Death can be painful enough to deal with on its own, but a murder can compound the suffering for the family. For some, years and years without answers guarantees that the wounds caused by this hardship never heal.

Sometimes, detective work is a waiting game—for breakthroughs in technology or that one witness to come forward who can crack the case wide open. Unfortunately for these 10 people, life was cut short and their families were left with questions that went unanswered for years.

10 Sheila And Katherine Lyon

The year was 1975. Sheila and Katherine Lyon were supposed to meet friends for a day of fun in a shopping mall in Maryland. But they disappeared and were never seen alive by their loved ones again.

After over 40 years without answers, a pair of cold case detectives decided to look at the investigation with fresh eyes. They examined the case as if it had just been called in and pored over case records. One account stood out from a man named Lloyd Welch. He had claimed to have seen the girls when they were being abducted. After failing a polygraph, he was deemed to be an unreliable witness.

The detectives decided to look into what Welch had been doing for the last 40 years and discovered that he had accrued a lengthy criminal record, mostly for sex crimes against children. So the detectives decided to reinterview him.

After eight hours of interrogation, Welch’s story changed multiple times. He did not admit to killing the girls. Instead, he said that he had participated in the abduction and had been a witness to the dismemberment of one girl. Welch also stated that the bodies of both sisters had been taken to the land owned by his family in Bedford County and burned.^[1]

He blamed the killings on his father and an uncle, but there was never any evidence to substantiate those claims. Lloyd Welch pleaded guilty to the deaths of the Lyon sisters and two other sex crimes involving children.

9 Edmund Schreiber

In 1983, 92-year-old Edmund Schreiber was living alone in his home in Buffalo. During World War I, Edmund had been shot in both thighs and received a Purple Heart for his service. In an ideal world, he would have been able to live out his twilight years peacefully. But unfortunately, that’s not what happened.

A young woman named Saundra Adams lived on his street and ran errands for the elderly man. At 17, she and an accomplice broke into Schreiber’s home. They tied him up, and Adams strangled him with several of his neckties. They robbed him and left his body on his bed where he was discovered later by friends.^[2]

It took more than 30 years for Adams to be brought to justice. By then, her accomplice was dead. Meanwhile, Adams was working as a librarian and had two kids of her own. In 2016, DNA evidence from Schreiber’s murder was tied to Adams. She pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of first-degree manslaughter and was sentenced to 7–21 years in prison.

8 Melanie Road

In 1984, Melanie Road was just 17 when she was found stabbed to death one early morning in Bath, Somerset. At the time, detectives had no real leads and forensics was not as solid as it is today. Nonetheless, they took swabs of every drop of blood as well as the semen that was found inside Melanie’s body and on her clothes.

Decades passed, but the detectives never gave up. In the 1990s, the DNA profile of the killer was extracted from semen samples and put into the national DNA database. There was no match at the time.

However, in 2014, a woman who had gotten into a domestic dispute with her partner had her DNA put into the system. In 2015, the familial DNA testing for Melanie’s murder was rerun and it was a match to the woman. Police looked at the woman’s father, Christopher Hampton, and he agreed to have his mouth swabbed.

His DNA was a match. Hampton was arrested, and in 2016, he was sentenced to life in prison.^[3]

7 Kylie Maybury

A young Australian girl named Kylie Maybury had been sent out by her mother to buy sugar, but she never returned home. The six-year-old’s body was discovered the next day abandoned in a gutter. She had been raped and murdered.

Thirty-three years passed, and suspects were investigated. But none panned out. Until the police decided to reinterview a man named Gregory Keith Davies. He was a suspect early in the case, but no evidence was found to prove his guilt.

During his reinterview, however, he agreed to have a DNA sample taken. His DNA was a match for that found on Kylie’s body. Davies was charged and later pleaded guilty.^[4]

6 Jacob Wetterling

Jacob Wetterling was kidnapped by a masked gunman while riding bikes with his brother and a friend in October 1989. Decades passed with no trace of Jacob or any clue about what had happened to him—until the 25th anniversary of Jacob’s abduction. Then police decided to further investigate an early suspect named Danny Heinrich.

Heinrich had been questioned previously in connection with Jacob’s disappearance, but they could never pin anything on him. Luckily, that changed with updates in forensic technology. Police matched sweat samples from a boy who was sexually assaulted to Heinrich. Police then used this evidence to get a search warrant for Heinrich’s home, where child pornography was found.^[5]

Danny Heinrich took a plea bargain. If he showed where Jacob’s remains were and confessed his crimes, Heinrich would only be charged for possession of child porn. The Wetterling family was consulted by the police. The family agreed to the plea deal so that they would finally know what had happened to their son. Danny Heinrich was sentenced to 20 years.

5 Marlene Warren

Truly one of the most bizarre cold cases was the death of Marlene Warren. She opened her door one day in 1990 to see a clown holding several balloons and a bundle of flowers. As Marlene went to take the gifts, she was shot in the face.

Twenty-seven years passed, and the main suspect seemed to be Marlene’s husband, Michael Warren. But in a Shyamalan-esque twist, Michael Warren’s current wife, Sheila Keen Warren, was arrested.

It was discovered early in the investigation that Sheila and Michael were having an affair.^[6] Over the years, police compiled circumstantial evidence against her. But they never had enough to charge her until new technology allowed them to retest DNA from the crime scene. Sheila Keen Warren was arrested and charged with first-degree murder.

4 Lisa Ziegert

Lisa Ziegert was working as a teacher’s aide during the day and at a gift shop at night in spring 1992. One night, Lisa seemingly vanished from the gift shop. When her body was found days later, it was determined that she had been raped and stabbed to death.

In the days leading up to her disappearance, Lisa had told her friends and family that she felt like she was being watched. The community of Springfield, Massachusetts, was devastated by her loss.

After 25 years, police had gone through multiple means of investigating. But none had been fruitful until a breakthrough in forensics technology allowed a male DNA profile to be built using evidence from the crime scene. Using this tech, they were able to predict what the perpetrator might look like and compare that to the suspects.

One man stood out: Gary E. Schara. In late 2017, he was arrested in connection with Lisa Ziegert’s killing.^[7]

3 Karen Sue Klaas

After more than 40 years, the Klaas family can finally put to bed the mystery of what happened to Karen Sue Klaas in 1976. After dropping her son off at school, Karen was attacked, tied up, raped, and strangled nearly to death. When Karen was discovered, she was barely clinging to life. After five days in a coma, she finally passed away.

Kenneth Eugene Troyer was the initial suspect and considered the most likely perpetrator as he was believed to have committed two other sexual assaults in Karen’s neighborhood. Troyer was killed when the Santa Ana police shot him to death while he was on the run after a prison break.

It looked as though Karen’s loved ones would never have a satisfying answer about what had happened to her. Then came the breakthrough of testing familial DNA.^[8]

One of Troyer’s relatives was incarcerated, and that person’s DNA profile was put into the police database. It was a partial match to the DNA found on Karen’s body. Now her family can finally close the book on one of the most tragic moments in their lives.

2 Angela Kleinsorge

On February 29, 1992, the daughter of Angela Kleinsorge knew something was amiss when her mother didn’t answer the phone for their daily phone call. Concerned, Hedy Kleinsorge drove to her mom’s house and discovered a grisly scene. The 84-year-old was on the floor of her bedroom. She had been sexually assaulted and stabbed multiple times in the neck.

It took 25 years for police to figure out who did this to Angela. Using the newly implemented forensics tool of familial DNA testing, they found a partial match in a convict. The police investigated the brothers of the convict. DNA was taken from one, and he was innocent.^[9]

The other brother had been dead for years. They had the coroner send samples, and the DNA was tested. It was a match for the DNA found on Angela Kleinsorge’s body. The man, Jeffrey Falls, had been a neighbor of Angela’s who lived across the street from her. He had died in a motorcycle accident in 2006.

1 Freddie Farah

Freddie Farah was a father of four and worked at a grocery store that he owned. On May 22, 1974, a man walked into the store, brought some items over to the counter for checkout, pulled a gun, and demanded money. Freddie was startled and swiped at the gun. The gunman shot Freddie, causing the wounds from which he would later die.

After 43 years, the case was finally solved with the arrest of Johnie Lewis Miller. He had been working as a street performer in New Orleans for the previous 20 years. He was just 17 years old when he murdered Freddie Farah.

Miller had left fingerprints on the counter. Due to improvements in the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, he was positively identified as the killer and arrested.^[10]

Ancient Greece is often seen as the birthplace of Western civilization. It’s also credited with founding some of the earliest institutions devoted to acquiring knowledge, and if that wasn’t enough, Athens is commonly regarded as the birthplace of democracy.

But the length of time between this era and the modern world means that not everything about this period of antiquity is actually known to us today. Records are lost, stories become embellished, and so on. Here are ten mysteries about ancient Greece which still remain unresolved.

10 The Secrets Of The Eleusinian Mysteries

One of the most intriguing mysteries of ancient Greece concerns a secret organization whose name also helped to define the concept of “mystery” as we understand it today.^[1] The Eleusinian Mysteries were a religious cult which revolved around a series of clandestine rituals and ceremonies, many of which still remain unknown today. (Note that the term “Eleusinian Mysteries” is also used to refer to the rituals themselves.)

One of the reasons for our current lack of knowledge is that the Mysteries were designed to be kept secret, and followers were forbidden to divulge the details of the cult’s inner workings. It has even been claimed that anyone who did reveal the truth risked being killed. The limited number of sources discussing the nature of the rites involved makes it even more unlikely that the whole story behind this cult will ever be known in its entirety.

9 The Life Of Thespis

Thespis is the name attributed to the sixth-century-BC Athenian who was believed to have been the first individual to perform a role as if he were another person and is therefore regarded by some as being the world’s first actor. The impact of this figure in cultural history is such that the term “thespian” was derived from his name as a way to refer to actors. Yet relatively little is known for certain about him, his life, and his career. Was Thespis his real name? Was he really from Athens? And most importantly, did he really exist in the first place?

It has been noted that all the sources which refer to him, including an account by the poet Horace, were written at a much later point in time than he was said to have performed, and there are no contemporary accounts of the person in question.^[2] It has therefore been suggested that Thespis himself could be considered a myth and more of a symbol of the beginning of acting in the Greek theatrical tradition, rather than a specific person who could be definitively identified.

8 The Art And Architecture Of The Parthenon

The Parthenon in Athens is one of the most iconic images of ancient Greece. Its endurance over the past 2,500 years is all the more remarkable, given that it was built in an unusually short period of time, and seemingly without a detailed construction plan.^[3] Mystery also surrounds other aspects of its architecture and art, with much remaining undetermined about both the creation and purpose of certain details of the building.

There has been ongoing debate over the content of the frieze which decorates the interior of the Parthenon and what the figures within the frieze are intended to convey: One of the possibilities raised has been that they may have been intended as representations of the people who helped to build it. The temple also contains two interior chambers, the smaller of which has never had its purpose identified.

7 The Creators Of The Two Constitutions Of The Athenians

The Constitution of the Athenians is a title attributed to two different documents of ancient Greece, one originally associated with the philosopher Xenophon, the other with Aristotle. However, in both cases, the authorship has been disputed and continues to be debated to this day. While the older of the two texts was originally credited to Xenophon, it is now regarded as not actually his own work, partly due to the likely date of its composition having predated the mature years of his writing career.^[4] Its author is now often described as “Pseudo-Xenophon,” but the identity of the person who actually wrote the work has never been conclusively established.

The later document was regarded by most as having been written by Aristotle, but there has been some disagreement on this, due to the fact that it is very different in style to his other works. However, this has been countered by the suggestion that such differences could be attributed to the fact that the constitution was a form of writing very different from the rest of his accomplishments.

6 The Work Of Pythagoras

The mathematician Pythagoras is famous today for his association with the theory that the square of the longest side of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the remaining two shorter sides. One of the most famous of all mathematical theorems, it has become known as the Pythagorean Theorem, yet the life and work of the man so closely associated with it is actually much more unclear.

This is partly due to the fact that the philosophical school he worked within operated under very secretive conditions, and it is therefore unclear in some cases which work can be attributed to him and which may have been done by another member of the organization.^[5] It has also been proven that the most famous theory associated with him was already known in ancient Babylon and that it cannot be considered to be his original discovery.

5 The Destruction Of The Statue Of Zeus

The Statue of Zeus was one of the legendary Seven Wonders of the World, a list compiled by notable scholars during antiquity of the most impressive structures created by human beings in ancient times. Of the seven wonders, only the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt survives today, the six others having been lost over the course of time. The Statue of Zeus was created by Phidias, one of the most renowned sculptors of ancient Greece, and its eventual destruction remains one of the most mysterious losses of the wonders.

The statue was housed within the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, which was eventually destroyed by fire, and it is often assumed that the statue was lost in this blaze, but it has also been argued that the statue may have been removed from the temple at an earlier stage and taken to the city of Constantinople, known today as Istanbul, where it may have been lost in a fire there instead.^[6]

4 Aristotle’s Lost Theory Of Comedy

Aristotle’s Poetics is a major text in the history of literary criticism, the earliest known work to analyze the art of writing itself. However, one part of this key work of ancient Greek literature seems likely to remain a mystery: the legend of the existence of a second book, which was said to have focused on Aristotle’s theory of comedy, accompanying the theory of tragedy discussed in the first book of the Poetics.

There has been debate as to whether or not this is a genuine lost work, as, despite being mentioned in a list of Aristotle’s works in an early biography, there is little other evidence for its existence.^[7] Nevertheless, the possibility of such a lost text has been an enduring source of speculation and even plays a role in Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose, in which the supposed rediscovery of this book becomes an important plot point.

3 The Labyrinth Which Inspired The Minotaur Myth

One of the most famous Greek myths centers on the story of the Minotaur, the terrifying individual who was half a bull and half a human and was kept imprisoned within a labyrinthine maze by King Minos. This labyrinth has subsequently been speculated as a structure that may have genuinely existed and served as the inspiration for the myth in question.

The palace at the ancient city of Knossos, located on the Greek island of Crete, has sometimes been argued as a location for the labyrinth that may have inspired this myth, although excavations at the site have not yet revealed a structure which matches the idea. However, recent research has also proposed a stone quarry near the town of Gortyn, 32 kilometers (20 mi) away from Knossos, as an alternative possible location.^[8] The debate continues, and a definitive location remains to be identified.

2 Plato’s Unfinished Trilogy

The myth of Atlantis originated in the work of Plato, where it is mentioned in his dialogues, Timaeus and Critias, as an example of a civilization in counterpoint to that of Athens, one which eventually falls into ruin and sinks beneath the waves of the Atlantic. But the mystery remains why these works, which were projected to form a trilogy upon completion, were ultimately abandoned.

Plato did not complete the Critias, the second dialogue, and no record can be found of him having embarked upon the intended third work, which was to have been entitled Hermocrates.^[9] It remains unknown why Plato did not complete this intended trilogy. The result of this is that the work which generated so much speculation on the subject of Atlantis has now become a source of mystery in its own right, due to the fact that the philosopher himself never completed it, without any definitive answer as to why he did not.

