Speaker 1: Imagine a box, not a metaphorical one, but a real
cardboard banker's box. It's sitting on a shelf in some
police archive, you know, the kind that smells like old
paper and stagnation exactly. And inside that box, it's not
just old evidence like rusted shell casings and faded photos.
It's a question mark.
Speaker 2: It is. It's a question that's been burning a hole
in a detective's mind for decades.
Speaker 1: Or a famili's. It's that phone call that never ever rings.
It's a detective lying awake at three in the morning,
just wondering, how does a person just vanish? Or how
does a monster walk among us for so long, completely unnoticed.
Speaker 2: It's the ultimate locked box, the story with no ending,
And for a long time, that's where these stories stayed.
They were just gathering dust, becoming artifacts of a failure
to find the truth.
Speaker 1: But that is exactly why we're here today. We're not
talking about the mysteries that stayed mysterious. We are talking
about the moment the lock finally clicked open, the.
Speaker 2: Moment the light turned on in the attic.
Speaker 1: Yes, welcome to Thrilling Threads. Today is all about the breakthrough.
It's about those aha moments that didn't just solve a crime,
they literally rewrote the history books.
Speaker 2: And you know, it's a fascinating time to be having
this conversation. We're living through what I would call a
golden age of forensic resolution.
Speaker 1: A golden age.
Speaker 2: How so well, you're seeing this convergence of three powerful forces, First,
the maturity of genetic genealogy, Second, the declassification of old
government files. And third just the simple passage of time,
which loosens tongues, it loosens tons. You get deathbed confessions.
We're answering questions that even ten fifteen years ago were
considered permanently unanswerable.
Speaker 1: We have a huge stack of case files to get
through today. I mean, we're going to be all over
the map, from the dusty plains of nineteenth century Kansas
to the coastal fog of California.
Speaker 2: We have escapes from inescapable prisons.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, and we've got polite, unassuming neighbors who, it
turns out, were some of history's most terrifying serial killers.
And we have the science that finally find caught up
to them.
Speaker 2: What's so compelling here isn't just the who or the how,
it's the shift in our understanding of these events. What
do you mean when you solve a fifty year old mystery,
You don't just close a file. You change a victim's
memory from a statistic back into a person, or you
strip away the myth of some genius criminal and reveal
them for what they were.
Speaker 1: Just lucky, we're just brutal, exactly. That's such a great point,
and there is no better place to start than with
the technology that has completely changed the game, the DNA revolution.
I want to talk about the Boogeyman because for people
in California in the seventies and eighties, the Boogeyman wasn't
a story. He was real.
Speaker 2: You're talking about the Golden State Killer.
Speaker 1: I am the sheer scale of this guy's reign of terror.
It's just it's hard to wrap your head around. We're
talking about a spree that went from Sacramento all the
way down to Orange County.
Speaker 2: Fifteen different jurisdictions. He was a ghost.
Speaker 1: He was the shadow in the bushes, the face in.
Speaker 2: The windows, and he was a chameleon. That was the
most terrifying part for him investigators at the time. He
kept changing his methods.
Speaker 1: His mo right. He wasn't just one thing.
Speaker 2: No, he started as the vizil I ransacker, Yeah, just
a burglar. Then he escalated to become the East Area rapist,
then the original night stalker. For decades, police departments thought
they were hunting three or four different men.
Speaker 1: Not realizing it was one monster who was just evolving precisely.
Speaker 2: And then he just vanished. The crime stopped in the
mid eighties. The trail went ice cold for decades.
Speaker 1: Until twenty eighteen. This is the moment, this is the
breakthrough that changed everything. So how did they finally catch
this ghost.
Speaker 2: It wasn't a fingerprint or witness. It was genealogical DNA.
This is the huge technical leap forward.
Speaker 1: Okay, so break that down because we hear about DNA
evidence all the time. What makes us different.
Speaker 2: Well, historically police used CODIS, which is the FBI's database.
But that only works if your suspect has already been
arrested and had their DNA swabbed. If they have a
clean record, they're invisible to that system.
Speaker 1: So what did they do here?
Speaker 2: They used public genealogy databases.
Speaker 1: Just so like those heritage slides where you send in
a sample and find out your ten percent Scandinavian, exactly
like those.
