Movie and TV crime dramas sometimes make it seem that strange cases are impossible to solve. However, in reality, thanks to advanced forensic techniques and meticulous detective work, we can get answers to even the most perplexing ones.
So, in an attempt to reassure each other that society can protect its innocent members from the vile ones, Reddit users have been sharing creepy and puzzling mysteries that were eventually cracked.
#1
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#2
Debugging behind the iron curtain. Computers at a soviet train station would randomly bug out and no one knew why. One guy eventually traces it to when livestock was being brought in from Ukraine, where Chernobyl left the cows with so much radiation they could flip bits.
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#3
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#4
The Body in Room 348.
This is another one I've posted about, but it's such a good mystery. Really, don't read my summary -go for the article.
A man is found dead in his hotel room. He enjoys drinking and eating less than healthy and has been a lifelong smoker. It looks like natural causes from a lifestyle that caught up with him. He was found lying on the floor as if staggering for the door.
The autopsy says otherwise. He's got a laceration in his s*****m and it's bruised and swollen as if he'd been given a hard kick. There's bruising in his groin that rises up through his hips and abdomen. Inside, his organs are bruised and lacerated. It looks like he was brutally beaten. However, his hotel room was normal, except, ya know, for his corpse. Nothing out of order, no blood, no signs of anything foul.
Case goes cold. A new detective is brought in, one known for solving the unsolvable. He sits down with the medical examiner to go over autopsy photos and such. Then, he figures it out. The man had been shot. Through his s*****m. That was the laceration and the wrinkled skin folded to obscure the bullet hole. The bullet had traveled up through his body causing the other injuries.
So, who did it?
There had been a group of men in the room next door and one of them pulls out a gun and starts playing with it. It went off, firing through the wall into the victim's room where it hit him. The men used toothpaste to fill the bullet hole, which had been through a part of the wall that wasn't easy to notice.
Image credits: Wonderpuff
#5
I've posted about this one before, but the Death Valley Germans.
Article is an amazing write up of the case and methods used to solve it by the man who cracked it.
I'm going to try to explain -no, there is too much, I will summarize.
A family of German tourists go missing on their US vacation. They're tracked to Death Valley. Their rented van is found abandoned off an abandoned service path. There's no sign of them. They disappeared in the valley in July when even experienced outdoorsmen would have struggled to survive with proper gear.
Why were they so far from the tourist spots of Death Valley? Where did they go? Were they kidnapped/car jacked?
It amounts to a series of unfortunate events. It was determined they made a last minute choice to sight see there, misunderstood a map, and instead of turning around, assumed there would be ranger stations and pressed on. The unkempt path cause the van to break down. Looking at their map, they saw a US military installation. Being from Europe, to them, that meant it would be manned with patrols. It wasn't. They set off for help in the direction of the base -the one direction no one thought to check because as Americans, the rescuers knew there would be no help that way. A health card for one of the family members and scraps of bones were found to confirm what happened.
Really, though, read the article. It's fascinating.
Image credits: Wonderpuff
#6
Posted this elsewhere, but the Weepy Voiced Killer was a serial killer who would murder women and then call the police weeping, stating his regret and saying he needed to be caught and couldn't help himself. Some of his calls are readily available on the internet and are pretty chilling. Anyway, he bit off more than he could chew one night with a prostitute named Denise Williams who sensed danger, hit him with a glass bottle and with the help of another dude managed to escape. Paul Michael Stephani was caught when he sought medical assistance and was identified by the dude who had clashed with him. He was convicted of a murder and attempted murder but later confessed to three murders and two attempted murders when he realised he would die of cancer.
Image credits: Freebird_McTwist
#7
Two girls were on their way to a college party in 1971 in South Dakota and all of a sudden went missing. Virtually vanished with no leads, they tore up the property of a classmate who was in prison on SA charges but found no evidence of the girls. 42 years later, in 2013, a nearby creek dried up and revealed a car with the two girls' bodies inside.
Image credits: drunkenpossum
#8
I grew up in Nashville, TN in the 1970s. Terrible crimes were rare.
The disappearance of 9yo Marcia Trimble.
She was delivering Girl Scout cookies a couple of doors down from her home and vanished.
The case was strange from the beginning, and went unsolved for 33 years.
I called my older sister when I heard the news and we both just cried even though it had been so long ago. We had friends close to the case and my folks were friends with the police chief at the time. The entire city felt the same way; we all felt she was one of us, and that's what made the whole thing so scary and sad.
There were several suspects, and many theories of the case, but none ever panned out.
