Mysteries and Histories

Throughout the 1980s, women and girls were found murdered near Ohio highways and truck stops. Several victims were sex workers, and investigators suspected a killer who travelled the interstate routes. One chilling lead gave the case its name: a truck driver reportedly used the CB radio handle “Dr. No.

Witness accounts and similarities between the deaths suggested a connection, but investigators struggled to establish which murders belonged to the same series. The truck stops offered a disturbing advantage: an offender could encounter a victim and leave the area before anyone realised she was missing.

Decades la...

In August 1951, hundreds of people in the French town of Pont-Saint-Esprit fell ill with stomach pains, insomnia, and terrifying hallucinations. Some believed animals were attacking them; others became dangerously disoriented. Several people died, and dozens were admitted to psychiatric hospitals as doctors struggled to explain the outbreak.

Investigators traced the poisoning to bread from a local bakery. Doctors initially blamed ergot, a fungus that contaminates grain and can cause convulsions and hallucinations. But that explanation remained disputed, with later researchers proposing mercury contamination or other chemicals used in flour production.

The incident became known as...

In January 1989, Chicago television station WMAQ ended its overnight broadcast with a haunting missing-person notice: a grainy photograph, the name Joanna Lopez, and a phone number. There was no age, no description, and no explanation of when or where she had disappeared.

Decades later, the footage drew internet sleuths into a mystery with remarkably little evidence. Researchers reported finding no matching entry in major missing-person databases, leaving Joanna’s identity and the circumstances behind the broadcast unverified.

Was she a missing girl whose story slipped through the records or was there another explanation? The notice ex...

On October 13, 1972, a plane carrying a Uruguayan rugby team, relatives, and friends crashed high in the Andes while travelling to Chile. There were 45 people aboard. Those who survived the impact faced freezing temperatures, serious injuries, and almost no food, then an avalanche buried their makeshift shelter inside the wreckage, killing eight more.

With rescue no longer coming and their supplies exhausted, the survivors made an agonising decision: to eat the bodies of those who had died. They sheltered in the broken fuselage and relied on one another while two of the men, Nando Parrado and Roberto Canessa...

On March 18, 1937, a massive explosion tore through a school in New London, Texas, shortly before the end of the school day. Nearly 300 people, most of them children, were killed as the building collapsed, turning an ordinary afternoon into the deadliest school disaster in U.S.

To save money, the school had switched to a nearby oil company’s residue gas supply. A faulty connection allowed odorless gas to collect beneath the building, unnoticed until a spark from an electric sanding machine ignited it. Parents and oil-field workers rushed to the wreckage, searching for children beneath the rubble.

In 1928, Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming noticed something strange in a contaminated Petri dish at his London laboratory: bacteria would not grow around a patch of mould. The substance responsible, which he named penicillin, would transform medicine, but discovering it was only the beginning.

More than a decade later, Howard Florey, Ernst Chain, and their Oxford colleagues, including Norman Heatley, turned Fleming’s observation into a treatment that could save lives. During the Second World War, British and American researchers and manufacturers overcame enormous production challenges to make the drug widely available.

Penicillin helped turn once-deadly ba...

On March 13, 1973, University of Iowa student Sarah Ann Ottens was found dead in her dorm room at Rienow Hall. Much of the campus had emptied for spring break, but Sarah had stayed behind. She had been brutally beaten and strangled.

Fellow student James Wendell Hall was convicted of her murder in 1974 and sentenced to 50 years in prison. But in 1983, his conviction was overturned after evidence emerged that prosecutors had withheld information that could have helped his defence.

No one else has ever been charged. More than half a century later, Sarah’s murder remains unsolved, a...

On June 8, 1924, British climbers George Mallory and Andrew “Sandy” Irvine disappeared into the clouds high on Mount Everest while attempting to become the first people to reach its summit. Neither returned, leaving a question that has haunted mountaineering for a century: did they reach the top before they died?

