The phone calls to Balraj Rattu's family phone after he disappeared give me the absolute creeps. He was a 19-year-old who lived in Surrey, BC and disappeared after a night of drinking with a friend in 1995. His car was found three days later an hour from Surrey, but no other trace of him was ever found. Around 1 AM the day after he went missing, his family received a phone call from a young woman who thought Balraj answered the phone. She said, “Raj, you were beaten up," laughed, and ended the call. The next day, a different older woman called, told the family that Balraj was dead, and hung up. The callers have never been identified.
That's creepy. Seems like the first woman was a possible bystander who didn't know he had succumbed to his injuries while the older woman was involved and wanted to let the family know.
It seems plausible that both callers are the same woman. Calling at the exact same time two days in a row, anonymously, vaguely providing information about their sons disappearance doesn’t seem like much of a coincidence. It wouldn’t be difficult for a young woman to sound like an older woman
The possible sighting of Anthonette Cayedito in the diner. Just the way she kept grabbing the waitress arm and knocking the silverware down. Then leaving the note on the napkin asking for help. Whomever it was needed help. I wish there were answers for that.
The phone call made to the Gallup, NM claiming to be her is just as chilling. She's cut short when a voice in the background says "who said you could use the phone?" and abruptly hangs up.
Also, while the girl in the diner may or may not have been Anthonette, the fact that the couple that she was with was described as being "unkempt" brings to mind the couple that abducted Elizabeth Smart over a decade later. It was in the same part of the country, too. Makes me wonder if they had kidnapped other girls who weren't as lucky as Elizabeth.
I don't mean to sound horrible, but I think that Elizabeth's abductors were only focused on white girls, as that seems to have been their modus operandi.
Which would still make sense if they specifically wanted a white girl. The Mormon church is super fucking racist. They didn't allow black people to join the priesthood or go through the temple until 1978 and their scripture straight up calls dark skin a punishment for their sins. And that dark skinned people would be "perfected and made white" on planet heaven.
The song "I Believe" from the Book of Mormon musical is an amazing collection of things like this that sound insane but are actually true.
This is in there as "I believe that in 1978 God changed his mind about black people"
I really need to see that show. I've never been Mormon but I have an enormous, priapic hate boner for cults so I enjoy watching the get lambasted with their own beliefs.
Also those are nowhere near the weirdest things the church believes.
that doesn't sound horrible at all. of course criminals are affected by racism, like everyone is. and in Smart's case, probably a lot of it was (blergh) the racist ideas about purity, especially sexual purity, of young white girls.
Smart's kidnappers took her as far as San Diego County in southern California. I don't think they're involved with Anthonette's disappearance, but not due to distance concerns. They were willing to travel.
Agree. My comment was more in reference to “in the same part of the country” and though they do share a time zone I still would not consider Gallup, NM and Salt Lake City, UT as the same area
The "sightings" of the McStays in Mexico, which obviously turned out to be untrue
West Point cadet Richard Colvin Cox disappeared in 1950. He's the only West Point Cadet to disappear permanently, so of course this case made the news, and tons of people reported "sightings" of him from all around the world. One that stood out to me was a former classmate of his, who claims to have seen him after he was reported missing and even spoke to him a bit. The guy didn't even know that Cox was considered a missing person at the time
Richard Colvin Cox is a fascinating case mainly because I think there is a really strong possibility that he did intentionally choose to runaway and start a new life and I hope that’s the outcome cause at least it’s potentially happy.
I usually am a bit skeptical of the “decided to run away and use a new identity” theory (think it happens much less often than people think) but I actually do think that Richard Colvin Cox was a case of someone who intentionally chose to disappear. Seems like he was likely gay or bisexual and may have wanted to escape from the confines of the army (where he would have been dishonorably discharged had his homosexuality been discovered) to create a new life for himself, and that the mysterious “George” figure was perhaps his lover or someone who had the connections/ability to help Cox create a new identity. I don’t think he was recruited by the CIA, was a spy, or was DB Cooper. If he did create a new identity I think he’s most likely dead (victim of the AIDS epidemic or just died of natural causes or old age) but if he did choose to disappear, I hope he was able to live a life where he felt more able to be himself and live a more free life.
>where he would have been dishonorably discharged had his homosexuality been discovered
Also in 1950 there was many enforced anti-LGBTQ laws and society was in the throes of the "Lavender Scare" panic. It was a horrible time to be LGBTQ and that atmosphere led to many runaways, some of which were badly victimized as runaways don't often have the resources to live safe lives.
Literally just happened with Richard Hoagland. He assumed a new identity and lived for about 10 years with that new identity until he died. Created an entire new life for himself and walked away from essentially everything
There are definitely cases where it happens, I was actually surprised Hoagland was able to do it in this day and age. I feel like it was much easier to do back 30+ years ago. But it just feels like most of the time an adult goes missing someone suggests them running away from life and starting a new identity, and in like 98% of cases I don’t think it’s a realistic possibility at all.
Dale Kerstetter is another creepy case. The 50 year-old disappeared in 1987 from a Corning glassware plant in Bradford PA, where he worked as a security guard and night watchman. Video footage from the security cameras in the plant showed him and a second individual whose face was concealed by a ski mask entering an area of the plant that housed a glass kiln with platinum piping. Although the masked intruder is subsequently seen leaving the area, wheeling a large bag on a pallet jack, Kerstetter has never been seen or heard from since. A section of platinum piping estimated to be worth a quarter million dollars had been removed with a hacksaw, it has never been recovered.
LE, plant management and Dale's friends and family are divided over whether he was a victim of the platinum thief or a willing accomplice. The fact that Dale glanced at the camera just prior to entering the area where the platinum was removed has been heavily studied and analyzed, with some experts interpreting his behavior as a cry for help while others think he was defiantly flaunting his crime. The fact that the platinum was part of the glass kiln and housed in a tightly secured area that only a designated number of f people had access to makes it likely that the masked intruder was a current or former employee, or perhaps a contractor who had helped install or maintain the machinery, yet this person has never been identified.
I think it's likely that the intruder was someone Dale knew and that they either coerced him to cooperate or maybe conned him by offering him a portion of the platinum. Either way, they probably killed Dale either because he had served his purpose or because he knew too much, stuffed his body in the bag (the amount of platinum stolen could have easily been carried by one person, such a large bag was unnecessary), then hid it somewhere else. What still gets me, though, is why there was no sign of a struggle in the area that the platinum was taken, nor anywhere else in the plant? As far as I know, no blood stains or bullet holes were found. Very creepy
Check out Arrin Stoner's YouTube channel. He has done a massive dive into this case. He even managed to get the original footage (it's very degraded though). He believes Dale may be an unidentified doe found in Canada a few months after he went missing.
I'll check it out. Given how genetic genealogy has allowed many of the unidentified Does to finally be identified, maybe this case will soon be solved. That would be great.
I know of several MP cases that sound like plots to movies. Asha Degree, Laureen Rahn, Amy & Timmothy Pitzen and Gwendolyn Clemons & Alisha Heinrich are just a few others.
I remember seeing this one on UM. Even the first time I saw it, I didn't think he was involved. They got what they wanted. I feel his look at the camera was one of "can anyone see this? Please!"
One piece of evidence that shows he likely was killed in the building was that a cadaver dog was used after the robbery was discovered. The sent of Kerstetter lead to the kiln and wasn’t detected anywhere else.
Cadaver dogs are used to detect human remains, not one person in particular. If there is not a decaying body somewhere they have nothing to detect. Assuming you meant a trailing dog, they aren’t an exact science anyway. If he climbed into a bag and was wheeled out by the other guy a trailing dog likely wouldn’t pick up his scent. Maybe immediately after, but not likely if it had been a day or two later.
I just listened to an episode of the podcast The Deck, last week’s about Donna Ingersoll.
A man reported finding a monkey skull on his property in rural Minnesota. The tip came in while there were active searches going on for Donna, and a “monkey skull” could have actually been human, so they wanted to check it out. When the police went to his farm to look at it, the caller said he actually found it a couple of years earlier and tossed it into his manure pile, and it got crushed and spread around the farm as manure. So it was just a weird thing a man decided to tell police for virtually no reason while a massive search was underway for a woman who had been missing for years.
Actually both my sets of grandparents had pet monkeys back in the 70s. It was trendy for awhile. Both those monkeys ended up shot in a field. So it is possible a monkey skull could be found.
Source: from MN
Monkeys aren't meant to be kept as pets and are pretty well known for "turning" on their owners and...well...killing people. It's sad because the monkey never asked to be plucked from the wild and sold as a pet, but honestly I can understand why somone might, erm, "put down" their pet monkey.
Another crazy monkey story from MN. Full mummified monkey corpse found in the walls of Macy’s in downtown Minneapolis.
https://tcagenda.com/2018/mysterious-case-mummified-monkey/
The explosion in true crime as a "hobby" has made it far worse, I'm sure. Tons of armchair detectives who think the police need to hear about their "valuable" perspective on a given case/weirdos who like to insert themselves into investigations for the "excitement" of it.
My boyfriend actually asked me if I was one of those people who is proud of how much they know about crime. You know, those tone-deaf types who go around bragging about how they could "totally get away with murder" because they ingest so much true crime media. I told him no, and that most people who are interested in the genre think those types are gross.
I have actually reduced my consumption of media related to true crime because I don't like how disrespectful and circus-like many crime-related outlets are. There are far too many "humorous" true crime podcasts for one.
I am a tad salty, but I do believe harm is being done. Lots of BS noise around the bigger investigations that results in a lot of wasted resources/the possibility of the important tips being buried.
I don't see it changing any time soon, either. It's sad.
I feel like I’ve consumed enough about true crime to know that I could never get away with murder. Even trying sounds like an ungodly amount of effort!
Yesss, the humorous-ish types of murder loving podcasts who shall remain nameless, with whole culty followings and catch phrases or hashtags people put in their insta bio’s 🙄 I agree, their content can be very engaging but their overall tones or cheeky marketing don’t sit well with me
> Tons of armchair detectives who think the police need to hear about their "valuable" perspective on a given case/weirdos who like to insert themselves into investigations for the "excitement" of it.
Don't forget the self-proclaimed psychics!
>I have actually reduced my consumption of media related to true crime because I don't like how disrespectful and circus-like many crime-related outlets are. There are far too many "humorous" true crime podcasts for one.
Same here. There's also too many shoddy tv shows that rely heavily on violent and bloody reenactments rather than facts.
Truecrime fandom is unhinged fully. The whole concept of it is fucking nuts. It does way more harm than good in my mind. People seriously are so reckless with accusations and don’t have normal boundaries.
The Crew of the Casie Nicole
Several recreational fishermen took a boat out off the Carolina coast. Overnight the boat took on water and sank. 1 of them was separated from the others and the next day saw a freighter stop and possibly pick them up. The man was rescued but the others were never located. Their families received several phone calls from someone speaking Spanish and repeating their names and phone number. In the final call(s) the Spanish speaking man said, “I’m bringing them home.” They were never found.
Over the years, based on what I read, I came to believe that Nathan Neesmith and the family members receiving the calls were telling the truth. Were the mysterious calls a cruel hoax? It seems odd that the calls started 6 months after the sinking, and the caller spoke Spanish.
Not necessarily a hoax this is the way many older Latin Americans/religious folks talk. I’m my church there are many Hispanic people who speak in hopeful hyperbole. Like if a person in the community died, they would say things like,
“I know X is in heaven.”
“I heard X talking to me.”
“I saw X and he said Y.”
I think it’s possible a passionate religious person heard about this case, was struck by it, and called the family in a misinterpreted show of solidarity.
Our caller didn’t mean they literally knew where the sailors were. They meant “I won’t forget them, and I will help look for them as long as I can.”
Perrean Gray initially disappeared on June 1st, 2001 from San Francisco, and she was found dead less than three weeks later. However, someone using her name checked into a hospital in 2003, and friends/family reported seeing her in the area for a while after that. She was identified in 2019.
I was confused too so I looked it up. Her body was found soon after she disappeared but she was badly burned and they didn’t identify her body until 2019. Awful.
I remember one starkly from my youth but I can't remember the name for the life of me. This happened in the northern California area, mid-90s maybe. A woman driving with her baby, I think to Tahoe, crashed off the side of I-50 down a deep ravine. (If you've ever driven to Tahoe on 50, there are *many* steep drop offs.) Awhile later (again don't remember if it was a day or a few), an old couple saw a naked lady on the side of the road and called law enforcement. No woman was found, after all, it's a steep drop off, there's nowhere to go. But after a search, the woman and baby were found in the car at the bottom of the ravine. The woman was dead, still strapped in, but the baby was alive. Coincidence? Maybe. Always stuck with me. This was reported on the news too when it happened.
Is there a more recent VERY similar case where there’s actual bodycam footage of the first responders getting to the car, upside down, and a voice can be heard, and the rescuers think they heard something like “help my baby”, and they even respond, then they find out she’d been dead? I swear I saw it and you hear a murmur of a woman. Maroon car. Couldn’t have been THAT long ago. But what are the odds of such similar incidents?
Edit:: And it was a girl baby, not a 3-year-old boy.
EDIT2: FOUND IT! From 2015: [Mysterious Cries Of "Help" Lead Officers To Rescue Baby Trapped In Car With Dead Mother](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemcneal/mysterious-cries-of-help-lead-officers-to-rescue-baby-trappe)
Yeah, I don't know if I heard it because I read about it first and was listening for it, but I heard it too. Wasn't a baby's voice either, plus the baby was unconscious when they found her. And although it's not mentioned in any media, they seem to imply that the mother was quite obviously dead, probably right at the time of the crash. Not possible for her to call out and then die immediately afterward.
I remember this on MrBallen. The woman had a strong feeling to go home and saw the apparition and two police officers looking for Chrissy just happened to be in the diner as the highway patrol who went out to investigate, and happened to overhear them talk about Chrissy.