1 The Authorship Of Homer’s Poems

Homer, the poet credited as the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, is believed to be the earliest known Greek author. But he remains a mysterious figure in many respects, including the question of whether or not he was the sole author of either of the works most closely associated with him. It has been suggested that Homer may not have been the creator of both the Iliad and the Odyssey, due to stylistic differences between the two works, which some believe indicate different authors.

It has also been argued that, even if Homer did originate both works in some form himself, it is still appropriate to view the poems as collective endeavors, due to the fact that they would have been initially composed through speech rather than writing and communicated through a number of subsequent speakers, with likely elaborations during this process.^[10]

Jane Alexander is a freelance writer.

There is just something about an unsolved mystery, isn’t there? Sure, it’s great when you eventually find out why something happened the way it did. Still, man, the idea of an event taking place without an immediate plausible explanation just sends those debating skills into overdrive and makes the conspiracy theories pile up. Below are just some examples of mysteries that will probably be debated for a long time to come.

10 The Mummy That Wasn’t

Back in 2000, Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan battled for ownership of what they believed to be the mummified remains of a 2,600-year-old Persian princess. Police found the mummy during a raid of a Baluchistan chieftain home in Kharan, Pakistan and was to be sold on the black market for millions. When she was discovered, the mummy’s head was adorned with a golden crown, and there were gold ornaments in her coffin, which truly made it seem that an archaeological wonder had been found. However, not everyone was convinced that the mummy was the real deal. Professor Ahmad Dani, director of the Institute of Asian Civilizations in Islamabad, claimed to have known from the beginning that the mummy was not all it was cracked up to be.^[1]

He was not wrong. After a detailed study of the remains, it was soon discovered that the body was not 2,600 years old and not a Persian princess. It was revealed that the coffin she rested in was not as old as her remains were believed to be and that the mat she was laid on was possibly a mere five years old. The Persian mummy was now believed to be the body of a 21-year-old female murder victim—her neck, jaw, and back broken. Finally, it was confirmed, with the help of radiocarbon testing, that the victim had died in 1996. The “mummy” was buried in 2005 without the victim ever being identified.

9 Dutch Students’ Deaths

On 1 April 2014, two Dutch students, Lisanne Froon and Kris Kremers, waved goodbye to the family hosting them during their long-planned trip to Panama and walked off with the family dog for a hike along the Baru volcano. They posted on Facebook that they were going to walk around Boquete before tackling the hiking trail.

That evening, the host family noticed the dog traipsing back into the house, but there was no sign of the two young women. Assuming they may have decided to stay overnight on the trail, the family waited until morning. However, when they discovered that Kris and Lisanne never showed up for their private walking tour of Boquete, the family immediately contacted the police. Kris and Lisanne’s parents arrived in Panama five days later and waited anxiously for news of their children as police and detectives scoured the forest for ten days.^[2]

It took 10 weeks for a break in the case. A local woman turned up at the police station with a blue backpack she had found on a riverbank in the Boco del Toros region. Inside the backpack were Lisanne’s passport, sunglasses, two pairs of bras, a water bottle, and some cash. Police also found a camera and both girls’ cell phones in the backpack. When they scrolled through the phones, they found that there had been 77 attempts to call the police and emergency services in both Panama and the Netherlands. Due to the lack of signal in the area, these calls did not go through. On one of the phones, they found several photos of the trail and surrounding forest. There were also photos taken on 8 April of the girls’ belongings scattered over some rocks and a disturbing photo of the back of Kris’ head showing blood streaming from her temple.

Two months later, bones were found in the forest. DNA tests confirmed that the bones belonged to the two missing girls. Later in 2014, they were publicly declared dead of a hiking accident. Police never found out how they died or if someone was responsible for their deaths.

8 Leatherman

Historian Dan DeLuca spent most of his life researching a deceased homeless man’s life. Ever since he stumbled upon his grave in the Sparta Cemetery in Ossining, New York, DeLuca had been fascinated with the man known as Leatherman. He learned that the inscription on Leatherman’s gravestone incorrectly referred to the deceased as Jules Bourglay of Lyons, France. He also knew that Leatherman had been a source of mystery for people in Westchester County and western Connecticut since the 1850s.^[3]

Leatherman was said to have had a strange ritual that contributed to much of the speculation surrounding him. Once a month, he would walk 360 miles between the Hudson and Connecticut rivers. Being homeless, he was dressed very modestly in patchwork garments and wooden shoes and very rarely spoke to anyone. He slept in the forest and sometimes in caves, but he would never stay inside a building for more than a couple of minutes. He often asked for food as he passed by a farmhouse, and the occupants were amazed at his appetite. He could eat a staggering amount while remaining standing at the front door.

The press began following Leatherman’s movements and chronicled his travels for over 30 years. In modern times the research into this mysterious man continues. Pearl Jam got caught up in the mystery and wrote a song about him. Leatherman’s real name and age at that time remain unknown, as does his place of birth and where he grew up.

7 Nina Craigmiles’s Blood-Stained Crypt

Nina Craigmiles was born to Myra Adelia Thompson Craigmiles and John Henderson Craigmiles on August 5, 1864. As she grew, Nina learned to love riding in a horse-drawn buggy. During one such outing with her grandfather on St. Luke’s Day in 1871, the buggy they were riding in was hit full-on by an oncoming train as they were crossing the railroad tracks. Seven-year-old Nina was killed on impact.

While her family grieved, Nina’s father changed his will to include a clause that stated he wished to be buried inside the mausoleum where Nina’s ashes rested. John Craigmiles also ensured that an Episcopal church was built in Nina’s memory, which included the marble mausoleum in the churchyard to keep Nina’s ashes in. The church was named St. Luke’s Memorial Episcopal Church and was consecrated in 1872.^[4]

John died in 1899 and was buried, as requested, inside Nina’s mausoleum. Sometime later, red stains started appearing on the outside of the mausoleum. Efforts to clean the stains failed, and when the marble blocks were replaced, the stains simply reappeared. In modern times, sightings have been reported of a little ghost girl in 1800s clothing, playing outside the mausoleum. The red stains, whom many believe to be blood, are still visible on the Craigmiles Mausoleum in Cleveland and tourists love relating the story. However, the cause of the stains remains a mystery.

6 The Circleville Letters

In 1976, several Circleville, Ohio residents began receiving strange letters detailing personal information about their lives. The letters contained threats of violence and personal information that, in some cases, only the recipient was aware of. Many of these letters were hatefully written with vulgarisms and lewd artwork. None of the Circleville letters had any return address, and all appeared to come from somewhere within Columbus. Every single letter was written in the same distinct style—block letters—and might have been an attempt to cover up the author’s personal handwriting.

Bus driver Mary Gillispie was accused of a supposedly non-existent affair with the superintendent of schools. The writer told Mary that they had been observing her house and knew she had children. It was postmarked in Columbus, Ohio, but had no return address. Within eight days, Mary received a similar letter. She kept the letters to herself, until her husband, Ron, received one as well. The letter stated that if Ron did not stop his wife’s affair, his life would be in danger. The couple believed that the letter writer was Ron’s brother-in-law, Paul Freshour, and the letters stopped after they sent accusatory letters to Freshour—at least for a time.

Ron Gillispie died a few weeks later in a suspicious car accident as the letters continued, now being sent to more residents ordering a more thorough investigation into the crash. After a botched attempt on Mary Gillispie’’s life six years later, police arrested Freshour for attempted murder. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison as his gun was used in the boob-trap device meant to kill Mary. While in prison, the letters continued, still postmarked from Columbus, even though Freshour was nowhere near there, nor were any letters sent from the prison. The writer of the letters is still unknown, although there have not been any letters received since 1994.

While Unsolved Mysteries was filming this story, they received a postcard, apparently from the letter writer. It read “Forget Circleville Ohio: Do Nothing to Hurt Sheriff Radcliff: If You Come to Ohio You El Sickos Will Pay: The Circleville Writer.”^[5]

5 Mysterious Vatican Disappearance

When 15-year-old Emanuela Orlandi finished her second year of high school in Rome in 1983, she chose to continue with flute lessons at the Tommaso Ludovico da Victoria School. On 22 June 1983, Emanuela asked her brother, Pietro, to accompany her on the bus to the music school, but he had prior commitments. She arrived late to class that day and later telephoned her sister to inform her that she had been given a job opportunity to become a representative of Avon Cosmetics. The rep who had presented her with the opportunity spoke to her before her music lesson, causing Emanuela to run late. Later that day, Emanuela told a friend of hers about the job, before getting into a BMW and riding off.^[6] Emanuela Orlandi was never seen again.

Many false leads materialized over the years, as did an abundance of theories on what may have happened to the young girl. Some believe that a Bulgarian neo-fascist youth group abducted her. Others claim that she is living in a Muslim community in Paris. Even more outrageous theories include that her kidnapping was part of a plot to kill St. John Paul II or could even be linked to the seedy underbelly of Rome.

In 2017, an Italian journalist claimed to have stolen a document from the Vatican which suggested that the Holy See arranged Emanuela’s disappearance. The Vatican immediately claimed, “fake news.”

In July 2019, the Vatican excavated the tombs of two 19th century German princesses in the Pontifical Teutonic College cemetery after an anonymous tip was received that Emanuela’s remains were buried inside them. Instead, they found completely empty tombs, meaning the remains of the princesses are in question as well. During these excavations, two sets of bones were found under a stone slab and were inspected and determined to be too old to be the remains of Emanuela Orlandi. The Vatican closed its investigation, but the mystery still remains—what happened to Emanuela?

4 Kathy Hobbs Premonition

When Katherine Marie Hobbs was eight years old, her parents divorced. As if this wasn’t bad enough for the young girl, her best friend died while they were both in middle school. Soon after, Katherine or Kathy as her family called her, started having disturbing premonitions that she would not live past 16 years of age.^[7]

Kathy and her sister Theresa moved to a Las Vegas suburb with their mother where Kathy made new friends and eventually woke up on her sixteenth birthday on 20 April 1987 feeling greatly relieved that nothing terrible had happened to her. As the days passed after her birthday, Kathy grew confident that her premonitions were nothing more than a figment of her imagination.

On July 23, 1987, Kathy left her house to buy a novel at the local supermarket a block and a half away. Her mom kissed her goodbye in case she fell asleep before Kathy returned.

The next morning, Kathy’s mom knocked on her bedroom door only to discover it was empty. Kathy never made it back home. Her mother filed a missing person’s report immediately. Nine days later, a hiker found Kathy’s body near Lake Mead. When police were called, they discovered rocks at the murder scene with Kathy’s blood on them, indicating that the teenager had been hit in the head repeatedly. The news devastated Kathy’s mother and sister. Later, while cleaning out her bedroom, they found letters written by Kathy to each family member. The letters were dated a month before Kathy’s sixteenth birthday. In them, she wrote that she loved them dearly and that they shouldn’t be upset or dwell over her death.

Kathy Hobbs’ murder remains unsolved, even though a serial killer named Michael Lee Lockhart was a prime suspect and eventually executed for another murder.

3 Titanic Poisoning

On the last day of filming the movie, Titanic, in Nova Scotia, James Cameron suddenly felt inexplicably ill and disoriented. When he started vomiting, he realized something was very wrong. Once he got back to the set, he found he wasn’t the only one feeling strange as some of the cast and crew were vomiting or crying and some even laughing.

At Dartmouth General Hospital, things took an even weirder turn when a crew member stabbed Cameron in the face with a pen. At the same time, others started stealing unoccupied wheelchairs and wheeling themselves up and down the hospital corridors. Cameron, who was bleeding from the pen stab wound, couldn’t stop laughing.

Once the hospital staff ruled out food poisoning, they realized that chowder consumed by more than 60 people on set had been laced with PCP.^[8]

Theories abounded, one of which had it that a dismissed crew member tried to take revenge by poisoning the food. Officially the mystery remains long after the case was closed in 1999 due to a lack of suspects.

2 Miniature Coffins

In 1836 a group of boys set off for Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh, Scotland to hunt rabbits. Intrigued by a concealed cave, the boys decided to peek inside. After pulling away the stones covering the entrance, they stumbled upon 17 miniature coffins, each with a wooden doll inside. The dolls had big eyes and were dressed in cotton clothing.^[9]

When the discovery was reported in the Scotsman newspaper, the article mentioned that the coffins were decorated with funeral trappings. It seemed that they had been placed inside the cave recently.

As is always the case with unexplained discoveries, multiple theories were presented to try and explain the coffins. Some people thought it might be children playing a trick, while others mused that witches might have used the coffins for rituals. Yet another theory said that the coffins may have been part of an ancient custom to give sailors who died at sea a Christian burial. A dark theory suggested that the coffins may have been set up in tribute of killers William Burke and William Hare who murdered 17 people.

The true purpose of the coffins and who placed them in the cave remains a mystery.

1 The Handless Monk

In 2017, archaeologists made the startling discovery of a medieval dolphin skeleton on an islet off the coast of Guernsey. The following year, they made an even more baffling discovery: that of a male skeleton with no hands. Following an investigation, it was found that the skeleton of the man, believed to be a monk, was buried at a much later time than the dolphin, and the two incidents were not related.^[10]

Archaeologists initially believed the islet, Chapelle Dom Hue, used to be much larger and home to a few Christian monks during the Middle Ages. One of the theories surrounding the mystery of the skeleton has it that the monk may have suffered from leprosy and had his hands cut off because of it. However, some experts feel this is unlikely and don’t believe that the man was a monk. The details on the skeleton’s clothing indicate the body may have been buried in the 17th century, long after monks would have inhabited the islet.

The skeleton discovery remains shrouded in mystery for the time being, as experts are still in the process of examining the remains and investigating a different theory which states that the man may have been a sailor who died at sea and was thrown overboard before washing up on the islet.

Mysteries are woven into the fabric of civilizations around the world. The creepy ones are spoken about in hushed tones. The funny ones are laughed over around the dinner table. Lengthy articles are written about them and heated discussions arise because of them. And perhaps the best of all mysteries are the historic ones that remain unsolved. Those that occurred when built-in cameras in smart phones and instant posts on social media were still years, if not decades, in the making…

SEE ALSO: 10 Mysteries Resolved By Unbelievable Surprise Twists.

8 The Houston gargoyle

In 1986, NASA employee Frank Shaw, left his office late one evening and walked briskly to his car. He had worked a long shift and was anxious to get home. But all thoughts of home flew from his mind when he looked up at the NASA buildings and saw a black figure perching on one of its corners. Afterwards Shaw recalled the figure resembling a humanoid creature with a something like a cape wrapped over its shoulders. In his shocked state, Shaw thought it may have been a gargoyle. He also claimed to have seen two massive wings protruding from the its sides.^[1]

Eventually arriving home, Shaw told his family what he had seen and that the ‘gargoyle’ had stared directly at him. When the winged creature took flight, Shaw had run to his vehicle and drove off in terror.

