Speaker 1: You know, it's a profound and often really unsettling realization
that certain places in America seem to hold onto secrets.
Speaker 2: Almost like they refuse to let them go exactly.
Speaker 1: We're talking about those files that just never close, the
cases where history, you know, stops writing the final chapter
and myth eagerly steps right in to take its place.
Speaker 2: Welcome to thrilling Threads. Today, we are undertaking a massive exploration.
We've compiled a huge stack of source material detailing twenty
four of the most persistent, most haunting, unsolved cases from
right across the United States.
Speaker 1: And these aren't just local curiosities.
Speaker 2: Not at all. These are national enigmas. They span four centuries,
and they cover well everything from quiet prairie roads and
remote wilderness disappearances to heavily guarded desert bases and some
of the most terrifying cold case murders imaginable.
Speaker 1: Our mission today is to go far beyond the surface
facts you might read in a headline. We really want
to unpack these chronic question.
Speaker 2: Marks, find those memorable details, right.
Speaker 1: Yes, the surprising taw moments that are kind of hidden
inside the investigative files, and the crucial lingering questions that
keep these stories alive, actively defying explanation decades or even
centuries later.
Speaker 2: And the scope here really demands depth. You're moving all
across the continental US, across different historical eras, looking at
cryptids and covert government operations, right alongside classic missing persons
and mass murders.
Speaker 1: These are the narratives that remain stubbornly open, unexplained, or
just shrouded in controversy and suspicion. Okay, let's unpack this.
And I think we have to start at the very beginning,
the birth of really American failure and mystery.
Speaker 2: We have to begin with the lost colony of Roanoke
in North Carolina, established in fifteen eighty seven by over
one hundred English settlers.
Speaker 1: And the core fact here, the thing you can't get
past is that crushing three year gap.
Speaker 2: It's everything. The settlement's leader, John White, he sails back
to England for supplies, but then the Spanish Armada happens, right.
Speaker 1: The war diverts all the ship available shit, so.
Speaker 2: He's prevented from returning until fifteen ninety, three years later.
Speaker 1: And three years isn't just time for a brand new,
fledgling colony. It's an extinction event, absolutely.
Speaker 2: So when White finally gets back, he finds the fort
completely utterly deserted, nothing.
Speaker 1: No signs of a struggle, no bodies, no graves, no
battle scars, no.
Speaker 2: Records, nothing to say where they went or why they
went there, just gone except for one thing, the one thing.
The only piece of information left behind was the word
croaton carved into a post and then the letter cro
carved into a tree nearby.
Speaker 1: So what did White make of that? I mean, that
had to mean something specific.
Speaker 2: He took it as a clear sign Croatoan Island was nearby,
and it was the home of a friendly Native American tribe.
They had actually pre arranged a signal, a signal. Yes,
they agreed that if they were forced to leave under duress,
you know, if they were attacked, they would carve across.
Speaker 1: And that cross was notably absent.
Speaker 2: It was, and that detail is critical. White interpreted the
lack of a cross as meaning the migration was planned,
it was safe.
Speaker 1: So this changes our whole perspective on their state of mind,
doesn't it completely?
Speaker 2: It suggests, as our sources highlight, that the colonists didn't
think of themselves as lost.
Speaker 1: They weren't waiting around for rescue.
Speaker 2: No, they were sending a message, this is where we've gone.
They fully expected that resupply ship to come back, find
the message and follow them.
Speaker 1: And have modern archaeologists found anything that backs that up.
Speaker 2: Well, there have been some interesting finds. Digs miles away
inland suggests they might have broken up into smaller groups
and moved on, maybe assimilated with local tribes because of famine,
or even conflict with other less friendly tribes.
Speaker 1: But no definitive proof.
Speaker 2: No smoking guns, so to speak. Yeah, it remains elusive.
Speaker 1: It's just astonishing to me that the very first attempt
at a permanent English settlement in North America is preceded
by this story of total complete erasure.
Speaker 2: Really sets a precedent, doesn't it. America is a place
where people, even whole communities, can simply disappear.
Speaker 1: It marks the birth of America. Yeah, but it's also
a story of failure. It's this persistent historical trauma that's
just etched into.
Speaker 2: The coastline, and the fact that it's still a mystery
ensures ronokes stays relevant. It's the ultimate cautionary tale.
Speaker 1: Okay, so let's move forward a few centuries. We see
a very different kind of vanishing act, much more calculated,
from the world of high society and politics.
Speaker 2: The disappearance of New York Supreme Court Justice Joseph Forst
Crator in nineteen thirty.
Speaker 1: And this man was the absolute definition of a New
York celebrity.
Speaker 2: Oh a major figure. He wasn't just known by judges
and powerful politicians. He was known by figures in the
shady Broadway world, cops on the street.
Speaker 1: And the rumors were swirling that he was on the
shortlist for an FDR nomination to the US Supreme Court.
Speaker 2: Right and then on August sixth, nineteen thirty, he leads
a restaurant near Times Square, gets into a taxi and
has never seen a.
Speaker 1: His vanishing just immediately became this national circus. It was
steeped in all these rumors of corruption mistress's political scandal.
Speaker 2: But the thing that sets it apart is that this
was not impulsive. The evidence shows it was clearly methodically planned.
Speaker 1: Exactly what did the investigation find?
