bundle—tie them up with a rubber band, and then stuff them into whatever vessel they would use to carry them. I think it’s important to note that this is the last time he was seen by multiple witnesses, because eyewitness accounts are inherently unreliable, and become even more unreliable when there’s no one else to corroborate them. Add to that that most of these eyewitness accounts come from adolescent boys who are half-asleep and probably aren’t being hyper-observant at 6:00 on a Sunday morning, and you’ll see why I have a hard time completely trusting this version of events.
Anyway, at the paper drop, Johnny loaded up his wagon with newspapers when a car described as a two-tone Ford Fairmont stopped, and the driver of the car opened the passenger side door swung his feet out of the car, (which…what?) and began asking Johnny where 86th street was. Johnny was frightened by this and thought there was something wrong with the driver of the car, so he asked a neighbor man who was there helping his own son, John Rossi, to come help the guy out. As Rossi approached the car, the driver all of a sudden pulled his feet back in his car, fired up the engine, made a U-turn and took off. Noreen reported that before taking off, the man in the car clicked the dome light three times as some sort of signal to someone else. Near as I can tell, though, Rossi, who was actually there that morning, never said anything about this.
Rossi was able to get a glimpse of the driver of the car, and said that he looked like he was mad about something and that he must have been drinking a lot of caffeine, because he didn’t look sleepy at all, even though it was early in the morning.
Interestingly, West Des Moines Police Captain Bob Rushing doesn’t think there was anything particularly odd about a car stopping to ask a paper boy for directions, and that he’s still not sure what exactly happened the morning Johnny disappeared.
As Johnny left the paper drop to begin delivering his papers, a witness reported that a tall man stepped out from between two houses and began to follow Johnny, but was following far enough behind that Johnny did not realize he was being followed. At one point, a sleeping neighbor heard the slamming of a car door, and when he sat up in bed he saw a Ford Fairmont near the spot where Johnny was last seen make a left turn after rolling through the stop sign at the intersection where Johnny’s wagon was later found.
In some accounts, Noreen states that Johnny was shot by some sort of stun gun that made him collapse on the ground, and then two men came, picked him up, one by his shoulders and one by his feet, and stuffed him in the back of the car. Strangely, though, Noreen does not give this detail in all her accounts of the kidnapping, and it isn’t included in the documentary Who Took Johnny, so I have difficulty believing that this is a legitimate detail. After all, it seems like a pretty important part of the story, so it would be very weird for her to leave it out more often than not.
After John Gosch found his son’s wagon, he reported this back to his wife Noreen, saying that something was wrong. Noreen described her feeling then as “panic-stricken,” but nevertheless sprang into action and immediately called the West Des Moines Police Department. It took the police 45 minutes to respond even though the station was a mere ten blocks away, but during that long period of time which must have felt like an eternity, Noreen spoke with some of the other paper boys and their parents about what had happened that morning.
When the police finally did show up 45 minutes after Noreen initially called, the Gosches described the responding officers’ attitude as one of dismissal rather than of a ready and willing eagerness to help find a child who was potentially in danger. Apparently, the police came in under the assumption that Johnny had merely run away, since, like I said earlier, that was a fairly common and easy thing to accomplish back in 1982. The Gosches, however, knew better, and tried to get the police to believe them when they said that there was no way Johnny would have ever run away from home. One major piece of evidence they brought up was the dog: what twelve-year-old boy would just abscond while leaving behind his dog?
The police, however, weren’t buying the abduction story and informed the Gosches that they would need to wait 72 hours before filing an official missing persons report. This might sound ridiculous to us now, but in 1982, that was the standard. There was no law saying that police must act immediately when a child goes missing, because there was this naïve belief that random strangers did not just nab children off the streets.
Obviously frustrated by the police’s unwillingness and inability to do anything in the moment, the Goshes organized search teams of their own to go out looking for Johnny. There was a huge outpouring of community support for the Gosches during this time, but still very little from the West Des Moines Police. Noreen has stated that, at one of the searches, the West Des Moines Police Chief Orval Cooney, while intoxicated, got up on a park table with a bullhorn and told the searchers to go home because Johnny Gosch was “nothing but a damn runaway.”
Noreen had several negative interactions with the West Des Moines Police during the first days, weeks, and months after Johnny’s disappearance, which sometimes ended with officers yelling at her or with her throwing hot coffee at them. She had a particularly contentious relationship with Orval Cooney, who once stated in a newspaper interview that, “I don’t really give a damn about what Noreen Gosch has to say. I really don’t give a damn what she thinks.” Cooney, who died in 2003, didn’t last long in office after the disappearance of Johnny Gosch. He resigned in 1983, amid allegations of fixing tickets for friends and family, racial prejudice that affected his work performance, working while intoxicated, and interfering with an investigation against his son.
During this time, we see just how diligent, tireless, and hard-working Noreen Gosch was to get her son back. She regularly petitioned the FBI to get involved, even though they wouldn’t, and she took every opportunity to get Johnny’s story out to the public and to ask for help. One month after Johnny disappeared, Noreen founded the Johnny Gosch Foundation, developed a program called “In Defense of Children”, and went on a national tour, keeping over a thousand appointments with various organizations involved with protecting children.
Searchers continued to scour the area for any sign of Johnny. Psychics told the family that Johnny was dead, and that his body would be found near a creek two miles from the Gosch home, where the porch light was left on nightly and where John and Noreen regularly announced that they were willing to work with whatever demands the kidnappers had. At this point, Noreen stated that she hadn’t even heard the word pedophile before, and so they initially believed that Johnny must have been kidnapped for some sort of ransom.
Six months after Johnny disappeared, there was a reported sighting of him in Oklahoma. Apparently, a woman who was in the parking lot of a convenience store was approached by a boy who screamed, “I’m Johnny Gosch, I’ve been kidnapped.” Before the woman could do anything, two men snatched up Johnny and he wasn’t seen again. The woman called the police, but they were unable to find the boy. I’m not sure how believable this account is, but it was reported in multiple places, so I figured it was worth including here.
Noreen continued to be involved in advocating for missing children. In 1984, she was involved in two very big developments in the Missing Children movement. She was instrumental in the formation of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and was invited to the White House by President Reagan as a result. On July 1, 1984, the Johnny Gosch Bill was signed into Iowa law. This bill, which was the first of its kind, required law enforcement to respond immediately when a child goes missing.
On Sunday, August 12, 1984, almost two years after Johnny’s disappearance, a thirteen-year-old boy named Eugene Martin left his house around 5:00 in the morning wearing a red shirt, blue jeans, and a gray sweatshirt. He left the house so early because he was a delivery boy for The Des Moines Register, the very same newspaper that had once been delivered by one Johnny Gosch. Eugene typically went with his step-brother to deliver the paper, but I guess on this morning the step-brother decided to sleep in.
Eugene was seen between 5:00 and 5:15 am, folding his papers while engaged in what seemed to be a friendly conversation with an unidentified man in his mid-thirties, who appeared to be a clean-cut individual.
Sometime between 6:10 and 6:15 am, the bag where Eugene typically stowed his newspapers was found with ten newspapers inside, but no Eugene. After receiving complaints from customers about not getting their newspapers, Eugene’s manager picked up the boy’s newspapers and delivered them himself. After that, Eugene’s father called the police and the search for Eugene began.
Unlike the Johnny Gosch case, the FBI did become involved in the disappearance of Eugene Martin, and early on in the investigation they stated that there was a definite possibility that Eugene’s case and Johnny’s case were connected. Eventually, though, the local police determined that there was not enough evidence to connect the cases, even though the boys were of similar age, both of them were paperboys in the same metropolitan area, both disappeared in the early morning hours of a Sunday in the fall, and both were last seen talking to an adult male before they disappeared.