Mallory’s body was discovered in 1999, but it did not settle the mystery. Then, in September 2024, a National Geographic team found a boot containing a foot and a sock labelled “A.C. Irvine”, remains believed to belong to his missing climbing partner.

Their camera, which might hold photo...

Why would someone confess to a crime they never committed? Real cases reveal how hours of questioning, exhaustion, intimidation, and false claims about evidence can push innocent people to say what investigators want to hear, sometimes believing that confessing is their only way to go home.

Children and people with intellectual disabilities are particularly vulnerable, but adults can also be pressured into false admissions. Once a confession is obtained, it can overshadow contradictory evidence and turn an investigation toward the wrong person.

This episode explores the psychology of false confessions and the consequences of treating...

In January 1968, 18-year-old Iowa State freshman Sheila Jean Collins was trying to get home to Evanston, Illinois, for the weekend. When her boyfriend could not drive her, she accepted a ride from someone who had found her name on the university’s ride board, without ever learning the driver’s name.

Sheila was last seen waiting with her suitcase in Ames on January 26. Two days later, her body was found in a rural ditch near Colo, Iowa. She had been strangled with a nylon cord, and investigators believed she was killed elsewhere before being left there.

He...

In February 2009, 44-year-old Lesley Herring vanished from her Los Angeles home, leaving behind her car, phone, keys, purse, jewellery, and savings. Her husband, Lyle, claimed she had simply left but a Starbucks receipt found in her purse appeared to show she had bought coffee days after she disappeared.

It was meant to be proof she was alive. Instead, investigators checked the café’s CCTV and found Lyle buying the coffee himself. Detectives concluded he had planted the receipt to create a false timeline and divert suspicion.

Lesley’s body was never found, but cadaver dogs detec...

On Christmas Eve 2010, Lori Erica Ruff died by suicide outside her in-laws’ home in Texas. Afterward, her family found a box of documents revealing that “Lori” had built her life on the identity of a child who had died years earlier. Even her husband had not known her real name.

Investigators traced the paperwork back to 1988, when she obtained identification as Becky Sue Turner, then legally changed that name to Lori Erica Kennedy. She later married and had a daughter, but the documents offered no clear path to the person she had been before.

In 2016, geneal...

In October 1976, a farmer harvesting corn near Otterbein, Indiana, found a small cardboard box about 15 yards from the road. Inside was the body of an older woman who had been shot in the back of the head. For almost 50 years, she was known only as the “Box Lady of Benton County.”

In 2026, genetic genealogy finally identified her as Jane Hart, a 69-year-old woman who had been living in Chicago around the time of her death. Her identity was restored but the person who killed her, and the reason she ended up in a rural Indiana cornfield, remain unkn...

In 2002, a quiet Ohio man named Joseph Newton Chandler III died by suicide in his Eastlake apartment. He left behind $82,000, but no family, no clear past, and a name that turned out to belong to an eight-year-old boy killed in a Texas car crash in 1945.

For years, authorities had no idea who the adult “Chandler” really was. He had acquired the dead child’s identity in 1978 and lived under it for decades, carefully cutting himself off from people and paperwork.

In 2018, genetic genealogy finally identified him as Robert Ivan Nichols: a World War II veteran and Pu...

In October 2006, a man harvesting dogwood plants found a young woman’s remains in a marshy field near the Darlington Nuclear Plant in Bowmanville, Ontario. Investigators estimated she was 18 to 25 years old and that she may have died years before she was discovered.

She was found with a ring marked “Burns,” but no identification. Police believe she was likely murdered; modern DNA analysis indicates African and Southeast Asian ancestry, possibly with Caribbean roots.

Nearly two decades later, Bowmanville Jane Doe still has no name, and no one has been charged in her death.

In 1887, reporter Nellie Bly faked mental illness to be committed to New York City’s Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island. For ten days, she witnessed cold baths, rotten food, beatings, neglect, and women held there despite showing no sign of mental illness.

Her exposé, Ten Days in a Mad-House, shocked the public and helped secure increased funding and reforms for the institution. More broadly, it changed journalism: Bly proved that going undercover could expose abuses that officials preferred to keep hidden.

