What’s the scariest unsolved mystery you know?

[Mimmy352]

Whether it’s personal or well known, which unsolved case makes your brain sound like dial up?

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cbc.ca/amp/1.6714959

Not really that much if a mystery as such but the desperation to cross the US border from Canada in minus 35 degree weather just makes me so sad. I live in Canada and remember this story being reported and it was exceptionally cold. How desperate must you be to make that kind of journey?? So sad

They singled him out because he acted odd and he had a history of domestic violence. I think it was terrible that one witness told lies and said it was because the guards put pressure on her and she was having an affair at the time. It could have been a robbery gone wrong houses in rural Ireland were easy targets.

Damien Nettles.
The rumour is that he was drunk/stoned and went to a dealers house to get more drugs shouting up at his window.This angered the guy so he went after Damien and took him to another house and beat him up causing his death He and some others then got rid of the body. Probably burying him somewhere remote.
I knew the dealer years before at school and then met him again in my clubbing days. He had a fearsome reputation and most people were scared of him.
The dealer died from a heroin overdose years later.
It all sounds plausible but unless someone talks we will never know for sure.
I wish his Mum could find out the truth and recover his remains. I feel desperately sorry for her never knowing what happened to her son.

If you have an ancestry account you can download your dna to gedmatch for free. I think ancestry is the only uk dna provider to do this you can download free to myheritage,dna living etc. When you sign up to gedmatch they ask for permission to share but I think this is only police in America. Quite a lot of cases have been solved this way I know one was the rape and murder of a little girl. The dna match was not the person that did the crime I think he was a nephew.

Patrick and David, the 2 boys who vanished but their bikes were found near a petrol station .

I’m still betting it landed at Diego Garcia and was then re-painted.
There’s the very strange story of the IT guy Philip Wood on flight MH370, who supposedly hid his phone ‘internally’ and then once off the plane in a cell on Diego Garcia, used the phone to take a photo - and sent it. It looked like a completely black /blank screen but there was data showing where and when it was taken. And it was showing the phone as at DG.
All very interesting.

Some Australian ones i often think about with these threads

Joanne Ratcliffe and Kirsty Gordon
https://australianmissingpersonsregister.com/ampr/Ratcliffe.htm

William TYRRELL
https://australianmissingpersonsregister.com/ampr/WilliamTyrell.htm

Jennie KEHLET - Is she dead
https://australianmissingpersonsregister.com/ampr/Kehlet.htm

Rhianna Barreau
Melissa Caddick
Rachel Antonio

Cindy James: There was extensive investigation, and the longest inquest in BC history.

I did enjoy that novel by Josephine Tey. I am not convinced Richard 3rd was guilty either but maybe I let the book sway me a bit. It's certainly an intriguing one.

Hasn't the PSNI also locked down files on Noah's case for years? Family challenged this in court and lost?

All very very odd. If there's nothing to see why lock down the files this way?

Is there a specific sub/topic on Mumsnet where people who like to discuss real life cases/mysteries/unsolved incidents can discuss them? Or does it just come under the Crime sub or The Unexplained?

If not then would it be worth/possible in future to have a topic specifically aimed at those who have a keen interest in these types of cases? Just a thought.

Yes! All the yes! I'm obsessed with, mysteries, murders and crime!!

Just read that her bones were bleached too! What!!!

Me too! Hence the suggestion. I like to discuss & keep track of cases and always hope that one day some of them will be solved & that their families can finally have a sort of semblance of closure.

It’s unimaginable how they must feel & what they face in their daily lives. I’ve seen so many suggestions on here tonight that I wasn’t aware of so have been checking those out. Awareness is key in a lot of cases, someone out there usually knows something even if they think it’s insignificant.

All it takes is one person to have their memory jogged & that could cause a domino effect.

Sorry I’m just blabbering on now lol I do get carried away at times!