Speaker 2: They uploaded the crime scene DNA profile evidence that had
been sitting in an evidence locker for forty years to
a public database. Wow. And they weren't looking for the
killer directly, that's the genius of it. They were looking
for his third cousins, his fourth cousins.
Speaker 1: People who had absolutely nothing to do with the crimes,
nothing at all, people who just wanted to build out
their family tree.
Speaker 2: And by finding those distant relatives, investigators could start to
build that same family tree, but in reverse.
Speaker 1: So they're building it backwards through time.
Speaker 2: Precisely, it's reverse engineering a family. They built trees back
to the eighteen hundreds and then moved forward, branch by branch,
looking for a male who fit the age profile and
was in the right locations at the right times.
Speaker 1: And that led them to one name.
Speaker 2: It led them to a former police officer named Joseph
James DiAngelo.
Speaker 1: And this is the part of the feels like it's
straight out of a movie script. A former cop. He
knew the tactics, he knew how to not leave fingerprint, he.
Speaker 2: Knew exactly what they'd be looking for.
Speaker 1: And he'd been living this quiet suburban life for forty years.
But they couldn't just arrest him based on a probability, right,
They needed his actual DNA.
Speaker 2: They needed a direct match. Yeah, so they set up
surveillance on his house. They watched him, They waited for
him to take out his trash.
Speaker 1: That's it, the trash, that's.
Speaker 2: It, because once that trash can is on the curb,
legally it's public domain. They went through his garbage and
retrieved a single piece of tissue he'd used. That is
just why, And that one piece of refuse provided a
one hundred percent match to the biological evidence found in
crime scenes forty years prior.
Speaker 1: Just think about that. You spend decades as this mythical monster,
this terrifying Golden State killer, this ghost, and your downfall
is a used Kleenex in a trash can.
Speaker 2: It just strips all the power away from him, doesn't
it completely? And it highlights a brand new reality for criminals.
There's no such things anonymity anymore. If you leave your
DNA behind, you're not just betting against the police, You're
betting against every single one of your distant relatives who
decides to take a heritage test.
Speaker 1: It's chilling for them, but it's amazing for justice. Speaking
of justice delayed, let's talk about the Boy in the box.
This one, uh, this one is just heartbreaking. Philadelphia, nineteen
fifty seven.
Speaker 2: This was Philadelphia's longest continuously investigated homicide for sixty five years.
Generations of detectives worked this case. The tragedy wasn't just
the murder, it was the complete erasure of his identity.
Speaker 1: He was just the boy in the box, a.
Speaker 2: Nameless symbol of tragedy, a face on a poster.
Speaker 1: I've seen the pictures of the flyers they used to
hand out, just a sketch of this little boy and
a plea for anyone to come forward. But in twenty
twenty two, that box was finally metaphorically.
Speaker 2: Open, and again it was thanks to genealogical DNA they
finally identified.
Speaker 1: It Joseph Augustuszarelli Joseph Augustus Cirelli.
Speaker 2: They even managed to his original birth certificate just saying
the name.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it feels like, I don't know, like you're fixing
something that was broken in the universe.
Speaker 2: That is the emotional weight of these breakthroughs. It's not
just about finding a killer in this case, the people
responsible are likely long dead. It's about giving a victim
their humanity back.
Speaker 1: He's not a ghost story anymore.
Speaker 2: He was a child who existed. He had a name,
he had a birthday.
Speaker 1: We saw something similar with the Lady of the Dunes
nineteen seventy four, Provincetown, Massachusetts. This one was particularly gruesome.
Speaker 2: It was the killer had actually cut off her.
Speaker 1: Hands to prevent fingerprint identification.
Speaker 2: A brutal, calculated attempt to erase her from history, and
for nearly fifty years it worked. Because there was no id,
the public imagination just ran wild.
Speaker 1: I heard theories that she was an extra from the
movie Jaws since it was filming nearby.
Speaker 2: Right, or that it was an organized crime hit. When
you don't have facts, fiction fills in the blanks.
Speaker 1: But DNA doesn't need fingerprints, No, it does not.
Speaker 2: In twenty twenty two, they identified her.
Speaker 1: As Ruth Marie Terry, and even though we don't know
who killed her yet, just knowing her name it matters.
It restores her dignity, It.
Speaker 2: Connects her back to a family, It ends the what
if that they've lived with for decades.
Speaker 1: There's one more DNA case we have to touch on
just because the twist is so unbelievable. The bear Brook
murders in New Hampshire.