Speaker 2: A flurry of preparatory actions. He had withdrawn over five
thousand dollars in cash of fortune at the time, he
liquidated investments, and crucially he emptied his safe deposit box
and all of his files. Just days before he disappeared,
he was systematically erasing his own paper trail.
Speaker 1: And his wife, Stella. She immediately suspected a political cover up.
Speaker 2: She did. She started calling these powerful men who she
believed were either concealing his whereabouts or even worse, were
involved in his forced absence.
Speaker 1: The idea that someone so public, so well known, could
be so intentionally and cleanly erased, it's terrifying.
Speaker 2: And what does it say about our relationship with unresolved
crime that a tragedy like creators could immediately become slang.
Speaker 1: To pull a Crater right.
Speaker 2: It entered the American lexicon as the definitive way to
disappear without a trace. It's just the sort of cultural
acceptance that will some things just go unresolved off because
of powerful forces.
Speaker 1: And the case just refused to die. Decades later, there
was another twist.
Speaker 2: That's right. In nineteen fifty four, this woman named Kraus
claimed that she and Crater had buried ninety thousand dollars
in her vacation homes backyard back in early nineteen thirty, which.
Speaker 1: Led to a Life magazine funded excavation. I mean that
shows you the public subsession.
Speaker 2: It does, and police confirm there was a connection between
Kraus and Creator through some checks, which lent creens to
the theory that maybe Creator was killed over hidden.
Speaker 1: Money, but the excavation found nothing, the.
Speaker 2: Official trail went cold again. The theory now really leans
toward Crater having been murdered by organized crime figures connected
to his political and Broadway dealings.
Speaker 1: So if Crater represents this calculated political vanishing, the case
of Patricia Mia offers the terrifying counterpoint.
Speaker 2: A person erased by instantaneous is accidental trauma.
Speaker 1: A devastating story out of Montana. April twentieth, nineteen eighty nine,
thirty seven year old Patricia Miann collides head on with
another vehicle on Montana Highway two hundred, and.
Speaker 2: That crash was the trigger. Immediate aftermath is what's so haunting.
Speaker 1: She stepped out of the car, dazed and just stared
stared silently at the wreckage. An observer noted she stood like.
Speaker 2: A spectator, as if it hadn't even happened to her.
Speaker 1: Exactly a total dissociation. And then she just walked off
into the vast open prairie, never seen again.
Speaker 2: Investigators theorized she was suffering from severe head trauma or
just profound emotional distress, a dissociated fugue state.
Speaker 1: The fear that she had hurt or killed someone in
the other car might have just broken her reality.
Speaker 2: And she simply wandered away. But the key factor here
is the landscape that prairie, just vast and unforgiving. It
just swallowed her without a trace.
Speaker 1: Her family's enduring fears twofold.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: There's the worry, is she succumbed to the elements out there?
Speaker 2: And then there's the other terrifying possibility that someone stopped
and offered her a ride.
Speaker 1: And her fate now rests with a complete stranger. The
silence of those open planes where she was last seen
is just it's deafening.
Speaker 2: Moving to Oregon, we find the heartbreaking case of Chiron Horman.
Speaker 1: Vanished from Skyline Elementary School in Portland June fourth, twenty ten.
He was seven years old.
Speaker 2: He was at a science fair with his stepmother, Terry Horman.
He was seen walking toward his classroom, but he never.
Speaker 1: Arrived, and the search that followed was just unprecedented.
Speaker 2: It was the largest criminal investigation in Oregon's history. It
pulled in over a thousand volunteers multiple.
Speaker 1: Agencies, and yet that massive search yielded virtually no physical
evidence of where he went.
Speaker 2: That lack of physical evidence despite all those resources is
sort of a signature of these modern high profile disappearances.
Suspicion almost immediately focused on Terry Horman. Why her specifically,
there were inconsistencies in her narrative, her subsequent polygraphic exams,
and just her community cation with investigators. But she has
never been charged with a crime.
Speaker 1: So the legal scrutiny on her, combined with the devastating
lack of a body, has created a perpetual state of
limbo for the whole family.
Speaker 2: It has and the persistence of his mother, Cain Horman,
is really what keeps this case alive.
Speaker 1: It goes back every year, every.
Speaker 2: Year she visits the Portland area, maintains pressure, works with
law enforcement. She ensures this case does not become a
forgotten piece of history. And the sources really highlight that
the emotional cost of that constant, active fight is immense
but necessary.
Speaker 1: Finally, in this section, let's look at two cases where
the American wilderness itself seems to be the confounding factor.
We can start with the Bennington Triangle in Vermont.
Speaker 2: Right This remote area saw this cluster of bizarre disappearances
in the nineteen forties and fifties.
Speaker 1: The most cited victim is Paula Jean Weldon, a nineteen
year old Bennington College student who vanished while hiking the
Long Trail on December first, nineteen forty six.
Speaker 2: A routine hike. She told her roommate she was just
going for a short walk and never came back.
Speaker 1: And this wasn't an isolated incident. That's what created the
lore of the Bennington Triangle.
Speaker 2: Exactly. At least four other people disappeared in that same
specific area between nineteen forty five and nineteen fifty. But
the strangest case might be James Tedford, a veteran who
vanished from a public.
Speaker 1: Bus from a moving bus, from a.
Speaker 2: Moving bus in nineteen forty nine. He's running a bus
is on the highway near the Bennington area. Witnesses confirmed
seeing him asleep on the bus at the very last
stop before Bennington.
