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Unsolved Mysteries
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"This article is about Unsolved Mysteries. Whenever possible, the actual viewers and fans have participated in recreating the tropes. What you are about to read is not a news broadcast."Unsolved Mysteries was a TV show which ran from 1987-2002, with intermittent breaks in between, and was hosted for most of its run (which Channel Hopped from NBC to CBS and then Lifetime) by Robert Stack. It was revived from 2008-2010 on Spike TV, hosted by Dennis Farina, and again beginning in 2020 on Netflix with all-new mysteries. The original series run was seen in Canada in syndication.As the show's name implies, this series delves into a variety of mysteries, showing dramatic re-enactments of each. They can range from typical missing persons cases and stories of lost loved ones to the paranormal: ghost stories, UFO's, the Loch Ness Monster, and all that good stuff.Although it's presented like a piece of fiction, most every mystery is real. In fact, roughly 400 of this show's mysteries have been solved. It is believed to have originally directly competed with America's Most Wanted. Previous versions of the show had a telephone hotline set up that you could call if you have any information, while the current version only has a website. Some of the mysteries presented back then have remained unsolved to this day, while others are still being solved. You may watch re-edited episodes of the original show with iconic host Robert Stack on various streaming services, with new updates from as late as 2017. Thanks to FilmRise, Unsolved Mysteries now has its own YouTube channel. | |
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Scenery Censor | |
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Scenery Censor: A segment on the murder of Hilda Roche has her nude body being found in the woods. A tree conveniently hides her buttocks from the viewers. In another segment, when the police go to arrest a nudist for sexually assaulting a young girl, an officer stands in front of the man as he reads him his rights and thus shields the viewers from seeing him. | |
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Amazingly Embarrassing Parents | |
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Amazingly Embarrassing Parents: Don Smith showed up unannounced and drunk at a local tavern where his daughter Brenda Walker was having a few drinks with friends, and proceeded to make a scene, tearfully claiming he had terminal cancer and then challenging other patrons of the bar to a fight. An irritated Brenda, unable to calm her father down, angrily left the bar without speaking to him. She later regretted this when Don was found murdered. The crime is still unsolved. | |
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Cool Old Guy | |
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Cool Old Guy: Robert Stack, and how. He hosted the show until just before his death in 2003. He was 84. | |
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Mr. Fanservice | |
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Mr. Fanservice: A then 23-year-old Matthew McConaughey, in his portrayal of murder victim Larry Dickens, was shown mowing the lawn in a sleeveless, open shirt, exposing his biceps and chest muscles. | |
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Unsolved Mysteries / int_1b539743 | type |
Survival Through Self-Sacrifice | |
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Survival Through Self-Sacrifice: In 1943 in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, teenager Helen Elas hid and cared for a cadre of U.S. soldiers after their plane crashed near her home. She knew she was putting herself in danger, but was unwilling to put her own needs ahead of the soldiers', and was fully prepared to do whatever it took to protect them, even if it meant giving up her own life. Sure enough, she was betrayed by her own stepmother and eventually sent to a concentration camp. Miraculously, she survived and, through the show, was able to reconnect with the men she saved. | |
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Heterosexual Life-Partners | |
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Heterosexual Life-Partners: In 1969, seven-year-old LaHarriet "Niki" Crowder (nee Wade) befriended eight-year-old Charita Harding when the two girls were hospital roommates. Upon learning that Charita required surgery for cancer that would leave her sterile, Niki promised Charita that if she ever had a child, she'd share it with Charita and they'd both be its mother, and that she'd name it after Charita. The two girls lost touch soon afterward but were reunited thanks to the show, and Niki was able to keep her promise. (This has been cited by fans as one of the most beautiful Tear Jerker episodes.) Bill Rundle and his BFF Traci Kenley, who vanished from their small Nebraska town in 2000. Although Traci and Bill were extremely close and did everything together, their relationship was from all accounts platonic, and Traci already had a long-term boyfriend. Their disappearance sparked rumors of an affair, but two years later, their bodies were found in a nearby lake, and it was determined to be most likely an accidental drowning. | |
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Cousin Oliver | |
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Cousin Oliver: From 1994-1997, Stack was joined in the show's telecenter by journalists Keely Shaye Smithnote now Mrs. Pierce Brosnan, a journalist, gardening expert and environmental activist and Lu Hanessian, who provided updates and in 1999, Virginia Madsen was brought on as Stack's co-host for the show's second (and last) season on CBS. | |
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Heroic Dog | |
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Heroic Dog: Victoria Doroshenko's service dog, Harley, possessed an uncanny knack for being able to predict when his owner was about to have a seizure and making sure she was safe. On one occasion, he began barking and acting unruly in order to get Victoria to a safe place to have her seizure. The episode reported that 15 other dogs were known to possess the same ability, six of them originating from the same facility as Harley. Another story featured a young Newfoundland dog who rescued a deaf-mute prospector swept away in the Yuba River's strong current; and Oscar, a Golden Retriever who was extremely friendly and relaxed with strangers, but attacked the armed intruder who threatened his owner's life. Neither had had any training and their owners put their actions down to possible psychic ability. There's also Mia, a yellow Lab whose agitated nibbling and and pawing at her owner's breast caused her to discover a malignant tumor; and Shadow, a gentle Schnauzer who could tell when his human had dangerously low blood sugar. Doctors speculate that a keen sense of smell was responsible in those cases. There's been at least one story of a Heroic Cat as well (Ringo, who was able to detect a gas leak that might have killed his owners) and even a Heroic Pot-Bellied Pig (Lulu, who ran to get help when her owner suffered a heart attack). | |
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Parents Know Their Children | |
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Parents Know Their Children: Like the above, parents have been convinced that foul play was the reason for their child's death or disappearance (even if the child is themself an adult) when they notice unusual circumstances—"He/she wasn't suicidal!", etc. | |
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Tampering with Food and Drink | |
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Tampering with Food and Drink: In 1967, Joe Maloney offered his ex-wife, June, a drink, which unbeknownst to her was tainted with poison Joe had stolen from a friend's laboratory. June lapsed into a coma and lingered for three months before succumbing. Joe was apprehended in Ireland years later but freed as the nation had no extradition law with the U.S., making his case also one of the worst examples of Karma Houdini profiled on the show. Elizabeth Ortiz, who poisoned her husband Gilbert's muscle-building amino-acid milkshakes with insecticide, then ran off with their young son. Miraculously, Gilbert survived, though the poison severely damaged his nerves and liver. Elizabeth was eventually captured in Mexico and Gilbert and his son were reunited. Sadly - see under Bittersweet Ending above - Gilbert's relationship with his son is now strained (to say the least). Dr. Michael Swango's coworkers thought it was a nice gesture when he bought them "extra spicy" fried chicken and donuts. Unbeknownst to them, he had laced the food with ant poison. They became violently ill but survived; as many as 60 others, both patients and coworkers of Swango's, were not so lucky. Similarly, Tampering with Medicine in the case of Patsy Wright, a Texas businesswoman who died in 1987 after ingesting cold medicine tainted with strychnine. The victim's ex-husband was a prime suspect but police were unable to gather enough evidence to prosecute him, and Patsy's murder remains unsolved. A segment on a Serial Rapist depicted his victim being drugged by whatever he'd put in her drunk. Lab work showed it was a sedative (he was a doctor) given at much higher than the necessary amount. The Frank Olson case. A few weeks before his death, he was served a drink which, unbeknownst to him, was spiked with LSD, apparently so that CIA brass could prepare operatives for the eventuality of Soviet agents doing the same to them.note This was in 1953, some time before the recreational use of LSD became common. When Olson learned he'd been drugged, he was furious. His family believes he was murdered to keep him quiet about this and other such abuses committed by the CIA during the Cold War. | |
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As the Good Book Says... | |
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As the Good Book Says...: Dennis DePue attempted to justify murdering his ex-wife, Marilynn, in a series of rambling letters sent to family and friends while he was on the run, in which he quoted liberally from Scripture. He even said he was tired of waiting for God to punish Marilynn for treating him unfairly during the divorce, so he took matters into his own hands. Ecclesiastes 12: 1-8 may be an important clue in the still-unsolved 1977 death of Charles Morgan. Before Morgan's body was found, an unidentified woman called his wife and told her that he was all right, and mentioned this Bible passage. Morgan had also mentioned these verses on a $2 bill found on his person. Part of the passage reads: "Men are afraid of a high place and of terrors on the road. Remember him before the silver cord is broken and the golden bowl is crushed. Then the dust will return to the earth as it was and the spirit will return to God who gave it." | |
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Identical Twin Mistake | |
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Identical Twin Mistake: Jim Baumgartner never knew he had a twin brother until friends and family told him they'd seen him in places he'd never been. They looked so alike that even Jim's father was fooled. In one instance, Jim literally missed meeting his twin by a few minutes when the two men visited the same convenience store on the same day. Sadly Jim died without ever meeting his twin (though he was able to find a long-lost older sister he also hadn't known about previously), but his family has continued the search. | |
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Great Escape | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_2562da69 | comment |
Great Escape: A special episode revolved around the legendary escape of Frank Morris and the Aldin brothers from Alcatraz Island and their subsequent disappearance from the face of the Earth. An early episode profiled Mark Adams, a convicted thief and murderer who managed to escape from San Quentin in 1986. Authorities believed he had either scaled the 25-foot prison walls (unlikely), stowed away in a service vehicle, or disguised himself in civilian clothes and blended in with a crowd of visitors. Unlike the Alcatraz escapees, he was caught and returned to prison (although it took seven years).note Soon after his return to San Quentin, Adams was fatally shot by guards while scuffling with another inmate. | |
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Death of a Child | |
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Death of a Child: Sadly, occasionally. | |
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Bitch in Sheep's Clothing | |
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Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: The story of Kevin Hughes, the country-music singles chart director of music industry newspaper Cash Box, whose 1989 murder was thought to be related to a chart fixing scheme in which he had refused to participate. Record promoter Chuck Dixon was interviewed for the segment and had nothing but complimentary things to say about Hughes. When the murderer, a fellow Cash Box employee, was eventually caught, he revealed that Dixon was the one who had ordered the hit on Hughes for refusing to get involved in the chart fixing operation. By this time, Dixon had passed away, but the hit man himself got a life sentence and died in prison. | |
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Offing the Offspring | |
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Offing the Offspring: The case of Darlie Routier, convicted of murdering her own children, despite her insistence (as well as some evidence showing) that she is innocent and that an intruder took their lives. There is some evidence suggesting that she did in fact kill her kids (crime scene appearing staged, Darlie's indifferent behavior after the murders, etc.) She currently sits on death row.note Profiles of the case on other similar shows, such as Deadly Women and Forensic Files, portray Darlie unambiguously as guilty. William Bradford "Brad" Bishop, who bludgeoned all three of his sons, as well as his wife and mother, to death in 1976. His whereabouts remain unknown over 40 years later. | |
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Impersonating an Officer | |
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Impersonating an Officer: How the Blind River Rest Stop killer gained entry into Gord and Jackie McAllister's motor home. He proceeded to rob and shoot them both, killing Jackie, and then murdered a Good Samaritan who stopped to help. | |
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Hereditary Curse | |
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Hereditary Curse: Given that both Bruce Lee and Brandon Lee died young, unexpectedly, and under tragic circumstances, one episode examined the theory that the Lee family was plagued by a curse. Bruce's widow pooh-pooed this notion, pointing out that she and her surviving daughter felt blessed, rather than cursed, to have known and loved both Bruce and Brandon. | |
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The Scrooge | |
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The Scrooge: Howard Drummond was one of these in the lost heir cases. When Drummond died in 1989, he was found to have nearly US$250,000 to his name. From 1985 until his death, Drummond amassed a good part of this money through much penny-pinching. Some of his ways of saving money included moving into a YMCA in Lansing, Michigan during the last four years of his life but not paying extra for a private bathroom. He also spent about $6 a day on food, getting a breakfast of bacon, eggs & toast from a diner along with two more of those that he'd eat for lunch and dinner. | |
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Suicide, Not Murder | |
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Suicide, Not Murder: In season one, the show profiled Gail Delano, a lonely single mom from Maine who disappeared under mysterious circumstances after leaving to meet a blind date named "John." A friend interviewed for the story noted that she had a history of depression and always seemed sad whenever he talked to her, and theorized that she may have committed suicide and elaborately staged a crime scene to make it appear that she was abducted. Sadly, this turned out to be the case, as a viewer recognized Gail as a suicide victim whose body was found in a Mobile, Alabama hotel. | |
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Ghost Ship | |