The public, however, believed that Johnny and Eugene’s cases were related. Noreen and John met with Eugene’s family to offer their condolences, and the two sets of parents appeared on television together to publicize the cases, hoping that Eugene’s case would uncover more information regarding Johnny’s and vice versa. A $94,000 reward was offered for any information leading to the recovery of the two boys, and Eugene and Johnny were two of the first missing children to be featured on milk cartons.
Unfortunately, there was no evidence and no leads in Eugene’s case. The boy was never recovered and there was no conclusive determination as to what happened to him. Like Johnny, Eugene simply vanished, and no one has any idea where he ended up.
In 1985, a dollar bill surfaced in Sioux City, Iowa with a handwritten message on it: “I am alive. Johnny Gosch.” The Gosch family sent one dollar the woman who found the bill and asked her to send the marked bill to them, which she did. Almost immediately, the Gosches stated that they believed that Johnny wrote this message, even though there’s really no reason to believe it wasn’t written by some snot-nosed, grease-fingered fourteen-year-old boy who hasn’t changed his socks in six weeks. This is something we’ll see throughout this case: that a tip or a lead will come in, and almost immediately Noreen will believe it completely, regardless of whether or not it actually holds up to rational reasoning.
On March 29, 1986, the day before Easter, another young teenage boy from Des Moines went missing. This time it was 13-year old Marc Allen. Marc, who was described as a handful and who frequently bounced back and forth between his mom and dad’s house, told his mother that he was planning to walk over to a friend’s house down the street and asked her to save him some pizza, because he would be hungry when he got home. Only Marc never made it home, and like Johnny and Eugene, he was never seen again, however police never linked his case to either Eugene’s or Johnny’s case. To this day, no one knows what happened to Marc Allen.
Noreen Gosch, however, believed that there was a connection between all three boys’ cases, but there just wasn’t enough evidence to conclusively state whether or not they were related. The disappearances of three boys in the same metropolitan area in a four year span caused parents to develop a new understanding of the potential dangers that their children faced when left unsupervised.
Years passed and the 1980s came to a close without much progression in any of the three cases of missing boys. In April of 1990, West Des Moines Police believed they had finally received a break in the case when the body of a young man named John Gosch turned up dead in Mexico. However, this John Gosch ended up being a John Gosch of Tacoma, Washington, and not the Johnny Gosch of West Des Moines, Iowa, although, coincidentally, the two John Gosches were born just weeks apart. What the West Des Moines Police thought had been the resolution to a case that had become well-known on a national level was little more than a bizarre coincidence.
However, one year later, in 1991, a break in Johnny’s case would finally come in an even more bizarre twist, when an inmate in a Nebraska prison confessed to his lawyer that he was involved in the abduction of Johnny Gosch. But, unfortunately, Willy, that story is going to have to wait until next week’s episode.
This week on MysteriYES we’re going further back in time than we ever have before. We are going all the way back to 1461 for the mystery of The Princes in the Tower https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princes_in_the_Tower. Before I get started it should be noted that this is our first HISTORICAL mystery. Meaning that there is a lot of over simplification, and, because everyone in this story is named either Edward, Elizabeth or Richard, I’m going to change some names. This isn’t supposed to be like school. It’s supposed to be fun. School is for dweebs. Do drugs and drop out.
In England in the 1400s, there were two families, the House of York and the House of Lancaster, fighting an incredibly complicated and difficult to follow war to claim the English crown. This war was called the war of the roses. This thing is super complicated (again because literally everyone has the same first name) and it lasted 35 years. There were battles and seiges and bribery and betrayal and murder and clergymen. It was a whole bit thing, and seriously, this thing is so convoluded. I honestly can’t make it through most of the wikipedia pages on this war let alone any deeper historical texts. I was even trying to summarize this story to my girlfirend and I honestly couldn’t do it. Suffice it to say, I am not an expert.
Our story takes place kind of in the middle of the war of the roses. In 1461, the house of York took control of the English crown, and Edward of York became Edward IV.
Edward was pretty much everything you want in a king, he was young, handsome, an excellent military commander, and a notorious womanizer. He had a ton of siblings, but the one who matters for this story is his youngest brother: Richard III. This is the same Richard from the Shakespearean play but Shakespeare was also writing the play under the reign of queen Elizabeth (who was a Lancaster) so the play’s depiction of him as evil, deformed, and conniving is probably extremely inaccurate.
Richard had scoliosis. Apparently it was noticeable, but it wasn't severe enough to stop him from riding a horse and being a well renowned soldier. He was Edward's second-in-command and adviser. This is in a time where pretty much nobody could trust their family, but Edward and Richard seem to be the exception. Richard was loyal to Edward through the ups and downs of his reign. He was even loyal when their other brother George turned against him. There's pretty solid evidence that he was the person Edward trusted most in the world.
A few years after becoming king, Edward married Elizabeth Woodville. Together they had a dozen children, but only three of them really come into the story. The two oldest sons were Edward, who I am going to refer to as lil’ Eddy, and Richard, who I’m going to refer to as Dick. The eldest daughter was of course named Elizabeth. We'll call her the Lizard
Not only was Elizabeth Woodville extremely fertile, but she was also a shrewd politician. She spent a considerable amount of time getting appointments for her family, and by 1483, the Woodvilles were a major force in English politics.
In April 1483, Edward died. His health had apparently waned quite a bit in his later years. It’s been theorized that he died of typhoid, pneumonia, and even poison. (Just to keep the Game of Thrones comparison alive he reportedly was very inactive and lazy in his later years). When Edward died liil’ Eddy, who was 12 at the time, became king. Edward made a decision (that surprisingly few kings made) he created a will and named his brother Richard as Protector - meaning that Richard was in charge of Edward's children and of overseeing the country until lil’ Eddy was old enough to rule the country on his own.
When he took over the country, the first thing Richard did was get rid of all the councillors related to lil’ Eddy’s mother. Then he brought lil' Eddy and his brother Dick, to London, where they into the Tower of London. Now when pretty much anyone hears that someone was kept in the tower of London they probably assume it was as a prisoner. It is important to not that at this point the tower was not yet a prison and this would be the normal place for a king in waiting to be kept.
After moving lil’ Eddy and Dick to London, Richard began to prepare for lil' Eddy's coronation – but on 22 June, a clergyman claimed that he had formally betrothed Edward to another woman before Edward married Elizabeth. Betrothal was a big deal in 1400s England, and it basically meant that Edward's marriage to Elizabeth was invalid, and, therefore lil' Eddy, Dick, their sister Lizzie and all the other children were illegitimate.
After Edward’s children, Richard was next in line to the throne. So, a couple days later, an assembly of Lords and Commons declared lil' Eddy and Dick illegitimate and Richard King of England. This was later confirmed and publicized by something called 'Titulus Regius'. After he was coronated he was apparently a good king, continuing Edward's restoration of law and order after decades of war and chaos.
Over time, lil' Eddy and Dick were seen less and less, and then not at all. After a while, rumours started to spread that they had been murdered.
Two years later, in August of 1485, a guy called Henry Tudor, who was kind of related to the Lancasters (but let’s be honest everyone was related to everyone) led a rebellion against Richard. Richard was killed and Henry took over the throne.