Speaker 1: And when the driver reached the town.
Speaker 2: Tedford's belongings were still on his seat, but he was
gone and the bus was moving the entire time, no
one saw him leave.
Speaker 1: It's that total lack of a rational explanation for Tedford's
vanishing that just cements the Bennington mystery. A disappearance from
inside a moving, contained vehicle.
Speaker 2: You can trast that with the silence of the wyoming wilderness.
In the case of Amy roebecktil in nineteen ninety seven.
Speaker 1: A record breaking distance runner, an aspiring Olympian, vanished while
mapping a ten k race route near her home and Lander.
Speaker 2: And the puzzle here is her vehicle. Her unlocked white
Toyota Turcell was found abandoned along Loop Road in.
Speaker 1: The wind River Range, no sign of a struggle, nothing, And.
Speaker 2: For a dedicated athlete like her, who likely ran long
distances daily, there were so many possibilities.
Speaker 1: The context here is what matters so much. Lander is
a small, closely knit community, very low crime rate.
Speaker 2: So for a high profile, dedicated runner to vanish without
leaving a single trace, no footprints leading off the road,
no clothing, no sign of a struggle, it left investigators
with nothing, just the empty landscape. It's one of those
cases where a person vanishes not into the chaos of
a city, but into the baffling silence of the frontier.
Speaker 1: So we're transitioning now from the emptiness of absence to
the fullness of a really frightening presence. When the facts
fail us, we often feel that vacuum with legends.
Speaker 2: And we have to begin with perhaps the most famous
harbinger of calamity, the Mothman of Point Pleasant, West Virginia.
Speaker 1: Frame is so intensely focused here.
Speaker 2: It is November nineteen sixty six to December nineteen sixty seven.
Over that single year, residents of Point Pleasant reported sightings
of a large, bizarre, winged humanoid.
Speaker 1: The descriptions were consistent, right, a six foot wingspan, moving
extremely fast.
Speaker 2: And possessing large, glowing red eyes.
Speaker 1: The specific origin point for these sightings is fascinating too.
It was near the old TNT.
Speaker 2: Plant, right, a decommissioned industrial site that already lends this eerie,
abandoned quality to the landscape. Two couples first reported the creature,
and they explicitly said it was fast enough to keep
up with their fifty seven Chevy.
Speaker 1: Which would have been moving at a pretty significant highway speed.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, But what transforms Mothman from just another cryptid
sighting into a foundational American legend is the tragedy.
Speaker 1: That followed the sightings just stopped.
Speaker 2: They ceased abruptly when the Silver Bridge collapsed in December
nineteen sixty seven, killing forty six people. The official cause
of failure was a microscopic crack and a single fractured eyebar.
Speaker 1: But for the locals, the narrative solidified instantly. Mothman wasn't
the cause of the disaster.
Speaker 2: He was an omen a, premonition, or a supernatural warning
that they failed to heed.
Speaker 1: And the sources show that while scientists often dismissed these accounts,
you know, saying it's a misidentified barn owl or a
large crane, which.
Speaker 2: Is hardly satisfying when witnesses are describing as six foot
vertical man.
Speaker 1: Right, The story persists because it offers a narrative explanation
for an otherwise inexplicable tragedy. It fills that cultural void
created by the bridge failure.
Speaker 2: And now it's a permanent fixture. It spawned festivals, books,
and that giant metallic statue you can visit today.
Speaker 1: From a flying harbinger to a reptilian icon, the lizard
man of scape or swamp in South Carolina, this is.
Speaker 2: A purely modern mythology, but it's embraced with just as
much fervor.
Speaker 1: This phenomenon just exploded in the summer of nineteen eighty
eight near Bishopville, South Carolina.
Speaker 2: The main witness was a seventeen year old Christopher Davis.
He claimed he was driving at two am that classic
horror movie timing when his tire blew.
Speaker 1: Out, and the encounter he described as just chilling.
Speaker 2: A seven foot, powerfully built, red eyed reptilian preacher allegedly
lunged at his car, and crucially, he reported that it
left deep claw marks in the metal of the vehicle.
Speaker 1: Which suggests immense physical strength, and it provided this tiny
piece of physical evidence.
Speaker 2: The media frenzy was instantaneous. Other sightings followed. Reports of
strange animal attacks compounded the.
Speaker 1: Fear, and the sheriff's deputies even photographed large three toed
footprints and yes, damaged cars.
Speaker 2: Right though verifiable evidence was never found. The local response
is the real takeaway here.
Speaker 1: They didn't run from the story at all.
Speaker 2: They embraced it absolutely. The lizard Man is now the
icon of Lee County. Our sources highlight this local pride.
It's a powerful example of a community adopting a cryptid
as its cultural brand, turning local fear into tourism and identity.
Speaker 1: Smack in the middle of these sightings is the Beast
of Bray Road in Walworth County, Wisconsin. This was mostly
in the nineteen eighties and nineties.
Speaker 2: Witnesses there described a all hairy, distinctly wolf like creature,
but one that's sometimes walked upright, making it humanoid, and
sometimes on all fours.
Speaker 1: And it was always characterized by glowing eyes and this
palpable menacing presence.
Speaker 2: The specific anecdotes are really vivid. There are claims of
the creature stalking through corn fields, jumping onto the roofs
of cars, leaving scratch.
Speaker 1: Marks much like the lizard Man.