Speaker 2: Ah, yes, this is an incredibly complex web. You have
barrels found in a state park, the first one in
nineteen eighty five, and then more years later in two thousand.
Speaker 1: And Inside are the remains of a woman and three.
Speaker 2: Young girls, and for years they were all Jane does.
But the breakthrough here didn't just identify the victims. It
identified the killer, who was already dead.
Speaker 1: He was in prison, but under a fake name.
Speaker 2: Correct The man died in prison in twenty ten. He
was known as Bob Evans, but he had a dozen
other aliases. Through forensics, they found his real name was
Terry Rasmussen. But here's the twist you mentioned.
Speaker 1: This is the part I can't get over.
Speaker 2: And a testing revealed that one of the victims, the
middle child found in the barrel, was his own biological daughter.
Speaker 1: That is horrifying. So he murdered his own child along
with the.
Speaker 2: Others, it appears. So this case shows how forensic science
can reach back through time. It connected a man who
died in prison for a completely separate crime to these
cold cases from decades before. It's like building a puzzle
where the pieces are scattered across half a century.
Speaker 1: It's like the ghosts are finally talking to each other. Okay,
I want to pivot now. We've talked about the people
who finally got caught, but what about the ones who
got away? Or maybe got away? The art of the
escape The Ultimate Escape Story Alcatraz nineteen sixty two, Frank
Morris and the Angland Brothers. This is the stuff of legend,
the inescapable rock.
Speaker 2: It was designed to be impossible. I mean, you have
the cell house, the watchtowers, a twenty foot fence with
barbed wire, and even if you somehow get past all that.
Speaker 1: You're staring at the San Francisco Bay.
Speaker 2: The San Francisco Bay, freezing cold, turbulent current that can
pull even a strong swimmer under in minutes. It was
a fortress.
Speaker 1: But these guys had a plan. They'd been working on
it for months. They had the raft made from raincoats,
the paper mache dummy heads, and their beds to fool
the guards.
Speaker 2: The ingenuity is undeniable. It was meticulous, But for decades
the official narrative from the FBI was very simple. They
drowned case closed, the raft failed, they perished in the bay.
End of story.
Speaker 1: But now we have new files, declassified FBI documents, and
they paint a very very different picture.
Speaker 2: They introduce a lot of doubt. The files mentioned reports
of family correspondence, like letters sent to relatives after the escape.
There were sightings of the men for years.
Speaker 1: But there's one piece of evidence that really challenges the
whole drowning theory.
Speaker 2: Isn't there the blue Chevy?
Speaker 1: The blue Chevy tell us about that?
Speaker 2: Okay, So a nineteen fifty five blue Chevrolet was reported
stolen in Marin County on the very night of the escape.
Speaker 1: And Marin County is right across the bay from Alcatraz.
Speaker 2: Exactly where you'd want to have a game away car waiting.
And the eyewitness who reported the theft, so they saw
three men inside the car.
Speaker 1: But here's a kicker. The escape wasn't public news yet,
was it.
Speaker 2: That is the key. The witness saw three men in
a store and car hours before the world even knew
that three men were missing from Alcatraz.
Speaker 1: Oh that just gives me goosebumps. That feels like the
smoking gun.
Speaker 2: It is certainly compelling evidence. It strongly suggests they made
it to land. Now, whether they lived out their lives
in Brazil, which is the popular rumor, or got into
trouble later, we don't know. But the idea that they
died in the.
Speaker 1: Water, that seems much less likely.
Speaker 2: Now, much less likely.
Speaker 1: From a raft made of raincoats to a parachute in
the middle of the night, we have to talk about D. B.
Speaker 2: Cooper, the only unsolved skyjacking in American history, A true legend.
Speaker 1: Nineteen seventy one. A man in a suit and tie
hijack's commercial airliner, demands two hundred thousand dollars, drinks a
bourbon and soda, and then jumps out the back of
the plane with a parachute somewhere over Washington State.
Speaker 2: He became a folk hero, didn't he totally?
Speaker 1: Because nobody got hurt. He was apparently very polite to
the flight crew, and you know, he stuck it to
the man. But for years the question was just who
was he and did he even survive the jump?
Speaker 2: Well, recently the theory is really solidified around one guy
in particular, Robert Regstraw, and.
Speaker 1: He fits the profile perfectly.