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Ghost Ship: The show covered its share of these. And, in one case, a ghost blimp. | |
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Missing Child | |
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Missing Child: Every "missing child" story is undoubtedly every parent's worst nightmare, made even worse by the fact that many of these children have never been found. | |
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That One Case | |
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That One Case: For Eliot Ness, the Cleveland torso slayer who terrorized the city during the 1930s. Ness believed he knew who the killer was - a prominent socialite who checked himself into a mental hospital, after which the murders stopped - though he lacked the evidence to bring him to justice. However, it's theorized that due to his social standing, the suspect was allowed to come and go as he pleased while incarcerated, and indeed, after the murders in Cleveland ceased, similar killings were reported in other Midwestern cities. It's even theorized that the torso slayer may have been responsible for the death of "Black Dahlia" Elizabeth Short in Los Angeles in 1947. | |
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Gratuitous Foreign Language | |
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Gratuitous Foreign Language: Stories taking place in non-English-speaking countries, or involving non-English-speaking Americans, were filmed with actors speaking the vernacular language with English subtitles. There were examples of Gratuitous Spanish, Gratuitous French, Gratuitous German, Gratuitous Portuguese, and so on. | |
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Distant Finale | |
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Distant Finale: Sort of. While many cases were left unsolved, some cases did get a resolution on other programs years later. The murder of Dorothy Donovan, for example, an elderly woman who was killed by a mysterious hitchhiker, that the woman's son had encountered earlier in the night, was solved on Forensic Files. The murderer was a drug-addicted drifter who broke into the woman's house thinking it was abandoned. Resolutions came even on Unsolved Mysteries itself. For a while, reruns of the show were aired on Lifetime (before the network began to get new episodes of its own). Very often, updates were provided and specifically designated as "Lifetime Exclusive," meaning that even after all these years, the cases had either been solved in the interim between network and cable TV airings or were still being solved thanks to viewership (for example, Jesse James Hollywood). In the early morning hours of December 30, 1999, the home of Danny and Kathy Freeman was torched. Investigators found their bodies in the rubble and that their daughter Ashley and her friend Lauria Bible (who had been spending the night) had vanished. After years of speculation as to their fate, including that they had murdered the couple and then run off, the murderer of all four was finally arrested in 2018. In January of 1993, young mother Bonnie Haim disappeared from her home. Suspicion quickly fell on her husband, but the case went cold with no evidence. 21 years later, her now grown son—who even as a toddler was certain that he witnessed his mother's murder—discovered her remains in the backyard of his childhood home. As of April 2019, her husband has been convicted of her murder. Joyce McClain was murdered August 8, 1980. Nearly 36 years later, her killer was finally arrested. Jay Cook and Tanya Van Cuylenborg were murdered in November of 1987, with their killer being arrested in 2018 and convicted the following year. The murderer of Annette Schnee and Bobbi Jo Oberholtzer was finally arrested in March 2021, 39 years later. | |
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Lured into a Trap | |
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Lured into a Trap: Michaela Garecht's abductor moved the girl's scooter while she was shopping, and then nabbed her when she came out of the store and went to get the scooter. | |
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Kick the Dog | |
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Kick the Dog: Or rather, set fire to the dogs. Sixty of them — in a single night. All but one died. They belonged to a rescue run by an elderly woman, Mabel Wood, who was harassed for years and her kennels attacked not once but several times. To make matters worse, the perp has never been caught, and no one has any idea why he (or she) did such a thing. Sadly, Wood passed away in 2012 without ever receiving justice for the slaughter of her dogs. Equally horrifying, sacrifice the dogs. The Satanic cult suspected of involvement in New York's Son of Sam murders in 1976-77 regularly killed German Shepherds as part of their rituals, and canine mass graves were unearthed in the park where the cult held its meetings. | |
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Satanic Panic | |
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Satanic Panic: Satanic cults or rituals played a part in a number of murder cases profiled. Texas teenagers Shane Stewart and Sally McNelly left the Satanic cult of which they had been members and went to the police after allegedly learning that cult members were involved in robbery and murder. In July 1988, Shane and Sally were themselves murdered, and authorities believe the killers were members of said cult who wanted to keep them quiet. The case is still unsolved. Charlie Sigmin, a devout Christian, was horrified when he caught his wife, Ann, in the middle of a Satanic ritual, and the two separated soon afterward. In 1986, Ann's boyfriend Garey Goff shot Charlie to death, and Ann was later caught on tape implicating herself in a plot to kill Charlie. Goff served his time and has been released; Ann's whereabouts are still unknown. An early episode theorized that David Berkowitz was not the only individual involved in the Son of Sam murders, and that several other members of the Satanic cult in which he was involved committed some of the shootings. As of the year the episode aired (1988), this cult was apparently still meeting regularly in a nearby park, and if their apparent past behavior was any indication, still posing a serious threat to the general public. In the California Arsonist case, a man and his son found a videotape wrapped in a cast-off fatigue jacket by the side of the road and took it home to watch it. It was a recording of a house on fire, with whoever was making the video providing a demented running commentary suggesting that he was both the arsonist and involved in satanism. After the family turned the videocassette in to the police, the police searched for the aforementioned jacket and found it. In the pockets were a ceramic skull, cassette tapes of heavy-metal music, and a wooden pestle—of the type, said narrator Stack, "sometimes used to grind herbs for satanic rituals." (When the arsonist was found, it turned out he was simply a mentally unstable teenager and had no connection with any satanic cult.) | |
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Terror at Make-Out Point | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_3661df5c | comment |
Terror at Make-Out Point: The still-unsolved murder of Thomas Hotard and disappearance of Audrey Moate occurred as the two were making love in his car while parked in the woods, something they'd been doing every Saturday for years (he was married). It's speculated that the killer was an ill-tempered recluse who lived nearby and had either gotten fed up with their behavior and/or wanted the woman for himself. | |
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Bad Liar | |
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Bad Liar: Greg Webb, police chief of Lyons, Nebraska, was asked by investigators whether he'd had an intimate relationship with murder victim Anna Anton, and answered, "No." In the reenactment, Webb, immediately after saying "No," takes a sip of his beverage while averting his eyes. The investigator, knowing Webb is lying, asks Webb the same question a second time, and Webb admits he and Anton were indeed lovers. With this lie, Webb immediately became a suspect in Anton's death, and eventually ended up serving eight years in prison after being apprehended due to viewer tips. | |
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Took a Level in Kindness | |
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Took a Level in Kindness: Thomas Sawyer after his Near-Death Experience. His family reported he began a less selfish and more loving and considerate person after the incident. Researchers pointed out this was common in people who had such experiences. | |
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Dated History | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_3e8c87a3 | comment |
Dated History: Quite a few of the high-profile mysteries aren't so mysterious anymore. note The FilmRise reruns of the original series on YouTube bring the viewer up to date (or at least to 2017) with updates on cases resolved since the original series went off the air, although a few cases have had important developments even more recently, two examples of which - the Molly Bish and Barbara Jean Horn stories - are noted below. Unsolved Mysteries aired a segment about the then-unknown Unabomber. Several years later, he was identified as Ted Kaczynski. The show later floated the idea that Kaczynski was also the Zodiac Killer (some still believe he was). In 2002, in one of Robert Stack's final episodes before his death, the show aired a segment about an elusive serial rapist/killer only known then as the East Area Rapist/Original Night Stalker, who struck across California in the 1970s and '80s. The case was only recently solved on April 25, 2018, when the FBI arrested former police officer Joseph James DeAngelo, age 72, based on familial DNA evidence. It also aired a segment fingering William Stevens, a petty criminal and all-around creep, as the Green River Killer. Five years after the episode aired, Gary Ridgway was identified as the Green River Killer through DNA evidence. Stevens is no longer considered a suspect in the case. The 1991 "Diabolical Minds" special profiled the case of Joan Rogers, who was murdered along with her daughters Michelle and Christe while on vacation in Florida in 1989. The murderer, Oba Chandler, was caught in 1992 and executed in 2011, and was posthumously implicated in another unsolved murder from 1990. A 1996 segment covered the unsolved 1975 murder of Martha Moxley. Seven years later, Michael Skakel was convicted of the murder, although Skakel's conviction was overturned 2018 and the State of Connecticut eventually decided not to retry him. Then-fugitive James Bulger was featured in an episode. By the time he was finally caught, an update was added to the episodes that were now being shown on Spike TV. The 2000 disappearance of 16-year-old Molly Bish sadly became a murder investigation when her body was found in June 2003. 18 years later, investigators announced they had a person of interest in the case - a convicted rapist named Frank Sumner, who had died in 2016. Ronald Glenn West, a former cop currently serving a life sentence for raping and killing two women near Toronto in 1970, is considered a person of interest in the Blind River Rest Stop murders of 1991, as he was living in that northern Ontario community at the time and reportedly, if he wore a blond wig, bore a resemblance to the composite sketch of the killer. However, there has never been enough evidence to charge him, and the lone survivor of the attack, Gord McAllister, is now deceased. On the flip side of the coin, the 1988 murder of four-year-old Barbara Jean Horn is once again unsolved. Walter Ogrod confessed to the killing and was sentenced to death in 1996, but claimed he was innocent and his confession had been coerced, and was officially exonerated in 2020 due to DNA evidence. Google-searching many of the cases will find newspaper articles on them, revealing that they were high-profile locally, if not nationally, and also often mentioning that their story was profiled on the show. Often, these articles come with a resolution on the case, like those of Bonnie Haim and Joyce McLain's killer has finally been arrested. The story of the abductions of Angela Hammond, Cheryl Ann Kenney, and Trudy Darby was recently featured on the Investigation Discovery series "Welcome To Murdertown". In was done in a very similar format to the Unsolved Mysteries segment and reveals that not only have Trudy's killers been caught, police indeed believe that they are responsible for the disappearance and presumed murder of the other two women. On occasion, new developments in cases would occur before the segments even aired. An example is the case of Adam and Elena Emery, who were believed to have staged their own suicides in 1993 after Adam was convicted of a 1990 murder. Before the case aired, Elena's skull was found, confirming that she was in fact dead, though the circumstances of her death remain unclear. | |
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Make It Look Like an Accident | |
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Make It Look Like an Accident: Probably the most common type of case during Stack's era involved someone being found dead, with Stack always introducing the segment by saying "the police ruled it a suicide, but the family says... MURDER." In some cases there were multiple types of blood being found at the crime scene, or victims that were bound with packing wire before being dumped into incinerators. The Keith Warren case took this up to eleven. Aside from his likely murder being made to look like a suicide (numerous toxins were found in his body, he was wearing clothes that weren't his, both the rope and the tree that he was hung from were far too fragile to support his weight, and the rope was tied in a ridiculously elaborate fashion that would have been impossible for him to do), when a friend of his called his mother, wanting to talk to her, he was soon found dead by the side of the road. Despite injuries that clearly indicated that he'd been beaten with an object, it was ruled as a hit-and-run. In one such case - the 1987 deaths of Arkansas teens Don Henry and Kevin Ives, who were run over by a locomotive while lying unconscious on the train tracks - the victims' families were successful in getting the cause of death changed to murder. Their deaths had originally been ruled accidental after autopsies seemed to show the boys had smoked enough marijuana to render them unconscious. However, subsequent postmortems revealed that the boys had not smoked nearly that much pot and that both were probably dead or at least unconscious before they were placed on the tracks. The murders remain unsolved. Subverted in some cases where it possibly was an accident. In the Russell Evans case, Stack truthfully pointed out that even if he had been accidentally hit by a car (as investigators believed) instead of beaten (as his parents believed), the driver still deserved to be arrested for his actions. Sadly, successful in the case of the above-mentioned Michelle Witherell. In all likelihood, her husband beat her to death after catching up with her as she tried to flee him and then dragged her body to a spot in the parking lot right under their balcony to make it look as though she had fallen off while trying to hang Christmas lights. Despite her injuries clearly being consistent with being beaten rather than from a fall, as well as further evidence of her body being dragged to where it was found, he was acquitted. | |
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Blatant Lies | |
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Blatant Lies: A lot of suspects in the "missing"/"murder" cases have given interviews swearing their innocence. Only for an update to reveal that they were arrested for the crime. | |
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Bittersweet Ending | |
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Elizabeth Ortiz, who poisoned her husband Gilbert's muscle-building amino-acid milkshakes with insecticide, then ran off with their young son. Miraculously, Gilbert survived, though the poison severely damaged his nerves and liver. Elizabeth was eventually captured in Mexico and Gilbert and his son were reunited. Sadly - see under Bittersweet Ending above - Gilbert's relationship with his son is now strained (to say the least). | |
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Lonely Funeral | |