Speaker 2: Yes, and one specific report described the creature simply trucking
down the road toward a surprise driver.
Speaker 1: It's this tension between total skepticism, you know, misidentified animals
or just hoaxes, and the enduring culp following that really
fuels cryptid culture.
Speaker 2: The sheer consistency of that wolf humanoid description across different
witnesses over decades and sure as it remains a significant
and unresolved piece of American folklore.
Speaker 1: Okay, shifting from cryptids to the distinctly historical and supernatural,
we have to talk about the legendary Bell Witch of Tennessee.
Speaker 2: This is a deep historical case. It's centered on the
Bell family of Adams, Tennessee. Between eighteen seventeen and eighteen
twenty one, the farmer John Bell and specifically his daughter Betsy,
claimed they were relentlessly tormented by a violent and intelligent.
Speaker 1: Spirit and the activity was far from subtle.
Speaker 2: Not at all. It included disembodied voices that allegedly spoke eloquently,
moved objects, pulled hair, and delivered physical strikes to family members,
especially Betsy.
Speaker 1: And what's crucial here is that the entire community of
Adams allegedly witnessed these strange events. It lends it a
credibility beyond just a single family's paranoia.
Speaker 2: The entity even provided multiple identities for itself, claimed to
be the spirit an Indian or a woman named Kate,
and it famously stated its sole purpose was to torment
John Bell until his death.
Speaker 1: And the terror culminated in John Bell's mysterious death.
Speaker 2: In eighteen twenty which the spirit was later blamed for
allegedly placing him with some dark unidentified liquid.
Speaker 1: The legend ballooned so large that it even drew the
interest of national figures, famously Andrew Jackson.
Speaker 2: Yes, The story persists that Andrew jacks And visited the
Bell Home with his entourage to verify the phenomenon. According
to the legend, Jackson was either frightened away or was
prevented by the entity from even entering the house.
Speaker 1: Leading him to declare, I would rather face the whole
British Army than face the bell Witch right now.
Speaker 2: While historians haven't found documentary proof of this visit, the
fact that the legend incorporated such a historical heavyweight just
shows how profound the impact was. It refuses to become
mere history.
Speaker 1: And people say the haunting continues even today.
Speaker 2: According to local reports, Yes, visitors and staff at the
bell Witch Cave and the Farm Gift Shop have reported
tapping footsteps when no one is there and books scattered
across the floor. It's a mystery that is actively maintained
by current activity.
Speaker 1: Our final enigma in this section is architectural. It's one
that challenges the entire timeline of American discovery.
Speaker 2: The origins of the Newport Tower in Rhode.
Speaker 1: Island it's the oldest building in Rhode Island, a circular
stone structure masonry fieldstone with eight arches. His style is
just highly unusual.
Speaker 2: Especially given the traditional early colonial architecture in the state
was uniformly wood and rectangular.
Speaker 1: So the conventional accepted view is that it was just
the seventeenth century windmill.
Speaker 2: Credited to Governor Bennedict Arnold, who referenced as Stone Windmill
in his sixteen seventy seven will, But.
Speaker 1: The structure's design has long fueled these alternative pre Columbian theories.
Speaker 2: Theories that claimed the tower was built by everyone from
Norse explorers and knights templar to Chinese sailors, suggesting contact
with the Americas long before Columbus or the English.
Speaker 1: And this is where we move beyond just historical speculation
into forensic architecture. The astronomical angle.
Speaker 2: The late nineteen nineties brought intense analysis focusing on the
tower's potential function as an astronomical time piece a horologium,
meaning through the precise placement of windows, arches, and alignment points.
It's been suggested the structure tracks the North Star, the solstices,
and the equinoxes.
Speaker 1: And crucially, it seems to track the eighteen point six
to six year lunar minor cycle. Now, for a listener
who isn't steeped in astronomy, what exactly is the significance
of that number? Why it is tracking it? Suggest advanced knowledge?
Speaker 2: Well, the eighteen point sixty six year lunar minor cycle
is the time it takes for the Moon's orbital plane
to complete one full procession, basically the Moon's wobble. Okay,
this knowledge was essential for highly accurate navigation and for
calindrical observation. If this tower truly tracks this complex cycle,
it means the builders had an astronomical sophistication far beyond
what Governor Arnold would have needed to build a simple
flour mill.
Speaker 1: It forces us to ask, if it was a windmill,
why was it also a highly precise astronomical calendar.
Speaker 2: Exactly so the structure itself just stands there as this
silent challenge to American historical certainty, forcing us to continuously
question who built what and when.
Speaker 1: We turn now to cases of violent crime, where definitive
justice remains elusive despite decades of investigation. These are the
darkest thread in the American narrative.
Speaker 2: And we start in New Mexico with the terrifying Ols
Cruse's Bowling Alley massacre.
Speaker 1: This happened on the morning of February tenth, nineteen ninety
two armed men entered the Lost Crucis Bowl as the
staff were preparing to open.
Speaker 2: They gathered seven people, three adults and four children and
forced them into an.
Speaker 1: Office, and the crime was marked by this extreme brutality,
but for minimal gain.
Speaker 2: Right they stole a relatively small amount of cash, somewhere
between four and five thousand dollars, and then they proceeded
to shoot all seven victims execution style, point blank range,
before setting papers on fire to try and destroy evidence.
Speaker 1: Five people ultimately died from their injuries, including all three children.