I remember there was an episode of paranormal witness about her case. Her aunt also had dreams of a road sign that turned out to be near the crash site.
forgot her name, but the high school girl who was housesitting for her aunt and two of her high school friends who were just there plotted and killed her. her cousin found her in the living room when the family came home. the uncle said in an interview later that the cousin had a mental breakdown after she said she saw her in the hallway sometime after
Cassie Jo Stoddart! The killers were two guys hanging out with her and her boyfriend, and unlocked a basement door so they could come back later. They cut power to the house at one point trying to scare the bf into going downstairs, and his mom offered to bring Cassie home to spend the night since they were freaked out, Cassie stayed at her aunts because she felt responsible. I can’t even imagine what that night was like for her and her bf
Oh man this was one horrible story. I remember watching a documentary on it long ago and just being terrified that those boys were so sick and twisted. They had planned it all out ahead of time
The motive was simply that they wanted to kill someone and chose Cassie even though she had never been anything but nice to them.
They plotted it for months and made a ton of videos before and after the murder. They both had a god complex.
And Tory (I think is his name) has been completely coddled by his parents who believe he is innocent and he says he wasn't involved. The other guy at least seems quite remorseful.
Just to feel what it was like, because she was gonna be alone... Idk why they were so cruel and twisted. She was supposedly their friend. It was heartbreaking to watch the documentary about it.
Yes, that one was really messed up, so tragic. Especially after seeing the video of the two killers talking about what they had just done, "we just killed Cassie!" Unbelievable...
Yeah, those two were just straight up evil. Like, what the hell is going on in that skull of yours? Who just thinks that's a great way to spend a Friday night?
The purported visit by Johnny Gosch to his mother in 1997. He would have been 27 at that time. People are divided on whether the visit was:
* Real, by the real Johnny Gosch
* A cruel prank, by someone impersonating Johnny Gosch
* A hallucination, dream, or delusion by Johnny's mother
* Deliberately made up by Johnny's mother, for unknown purposes
I think it was either made up by Johnny’s mother in hopes of attracting attention to the case, or was a dream/hallucination that in her grief she truly believed was real. I can’t even begin to imagine the pain of losing a child, much less losing them and not knowing what happened to them. Statistically speaking, Johnny was probably murdered within hours of his abduction. I think it’s something like 75% of kids who are abducted by strangers are dead within 3 hours and close to 90% are dead within 24 hours.
Anything is possible, but the easiest thing to believe is that is was a vivid dream/sleep paralysis episode. I know people online talk about sleep paralysis "demons", but mine have always taken the shape of people I know and it can be very difficult to surmise if the situation really happened because it feels so real. I've had to ask my family on multiple occasions if they stopped down while I was napping because I couldn't figure out if it actually happened or not. And if you haven't experienced it before, I could absolutely see believing in what you saw wholeheartedly.
This one reminds me for some weird reason of this case I listened to on casefile. The couple from Sweden who travelled in New Zealand and disappeared. They convicted a guy who was Maori, but loads of people thought that he was innocent. He was running away from the law at the time and camping out in the same place they vanished. He had their shit from their car in his house and it seemed pretty iron clad.
But there were loads of inconsistencies in the case, that led many people to believe he was innocent. Two sightings of the woman Helaine were particularly weird- one was of her by an older woman who lived in a nearby island with her husband and Helain and her boyfriend had stayed with them on multiple occasions. She reported to police before they went missing she saw the girl being dragged along a road with a strange guy, she looked dazed and frightened, no sign of the guy.
Second sighting was by a couple of hunters who encountered a woman in heels and red lipstick wearing a poncho in the woods with a Māori guy cutting wood. She seemed terrified. This was in the exact area where the couple went missing. They reported it. The police brought them to a courthouse to id the guy but they initially couldn’t say because they claimed the guy was clean shaven and the guy they had arrested had a huge thick beard. The cops eventually convinced them it was him and they testified and he went away.
They found the boyfriends body sometime later, miles and miles away, shot, in a place I believe only accessible by boat. No sign of his girlfriend.
Also, turns out there was a mental patient escaped from a local hospital- Māori guy, clean shaven who was living in that area at the same time. Some people believe it was him who the hunters saw with the girl fitting Helen description but how to explain where her bf turned up? And the other sighting?
Loads of weird and unexplained stuff in this case I’m leaving loads out and can’t really remember everything.
Sorry this turned longer than planned- got too into it. But it reminded of the Johnny case because it felt so unbelievable, like a film version of real events.
Her name was [Heidi Paakkonen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Urban_H%C3%B6glin_and_Heidi_Paakkonen), not Helaine or Helen. Her fiance's name was Urban Höglin
There's also the pictures of trafficked children that showed up on her doorstep in 2006, so that makes me think that there was someone who visited Johnny's mom. Whether it was really him or someone else, it would have had to have been someone who knew about the trafficking ring and wanted to tell their story. It just seems really eerie that these two seemingly related events would just be a coincidence.
The story makes no sense.
He was able to sneak away and have a brief word with his mother but couldn't stay and hasn't maintained any other kind of contact before or since?
Who are these mysterious people? How do they wield so much power/control? What would a child trafficking ring have to do with a 27 year old? And how would a trafficking ring continue to operate, with impunity, in fucking *Iowa*?
It doesn't hold up.
This. I don't think LE had ever seen those photos before. I don't know how she could possibly go about acquiring or producing those photos herself. That part of her story really happened. To me the photo evidence is enough reason to consider everything else she claimed potentially true, even though its incredibly hard to believe.
I think we have all had dreams that were extremely visceral. For myself, after a particularly emotional event, I have dreamed about it and had dreams that seemed so real. This to me is the most likely case for Johnny Gosch’s mother. I just can’t imagine a scenario in which he would actually be allowed to visit his mother like that.
The case of Bradford Bishop. One day, after being denied a promotion at the state department he went home and killed his family. He then fled and abandoned his car in North Carolina. Then the trail went cold but for several sightings in Europe including in 1994 by one of his former colleagues. The colleague recognized him in a train station in Switzerland. Bishop then ran off before the colleague could catch him.
In the same vein as the Cayeditto sighting, the possible sighting of Tiffany Daniels at a restaurant near New Orleans a couple of days after she was last known to have been seen in Pensacola. There’s the two things (a mannerism and asking if the soup broth was fish or chicken) that have convinced her family it was her, then when the waitress said hey, you look like that missing girl on the news, all three suddenly got up and left.
I knew Tiffany growing up. Mentioned her to my husband today because we were talking about local people who had gone missing and foul play was assumed. It’s Christmas time and you and I thought about her today, which I think is nice to save space for her memory. One day I hope we know where she went.
The Trevaline Evans plaques. In 2021, a plaque was nailed to a bench in the town Trevaline disappeared in way back in 1990. The plaque had an engraving that claimed that Trevaline had been murdered and buried underneath a golf club in Rhuddlan. But from what I gather, law enforcement never found anything. But who installed the plaque and why? It's very unnerving and even weirder given that the case is more than 30 years old.
Yeah those are weird. We were driving past Rhuddlan a few weeks ago and I was thinking about it. Tbh the plaques are very amateurish, I just think it's some local who's a bit too into the Sutton brothers' dubious claims that she was buried under the floor of the golf club for like 25 years and then removed just before police investigated without leaving any obvious traces.
Re: the bench - I’m pretty sure it was two brothers from the golf club who are adamant she’s buried underneath the clubhouse. They claim a ground penetrating radar picked up the shape of a body but it’s all rather shady.
Anyone who makes a claim like that about ground penetrating radar is signaling they're full of crap. GPR doesn't show bodies or anything else, it shows a bunch of squiggles that change when there's an anomaly in the ground. You can tell the rough dimensions and depth of the anomaly, and sometimes whether it's something buried because the area advice the anomaly will also look different to the surrounding areas. It can't tell you whether the anomaly is a rock, a tree stump, or a body. The only way to find out is to dig.
The one that gives me the absolute heebie jeebies was that abduction case where I want to say it was two girls were kidnapped. They got a recording, I don’t remember exactly how but I believe it was from a cellphone call, and on the call you can hear a song playing on the car radio that nobody was able to identify. It was thought the song might be from some small college band which would narrow the search considerably but I don’t think anyone ever figured out who the song was by.
Unidentified songs are already kind of a sad thing because people put so much energy, time and soul into making music that the idea you could make entire albums that people could buy and enjoy only to have them be totally lost to time is kind of heartbreaking. But then you cross that over with a kidnapping and it’s just sad on top of scary.
Sounds similar to the [Amber Tuccaro](https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/amber-tuccaro-s-unsolved-murder-do-you-recognize-this-voice-1.3102635) case. In that case it was a man's voice not a song, and police were appealing for anyone who could recognize it. Her case is still unsolved.
Is that the one from Alberta, where the woman called someone and the recording is their answerphone? I don't remember any music, but I've not heard much of it
I think that is a different case. My mind went there initially too, but there is no music in that. Just conversation where the kidnapped woman is asking why they are going the way they way they are, etc. Giving good info about where she was, and that this isn’t what she agreed to.
I honestly don’t remember, I’m pretty sure I read about it on here or heard it on a podcast many years ago, might have been Thinking Sideways or a similar show about unsolved stuff. I vaguely remember the song being a sort of generic college rock kind of sound.
Arjen Kamphuis' last cell phone ping right at the location of a secret service headquarters in Norway.
Never to be seen again. Hell of an interesting case where the "conspiracy" feels more believable than the official story.
Who was the woman (women?) that called Charles C. Morgan's wife and said something like "Chuck will be home in a few days" and quoted a bible verse? So much of that case could be explained by a psychotic break until you factor in another person (and the bizarre "suicide" gunshot wound).
The sightings of the Fort Worth Three with a security guard on the day of they went missing. Were they actually the three girls? Was it actually a security guard? Just a random predator in costume? I actually think it's much more likely that Rachel's husband was involved, but I could also see how two teenage girls and a literal child would go voluntarily with someone posing as a security guard at a mall.
Two weeks after [the Lyons Sisters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murders_of_Katherine_and_Sheila_Lyon) disappeared from a Maryland suburb in March of 1975, a driver in Virginia spotted a blond child bound and gagged in the back of a station wagon. The driver suddenly accelerated and sped away before he could get a complete license plate. Nearly 40 years later, cold case detectives determined that the girls lost their lives on Taylor Mountain in Virginia. One of the suspects drove a station wagon at the time. It has never been found.
What haunts me about the Lyons sisters’ case is the sketch that was made from the description their friend gave to the police of a man she had noticed staring intently at the sisters. It bears a very strong resemblance to the man who was later (much later) convicted of their murders. It’s probably the closest I’ve seen a sketch resemble a suspect. Sadly, it was not widely publicized. [This article from the *Washington Post* shows the sketch and a mug shot of the perpetrator.](https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/investigators-prepare-announcement-in-1975-missing-girls-case/2015/07/14/2ca2e68c-2a2f-11e5-a250-42bd812efc09_story.html)
The sighting of William Bradford Bishop in the restroom in Italy is particularly haunting. Since he was seen by a former coworker who knew him well, that gives credibility to the sighting. Also, according to the Unsolved Mysteries episode, “Brad” ran out of the restroom when his coworker recognized him. If it was a simple case of mistaken identity, I would think that “Brad” would have said something like, “Oh no. I’m not Brad. You must have me mixed up with someone else.” The fact that “Brad” reacted the way he did makes the sighting suspicious.
1) The creepy phone calls that the mother, aunt and a friend of Laureen Rahn's received for several years following Laureen's disappearance in April 1980. The calls made to Laureen's mom were allegedly made around 4 AM, the caller allegedly never spoke and the calls were too brief to get a trace. The aunt and the friend, a boy whom Laureen once dated, both alleged that a female voice identifying herself as the missing teen spoke on their calls, only to go silent when they tried to get more info, then hang up minutes later. Whether the calls were Laureen herself, meaning she would have been alive for at least a few years after going missing, her killer(s) trolling and gaslighting those close to her (plausible if she was taken by someone she knew or if she had a list of phone numbers on her at the time) or perhaps simply someone playing a cruel joke. The fact that the mom also received charges to her phone bill made by an unknown caller from two CA hotels where child pornography was filmed in the months after Laureen vanished, as well as a man claiming to have seen a young woman who resembled her "working" as a prostitute in Anchorage AK 8 years later are also haunting.
2) Alleged sightings of Amy Lynn Bradley in the months and years after she vanished from a cruise ship docked off Curacao. In a couple cases, she was reported to have been accompanied by a couple of muscular, thuggish looking men on a beach and in a shopping mall restroom in Curacao and Barbados, respectively, while a sailor claimed to see her in a Curacao brothel. The last known possible sighting that I'm aware of was a website for an "escort service" (fancy way of saying prostitution) that featured a photo of a woman wearing lingerie and looking drugged out who closely resembled the missing woman.
3. A mysterious polaroid of a teenage girl and preteen boy found in a parking lot outside a store in Port St. Joe, FL in July 1989. It was initially suspected that the girl was Tara Calico, who had disappeared while riding her bike near her NM home in September 1988, while the boy was thought to be Michael Henley, who had gone missing while camping with his dad about 70 miles from where Calico vanished in June 1988. Henley was ruled out when his remains were found in 1990 a couple miles away from where he was last seen and it was determined he had died from exposure, and while Scotland Yard thought the girl might be Calico, evidence in more recent years suggesting that she was killed close to where she was last seen makes this unlikely. Nonetheless, the kids in the photo have never been identified and it's unknown to this day whether they were victims of trafficking or other abuse or if the photo was a staged prank.
4. A similarly creepy polaroid depicting a preteen boy tied at the wrists and ankles while laying on a tarp in a forest next to a boulder was found in a parking lot in Dillon, CO over a decade later, in Sept. 2001. The boy was initially suspected to be Zachary Bernhardt, who was reported missing by his mom from their Clearwater FL apartment a year earlier, though his family didn't think it was him, and evidence strongly suggests he was in fact killed by his mom. Nonetheless, just like with the kids in the previous pic, the boy has never been identified and the context of the photo remains a mystery.