Naturally most were sceptic of Shaw’s tale, but his family rallied behind him. However, they did warn him to keep his sighting a secret from his bosses so as to not be labelled ‘insane’. As time went by, Shaw kept pondering over what he had seen and eventually built up enough courage to tell his supervisor, despite his family’s advice. To Shaw’s great surprise, his supervisor proceeded to tell him that other employees had experienced similar sightings. A file on the creature had also been opened after the corpses of two resident NASA German Shepherds were found mutilated in the same location the ‘gargoyle’ had been spotted.

Over the years, no new sightings of the creature have made the headlines. What exactly did Frank Shaw and those before him see at the NASA buildings? That remains a mystery.

7 The Kaimanawa Wall

In the Kaimanawa State Forest stands a mysterious structure known simply as the Kaimanawa Wall. Alternative historian, Barry Brailsford, caused an uproar in 1996 when he claimed the wall pre-dates Maori colonization by around 1200 years. He also claimed the wall was man-made, because it consists of ignimbrite and its sculpted surfaces seem to have been shaped by human hands. Had these claims been accepted as truth, it would have meant serious financial and political implications for Maori tribes in New Zealand.^[2]

If the wall is indeed as old as 2000 years, an old claim from the Waitaha would be proved as true. The Waitaha have long claimed that their people settled in NZ before the Maori tribes got there. This theory goes directly against the long-standing belief that archaeological evidence shows the first Maori people arrived between 1250 and 1300 followed by more. Local tribes in the Kaimanawa region believe that the wall is no more than a natural formation eroded by weather over many years.

Another theory about the wall has it that the wall is probably not even a hundred years old and is the last standing reminder of what used to be a sawmill. Geologist, Dr Peter Wood, stomped on this theory by stating that he believed the wall was formed by an ignimbrite sheeting cooling process and that the stones were more than 300,000 years old. The government instituted a ban to the site after these findings, effectively prohibiting any further assessments. While theories remain, any conclusive proof of the wall’s age and origin remains elusive.

6 Swissair Flight 111 valuables

On 2 September 1998, Swissair Flight 111 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean roughly 8 kilometres from Peggy’s Cove, Nova Scotia. The accident killed all 229 passengers and crew onboard the McDonnell Douglas MD-11. It took four years to complete the search and rescue, recovery and investigation which ultimately led to the conclusion that flammable material in the plane’s structure allowed an onboard fire to spread beyond control.^[3]

Sometime after the crash, it emerged that the plane was carrying a Picasso painting, almost 50kg in cash as well as 5kg of jewels including a diamond from the American Museum of Natural History in New York. None of these were ever recovered. For 1 year after the accident an exclusion zone extending 2 kilometres was set up around the crash site. When this zone was suspended, people would have been ‘free to search the area’ for the lost valuables. While it is possible that none of the valuable items may have survived the plane crash, their eventual destination and whether someone may have already located them, remains a mystery.

5 Russian plane in Nairobi

On 17 December 2018, a private jet landed at Wilson Airport in Nairobi, Kenya just half an hour before it was due to close for the day. There were five people on board the twin-engine jet which sported a foreign registration. Three days later the plane departed for Jomo Kenyatta International Airport at half past four in the afternoon. A little more than an hour later on the same day the plane set off again to a new destination, Chad, this time with seven people on board.^[4]

Now this in itself does not constitute any mystery. However, it was discovered that the plane is owned by Yevgeny Prigozhin who is a Kremlin insider with ties to Vladimir Putin. Prigozhin had been named one of 13 people of interest in the investigations into the 2016 US election. The immigration department also refused to reveal the identities of the other passengers on the plane.

This caused quite a commotion in Kenya, because while the plane was expected, there was no word from local security agencies on whether Prigozhin was actually aboard the aircraft. Rumors spread that Prigozhin, who is part of Wagner Group, wanted to set up security deals in Kenya where training, weapons and electioneering services would be traded for mining rights. Wagner Group has been linked to the murder of 3 journalists of Russian descent in July 2018.

A month before the plane landed in Nairobi it was reported that Kenya and Russia are working together in developing nuclear power technology. Whether this was the reason for the mission being kept hush hush or whether something shady was being planned, we’ll probably never know.

4 Phantom kangaroos

Earlier in 2019, a photo of kangaroos jumping in the snow in Australia made the rounds on social media. However, that was nowhere near as weird as the phantom kangaroo sightings in the US of all places.^[5]

The very first sighting was reported in 1899 in Wisconsin. Then after several years of no sightings, Reverend W.J. Hancock spotted a phantom kangaroo in Tennessee in January 1934 along with several other witnesses. This particular kangaroo was blamed for the killing of a dog, chickens and sheep. According to several people who claimed to have seen phantom kangaroos, the creatures are up to 5.5 feet tall and have glowing eyes.

Several years later between 1957 and 1967, many reported seeing these kangaroos in Minnesota and in 1974 hundreds witnessed a kangaroo in Chicago. There were even reports of a kangaroo haunting the Golden Gate Park in San Francisco in 1980. Local zoos were contacted during sightings, but no kangaroos were ever reported missing. It is alleged that one of the kangaroos was struck by a car and killed in 1981 but both driver and creature disappeared before any investigation could take place.

3 Mzora stone circle

11 kilometres from Asilah in Morocco, a megalithic stone circle named Mzora stands guard over the hills. The existence of the circle was first realized in 1830 AD. Starting out with 175 stones, the circle now consists of 168 with the tallest being more than 5 metres high. There is a barrow at the centre of the circle and the diameter of the structure is spread over 55 metres.^[6]

In the 1st Century AD, Roman general Quintus Sertorius believed Mzora to be the tomb of Antaeus, a giant killed by Hercules as one of his labors. He noted that the remains of an 85-foot man were found inside the circle and they were immediately covered up again. An excavation of the site in the 30s revealed no remains, neither did further investigations in the 70s.

Assessments have revealed that Mzora was built by the same culture that was responsible for the megaliths in Europe. The circle incorporates a Pythagorean right angle triangle which is the same method used in similar megalithic structures in Britain.

As with other megalithic circles it has been theorized that the stones were used as a calendar and for monitoring the incoming seasons. Others believe that druids worshipped at the stones or that they were landing strips for alien crafts. But the true purpose of Mzora remains unknown.

2 The missing volcano

In 1469, a mini ice age struck Europe. Flora didn’t flourish at all and there were reports of fish being frozen as they swam around in ponds. Four years earlier, crowds attending the wedding of King Alfonso II of Naples gazed up at the sky in awe as the sun turned dark. Following that day, the weather turned grim in Europe. Germany experienced flooding to the extent that coffins were exposed in cemeteries, whole villages were swept away and in Poland, citizens started traveling by boat as the rain poured relentlessly. What no one realized was that a giant volcano thousands of miles away had erupted and caused an ash cloud so big it covered Earth. This led to the coolest decade for many centuries to come.^[7]

In 2009 scientists found a sulphurous layer in the snow layers of 1809 and 1810 while on expedition in Antarctica and Greenland. The finding indicated that a volcanic blast had occurred which would have shot debris almost 50 kilometres up in the air. They had found the aftermath of the volcano that erupted thousands of years ago. The only problem was, they couldn’t find the volcano itself.

In 2012, further investigation revealed that the 15th Century climate disaster wasn’t caused by only one volcanic eruption, but two. However, the volcano remains missing. Some have surmised that the eruptions were so violent it may have torn the volcano apart. But until evidence is found, that remains just a theory.

1 The Hunt for The Golden Owl

In the early 90s, author Max Valentin hid a bronze sculpture of an owl in flight in mainland France. Valentin was the only person who knew the location of the owl. He then published a book called The Hunt for The Golden Owl effectively setting up a treasure hunt with no time limit. The book contained riddles that needed to be solve in order to find the little owl, with the prize being not only the bronze sculpture but a statuette of the original owl in gold and silver to the value of one million francs.

The book also included several rules including prohibiting the winner of the treasure hunt from speaking to the public or media about the location of the owl or the solutions to the riddles in the book.

Max Valentin has since passed away and his publishing company went out of business, but the location of the little bronze owl remains a mystery. The creator of the silver and gold owl, Michel Becker, regained ownership of it via a court ruling in 2009 but tried to auction it in 2014. Luckily the owl’s status was protected, and it had to be removed from the auction. Becker is still in possession of the owl today.^[8]

Max Valentin is said to have produced a book of solutions to the riddles in his original book before he died but his son is holding fast to that document; honoring his father’s wish that the bronze owl be found by someone who could figure out the riddles.

2019 has flown by in a blur. In just a little over a month, we’ll be celebrating Christmas again and then the start of yet another new year. As time speeds on, mysteries pile up around the world. Some of them will eventually be solved, but others are doomed to remain forever unexplained and speculated over.

SEE ALSO: 10 Unsolved Mysteries Surrounding Historical Tragedies

10 The Murder of Aarushi Talwar

On 16 May 2008, the body of 13-year old Aarushi Talwar was discovered at her home in Noida, India. Her throat had been slit. When police couldn’t find the family’s live-in domestic worker, 45-year old Hemraj Banjade, he became a prime suspect. That was until 17 May, when Banjade’s body was discovered on a terrace at the house.

Next up to be considered suspects were Aarushi’s parents. It was thought that her father, Rajesh, may have happened upon his daughter and Banjade in an unsavoury position and killed them. Another theory was that Rajesh had been involved in an affair and had been confronted by his daughter and blackmailed by Banjade, and he, therefore, decided to get rid of them both.

The case was eventually given to the CBI, who did not prove that Rajesh and Nupur Talwar were responsible for the murders. The CBI also investigated two other domestic servants and a personal assistant, but nothing came of this. After the case was handed over to yet another team, Aarushi’s parents were convicted and handed life terms in November 2013. In 2017, they were acquitted after they challenged the decision.

To this day, there have been no other leads in the double Noida murder. The killer remains free, and it seems unlikely that the case will be solved any time soon. ^[1]

9 Smiley Face Murders

Over a time span of more than 20 years, around 350 young men drowned in lakes and other bodies of water in Midwestern American states. It became known that police officers had come across graffiti in the form of smiley faces near at least 12 locations where drownings occurred. Several people, including NY detectives Kevin Gannon and Anthony Duarte, believe these drownings to be murders committed by either a lone serial killer or a group of serial killers. Their theory is that the men were most likely drugged after being abducted and then murdered before being disposed of by dumping them in lakes and rivers. The detectives also believe that these serial killers include both men and women.

Victims include 21-year old Brian Welzien, who disappeared on New Year’s Day in 2000. His decomposing remains were found 8 weeks later in a lake in Indiana. In 2009, 24-year old William Hurley was missing for 6 days before being found dead and floating in a river in Boston. One of the smiley faces was spotted near the river.

While the FBI is not convinced and says that the drownings are most likely alcohol-related, private investigations continue. A documentary on the drownings saw the light in early 2019. Whether the detectives will ever find serial killers lurking in the periphery and bring them to book remains to be seen.^[2]

8 Jennifer Beard Murder

Two days after New Year’s celebrations in 1970, a couple travelling past the Haast River in New Zealand decided to stop at the Haast River bridge to allow their young daughter to use the bathroom. When the 8-year old returned to the car, she told her parents she saw a naked lady. Dismissing it as active imagination, they told their daughter to get back in the car, and they continued their journey.

On the 19th of January, police discovered the “naked lady” under the bridge. She was dead, having been raped and strangled. It was believed that 25-year old Jennifer Beard, as she was later identified, had been ambushed while using the nearby bathroom. She had been reported missing by her fiancé several days earlier. During the police investigation, witnesses claimed to have seen the young woman in a blue-green Vauxhall driven by a middle-aged man. A truck driver fitting the description and driving the same model car was questioned but never charged. A pair of trousers was found a few metres away from the crime scene and was sent away for analysis. Unfortunately, authorities forgot about the pants for several months. When they were examined afterwards, a receipt bearing the name of the truck driver was discovered in one of the pockets. Still, the Crown refused to lay charges, citing insufficient evidence.

The truck driver never strayed from pleading innocent regarding the murder, right up until he died in 2003. In 2008, police were investigating new leads, but nothing came of that either. To date, the murder of Jennifer Beard remains officially unsolved.^[3]

7 Death of Ashley Turner

Airman 1st Class Ashley Turner was stationed at Naval Air Station Keflavik in Iceland in 2005 when she was savagely murdered near her dorm room. Through an Iceland paper posted on the Internet, her parents learned that their daughter had been murdered after military investigators simply stated that Ashley had died of trauma to the head and neck.

20-year old Ashley had been stabbed in the head and neck, but this seemed to be the only straightforward information about her murder. Several incorrect death certificates were issued, no forthcoming assistance on death benefits, and a lack of critical information from the military.

Eventually, it was revealed that Ashley was to testify against a man accused of stealing from her. She was forced to live in the same dorm as this man. Airman Calvin Eugene Hill was charged with Ashley’s murder but acquitted in 2007. He did, however, plead guilty to stealing from her and was to face punishment for it. This, however, means that Ashley’s killer is still roaming free somewhere out there. ^[4]

6 Ryan Singleton Disappearance

24-year old model, Ryan Singleton, left Las Vegas and headed back home to Los Angeles after a well-deserved vacation in July 2013. His car broke down in the Mojave Desert, and a Highway Patrol officer offered to take Ryan to a rest stop in Baker. When Ryan got to the rest stop, he phoned one of his friends and asked if he could come to pick him up. The friend did not delay in driving to Baker, but Ryan was nowhere to be found when he arrived.

Nearly 3 months later, Ryan’s body was discovered by two joggers two miles from where he was last seen at the rest stop. His eyes and internal organs were missing. An autopsy could not determine the exact cause of death due to the advanced state of decomposition of the remains. Authorities believed the missing organs were due to scavenging animals in the area, but Ryan’s family believed otherwise. His mother insisted that her son had been the victim of “illegal organ trafficking.”

By December 2018, the case was still being investigated by police. Public opinion has it that Ryan had been murdered, regardless of whether animals were to blame for the lack of internal organs or not. Unfortunately, it seems the case has stalled with no new information forthcoming. Exactly what happened to Ryan, remains unknown. ^[5]

5The Wickenburg Massacre

On 5 Nov 1871, 7 passengers boarded a stagecoach in Wickenburg and headed for California. Unfortunately, only 2 of them would survive the journey. Only an hour after the stagecoach set off, it was attacked, and 5 passengers and the driver were murdered. One of the survivors, William Kruger, stated that a ‘band of Indians’ had attacked the stagecoach. The other survivor, Mollie Sheppard, believed that ‘Mexican bandits’ were to blame for the killings.

This led to General George Crook sending an officer to investigate the claims. The conclusion was that raiders at Date Creek were to blame. This, in turn, led to an attempt on Crook’s life, to which his cavalry responded by killing around forty Indians. Crook also forced many Yavapais and Tonto Apaches residents to relocate to San Carlos Apache Reservation.

The real culprits were never found, and many theories saw the light as the years went by. Some believed white criminals dressed up as Indians and attacked the stagecoach. Others were wont to look upon the two survivors with suspicion: they may just have robbed the stagecoach themselves and killed the other passengers to make it seem as though Indians were responsible.