Speaker 2: And tragically, the manager, Stephanie Sanak. She survived initially, but
died nine years later in nineteen ninety nine from complications
related to the gunshot wounds she sustained.
Speaker 1: And despite composite sketches from survivor testimony, including from Senak's
own daughter, the gunmen have never been identified.
Speaker 2: The lack of a clear high value motive and just
the sheer violence of it just a level of depravity
that has consistently baffled investigators. The case remains open. It's
an active wound in that community with a standing twenty
five thousand dollars reward.
Speaker 1: And the sources emphasized that the low monetary gain compared
to the high human cost is what makes the crime
so confounding it does.
Speaker 2: Now, moving to Texas, we had the legendary and fear
inducing texor Cana moonlight murders committed by the unidentified phantom
killer in nineteen forty six.
Speaker 1: This spreed terrorized the twin cities of Texarkana in the
spring of forty six. The killer stalked young couples parked
on remote roads the lover's lanes.
Speaker 2: And over just ten weeks, the phantom murdered five people
and severely wounded three others.
Speaker 1: The specific mo is so unnerving. Survivors described him wearing
a white sack with eye holes cut out, attacking mostly
with a point three to two caliber pistol.
Speaker 2: The fear in that town was paralyzing.
Speaker 1: I can't even imagine.
Speaker 2: The sources describe a palpable shift in the city's atmosphere.
Curfews were imposed. Police advise families to put chair in
front of their doors. The entire town went dark after sundown, and.
Speaker 1: It drew national attention.
Speaker 2: Front page coverage in Life magazine. It brought in hordes
of Texas rangers and state police, and yet the perpetrator vanished.
Speaker 1: There was a primary suspect, right, a man named Eule Swinney, Yes.
Speaker 2: A known car thief. He was widely suspected, but the
issue was he was already imprisoned for auto theft, which
complicated the.
Speaker 1: Timeline, so they could never definitively link him.
Speaker 2: Police had strong circumstantial suspicion, but they could never conclusively
link him to the murder weapons or provide definitive physical evidence,
and that ambiguity allowed the mystery to endure, fueling speculation
that the real killer was never even targeted.
Speaker 1: And the case has an incredibly chilling PostScript.
Speaker 2: The anonymous phone calls.
Speaker 1: Tell us about those.
Speaker 2: Years after the spree, relatives of the victims reportedly received
anonymous phone calls from a middle aged woman apologizing for
what her father had done.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: It suggests that the not knowledge of the phantom's true
identity may be hidden actively protected within a family unit
to this day.
Speaker 1: Now, let's consider another series of unsolved Lover's Lane attacks.
The Colonial Parkway murders in Virginia.
Speaker 2: Between nineteen eighty six and nineteen eighty nine, at least
eight people, four young couples, were murdered along or near
Virginia's scenic Colonial Parkway, a route connecting historical sites like.
Speaker 1: Jamestown, and the physical scene was confounding. Victims were found
in or near their cars, often showing signs of restraint,
but there was.
Speaker 2: Little evidence of robbery or sexual assault. This suggests a
highly specific, maybe even ritualistic, motive that prioritized control and
murder over other criminal aims.
Speaker 1: So what were the theories?
Speaker 2: Initial theories focused on a single serial killer, but the
variation in the crime scenes later led some investigators to
suggest multiple offenders.
Speaker 1: Or, most chillingly, a.
Speaker 2: Rogue law enforcement impersonator, someone who could use the isolation
of the parkway and the illusion of authority to lure victims.
Speaker 1: But the families received measure of peace just recently in
early twenty twenty four, which is extremely rare for a
case this.
Speaker 2: Cold, Virginia State Police identified a man named Alan Wilmer
Senior as a suspect in two related cases within the
Broader series.
Speaker 1: Thanks to forensic advancement.
Speaker 2: Exactly, specifically the deaths of Lori em Powell, Anna Maria Phelps,
Robin Edwards, and David Nobling.
Speaker 1: But this is where the nuance of justice comes in.
Does that identification mean the entire Colonial Parkway series is solved?
Speaker 2: No, and that's the key point. The broader series, encompassing
all eight victims, officially remains unsolved. So while Wilmer Senior's
identification provides answers and accountability for some families, others are
still waiting. It just illustrates the fragmented nature of resolution
in these serial cold cases.
Speaker 1: Moving to Oklahoma, we have to examine the tragic and
legally complicated Girl Scout murders from Camp Scott in nineteen
seventy seven.
Speaker 2: On June thirteenth, nineteen seventy seven, the bodies of Lorii Farmer,
Denise Milner, and Michelle Goose were found on a trail
to just one hundred and fifty yards from their tent.
They had been assaulted and.
Speaker 1: Murdered, and crucially, evidence including blood was found on the
mattresses and floor inside the tent.
Speaker 2: Right suggesting Laurie and Michelle were killed there before their
bodies were moved.
Speaker 1: The immediate focus fell on Jean Loihart, a convicted sex
offender who had escaped prison four years prior. He was
the prime suspect.
Speaker 2: He was captured after an intense manhunt and brought to
trial in nineteen seventy nine, but despite the circumstantial evidence
in his background, he was equated.
Speaker 1: A massive blow to the investigation and the community.
Speaker 2: Huge and he died in custody just months later from
a heart attack.
Speaker 1: But the narrative shifted dramatically decades later with modern technology.