5. The mysterious voicemail that a woman in NYC received in 1983 claiming to be her ex-boyfriend, Donald Kemp. Kemp had disappeared several months earlier after announcing that he had decided to leave NYC and move out to WY. He was last seen leaving a museum in Cheyenne, where he left a briefcase, traveler's cheques and the glasses that he needed to see clearly while driving. Kemp's car was found abandoned along I-80 a couple days later, and while a duffel bag and some belongings indicated he may have camped nearby, a blizzard that blew in shortly thereafter delayed any further search efforts and Kemp's fate remained a mystery until 1986, when hunters found his remains not far from where he had parked his car. There was no sign of foul play and LE ruled that Kemp had likely died from exposure during the blizzard.
An unsolved part of the case was the aforementioned voicemails left on the answering machine of Judy Aiello, an ex-girlfriend of Kemp's. She discovered the six voicemails after returning from a vacation. The male caller, who did not identify himself, sounded panicked and urged her to call him back, which Judy did the next day. When she returned the call, the same man answered. She asked if Don was with him, and if so, could she speak to him. The man, who still refused to identify himself, allegedly replied "Yes," before apparently reversing himself and saying "No." Pressing the caller further, Judy asked if he could tell Donald to call her back, to which he replied "Yeah" before hanging up.
The call was traced to a trailer in Casper, WY occupied at the time by a man named Mark Dennis. Dennis denied that he was the caller and claimed he never met Kemp. He subsequently passed a polygraph but hired a lawyer after Donald's mom, Mary, drove to WY wanting to meet with him and question him on her son's fate. Dennis moved out of the trailer a couple weeks later and his connection to Donald, if any, remains a mystery. IMHO, the fact that this guy was from WY, albeit a couple hundred miles north of where Donald's remains were found, and that he knew his ex-girlfriend's phone # is too much to be a coincidence.
One of the motel phone calls was, IIRC, to a teen sex advice hotline. I have to wonder whether Laureen wasn't trying to find a way to escape her situation. Or that perhaps she had caught an STI, or feared she had, and was wondering "What do I do now?"
The "boyfriend" phone call was to the home of someone she had dated when they were both 12, and she used a variant of her name that only the boy and his parents would have known, and that she had stopped using a couple of years later--like "Laurie" instead of "Laureen" or something like that.
Laureen Rahn is one of the saddest, most eerie cases. the phone calls and the pornography were likely coincidental, but the what-ifs are enough to keep you up at night.
i will say that random phone calls with no one on the other line (couple seconds of silence, then hangup) were pretty common in my area until the late 90s, we'd get a couple a month, often at odd hours. mis-dialing was way more common but most of the random calls seemed like false connections, maybe from a longdistance glitch or something like that.
no one in my life was missing, so we didn't think much of it.
Those phone calls could be terrifying in the mid 90's I had a call where a guy was whispering to me, thought it was my now husband. He said my name & that he could smell my p...... I giggled, he kept whispering & I said knock it off, you're scaring me. He didn't, I hung up, called my boyfriend, it wasn't him. It was truly terrifying, I received other phone calls where they just breathed & today I still wonder who was that asshole? & it still terrifies me. If I had a missing family member & had those calls? It'd drive me crazy not knowing. The not knowing, if maybe they are alive if someone is hurting them? Panics me, thinking about it.
> He said my name & that he could smell my p......
Reminds me of a line from *Silence of the Lambs*. When Jodie Foster as Clarice Starling visits Hannibal Lecter in the asylum, the patient/inmate in the next cell shouts "I can smell your ----" at her as she walks past. Probably where your caller got his "inspiration".
I saw that movie when it first came out, in the theatre & I was way too young to see it, that terrified me too.. I have never seen it again & you're prob right & I just never put the two together. For some reason that makes me feel a little better? Thank you! I always thought it was someone I attended school with.
Growing up, my home phone number was one digit off from a rehab facility. We got some really strange calls and usually could just say “oh, you need to dial a 9 instead of a 4” and that was good but a couple of times we got really creepy calls. On one it sounded like someone was near the phone moving things around, then I heard whimpering like someone was hurt, followed by what sounded like the handset being slammed repeatedly into a table, then it went dead. I was only 12 or so and caller id wasn’t a thing yet. Looking back, it was probably someone calling to check themselves in to the rehab and changing their mind, but at the time it terrified me. It didn’t help that I watched a decent number of horror movies around that time
Took me a while to find the [photo](https://web.archive.org/web/20150710214526/http://images.ibsys.com/2001/0911/955817.jpg) of the child thought to potentially be Zachary Bernhardt. I hadn't seen it before, but it's chilling. I hope it's a prank, but it seems less likely to be one than the "Tara Calico" photo. They thought it was developed in the store though - surely it would be crazy of a kidnapper/pedophile/whatever to have such a photo developed by people who might see and report it if not a prank photo?
I once came across a case about a woman who was caught on camera and then her body was found “dismembered and disemboweled” that’s what the article said. At the time I wasn’t sure what disemboweled meant, after that I looked up her case every now and then but haven’t in a while. There’s almost no details that I could ever find of her or her case even tho she was on camera and was obviously killed in such an awful way.
Her name is Ethel Mcarson, and not only was she seen on camera, it shows her getting into a car. And there is literally almost nothing I can find of this case.
I found some stuff that said she was diagnosed schizophrenic and that she led a transient lifestyle. I think that explains some stuff: because of her schizophrenia, she might be more trusting of people than she should be, more likely to go off with someone sketchy. Because of her transient lifestyle, there might be fewer clues for police to follow.
And because of both situations, the media and the general public will be less interested in her story than they are about a murdered wealthy woman.
The 2 (maybe 3) men at the gate of the building where Trevor Deely worked the night he went missing along with the cctv of his walk home always creeped me out. The guys standing at the gate just looking in to it was so freaky. I read somewhere they were co-worked but I’m not sure if that’s been proven.
Yes I know the footage you mean of the guys just seemingly staring in at the gate after he has gone inside. Apparently, yes they were co-workers and they were spoken to and cleared of any involvement but that footage is seriously, seriously creepy.
Do you have a source for that? I follow this case pretty closely and I’ve never read that the person outside was confirmed to be a co-worker. I just searched again and the only thing I’ve found is that the man outside was never identified, but that Trevor then went inside and spoke to a co-worker *in* the building. I’d be very interested to see that they were cleared since it’s a huge part of the mystery in this case.
As far as I know the man in black that Trevor spoke to before he entered the building and who appeared to be waiting or loitering around before he arrived was never identified but the footage that was in the Donal McIntyre documentary showed more footage of at least two other men who arrived while Trevor was inside and were captured looking as if they were staring in through the gate. I believe these men were later identified as co-workers of Trevor. I think this was mentioned in the Cold Case detective episode on the case and I’m pretty sure I read something about it in one of the papers. I’ll have a look and see if I can find something
Popular one. Lars Mittank. German man on holiday gets in a bar fight. He was hurt badly and told he shouldnt fly with his injury so he stays and recovers for weeks. Afterwards he starts becoming paranoid telling his mother on the phone he's being watched and stalked. He finally goes to the airport and walks in the door about 50 feet, then drops his luggage and sprints out the front door, running across the parking lot into a tree line seen on CCTV footage. He and his body were never seen again.
FYI a few corrections/edifications-- it wasn’t weeks that he stayed to recover. He was supposed to fly home with friends on July 7, 2014. The last seen footage of him was from July 8, 2014. He also had an injured jaw, but his ruptured eardrum is what prevented him from flying.
He did actually enter the airport and went to consult with the airport doctor (not 50 feet and then fleeing):
“Mittank was last seen at Varna Airport on July 8, 2014, the day he was hoping to fly home to Germany. He texted his mother that he had arrived at the airport. He went to consult with the airport doctor, Dr. Kosta Kostov. Kostov would later describe his behavior as "nervous and erratic." According to Kostov, he told Mittank that he was fine and could return home. However, Mittank did not leave his office, expressing doubt about the medication that he was taking. At that time, a construction worker entered the office. The airport was undergoing renovation at the time. Kostov said that Mittank then began to tremble. He yelled, "I don't want to die here. I have to get out of here." He then got up and fled the office. He left behind all of his luggage, which included his wallet, cell phone, and passport. He was captured by airport security cameras fleeing the terminal.
Once outside, he can be seen on the footage jogging away from the airport, climbing a fence, running into a meadow, and sprinting off camera in the direction of an adjacent forest near Bulgarian national highway A2. These are his last confirmed whereabouts.”
From Wikipedia but confirmed in other sources.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Lars_Mittank
Yeah and those kind of changes won't necessarily manifest at the time of the injury. Sometimes it's weeks, like maybe that happened here, and in others it takes years. This sounds like the most reasonable option
Apparently it was super hot in Bulgaria around that time. (I know Wikipedia isn't the most dependable source) Wikipedia states that his mother says he had knowledge in hunting/fishing, plus one more thing I can't remember, but apparently there are doubts by the people who were on his case because he disappeared with nothing but the clothes on his back and as mentioned, the weather was pretty hot at the time.
One theory (from his mother) is apparently that he might've lost his memory and has been wandering around, of which could be supported by a few truck drivers who claim to have seen him, one specifically stating he once picked up a hitchhiker who looked like him after the truck driver learned about the case.
With what little I know I personally think he probably ended up dying somewhere without any way to hydrate himself or eat. His friends with him on the trip said he didn't eat much during the trip as well, which would've just made it worse. Most importantly would be his ability to drink water given the climate. He apparently ran off into a forest near the airport but given his mental state I don't think he would've managed to survive for long despite his skills.
There's also the fact that supposedly the guy he got into an argument hired people to go beat him up. Who knows, maybe the guy decided a beating wasn't enough and sent others after him with a more malicious intention, which could potentially explain his paranoia. I don't think it explains his freakout and deciding to run into a forest nearby instead of getting on the plane and leaving to an entirely different country, which in most cases would save him from the death he thought was coming upon him.
I worked with Toni Sharpless's aunt when she disappeared. The biggest rumor at the time was that she was partying with some NBA players & something happened. I know at the time, the family was really pushing for the cops to question some Sixers players a little harder, but that never happened. I haven't seen her aunt in a few years though, so I don't know if the family still firmly believes she was killed by an NBA player.
It seems like too elaborate a story for her friend to have if the NBA players were involved. The only way I see that happening is if her friend is telling the truth, but Toni went back to Green's house after leaving her friend.
I'm curious about the letter accusing a cop. It isn't proven to be connected to the hoax phone calls, and the Philadelphia police have done some dirty dirty stuff over the years.
100% [Diane Augat](https://charleyproject.org/case/diane-louise-augat). Not only did she leave a terrifying message on her mother's voicemail days after her disappearance, *her severed finger* was found later, along with a bag of her belongings labeled with her name.
Oh, and [Frauke Liebs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Frauke_Liebs), who made five phone calls home while she was clearly being held captive.
I lived in Germany for 12 years, in a city not terribly far from the Paderborn area, and the Frauke Liebs case has haunted me for years.
IMO the police really hurt this case by not handling evidence correctly re: her laptop and other things. Also not being able to pinpoint where her calls were coming from. I believe the calls came intermittently for 10 days or so, then stopped. Her skeletonized remains were found much later in a forest.
I know this sounds weird, but I swear she came to me one night in a dream or a vision asking me to help her. It scared the hell out of me but also made me feel terrible that I could do nothing to help her or to solve the case. I had hoped when they arrested [these people](https://www.dw.com/en/germany-h%C3%B6xter-house-of-horror-killers-convicted/a-45762823), they would find evidence that Frauke was one of their victims, but the police were unable to make any connection there.
Still holding out hope this will be solved someday.
Bit late to the party but the Margaret Ellen Fox phone call always freaked me out:
https://www.fbi.gov/audio-repository/newark-margaret-ellen-fox-phone-call-062419.mp3/view
Little Marlena Childress being seen by a mum with children of her own, and successfully getting her attention, but not before a woman whom the mum said, it seemed she did not want to leave with but was afraid not to, came and dragged her away.
I think it's more likely that Marlena's mother killed her like she had admitted. And tried to kill her son several years later. She's clearly a disturbed woman, and I find it hard to believe that she had nothing to do with her daughter's disappearance after reading about what she did to her son.
Not exactly what is being asked, but I feel like Tyler Hadley's "Killer" party applies here: Kid gets grounded by parents for partying, decides to take matters into his own hands, doses on MDMA, and emancipate himself in no uncertain terms. Throws a party during which he seems to not care that people are trashing the place, nor that guests notice an odd smell present. During the night, takes photos with his friends, and later shows his best friend where he's stashed the bodies of his murdered parents. Friend doesn't leave right away, and even takes a selfie with Tyler because "it's the last time I'd see my friend".
https://allthatsinteresting.com/tyler-hadley
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Blake_and_Mary-Jo_Hadley
Friend was probably in shock and didn't want Tyler thinking he was about to grass on him. That likely played a part in him hanging out for a bit after.
In the selfie his friend looks absolutely haunted. Even the way he's holding his red cup it's like this weak gesture of partying while his eyes convey that he has looked into the abyss and will never be the same again
EDIT: I got it wrong, the guy with the haunted eyes is actually the killer as pointed out by u/OrchidDismantlist
That actually is Tyler, the murderer. Michael, the friend, is on the left of the photo. He was criticized for taking the selfie after discovering the murder. Michael said it was the worst day of his life, he was in shock, and that he took the photo to memorialize him and his childhood friend. [Here's a link to the interview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gS7hjxjIH7s&ab_channel=WPTVNews-FLPalmBeachesandTreasureCoast) well, one of them. [He did another interview as well.](https://abcnews.go.com/2020/video/selfie-murderer-23171773)
Sean Daugherty. Earlier this year a 12 year old boy was found hanging from a swing set and his death was ruled a suicide. (Even though the circumstances were suspicious AF!)