Henry didn’t have a very strong claim, and a lot of people weren't happy about someone with a shaky claim to the throne ruling the country, but they also weren’t thrilled about more war. Henry came up with a brilliant solution to this problem. He nullified the Titulus Regius that had been declared (thereby making Edward’s kids legitimate again) and he married Lizzie. Now his claim is much more legitimate: he was married to the legitimate heir to the throne - as long as, that is, lil' Eddy and Dick were didn’t show up.
Henry also put out a Bill of Attainder against Richard - basically a document explaining why Richard sucked and wasn't fit to be king. He brought up just about everything bad that had ever been said about Richard. And yet he made absolutely no mention of what should have been the prime weapon in his arsenal: the accusation that Richard had murdered lil' Eddy – *murdered the rightful king*, which was about as big a deal as you could get – and Dick.
A lot of people try to point to Richard’s actions after his brother tied as an attempt to usurp the trone' but that doesn't make a lot of sense. What those actions do suggest very clearly is that he didn't like or trust the Woodvilles , and he was obviously concerned about their influence. Richard was worried about them basically taking over lil' Eddy, and therefore the country, so he took steps to isolate lil' Eddy from them as much as possible. Dick was brought along either to keep lil' Eddy company or because he was the heir to the throne, so Richard wanted him away from Woodville influence as well. By June of that year, Richard definitely believed the Woodvilles were plotting to kill him in order to regain their influence over lil' Eddy.
lil' Eddy and Dick were never seen again. Two people claiming to be Dick turned up along the way, and some historians believe that, while lil' Eddy was killed or died of illness in the Tower, Dick got out alive.
In 1674, the bones of two children around the right ages were found in the White Tower, but the royal family has refused permission for DNA testing - which in any case wouldn't answer the core question: what happened to the Princes in the Tower, and who happened it?
The most common theory is that they were both murdered, and the usual suspect is Richard. This is partly because of Henry's propaganda machine - almost everything we know about the princes comes from Henry's historians or from people whose knowledge was based on material from Henry's historians. Partly it's because of Shakespeare, who - writing under Elizabeth I, Henry's granddaughter, so not exactly unbiased - made Richard into one of the great villains of all time.
The main alternative suspect is Henry.
Richard was legally and solidly established as king. (There's no evidence that he had ever wanted to be king - contrary to Shakespeare's portrayal of him as wildly resentful and ambitious - but there he was.) He had nothing to fear from a challenge to his actual right to the throne; the only way lil' Eddy could have been a threat would have been as a focus for rebellion. And if Richard did want to eliminate that focus for rebellion - want it enough to murder the children of the brother to whom he had always been loyal, who had trusted him more than anyone else - he would have needed lil' Eddy and Dick to be not only dead, but seen to be dead. He would have announced that they had died 'of a fever', or whatever, and given them a fancy state funeral where everyone got a good look at the bodies, so that everyone would know they were dead and no one would get any ideas about organising a rebellion in lil' Eddy's favour. Having them just sort of vaguely melt away would have done him a lot less good. It would have been an incredibly stupid thing to do. And Richard was, beyond a doubt, very far from stupid.
Henry, on the other hand. He obviously wanted to be king very badly. In order to solidify his position on the throne, he needed Lizzie to be legitimate. Which meant lil' Eddy and Dick would be legitimate, and lil' Eddy would be the rightful king of England. If they were alive when Henry seized power, he had a big problem. And he couldn't pull the 'Oopsie, fever' routine, because nobody would have believed him, and an already stirred-up and unsettled country might well have exploded into rebellion and chaos - plus his mother-in-law-to-be Elizabeth and the powerful Woodville contingent would not have been one bit happy, and he badly needed them on side. Henry needed the boys to just vaguely melt away. Which they, conveniently, did.
An alternative theory is that they weren't murdered at all. Richard smuggled them out of the country to prevent them becoming a focus for rebellion; or lil' Eddy died of illness and Henry, when he came to power, had Dick killed; or lil' Eddy died of illness and Henry had Dick shipped off somewhere to get him out of the way.
So:
If Richard did in fact have the princes killed, in the way that was obviously going to do him the least amount of good, what the hell was he thinking?
If the princes were alive, then why didn’t he produce them, in order to quell the rumours that he had murdered them?
If the princes weren't there when Henry came to power, why did he not mention this in the Bill of Attainder?
Here's what I think. I'm not set on this theory, but it seems to make the most sense, given the facts.
For Richard to eliminate the boys as a focus of rebellion, his undoubted best option would have been to show everyone their dead bodies. We know he didn't do this. It's not a big leap to infer that he didn't have any dead bodies to produce.
So why didn’t he produce the boys alive and well, to quell the rumours that they were dead?
I think he decided it was to his advantage to let the rumours keep going for a while. They weren't doing him any actual harm, and if no one knew where the boys were or whether they were alive or dead, they would be a good bit less likely to be a focus for rebellion. I think Richard just kept the boys in the Tower and played it cool. As far as he knew, he had a long reign ahead of him. Once the dissatisfied contingent had settled down and given up the idea of rebellion, he could bring the boys back out to normal life.
I think Henry genuinely believed the rumours. Then he seized power, got to London and nearly had a heart attack when, surprise, there were the boys - not just a potential focus for rebellion but, once Titulus Regius was repealed (and repealing it was an essential part of Henry’s plan), the actual king and his heir. The fact that he didn't accuse Richard of their murders in the Bill of Attainder suggests that the boys were still alive, Henry had been taken off guard by this, and he was still deciding what the hell to do about them.
What he eventually did, I don't know. He may have had them killed outright, or had them shipped off somewhere far away, or just left them in the Tower and suggested to a retainer that it might not be a bad idea if they didn't get quite enough food and water.
