Which Real Life Mystery Do You Find Most Fascinating?

[LifeIsBrutal]

Mine is D. B. Cooper. He hijacked a beong 727, stole $1.25 million in today's money, and parachuted down to earth with it. His identity is unknown and it's unknown if he survived the plunge to earth.

When you go off a trail in wilderness it can be incredibly disorientating and hard to find where you are. I wouldn't be surprised if they just went slightly off the trail and then never found their way back again

Not in this case. The path is clear. Kris' father walked it. Two days after they went missing, the trail was being searched. No sign of them. The first emergency call was made two hours after their last tourist picture. Something happened to make them phone 911. Partial bones were found fourteen hours walk deeper up into the jungle from the location of the call. It does not make any sense. And if they had got lost, why are there no pictures of what was happening to them? Their camera had a video function. Its battery was still working when it was found in the backpack.

Yeah. I assumed got lost/accident till I started reading in depth blogs from those familiar with the region. Jungle makes it sound like absolute wilderness, and it wasn’t. It was a well-travelled path that went through a meadow, where locals lived, and numerous people have stayed that it would be impossible to get lost or lose the part in that particular point.

On the other hand, the arguments for the sheer unlikelihood of someone going to such lengths to fake an accident are very strong.

I don’t think there any conspiracy. I lean towards a kidnap (by one individual) situation. They called 911 because they’d seen or encountered a strange person they felt threatened by, and perhaps left the trail on purpose to avoid him, but were subsequently caught and eventually killed.
He dumped the backpack many miles away, and disposed of the bodies. That explains the skin and bleached / fractured bones.

It’s not a perfect explanation but it seems to fit better than an accident.

This is the best mumsnet thread ever

@Londonsuffolkmummy I can’t find any reference to this case. It’s driving me nuts I want to know more. Why would the name be held in the British library? Would they really grant anonymity to a killer because of shame on their family? I’m soooo fascinated.

they called 911 because they’d seen or encountered a strange person they felt threatened by, and perhaps left the trail on purpose to avoid him, but were subsequently caught and eventually killed

I agree. It's a really sad and awful case.

Another one that may send you down a rabbit hole if you're not familiar, is Ben McDaniel, scuba diver

I don’t know the woman’s name but a young girl was murdered I think 80s? At a party/ball and the killers name will never be released the details are being held at the British library

Has anyone managed to find more on this case, I tried googling different search words but no luck!
Very very intrigued!!

Just wanted to point out that regarding the Panama case - the local woman who found the backpack apparently later admitted she had washed and dried all the stuff. I think maybe she found it and planned to keep it (these were poor people after all and the bag contained sunglasses and covetable items) and then later handed it in when she realised it belonged to the girls.
At first she told the police she had found it like that (as she obviously didn’t want to get into trouble) but later told the truth. That’s my understanding from the VERY long article I read.

Coveting I’ve been searching For this and I can’t find anything. I thought I’d found a file on 4 episode on I played but having listened to a few mins I’m certain it’s not the same case.

Has anyone managed to find more on this case
No, please OP come and say a bit more,

I'd really like to know who killed Carl Bridgewater, given that the original convicted killers had their convictions quashed.

Panama girls: I firmly believe the first emergency call on same day as their walk was made by them, then god knows what happened after that.

Larry Murillo. He was hearing voices and acting irrationally, one night he ran out of his parents house barefoot in a snowstorm and was never seen again. His disappearance was a mystery until last year when his body was found at the supermarket where he worked, wedged in an 18 inch gap behind a large industrial freezer. The theory is that he climbed up to a storage area on top and fell down the back. Still so mysterious though - why did he run out, why did he go to work at night in a snowstorm, how come nobody saw or heard him? Also it freaks me out to think of starving to death wedged in an 18 inch gap.

Also: Oak Island. All the signs point to buried treasure but it’s never been found.