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Lonely Funeral: Happened to the mysterious woman known as "Jennifer Fairgate", who is the subject of the episode "A Death In Oslo" in the Netflix revival. | |
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Amnesiac Liar | |
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Amnesiac Liar: Investigators believe Arthur Paul Beal (alias "Tyler"), who contacted the show hoping to find out his true identity, may have been one. A detective who interviewed Beal noted that Beal seemed very talkative and eerily intelligent, plus there was the fact that Beal was wanted for grand larceny for allegedly stealing a shipment of food. Although Beal's mother seemed to think his amnesia was real, Beal's ex-wife has since commented that she and the couple's children believed he was faking. The truth will likely never be known, as Beal reportedly suffered a massive heart attack several years ago that left him in a vegetative state. | |
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Greaser Delinquents | |
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Greaser Delinquents: In the late 1960's, a gang of these began terrorizing the small town of Rock Creek, Ohio and in all likelihood, murdered police chief Robert Hamrick. | |
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Would Hurt a Child | |
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Would Hurt a Child: Many of the criminals profiled for abusing, kidnapping, or murdering children. One of the more horrifying cases is that of three-year-old Rachael Runyan, who was not only abducted and killed, but may have been featured in a Snuff Film made by her killers. Four of the people shot in the Las Cruces bowling alley massacre were children. Three of them died, with the youngest victim just two years old. Jim Burnside told his wife, Annette, he'd kill her and her entire family if she ever tried to leave him. When his five-year-old daughter asked him if he'd kill her too, Jim, without missing a beat, replied, "Yes, I'll kill you too." He later made good on his threat to kill Annette. He was captured and died in prison. The "baby brokers" profiled on the show, including Bessie Bernard, Ethel Nation, and especially Georgia Tann, who became notorious for kidnapping infants and then selling them to childless well-to-do couples. Ethel Nation continued to inflict emotional pain on her victims into adulthood, cruelly telling anyone who inquired about their background that their mothers had been wanton women who hadn't wanted kids but were unable to afford abortions. In at least one case, this was determined to be a cruel lie. Sometimes extends to the authorities. In 1917 in Fatima, Portugal, young Lucia Santos and her two cousins, who claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary, were held by town officialsnote The visions were believed by authorities to be a political hoax and that the kids had been put up to it by the local priest, in opposition to the secular Portuguese Republican government. Ironically, the priest didn't believe the kids at first either. who ordered them to divulge what the Blessed Mother had told them, under threat of torture and death. Lucia's cousins, after refusing to talk, were taken away and told they would be boiled in oil; despite this, Lucia remained unflappable. Fortunately the authorities were bluffing, as Lucia's cousins were not harmed and she was soon reunited with them. | |
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I Want My Mommy! | |
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I Want My Mommy!: A Lost Loves segment has the father variant with a young girl named Patty Miller being kept away from her loving father growing up.note her father, Robert Miller, was a loving father, but after her parents' divorce and given the time period this happened in (the 60s), custody went to her unloving mother, who eventually remarried and gave Patty and equally unloving stepfather, who didn't want him to have any contact with her He once tried to visit her at school, but being unable to understand him as she was deaf and him being fearful of a confrontation with the stepfather again that would upset her, he left. Upon realizing too late who he was, she ran out after him and then cried out to her teacher "I want my Daddy!"note She caught up with him two years later and told him she wanted to live with him. He tried to arrange it legally but couldn't, then her stepfather threatened him. Fortunately, a half-sister saw the broadcast, called Patty, and put her in touch with her father and other family members. | |
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Happily Adopted | |
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Happily Adopted: A number of stories in the Lost Loves segments. In particular, the Hatbox Baby had no clue she was adopted until her adoptive mother revealed the truth on her deathbed — fifty-five years later. | |
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Gory Discretion Shot | |
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Gory Discretion Shot: Many murder/assault depictions often employ this. For example, in the segment "Whistle Blown", Dave Bocks is strung up and slowly lowered into a furnace, but it cuts to the temperature gauge at the moment his body would have been dropped in. | |
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Obnoxious In-Laws | |
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Obnoxious In-Laws: Kristie Lee's mother and stepfather-in-law in did not get along with her and were even suspected of killing her. Wendy Camp's former in-laws gave her a hard time in trying to see her son and an argument regarding custody resulted in the deaths of her, her young daughter and her new sister-in-law. While the mother-in-law was eventually charged with their murders, the grandmother-in-law and suspected ringleader died before any charges could be brought against her. In the Charlotte Pollis segment, it's abundantly clear that Charlotte's family believes that her husband Paul is her killer and that his family helped him cover it up. The two families have been at each other's throats since Charlotte's 1994 disappearance. | |
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I Never Said It Was Poison | |
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I Never Said It Was Poison: In one episode, after a restaurant owner is shot, the police bring his business rival into the station for questioning. When they ask the man if he knows why he's there, he states, "I assume it's about the shooting of (rival business owner)." When the cops ask him how he could have known about that, as (a) they hadn't told him, and (b) the news hadn't been made public, so no one else could have told him, the man nervously refused to answer any more questions and declared that he wanted to call his lawyer. Said attorney promptly told him to walk out if he wasn't under arrest. He did, but sure enough, an investigation found that he'd hired a hit man to kill the other man. The police became suspicious of Tim McClure when he claimed that he drove along the highway looking for his mother's purse, something they had not told him was missing when they found her body. The Christi Nichols case mentioned above. Police were suspicious of Christi's husband Mark after he recited the contents of his missing wife's suitcase down to the last detail. Ultimately, however, they did not have enough evidence to charge him, though they believed he likely killed his wife. | |
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Good Girl Gone Bad | |
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Good Girl Gone Bad: 15-year-old Melissa "Missy" Munday, an honors student and member of the Future Homemakers of America who ran off with an ex-con nearly twice her age named Jerry Strickland and ended up assisting him in robbing and murdering a gas station oil courier. Her friends and family couldn't believe the Missy they knew was capable of such evil. | |
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Downer Ending | |
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Downer Ending: The mysteries that are still unsolved. It becomes even more of a downer when you learn that some of the victims' loved ones died not knowing what happened to those they lost. One of the ultimate Downer Endings is the story of Joseph Felix Schambier, who spent 45 years searching for the newborn daughter he'd had to give up after his wife died, only to discover that his daughter had perished in an explosion at the age of 18. Even worse, it was murder; her estranged husband had rigged her car with dynamite. Some research will turn up examples of some sad or unfortunate things that have happened to people who were interviewed on the show in the years since. Some have passed away under sad circumstances, such as Nyleen Kay Marshall's mother, Nancy, who was raped and murdered in 1995 in Mexico, or Heidi Wyrick's father Andy, who died at the young age of 45. Others have ended up on the wrong side of the law, such as the motorcyclist who found the Good Samaritan who saved his life after an accident, then went on to be convicted of molesting a child. | |
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The Coroner Doth Protest Too Much | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_4e6e4dc7 | comment |
The Coroner Doth Protest Too Much: A lot of the "unexplained deaths" have been ruled suicide/accident/natural causes despite strong evidence of murder. For example, Russell Evans' death was ruled as the result of a hit-and-run, but the ER report indicated that he'd been beaten up. Or Robert Hamrick, deemed to have died in a car accident despite also showing signs of a beating—blood being found in the back of his car, his billy club missing, and the damage to his car being insufficient to have caused fatal injuries. People suspicious regarding the death of their loved ones have often had the bodies exhumed for a second autopsy to find that the second report flat-out contradicts what was said in the original and/or what the police and/or eyewitnesses claimed to have happened. | |
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Early-Installment Weirdness | |
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Early-Installment Weirdness: The show began as a series of intermittent prime-time specials during the 1987-88 TV season (it did not debut as a weekly series until the fall of 1988), with Raymond Burr hosting the first episode and then Karl Malden taking over for the next two. Robert Stack did not join the show until episode four. The early episodes also feature a different edit of the opening theme song and a completely different ending theme song. | |
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Disproportionate Retribution | |
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Disproportionate Retribution: A handful of assault or murder victims were attacked over a minor slight. Such as the Dick Hansen case. After a date with his girlfriend, she ended up being followed in her car by a strange, irate man. When he was finally able to confront the man and ask what his problem was, he made angry gestures towards the woman's license plate holder, which displayed that she was a fan of the San Francisco 49ers. When an incredulous Hansen told him to get lost, the man shot and killed him and drove off, never to be seen again. | |
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Crazy Jealous Guy | |
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Crazy Jealous Guy: Far too many cases involve this. One particular case was that of murderer Rick Church, who after his break-up with Colleen Ritter, broke into her house in the pre-dawn hours and attacked her family at knife-point. Both her parents died, but Colleen and her brother lived. Although he fled the scene, Church was soon captured after the episode's broadcast and sentenced to life in prison. The distaff equivalent was also profiled on occasion. Maria Armstrong was a Clingy Jealous Girl (and a paranoid schizophrenic to boot) who was regularly violent with her boyfriend, Ron Argenti, and ultimately bludgeoned him to death. | |
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Reincarnation | |
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Reincarnation: Georgia Rudolph, a woman from Macon, Georgia, and Jack Turnock, a college professor, claimed to be the reincarnations of Sandra Jean Jenkins and Tommy Hicks, a young couple from Marietta, Ohio, who both died under tragic circumstances in 1914: Tommy was killed in an accidental fall, and Sandra Jean, who was pregnant with his child, committed suicide soon afterward. Both Rudolph and Turnock claimed to have recalled the same events in Tommy's and Sandra's lives under regressive hypnosis. | |
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Foreseeing My Death | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_514bc7f8 | comment |
Foreseeing My Death: Some murder victims apparently had eerie premonitions of their own demises. Las Vegas teenager Kathy Hobbs was plagued as a child by a premonition that she would not live to be 16. She was ecstatic when her 16th birthday came and went without incident, and began to come out of her shell and make plans for her future. Tragically, Kathy would not live much longer, as she was abducted and killed exactly three months and three days later. Wendy Camp's husband had a bad feeling when her ex called and offered to let her come and visit their son. He should have heeded it, as she, her daughter, and his sister (he sent her along for safety) never returned.note The bodies of all three were found in 2013 and the ex's family charged with the murders. Cindy Anderson was beset by a series of nightmares, including one in which she was abducted and murdered. In 1981, she vanished under strange circumstances from the legal practice where she worked as a secretary. At first police suspected she was the victim of an unknown Abhorrent Admirer who scrawled love messages for Cindy on the sides of buildings near her workplace. She has never been found.note Police now believe she was murdered by drug dealers after overhearing an incriminating conversation, but there is not enough evidence to file charges. Subverted with the Doris Smith case, due to both her son, Thomas Wright, having a nightmare about a criminal being transported to prison overpowering her and killing her and that even though the next day the situation played out exactly how he saw it...until two good Samaritans managed to come along and save her. Sadly, neither of these heroic men have ever been identified and located. | |
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Unsolved Mysteries / int_51f336bf | type |
Joggers Find Death | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_51f336bf | comment |
Joggers Find Death: On July 24, 1997, Amy Wroe Bechtel ran some errands, then set out for a training run in preparation for a race she was planning to participate in. She has never been seen again. There are several other cases of people going for a run/walk and being assaulted/murdered/disappearing. Or of finding a victim—two hikers found the remains of the below mentioned Susan Harrison. | |
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Unsolved Mysteries / int_54adb6a3 | type |
Staircase Tumble | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_54adb6a3 | comment |
Staircase Tumble: What was initially believed to be the contested cause of death of college student Jack Davis, Jr. His death was ruled an accident in which he had fallen down a flight of stairs on campus after a night of drinking. However, an independent autopsy requested by his father shows that he suffered several fractures to the skull—more congruent with being beaten—and then placed at the bottom of the staircase. Over three decades later, while his case has now been upgraded to suspicious, officially it still leans towards being accidental. Dennis DePue pushed his wife, Marilynn, down the stairs during an argument and then proceeded to beat her to a pulp while she was prone on the floor, all in front of their children. He then told the kids he was taking her to the hospital; instead, he shot her in the head and dumped her body in the nearby countryside. | |
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Unsolved Mysteries / int_550754dc | type |
Improbable Infant Survival | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_550754dc | comment |
Improbable Infant Survival: In the case of some of the miracle stories, played straight. | |