Just read about the Dyatlov incident, new to me but tbh eve eyes and tongue missing

I'm probably going to annoy some people here (and I'm honestly not a complete sceptic - there are a lot of cases, like Asha Degree, that I find genuinely completely mystifying) but a LOT of these online mysteries have details that everyone accepts as fact but actually were invented by the press or by random people online in an attempt to exploit tragic deaths for clicks.

For example: The Ugly Tuna bar (where Brian Shaffer vanished) had four separate exits, including backstage exits with no CTTV. This is very easily proven by looking at blueprints of the building online or looking at comments online from people who live/lived in the area. The whole "OMG there was only one exit and they counted every single person leaving on CCTV except Brian!" was literally just completely made up after the fact, just an utter lie invented by some random and then spread as gossip until gossip became accepted fact. The investigators are even on record as saying that the CCTV didn't catch everyone since the camera swept the room rather than being static, and that Brian might have left without being identified on CCTV if he, for example, happened to put a hat on.
Brian Shaffer's disappearance obviously is a mystery since we don't know what happened to him, but the "only one exit" thing is pure bullshit. Police searched the area outside the bar and other local areas so they clearly thought there was at least a good possibility that he left the bar that night.

Similarly, Elisa Lam had severe mental illness, the toxicology report showed that she'd stopped taking her antipsychotics but was continuing to take her antidepressants, which is extremely dangerous with bipolar since the extra serotonin is known to incite manic episodes. That's why people with bipolar should never take ADs unless they're also on antipsychotics. The water tank was easily accessible from the roof which was kept unlocked, and the lid was open when the body was found. There's a lot of misinformation online eg people claiming she removed her clothes before getting in the tank, or claiming the lid was closed. All fake rumours. The footage from the elevator isn't creepy if you watch the unedited footage and are familiar with what mentally ill people can behave like when manic. Her death wasn't ruled a suicide because there's no way to tell if she had the intention to end her life or was hallucinating or went into the tank for some other reason, but there is no mystery, just an awful tragedy and sign of how devastating mental illness can be.

The Netflix "documentary" btw is total trash and very exploitative and plays fast and lose with the truth, there are far better sources that handle the case with care and accuracy.

Maura Murray most likely ran into the woods and perished. She was seriously struggling with alcohol and personal problems, was drinking at the wheel when she vanished, and took some bottles from the car after the crash. It doesn't seem plausible that someone came along and kidnapped her during such a tiny window of time, and kidnap wouldn't explain the missing bottles.

The Panama girls is the one case that everyone believes was an accident but I personally believe may have been foul play, because there were other attacks and murders of tourists (and many murders of locals) in the area. A German tourist got lost in the same area and was actually kidnapped by three men who were part of the search party looking for her, and held prisoner in a cabin and raped, and she found an empty bottle of Rum which she broke and used to attack the men and escape. She injured one of the men badly enough that the others took him to hospital, and they wound up being arrested and convicted. If not for the extraordinary circumstances of her escape, everyone would assume she also got lost and died of exposure.

Claudia Lawrence
Madeline McCann
Suzy Lamplugh
Louise Kaye - they never even found her car
People don’t just disappear someone must know something

All of these women went missing in the same area. It was during the time Ivan Milat, the convicted killer of many tourists and hitchhikers was driving trucks long-hail around Australia. This area was the last bit of “country” before arriving in Brisbane city. He died fairly recently, taking his secrets with him. Sick bastard.

https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/ipswich/cold-case-what-happened-to-five-people-missing-from-ipswich/news-story/a58cba0cb87bfb1abe149f03ceefda9c

The disappearance of Brandon Swanson. He was in the middle of no (think desert) where driving home from a party. Accidentally drove into a ditch (uninjured) called his parents to let them know. He couldn't give his exact location but his parents drove all the way out to meet him and they stayed on the phone to him the entire time, suddenly shouted 'oh shot' and went silent for 47 minutes until his phone died. His parents reported him missing and never managed to find his car. They eventually found his car 25 miles from where he said he was and in a different direction. They found his car and no body. He literally vanished

One last thing because it's an interesting example of how True Crime narratives are created and pushed by a hungry media.

In April 1988 a boy named Michael Henly vanished while camping with his family in New Mexico.