The mystery remains.^[6]

4 Little Girl Blue

8-year old Helen Bailey loved playing outside and left her Birmingham home to do just that on 10 August 1975. Her mother became concerned when her daughter failed to return at a specified time and contacted the police. The following morning, Helen’s body was found in dense woodland in the Booth Farm area. There was a cut to her throat, which was deemed the cause of death.

Initially, Helen’s (nicknamed Little Girl Blue because of the blue clothing she was wearing when found) death was not treated as suspicious, with the pathologist stating that there were no signs of a struggle and that the little girl’s death lacked certain hallmarks of an attack. Therefore, he stated that her death was accidental. However, in 2014, another pathologist reviewed the case and found that Helen had been strangled before the cut to her throat occurred. It was later revealed that someone ‘confessed’ to the killing in 1979 but was never prosecuted. In July 2019, coroner Louise Hunt was going to approach the CPS to ask whether they would reconsider prosecuting a suspect arrested and convicted on an unrelated charge, as he was the only existing suspect.

However, to date, Helen Bailey’s murder remains unsolved.^[7]

3 Dorothy Scott Disappearance

On 27 May 1980, 32-year old Dorothy Jane Scott attended a company meeting after dropping her son off at her parents’ house. There was nothing unusual about the meeting, except for a colleague suddenly complaining of severe pain. Dorothy offered to take the colleague, Conrad Bostron, to the emergency room. Another colleague, Pam Head, accompanied them.

Doctors established that Conrad had been bitten by a black widow spider and was given immediate treatment. He was discharged at 11 pm, and Dorothy left the hospital to bring her car to the entrance. Pam saw the car leave the hospital parking lot, but Dorothy didn’t return to the hospital. Two hours later, Pam notified the hospital security that Dorothy was missing and called Dorothy’s parents.

In the weeks and months that followed, police were informed that An unknown male had stalked Dorothy before her disappearance. Dorothy told a co-worker that the man had called her several times and mentioned events he could not have known about unless he has witnessed them. After Dorothy vanished, the man continued calling her house when her mother was there alone. When she answered the phone, the stalker would either ask for Dorothy or gleefully claim that he killed her. When Scott’s father picked up the phone in 1984, the calls ceased.

In August 1984, Dorothy’s remains were found buried underneath a dog in Anaheim Hills along the Santa Ana Canyon Road. After the discovery, the stalker called twice more, asking for Dorothy.

To date, Dorothy’s stalker/killer has never been found. ^[8]

2 The Disappeareance of Amy Billig

Seventeen-year-old Amy Billig was a high school student who lived in Coconut Grove, Florida, with her parents, Ned and Susan, and her younger brother, Josh. At around 12 pm on March 5, 1974, she came home from school to have lunch. She planned to go out with friends later and called Ned, asking to borrow some money. She vanished while hitchhiking to his office. A few days later, sixteen-year-old twins Charles and Larry Glasser claimed to have kidnapped her and asked for a $30,000 ransom, but the police discovered this was a ruse and arrested them for extortion.

Investigators interviewed Amy’s family, friends, and neighbors but could find no trace of her. They did not think that she vanished voluntarily. Shortly after she disappeared, her camera was located at the Wildwood exit on the Florida Turnpike and surrendered to the police. Many of its photos were overexposed, and the few decent ones had no further clue to her whereabouts.

Twelve days later, Susan received tips that she might have been kidnapped by a motorcycle gang called “The Outlaws” and taken cross-country. She learned that a chapter of them had come through Coconut Grove at the time of Amy’s disappearance. After contacting and meeting with several bikers, Susan Billing spent years chasing down false leads (from Oklahoma to Seattle to England) they gave her about Amy’s whereabouts. Even with these leads and so-called deathbed confessions of what happened to Amy, nothing came of it.

While this case is not much different from others on this list, one aspect is chilling. Not long after Amy’s disappearance, Susan began receiving telephone calls from random payphones from a “Hank Johnson” claiming he had Amy. He would call her off and on over the next 21 years, claiming Amy was being trained as a sex slave and telling Susan about her daughter’s training in explicit detail. The police finally caught Hank after he began using a cell phone.

To their surprise, it was linked to U.S. Customs agent Henry Johnson Blair. Blair confessed to calling Susan for three years, but, in 1996, he was eventually sentenced to two years for stalking and ordered to pay the Billig family a settlement. After his arrest, she took out Amy’s diaries and read them for the first time. On one page, in purple ink, Amy wrote: “Hank says as soon as I finish school he wants me to go to South America with him. I told him he’s crazy.” At that time (1974), Blair was scheduled to be sent to Argentina for his job. However, he was never officially charged in Amy’s disappearance despite Susan’s belief he was involved somehow.

Unfortunately, Susan Billing died in 2005, still hoping that Amy’s whereabouts would be discovered and her killer brought to justice.^[9]

1 Kanika Powell’s Murder

After 28-year old Kanika Powell finished her tour of service, she began a career working as a security contractor at Johns Hopkins University in the Applied Physics Laboratory. After two years, her job became permanent and much more involved. She worked on projects relating to National Security and the Department of Homeland Security. Due to the sensitive nature of her daily tasks, Kanika was very alert. So, when a man pretending to be an FBI agent tried to enter her home, Kanika resisted and called the police. She also let her loved ones know what had happened.

Another man showed up at her door a mere four days later, claiming that she needed to sign for a delivery. Kanika refused to let him in and called her mother later to discuss the incident. The same day she left her apartment to run errands, arriving back just before midday. Someone was hiding in the hallway, and as Kanika approached her apartment, the person shot her several times. Kanika died of her injuries the following day.

3 months later, 31-year old Sean Green was ambushed while waiting at a red light. He was shot nine times. Sean worked at a National Security contractor and was murdered 25 miles from where Kanika lived.

Both murders remain unsolved.^[10]

There are two topics that are perennial favorites online . . . unsolved mysteries and celebrities. So what could be better than a list combining both? Here we look at some mysteries that we have never covered at , and we re-visit a few better known cases that have had new information emerge recently.

See Also: 10 Crazy Conspiracy Theories About Celebrity Deaths

10 Princess Diana, Surveilled

I am starting the list off with Diana, Princess of Wales as her death is typically considered to be lacking any mystery. However, many theories have been touted over time to suggest that there may have been more to the events leading up to her being killed in a car wreck. Additionally, the scandal around Prince Andrew and his ties to arguably-murdered paedophile Jeffrey Epstein has re-opened the debate around whether the royal family may be involved, from time to time, in the sordid business of wetwork.^[1]

On August 31, 1997 it was announced that Princess Diana had been in a car accident mortally wounding her and her lover Dodi Fayed, along with a security guard Henri Paul. The accident was the result of an attempt to escape the invasive eye of the mainstream media. Her death sent shockwaves around the world and more than thirty million people tuned in to watch the official broadcast of her funeral. And then the theories began to appear: did Diana really die in an accident or was she killed at the request of the Royal family to prevent her marriage to Dodi Fayed or from converting to Islam as there had been indications that she was considering it.^[2]

It was revealed in 1999, due to a FOIA request in the United States, that Princess Diana had been under twenty-four hour secret surveillance by the NSA. The reasons for the surveillance and the more than 1,000 pages of data on the princess remain under lock and key to this day. Additionally, scandalous conversations involving Princess Diana that were leaked to the media were recorded by the GCHQ, an element of the British secret service. These facts, and a 1993 letter the Princess wrote to her butler stating that she believed His Royal Highness Prince Charles intended to have her killed, do not help dismiss the theories that very important people may have had a hand in the untimely demise of the future King’s mother. Perhaps we shall never know whether Princess Diana was murdered or whether she truly was just the victim of a rabid media.^[3]

9 Lost Heiress Dorothy Arnold

Once upon a time celebrity didn’t involve the silver screen . . . because there wasn’t one! In those days, celebrities were royals, or wealthy businessmen (like Daddy Warbucks in Annie), or socialites: the “it girls” of their day. It was to this world, in 1885, that heiress Dorothy Arnold was born.^[4]

Dorothy’s father was a wealthy perfume importer, her aunt was married to a Supreme Court Justice, and the Arnold family descended from passengers on the Mayflower, which is about as close as it gets to being royalty in America. Living a life of wealthy privilege left Dorothy bored so, upon graduating from college with a degree in literature, she began to attempt a writing career which led to many rejection letters and little else. On the morning of December 12, 1910, Dorothy went dress shopping with the equivalent of $800 in today’s currency in her purse. She purchased a box of chocolates and briefly met with and chatted to an old friend on the street. That friend was the last person to see Dorothy Arnold alive. She vanished into thin air.^[5]

News of her disappearance caused a media frenzy—much like the JonBenét Ramsay case in our own time. Rewards were offered, lakes were dredged, and private detectives were sent around the world seeking information. Two mysterious clues emerged. One was a letter simply stating “I am safe” in Dorothy’s handwriting and the other was a claim made by a Jeweler in San Francisco who said he engraved a wedding ring for her with the inscription “To A.J.A. from E.R.B.”. Both clues were dismissed as inconsequential for reasons unknown and very soon after the police called off the investigation stating that no evidence existed of a crime having been committed.^[6]

For many years the story was headline-making and many theories were posited for Dorothy’s whereabouts. The first (though ultimately dismissed and unproven) came from a convict who claimed to have taken Dorothy’s body from the home of a doctor in New York and buried it—presumably to conceal her death by illegal abortion. But perhaps the most believable is that of the family lawyer who, upon the death of Dorothy’s mother, stated that he had always believed that Dorothy killed herself due to her failed writing career.^[7]

8 Who Saved Blanche Monnier?

On the 23rd of May, 1901, the attorney general of Paris received an anonymous note which read: “Monsieur Attorney General: I have the honor to inform you of an exceptionally serious occurrence. I speak of a spinster who is locked up in Madame Monnier’s house, half-starved and living on a putrid litter for the past twenty-five years – in a word, in her own filth.” The attorney general issued an order for the police to investigate the matter.^[8]

One of the policemen arriving upon the scene described what he found: “The unfortunate woman was lying completely naked on a rotten straw mattress. All around her was formed a sort of crust made from excrement, fragments of meat, vegetables, fish, and rotten bread . . . We also saw oyster shells, and bugs running across Mademoiselle Monnier’s bed. The air was so unbreathable, the odor given off by the room was so rank, that it was impossible for us to stay any longer to proceed with our investigation.”^[9]

It turns out that Blanche Monnier, a wealthy aristocratic woman from Poitier France had decided to marry a common lawyer and, fearful of the scandal it would cause in the public eye, her mother locked her up in a small room to prevent the marriage. The wealthy mother, and her son, announced that Blanche was dead and the world was none the wiser. Until the mysterious letter arrived with the attorney general twenty-five years later. In the meantime the lawyer had died but Monnier’s mother and brother remained. The news caused an outcry and a mob gathered outside the home.^[10]

Fifteen days later Blanche’s mother died but her brother was put on trial. He was convicted but the conviction was overturned on appeal as he was deemed mentally incapable of knowing he had a responsibility to rescue his sister. Monnier suffered from numerous mental disorders as a consequence of her captivity including anorexia, exhibitionism, and coprophilia. She was incarcerated in a mental hospital until her death in 1913, a celebrity more for her horrific captivity than her position as a socialite and heiress. The mystery of who wrote the letter that exposed this hideous crime to the world remains unsolved.^[11]

7 Disappearance Of Joe Pichler

Joe Pichler was a child actor who was best known for his roles in the Beethoven movies (about a dog named Beethoven) and stints in various TV series in the late 1990s and early 2000s. After establishing himself as a Hollywood actor with a promising future, his parents felt he would be better served (at least for the time being) returning home to complete high school.^[12]

He moved back to his home town of Bremerton, Washington, in 2003, and graduated from high school two years later. His intention was to return to Hollywood the following year, once his dental braces were removed. And then he vanished. On the night of the 9th of January 2006, Joe’s car was found with all of his belongings intact except his wallet and car keys. He had also uncharacteristically left his home unlocked with all the lights on.^[13]

Poetry found in the car suggested that Pichler was down in the dumps but no significant evidence was found to support the case that he was suicidal. Police suspected he may have jumped from a nearby bridge, but sniffer dogs found no trace of him there nor any indications that he had walked by recently. Strangely, the parents accused the police of not actively trying to investigate the case as no fingerprints were taken. The case remains open.^[14]

6 Bob Crane Bludgeoned

Most loved for his role as Hogan in Hogan’s heroes, Bob Crane had an unusual hobby: he liked to film and photograph his sexual activities. It was while filming Hogan’s Heroes that he was introduced to John Carpenter, an electronics salesman who helped Crane with his video machinery. The two would prowl bars for new women to video in their sex sessions.^[15]

On June 29, 1978, Crane’s corpse was found in his apartment by a co-star from a show he was currently engaged in. He had been bludgeoned to death and an electrical cable was tied around his neck. The murder weapon was never identified. Carpenter immediately became the chief suspect due to his recent falling out with Crane that had led to the end of their friendship. Carpenter’s car was searched and blood smears were found matching Crane’s blood type (no more accurate testing was available in those days).^[16]

A 1990 re-examination of the evidence uncovered a photo showing what appeared to be a piece of brain in the car interior but no physical evidence was found. The photograph, however, was sufficient to get a judge to allow the re-opening of the case and a DNA test of the blood. It was inconclusive. In 2016, further DNA testing was used on the remaining samples from Carpenter’s car. Two sequences resulted: one from an unknown male, and the other too damaged for a conclusive match to anyone. Right to his death Carpenter denied any role in the murder of Crane.^[17]

5 Agatha Christie’s Memory Loss

What could be more fitting for, arguably, the greatest writer of mystery novels than to find herself at the center of a true-life mystery of her own? At 9:30pm on the night of December 3rd 1926 Agatha Christie’s husband admitted to an affair with another woman and asked for a divorce. Agatha, after saying goodnight to her young daughter, drove off into the night not to be seen again for eleven days. Her vanishing sparked a nationwide manhunt with over 1,000 policemen being put on the case. Christie was thirty-six years old and already an acclaimed writer.^[18]

The genre of her writing and mysterious nature of her disappearance prompted the police to drag other luminaries of the mystery writing world (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Dorothy L. Sayers) into the investigation in the hopes that their skills might be of assistance to investigators. A fanatical spiritualist, Doyle gave one of Christie’s gloves to a medium though it offered up no leads. But then Agatha’s car was found abandoned on the edge of a steep chalk cliff.^[19]

The hunt for Mrs Christie continued unabated with 15,000 volunteers joining the search and airplanes being called in to surveil the countryside around the car. And then, unexpectedly, Agatha was found sojourning in an elegant hotel in fashionable Harrogate under the false name of Mrs Tressa Neele (the same surname as her husband’s mistress). Christie had no recollection of the previous eleven days and, until her death, refused to speak of them. It went unmentioned in her autobiography.^[20]