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Unsolved Mysteries / int_550754dc | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_55c87054 | type |
Mystery Cult | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_55c87054 | comment |
Mystery Cult: In addition to the Satanic Panic cases. Nelson DeCloud, self-appointed "spiritual leader" of one such cult in Missouri, forced a young girl named Julie Cooper to join his "harem" of sexual partners and had her humiliated and beaten if she resisted or tried to escape. Eventually, with the help of her future husband, Tim Santi, Julie was able to escape, and her appearance on Unsolved Mysteries led to DeCloud being captured and sent to prison. He is now deceased. | |
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Unsolved Mysteries / int_55c87054 | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_564d4e71 | type |
Tired of Running | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_564d4e71 | comment |
Tired of Running: A variation: Domestic Abuser David Kemp, who killed his ex-wife and her new boyfriend in a jealous rage and then went on the run for the next several years, finally gave himself up, not because it was the right thing to do, but because his years on the run were ruining his health. | |
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Unsolved Mysteries / int_57bb7b55 | type |
Near-Death Clairvoyance | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_57bb7b55 | comment |
Near-Death Clairvoyance: Kristle Merzlock claimed she experienced this in 1982 when the then-seven-year-old was pronounced clinically dead after drowning at a swim party. She claimed she felt her soul ascending from her body and could look down and see the doctors trying to revive her. Later, she was able to describe things about the resuscitation attempts she shouldn't have known about. | |
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Unsolved Mysteries / int_57bb7b55 | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_590eb583 | type |
Domestic Abuse | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_590eb583 | comment |
Domestic Abuse: Frequently. Friends and relatives of missing or murdered women often cite that their husbands/boyfriends were violent and believe them to be responsible. In several two instances, it wasn't even the women who had vanished/been killed or attacked, but friends of theirs who had tried to help, or in the Theresa Stamper story, her new boyfriend. Some of the "wanted" segments take it further, with everyone knowing for a fact that the man in question is guilty and the focus being on catching him. | |
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Unsolved Mysteries / int_5a3b8032 | type |
The Un-Reveal | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_5a3b8032 | comment |
The Unreveal: Everyone realized that the truly unexplained paranormal mysteries, as well as stories on locales such as Lourdes and Fatima where religious miracles are said to have occurred, were never going to be solved. It didn't make their episodes on them any less awesome. Some of the more infamous crime based cases the show covered, such as the harassment of Bill and Dorothy Wacker or the Circleville Letter Writer, will likely never be solved since in the former case both of the victims are now dead, and in the latter case the only remotely plausible suspect has already served a prison sentence and still actively denies he had anything to do with it. Or other infamous murder or missing person cases—the Lincoln assassination, the MLK assassination, the Huey Long assassination—that took place so long ago that solving them is unlikely and bringing the responsible party to justice is impossible given that they themselves are likely dead. An update to the Huey Long report stated that a former superintendent of the Louisiana State Police, Francis Grevemberg, has revealed that two eyewitness state troopers told him that the supposed assassin Dr. Weiss was unarmed, and Huey was accidentally shot by his own bodyguards, who then planted a gun on Weiss. Grevemberg could not speak up earlier because the Louisiana State legislature was filled with pro-Long politicians who did not believe the story or support an inquiry: also revealed was the $20,000 life insurance payment granted to Long's family on his accidental death. | |
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Unsolved Mysteries / int_5a3b8032 | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_5af55436 | type |
Forced to Watch | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_5af55436 | comment |
Forced to Watch: During the Alien Abduction case, one of the victims, under hypnosis, recounted how one of his friends was subjected to a painful experiment that involved something being forced onto his face. None of the others could help him and could only watch. | |
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Near-Death Experience | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_5b4573b1 | comment |
Near-Death Experience: A first-season episode examined these, profiling two people, a young girl named Kristle Merzlock and a New Yorker named Thomas Sawyer, who claimed they had experienced this. Both described journeys toward a white light and feeling a comforting, omniscient presence nearby. Kristle almost chose to stay and "become one with the light" but changed her mind once she realized she'd miss her family; Thomas also chose to stay, but abruptly felt himself "slammed" back into his body, leading him to joke he'd been "kicked out of heaven." | |
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Unsolved Mysteries / int_5c04772f | type |
Conviction by Counterfactual Clue | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_5c04772f | comment |
Conviction by Counterfactual Clue: The Christi Nichols story. Her husband claimed that she had walked out on him, citing that several of her things and her suitcase were missing. When her suitcase was found, it contained exactly what he said it would, piquing the cops' suspicions, as they found it highly unlikely that any man could know exactly what was in his wife's suitcase, as one detective declared that he himself had no idea what was in his own wife's purse. (It's actually a very sad aversion, as to this day, she remains missing, and despite the cops' strong suspicions that he killed her, they have zero evidence to support this, meaning he remains a free man.) | |
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Unsolved Mysteries / int_5ce2ab52 | type |
Police Psychic | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_5ce2ab52 | comment |
Police Psychic: Psychic Dorothy Allison was profiled in one episode, which detailed how she had helped solve the accidental drownings of a 5-year-old boy and a New York banker and the murder of a 14-year-old Staten Island girl. The episode also followed her as she attempted to help investigators solve the 1984 murder of 15-year-old Lori Zimmerman, and although Dorothy was able to name a good suspect, Lori's murder is still unsolved nearly 40 years later. | |
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Unsolved Mysteries / int_5ce2ab52 | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_5dd191ec | type |
Wife Husbandry | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_5dd191ec | comment |
Wife Husbandry: After Franklin Delano Floyd kidnapped Michael Hughes from his school, an investigation found that Michael's mother Sharon had herself been kidnapped by Floyd as a child. He raised her as his own—molesting her the entire time—then married her when she came of age, then killed her either when she got fed up with the abuse and tried to leave, or because he feared she would turn him in regarding another murder he had committed. note In 2014, Sharon was finally identified as Suzanne Maree Sevakis, who had been kidnapped by Floyd after he and her mother broke up, and Floyd finally admitted to killing Michael Hughes the very day he abducted him. | |
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Unsolved Mysteries / int_617f0563 | type |
Heel–Face Turn | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_617f0563 | comment |
Heel–Face Turn: Kevin Poulsen, ultimately. He was charged with several counts of fraud and conspiracy and once caught served his five-year sentence, but also went on to become a journalist and used his skills to help set up computer programming to locate sex offenders on MySpace. He eventually located and identified 700 offenders with accounts. | |
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He Knows Too Much | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_65acf9db | comment |
Texas teenagers Shane Stewart and Sally McNelly left the Satanic cult of which they had been members and went to the police after allegedly learning that cult members were involved in robbery and murder. In July 1988, Shane and Sally were themselves murdered, and authorities believe the killers were members of said cult who wanted to keep them quiet. The case is still unsolved. | |
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Unsolved Mysteries / int_65acf9db | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_66dfe36a | type |
Missing Mom | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_66dfe36a | comment |
Missing Mom: Many missing people featured are missing women who are mothers. Also, many of the "Lost Loves" stories dealt with grown children searching for their birth mothers, or who were placed in foster homes after their mothers died. | |
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Unsolved Mysteries / int_6d332aea | type |
Driven to Suicide | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_6d332aea | comment |
Driven to Suicide: Rozsi Thormat, a Russian immigrant to New Jersey, drowned herself and her infant daughter, Fatimat, in 1956. She had been in a dispute with her husband as to whether the family should stay in America (which she wanted) or return to Russia (which he wanted, as his business wasn't doing well in the U.S.) and also suffering from what would likely be today diagnosed as postpartum depression. Fatimat's sister, Farezat Thormat-Abdokov, contacted the show in hopes of reuniting with her half-sister, Margaret Wiesner, the daughter of Rozsi's first husband Samuel. Margaret was taken away by Samuel after Rozsi's death because he wanted her to be raised in a Jewish family, not with her stepfather who was Muslim and who kept Farezat. The case remains unsolved. (The Unsolved Mysteries wiki has this one under Margaret Wiesner's name.) One episode profiled a woman named Georgia Rudolph who claimed she was the reincarnation of Sandra Jean Jenkins, a young woman from Marietta, Ohio, who had drowned herself in 1914 after her boyfriend had been killed in an accidental fall. According to Georgia, Sandra was pregnant with Tommy's child, a cause for scandal at the time as the couple were not married, and wanted to avoid the ostracism and gossip she knew would ensue if she continued living. Because she was a suicide, Sandra was allegedly buried in an unmarked grave. Some fugitives, such as Dennis DePue (who beat and shot his estranged wife to death), opted to take their own lives rather than face the music when cornered by law enforcement. In 1958, Texas teen Patsy Summers had an affair with an enlisted man named Duncan Gilmore and ended up pregnant, but kept this a secret from her fiancee and let him believe the baby was his. The stress of keeping this secret took its toll on Patsy and she attempted suicide twice, succeeding the second time by driving head-on into oncoming traffic. Patsy and Duncan's daughter, Jeannie, was successful in her search for her birth father. | |
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Unsolved Mysteries / int_6d7cd3e | type |
Dead Person Impersonation | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_6d7cd3e | comment |
Dead Person Impersonation: The story of Phillip Fraser, a young man from Alaska who was murdered in the British Columbia wilderness in 1988 while on his way to college in Seattle. It's believed Fraser was killed by a Hostile Hitchhiker who then stole his identity, as Fraser was seen picking up a hitchhiker while leaving a restaurant parking lot and an elderly couple later helped a young man with car trouble who was not Fraser but was driving Fraser's car and pretending to be him. The case remains unsolved, although some believe Fraser may have been a victim of a serial killer who was known for attacking hitchhikers (and matches the description of the man wanted in the Fraser case). | |
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Unsolved Mysteries / int_6d7cd3e | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_6e70b12b | type |
Nominal Importance | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_6e70b12b | comment |
Nominal Importance: Unfortunately, real-life photos of some of the victims are unavailable at the time of a broadcast, usually when there is more than one victim and the segment focuses on the main victim (or that victim's family was the only one willing to appear in the segment). Most infamously is the "Unexplained Death" of Kenneth Engie. There was a featured actor in the reenactment, but no clear photos of him to broadcast even though he was the only victim featured in the segment. | |
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Unsolved Mysteries / int_714667be | type |
Murderer P.O.V. | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_714667be | comment |
Murderer P.O.V.: The reenactments sometimes use this to very frightening effect—the killer of Chaim Weiss slowly climbs the stairs of his dormitory, walks down the hall, opens the door to his room, approaches his bed... cue Gory Discretion Shot. Another example is the still-unsolved 1967 murder of Chicago cop Ralph Probst, who was shot from outside while in his kitchen. | |
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Unsolved Mysteries / int_72852a93 | type |
Henpecked Husband | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_72852a93 | comment |
Henpecked Husband: It was theorized this might have been William Bradford "Brad" Bishop's motive for murdering his wife and mother, as both women were reportedly always telling him he was worthless and washed up due to his failure to secure a promotion in the U.S. State Department. Why he also chose to kill his sons is unclear, though possibly it was to make sure there were no witnesses left alive. | |
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Unsolved Mysteries / int_7301ae04 | type |
Serial Killer | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_7301ae04 | comment |
Serial Killer: Some of the show's scariest segments were those featuring attempts to capture and identify these. The segment on the murder of Joyce Chiang speculated that one of these might be responsible for her death, that of another intern who'd been killed a year before, and for the murder of Chandra Levy before it turned out that despite the similarities among the women, their deaths were unrelated. | |
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Unsolved Mysteries / int_744e3311 | type |
Police Brutality | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_744e3311 | comment |
Police Brutality: Often implied as the reason behind suspicious deaths that happened in police custody, particularly that of Michael Rosenblum. The respective departments pathetic attempts at explaining—or not explaining things doesn't help. | |
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Out-of-Character Alert | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_777baed3 | comment |
Out-of-Character Alert: Loved ones of those profiled in the "missing"/unexplained death" segments usually state that they became convinced that foul play was involved rather than an accident or suicide when they noticed something unusual—"My wife never goes anywhere without her purse!", "He always drives with the windows rolled up!", "There were cigarette butts found by his car but he didn't smoke!", etc. | |
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For Want of a Nail | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_79a60aec | comment |