In a chain of almost unbelievable and seriously cool events, Richard's remains were found a couple of years back, buried under a parking lot, and were definitively identified via DNA. You can see a forensic reconstruction of his face, based on his skull, http://www.culture24.org.uk/history-and-heritage/royal-history/art52050-head-of-richard-third-reconstructed-in-four-hour-operation-based-on-dna-test-results
Today’s story, while incredibly fascinating and mysterious, is also really sad. The phenomenon of missing children is considered by most people to be among the most tragic occurrences in our society, and what’s even worse is when a missing child is not recovered and their ultimate fate is never determined. That’s precisely what we’re going to be talking about in today’s episode. Asha Degree was nine years old when she disappeared from her home in Shelby, North Carolina on February 14, 2000. She was born August 5, 1990 to her parents, Harold and Iquilla Degree. She had an older brother named O’Bryant, and the family lived in a residential subdivision on the north side of Shelby. In all the pictures I can find of Asha, she has a huge grin, bright smiling eyes, and a different hairstyle in each picture. She looks just like every child should look: happy, healthy, and safe.The Degree home was a very sheltered one, as Asha and O’Bryant were limited in their interactions with others outside of school, church, and family. I read in a couple places that the family didn’t even own a computer. This cloistered lifestyle didn’t really bother Asha, as she was a shy, timid, compliant girl who was also described as an avid reader who was afraid of dogs.Asha disappeared in the early morning hours of the Monday after a three-day weekend from school. Fallson Elementary School—where Asha was a fourth-grader—was closed for the day on Friday, February 11 due to Presidents’ Day. Harold and Iquilla still had to work though, so O’Bryant and Asha spent the day with an aunt who lived nearby, before each going to their respective basketball practices. The next day, Saturday, both O’Bryant and Asha had basketball games. Asha’s team played first, and they lost, their first of the season, which, considering it was February and pretty late in the season, is impressive. Asha—the team’s star player—fouled out. After the game, her parents said she was visibly upset, crying with the rest of her teammates. Her parents also said that she seemed to get over it fairly quickly as she watched O’Bryant’s game.On Sunday, the family went to church, and spent much of the day with a relative who lived nearby. In the afternoon, Harold had to go to work, from which he didn’t get home until 12:30 am. That evening, Iquilla said that Asha was laughing and talking with her family, and that they thought everything was fine. Asha and O’Bryant shared a bedroom, and they went to sleep around 8 pm on Sunday night. At 9 pm, the power in the house was knocked out due to a car crash that happened nearby. The power came back on around 12:30 am when Harold got home. At that time, Harold checked in on his two children, who were sleeping peacefully in their beds. He checked in on them again before he went to sleep himself at 2:30. Again, he saw both Asha and O’Bryant, fast asleep in their beds. This would be the last time anyone in Asha’s family ever saw her.It was sometime after Harold went to bed at 2:30 when O’Bryant heard something like a bed squeaking. He assumed that this was just Asha rolling over in her sleep, and therefore didn’t bring himself all the way to full consciousness. O’Bryant went back to sleep before he even realized that his sister had gotten out of bed.Once out of bed, Asha got dressed and grabbed a backpack that she had packed sometime previously. Then she left her house, locking the door behind her with the key she usually kept in her backpack. By all accounts, it seems that Asha left her house of her own accord.Later, two different truck drivers reported that they sighted Asha walking south along Highway 18, about a mile south of her house, dressed in a white t-shirt and white pants. Highway 18 was a rural road that would have been incredibly dark at that time, having no streetlights and very little traffic at that time. Now, I haven’t been to North Carolina in twenty years, but I did drive on some rural highways in Kansas in the middle of the night a few years ago, and they are unbelievably dark and really pretty scary. It kind of feels like you’re floating in space because it’s so dark, and it’s really odd that Asha was walking alongside such a dark highway. Anyway, one of the witnesses stated that there was a “storm raging” and that there was torrential rain along with very cold temperatures, meaning that Asha’s white t-shirt and pants were completely inappropriate attire for the weather. One of the drivers who saw Asha stated that he found it “strange such a small child would be out by herself at that hour,” and so he circled around three times to try to pull up beside her to pick her up. He had to circle three times so he could find her, and when he did find her, she ran away into the nearby woods, never to be seen again.At 5:45, back at the Degree household, Asha’s mother Iquilla woke up so that she could get her kids up and ready for school. Shortly before 6:30, Iquilla went into her children’s room to wake them up, and that’s when she found that Asha was not in her bed. Iquilla checked all the other rooms of the house, as well as the family cars, and still could not find Asha. Harold suggested that Iquilla check to see if Asha was at her grandmother’s house across the street. Iquilla called, and Harold’s sister, who also lived with Asha’s grandmother, stated that Asha was not there.That’s when Iquilla and Harold realized that something very bad was happening. Iquilla called her mother, and Harold called 911. Officers responded to the Degree house around 6:40 am. They brought police dogs with them, but the dogs were unable to pick up Asha’s scent.Meanwhile, Iquilla and other family members went out into the street and began screaming Asha’s name. Police joined the search, combing through the nearby area for any sign of the girl along with family, friends, and neighbors of the Degree family. Meanwhile, members of the clergy spent the day with the family, comforting them in what was a horror they never expected they’d have to endure—particularly not on the day of their 12th wedding anniversary.During the whole first day of searching, the only piece of physical evidence that was found was a single mitten, but according to Iquilla, the mitten couldn’t have belonged to Asha because no winter clothing was missing from the house. However, local news coverage of the disappearance did turn up the witnesses who saw Asha walking along Highway 18 early that morning.The search for Asha continued over the next week. On February 17th, three days after Asha’s disappearance, some evidence of Asha was finally found. Along Highway 18 near where Asha was last seen and about a mile from her house, there was a business called Turner’s Upholstery. In a shed belonging to Turner’s Upholstery, the police found some candy wrappers, a pencil, a marker, and a Mickey Mouse-shaped hair bow. It was determined that these items belonged to Asha, and they were the only trace of her found during that initial search for her. Police searched the surrounding area further, but found no other evidence of what happened to Asha.The police searched the three mile radius surrounding Asha’s house for a week. After 9,000 man hours, however, the search was called off. In explanation, Shelby County Sheriff Dan Crawford said, “We have never really had that first good, substantial lead.” And while the physical search for Asha ended, the investigation continued. The FBI and the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation joined the investigation and added Asha to their database of missing children. Flyers had been posted all over the area, and police had some 300 leads to follow up on. Some of these leads were potential sightings of Asha, while others were about abandoned houses or wells where Asha could be hiding. Asha’s disappearance presented an interesting challenge for investigators. While it seems pretty clear that Asha did leave the house on her own, she did not fit the typical profile of a runaway. Most runaways are at least twelve years of age or older when they take off, and they are fleeing some sort of real or perceived issue, such as abuse or neglect in the home, failure to meet parents’ expectations, or some other personal crisis. However, on the surface, this did not appear to be true of Asha, as she seemed to have come from a good family and to have been a well-functioning part of the system.Regardless of why Asha had left her house, though, investigators did believe that she had left on her own. They figured that she either left with some ultimate destination in mind and gotten lost, or that she had been abducted sometime after leaving home. The only trouble was, they couldn’t seem to find any evidence that would lead them to believe one way or another.On August 3, 2001, almost a year and a half after Asha disappeared, the backpack she had taken with her was found during a construction project along Highway 18, about 26 miles north of Asha’s hometown of Shelby. This was particularly puzzling, since Asha was last seen walking a mile south of Shelby. The bag, which was easily identifiable as Asha’s because it had her name written on it, was double-wrapped in trash bags and buried underground. Inside of the backpack were pictures of her family, her basketball uniform, a pair of jeans, black tennis shoes, a long-sleeved white t-shirt, a red vest, a long-sleeved black and white shirt, and black overalls with Tweety Bird on them.Now, I had managed to stay pretty emotionally disconnected from this case until I read about the Tweety Bird overalls they found in her backpack and the Tweety Bird purse that was missing from her bedroom. While this is a fascinating mystery, I was reminded that Asha is still a person, a beautiful little girl, who was afraid of dogs and apparently loved Tweety Bird. It sucks to imagine what could have happened to such an innocent member of our society.But anyway, near where the backpack was found, police also found some animal bones and a pair of men’s khaki pants, but a further search of the area turned up no additional evidence related to Asha’s case. The FBI took the bag with them and conducted forensic analysis on it, but these results have not been publicly released due to the need to maintain the integrity of the case. Because of the discovery of the backpack, though, foul play became suspected as the reason for why Asha never resurfaced after leaving her house. Since then, no physical evidence has ever been discovered.Over the years, police would