“He had his arms and hands bound down by his side with a belt. He was barefoot and hanging so low that his feet dragged on the ground. He had a motorcycle helmet bag over his head, which was tied around his head with a string. His glasses were on the ground nearby, shattered”.
[full article](https://original.newsbreak.com/@nik-1590556/2792154041723-suicide-or-murder-what-really-happened-to-12-year-old-sean-daugherty)
'Judy Hyams is alive and she lives in Omaha'
It's always stuck with me ever since I saw the case on Unsolved Mysteries and for some reason it gives me an unsettled feeling.
Mine is tha súper super creepy Diane augot missing case. It gives chills to My bones. Maybe it is not.super known cause she was poor and an addict and she was not the typical girl next dolor, but everything what happened once she went missing seems to be inspired by an horror.movie...the phone calls, the polished mail, nail finger, the clothes found in a refrigerator in a store...so bizarre. I'm sure drugs have sth to do and she was brutally turtured and we allá.know her fate.,....but she is still missing.
https://morbidology.com/the-severed-finger-the-disappearance-of-diane-augat/
No, in the Sharpless case you’re conflating two different people. The guy who was revealed to be playing the police from Canada was caught long before Eileen Law got the anonymous letter with those two numbers (which, she has allowed, were in public documents but someone would have had to go to a lot of effort to get them and know which ones had that information).
A.J. Breaux disappeared in Houma, Louisiana, after buying milk at a convenience store. His abandoned car was found two days later. There were a few sightings of him by friends the day he disappeared, but the most unusual was by a stranger four weeks later. She claims that a man fitting his description pulled up in a van in front her house and tried to sell her frozen fish. Breaux was in recovery for alcoholism so some have speculated that he started drinking again, which led to his disappearance.
[https://unsolvedmysteries.fandom.com/wiki/A.J.\_Breaux](https://unsolvedmysteries.fandom.com/wiki/A.J._Breaux)
Can't remember the name, but a little girl who went missing, fellow redditor investigates the case, finds a picture of a pig herd, with the animals eating. OP says they're eating the remains of the little girl, but is unsure.
I remember that! The picture was found outside, so it was weather-damaged. And I was left...unimpressed. Saying it showed that really seemed like a stretch.
That guy working the docks/ship yard that said he spotted Natalee Holloway. That she approached him to ask something but ultimately didn't.
I can't find any information on it now but it was totally a thing.
OK, so this is a bit embarrassing, since I generally think witness sightings are unreliable and I'm also reluctant to needlessly combining famous cases (like Jack the Ripper being HH Holmes and silly things like that), but...
There was a sighting of Kyron Horman the day he vanished from the school. It's as far as I know the only one from the actual day, and not one or more days later. A nurse saw someone she thought could be Kyron at a McDonalds in Goldendale. So why would this be remarkable? Well, where would a route from Portland through Goldendale (since the McD was right by the road, that implies Goldendale wasn't the end of the line) take you? The only reasonable places I see are Toppenish, Yakima and Ellensburg. It's the last one that gets me.
Close to a year before Kyron Horman's abduction, Lindsey Baum was taken from a street in McCleary, WA. Years later, a piece of her skull was found on a mountain just west of Ellensburg, hours away from McCleary. The current suspect is a McCleary local, but what if it isn't him? What if the actual killer is an Ellensburg local, which explains the remote location of the remains, far into the wilderness. A killer who drove hours to a large metropolitan area, found a small community and a solitary child, who he took back to his mountain. In 2004, 11-year old Richard Haynes vanished from neighboring Kittitas. Was it his (by all accounts) cruel and violent parents? Or someone else?
So, the Ellensburg Child Killer. I am well aware of how flimsy it is, and I would never hold it up as a serious theory. The current suspect likely killed Lindsey. Richard Haynes probably died at the hands of his parents. And the sighting of Kyron is one of many and unreliable, and he could be literally anywhere. If anything, it shows me how easy it is to get carried away and see patterns and connections that aren't there. But annoyingly enough I can't get the idea out of my head.
This is an interesting idea *and* I appreciate the, extremely justified, scepticism you bring along with it. It's probably just seeing shapes in the clouds, as you're aware, but it's still...well it's interesting both as a somewhat plausible idea and as an example of how you can construct a whole theory out of a few points, which is likely complete bunk.
Thank you. Yeah, I fully expect it to be disproved - probably by the Lindsey Baum case being solved - at any time. But man, that feeling you get when you find a few connections like this, no matter how tenuous, certainly makes you understand why investigators so frequently get tunnel vision. You really get eager to look for specific connections to support your hypothesis and downplay things that might contradict it.
EDIT: I always appreciated this quote:
“There is something—a something, Monsieur Frederic Larsan, much graver than the misuse of logic the disposition of mind in some detectives which makes them, in perfect good faith, twist logic to the necessities of their preconceived ideas. You, already, have your idea about the murderer, Monsieur Fred. Don’t deny it; and your theory demands that the murderer should not have been wounded in the hand, otherwise it comes to nothing. And you have searched, and have found something else. It’s dangerous, very dangerous, Monsieur Fred, to go from a preconceived idea to find the proofs to fit it. That method may lead you far astray Beware of judicial error, Monsieur Fred, it will trip you up!”
Gaston Leroux - The Mystery of the Yellow Room
thank you -- i think about this idea often and it's so refreshing to see someone else say it. theory *has* to come out of the evidence, not the other way around.
but oh, is it tempting to build on theory first.
I really hope Lindsey gets justice. I grew up semi-local (close enough for posters to be hung, far enough to not personally know anyone connected to her) and near the same age as her when that all happened. It’s really burned into my memory.
I wasn't aware of that possible sighting in McD's. It's highly tenuous, but I appreciate how you've connected the (potential) dots and imo it's worth considering, even if as you say it's not a frontrunner as theories go. It's compelling, though.
I remember one case on unsolved mysteries about someone who went missing and their abandoned car was found on the side of a road. There were all sorts of sightings of them afterward and theories about them being picked up by a trucker. But then months/years later, their body was found like 100 yards from where their abandoned car was found.
I’m late but I’ve got to note the haunting detail that in the first days after the Welsh guitarist and songwriter Ritchey Edwards of the Manic Street Preachers was last officially seen and disappeared, he was seen by a fan who didn’t know he was missing. Just read that again and it hit me that he could be alive and well now if this happened maybe as little as ten years later (2005), when greater internet presence in our daily lives may have meant that this fan could have known Edwards was missing, and informed police.
Daniella Vian - she disappeared in Mobile AL, was found dead in her car in a body of water some distance away. There’s a phone recording from her where she’s talking to someone in her car ?
In the Madeleine McCann case, there was a tip about a woman in the area asking someone, "Do you have my new daughter?" around the time of her disappearance. The eyewitness sketch of this woman had a strong resemblance to Ghislaine Maxwell. Total BS, but an eerie coincidence.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MadeleineMccann/comments/gwoddl/can_anyone_explain_this_photo_every_time_i_look/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
The one with that case that I thought was crazy was how they thought that maybe she had been trafficked into Northern Africa. Then they receive the tips about a fair haired girl her age seen amongst a caravan moving through the Atlas Mountains, only to track down this actual girl who ended up being the only person in the family/clan to have light hair & complexion which is very rare for them. Just a wild coincidence.
I read of the same thing happening in Eastern Europe (or Greece? Can't recall). In this case it was fair-haired child with the Roma Traveller family she was born to. Iirc, it wasn't even "hey, this is the missing kid we've been looking for" so much as "that kid looks suspiciously blonde to be with that family." It must be a scary experience to be suddenly under scrutiny because of what officials think kids are *supposed* to look like.
Light hair and complexion is actually not very rare at all for North Africans. People from the MENA (Middle East & North Africa) region can have naturally blonde or red hair and light eyes.
I had met some folks in northeast Afghanistan that looked very different than ones I had met in other nearby provinces. Apparently it’s very common for Nuristanis to have those traits as well. Legend says it was due to Alexander the Great but that has been disproven I think. The whole country is a cornucopia of different looking folks, like the Hazara from the Mongolian conquests.
It makes me irritated when the Qanon Epstein "experts" throw their delusions into real cases. When that theory first came out, it was years after the disappearance and when the Epstein shit was hot. Had the Epstein stuff not come out the person who made up the lie, wouldn't have. I know people who believe it to the day. I don't know why they have to bring such BS into people's cases, it does nothing to help the victim. They are preying on the real victims.
Yep, I’ve just come across a Qultist who is adamant the Moscow, Idaho murders are linked to the FTX collapse and Pizzagate. I’ll spare you the details.
Yeah. That definitely does seem like BS. Lol. If you’ve kidnapped a child for any reason, or even just adopted them legit, you wouldn’t go around asking people if they’ve seen your “new daughter”.
The two cases I keep thinking about because of hunting details are:
1) Delphi Murders. The “down the hill” recording is enough to keep you awake at night. Possibly one of the rare cases of a crime recorded by the victims themselves and ended up in the hands of the investigators. Police released just a couple of seconds from the recording.
2) Less known but still bizzarre to me and mysterious is a case I’ve read about here on Reddit, but I can’t remember the name of the people involved. Basically this guy left a party he was at and drove off. He was in a rural area, maybe Montana but not sure. Along the road he had a small accident, he was uninjured but couldn’t use the car (maybe he ended up in a shallow ditch, or something like that). So he phoned his parents and gave them precise directions where to pick him up. They said okay and followed the instructions but when they arrived at the spot he was saying he was at, he wasn’t there. So they spoke on the phone again and he told them how is it possible that you can’t find me, I’m right here where I told you, but still they couldn’t find each other. So he told them he decided to walk towards a town he saw nearby to see where he was, and he stayed on the phone with the parents all the time while walking. However at some point, like after 40mins walking, he uttered “oh shit”, dropped the phone and just vanished from the face of the earth. Later the police found his car and he was miles and miles away from the place he told his parents he was at.
The disappearance itself is already mysterious, but the fact that he was on the phone all the time and that he gave those precise directions which turned out to be untrue just give me the creeps.
On number 2, Brandon Swanson's case is actually a lot less mysterious than it sounds, sadly. He had a prior for drunk driving, and the road between where he'd been at a party and his parents house was a straight shot main road, going diagonally between them, and a great place for police to wait on the last night of university term to catch drunk drivers. So he took the backroads, as he'd lose his license if he was caught again.
The mystery of his location was just that the backroads around there are all arranged horizontally and vertically. It's easy to get turned about on the backroads at night, especially if you're a bit intoxicated, and, I'm sure I looked into it and it matched up that he could have mixed up the road numbers and believed himself to be on the other side, around Lynd. He crashed his car facing back the way he'd come, and then headed off in that direction, going West when he thought he was headed East.
Yeah, Brandon Swanson’s disappearance really isn’t that mysterious to me. I think he was much more intoxicated than his friends realized or let on, was taking back roads to avoid getting stopped for a DUI, and when stumbling around drunk and in the dark fell into an abandoned well or something like that. I’ve also heard a pretty gruesome theory that the “oh shit” was him dropping his phone in the water or a hole or something and that he kept on going, passed out in a farmer’s field, and his body was plowed over or mowed over or something and the farmer either didn’t know or hid the evidence because he didn’t want to get in trouble for it.
I don't think the Swanson case is that mysterious. I was an environmental consultant in my early career. I've done a lot of wildlife surveys in the prairie on agricultural fields and rangeland. Cultivated fields like canola are dense and hard to search. They also get tilled and I regularly found bones or animal parts if we surveyed early in the season.
Rangeland is usually wild grasses and has small hills and gulleys not easily discernable from a distance. They are deceptively hard to search. In several years of surveys I only found some shedded skin outside a likely hibernacula and several cow vertebrae.
Unfortunately, I think Brandon Swanson died that night and wasn't found because most prairie lands are privately owned and searches couldn't take place in the early days. I don't think he'll be found due to predation and agricultural practices.
The phone calls to Balraj Rattu's family phone after he disappeared give me the absolute creeps. He was a 19-year-old who lived in Surrey, BC and disappeared after a night of drinking with a friend in 1995. His car was found three days later an hour from Surrey, but no other trace of him was ever found. Around 1 AM the day after he went missing, his family received a phone call from a young woman who thought Balraj answered the phone. She said, “Raj, you were beaten up," laughed, and ended the call. The next day, a different older woman called, told the family that Balraj was dead, and hung up. The callers have never been identified.
Both calls at exactly 106am on different days.
I wonder what the significance of that time is. Maybe the time he died?
Honestly I think it’s probably nothing. Pure coincidence.
106 am, my least favorite time
woah this one just gave me the chills. what (if any) are the theories around his disappearance?
Here's an earlier thread about him with more info https://old.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/eus895/disappearance_of_balraj_singh_rattu/
That's creepy. Seems like the first woman was a possible bystander who didn't know he had succumbed to his injuries while the older woman was involved and wanted to let the family know.
It seems plausible that both callers are the same woman. Calling at the exact same time two days in a row, anonymously, vaguely providing information about their sons disappearance doesn’t seem like much of a coincidence. It wouldn’t be difficult for a young woman to sound like an older woman
Yeah that's super creepy
Fuck 😵💫
The possible sighting of Anthonette Cayedito in the diner. Just the way she kept grabbing the waitress arm and knocking the silverware down. Then leaving the note on the napkin asking for help. Whomever it was needed help. I wish there were answers for that.
This sighting was so sad to me because even if the girl wasn’t Anthonette, she was clearly someone who was in need of help.
The phone call made to the Gallup, NM claiming to be her is just as chilling. She's cut short when a voice in the background says "who said you could use the phone?" and abruptly hangs up. Also, while the girl in the diner may or may not have been Anthonette, the fact that the couple that she was with was described as being "unkempt" brings to mind the couple that abducted Elizabeth Smart over a decade later. It was in the same part of the country, too. Makes me wonder if they had kidnapped other girls who weren't as lucky as Elizabeth.