Logic would suggest that Christie fled after the news of her husband’s affair, but even so, her memory loss, which was medically verified, is inexplicable. Ultimately she gave her husband the divorce he wanted and, in her own words: “[A]fter illness, came sorrow, despair and heartbreak. There is no need to dwell on it.”^[21]

4 Natalie Wood’s Watery Death

Natalie Wood was a beautiful and talented actress who has been mentioned a number of times on in the past but she definitely deserves a spot on this list for the mysterious nature of her death. Shortly after thanksgiving in 1981, Natalie, her husband Robert Wagner (famed for the television program Hart To Hart) and Christopher Walken (famed for his character in Pulp Fiction who carried a watch “up my ass for two years”), whom she was working with on a film, went sailing to Catalina Island for the weekend.^[22]

Allegedly Wood tried to either leave the yacht or secure a dinghy that was banging against the hull when she accidentally slipped and fell overboard and drowned. Later it was discovered a witness nearby heard calls for help at around midnight. She said the cries lasted for about 15 minutes and were answered by someone else who said, “Take it easy. We’ll be over to get you. “It was laid back,” the witness recalled. “There was no urgency or immediacy.” An investigation by Los Angeles County coroner Thomas Noguchi resulted in an official verdict of accidental drowning. Noguchi concluded Wood had drunk several glasses of wine and was intoxicated when she died. There were marks and bruises on her body but they could have been received as a result of her fall.^[23]

People thought little of the case until the yacht’s captain, Dennis Davern, published a book in 2008 which suggested that the “accident” came close on the heels of a fight with Wagner. And then in 2011 the police unexpectedly re-opened the case. Most recently the coroner changed the official cause of death from “drowning” to “drowning and other undetermined factors.” Is there something more to the case that has been uncovered by the police since 2011? It would appear so, because just last year (2018), the police officially named Robert Wagner as a “person of interest” in the case.^[24]

3 Elizabeth Short’s Vampiric Murder

The Black Dahlia was once the greatest Hollywood mystery but the infamy of the case has diminished slightly in recent years due to some new developments. But before we talk about that, here’s a summary of the story. In 1947 the body of 22 year old Elizabeth Short was found drained of blood and cleaved in two in a parking lot in Los Angeles. Until her identity was known, she was nicknamed “Black Dahlia” as a play on a then-current movie The Blue Dahlia.^[25]

The reason for her death and the perpetrator remain unknown though her tale is certainly one of the most discussed of all Hollywood mysteries. Movies, books, scintillating top 10 lists, and other media formats have told her story and it will certainly go down in the annals of history as one of the most deeply disturbing unsolved murders.^[26]

The latest breakthrough in the case is the recent statements of Buz Williams, the son of one of the now-dead police officers who investigated the case. Mr Williams has said that Leslie Dillon, a bellhop and one-time mortician’s assistant, murdered Short at the request of a Hollywood mogul obsessed with her. Dillon even contacted the police anonymously at the time of the crimes to make enquiries as to their progress. We will most likely never solve this mystery, but there is no denying that the passage of time does not make it any the less fascinating.^[27]

2 Brittany Murphy’s Black Death

In 2009, rising star of the film world Brittany Murphy died at age thirty-two of pneumonia. An autopsy revealed that she was full of flu medication. Her death was a shock and the results of the autopsy couldn’t explain why a woman of her age, in otherwise excellent health, would die like she did. Then, in a shocking coincidence, five weeks later her boyfriend Simon Monjack, aged forty, also died . . . of pneumonia. Their deaths occurred in the same house so people began pointing fingers at black mould as a potential cause of death, though no evidence was put forth that proves it was the culprit.^[28]

Brittany’s father (Angelo Bertolotti) believed she was poisoned by the CIA for being an outspoken supporter of whistleblower Julia Davis who, in 2004, leaked information showing that the department of Homeland Security was not properly vetting visa requests from terrorist nations. Davis’ home had been raided by twenty-seven armed agents, a U.S. Marshall, and a Blackhawk helicopter. Murphy’s phone was wiretapped according to her father.^[29]

Bertolotti ordered a toxicology report to be done independently of the official autopsy and the results found ten heavy metals consistent with death by rat poison. What did kill Brittany Murphy and her boyfriend? Was it just excess moisture leading to a dank and unsafe home, or was it part of a massive coverup of government incompetence?^[30]

1 Dallas’ Debbie Disappears

What ’80s schoolboy didn’t see—or at least hear—of Debbie Does Dallas, the 1978 film by Jim Buckley? It was lauded as one of the truly great blue movies from what is now known as the Golden Age of Porn (1969–1984). To this day the picture remains the number one best-known adult film in history.^[31]

But what most people don’t know is that Debbie disappeared without a trace. Furthermore, no one even knows who Debbie actually was. The actress playing the title role went by the stage name “Bambi Woods”. It was common in those days for porn stars to keep their real identities secret as much of the industry operated outside of the law and there was considerable influence from the mafia.^[32]

Woods took up pornographic acting in order to pay debts she owed. Debbie Does Dallas is the only porn film she starred in. For two years Woods made appearances in public and lived a fairly extravagant and exotic life amongst the jet set of New York clubs Studio 54 and Plato’s Retreat. And then, just like that, she vanished. Lurid rumors arose that she had died a brutal death of a drug overdose.^[33]

A 2005 documentary, Debbie Does Dallas Uncovered, claimed to have found and interviewed the real Bambi Woods, alive and well in Iowa keeping her past safely—and secretly—in the past. But then, in 2007 a woman claiming to be Woods disputed (via email) virtually every claim in the documentary except that of wanting to maintain her private life. Was one of these women the real Bambi Woods, or did Debbie die doing drugs?^[34]

Human desire to conceal is rivaled by our desire to reveal. Mystery texts arise anytime an inventive author conceals the key to understanding some new method of writing, but mystery texts go viral whenever the code suggests the key is easy to recover. Maybe the author is alive and deliberately withholding information, or maybe the key appears entirely lost to the past.

readers already know many still-unsolved mystery writings of the past, like the Voynich manuscript and the Phaestos disk, and treasure-hunt codes of the present, like the Kryptos cipher sculpture that was recently updated with the “Berlin clock” hint. Now you can test your discovery skills against a fresh slate listing ten more of the most compelling unsolved codes and ciphers ever concealed, all of which have supernaturalist or globalist backstories. Your rewards, described below, include buried treasures, rewrites of history, and even mystical insights into the universe.

See Also: Top 10 Secret Codes You Aren’t Meant To Know

10 Faust’s Magic Disc

Dmitri Borgmann, linguistics pioneer, successfully cracked many codes but left two “bafflers” in his authoritative work “Beyond Language”. Besides the inscrutable French government formula for pricing funerals, Borgmann asks for help solving the mystery text Rembrandt etched into “Faust in His Study, Watching a Magic Disc” (about 1652, with prints held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Pierpont Morgan Library). Rembrandt’s glowing disc contains “INRI” in the center, and (reading clockwise from the southeast and outward) “ADAM + TE + DAGERAM / AMRTET + ALGAR + ALGASTNA”. The text remains an “indecipherable anagram”,^[1] although “INRI” is usually understood as representing the inscription on the cross of Jesus.

Borgmann suggests the “surely irrelevant” occurrence of AMSTERDAM, Rembrandt’s home, among the outer letters, and some “most unconnected” Latin anagrams: “ADAM is a cyclic transposal of DAMA (‘fallow-deer’)”.^[2] Twentieth-century mystic Samael Aun Weor made use of the same text, rendering it “adam te dageram amrtet algar algas tinah”, as an inscription for a magic mirror.^[3] However, he appears merely to be recycling the text, which Borgmann suspects came from Rembrandt’s neighbor, Samuel Menasseh ben Israel, who had deep occult interests^[4] and married into the rabbinic Abarbanel family. Is ADAM plaintext, or for that matter is INRI part of the anagram? Should we rely on such partial anagrams as Meradag (Mordechai), Graal, or Satan as having any meaning? Borgmann concludes playfully, “the anagram … remains a cabalistic conundrum. Does it inspire you to try your own hand at it?”

9 Cicada 3301’s First Book

Cicada 3301, anonymous publisher of challenge data texts, is controversial enough to need its own article. “The Washington Post” ranked the organization among the top five “eeriest” internet mysteries.^[5] For three years, Cicada 3301 claimed to use complex data encryption puzzles to recruit the best codebreakers, the most interested in data privacy. Unsurprisingly, very few successful solvers came forward to disclose what they learned about the organization, even while it appears that the victorious “recruits” were assigned to engineer novel web privacy tasks.

A Cicada ebook, “Liber Primus” (Latin for “First Book”), had been discovered in 2014, completely written in runes, and with cover art of a hand holding a compass in the traditional triangular pose. Approximately half of the text has been solved, beginning with the words, “A warning: Believe nothing from this book”; but solvers despaired of further solution or anything more meaningful being recovered. Suddenly in 2016, a single tweet was released, bearing the same digital signature that verified its origin with Cicada 3301, and stating that “Liber Primus is the way”.^[6] To this date, the unknown rewards to be claimed upon solving Cicada’s hardest challenges remain publicly unclaimed.

8 Swift’s Little Languages

Like musician Edward Elgar,^[7] author Jonathan Swift frequently experimented with impromptu coding in his art, most notably in “Gulliver’s Travels” and the posthumous “Journal to Stella”. Lemuel Gulliver is frequently taken as a pun on “gullible” (even as Lemuel is known incongruously to be a nickname for Solomon); the lands he visits, Lilliput and Brobdingnag, sound like “little” and “big”. On a deeper level, Isaac Asimov speculated on many of Swift’s etymologies,^[8] holding that Swift’s “Lindalino”, which suffered government impositions, was a “double Lin” and therefore represented the city of Dublin, which Swift regarded as similarly beseiged. Most notably, the invented word “Yahoo”, taken as an insult but now a dominating search engine, is probably a corruption of the divine name “Yahweh”.^[9]

Much work has also gone into understanding a collection of Swift’s letters to close friend Esther Johnson, published as “A Journal to Stella”. Like the name Stella itself (taken for Esther), the letters are often full of nonce language that involves an irregular set of phonetic and linguistic changes that Swift believed Johnson would understand.^[10] Often resembling baby talk, this “little language” remains incompletely solved. Swift’s “word-doodling” is so various in these and other works that much new ground remains to be solved despite past scholarly forays.^[11]

7 Serafini’s Uncyclopedia

Inspired by the medieval Voynich Manuscript, architect Luigi Serafini handwrote and hand-drew an immense encyclopedic work, published in two volumes in 1981. Many discovered this book via Douglas Hofstadter’s review in his monthly column (and later book), “Metamagical Themas”. The pictures, which Hofstadter in one sentence called “grotesque and disturbing … beautiful and visionary”, start with the famous cover art of a lovemaking couple methodically transforming into an alligator.^[12]

Many years later, Serafini discounted his literary output as having “become” the same as automatic writing, even though many regularities in the Codex script, such as its page numbering, have been discovered.^[13] Is the work entirely to be understood merely as an absurdist fantasy universe without linguistic content, or is meaning inherent in the allegedly “automatic” text? Readers are still debating!

6 The Holy Codex of Rohonc

By 1838, Count Gusztav Batthyany had accumulated myriads of books from all over the world in his home, the Castle of Rohonc (now called Rechnitz, Austria). Very many of these were at that time donated to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, which shortly discovered that one codex of nearly untraceable origin was full of incomprehensible script characters, regarded by some contemporaries as a meaningless hoax. Unlike most other unsolved codes, the “pictures are almost primitive … and the codes are not especially decorative”.^[14] As a further complication, the cipher alphabet contains at least 100 to 200 characters, often confusingly joined together, and nobody is certain what original language might have been used.

A clue may appear in the catalogue of the Batthyany library from 1743, where one entry translates as “Hungarian prayers in one volume, size duodecimo”.^[15] Work by Gabor Tokai and Levente Zoltan Kiraly in 2010-2011 seems to be converging on some characters representing New Testament books and chapters, while some illustrations retell the Passion of Christ.^[16] While this work seems promising, it may provide no more structure than the page numbers of Serafini’s much more elaborate codex. Does Rohonc display more “certain piety” than Serafini? Time must tell.

5 Hal Gashtan’s Microcosm

“In July 1984 an envelope was placed in the room pictured above …” reads the teaser of “Microcosm”, a psychedelically illustrated treasure book by “Hal Gashtan”, promising one thousand pounds to the decoder of the name within the envelope. Two magazines, “Creative Computing” (America) and “Your Computer” (Britain), sponsored this simple-looking BASIC-language programming contest, thinking it might briefly challenge ’80s PC users. Simply join the correct phrases from the book’s poetry to one of the given 20-letter keys using the columnar decryption program provided, and the answers lead to the phone number and secret name.^[17]

Unfortunately, the publisher, Lazy Summer Books (now YouCaxton Publications), underestimated the permutational challenge involved, well beyond that of the typical BASIC PC. Each of thirteen keys requires thirteen correct choices out of sixteen possibilities each (many quadrillions of combinations), before an unspecified final combination of the thirteen solutions is required. Two clues were later released by “Your Computer”: George Washington, and computer names.^[18] In the latter case, the correct 13 computers were found, but led only to the first solution text “FIND THIRTEEN NOT ME”, leaving it unclear whether this was indeed one of the final thirteen texts. The author has disappeared, and the illustrator (possibly Nigel Mynheer) has not been forthcoming. In short, no internet solve team has ever coalesced, and neither brute force nor intuitive solution has ever been successfully marshaled against the mysterious author.