For Want Of A Nail: The George Owens case. An 80-year-old man gets lost while driving, and decides to stop at a gas station and ask for directions back to his hometown. The clerk misunderstands where George is trying to go, and sends him to a town on the other side of the state. The next day he turns up there, and thereafter disappears and is never seen again. We will never know why George got lost that day or what happened to him when he got to the strange town, but it is very possible that the clerk's mistake changed the course of — and perhaps ended — George's life. Equally sad is the story of the store owner who waited on George while he was in the unfamiliar town. During her interview segment, she was visibly trying not to cry and clearly berating herself for failing to realize that he was disoriented and needed help. Many stories are like this. Were it not for a simple late night trip to the ATM/supermarket/coffee shop, had people accepted the offer of a ride instead of deciding to walk (or turned down a ride from that person they thought they knew) — many of the "deaths" and "missing persons" might still be alive today. As the arrest of Joyce McLain's killer shows, it turns out that the cops often have suspicions about the guilty party from the get-go, but can't make an arrest because those suspicions are all that they have. It can sometimes take years before enough evidence is accumulated to bring charges. A number of cases involved kids who ended up abducted and/or murdered because their parents let them go somewhere (like to The Convenient Store Next Door), play, etc. without adult supervision. Michaela Garecht's parents assumed she would be safe if a friend went with her; they were wrong. Kathy Hobbs' mother assumed her daughter would be with friends, but Kathy's friends weren't at their usual meeting place and Kathy chose to go alone. The investigator who handled the discovery of Kathy's body noted that the sight made him want to bring his daughter to the scene, to show her what sometimes happens to kids who go out after dark. A particularly tragic example: Lauria Bible's parents let her stay at her friend Ashley Freeman's to celebrate the latter's 16th birthday. Before the night was over, Ashley's parents were murdered, the Freeman house had been burned to the ground, and Ashley and Lauria had disappeared. 19 years later, the killers of all four were finally arrested. Had she not been allowed to do something as commonplace as spend the night with her best friend, Lauria would be alive today. This doesn't only apply to kids either. In 1910, Conradina Olson's son, Edwin, opted not to accompany his mother on a train trip, which she claimed was for a doctor's appointment. Conradina was never seen alive again, and Edwin blamed himself for the rest of his life. Conversely, this has also saved many potential victims lives. In particular, all 15 members of a choir were late for rehearsal due to some trivial reason, and all were spared a fiery death when the church exploded (due to a faulty boiler) within minutes of when rehearsal would have started. | |
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Unsolved Mysteries / int_7b21ef92 | type |
Later-Installment Weirdness | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_7b21ef92 | comment |
Later-Installment Weirdness: The 2020 Netflix revival notably goes for a full docuseries presentation with no main host/narrator. | |
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Unsolved Mysteries / int_7b21ef92 | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_7c9dcc1 | type |
THeUnfavorite | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_7c9dcc1 | comment |
The Unfavorite: Helen Elas suffered verbal and physical abuse from her father and stepmother while a child in Czechoslovakia, while her siblings were all treated well. She believed it was because her father blamed her for her birth mother's death. | |
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Unsolved Mysteries / int_7c9dcc1 | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_7e84a642 | type |
Serial Rapist | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_7e84a642 | comment |
A segment on a Serial Rapist depicted his victim being drugged by whatever he'd put in her drunk. Lab work showed it was a sedative (he was a doctor) given at much higher than the necessary amount. | |
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Unsolved Mysteries / int_808cbaeb | type |
Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_808cbaeb | comment |
Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: In the segment on Ira Einhorn and his murder of Holly Maddox, her sister described him as being rude, overbearing to Holly, and as having poor hygiene. | |
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Unsolved Mysteries / int_834420aa | type |
BFS | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_834420aa | comment |
Mike Emert's killer was believed to be this. He was to show a house to a potential buyer—he was a successful real-estate agent—and although he was said to be an older man who had a limp and walked with a cane, investigators theorized that it was a disguise and his "cane" was actually a sword cane he used to stab him to death. | |
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Unsolved Mysteries / int_863fa679 | type |
What Happened to the Mouse? | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_863fa679 | comment |
What Happened to the Mouse?: The Clifford Sherwood disappearance segment mentions that the boy that Clifford was walking to school with went missing as well. Short of that one sentence, we hear absolutely nothing else about the other boy. This is made worse by the fact that Clifford's mom promotes an elaborate conspiracy theory in which her estranged husband abducted Clifford, a scenario that becomes much more unlikely when considering that both boys went missing. | |
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Quiet Cry for Help | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_868a972f | comment |
Quiet Cry for Help: Attempted in the Anthonette Cayedito case: a few years after being abducted from her home, a waitress at a restaurant noticed her in the company of an unknown man and woman. She repeatedly dropped her fork and at one point squeezed her hand when she picked up. When the girl left, there was reportedly a note identifying herself and to call 911, but by then she and her two companions were long gone. | |
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Abhorrent Admirer | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_88cee6e2 | comment |
Cindy Anderson was beset by a series of nightmares, including one in which she was abducted and murdered. In 1981, she vanished under strange circumstances from the legal practice where she worked as a secretary. At first police suspected she was the victim of an unknown Abhorrent Admirer who scrawled love messages for Cindy on the sides of buildings near her workplace. She has never been found.note Police now believe she was murdered by drug dealers after overhearing an incriminating conversation, but there is not enough evidence to file charges. | |
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Spell My Name with an S | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_89a17726 | comment |
Spell My Name With An S: Victor Simon ran into a combination of this and mondegreen when trying to research his birth family. He assumed for a long time that his family name was "Shiman," as that was how "Simon" would be pronounced in Hungarian, but searches for "Shiman" turned up nothing and prevented him from making any headway until he realized the error. Additionally, a newspaper article about his mother's death spelled her name as "Schmon." | |
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Ghost Story | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_8aad574b | comment |
Ghost Story: One of the draws of the original show, presented to horrifying effect. | |
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Department of Child Disservices | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_8afadb7e | comment |
Department of Child Disservices: Sometimes plays a role, particularly in some of the "Lost Loves" segments. One woman, Sharon Stevens, as a girl, was taken from her loving foster home to be returned to her abusive father who, among other things, used the belt buckle his daughter had given him for Christmas to beat and cut her. Another story involved a corrupt juvenile court judge who awarded custody of a girl to the woman who kidnapped her, overruling the objections of the girl's own mother. This judge is believed to have been a co-conspirator in a notorious "baby broker" operation in which babies from poor backgrounds were kidnapped and adopted out to rich couples, and was eventually forced to resign in disgrace. | |
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There Is No Kill Like Overkill | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_8b606a51 | comment |
There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Some murders or assaults has the victim suffering wounds much more than what would kill an average person. A particularly cruel murder was that of Megan Curl, who in addition to being tied up was also asphyxiated with a plastic bag, had her throat slit and was set on fire. One of the detectives outright described it as "the meanest thing I'd ever seen someone do to another human being" in his years in law enforcement. | |
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Took a Level in Jerkass | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_8cb1a369 | comment |
Also, several children of parental abductions end on a bittersweet note with the child turning against the left-behind parent or guardian due to the brainwashing they suffered from their abductor. The worst example of this is the case of Jonathan Ortiz, who was abducted by his mother as a baby, eventually reunited with his father as a child and was arrested as a teenager for multiple incidents of beating up his father (who was left disabled due to his ex-wife poisoning him) due to blaming him for his mother being in prison. | |
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Laser-Guided Karma | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_90e31482 | comment |
Laser-Guided Karma: Recently, this can be applied to Cedric Young. He’s been in and out of prison since the episode premiered while his brother Fred was paroled and released for good behavior, vindicating his claims of innocence. | |
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Children Are Innocent | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_91672d3e | comment |
Children Are Innocent: Many of the children tangentially involved in segments are believed to have witnessed the crime in question but are too young to remember or articulate this. Some were even inadvertently involved—Susan LaFerte's 3-year old daughter actually let her mother's assailant into her house, too young to realize his dastardly intentions or provide a decent description. | |
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Crazy Cat Lady | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_9182ea54 | comment |
Crazy Cat Lady: Anna Anderson, whose claim to be Russian Grand Duchess Anastasia Romanov was posthumously disproved, had 30 cats and lived in a home that was perpetually filthy and unkempt. Dian Harlin was a Crazy Dog Lady who reportedly cared more for her dogs than she did for her husband, Hugh. Rumor has it she even baked dog food into a casserole and served it to her husband for dinner. | |
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Unsolved Mysteries / int_94b11537 | type |
The Convenient Store Next Door | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_94b11537 | comment |
A number of cases involved kids who ended up abducted and/or murdered because their parents let them go somewhere (like to The Convenient Store Next Door), play, etc. without adult supervision. Michaela Garecht's parents assumed she would be safe if a friend went with her; they were wrong. Kathy Hobbs' mother assumed her daughter would be with friends, but Kathy's friends weren't at their usual meeting place and Kathy chose to go alone. The investigator who handled the discovery of Kathy's body noted that the sight made him want to bring his daughter to the scene, to show her what sometimes happens to kids who go out after dark. A particularly tragic example: Lauria Bible's parents let her stay at her friend Ashley Freeman's to celebrate the latter's 16th birthday. Before the night was over, Ashley's parents were murdered, the Freeman house had been burned to the ground, and Ashley and Lauria had disappeared. 19 years later, the killers of all four were finally arrested. Had she not been allowed to do something as commonplace as spend the night with her best friend, Lauria would be alive today. This doesn't only apply to kids either. In 1910, Conradina Olson's son, Edwin, opted not to accompany his mother on a train trip, which she claimed was for a doctor's appointment. Conradina was never seen alive again, and Edwin blamed himself for the rest of his life. | |
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Unsolved Mysteries / int_9633f14b | type |
Badass Bystander | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_9633f14b | comment |
Badass Bystander: One case had a local newspaper journalist named Katherine Scott, who'd witnessed an armed robbery, then just so happened to be crossing paths with the robbers via their respective cars. Having a camera with her, she managed to snap a picture of the driver as she went by on the highway, even at the risk of either getting a poor quality shot, losing the camera or, even worse, she being harmed due to her actions. Fortunately, her picture allowed a composite of the suspect to be made and eventually led to one of the robber's arrest. | |
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Unsolved Mysteries / int_969c0ac2 | type |
Fresh Clue | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_969c0ac2 | comment |
Fresh Clue: In the segment about the murder of Kay Hall, one of the members of the group of people who find her body says, "She was as warm as you (the interviewer) and I are now, so whatever happened had just happened." Inverted in the Norman Ladner case. When his father finds his body, he notes how cold he is and realizes that he's been dead for a long time. | |
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Unsolved Mysteries / int_96a33f11 | type |
Riddle for the Ages | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_96a33f11 | comment |
The George Owens case. An 80-year-old man gets lost while driving, and decides to stop at a gas station and ask for directions back to his hometown. The clerk misunderstands where George is trying to go, and sends him to a town on the other side of the state. The next day he turns up there, and thereafter disappears and is never seen again. We will never know why George got lost that day or what happened to him when he got to the strange town, but it is very possible that the clerk's mistake changed the course of — and perhaps ended — George's life. Equally sad is the story of the store owner who waited on George while he was in the unfamiliar town. During her interview segment, she was visibly trying not to cry and clearly berating herself for failing to realize that he was disoriented and needed help. | |
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Unsolved Mysteries / int_96cc4848 | type |
"Dear John" Letter | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_96cc4848 | comment |
"Dear John" Letter: "Sweetheart Swindler" Arthur Frankford left one for one of his victims, claiming he was leaving her because she was too possessive. Along with him, he took $4500 in valuables and jewelry as well as several sentimental items. He was brought to justice thanks to the show. | |
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Never My Fault | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_973d220f | comment |
Never My Fault: Dennis DePue refused to accept any responsibility for the breakup of his marriage, blaming his wife Marilynn for turning the kids against him. He never denied that he murdered Marilynn, but in letters to Marilynn's family and friends sent while he was on the run in which he quoted liberally from the Bible, essentially blamed his victim - and her family and friends - for the act. | |
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Unsolved Mysteries / int_9858c391 | type |
Chick Magnet | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_9858c391 | comment |
Chick Magnet: Tony Lombardi, who was seeing three different women at the time of his death. This may have been a factor in his death, as one of the women already had a boyfriend and Tony had reportedly recently been receiving death threats, although the death was ruled a suicide. | |
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Stock Ness Monster | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_9a7d4472 | comment |