receive several tips that developed into leads, but none of them ever materialized with actual evidence, although in 2004, police did a dig at an intersection near Lawndale, South Carolina, hoping to find Asha’s remains. They found more animal bones, but nothing related to Asha’s case. The trail was cold again.While Asha’s disappearance is considered a cold case, the Degree family has worked hard to keep Asha’s case, and her memory, alive. The family has appeared on The Montel Williams Show, Oprah, and America’s Most Wanted, and they are still regularly featured in their local news. In 2008, the family established a scholarship in Asha’s name, and each year they host a walk from their house to the place along highway where Asha was last seen. There, a billboard still stands, marking the last time Asha was seen, and reminding passing motorists that the little girl—now a grown woman—is still missing. Asha’s mother, Iquilla, still believes that Asha is alive somewhere, and she fully expects her daughter to walk through the front door of their house, which is still the same house from which Asha walked away sixteen years ago.In January of 2014, a man named Donald Preston Ferguson was arrested in South Carolina for the 1990 rape and murder of seven-year-old Shalonda Poole behind an elementary school in Greensboro, North Carolina. Because Shalonda was murdered just a two hour drive from where Asha was last seen, and because, as victims, the two girls were similar in type, Ferguson became a suspect in the Asha Degree case. An article by the Gaston Gazette from February of 2016 reported that this theory had led to a dead end, but I wasn’t able to figure out why.In February of 2015, the FBI announced that investigators from the FBI, the Cleveland County Sheriff’s Office, and the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation were going to re-open the Asha Degree case and re-interview all the witnesses. A reward of $25,000 was offered for “information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person or persons responsible for her disappearance,” while a community group offered up an additional $2000 reward on top of that.On May 25, 2016, the FBI announced a new possible lead—that Asha may have been seen getting into a dark green early 1970s Lincoln Continental Mark IV, or perhaps a Ford Thunderbird from the same time period. The witness who came forward stated that they may have seen her getting into this car along Highway 18, near where she was last seen. At last report, investigators were attempting to sift through all registered vehicles of that kind in the state, with the caveat being that, after sixteen years, finding the person who owned this specific one back in 2000 could be a very difficult task.That is the most recent news we have on the disappearance of Asha Degree.Just one more thing I want to note before we jump into theories: There is a WordPress website called findingashadegree.wordpress.com that is run by a Charlotte, North Carolina woman named Wendy Hughes, who is completely unconnected to the case. From what I can tell by examining the website, Hughes is a well-intentioned woman who is doing an absolutely terrible job of helping to find Asha by completely discounting every possible theory that isn’t her own sensational—if implausible—theory. Plus, Asha’s mother Iquilla calls it a website filled with “half-truths” and doesn’t take it seriously. Therefore, since the most important person in the case besides Asha says it’s rubbish, I’ve decided not to include any information from that website. However, I’d encourage you to check it out on your own. It’s still pretty interesting, even if it is a bit pretentious and quixotic.So Willy, do you want to give your thoughts or reactions to the case before I lay out some of the main theories?The first theory is that Asha was abducted and potentially murdered. Some people think that Asha was coaxed out of her house by someone she knew, or that she left her house on her own and ran into a pedophile while out in the night. Evidence in support of this theory is that the FBI believes she got into a car with someone, and that her backpack was found buried 26 miles north of her house, even though she was last seen a mile south of her house. It’s possible that Asha was taken by her abductor to the shed belonging to Turner’s Upholstery, where the abductor could have given her candy to establish a semblance of rapport with her. There are some issues to this theory, though. For those who think she was lured out, there are issues with just who could have lured her out? As I mentioned earlier, Asha lived a very sheltered life, and the family didn’t have a computer, so the possibility of meeting someone online is out of the question. Responses to this issue would be that perhaps a teacher, a coach, or a minister could have lured her out, but to me, this still seems unlikely. After all, why Asha, of all children? Why choose the girl who comes from such a protective home? Surely some other children would have been easier targets for luring. For those who think she left of her own choosing and happened upon a bad dude, my question is, how often do pedophiles hang out along unlit rural highways in the middle of a driving rainstorm? Probably not often, and if they do, the odds of one doing it on the exact night, at the exact time, and in the exact spot that Asha was out and about are ludicrously small.The second theory is that Asha did leave home on her own—for one reason or another—and succumbed to the elements of nature. It is thought that when the driver circled around a few times and she was last seen running into the woods, it was because she became scared that the driver was trying to nab her, and so she went to hide. While in the woods, she may have gone into the shed near Turner’s Upholstery to get out of the rain, and then later continued on her way before eventually succumbing to the elements. I think this is a more likely theory than the abduction theory, but I still have a few major issues with it. First off, how come her remains weren’t found? If Asha did succumb to the elements, then her body would probably have been left somewhat out in the open and probably visible to searchers. That area was scoured for a week straight, not to mention sixteen more years of searchers or hikers or whoever, and yet, no trace of her remains were found. Plus, if she had died in the woods a mile or so south of Shelby, how on earth did her backpack end up 26 miles north of Shelby? The third theory I came across isn’t a great one, but I’ll talk about it briefly. This one basically suggests that perhaps Asha was sleepwalking. However, her bag had been meticulously packed, her front door was locked, and she made it a mile south of her house in a pretty vicious and cold rainstorm. This doesn’t sound like something a sleepwalker would be able to accomplish.The fourth theory is the theory that I personally believe is most likely, although I didn’t see much about it as a possibility in my research. I’ll describe it along with some other elements of the case that I think make it the most likely explanation for what happened to Asha.I believe Asha left her house of her own accord, not to run away for good, but to have an adventure, perhaps inspired by The Whipping Boy, the book she read with her class at school, which is a book about two boys who run away from their home and go on a whimsical adventure together. While this may sound drastic unrealistic, I can distinctly remember being a child and reading books or watching movies that inspired me to have similar adventures of my own, often disengaging from reality and common sense to experience a more feral thrill than that of late twentieth century childhood.Perhaps being conscientious of the need to know where she’s headed and how to get back home, I believe Asha purposefully walked south along Highway 18, which her mother stated was her bus route to school. I think that, when that one driver circled around a few times, Asha ran into the woods to hide. While there, she found the Turner’s Upholstery shed and decided to go inside and get out of the rain for awhile. Then, perhaps having some sort of end goal in mind, she must have eventually left the shed to keep on trekking.While continuing her hike along Highway 18, I think Asha may have either crossed the road or maybe simply wandered into it and—due to the low visibility caused by the storm and the darkness of the rural highway—was hit and killed by an oncoming car. The driver, probably horrified by what had happened and not wanting to deal with the consequences of it, disposed of both Asha’s body and her backpack. And, while her backpack has been found, her body is still out there, hidden only God and the driver who hit her know where.Like all the other theories, this one has issues. For example, how could a little girl without a raincoat make it a full mile from her house in the rain and cold? That’s a good question—I’m not sure. Maybe she was just that dedicated to reaching her end goal?Or what about the FBI’s announcement that Asha may have been seen getting into a car? I have a few thoughts on that. Just because Asha may have been seen getting into a car doesn’t mean she actually did. An even if she did, perhaps she was overwhelmed by the weather and did accept a ride from someone. This doesn’t mean that she couldn’t have been let out of the car a few miles down the road and then gotten involved in a hit-and-run.Honestly, none of these theories are perfect, and we may never know what actually happened to Asha Degree. I hope, like the Degrees believe, that she is alive somewhere and will come home eventually, but for me that’s hard to believe. I think somebody does know something, and I just hope that person comes forward—or already has come forward—to discuss with investigators what they know, so that way Asha’s case can be solved once and for all.If you know something about what happened to Asha, or you think someone you know does, please tell someone. Tell your local authorities, or the Cleveland County Sheriff’s Department, or the FBI, or the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation, or even the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. And if you know anything about any other missing children, tell someone. Don’t be a dweeb.
Today we’ve got a swashbuckling mystery that takes place on the high seas. I’m drawn to nautical tales and nautical symbolism, but the idea of being out in the middle of the open ocean is absolutely terrifying, particularly if you’re in a deep sea fishing boat or something like that. Not that I’ve ever been deep sea fishing—the prospect is too unsettling for me. If I fell out of that boat, I’d be done. I mean, I know how to swim, but I’m not very resilient, so as soon as I hit the water I’d just throw my hands up and admit defeat.