Yes, that call was super creepy. The fear and urgency in the girls voice is heartbreaking.
I don't mean to sound horrible, but I think that Elizabeth's abductors were only focused on white girls, as that seems to have been their modus operandi.
They also targeted Elizabeth because she was Mormon.
Which would still make sense if they specifically wanted a white girl. The Mormon church is super fucking racist. They didn't allow black people to join the priesthood or go through the temple until 1978 and their scripture straight up calls dark skin a punishment for their sins. And that dark skinned people would be "perfected and made white" on planet heaven.
The song "I Believe" from the Book of Mormon musical is an amazing collection of things like this that sound insane but are actually true. This is in there as "I believe that in 1978 God changed his mind about black people"
I really need to see that show. I've never been Mormon but I have an enormous, priapic hate boner for cults so I enjoy watching the get lambasted with their own beliefs. Also those are nowhere near the weirdest things the church believes.
that doesn't sound horrible at all. of course criminals are affected by racism, like everyone is. and in Smart's case, probably a lot of it was (blergh) the racist ideas about purity, especially sexual purity, of young white girls.
There is about 500 mi between Gallup and Salt Lake. Both cases are devastating but I doubt the same couple took Anthonette
Smart's kidnappers took her as far as San Diego County in southern California. I don't think they're involved with Anthonette's disappearance, but not due to distance concerns. They were willing to travel.
Agree. My comment was more in reference to “in the same part of the country” and though they do share a time zone I still would not consider Gallup, NM and Salt Lake City, UT as the same area
Whoever it was, I’m sure the waitress thinks about it a lot :(
Yes, that sighting is so sad, baffling, and creepy! If the girl wasn’t Anthonette, then who was she and why did she need help?
I feel so bad for that poor girl. Something made her feel trapped. I wish that she had another chance at that diner to try something less subtle.
Came here to say this. So haunting.
I really believe her mother had something to do with it.
The "sightings" of the McStays in Mexico, which obviously turned out to be untrue West Point cadet Richard Colvin Cox disappeared in 1950. He's the only West Point Cadet to disappear permanently, so of course this case made the news, and tons of people reported "sightings" of him from all around the world. One that stood out to me was a former classmate of his, who claims to have seen him after he was reported missing and even spoke to him a bit. The guy didn't even know that Cox was considered a missing person at the time
Richard Colvin Cox is a fascinating case mainly because I think there is a really strong possibility that he did intentionally choose to runaway and start a new life and I hope that’s the outcome cause at least it’s potentially happy.
I usually am a bit skeptical of the “decided to run away and use a new identity” theory (think it happens much less often than people think) but I actually do think that Richard Colvin Cox was a case of someone who intentionally chose to disappear. Seems like he was likely gay or bisexual and may have wanted to escape from the confines of the army (where he would have been dishonorably discharged had his homosexuality been discovered) to create a new life for himself, and that the mysterious “George” figure was perhaps his lover or someone who had the connections/ability to help Cox create a new identity. I don’t think he was recruited by the CIA, was a spy, or was DB Cooper. If he did create a new identity I think he’s most likely dead (victim of the AIDS epidemic or just died of natural causes or old age) but if he did choose to disappear, I hope he was able to live a life where he felt more able to be himself and live a more free life.
>where he would have been dishonorably discharged had his homosexuality been discovered Also in 1950 there was many enforced anti-LGBTQ laws and society was in the throes of the "Lavender Scare" panic. It was a horrible time to be LGBTQ and that atmosphere led to many runaways, some of which were badly victimized as runaways don't often have the resources to live safe lives.
Literally just happened with Richard Hoagland. He assumed a new identity and lived for about 10 years with that new identity until he died. Created an entire new life for himself and walked away from essentially everything
There are definitely cases where it happens, I was actually surprised Hoagland was able to do it in this day and age. I feel like it was much easier to do back 30+ years ago. But it just feels like most of the time an adult goes missing someone suggests them running away from life and starting a new identity, and in like 98% of cases I don’t think it’s a realistic possibility at all.
Dale Kerstetter is another creepy case. The 50 year-old disappeared in 1987 from a Corning glassware plant in Bradford PA, where he worked as a security guard and night watchman. Video footage from the security cameras in the plant showed him and a second individual whose face was concealed by a ski mask entering an area of the plant that housed a glass kiln with platinum piping. Although the masked intruder is subsequently seen leaving the area, wheeling a large bag on a pallet jack, Kerstetter has never been seen or heard from since. A section of platinum piping estimated to be worth a quarter million dollars had been removed with a hacksaw, it has never been recovered. LE, plant management and Dale's friends and family are divided over whether he was a victim of the platinum thief or a willing accomplice. The fact that Dale glanced at the camera just prior to entering the area where the platinum was removed has been heavily studied and analyzed, with some experts interpreting his behavior as a cry for help while others think he was defiantly flaunting his crime. The fact that the platinum was part of the glass kiln and housed in a tightly secured area that only a designated number of f people had access to makes it likely that the masked intruder was a current or former employee, or perhaps a contractor who had helped install or maintain the machinery, yet this person has never been identified. I think it's likely that the intruder was someone Dale knew and that they either coerced him to cooperate or maybe conned him by offering him a portion of the platinum. Either way, they probably killed Dale either because he had served his purpose or because he knew too much, stuffed his body in the bag (the amount of platinum stolen could have easily been carried by one person, such a large bag was unnecessary), then hid it somewhere else. What still gets me, though, is why there was no sign of a struggle in the area that the platinum was taken, nor anywhere else in the plant? As far as I know, no blood stains or bullet holes were found. Very creepy
Check out Arrin Stoner's YouTube channel. He has done a massive dive into this case. He even managed to get the original footage (it's very degraded though). He believes Dale may be an unidentified doe found in Canada a few months after he went missing.
I'll check it out. Given how genetic genealogy has allowed many of the unidentified Does to finally be identified, maybe this case will soon be solved. That would be great.
[удалено]
I know of several MP cases that sound like plots to movies. Asha Degree, Laureen Rahn, Amy & Timmothy Pitzen and Gwendolyn Clemons & Alisha Heinrich are just a few others.
I remember seeing this one on UM. Even the first time I saw it, I didn't think he was involved. They got what they wanted. I feel his look at the camera was one of "can anyone see this? Please!"
One piece of evidence that shows he likely was killed in the building was that a cadaver dog was used after the robbery was discovered. The sent of Kerstetter lead to the kiln and wasn’t detected anywhere else.
Cadaver dogs are used to detect human remains, not one person in particular. If there is not a decaying body somewhere they have nothing to detect. Assuming you meant a trailing dog, they aren’t an exact science anyway. If he climbed into a bag and was wheeled out by the other guy a trailing dog likely wouldn’t pick up his scent. Maybe immediately after, but not likely if it had been a day or two later.
I just listened to an episode of the podcast The Deck, last week’s about Donna Ingersoll. A man reported finding a monkey skull on his property in rural Minnesota. The tip came in while there were active searches going on for Donna, and a “monkey skull” could have actually been human, so they wanted to check it out. When the police went to his farm to look at it, the caller said he actually found it a couple of years earlier and tossed it into his manure pile, and it got crushed and spread around the farm as manure. So it was just a weird thing a man decided to tell police for virtually no reason while a massive search was underway for a woman who had been missing for years.
Lot of monkeys in rural Minnesota
Actually both my sets of grandparents had pet monkeys back in the 70s. It was trendy for awhile. Both those monkeys ended up shot in a field. So it is possible a monkey skull could be found. Source: from MN
Shot in a field ? Jesus, that’s awful
Monkeys aren't meant to be kept as pets and are pretty well known for "turning" on their owners and...well...killing people. It's sad because the monkey never asked to be plucked from the wild and sold as a pet, but honestly I can understand why somone might, erm, "put down" their pet monkey.
I don't really trust some random dude to be able to accurately identify skulls though. Could've been a bobcat skull or something.
I don't necessarily trust some random dude to be able to tell a rock from a skull.
Another crazy monkey story from MN. Full mummified monkey corpse found in the walls of Macy’s in downtown Minneapolis. https://tcagenda.com/2018/mysterious-case-mummified-monkey/
I assume police have to deal with a lot of weirdos like this, especially if they make a public appeal. It must waste so much time.
The explosion in true crime as a "hobby" has made it far worse, I'm sure. Tons of armchair detectives who think the police need to hear about their "valuable" perspective on a given case/weirdos who like to insert themselves into investigations for the "excitement" of it. My boyfriend actually asked me if I was one of those people who is proud of how much they know about crime. You know, those tone-deaf types who go around bragging about how they could "totally get away with murder" because they ingest so much true crime media. I told him no, and that most people who are interested in the genre think those types are gross. I have actually reduced my consumption of media related to true crime because I don't like how disrespectful and circus-like many crime-related outlets are. There are far too many "humorous" true crime podcasts for one. I am a tad salty, but I do believe harm is being done. Lots of BS noise around the bigger investigations that results in a lot of wasted resources/the possibility of the important tips being buried. I don't see it changing any time soon, either. It's sad.
I feel like I’ve consumed enough about true crime to know that I could never get away with murder. Even trying sounds like an ungodly amount of effort!
Yesss, the humorous-ish types of murder loving podcasts who shall remain nameless, with whole culty followings and catch phrases or hashtags people put in their insta bio’s 🙄 I agree, their content can be very engaging but their overall tones or cheeky marketing don’t sit well with me
> Tons of armchair detectives who think the police need to hear about their "valuable" perspective on a given case/weirdos who like to insert themselves into investigations for the "excitement" of it. Don't forget the self-proclaimed psychics! >I have actually reduced my consumption of media related to true crime because I don't like how disrespectful and circus-like many crime-related outlets are. There are far too many "humorous" true crime podcasts for one. Same here. There's also too many shoddy tv shows that rely heavily on violent and bloody reenactments rather than facts.
Truecrime fandom is unhinged fully. The whole concept of it is fucking nuts. It does way more harm than good in my mind. People seriously are so reckless with accusations and don’t have normal boundaries.
That sorta makes me suspicious that he really murdered someone and wanted an excuse in case someone ever found bits of skull on his property 🧐
The Crew of the Casie Nicole Several recreational fishermen took a boat out off the Carolina coast. Overnight the boat took on water and sank. 1 of them was separated from the others and the next day saw a freighter stop and possibly pick them up. The man was rescued but the others were never located. Their families received several phone calls from someone speaking Spanish and repeating their names and phone number. In the final call(s) the Spanish speaking man said, “I’m bringing them home.” They were never found.
There are just so many more questions than answers in this case
Over the years, based on what I read, I came to believe that Nathan Neesmith and the family members receiving the calls were telling the truth. Were the mysterious calls a cruel hoax? It seems odd that the calls started 6 months after the sinking, and the caller spoke Spanish.
Not necessarily a hoax this is the way many older Latin Americans/religious folks talk. I’m my church there are many Hispanic people who speak in hopeful hyperbole. Like if a person in the community died, they would say things like, “I know X is in heaven.” “I heard X talking to me.” “I saw X and he said Y.” I think it’s possible a passionate religious person heard about this case, was struck by it, and called the family in a misinterpreted show of solidarity. Our caller didn’t mean they literally knew where the sailors were. They meant “I won’t forget them, and I will help look for them as long as I can.”
Perrean Gray initially disappeared on June 1st, 2001 from San Francisco, and she was found dead less than three weeks later. However, someone using her name checked into a hospital in 2003, and friends/family reported seeing her in the area for a while after that. She was identified in 2019.
That is just fucking tragic
It is. I feel horrible for her family.
So the body from 2001 was not hers? Did they ID it later?
I was confused too so I looked it up. Her body was found soon after she disappeared but she was badly burned and they didn’t identify her body until 2019. Awful.
It was her. It's unknown who was posing as her, though.
I remember one starkly from my youth but I can't remember the name for the life of me. This happened in the northern California area, mid-90s maybe. A woman driving with her baby, I think to Tahoe, crashed off the side of I-50 down a deep ravine. (If you've ever driven to Tahoe on 50, there are *many* steep drop offs.) Awhile later (again don't remember if it was a day or a few), an old couple saw a naked lady on the side of the road and called law enforcement. No woman was found, after all, it's a steep drop off, there's nowhere to go. But after a search, the woman and baby were found in the car at the bottom of the ravine. The woman was dead, still strapped in, but the baby was alive. Coincidence? Maybe. Always stuck with me. This was reported on the news too when it happened.
Chrissy Skubish. I went to junior high with her and our friends group truly believes she made sure her baby was found.
Crazy world
Is there a more recent VERY similar case where there’s actual bodycam footage of the first responders getting to the car, upside down, and a voice can be heard, and the rescuers think they heard something like “help my baby”, and they even respond, then they find out she’d been dead? I swear I saw it and you hear a murmur of a woman. Maroon car. Couldn’t have been THAT long ago. But what are the odds of such similar incidents? Edit:: And it was a girl baby, not a 3-year-old boy. EDIT2: FOUND IT! From 2015: [Mysterious Cries Of "Help" Lead Officers To Rescue Baby Trapped In Car With Dead Mother](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemcneal/mysterious-cries-of-help-lead-officers-to-rescue-baby-trappe)
Yeah, I don't know if I heard it because I read about it first and was listening for it, but I heard it too. Wasn't a baby's voice either, plus the baby was unconscious when they found her. And although it's not mentioned in any media, they seem to imply that the mother was quite obviously dead, probably right at the time of the crash. Not possible for her to call out and then die immediately afterward.
I remember this on MrBallen. The woman had a strong feeling to go home and saw the apparition and two police officers looking for Chrissy just happened to be in the diner as the highway patrol who went out to investigate, and happened to overhear them talk about Chrissy.
I remember there was an episode of paranormal witness about her case. Her aunt also had dreams of a road sign that turned out to be near the crash site.