The Marie Celeste

Dr David Lidgey. Seems to have disappeared on purpose, a few sightings near the beginning, then nothing. Left a wife and children, didn't take wallet, car or passport, didn't show up on local train/bus station CCTV leaving the area. I wonder what happened to him.

Panama girls case is baffling! I have a feeling the guide called 'F' had something to do with it. I'm probably wrong.

Dyatlov Pass, the Sodder children, Andrew Gosden also baffling.

That’s all I can remember it’s drove me nuts trying to think of more information I’ve googled for the last couple of years and nothing

@EllieQ

Sadly I think the twist in the Chris watts case was that his daughters were alive when he put them in the car and drove them and his dead wife to the oil field. He killed the daughters there - one in front of the other. Very sad.

I think a lot of 'mysteriously missing' people are sadly dead by their own hand and just not found.

There was a local case recently where someone went missing. They had committed suicide very very close to where their car was found, yet the body wasn't found for a considerable while. Even in Britain woodland and undergrowth can be dense and even dogs aren't infallible. Currents can be unpredictable if someone has gone into the water and they may not appear again for some time.

And EVERYONE who knew them will say 'they definitely didn't kill themselves, they weren't that kind of person/wouldn't do that to their family/had no worries' etc.

Humans endlessly misread other humans. And also LOVE a mystery.

I have spent the last about year or so thinking that the Panama girls was an accident but now this thread has turned that upside down again....

I don't think there is much in the deleted photo though - someone would have had to take the camera, plug it into a computer, deleted just that photo but leave all the other strange ones, and then put the camera back into the bag to be found? Why wouldn't you just keep and destroy the camera? It's not like the photos that were left on immediately make anyone think it was definitely an accident? It must have just been a glitch?

Unless, @JoeExoticsEyebrowRing the photo was compromising and as soon as someone took it for their own purposes they realised it could be evidence of foul play, so deleted it and added very bland misleading photos afterwards.

There was a case here a few years ago where a building plot had been bought and cleared. When clearing it they found a body. It was one of those plots that was boarded all the way round. It had been like that for years. On a residential street with houses either side, a nice part of town too. They though he’d been there for about ten years.
Not murder, sadly a rough sleeper who hadn’t woken up one morning. But it goes to show how a body could be yards away from people living their lives and no one know.

Unless, @JoeExoticsEyebrowRing the photo was compromising and as soon as someone took it for their own purposes they realised it could be evidence of foul play, so deleted it and added very bland misleading photos afterwards.

Yes but they said that it wasnt just deleted from the camera (as in you press the delete button and it's gone but is still retrievable) it had been completely wiped which would take more work and require a computer I think?

I presume the theory is that the deleted photo is highly incriminating but if you had the camera somewhere with a computer, why then put it back, why not just destroy it? Unless you it had photos on it which strongly suggested an accident to put people off the scent, which it didn't? It just had photos that would further muddy the waters?

Just bumping this thread.
I'd like to get to the bottom of how many people Peter Sutcliffe really killed. There are murders in other countries he may have been involved in.
The main fascination I have is with people who've been convicted though. As in, why?what really happened? What makes them turn out that way.

I've deleted photos one by one to save space on a memory card before. Possibly if it was a video or something that was taking up loads of space? But I don't know enough about file recovery to know whether it was definitely a photo or possibly a video that was deleted. Just thinking, if they were using it as a sort of torch and they thought using the video function would enable the flash light to stay on for longer, but then it filled up the memory card and the camera refused to take any more photos, they could have deleted that one and then carried on with photograph light.

Looking at the era of the phones they had, you couldn't just make the camera LED stay on without an third party app usually and if they hadn't thought in advance to make sure they had such an app on their phones. Also, they may have wanted to preserve the phone battery in order to try and contact help again later.

That long blog page suggests that a drug route crossed that path - they may have been in the wrong place at the wrong time and witnessed something that somebody wanted to make sure they wouldn't take to the authorities.

Apparently the camera still had loads of space, I don’t know if that’s accurate.

ANoiseAnnoys, thank you for sharing, I hadn’t heard that. Explains a lot.