Stock Ness Monster: A few of the "Unexplained" segments featured searches for varying versions of these—New York/Vermont/Quebec is believed to have one inhabiting Lake Champlain (which is bordered by the two states and the province), appropriately named "Champ". There's also "Ogopogo," who reportedly inhabits Okanagan Lake in British Columbia, and has even been apparently caught on video. | |
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Unsolved Mysteries / int_9b4c842e | type |
Longer-Than-Life Sentence | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_9b4c842e | comment |
Longer-Than-Life Sentence: Has happened in some cases profiled on the show. Specific examples include: Dennis Keith Smith was captured after being profiled for committing two murders after he had been paroled for another murder he committed. Smith was sentenced to 160 years in prison and committed suicide just a few years into his sentence. Luis Diaz was convicted for being the Bird Road Rapist and was sentenced to thirteen life sentences plus 55 years. It turns out that Diaz was innocent all along; he was exonerated after serving 25 years when DNA evidence proved he was not the rapist. The real perpetrators, now believed to be more than one, have never been caught. | |
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Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and Yeti | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_9c23f3a0 | comment |
Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and Yeti: A handful of the "Unexplained" segments featured searches for varying versions of these, explaining the folklore and showing investigations into sightings to find out what had really been seen or experienced. | |
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Foreshadowing | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_9d12bbc1 | comment |
Foreshadowing: The Tracy Kirkpatrick story begins with a recitation of part of Christina Rossetti's poem, "Remember," in which the narrator implores her loved ones not to grieve after she is dead, but to remember her with a smile. Not long afterward, Tracy was murdered, and this poem was inscribed on her tombstone. Her murder is still unsolved. | |
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Alien Abduction | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_a05522e3 | comment |
Alien Abduction: The Allagash Abduction, an incident wherein four men on a camping trip were allegedly taken into a luminous ship before being subjected to bizarre and painful medical experiments. | |
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Unsolved Mysteries / int_a1b141f4 | type |
My God, What Have I Done? | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_a1b141f4 | comment |
My God, What Have I Done?: Family and friends of kidnap or murder victims often expressed regret that the last interaction they had with their lost loved one was an argument. Michael Rosenblum's mother, Barbara, threw him and his girlfriend out of her house when she discovered he'd relapsed on drugs and told him not to come back until he was clean. She never saw him alive again. | |
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Identity Amnesia | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_a2836be5 | comment |
Identity Amnesia: A handful of cases involved people who suffered from amnesia and contacted the show in hope that someone would recognize them and let them know who they were. One, however, turned out to be wanted for grand larceny, and some believe he was an Amnesiac Liar. In some stories, Identity Amnesia was feared to be the fate of missing persons such as Patricia Meehan, who wandered away from the scene of a traffic accident in 1989 and disappeared. She had a history of mental issues, and her family feared she'd suffered head trauma in the accident and was wandering around not knowing who she was. Patricia has never been found. | |
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Unsolved Mysteries / int_a4be7043 | type |
Da Chief | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_a4be7043 | comment |
In at least one story, the Corrupt Cop was the Chief of Police. Of Lyons, Nebraska, to be exact. Anna Anton broke off her romance with the town's police chief, Greg Webb, when she learned he had another girlfriend. Investigators believe he murdered Anna during an argument and dumped her body in a nearby field. He was captured due to viewer tips and served eight years for manslaughter before being paroled. | |
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Desperate Plea for Home | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_a61fc28e | comment |
Desperate Plea for Home: A variant; in the segment focusing on the Allagash Abduction, one of the victims stated under hypnosis that during the event, all he could think was how he wanted to be back on the canoe he and his friends were on before the creatures took them. | |
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Unsolved Mysteries / int_a6c69bd | type |
MacGuffin | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_a6c69bd | comment |
MacGuffin: A few cases revolved around an item instead of a person. One example was the family bible of Charles Lazarus. Said case involved a bible found in a junk store by Jonathan Grady, recording the marriage of a man named Charles Lazarus as well as his death and the birth of many descendants. Attempts to return the bible to any heirs have been unsuccessful in spite of being featured on the show and coverage in many national newspapers. | |
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Unsolved Mysteries / int_a70223 | type |
Karma Houdini | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_a70223 | comment |
In 1967, Joe Maloney offered his ex-wife, June, a drink, which unbeknownst to her was tainted with poison Joe had stolen from a friend's laboratory. June lapsed into a coma and lingered for three months before succumbing. Joe was apprehended in Ireland years later but freed as the nation had no extradition law with the U.S., making his case also one of the worst examples of Karma Houdini profiled on the show. | |
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Slipping a Mickey | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_ab8e26e2 | comment |
The Frank Olson case. A few weeks before his death, he was served a drink which, unbeknownst to him, was spiked with LSD, apparently so that CIA brass could prepare operatives for the eventuality of Soviet agents doing the same to them.note This was in 1953, some time before the recreational use of LSD became common. When Olson learned he'd been drugged, he was furious. His family believes he was murdered to keep him quiet about this and other such abuses committed by the CIA during the Cold War. | |
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Unsolved Mysteries / int_b01abe4f | type |
Catchphrase | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_b01abe4f | comment |
Catchphrase: "This is a true story, from the files of Unsolved Mysteries." "What you are about to see is not a news broadcast." "Join me. Perhaps you may be able to help solve a mystery." "For every mystery, there is someone, somewhere, who knows the truth. Perhaps that someone is watching. Perhaps... it's you." "Update" segments often included the phrase "...Until the night of our broadcast," before Stack began to narrate the details of the update. | |
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Abusive Parents | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_b11ac9f5 | comment |
Abusive Parents: Some of the "Lost Loves" segments involving separated siblings include these as part of the backstory. Victor Simon's adoptive parents went so far as to disown him and throw him out at the age of nine, after beating and starving him for most of his life - in 1929, during the Great Depression. | |
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Dead-Hand Shot | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_b1e81ef2 | comment |
Dead-Hand Shot: The segment on a still unknown Serial Killer operating in New Orleans in the early 90's begins with a man searching through a dump for cans to recycle. He moves an item... and recoils in horror at the sight of a young woman's hand. Joe Spencer's mother notices her dogs digging in her front yard and, when she goes to investigate, finds a young woman's hands sticking out of the ground. The body is that of Roxanne Woodson, one of her son's victims. In a Season Six episode, a security guard in Brooklyn investigates a dumpster after chasing away a suspicious-looking young man who has just dumped trash there, and notices a hand sticking out of the trash. He's discovered the body of Su-Ya Kim, a Korean immigrant and local businesswoman. The crime is still unsolved. | |
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Unsolved Mysteries / int_b3dbc942 | type |
Sequel | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_b3dbc942 | comment |
Sequel: Several cases (the murder of Shannon Mohr, the murder of Daniel Short) would later be covered on Forensic Files, which told the rest of the story after the mysteries were solved. The Shannon Mohr case was also revisited by the producers of UM themselves in 1993, when the story was turned into an NBC TV movie, Victim of Love: The Shannon Mohr Story. The film was later rerun on Lifetime at the same time as its "parent" show. | |
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My Beloved Smother | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_b58c51d8 | comment |
My Beloved Smother: Charlotte Pollis' mother blithely admits to calling her daughter "10,12,14 times a day". Ironically, this annoying tendency was one of the first things to cast doubt on her husband's story when he could offer no explanation for not answering the phone at a time when he was, by his own account, still at home. She later kidnapped Charlotte's daughter, who she believed witnessed her mother's murder, and fled the country with her in an effort to protect her from her father. | |
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Snuff Film | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_b6aad019 | comment |
Snuff Film: It's believed one may have been made featuring Rachael Runyan, a young Utah girl who was abducted and murdered in 1982. Even more disturbing, Rachael was only three years old. The murder is still unsolved. | |
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The Bluebeard | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_b9f6cc0a | comment |
The Bluebeard: One of the earliest stories was that of Robert Weeks who was suspected in the 1980 disappearance of girlfriend Cynthia Jabour and the 1986 disappearance of girlfriend Carol Ann Riley. Towards the end of the segment, it was mentioned that his wife Patricia was also missing, having disappeared in 1968. note The update informed viewers that Weeks was eventually captured and convicted of murdering Patricia and Cynthia, even though no trace of any of the missing women or his male business partner (who had discovered his dirty business dealings) was ever found. Interviews with the loved ones of missing/murdered women or the police investigating the case make it quite clear that they believe their husbands/boyfriends are responsible. Ricardo Caputo was known to have murdered four girlfriends and was a suspect in the murder of at least two more. He never married any of them, but one of his victims was two months pregnant with his child at the time of her death. | |
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Tear Jerker | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_bb53d08 | comment |
In 1969, seven-year-old LaHarriet "Niki" Crowder (nee Wade) befriended eight-year-old Charita Harding when the two girls were hospital roommates. Upon learning that Charita required surgery for cancer that would leave her sterile, Niki promised Charita that if she ever had a child, she'd share it with Charita and they'd both be its mother, and that she'd name it after Charita. The two girls lost touch soon afterward but were reunited thanks to the show, and Niki was able to keep her promise. (This has been cited by fans as one of the most beautiful Tear Jerker episodes.) | |
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Clear My Name | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_bc3cb7ff | comment |
Clear My Name: The purpose of the "Final Appeal" segments, which profiled prison inmates who claimed to be innocent of the crimes of which they had been convicted. Some of them were successful, particularly Patty Stallings, who had been convicted of the poisoning death of her infant son but was subsequently exonerated when the boy's death was proven to be the result of a rare genetic disorder which created chemical byproducts in his body. Others, such as Michael Lloyd Self (who was convicted of murdering two teenage girls in 1971), sadly died in prison without having their names cleared; investigators now believe Self was innocent and was railroaded into confessing to the murders.note It's now believed that Edward Harold Bell, profiled in a separate episode for the 1978 murder of Larry Dickens, may have been responsible for the murders of which Self was accused. | |
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Happily Married | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_bec0417c | comment |
Even some cases where a missing/abducted person is found alive can have this. One case had a Happily Married man go missing that was found and he explained that in traveling for the business he and his wife owned, he was robbed and beaten, which caused him to lose his memory and he and his wife eventually divorced because the brain injury he received made him lose memories of her. Even worse, investigators believe he might have been an Amnesiac Liar who abandoned his wife and his business because the pressure was too much for him. The Alex Cooper case, in which another Happily Married man went missing voluntarily because he feared prosecution for a robbery he'd been accused of decades earlier, not realizing that any charges filed against him had probably been long since dropped. His family were already in shock from learning that "Alex Cooper" wasn't even his real name, and once found, Cooper revealed that he changed his name as part of his original strategy to avoid the charges. Cooper was genuinely remorseful for the pain he had caused his family, but his wife and daughter seemed willing to welcome him back into their lives despite the fact that he had damaged their trust. The Mac MacDonald case, in which MacDonald finally found the daughter he'd run out on decades earlier. MacDonald had become romantically involved with a teenage girl which resulted in the girl becoming pregnant, but when he finally met the infant, he was afraid to get close to her for fear his girlfriend's parents were luring him into a trap to face statutory rape charges, and he fled quickly and never saw his daughter again until the show reunited them. MacDonald's now-adult daughter had mixed feelings about the reunion, as she still resented her father for running out on her and her mother and had come to consider the man who raised her as her real father, but also stated she felt there was nevertheless room for her birth father in her family. Also, several children of parental abductions end on a bittersweet note with the child turning against the left-behind parent or guardian due to the brainwashing they suffered from their abductor. The worst example of this is the case of Jonathan Ortiz, who was abducted by his mother as a baby, eventually reunited with his father as a child and was arrested as a teenager for multiple incidents of beating up his father (who was left disabled due to his ex-wife poisoning him) due to blaming him for his mother being in prison. Dyann Hahnlein, who was suffering from a terminal blood disorder, was able to find her long-lost sister, Marilyn, due to the show, with the hopes that Marilyn would be able to donate bone marrow to treat the disease. Sadly Marilyn's bone marrow was not a match and Dyann would eventually lose her battle with the disease just a year after the reunion, but she was able to rekindle her relationship with her sister before she died. | |
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Really Gets Around | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_bf1255fa | comment |
The "baby brokers" profiled on the show, including Bessie Bernard, Ethel Nation, and especially Georgia Tann, who became notorious for kidnapping infants and then selling them to childless well-to-do couples. Ethel Nation continued to inflict emotional pain on her victims into adulthood, cruelly telling anyone who inquired about their background that their mothers had been wanton women who hadn't wanted kids but were unable to afford abortions. In at least one case, this was determined to be a cruel lie. | |