4 Pink Floyd’s Publius

In a more widely known puzzle marketing campaign that apparently failed, Pink Floyd’s album “Division Bell” was released in 1984 to promote a world tour. The album’s title was proposed by author Douglas Adams, the cover art’s tantalizing head sculptures were photographed in front of Ely Cathedral, and additional edgy, discontinuous album artwork was provided by graphic designer Storm Thorgerson. With the tour ongoing, an anonymized internet persona named Publius proposed on Usenet that within the album lurked an enigma, where “there is a central purpose and a designed solution …. a unique prize has been secreted.” On July 16, 1994, Publius prophesied that Pink Floyd would verify the enigma’s existence, which happened on the 18th when programmable stage lights briefly displayed the words “PUBLIUS ENIGMA”, during the band’s last U.S. event.^[19]

Despite further confirms and internet hints, no convincing solution appeared, no prize was awarded, and the puzzle continues fascinating fans today. Lighting designer Marc Brickman said in 1995 that he had programmed the repeated “ENIGMA” lights under the orders of band manager Steve O’Rourke, who had given Brickman’s idea of internet exposure to “some guy of Washington DC … in the encryption game”.^[20] Drummer Nick Mason later stated that an EMI Records employee with encryption experience, who had also worked for President Reagan, designed the enigma, and the prize was more intangible, “something like a crop of trees planted in a clear cut area of forest”.^[21] Putative solutions include references to single or double 11s, as well as the writer of PubliusEnigma.blog, who claims actually to be the intended solution, explaining that the album regularly refers to herself.^[22]

3Copious Masonic Mnemonics

If that weren’t enough, our top three codes all involve known Freemason links. In 1981, the staff of fledgling puzzle magazine “Games” (in their first spinoff publication, “The Four-Star Puzzler”) asked for “help in solving the mystery” of an encoded 1860 book. Aside from its hefty title, “Written Mnemonics: Illustrated by Copious Examples From Moral Philosophy, Science, and Religion”, the book consists essentially of left-hand letter grids opposite right-hand number grids. The “Puzzler” also reproduced a back-cover chart listing number triads for the book’s divisions I-III (the book helpfully says in plaintext, e.g., “DIVISION I. — MORAL PHILOSOPHY”), where the first number is even (like a left-hand page number) and the other two are often “1 1” (like a mnemonic start location). The “Puzzler” speculated it contained Civil War codes but never got to run the full followup report its editors intended for a future issue.^[23]

Several other copies of the book are alluded to on the internet; they typically have owners’ names and 1860s dates within the front cover and the same mysterious charts. The book’s basic purpose has been generally determined: it is “an example of a Masonic ritual cipher … which can be read if one has the key to decrypt it”.^[24] In 1931, a Mason named Ray Denslow described the method in detail in “The Masonic Conservators”, now a public-domain work. The three divisions represented the first three degrees of Freemasons (“Moral Philosophy” meant “Entered Apprentice”), the letters and numbers were a book code (“T 9” meant “the”), and the contents chart indicated the rituals involved (“Cong.” meant “to congregate”). The author was Rob Morris, a Mason who created the Conservator movement in an attempt to keep Masonic lecture texts consistent; he began with wide approval but his method was deprecated later in the 1860s because it was held to contain omissions and errors and to come too close to revealing sworn secrets.^[25] Yet, if the book key (called the “spelling book”) could be located or reconstructed, would an early source of authentic Masonic ritual be laid bare before the general public?

2Secrets of … Michael Stadther

Inspired by Kit Williams’s “Masquerade”, author Michael Stadther published a successful puzzle book, “A Treasure’s Trove”, in 2004, for “children of all ages”. Clues led solvers to locations in fourteen state parks where tokens had been secreted; in 2005 Stadther redeemed these tokens by awarding hunters with fourteen jewels worth one million dollars, on the “Today” show.^[26] Solvers looked forward to his second book, 2006’s “Secrets of the Alchemist Dar”, even more lavishly illustrated and confusingly encrypted. One hundred tokens with redemption value of two million dollars in diamonds were represented.

It is clear that “The Alchemist Dar” was merely an anagram of “Michael Stadther”, but totally unclear how the hundred locations can be found, as Stadther’s company entered dispute-related bankruptcy in 2007 before the hunt could be completed, so no official Dar redemptions have taken place. In 2012 Stadther promised to release hints until full solution “even though there is no possibility for someone to win a ring.” For instance, of the mystery language in his book, Stadther says, “Hest is English”; but these leads have not helped.^[27] Stadther died in 2018 in Coronado, California, taking many secrets with him. In particular, why were two Freemason-connected texts, the Oak Island 90-foot-deep stone and the Beale cipher, numbers 2 and 3 in Stadther’s 2004 book, “100 Puzzles, Clues, Maps, Tantalizing Tales, and Stories of Real Treasure”, if the book was intended “to get you thinking about treasures” and to help you see Stadther’s own hunt clues?^[28]

1 Cole’s Solution to Beale’s Cipher

Readers know that in 1885 “The Beale Papers” was a money-making pamphlet; it was published (and probably written) by James B. Ward, who became a Master Mason in 1863 (during the Conservator era). The pamphlet told the story, possibly invented, of a Thomas J. Beale who hid tons of gold and silver in Bedford County, Virginia, in the 1820s. Temptingly, it contained three ciphertexts, one of which was presented as already easily solved, a simple book cipher based on the Declaration of Independence that described the treasure’s contents. The other two, unsolved, described location and heirs.^[29] Kryptos solver Jim Gillogly later pointed out that cipher one (locating the treasure) contained a highly improbable alphabetic sequence; he favors a hoax interpretation but recognizes the possibility “that another level of encryption (e.g. elimination of nulls) must be stripped away”.^[30]

The Tripod website BealeSolved claimed the vault was found in 2001, providing photos, and presented complete solutions to ciphers one and three, but stated nothing was left of the original treasure. However, the solutions were no book ciphers as others expected, because identical numbers repeatedly yielded different alleged plaintext, and no solution method was given; solver Daniel Cole died during the hunt in 2001. A Masonic background, including “very high degree”, was “a common bond” between Cole and fellow treasure-hunter Gary Hutchinson.^[31] The BealeSolved site was composed in 2001 by SWN, probably Steven Ninichuck, the third member of the team. Ninichuck and Hutchinson reported to Michael Stadther that they had solved everything correctly but had merely been beaten to the punch. But then why did Ninichuck post an unverifiable solution, alongside Vigenere systems with the keys “blue” and “point-to-point”? Why did Hutchinson say that a former hunter for “T. J.” Beale’s gold was improbably named “G. W. Hunt”? Why did Stadther say the solution was “deciphered … from a Masonic ritual”? How did Cole compose his own manuscript, if not by using something like written mnemonics; as Stadther asks, “When will we see how the Location cipher was broken?”

About The Author: John J. Bulten has been puzzle editor for independent news network WND, inventor of the 3-D crossword, and the best Scrabble player in Florida.

Sometimes things just happen and other times they happen for sinister reasons. Freak accidents occur all the time, but so do well-planned tragedies. The problem is that one cannot always distinguish between the two and the more time passes after a mysterious incident, the more difficult it becomes to determine whether it happened out of spite or just bad luck. Was the object or person just at the wrong place at the wrong time, or did someone make sure they would be? Also, some mysteries are more ‘obvious’ than others, but often their causes remain obscure.

See Also: 10 Unsolved Crimes That Were Caught On Video

10Greensboro hit and run

What was supposed to be a fun last-minute Christmas shopping trip, turned into a nightmare for a group of teenagers on 23 December 1988. Kenneth Lynn Dungee, Lavern Allen, Kenneth Newkirk and Darius Bannerman set off in a Plymouth Duster and planned to drive from Greensboro to Raleigh.

Allen was driving and they were all laughing and talking while travelling along Interstate 40. At some point during the drive, they passed a car that would later be revealed to have been driven by Grady Alexander. Mere seconds after passing the car, a blue Monte Carlo bore down on them after speeding past Alexander. Allen noticed the car getting very close to their Plymouth and tried to speed up a bit. However, the man in the Monte Carlo kept close and eventually bumped into them from behind.

The four teenagers were terrified, and Allen tried swerving through traffic to get away from the Monte Carlo. Unfortunately, the car caught up to them and side-swiped them. The driver then fell back a bit only to hit the Plymouth from behind again and again.

Allen tried to hold the Plymouth steady, but eventually lost control of the car and it ended up rolling several times and landing in a field.

Kenneth Dungee died on impact. Kenneth Newkirk suffered a broken leg and skull fracture. Darius Bannerman suffered a broken wrist and multiple injuries to his face. Lavern Allen was freed from the mangled wreck after 30 minutes and later had his leg amputated.

The unknown man who had run them off the road, got out of his car at the accident site, briefly stared at the wreck and was then called back to his own car by a female companion who had been riding with him.

Police never found the man who caused the death of Kenneth Dungee and the terrible injuries of the other three men in what was initially suspected to be a hate crime. The case was featured on Unsolved Mysteries and is still talked about on internet forums but seems unlikely to ever be solved.

9Rietbok plane crash

It seemed a bad omen preceded a plane crash more than 50 years ago. On 13 March 1967, South African Airways Flight 406, also known as ‘Rietbok’, set off from Jan Smuts Airport in Johannesburg but had to return shortly after take-off due to a faulty front nosewheel. This however didn’t deter anyone from letting the plane complete its journey shortly after being repaired. It landed in East London in the afternoon and took off again shortly after. The plane was hardly airborne before it struck a bird. Upon landing in Port Elizabeth, the plane was inspected, and it was decided it could continue flying.

The plane had to then return from Port Elizabeth to Johannesburg and the pilot took on more fuel to ensure that predicted bad weather in East London didn’t cause any problems. Passengers who needed to disembark at the East London airport were warned they may not be able to do so. The plane took off from Port Elizabeth at 4:41 GMT and the pilot received a weather update at 4:58 GMT. When the plane passed the Port Elizabeth tower at 5:06, the pilot radioed that he was 20 miles from landing. Three minutes later, the pilot communicated for the last time, saying he was at 2,000 feet and could see the coast. Only one minute after this communication, the ‘Rietbok’ crashed into the sea killing all 25 people on board. Eyewitnesses on a nearby beach, who saw the plane go down, immediately notified police.

There was minimal wreckage to work with for the subsequent investigation into the crash and no bodies were ever recovered. Theories ranged from the pilot suffering a heart attack to sabotage. Others believed the plane crashed due to structural failure as the wing may have separated from the body of the aircraft. However, the true cause of the crash has never been established.

8Disappearance of David Guerrero

13-year old David Guerrero was something of a prodigy. He had a considerable talent for painting and attended an art academy in Spain. He was a shy boy who preferred to hang out with his brother or parents.

David received a wonderful opportunity in 1987 when he was invited to unveil his first artwork in the La Maison art gallery. In addition to his, a local radio host wanted to interview him about it. David and the radio station agreed to meet in La Maison after school and before David had to be at the art academy. David’s father couldn’t drive him to the interview and instead told him to remain in La Maison after the interview if it ran late and he would pick him up afterwards.
David felt a little under the weather on 6 April 1987, the day of the interview.

He left for the radio station at 18:30. At some point during the 10-minute walk to the bus stop, David disappeared. When his father arrived at the academy at 21:00, he couldn’t find David anywhere. Upon approaching the gallery, he was informed that they hadn’t seen the teenager that day. He drove home to check whether David was there and seeing that he wasn’t, he went to the police station to report his son missing.

The police interviewed many people over the course of their investigation, including all bus drivers that travelled the route David would have taken. Hundreds of anonymous tips were investigated without success. So baffled were the authorities they even followed up on a claim from a psychic that the boy was living in a remote shrine. This too proved to be a dead end. Years passed and the trail as well as the case grew cold.
To date David Guerrero remains missing.

7Eric Wone murder

In 2006, Joseph Price, Victor Zaborsky and Dylan Ward lived as a polyamorous family in Washington. Robert Eric Wone was acquainted with and visited them on 2 August 2006 with the aim of staying overnight. Within an hour of Wone arriving at the Swann Street residence, neighbours heard a terrified scream. This would later be confirmed to have been uttered by Wone.

Victor Zaborsky called 9-1-1 just before midnight and a string of police officers and paramedics arrived within 5 minutes. Upon their arrival, they were astonished to find the body of Robert Eric Wone lying prone on a bed, fully dressed, with three stab wounds to his chest. The bedding beneath him was folded neatly and there were no signs of a struggle. It also seemed that the body had been washed down after being stabbed. The three occupants of the house were all wearing white bathrobes and looked rather unperturbed by the dead man in their midst. Later, during the autopsy, a pathologist discovered seven needle prick marks on Wone’s body that could not be explained.

Afterwards it was revealed that Zaborsky told the 9-1-1 operator that there was an intruder in their house and that he stabbed Wone. This did not convince police. Price, Zaborsky and Ward were arrested and charged with Wone’s murder. Prosecutors stated that the men cleaned up the crime scene before calling for help. However, the three men’s defence team retorted that they were suspected of the crime merely out of prejudice of their lifestyle.

The accused were all acquitted in 2010 and no one else has ever been charged with Wone’s murder. The mystery of what happened that terrible night, remains.

6Stolen Boeing 727-223

25 May 2003 was just another day in Luanda, Angola. That is until a Boeing 727-223 was stolen from Quatro de Fevereiro Airport. It is alleged that just before sunset American pilot, Ben C. Padilla and a mechanic from the Congo, John M. Matantu, boarded the plane. Shortly after, the aircraft started moving without any communication reaching the control tower. The plane took off without any lights and disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean.

Padilla’s sister told a newspaper in 2004 that she and her family believed Ben flew the plane against his will and that he may have crashed somewhere over Africa. Other theories include a business feud gone wrong or that the plane was to be used in a terror attack.

The US authorised a search for the aircraft in several countries without success. Several sightings were reported but nothing panned out. The plane as well as the two men remain missing to this day.

5Utah family stalker

From 2018 through August 2019, a woman and her father had more than 500 people pitch up at their Utah home. They included repairmen, delivery drivers, food deliveries etc. These people were all sent to the house by Loren Okamura who was behind a chilling cyberstalking campaign against the woman.

Okamura even revealed the house address on Craigslist and sent over drug dealers and prostitutes. He also contacted the woman via email and threatened her by writing that she should sleep with one eye open and that “they were coming for her and her parents”. He went on to say that she “should just kill herself and do her family a favor already”.

Okamura didn’t desist from the stalking and harassment even after a civil stalking injunction was obtained against him. The family eventually had to put up a sign at their home to avoid having to open the door for all the strangers that pitched up there. The sign asked that anyone who was sent to their address call the police.

The stalker was eventually arrested in Hawaii in November 2019. However, the motive for his deplorable actions remains unknown.

4Sneha Anne Philip’s disappearance

31-year old medical intern, Sneha Anne Philip, had a rare day off on 10 September 2001. She used the day to tidy up the apartment she shared with her husband Ron and then had a two-hour instant messaging conversation with her mother between 2 and 4pm. She then changed into different clothes and headed out to buy bedding, underwear, pantyhose, a dress and three pairs of shoes.

When Ron returned home just before midnight, Sneha wasn’t there. He wasn’t worried because she frequently stayed over at her cousin Annu’s or at her brother John’s place. He also wasn’t worried the next morning when he headed back to work in the Bronx.

However, when the news broke that a plane had struck the north tower of the World Trade Centre, he called home immediately. His wife didn’t pick up. He phoned several times more, each time leaving a message. He then started worrying that Sneha may have got caught up in the WTC attack. He set off looking for his wife. The panic that struck Manhattan caused traffic pileups and he reached Tribeca at nine in the evening. He spent the night at a friend’s house and returned home in the morning, only to find Sneha still wasn’t there.

Sadly, Sneha’s name ended up on the 9/11 victims list. Her family believes that she died a hero; that she ran into the inferno caused by the planes crashing into the towers to help those who were hurt and dying. This story was helped along with a lie told by Sneha’s brother who told WABC that he spoke to his sister on 11 September and she told him she was helping people inside the towers.

Officials do not share this belief. Sneha’s name was removed from the list in 2004 when it was alleged that Sneha led a double life and died the night before 9/11. Another theory says that Sneha used the 9/11 tragedy to disappear and start a new life someplace else.

Either way, Ron Philip never saw his wife again and her true fate remains a mystery.

3Otto Warmbier’s mysterious injury

On 2 January 2016 American college student, Otto Frederick Warmbier was arrested in North Korea. The charge: allegedly stealing a propaganda poster from his hotel. The sentence: 15 years in jail including hard labor.