My fear of open water is made worse by stories like the one we’re going to talk about today. If you read the book or saw the movie In the Heart of the Sea, today’s story is a little bit like that, but way less triumphant and with no happy ending—just mystery. Today I’m going to tell you the story of the crew of the Sarah Joe.
The Sarah Joe was a Boston Whaler boat that was seventeen feet long, belonging to Robert Malaiakini of Hana, Hawaii. On the morning of February 11, 1979, Robert Malaiakini’s twin brother Ralph asked if he could borrow the boat to go out fishing with his four friends—Peter Hancett, Benjamin Kalana, Scott Moorman, and Patrick Woesner. The five men had been working construction on a house, and figured that fishing on such a nice day would be a great way to relax.
The men packed the Sarah Joe with beer, soda, snacks, and a cooler filled with ice for the fish they planned to catch; and at 10 am, they left the shore and went out fishing.
It was a beautiful morning—but not for long. After a few hours, the wind began to pick up and change direction, indicating a storm rolling in. When the storm arrived, it came with huge winds and torrential downpours. Apparently some residents of the area said it was the worst storm they had seen in fifty years.
As the storm approached, boats began to race back to shore. But the Sarah Joe never arrived. Peter Hanchett’s father, John, became concerned as the weather worsened and yet his son’s boat didn’t show back up. He and a friend went out to look for them, but was unsuccessful. The next day, a marine biologist named John Naughton joined the search for the Sarah Joe, and again, nothing was found. The third day, the US Coast Guard became involved with the search.
Even with the Coast Guard now involved, the search for the Sarah Joe was incredibly difficult. For one thing, no one was quite sure where exactly the Sarah Joe was when the storm rolled in, so it was unclear where to even start the search. After five days and absolutely no trace of the Sarah Joe, the Coast Guard called off the search. By that time, they had already covered 73,000 square miles, and discovered absolutely nothing.
For weeks after the disappearance, the locals searched for the missing boat and her crew, scouring the beaches for any trace whatsoever as to what had happened to them. But, unsurprisingly, nothing ever showed up. Eventually and understandably, family members began to lose hope that their loved ones would be found. After all, even if the men had somehow made it through the horrible storm, how were they supposed to survive on that boat for so long? And if they didn’t survive the storm, what were the chances that any of trace of them would drift ashore?
A year passed, and still there was absolutely no trace of the five missing men and their boat. A memorial was held for the last crew of the Sarah Joe, to honor them for whatever horror they had experienced during the storm and its aftermath.
Now, at this point, the story isn’t too out of the ordinary or mysterious. I tried to find a statistic for how many people go lost at sea each year but couldn’t find anything, but from what I could find, it seems like getting lost at sea isn’t a super rare phenomenon. It happens. People go out to sea and they don’t come back, especially when there’s a violent storm that is allegedly worse than any in decades. So you might be wondering, why are we talking about this story? What’s so mysteriYES about some guys going off in a boat, getting caught in a terrible storm, and not making it back to shore?
Well, there’s a very bizarre twist in this story, one that would seem contrived and hard to believe if the story were a work of fiction. You remember John Naughton, the marine biologist who helped Peter Hanchett’s father search for the Sarah Joe that second day? Well, in 1988, he was hired by the government of the Marshall Islands to find an appropriate site for a wildlife preserve. On September 9, 1988, he and his crew were traipsing around the Taongi Atoll, a ring-shaped island with a lagoon in the middle of it, and the only way into that lagoon is through a channel that is 66 feet wide. Taongi is little more than a sandbar that barely rises out of the ocean, and has been uninhabited by humans throughout history due to an inability to sustain human life, although it does have a relatively undisturbed flora and fauna.
Anyway, Naughton and his fellows had only been on Taongi for a half-hour when they noticed something curious poking out of the sand. When they uncovered the curious site, they found what appeared to be a Boston whaler boat, seventeen feet in length. Naughton called the US Coast Guard and identified that the boat’s registration was that of none other than the Sarah Joe, over two thousand miles away from where it was last seen in Hana, Hawaii.
A few hundred feet away from the boat, Naughton’s crew found a wooden cross in the sand, and next to the cross was a human jawbone. While Naughton didn’t think the jawbone had anything to do with the boat, he reported it anyway. The crew combed through the rest of the island to see if there were any other traces of people who could have arrived at Taongi on the Sarah Joe—alive or dead. No such traces were found.
The Coast Guard sent two forensic experts from the US Army to investigate the jawbone and the crudely-marked grave. When the shallow grave was excavated, other parts of human remains were found, but not a complete skeleton. Also found in the grave was a stack of slightly burnt, unbound papers, about three inches by three inches, and ¾ of an inch tall. Inserted between the papers were small pieces of tin foil. It is suspected that this could be part of a Chinese burial ritual involving what’s called Joss paper, which are sheets of paper which are burned as offerings to ensure good fortune for the deceased in the next life.
The bones that were found in the shallow grave were taken back to Hawaii, where dental records and DNA confirmed that the bones belonged to none other than Scott Moorman, one of the five men lost at sea aboard the Sarah Joe. Unfortunately, the experts examining the bones were unable to determine the cause or time of Scott’s death, although one source I read claimed that the bones must have been recently buried due to a lack of bleaching.
Family members of the four men whose bodies hadn’t been fiound hired a private investigator, who went to Taongi and scoured the island and lagoon it for any more trace of the other men. The private investigator found the outboard engine of the Sarah Joe as well as a few more human bones in the lagoon, although these were determined to also be Moorman’s bones. Nothing else was found on Taongi to suggest the four other men had ever been there.
Nautical experts determined that the trip from Hawaii to Taongi would have taken three months, however most people figure that the Sarah Joe couldn’t have possibly landed on Taongi until at least three years after her disappearance, because a 1982 survey of the island sanctioned by the Marshallese government had turned up absolutely no evidence of the Sarah Joe.
But then, what on earth happened to the Sarah Joe and her crew? The theories are pretty few, and each of them have their issues.
The theory put out by the private investigator who searched island postulated that, somehow, Scott Moorman had found himself the last person left, potentially tying himself in the boat to keep from falling out. The PI assumed the boat must have been led into the lagoon, since the only opening was only 66 feet across. His theory stated that Scott died in the boat, which was then found near Taongi by some Chinese fishermen. The fishermen then led the boat into the lagoon and buried Scott in the sand, leaving Joss paper to honor him. The PI also believed the reason they never reported the body was because they were fishing at Taongi illegally.
There are a couple problems with this theory, though. For instance, if Scott were actually buried by Chinese fishermen who felt compelled to leave Joss paper, why would they also mark his grave with a cross, a distinctly Christian symbol? This is a rather small issue, though, since I guess it’s possible to have done both a cross and Joss paper. The more convincing issue for me is the fact that Moorman’s bones were found both on the island and in the lagoon. I would assume that if Scott were dead in the boat, his body would still be in one piece, and therefore these fishermen would have probably buried him in one piece as well. Therefore, this theory doesn’t really explain why his bones were found in multiple places.
Another theory is that perhaps all five men did survive and rode the Sarah Joe all the way to Taongi, miraculously making its way through the 66 foot wide opening and into the lagoon. Instead of being the last to die, this theory suggests that Scott Moorman was one of, if not the first to die, and that the other four (or however many were left) buried his body in a shallow grave. Before they died, however, (which they inevitably would have in a place like Taongi), they could have been rescued and taken somewhere without coming forward to let their families know that they’re alive.