Two years later, she became a global celebrity by travelling around the wor...

On the morning of February 10, 1990, two armed men walked into Las Cruces Bowl in New Mexico, forced seven people into an office, stole less than $5,000 from the safe, and shot every victim before setting the room on fire.

Steven Teran, 26; his two-year-old daughter, Valerie; six-year-old Paula Holguin; and 13-year-old Amy Houser were killed in the attack. Three others survived: bowling-alley manager Stephanie Senac, her 12-year-old daughter Melissa Repass, and cook Ida Holguin. Senac died in 1999 from complications connected to the wounds she suffered, bringing the death toll linked to the massacre to five.

More than 35...

In 1796, English doctor Edward Jenner noticed a local belief that milkmaids who caught cowpox, a usually mild disease, seemed protected from smallpox, one of history’s deadliest infections. He tested the idea by taking material from a cowpox sore on milkmaid Sarah Nelmes’s hand and inoculating eight-year-old James Phipps.

James became mildly ill, recovered, and later did not develop smallpox when Jenner tested whether the cowpox exposure protected him. The experiment was ethically unacceptable by modern standards, but it demonstrated the principle behind vaccination: safely training the immune system to recognize a dangerous disease.

Jenn...

In December 1996, 12-year-old Celina Mays went to bed after church at her family’s home in Willingboro, New Jersey. She was nine months pregnant and due to give birth within weeks. By morning, she was gone, her blankets had been arranged over pillows to make it look as though she was still asleep, while her purse, prenatal vitamins, and other belongings remained behind.

No one has ever publicly identified the father of Celina’s baby. Her family said she had mentioned a 16-year-old boy but never gave a name; investigators have never established whether she gave birth or w...

For more than 200 years, treasure hunters have dug into a small island off Nova Scotia, chasing a story about a mysterious shaft called the Money Pit. Legend says that in 1795, a teenager noticed a strange depression in the ground and found layers of wooden platforms as he dug, before seawater repeatedly flooded every attempt to reach whatever lay below.

The theories became bigger with every failed excavation: pirate treasure, Captain Kidd’s gold, Templar relics, Shakespeare’s manuscripts, even the Ark of the Covenant. Searchers have found old wood, coconut fibre, tools, and fragments of material but neve...

Between 1976 and 1986, three young Native American women were murdered, mutilated, and dismembered in Oklahoma City. Their deaths were linked by the apparent care taken to conceal, and degrade their bodies, leading investigators to believe a single unidentified offender was responsible: the Oklahoma City Butcher.

The victims were 18-year-old Cathy Lyn Shakelford, found in an abandoned house in 1976; 22-year-old Arley Bell Killian, whose remains were discovered across a neighbourhood in 1979; and 22-year-old Tina Marcia Sanders, found in an alley in 1986. All were vulnerable, unhoused Native women, a fact that shaped both their risk and the limited attention their...

In 1968, a man searching for a well site in rural Kentucky found the body of a young woman wrapped in canvas. She had been strangled and left without identification; for three decades, the grave marker simply read “Tent Girl.”

Then amateur researcher Todd Matthews, whose future father-in-law had found her body, became determined to learn her name. In 1997, he created one of the early true-crime identification websites, TentGirl.com, and searched emerging online missing-person databases and classified listings.

In 1998, Matthews found a post from Rosemary Westbrook, an Arkansas woman looking for her missing sister, Barbara Ann...

In 1985, a hunter found a 55-gallon barrel in the woods near Bear Brook State Park in New Hampshire. Inside were the bodies of a woman and a little girl. Fifteen years later, police found a second barrel nearby containing two more children. For decades, none of the four victims had names.

DNA eventually exposed the man investigators believe was responsible: Terry Peder Rasmussen, a serial offender who lived under numerous false identities, including “Bob Evans.” Dubbed the “Chameleon Killer,” he moved across the United States, leaving behind fractured families, missing women, and children whose identities he tried to erase...