Speaker 2: In twenty seventeen, DNA retesting strongly suggested Heart's involvement. They
compared DNA found at the scene with his profile and
found a very high likelihood of a match.
Speaker 1: So if the sources clearly suggest Heart's involvement through modern DNA,
why does the OSBI refuse to officially close the case?
What's the legal barrier?
Speaker 2: Well, the legal barrier is that the DNA, while compelling,
doesn't meet the next series standard for conclusive legal result
that overturns a prior acquittal, Especially since the subject.
Speaker 1: Is deceased and the DNA was degraded exactly, it.
Speaker 2: Was insufficient to eliminate all other possibilities definitively. Therefore, the
Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation officially considers the case unsolved,
even though they professionally believe Hard committed the murders. It
really tells you a lot about the limitations of retroactive
DNA analysis against the rights and realities of the legal system.
Speaker 1: We turned now to a case that was finally given
a name after nearly seven decades of being known only
as the Boy in the Box.
Speaker 2: Pennsylvania, February nineteen fifty seven, the body of a young
boy is found wrapped in a blanket inside a cardboard
box in Philadelphia's Fox Chase neighborhood. He had died from
blunt force trauma.
Speaker 1: And investigators chased thousands of dead ends for decades. He
remained unidentified for sixty five years.
Speaker 2: The breakthrough came through the relentless advance of forensic genealogy,
which is just rapidly redefining cold case investigation.
Speaker 1: DNA was collected back in ninety eight but yielded no match.
Speaker 2: In twenty nineteen, new samples were extracted and run through
these forensic genealogy databases, and this painstaking process allowed detectives
to build a family tree that eventually led to a
relative and finally to his birth parents.
Speaker 1: In twenty twenty two, he was formally identified as Joseph
Augustus Soirelli, born in nineteen fifty three.
Speaker 2: Restoring his identity was a huge moment, a measure of
dignity restored to a child forgotten by history.
Speaker 1: But the profound sadness remains because while his name was restored,
the perpetrator has not been publicly identified or charged.
Speaker 2: And that's the lingering tragedy. We know who Joseph was,
we know his parents, but the exact context of his
death and the identity of the person who inflicted that
fatal blunt force trauma are still hidden. The identity was taken,
and now even with the name back, the truth of
his final moments is still elusive.
Speaker 1: Let's examine the perplexing case of Stephen Hataja, a math
professor in Nebraska whose death remains officially undetermined.
Speaker 2: Steven Nataja was a Chadrin Skate college man professor who
vanished from that small Nebraska college town in December two
thousand and six. He was known as kind and quiet,
but he was privately struggling with significant personal and professional pressures, and.
Speaker 1: The discovery of months later in a ravine south of
campus was gruesome and baffling. Searchers found his burned remains.
Speaker 2: The cause of death was ruled as smoke inhalation combined
with thermal injuries, meaning he tragically burned to death. But
the bizarre aspect that fundamentally confused investigators were the bindings.
Bindings he had wrappings around his ankles and torso connecting
him to a nearby tree.
Speaker 1: The scene itself presents a stark conflict. The burning and
his internal struggles could suggest a severe, tragic self harm incident, but.
Speaker 2: The bindings scream of external foul play of someone ensuring
he couldn't escape the.
Speaker 1: Fire, and that combination is precisely why the official manner
of death was left as undetermined. The binding suggested the
crime was intensely personal, likely not a random stranger attack,
but the evidence wasn't strong enough to exclude the possibility
of a stage scene or an assisted suicide, complicated by
the remote location and the physical destruction caused by the fire.
Speaker 2: The complexity of this case, illustrating the limits of forensics
when motive is ambiguous, actually inspired Poe Balantine's memoir Love
and Terror on the howling planes of Nowhere.
Speaker 1: Finally we turned to two quiet tragedies in the Dakotas,
starting with fifteen year old Barbara Barb Cotton in North Dakota.
Speaker 2: Barb Cotton vadished on April eleventh, nineteen eighty one, during
the short walk home in Williston after having dinner with friends,
and the tragedy here is really rooted in the initial
investigative error.
Speaker 1: The case was initially classified as a possible runaway scenario
for a long time, for.
Speaker 2: Far too long before it was correctly labeled as a
missing person case. Precious time and resources were lost in
those critical early hours.
Speaker 1: And days, and the consequence of that early misclassification is
the family's decades of agony.
Speaker 2: Our sources detail that persistent, painful hope, the daily rituals
of thinking they see her in a store or answering
the phone expecting it to be heard. More than forty
years later, it remains one of North Dakota's oldest active cases,
defined by the failure of early investigative protocol.
Speaker 1: And in South Dakota, the deaths of Arnold Archimbau and
Ruby Bruges offer a paradox of the missing body and
the failed search.
Speaker 2: In December nineteen ninety two, the couple members of the
Yankton Sioux Indian Reservation, crouched their car near Lake Andy's.
When responders arrived, only their cousin, Tracy Dan was left
at the scene, disoriented but alive. Arnold and Ruby were gone.
Speaker 1: The mine bending twist is that three months later, their
partially decomposed bodies were found in the exact same roadside
ditch within.
Speaker 2: Yards of the crash site, despite earlier searches coming up
completely empty.
Speaker 1: The coroner determined hypothermia due to exposure, but the manner
of death was officially undetermined.