In March 2016 Warmbier suffered a brain injury which caused him to lapse into a coma. It took North Korean authorities over a year to disclose Warmbier’s medical situation which they tried to explain away by saying he had contracted botulism which had been worsened by Warmbier’s ingestion of a sleeping pill. The young man was released in June 2017, while still in a coma, and transported to a medical centre in the US for treatment.

Sadly, Warmbier never woke up and died six days after being admitted at the medical facility. It was revealed that he died of a lack of oxygen to the brain caused by an unknown neurological injury.

A U.S. federal court ruled that the North Korean government should be held liable for Warmbier’s torture and death. To date, it remains unknown how Warmbier received the injury that ultimately killed him. There has been no evidence to support the botulism and sleeping pill theory, but there also was no physical evidence of torture on Warmbier’s body.

Otto Warmbier’s parents have decided to sue the North Korean government over the death of their son.

2Disappearance of Claudia Kirschhoch

29-year old New Yorker, Claudia Kirschhoch, was offered a paid work trip to the new Sandals resort in Cuba in 2000. The travel writer met up with other travel writers and arrived in Montego Bay on 24 May 2000. Unfortunately, visa problems led to them being stranded in Jamaica and unable to fly back to New York since flights were fully booked for the next week.

Claudia and a fellow writer, Tania Grossinger, then went to the Sandals resort in Negril instead. They stayed at the resort for three days before managing to book a flight out of Jamaica. However, Claudia wasn’t ready to leave. She and Tania had breakfast together before Tania’s flight. That afternoon, Claudia took a stroll on the beach and disappeared.

Claudia’s parents called the company she worked for after a couple of days of struggling to get in touch with their daughter. They received the shocking news that Claudia never returned to work. When Claudia’s hotel room was searched her passport, phone and flight ticket to New York were all there. Management at the hotel seemingly didn’t care that the room might contain clues to Claudia’s disappearance and they simply rented it out to other visitors. It wasn’t long before Claudia’s phone disappeared as well as the logbook that recorded all license plate numbers of cars entering and exiting the resort.

It was discovered that Claudia spent time with a bartender named Anthony Grant who called in sick the day after Claudia vanished. He stayed away from work for four days and when police finally got hold of him, he admitted that he and Claudia saw each other on 26 May. He denied any involvement in her disappearance even though sniffer dogs traced Claudia’s scent to the trunk and back seat of his car. He was never named as a suspect or arrested on any charges.

Claudia’s parents searched non-stop for their daughter, but she was officially declared dead in 2002. Her fate remains unknown.

1Patrick Erhabor’s murder

In September 2001, a pedestrian walking along the River Thames spotted something bright orange in the water. When police investigated, they found that the orange object was a pair of shorts draped over the torso of a young boy.

When the torso was removed from the river, police saw that the legs, arms and head had been cleanly removed with a very sharp knife. Tests on the torso revealed that the young boy had been poisoned before being murdered. Plant extracts were found in his intestines which were traced to West Africa. The shorts found with the torso were likely bought in either Germany or Austria.

This terrible crime uncovered a network of child traffickers who kidnapped children in Africa and brought them to the UK. Many traffickers were jailed, but the boy’s murderer was still free. Police named the boy ‘Adam’ and had his remains buried in a Southwark cemetery.

During their investigation, police questioned a woman named Joyce Osagiede after a similar pair of orange pants were discovered in her house. A lack of further evidence led to her never being charge with the murder and she was eventually deported to Nigeria. 10 years later, Joyce appeared in a BBC interview during which she said the boy’s name was Patrick Erhabor. She claimed to have given him to a man named Kingsley Ojo. Ojo was arrested for trafficking in 2004 but could not be linked to Adam’s murder.

To date, no arrests in this horrific murder have been made. And even though a ritual sacrifice was suspected, this motive was never confirmed.

Murder. The word alone is enough to send cold shivers down your spine. Just the thought that some people out there kill for pleasure could be enough to make you never want to step outside again. No one wants to fall victim to a psycho’s fantasies. No one wants to be shot, stabbed, strangled, poisoned, or pushed off a bridge. Terrifyingly, however, people are killed like this around the world every single day. They are shot in a fit of rage, stabbed out of jealousy, strangled in a moment of insanity, or pushed off a bridge when no one is looking. The aftermath of terrible incidents like this leaves family and friends devastated and keeps harried detectives working around the clock to find the killer. Some murder cases are solved within days, some within decades. Some are never solved.

See Also: Top 10 Murder Mysteries Finally Solved Using Forensics

10 Arthur “Buddy” Schumacher

Eight-year old Arthur Louis “Buddy” Schumacher was a lively, happy child. He attended Lincoln Elementary School in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin and had many friends. On July 24, 1925 he and some boys from his neighborhood jumped on a freight train to hitch a ride to the local swimming hole. That was the last time Buddy was seen alive.

When he failed to return home later that day, he was reported missing by his family. Police, together with the community, searched the surrounding area non-stop for seven weeks. Then, a mere mile from his home, Buddy’s remains were found partially hidden underneath some bushes. His clothing had been torn and a handkerchief protruded from his throat. He had also been sexually assaulted and mutilated.

Police investigations eventually led to the arrest of a drifter in the Wauwatosa area, but when witnesses later retracted their statements, he was released. No one else was ever arrested in connected with the brutal murder. The mystery remains unsolved and the Schumacher family never got closure regarding the loss of their only son.

9 Elaine Nix

Being a typical teenager in 1999, 18-year old Elaine Nix called her boyfriend Billy just about every day. Since she lived in Georgia and he in Cleveland, the phone charges quickly racked up to $75 in a single month. Soon Elaine’s mother blocked long-distance calls from their line and told her daughter she would have to make another plan to get in touch with Billy.

Unperturbed, Elaine started driving to Zack’s Food Rack to use their payphone which cost her only 35 cents for unlimited talk time. The couple got into a routine whereby Elaine would call around 11pm and they would talk for around an hour, after which she would drive back home. On September 20, 1999, Elaine and Billy spoke for an hour about an upcoming camping trip. When they hung up, Billy assumed Elaine would drive back home as per usual. Unfortunately, Elaine never made it home.

Her parents weren’t overly concerned at first, since Elaine frequently stayed over with friends and family instead of driving home. However, when their daughter didn’t show up for work the following day, they knew something was wrong. Driving past Zack’s Food Rack, they spied her car in the parking lot; key still in the ignition, driver’s window rolled down. On the passenger seat sat Elaine’s purse and a packet of cigarettes. Elaine’s mother drove the car home, unknowingly destroying potential evidence.

After the teenager was reported missing by her parents, roadblocks were set up while her family searched the area around the restaurant. Nine days after her disappearance, an unnamed person cutting the grass behind a park made a tragic discovery: Elaine’s body, naked and badly decomposed, lying just inside the tree line. She had been killed and dumped 17 miles from the payphone she frequented.

An official cause of death was never established due to the advanced decomposition of the remains, yet theories surfaced that Elaine Nix had been strangled or smothered. A murder investigation was opened, but a lack of leads and evidence led to the case running cold within a few years. To date, no arrests have been made and Elaine’s killer may still be on the loose.

8 Jenny Low Chang

Nineteen-year old Jenny Low Chang was a student at San Francisco State University in 1977. She took her studies seriously and booked a study session in the library basement to which she headed at 6pm on September 11, 1977.

When her roommate awoke the following morning and saw that Jenny hadn’t returned to the dorm room and her bed had not been slept in, she reported her missing. Only three hours had passed when one of the professors at the university discovered Jenny’s naked body in the reading room on the fourth floor. Her head showed signs of a severe beating, she had multiple stab wounds and there was evidence of sexual assault. Several pieces of furniture in the room were broken, which pointed to a struggle, and her clothes and books were placed next to her body.

It was pointed out during investigations that someone would have had to open the door to the reading room for Jenny as it would have been locked at around 5pm on a Sunday. Over 200 school staff members and 1,200 faculty members possessed keys and coded cards that could unlock that particular door.

Despite the number of potential suspects, only two were ever questioned: a campus security guard and a faculty member. Some people were convinced the “Zodiac Killer” was the culprit. Nothing ever came of police investigations and over 40 years later, Jenny’s murder remains a mystery.

7 Don Henry and Kevin Ives

On August 23, 1987, a cargo train was traveling through Alexander, Arkansas when the driver saw something on the tracks ahead. As the train closed in on the object, he could see it was a body. He then realized that there were in fact two bodies lying across the tracks, in the way of his oncoming train. Attempting desperately to stop and blowing the horn incessantly, the driver almost succeeded in avoiding hitting the bodies, but unfortunately the train’s momentum caused it to roll over them.

An investigation revealed that the bodies were those of 16-year old Don Henry and 17-year old Kevin Ives. Initially it was suspected that the boys had fallen asleep on the tracks due to heavy use of marijuana. However, both sets of parents insisted that a second autopsy be conducted. Eventually a pathologist realized that the marks on Don Henry’s shirt were consistent with a stabbing injury, and that Kevin Ives’ skull had been crushed possibly by the rifle he used to hunt with.

Some witnesses claimed to have seen a man dressed in military attire a week before the train incident as well as the same day the train hit the boys. One theory had it that the boys may have stumbled across a drug dealing operation and had been murdered for it.

Police investigated all possible leads but they all led to a dead-end. To date, the boys’ killer remains unknown.

6 Zigmund Adamski

Zigmund Adamski, 56, left his home in Tingley, near Wakefield, England in June 1980 and set off on a walk to the local store to do some shopping. He never returned.

A search effort ensued and Zigmund’s body was located five days later at a coal yard in Todmorden. Lying on top of a heap of coal, the body was dressed in a suit but no shirt. His wallet and watch were also missing. The coroner inspected several burns on the back of Zigmund’s head, neck and shoulders, but could not determine the cause thereof. The coroner was also puzzled by the fact that Zigmund barely had a 5 o’clock shadow even though he had been missing for five days. Furthermore, forensic experts determined that a type of ointment had been rubbed onto the burn wounds, but could not establish the exact kind.

In a very strange turn of events, a well-known UFOlogist in the area claimed that Zigmund had been abducted by aliens. This speculation was fueled by the policeman who found Zigmund’s body, Alan Godfrey. Godfrey claimed to have personally encountered a UFO. Shortly after this revelation, he quit his job and started a new career as a motivational speaker.

Godfrey also claimed that Zigmund died of a heart attack, but this did not explain how he got on top of a coal pile nor why he was lying face down, as his positioning meant he would have had to have been deposited from above. Despite a thorough police investigation, Zigmund’s killer was never found and what exactly happened to him remains a mystery.

See Also: Top 10 Creative Ways Someone Has Committed Murder

5 Frauke Liebs

Excitement hung in the air in the city of Paderborn, Germany in June 2006 as the FIFA World Cup tournament was in full swing. Frauke Liebs, 21,  joined a friend at a local pub to watch a match between England and Sweden. At some point during the night, she borrowed another friend’s cellphone battery as hers was just about dead. Before she left at 11pm she put her own battery back in her phone and set off on a walk to her house, 1.5 kilometers away.

Just before 1am, Liebs still hadn’t arrived home. Her roommate received a text from her, saying she would be back later that morning. However, Liebs never returned home and didn’t arrive at work either. Her mother reported her missing the same day.

In the days that followed, Liebs called her roommate five times from five different locations within Paderborn. She didn’t answer the multiple questions her roommate had and would only repeat that she would be home soon. During the last phone call, Frauke’s sister spoke to her and later told police that Liebs had answered ‘yes’ when asked whether she was being held captive. The phone calls then abruptly stopped.

Liebs’s remains were found near Lichtenau almost four months later. Her bag and possessions were missing. Her body was severely decomposed, and a cause of death could not be established. Police later concluded that Liebs had been held captive for a while in Nieheim before being killed and her body dumped. There were five initial suspects, but all were released without being charged due to a lack of conclusive evidence.

Frauke Liebs’ murder remains unsolved.

4 Diao Aiqing

On January 19, 1996, a street cleaner in Nanjing thought she had received a belated Christmas gift when she found a bag of meat sitting in a clump of snow next to the road. She took it home but was horrified when she started cleaning the meat and discovered three human fingers inside the bag.

The woman notified the police, and officers found more human remains in two other areas. The body parts totaled over 2,000 pieces and a boiled head and limbs were also found. It was eventually established that the remains were those of 19-year old university student, Diao Aiqing. Diao went missing on January 10, 1996 after getting into a fight with other students at the university over the use of electrical appliances. She was never seen again.

Police launched a massive investigation but to date, Diao’s killer is still unknown and the motive for her gruesome murder remains elusive.

3 Terry Sutter

Terry Sutter was looking forward to spending some time with his friends at the movies and the local bowling alley on September 1, 1973. But before he could do that, he had to finish his chores for the day, which included mowing someone’s lawn. When he was done, he waited in vain for his mother to pick him up; when she didn’t show up, he walked home. That evening he joined his friends in Frankfort, Michigan with strict instructions from his parents to be at his grandmother’s house no later than 11pm. The next day Terry’s grandmother informed them that the 15-year-old never arrived at her house and she still hadn’t heard anything from him.

Terry’s parents immediately informed the police that he was missing, but officers weren’t especially worried and voiced their opinion that he was probably just hiding somewhere to avoid having to go to school. However, they soon regretted thinking this. That afternoon a tourist stumbled upon Terry’s body on a beach in Michigan. It soon became apparent that someone had held him down in the sand until he suffocated; his lungs and eyes were filled with sand. He also had multiple bruises on his head and neck.

The teenager’s parents were devastated, but requested minimal media coverage of the murder. They had their son buried in the Lake Township cemetery, but their trauma was far from over. For some reason, Terry’s grave kept being vandalized. Flowerpots would be broken and plants ripped out. Things got so bad that Terry’s parents eventually had his remains moved to an unmarked grave.

It remains unknown who was responsible for Terry Sutter’s death and whether his killer and the person who vandalized his grave were one and the same.

2 Ida Lowry

Edwin Smith was tired and grateful to be heading home just after midnight on April 23, 1960. As he passed between Clybourn and St. Paul avenues in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, he thought he heard someone screaming. He stopped his car and listened. Sure enough, he heard cries for help coming from an alleyway. Running to it, he couldn’t believe what he saw. An elderly woman, later identified as 76-year-old Ida Lowry, was lying in the alley covered in blood and bruises. When he tried to help her up, she screamed in pain, so he left to call the police instead. Unfortunately, an hour after police arrived and transported Ida to a hospital, she died.

Before she drew her last breath however, Ida was able to tell officers that a big white man who ‘worked at the bridge’ grabbed her and hit her with a heavy object. He then raped her. When he was done, he simply left her to die in the alley.

An investigation into Ida’s life revealed that she was somewhat of an eccentric loner who loved rifling through garbage cans. She had two sisters, both of whom hadn’t seen her in a while. Police ramped up their search for suspects and identified six men of interest within just a few days. None of them were ever charged. A 24-year-old man falsely confessed to the murder and over the next few weeks many others were questioned. However, Ida Lowry’s murderer is yet to be found.