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Empty Bedroom Grieving | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_c019a4c7 | comment |
Empty Bedroom Grieving: The family of Rhonda Hinson, who was murdered shortly after leaving an office Christmas party in 1981, had left her bedroom open and clean several years afterwards. Su Taraskiewicz's mother did not enter her daughter's bedroom for over a year after her murder in 1992. | |
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Imperiled in Pregnancy | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_c02a3bf2 | comment |
Imperiled in Pregnancy: One story about the actions of a still-unknown Serial Killer note The Connecticut River Valley Killer featured his attack on a visibly pregnant (7 months) woman. Miraculously, the victim and her fetus both survived. Another of its paranomal stories claims that the ghost of Grace Brown haunts the lake where she was murdered by her faithless lover, who didn't want the responsibilities of marriage and fatherhood. Cecilia Newball was 8.5 months pregnant when she and her six-year old son vanished from their home. Her husband claims that she left him for another man and that she wrote him a "Dear John" Letter. Her friends and the police suspect otherwise but with no evidence, he remains a free man. One of serial killer Ricardo Caputo's victims, Laura Marie Gomez, was two months pregnant, presumably with his child, when he murdered her. Stephanie Gaffney was eight months pregnant when she became a victim of New York City's "Zip Gun Bomber," whose attacks - consisting of mailing a package which appears to be a gift and fires three shots at the recipient when opened - killed at least one person and injured at least five others between 1982 and 1996. Miraculously, Stephanie survived and gave birth to a healthy baby girl when doctors had to induce labor due to the fetus being in distress. She believes the only reason she and her baby were not killed was that she was holding the package at an angle when the shots were fired. | |
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Against My Religion | |
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Against My Religion: Detectives investigating the murder of Chaim Weiss ran into this problem when trying to question his Yeshiva classmates. Aside from being unable to write because it was the Sabbath, Jewish law (specifically the Ninth Commandment, "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor") forbids condemning someone unless you have definitive proof or knowledge of their wrongdoing. (Some very strict Orthodox Jews categorize talking about other people, good or bad, as forbidden except for definitively proven statements.) Which means that even though they may have had suspicions of who his killer was, they refused to name them without concrete evidence. | |
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I Have No Son! | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_c132c0c5 | comment |
I Have No Daughter!: In 1941, during World War II, Helen Rose Myran, an Ojibwe teenager from Manitoba, needed her father Archie's permission to join the Royal Canadian Air Force since she was underage. Archie refused and told Helen Rose he would disown her if she joined up. Hurt and disappointed, Helen Rose told her father he would never see her again, and signed up anyway. Archie later regretted this and went to his grave without making peace with his daughter. However, Helen Rose's siblings were able to locate her in New York thanks to viewer tips. | |
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Hostile Hitchhiker | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_c19c82d4 | comment |
Hostile Hitchhiker: Several segments, particularly the "Donovan" and "Fraser" cases cited above, have featured hitchhikers turning violent on those who picked them up. The Harmful to Hitchhikers variation also applies, as in the case of Maria Wahlén and Marie Lilienburg, two young women from Sweden who were murdered while hitchhiking around California in 1983. Their murders are still unsolved, although investigators believe the women may have been victims of a serial killer who has since committed suicide. | |
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Irony | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_c335b9ec | comment |
Irony: Wendy Camp's husband had a bad feeling when her ex called and offered to let her visit their son. He sent his sister along with her and her daughter for safety. . . and they all disappeared that day. (21 years later, a local finally led police to where all three bodies were buried, and her ex and his mother were charged with murder). Angela Maher had founded her local Students Against Drunk Driving chapter after a friend of hers was killed while driving drunk...and was killed herself by a drunk driver, who subsequently went on the run (where she remains to this day). Worse, that night she was actually on her way to pick up an intoxicated friend to safely drive them home. The story of Gretchen Burford, a criminal defense attorney from Palo Alto, California, who was carjacked and then stabbed to death in February 1988. Gretchen's family expressed sorrow that her murderer, a young Black man, was exactly the kind of person Gretchen had dedicated her life to helping. It took nearly two decades to find her killer, and in a final ironic twist, he was saved from the death penalty by the fact that his victim had been opposed to capital punishment. | |
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Unsolved Mysteries / int_c3c18143 | type |
Hope Spot | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_c3c18143 | comment |
Hope Spot: Whenever a missing person's family received news (i.e. a sighting) suggesting that the missing might still be alive, only to have their hopes dashed. One noteworthy example is the story of Kari Lynn Nixon, a 16-year-old girl from New York state who went missing in 1987. A woman several states away reported meeting a girl she assumed to be a runaway who met Kari's description and even answered to Kari's name. And in 1989, a girl matching Kari's description was seen in a New Kids on the Block concert video. Sadly, Kari's remains were discovered in 1994 and it was determined she had been killed shortly after her abduction. Her killer is serving life without parole. | |
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Shout-Out | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_c75df49a | comment |
Shout-Out: One story profiled legendary police detective Eliot Ness and the one case he was never able to crack, a grisly series of torso slayings in Cleveland in the late 1930s. Host Robert Stack had portrayed Ness on the 1960s TV series The Untouchables and, in the opening salvo to the story, talked about what he'd learned about Ness' character through his work on the series. The original episode as seen on NBC also featured a short clip of Stack playing Ness on The Untouchables, which was cut from the version currently available for viewing online, probably for copyright reasons. | |
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Bait-and-Switch Credits | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_c76b215e | comment |
Bait-and-Switch Credits / Trailers Always Lie: The opening sequence in earlier seasons featured a segment called "SOLVED," which displayed clips from stories which the viewer would likely assume were resolved. However, some of them remain unsolved - for example, the story of Mabel Wood, whose dogs were murdered by an arsonist. Others were clips from stories in the "Unexplained" and related categories, which by their very definition will most likely never be solved. | |
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Bystander Syndrome | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_c83f40d8 | comment |
Bystander Syndrome: A particularly frustrating example happened in the Crystal Spencer case. Several days before her body was discovered, two neighbors heard her blood-curdling screams and while the wife wanted to call 911, the husband refused, fearing that he would get involved and possibly harmed. Also, several people at her job reported that she didn't show up for work for nearly a week and even a friend of hers tried to call her (only for the operator to say that the phone was off the receiver), went to her apartment and banged on the door for, in his words, 45 minutes. Had any of these people reacted sooner, she might have been saved or at least her killer could have been identified. | |
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Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_cb70651c | comment |
Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Many of "The Unexplained" segments fall into this category, whether they were stories of alleged hauntings, sightings of UFO's or other mysterious creatures such as Ogopogo and Chupacabras, unexplained phenomena such the "ghost lights" of Texas, religious miracles such as the Catholic legends of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Lourdes, Fatima, and Medjugorje, or medical miracles such as the Logan Carroll story. Many of these stories mentioned curious things that could not be easily explained away - for example, the lack of an "undersketch" on the portrait of the Virgin Mary on Juan Diego's tilma (which would likely have existed if the portrait had been painted by human hands). On the other hand, it was mentioned that it had been determined that the Shroud of Turin was not old enough to have been the burial garment of Christ. The story of the West Side Baptist Church choir, whose 15 members escaped a fiery death when they were all late for practice (the church exploded due to a faulty furnace within minutes of when rehearsal would have begun). To this day, they are all convinced that this was due to Divine Intervention. | |
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Corrupt Corporate Executive | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_cbe687ab | comment |
Corrupt Corporate Executive: Financial crimes typically feature one of these. | |
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Incriminating Indifference | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_cd33644f | comment |
Incriminating Indifference: Tina Marcotte's friend and boyfriend became suspicious of her co-worker Tom Keuter's denial of having killed her when he had little reaction to their accusations —"Tom's the kind of guy if you accused him of doing something that he didn't do, he'll start fighting you." Cecilia Newball's friend became suspicious of her husband Arturo when he called him to ask if she was with him, noting that he was much too calm for a man whose pregnant wife and stepson were missing | |
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CorruptCop | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_cd70c3dc | comment |
There have been several other stories about missing persons believed to have faked their death to escape prosecution for a crime they've been accused of. Robert Arcieri, alleged to have masterminded armed robberies and attempted murder against his friends and business partners, was captured - alive and well - 24 years after he supposedly had a heart attack and drowned, and served six years in prison. Corrupt Cop Charles Mule left his car on a bridge to make investigators think he'd jumped to his death, but was later spotted in the wilds of Louisiana and eventually captured in Florida. | |
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Dude, Not Funny! | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_cdd835ce | comment |
Dude, Not Funny!: Jim Meade, a Vietnam War veteran, contacted the show in search of the nurse who helped him recover from a nearly fatal traumatic brain injury. He recalled an incident in which the nurse angrily scolded and threw out two fellow soldiers for mocking and laughing at him when he fell during physical therapy. Meade and the nurse, Karen Stephens, were quickly reunited thanks to the show. | |
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Harassing Phone Call | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_ce389717 | comment |
Harassing Phone Call: Exaggerated with the Bashir Kouchacji story - during the 1980s, the Washington restaurateur was getting up to 20 harassing and threatening phone calls a day, some of which seemed to have been made by a child, and theorized the calls may have had something to do with his abduction and brief imprisonment by the PLO while in Lebanon. Even after checking himself into a mental hospital to escape the harassment, the callers were still able to reach him in the hospital. To make matters worse, Bashir's son was attacked by unknown assailants, and Bashir himself nearly escaped death when his car was set on fire. The perpetrators of this harassment have never been caught. In some stories, relatives and loved ones of missing or deceased persons were subjected to this. One in the case of Patsy Wright, a Texas woman who died after ingesting tainted cold medicine in 1987, was particularly cruel: it was answered by the victim's teenage daughter the day after Wright's death, and the caller, upon being told that Wright had passed away, replied that she was glad to hear that. | |
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Nightmare Fuel | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_cf4d770 | comment |
"What you are about to see is not a news broadcast." | |
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Cool Old Lady | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_d2b59903 | comment |
Cool Old Lady: Clara "C.W." Roddy, who worked bravely and diligently to rid her East Palo Alto, California, neighborhood of drug dealers and nearly paid for it with her life: she was shot in the stomach on New Year's Day 1990, and not only survived but refused to move away or back down. She was ultimately successful in driving the drug dealers away, but her attackers were never caught, and she sadly passed away in 2012 at the age of 83, without ever receiving justice. Wendy Radcliffe had a very close friendship with her grandmother, Bernice Gardner, especially after her parents' divorce. Tragedy struck in December of 1984 when Bernice was struck and killed by a car while crossing a busy street, right before Wendy's eyes. Through the show, Wendy was able to locate the Good Samaritan who comforted her in the wake of the tragedy and kept her from completely falling to pieces. | |
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Hoist by His Own Petard | |
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The bizarre story of Clarence Roberts of Nashville, Indiana, may be an extreme example. A body found burned to death on a fire on his property in 1970 was identified as Roberts. Ten years later, a body found in a second fire in which the Roberts residence was destroyed was also identified as Clarence Roberts. This second fire, determined to be arson, also killed Roberts' wife, Geneva. Roberts had been in substantial debt in 1970, and many in Nashville believe he murdered a transient and planted the transient's body in the first fire so he could disappear and his wife could collect on his life insurance (the scheme failed because they were unable to prove Clarence was in fact dead). Investigators believe Roberts set the second fire deliberately to murder his own wife and ended up killing himself accidentally, but some believe he faked his death a second time. | |
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False Confession | |
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False Confession: More like Staged Confession in the story of a faked murder confession aired by KROQ-FM morning duo Kevin and Bean in 1990. The story was profiled on Unsolved Mysteries and the L.A. police investigated it as a real crime for ten months before the DJs confessed the call was staged. They were forced to make a public apology, suspended without pay and forced to pay over $12,000 in restitution to the police department. | |
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Mondegreen Gag | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_db99b292 | comment |
Mondegreen Gag: According to one segment, the common English name for the Yeti, the abominable snowman, is actually a mondegreen of the original translation: abominable-smelling man. | |