Speaker 2: To a t. He was a former soldier, extensive experience
with parachuting. He had a my serious history aggrievance with
the military. He has all the skills you would need
to survive a jump like that into the dark, rainy woods,
and the attitude.
Speaker 1: I love the detail about his response when people asked
him if he was dB Cooper. He never really denied it,
did he No.
Speaker 2: He played a very cooy game. He would say things
like I told the world I did what I did.
It was a wink and a nod.
Speaker 1: So has the FBI confirmed it was him?
Speaker 2: The FBI officially closed the act of investigation without naming
a suspect. But the circumstantial evidence, the skills, the physical resemblance,
his own cryptic statement, it all points to Rackstraw. It's
the strongest narrative we have by far.
Speaker 1: It's that difference between we can't prove it in a
court of law and we're pretty sure we know who
did it precisely. Now here's a guy who definitely did
not become a folk hero John List. This story, this
story creeps me out more than almost any other.
Speaker 2: The Family Annihilator. This is a case of what you
could call the long Con Escape. In nineteen seventy one,
this accountant John lest murdered his entire family, his wife,
his mother, and his three children in their New Jersey home.
Speaker 1: But he didn't just run. He planned the aftermath with
this chilling, cold precision.
Speaker 2: He did. He canceled the mail delivery, He stopped the milkman.
Speaker 1: He cut off all the household expenses, and wrote letters
to the kid's schools saying the family was going on
an extended trip to visit a sick relative.
Speaker 2: He bought himself time, a lot of time. By the
time the bodies were finally discovered, he had a month
long head start, and.
Speaker 1: He just vanished. For nearly eighteen years, he was a ghost.
He was living a completely new life under a new name.
Speaker 2: He remarried, He was working as an accountant again. He
was a church goer in Virginia. He just started over.
He compartmentalized the horror of what he'd done and built
a new identity.
Speaker 1: Until America's most wanted.
Speaker 2: Television was The Breakthrough. The show hired a forensic sculptor,
Frank Bender, to create a bust of what List might
look like aged up. A neighbor in Denver saw the show,
looked at the bust and thought.
Speaker 1: That looks like my quiet neighbor.
Speaker 2: Bob, and she called it in It's just terrifying to
think that someone could just switch off one life and
start another like that. His motive was financial struggles.
Speaker 1: He said he wanted to save their souls from poverty.
Speaker 2: That was his twisted logic, a perverted sense of mercy.
But the meticulousness of his escape shows a very cold,
calculating minded work.
Speaker 1: Speaking of families in cold calculation, let's go way back
the eighteen seventies, the Bloody Benders.
Speaker 2: America's first family of serial killers.
Speaker 1: That phrase alone, family of serial killers is just a
lot to untack. They ran a small inn on the
Kansas Prairie.
Speaker 2: It seemed like a normal stopover for travelers on the
Osage Trail. You had the parents, a son, and a daughter.
But they had a system, a truly gruesome system.
Speaker 1: They would see a guest at the dining table with
their back to a canvas.
Speaker 2: Curtain, and behind that curtain was one of the Bender
men with a hammer, and directly under the guest's chair
was a trapdoor.
Speaker 1: It's like something out of a Sweeny Taw horror story.
They'd knock the person out, drop them through the trap
door into the cellar and rob them.
Speaker 2: At least eight to eleven bodies were eventually found buried
in their orchard. But the real mystery here isn't what
they did, it's where they went.
Speaker 1: Because when people started getting suspicious, especially after a prominent
doctor's brother went missing, the benders didn't fight, they didn't
get caught.
Speaker 2: They fled. By the time the community formed a posse
and went to the end, the food was still on
the table. The place looked like they had just stepped
out for a moment. But the benders were gone and
never caught, never officially caught. There were all kinds of rumors,
vigilante justice sighting in other states, but as far as
the record shows, they committed this series of horrific murders
and just vanished into the wild West.
Speaker 1: That is deeply unsettling. An entire family just gets away
with it.
Speaker 2: It speaks to how vast and anonymous the frontier was
back then. It was a lot easier to disappear before
we all had digital footprints.
Speaker 1: That's true, but some mysteries they hang around for a
lot longer than the Wild West era. Let's talk about
the big ones, the historical titans of cold cases, Jack the.
Speaker 2: Ripper, the Whitechapel murders. Yeah, one hundred and thirty years
of endless speculation.