In March 1997, deputies entered a rented mansion in Rancho Santa Fe, California, and found 39 members of Heaven’s Gate dead by suicide. They were dressed alike in black clothing and Nike trainers, lying in neatly prepared beds, one of the most unsettling mass deaths in modern U.S. history.

The group, led by Marshall Applewhite, believed human bodies were temporary “containers.” As Comet Hale, Bopp passed Earth, Applewhite convinced followers that an alien spacecraft hidden behind it would carry them to a higher existence, if they abandoned their bodies first.

Over several days, the members took p...

In 1974, 28-year-old Karen Silkwood worked at Kerr-McGee’s plutonium fuel plant in Oklahoma. A union activist, she raised alarms about safety failures, radioactive contamination, and alleged falsification of quality-control records, then testified to the Atomic Energy Commission about the risks facing workers.

On November 13, she was driving to meet a New York Times reporter and a union official, reportedly carrying documents she believed could expose the company’s practices. She never arrived. Her car left Highway 74 near Crescent, Oklahoma, struck a concrete structure, and Silkwood was killed; the folder of documents she was said to be carrying was...

In March 2002, John Darwin paddled his canoe into the North Sea off Seaton Carew and disappeared. Searchers found wreckage, his family mourned, and his wife Anne claimed more than £500,000 in insurance and related payments. But Darwin had not drowned: he was alive, hiding in a bedsit next door to the family home while his two sons believed their father was dead.

Five years later, he walked into a London police station claiming he had amnesia. The story collapsed when investigators found a photograph of John and Anne together in Panama, taken while they were planning a new l...

In 1928, May Donoghue was drinking ginger beer at a café in Paisley when a friend poured the last of an opaque bottle into her glass. Out came the decomposed remains of a snail, something she could not have seen before drinking from it. She later became ill and sued the drink’s manufacturer, David Stevenson.

The problem was that May had not bought the drink herself, so she had no contract with the manufacturer. But in 1932, the House of Lords ruled that a maker of products owes consumers a duty to take reasonable care, even without a dir...

In December 2010, 25-year-old landscape architect Joanna Yeates vanished after a night out in Clifton, Bristol. CCTV showed her buying a Tesco pizza on the way home but when detectives searched her flat, the pizza, its wrapping, and even the box were gone.

Her body was found on Christmas Day. The case initially fixated on her landlord, Christopher Jefferies, who was later cleared and formally acknowledged by police as completely innocent.

The real killer was Yeates’s next-door neighbour, Dutch engineer Vincent Tabak. Forensic evidence linked him to Joanna’s body, and prosecutors said he strangled her...

In 1483, 12-year-old King Edward V and his nine-year-old brother, Richard, Duke of York, were placed in the Tower of London by their uncle, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, while Edward awaited his coronation. Instead, Richard took the crown as Richard III and the boys vanished from public view that summer, never to be seen alive again.

Most historians believe the princes were murdered, with Richard III long considered the likeliest person to have ordered it because their deaths removed the strongest rivals to his throne. But there is no conclusive contemporary proof, and competing theories remain.

...

At 9:02 a.m. on April 19, 1995, a rented Ryder truck packed with explosives detonated outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The blast destroyed much of the building, killed 168 people, including 19 children in a daycare centre and injured hundreds more.

The bomber was Timothy McVeigh, a former Army soldier whose anti-government extremism had hardened into violence. He was stopped on a weapons charge less than 90 minutes after the bombing, and investigators quickly connected him to the truck and the attack. McVeigh was convicted in 1997 and executed in 2001; his co-conspirator, Terry Nichols, received life in prison.<...

Graham Young was only 14 when he began secretly slipping poison into his family’s food and tea, treating their sickness like a private scientific experiment and recording the effects in his diary. His stepmother, Molly, died after he poisoned her with thallium; his father, sister, and a school friend were also poisoned, and Young was sent to Broadmoor rather than prison.academic.

But after just eight years, he was released and given a job at a Hertfordshire factory, where colleagues began collapsing with agonising stomach pain, paralysis, and mysterious “flu-like” symptoms. Young had returned to the teacups, poison...