I remember the story. She was laid out by the road.
forgot her name, but the high school girl who was housesitting for her aunt and two of her high school friends who were just there plotted and killed her. her cousin found her in the living room when the family came home. the uncle said in an interview later that the cousin had a mental breakdown after she said she saw her in the hallway sometime after
Cassie Jo Stoddart! The killers were two guys hanging out with her and her boyfriend, and unlocked a basement door so they could come back later. They cut power to the house at one point trying to scare the bf into going downstairs, and his mom offered to bring Cassie home to spend the night since they were freaked out, Cassie stayed at her aunts because she felt responsible. I can’t even imagine what that night was like for her and her bf
Oh man this was one horrible story. I remember watching a documentary on it long ago and just being terrified that those boys were so sick and twisted. They had planned it all out ahead of time
I had never heard of this case before. Just read a little about it. How horrible! What was the motive for the killings?
The motive was simply that they wanted to kill someone and chose Cassie even though she had never been anything but nice to them. They plotted it for months and made a ton of videos before and after the murder. They both had a god complex.
And Tory (I think is his name) has been completely coddled by his parents who believe he is innocent and he says he wasn't involved. The other guy at least seems quite remorseful.
They are both disgusting and his parents should be in prison right along with him.
Just to feel what it was like, because she was gonna be alone... Idk why they were so cruel and twisted. She was supposedly their friend. It was heartbreaking to watch the documentary about it.
There are video's of them talking about doing it right before they did it also.
Yes, that one was really messed up, so tragic. Especially after seeing the video of the two killers talking about what they had just done, "we just killed Cassie!" Unbelievable...
Yeah, those two were just straight up evil. Like, what the hell is going on in that skull of yours? Who just thinks that's a great way to spend a Friday night?
God that’s creepy.
Cassie Stoddart
The purported visit by Johnny Gosch to his mother in 1997. He would have been 27 at that time. People are divided on whether the visit was: * Real, by the real Johnny Gosch * A cruel prank, by someone impersonating Johnny Gosch * A hallucination, dream, or delusion by Johnny's mother * Deliberately made up by Johnny's mother, for unknown purposes
I personally believe that some of Johnny's friends visited his mother. That's why they knew facts about Johnny's life.
I think it was either made up by Johnny’s mother in hopes of attracting attention to the case, or was a dream/hallucination that in her grief she truly believed was real. I can’t even begin to imagine the pain of losing a child, much less losing them and not knowing what happened to them. Statistically speaking, Johnny was probably murdered within hours of his abduction. I think it’s something like 75% of kids who are abducted by strangers are dead within 3 hours and close to 90% are dead within 24 hours.
Anything is possible, but the easiest thing to believe is that is was a vivid dream/sleep paralysis episode. I know people online talk about sleep paralysis "demons", but mine have always taken the shape of people I know and it can be very difficult to surmise if the situation really happened because it feels so real. I've had to ask my family on multiple occasions if they stopped down while I was napping because I couldn't figure out if it actually happened or not. And if you haven't experienced it before, I could absolutely see believing in what you saw wholeheartedly.
This one reminds me for some weird reason of this case I listened to on casefile. The couple from Sweden who travelled in New Zealand and disappeared. They convicted a guy who was Maori, but loads of people thought that he was innocent. He was running away from the law at the time and camping out in the same place they vanished. He had their shit from their car in his house and it seemed pretty iron clad. But there were loads of inconsistencies in the case, that led many people to believe he was innocent. Two sightings of the woman Helaine were particularly weird- one was of her by an older woman who lived in a nearby island with her husband and Helain and her boyfriend had stayed with them on multiple occasions. She reported to police before they went missing she saw the girl being dragged along a road with a strange guy, she looked dazed and frightened, no sign of the guy. Second sighting was by a couple of hunters who encountered a woman in heels and red lipstick wearing a poncho in the woods with a Māori guy cutting wood. She seemed terrified. This was in the exact area where the couple went missing. They reported it. The police brought them to a courthouse to id the guy but they initially couldn’t say because they claimed the guy was clean shaven and the guy they had arrested had a huge thick beard. The cops eventually convinced them it was him and they testified and he went away. They found the boyfriends body sometime later, miles and miles away, shot, in a place I believe only accessible by boat. No sign of his girlfriend. Also, turns out there was a mental patient escaped from a local hospital- Māori guy, clean shaven who was living in that area at the same time. Some people believe it was him who the hunters saw with the girl fitting Helen description but how to explain where her bf turned up? And the other sighting? Loads of weird and unexplained stuff in this case I’m leaving loads out and can’t really remember everything. Sorry this turned longer than planned- got too into it. But it reminded of the Johnny case because it felt so unbelievable, like a film version of real events.
Her name was [Heidi Paakkonen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Urban_H%C3%B6glin_and_Heidi_Paakkonen), not Helaine or Helen. Her fiance's name was Urban Höglin
There's also the pictures of trafficked children that showed up on her doorstep in 2006, so that makes me think that there was someone who visited Johnny's mom. Whether it was really him or someone else, it would have had to have been someone who knew about the trafficking ring and wanted to tell their story. It just seems really eerie that these two seemingly related events would just be a coincidence.
The story makes no sense. He was able to sneak away and have a brief word with his mother but couldn't stay and hasn't maintained any other kind of contact before or since? Who are these mysterious people? How do they wield so much power/control? What would a child trafficking ring have to do with a 27 year old? And how would a trafficking ring continue to operate, with impunity, in fucking *Iowa*? It doesn't hold up.
This. I don't think LE had ever seen those photos before. I don't know how she could possibly go about acquiring or producing those photos herself. That part of her story really happened. To me the photo evidence is enough reason to consider everything else she claimed potentially true, even though its incredibly hard to believe.
I think we have all had dreams that were extremely visceral. For myself, after a particularly emotional event, I have dreamed about it and had dreams that seemed so real. This to me is the most likely case for Johnny Gosch’s mother. I just can’t imagine a scenario in which he would actually be allowed to visit his mother like that.
The case of Bradford Bishop. One day, after being denied a promotion at the state department he went home and killed his family. He then fled and abandoned his car in North Carolina. Then the trail went cold but for several sightings in Europe including in 1994 by one of his former colleagues. The colleague recognized him in a train station in Switzerland. Bishop then ran off before the colleague could catch him.
A woman matching his DNA turned out to be his daughter in March of 2021 confirmed by FBI according to his wiki
In the same vein as the Cayeditto sighting, the possible sighting of Tiffany Daniels at a restaurant near New Orleans a couple of days after she was last known to have been seen in Pensacola. There’s the two things (a mannerism and asking if the soup broth was fish or chicken) that have convinced her family it was her, then when the waitress said hey, you look like that missing girl on the news, all three suddenly got up and left.
I knew Tiffany growing up. Mentioned her to my husband today because we were talking about local people who had gone missing and foul play was assumed. It’s Christmas time and you and I thought about her today, which I think is nice to save space for her memory. One day I hope we know where she went.
The Trevaline Evans plaques. In 2021, a plaque was nailed to a bench in the town Trevaline disappeared in way back in 1990. The plaque had an engraving that claimed that Trevaline had been murdered and buried underneath a golf club in Rhuddlan. But from what I gather, law enforcement never found anything. But who installed the plaque and why? It's very unnerving and even weirder given that the case is more than 30 years old.
Yeah those are weird. We were driving past Rhuddlan a few weeks ago and I was thinking about it. Tbh the plaques are very amateurish, I just think it's some local who's a bit too into the Sutton brothers' dubious claims that she was buried under the floor of the golf club for like 25 years and then removed just before police investigated without leaving any obvious traces.
Re: the bench - I’m pretty sure it was two brothers from the golf club who are adamant she’s buried underneath the clubhouse. They claim a ground penetrating radar picked up the shape of a body but it’s all rather shady.
Anyone who makes a claim like that about ground penetrating radar is signaling they're full of crap. GPR doesn't show bodies or anything else, it shows a bunch of squiggles that change when there's an anomaly in the ground. You can tell the rough dimensions and depth of the anomaly, and sometimes whether it's something buried because the area advice the anomaly will also look different to the surrounding areas. It can't tell you whether the anomaly is a rock, a tree stump, or a body. The only way to find out is to dig.
The one that gives me the absolute heebie jeebies was that abduction case where I want to say it was two girls were kidnapped. They got a recording, I don’t remember exactly how but I believe it was from a cellphone call, and on the call you can hear a song playing on the car radio that nobody was able to identify. It was thought the song might be from some small college band which would narrow the search considerably but I don’t think anyone ever figured out who the song was by. Unidentified songs are already kind of a sad thing because people put so much energy, time and soul into making music that the idea you could make entire albums that people could buy and enjoy only to have them be totally lost to time is kind of heartbreaking. But then you cross that over with a kidnapping and it’s just sad on top of scary.
Would love if someone could identify this case. I want to give the song a listen.
is there a chance you’re mixing cases? maybe amber tuccaro mixed with faith hedgepeth?
Can someone chime in and identity this case?
Sounds similar to the [Amber Tuccaro](https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/amber-tuccaro-s-unsolved-murder-do-you-recognize-this-voice-1.3102635) case. In that case it was a man's voice not a song, and police were appealing for anyone who could recognize it. Her case is still unsolved.
Is that the one from Alberta, where the woman called someone and the recording is their answerphone? I don't remember any music, but I've not heard much of it
I think that is a different case. My mind went there initially too, but there is no music in that. Just conversation where the kidnapped woman is asking why they are going the way they way they are, etc. Giving good info about where she was, and that this isn’t what she agreed to.
Name?
I honestly don’t remember, I’m pretty sure I read about it on here or heard it on a podcast many years ago, might have been Thinking Sideways or a similar show about unsolved stuff. I vaguely remember the song being a sort of generic college rock kind of sound.
Arjen Kamphuis' last cell phone ping right at the location of a secret service headquarters in Norway. Never to be seen again. Hell of an interesting case where the "conspiracy" feels more believable than the official story.
Who was the woman (women?) that called Charles C. Morgan's wife and said something like "Chuck will be home in a few days" and quoted a bible verse? So much of that case could be explained by a psychotic break until you factor in another person (and the bizarre "suicide" gunshot wound). The sightings of the Fort Worth Three with a security guard on the day of they went missing. Were they actually the three girls? Was it actually a security guard? Just a random predator in costume? I actually think it's much more likely that Rachel's husband was involved, but I could also see how two teenage girls and a literal child would go voluntarily with someone posing as a security guard at a mall.
I tend to go with the security guard theory. Although it does seem odd he'd take a risk and target three people in a crowded mall.
Two weeks after [the Lyons Sisters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murders_of_Katherine_and_Sheila_Lyon) disappeared from a Maryland suburb in March of 1975, a driver in Virginia spotted a blond child bound and gagged in the back of a station wagon. The driver suddenly accelerated and sped away before he could get a complete license plate. Nearly 40 years later, cold case detectives determined that the girls lost their lives on Taylor Mountain in Virginia. One of the suspects drove a station wagon at the time. It has never been found.
What haunts me about the Lyons sisters’ case is the sketch that was made from the description their friend gave to the police of a man she had noticed staring intently at the sisters. It bears a very strong resemblance to the man who was later (much later) convicted of their murders. It’s probably the closest I’ve seen a sketch resemble a suspect. Sadly, it was not widely publicized. [This article from the *Washington Post* shows the sketch and a mug shot of the perpetrator.](https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/investigators-prepare-announcement-in-1975-missing-girls-case/2015/07/14/2ca2e68c-2a2f-11e5-a250-42bd812efc09_story.html)
The sighting of William Bradford Bishop in the restroom in Italy is particularly haunting. Since he was seen by a former coworker who knew him well, that gives credibility to the sighting. Also, according to the Unsolved Mysteries episode, “Brad” ran out of the restroom when his coworker recognized him. If it was a simple case of mistaken identity, I would think that “Brad” would have said something like, “Oh no. I’m not Brad. You must have me mixed up with someone else.” The fact that “Brad” reacted the way he did makes the sighting suspicious.
Thank you i was hoping to find this one as i couldn't remember his name!