It turns out a local man had murdered a Vanderbilt student and raped a Belmont student just days before killing Marcia Trimble. He was arrested in March for those crimes and was imprisoned. He eventually confessed to Marcia's murder to other inmates who turned him in.
Her parents both died before her case was solved.
Image credits: 500SL
#9
This one's pretty widely known on Reddit, but Lori Erica Ruff.
Short version is that she was a Texas mother and wife whose past was shrouded in mystery from her husband and in-laws, who suspected she was hiding something and felt that she was lying about her age (she appeared older than she was claiming to be). Her behavior became increasingly erratic, and her husband filed for divorce. She killed herself on Christmas Eve 2010, after which her in-laws went through her private belongings and found a birth certificate for a Becky Sue Turner and documents requesting a name change from Becky Sue Turner to Lori Kennedy (her maiden name).
It was discovered that Becky Turner had actually died in a fire at the age of 2 in the 70s. From what people were able to dig up, "Lori" had somehow obtained Becky's birth certificate and used it to petition a name change for herself to Lori Kennedy. Investigators were able to find only a few people who knew her before she married her husband.
Her identity was finally discovered in 2016 thanks to forensic DNA evidence and Social Security records--she was Kimberly McLean, a Pennsylvania woman who had run away as a teenager. We still don't know what she was up to in the two years between when she left Pennsylvania and when the next sightings of her show up in California two years later.
I'm probably messing up the details of the story. It's an interesting one, though.
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#10
The McStay family disappearance & murder. I’m going to f**k it up if I fully explain but the short version is a family of four is found missing, nothing disturbed in their home, it looked like they just up and left. A search is performed and their car is found near the Mexico border. Border surveillance is checked and a family of four who resembles them (on grainy video) is found so everyone thinks they were running away from something/one. A few years later, someone off roading in the California desert stumbles upon their remains. After digging deeper into the family’s relationships, they arrest the business partner of the slain father of the family. And if I’m not mistaken, the trial is just starting or has been postponed to start very soon.
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#11
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#12
A school bus driver kidnaps 3 girls on Aug-23-2002, Apr-21-2003, Apr-2-2004. He holds them captive in his house in a Cleveland city neighborhood. For SA and torture. One of the girls gives birth to a daughter on Dec-25-2006. They escape May-6-2013. Almost 11 years after the first.
Ariel Castro - kidnapper of Michelle Knight, Amanda Berry, and Georgina DeJesus. Rescued by Charles Ramsey. He has a song about his initial interview.
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#13
I remember being pretty terrified after I read a bunch of stuff about Albert Fish, aka The Gray Man.
He killed, tortured and ate a bunch of people in the early 20th Century.
He would send obscene letters to the police, the victims families and random women, baffling police for years.
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#14
This one stuck with me since I saw one of those Identification Discovery shows detailing the story. It's not as much of a mystery as some cases, since it didn't make national or international news while being solved. But I'm damn sure it was a clusterfuck of a mystery for people that knew this couple and police investigating it.
Police were called to a hotel because a man jumped to his death. He had a lonnnng suicide note in his pocket, and it said something to the effect of "I'm ending my life because I'm so sorry for the one I took." (super paraphrased here)
So police went to his address and found crazy rantings spray painted on the wall including "look in the oven." Oh, what did they find in the oven, you wonder? It's body parts belonging to his girlfriend. Her head was in a pot on the stove, and some of her was in the fridge. He strangled her, dismembered her, and cooked her. Supposedly, he wasn't planning to eat her, he was trying to get rid of evidence until his conscience caught up with him.
The couple was Zach Bowen and Addie Hall who had met in New Orleans and weathered Hurricane Katrina together and stayed in the area after the storm. If you google them, you can find a picture that made it into some sort of magazine or newspaper that was a little fluff piece showing young lovebirds dealing with Katrina aftermath.
Apparently Zach Bowen had spent time in the military and had a wife he was separated from. Zach and Addie bartended together and drank a lot. Some people said Addie was a nasty drunk that could be abusive. Also there were rumors that they were doing a lot of cocaine. The substance abuse issues and the possibility that Zach may have had undiagnosed mental issues after his military experience are the theories for possible motive of the crime.
Edit - I just posted this as a reply to a comment, and wanted to add it here because it adds to how interesting and insane this case is.
Also on the show I saw, they had a friend of theirs giving an interview just kind of giving her opinions on their character and how it was super shocking and batshit crazy for this to happen.
The friend was Margaret Sanchez and she herself wound up pleading guilty to manslaughter in an unrelated case. She and her boyfriend apparently stabbed and dismembered an exotic dancer. Margaret's boyfriend, Terry Speaks, was found guilty of second-degree murder, obstruction of justice, and conspiracy to commit obstruction of justice. The victim's name in that case was Jaren Lockhart.