Speaker 2: Because investigators couldn't explain the paradox how did two bodies
end up back at the scene and how were they
missed in the first place? In consistency deeply fueled suspicions
of foul play and raised serious questions about the diligence
of the initial surch of that ditch.
Speaker 1: We're going to delve now into mysteries driven not by
nature or personal tragedy, but by institutional secrecy and modern threats.
And we have to begin with the absolute gold standard
of conspiracy. Area fifty one in Nevada.
Speaker 2: Area fifty one is a US Air Force testing ground
hidden deep in the Nevada Desert. For decades, the US
government officially denied its existence.
Speaker 1: Which created the perfect environment for the growth of myth
in conspiracy.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, the official denial served a very real purpose during
the Cold War. It is where they tested advanced clandestine
aircraft like the U two spyplane and A twelve oxcard.
Speaker 1: The CIA finally acknowledged its existence in twenty thirteen through
a Freedom of Information.
Speaker 2: Act Release Right, confirming its existence in detailing those Cold
War test programs. But by twenty thirteen the truth was
almost irrelevant.
Speaker 1: Decades of ironclad denial had already allowed the public imagination
to fill that with aliens, flying saucers reverse engineered technology.
Speaker 2: The myth had become far more potent than the reality.
Speaker 1: So what made Area fifty one the epicenter of extraterrestrial
speculation distinct from other secret bases.
Speaker 2: It was a perfect storm of elements. The remote location,
the massive visible security perimeter, and the enticing specific.
Speaker 1: Rumors, specifically figures like Bob Blazar exactly.
Speaker 2: He claimed in the late nineteen eighties to have worked
on alien technology, reverse engineered at a site called S
four just south of Very fifty one, and.
Speaker 1: Lazar's detailed, though unverified testimony created a foundational narrative for
the alien theory that the government's twenty thirteen partial admission
oh it was just spyplanes could never fully erase, not
at all.
Speaker 2: The combination of official silence and persistent specific rumors about
unmarked planes flying workers in and out daily transformed it.
Area fifty one remains the gold standard for mystery and
myth because the government's attempt to control the narrative ultimately
amplify the speculation.
Speaker 1: From government secrecy to the most audacious unsolved caper in
American history, the disappearance of D. B. Cooper in Washington State.
Speaker 2: On Thanksgiving Eve, November twenty fourth, nineteen seventy one, a
man calling himself Dan Cooper hijacked Northwest Orient flight three
oh five, claiming to have a bond.
Speaker 1: He successfully extorted two hundred thousand dollars in ransom and
four parachutes, released the passengers in Seattle, and then, after
ordering the plane to fly toward Mexico, he made his
unprecedented escape.
Speaker 2: He parachuted from the rear stairs of the Boeing seven
to twenty seven, known as the airstair into stormy skies
over southwest Washington.
Speaker 1: This sheer boldness of the act, leaping from ten thousand
feet going two hundred miles per hour in freezing rain,
it's astounding.
Speaker 2: The FBI mounted an extensive, years long hunt, but neither
Cooper nor definitive evidence of his fate, whether he even
survived the jump, has ever been found.
Speaker 1: And the incident was so impactful it led the FAA
to mandate a simple, specific technological change on all subsequent
seven to twenty sevens.
Speaker 2: The Cooper vane, the device that since the airstare from
being lowered while the plane is in flight.
Speaker 1: There have been tantalizing clues though. A partial stash of
the ransom money, identifiable by its serial numbers, was found
near Vancouver in nineteen eighty.
Speaker 2: By an eight year old boy named Brian.
Speaker 1: Ingram, and more recently there was the highly technical analysis
of his clip on necktie which Cooper left on the plane.
Speaker 2: A trace of metal, an incredibly tiny fragment was pulled
from it and analyzed by the dB Cooper Project.
Speaker 1: And what did that analysis reveal?
Speaker 2: It showed it was composed of rare earth elements, titanium
and other alloys, suggesting Cooper was likely an engineer, a manager,
or a.
Speaker 1: Metal argist, someone working in the aerospace industry or maybe
even the military exactly.
Speaker 2: These details narrow the field of potential suspects, yet they
do not solve the caper, which remains in a perpetual stalemate.
Speaker 1: Let's move to a profoundly modern form of psychological terror,
the Watcher of Westfield in New Jersey.
Speaker 2: This is a scenario of total domestic nightmare. Derek and
Maria broad Us bought their dream home at six hundred
and fifty seven Boulevard in Westfield, New.
Speaker 1: Jersey, but before they could even move in, they began
receiving these deeply disturbing anonymous letters signed the Watcher.
Speaker 2: The notes were specific and terrifying. They described the couple's children,
the homes layout, and chillingly claimed the author's family had
watched the house for generations.
Speaker 1: And the language was threatening, asking if the couple needed
the young blood and referring to the home as a sanctuary.
Speaker 2: The psychological toll was severe. The family became a depressed wreck.
They had to hire experts, including an FBI profiler and
private investigator. Police exhausted every local, led neighbors, postal records,
handwriting analysis but came up empty.
Speaker 1: And DNA testing on one envelope was inconclusive.
Speaker 2: Inconclusive. The tragic outcome really highlights the power of modern paranoia.
The family never lived in the house. They eventually sold
it in twenty nineteen at a staggering four hundred thousand
dollars loss.
Speaker 1: Their lives entirely destroyed by an anonymous, unresolved threat.