Speaker 1: Everyone has a theory. It was a member of the
royal family, it was a doctor, a painter, but recent
evidence points to someone while someone remarkably ordinary.
Speaker 2: Aaron Kasminsky. He was a Polish barber an immigrant living
in the area and he was actually a suspect at
the time. The police had their eye on him, but
they could never prove anything.
Speaker 1: And the proof now supposedly comes from a shawl, a.
Speaker 2: Shawl that was said to be found near one of
the victims, Catherine Eddos. In twenty nineteen, researchers performed DNA
analysis on stains found on that shawl. They claimed the
mitochondrial DNA match descendants of both Eto's and Kazminski.
Speaker 1: Now, I know there's some controversy around this finding.
Speaker 2: A lot of controversy. Critics argue about the chain of
custody of the show. I mean, has been contaminated in
the one hundred plus years since the murders, how many
people have handled it. It's definitely not a court of
law beyond a reasonable doubt. Slam dunk historically, historically it
fits the profile. Kauz Minsky suffered from severe mental illness.
He was committed to an asylum shortly after the murders stopped.
The timeline aligns.
Speaker 1: It's a recurring theme, isn't it. The real monster isn't
some shadowy, evil genius. He's the local barber with mental
health problems.
Speaker 2: It grounds the legend in a much more pathetic and
perhaps more terrifying reality.
Speaker 1: Same thing with the Cleveland Torso murderer. This is the
guy that elliot Ness, mister Untouchable himself couldn't catch.
Speaker 2: Nineteen thirties, Cleveland dismembered bodies off and just torsos started
appearing in an area called Kingsbury Run. It was brutal,
shocking stuff, and elliot Ness was convinced he knew who
was doing it.
Speaker 1: Doctor Francis C. Sweeney.
Speaker 2: Right. Sweeney was a doctor. He had the medical knowledge
needed for those precise dismemberments. He even failed a couple
of light detector tests that Ness secretly administered, but Ness
could never find enough hard physical evidence to charge him.
Speaker 1: So Sweeney just walked away.
Speaker 2: He eventually checked himself into a veteran's hospital and lived
out his days there and the killing stopped. Declassified files
later confirmed that Ness was absolutely certain Sweeney was his man.
It's a frustrating end, knowing the truth but lacking the justice.
Speaker 1: And then there's the Zodiac, the taunting, the letters to
the press, the cipher's I hope you were having lots
of fun in trying to catch me.
Speaker 2: The Zodiac thrived on the game. He craved the attention
more than anything. For fifty years, one of his ciphers,
the big one, the three hundred and forty character cipher,
remained unsolved, and we all.
Speaker 1: Hoped that when it was finally cracked, it would say
you know, my name is Arthur Lee Allen or something definitive.
Speaker 2: But in twenty twenty, a team of civilian codebreakers finally
cracked it, and it didn't reveal his name at all.
Speaker 1: No, it was just more of his creepy rambling exactly.
Speaker 2: He talked about how he wasn't afraid of the gas
chamber because he was collecting slaves for the afterlife.
Speaker 1: It's almost more chilling that way. It wasn't a clue
for them to catch him. It was just a window
into his massive, twisted ego.
Speaker 2: It reveals he wasn't leaving breadcrumbs because he secretly wanted
to be caught. He was leaving graffiti to brag. He
just wanted to be the smartest person in the room,
even fifty years after the fact.
Speaker 1: One last historical one Amelia Erhart. The story we all
know is that she vanished over the Pacific, a crash
at sea.
Speaker 2: That was the prevailing theory for decades, but the Nickomaro
Island theory has gained significant traction in recent years.
Speaker 1: This is the idea that she didn't crash into the ocean,
but made an emergency landing on a remote uninhabited at all.
Speaker 2: And became a castaway. Yes, bone fragments were found on
that island back in the nineteen forties. At the time
they were dismissed, but recent more advanced forensic analysis suggests
they are plausibly hers, a tall woman of European ancestry.
Speaker 1: So instead of a quick, tragic end in the ocean,
it becomes this long drawn out story of survival.
Speaker 2: A tragic survival story most likely, Yeah, but it shifts
the entire narrative from a mysterious disappearance into a specific, located,
and ultimately knowable end.
Speaker 1: It feels more real, less like a magic trick exactly.