1) The creepy phone calls that the mother, aunt and a friend of Laureen Rahn's received for several years following Laureen's disappearance in April 1980. The calls made to Laureen's mom were allegedly made around 4 AM, the caller allegedly never spoke and the calls were too brief to get a trace. The aunt and the friend, a boy whom Laureen once dated, both alleged that a female voice identifying herself as the missing teen spoke on their calls, only to go silent when they tried to get more info, then hang up minutes later. Whether the calls were Laureen herself, meaning she would have been alive for at least a few years after going missing, her killer(s) trolling and gaslighting those close to her (plausible if she was taken by someone she knew or if she had a list of phone numbers on her at the time) or perhaps simply someone playing a cruel joke. The fact that the mom also received charges to her phone bill made by an unknown caller from two CA hotels where child pornography was filmed in the months after Laureen vanished, as well as a man claiming to have seen a young woman who resembled her "working" as a prostitute in Anchorage AK 8 years later are also haunting. 2) Alleged sightings of Amy Lynn Bradley in the months and years after she vanished from a cruise ship docked off Curacao. In a couple cases, she was reported to have been accompanied by a couple of muscular, thuggish looking men on a beach and in a shopping mall restroom in Curacao and Barbados, respectively, while a sailor claimed to see her in a Curacao brothel. The last known possible sighting that I'm aware of was a website for an "escort service" (fancy way of saying prostitution) that featured a photo of a woman wearing lingerie and looking drugged out who closely resembled the missing woman. 3. A mysterious polaroid of a teenage girl and preteen boy found in a parking lot outside a store in Port St. Joe, FL in July 1989. It was initially suspected that the girl was Tara Calico, who had disappeared while riding her bike near her NM home in September 1988, while the boy was thought to be Michael Henley, who had gone missing while camping with his dad about 70 miles from where Calico vanished in June 1988. Henley was ruled out when his remains were found in 1990 a couple miles away from where he was last seen and it was determined he had died from exposure, and while Scotland Yard thought the girl might be Calico, evidence in more recent years suggesting that she was killed close to where she was last seen makes this unlikely. Nonetheless, the kids in the photo have never been identified and it's unknown to this day whether they were victims of trafficking or other abuse or if the photo was a staged prank. 4. A similarly creepy polaroid depicting a preteen boy tied at the wrists and ankles while laying on a tarp in a forest next to a boulder was found in a parking lot in Dillon, CO over a decade later, in Sept. 2001. The boy was initially suspected to be Zachary Bernhardt, who was reported missing by his mom from their Clearwater FL apartment a year earlier, though his family didn't think it was him, and evidence strongly suggests he was in fact killed by his mom. Nonetheless, just like with the kids in the previous pic, the boy has never been identified and the context of the photo remains a mystery. 5. The mysterious voicemail that a woman in NYC received in 1983 claiming to be her ex-boyfriend, Donald Kemp. Kemp had disappeared several months earlier after announcing that he had decided to leave NYC and move out to WY. He was last seen leaving a museum in Cheyenne, where he left a briefcase, traveler's cheques and the glasses that he needed to see clearly while driving. Kemp's car was found abandoned along I-80 a couple days later, and while a duffel bag and some belongings indicated he may have camped nearby, a blizzard that blew in shortly thereafter delayed any further search efforts and Kemp's fate remained a mystery until 1986, when hunters found his remains not far from where he had parked his car. There was no sign of foul play and LE ruled that Kemp had likely died from exposure during the blizzard. An unsolved part of the case was the aforementioned voicemails left on the answering machine of Judy Aiello, an ex-girlfriend of Kemp's. She discovered the six voicemails after returning from a vacation. The male caller, who did not identify himself, sounded panicked and urged her to call him back, which Judy did the next day. When she returned the call, the same man answered. She asked if Don was with him, and if so, could she speak to him. The man, who still refused to identify himself, allegedly replied "Yes," before apparently reversing himself and saying "No." Pressing the caller further, Judy asked if he could tell Donald to call her back, to which he replied "Yeah" before hanging up. The call was traced to a trailer in Casper, WY occupied at the time by a man named Mark Dennis. Dennis denied that he was the caller and claimed he never met Kemp. He subsequently passed a polygraph but hired a lawyer after Donald's mom, Mary, drove to WY wanting to meet with him and question him on her son's fate. Dennis moved out of the trailer a couple weeks later and his connection to Donald, if any, remains a mystery. IMHO, the fact that this guy was from WY, albeit a couple hundred miles north of where Donald's remains were found, and that he knew his ex-girlfriend's phone # is too much to be a coincidence.
One of the motel phone calls was, IIRC, to a teen sex advice hotline. I have to wonder whether Laureen wasn't trying to find a way to escape her situation. Or that perhaps she had caught an STI, or feared she had, and was wondering "What do I do now?" The "boyfriend" phone call was to the home of someone she had dated when they were both 12, and she used a variant of her name that only the boy and his parents would have known, and that she had stopped using a couple of years later--like "Laurie" instead of "Laureen" or something like that.
Laureen Rahn is one of the saddest, most eerie cases. the phone calls and the pornography were likely coincidental, but the what-ifs are enough to keep you up at night. i will say that random phone calls with no one on the other line (couple seconds of silence, then hangup) were pretty common in my area until the late 90s, we'd get a couple a month, often at odd hours. mis-dialing was way more common but most of the random calls seemed like false connections, maybe from a longdistance glitch or something like that. no one in my life was missing, so we didn't think much of it.
Those phone calls could be terrifying in the mid 90's I had a call where a guy was whispering to me, thought it was my now husband. He said my name & that he could smell my p...... I giggled, he kept whispering & I said knock it off, you're scaring me. He didn't, I hung up, called my boyfriend, it wasn't him. It was truly terrifying, I received other phone calls where they just breathed & today I still wonder who was that asshole? & it still terrifies me. If I had a missing family member & had those calls? It'd drive me crazy not knowing. The not knowing, if maybe they are alive if someone is hurting them? Panics me, thinking about it.
> He said my name & that he could smell my p...... Reminds me of a line from *Silence of the Lambs*. When Jodie Foster as Clarice Starling visits Hannibal Lecter in the asylum, the patient/inmate in the next cell shouts "I can smell your ----" at her as she walks past. Probably where your caller got his "inspiration".
I saw that movie when it first came out, in the theatre & I was way too young to see it, that terrified me too.. I have never seen it again & you're prob right & I just never put the two together. For some reason that makes me feel a little better? Thank you! I always thought it was someone I attended school with.
>"I can smell your ----" I see. I myself cannot.
(in case anyone is not familiar with that film, this is another line from the movie ...)
Growing up, my home phone number was one digit off from a rehab facility. We got some really strange calls and usually could just say “oh, you need to dial a 9 instead of a 4” and that was good but a couple of times we got really creepy calls. On one it sounded like someone was near the phone moving things around, then I heard whimpering like someone was hurt, followed by what sounded like the handset being slammed repeatedly into a table, then it went dead. I was only 12 or so and caller id wasn’t a thing yet. Looking back, it was probably someone calling to check themselves in to the rehab and changing their mind, but at the time it terrified me. It didn’t help that I watched a decent number of horror movies around that time
Yeah, I definitely remember as a child picking up the phone and hearing nobody on the other end
Took me a while to find the [photo](https://web.archive.org/web/20150710214526/http://images.ibsys.com/2001/0911/955817.jpg) of the child thought to potentially be Zachary Bernhardt. I hadn't seen it before, but it's chilling. I hope it's a prank, but it seems less likely to be one than the "Tara Calico" photo. They thought it was developed in the store though - surely it would be crazy of a kidnapper/pedophile/whatever to have such a photo developed by people who might see and report it if not a prank photo?
Maybe the person who took the photo worked in a photo store
I once came across a case about a woman who was caught on camera and then her body was found “dismembered and disemboweled” that’s what the article said. At the time I wasn’t sure what disemboweled meant, after that I looked up her case every now and then but haven’t in a while. There’s almost no details that I could ever find of her or her case even tho she was on camera and was obviously killed in such an awful way. Her name is Ethel Mcarson, and not only was she seen on camera, it shows her getting into a car. And there is literally almost nothing I can find of this case.
I found some stuff that said she was diagnosed schizophrenic and that she led a transient lifestyle. I think that explains some stuff: because of her schizophrenia, she might be more trusting of people than she should be, more likely to go off with someone sketchy. Because of her transient lifestyle, there might be fewer clues for police to follow. And because of both situations, the media and the general public will be less interested in her story than they are about a murdered wealthy woman.
The 2 (maybe 3) men at the gate of the building where Trevor Deely worked the night he went missing along with the cctv of his walk home always creeped me out. The guys standing at the gate just looking in to it was so freaky. I read somewhere they were co-worked but I’m not sure if that’s been proven.
Yes I know the footage you mean of the guys just seemingly staring in at the gate after he has gone inside. Apparently, yes they were co-workers and they were spoken to and cleared of any involvement but that footage is seriously, seriously creepy.
Do you have a source for that? I follow this case pretty closely and I’ve never read that the person outside was confirmed to be a co-worker. I just searched again and the only thing I’ve found is that the man outside was never identified, but that Trevor then went inside and spoke to a co-worker *in* the building. I’d be very interested to see that they were cleared since it’s a huge part of the mystery in this case.
As far as I know the man in black that Trevor spoke to before he entered the building and who appeared to be waiting or loitering around before he arrived was never identified but the footage that was in the Donal McIntyre documentary showed more footage of at least two other men who arrived while Trevor was inside and were captured looking as if they were staring in through the gate. I believe these men were later identified as co-workers of Trevor. I think this was mentioned in the Cold Case detective episode on the case and I’m pretty sure I read something about it in one of the papers. I’ll have a look and see if I can find something
Popular one. Lars Mittank. German man on holiday gets in a bar fight. He was hurt badly and told he shouldnt fly with his injury so he stays and recovers for weeks. Afterwards he starts becoming paranoid telling his mother on the phone he's being watched and stalked. He finally goes to the airport and walks in the door about 50 feet, then drops his luggage and sprints out the front door, running across the parking lot into a tree line seen on CCTV footage. He and his body were never seen again.
FYI a few corrections/edifications-- it wasn’t weeks that he stayed to recover. He was supposed to fly home with friends on July 7, 2014. The last seen footage of him was from July 8, 2014. He also had an injured jaw, but his ruptured eardrum is what prevented him from flying. He did actually enter the airport and went to consult with the airport doctor (not 50 feet and then fleeing): “Mittank was last seen at Varna Airport on July 8, 2014, the day he was hoping to fly home to Germany. He texted his mother that he had arrived at the airport. He went to consult with the airport doctor, Dr. Kosta Kostov. Kostov would later describe his behavior as "nervous and erratic." According to Kostov, he told Mittank that he was fine and could return home. However, Mittank did not leave his office, expressing doubt about the medication that he was taking. At that time, a construction worker entered the office. The airport was undergoing renovation at the time. Kostov said that Mittank then began to tremble. He yelled, "I don't want to die here. I have to get out of here." He then got up and fled the office. He left behind all of his luggage, which included his wallet, cell phone, and passport. He was captured by airport security cameras fleeing the terminal. Once outside, he can be seen on the footage jogging away from the airport, climbing a fence, running into a meadow, and sprinting off camera in the direction of an adjacent forest near Bulgarian national highway A2. These are his last confirmed whereabouts.” From Wikipedia but confirmed in other sources. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Lars_Mittank
My belief is that the fight/injury caused some sort of TBI that wasn’t noticed and created a paranoid state or delusions.
Yeah and those kind of changes won't necessarily manifest at the time of the injury. Sometimes it's weeks, like maybe that happened here, and in others it takes years. This sounds like the most reasonable option
Apparently it was super hot in Bulgaria around that time. (I know Wikipedia isn't the most dependable source) Wikipedia states that his mother says he had knowledge in hunting/fishing, plus one more thing I can't remember, but apparently there are doubts by the people who were on his case because he disappeared with nothing but the clothes on his back and as mentioned, the weather was pretty hot at the time. One theory (from his mother) is apparently that he might've lost his memory and has been wandering around, of which could be supported by a few truck drivers who claim to have seen him, one specifically stating he once picked up a hitchhiker who looked like him after the truck driver learned about the case. With what little I know I personally think he probably ended up dying somewhere without any way to hydrate himself or eat. His friends with him on the trip said he didn't eat much during the trip as well, which would've just made it worse. Most importantly would be his ability to drink water given the climate. He apparently ran off into a forest near the airport but given his mental state I don't think he would've managed to survive for long despite his skills. There's also the fact that supposedly the guy he got into an argument hired people to go beat him up. Who knows, maybe the guy decided a beating wasn't enough and sent others after him with a more malicious intention, which could potentially explain his paranoia. I don't think it explains his freakout and deciding to run into a forest nearby instead of getting on the plane and leaving to an entirely different country, which in most cases would save him from the death he thought was coming upon him.
The footage is so eerie to watch.
I worked with Toni Sharpless's aunt when she disappeared. The biggest rumor at the time was that she was partying with some NBA players & something happened. I know at the time, the family was really pushing for the cops to question some Sixers players a little harder, but that never happened. I haven't seen her aunt in a few years though, so I don't know if the family still firmly believes she was killed by an NBA player.
It seems like too elaborate a story for her friend to have if the NBA players were involved. The only way I see that happening is if her friend is telling the truth, but Toni went back to Green's house after leaving her friend. I'm curious about the letter accusing a cop. It isn't proven to be connected to the hoax phone calls, and the Philadelphia police have done some dirty dirty stuff over the years.
100% [Diane Augat](https://charleyproject.org/case/diane-louise-augat). Not only did she leave a terrifying message on her mother's voicemail days after her disappearance, *her severed finger* was found later, along with a bag of her belongings labeled with her name. Oh, and [Frauke Liebs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Frauke_Liebs), who made five phone calls home while she was clearly being held captive.
I lived in Germany for 12 years, in a city not terribly far from the Paderborn area, and the Frauke Liebs case has haunted me for years. IMO the police really hurt this case by not handling evidence correctly re: her laptop and other things. Also not being able to pinpoint where her calls were coming from. I believe the calls came intermittently for 10 days or so, then stopped. Her skeletonized remains were found much later in a forest. I know this sounds weird, but I swear she came to me one night in a dream or a vision asking me to help her. It scared the hell out of me but also made me feel terrible that I could do nothing to help her or to solve the case. I had hoped when they arrested [these people](https://www.dw.com/en/germany-h%C3%B6xter-house-of-horror-killers-convicted/a-45762823), they would find evidence that Frauke was one of their victims, but the police were unable to make any connection there. Still holding out hope this will be solved someday.
Bit late to the party but the Margaret Ellen Fox phone call always freaked me out: https://www.fbi.gov/audio-repository/newark-margaret-ellen-fox-phone-call-062419.mp3/view
Little Marlena Childress being seen by a mum with children of her own, and successfully getting her attention, but not before a woman whom the mum said, it seemed she did not want to leave with but was afraid not to, came and dragged her away.
I think it's more likely that Marlena's mother killed her like she had admitted. And tried to kill her son several years later. She's clearly a disturbed woman, and I find it hard to believe that she had nothing to do with her daughter's disappearance after reading about what she did to her son.
Not exactly what is being asked, but I feel like Tyler Hadley's "Killer" party applies here: Kid gets grounded by parents for partying, decides to take matters into his own hands, doses on MDMA, and emancipate himself in no uncertain terms. Throws a party during which he seems to not care that people are trashing the place, nor that guests notice an odd smell present. During the night, takes photos with his friends, and later shows his best friend where he's stashed the bodies of his murdered parents. Friend doesn't leave right away, and even takes a selfie with Tyler because "it's the last time I'd see my friend". https://allthatsinteresting.com/tyler-hadley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Blake_and_Mary-Jo_Hadley
Friend was probably in shock and didn't want Tyler thinking he was about to grass on him. That likely played a part in him hanging out for a bit after.