The story for that one is that the couple was at a gentleman's club and offered Jaren Lockhart money to come back to their place for a private party. They stabbed her, dismembered her, and she washed up on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
In the couple articles I skimmed, I couldn't find a motive for this.
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#15
#16
Claremont killings.
3 women in the late 90s all disappeared from the same suburb in Perth. It was well known and a lot of people stopped going out. Then he just stopped.
Well a few years back they actually caught him. And he’s the most unassuming person you’ll ever see. Ran his Little Athletics club, was quite popular. I know people who know him through sport and to say they were stunned was an understatement.
They finally charged him with the third murder not long ago.
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#17
#18
Charlie Brandt. He & his wife stayed at her nieces house in Orlando, Florida, because of Hurricane Ivan.
3 days later, Charlie is found hanging in the garage, his wife stabbed to death and the niece had been decapitated & her heart removed.
Very freaky story, with lots of twists. Turns out Charlie had murdered his 8 month pregnant Mom & attempted to kill his Dad & sister as a child .
Dr's could not figure wtf was wrong with him, or how to even label it- I believe he was 12 at the time. He served no jail time & his records were sealed.
Another twist! He grew up to become a serial killer too. Married and lived a semi normal life with his wife - or so everyone thought. While apparently obsessing over his wife's niece.
Think 48 hours did an episode & it can be found on Youtube.
#19
#20
There was a segment on the TV show Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction, where a big brother was taunting his younger brother about a monster in the closet or something like that. Then, one day, the big brother goes into the closet and disappears. The show insinuates there was something supernatural going on, and viewers were freaking out when it was revealed to be one of the true stories. But it turns out the the big brother had some secret passage that he escaped out of and he was basically just running away from home.
Edit: Here is an excerpt from an article I found:
> A bit of digging turns up at least one comment on the show’s IMDB message board, posted on February 12, 2008, in which the commenter shared her correspondence with someone who had worked on Beyond Belief and knew the actual truth:
> “The Beyond Belief: fact or fiction story about the monster in the kid’s closet was based on an actual event that I personally investigated,” she was told. “At the time it happened there was no explanation for the boy’s disappearance— until two weeks later when it was learned that he had climbed out of the closet through a ceiling panel and ran away from home. He stayed at a friend’s house surreptitiously until the friend’s mother discovered him hiding in the attic of their home and exposed the ruse.”
> The show’s producer wouldn’t discover this very important detail until it was far too late.
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#21
#22
This isn't creepy but very interesting. A writer went missing while driving from point A to point B. It became a cold case after nearly a year with absolutely no clues. An amateur detective decided to retrace the route and found the car & driver in an aqua-duct.
Crawford said that when he read about Devore's disappearance, it struck him as remarkably similar to the story of an Orange County woman who vanished on a trip to Montana some years ago and was later found to have crashed into the California Aqueduct.
"Devore had stopped for gas in Fenner, Calif., about 10:15 p.m. on June 27, 1997, and spoke with his wife by cellular telephone outside of Barstow about 1:15 a.m. the next morning.
"From this, I deduced that he was traveling in the direction of home, and he had traveled approximately 110 miles since refueling," Crawford said in the e-mail, which was forwarded to investigators with the Santa Barbara County and Los Angeles County sheriff's departments.
Crawford said that during his July 3 trip, he stopped at the spot where the Antelope Valley Freeway crosses the aqueduct. There, he found debris matching Devore's Ford Explorer.
In response to Crawford's message, Santa Barbara County sheriff's detectives began their search of the area Tuesday.
Inside Devore's Explorer, detectives on Wednesday found a 35-millimeter camera and a pottery vase, which they believe Devore may have purchased while staying at actress Marsha Mason's New Mexico ranch."
#23
#24
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#25
#26
#27
Similar to Jaycee Dugard, is the Shawn Hornbeck story.
I remember reading details, when he was found, that while he was missing Shawn posted a message to his family through the Internet asking how long they planned to look for their son.
I think it was his dad that answered back (thinking it was just a cruel comment). "We will never stop looking.".
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#28
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#29
The Case of the Vanishing Blonde.
After a woman living in a hotel in Florida was raped, viciously beaten, and left for dead near the Everglades in 2005, the police investigation quickly went cold. But when the victim sued the Airport Regency, the hotel’s private detective, Ken Brennan, became obsessed with the case: how had the 21-year-old blonde disappeared from her room, unseen by security cameras? The author follows Brennan’s trail as the P.I. worked a chilling hunch that would lead him to other states, other crimes, and a man nobody else suspected.".
Image credits: Misaria