Now I want to move to a section that is
I think arguably the most important, because sometimes solving a
case isn't about finding a killer, it's about proving that
the wrong people are in prison, correcting the record.
Speaker 2: This is where the science of DNA becomes this incredible
tool for exoneration, not just conviction. And the Central Car five,
now known as the Exonerated five, is the defining case.
Speaker 1: Nineteen eighty nine, five black and Latino teenagers wrongfully convicted
of a horrific crime in Central Park.
Speaker 2: It was a media frenzy. The press and politicians whipped
up this narrative of wilding. These boys were interrogated for
hours on end, without parents, without proper counsel. They were
turned against each other, and.
Speaker 1: They were coerced into giving false confessions. They lost years
of their lives in prison.
Speaker 2: For a crime they did not commit. Yeah, and the
truth only came out in two thousand and two when.
Speaker 1: The real perpetrator confessed.
Speaker 2: Mattias Rays, a convicted serial offender who was already in prison, confessed.
He said he acted alone, and the DNA that was
preserved from the crime scene backed him up completely.
Speaker 1: The DNA matched rays and excluded all five of the boys.
Speaker 2: It exposed these huge gaping flaws in our justice system,
the immense danger of coerced confessions, the power of media bias.
It was reckoning. But you can't give those men back
the thirteen years they lost.
Speaker 1: No, you absolutely can't. And look at a case like
John Banay Ramsay. The parents were essentially tried and convicted
by the court of public opinion for years.
Speaker 2: Everyone was so sure the family had to be involved.
The narrative was set almost immediately.
Speaker 1: But the DNA evidence, which has been retested with modern
technolog tells a very different story.
Speaker 2: It does unidentified male DNA was found on the child's clothing,
under her fingernails. It didn't match your father, It didn't
match her brother, It didn't match anyone in the family.
Speaker 1: It points to an intruder.
Speaker 2: It strongly suggests an intruder. It fundamentally reshapes the entire investigation.
It doesn't tell us who it was yet, but it
tells us who it wasn't, And that is crucial when
you have a family that has lived under this dark
cloud of public suspicion for decades, and then.
Speaker 1: There's a case like Jeffrey Dahmer. This isn't about exoneration,
but about expanding the scope of guilt. We all know
about his horrific crimes in Milwaukee, but what about his
time in Germany.
Speaker 2: This is a terrifying and relatively recent revelation. Dahmer was
stationed in West Germany with the US Army in the
late seventies, from seventy nine to eighty one.
Speaker 1: And investigators have found reports of unsolved murders and disappearances
there at.
Speaker 2: That time, unexplained disappearances and assaults in the exact areas
where he was known to be present. The patterns are disturbing,
least similar to his later crimes.
Speaker 1: So his killing spree might have started years earlier than
we ever thought, and on another continent.
Speaker 2: It's very possible. It suggests his pathology was fully active
long before he was making headlines in the US. It
just makes you wonder how many other victims are out
there across the ocean who have never been linked to him.
Speaker 1: It really does. It's just it's overwhelming to think about.
It is all right, buckle up, We're heading into the
final stretch here, and this is the bizarre and unexplained
file these are the ones that just make your skin crawl.
Let's start with the Solder Children.
Speaker 2: Nineteen forty five, Fayetteville, West Virginia. A Christmas Eve fire
burns the family home to the ground. The parents and
four of the children make it out. Five are believed
to have been prapped upstairs.
Speaker 1: Believed to have been because no remains were ever found.
Speaker 2: None, and in a house fire of that intensity, you
would expect to find skeletal remains. The fire chief at
the time said so, the Solder family never believed their
children died in that fire. They were convinced it was
a kidnapping and the fire was a diverse.
Speaker 1: And then twenty years later something arrives in the mail.
Speaker 2: In nineteen sixty seven, a photo comes in the mail,
addressed to the family. It shows a young man in
his twenties. On the back, a cryptic note is written.
It says Louis Sotter.
Speaker 1: Who was one of the missing sons, and it resembles
him grown up.
Speaker 2: It did, and there was no return address, just this
face staring back at them from a photograph.
Speaker 1: Can you even imagine that you grieve for twenty years
holding onto this sliver of hope and then you get
a photo that seems to scream I'm alive, but gives
you no way to find him. That's a special kind
of psychological torture.
Speaker 2: It's the definition of a haunting mystery. To this day,
we don't know if it was a genuine, heartbreaking message
or just a spectacularly cruel prank.