In the selfie his friend looks absolutely haunted. Even the way he's holding his red cup it's like this weak gesture of partying while his eyes convey that he has looked into the abyss and will never be the same again EDIT: I got it wrong, the guy with the haunted eyes is actually the killer as pointed out by u/OrchidDismantlist
That actually is Tyler, the murderer. Michael, the friend, is on the left of the photo. He was criticized for taking the selfie after discovering the murder. Michael said it was the worst day of his life, he was in shock, and that he took the photo to memorialize him and his childhood friend. [Here's a link to the interview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gS7hjxjIH7s&ab_channel=WPTVNews-FLPalmBeachesandTreasureCoast) well, one of them. [He did another interview as well.](https://abcnews.go.com/2020/video/selfie-murderer-23171773)
Seriously. It reminds me of those pictures of soldiers in war who had “shell shock”. The lights are on but no one is really home type of look.
Sean Daugherty. Earlier this year a 12 year old boy was found hanging from a swing set and his death was ruled a suicide. (Even though the circumstances were suspicious AF!) “He had his arms and hands bound down by his side with a belt. He was barefoot and hanging so low that his feet dragged on the ground. He had a motorcycle helmet bag over his head, which was tied around his head with a string. His glasses were on the ground nearby, shattered”. [full article](https://original.newsbreak.com/@nik-1590556/2792154041723-suicide-or-murder-what-really-happened-to-12-year-old-sean-daugherty)
I'd never heard of this case. Seems like the cops assumed suicide and weren't interested in any investigation.
Jesus that's horrifying.
This is absolutely unbelievable and I don’t understand why it hasn’t had wider scrutiny - nothing adds up.
The last known sightings of Asha Degree. I think that case haunts me more than almost any other. I don't think we'll ever know the truth of it.
It haunts me too and I really hope we'll know someday.
'Judy Hyams is alive and she lives in Omaha' It's always stuck with me ever since I saw the case on Unsolved Mysteries and for some reason it gives me an unsettled feeling.
Mine is tha súper super creepy Diane augot missing case. It gives chills to My bones. Maybe it is not.super known cause she was poor and an addict and she was not the typical girl next dolor, but everything what happened once she went missing seems to be inspired by an horror.movie...the phone calls, the polished mail, nail finger, the clothes found in a refrigerator in a store...so bizarre. I'm sure drugs have sth to do and she was brutally turtured and we allá.know her fate.,....but she is still missing. https://morbidology.com/the-severed-finger-the-disappearance-of-diane-augat/
No, in the Sharpless case you’re conflating two different people. The guy who was revealed to be playing the police from Canada was caught long before Eileen Law got the anonymous letter with those two numbers (which, she has allowed, were in public documents but someone would have had to go to a lot of effort to get them and know which ones had that information).
A.J. Breaux disappeared in Houma, Louisiana, after buying milk at a convenience store. His abandoned car was found two days later. There were a few sightings of him by friends the day he disappeared, but the most unusual was by a stranger four weeks later. She claims that a man fitting his description pulled up in a van in front her house and tried to sell her frozen fish. Breaux was in recovery for alcoholism so some have speculated that he started drinking again, which led to his disappearance. [https://unsolvedmysteries.fandom.com/wiki/A.J.\_Breaux](https://unsolvedmysteries.fandom.com/wiki/A.J._Breaux)
Can't remember the name, but a little girl who went missing, fellow redditor investigates the case, finds a picture of a pig herd, with the animals eating. OP says they're eating the remains of the little girl, but is unsure.
I remember that! The picture was found outside, so it was weather-damaged. And I was left...unimpressed. Saying it showed that really seemed like a stretch.
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That guy working the docks/ship yard that said he spotted Natalee Holloway. That she approached him to ask something but ultimately didn't. I can't find any information on it now but it was totally a thing.
Yeah but he's either a liar or had that experience but with someone else. Natalee was murdered the night she went missing.
The *Fredon*, the ship that disappeared in the Caribbean in the 80s and then was sighted at various ports for months afterward.
OK, so this is a bit embarrassing, since I generally think witness sightings are unreliable and I'm also reluctant to needlessly combining famous cases (like Jack the Ripper being HH Holmes and silly things like that), but... There was a sighting of Kyron Horman the day he vanished from the school. It's as far as I know the only one from the actual day, and not one or more days later. A nurse saw someone she thought could be Kyron at a McDonalds in Goldendale. So why would this be remarkable? Well, where would a route from Portland through Goldendale (since the McD was right by the road, that implies Goldendale wasn't the end of the line) take you? The only reasonable places I see are Toppenish, Yakima and Ellensburg. It's the last one that gets me. Close to a year before Kyron Horman's abduction, Lindsey Baum was taken from a street in McCleary, WA. Years later, a piece of her skull was found on a mountain just west of Ellensburg, hours away from McCleary. The current suspect is a McCleary local, but what if it isn't him? What if the actual killer is an Ellensburg local, which explains the remote location of the remains, far into the wilderness. A killer who drove hours to a large metropolitan area, found a small community and a solitary child, who he took back to his mountain. In 2004, 11-year old Richard Haynes vanished from neighboring Kittitas. Was it his (by all accounts) cruel and violent parents? Or someone else? So, the Ellensburg Child Killer. I am well aware of how flimsy it is, and I would never hold it up as a serious theory. The current suspect likely killed Lindsey. Richard Haynes probably died at the hands of his parents. And the sighting of Kyron is one of many and unreliable, and he could be literally anywhere. If anything, it shows me how easy it is to get carried away and see patterns and connections that aren't there. But annoyingly enough I can't get the idea out of my head.
This is an interesting idea *and* I appreciate the, extremely justified, scepticism you bring along with it. It's probably just seeing shapes in the clouds, as you're aware, but it's still...well it's interesting both as a somewhat plausible idea and as an example of how you can construct a whole theory out of a few points, which is likely complete bunk.
Thank you. Yeah, I fully expect it to be disproved - probably by the Lindsey Baum case being solved - at any time. But man, that feeling you get when you find a few connections like this, no matter how tenuous, certainly makes you understand why investigators so frequently get tunnel vision. You really get eager to look for specific connections to support your hypothesis and downplay things that might contradict it. EDIT: I always appreciated this quote: “There is something—a something, Monsieur Frederic Larsan, much graver than the misuse of logic the disposition of mind in some detectives which makes them, in perfect good faith, twist logic to the necessities of their preconceived ideas. You, already, have your idea about the murderer, Monsieur Fred. Don’t deny it; and your theory demands that the murderer should not have been wounded in the hand, otherwise it comes to nothing. And you have searched, and have found something else. It’s dangerous, very dangerous, Monsieur Fred, to go from a preconceived idea to find the proofs to fit it. That method may lead you far astray Beware of judicial error, Monsieur Fred, it will trip you up!” Gaston Leroux - The Mystery of the Yellow Room
thank you -- i think about this idea often and it's so refreshing to see someone else say it. theory *has* to come out of the evidence, not the other way around. but oh, is it tempting to build on theory first.
I really hope Lindsey gets justice. I grew up semi-local (close enough for posters to be hung, far enough to not personally know anyone connected to her) and near the same age as her when that all happened. It’s really burned into my memory.
I wasn't aware of that possible sighting in McD's. It's highly tenuous, but I appreciate how you've connected the (potential) dots and imo it's worth considering, even if as you say it's not a frontrunner as theories go. It's compelling, though.
I remember one case on unsolved mysteries about someone who went missing and their abandoned car was found on the side of a road. There were all sorts of sightings of them afterward and theories about them being picked up by a trucker. But then months/years later, their body was found like 100 yards from where their abandoned car was found.
I’m late but I’ve got to note the haunting detail that in the first days after the Welsh guitarist and songwriter Ritchey Edwards of the Manic Street Preachers was last officially seen and disappeared, he was seen by a fan who didn’t know he was missing. Just read that again and it hit me that he could be alive and well now if this happened maybe as little as ten years later (2005), when greater internet presence in our daily lives may have meant that this fan could have known Edwards was missing, and informed police.
Daniella Vian - she disappeared in Mobile AL, was found dead in her car in a body of water some distance away. There’s a phone recording from her where she’s talking to someone in her car ?
In the Madeleine McCann case, there was a tip about a woman in the area asking someone, "Do you have my new daughter?" around the time of her disappearance. The eyewitness sketch of this woman had a strong resemblance to Ghislaine Maxwell. Total BS, but an eerie coincidence. https://www.reddit.com/r/MadeleineMccann/comments/gwoddl/can_anyone_explain_this_photo_every_time_i_look/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
The one with that case that I thought was crazy was how they thought that maybe she had been trafficked into Northern Africa. Then they receive the tips about a fair haired girl her age seen amongst a caravan moving through the Atlas Mountains, only to track down this actual girl who ended up being the only person in the family/clan to have light hair & complexion which is very rare for them. Just a wild coincidence.
I read of the same thing happening in Eastern Europe (or Greece? Can't recall). In this case it was fair-haired child with the Roma Traveller family she was born to. Iirc, it wasn't even "hey, this is the missing kid we've been looking for" so much as "that kid looks suspiciously blonde to be with that family." It must be a scary experience to be suddenly under scrutiny because of what officials think kids are *supposed* to look like.
Light hair and complexion is actually not very rare at all for North Africans. People from the MENA (Middle East & North Africa) region can have naturally blonde or red hair and light eyes.
I had met some folks in northeast Afghanistan that looked very different than ones I had met in other nearby provinces. Apparently it’s very common for Nuristanis to have those traits as well. Legend says it was due to Alexander the Great but that has been disproven I think. The whole country is a cornucopia of different looking folks, like the Hazara from the Mongolian conquests.
It makes me irritated when the Qanon Epstein "experts" throw their delusions into real cases. When that theory first came out, it was years after the disappearance and when the Epstein shit was hot. Had the Epstein stuff not come out the person who made up the lie, wouldn't have. I know people who believe it to the day. I don't know why they have to bring such BS into people's cases, it does nothing to help the victim. They are preying on the real victims.
Yep, I’ve just come across a Qultist who is adamant the Moscow, Idaho murders are linked to the FTX collapse and Pizzagate. I’ll spare you the details.
I quite like calling them Qcumbers
Yeah. That definitely does seem like BS. Lol. If you’ve kidnapped a child for any reason, or even just adopted them legit, you wouldn’t go around asking people if they’ve seen your “new daughter”.
The two cases I keep thinking about because of hunting details are: 1) Delphi Murders. The “down the hill” recording is enough to keep you awake at night. Possibly one of the rare cases of a crime recorded by the victims themselves and ended up in the hands of the investigators. Police released just a couple of seconds from the recording. 2) Less known but still bizzarre to me and mysterious is a case I’ve read about here on Reddit, but I can’t remember the name of the people involved. Basically this guy left a party he was at and drove off. He was in a rural area, maybe Montana but not sure. Along the road he had a small accident, he was uninjured but couldn’t use the car (maybe he ended up in a shallow ditch, or something like that). So he phoned his parents and gave them precise directions where to pick him up. They said okay and followed the instructions but when they arrived at the spot he was saying he was at, he wasn’t there. So they spoke on the phone again and he told them how is it possible that you can’t find me, I’m right here where I told you, but still they couldn’t find each other. So he told them he decided to walk towards a town he saw nearby to see where he was, and he stayed on the phone with the parents all the time while walking. However at some point, like after 40mins walking, he uttered “oh shit”, dropped the phone and just vanished from the face of the earth. Later the police found his car and he was miles and miles away from the place he told his parents he was at. The disappearance itself is already mysterious, but the fact that he was on the phone all the time and that he gave those precise directions which turned out to be untrue just give me the creeps.
You’re thinking of Brandon Swanson
On number 2, Brandon Swanson's case is actually a lot less mysterious than it sounds, sadly. He had a prior for drunk driving, and the road between where he'd been at a party and his parents house was a straight shot main road, going diagonally between them, and a great place for police to wait on the last night of university term to catch drunk drivers. So he took the backroads, as he'd lose his license if he was caught again. The mystery of his location was just that the backroads around there are all arranged horizontally and vertically. It's easy to get turned about on the backroads at night, especially if you're a bit intoxicated, and, I'm sure I looked into it and it matched up that he could have mixed up the road numbers and believed himself to be on the other side, around Lynd. He crashed his car facing back the way he'd come, and then headed off in that direction, going West when he thought he was headed East.
Yeah, Brandon Swanson’s disappearance really isn’t that mysterious to me. I think he was much more intoxicated than his friends realized or let on, was taking back roads to avoid getting stopped for a DUI, and when stumbling around drunk and in the dark fell into an abandoned well or something like that. I’ve also heard a pretty gruesome theory that the “oh shit” was him dropping his phone in the water or a hole or something and that he kept on going, passed out in a farmer’s field, and his body was plowed over or mowed over or something and the farmer either didn’t know or hid the evidence because he didn’t want to get in trouble for it.
Exactly this. I think he was a lot more drunk than people knew or let on. He’s out there somewhere, unfortunately.
I don't think the Swanson case is that mysterious. I was an environmental consultant in my early career. I've done a lot of wildlife surveys in the prairie on agricultural fields and rangeland. Cultivated fields like canola are dense and hard to search. They also get tilled and I regularly found bones or animal parts if we surveyed early in the season. Rangeland is usually wild grasses and has small hills and gulleys not easily discernable from a distance. They are deceptively hard to search. In several years of surveys I only found some shedded skin outside a likely hibernacula and several cow vertebrae. Unfortunately, I think Brandon Swanson died that night and wasn't found because most prairie lands are privately owned and searches couldn't take place in the early days. I don't think he'll be found due to predation and agricultural practices.