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Red Herring | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_dbca2c99 | comment |
Red Herring: A lot of suspects have ultimately turned out to be completely innocent, despite their admittedly weird/creepy/suspicious/inappropriate behavior. | |
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Bad Samaritan | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_ddab9ac8 | comment |
Bad Samaritan: While investigating the still unsolved murder of Alicia Showalter Reynolds, detectives found that for several weeks prior, a man had been driving along the very interstate that she disappeared from, pulling up next to women and telling them something was wrong with their car. While most women declined his offer of help, at least one got into his car—and barely managed to get away after he attacked her. The cops soon realized that Ms. Reynolds had likely fallen into the same trap and had not been as lucky as the previous women. | |
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Vision Quest | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_de9c7ad5 | comment |
Vision Quest: Californian stockbroker David Stone went on one in 1988 in search of "The Beast" - the negativity inside of every person keeping us from being one with God - and subsequently disappeared, leaving a number of baffling clues behind. Sadly, his remains were found in 1992, two years after his story aired, and it's believed he likely succumbed to the elements. | |
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Throwing Off the Disability | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_e016e53f | comment |
Throwing Off the Disability: A 1994 episode profiled two women who claimed to have been cured of debilitating illnesses while visiting Lourdes, the French town where young Bernadette Soubirous claimed to have seen the Blessed Virgin Mary in 1858. Jeanne Fretel suffered from tubercular peritonitis and was near death when her friends brought her to Lourdes; after taking Communion and visiting the grotto where Bernadette's vision occurred, she completely recovered,note Most of the healings officially declared "inexplicable" by the Lourdes Bureau, a team of doctors made up of believers and atheists/agnostics, happen during or after the daily Blessing of the Eucharist ceremony and not after bathing or drinking from the spring. and her case was officially declared a miracle by the Vatican. Pennsylvania teenager Lorraine Echevarria was stricken with a strange illness that made her so weak she could not lift her head and caused her kidneys to fail. After having some water from the baths at Lourdes poured over her head, she, too, recovered, although the Catholic Church has not declared Lorraine's story a miracle since she was not examined by physicians afterward. Mike Emert's killer was believed to be this. He was to show a house to a potential buyer—he was a successful real-estate agent—and although he was said to be an older man who had a limp and walked with a cane, investigators theorized that it was a disguise and his "cane" was actually a sword cane he used to stab him to death. | |
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Unsolved Mysteries / int_e13156e1 | type |
Mama Bear | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_e13156e1 | comment |
Mama Bear: "Sue" (not her real name), the Texas housewife and mother of a three-year-old who chased an intruder out of her house at gunpoint and even fired several shots at him, though none did serious damage. She later found out that the intruder, Edward Harold Bell, was wanted for the 1978 murder of Larry Dickens. note Bell, who was captured due to viewer tips, given a 71-year sentence and died in prison in 2019, is also a person of interest in the murders of six young girls, including Rhonda Johnson and Sharon Shaw, who were profiled in a separate episode. The man who was convicted of Johnson's and Shaw's murders, Michael Self, is now believed to have been framed by corrupt cops, but died in prison before he could be exonerated. | |
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Disposable Vagrant | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_e1d1a88c | comment |
Disposable Vagrant: The story of the still-unsolved cases of the Kingsbury Run Murders strongly implies that the killer was choosing homeless people and/or sex workers as his victims because he knew they wouldn't be missed and/or that solving their murder wouldn't be top priority. Indeed, out of twelve victims, only three were ever identified. | |
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Phone Call from the Dead | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_e384c244 | comment |
Phone Call from the Dead: The spirit of Teresita Basa, a murdered nurse from Chicago, apparently possessed the body of one of her friends and spoke through the friend, not only naming her killer but giving authorities a clue to go on (the killer had given some of Teresita's jewelry to his girlfriend, and Teresita's family positively identified the jewelry as hers). The killer had no choice but to confess. Opinions vary as to whether Teresita Basa actually helped solve the case from beyond the grave, but authorities agree that without the jewelry, her murder would likely stayed unsolved for much longer. | |
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Very Loosely Based on a True Story | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_e4b69188 | comment |
Very Loosely Based on a True Story: As the series would open each episode with the disclaimer that it was "not a news broadcast," many segments would eschew Occam's Razor in favor of more sensational and far-reaching speculations. This was especially prevalent in cases of fairly obvious suicides where the families of the deceased postulated murder, and missing persons cases where unsubstantiated sightings of the person were treated as concrete evidence that they were still alive. | |
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Unsolved Mysteries / int_e90a93b2 | type |
Creepy Monotone | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_e90a93b2 | comment |
Creepy Monotone: Dear God, Robert Stack's voice gives off nightmares. | |
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Secretly Wealthy | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_e9c022ea | comment |
Secretly Wealthy: A few of the lost heirs cases profiled on the show involved individuals who were this trope. A notable example was the case of Walter Green. A resident of Omaha, Nebraska, he died in 1978 and his acquaintances were shocked to find that he not only owned the building he lived in but he amassed over US$200,000 in assets. Some came from bonds, some from rare coins and some of it from penny-pinching. Unfortunately, Green's life and background was a complete mystery; no will, heirs or living family were ever found so his fortune has presumably gone to the state of Nebraska. Ironically, when he was a young man, the only woman he ever loved rejected him because he was poor. | |
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Unsolved Mysteries / int_eb251937 | type |
Dirty Cop | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_eb251937 | comment |
Dirty Cop: A lot of cases have featured detectives who the victim's loved ones clearly felt were incompetent or willfully turning a blind eye to the truth. There have also been a number of cops who have been criminals themselves. An especially repugnant example is the cop investigating a case of child molestation—who proceeded to molest the victim himself! In at least one case, the murder of Anna Anton, the culpable party was the Chief of Police, who had been carrying on an extramarital affair with the victim to boot. | |
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Unsolved Mysteries / int_eb28ab57 | type |
Bound and Gagged | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_eb28ab57 | comment |
Bound and Gagged: An infamous and haunting example was in the case of missing New Mexico woman Tara Calico. Months after her abduction, a Polaroid photo surfaced in Florida of a young woman with long legs and a small boy both bound and gagged in the bed of a pick-up truck. Although many believe that the people in the photo are her and another child who was eventually found dead, neither has been positively identified. | |
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Clingy Jealous Girl | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_eb5b71fe | comment |
The distaff equivalent was also profiled on occasion. Maria Armstrong was a Clingy Jealous Girl (and a paranoid schizophrenic to boot) who was regularly violent with her boyfriend, Ron Argenti, and ultimately bludgeoned him to death. | |
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No Good Deed Goes Unpunished | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_eb8f64a6 | comment |
No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Quite a few missing/murdered people got involved in trying to help those in trouble. | |
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Disposable Sex Worker | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_ecbf37ff | comment |
Disposable Sex Worker: Averted in several cases, which involved the murder of prostitutes/escorts/strippers—including several serial killers—and despite their "unsolved" status, the lack of resolution is not due to police apathy. Played straighter in the story of Candy Belt and Gloria Ross, who worked at a massage parlor/brothel in Kentucky when they were murdered. This story added a twist: in addition to the locals' apathy due to the victims being sex workers, the brothel's madam was convinced that the women were murdered by one of the town's police officers, who had been a steady client until she banned him from the premises for bullying her employees. This officer was eventually charged with the murders but was acquitted, and the killings are still unsolved. | |
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Good Samaritan | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_eeb86ce6 | comment |
Good Samaritan: Many of the "Lost Loves" segments involved peoples' searches for the people who helped them out when they were at their lowest point. One such story was that of Cathy Williams-Loving, who was sexually abused as a teenager by her stepfather (a highly respected cop) and ended up in juvenile detention through no fault of her own. Fortunately, another cop believed Cathy's story and intervened on her behalf to get her released from detention so she could live a normal life. Cathy's search for her Good Samaritan, Fred Lyle, was successful. | |
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Finally Found the Body | |
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Finally Found the Body: Often the resolution to many missing persons cases. | |
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Never Found the Body | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_f516f938 | comment |
Never Found the Body: Even though some updates mention someone confessing to killing a missing person, they also mention never finding the person's remains. | |
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Unsolved Mysteries / int_f5a90567 | type |
Incredibly Conspicuous Drag | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_f5a90567 | comment |
Incredibly Conspicuous Drag: Following the 1990 disappearance and murder of Beverly McGowan in Pompano Beach, Florida, an individual using the name "Sam," who appeared to be a man dressed as a woman, used the victim's credit card to rent a car for a trip to London, England. "Sam" has never been identified, but McGowan's killer is believed to have been Elaine Parent, a serial killer known for stealing her victims' identities and who had been McGowan's roommate using the alias "Alice." Some believe "Sam" was really Parent, who committed suicide after authorities tracked her down. | |
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Faking the Dead | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_f9876f7e | comment |
Faking the Dead: The bizarre story of Clarence Roberts of Nashville, Indiana, may be an extreme example. A body found burned to death on a fire on his property in 1970 was identified as Roberts. Ten years later, a body found in a second fire in which the Roberts residence was destroyed was also identified as Clarence Roberts. This second fire, determined to be arson, also killed Roberts' wife, Geneva. Roberts had been in substantial debt in 1970, and many in Nashville believe he murdered a transient and planted the transient's body in the first fire so he could disappear and his wife could collect on his life insurance (the scheme failed because they were unable to prove Clarence was in fact dead). Investigators believe Roberts set the second fire deliberately to murder his own wife and ended up killing himself accidentally, but some believe he faked his death a second time. There have been several other stories about missing persons believed to have faked their death to escape prosecution for a crime they've been accused of. Robert Arcieri, alleged to have masterminded armed robberies and attempted murder against his friends and business partners, was captured - alive and well - 24 years after he supposedly had a heart attack and drowned, and served six years in prison. Corrupt Cop Charles Mule left his car on a bridge to make investigators think he'd jumped to his death, but was later spotted in the wilds of Louisiana and eventually captured in Florida. Partially subverted with Adam and Elena Emery, who were initially thought to have staged their own suicides after Adam's conviction for the 1990 murder of Jason Bass. Elena was subsequently confirmed dead when her skull was discovered. However, no trace of Adam has ever been found. He was declared legally dead in 2004, but placed back on the FBI wanted list six years later. | |
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Childhood Brain Damage | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_f9c77812 | comment |
Childhood Brain Damage: Teenager Jennifer Pratt, an aspiring model, sustained a nearly fatal blow to the head in 1987 that authorities believe was probably meant for her drug-dealer boyfriend, Curtis Croft. She miraculously survived after months in a coma, but was left with permanent brain damage, which noticeably affected her motor skills and speech, as was evident during her interview. Frustratingly, several of Jenny's classmates believed they knew who was responsible but were unwilling to name names, and Curtis Croft himself was uncooperative. Not helping matters was Jenny's mother, who instead of being grateful that her daughter was still alive, only mourned the loss of the "old" Jenny and seemed to imply that Jenny would have been better off dead than disabled. | |
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Department of Redundancy Department | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_fc151e9d | comment |
Department of Redundancy Department: The title. If they were solved they wouldn't be mysteries. That said, just "Mysteries" would be a pretty lame title. | |
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Deadly Doctor | |
Unsolved Mysteries / int_fc1ee7d5 | comment |
Deadly Doctor: Dr. Boggs, a California doctor who was convicted of murdering and deliberately misidentifying a man so a confederate — whose identity Boggs falsely assigned to the victim — could collect on his own life insurance policy. Perhaps the most infamous example profiled on the show is Michael Swango, who may have been responsible for as many as 60 poisoning deaths (although he only confessed to four) - both patients and coworkers - in both the U.S. and Zimbabwe. Sadly, many of those deaths could have been prevented - despite several suspicious deaths under his watch at Ohio State, the university opted to let his residency expire quietly rather than investigate thoroughly, and he continued to find work in the medical field for more than a decade afterward, despite the clouds of suspicion that followed him. He is now serving life without parole. | |
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Young Future Famous People | |
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Young Future Famous People: A young Matthew McConaughey starred in one episode as Larry Dickens, a former United States Marine who was shot to death while confronting pedophile (and, it turned out, probable serial killer) Edward Harold Bell. | |
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Unsolved Mysteries |
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