Speaker 1: Speaking of cruel, the Thailand All murders nineteen eighty two.
Speaker 2: This case changed the world. Seven people dead in the
Chicago area because someone had opened Thailand All capsules and
laced them a cyanide.
Speaker 1: It's the reason why it takes me five minutes and
a pair of pliers to open a bottle of aspirin
today at the tamper proof seal exactly.
Speaker 2: That is the direct legacy of this crime. One man,
James William Lewis, sent an extortion letter to Johnson, and
Johnson taking credit for it. He became the primary suspect.
Speaker 1: The FBI even named him as the guy, but they
could never charge him with the actual murders, could they.
Speaker 2: No, they never had the physical proof to tie him
to the poisonings, only to the extortion letter. So he
went to jail for the letter, but not for the.
Speaker 1: Seven deaths, and he denied the killings until the day
he died.
Speaker 2: He did, but the impact he had a single individual
on global consumer safety is just undeniable. It was a
pivotal moment.
Speaker 1: And then the disappearance of the century.
Speaker 2: Jimmy Hoffa, the most powerful man in America, the head
of the Teamsters Union, vanishes from a restaurant parking lot
in nineteen seventy five.
Speaker 1: And everyone has a theory. He's buried under the Old
Giant Stadium, He's in a swamp in Florida. But the
irishman confession that one feels done.
Speaker 2: Frank Scheran, a high level mob associate friend of Haffa's,
He claimed in great detail before he died that he
was the one who killed Haffa in a house in Detroit.
Speaker 1: So it wasn't some grand, complicated conspiracy burial. It was
a simple hit carried out by someone Haffa trusted.
Speaker 2: His account moves the story from this wild, almost mythical
speculation into the realm of plausible insider testimony. Forensic teams
even searched the house he named. They found blood traces,
but due to the age, they couldn't conclusively match it
to Haffa. Still the narrative fits the brutal reality of
organized crime much better than the.
Speaker 1: Stadium miss And finally, the Boston Strangler. This was another
case filled with doubt. Albert DeSalvo confessed to the crimes,
but then he recanted, and.
Speaker 2: There was no physical evidence at the time linking him
to the murders. For decades, people thought he might have
just been a pathological liar, someone confessing for the fame
and notoriety.
Speaker 1: But twenty thirteen changed.
Speaker 2: All of that. In DNA again, they were able to
exhum Disalva's body and match his DNA to seminal fluid
found on the last victim, Mary Sullivan, back in nineteen
sixty four. It was a ninety nine point nine percent match.
Speaker 1: So the doubt is gone. He really was the monster
he was.
Speaker 2: The confession that had been questioned for fifty years was
finally proven to be true.
Speaker 1: You know, as we sit here and look back at
all these different cases, there's a common thread that keeps
popping up, and it's time.
Speaker 2: Time is a double edged sword in these investigations. Absolutely,
on one hand, time degrades, evidence, memories fade, witnesses die,
crime scenes are paved over.
Speaker 1: But on the other hand, time allows technology to catch up.
DNA sequencing didn't exist when the Golden State Killer was active.
Speaker 2: And time loosens tongues, people give deathbed confessions, old classified
files finally see the light of day.
Speaker 1: The locked box we talked about at the beginning.
Speaker 2: Time eventually rusts the lock, and with enough pressure and
the right tools, it breaks open.
Speaker 1: So I have to ask you, and I want to
ask or listeners this too. What do you think is
scarier the killer like DiAngelo, the Golden State Killer who
gets away with it, lives a normal life, Moses Lawn
waves to his neighbors for forty years before he's caught.
Or the mystery that is never solved at all, the
Sowder children just gone on thin air.
Speaker 2: That's a tough question for me. I think it's the neighbor.
The idea that pure evil can be mundane, that it
can be boring and polite and live right next door.
That is what's truly terrifying to me.
Speaker 1: I think I agree with you, but I really want
to know what you think. Which of these solved mysteries
do you still have doubts about? Do you really believe
the Zodiac cipher didn't have a name hidden in it somewhere,
or that the England brothers actually drowned in that bay.
Speaker 2: There's always room for a little bit of doubt.
Speaker 1: Let us know in the comments. We want to hear
your theories. Until next time, this has been thrilling. Threads
keep pulling at the loose ends. You never know what
might unravel.