This theory has more issues than the first one. It’s a pretty big stretch to believe that more than one of the men had survived for the three years the Sarah Joe would have had to be at sea before landing on Taongi. And if these men had buried Scott, how and why would they have had Joss paper to put in the grave with his body? And then, of course, assuming they were rescued before dying on the island, why in the world would they not let people know that they’re alive and well?
My theory is somewhere in the middle, I think. I know it’s not perfect, but this case is so bizarre that I don’t think it’s possible to have a perfect theory, because something sensational must have happened for it to unfold the way it did, but it’s really hard to guess a sensational happenstance.
What I think happened is that, once the boat was lost at sea, the men who survived the storm stretched the provisions they had with them to survive as long as possible. I’m not sure how long they could survive, even if they severely rationed all of the provisions. At some point, though, some of the men must have died off, and I’m wondering if Scott Moorman might have cannibalized the others to stay alive. I don’t mean to speculate in such a way that makes Scott look bad, but I think it would certainly be understandable—if horrific—for him to eat his friends. If he didn’t eat his friends—which, I admit, he probably didn’t—he must have thrown them overboard or something, otherwise we might have found their remains along with Scott. I do think that during the at least three years of drifting at sea, Scott died in the boat. And while I typically tend to disbelieve the sensational, but I’m willing to accept that the Sarah Joe made it through the 66 feet of opening into the lagoon, and once the boat reached the shore, Scott got tossed out, perhaps with his feet and legs partially in the lagoon, and the rest of his body on the sand. As his body decomposed, this could explain why some of his bones were found in the lagoon. At some point, I think someone must have stumbled upon the decomposed body and given it a burial. I suppose it could have been Chinese fishermen and that could explain the Joss paper, but I think whoever buried the body was not supposed to be there, hence the reason the body was never reported.
There’s issues with my theory, I know, and a lot of it probably isn’t likely. But the problem with this story is that there’s really no way to explain everything in a way that seems likely, or even possible. But that’s why we’re talking about this story on mysteriYES, because it wouldn’t be worth talking about if it wasn’t a mystery. What are your thoughts on this story?
http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2016/01/the-strange-high-seas-mystery-of-the-sarah-joe/
http://archives.starbulletin.com/content/20090220_Lost_fishermen_still_cast_shadow_30_years_later_
mystery-of-the-sarah-joe.html">http://1dustytrack.blogspot.com/2013/11/unsolved-mystery-of-the-sarah-joe.html
http://unsolvedmysteries.wikia.com/wiki/The_Crew_of_the_Sara_Jo
This week we’re going all the way from Espoo, Finland back to where I’m currently living, Kansas City, Missouri (well I live in KCK but who cares). Despite living in Kansas City for the past 6 months and the surrounding area for more than 20 I hadn’t heard of this story until I found a pretty great write up from the Kansas City Public Library. (By the way if you haven’t been to the Kansas City downtown library you really should. It’s located in an old bank building downtown. The video collection is in the old vault and it’s really cool. Plus the parking garage is painted to look like a bunch of books.)
The mystery we’re going to be talking about today is called either The Mystery in Room 1046 or The Horror in Room 1046. Personally I prefer horror simply because I think it’s more descriptive of what happened.
Our story starts on the afternoon of January 2nd, 1935, when a man going by the name “Roland T. Owen” checked into the Hotel President in downtown Kansas City. (It should be noted that the Hotel President is still in business today and still has a room 1046. I went down there myself just out of curiosity). Anyway, a man checks into the Hotel President on January 2nd, 1935, claiming to be Roland T. Owen from Los Angeles. He is described as a tall, slightly chubby man with cauliflower ears and a large scar on the side of his head. He pays for one nights stay, signs the register with the name “Roland T. Owen”, and asks for a room several stories up.
He is given room 1046 and is escorted to the room by the bellboy, Randolph Propst. Randolph is a pretty key witness in this story because he interacted with Owen more than just about anyone. Apparently while being taken to his room Owen told Randolph that he had originally planned on checking into Muehlebach Hotel but decided against it when he found out that they charged $5 per night. (The Muehlebach Hotel is also still standing although it is now part of the Kansas City Downtown Marriott. I had never heard of it before but apparently it was very famous back in the day. Celebrity such as, Babe Ruth, Ernest Hemingway, Frank Sinatra, Babe Ruth, Elvis, The Beatles, and Helen Keller stayed there as well as every US president from Teddy Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan. None of this is relevant at all I just thought it was interesting).
Anyway once Randolph let Owen into the room Owen took a comb, brush, and a tube of toothpaste out of his pocket and put them in the bathroom. This was apparently the only unpacking he did. Then Randolph locked the door, gave Owen the key, and Owen left the hotel.
Later that day a maid, Mary Soptic, came by room 1046. Owen let her in but when she started to clean he put on his coat and left. As he left he told her to leave the door unlocked because he was, “expecting a friend”. The maid later told police that she remembered the curtains being closed tightly with only a single lamp to light the room. She also said that Owen was nervous or afraid of something.
I don’t know how many times this hotel had maid service because around 4pm that same day the same maid returned to room 1046 to switch out the towels. The door was apparently still unlocked and was supposedly very dim. When the maid walked into the room she saw that Owen was fully dressed and lying on the bed. The maid also saw a note on the desk that read, “Don, I will be back in fifteen minutes. Wait.”
It should be noted that it is quite possible that the maid’s account of what happened could very easily be influenced by what happened later, but I think the important details that aren’t exaggerated are, the note, the fact that a friend was coming over, and that someone named Don was there.
Anyway the next account of what Owen was doing comes from that same maid again. At 10:30 the next morning she went back to 1046. She unlocked the door with a passkey which is something that can apparently only be done if the door was locked from the outside. I think it’s a situation where the room could only be locked with a deadbolt or something from the inside and the actual lock could only be used from the outside. Anyway, she unlocks the door with the passkey (meaning someone else was there and locked the door) and was startled to see Owen sitting in the dark in a chair just staring into the darkness. Apparently once she opened the door the phone rang and Owen said, “No, Don, I don’t want to eat. I am not hungry. I just had breakfast. No I’m not hungry.” After he finished talking to Don he hung up the phone and started to talk to the maid about what she did at the hotel. He also started complaining about the high prices at the Muehlebach hotel again.
The maid went back to the 1046 one more time that day around 4pm to replace the towels. This time the door was locked from the inside and she heard two men talking. She knocked and a man who wasn’t Owen responded by saying that they didn’t need any towels and they wouldn’t let her in. The maid knew this was a lie because she had taken the only towels with her before and was returning clean ones.
Okay, so the night of January 3rd into the morning of January 4th is when the important details of this case happen and they’re all a little confusing and scattered so bear with me.
Let me start by telling you about the actual mystery which is what happened to Roland T. Owen. On the morning of January 4th, around 7 am the operator at the hotel noticed that the phone in 1046 was off the hook. After waiting a while she sends the bellboy Randolf Propst (from the beginning of the story) up to the room. When Randolph got up there he found that the room was locked and had a “do not disturb” sign hanging up. He knocked on the door and a voice told him to come in. He tried to open the door again but found it was still locked. He knocked on the door again and the voice told him to turn the lights on. He knocked a few more times without an answer when he decided Owen must be drunk. He yelled at him through the door to hang up the phone and left.
Around 8:30 am the operator noticed that the phone was still off the hook so they sent a different bellboy name Harold Pike up to the room. When he got there he found that the door was still locked. This time he used the passkey (again something that could only be done if the door had been locked from the outside). The room was very dark but when he walked in he found Owen lying naked on the bed. The stand that held the phone had been knocked over. Harold assumed Owen must be drunk so he picked up the phone and left.
