Unsolved Crimes & Disappearances
16 case files in Unsolved Crimes & Disappearances. Each lays out the claim, the origin, the evidence on every side, and an honest verdict — every point sourced, so you can judge for yourself.
A cluster of unexplained disappearances marks Vermont's Glastenbury Mountain as a 'Bennington Triangle'
Between 1945 and 1950, at least five people disappeared in the rugged country around Glastenbury Mountain in southwestern Vermont — an elderly hunting guide, an 18-year-old college student, a war veteran on a bus, an 8-year-old boy, and a 53-year-old woman whose body was the only one ever recovered. Decades later, Vermont author Joseph A. Citro grouped the cases under the name 'the Bennington Triangle.' The disappearances are real and mostly unsolved; whether they add up to anything more than a run of tragedies in dangerous terrain is the question.
Read the case file →Amelia Earhart survived her 1937 disappearance
The world's most famous aviator vanished over the Pacific in 1937 chasing an island the size of a golf course — and whether she died on impact or lived days, weeks, or years longer remains, honestly, unknown.
Read the case file →An entire family was murdered on an isolated Bavarian farmstead
On an isolated farmstead north of Munich, six people (three generations of one family plus a maid who had arrived hours earlier) were beaten to death with a farm mattock in the spring of 1922. For days afterward someone fed the animals, ate the food, and kept the chimney smoking while the bodies lay where they fell. The killer was never identified. Around the crime clings a set of strange preceding events (footprints in the snow leading to the house but not away, unexplained noises in the attic, a maid who fled claiming the place was haunted) that has kept Hinterkaifeck one of Europe's most examined cold cases.
Read the case file →An unidentified woman was found burned in Norway's Ice Valley
On 29 November 1970 hikers found a woman's partly burned body in a remote scree slope of Isdalen — 'Ice Valley' — outside Bergen. She carried no identity; the labels were cut from her clothes, her fingerprints were sanded from a scene, and she had crossed Europe under at least eight aliases with coded notes and wigs stashed in suitcases at the train station. Police called it suicide. Almost no one has believed them since.
Read the case file →D.B. Cooper survived his jump and got away with the only unsolved skyjacking in U.S. history
On Thanksgiving Eve 1971, a man calling himself Dan Cooper hijacked a Boeing 727, collected $200,000 in ransom, and parachuted into the Washington wilderness — and simply vanished. Unlike most conspiracy theories, the strange part here isn't a cover-up. It's that the FBI, with a fully documented crime and real evidence, still cannot say who he was.
Read the case file →The 25 people aboard the MV Joyita vanished under sinister or inexplicable circumstances
A cork-lined, near-unsinkable merchant vessel found half-submerged and adrift in the South Pacific in November 1955, weeks after leaving Samoa for Tokelau — its 25 passengers and crew, its lifeboats, and much of its cargo simply gone. An official inquiry called the fate of everyone aboard “inexplicable.”
Read the case file →The Circleville Letters were written by someone other than the man convicted for the case
Beginning in 1977, residents of Circleville, Ohio received a flood of anonymous, threatening letters that exposed intimate personal secrets. The saga ran through the 1977 death of school bus driver Ron Gillispie, a 1983 roadside booby-trap, and the conviction of Paul Freshour for attempted murder — and yet the letters continued to arrive while Freshour sat in prison. The writer's identity has never been established.
Read the case file →The crew of the Carroll A. Deering vanished through piracy, mutiny, or foul play off Cape Hatteras
A five-masted American schooner found run aground with all sails set on Diamond Shoals off Cape Hatteras in 1921, abandoned by its entire crew, its lifeboats, log, and navigation gear gone but a meal still under preparation in the galley — a real case that drew a five-agency federal investigation and later fed a century of piracy, mutiny, and Bermuda Triangle lore.
Read the case file →The crew of the High Aim 6 vanished from a well-stocked fishing boat found drifting off Western Australia
A modern Taiwanese-owned longliner found drifting near Rowley Shoals off north-west Australia in January 2003, its crew of about ten gone but its fuel, food, water, personal effects and a hold of rotting fish left behind — a case Australian and Taiwanese authorities partly unravelled through a crew member's confession, yet never fully explained.
Read the case file →The crew of the Kaz II vanished under sinister or unexplained circumstances
A 9.8-metre catamaran found drifting off the coast of Queensland, Australia, in April 2007 with its engine idling, a laptop running, and the table set — but its three experienced-seeming crew gone without a trace. A 2008 coroner's inquest reconstructed a probable accidental drowning, yet with no bodies and no witnesses, the case is still told as an unsolved vanishing.
Read the case file →The crew of the Mary Celeste vanished under supernatural or sinister circumstances
A seaworthy American ship found drifting and empty in the Atlantic in 1872, its cargo and provisions intact but its crew and lifeboat gone without a trace: a genuine mystery later buried under a century of invented ghost-ship lore.
Read the case file →The identity of Elizabeth Short's killer
On January 15, 1947, the bisected body of 22-year-old Elizabeth Short was found staged in a vacant Los Angeles lot, launching a sprawling LAPD manhunt, a flood of false confessions and taunting letters, and nearly eighty years of suspect theories, none of them ever proven, and the case never officially solved.
Read the case file →The Lost Colony of Roanoke vanished without a trace in 1587–90
In 1590, Governor John White returned to Roanoke Island to find the colony he had left behind three years earlier completely gone: no bodies, no battle, just the word CROATOAN carved into a post. More than four centuries on, the strongest evidence points to peaceful assimilation with a nearby Native nation, but no one has ever definitively closed the case.
Read the case file →The Max Headroom broadcast signal intrusion was pulled off by a lone insider
On the night of November 22, 1987, someone overpowered the broadcast signals of two Chicago TV stations and replaced their programming, for less than two minutes total, with a masked figure in a crude Max Headroom costume. It required real engineering skill and expensive equipment to pull off. Decades of FCC and amateur investigation later, the perpetrator has never been identified.
Read the case file →The Somerton Man was a Cold War spy killed by a secret code and poison
An unidentified man found dead on an Adelaide beach in 1948, with his labels cut out, an untraceable poison, and a scrap reading 'Tamám Shud' sewn into his trousers: a mystery that fed decades of Cold War spy speculation until 2022 DNA work pointed to a Melbourne engineer, without explaining how or why he died.
Read the case file →Three lighthouse keepers vanished from the Flannan Isles under inexplicable or sinister circumstances
In December 1900, three keepers vanished without trace from a new lighthouse on a remote Atlantic rock in the Outer Hebrides, leaving a stopped clock, an unfinished chore, and a light that had gone dark — a real and permanent mystery later buried under a century of invented meals, phantom log entries, and sea monsters.
Read the case file →