On Easter Sunday in 1955, Ruth Ellis waited outside a Hampstead pub for her lover, racing driver David Blakely, then shot him dead in the street as he walked toward his car. She confessed almost immediately, but the story behind that final act was tangled with years of domestic abuse, coercion, infidelity, violence, and a legal system that gave the 28-year-old nightclub manager just one route to the gallows.

Her trial lasted only days, the jury deliberated for less than half an hour, and just three months after the shooting, Ruth was hanged at Holloway Prison, becoming the...

In 1971, an off-duty constable walking near an abandoned flint mill beside the River Trent in Burton upon Trent found what he first thought was a piece of cement, until he saw it was part of a human skull. Beneath the earth lay the skeletal remains of a young man, naked, bound hand and foot, and buried in a shallow grave in a kneeling position, with only pink socks and a wedding ring left to suggest he had once belonged somewhere.

More than five decades later, he is still known only as “Fred the Head”, a nickname born from...

At Nottingham’s Goose Fair in 1766, cheese became a symbol of something much bigger: hunger, profiteering, and a town pushed too far. After failed harvests sent food prices soaring, locals watched Lincolnshire merchants buy up huge quantities of cheese, already selling at nearly double its usual price, to carry away and resell elsewhere.

What began as an argument spiralled into days of chaos: stalls were looted, wheels of cheese rolled through the streets, a cargo boat was raided, and even Nottingham’s mayor was knocked down by a runaway cheese wheel. When soldiers arrived to restore order, they...

On a freezing January night in 2010, 55‑year‑old JoAnn Matouk Romain attended an evening prayer service at her church on Lake Shore Drive in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, then seemed to vanish between the pews and the water. Her Lexus was found abandoned in the church parking lot with her purse, wallet, and cash still inside, footprints in the snow led toward Lake St. Clair, and police quickly decided she had walked down the icy embankment in high heels and drowned herself.

Seventy days later, JoAnn’s body surfaced in the Detroit River near Boblo Island, roughly 30 miles away...

In the isolated highlands of Papua New Guinea, a strange and horrifying disease spread through entire villages, leaving women and children trembling, stumbling, and erupting into sudden fits of laughter before wasting away to death. For years, no one knew what was killing them, and the answer turned out to be far more disturbing than anyone expected: a fatal prion disease tied to one of the greatest human taboos.

On a honeymoon in rural Ontario in 1947, Christina Kettlewell was found dead in a few inches of water after the cottage she was staying in burned down around her. Eight days after a secret wedding, a fire, a drowned bride, and a pair of men with too many explanations turned her death into one of Canada’s strangest mysteries, part romance, part cover-up, and part nightmare no inquest ever fully solved.

In the late 1800s, women began wearing a seemingly ordinary accessory that made men furious, nervous, and sometimes even afraid to stand too close. What looked like fashion was also a tiny weapon, and as women claimed more freedom in public, the hatpin became a symbol of that shift, elegant on the surface, but sharp enough to stab back when men thought they could crowd, grab, or control them.

On a January morning in 2002, 19-year-old Rachel Louise Cooke left her home for a run in suburban Austin, Texas, and never made it back. What should have been an ordinary jog turned into a nightmare of empty roads, unanswered questions, and a family forced to live with the sickening fact that Rachel seemed to vanish without a trace.

Her disappearance left behind no body, no confirmed explanation, and no closure, just a case that still feels frozen in the moment she stepped out the door. It’s the kind of mystery that gets darker the longer it st...

In the summer of 1994, Oakville, Washington was hit by something no one could quite explain: not rain, but translucent, gelatinous blobs that fell from the sky again and again, leaving residents sick, panicked, and convinced they were being poisoned by something unnatural.

Samples were tested, theories ranged from airplane waste to biological contamination to something stranger, and then the evidence effectively disappeared, turning the Oakville Blobs into one of those rare mysteries where the substance was real, the fear was real, and the answer still feels disturbingly out of reach.