He didn’t check Owen closely so we don’t really know much more until another operator noticed the phone was off the hook again just a little before 11 am. Our good friend Randolph was sent up again and apparently he drew the short straw that day because this time something actually happened. When he got to 1046 he found the door was once again locked from the outside (I’m not sure if it is possible that this is still from Harold Pike or not). He used the passkey to get into the room again and walked inside.
This time Randolph found Owen, naked, crouched on the floor, covered in blood, and holding his head in his hands. When he turned on the lights he saw that the room was covered in blood including the walls and the bathroom. Randolph ran downstairs to get the manager and the manager called the police.
When the police arrived they discovered that probably sometime between 5:00-6:00 AM someone had tied up Roland T. Owen and repeatedly stabbed him. He also sustained a fracture to his skull and had bruises on his neck suggesting he had been strangled. Owen was still semi-conscious when the police arrived and when asked what happened Owen replied that he, “fell against the bathtub”. Owen was immediately rushed to the hospital but because it was 1935, and people were still dying from diarrhea, he slipped into a coma and died shortly thereafter.
When the police searched the room they found that there wasn’t a single article of clothing in the room. They also found that the room’s soap, towels, and shampoo were all gone. The only things they found in the room were, a necktie label, an unsmoked cigarette, four bloody fingerprints on a lampshade, and a hairpin. There was also no sign of anything that could have been used to restrain Owen or anything that could have been used as a weapon against him.
The police weren’t able to find any record of a Roland T. Owen from Los Angeles meaning he had probably checked in under a fake name. Apparently when he had tried to check into the Muehlebach he used the name “Eugene K. Scott” again of Los Angeles. Again there was no record of a Eugene K. Scott so that name was most likely fake too. Owen/Scott/whoever he was apparently also reportedly checked into the St. Regis hotel in Kansas City. This time there was no record of a name but supposedly checked in with a man who was never identified.
On the afternoon of the 3rd a woman named Jean Owen (who was not related to Roland T. Owen) checked into the Hotel President and was given room 1048. She reported that she was bothered all night by at least two male voices and a female voice arguing violently in room 1046. She also reported hearing a scuffle and a “gasping” sound which, according to her, she mistook for snoring. This is important there was also a hotel employee who reported seeing a man and a women hurriedly leaving the hotel several hours before Roland was discovered. This isn’t conclusive but I would say that this indicates that there was probably more than one person involved and there was at least one man and one woman.
The body of Roland T. Owen was taken to a funeral home where it was put on public display in hopes that someone would recognize him. There are reports ranging from 60-300 people coming to see the body. Several bartenders testified that they had seen him in the company of two women on the night of January 3rd.
One of the visitors was a city worker named Robert Lane who testified that he had seen Roland T. Owen running down the street around 11 pm on January 3rd. Of course this was January in Kansas City so it was undoubtedly very cold outside so it was strange that Owen was only wearing pants and an undershirt. This was of course the height of the “everybody wore suits all the time” era. Anyway Owen apparently mistook Lane for a taxi and waved him down. Lane decided to give him a ride to a place he could catch an actual cab and let him in. During the ride Lane said something to the effect of, “you look like you’ve had a rough night” to which Owen responded, “I’ll kill that [expletive removed] tomorrow.” I honestly have no idea what that expletive is which is very frustrating because it could potentially reference gender which could be important here. Anyway Lane dropped Owen off and didn’t see him again until he identified his body.
There were several other people who recognized him from various other locations but none of the leads ended up going anywhere. After several months of investigation the police were about to bury Owen as a John Doe in an unmarked grave. Just before this could happen, however, the funeral director received a phone call from someone who offered to pay for a much better burial. The person was never identified but claimed that “Roland T. Owen” was the man’s real name and that he had been engaged to their sister. The caller also added that the police were off track and that Owen had simply “got in a jam”.
The money arrived in a couple days and Owen was buried in Memorial Park Cemetery (which is 10 minutes from my apartment). No one attended the funeral but someone had anonymously paid a florist to deliver flowers with a card that said, “Love forever--Louise”.
One more thing is that on the night of January 3rd the elevator operator reported taking a “woman who frequented the hotel with different men in different rooms” to the 10th floor. He claimed that she was meeting somebody in room 1026. He took her upstairs and after a few minutes was called back to take her down. Apparently the woman was upset because whoever she was supposed to meet wasn’t at room 1026 when she got there. About an hour later the woman returned to the elevator with a man. They were taken up to the 9th floor. Around 4 am the woman was taken back downstairs and the man followed her about 15 minutes later. It’s not known if this is connected but a prostitute getting the room number wrong could explain why he was so upset when he got picked up.
The case drifted into obscurity and was never solved but the victim was possibly identified. In late 1936 a woman named Eleanor Ogletree read a story about the murder. She claimed that the description of Owen matched that of her missing brother Artemus. He had apparently left his hometown of Birmingham, Alabama in 1934 to, “see the country”. When Eleanor was shown a picture of the victim she immediately identified him as her brother, but this really can’t be proven (if true Artemus was only 17). However, Artemus mother, Ruby, received three typed letters (Artemus couldn’t type) several months after “Owen” died. The last letter said Artemus was, “sailing for Europe”. Several months after this last letter (so quite a while after “Owen’s” death) the Ogletree’s received a call from a man who identified himself as, “Jordan”. Jordan said that Artemus had saved his life in Cairo and that he had settled down with a wealthy egyptian woman.
While researching this mystery I definitely felt like the more I learned, the more questions I had. Who really was Roland T. Owen? Why was he using false names? Who was Don? Who was Louise? Who was Jordan? Why was he just sitting in the dark? Why didn’t he have any luggage? Why did the killer take his clothes? Why did Owen insist it was an accident? Who paid for his funeral? Who wrote those letters to Mrs. Ogletree? Who murdered Roland T. Owen and why? I have some theories for a handful of questions, but for the big ones I have absolutely no idea.
That’s just about it for this story. The only other detail is that in 2003 or 2004 someone from out of state called the Kansas City Public Library claiming to be in the process of itemizing the estate of a deceased family member. While going through their belongings they claim to have found a box filled with newspaper clippings about the event as well as “something” that was mentioned in the police reports. The anonymous person never elaborated and has never come forward.
Most of my information came from a report from Dr. John Arthur Horner (the man who received the phone call at the KC public library). It can be found at the library’s website and I would highly recommend it to anyone who wants to know more about the case.
The Lake Bodom murders (Finnish: Bodominjärven murhat, Swedish: Bodommorden) were a multiple homicide that took place in Finland in 1960. Lake Bodom is a lake by the city of Espoo, about 22 kilometres west of the country's capital, Helsinki. In the early hours of June 5, 1960, four teenagers were camping on the shores of Lake Bodom.[1] Between 4AM and 6AM, an unknown person or persons murdered three of them with a knife and blunt instrument wounding the fourth. The sole survivor, Nils Wilhelm Gustafsson, led an otherwise normal life until 2004, when he became a suspect and was subsequently charged. In October 2005, a district court found Gustafsson not guilty of all charges against him.
The murders have proven to be a popular subject in the Finnish media and commonly return to the headlines whenever new information or theories surface, but the case is still unsolved.
I loooove this podcast, because these guys are genuine down home dudes that you feel like you're friends with after one episode. They present the crimes very well and of course added in is their own corky sense of humor that I love. You end up feeling as if you're sitting right there with them at the table discussing crimes and solving myseries as old buddies. Love you guys!! Keep up the awesome work!!