Speaker 2: It's a compelling look at how, even with all our technology,
nanimity can be weaponized with devastating effect, transforming a suburban
dream into a continuous financial and emotional nightmare.
Speaker 1: Finally, let's discuss the Circleville Letters in Ohio, a strange
case of a prisoner's pen that kept writing.
Speaker 2: Starting in nineteen seventy six, residents of Circleville, Ohio received
these anonymous poison pen letters exposing alleged affairs and local corruption.
Speaker 1: And the campaign turned sinister when Mary Gillespie's husband, Ron
died in nineteen seventy seven in a suspicious car crash
that was ruled an accident but was widely disputed by locals.
Speaker 2: The focus of suspicion eventually fell on a bus driver
named Paul fresh Hour, partly because the letters had accused
his exister in law of.
Speaker 1: An affair, and fresh Hour was later convicted of attempted
murder after a booby trapped gun linked to him was
discovered in a mailbox belonging to the woman.
Speaker 2: However, the twist is what elevates this case to true
enigma status. Even while fresh Hour was imprisoned, the anonymous
letters kept.
Speaker 1: Coming, postmarked from Circleville exactly.
Speaker 2: It's genuinely unsettling. It raises three immediate critical possibilities. A
fresh Hour was innocent and the true author was still free.
B he had a partner working outside who continued the campaign.
Or C a copycat took.
Speaker 1: Over, and the mystery persisted for decades, long after fresh
Hour was released and maintained his innocence. The letters continued
sporadically into the nineteen nineties, and then as.
Speaker 2: Suddenly as they began, they stopped. It leaves this unsettling
PostScript on the town's history, permanently casting doubt on the
entire legal process.
Speaker 1: We're dedicating this final analytical segment to a case that
beautifully illustrates the nature of partial resolution. The bear Brook murders,
also known as the Allenstown Four in New Hampshire.
Speaker 2: This case saw forensic genealogy bring justice, but not necessarily
a complete story.
Speaker 1: The case began tragically in the mid nineteen eighties when
a hunter in bear Brook State Park found a fifty
five gallon drum.
Speaker 2: Inside were the remains of an adult woman and a
young girl. Fifteen years later, in two thousand, a second
barrel was found nearby with two more children inside.
Speaker 1: For decades, the identities of all four victims and their
killer were unknown. They were simply the Allenstown Four.
Speaker 2: This case became a landmark example of how forensic genealogy
can crack the oldest, coldest cases when traditional methods fail.
The breakthrough came when the murders were tied to his
serial offender named Terry Peter Rasmussen.
Speaker 1: Who used multiple aliases, including Bob Evans right.
Speaker 2: Forensic genealogy helped trace his lineage and connect him to
the victims. The identification process, though, was gradual. By twenty nineteen,
three victims have been identified, Marlsa Elizabeth Honeychurch and her
two daughters, Marie Elizabeth Vaughan and Sarah Lynn McWaters.
Speaker 1: And remarkably, just in twenty twenty four, the final piece
fell into place.
Speaker 2: The fourth victim, one of the children, was identified as
Rasmussen's biological daughter. All the players had finally been named
and accounted for.
Speaker 1: But this is where the limit of closure becomes painfully clear.
We have the who the killer and who the victims,
but what remains unsolved.
Speaker 2: Questions still remain about the precise timeline and critically, the
full motive for the killings. Terry Rasmussen is deceased, he
took the narrative context with him.
Speaker 1: So we know he murdered them, but we don't know
the exact order of events, the specific catalyst for the violence,
or the full extent of his movements and actions during
that period.
Speaker 2: It shows that forensic science can restore identity, but it
can't always restore the story. The ultimate why the core
of the motive often dies with the perpetrator. You know,
if we connect this to the bigger picture. The sheer
variety of these mysteries, from the political cover up of
Judge Crater to the persistent regional myth of the Lizardman,
it all serves to illustrate the fundamental limits of human
knowledge and control.
Speaker 1: These cases show how deeply certain traumas, both national and personal,
can etch themselves into the geography of America. Being well
informed means appreciating not just the facts of the crime,
but the folklore, the fear, and the tireless decades long
pursuit of answers they inspire.
Speaker 2: And the true takeaway here, I think, is recognizing the
pattern in how these cases endure. The deepest mysteries are
those where the information exists, the bodies, the letters, the
highly analyzed nicktie trace.
Speaker 1: But the crucial integrating context is obscured.
Speaker 2: It's obscured, and that obscurity is caused either by human intention,
like the government denial in Area fifty one or the
cover up around Judge Crater, or.
Speaker 1: By the simple brutal passage of time, as we see
with Roanoke, or the way the landscape seems to intentionally
erase figures like Patrician Mian and Amy roe Bechdel.
Speaker 2: That theme the unexplained human vanishing is perhaps the most visceral.
The victim simply disappears into the landscape or the ether,
leaving behind an empty car or an unclosed door, and
an internal question mark.
Speaker 1: We've really explored three distinct categories today, the unexplained human
vanishing like Mion and Weldon, the documented historical conspiracy like
Area fifty one or Crater, and the persistent regional legend
like Mothman or the Belwitch, and each one refuses to
let the American imagination rest.
Speaker 2: For so, we ask you directly, which type of mystery,
the unexplained human vanishing, the documented historical conspiracy, or the
persistent regional legend do you find the most profoundly unsettling?
And why do you think these specific stories refuse to
let the American imagination rest