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?

when its espionage, nothing is as it seems,

was/is Virginia/VA Andrews, and why is more than one author apparently writing under that name?

This is pretty common practice, some "authors" are basically brand names with a syndicate of writers behind the name. Carolyn Keene (Nancy Drew[ is another one.

If his parents are reading this, I hope they take comfort that’s he’s not been forgotten.
His dad died in 2015.

The police are fairly certain Genette Tate was killed by Robert Black.

The two brothers in the tower. Who killed them? Richard? Richard's supporters taking matters into their own hands? Richard's enemies trying to destroy him? Henry VII?

Was it even the youngest brother or an imposter? When Richard III went to get him, they were sent away from the Abbey because he was experiencing a bad cold and was too sick to travel. When they went back the 2nd time, he was wearing a thick scarf obscuring his face. So was it him, or did his mother, fearing for his life after her first son was removed from her care, smuggle him out of sanctuary and send an imposter in his place?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DisappearanceoffMaryBoyle
I believe the uncle was a suspect in this case but Mary has never been found.

@PinkPondQueen why do you say the South Wales police are the most corrupt?

There’s so much attention on the Met Police that the forces elsewhere are entirely forgotten about.

I'm always shocked when it turns out that police have lost vital evidence from cold case crimes. Rikki Neave's murder, for example, was a cold case for 25 years and although there has now been a conviction, that happened despite Cambridgeshire Police having lost every single bit of clothing he was wearing and which had been collated as evidence. So between 1994 and the 2010s they had somehow lost the trousers, shirt, coat and underwear of a 6 year old whose murder was unsolved. That's just massively remiss.

And the Netflix documentary about the Frenchwoman murdered in Ireland revealed that the Gardai have somehow lost an entire full size farm gate that was taken as evidence because covered in her blood. How do you lose a gate??

Ahh! Thank you!

I listened to a BBC sounds podcast on the Ricky Neeve case, called Boy in the Woods. The olice were so convinced that Ruth had done it, they didnt think they needed to hang onto any evidence.

The police were convinced that, because Rikki Neave's mother was a cruel and inadequate parent who made him unhappy, she must have killed him. They don't seem to have stopped to think that her cruelty and inadequacy also made him especially vulnerable to an opportunistic killer.

We lived in the same town, these were the two cases that came to mind for me when I opened the thread. Often walked past the allotments where Sharon was found.

Georgina Gharsallah is one very close to home for me. 30 year old mum of 2 just disappeared into thin air. Was seen earlier that day arguing with men. No one has ever come forward and the Sussex police messed up the investigation by not looking into it quick enough.

It wasn't her T shirt, she'd just escaped a murderer in the bush leaving behind all her possessions in a campervan. The T shirt belonged to (I think) a barmaid at the Inn she stayed at after escaping.

Oh, I know, I read a interview with her some years later and she mentions the t shirt. I just meant that it kind of turned the public a bit because it seemed to be very off kilter for someone who had been kidnapped and was very close to being killed, after having heard her boyfriend murdered. There’s a bit about it in this article.

Strange how they never found his body, though I suppose the Australian outback is massive.

https://www.standard.co.uk/hp/front/i-so-regret-my-secret-affair-says-outback-murder-girl-7211397.html

This one may have been mentioned as I think I heard about it on mumsnet, but this little lad was dropped off to school by his grandmother who waved to him as he walked down the corridor, but he never made it to the classroom and was never seen again…https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Kyron_Horman

They have the worst record in the UK for miscarriages of justice. Off the top off my head, the Cardiff 3, the Darvell brothers, the Cardiff 5...and while we're on the subject of the Cardiff 5 the 8 police officers charged with fabricating evidence, their trial of which then collapsed due to important documents being lost which then magically reappeared at Police HQ! But couldn't be used for another trial as they'd already been acquitted.

McCann

Indeed, and were almost ready to charge him just before he died.

Just after the end of WW2 a boy called Quentin Smith was murdered not far from my parents' house and his killer was never found. In the '80s we were looking at a house and when the vendor, a retired police officer, found where I was from he said that he'd worked the Smith case and that the police knew who'd done it but couldn't prove it. They told the man who'd done it and the family moved away but the police where he moved to were unofficially informed and kept a watch on him for the rest of his life.

Dorothy Jane Scott is a case I find utterly disturbing and completely terrifying.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_who_disappeared_mysteriously:_1990–present

Just came across this.

A response to a couple of mysteries that have been mentioned several times:

a) MH370. It is extremely likely that this was pilot suicide, it’s just that without the plane it can’t be proven. The plane didn’t land at Diego Garcia and get repainted as someone suggested. Parts of it have washed up as debris.

this is long but very good on what we know and why it can’t realistically have been anything except deliberate act by the pilot: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/call-of-the-void-seven-years-on-what-do-we-know-about-the-disappearance-of-malaysia-airlines-77fa5244bf99

TLDR -someone was awake and touching the controls to fly the plane. The communications systems were switched off in quick succession, one after another - not simultaneously as would happen if it was a mechanical or electrical failure. The timing suggests a deliberate attempt to conceal what was being done, waiting until just after leaving Malaysian airspace to do “disappear”.

The sharp turn to the left was flown manually, and by a highly skilled pilot. An autopilot would not make that turn as it required a dangerously steep bank angle for such a high altitude - the in built flight envelope protections would kick in. The autopilot (which overrides any unsafe manoeuvres pilots attempt) would have to be switched off. No one else on the plane, including the inexperienced first officer, had the skill to undertake this risky turn except the captain.

We only know the plane turned and went over the Indian Ocean because of secondary military radar, which the pilot wouldn’t have known about. Otherwise it was a very clever and planned attempt to conceal the plane, such as flying along busy air routes, flying on the borders between countries hoping each country would assume the other was dealing with it, and disappearing just out of radar.

I think it was a very tragic case of pilot murder-suicide and I don’t know what the evidence is that it was anything other than this.

b) Eileen-Mor. A lot of the details such as the half eaten meals have been added later and do not appear in contemporaneous records. The report of the man that found the empty light house explicitly states that the kitchen was tidy. It is also extremely likely that the log book records are fake as the light house board’s own records show the entries stopped 2 days earlier than the “god is over all” comment. A very thorough essay by Mike Dash looks at the original sources and debunks a lot of the urban legend about it. Sadly it seems very likely these men got knocked off the island by high waves in a storm.

Thanks to this thread I now have a very long "watch later" list on YouTube.

I have just been reading about Robert Black and I wish I hadn't he was an evil monster