Later that same year a teenage girl named Tara Calico vanished while out riding her bike, 75 miles from where Michael had vanished.

The following year, a woman in Florida came forward claiming to have found polaroid photos in a car park, which appeared to show a teenage girl and a younger boy tied up in the back of a van.

Michael Henly's mother positively identified the boy in the photo as her son, and Tara Calico's family came to believe the girl in the photo was their daughter.

This photo went massively viral and were all over the press and TV: the photo of two kidnapped, trafficked kids.

Except that Michael Henly's body was then found, near the campsite he vanished from. An autopsy showed he'd died of hypothermia and had almost certainly died within hours of going missing.

So the boy in the photo wasn't Michael Henly. It was never Michael Henly. His mother was wrong when she believed it was her son.

Does that mean the girl was still Tara?

People started to notice weird things about the photo. The duct tape over their mouths was a thin strip that anyone can work off with their lips and tongue very quickly. The girl had an open book lying next to her, but why if her hands are presumably tied behind her back? Their arms look as though they're simply holding them behind their backs, not tied.

Over the years, more photos of the girl in the van have come to light, and these seem to show the girl playing around, and not kidnapped. In these other photos, her resemblance to Tara is less striking.

For some years it's apparently been "common knowledge" in Tara's hometown that she was knocked off her bike and killed by the son of the town sheriff, who covered up her death. In 2008 the sheriff (I believe a different sheriff) released a public statement confirming that two boys had accidentally killed her by hitting her with their truck, that he knew the names of the two boys and that there was strong circumstantial evidence as to what had happened, but without a body he didn't have a strong enough case to arrest them. Tara's case was re-opened, two years ago they announced they had a strong lead and had issued a warrant to search a house in the town. Only a few weeks they announced they had found sufficient evidence to submit to the DA's office for criminal charges to be filed.

Such an awful yet fascinating story. Both sets of parents were so desperate to wish their children still alive they saw their children in the faces of strangers, and tortured themselves with the belied their children had been kidnapped and trafficked, when both died the day they vanished, one by natural causes and one by a car accident. And all this stoked to a crazy degree by media hysteria, and ties in with the whole "white slavers are lurking everywhere waiting to kidnap and traffic nice middle class Americans" which is basically the new Satanic Ritual Abuse Panic.

The most compelling theories I've read are that he either fell into the huge river right by where his car was found, or he fell and knocked himself out while walking through one of those giant farms they have in the Midwest and got chewed up by farm machinery (the farm machinery on those mega-farms is the size of the space shuttle, and a lot of them are automated. I don't mean to be graphic but they can reduce a deer carcass to atoms without anyone even noticing). Or that a farmer shot him as a trespasser and quietly disposed of the body.

It's very sad but he'd been partying and drinking, got lost and crashed his car,
decided to walk towards some lights rather than stay put, and he mentioned during the phone call that he was having to climb fences so he was obviously trespassing on private land and almost certainly on farm land. The area where his car was found was very rough terrain with a big river, and lots of huge farmland with massive fields of crops, which I know from personal experience are disorienting and scary to try to cross, even sober and in daylight.

I remember that! Always put everything spikey bit down in the basket after that, even forks! Now, i have a bosch with cutlery drawer!

I thought people at the pub Claudia Lawrence drank at all said "no comment" so that was the suspicion.

The murder of Kate Bushell in 1997. I was a child growing up in Exeter at the time and I was petrified by what had happened.

https://www.devonlive.com/news/devon-news/kate-bushell-exeter-murder-appeal-8212768

The deaths of Steve Branch, Chris Byers and Michael Moore from West Memphis Ark, Kyle Horman, Brianna Maitland, Madelynn McCann, Jon Benet Ramsey, Helen Brach, Judy Martins, Haleigh Cummings, Baby Lisa, Mary Jo Shelleby, West Mesa Murders (11 women) all bother me but the scariest for me are the West Memphis Boys, Brianna Maitland and Judy Martins. The former for the brutality and the other two for the almost complete absence of evidence.