1 Tristan Brübach

Tristan Brübach was an only child to his parents. The family lived in Frankfurt, Austria and Tristan attended Walter Kolk Primary school up until the 5th grade after which he moved to a school in Sindlingen. Tragically Tristan’s mother, who was a drug addict, committed suicide when her son was only 10.

Tristan’s grandmother soon moved in with him and his father to help look after the young boy. Tristan, being bored with his grandmother’s company, took to hanging around outside and walking around the neighborhood until late in the evening. When he wasn’t outside, he was playing video games and tending to his pet rabbit. Soon however, Tristan started to rebel because he wanted to fit in with older kids. He started smoking in a bid to appear “cool,” but this didn’t prevent other children from bullying him.

On March 26, 1998, Tristan didn’t want to go to school. He asked his father if he could go to the doctor instead, claiming that his back was sore. His father didn’t fall for this story and told his son to go to school. Tristan eventually showed up to school at 9am after hanging out with a friend outside the school premises. Later in the day he asked the teacher if he could leave early to go to the doctor and was granted permission. He was last seen alive at a park in front of the Frankfurt-Höchst railway station.

Some of his fellow school mates found Tristan’s lifeless body on their way home from school. They ran back to the school building to alert the teachers and the police arrived at the scene just after 5pm. Tristan’s body was lying in a pedestrian tunnel. He had been severely beaten, strangled and his neck had a deep cut. Upon further inspection, police found that the young boy’s testicles had been removed and that flesh from his thighs and buttocks had been cut out. The murder weapon was found close to the scene.

Three teenagers claimed to have seen the murder take place from a distance and gave police a description of the killer. However, after a large-scale fingerprint operation, the identification of several persons of interest and the offering of a monetary reward for information, the case remains unsolved.

2020 brings with it the start of not only a new year but a brand-new decade. There is a whisper of better things to come and a hint of hope. However, for some, it just means another year and possibly another decade stuck with an unsolved mystery that keeps them from finding closure.

See Also: 10 Truly Bizarre And Chilling Cases Of Mass Disappearances

Many have lost loved ones in inexplicable ways, while others wait for word on missing family members that never comes. On this list are 10 disappearances to be debated and mulled over. But all the while, we should not forget those left behind who are praying for their missing loved ones to return unharmed.

10 Boris Weisfeiler

Forty-three-year-old Boris Weisfeiler had just about had it with all the snow in Pennsylvania in December 1984. Craving sunshine, he booked a trip to Chile and was looking forward to hiking several trails in the Andes Mountains.

It is believed that Weisfeiler tried to cross a river at one point during a hike. The only sign that he was ever there was a backpack found on the riverbank. Weisfeiler never returned home and was never seen again. Authorities in Chile concluded that he had drowned while trying to cross the river, but his body was never recovered.^[1]

Fast-forward 16 years, and Boris Weisfeiler’s mysterious disappearance takes a sinister turn. Declassified US documents reveal that the Penn State University professor may have been murdered in Chile. The documents allege that a witness saw Weisfeiler being interrogated at an agricultural commune before being shot point-blank.

This revelation led to a new investigation. In 2012, eight men, including police and military officers, were charged with the kidnapping of Weisfeiler. However, the case was closed in 2016 and the men were all freed.

Boris Weisfeiler’s sister was devastated at this turn of events. To date, a body has not been recovered in Chile and Boris Weisfeiler’s ultimate fate remains a mystery.

9 Patricia Meehan

On April 20, 1989, 37-year-old Patricia Meehan was driving on the wrong side of the road on Montana Highway 200 when she crashed into another vehicle. The driver of the other car was Carol Heitz, an off-duty police dispatcher.

After Heitz exited her car, Meehan walked up to Heitz and stared silently at her. After a few seconds, Meehan turned around, climbed over a nearby fence, stared again at the scene, and then walked away. She was never heard from again.^[2]

After the incident, thousands of sightings of Meehan were reported: She was either hitching rides or having low-key meals at diners. These sightings all allegedly took place in the states of Montana and Washington. It was revealed that Meehan had suffered from depression and worked odd jobs at a ranch in Montana before her disappearance.

In conjunction with police efforts, Meehan’s family launched a personal search for Patricia. The family distributed 2,000 missing person flyers and made use of horses and a helicopter to search rough terrain. Despite this huge effort, Patricia Meehan remains missing.

8 Mayumi Arashi

Twenty-seven-year-old Mayumi Arashi left her home in Tokyo on September 2, 1994, after telling her sister, Yoko, that she was going out to meet a friend. When Mayumi failed to return by September 3, Yoko phoned that friend to find out where her sister was. The friend said that she hadn’t had plans to meet Mayumi the previous day.

Later the same day, a note was found in Yoko’s wardrobe. The note read: “I was going out with A but was betrayed. [ . . . ] I’m sorry.” A’s phone number was written at the bottom of the note.

Yoko dialed the number and spoke with “A.” He said that he had met with Mayumi the previous day. If Mayumi was dead, he hoped that the punishment would be prison. Yoko got hold of a private detective who tracked the movements of “A” for months. But the detective could only come back with the information that “A” had gone into the woods on March 9, 1995, carrying two drinks. A police investigation of the area turned up nothing.

Years went by with no news of Mayumi. Yoko and her father eventually did an TV interview about Mayumi’s disappearance. On a shelf behind the father was a piece of paper stuck to the wood that read: “Don’t believe what Yoko says.”^[3]

This sent viewers into a frenzy. But despite this weird turn of events, Mayumi Arashi remains missing. There are no new clues as to what may have happened to her.

7 Hannah Upp

It is not often that you hear of a person disappearing multiple times. However, this is exactly the case with Hannah Upp. She disappeared for the first time on August 28, 2008, after going for a jog on Riverside Drive near Hamilton Heights where she lived.

Nearly three weeks later, she was found floating in New York Harbor. She could not recall how she got to the harbor or what happened in the weeks she had been missing. While undergoing tests in a hospital, Upp was diagnosed with dissociative fugue, which is a rare form of amnesia. This disorder causes sufferers to forget their own identities and can last for years.

Upp disappeared again for two days in September 2013 and then again on September 14, 2017, a week after Hurricane Irma hit the Caribbean. She was working at a school in the Virgin Islands at the time.^[4]

On September 16, 2017, construction workers found her car at a beach. The vehicle contained clothes and her keys. The same day, Hurricane Maria was forming in the Atlantic and brought more devastation across the northeastern Caribbean.

Unfortunately, Hannah wasn’t found and remains missing to this day.

6 Patrick Warren And David Spencer

After celebrating a great Christmas Day with their families in 1996, best friends Patrick Warren, 11, and David Spencer, 13, spent Boxing Day lazing about in their homes in Chelmsley Wood. In the afternoon, they played with a group of children in Meriden Park. When the two boys finally returned home, they asked their parents if they could visit one of Patrick’s brothers that evening.

Patrick set off on the new bicycle he had received for Christmas, and David walked beside him. They made it as far as the local gas station where an attendant saw them head toward a shopping center.

The next day, another of Patrick’s brothers went looking for the boys when it was learned that they had never arrived at their destination the previous day. Much later, Patrick’s bicycle was found behind the gas station. The boys’ faces were plastered on milk cartons in an effort to find them.^[5]

It was only in 2003 that a suspect was arrested. However, the man was released without being charged. Child killer Brian Field was also a suspect because he had killed and raped a child in 1968 and imprisoned two teens in 1986.

In 2006, the area where Field used to dump waste was searched in the hopes that the remains of the boys would be found. The search was unsuccessful.

Patrick and David remain missing in early 2020. There is little hope that the case will ever be solved.

5 Ireland’s Vanishing Triangle

On March 26, 1993, 26-year-old native New Yorker Annie McCarrick went missing from Sandymount. She was last seen outside a post office in Enniskerry. Her parents arrived after being contacted by their daughter’s friends. The parents stayed in Ireland for six months while searching unsuccessfully for their daughter.

On July 25, 1993, 39-year-old Eva Brennan left her parents’ house in Rathgar but never made it back to her apartment. After two days of not hearing from his daughter, her father went to investigate. Inside Eva’s apartment, he found the jacket she’d been wearing the day she disappeared. Eva was never seen again.

On January 3, 1994, 22-year-old Imelda Keenan told her boyfriend that she was going to the post office. She left their apartment in Waterford City at 1:30 PM. The local doctor’s secretary was the last person to see Keenan as she crossed a road in town and seemingly vanished into thin air.

On November 9, 1995, 21-year-old Josephine Dollard was spotted using a pay phone in the Moone area of Kildare. After she ended the call, she was seen getting into a car with an unknown person. Dollard never made it back home.

On August 23, 1996, 25-year-old Fiona Pender vanished after leaving her apartment in Tullamore. On February 13, 1997, 17-year-old Ciara Breen disappeared from her home in Dundalk. On February 8, 1998, 19-year-old Fiona Sinnott went missing after leaving a pub in Broadway. On July 28, 1998, 18-year-old Deirdre Jacob went missing mere meters from her parents’ home.

None of these young women have ever been found.^[6]

The tie that binds them together? They all disappeared in what has come to be known as Ireland’s Vanishing Triangle within the boundaries of Leinster. Police decided that the missing women were most likely murdered and focused their investigation on convicted rapist Larry Murphy. He was charged with an unrelated rape and attempted murder case in 2000.

With Murphy in prison, the vanishings abruptly stopped, giving authorities even more reason to suspect him. Unfortunately, a lack of evidence and staunch denials on Murphy’s part mean that he was never charged for any of the disappearances. The fate of those who vanished remains unknown.

4 Lauren Spierer

On June 3, 2011, 20-year-old Indiana University student Lauren Spierer was enjoying an evening out at a bar with a bunch of friends. Her boyfriend, Jesse Wolff, hadn’t joined her. But he texted back and forth with her before eventually heading to bed.

Surveillance footage captured Spierer leaving the Bloomington bar just before 2:30 AM. She was accompanied by a friend named Cory Rossman. Several witnesses who had seen Spierer at the bar claimed that both she and Rossman were very intoxicated when they left.

Rossman and Spierer reached her apartment complex but left again shortly afterward. They walked through an alley just before 3:00 AM. They arrived at Rossman’s apartment, and his roommate, Michael Beth, escorted the young man to his room.

Spierer refused to stay and said that she wanted to return to her own home. She ended up at the apartment of Beth’s neighbor, Jay Rosenbaum. He claimed that Spierer left at 4:30 AM and that he saw her for the last time as she was heading south on College Avenue.

Boyfriend Jesse Wolff sent Spierer a text several hours later. But he received a reply from a bar employee indicating that Spierer had forgotten her phone at the establishment. Lauren Spierer was never seen again.^[7]

In 2015, 22-year-old Hannah Wilson was found murdered and dumped in a vacant lot 10 miles from the Bloomington campus after being reported missing. Daniel Messel was charged and convicted for the crime. Police investigated any possible links between the Spierer disappearance and the Wilson murder, but nothing came of their efforts. To date, no suspects have been named and no new clues have emerged.

3 Ben McDaniel

Thirty-year-old scuba diver Ben McDaniel was diving in the underwater cave at Vortex Springs on August 18, 2010. He tried to access a dangerous part of the cave by tampering with the gate that barred uncertified divers. Two employees of Vortex Springs were diving at the same time and noticed what McDaniel was doing. One of the men decided to let McDaniel into the cave to minimize the risk of him hurting himself or accidentally drowning by getting himself stuck inside the gate.

It took two days for the same employee to realize that McDaniel’s truck had never left his parking spot on the day he went diving. Fearing that McDaniel had drowned, the employee immediately called the police. Recovery divers searched every possible corner of the cave but came up empty-handed. A veteran diver came back with the news that Ben’s stature made it impossible for him to have become confined deeper in the cave.^[8]

McDaniel’s parents offered a $30,000 reward for any diver who would risk his own life to go even further into the depths of the cave to try to find their son. One diver may have taken up the challenge, though no one is sure. That diver was found dead in the cavern.

Conspiracy theories began flying. One claimed that McDaniel had faked his own death to escape personal troubles. Another maintained that someone had murdered McDaniel and hidden his body where it would be impossible to find. According to other theories, McDaniel had drowned and his body was covered with sand or he had committed suicide and squeezed himself into a tight space beforehand, making sure that no one could get him out.

Ben McDaniel remains missing, and the truth of his disappearance still evades his loved ones.

2 Anthonette Cayedito

On April 6, 1986, Penny Cayedito arrived at her apartment in Gallup, New Mexico, after a hard day’s work. Her three daughters were sound asleep, and the babysitter left as soon as Penny got there. Penny still had a few things to do around the house and only got to bed around 3:00 AM.

She had barely fallen asleep when a knock sounded at the door. Penny didn’t hear it. But her eldest daughter, Anthonette, did and went to answer the door. Penny’s two youngest daughters didn’t think anything of this and went right back to sleep. When the family awoke later that morning, nine-year-old Anthonette was gone.^[9]

Penny immediately called the police and reported her daughter missing. One of Anthonette’s sisters believed that their uncle may have been the one who had knocked on the door. But he was soon ruled out as a suspect due to a lack of evidence.

Neighbors reported seeing a brown van outside the Cayedito residence and a man walking toward the house. Police never found this van. A whole year had gone by without any leads when police received a phone call out of the blue from a young girl.

She told police that her name was Anthonette. She claimed to have been abducted and held in Albuquerque. In the background, a male voice could be heard asking, “Who said you could use the phone?” After that, the line went dead. Police were unable to trace the call.

A few years later, a waitress in Carson City, Nevada, contacted police after a teenager left a note under her plate that read, “Help me! Call police.” Despite this, the police never found Anthonette. Penny Cayedito died in 1999 without seeing her daughter again. The case remains open.

1 Mikelle Biggs

On January 2, 1999, nine-year-old Kimber Biggs and 11-year-old Mikelle Biggs were impatiently waiting outside their house in Mesa, Arizona, for an ice cream truck to arrive. Mikelle was riding her younger sister’s bike. Kimber was feeling very cold, so she told Mikelle that she was going inside. Kimber came back outside 90 seconds later and saw her bike lying in the road with the front wheel spinning. There was no sign of Mikelle.

Within 30 minutes, more than 1,000 people were walking the streets looking for Mikelle. But with no witnesses and no leads, the case quickly ran cold. The only people questioned were neighbors of the Biggses and Mikelle’s own father, who was quickly cleared of any suspicion.

Years passed without any sign of Mikelle. Then on March 14, 2018, a reporter phoned the police in Mesa. He told an officer that a man had handed in a dollar bill with writing on it that read: “My name is Mikel Biggs. Kidnapped from Mesa. I’m alive.”^[10]

Kimber Biggs was not convinced that the note was authentic because her sister’s name had been misspelled. This, too, was a dead end.

As of early 2020, Mikelle Biggs remains missing. Her sister now has her own son, and not a day goes by that she doesn’t hope and pray for Mikelle’s safe return.